Commissario
YupSo they turned off all automated flying systems and didn't know that the one that malfunctioned was still operating anyway. Nice
It sounds like it.
Boeing's official cross training sounds like it was barely more than you get when buying a new car and the dealer demo's the various functions.
This if true is something that is inexcusable when there were major new systems, combined with the lack of information in the in flight emergency book (if true) and it's a mess that means that they've ignored 30+ years of lessons in regards to training flight crews on new variants of an existing airframe*, and probably 50 years of lessons in regards to safe use of automation in aircraft.
I find it hard to believe (yet it seems true) that Boeing and the FAA thought it was ok to make a change to a passenger aircraft that resulted in a change in it's flight characteristics such that it needed an automated system to maintain stable flight (isn't a default to stable flight a normal requirement for passenger aircraft?), then designed the system so that the default version only used one sensor with no failsafe or possibilities of it warning the pilots of a problem, then didn't cover the change properly in the required flight certification training for the pilots, or in the in flight manual.
I'm not sure where I heard it, but I also heard something about when they rebooted the system it didn't calibrate itself on the position of the trim based on actual trim position, but possibly on the assumption the trim was at zero (I can't believe any company would be stupid enough to do that, especially in the aviation industry but then look at the other issues and you wonder). It would be like having a car with some level of automation that assumed every time you turned the engine on that the steering was set for straight ahead.
*IIRC there was an accident under vaguely similar circumstances in the 80's where it was an Airline (not the manufacturer) who decided that that as the pilots were trained on X aircraft and Y was effectively the same (updated model from memory), they didn't need a full familerisation and training on it - from what I remember the FAA basically said that under such circumstances there should always be training on updated versions that covered the changes.