Originally Posted by fdcg27
Do you think that the problem is that the type was designed for a time when most of the crews had training and experience similar to your own?
There are simply not enough military and civil trained crews available today to operate the global airline fleet.
In your training, you either qualified each step of the way or you got washed out.
In the civil world, there are good pilots flying freight in piston twins or flying the Alaskan or Canadian bush or they become dead pilots.
There aren't enough such pilots to crew the global narrow body fleet, so we end up with guys who know how the buttons are supposed to work but have very little of the feel acquired from handling an airplane of any size or type.
It isn't so much a matter TT as it is one of hours spent hand flying the machine.
Just as an example, trimming is something anyone with any flying experience quickly grasps, but at least two crews seem to have missed that part of the lesson, maybe because they lacked the experience of actually flying any aircraft and not just monitoring it.
I think issues is much deeper than that.
First of all, they messed up lift on that aircraft with bigger engines that are pitched now forward and up. The problem is design of an aircraft that was very useful for 1960, but not for today. This would be like using Impala design from that time with new engines.
Second, from what I have read, Boeing did not disclose degree of assistance. They have changed it (as far as I remember typing this) from 0.6 to 2.4. That is HUGE change.
Third, Boeing CEO (and he supposed to be fired promptly for this alone) tried to pitch blame to pilots. But AA union and other US pilots came to defense saying that pilots are not to blame and that American pilots had similar issues. In the end by now, I think it is very clear (and Boeing quietly acknowledged this) that is is MCAS and design to blame, not pilots.
I think the real issues here is application of New Public Management and theory of shifting services to for profit entities, services in this case being compliance. Also, FAA is purposely starved, and when you financially starve organization like that, that requires high technical expertise that costs money, it is easy to accuse it of inefficiency later. This happened in 2005, and I believe if we want to address this issue and future similar issues (and there will be a lot of them) we need stronger FAA and compliance part back to it. This issue is much more than just Boeing. VW got into hot sauce with dieselgate because of self regulation in EU, thinking they could muddle through in US.