Boeing’s MCAS had the Conn!
In the very entertaining movie, “Crimson Tide”, starring Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, the term, “I Have the Conn” or “the First Officer has the Conn”, is heard frequently.
The phrase has several uses aboard U.S. Navy Submarines but generally the officer with “the Conn” is the one legally responsible to give proper steering and engine orders for the safe navigation of the ship. There should never be more than one officer “with the Conn”.
However, if the Commander of the ship assigns the Conn to one of the officers he or she expects to have it returned upon command, meaning the Commander is back in control of the ship. Apparently that’s not what happened aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302 last week when it nose-dived into the ground killing all 157 passengers.
Investigators are now learning that Flight ET302’s captain, Yared Getachew, was unable to regain command of the airplane after he had engaged the plane’s “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS)”. In effect Captian Getachew had assigned “the Conn” to the MCAS and it did not return “the Conn” to the captain when ordered to do so.
The preliminary findings regarding the crash of Flight ET302, released Thursday in Ethiopia, suggest that the pilots on the Ethiopian Airlines flight initially followed the prescribed procedures after the MCAS anti-stall system malfunctioned.
In an earlier Medium.com piece I described the three components of the MCAS which are
- Sensors,
- Code and
- Mechanics. https://medium.com/@WillmsmithSmith/watch-out-for-those-self-driving-cars-9c6645ddd50a ) I this piece I wrote;
“Even rigorous testing is not a fail-safe mechanism to avoid mistakes from occurring in complex systems. There’s simply no way of anticipating “all” the events that might occur in the real environment and cause a system to fail.”
For example, I suspect investigators will be looking into the possibility that Boeing tested for a situation in which the MCAS did not return control of the airplane to the captain but even if it did what would the procedure be, especially under the specific conditions the airplane was flying at the time of the crash? What would the captain be instructed to do if he could not regain control of the mechanics of the plane from directing it into a nose-dive into the ground below? In effect what would the captain do if the airplane did not “return the Conn” when he ordered it to?
In the case of Flight ET302 “The captain was not able to recover the aircraft with the procedures he was trained on…,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union and a 737 pilot, who read a preliminary report of the accident .
Lawmakers and regulators are scrutinizing Boeing and the process for certifying the 737 Max. The families of passengers and crew killed in two 737 Max crashes have hired lawyers to pursue claims against Boeing. Those lawyers may use film from Crimson Tide to argue the officer with “the Conn” is the one legally responsible to give proper steering and engine orders for the safe navigation of the ship. There should never be more than one officer “with the Conn” and Boeing’s (MCAS) had the Conn.
