
Boeing and the Battle over Blame - abhi3
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/sd9LGK2S9m/battle_over_blame
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salawat
I'm still astounded that there are credentialed pilots who happen to be
electable that have the nerve to try to blame the Ethiopian pilot's for the
disaster.

I'm not sure if it just comes out of some misguided sense of brand loyalty, or
the campaign donations were just that high.

As the article mentions: A congressman blames the pilot's for not retarding
the throttles to prevent overspeed.

Happily, this journalist did their research and got a second opinion which
noted that:

>Addis Ababa is hot and high. >The stick shaker was on >The underslung engines
actually were providing a pitch-up moment that was helping to counter the
nose-down pitch caused by MCAS induced mistrim, pulling throttle would have
caused even more nose down.

Not explicitly called out, but worth noting: >The plane was technically in
Airspeed Unreliable as far as malfunctioning AoA sensors feeding garbage data
to the computer to calculate CAS (Calibrated Air Speed) and TAS (True Air
Speed) from IAS (Indicated Air Speed).or those that don't know, Airspeed is
measured based off of pressure measured from devices known as out of tubes.
This measurement alone is known as Indicated Air Speed. This measurement is
sensitive to the orientation of the aircraft to the airstreams, so requires
among other things accurate AoA measurement to actually derive an accurate
number truly representative of the velocity of the plane relative to the local
airstreams being sampled.

Given the circumstances, I'd recommend taking the Congressman's exhortations
with a grain of salt. Not sure what dog he has in the game besides wanting to
take cheap shots at Ethiopian Airlines, but the facts are far more in the
realm of the pilot's having done everything they could and having to
improvise/triage with faulty information at their disposal rather than gross
pilot negligence taking place.

