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Comment by etep | Hacker News Reader

It's not nice that so many writers parrot that the solution is "more pilot training." Under the hypothesis that there needs to be a solution (one that I think is correct), then the answer of more training amounts to mere hope. One hopes that the pilot a) knows and b) remembers to turn off the autopilot when the emergency starts.

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Pilots can fly planes with unusual characteristics when properly trained. That is the point of the type rating. I feel the 737 MAX needs its own type certificate distinct from the rest of the 737s and that should solve the problem, since the MAX has very different flight characteristics in certain situations.

Either that or ground the plane permanently for being poorly designed and unsafe with any amount of training.

If the FAA does anything else, it will harm my faith in the organization, which is already at a recent low.

NB: Jet pilot, not 737 pilot.

737 pilots have said that they are already trained in the tendency of a 737 to pitch up when full power is applied at low speeds, which apparently is present in all 737 models. (Stall recovery procedures for a 737 apparently specifically detail that you must lower the nose first, and then apply power (and not too much power) as applying full or higher power near stall speed will overwhelm the pitch authority.

What's not clear to me is how much worse the characteristics of the MAX are compared to the NG or earlier 737s? Would it really be unsafe to fly without the MCAS, or was this just the route Boeing took to avoid having to retrain pilots?

Money's on a last minute fix to the problem and engineering being told the launch couldn't be delayed.

We're told that MCAS only activates with the autopilot already off.

I agree with you that pilot training doesn't seem to be a plausible answer given that the Lion Air crash was world news, resulting in retraining, and yet that wasn't enough.

Thank you for the insight! Just for clarity, I'm using "autopilot" as a catch-all term that refers the automated systems that plausibly seem to have caused these crashes.

...which is a pretty confusing thing to do, given that there are multiple such systems, one of which is conventionally called "autopilot".

The solution isn't so much "more pilot trainimg".

It's that pilot training wasn't done that absolutely needed to have been.

A three page if even that description of the system, and it's inputs/outputs/controls should have been sufficient for a pilot to be able to build up a mental model to deal with a faulty AoA sensor, and modify their piloting technique to stay within a more conservative maneuvering envelope while operating the plane.

Whether that would have been sufficient to prevent both disasters I don't know, but it sure seems like it would be a small trade off that even in the absence of any other system hardening could have made the difference between no survivors, and an emergency landing.

Pilot training is a major reason air travel is so safe.

> One hopes that the pilot a) knows and b) remembers to turn off the autopilot when the emergency starts.

This is where training kicks in. After hitting the scenario 10 times in the simulator, the pilot doesn't remember; they _do_.

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