I disagree. I think it is a two-fold matter... 1) The automation took too much workload off the pilots' hands, and pilots then become complacent and overly-reliant on the automation to help them fly. Not just in this case, but on every flight... 2) The automation MUST relinquish control to the pilots when the situation warrants, which in these two cases it did not do.
Absolutely correct. I've watched almost every episode of that TV show "Mayday" which does re-enactments of airplane crashes. In most cases, it is human error. In many cases, pilots become disoriented and crash a perfectly working plane into the ground. This is the case in a vast majority of cases. So as tragic as these two crashes of the 737 MAX are, there is a very good reason for why you don't want automation to be turned off, or at least not very easily. I think much of the problem was that the pilots didn't even know about the system. Had they known, perhaps the results would have been different if they could simply pull a circuit breaker or something to disengage the system, or at the very least take the sensor offline that was providing faulty information. Perhaps it wasn't even the software at fault, or that needed a big rewrite, but rather not enough redundancy in that angle of attack sensor. There were already other cases of planes crashing because of disagreement between speed sensors. I'm surprised its taking this long to fix the problem.
Not so, this puppy is hard to control and has a tendency to nose up and stall during TO, that is why BA installed the MCAS.
I have an experience that relates to this. Actually there are far more incidents that accidents, that are not in the media and even the passengers of those airplanes are not even aware that something happened. I had to analyse many of them and I will always remember my first one. They brought me the FDR and CVR, the "black boxes" that are actually orange and not black. Nobody knew exactly what happened as it was my role to find out. The first to analyse is the Flight Data Recorder as you don't want your judgment to be influenced by pilot and co-pilot understanding of the situation as recorded in the Cockpit Voice Recorder. Quick parameter analysis To make it short, I found that while ground speed (Airplane speed compared to the ground) at one point decreased gradually, the air speed (Airplane speed compared to the surrounding air) suddenly spiked just before to reach a critical level then lower quite rapidly. At the same, altitude increased suddenly first then even faster few seconds after. So what happened? Airplane entered a air hole consequently air speed reached critical over-speed. To reduce speed, airplane has to go up (and not reduce gas), so the computer reacted immediately and the pilot had the same reaction just after. Hence because of this double reaction, correction became excessive and airplane went above max altitude it was designed for. Nobody was injured but because of this incident, the aircraft was not allowed to fly. Structure department took my report and had to define whether there could be internal structure damage and where. The computer had a correct reaction to a problem: over-speed, so as the pilot. But it's the interaction between the 2 that failed. Actually the pilot should have known (it's part of their training) that the computer would react that way and should have monitored the reaction instead of reacting himself. We are going toward pilot-less airplanes but we are not yet ready technically and psychologically. So we have automation with pilots. That mandatory interaction between the 2, nowadays cause of many incidents, is very complicate to manage due to the radical differences between the 2 "thinking processes". One can correct the other deficiency but in some cases it creates or worsen the situation as my simple example showed. It's a difficult transition. We shouldn't resist against this technological progress because it's not perfect. Once we are ready technologically and psychologically to pilot-less airplanes, pilots will be only a source of unpredictability and errors that we will need to get rid of. But as for now, we can't. So efforts should be made on making this interaction between human and computer as error-less as possible. And tricking the 737max computer on the real gravity center position (due to the excessive engines weight) by changing its attack angle is, to me, completely against the philosophy. It can be a huge errors generator as the 2 accidents and multiple incidents seem to indicate!
Looks like we have a real engineer here. I do have a minor add: The design, even with the CG and thrust issues, is OK if the AOA is triple redundant so they can vote. With only two, and the MCAS software programmed to acts on the one showing bad angle of attack, it is essentially a single point failure, a cardinal sin in man flights. The 737 Max Chief Engineer was asleep at the switch.
Exactly. But these stories are not so fascinating for people as they are often easy to explain or unknown why a pilot behaves the way he did. I might agree but the fact remains that there's many more accidents that are caused by pilots. Anecdotal. Again, look at all the cases where automation would have saved the plane.
That's a very cool job to have. My experience in the industry, just like @Seaweed, comes from watching Mayday/Air Crash Investigation seasons (all of them) and Youtube, so I'm clearly an expert... What you described is getting more and more common in mixed systems. I've had it with trading multiple times. I run fully automated but there have been failures or unique situations where I've interfered. The code is complex enough with order submission checks, position size adjustments depending on margin etc. so that when I manually interfere, I've gotten into a "battle" with the automation itself. The more complex systems become, the more difficult it is to estimate how humans and machines interact. It's even worse for a pilot because he didn't design the automation system so he probably does not have a very good idea what's going on in the software at any given moment, training can only do so much.
There should be no compromise when 100s of people's life's are on the line. I bet you would sing a different tone, if god forbids, it was your loved one on those planes. The whole thing is a failure from top to button. The only way why this plane saw the light of day is because Boeing lobbied to allow FAA to be self certifying their own product. If FAA had a full say, it would not get certified. Up to this week top management was sure restriction would be lifted by year end, but it was not. Rest assured if it was up to Boeing, those planes would be back in service. Who wants to loose billions. Their greed and stupidity costed a lot more than they made. And will continue to cost.
Was! It was fun. But at that time Airbus was not paying that much so I changed industry after some time. True! That's interesting to see the similitude with trading automation. I still fly manual. But I know the huge potential of flying automation. I admire people who reached that stage and succeeded. In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis describe the Goldman Sachs complex trading system. For each error that happens, the part concerned is patched. Sub-systems are added when new functions are required. By accretion of all those modifications during all those years, it becomes a system incredibly complex, redundant, messy and slow, that no IT guy really understands in its entirety. Therefore nobody is able to modify it in its core to make it simpler, more efficient and competitive against HFT firms. I believe the more people are involved, the more unnecessary complex it sometimes tend to be . Let's hope that it won't be the same case for airplanes automation systems.