‘Sully' Sullenberger Would've Also Struggled During Boeing 737 MAX Crashes

Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, a real American hero for saving 155 people after his Airbus A320 crash landed on the Hudson River in 2009, drove a stake into the heart of the shameful argument ill-trained foreign pilots are to blame for the two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliners in 2018 and 2019.

Now a speaker for airline safety, Sullenberger spent time in a simulator replicating events that led to the crash of an Indonesian Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8 on Oct. 29, 2018, and a similar plane belonging to Ethiopian Airlines that crashed March 10. Everyone on board both planes -- 346 people, including passengers and crew -- were killed.

Some executives in The Boeing Company, maker of the planes that remain grounded, and their allies have blamed the alleged inexperience or ill-training of foreign pilots in both planes as the cause for the crashes. This, despite near complete agreement the disasters were caused by Boeing’s faulty automated flight control system called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System).

After the simulator flights, Sullenberger said he can now see how crews of both ill-fated aircraft would have struggled.

"I recently experienced all these warnings in a 737 MAX flight simulator during recreations of the accident flights," said Sullenberger to the House Transportation Committee during a hearing on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 on Wednesday.

"Even knowing what was going to happen, I could see how crews could have run out of time before they could have solved the problems. Prior to these accidents, I think it is unlikely that any U.S. airline pilots were confronted with this scenario in simulator training," said Sullenberger whose "Miracle on the Hudson" landing has passed into American folklore.

Sullenberger told the congressional subcommittee MCAS on the 737 MAX "was fatally flawed and should never have been approved."

"We must make sure that everyone who occupies a pilot seat is fully armed with the information, knowledge, training, skill and judgment to be able to be the absolute master of the aircraft and all its component systems and of the situations simultaneously and continuously throughout the flight," he said.

Pilots also need physical, firsthand experience to be prepared for emergencies, he said.

"Reading about it on an iPad is not even close to sufficient.”