must be accepted as a medium for commercial exchange and payment for a money debt.
Sounds to me like Amazon is making the right move. I don't see much room for interpretation for the definition of 'legal tender' here.
Someone else has already pointed out for another comment like yours that it is your definition of "debt" that is in error. If the vendor refuses to sell to people who don't have cash, then there is no debt to start with. You walking up to a cashier station does not create the debt; you waking out the door with the merchandise does. If you walk out without paying FIRST then you are shoplifting.
I know exactly how much I paid with direct payment as well...
After it happens and appears on your statement. It's hard to be overcharged even by accident when you hand someone the exact amount to cover the payment in cash, and the overcharge is limited to the amount you hand them if you don't have exact change. You can also immediately reconcile the charges with the change and see if the change is correct.
Also, I expect that the government and bank have more important things to do than monitor my pathetic spending habits anyways.
You could be wrong, and you are absolutely wrong when you include the vendor to whom you have handed a handy account number they can use to track your every purchase. Why do you think "loyalty cards" are so ubiquitous? Do you think the stores that have them are just nice friendly folks who give people with loyalty cards a good deal because they like them? Or is it so they can track individual purchasing habits?
Only if you are not very good at paying attention to exactly how your money is being spent.
You might note that all the fees I mentioned have nothing to do with spending your own money, it's fees imposed by the bank for the simple privilege of having an account with them.
A funny thing about being poor is that you end up learning how to really make every dollar stretch as absolutely far as it will go...
The only way to avoid the fees is to have a "minimum balance", in some cases. Poor people have a really hard time keeping a "minimum balance" because you need to be "not poor" to have that much money sitting in the bank unusable.
For the person who provided "two words", yes, I spoke specifically about a bank because my normal CU has none of the fees and does none of the stupid tricks the bank was pulling on me. I have an account at one CU that I don't touch. It's a CD in an IRA. About once a year I call them so they know I'm still alive, and that's all they want. No threats of account dormancy, no fees. The basic savings earns me a few pennies a year in interest, even. And they send me paper statements.
For many people cable really is the only viable Internet service method.
That has nothing to do with what I said.
it basically means that incumbent operators are de facto monopolies,
That also has nothing to do with what I said. I replied to a comment about governments handing out monopolies. That doesn't happen any more, and it happened so long ago that none of those still exist.
Democrats could push a bill that says, "Every conservative will get a free million dollars paid for by the left" and it would still get blocked, for no other reason than because it was Democrats that pushed it.
Really? I think it would be opposed because it is 1) stupid, 2) unconstitutional, 3) would create an immense crush at the local elections offices as people changed their party preferences, (including green, peace, communist, and independents all becoming Republican overnight), and 3) would create a rush of people trying to hide all their income so they wouldn't have to be one of the Democrats that has to pay for it.
Trying to put words in other people's mouths when you don't understand their philosophy is really dishonest.
Otherwise, get government COMPLETELY out of the business and don't give out the monopolies in the first place.
"In the first place" was many decades ago. You can't stop what already happened. However, you can stop it from happening again -- and more than two decades ago federal law stopped anyone from handing out a cable communications exclusive franchise to anyone. That's about ten years more than any existing franchise was good for, so for more than the last decade there have been and are no cable exclusive franchises anywhere in the US.
But cable isn't the only Internet service method, and no ISP has every been granted a monopoly anywhere in the US. Ever.
How is this any different than Costco requiring that you have a membership to shop at their stores?
Costco doesn't let you IN the store unless you wave the membership card at them. Amazon lets you enter the store, spend a lot of time shopping, and then won't let you buy the stuff without having their form of payment.
It's not really a "poor vs. rich" argument. It's a "have vs. have not". I got bit by one of these kinds of cashless stores a few months ago. I'm a visitor, don't have any local accounts of any kind. I need to buy lunch. I go into a nice little shop, pick up some food, and wind up at a machine that wants a specific kind of card -- that I don't have, and would have no reason to have. And no way of getting. No cash slots on the machine. So, I have to walk out and let them restock their items. Really fun. You should try it sometime.
You don't have to have much money to have a bank account....
If you don't have much money and you have a bank account, pretty soon you will have no money.
I got a "free" $400 offer from a local bank. Deposit X dollars and we'll give you $400 for opening the account. Great deal. Until you find out there's a fee every month that you don't do a certain number of POS transactions with their card. (Hmmm. Not processing transactions costs money that justifies a fee? No, not giving them consumer demographics they can sell costs them money.) There's a fee if you want a paper statement. After just a few months (like 6) without the appropriate number of transactions, your account is deemed "inactive" and... you pay a fee for that. And after a few more, your account is dormant and can be turned over to the state.
I needed an international money transfer, and did it through them. There was a $27 fee for that which nobody bothered to tell me about (I had to ask them multiple times for the secret codes so the other bank could send the money, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to tell me), and was not mentioned even on their international money transfer web information pages.
Banks are a rip-off. Poor people and banks have no common ground.
If they are 20 minutes behind schedule, they can just up the speed.
If they can, they might do so. Or the delay might be because of weather at the destination or en-route which can't be fixed by wasting fuel going faster. The delay might be due to headwinds, in which case they can still be delayed while having the throttle to the firewall. If you aren't going to be able to land on time anyway, going faster to get there sooner isn't going to solve the problem. Wasting fuel can also be a problem if you don't have the fuel to waste.
And for an hour long flight, making up 20 minutes is pretty hard to do without breaking mach 1. Figuratively.
How about the role Islam plays in spreading hate speech and extremism?
How about the role that the Internet plays? How about the role that the English language plays? How about the role that keyboards play? How about the role that computers play? How about the massive role that oxygen plays?
Lots of things are used by lots of people to do lots of things that lots of people don't agree with. Social media are media; the message comes from the people who use it.
Microsoft is guilty! Linux is guilty! SGI is guilty! (I'm using an SGI-branded keyboard.) Intel and AMD are guilty! Ban them all.
Only on/. would people complain that a corporation is being more honest about the time it takes to get from point A to point B.
Airlines used to plan best-case travel times, and many times that didn't happen. That could be for any number of reasons having nothing at all to do with their operations. Diverting around weather, lineups for departure, delays for landing due to weather, etc. Airlines aren't just flying around in circles to waste gas because they're 15 minutes early and have to arrive exactly on the padded arrival time, and being late impacts much more than just the people on that one flight.
Outside of major issues, most of the flights I have been on have arrived early. It is actually a Good Thing when something does delay a flight and it still arrives on schedule. It's actually a Great Thing when a small delay in departure can result in no delay in arrival. It's a Really Bad Day when a plane arrives too late to make connections, because that can result in multi-day delays in people getting to final destinations.
You mean like the one that requires me to carry a nearly useless ELT?
An ELT is only required for certain operations.
Even though ADS-B has been mandated?
ADS-B out is only mandated for operations in certain airspaces.
You clearly don't understand the difference between ADS-B out and an ELT if you think ADS-B out is designed to cover for the other. If you think otherwise, will you be happy to get a phone call from the FAA or FSDO or flight service when they notice that your ADS-B out shows zero forward speed after you've landed? There really is a difference between sitting on the ramp and sitting in a swamp with serious injuries.
The FAA reports the results of EVERY accident they investigate for this sole reason,
The FAA doesn't investigate aircraft accidents. That's the job of the NTSB.
so that we can all learn from those that have gone before us
The same thing happened last October, the FAA issued an emergency AD covering the issue, Boeing sent messages to every customer. The second crash should never have happened because the information was disseminated last November. Plenty of time for training. But...
"Any system required for safe completion of the flight should be as reliable as the wing spars."
The AoA sensor is not required for safe completion of any flight. How do all those airplanes that don't have any AoA sensors manage to stay aloft without them, hmm?
There is no way pilots can figure this out in less than a minute while the MCAS is driving them into the ground.
The report tells us it was six minutes from takeoff to crash. The manual trim is certainly "strong enough" to deal with the trim system -- that's what it does.
And having one person diagnose while the other flies is why there are two pilots to begin with.
2. Pilots had to break out the manual during an emergency to properly control a system they were not trained to use.
Bullshit. Dealing with a runaway stabilizer trim is a procedure that is trained into every pilot. It ought to be automatic. "If the trim is malfunctioning, TURN OFF THE TRIM." End of problem.
It's SO COMMON that even I, as a pilot who has never flown a 737 of any variant, know what to do when the trim system runs away. It's so basic that anyone who has an ATP certificate will know it by heart. It is the same thing that the dead-heading pilot on the earlier flight that did NOT crash did -- turn off the electric trim and leave it off.
If you are right that they were not trained to use this airplane, it is NOT Boeing's fault, it is the fault of the airline that allowed completely untrained pilots to fly passengers.
3. The system either did not disengage properly, or else it reengaged automatically,
Didn't read TFA, did you? That's normal, and it's made harder because the LINK to TFA is a self-referential link back to this same story. Here, I'll quote the relevant part for you:
The pilots initially followed Boeing's emergency steps by disconnecting the MCAS system by switching off power to a stabilizer on the tail, the report said. But they turned the system back on 32 seconds before hitting the ground and tried unsuccessfully to use it to point the nose up. Boeing's procedures instruct pilots to leave the MCAS disconnected and fly manually for the rest of the flight.
The system did not "reengage[d] automatically",
THEY TURNED THE SYSTEM BACK ON. The FAA emergency AD says not to, and the Boeing emergency procedure they allegedly followed said NOT TO. And common sense says "if turning the broken thing back on results in continued problems, TURN IT OFF AGAIN." (Emphasis in quote is mine.)
So, the story lies -- they did NOT follow the procedure, they decided to turn a know-malfunctioning system back on, and then wondered why the trim system they should have turned off was still operating. And they kept the system on again until they hit the ground.
Pilot error. Period. They didn't not follow the procedure. They thought they knew better and clearly did not.
Thank you for your kind words. Of course the system should not have failed. But, being a physical device, designed by humans, built by humans, systems CAN fail. And knowing that the system CAN fail, the designers put in a method of disabling the effects of the failure. Screaming that the system should not have failed is simply childish and immature, like the rest of your language demonstrates.
If the stabilizer trim runs away and there is no way to stop it, then yes, there is a problem with the design and outrage would be justified. But since there is a documented and practiced method to disable such a failure, outrage at the manufacturer is misplaced.
on top of the whole sad fiasco starting with the stubby landing gear.
The landing gear has nothing to do with MCAS or a runaway stabilizer emergency procedure.
Boeing put the flight crew in a position where they needed to solve a puzzle in one minute or die in a huge fireball.
And Boeing provided a method of disabling the runaway stabilizer trim that takes just a few seconds to accomplish. Prior to following the standard emergency procedure, pulling back on the yoke takes just a second and would stop the descent.
If you are going to be outraged at how Boeing put these pilots in such a bad position, then you need to be outraged at EVERY aircraft manufacturer, because EVERY aircraft manufacturer of similar aircraft has an electric trim system that can run away.
You clearly are not a pilot, or not a pilot who has transitioned from anything more complicated that a C152 or other trainer. If you had, you would know about electric trim failures and how easy it is to stop them dead without dying yourself.
The point is that they should not need to disable anything. Just haul on the stick to override it.
According to everything I've read, they can just pull back. It just gets tiring to have to pull back all the time, so it's good to be able to retrim and then turn off the electric trim.
That pilot did not know and understand the flaw. He knew that if you worked through the trim excursion checklist you eventually hit something that resolved the symptom.
EVERY pilot is supposed to understand that if you are experiencing a runaway stabilizer that disabling the electric trim system is how you stop it. That's part of their training. It's part of the training beginning with the first contact with an autopilot that has an electric trim system. It's part of the recurring training in the simulators as ATP-level pilots go through their corporate check rides. Before I was ever let loose in an airplane with such an autopilot the CFI made me show him every one of the half a dozen ways of disabling the autopilot, including pulling the circuit breaker for the trim system. And amazingly enough, it's part of the preflight checklist, too.
It's not a case of "eventually hit something", it's a part of the design of the system and part of the emergency procedures that every pilot ought to know.
The important question is not why the dead-head pilot knew it, but why the six other pilots involved did not. No, it's not Boeing's fault that they weren't trained on dealing with this failure, it was in the POH from the beginning.
leaving the pilot to notice a "disagreement" light in the middle of trying to keep a flying bucking bronco stable.
It is this kind of repeated, ignorant hyperbole that makes this discussion to frustrating. The aircraft is not "a flying bucking bronco". The failure resulted in a nose-down trim condition. The solution to a nose-down trim condition is to pull back on the yoke. That stopped MCAS and corrected the flight attitude. At that point, disabling the electric trim system is the documented action to stop the problem.
The only reason the aircraft would be a "bucking bronco" is if the pilot, who has already demonstrated a lack of training on how to safely fly any aircraft with an autopilot or electric trim system, repeatedly pulls the yoke back and lets go without bothering to correct the nose-down trim problem. That's a demonstration of a complete lack of pilot qualifications, which is not Boeing's fault. Whatever airline lets its pilots fly without any knowledge of how to stop a runaway trim system is at fault.
Of course it was possible. Pull up. Countermand, check. Then readjust trim, check. Then DISABLE ELECTRIC TRIM -- not check. That's what the emergency procedure for a runaway stabilizer says. (It also includes "disable autopilot if engaged", but it wasn't, so that step is moot.)
The driver should NOT have to read some checklist in the manual to figure out which buttons to press to disable the system all while the car is heading towards a tree.
Some checklists are immediate action, and are supposed to be automatic. If the electric trim is running away, disable the electric trim. You don't need a checklist to figure that out. And THEN the PNF pulls out the book and goes through the written checklist to deal with the non-obvious things.
Considering that a runaway stabilizer failure is a possibility for many reasons, it is one of those immediate action items that is practiced in the simulator and demonstrated in check rides. To claim that disabling the electric trim was not possible and takes some kind of special training is just looney.
If something goes wrong with autopilot in a plane, very bad things happen.
Yeah, really bad -- the pilot has to disable the autopilot and fly by hand.
If autopilot goes wrong on a car, not so bad things are probable.
Yeah, the driver disables autopilot... oh, wait, there is no "driver" and no controls for him to take over when autopilot is disabled.
When an aircraft autopilot goes bad, the pilot, who has been trained and demonstrated the ability to deal with the emergency, has a reasonable amount of time to take control. When a car goes batty, it may first demonstrate the failure by running a pedestrian over. But that's ok because the occupants can "walk away."
These glitches illustrate why we need the capability to override autopilot.
Aircraft pilots already have that ability, and must be able to demonstrate that they have that ability every time they take a check-ride. That includes MCAS.
If we had UBI and national health, on the other hand, we wouldn't need a minimum wage at all.
If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
If a business can't pay a living wage, it shouldn't exist in our current system at all.
In other words, no business can have any jobs that aren't worth the cost of a "living wage" according to drinkypoo. No entry level jobs for teens, for example.
Actually, minimum wage was never intended to force "living wages". Minimum wage is NOT intended to be a living wage, because not all jobs are worth minimum wage and not all employees are worth minimum wage.
I actually have empirical data: two crashed planes and Boeing doing massive damage control.
You lie. You have two instances of where a failed sensor led to incorrect MCAS operation and pilots who could not diagnose a problem that they face on every simulator checkride. That's not proving what you claim.
I'm not going to discuss an idiot like you. Goodbye.
When the facts elude you, ad hominem to the rescue.
However, if the plane is already upset it is probably impossible to engage the autopilot at all.
The emergency procedure for runaway stabilizer is to DISengage the autopilot (if engaged), not engage it. And then you pull the circuit breakers for the electric trim motors, which prevents anything from changing the trim without the pilot's direct action.
If you have a trim system that is out of control for some reason when the autopilot is not on, then you must assume there is something outside the autopilot that is broken. Turning on the autopilot will not fix that.
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must be accepted as a medium for commercial exchange and payment for a money debt. Sounds to me like Amazon is making the right move. I don't see much room for interpretation for the definition of 'legal tender' here.
Someone else has already pointed out for another comment like yours that it is your definition of "debt" that is in error. If the vendor refuses to sell to people who don't have cash, then there is no debt to start with. You walking up to a cashier station does not create the debt; you waking out the door with the merchandise does. If you walk out without paying FIRST then you are shoplifting.
I know exactly how much I paid with direct payment as well...
After it happens and appears on your statement. It's hard to be overcharged even by accident when you hand someone the exact amount to cover the payment in cash, and the overcharge is limited to the amount you hand them if you don't have exact change. You can also immediately reconcile the charges with the change and see if the change is correct.
Also, I expect that the government and bank have more important things to do than monitor my pathetic spending habits anyways.
You could be wrong, and you are absolutely wrong when you include the vendor to whom you have handed a handy account number they can use to track your every purchase. Why do you think "loyalty cards" are so ubiquitous? Do you think the stores that have them are just nice friendly folks who give people with loyalty cards a good deal because they like them? Or is it so they can track individual purchasing habits?
Only if you are not very good at paying attention to exactly how your money is being spent.
You might note that all the fees I mentioned have nothing to do with spending your own money, it's fees imposed by the bank for the simple privilege of having an account with them.
A funny thing about being poor is that you end up learning how to really make every dollar stretch as absolutely far as it will go...
The only way to avoid the fees is to have a "minimum balance", in some cases. Poor people have a really hard time keeping a "minimum balance" because you need to be "not poor" to have that much money sitting in the bank unusable.
For the person who provided "two words", yes, I spoke specifically about a bank because my normal CU has none of the fees and does none of the stupid tricks the bank was pulling on me. I have an account at one CU that I don't touch. It's a CD in an IRA. About once a year I call them so they know I'm still alive, and that's all they want. No threats of account dormancy, no fees. The basic savings earns me a few pennies a year in interest, even. And they send me paper statements.
For many people cable really is the only viable Internet service method.
That has nothing to do with what I said.
it basically means that incumbent operators are de facto monopolies,
That also has nothing to do with what I said. I replied to a comment about governments handing out monopolies. That doesn't happen any more, and it happened so long ago that none of those still exist.
Democrats could push a bill that says, "Every conservative will get a free million dollars paid for by the left" and it would still get blocked, for no other reason than because it was Democrats that pushed it.
Really? I think it would be opposed because it is 1) stupid, 2) unconstitutional, 3) would create an immense crush at the local elections offices as people changed their party preferences, (including green, peace, communist, and independents all becoming Republican overnight), and 3) would create a rush of people trying to hide all their income so they wouldn't have to be one of the Democrats that has to pay for it.
Trying to put words in other people's mouths when you don't understand their philosophy is really dishonest.
Otherwise, get government COMPLETELY out of the business and don't give out the monopolies in the first place.
"In the first place" was many decades ago. You can't stop what already happened. However, you can stop it from happening again -- and more than two decades ago federal law stopped anyone from handing out a cable communications exclusive franchise to anyone. That's about ten years more than any existing franchise was good for, so for more than the last decade there have been and are no cable exclusive franchises anywhere in the US.
But cable isn't the only Internet service method, and no ISP has every been granted a monopoly anywhere in the US. Ever.
How is this any different than Costco requiring that you have a membership to shop at their stores?
Costco doesn't let you IN the store unless you wave the membership card at them. Amazon lets you enter the store, spend a lot of time shopping, and then won't let you buy the stuff without having their form of payment.
It's not really a "poor vs. rich" argument. It's a "have vs. have not". I got bit by one of these kinds of cashless stores a few months ago. I'm a visitor, don't have any local accounts of any kind. I need to buy lunch. I go into a nice little shop, pick up some food, and wind up at a machine that wants a specific kind of card -- that I don't have, and would have no reason to have. And no way of getting. No cash slots on the machine. So, I have to walk out and let them restock their items. Really fun. You should try it sometime.
You don't have to have much money to have a bank account....
If you don't have much money and you have a bank account, pretty soon you will have no money.
I got a "free" $400 offer from a local bank. Deposit X dollars and we'll give you $400 for opening the account. Great deal. Until you find out there's a fee every month that you don't do a certain number of POS transactions with their card. (Hmmm. Not processing transactions costs money that justifies a fee? No, not giving them consumer demographics they can sell costs them money.) There's a fee if you want a paper statement. After just a few months (like 6) without the appropriate number of transactions, your account is deemed "inactive" and ... you pay a fee for that. And after a few more, your account is dormant and can be turned over to the state.
I needed an international money transfer, and did it through them. There was a $27 fee for that which nobody bothered to tell me about (I had to ask them multiple times for the secret codes so the other bank could send the money, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to tell me), and was not mentioned even on their international money transfer web information pages.
Banks are a rip-off. Poor people and banks have no common ground.
If they are 20 minutes behind schedule, they can just up the speed.
If they can, they might do so. Or the delay might be because of weather at the destination or en-route which can't be fixed by wasting fuel going faster. The delay might be due to headwinds, in which case they can still be delayed while having the throttle to the firewall. If you aren't going to be able to land on time anyway, going faster to get there sooner isn't going to solve the problem. Wasting fuel can also be a problem if you don't have the fuel to waste.
And for an hour long flight, making up 20 minutes is pretty hard to do without breaking mach 1. Figuratively.
How about the role Islam plays in spreading hate speech and extremism?
How about the role that the Internet plays? How about the role that the English language plays? How about the role that keyboards play? How about the role that computers play? How about the massive role that oxygen plays?
Lots of things are used by lots of people to do lots of things that lots of people don't agree with. Social media are media; the message comes from the people who use it.
Microsoft is guilty! Linux is guilty! SGI is guilty! (I'm using an SGI-branded keyboard.) Intel and AMD are guilty! Ban them all.
Airlines used to plan best-case travel times, and many times that didn't happen. That could be for any number of reasons having nothing at all to do with their operations. Diverting around weather, lineups for departure, delays for landing due to weather, etc. Airlines aren't just flying around in circles to waste gas because they're 15 minutes early and have to arrive exactly on the padded arrival time, and being late impacts much more than just the people on that one flight.
Outside of major issues, most of the flights I have been on have arrived early. It is actually a Good Thing when something does delay a flight and it still arrives on schedule. It's actually a Great Thing when a small delay in departure can result in no delay in arrival. It's a Really Bad Day when a plane arrives too late to make connections, because that can result in multi-day delays in people getting to final destinations.
You mean like the one that requires me to carry a nearly useless ELT?
An ELT is only required for certain operations.
Even though ADS-B has been mandated?
ADS-B out is only mandated for operations in certain airspaces.
You clearly don't understand the difference between ADS-B out and an ELT if you think ADS-B out is designed to cover for the other. If you think otherwise, will you be happy to get a phone call from the FAA or FSDO or flight service when they notice that your ADS-B out shows zero forward speed after you've landed? There really is a difference between sitting on the ramp and sitting in a swamp with serious injuries.
The FAA reports the results of EVERY accident they investigate for this sole reason,
The FAA doesn't investigate aircraft accidents. That's the job of the NTSB.
so that we can all learn from those that have gone before us
The same thing happened last October, the FAA issued an emergency AD covering the issue, Boeing sent messages to every customer. The second crash should never have happened because the information was disseminated last November. Plenty of time for training. But ...
"Any system required for safe completion of the flight should be as reliable as the wing spars."
The AoA sensor is not required for safe completion of any flight. How do all those airplanes that don't have any AoA sensors manage to stay aloft without them, hmm?
There is no way pilots can figure this out in less than a minute while the MCAS is driving them into the ground.
The report tells us it was six minutes from takeoff to crash. The manual trim is certainly "strong enough" to deal with the trim system -- that's what it does.
And having one person diagnose while the other flies is why there are two pilots to begin with.
2. Pilots had to break out the manual during an emergency to properly control a system they were not trained to use.
Bullshit. Dealing with a runaway stabilizer trim is a procedure that is trained into every pilot. It ought to be automatic. "If the trim is malfunctioning, TURN OFF THE TRIM." End of problem. It's SO COMMON that even I, as a pilot who has never flown a 737 of any variant, know what to do when the trim system runs away. It's so basic that anyone who has an ATP certificate will know it by heart. It is the same thing that the dead-heading pilot on the earlier flight that did NOT crash did -- turn off the electric trim and leave it off.
If you are right that they were not trained to use this airplane, it is NOT Boeing's fault, it is the fault of the airline that allowed completely untrained pilots to fly passengers.
3. The system either did not disengage properly, or else it reengaged automatically,
Didn't read TFA, did you? That's normal, and it's made harder because the LINK to TFA is a self-referential link back to this same story. Here, I'll quote the relevant part for you:
The system did not "reengage[d] automatically", THEY TURNED THE SYSTEM BACK ON. The FAA emergency AD says not to, and the Boeing emergency procedure they allegedly followed said NOT TO. And common sense says "if turning the broken thing back on results in continued problems, TURN IT OFF AGAIN." (Emphasis in quote is mine.)
So, the story lies -- they did NOT follow the procedure, they decided to turn a know-malfunctioning system back on, and then wondered why the trim system they should have turned off was still operating. And they kept the system on again until they hit the ground.
Pilot error. Period. They didn't not follow the procedure. They thought they knew better and clearly did not.
Fuck off. The trim should not have run away,
Thank you for your kind words. Of course the system should not have failed. But, being a physical device, designed by humans, built by humans, systems CAN fail. And knowing that the system CAN fail, the designers put in a method of disabling the effects of the failure. Screaming that the system should not have failed is simply childish and immature, like the rest of your language demonstrates.
If the stabilizer trim runs away and there is no way to stop it, then yes, there is a problem with the design and outrage would be justified. But since there is a documented and practiced method to disable such a failure, outrage at the manufacturer is misplaced.
on top of the whole sad fiasco starting with the stubby landing gear.
The landing gear has nothing to do with MCAS or a runaway stabilizer emergency procedure.
Boeing put the flight crew in a position where they needed to solve a puzzle in one minute or die in a huge fireball.
And Boeing provided a method of disabling the runaway stabilizer trim that takes just a few seconds to accomplish. Prior to following the standard emergency procedure, pulling back on the yoke takes just a second and would stop the descent.
If you are going to be outraged at how Boeing put these pilots in such a bad position, then you need to be outraged at EVERY aircraft manufacturer, because EVERY aircraft manufacturer of similar aircraft has an electric trim system that can run away.
You clearly are not a pilot, or not a pilot who has transitioned from anything more complicated that a C152 or other trainer. If you had, you would know about electric trim failures and how easy it is to stop them dead without dying yourself.
Got any other piffle to dispel?
I've already dispelled your piffle, so no.
The point is that they should not need to disable anything. Just haul on the stick to override it.
According to everything I've read, they can just pull back. It just gets tiring to have to pull back all the time, so it's good to be able to retrim and then turn off the electric trim.
That pilot did not know and understand the flaw. He knew that if you worked through the trim excursion checklist you eventually hit something that resolved the symptom.
EVERY pilot is supposed to understand that if you are experiencing a runaway stabilizer that disabling the electric trim system is how you stop it. That's part of their training. It's part of the training beginning with the first contact with an autopilot that has an electric trim system. It's part of the recurring training in the simulators as ATP-level pilots go through their corporate check rides. Before I was ever let loose in an airplane with such an autopilot the CFI made me show him every one of the half a dozen ways of disabling the autopilot, including pulling the circuit breaker for the trim system. And amazingly enough, it's part of the preflight checklist, too.
It's not a case of "eventually hit something", it's a part of the design of the system and part of the emergency procedures that every pilot ought to know.
The important question is not why the dead-head pilot knew it, but why the six other pilots involved did not. No, it's not Boeing's fault that they weren't trained on dealing with this failure, it was in the POH from the beginning.
leaving the pilot to notice a "disagreement" light in the middle of trying to keep a flying bucking bronco stable.
It is this kind of repeated, ignorant hyperbole that makes this discussion to frustrating. The aircraft is not "a flying bucking bronco". The failure resulted in a nose-down trim condition. The solution to a nose-down trim condition is to pull back on the yoke. That stopped MCAS and corrected the flight attitude. At that point, disabling the electric trim system is the documented action to stop the problem.
The only reason the aircraft would be a "bucking bronco" is if the pilot, who has already demonstrated a lack of training on how to safely fly any aircraft with an autopilot or electric trim system, repeatedly pulls the yoke back and lets go without bothering to correct the nose-down trim problem. That's a demonstration of a complete lack of pilot qualifications, which is not Boeing's fault. Whatever airline lets its pilots fly without any knowledge of how to stop a runaway trim system is at fault.
But apparently that was not possible,
Of course it was possible. Pull up. Countermand, check. Then readjust trim, check. Then DISABLE ELECTRIC TRIM -- not check. That's what the emergency procedure for a runaway stabilizer says. (It also includes "disable autopilot if engaged", but it wasn't, so that step is moot.)
The driver should NOT have to read some checklist in the manual to figure out which buttons to press to disable the system all while the car is heading towards a tree.
Some checklists are immediate action, and are supposed to be automatic. If the electric trim is running away, disable the electric trim. You don't need a checklist to figure that out. And THEN the PNF pulls out the book and goes through the written checklist to deal with the non-obvious things.
Considering that a runaway stabilizer failure is a possibility for many reasons, it is one of those immediate action items that is practiced in the simulator and demonstrated in check rides. To claim that disabling the electric trim was not possible and takes some kind of special training is just looney.
If something goes wrong with autopilot in a plane, very bad things happen.
Yeah, really bad -- the pilot has to disable the autopilot and fly by hand.
If autopilot goes wrong on a car, not so bad things are probable.
Yeah, the driver disables autopilot ... oh, wait, there is no "driver" and no controls for him to take over when autopilot is disabled.
When an aircraft autopilot goes bad, the pilot, who has been trained and demonstrated the ability to deal with the emergency, has a reasonable amount of time to take control. When a car goes batty, it may first demonstrate the failure by running a pedestrian over. But that's ok because the occupants can "walk away."
These glitches illustrate why we need the capability to override autopilot.
Aircraft pilots already have that ability, and must be able to demonstrate that they have that ability every time they take a check-ride. That includes MCAS.
If we had UBI and national health, on the other hand, we wouldn't need a minimum wage at all.
If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
If a business can't pay a living wage, it shouldn't exist in our current system at all.
In other words, no business can have any jobs that aren't worth the cost of a "living wage" according to drinkypoo. No entry level jobs for teens, for example.
Actually, minimum wage was never intended to force "living wages". Minimum wage is NOT intended to be a living wage, because not all jobs are worth minimum wage and not all employees are worth minimum wage.
I actually have empirical data: two crashed planes and Boeing doing massive damage control.
You lie. You have two instances of where a failed sensor led to incorrect MCAS operation and pilots who could not diagnose a problem that they face on every simulator checkride. That's not proving what you claim.
I'm not going to discuss an idiot like you. Goodbye.
When the facts elude you, ad hominem to the rescue.
However, if the plane is already upset it is probably impossible to engage the autopilot at all.
The emergency procedure for runaway stabilizer is to DISengage the autopilot (if engaged), not engage it. And then you pull the circuit breakers for the electric trim motors, which prevents anything from changing the trim without the pilot's direct action.
If you have a trim system that is out of control for some reason when the autopilot is not on, then you must assume there is something outside the autopilot that is broken. Turning on the autopilot will not fix that.