In the other news, on the previous day on the same plane there was a retired pilot flying in cockpit who correctly diagnosed problem & told how to disable malfunctioning system: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-19/how-an-ex...
Further, the Bloomberg story reports:
"The Indonesia safety committee report said the plane had had multiple failures on previous flights and hadn’t been properly repaired."
Lots of blame to go around here.
Only if the faulty sensor was listed as "critical." Boeing didn't declare it as such and reported to nobody the way it was used in the unreported MCAS.
That the MCAS even exists and that a single faulty sensor was enough to mess with the flight erratically enough to confuse the pilots was somehow acknowledged by Boeing only after the first crash. It took the second crash for most observers to recognize that just blaming the pilot or maintenance won't keep the planes from not crashing.
Boeing is still fully culpable, but the airline should have debugged the issue before using the plane again.
There is not only "the issue" there are a lot of "issues" happening all the time. The problem is even knowing which are "too serious." That the single faulty sensor which didn't affect anything on the previous planes could mean the difference between the life and death was specifically not reported by Boeing.
How it is responsible to certify the plane without properly analyzing the MCAS implementation?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/business/boeing-elaine-ch...
And how it is responsible to claim "everything is OK everywhere" after the two crashes?
https://www.barrons.com/articles/faa-not-grounding-boeing-73...
We're not talking about a faulty sensor, we're talking about an uncontrolled dive. The airline is not at fault for not connecting the two, but that only means they had information of an uncontrolled dive from an unknown cause, and still flew the plane.
> How it is responsible to certify the plane without properly analyzing the MCAS implementation? (...) And how it is responsible to claim "everything is OK everywhere" after the two crashes?
It's not, but that's whataboutism. Boeing's neglect doesn't excuse the FAA, and the FAA's neglect doesn't excuse the airline.
I believe the tighter turnaround times of flights these day may either mean this step is rushed too quickly or omitted altogether...
But the hiding of this information on the initial reports of that incident suggest there might be some fear of corporate culpability. Perhaps the pilots DID log it and it was ignored and the plane was turned around and flown again with a faulty AoA and without passing on the “lessons learned”. Will be interesting as we learn more.
The same plane had an identical uncontrolled-dive problem
the day before, [...] and somehow that incident didn't
ground the plane or even result in any effective advisory
to the next crew.
If the pilots fear near misses will be called pilot error, and they'll be called incompetent/dangerous or punished for endangering passengers, that would do a lot to discourage near miss reporting.
A tiny shred of mutual respect for other flight crews, or for human life of passengers in general, should easily overwhelm any concern an anomaly report will harm their record.
In this case, the prior crew could've reported the problem, and their successful resolution. There's little risk of an actual malfunction requiring the emergency disengagement of normal systems being mislabeled "pilot error", especially when they made a proper recovery according to trained procedures.
For all I know, the crew did make this report, but the report failed to have the necessary impacts, in either grounding/fixing the plane or reminding followup crews of relevant emergency procedures. If that incident or prior failures weren't reported, or were reported but not acted upon, then the fault for that lies with some mix of the crews, the airline, and relevant regulators – in addition to any other failures by Boeing.
"The cause of the Lion Air crash has not been determined, but the preliminary report mentioned the Boeing system, a faulty, recently replaced sensor and the airline’s maintenance and training.
On the same aircraft the evening before the crash, a captain at Lion Air’s full-service sister carrier, Batik Air, was riding along in the cockpit and solved the similar flight control problems, two of the sources said. His presence on that flight, first reported by Bloomberg, was not disclosed in the preliminary report."