Reply to post: Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

"The most common place for manual trim wheels is in the centre of the cockpit between the seats or by the pilot's knee"

The B737 trim wheel is something like a couple of hundred revolutions from one end to the other.

Yes you can turn it by hand. Yes it's geared down to allow you to do that without power assist. If it's been whacked against the stops it's going to take one pilot frantically spinning it whilst the other is doing full stick elevator to try and keep the thing from going dirtside - and at either stop there's NOT enough elevator to bring the aircraft back to level flight (Unlike smaller aircraft, on airliners you fly and trim with the _entire_ tailplane. Elevators are effectively there for small corrections and manouvres)

The wheel has a popout handle to make it easier to do gross movements (or did on the 737-200 simulator I did my turbine ratings in) but it's still going to take a some time to retrim and in the meantime you can easily run out of sky if the pilots have taken a while to figure out WTF is happening and pull the motor breaker.

Essentially, what Boeing did with the Max was to Rat Rod a 50yo airframe and hope they could get away with it by not explicitly spelling out that software is now essential to keeping the aircraft flying straight&level/preventing pilots from badly screwing up by applying power too early in a stall and if that software goes wrong Bad Things Happen - remember the constant refrain has always been that Boeings are aerodynamically stable without needing computer intervention and Airbus are not (If you stall in a Max or NG and apply power _BEFORE_ nosing down, you'll never be able to get your nose down, so this was already a design on the ragged edge of oblivion. MCAS just adds to it)

There comes a time when engine evolution gets the things too large for whatever they're bolted onto and Max is it - speculation had been around for a while as to when it would happen on 737s - you can't give the 737 airframe longer legs (to move the engines back under the wings) for a bunch of reasons, so the choice for Boeing was Max or a new airframe. It's looking pretty clear that they made the wrong choice.

The FAA being subject to regulatory capture has been known about for a while but I'm not sure even this will solve that problem in the USA. You can expect EASA and other regulators to start looking much more closely at what gets approved by the FAA as a result of this and the 787 battery fires (If they'd used Lithium Iron Phosphate chemistry, those wouldn't have burned, but would have weighed a little more).