Yesterday, A China Eastern passenger jet crashed in a mountainous area of southern China. The Boeing 737 was carrying 132 people, and now we have added another list of scandals or incidences with Boeing in the news related to another tragic manner. The international news initially reported they couldn’t determine the amount of casualties, but I think it is safe to say the way the plane came down, they are all fucked.
Now lucky for us we are a group that has some rocket scientists and aerospace brainiacs who can try to rationalize some of the figures and facts that the news is presenting to us. With that being said here is some initial thoughts that the Red Barons of the AH Media Group have to say.
So if you look at the graphic showing the planes altitude and speed you can see at one point the aircraft was going over 350 MPH straight down. It can potentially be speculated that there was a complete loss of control or lockup in the trim tab or control surfaces, but the plane still would not nosedive that hard if there was anyone with a pulse in the cockpit.
For those not so in tune; Trim Systems are considered to be a “secondary” flight control system. By definition, to “trim” an aircraft is to adjust the aerodynamic forces on the control surfaces so that the aircraft maintains the set attitude without any control input.
Trim doesn’t have substantial effect on control, just optimizes the control surfaces to reduce drag based on the free stream velocity. These systems have redundancy and separated actuators, so it’s unlikely that you would lose all control at once. You might lose one elevator, but not both, and there are enough other control surfaces on the plane to account for the loss. The plane should also be designed, both in mechanical and systems design, so that it’s balanced and in the case of a failure, can maintain level flight. It is also possible the plane rapidly depressurized if something onboard blew up, taking out some sort of electronic autopilot feature with it, and then the remaining autopilot features tried to overcorrect and sent the plane into a nosedive.
Now going back to our point earlier, if someone’s asleep at the wheel, total loss of trim control can pitch you nose down immediately, but several other systems would have to fail, and we are not so sure if the Boeing NG series has the same problems as the Boeing 737 Max’s. It tends to be known that these bigger planes basically fly themselves though. The pilot is usually just there to accept liability for failure. It shouldn’t have the same problem that the several 737-Max crashes had in 2018 and 2019. The Max’s used larger area engines to increase fuel economy and had to be moved forward and up since they wouldn’t fit under the wing. This moved the center of gravity forward, decreasing the balance of the plane. To counter this, Boeing put an AoA (angle of attack) sensor in the nose as many jets have, that was hooked up to their MCAS (Maneuvering Control Automation System) that told the elevators to correct this issue in the event of any abnormal pitch, in the event a stall could occur. There was no redundancy, and the sensor failed a lot. Pilots also didn’t know how to turn that feature off. Therefore, the planes altitude looked like 
before crashing because the pilots were fighting the computer, in an aerial action known as ‘porpoising’, while the MCAS was receiving faulty inputs.
One note that we wanted to mention to leave you thinking is CNN claiming it leveled out at 10K feet after 19K nosedive, there isn’t a chance in hell those wings would be able to sustain that force to make that possible while the time from cruise altitude to crash is a rather astonishing 26k in 90 seconds. Then again, the ADS-B (antenna and radio system used to relay a planes position and flight characteristics via satellite) could have been damaged during the nosedive, giving faulty readings. It has not even been two days since the plane crashed, but it may be hard to accept this might be the next mystery plane crash or conspiracy theory of someone very important was whacked on that plane and the rest of the passengers unfortunately had to go as well. Doubt China’s State Media will tell us the truth. I guess there will be more to come in the coming days.
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