The lion air accident

[rwanttaja]

Ron , I receive a check from Exxon so when the media reported that Exxon had spilled a lot of oil in the water in Alaska, the explanation must be that he media is lying?

Better re-check what I said. I never said the media is lying; they're expressing an opinion without understanding the facts involved. They're reporting what "sells papers," without the technical expertise to tell if it's correct. Being stupid is not the same as lying.

About twenty years ago, a local company chartered an airliner for a flight around the world. No real reason for it, except for a unique experience.

The local media covered it pretty well, especially one older couple. The man claimed he had been afraid to fly all his life, and had bought his ticket on the around-the-world flight to finally face his fear.

The media ate it up. The story was too good to fact-check.

Turns out the guy was a retired airline pilot. Yes, he lied, not the media. But no one bothered to make a cursory check of the man's background. The media didn't lie...but they sure were stupid.

Ironically, this was in Seattle, where the media SHOULD be pretty good at aviation stories.

The weak spot in you analysis , is while Indonesia and their version of NTSB may be incompetent and even corrupt like lots of other 3rd world countries, their board did not cause the crash. If there was no defect in the airplane there would have not been an emergency, and he pilots would not have had to try to overcome the out of control pitching. How do we know about the pitch fluctuations? It is reported from the data from the black box recovered. but then again maybe the media, NBC news just made all this up and is lying.

Oh, I don't doubt that there was a fault in the airplane...and have never claimed there wasn't. I merely question the ability of NBC/FOX/CNN to understand what potentially biased sources might be telling them. I'm confident in the NTSB's ability to assess the evidence without bias, but they're just an observer at this point. The Indonesian equivalent will make the final ruling. I don't know much about them, but know that some countries look at these sorts of things a bit different.

Some good examples can be found in "Flying Upside Down," a book allegedly written by a Western pilot who flew for a Chinese airline. I have no idea if it's "for real" or not, but there's a huge amount of rather scary detail about a national aviation establishment supposedly being driven primarily by political, not technical, issues.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/273231452...pside-Down-pdf

A fundamental aspect of aircraft design is to minimize the potential for any failure to cause injury or death. That's why certified engines have dual ignition systems, why retractable-gear aircraft have emergency gear-extension systems, why the Space Shuttle has five parallel computer systems, with one using completely different hardware and software from the four primary computers. Redundancy. Fall-back modes. Good stuff.

Allow me to speculate for a moment, based on what I've heard. I've heard the Lion Air aircraft had a failure in either the airspeed or angle of attack sensor. Surely the type of thing that can happen. From what I understand, the 737 has a fall-back mode in these cases, where the pilot switches to an alternate control mode and then must fly the aircraft without a lot of the software "helpers" these modern aircraft include.

Now, again, I understand that this failure occurred on a previous flight. The previous crew switched to this alternate mode, and landed safely.

And as I posted earlier, two questions arise: Was the previous failure fixed, and was the repair tested to published Boeing procedures?

Then comes the second question: If the problem hadn't been fixed...or the same one cropped up again...what was different about the second crew that they were not able to successfully use the alternate mode? Was it a totally different type of failure?

Boeing's culpability basically rests on the answers to these questions. Things break. The key point is whether the crew can still successfully land the airplane, and whether using Boeing's repair procedures will correct the issue. If the failure was not properly repaired, would the standard, published Boeing diagnostics have made the faulty repair clear to the maintainer? Was the aircraft returned to service because of a failure of a correctly-executed process, or because the managers of a bargain basement airline HAD to get the plane back into service? An airline with a trouble history along these lines?

After all, they had justification for this: The previous crew was able to handle the anomaly and safely complete their flight. There are some managers who might take that as an indication that the "problem" isn't really a problem.

But...then we get in the same situation: Why was one crew able to handle the anomaly, but not the other? If you read the "Flying Upside Down" book, one of the writer's complaints is that pilots were assigned to fly aircraft based on political "pull," not their technical expertise. I'm wondering if we're looking at the same sort of situation.

Finally, Bill, you might be familiar with the name Wolfgang Langewiesche. He wrote one of the most famous books about how to fly.

His son William is a crackerjack aviation writer, too. Vanity Fair magazine published an incredible article about the crash of Air France 447, the plane lost over the south Atlantic about ten years ago.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/busi...ight-447-crash

It sounds like a very similar sort of accident: A failure of a sensor. Yet the crew couldn't handle it. It was an Airbus, not a Boeing, which might indicate an overall pilot issue rather than something specific to an aircraft type.

So I'm waiting to see a technical assessment of the accident, and tend to discount any non-technical-media coverage.

Ron Wanttaja