Back

Just watched the two Mentor Pilot MCS videos.

What an utter cluster fuck,

Boeing added a system that wasn't even needed that they thought was easily ignorable if it malfunctioned as long as you did the Thing, and then didn't tell anyone what the Thing was.

They basically designed an escape room that you have to solve whilst hurtling at the ground at Mach 0.75 while pulling back on the control column with half your body weight.

Astonishingly, the first bunch of pilots on LionAir actually managed to solve that escape room and lived. It was the guys who took it out the next day who died.

And then the Ethiopian pilots, who had read the instructions that Boeing had provided after the first crash, did what they were told to do and it didn't work because while the escape room was actually solvable (hold the trim button constantly until the pressure on the column disappears then flip the stabiliser switches to off, or throttle right back and set the flaps to 1º when the plane slows down), Boeing's instructions put while flying manually in bold, so that was the bit everyone remembered, and instead they kept trying to engage the autopilot, which didn't work and never would, because the failure mode only occurred when the plane was so confused that autopilot wasn't going to work anyway.