Ethiopian Airlines på väg till Nairobi har störtat (2019-03-10)

"Senator, I would actually say that it is accounted for in the training," Elwell replied. He went on to say that the real problem the 737 Max pilots faced was something called runaway pitch trim.

That problem concerns the pitch, or angle of the plane's nose in the air. Every aircraft has systems for adjusting pitch.

When a plane is cruising it is usually controlled by autopilot. But pilots are trained to take over and fly the plane manually if the pitch trim system is out of control. Elwell emphasized that all pilots should know how to do that. "You're not fumbling through books; it's a time-critical procedure, and you go to that," he told lawmakers.

Capt. Jason Goldberg, who flies for American Airlines and is a spokesman for its union, the Allied Pilots Association, disagrees that pilots got enough training to handle MCAS. "I hate to be in a position to contradict acting Director Elwell, but in this case the statement is not correct," Goldberg says.

Goldberg says it's true that pilots train to overcome pitch trim problems, so they can get the plane's nose flying at the correct angle if the system goes haywire. But an MCAS malfunction on a Boeing 737 Max creates a host of other problems, and they're all distracting.

"You would have the stick shaker, which [activates] a rather violent aggressive shaking of the control column," Goldberg says. "You would have the appearance of unreliable airspeed. You would have a number of warnings that don't immediately or intuitively give the impression of a pitch trim problem."

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Even among pilots of major U.S. airlines, Elwell has triggered a stark difference of opinion.

"We have been trained on how to handle the mishap that occurred in at least the Lion Air jet that we know about," says James Belton, a United Airlines pilot and spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association.


Belton says the manual described how a 737 Max will respond in the kind of scenario that would trigger MCAS, even if it did not name the software outright. Further, he says the FAA issued a directive after the Lion Air crash that provided clearer instructions. Belton says U.S. airlines have flown the 737 Max for more than 100,000 hours, including some 23,000 hours at United, without a problem.

"I can't really comment as to the training that they get overseas, but I know here in America ... we have not seen one data point saying that we had a performance or a maintenance issue with it," he says.

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Elwell's claim that pilots were prepared for the MCAS has raised eyebrows among some training experts. "I find it surprising that a system that affects the pitch control of an aircraft of any description is not brought to the attention of the people that are going to be flying it," says Dai Whittingham, chief executive of the United Kingdom Flight Safety Committee. The group promotes commercial air safety and counts British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Ryanair among its members.

Whittingham says that pointing to the pilots' training as a possible reason for the two crashes is "deflecting responsibility from where it properly lies" — with Boeing and the FAA.