flightcrewguide.com
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2016–2019
39:34 · 153K views · Nov 15, 2013
An American Airlines training video by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on control malfunctions and flight instrument anomalies. It discusses real incidents such as runaway trim and instrument failures and how crews should respond.
Cited in aviation threads as a gripping primary-source account of incidents like stabilizer trim moving without the pilot's knowledge.
4 comments from Hacker News
There's an engaging account of this incident in an American Airlines training seminar that's now on Youtube - it's even more dramatic than your summary suggests: this video (Incidentally, this is the video series that includes the famous "Children of Magenta" lecture, which is a must-watch for anyone who designs or thinks about how to use a system with multiple levels of abstraction: [LINK] )
MCAS is not a stick pusher -- and that's the crux of the problem. A stick pusher would essentially adjust the elevator to pitch the plane down. MCAS trims the stabilizer. At full stabilizer travel you may not have sufficient elevator authority to overcome the downward pitch. Put another way, you can counteract the stick pusher by pulling back (although this may take a strong pilot). If you don't catch MCAS doing something stupid and the plane ends up fully trimmed down you cannot counteract this by pulling back. Here's some other examples of what happens when the stabilizer is trimmed without the pilot knowing. Sadly Capt. VanderBurgh died a couple years ago. Had he not it would have been fascinating to see his take on the Lion Air wreck. this video And here's a quick overview of how the stabilizer functions in a 737: [LINK]
> American Airlines got in some trouble after other parts of this training course were blamed for the crash of AA flight 587 More specifically, the pilots manipulated the rudder on that airplane so aggressively that it sheared off in flight. They were trained to react aggressively in the "Advanced Aircraft Maneuvering Program", which this video is a part of. (There are also related videos that I'm going through now that are more relevant to this particular incident; this video , etc.) BTW, if AA is indeed DMCA-ing these videos, that's pretty interesting. Copyright was designed to incentivize the progress of science and the arts -- not to make large corporations look less bad after they unintentionally kill a few hundred people. Oops.
I was wrong. Take a look at "Control Malfunctions & Flight Instrument Anomalies": this video [edited]