2019 05 09 11 17 33
In congressional testimony yesterday at the House Aviation subcommittee, several congressmen in their statements and questioning blamed pilots at Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines for the crashes, even making the extreme statements that US trained pilots could have handled the situation. In an excellent Seattle Times article, Dominic Gates cites why that isn’t true, and the Washington Post labeled label administration statements as “jingoism” with respect to third world country pilots.
Apparently many of the congressmen were influenced by a report prepared for an institutional investor with significant Boeing shareholdings written by Don McGregor and Vaughn Cordle. That report apparently echoes the Boeing company line that a series of events caused the crashes, and that pilot error was the primary cause of the accidents. However, simulator testing, as reported by Gates, has shown their conclusions to be dubious, as even experienced pilots could not recover from the MCAS commands.
