Quote:
Originally Posted by aberdeen5698
I take strong exception to this. The MCAS software that caused the complete loss of two 737 MAX aircraft and all aboard had IMHO two major flaws that were not the fault of the hapless pilots who fell victim to it.
The first is that the software inexplicably relied on the inputs of only one of two redundant angle of attack sensors. If the active sensor suffered a failure that caused erroneous readings, the software would wrest elevator control from the pilots even though the other sensor was still providing valid data. This resulted in a single point of failure that could doom the aircraft. It's a patently absurd design decision to have redundant sensors upon which the safety of the aircraft relies and then to completely fail to check to see if those sensors agree with each other or not.
The second is that in it's eagerness to certify a new version of the 737 without having to update the aircraft's type certification, which would have required costly retraining of pilots, the very existence of the newly-introduced MCAS software and its behaviour was hidden from pilots. They literally were unaware of its presence and what it could do. Pilots had no training for scenarios where faulty angle of attack indications could cause MCAS to pitch the aircraft's nose down using a force stronger than they were able to counteract by pulling back on the control stick. Post-accident investigations have concluded that pilots would likely not have had enough time to understand the what was happening to the aircraft and recover from it before it was too late.
There's a good reason that the 737 MAX was grounded for the better part of two years - it has nothing to do with pilot error and everything to do with the design and implementation of the aircraft's flight control system. |
Sooo,...
STILL human error, right?
Whether it was the lack of proper training or instruction on the new software, the failure of informing the pilots of existence of said new system, or (poor) design and implemenation of said flight system (both of which were presumbaly done by humans).
You're just taking exception as to what point the human error occurred.
The point remains that the software doesn't act sentiently and doesn't do what it wasn't programmed to do, or fail to do what it was programmed not to fail to do.
Maybe the pilots in those particular cases weren't directly at fault, but their failure/inability to rectify what was going wrong at the moment still lies at the hands of their fellow Homo Sapiens and not non-sentient lines of code.
And at the end of the day, we STILL have the over-riding fact which even you didn't dispute, that ever since the advent of automated flight control systems, the overwhelming vast majority of flight crashes that have happened since have still been as a result of pilot (....or if you prefer, "human") error, rather than the systems themselves.
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