Here’s an idea Hundreds of lives end each day from wars.
Time to invest in peacemaking.
9
Rethinking safety and security is most important as in NASA's oopps. On January 28, 1986, as the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up over the Atlantic Ocean 73 seconds into its flight, Engineer Allan McDonald looked on in shock -- despite the fact that the night before, he had refused to sign the launch recommendation over safety concerns.
McDonald, the director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for the engineering contractor Morton Thiokol, was concerned that below-freezing temperatures might impact the integrity of the solid rockets' O-rings.
8
I owned a hobby business in the 70s that operated out of five airports in New England. Over a 16 year period we taught close to 1,000 people to fly gliders and airplanes. The airports we operated out of that provided dozens of pilots who went to the airlines or ended up like Professor R. John Hansman Jr. at MIT, but in some cases no longer exist or have eliminated the glider operating areas we used despite the fact that they are FAA funded and the loss of these facilities for any type of aircraft being flown by local pilots is illegal. Soaring helped Neil Armstrong and Sully Sullenberger and the other two sailplane pilots whose off field landing skills saved three airliners and the Apollo command module make emergency landings with dead engines. Soaring isn't the only way to train pilots who have the ability to control aircraft in unusual circumstances, but it is the most economic way to train very competent pilots, pilots who start off giving flight instruction in gliders before moving to towing gliders then going to work with a commuter airline or ferrying aircraft to and from Australia that one of the captains we trained did who retired after 34 years from Delta with 20 years flying 747s who was passed over by United because he successfully ditched a Cessna in the Pacific.
200 hours total time! This made the kid sitting in the right seat of this 737 more of a liability than an asset to its captain who hopefully was the person dealing with this emergency.
9
@Stephen Fried
Disturbingly tragic indeed.
1
This morning I saw an analysis of the information available before the FAA's “new information from the wreckage concerning the aircraft’s configuration just after takeoff” that, too me, suggested enough similarities between the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes to have mandated the US ground Max flights much sooner than Wednesday. They used the vertical speed graphs shown in this article.
Statistically, air travel is extremely safe. Which means two of the same aircraft, crashing within months of each other and showing marked similarities in control problems, is a huge statistical blip; one too big to play around with for the sake of losing some money.
20
If only Trump had appointed a head of the FAA this might/should have happened immediately following the second crash.
9
Hundreds of lives are lost after two brand new aircraft, of the same brand new model, crash in a 5 months time span. These circumstances are unprecedented. When has that ever happened before?
Then, the US Government (FAA), the US manufacturer (Boeing), and US Airlines (American, United, Southwest, etc) drag their feet before taking action. They all want “more evidence.” Days later, they finally wake up and ground this mechanical misfit, doing what they should have led the world in doing.
The tragic loss of life in these unique circumstances, at a time of extraordinarily safe air travel, somehow didn’t spur action by our government, and some of our largest corporations to ensure the safety of travelers worldwide.
Two vitally important investigations are needed now. One into the causes of these aircraft crashes and the tragic loss of life, the other into the causes of the breakdown of our collective judgment, leadership, and values that caused us to be dilatory in doing what was so right and so obvious.
What has happened to us…?
16
@PJB Circumstances not unprecedented. The deHavilland Comet suffered five hull losses in a short span of time in the mid-1950s before the type was grounded and a structural flaw fixed. The DC10 suffered a series of mishaps related to a poorly designed cargo door and insufficient hydraulic system redundancy before the FAA grounded the type in 1979. The 787 Dreamliner suffered a series of fires relating to faulty, poorly manufactured batteries before the type was grounded for months in 2013. And back in the 1990s, an earlier edition of the Boeing 737 suffered an apparently related series of rudder malfunctions leading to control crises (and on several occasions the loss of the plane), but the FAA never acted to ground the type in that case.
4
@PJB, ......Trump happened.....With the help of Putin.
4
@TomF
In that case it's even worse. With all that background experience, the loss of two of the same brand, new design aircraft in such a short time still doesn't spur immediate action...
The FAA, the manufacturer and the airlines really have lost their way.
7
Why are Canadian and American regulators calling the VSI data "newly available satellite data"? Flightradar24 had the VSI data on their website within hours of the when the Ethiopian crash happened?
11
Money is the root of all evil. Boeing improved their 737 aircraft to the MAX 8, but the flying characteristics changed, which would have cost the airlines money in training. Boeing added MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) to make the new 737 MAX 8 fly like earlier 737s. To add insult to injury the airlines and pilots were not informed of the new system which controls the plane nose pitching up under manual flight control. MCAS was wrongly designed to use only one sensor to detect the pitch up, when both sensors on the airplane should have been compared and the MCAS shut off if the sensors did not compare. Just a matter of safety of flight.
13
Unanticipated failure modes involving human-machine interaction are difficult to predict and the number of possible anomalies is too great to identify in flight testing or even with classical hardware-based flight simulators. An entirely virtual simulation environment which can accurately model both the spectrum of possible hardware failures and human responses is the only feasible way to sort through all the potential failures quickly. This will require that the human side of the interaction be effectively modeled as well as the machine side.
2
But Dr. Dan pilots have expressed issues with the autopilot prior to the first crash, 8 months? It was on their radar. After the first crash they troubleshooter found the issue and were set to start adding of additional sensors in January. But Trump SHUTDOWN the GOVERNMENT and those workers were held hostage with the other federal employess. The time sensitive repairs were on hold as Trump doubled down on foolishness to save face.
16
Where are the consequences of their actions?
The CEO of Boeing should be made to fly -on a Boeing MAX 8- to the funerals of all who died because of his actions. Then fire him, give his retirement to those grieving families and deport him to Ethiopia.
7
@senior citizen This is what's is wrong with society... verdict not in but you want a hanging... instant revenge pre-facts... (BTW, how were you harmed?)
4
what does MCAS stand for?
Here is an article that explains clearly.
https://hackaday.com/2019/03/14/mcas-and-the-737-when-small-changes-have-huge-consequences/
@Lee De Cola
Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System
@Lee De Cola. Money Can Always Sway
6
Boeing deserves what it gets. The airlines workers do not. There isn’t enough training time to justify the system changes on the jets. It’s an industrial engineering problem which will only get worse as tech disrupts.
8
Self oversight by Boeing can only be self serving. It is outrageous the FAA did not ground these planes. So many Federal agencies are afraid to actually make a decision in the "Fear based environment" created by Trump. Just as Republican senators are afraid to speak out, due to the fear of "not being re-elected", this "no decision" from the FAA is the same.
17
@ Easy The acting FAA Secretary, took his orders from Trump. Trumps installs yes men. Trumps narcissitic ego could not even follow protocol and allow who ever he is, to make the announcement. He was spraying Rose scented perfume to mask the,...odor. Looking always looking for people to fawn over him and give absolute devotion to his mighty magnificance,... A "Hail Caesar!"... A Sick and dangerous personality.
11
Science has greatly improved our lives, making our world a more convenient place to live in, and helped us gain a better understanding of ourselves and our universe.
It’s as if when science progresses, so does humanity. With this in mind, Aviation and automotive designers and researchers are eager to embark on scientific projects to revolutionise and benefit all of mankind.
When confronted with the tragedies of great magnitude like two Boeing Max 8 crashes, the inescapable feeling that scientific progress, innovation, and discoveries can only be made if scientists take the role of God.
Heedless progress in automobile and aviation fields heavily incorporating AI to replace humans are increasingly and unexpectedly running to horrendous problem. Not that the dangerous situation was not thought of. As far back in early sixties 2001: A Space Odyssey got right about our blind leap into the digital age.
Decades after its release, the film seems prescient – an allegory about how destructively artificial intelligence can be misused.
More the automation removing human higher are the chances of Black Swan even occurring. Black Swan event is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
3
Umm, folks, there's nothing "Max" about a 737. All great tragedies start from small slights. Less pride, more work.
Bad software or hacked software, just like Margaret Atwood said: "Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results."
5
@Chris How about MAXimum $ profit for Boeing et al.
3
America was forced to follow international pressure !
This is a clear example of how the rest of the world has given up on Americans unilateral measures and isolationism.
This administration’s policies on tarifs ,broken international treaties, NATO criticism, Paris Agreement, Iran nuclear deal, added to the exacerbation of the too friendly relationships with dictators and rogue states autocrates, has created for the first time since WW2 a sense that the USA is not in charge of the world anymore.
Putting economic priorities and pride before American lives is just another disconnect beyond repair of this Trump era,we gonna have to bear with, until America decides to be herself again.
21
@Zozo Obviously Trump did it!
1
Zozo, Dont leave out the armchair cabinet members at Mar- A - Lego, the un-vetted easy access of anyone (corrupt, or with an agenda to circumvent the constitution, law, or get favors) who has money and/or power to whisper in his ear...
7
Alright, here's what I want to know: the video in this article includes a clip of a promotional shot where pilots appear to take a tester flight and are congratulated by a crowd after their successful landing. Can Boeing share, maybe, whether any of the tester flights had similar problems? Can the satellite data that provided the buttress for deciding that there are maybe similarities between the two crashed flights also be used to find and analyze Boeing's tester flights?
I mean, if satellite data can do it for the two crashes, why can't satellite data do it for Max 8 tester flights?
1
After 'days of pressure' - the planes were grounded on Monday, the US grounded them on Wednesday. I'm not thinking that amounts to 'days of pressure.' The FAA made a good decision regardless as confidence would be in the tank for flyers.
1
As I read comments by experienced pilots who would fly the problem plane since they had no problems in the past, all I can think of is the definition of INSANITY: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results...
Enough said. I WOULD NOT EVER FLY THAT PLANE OR IN THAT PLANE regardless of how many said it was safe until we know for a fact the cause of those two crashes. I don’t care if Boing goes bankrupt, my life or ANY human life is more important than a company who builds a problem plane.
9
This is called lead from behind.
6
Three or four US pilots have reported glitches with MCAS autotrim system used on Max...but they simply disengaged and continued flights uneventfully. Why didn't these pilots do same? Not to say there isn't a design issue but seems there might be a communication/training disconnect with foreign carriers.
Also, why no attention to the shockingly low experience level of the Ethiopian first officer -- just 200 hours. I would get on a Max with 2 experienced pilots before I would get on any airliner with what amounts to an intern in the right seat.
6
@BillScott
Bingo! Not fair for airlines or the FAA to devalue crews they know are excellent until it’s clear they have no choice due to public hysteria. On top of legit nit wanting to lose money
2
@BillScott Exactly... all mechanical devices have problems (BTW, when the actual facts come out we will once again know that this was pilot error). In the case of airplanes that is why we also have people up front...
1
@BillScott What if the glitch happens at a time, and with such rapidity, that "disengage" is not recognized as an option until it's too late? Because, 1. if glitches are happening often enough that it becomes second nature to disengage the automatic system, then it will be statistically likelier for a glitch to happen that can't be bypassed in time to save the plane...and lives. And, 2. a system that glitchy has no business being in use, period.
It would be like using cruise control in your car, with a system that occasionally loses speed feedback and just keeps accelerating. What would be the purpose of using cruise control if you constantly had to monitor your speed in order to be ready to manually "disengage" to avoid an accident? That might be more fatiguing than just driving manually, period, at least mentally.
6
China and others grounded their aircraft first for “safety” reasons for sure!! They’re actually at risk of losing $$ aircraft to the MCAS issue!!
2
As a retired commercial pilot, retired military pilot, and someone who has been flying since my 18th birthday, a few observations:
1. Without question, the automated systems today, are far safer than manual flying by human pilots.
2. The use of these automated systems have resulted in an incredibly safe air transportation environment.
3. The airlines can only afford to train their crews to some cost point. Of course they will opt towards emphasizing the automated systems.
4. There's an old adage pilots use when confronted with an usual situation..."fly the aircraft, navigate, and communicate" in that order. It works!
5. The problem is two-fold; ie, one, even the most skilled pilot loses his basic flying skills over time if they are not kept honed and two, most airlines simply don't have the time or money to effectively maintain this experience level. Some have tried but it's too costly.
6. Pilots are notorious for claiming their reason for being in the cockpit is that when things "go bad" they will take control and save the day And yes, they generally do just that. But they may not realize that all those years of flying in the military or working at jobs that required more basic skills, those skills over time have eroded to the point that they are simply not available under duress. I also believe this is true of managing the automated systems as well.
For your information, try reading an Atlantic magazine article published years ago about an Air France accident.
7
I agree that automated systems are safer in a task where consistency, immediate response, and precision are essential. However modeling the effects of human interaction with the system, particularly when there are anomalies, is far more complex. A computer model of the human side of the interaction that can be used for high-speed simulation of the human machine interaction in a wide range of possible failures is needed to identify points of failure.
1
FAA Chairman could have made a decision to ground the planes. In fact, Trump had agreed that FAA should announce the decision to do so. Then he changed his mind and delivered the announcement himself. Along the way, Trump editorialized about the matter and unduly delayed the grounding.
Of course, the aircraft are now temporarily grounded. That's a good thing. But the manner in which this situation played itself out is typical tin-plate autocracy.
8
A computer is only as smart as the person who programmed it. The programmer is not also a licensed pilot, physician or psychologist and the machine he/she programs cannot be trusted to fly our planes, diagnosis our diseases nor tell us what our opinions, desires or whims may be.
This is exactly why A.I. is an insurmountable challenge - NO SINGLE mind nor group of arrogant programmers should be left on charge of our well being.
11
The government shutdown delayed the approval of the software update for these planes. I would like the NYT to further explore this aspect of the story. This second tragedy is on Trump and any other politician who does not value the essential functions of our government.
10
What I don't understand is why poorly skilled pilots are still allowed in the cockpit. Autopilot should be turned on AFTER the aircraft has passed out of its most dangerous regime NOT immediately after take off. Whatever may be the issue with the MCAS system all that's needed to solve a problem with it is TURN IT OFF! As long as the airline system keeps employing computer operators instead of pilots this will keep happening.
5
@Rick Girard At first I had the same line of thinking but it turns out the MCAS system (that pushes the nose down) is turned on when the autopilot is turned OFF (and disengages when the autopilot is turned on) - it's a safety system designed to add redundancy to manual flying. So the flight would have already been in manual flight mode when the error started occurring.
4
@Trevor B
Yes also it too can be disabled manually via switches in the cockpit.
It's interesting how the Wright brothers crashed many airplanes first before finally getting one in the air and then proclaimed it a success. Boeing's flies millions of successful flights and then one crashes so now they're a failure and their stock is toxic. This case reminds me of the problem Toyota's had a few years ago with reported sudden acceleration which I don't recall its cause was actually determined or resolved aside from changing some floor mats. The auto world was supposed to have ended that time too and all automobiles were considered man eating dragons.
1
@John Doe
The Wright brothers did all those crashes in the context of the test phase. These Boeings are fully operational, there already being 4,000 ordered, more than 130 delivered and flying.
Completely different cases.
9
California fire investigation authorities have now been investigating for over five months whether a broken C hook supporting a high voltage line caused the Paradise Ca. fire which claimed 87 lives.
How can anyone expect more immediate results from multiple investigations a billion times more complex, as is the case here?
3
America First has turned into America Last (in announcing this grounding)! True issue is the competition that makes people and corporations greedy at times.
Series of events in the rat race are
Shifting the Center of Gravity to accommodate bigger engines + introducing the MCAS to fix the newly created problem by auto correcting the planes (during crucial times Takeoff and landing) + Over ruling pilots manual controls at crucial times + Not considering additional Pilot training to handle all these Changes + Cannot even visualize even after the Lion Air crash and blaming poor maintenance of a brand new plane as cause + Importantly FAA approving such major changes and considering still the plane is 737 family just by seeing its outer shape & name. Several people out there with a Max-Phobia, better to re-certify the plane before it becomes Boeing phobia!
4
Why did this article not mention that at least five complaints from pilots about this airplane were reported. The pilots said they had to disengage the automatic pilot to stop the plane from nose diving.
12
@Patsy
Bc that would suggest American pilots are better which doesn’t fit the narrative of the NYT.
The U.S. grounds aircraft because of profit loss. Trump and Boeing 's reputations have gone way down in value.
4
It's interesting how the Wright brothers crashed many airplanes first before finally getting one in the air and then proclaimed it a success. Boeing's flies millions of successful flights and then one crashes so now they're a failure. This case reminds me of the problem Toyota's had a few years ago with reported sudden acceleration which I don't recall was actually determined or resolved aside from changing some floor mats. The auto world was supposed to have ended that time too.
Having been a pilot for 35+ years I would say grounding the fleet until the cause of the second crash can be determined is a good idea.
However, determining what actually caused the accident is vastly more important than speculating. The vertical speed graph, that is in the NY Times today, would be more meaningful if it were accompanied with a graph of altitude for the same time period. There are many things beyond a confused anti stall system that can cause uncontrolled descent.
Mr Trump's tweet could not be more incorrect. Modern aircraft are "managed" way more than "hand flown." On board computers have vastly improved flight safety. Most modern jets are easier to fly and safer because of computers and redundant systems.
I am quite surprised how many of the comments seek to randomly lay blame before the facts are known. Boeing and the FAA know that safety is their most important mission. Boeing and the FAA were here before our current crop of politicians and will be here when they are gone. The reason air travel is so safe is because of Boeing and the FAA not in spite of them.
A few weeks or months from now we will know what caused the accident.
7
@David C. Clarke
In regards to your last statement the issue with the FAA and Boeing is with regards to Trump and his corrupt administration. He has made it pretty clear that this country and its interest are up for sale and profit supercedes all us, including human life. Just look at his past actions since he has taken office in regards to environmental issues amd climate change. The oil and gas industry is having a field day and we will all suffer for it as our planet becomes more and more uninhabitable. Also consider that the president never chose a head of the FAA and as a result Mitch McConnell's wife was indirectly working as their head. That says a lot about what Trump is really about. Reports are also coming out that the software update that could have fixed the problem that lead to the second plane crash was delayed by the government shutdown. If it turns out that Boeing's software update could have resolved this issue before the Ethiopian Airlines crash the blood of those victims will be on the president's hands.
8
"After the Indonesian crash, pilots’ unions complained that pilots had not been made aware of a change to the flight-control system on the Max that could automatically push the plane’s nose down in certain situations. That software change is believed to have played a role in the Lion Air crash and may have been a factor in the Ethiopia accident as well. Boeing is now planning to roll out a software update that has been in the works since the Indonesian crash."
This paragraph says from the article says everything that needs to be said. There should have been an "all hands on deck" response by Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to this flight safety and air worthiness problem following the Lion Air Crash months ago.
Accordingly, Congress, both Democrats and Republicans acting in unison, needs to need determine IMMEDIATELY why the FAA was the last major air safety organization in the world to order the grounding of Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft and issue a joint communication as to the cause of this unpardonable occurrence as soon as possible.
10
How times have changed. In the near past, the U.S. and F.A.A. pretty well set the agenda when it came to plane safety/flight grounding determinations. Nations waited for the whistle as to what to do. Well that's not happening anymore. Sadly, it was the U.S. seen to be stumbling reluctantly last through the gate. Sign of the Trump times?
9
Did the government shut-down cause any delays to the FAA's evaluation of the circumstances or the approval of the new software "fix?"
4
So the FAA suffered "regulatory capture" sometime during the Bush43 administration. How is it that the FAA still does not have a head? Why is the acting head a Boeing executive? Why isn't the FAA headed by a figure of the caliber of the Canada Minister of Transport Marc Garneau?
Can somebody please provide details or links to articles describing what happened here?
About the only upside to the current administration has been the educational value. Since Jan 21 2017, I have newly learned the following:
=> emoluments (presidents accepting money/bribes from foreign governments)
=> emergency powers act in the 1970's (fake border emergency)
=> Posse Comitatus (using the army for non-emergencies that are supposed to be handled by various domestic agencies)
=> SCOTUS ruling that allowed a president to sidestep the order of succession in the DOJ (Sessions to Whitaker when it was supposed to go to Rosenstein).
=> Tariff (president unilaterally imposing a $300 billion tax - aka tariff - based on a fake national security excuse)
There's more, but I think I have made my point.
9
Where was Mr. Muilenburg's "abundance of caution" when he called Trump say everything is OK? There should be a severe consequence fall directly on Muilenburg for his self-serving disposition.
4
Should have happened long ago, the first time any pilot or any nationalityraised safety concerns -- and long before Boeing's boss started calling Trump to beg him not to ground his planes. A third crash, heaven forbid, would have bankrupted Boeing and destroyed the company's reputation irretrievably.
2
The Beoing CEO will be out of his job in a couple weeks. Ultimately he is paid for these moments - crisis management - and he failed.
6
Boeing has hundreds of "consultants" embedded within the FAA. Need we know more?
7
I can see it now: Wanted - highly motivated MIT Computer scientists to fly Air Force One. No experience needed. Licensed pilots are not eligible.
3
Perspective:
I have been flying airplanes since 1987, enjoyed a 20.5 year career in the USAF, flying trainer then fighter aircraft, and have been flying the 737 for seven years. I am also a highly trained expert in aviation safety and mishap investigation. I have over 9,400 total flight hours and 4,600 incident-free hours in the 737.
I have flown the 737 Max 8 seven times without incident.
U.S. airlines have flown the Max 8 for tens of thousands of hours without major incident.
The causes of the Indonisian and Ethiopian crashes are not yet public knowledge.
Speculation, rumor and hearsay are demonstrably detrimental to aviation safety and public confidence in the air transport system. Thorough investigation and data-driven, facts-based decision making are the only proven means to facilitate mishap prevention.
Personal/political/business agendas abound and media reports have been somewhat vague, but with my training, experience, judgment, and my trust in the U.S. system, I would not object to operating a 737 Max 8 with my family on board.
6
@32YearPilot
Interesting - I have a different view of my family and its safety.
6
@32YearPilot Would you do so with MCAS switched off? What other special precautions would you take? Are you ignoring the evidence that two flights ended when the pilots were unable to manage the plane?
5
@32YearPilot
Statistically the planes are safe but the concern comes from the extremely close relationship between the FAA and Boeing and, let's face it, the money, with Boeing the #1 exporter in the U.S..
It's my understanding that the redesign of the 737 involved larger engines moved forward on the plane. When engineers found that the added power would cause the plane to go nose-up, rather than correct the design, they added a software fix instead. It would appear that while this fix may be fine most of the time during flight, during takeoff there is little room for error due to lower altitude.
3
OK, fine- executives and politicians might express their confidence in the planes; but who can express confidence in the oversight of the F.A.A. and responsible parties for the training that should be provided to accompany new technology? This makes me sick.
10
What we don't have a clear answer to is the back-and-forth dicta in news reports: why did the pilots not know how to override the system when its nose dives? Is it truly a software problem or is it that corporations failed to provide or impose training? More transparency, please! We entrust our lives to this system of travel.
Too, why is contact lost and yet several more minutes pass? It'd be helpful to those of us who aren't aviators to understand why, if the computers are still working (meaning, they're misleading the plane into the ground) contact is nonetheless lost.
11
Yes you are on point. Something doesn’t feel right. Maybe the plane for a simple fact can not fly on its own under full weight. Example one engine fails can this plane fly on 1 engine alone. It looks like it can not under full load. Many commercial airplanes can make it to land on 1 engine. Boring has to come clean . This is not software alone really.
Regarding the US media coverage of this in general: Does anyone else have the impression that there has been disproportionate coverage of the financial consequences for Boeing, as opposed to the consequences to the victims (nearly 350 between the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights), and their families? I've found this really striking (especially in news outlets other than the NYT, which I think has been more balanced) and rather troubling. It seems to confirm the view of many of my friends and co-workers from abroad, who see the US as interested in profit above all else. I am also concerned that it reflects a relative disinterest in tragedies that affect individuals in Indonesia and Ethiopia, as opposed to the US.
22
@KC
Humans aren't valued by the economy intrinsically. The big players that have the most affect on the world are firms and therefore tend to grab more attention.
3
@KC I am still waiting to hear about the 8 American victims...
4
The Indonesia crash was in October. Where did those black boxes go? Possibly to the FAA which couldn’t make sense of them and forwarded them to Boeing?? Who decided a “software update” was the answer???
7
The latest black boxes went to France this time. Somebody figured out Boeing was not the best destination for full assessment.
1
I haven't read all the posts, but isn't the 737 MAX what Southwest is relying on for their Hawaii service?
I think we got an aircraft manufacturer's CEO who is headed for the unemployment line and then his lawyer's office in the cards soon.
4
I'm sure that Trump was worried far more about an incident that would ruin his chance of re-election, than he was about a plane load of people getting an early trip to capitalist heaven.
12
And why did tRump himself need to make this announcement? Trying to appear presidential, finally? Too little too late. Go away!
13
It's astounding these planes were allowed to fly after the Lion Air crash. All the evidence suggests a serious problem with the craft, particularly when coupled with the complaints filed by pilots.
Those 157 people shouldn't have died.
10
@Cindy L Also that 189 shouldn't have died if FAA would have acted properly on the below points of Max,
Changing the C.G of the plane there by creating higher possibility of steeper angle, there by higher chance of stalling & fixing it with a software that too overriding manual controls without even informing about this to pilots or training them. The DFMEA to be rewritten. New designs shall be more safer than existing designs. Operating Cost competence taken precedence that costs human lives! there is a saying that 'safety will fix things by itself, but it will make you to pay for fixing itself'
Reportedly a software update from Boeing meant to address some of the issues pilots were having with the flight control system was delayed from being implemented by over a month due to the government shutdown. Last year the president said he would be proud to own the government shutdown. We'll see how much responsibility he takes once this story begins to make the headlines. Trump is truly in over his head trying to run this country. The saddest thing about all of this is that his supporters will still stand by him. He boasted a few years ago that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone and still not lose votes. Well it looks like Trump literally made a decision that could have led to the deaths of almost 200 people and his supporters probably won't care. Sad.
15
Shouldn't we be leading the world in airline safety, and not be the last ones to ground a plane model after an incredibly worrying series of crashes and disturbing in-flight behaviors?
Who exactly is the FAA working for here?
15
@Jeff
Boeing
3
Boeing is and has been a great company for decades, but I for one found the CEO's phone call to Trump reassuring him that these planes were safe disturbing and precipitous to say the least - IMO Boeing should have taken the lead here and grounded the planes themselves until the causes of the crashes had been thoroughly investigated and any problem has been corrected - i'm sure this issue has huge financial implications to the company but i would only remind them that customer confidence is the most important factor affecting their bottom line.
25
“Since this accident occurred, we were resolute in our position that we would not take action until we had data to support taking action,” said Daniel K. Elwell, the F.A.A.’s acting administrator.
Mr Ewell is not a big fan of the precautionary principle. The basic data was in. Two crashes of a brand new plane within 5 months in very similar conditions right after takeoff. This should have been enough to call for action.
Economic arguments and ties to corporate friends often cloud judgment making one err on the side of corporate interest rather than passenger safety.
Time for Congress to clean up the FAA.
19
OUT OF AN ABUNDANCE OF CAUTION. That's how I thought the FAA was meant to act. But in the case of the grounding of the 737 Max air craft around the world, the US was NOT the leader. But dragged its feet in rallying to make air travel safer. Why? Need you ask? With so many governmental functions and agencies brain dead or DOA, it is scarcely surprising that the US under Trump would be laggard and derelict in its application of an abundance of caution. For example, papers published about Trump and his father reveal that they would neglect to provide maintenance and repairs on apartments they had built, then use some sort of legalistic scam to send around people to charge the renters for repairs that were required contractually. By those standards, Trump's US would have let more planes fall out of the sky, then charge the survivors of the victims pay the airline for the failure. At least some of the documents published from among those acquired by the Southern District in New York, appear to indicate. Humans may be thought of as being elevated. But some people's idea of elevated always ends with the elevator emptying out in the bargain basement, where all the shoddy merchandise is to be found.
7
@John Smith
That may be what Trump and his father did, but I’m pretty sure (when I can only name three aircraft manufacturers) this is not the outcome Boeing was seeking. Another plane? These comments want me to believe Boeing doesn’t care about their planes dropping out of the sky and I know better.
If my memory serves me correctly,The Times initially quoted Trump as saying, “The safety of the American people, OF ALL PEOPLE (my capitalization), is our paramount concern." I felt compelled to criticize the President for that. Suddenly, the quote changed to,“The safety of the American people AND ALL PEOPLE (again my capitalization), is our paramount concern." Did The Times err? If so, where is the correction?
4
The failure is that Boeing allowed this to happen, because they were rushing to get new Customers, for their new plane, instead of putting safety FIRST. I think this plane is eminently good and workable. But the Management of Boeing failed. I hope the CEO has to quit. And the idiotic PR Head as well. Reputation is easily broken in the modern world and this is all their fault.
6
will wonders never cease.....the FAA finally recovers ITS black box, aka a brain, that had fallen into a black hole (or box).
but before giving Boeing way too much credit for at last, not acting as they're above the law b/c they can bribe congressmen, oh I mean *offer campaign donations*, they're still lying out their black box about their "motivations".
as it seems quite clear they a) have looked at sat data and know the alarming changes the planes took on climb-out, ie when the nose should be pointed one way up, its also way clear b) its a lie they know *anything* about its configuration (positions that flight control surfaces were placed to make aircraft whatever) when the biggest piece found from what I read would fit in a #9 size letter envelope.
so I'm to believe they reassembled 10,000 pieces from 6 or 8 key areas and superglued them back together while we slept? please they aint Humpty Dumpty's support staff. but someone (or some corporation) might just be ready to "have a great fall" and I dont mean the season either.....
2
This may well be the end of Boeing. If it’s proven they KNEW there was a software problem even before Lion Air and certainly after, then the ambulance chaser lawyers will be on the next plane (although not a Max 8, or maybe not even a Boieing) to Asia to sign up close to 500 litigants. Let’s say 5 million each. We are talking over 2 1/2 billion in reparations. And perhaps overarching greed will finally get it’s just desserts. Of course that overarching greed doesn’t include that of the American lawyers but that’s another story.
4
And of course President Big Mouth just jumped right in babble-texting about “complex airplanes” and not wanting Albert Einstein to fly a plane...” and standing up for his Boeing against the entire world by not grounding these planes directly after the crash. Two days later, he “sees the light.” Another late aha moment from the most idiotic public official America has ever suffered through.
17
Boeing’s outrageous behavior is yet another reason we need to take back the senate and #DitchMitch
16
Good decision, but why did Trump have to announce it as if it were his personal decision? He has no expertise even to comment on such matters. All he wants to do is hog the stage.
22
Boeing has proven one thing. The over riding concern for the Trump administration all along money and profit. Surprise! It would seem that once Canada joined the rest of the world in putting safety of it`s passengers (what a radical idea) ahead of profit in recognizing these birds had a real problem; it was the straw that finally broke the camel`s back. The FAA should be ashamed of itself for such a pathetic slow response. As for Boeing; you were going to fix it in April? Yeah Right! Roll the dice and hope more people did not die first. Great example of corporate think there.
12
...the planes will be back in the air as soon as this investigation is completed.
....we can opine until then - but, ultimately, the likely outcome will have been the pilot's inability to control the aircraft.
3
@JMS Agreed, plus acknowledgement of the Boeing/FAA failure to require recertification and training.
When oh when are we going to have a decent, fast, and widespread rail system? Aircraft are like flies buzzing around a rotting corpse............our national one.
7
The individuals responsible for shortshrifting QA should probably face stiff criminal charges for placing quarterly profit margins above long-term safety and business sustainability. Boeing itself should immediately enter a lengthy period of public trusteeship to be scrubbed clean of corruption before being re-released into the corporate wild.
5
@Philippe Egalité
I certainly wish that could be true; sadly, this administration, and unfortunately the Supreme Court as well, has so gutted any kind of true regulatory oversight on corporations (and now regulatory agencies as well), in the name of profit that I fear nothing resembling criminal or even financial sanctions will come of this. American companies are now beholden to only one entity: their shareholders who demand ever greater returns on investment and are willing to sacrifice consumer safety and any kind of moral decency in order to achieve it.
I fear that unless there is some significant change in the next election, we will be seeing more of this.
3
Boeing's greedy and cowardly CEO is now on board with the grounding.
The US used to have real leaders at the head of giant companies. Now they are bought and paid for shills for rich investors.
Put the entire Boeing C-Suite in jail.
12
Ahhhh, I love the pontificating. The tea leaf reading. The baseless speculation. Me?? I’ll just wait for the FAA to tell me what happened.
3
@BCnyc Yes, we will wait for specifics. But having the same model of new planes going down in the same fashion a few months apart, combined with numerous other complaints of problems by pilots who were able to keep their planes in the air, give us good reason to question the judgment used by people at Boeing and at the FAA.
7
@BCnyc Given recent events hasn't your faith in the FAA been shaken?
6
Those poor passengers....they MUST have been able to feel the speed changes and maybe even sense the up and down movement...
My thoughts are with them, and Thank Goodness these planes were grounded.
7
Trump’s “Make America grate again” bullying risks every airline passengers’ life until he is shamed by the rest of the globe.
What a useless president we have. What a weak money-driven creep.
9
All you self-driving car proponents, take note. Death by software inadequacy, in all its form, is not a human tragedy, it is a sick joke.
3
I’m disgusted that the president has anything to do with the FAA. These decisions to ground airlines should have zero political influence. My God, how a politician could think they were helping Boeing by not grounding the fleet is idiotic. Now people can feel confident that any fix will be lasting. If not, I hope Boeing goes out of business for being incredibly incompetent. They’ve been making these planes for decades, the 737, how could they now have a problem? I guess if it’s a 737 in name only.
4
Do the "MIT computer scientists" agree with this decision?
1
Boeing was criminally negligent for asserting pilots didn't need additional training to fly the new 737. I wonder how many people at Boeing disagreed with that decision at the time it was being made?
10
A relative of mine (now retired) was directly involved in the dept with "Airworthiness directives". ALL airlines receive them when any changes are made. But the level of services may be different depending...
You might notice that these crashes occurred in countries whose airlines just might have spent less on "services" ... And with Pilots who may have had way less training than in other countries ...
The ridiculous rush to embrace AI & rely on it will also play a part in what happened along with inadequate Pilot training.
The fact that Trump jumped into the fray just shows exactly how cynical and thoughtless he really is. Whether or not the majority will recognize this remains to be seen.
1
Another case of to much Computer control... There is nothing like a good Captain that knows the plane backwards and forwards with flying time on said aircraft.... All aircraft should have the exact same systems so the pilots know what the plane is going to do in bad situations.... and they want us to drive self driving cars......
21
@DISCMAN The difference between self-driving cars and auto-piloted planes is that becoming a pilot requires thousands of hours of training and layers of redundant protection systems. The bar for driving is much lower, hence the vast number of car crashes relative to the number of plane crashes. Computers may very well do a much better job at driving than the average human.
4
@DISCMAN They don't want us to "drive self-driving cars;" they want us to RIDE in them.
3
This might be the first intelligent thing Trump has done since elected President. Bravo!
2
Could this be the dreaded computer hack of an automated system that we have been fearing for years by evil doers. Cyber terrorism come to our skies? If so, this is dangerous new dimension for homeland security.
2
The weight of comments here is upon the explanation that the pilots were unable to counteract actions of the automatic stabilization system that was misbehaving. Either because of insufficient training or expertise of the pilots.
However, no system requiring repeated human intervention and exhibiting roller coaster thwarting of attempts to override should ever leave the ground.
Boeing knows that. But their shakedown of the system didn’t reveal the issue. And when Boeing implements a hypothetical “fix” they won’t be sure the “fix” fixes things, because they don’t know exactly what is happening and cannot reproduce it.
The simple conclusion when faced with a design conundrum that defies understanding is to scrap the design and go back to standard proven approaches to accommodating the new engines. But Boeing isn’t going to scrap hundreds of hundred million dollar planes to build a new uncompetitively priced but safe replacement.
Nor will the FAA intervene, being completely unequipped to implement their own independent assessment of any claimed fix, and being dependent upon Boeing advice.
This problem isn’t over, and these planes with their “fix” will remain a gamble, possibly with better odds of survival, but a gamble nonetheless. Passengers may again enjoy the roller coaster that is the 737 MAX.
11
@John✔️❎✔️Brews I think the 737 platform should have ended with the NG. Instead Boeing decides to take it to the max and see how much they can milk out of it, attaching these new engines etc. I concur, they're probably not going to scrap this and build a safe replacement. I hope whatever "fix" they provide will avert disaster.
The investigation will probably show that the software had malfunctioned in both crashes. Boeing was aware of that as they are working on updating the software as evident of the first crash. My understanding is there are 2 switches that can be thrown to turn off the auto-pilot and go to manual. Why won't the pilots have done that as soon as they felt they were having problems with the controls? There was 3 minutes from take-off to crash. I would think the pilots would have more confidence in having the plane in their control vs the auto-pilot. I would question, did they know were those switches were located? Boeing would not produce a plane that can't be manually flown. The auto-pilot should be considered an aid and not a dependent. That is why we still have pilots in the cockpit.
God bless all the victims & their families of both crashes.
2
The co pilot had only 200 hours of flying time. In the U.S. you have to have 1500 hours to get hired anywhere. Basically, the pilots can't switch off the auto pilot and fly the plane because they don't know how to fly. My husband is a retired Delta captain and he refuses to fly on any non U.S. Carrier.
2
Having flown enough that I have been on planes that have skidded off the runway in a snow storm, a plane's wing that caught on fire, emergency landing because of lack of fuel, and each and every time it was the pilot who safely landed us and saved our lives. Many of these pilots were graduates of the Air Force Academy and veterans of combat. Now mature, experienced, these smart pilots working commercially had the necessary instincts to operate the planes safely in a time of emergencies. Boeing's executives and board of directors should demand that pilot's complaints are responded to immediately with the respect they deserve - it may save more than your stock prices such as passengers' lives.
17
Reassurance from Trump. Wow, that's a negative recommendation. Boeing may never recover from an at a boy from anti science, lying Trump.
3
I fly 737's twice monthly and have for years. The 737 is the best plane in the air. This "glitch" probably has more to do with pilot training.
Auto pilot is a switching flip. It's quite easy to override the computer. Pilots should know how to fly !
@Heartland Harry While you may have been flying prior models of the 737 "for years," the first 737-Max was put into service less than 2 years ago...
3
If they hadn't grounded these planes, the rarity of the "unlikely event of a water landing" would've come up in wrongful death litigation. If Boeing knows these 737s have a much higher chance of crashing into the ground than landing on the water, why are the seat cushions designed as floatation devices rather than packed with parachutes?
It the plaintiff attorney would then argue that that obviously wiser course wasn't pursued because it would scare off customers. And it would be awkard to announce, instead of the "unlikely...water landing...seat cushion...floatation" bit...
"Welcome to xxxxx airlies flight 3456.... the aircraft you are flying on this morning is a Boeing 737x, equipped with state of the art MCAS automatic trimming software which on occasion will go haywire with limited possibility of pilot correction, resulting in violent, random changes in pitch that will eventually result in plunging into the ground at velocities..... THEREFORE, in the unlikely yet realistically possible event of MCAS malfunction, sort of reminiscent of Hal in 2001, your seat cushion, which does not float by the way, has been packed with a PARACHUTE. Please unpack and harness to yourself your own parachute before those of younger passengers who may be traveling with you....
Yes, this would be awkward. And part of the litigation.
1
Surprised to see the President act on real data not his gut? Maybe Fox news commentators got to him.
2
the beginning of the end for Boeing and the trump administration.
thank God.
5
If the two aircraft had crashed within the United States I suspect they would have been grounded immediately.
4
Masha Gessen: “There is an adage of journalism that every story should be written as if by a foreign correspondent.”
So too for the first views of the crash of two Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft.
Gessen presented this principle in her analysis in the 3/13 New Yorker of the corrupt American educational system: “It (admissions scandal story) bears savoring and retelling, because it says something intuitively obvious but barely articulated about American society: its entire education system is a scam, perpetrated by a few upon the many.”
Money rules American decision making. So too with safety regulation. Airlines and countries looking from afar acted quickly. In the US with a president who shows every day that it is money, not being at all educated or capable of reasoning, that matters, the decision to ground could wait. In his mindless way he could tell us 326 million Americans that all Boeing and America need do is return to a distant past, return air transport to the level of American ground transport.
Look at America from afar, and you will see the land as it now exists, waiting for us voters in 2020 to bring it in to the 21st century, year 1.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
1
I guess corporations aren’t people after all. People would care about other people’s lives. And if their actions resulted in hundreds of deaths, they’d go to prison.
9
FAA cerified this aircraft model aiworthy. They needed Canadian experts to be pointed to available flight data.
What kind of professionalism is this?
7
There is that little difference between John Doe, Herr Schmidt, M. Dupont, Ola Nordmann, Ronnie Medel-Svensson, Vasya Pupkin and leading politicians and corporate leaders:
The latter are the ones who for their own benefit are playing with the lives of the former, whom they for some outrageous reason find expendable and too easily classify as "collateral damage".
That is the world's greatest tragedy.
Trump was worried about the affect of grounding on Boeing stock. I guess he needed a few days to let his friends (and Trump family) sell off some shares. Always follow the money.
5
The Boeing Company is among the greatest institutions in the history of the World. Those who delight in attacking Boeing are fleas on an elephant.
1
President Know-it-All saves us all once again.
God help us.
2
I wonder if Rep. DeFazio read a Times piece from 3 February of this year: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/world/asia/lion-air-plane-crash-pilots.html
Boeing appears to have pushed hard for the FAA not to require additional pilot training after the initial software change suspected (but not yet proven) to be at the heart of the Lion Air crash.
Mr. Muilenburg's apparently cozy relationship with the president seems to mirror Boeing's cozy relationship with the FAA. Both relationships might be considered too cozy in light of this second 737 tragedy.
6
It's an actuarial calculation... $737,000,000 in insurance divided by 157 deaths on Ethiopian Air + 187 deaths on Lion Air = 346 deaths x $1,000,000 each, and insurance covers for Being. (Pardon the sarcasm :/)
This would be a good time for another government shutdown. Then, someone can go through the FAA computers and delete the e-mails that were sent by worried pilots to the FAA during the last shutdown.
3
Using software to allow pilots to fly the planes in a way that artificially attempts to mimic handling of older planes that the pilots were trained to fly, rather than training the pilots to fly the new planes as they actually handle given newly designed engines that are placed on the body of the plane in ways that cause them to handle differently than older planes: brilliant and idiotic.
1
Trump has a lot of experience grounding aircraft. He did that financially for en entire airline. Trump Air. It’s all in chapter 7 of “The Art of the Deal” And the book has about 5 chapter 7s.
1
Heads should roll.
Out with the head of Boeing, out with the head of the FAA.
Self-interest trumped the public interest, a violation of trust.
Goodbye and see you in court.
5
So, the leader of the “Free World” led by President “Bonespurs” is now leading from behind.
After becoming President he took our nation out of the Trans Pacific Partnership, made us the only nation on Earth to be outside the Paris Accord, threatens to take us out of NATO, and now is dead last to ground aircraft that have already killed 300 people in two crashes.
Pollution kills people too, but slowly. Lack of healthcare kills people, but not so visibly. Guns kill people, as they were designed to do, but NRA funded Republicans think it’s “bad guys with guns, brown skinned asylum seekers from Central America and “mentally ill” people.
Ask yourself, why would anyone anywhere follow American leaders?
3
Shouldn't the CEO of Boeing resign over this?
1
Meanwhile 20,000 people die each year from air pollution yet Trump is weakening EPA pollution regulations. So much for "safety being the paramount concern".
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/well/live/air-pollution-smog-soot-deaths-fatalities.html
5
Can someone remind us -- who is the Secretary of Transportation? And has the Secretary taken any decisive action? .....
Oh.., it's do nothing Mitch McConnell's wife. Ok, that explains it.
Only duties are to look enthralled and ecstatic in camera view when great leader Trump speaks. Got it. Nothing else required.
4
Glad that President Trump got something right.
1
The FAA only grounded the planes after the competent Canadians publicly stated that the satellite data from the Ethiopian aircraft was similar to the Lion Air 737 MAX 8 that crashed.
Only a fool would believe that the FAA and Boeing didn't have access to this information earlier. Suddenly there is "new information". They care about money and not your lives as they know the max your heirs can claim in the event the aircraft "comes into contact with terrain" is I believe $250K.
2
Since apparently the Ethiopean pilots had received the updated training on this plane after the first crash, I would strongly presume that they performed that procedure of flipping the switches and turning the wheel to assume control of rear stabilizers. And IT STILL CRASHED. (Pardon my yelling.)
2
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/03/13/us/boeing-737-crash-promo-1552525399018/boeing-737-crash-promo-1552525399018-threeByTwoLargeAt2X-v8.png
The graph is stunning and shows just why the planes needed to be grounded.
1
The MOST shameful moment in this tragic series of event was when the amoral CEO of Boing called the amoral CEO of Trump Inc (who is squatting in the White House) and lobbied to keep the death machines in the air for business reasons and Mr. Trump agreed against the better judgement of the rest of the world. Eventually, the FAA had to follow.
2
The flight radar data that was available soon after the crash on March 10 (https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1104676048317362177) indicated unstable vertical speed - similar to the previous crash of a Lion Air plane. Why did the FAA have to wait for the "new" satellite data to ground the 737 Max 8s? Why was US the last country to do so? Would they have taken the same risk with passenger's lives if these planes were manufactured in a different country?
1
Possible answer: the FAA gave the black boxes from the October crash to Boeing and the FAA relied entirely upon Boeing’s assurances that a “software update” would fix things — oh, and no hurry about that.
1
i heard the Ethiopian flight was so short the MCAS would not have engaged or been on. No mention of that here.
That is a lot of idle jets. From my experience with mechanical devices (admittedly, mostly cars), leaving a complex mechanical device idle for any significant period of time leads to additional problems from non-use. Boeing better figure this out quickly imo or this problem will lead to more problems.
How do they NOT know exactly and for a fact what the cause of the Lion Air 737-Max 8 crash is yet? I realize they suspect heavily that is was this new Flight Control Software that adjust altitude to prevent stall but why is this not registered exactly in the Flight Data Recorder along with what the pilot tried to do to overcome or correct it? What are those Flight Data Recorders recording if not that information?
And since the Flight Data Recorder was found in the Ethiopian Air crash when for sure will that be known?
4
It has been widely reported (see WSJ, 03 13 19) that some of the software research being conducted to ameliorate the 737 problem was suspended during the recent, five-week Trump Shutdown.
Once this was revealed (in the press as well as on several broadcast stations) we saw Donald Trump suddenly do a 180 take an interest in his fellow human beings.
Before that....not so much.
NOT my president
4
The main problem here is Boeing stock. Look for the military to place a multi billion dollar order for fighter aircraft in the coming months. Big beautiful American fighter jets. That ought to solve the problem.
6
Now that the FAA has agreed the 737 Max 8 Lion Air and Ethiopian Airline crashes were similar, an available analysis of the flight recorder from the Lion Air becomes very relevant.
The Lion Air's flight recorder suggests that for much of its 11-minute flight on October 29, the pilots were struggling with the craft's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).
This is a computer system designed to prevent the nose of the Boeing 737 Max 8 from pulling too far up and putting the plane into a stall when under manual control. It has nothing to do with the airplane's autopilot.
The MCAS appeared to have mistakenly sensed a looming stall and tried to force the plane's nose down while the plane was under manual control. The pilots responded by pulling the plane's nose up to compensate, only to have the MCAS system force the nose back down again.
In effect, they were wrestling with software and hardware inadvertently trying to kill them.
Much of the discussion so far has pointed to the over reliance on computers for flight when in fact the problem here appears to be that while the plane was being manual flown Boeing had put an automatic override without fulling informing the pilots of its existence. This is unique.
Boeing has much to explain here.
12
@GerardM
Absolutely true, however, it also seems to be a significant problem with pilot training/compentence in that they don't know how to inactivate the system to begin with!!! In particular given all the news elicited from the previous crash. If there is anything a pilot should be keenly aware off is how to inactivate all the nannies in case they malfunction.
Boeing most likely allowed pressure to market the 737 Max to short circuit testing. And it was utterly foolish of them after the first crash to rely on luck - and blaming inexperienced pilots - to avoid facing the fact that a malfunction was causing serious risks.
As a general thin - with the sophisticatin of automated systems: perhaps the time has come to have two experts in the cockpit: the pilot, and the tech savant. The sheer amount of info thrown at a pilot has got to be distracting rather than helpful in some scenarios. And so far, I want pilots who understand the physics and the art of flying so well that their reaction time can't be detected by the rest of us. Because, as noted in these last two crashes, there wasn't really any time for speaking to air controllers.
I wonder if an overly automated aircraft can be controlled by an external (and hostile) party, especially if the plane's systems were designed by half baked engineers.
1
@Ancient This is a concern for future systems where the crew workload is shared by people on the ground, but for now the control of an airliner is 100% in the cockpit
@Ancient Well, they can do it with cars, why not planes?
1
The problem is that the software is a band aid which covers over a basic design flaw in the new planes. Larger engine housings were put into the new planes. To achieve ground clearance, these were mounted in a more forward position over the wing. This changes the center of gravity of the plane, and made it more likely to stall when the plane is angled upwards ( angle of attack). If the pilot was using an angle of attack that would have been safe on the old plane, it could stall the new plane. Boeing, with FAA oversight put in software that would override the pilot, and point the nose of the plane down. This is what caused both accidents. Initially the pilots werent told how to override the software, and it made flying the planes too complicated.
The old plane was very stable and forgiving in flight. The new plane isnt. No amount of software can fix a mechanical design problem. The mechanical design of the plane needs to be fixed.
16
As an engineerwith some 30 years of automation and automotive experience I have to question Boeing’s decision to compensate an apparent center of gracity shift in the airfrrame with a software solution. Ikve learned pretty early in my career that critical and safety functions should always have fail safe features and those should not be software based, especially when the risk of injury or death is high. In Boeing’s case, their solution should have been gravity based, by mechanically changing the airframe to compensate for the modifications imposed by the new engines. Gravity, as opposed to software, never fails, so logically thinking, a naturally balanced airframe is always prefferable to any automation wizardry. I do realize aeronautical engineering has particular challenges I couldn’t possibly be aware of, however the thought of starting with an inherently neutral handling system is always in my mind when I’m designing things.
15
There’s a very old saying that states: “If it isn’t broken, then don’t fix it.” The 737 is an iconic plane that has flown for decades. But the 737 Max is a new plane with the same name. As such, it should have required recertification to be flown. But the FAA is no longer an outside, independent body. The airline industry has been allowed, since 2005, to have many of their employees act as regulators. This has most certainly led to a dilution if it’s independent power. Case in point: the 787 Dreamliner lithium battery nightmare. The old FAA most likely would have grounded the 737 Max immediately. Too much automation has taken over flying planes. Why in the world would you have only ‘one’ sensor for MCAS? What happened to redundancy? This is a classic case of what happens when you get rid of those pesky regulations that are designed to protect the public that supposedly ‘suffocate’ big business. Bring back an independent FAA and it will solve the problem.
22
For any who have not read it, find and read Michael Lewis' new book, The Fifth Risk. It describes the effects which echo throughout government and society when new leadership eschews its responsibility to support the bureaucratic but needed agencies which keep us safe in so many otherwise inapparent ways.
This is our FAA, currently rudderless, with a president who actually suggested nominating his personal pilot to be its administrator.
Computerized flight control systems may be hacked or poorly written and planes can fall from the sky but a feckless administration can kill us with equal ease.
13
Michael Lewis’ book is, indeed, scary. Despite what President Reagan said government plays an important role in our lives. I fear that the Trump administration’s pro business stance is really a too cozy relationship that allows business to put profits before people.
6
Does anyone really wish to fly on a jury-rigged plane even with new software? Personally, I believe most of us would rather fly on a plane developed from the ground-up, thoroughly tested by both the manufacturer and the FAA ( without political considerations) and piloted by those who have gone through extensive training on the new model.
Isn't that the way it's supposed to work? I hope Congress will be looking into where it might have all fallen apart.
Aren't we all also worried about the influence Boeing and other large corporations play in our political system where every day it becomes more apparent that their influence overrides the health, safety and well being of the American people?
Our democratic system of government and of living is eroding faster than ever.What will we do to reclaim our voice over those " people" with so much bloody money?
11
@It's About Time
Well, yes, I’m worried, but who in their right mind would believe Boeing intended for this to happen, or that they believed it would happen again? (Something else is wrong) I just can’t believe a company who builds airplanes would purposely ruin their reputation. And that is the standpoint from which many are commenting. We are going to destroy ourselves - the enemy is ourself.
I agree with Sarah, USA - there is a design flaw and Boeing
knows it - just watch the short video in today's NYT - in order to compete with Airbus fuel efficient A320 - Boeing equipped the 737 Max 8 with larger and heavier engines - those new engines had to move further forward of the wing than the previous installations - according to the Boeing video that weight difference causes the nose of the plane to move upwards - the additional software (unknown to the pilots) was supposed to correct that flaw - I'm not an engineer - but it doesn't make design sense that a computer program should correct a design flaw - look at it this way: we flew to the Moon in '69 with less computer power than your iphone - that was 50 years ago - and Boeing can't figure out a safe program to keep it's 737 Max 8 flying safely today?
20
@ingo I completely agree with your interpretation. I also think that Boeing wanted to sell its planes with the idea that the airlines didnt have to send their pilots back to school thus saving them money on retraining. Competitiion makes the world go around till you cut corners to keep up with the competition. Unfortunately, I havent heard of an Airbus going down due to computer malfunction. What has happened to the America I once knew?
3
I strongly advise the Boeing CEO to redirect the millions of lobbying dollars spent to purchase parts of the F.A.A. and snug up to the oval office to his manufacturer's department of software development.
17
Ethiopia is not allowing the NTSB to examine the data on the recovered data and voice recorders. This is a significant rebuke and demonstrates the degree of mistrust created by Trump's America First doctrine. No doubt the Europeans assisted this decision by underlining the potential for American bias in favor of their own manufacturer.
33
@crowsnest You are so right and it is hurting all of America, not just his supporters (who are oblivious). These rivalries and lack of trust exist anyhow, but now it is particularly well noted.
9
I read elsewhere that there were incidents with this model airplane but unlike the two that crashed, the others had problems when the planes were flying on autopilot. The nose of the planes pushed down on their own. The pilots disengaged the autopilots and leveled out the nose. But pilots were told to keep quiet and not speak to the media on their own about any incidents with this model of airplane.
5
The vertical speed data show what happens when an airplane is tail heavy. The vertical motion is called a phugoid oscillation. Every pilot knows that the center of gravity, which is affected by how the plane is loaded, has to be checked before takeoff.
3
If I were to take a guess, I would bet that there's nothing wrong with the plane that proper training couldn't have fixed.
Why pilots are ever allowed in the air without sufficient practice and skill using a newly developed system remains a mystery.
Years back an Australian pilot had a similar problem in a Qantas plane that did some weird things. But because of his excessive (and unasked-for) level of study, he was able to react and save the plane and passengers.
There never are any short cuts.
8
@Lydia well, don't take a guess for things you don't know... The lack of need for training was a main selling point for this plane. You could guess here that a responsible company would not do that with sufficient testing and a responsible faa would not approve it without sufficient data.
Of course in a movie, Denzel Washington would probably land the plane by its nose and would save everyone...
4
@Lydia same with Lion Air. That same plane that crashed also had problems with the sensors yet the pilot was able to keep flying it. They changed the sensor but unfortunately the plane still crashed on the next trip. Also if you look at the graphs on the vertical takeoff for both airplanes they are very erratic. If that were a cardiac chart most likely it would show tachycardia, a fast erratic heartbeat. The point is it's not easy to recover easily from something that is happening so erratically and so fast.
1
@GA I also wonder how many other "passes" the FAA has given to not only Boeing but parts manufacturers, Pratt Whitney, etc. The American people have lost faith in that propped up fake FAA and it needs to be demolished and rebuilt under far stricter supervision. But until Trump is gone, that will never happen, and I, for one, will only fly on non-US airlines.
3
I hope the planes' control systems weren't hacked. I hope it's not even conceivable.
4
The good news is that these planes are grounded until they can figure out exactly what is going on. The bad news is that no one in the Trump administration seems able to make a decision without the pre-approval of Mr Trump. This was clearly the job of Mitch McConnell's wife. She did nothing . We don't need a "cabinet" under this president He must be at the center of all decisions.
31
Of course I'm no expert, but this seems like negligence to me: "... pilots had not been made aware of a change to the flight-control system on the Max that could automatically push the plane’s nose down in certain situations."
It seems to me that any automated system that can override the pilots input requires at least awareness training. And that any automatic flight control system should clearly indicate to the pilots when it is automatically 'correcting' their input. Further, it seems like pilots should be able to quickly and easily disable such a system in a way similar to disabling autopilot.
I hope all those who made that money saving decision to not inform or train pilots about the new system are today thinking about the 346 people lost, and their possible complicity in those deaths.
25
@Paul It's easy to be an armchair pilot. These incidents happened within a few minutes after takeoff. That's the most critical time to get the plane up to cruising altitude. No one should have to be fighting with a gadget during that critical period of ascending. Right now I see Honda recalls due to an airbag problem. They don't tell the drivers to use evasive techniques but to bring them back for service.
3
For all who cheer the Republican philosophy of deregulating everything, and eliminating government oversight, this is what you get. Unsafe planes and a lot of dead people - all in the name of corporate profit. These accidents are EXACTLY why we need our government to check corporate interests and protect the public from corporate greed.
81
Trump did not have to issue an executive order grounding the planes. He did so to protect Boeing from lawsuits by the carriers. Notice how carefully worded the FAA statement is. They will not admit there might be a design flaw. Ever. That would have the potential to bankrupt Boeing. And profits come before passenger safety, of course. Protectionism at its finest. Sickening.
31
I am certain President Trump knows more about flying than any pilot in the world, and that he certainly understand air safety than career people at the FAA, but it does worry me that he allowed our 737's to continue to fly when all of the rest of the world had grounded theirs due to safety concerns. Does he know what he is doing?
9
@Patrick Stevens I think you're giving Trump too much credit here. FAA is really the one in charge of groundings. Trump, in usual fashion, is trying to give the aura he was in charge, directed this, etc. but he's deferring to the FAA. If he told the FAA to hold off on a grounding despite the FAA wanting to because of other evidence (Boeing stock price, etc.) then that is wrong. So far we don't know that happened, I'm sure the media will imply that somewhere without any evidence.
2
@Patrick Stevens
The career people at the FAA made the decision. Please read carefully what the President said (not the Twitter blurb) and you would understand that he is not claiming any expertise that you imply.
Then again, if you are what I think you are, no matter what Trump says or does, you will be on the opposite side.
Sad.
5
@Patrick Stevens I think if Trump is smarter than career people at the FAA, that he should release his SAT scores and his grades.
He can't multiply:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMIKzUAY8n4
He can't spell - just read his tweets
He can't read - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfaXILOSEf0
His companies have had at least three bankruptcies.
He had no idea that Israel was in the Middle East.
He hasn't a clue as to who most of the presidents, prime ministers etc. of Europe are.
New Yorkers who have had to endure this man's endless self-promotion and con jobs for decades, couldn't believe that anyone would fall for his self-aggrandizing blather and not be bothered by the fact that he called his campaign "the biggest infomercial of all time." He knows absolutely nothing about governance. He has no idea what Congress actually does and, by his own admittance, he doesn't have the patience to read more than one paragraph at a time, if he can even do that. To be blunt, he's the most unqualified person in our entire history to ever hold the office of the presidency. The whole world laughs at him behind his back. Can you tell me why you think he's smarter than the people at the FAA. I think they're smart, but corrupt.
Why not put ALL Boeing execs into a 737 Max and see if anyone wants to take off?
23
Maybe this wouldn't have taken so long if Trump hadn't left the FAA without a leader for the past year?!?!
22
@BDubs
very good point.
acting directors are fine for a little while, but the longer the person is in place, the more an agency or unit drifts from effectiveness. it is a very tough job.
3
In normal times I'd think this was a prudent move in the interest of safety... that if officials are saying it's system... "let's keep people off those things... in normal times... but I don't trust anything this administration does. What's their angle? If they agree it's a systemic issue... this administration... then I'm thinking something like... Lockheed Martin and Martin Marietta got together and greased some palms to force the issue hoping this tanks Boeing's stock...
Or maybe someone on Fox News was really emotional about it...
I don't trust this administration to order their own lunch.
9
The newest graphs show about ten miles of Ethiopian data, then no data until a crash ten miles later. If this is data "transmitted to the sky" every 8 seconds (as I've read elsewhere; transmitted to satellites) it should have continued to the end of the flight. Why?
3
Why not put all the top Boeing execs into a 737 MAX and see if anyone wants to take off?
9
Pilots are the be-all and end-all not software. If the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air planes' automated systems went haywire the pilot should switch it off at the first hint of trouble and fly the aircraft manually.
5
@Hollis Of course but the ability of the pilot to take back manual control was disabled by the automated system. And the pilots' manual on how to use the system (since there was no actual training of pilots) was riddled with errors.
I have heard from a reliable source that the pilots in the first crash attempted to take over manual control but were unable to do so as the system was locked.
FAA needs to be purged and replaced with people who actually didn't used to work for plane manufacturers. This is an horrendous story that just keeps getting worse. While they are determining what to do with these planes, they really, really need to rebuild FAA from the bottom up and look at the conflict of interest that the members of FAA have, while also considering criminal charges. That they pretend they have the safety of the American public uppermost in their minds, is, at this point, absurd and insulting to the American public. Why did they give Boeing permission to fly these planes without ANY pilot training and then pressure Europe and the rest of the world to do the same. I maintain that is criminal behavior and the only way to stop these industries from policing themselves is to charge them with malfeasance.
16
My deepest condolences to families affected by any amount of this insanity. The whole debacle is especially heinous since, if the graphs in the other NYTimes article aren’t just for show, the software fix looks trivially easy to implement.
It would seem that they just needed one if() statement to do some bounds/“sanity” checking on sensor values in what’s called a PID, or proportional-integral-derivative, control loop. They could then flag any changes beyond a certain threshold and disable the automatic system in the event of too much spurious data.
This is actually something taught in introductory embedded control, and something must not be right at Boeing’s quality assurance to have let an oversight like that make it into production of a critical system. This is also, in my view, why all such autonomous systems need an absolutely-no-questions-asked manual override/“off” button. It should never take the death of hundreds (or even one!!) to make this point clear.
Really hate to say it, but these catastrophes were absolutely, 100% preventable. Here’s hoping that this provides a sobering moment for not just airplane manufacturers, but really any vehicle makers looking into autonomy (cars, boats, submarines; whatever).
P.S. If some reason proper QA is “too expensive” for a company to value human life, just make it open source and someone will probably come along and fix it.
9
I am very concerned that so little is being discussed about the five week gap in time because of President Trump‘s absurd government shut down and how this seems to have affected the FAA. It seems that there was some concern about this problem after the initial accident and investigation was supposed to have started and be finished by January but because of the FAA being decapitated temporarily nothing.
18
I never thought I would see the day when China puts more value on its citizen's lives than USA.
18
@sansay Really? Seems like business as usual for the GOP.
Is the F.A.A. and others really going to accept the outcome of an investigation of itself by Boeing? That's like Trump/AG Barr/Mueller.
3
Why must the pilots fight the computerized fight system? Why can't they just flick a switch, turn off the system and fly the plane manually?
I believe the Max has a new way to shut off the computer, but surely after Lion Air, all commercial pilots checked their guides to make sure what it was. I've watched hundreds of youtube flight videos.
The pilots turn the plane over to the computer a minute after takeoff and they don't have to fly again until a minute before touchdown. Otherwise, they just monitor the computer.
Can these pilots fly an international route manually anymore? Do they train? Is the plane's systems so complex that pilots are more dangerous than computers?
Until the cause is found, all airlines flying the Max should have their pilots flying manually in on-ground simulators. Once (and if) bug fixed, all Max pilots should fly a long commercial route manually with no passengers.
In fact, various airline authorities should mandate a long commercial flight without passengers for all pilots, say 6 times a year.
From that Air France that went into Atlantic from Brazil through countless incidents since, pilots seem befuddled when automatic pilots fail. We need pilots who train continuously to fly, not sit there like zombies watching computer controls.
9
@Frederick Kiel
This reminds me of the rough nauseating commutes in DC after a similar situation with the metro forced our rusty drivers to do more actual driving. (A crash was related to lack of skill through reliance on automatic systems).
As a passenger who barely made it through those first days without losing my cookies, the importance of practice was obvious.
@Frederick Kiel your comment about pilots turning on the computer to fly the plane is absolutely true. So many of today's pilots do not have basic flying skills. They believe the computer will solve all problems. Much of the issue today is recognizing a problem, understanding what has to be done, and taking the proper corrective action. So many of today's technologically advanced planes have so many systems, one must be very careful of interpreting the issues in order to know what to do. In my opinion, these two tragedies most likely took time to analyze, especially if they had no formal sim training, and this time lapse was fatal. Sad situation all around. Shame on Boeing.
Simple question below.
The new bigger engines causes the plane to naturally nose up, if it goes to far an auto system points it down, saving the pilots the trouble of leveling it off.
When it over corrects, why don't the pilots turn it off?
it takes a second to turn off a car's cruise control, maybe 5 seconds for the plane's system, can anyone explain why pilots can't turn it off and do their job?
3
@Oreamnos Because the MAX 8 system disabled the pilot's ability to regain manual control.
1
Two updated vertical speed graphs changed FAA's mind. I wonder what the normal vertical speed graphs look like, or is it just an excuse?
Since this accident occurred, we were resolute in our position that we would not take action until we had data to support taking action,” said Daniel K. Elwell, the F.A.A.’s acting administrator. “That data coalesced today, and we made the call.”
Or... take action, prove the planes are safe and THEN fly people around in them.
6
I believe today is the day that all countries with good conscience have shown that trump's America lacks all credibility in world leadership.
And that is very sad to witness.
19
Why wasn't the software update available before? Did the gov't shutdown in January have anything to do with the software not being approved?
Why doesn't the article mention that the acting head of the FAA is a former Boeing executive?
There are a lot of unanswered questions here.
19
@Bud Robinson I think Boeing has to come up with the software update, not the FAA. And if it were ready to go in January, it would have been approved by now, regardless of the shutdown. Seems like Boeing is dragging its feet or having trouble coming up with the right coding.
@Karen K Why did Boeing ask the FAA for a pass on training pilots on the new system? And, more importantly, why did FAA give them a pass? Then why did FAA put pressure on Europe to not train their pilots either? Only one country, Brazil, stood against FAA and insisted on pilot training. How can we follow their model? Perhaps by not having an interim FAA director who worked for Boeing.
1
Consumer rights and protection are very weak under trump and the gop. Businesses are abusing consumers and in this case boeing has put thousands of lives at risk with blessings from trump and the gop. the faa has become a joke. the boeing ceo should be in prison and the company hit with heavy fines for all the lost lives and broken families.
13
Pretty horrible that 2 planes have to crash before something is done about the problem. Isn't this why we have flight data and voice recorders as well external tracking and investigations???
2
Boeing said they were sorry and concerned about this so all's forgiven.
4
@skanda
Not really, their share price dropped a few more percentage points, have a heart for all those investors, what’s 300 odd dead people from some foreign country they’ve never heard of.
While Americans continue to post for or against Trump&Co, it would be better to investigate the collusion between Boeing and the FAA.
7
Boeing itself blew the handling of this. it should have grounded the planes. Boeing has now created a publicity monster it will fight for years. for that matter, the three U.S. airlines should have done it also. I have flown many, many times and, except of 747's, I don't think twice about it. I'm flying Sunday and I know one leg of the flights is always a 737. I checked to see which 737 it is. whew... it's the old 737-800!
the old saying, "Better safe than sorry." has a lot of connotations. in this case, the lives of many DO count more than the life of one. mine especially...
4
The failure rate is still practically zero on these planes, I doubt they're going to find anything wrong. What they are going to find is that they are being grounded by pilots that aren't properly trained, look at where these planes are going down these are not British, Chinese or American pilots, these are not our best and brightest in the world, I think they're going to find that this is pilot error.
@There
Said @There, based on nothing. Ethiopian Airlines is the #1 rated airline in Africa and is known for its rigorous pilot training. With over 300 lost souls, and every government in the world finding cause to ground these planes, I would say the failure rate is meaningful.
12
@There Uh, hello. American pilots aren't "properly" trained either. And on the MAX system, they weren't trained at all because Boeing refused to train them - too expensive.
A USC expert on aviation safety says that yes, traveling on certain airlines is less safe, but the reason for this is, "...the breakdown comes in safety enforcement, either for lack of training for regulators or because political cronies are appointed to foreign versions of the Federal Aviation Administration." H'mm, I wonder what's happening right here in the US, to a non-foreign version of the FAA. We're rapidly descending into second world status.
@There They found something yesterday.
Grounding is not the solution at all. Airplane is not something that can be bought for a few dollars. In view of people’s safety grounding is just the first step. Billions and billions of dollars are involved in the purchase of these planes. These are not meant to be kept in some museum or museums.
Immediate rectification and accountability are very very important. When it’s going to happen ?
2
@Sivaram Pochiraju
"... not something that can be bought for a few dollars …"
Let's do a back of the envelope calculation:
$10 billion divide by 300 dead people equals $33 million.
Value of one human life: $33 million. That is roughly equivalent to 10 of trump's trips to Mar-a-Lago.
11
The hand-in-pocket, hand-in-glove cozy relationship between Boeing and the million dollar gift to Trump's "inauguration party" shows how things work. There is no doubt about the quality of most of Boeing's excellent planes, but when the hour came for decisive leadership, it was easier to call Trump than make the harder and safer call regarding grounding. Now the company has put its own fiscal health in some jeopardy thanks to flying too close to the Trump sun; that has become a dark star for all who think that deals with the wobbly wheels of Trump-world are better than customer confidence.
20
@Ed Marth
I can’t believe there are people that think like you. Flying close to the Trump “sun?” The Presidents relationship with Boeing has nothing to do with a fault in software or a lack of pilot training. The decision to ground these aircraft was correct. The problem will be identified and fixed. Trump will have nothing to do with it.
The resignation of Elaine Chao, Mrs. Mitch McConnell, is called for. It is her Dept., Transportation, which seems not to have weighed in the equation of Life and Death.
If she doesn’t resign from sheer negligence of duty, she should be fired.
39
@annpatricia23
Also, someone of the equivalent stature as Canada Minister of Transport Marc Garneau needs to be immediately installed as the head of the FAA. Not some acting guy (FAA today), or some incompetent nitwit such as is the case as Energy Secretary Rick Perry with very smart looking glasses who can't tell the difference between a neutron and a nerf-ball.
Shouldn’t the overriding determinant of any FAA decision be safety? First accident, fully research cause and take a decision. 2nd accident, the default position is there’s something wrong and before more people get killed, we want 100% confidence the plane, it’s design, etc. isn’t the reason. Ask yourself. Would you allow your family to fly on this plane? It sounds commercial reasons had an influence which is totally wrong when people’s lives are at risk.
13
@Richard They were only now doing this due to the government shutdown which happened thanks to our wonderful President Donald Trump. And also thanks to the shortsighted decisions of Boeing Management, who now have no option but to fix the problems and also now will have to work even harder to fix Boeing's reputation. Sadly, none of the above are up to the challenge of their jobs and should resign forthwith.
9
Two US pilots reported their planes did something similar and Shut OFF the autopilot and I am assuming that since planes use software to take off fly and land that the autopilot was ON.
I am assuming these are trained pilots (sort of trained pilots as my father-in-law who is a pilot and trains pilots reminds me that pilot education is NOT equal), but we are not saying that there was no pilot around, so they told a guy mopping the floor, to fly the plane.
How were the US pilots able to shut of the Autopilot without crashing? Do the US planes get one extra button?
What happens if it turns out that two small sensors failing at the same time during takeoff because of some electrical surge, and these sensors are "Made in China" in one of their state supported factories?
But to me the biggest question is No Off Switch?
6
@TheBackman
My understanding is that the particular system involved is autonomous and continues to operate even after autopilot is disabled. In my mind, that's a faulty design. No matter how well programmed such a system is, it is unable to distinguish good input from bad. Humans are able to correlate massive amounts of sensory input for planning and executing actions, automatically discarding irrelevant or deceptive information. Until machines come closer to being our equals in this regard, pilots should always be the masters.
3
A very telling graph to show, more revealing even than the vertical speed graph, would be one that shows the altitude of the Ethiopian Airlines flight above the ground level (stress - above ground level) during the 3 minutes of available data. It is important because the airfield and surrounding terrain were about 7500' above sea level. Such a graph would show that the flight was in trouble literally from takeoff and did not reach more than a few hundred feet of altitude above ground level for 2-3 minutes. I've seen TV experts say that the flight "reached 8,000 feet" but a key detail here is the altitude relative to ground level. The plane was literally like a roller coaster from takeoff, almost descending to ground level one or more times during the short flight. This key detail, which would give much better context to the other data, is not being reported at all.
12
Boeing tried to keep the 737max running, even by calling and persuading Trump to do so, as they knew, once it is grounded, this plane and the over 5000 orders are toast.
The new and hopefully more diligent review of the entire "gestalt" of this plane will make it evident that it is totally flawed. What could be learned over the past few days is this: the basic physical make up of the plane is such that it will permanently stall. Any plane which can't support itself through basic lift in regular flight is more than flawed. Autopilot programs function for years on planes, as they just maintain the speed and altitude. A program however which constantly has to fight the plane's permanent inclination to stall due to design error, can function only so far.
Any "upgrade" to the software now, can just try to mediate these inherent flaws, until another malfunction causes another stall...Can anybody just imagine that after further "improvements" there might be another crash of this model?!
Boeing tried to pull a "fast" one on this segment of plane. Instead of taking the money in hand and to design a whole new, efficient plane for the next decades, they just refitted an old design, with engines that don't fit, extending landing gear that became too short....., in other words they just pimped up their 737 and thought that software gimmicks could camouflage basic physics.
Go back to the drawing boards, design a brand new plane for this segment, or get out of it altogether, Boeing.
30
@svenbi
> Any plane which can't support itself through basic lift in regular flight is more than flawed.
You literally have no idea what you are talking about. If your statement were true, no 737 MAX would ever have left the ground.
Where are the simulation tests.
If pilots are having issues with fighting the system, there should be dozens of simulation testing scenarios that. It only capture these two tragic events, but also those of the pilots that complained in the public database.
The data is available, run the tests.
Where are the experts to discuss these scenarios vs seeing former FAA administrators discussing why or why not the fleet should be grounded. Get in the seat and run the scenarios.
7
After the Lion Air crash a number of pilots reported similar problems. They said that the autopilot was trying to push the nose of the plane down, and every pilot said that their solution was to turn off autopilot. At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, providing additional training and making all pilots aware of this tendency would have helped. Even better idea: Do an analysis, recall every airplane, and fix them. As the saying goes ... 'an ounce of prevention' .
Perhaps, in the complex world of technology, money, and national pride the Lion Air crash was unavoidable.
In the case of the Ethiopian crash, the word is criminal negligence. Worse, it took the U.S. a few days to act.
10
@CD "a number of pilots reported similar problems. They said that the autopilot was trying to push the nose of the plane down, and every pilot said that their solution was to turn off autopilot."
My two questions are when a pilot has something like this, and the report it, does no one download the flight recorder's data?
If this happened 20 or 100 times and ALL those pilots shut off the autopilot, these crashes, while clearly something wrong with the plane, also point to 4 pilots who didn't do the simplest thing.
Tell me these 4 pilots DID shut off the auto pilot, then we really have a problem.
AND I am NOT saying the official answer is pilot error. But If there are half a million safe take-offs and landing and 2 crashes, Boeing saying the wishy washy garbage "complete confidence" and "deploy safety enhancements" tells me they need to hire someone who spends less time talking to politicians.
2
Complex software can never be guaranteed bug free. The notion that everything should be automated must be challenged. We are automating for the sake of automating. If our personal computers have bugs it is annoying but it is another thing altogether when human lives are at stake.
What will it take? A nuclear reactor blows up due to software issues or hacking vulnerabilities and some more planes go down before we our love of technology hits hard reality that some things should not be at the mercy of a program ?
Maybe it is time to start regulating software development i.e. Good Software Practices just as similar regulations exist in other industries.
Maybe we should start respecting that humans actually can do certain things very well.
BTW - I am no Luddite - I run Windows, Mac, Linux and regularly maintain my own computers as well as write my own code.
10
@Ray There are regulations and strict rules followed - it's not just about bugs but this is more of a "feature" it seems though we don't know that much.
I lived in Mukilteo WA for 14 years and know many people who worked at Boeing, particularly in the software design and management. What they do to ensure the software works and checks as expected is enormous - the top CS and engineering experts are used to ensure that the software and the mechanics check out. It doesn't just happen without rules.
I think in the end software will only do what is programmed to do and statistically it is better to let machines run things than humans - humans are more prone to error and fatigue and other human frailties even if they get it right better once in a while. So on average, the automation I think is a good thing and has improved safety in many diverse fields.
1
@RamS Hi RamS, But do the software engineers sit in the jump seat behind pilots and watch what happens in "non ideal" situations. I had the privileged of using a simulation for ships entering world harbors where single or multiple events could be simulated from another ship failing to obey to man overboard to weather all without warning. You do not have a lot of time to make decisions. It was terrifying. So turning off automation even when most of the time it is a benefit really needs to have the software people interface with how it works in real life with pilots.
1
The planes are safe until they aren’t.
Southwest Airlines has confidence in the planes until they don’t.
Passengers on the planes arrived to their destinations safely until they didn’t.
Boeing tried to pretend their bestselling planes were perfectly safe until it couldn’t.
25
Now there needs to be a criminal investigation into why after 1 horrific crash these Planes were still allowed to fly despite needing obvious software update. I cannot imagine the anguish of the families who lost loved ones due to an unsafe playing still being allowed to fly.
14
Boeing updates flight control software to push the nose down in some situations. Two planes crash in a nosedive.
Nothing to see here, move along.
13
Software upgrades are ok for computers on the ground, but how could the Max planes continue to fly when it was known after the Lion air crash that there was a shortcoming in the software? The very fact that an upgrade or a patch is required seems to imply there was something wrong with the software.
12
Designing a plane to the extent that it requires software to operate properly doesn't seem like a great idea here.
Maybe it's a bad example, but I'd never leave any critical task to my brand new computer's operating system, let alone when so many lives are at stake.
Sounds like cost cutting and lazy/sloppy designs to me, and a heavy reliance of code to try to keep it all together. FAIL
12
This is a control issue. The pilots could not recover management of the flight control system quickly enough to prevent a computer generated crash. In the maiden public relations flight of an Airbus years ago, the computer crashed the aircraft.
A means for a buffered transition between machine and person must be enabled so that pilots can take back aircraft control in the event of malfunction. Having a couple of old tech instruments on board would also help.
5
It is amazing to think that American (and Canadian) passengers were for days at risk before the F.A.A. took action to ground these planes. This was an action that was logical to everyone except Daniel K. Elwell, the F.A.A.’s acting administrator.
How is it possible that an agency who's major function (maybe its only function) is to assure the safety of the flying public, failed so spectacularly???
35
@Ex New Yorker Many, if not most, US federal agencies are now acting to destroy the interests which they are supposed to protect. This is pretty much business-as-usual for the Trumpf Administration, & shrugged off as an unpleasant but legitimate approach to governing by most of the media, & even many in the Democratic Party as well.
7
@Ex New Yorker I believe there should be a congressional investigation as to what happened between the FAA and Boeing since the Lion Air crash. Besides toying with the lives of thousands of US citizens in the last few days, the Ethiopian crash also involved 8 American casualties. For the memory of all who perished, let these citizens be the legal base to investigate this home made disaster thoroughly.
9
Pardon me for asking the obvious, but surely there will come a day when rogues can hack into a plane and make it crash. What if that day has come and these are just test runs? I have a hard time believing Boeing couldn't fix the nose diving issue as it has been described, and a much easier time believing that there is no better way to disrupt the world economy than to make people fear flying: it will only take a certain yet-to-be-determined number of similar crashes before people will think seriously before getting on a plane.
15
@Chris
What an interesting idea? Why not add pure profit in the this and look for large positions shorting Boeing before each of the crashes.
4
Automation of critical flight control systems must be 1. Fail safe, 2. have redundancy. This means if a critical sensor fails such as an angle of attack sensor, the system must never execute a critical pitch down control input especially at lower altitudes during take off and landing phases where there is very litlle reaction time by the pilots to avert a disaster. The current system takes input from only one of these highly critical sensors and can act based on erroneous input from a faulty sensor. It should at least compare data from both sensors and automatically disengage if there is any disagreement between two sensors, giving the pilots a clear warning. Pilots should never have to be in a position to fight the malfunctioning system for their lives. And flying modern airliners should never require extraordinary pilot skills to operate safely. A complete software re-designing process is required at Boeing with a different approach geared for safety first.
36
@radion great post. In your opinion was only one sensor utilized strictly for economic reasons? Meaning did Boeing put all these lives at risk simply because they didn't want to pay for additional sensors?
3
@radion
I will never fly in those planes even after the Software is updated!
Unlike other flight control software this system is crucial to the save flight of the aircraft. It is designed to prevent a stall due to a deliberate design flaw in the aerodynamics of the plane. Now if a sensor is faulty and the system disengages instead of pulling the plane down, the plane is now at risk to enter a stall. If this happens after take off the plane will crash.
3
@Garth Based on the information available on the automated stall protection system on these aircraft, there are two AOA sensors but only one of them at a time sends data for the critical elevator pitch control commands. If this is true the system is seriously flawed. Monitoring both sensors and disengaging automatically in case of discrepancy would be a far better option than causing the airplane to suddenly pitch down at low altitudes. Disengaging the autopilot is not enough in the current system to disable the auto stall protection acting dangerously on erroneous sensor input.. Even a better option would be to employ three sensors and base the pitch control commands on the data of two sensors that are in agreement, but still provide a warning to the crew on the critical sensor fault, and allow for a quick, one button disengagement at the least. Is it a cost consideration? For a 80 million dollar airplane I do not know. We need to ask that to Boeing management.
1
Charts don't help much. should show what a normal ascension looks like.
10
Our FAA didn't ground the planes initially because I suspect Trump didn't want them grounded. After days of pressure Trump playing Mr President takes executive action to ground the planes? Does anybody really believe Trump had an epiphany on this? The CEO of Boeing when he ta;led to Trump earlier must have made an impassioned plea to Trump not to ground the planes because of what it would do to stock prices. There was a time when we Americans were leaders in the world now are followers. Recent events have laid to bare just how wealth and power rules in America.
37
@Steven McCain: Trump's announcement of the ban with his typical meandering nonsense was totally embarrassing. How his supporters can view his performance as leadership is strange.
2
@Steven McCain keep obsessing about the president while us normal people simply focus on this horrible situation and pray for the families
The designer of the winglet, Richard T. Whitcomb, had an interest in many ideas, but he abandoned a lot of them. The fact that the main reason for the winglet came about to increase fuel efficiency, and to park more planes next to one another at busy airports, doesn't seem to be what safety is all about. Winglets cause drag, but no direct lift, and that could be part of the problem, besides the extra weight, that contributed to these Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes in both Indonesia the end of October, and the recent one in Ethiopia.
11
The reason for the first crash of this plane, which is also the suspected cause of this crash, is a preview of the future under while all planes and cars will operate. And that is that 'reality" according to the system operating those planes, trucks, cars and ships is not based on actual reality, but instead what the reality is according to the system's sensors and computers that process the information fed to it by the sensors. And so according to the system operating the plane the 'reality' was that the plane was pointing upwards and the system was straightening it while in fact it was pointing the plane towards the ground.
So in the future a faulty sensor or a malfunctioning computer will crash planes and all other vehicles. Today when a part ceases to work properly the worst that happens is the vehicle breaks down. However as we now see when a sensor or computer ceases to work properly the result with be that the vehicle will crash with almost no warning.
Now self driving cars were always presented as being allot safer than those operated by humans who are prone to making mistakes. However if a brand new plane can crash because of a faulty sensor or computer that went undetected what basis is there to assume that the ultra complex sensors and computer systems of a 10 year old self driving vehicle are all in perfect working order.
These crashes have shown us that it is lunacy to bet our lives on the fact that these systems are always in perfect working order.
33
@Michael Stavsen
Accidents because of a faulty sensor or design flaws will happen in the future and the design will be improved.
The question will always be was in negligence. An in my opinion in the of the 737 Max 8 it looks like it was.
They should have known better in the first place. Faulty airspeed of aoc sensor are not a rare thing. This is why the fly by wire system of Airbus planes does disengage in this case. The problem is the M.A.C.S is required to prevent a stall so it can't just disengage.
2
Trying to equate autonomous plane and vehicle technologies is a stretch. Plus, perspective is everything. While a tragic accident, the crash killed “just” 157 people compared to the over 37,000 killed in cars on American roads in 2017. Your comment presumes we humans are “always in perfect working order” when operating a motor vehicle. If only that were true. I’ll increasingly trust sensors over humans as the technology continues to get better.
No doubt, a software update could be rolled out quickly but, will it undergo the necessary rigourous testing given the numbers of aircraft sitting on the ground?
19
This is just an aperitif to these greedy advocates of automation they will keep pushing in trying to replace the human factor in all sectors of life, one can only imagine if such software and computer-like stuff are forced down on us in our highways a very scary picture.
28
@mbrocambro - Sorry, human error (idiocy) is the cause of 99 percent of car and truck crashes. A perfected auto system will cut death tolls "hugely." But the AI creators of auto systems acknowledge they will fail very rarely and lead to death. Do we accept that one out of million death to cut human-caused vehicle deaths by 99%.
This is totally different problem than air systems where all pilots are highly trained professionals. Getting into a car and confront drunks, pot heads, teenagers who think they're invincible, folks still seething over fights with family, drivers who can't keep their eyes open, texting drivers, Formula One wannabes, sleep-walking pedestrians - computers would save us all from them. Different problem in the sky.
6
@mbrocambro
There needs to be a shift back to incorporating the human factor in all aspects in our lives if we want a quality life. People everywhere are isolating themselves in public spaces by constantly playing with their phones. Even Home Depot has introduced self checkout counters so that the only time you talk to anyone there is to complain about the lack of service. Consumers do have an impact if we speak up.
1
Why only examine data from the crashed planes? While all these planes are grounded, why not take out the data boxes and examine pass flight data for anomalies?
33
@Ashwood8 I had the same idea! ...but i guess they will NEVER let THAT happen, and i'm sure they know why...
13
@Ashwood8
Dont the black boxes have limited memory to record on? So might only get the prior couple flights. Good suggestion though. Maybe they need onboard computers that pull various data from all the systems and when the plane is in maintenance they download that data to verify that the planes are operating as designed.
6
Black boxes now record for longer periods of time. It used to be that the CVR only recorded 30 minutes of the flight in a loop. Now it’s about 2hrs and FDR récords longer than that (17-25hrs). Maybe they could get some data from the prior flight.
3
Somewhere within Boeing, or its vendors, is an engineer of programmer who knows precisely what the problems is, but has to keep his/her mouth shut.
Perhaps they've documented the "problem," but were told to shut up and get the plane out the door.
Anyone remember the DC-10 story?
The tragedy is weeks/months/years could be saved fixing the plane if all involved could be honest, but no... Stonewalling is to be expected.
I wonder when that email will bubble up? How long the wait?
35
@William
It's not the best interest of Boeing to let its airplanes crash. If they knew the problem beforehand, they would probably have implemented a solution already.
Now imagine the effect on future sales, and the confidence of travelers.
3
@William I think there are many programmers and engineers who have known from the start that this plane comes a distant second to what it could have been if management weren't so focused on beating Airbus to market. Of course profit has to be part of the equation. But in its obsession with world domination, Boeing seems to have forgotten that sound design and engineering are paramount.
20
@William I am a retiree who worked in another division of the same company (take your pick: B or M-D, they are one and the same). We were told to shut up and get ourselves out the door.
Look no further than the demographics of the 1995 merger, which set up failure further down the chain of command.
"My heart is still beating, and the employees are shaking in their boots"
"Boeing planes, they cost too much!"
"So we may compete with China, white-collar staff will be trimmed by 50%"
7
That it took the administration this long to order the Boeing 737 MAX brings some thoughts to mind.
First, the administration was derelict in protecting the public and ensuring their safety. That included taking timely steps so the public wasn't exposed to an unnecessary risk.
Jay Lincoln in his post below concurred the Boeing 737 MAX should have been grounded earlier notwithstanding the later satellite tracking data's information that revealed a similarity in the erratic flight patterns for both downed aircraft. He pointed out that even to his eye, there were already two other similarities. The plane model and that they had crashed.
Second, the public safety was subordinated to another value. Perhaps economic loss in terms of Boeing's bottom line? Whatever it is, Trump needs to be asked what it was and why. At the very least, steps should be taken so Trump does not inject himself into matters affecting businesses where they are being handled by the regulatory agencies. Don't bypass them. Let them independently do their job without interference. After all, it enhances the public trust.
Third, it's ironic that the administration is now acting out of an abundance of caution and grounding the aircraft based on scientific data showing a possible cause for these catastrophic crashes even though the investigation is ongoing. If Trump relies on science in deciding to take precautionary action as to the Boeing 737 MAX then why not do the same for climate change?
28
@flyfysher Yes, why not for climate change?? The scientific prediction is that all of civilization is headed for a CRASH and taking most of the other species with us. The scientists keep saying we can't keep flying this fossil fuel craft much longer but few seem to be listening. 300 dead will be peanuts in 20-40 years if we don't do a massive overhaul of this doomed economic model and soon!!
17
@Diane
Because even when that happens, it will just be one crash. The GOP, aka the party of science, needs to have a second one so they'll have enough data.
6
Automatic control systems have been in place for decades and worked as intended to keep airplanes and their passengers safe. The majority of aircraft crashes are due to pilot error, not design faults.
3
@Tony
This plane does not have a history to measure against your stats. It is a new plane with new software. Pilots have not received the hours of training usually needed when a new system has been introduced. Finally, don't you feel a bit disappointed that the EU, China et al grounded this plane, while the U.S., its home, has attempted to keep it in the air? Even Canada has denied its air space to this plane. Boeing has a lot of money at risk; however, people have lives at risk. Air safety has been a goal for a long time now. If this plane has a safety issue, it can be fixed once the problems are found and addressed. I can't see any positive argument in favor of keeping it in the air with helpless passengers subject to a random preventable crash. I think we went through similar events after the Industrial Revolution. We enacted legislation to deal with them. Boeing is facing a stock price drop; that will be nothing if it faces mass class action suits due to the early launch of a plane with problems. Finally, we should ignore Trump's pronouncements; Boeing has probably donated money to his previous campaigns. His concern is in hanging on to a position for which he is highly unqualified for.
7
@Tony ...unless you extend (abuse!) those safety systems to keep a lack constuction like the max in the air at all...
@Tony All but two, apparently. And counting.
Regulators paid from manufacturers instead of governments...
Regrettably it sounds familiar in these months.
Citing from a NYT article of last March 5 about the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy:
"While no evidence has emerged that inspection findings were manipulated, the company effectively regulated itself — because Autostrade’s parent company owned the inspection company responsible for safety checks on the Morandi Bridge."
18
I heard the Boeing CEO interviewed on Marketplace recently. It was hard to bear his fawning over how great he thought the current administration was for cutting regulations and for the sizable corporate tax cut. And when asked if he thought it was appropriate for a president to try to negotiate directly with corporate leaders, he said it was great that 45 had gotten so involved. I don't know why, but all of this just rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn't impressed with Dennis Boeing, at least not favorably.
41
Calling this plane a 737 was the big corporate advertisement lie.
Had they called it a 797 or whatever other numbers they could have come up with every airline would have been alerted that this plane requires much more training and scrutiny than their existing work horse in their fleet. And many would have moved more cautiously with purchases.
22
This sad event just uncover one sad fact is that the FAA is deep down in Boeing pockets and they aren't truly on the side of consumers safety but on the side of Wallstreet and billionaires who were horrified by the tremendous lost that they were about to face due to the fact that they have rushed a non-matured and unproven tech just because they were worried about Airbus competition at the expense of peoples lives.
39
This is an easy fix. Just put a audible alarm in the cockpit when the nose of the plane is determined to be too high. Then the pilots can either ignore the alarm if they feel the plane is not with the nose too high or they can lower the nose. Having a computer automatically make a correction is far too risky. It should just warn the pilots.
7
@John
...but then you would have to admit that your plane is a misconstruction... that's what they wanted to cover up, that's why that system works in the background and that's why it didn't even show up in the aircrafts manuals at first
Please plot normal take-off behavior against these to other plots. That would be instructive. Thank you.
20
Boeing and the FAA was willing to risk lives "to keep the planes in the air" to keep generating profits.
there is a trade off between safety and profits,
and Boeing chooses profit.
33
@David
FAA did the same until Trump stepped in.
1
The FAA made the decision. Trump announced it.
Donnie finally got something right, although belatedly. A broken clock is right twice a day.
21
@jas2200 Donnie took credit for an FAA decision. Had he not gone along with the FAA administrator's decision, he would have been destroyed politically. Such courage. So much winning.
21
@jas2200
He had to - like the FAA, like Boeing - the moment they realized that they wouldn't get their hands on those black boxes and the usual cover-up policy might not work this time...
3
oddly like a sine wave
I don't get your data visualizations all the time, but I know a wave when I see one.
4
I've flown once since the year before to 9/11. Staying put on my little plot of ground taught me volumes about the subtlety and beauty of the seasons, all of them, and the rhythms of the creatures who share this space with me. I'm asked, since I have more than adequate means to travel anywhere and as often as I want, why I don't fly. I'm definitely not afraid of flying, although this week might be a good one to take up that reason. Supporting corporate airlines is distasteful but nowhere near as odious a burden as putting myself through the puriel indignities of our TSA. And then there's the travel itself. First class from one international airport to another which all look about the same. A motorcoach down an expressway from the airport to a hotel that looks much like the one I took to get to the origination airport. Then there's the hotels, with rooms not unlike one another. If the need to see some sight half around the world becomes too pressing, I strap on the VR goggles and check it out. Meanwhile, there's no better way to accelerate the destruction of the planet than climbing aboard a commercial jet aircraft.
18
A decision we can all agree with! Except for Boeing.
Time for Airbus to swoop in and grab that market!
17
@Will.
Boeing is recommending grounding the planes. A lot of you have preconceived notions that are crowding out the facts!
I got an idea: have all those people that voted for the orange head get on those 737 max eight planes and fly around and try to prove that those said planes will not fail e.g. by scientific method.
Then I’m going to get a real heavy duty umbrella, one that’s Goodnuf to stop following airplane parts when I go outside!
Every single witness to the crash said it was on fire before it hit. Why the rush to blame the software? It was an engine malfunction.
5
@Rob Turbulence off the control surfaces as the plane went down looks like smoke. The witnesses describe smoke coming off the plane.
11
@mc I have flown 200k and fog off one wing only is not logically warranted. Two observers said flames went up the left side all the way to the tail. That is not fog created by water dissolved in the air. Nor is it something to deny. Several witnesses describe black smoke and pieces of cargo egressing the craft before impact. Points to an engine failure.
2
@Rob YES. Also, the newest NYT graphics show ten miles of info transmittal, then no info for the last ten miles to the crash site. If this is info transmitted up to satellites (as I've read elsewhere), it should have continued til the crash.
Boeing has a lot to answer for. But it never will, alas.
14
If I were relatives of those lost their lives, Airlines whose reputation tarnished, I’d sue Boeing under every possible jurisdiction. At least process help uncover the truth. So we know what managerial decisions were made to put into service such an erratic aircraft.
19
20 years ago I sat in a meeting with a bunch of executives from a small Colorado ski resort. One of them brought up that one of their chairlift cables was in danger of failing. Apparently the replacement cost ran well into the six figures. Another executive asked what their insurance deductible was for a death. The answer: $50,000. And so it was decided… They would keep the cable for another season. // The cable never failed and no one ever died, but these are the types of decisions that happen in some businesses. I’ve seen it firsthand. Who knows what’s going on at Boeing, but they better solve it quick!
63
@M Decisions to accept not only possible, but inevitable loss of life based on not correcting dangerous issues happens daily with the "ethics" of American "healthcare insurance." A few million dollar lawsuit settlements to grieving families whose loved ones will die because an insurance policy arbitrarily does not cover a needed intervention that another policy might or "denies approval for interventions," has minimal impact on the bottom line of insurance companies and no impact on the income of the greedy, unconscionable CEOs. These CEOs (and their loved ones) certainly are not denied any level of care or interventions that others are.
16
The acting secretary of defense ( is no one permanent?) is a former Boeing employee. Hmmmmmm.
30
When 2 airplanes nose dive into the ground after take off, within 6 months on the same kind of airplane, and when Boeing issued a memo to all airlines after the first crash to review how to do manual override of a signal... as soon as the second crash occurred, Boeing should have stepped up and halted all planes. Now we learn a software upgrade was planned for April?! Too late for those who died in the Ethiopian Airline crash! Thank goodness no other plane crashed in the past couple of days.
187
Repairs were to be initiated in January. Now moved up to April because of Trumps GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN.
54
@Anne Ch
"Too late for those who died in the Ethiopian Airline crash!"
You are assuming that the software update would have prevented the Ethiopian crash, and there is no evidence of that. See jumping to conclusions.
9
@Sa Ha
Makes no sense. A shutdown might stop the FAA issuing regulations, but should not stop private companies such as Boing an their customers to proceed with upgrades and pilot training.
12
As a percentage of the total commercial aviation fleet, the 737 Max is a tiny percentage of capacity. Grounding these planes will cause minimal disruption. Some, but not enough to put safety in economy class. The airlines will adjust schedules and get through it.
The corporate and political powers-that-be should see the grounding as *saving* the 737 Max program, not disrupting it. If one more of these things goes down, Boeing will have a DC-10 on their hands. But maybe I'm expecting too much insight from them.
103
I completely agree with the decision to ground the 737 Max until we can be assured that it is safe to fly. Yet, if one 737 Max were to crash every six months the death rate per mile would be approximately the same as the US motor vehicle death rate per mile*. What is astonishing is how complacent we are about traffic deaths.
*Based on 8600 flights per week averaging 500 miles with 200 passengers aboard for which two crashes per year would be about one death per 100 million miles traveled, approximately the US motor vehicle death rate.
45
@Jon
Yet by your calculations, flying on these planes is way more dangerous per trip. What’s an average car trip, 20 miles?
That would suggest that traveling by 737 max would be 25 times as dangerous!!!
11
Over and over, the safety of travelling by car is cited to nullify irrational fears about the safety of air travel. But, there is something uniquely terrifying about a plane crash as opposed to a car accident. So many deeply psychic human terrors in all the possibilities: the fear of heights; the fear of drowning; the fear of burning to death; the fear of falling, precipitously; the fear of having no ability to exert any control whatsoever to change the outcome; the fear of the unknown: what does it feel like to drop 700 ft? Who is in that cockpit? How much experience? How mentally sound?
And then there are the numbers.
Telling human beings reading of an entire family extinguished in one swoop (or 179 lives lost in an instant) to "calm down" and consider statistics? Sheer nonsense.
What were those last minutes like? The screaming. The horror.
My heart goes out to those who died and those who knew them.
88
@Chris
Thank you, Chris.
Been flying my entire life. In my youth the DC 10 was still around, a marvel that crashed a lot.
When in planes I regularly try to remind me that this might be the last moments of my life and practice some breathing exercises to be okay with that.
8
What's lost among all the hysteria is the simple fact that air travel has never been more safer than it is today.
And it's accidents and lessons learned from them (whether you like to admit it or not) that have made aviation the safest form of mass transit ever.
Why is all sense of proportion lost in this conversation.
4
@BoingBoing
Your post does not excuse an early launch of an untested new system without enough time to train pilots how to disable the automatic system installed. Whatever happened to pilot control of a plane, with adequate pilot training? Remember Sully? He had hours of military flights; he knew how to land his plane under extreme circumstances; he knew his plane. Could he have safely flown this 737Max? I would like to hear his opinion on that.
6
Boeing better come up with a credible fix soon, or else that company will end up having a major meltdown.
18
A bit of bad design, bad luck and bad management plays so sweetly into Chinese hands when Trump is trying to negotiate trade. It probably took hardly a NY Minute to see the opportunity in the events and crisis. ( as Emanuel Rahm would say - “never let a crisis go to waste”). Imagine their cheer - First they can make Boeing look bad because they buy from Boeing and compete with Boeing. Next, they can make Trump and FAA look weak by their inaction and volte-face. Finally, if they were truly enterprising capitalists, the Chinese could easily have sold short shares of Boeing right before announcing their decision to ground aircraft, making a killing on that angle too.
12
@Will Eigo
With deepest due respect, I think it is more to the dismay of the Chinese negotiators. They are trying to work out how to reduce the trade gap so that the trade war can be averted. Buying Boeing planes is one good way to help with this. Then this unfortunate thing means that they have one less way to do so.
21
I’ve always been a strong believer in the integrity of the US aviation industry practices and policies. Boeing killed that. Along with more than 300 people. Let’s see how the company and its craven executives will now pay the price.
45
@NTL: In addition, deregulation in the interest of higher corporate profits ultimately leads to disasters in all sectors: banking, environmental, transportation, pharmaceutical, food, nuclear, etc. Most are slow moving disasters and they are the ones that claim the most casualties.
18
We can reasonably expect with two similar crashes less than five months apart killing 346 people, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg pulled together a team of high powered MBAs and Wall Street analysts to investigate.
Muilenburg would never declare the aircraft perfectly safe to fly unless a thorough review of the available financial data supported this decision. Boeing is demonstrating it's commitment to shareholder safety.
How can there any other explanation for the corporate recklessness we have just observed?
45
In the news in Europe everyone says that the plane has new engines that needed to be fitted higher and more forward than the old engines, which made the old 737 unstable and prone to stalling!!!. So to fix this on the cheap Boeing put these sensors with an automated anti-stall sensor which is making the planes crash. They should have instead re-engineered the plan completely, but of course that is more expensive...who cares about human life after all.
60
@SandonThey were trying to get over squeezing more profits out of some old stuff instead of investing in new designs.
1
Contrary to what the president has said earlier, he now decides to ground all Boeing 737 Max for good. Wonderful, did he not say earlier that the machine is too complex for ordinary pilots to fly? Worldwide, more than 10,000 flights cancelled indefinitely, affecting million travelers at the moment. Pity the giant Boeing company, a terrible 'mistake'?
8
Amidst all the media hysteria it is good to remember that airliners are filled with JP-5/Jet A, a flash fuel, then loaded with bags and humans, lit on fire--a controlled burn--and shot into the sky on a wing and a prayer, and solid engineering, that they will arrive on time, in one piece, i.e., given risk with ticket purchase. So it goes with life on planet earth in the post-Modern period.
15
So we have Boeing that might have manufactured defective planes and the FAA that didn't think two inexplicable crashes within four months was enough reason to ground the planes immediately?
I'm embarrassed for our country.
57
@Somewhere. I'm terrified. It's incomprehensible that a dope like Donald Trump is anywhere near a situation of such gravity for the flying public. The flat joke has now become the real nightmare.
2
Boeing made a colossal business mistake by not being the first to ground the plane. Instead they allowed regulatory agencies to one-one-one to do the job. The Civil Aviation Administration of China was the first major player to ground the craft and from there the pace accelerated. The last major straw was not the Canadian decision, it was the EU.
The FAA of the US fumbled the ball and then it got worse when the CEO of Boeing met with the president, who subsequently reversed himself.
The fact is the world's public opinion was stronger than the Boeing corporate mentality, the Safety Culture of the FAA, and the president combined. the fall out is that the US has lost moral authority in the world with this president and his Make America Great policies.
88
If Arthur Miller were alive today, he'd write a play about killing people by cutting corners on aircraft safety standards for higher profits. Oh, I forgot; he did: "All My Sons." (For those for whom Arthur Miller is a bit too highbrow, I guess you can watch "Towering Inferno" for a similar greed-and-terror-in-the-skies theme).
As films go, maybe a more relevant antecedent, oddly enough, is episode 3 of Ken Burns' "Vietnam War," which describes in detail how Macnamara, who had been recruited from leadership at Ford to direct the war effort, brought a metrics-obsessed cult of efficiency to the Pentagon, establishing enemy body count as the arbiter of success.
We see in this story the same cult of efficiency, and unfortunately, big body counts as well. The two seem to go together.
Anyway, the evidence is compelling that if "max efficiency" has entailed "max recklessness" in this matter, we could be looking at manslaughter of terrorist proportions.
Effeficiency people always had the soupcon of amorality about them in their capacity for "profits over people" thinking. Suddenly that callousness may reach (explicitly, if before it was only implied) into actual murderousness.
Franlkly, I might add, I won't be surprised if McKinsey, today's kings of efficiency and profit maximization, lean and mean, somewhere had a hand in this.
21
Sure enough, googling "Boeing McKinsey" reveals that the consulting company was involved in bankruptcy restructuring of American and United Airlines, which indeed connects them to aggressive profit enhancement and efficiency strategies at these main customers of Boeing. As the story develops, look for McKinsey pushing (again, just my suspicion at this point) this rash shift towards the souped up 737. I think my hunch will turn out to have been correct.
The google results, btw, reveal McKinsey being sued by a rival (represented by David Boies' firm) for wrongful concealment of a conflict of interest in this matter and abusing its relationship with the airlines to the plaintiff's detriment. I think that "conflict of interest" could come to loom large in an investigation of airlines' over-emphasis on efficiency since these 737s have become their main operation.
10
@Andrew So true, as a Vet of that war years later I counted the body count numbers and I believe it ended up we killed the population of North Vietnam several times over. It was one of those things you had to meet a certain quota so we started to invent the numbers you know like a cop that has to give out so many tickets otherwise they are in trouble. At 73 I still watch All My Sons and know that in 2019 what has really changed. Jim Trautman
The fact that Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, and United Airlines continued to fly these planes before knowing the cause of the second crash is disgraceful. In fact, it would have been prudent to ground these planes after the Lion Air flight given the fact that a malfunction caused the problem. Telling pilots to switch off the autopilot is hardly satisfactory knowing the plane might suddenly dip for no apparent reason. It gives me no confidence in the airlines or the FAA for that matter! For once, the President did the right thing.
31
Again no credit. His shutting down the GOVERNMENT prevented sensor repairs slated to start in January. His job is to secure America not cozy up with Boeing Execs and be lead around by his gut to make tragic decisions. That incoherent tweet yesterday was the backwash from Boeing's influence over him.
31
Broken clocks, you know.
The graph depicting the vertical speeds of Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines were so erratic. There was a segment in the graph in both graphs that were chillingly very similar, almost identical. That segment is hard evidence.
31
@Uly
FAA like the rest of this government is like a rotten tooth about to poison the rest of the body.
Anyone who doesn’t line up to impeach the whole government is not a patriot.
This is worse than than the last days of the Roman Empire.
Edward Gibbon, as brilliant as he was could not conceive of such an ending.
Let the USA live on. Bernie 2020.
1
I'm surprised a twin engine plane was certified for transoceanic routes. I wouldn't travel by plane, but if I had to it would have to be a four engine plane for maximum reliability. If you lose one out of two engines, oops! If you lose one out of four, you can make it to land.
6
You seem quaintly out-of-touch. Most transoceanic flights on international carriers are TWO engine aircraft. Boeing 777 and 787 are two engine equipped. The rule is that jets fly routes where a landing option is within reach. That is easily done. When considering most flights between USA/ Europe and USA/ East Asia go over northern end of globe and can touch in Canada, Alaska, Iceland if an engine has trouble or other emergencies.
30
@Will Eigo
Thanks Will but it seemed not in the routes shown yesterday. Thank you though. I will still only fly on four engine planes if I have to.
However, a glide path safely a reasonable distance is not always an option.
I think you have diverted from my initial theme, that of reliability.
3
We can certainly agree that reliability is almost totally intact. Very, very rarely does a plane seize up and fall out of the sky. The planes are reliable. But the software defect is a FATAL FLAW totally unrelated to reliability. Actually, it is the automatic engagement of bad software controls ( its ‘reliable’ but disastrous switching on ) that may be the core issue. I researched the question of glide. It seems from cruise altitude a modern jet can glide over 100 miles with no engine thrust. That is not much in my view. But presumably enough when flying most of these routes. There are landing strips everywhere. There are few cases where two engines or four engines fail simultaneously. Most often when it occurs , it is the problem of no fuel remaining or volcanic ash clogging. Not an engine flaw. In both those cases I found, these were four engine B747s that made it to safety after all four engines were cut.
10
Finally, some common sense from our President.
Very heartening to see that he made the call. It was a good decision, don't you think?
9
@2B or not 2B
It was a no brainer at this point, still, better late than another preventable catastrophe.
11
@2B or not 2B
Yes, it was a good decision. Still, trump didn't want to ground the planes because he worried aloud that it would be bad for the stock market.
13
@2B or not 2B
I'm pretty sure my 3.5 year old nephew (who, like Trump, believes himself to be an aviation expert, expert construction engineer, factory foreman, expert negotiator, and also Spider Man) would have been able to make this call.
41
I’m just relieved my loved ones are less likely to fall out of the sky on their next trip. And I’m rooting for a fix.
13
From an expense standpoint, The 737 paid for itself back during the Nixon administration.
Boeing had a long running cash cow in the 737, and now seems to have been overconfident in its rolling out changes in the MAX without necessary or adequate sim training, documentation, etc.
Why raise fresh issues with handling a trusted aircraft that now features larger, repositioned engines... if you don’t have to?
10
The never ending reach for efficiency and profits, that is what. Same as a car model. In a corporate, capital, shareholder world - it is irresistible the desire and necessity to eke out more from a successful product. That is why so many extensions of brand happen too. The multitude of flavors and variations on a Snickers or Coke.
10
I wrote Southwest and American the day the groundings commenced. I was displeased they continued to operate until today's Presidential order - which I cannot understand didn't come earlier. Why on earth would DJT risk breaking the nearly decade's long Z E R O airline fatality record?
11
Why on earth would DJT shoot from the hip immediately, aim and think two days later?? Do you really need an answer?
FAA's policy: Until we see data that proves that the plane is likely to crash, we're going to let it fly.
Alternative policy: Until we see data that proves that the plane is unlikely to crash, we're going to ground it.
Which policy do you prefer?
58
If I can help; the newly posted graphs represent rate of climb or descent and not actual altitude. May I suggest you convert the graphs to actual altitude over time in minutes as well to show the actual vertical flight path?
20
People should realize that there is a manual override switch for the problem that is suspected to have downed the lion air flight. The times has not reported this for reasons that are incomprehensible to me.
The “lack of training” they report on is based on the fact that pilots don’t need to further training due to the aforementioned manual override switch that has been in the exact same place on the 737 since it’s debut decades ago.
People are blaming Boeing for something that almost surely is caused by lowered certification standards by some airlines in order to meet demand for pilots.
7
@Woo I suspect the issue is not quite as simple as you suggest if two sets of pilots with tens of thousands of flying hours could not control their aircraft
10
@Woo I believe you are misinformed. My understanding from all the publicity following Crash #1 is that the manual override is about a 4-step operation involving actions in 4 different locations within the cockpit, was substantially different from that on earlier 737s, and Boeing did not provide or require simulator training for the design because they, like you, asserted that it was unnecessary. Oh, and also would have added to the acquisition cost of the plane. One thing you have right: there should quite obviously be ONE manual override switch, not a multi-step process.
2
@Woo
How much control force is required to counter the mcas system? Are both pilots hands busy?
Why did they fly this long? Two words: Patrick Shanahan. He is most recently in the top tier of management at Boeing. He is now acting chief of DOD...
17
@Berkeley Bee
I believe you are on the mark. Trump has loaded his Cabinet with compromised Agency heads who have conflicted interests. Zinke, Pruitt, Price, and now Shanahan. This might be due to Trump's reputation as a scofflaw; this would cause competent people with integrity to steer clear of this Administration. I worked and lived D.C.; there are a lot of competent, decent civil servants who have no interest in cutting corners. They might not want to work for this WH. Tillerson managed to gut the State Dept. How are the EPA and the Dept. of Interior doing?
2
One has to wonder what has happened to integrity. Boeing resisting calls for a further and deeper review and appealing to the highest raking people to try preventing the inevitable.rs.
7
When the plane is only a few thousand feet in the air, why is the computer program pushing down the nose? The nose gets pushed down when you're 40,000 ft up and you have somewhere to go other than ground.
8
Only 1 sensor calculating in error. Fixes scheduled to start in January Trump nixed with His GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN - and people have died.
6
@writebon
The software pushed the nose down because that's the correct attitude in stall recovery . . . to gain airspeed to stop the stall . . . and, in this instance, for a non-existant stall
6
@writebon AFAIK the new system was designed in part to compensate for the fact that high forward thrust from the new engines causes the nose to lift
More training? that's COST, I bet ya Boeing sold the plane as the most COST EFFICIENT EVER.
5
I don't think I'm being paranoid here, but could these planes not have had their computers hacked causing the crashes? Taking over control of a plane from the ground is the next step of terrorism following 911. I say this because I read the thesis of a college student a few years ago that was all about how to control airplane computers from the ground and taking control of the airplane ostensibly to do as they pleased with it. This guy, who I was checking out, was a rather suspicious person, so that's why I took the time to check his references for the position he was seeking. The next 911 cold be taking control of a group of these sophisticated overcomputerized airplanes and crashing them all at once. These two "foreign" crashes may have simply been tests. Let the pilots fly the bloody planes, please -- not computers. I am hoping this is why these jets have been grounded all over the world -- there's more out there than they are telling us me thinks.
6
@LiliAnna While I do not think it likely that this scenario played out, it is not so implausible that it can be discarded in the absence of evidence from the flight data recorders. Raising this and perhaps other possibilities also points out that while grounding these models is prudent, it is not obvious that they are flawed or, if so, are flawed in the way so many are assuming. It is not prudent, however, to fixate on a single hypothesis, especially on the basis of data presented in charts that, intentionally or not, are misleading. In particular, while the ascent rate graphs bear some points of similarity, the flight path resulting from the ascent rates shown would have been quite different and shown that the Lion flight probably lost altitude during the period shown, while the Ethiopian flight gained considerable altitude during the period shown and was climbing rapidly at the end.
Where was the FAA in this? Oh, right, they were stripped of their posers in 2005.
10
The airlines should just cancel all their orders and swap them to the Bombardier cs300 which had only a bit less range and can still seat 160
6
I know what the FAA and Mr. Trump secretly have in their minds: "Look, where did accidents happen? They just don't understand our brand-new computerized airplanes."
11
FAA: Leading from behind.
17
A deadly automated system that the pilots could not disable. A cautionary tale because similar systems are spreading. Not just to planes but cars too.
13
President Trump surprises me every day. I did not know that he was an aeronautical engineer.
18
Pitch-up and subsequent loss of control is not new. One of the most severe cases was the F101 Voodoo. The manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas made a film to explain it to pilots of these fast interceptor planes. If you want to understand the phenomenon of pitch-up and what can occur, take the time to view this short movie made about the Voodoo's similar to the 737 Max 8's problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wog3RRUySes
4
Thank goodness as I sit here in the airport for my next flight.
It did not take a rocket scientist to discern the similarities between crashes. Nor did you have to be paranoid to smell a rat with Boeing’s cozy relationships here in the good old boy USA.
21
Some great comments and discussions here. Well worth reading. Many of the comments appear to be from knowledgeable individuals. Entirely beyond the comprehension of Cadet Bone Spurs. But should be widely read by FAA and Elaine Chow.
14
@Gordon Jones
You refer to Mrs. Mitch McConnell, one of the most compromised men in the Senate? The Senator who managed to deny medical benefits to miners with Black Lung disease after working in unventilated Kentucky mines? Somehow, I doubt Elaine Chow is any more responsible than her husband. Both are part of the Trump WH.
I think Boeing should retire the 737 production line. Designed in the 1960's. Demand for travel has changed. They have responded by stretching the plane to accommodate more passengers. In a defensive move to their only competitor they introduced a more efficient engine that resulted in a necessity to install MCAS. The actual aluminum tube is the exact same diameter as it was in the 1960's. It happens to be the same diameter as the 757 and 727. In order to save money in production cost it is cheaper to use the same tube. So many bandaids have been added to keep it current that it has exceeded its ability to meet today's flying environment. It is still a workhorse and has been the most successful design for the company. Start from scratch and make a plane that can be sold for the next 30 years. The technology of their other newer aircraft should be applied. China and Russia are breaking into the industry and Boeing needs to come up with a better product. Airbus is surviving the failure of the A380. Come on Boeing.
16
Its becoming more apparent that new software programs are being launched in many Industries without the proper Staff training inservices before use, increasing incompetence and inefficacy. And now catastrophe.
Digital apps and programs should not be as proprietary as they currently are, and app developers' shouldnt influence their customers' day to day operations and corporate policy to fit into software or app requirements.
And there must be an even and timely balance between operating systems installation and users' training in those new systems.
4
@LongIslandRee
Well why is it that there is no proper staff training?
Do you have an explanation for that, or is it a hypothesis?
Show me other industries in the US lacking "proper staff training"!
Who knows, maybe you're right. All I can say is I get a periodic X ray or MRI or CT Scan and these techs sure know what they're doing. Just like my neighborhood mechanic told me it was the EGR valve in my Toyota that was causing the problem. Sure enough Toyota mechanics couldn't figure that one out.
So, maybe you're right. There are glitches in an aircraft which the mechanics still can't figure out just yet. Still, my condolences to the victims of this latest crash...
Why the inclination to go nose up? Why the need for firm/software to counteract that?Wings in the wrong place?
6
@Rod Joyce The MAX was designed to compete with the newer Airbus 320, which got better jet mileage. For the MAX, Boeing installed heavier, more efficient engines, but aerodynamically these caused a nose up attitude, tending toward a stall, particularly in takeoff. The sensors and computers were designed to detect such and automatically apply flaps to force the nose down. The computers could not be overridden, even manually, and since the Lion Indonesian incident, it was clear that the pilots were fighting the computers, to no avail, and the plane nosed down into the sea. Even 737 pilots had not been aware of these non-overridable computers and sensors, and the FAA certified the plane even though it was aware of the extra computer and sensors, even if the pilots weren't and the lack of training of the pilots. Boeing's liability is going to be immense, and Congressman DeFazio is undoubtedly aware of all these engineering and training deficiencies.
28
@Charlie
Not true. There has been an override switch (the stabilizer cutoff switches) on the 737 since it’s debut 50 years ago. Including on the Max8.
7
@Rod Joyce
After the Lion Air Flight 610 accident, Boeing suspected the angle-of-attack sensor was sending erroneous readings back to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System which is the anti-stall system that engages when the autopilot system is turned off. It would appear that the aircraft doesn't actually have an "inclination to go nose up" but that the instrumentation is somehow faulty.
6
Now that the govt. has finally done the right thing, the first question that needs answering is whether there is something about the aircraft structure that makes it inherently unstable under certain conditions that, while uncommon, can occur often enough to be of real concern.
It's not reasonable to rely on a software fix to for an underlying hardware problem. And it's totally unreasonable to burden the crew to deal with an emergency that arises from a software malfunction, as long as the root cause hardware problem still exists. After the Indonesia crash, it was all too easy for Boeing to blame the human factor. And this time, Boeing was again expressing full confidence in its product, which implicitly put the blame on the crew - until international pressure forced an attitude adjustment.
22
@mancuroc INternational pressure and 157 lives lost
". . . in relatively quick succession, Canadian and American aviation authorities said they were grounding the planes after newly available satellite-tracking data suggested similarities between Sunday’s crash in Ethiopia and one involving a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Indonesia in October."
What the heck? The black boxes were located within 48 hours of the crash in the midst of the rubble and remains of those poor souls but it wasn't until today that satellite-tracking data became available. Good grief - did that data come via pony express? Sorry for being unkind and rather annoyed, but I would think and assume satellite-tracking data, especially after a fatal air crash, would have been available within 24 hours.
Thank goodness for the intel and the Canadian and American aviation authorities.
16
@Marge Keller
Indeed, such data should be available within minutes if not seconds.
7
@Marge Keller had to , after likelihood that one of the authorities with access to that data announced it was about to make it public.
5
@Marge Keller
Satellite company provided data to FAA and NTSB on Monday.
Transport Canada received it Tuesday evening.
according to Jessie Hillenbrand, director of Public Relations at Aireon.
Bad Firmware is written all over this. I was shocked when the fleet wasn't grounded after the first crash in Indonesia. The nature of the problems is a give away for a flight control systems fail, and a huge one at that. Having worked on cockpit systems software, the failure screams that there is an isolated bug in the firmware. It is not as they say a "systemic failure". That much I agree with. It's a situation that is narrowly defined. In an unlikely set of circumstances that falsely mimics an emergency situation the control system is forcing a response that crashes the airplane.
42
@J.I.M. You are right. The Boeing statement carefully worded no "systemic" failure. They determined the problem with the October crash. It was localized and specific to the use of only 1 sensor. The fix of installing several sensors set to begin in January did not happen because Trump SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT and those tech workers, who were included with the thousands of others held hostage, could not install the additional sensors.
Trump owns this. His call. His watch. His catastrophic tragedy out of the GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN!
13
@J.I.M. Apparently not that unlikely if it happened twice in six months.
@Michael Miller Certainly not unlikely in the context of how often a life critical system is expected to fail.
1
With previous administrations, the FAA made the call as to whether a plane was no airworthy. Why is politics, and Trump, intruding on precedence?
9
Trump is the boss of the FAA. So it is administrative as well as political. In other words, it is in the job description of being president.
7
@Will Eigo
I get it, face time on TV. It would seem to me that the president delegates certain responsibilities to his subordinates who are experts in their fields.
3
Hi, Will Eigo. The acting administrator Daniel K. Elwell runs the FAA. The big hint, I think, in the Trump statement is the executive order phrase. Instead of business as usual at the FAA all of a sudden only Trump can take action.
5
Anyone remember how after the fires on the new Boeing Dreamliner that Boeing and the FAA assured there was not a problem until it happened several more times. That time it was due to the batteries that heated and caused a fire. Here in Canada the government which is having enough trouble in other areas dragged its feet for what I believe a simple reason Air Canada and West Jet have a large number of the aircraft. Anyway the bottom like is always about money and the stock price and then of course the ultimate it might cost people jobs with the company. Passengers are at the bottom of the list. In Canada 18 Canadians were killed on that flight. I write on aviation history, but not a flier, but from both it seemed like there was a common factor. Then Boeing announces no problem enjoy your flight new software coming end of April. Gee, if there is not a problem then why new software. I lived on the edge of Newark (now Liberty) Airport growing up and saw there aircraft go down in a short time and the airport was closed for almost a year to figure out what to do. Judith Blooms last book dealt with that period. I have had this strange idea that the FAA is there for us not for the corporate bottom line. Don't know how many times commentators have bemoaned the fact that Boeing stock is down, what about the people killed. I am sure once the emails and documents get uncovered there will be a ugly more to come. It happens every time. Jim Trautman
41
@trautman you’re absolutely correct. This is where capitalism can fail when unchecked. Boeing management were / are putting their corporate profits ahead of passenger safety, absolutely no question.
They are very proud of their rise in market capitalisation and are the darling of the S&P (and Dow Jones). However this is to the detriment of safety for all.
They have run a cost benefit analysis on all scenarios and they considered it was worth the risk to continue flying these planes after the second disaster which for me was almost criminal.
In light of the admission of issues with the MAX planes resulting in updates post the Lion air crash - I’m keen for someone to inform me what their liability is for the death of the passengers if it’s proved not to be pilot but plane design error.
12
@David O'Donnell Thanks and so right. What is usually forgotten is companies as part of their planning do a cost benefit study and how much it might cost them. I think when famous Pinto and Corvair had problems in catching fire and I remember one terrible accident at a toll plaza it was finally revealed to solve the problem would have cost like a $1, but they calculated how many cars would catch on fire and how many individuals might be killed or seriously burned and felt the numbers were so it was cheaper not to spend the $1. Of course I know people need jobs, but have always wondered how someone goes home and eats dinner with his family and does not think about what they are part of. In Vietnam it was the same calculations of how many we had to kill for each one of us to mean things were going alright. We became just numbers on a ledger without faces. Jim Trautman
10
Better late than never. The solution is also aft the fact (crashes , food poisoning, drug reaction etc.)
We don't know what we don't know.
My guess is the inability to override a critical signal on board.
Cynically, it is good few, if any , US citizens where involved so that the headlines were about a member of first of the Trial Lawyers hadn't hadn't brought suit. My over and under is 13:99 3/14/19.
2
This is the first time I have ever felt Trump did the right thing. Of course it took Canada and China, most of Europe and much of Asia to make the call first. But he made the call before Boeing and the FAA, so kudos to him.
Trump may be incorrect about the complexity of flying modern airplanes requiring MIT computer scientists to fly them—that is completely irrelevant. The planes seem to be faulty and the Indonesian Lion Air disaster brought the problem out into the open back in October. Three hundred plus people have died now. Boeing has a lot of explaining to do and if they have been as remiss as it seems they have been in placing safety before the dollar, they should be held responsible for the deaths of the people killed in these planes.
If this ends up playing out the way it looks now, it is disgusting, scary, unethical, and immoral.
Boeing is an American corporation. What is happening in this country? Surely the dollar is not all-important to most Americans. I know that it is extremely important to that 1% who worship at the altar of greed, maybe even to the top 5%. But I still believe most of us fine human life more important than the green-back. If not, I think we are no longer to be considered a great nation.
31
@GeriTheGreek 518 I agree with everything you said EXCEPT for giving Trump credit. The aviation authorities made this decision, based on new satellite data that showed similarities. Trump made the announcement. His typical self-aggrandizing behavior. For goodness sake, recently he was putting his signature on Bibles!
31
@Gerithegreek518 “Disgusting, scary, unethical, and immoral.” Sounds like you’re describing a big chunk of the business world.
4
@kfm Are you telling us that Trump didn’t write the Bible?
9
"The introduction of a consequential new flight-control feature without any requirement for pilot training is now drawing more scrutiny."
In the old days, corporations used to take great effort to train their employees well. This does not appear to be the case much anymore, and the airlines may be among the worst.
Several times recently when we have been flying, we quickly learned that the personnel the airlines put on the check-in desk had very little if any training; one apologized and admitted that was the case.
Not to do this for pilots is appalling.
Maybe it is both: software plus lack of proper pilot training and manuals explaining what the "upgrading" to the Max changed.
12
Dear Donald, skilled pilots may not be available if airplanes are flown in every country of the world. An example from the autonomous cars is in order- they crash sometimes but much less often than with human drivers....
1
To me, the giveaway is that the president of Boeing called Trump, not the head of the FAA.
57
@Bob Fankhauser Airlines are allowed to "SELF INSPECT". How wonderful for them!
Something tells me that if his former campaign manager paul manafort wasn't sentenced to jail time yet again, the old man wouldn't have grounded the fleet.
It was a convenient distraction...nothing more.
19
Why were the multiple written complaints from US pilots about the lack of training and the complexity of flying these planes ignored ?
45
What is not similar to Europe or China is that the pilots who have been flying the Max 8 for American and Southwest continued to climb into the cockpit despite the two fatal crashes.
What we know about the majority of America's major airline pilots--many trained by the US military--is that they are conservative in disposition, circumspect by nature, exceptionally competent, and rarely suicidal.
So is it training-experience or is it an unforeseen Lockheed Electra design flaw? Or perhaps, it just flies better in North America.
6
I think they got extra training in USA after pilot complaints.
2
Is anyone considering the possibility that this plane will never be safe to fly?
18
@Engineer Inbar I have. It would be devastating for Boeing and WA STATE.
If former CEO Jim McNerny's ten-year cost-cutting crusade at Boeing is in any way responsible for what is wrong with this plane and the Indonesian plane, Boeing did this to itself.
Anything that affects Boeing, affects WA STATE. 80,000 employees here, generating hundreds of millions of consumer dollars spent, ancillary restaurants, bars, services, stores of all kinds that are supported by Boeing employees...will suffer.
McNerny tore this company from its roots. Boeing is to Seattle what oil is to Texas and the film industry is to Hollywood. Generations of families with plane-building in their blood were alienated by McNerney who ruthlessly cut wages and benefits and forced concessions from engineers and mechanics.
Many other assembly line cost-cutting methods were implemented. If indeed, greed turns out to be responsible, McNerney's chickens will come home to roost. The unrelenting quest for profits could, ironically, spell the end of Boeing.
15
@Engineer Inbar
One issue is that it's hard to give pilots experience in dealing with a software malfunction.
7
@DJ
Is it impossible to give pilots the option to override software malfunctions, and to fly a plane manually? Have we reached a point where pilots are no longer able to fly a plane? Are Boeing's new planes like smart cars?
The current administration will weigh decisions like this in transactional terms.
Deaths in plane crashes versus problems with Boeing's support?
Tough call.
But then something gets worked out when Boeing looks bad and doesn't want to look worse.
They gave Donald the OK to ground the planes and he doesn't fear consequence$$.
10
"Boeing is an incredible company." Per Trump: Putin's a great leade, as is Kim Jong-Un. As long as the person or company is aligned with his personal interests, what support! As far as the rest of us, one more reminder, "buyer beware". In this case, rider beware.
18
Such is the nature of a poisoned well. All I just read was of Canada sticking out its tongue and saying “ we told you so”, while poking Trump in the eye after forcing him to relent. Perhaps it’s just my imagination.
8
@John Doe Love Canada. They were right. We were wrong. Just one more sign of appointment of incompetent people to Federal positions. Nepotism extends well beyond family ties.
9
Whew! They're all grounded. It's safe to fly again. (Zero crashes in 2017.)
"Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else." -- Winston Churchill
33
@Voter- Brexit? The British are just like us.
1
The dictator does not let his experts decide anything, all decisions are right from the top, even if they are shooting from the hip.
14
Seriously people, are we really to believe the "new evidence" cover? Satellite data were available from the time of the crash that showed similarities to the LionAir crash. Trump, the FAA, Boeing, were all backed into a corner and had to save face. Catch a clue America!
38
@jrmxx - Based on the many comments over the past few days it's quite clear that America *has* a clue and has since the Lion Air crash. It's their corporate masters and political enablers who don't. Or didn't. But somebody's political life flashed before his eyes and he had to do something.
23
@jrmxx, who knew Canada had its own private satellite system? Probably uses moose antlers for antennas which is why they’re more sensitive.
4
@John Doe Thank goodness there are other sources for satellite data, since without it it would be that much easier to withhold that data from public scrutiny
6
OK, maybe I'm naive, but why not put in a simple override switch to allow manual control of the aircraft so the pilots can actually fly the plane. You know, like they've been doing for 100 years.
11
@Joe C Hoping that Sully weighs in on importance of backup systems. Human intervention should always be part of the design process. Common sense is not so common.
4
@Joe C
Joe, great point but on thin ice: these new planes are not easy to fly manually, especially the MAX 8 with bigger engines that sit too far forward of the center of gravity/lift and make trim, balance and stability a challenge.
You really DON'T WANT to fly these planes manually! :-(
6
@Joe C
Already exists. The stabilizer cutoff switch is in the same place on the max 8 as all previous versions of the 737. For safety reasons.
The media coverage of this is incomprehensible to me. I hate to say this but it actually is sort of fake news. Particularly “concern” by pilots.
1
Great, first we are supposed to get used to self driving cars and now we’re even asked to flying self-flying planes.
9
@heinrich zwahlen That does not give me the warm fuzzies. Pilots Association needs to step firmly into the picture - experience counts.
3
Fire Elaine Chao.
30
That might tick off Mitch.
9
@Will Eigo
Get rid of Mitch too. He is responsible for mine owners allowed to run dangerous mines, with no escape routes. He fought against medical benefits for miners with Black Lung disease. He drives around his home base in an old beater truck, so his constituents, out side of Louisville, think he is one of them. He is also responsible for keeping a moderate, respected Superior Ct Judge, Merrick Garland, off the SC. He has now forced a compromised Justice Kavanaugh on the Court, a man who lied during his Hearing. We now have a right wing SC in place for decades: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. And, Trump will possibly get to appoint one more pro corporate Justice, if RBG is unable to continue. Welcome to the 21st Century version of the Middle Ages when there were nobles and serfs.
2
@CliffHanger
You mean Daniel Elwell, who runs FAA and resisted to ground?
Grounding was inevitable, incontrovertible in light of all available information. Now Mr. Trump owes the industry and the nation an explanation, no a retraction, of his inane commentary from yesterday about how Airplanes are “now too complicated to fly.”
12
@Lb
Who knew government was so complicated? Who knew health care was so complicated? McConnell et al knew; and, they knew that Trump was the perfect tool for themselves and their rich corporate donors. The GOP has been working to put a plutocracy in place for decades.
1
Thank you RICO Don.
Today's aircraft are way to complicated.
It was much easier when planes were powered by a taut rubber band.
But riddle me this:
A Max 8 kills a bunch of people and they get banned.
And regulated.
A Mac 10 kills WAY MORE people but it is neither regulated nor banned.
Hopefully Ozymandius Trump will order the sun to rise in the East tomorrow.
9
Anyone acknowledging that Trump actually did something good here by standing up to the FAA and grounding the 737's by executive order?
chirp.....chirp.....chirp....chirp....chirp
2
@megachulo - I did, but it was a grandstand play. He had to be *seen* to do something decisive when he could have just picked up the phone. Like everything else, it's all about his image, and you fell for it.
22
@Stevenz
Great spot Steve.
2
@megachulo
Ummm, the FAA works for Trump. He doesn't have to "stand up" to them.
2
Wasn't case of Trump stepping up--everyone else stepped down....anyway gets point by default..........
6
“Newly available satellite data”?!?! Ha! Anybody knows what happened. Politics are resulting in people loosing their lives. On the other hand, you only have about a 1 in 100,000 chance of being in a crash, if you end up on a Max 8. You took a bigger risk just going from your house to the airport.
2
@Max
Not really; the Boeing Max crashed twice in a few months, taking 300 lives. I can safely drive to the store, the movies, and to downtown shops without fear of being caught in a massive pile up.
Thank you Rachel Maddow.
8
Why does it take days for this to be done?!! What if another plane were to crash while they “calculate” their financial losses???!
Wasn’t the prudent thing to immediately ground them on Sunday morning?! How can they wait days while more of these death traps are flying around???
A whole three days??!!! Waiting for more information!!?? More information?!! Like more deaths??!! Who does that!!?
And it had to be an emergency order by one person, which likely means Boeing and it’s lobbyists were stonewalling this??
This should be criminal, to wait three whole days while thousands board these dangerous machines!!!!
13
@Frea Free Enterprise is good. But, unfettered Free Enterprise is unwise and deadly. Wondering what Elaine Chow (McConnell) has to say?
3
Trump claims to rule by his gut. His intestines and bowels must have been quite disturbed by learning the US was so late in grounding the planes even after his planes are too complicated tweet the other day.
Even his BFF Putin’s aviation system announced grounding the planes on Monday.
Why did Trump finally act? BLAME CANADA
10
@Agent 99 A political reaction - anyone surprised?
3
Thank you Canada. As usual.
23
F.eeble A.viation A.dministration....Thanks For Nothing
4
A good time to buy Boeing stock!
Oh boy... maybe that jape really doesn't strike the right tone at this particular moment...
But seriously folks... the 737 is the most numerously produced jet airliner in history, with the MAX 8 type really numbering only about 350 out of the 11,000+ 737's (!) already having served faithful duty for the past fifty+ years. Compared with the 747, slightly younger, of which only 1500 have been built.
Let us notice.. only very recently was it announced the end of production of the Airbus (Boeing's arch-rival) A380, Airbus's attempt to outdo the 747's prestige. They failed! And are stuck with the fact that the A380 never made its money back, whereas the 747 swept insane profits unto the bank of Boeing.
At the moment though, the 737 is Boeing's big bankroll.. so if one was to strike back below the belt.. at what production line would that blow be aimed... at?
1
@Cletus Butzin There are the trusty 737, still off and running - and then there's the new improved redesigned fuel efficient flawed smaller fleet that is in question right now.
3
If these crashes and unfortunate deaths are the result of the mahogany polishers eking out another percent of profit by not updating flight manuals and pilot training there should be firings of responsible individuals. The men and women who labor to build these magnificent planes are not happy to be undercut by shoddy management decisions to trim costs with lives forsaken.
18
Seems like the emphasis on eliminating human error, which has probably saved countless lives, may have been the cause of these last two crashes. That human error has been removed from those who fly the plane and has found its way into the computer programming.
8
@Bradley Bleck - You can't eliminate human error any more than you can eliminate computer error. As for me, I'd rather have a well-trained human making the decisions, with another well-trained human sitting beside him.
11
@Stevenz I can't disagree. What I wonder is how many lives have been saved by the trying to eliminate pilot error but now have been lost due to what might be programmer error.
7
From the reports, apparently a sensor can mistakenly trigger an auto-pilot response that puts the nose down. The planes were flying at low speeds in a cross-wind after takeoff, and American pilots had reported the problem previously--i think the remedy being to turn off the auto-pilot when the unstable flying arose. Only one sensor--it might be the way it's mounted, or it could be a software glitch. This from reporting by Rachel Maddow, who also reported that Boeing had been working on a fix, after the first crash, but this work stopped for five weeks during the Trump shutdown.
Presumably the nose down is to correct for a stall at low air speeds, but it shouldn't trigger an endless up and down loop.
13
@loveman0
Explain, why a government shutdown should stop a private company (a) grounding its products until they are save and (b) working on the updates.
1
Some of the pilot reports to the FAA seem to contradict the theory that the crashes are caused by the new MCAS automated trim feature. They report that the aircraft unexpectedly pitches down sharply followed by a warning from the plane’s computer “Don’t sink!” The auto trim should only force a dive if it thinks the plane is pitched too high and that it’s potentially in danger of a stall. However, the “Don’t sink!” warning indicates that the plane thinks it is pitched too low. It’s my understand that MCAS is just a few lines of additional code within the flight control system. So, unless the computer is suffering from a spit personality disorder, it wouldn’t trim the nose down when it already thinks the nose is too far down to begin with.
3
@ThomasB - I think you inadvertently hit on something here. The plane doesn't actually "think". I know how you meant it - we all say that about things all the time - but it's a significant word choice. Of the millions of parts that make up a commercial airliner the only thinking parts are the humans. And the thinking should be left up to them, not the robots.
7
I would appreciate an explanation for why France was chosen to examine the flight data recorders and the parties involved in making that decision. Typically, the recorders, once found, are examined promptly.
2
@B G Ethiopia immediately said once the recorders were found that they did not have the facilities to check the data. There was talk that the US pushed to have the recorders sent to them (thank god that did not happen). London was also considered, but in the end France was selected. I am sure a country that does not produce the 737 Max was the the right choice.
22
The 737 is 50 year old design that initially held less than 100 passengers. It was a reliable work horse for decades. But because of fuselage stretches made to accommodate more passengers and necessary changes to the engine position under the wings, it developed an unfortunate tendency to pitch the nose up while maneuvering at slower speeds.
To counteract this behavior, software was installed that appears to be confused by discrepant inputs from angle of attack sensors.
In retrospect, Boeing would have been far better off if they had done a clean sheet design for a replacement aircraft.
21
@Rich R.
Apparently, the angle of attack sensor is not redundant.
Wild speculation: Was this auto-pilot change made to allow experienced 737 pilots to transition to the new 737-MAX with far less training and experience in the new aircraft? This would be a big selling point to fleets that were already using earlier 737 variants, because it would save the airlines (and pilots) lots of expensive training time in simulators and the aircraft allowing the aircraft to be put into revenue service faster? Did both Boeing and the purchasing airlines have a huge incentive to accept this auto-pilot as a replacement for some costly crew training and practice?
At one time, it was the FAA with FAA employees who did certified a new aircraft ready for commercial flight operations and how much training crew would require. No longer. Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers largely self-certify.
Financial types would get very excited about the potential savings to both Boeing and their potential customers. And anyway, you can always blame the crashes on poor maintenance or poorly trained pilots.
The Boeing CEO should tender his resignation within 24 hours. If Donald Trump cares more about the lives of aircraft crews and passengers than the CEO of Boeing does, he has no right running a business that puts human lives at risk.
16
@Rich R.
Basically calling it a 737 was the BIG LIE here.
It was kind of like saying the BMW MINI was a redesign of the old British Leyland MINI COOPER from the 1960s. Vague similarities only.
Besides the obvious mechanical inspection and software evaluation, the investigation should include the chance of hacking or outside manipulation of sensors and other key components. We all know there are forces out there trying to disrupt and weaken the U.S. and Boeing is a key U.S. asset.
4
Lots of people here are "as usual" rushing to blame a company for nefarious activity. Let's wait and see what the FAA can uncover and then go ahead and judge. I'm not saying Boeing might not be responsible but please folks. Take a break on all the corporate conspiracies here. What airplane company would knowingly sell unsafe airplanes?
5
@Herb
No Boeing would not knowingly sell an unsafe airplane.
However, Boeing had a very strong financial incentive to minimize the training needed for experienced 737 crews to transition to the new aircraft. Boeing also has vast expertise and experience in building auto-pilots and cockpit automation. This experience can breed over-confidence. Auto-pilots have normally been designed for pilots who are fully familiar with hand-flying the aircraft and stop operating when things go wrong.
This change from "auto-pilot before operator" was a small step, probably easily ignored when considering the added value of the reduced training requirements for their customers.
6
Boeing let Trump ground the planes, because Southwest and American experienced a drop in reservations on their extensive 737 fleet. The flights would have been cancelled and planes grounded de facto anyway.
16
I think I can add a few things to the other 1500 comments here.
The Boeing 737 was originally certified in 1968. At that time it had a non-computerized flight control system. The 737 MAX is the third major update of the aircraft. Unlike previous 737s, it features a partially computerized flight control system, which is supposed to stop the aircraft from flying too slowly and falling out of the sky. It is this system which appears to be malfunctioning.
The 737MAX is certified under the old type certificate which dates from the 1960s. This means that it had less stringent testing than would be the case for an all new design. This is likely to become an issue.
The competing Airbus A320 was introduced in 1988, and has a fully computerized flight control system. This is usually referred to as 'fly-by-wire'. In its early years that aircraft also had a number of crashes which were related to pilot confusion about what the 'fly-by-wire' system did and didn't do. The pilot training was modified after those early crashes. For the past 20 years, the A320 has had a very good safety record.
Competitive pressure from the A320 forced the development of the 737MAX. Some felt that Boeing should have developed an all new jetliner, instead of upgrading the 737 for the third time.
42
The relationship and closeness of business and government under the Trump Administration is leading to reduced safety regulations and cronyism. A former Boeing executive should not be head of the Defense Department.
41
These sort of airline disasters happen around the world fairly frequently but haven't happened to US carriers in something like 15 years.
Maybe it's not the planes?
3
The plane is relatively new and wouldn't have crashed in previous years, so fifteen years of no,crashes by American Airlines is irrelevant here. Have you read anything about the previous Boeing 737Max disaster? Have you read anything about the problem, the pilots' complaints, and the pitiful attempt by Boeing to advise pilots of the existing problem with the plane that they acknowledged and the fix they suggested pilots use to keep from crashing the plane and killing innocent passengers who trust the Boeing Corporation to provide airlines with the safest possible vehicles?
What exactly are you suggesting is causing the problem?
6
I don't think that an automatic control system should ever auger in an aircraft and it shouldn't be up to the pilot to disengage a system to prevent it the plane from crashing - has this ever happened before in another aircraft - autopilot crashing the plane? There should be sensor redundancies; checks to be sure that the maneuver makes sense - MCAS should be able to detect that actions under its control are causing the plane to plummet at speed; checks to ensure that information collectively makes sense (ie if a mutually impossible set of conditions are reported by various sensors then disengage the MCAS),etc...
16
Back in the day the world looked to the US to lead the way. It took Canada using our satellites doubtless to lead the way. The US is no longer the world's leader. Our currency will follow next.
32
It’s incredible Boeing’s stock has dropped only 13% this past week.
Even more incredible is that today, even with this news and after-hours trading, as of now (7:27pm) the stock has dropped to $377.14 from opening at $378.43. A whopping $1.29.
What do we value in this country?
15
@SM, I agree the drop is very small given the potential problems and the fact that the stock has been on a tear for the past few years.
7
If Boeing can simply turn off the auto-pilot ( presuming that is the issue ) then the crisis in danger terms is managed to a great extent. The stock need not go down the toilet. It is the air carriers , more than Boeing who sold the jets, that bear the brunt immediately as their revenues will be affected by fewer flights and fewer passengers. OTOH, if there are clauses in their purchase and lease contracts for indemnification by Boeing for planes taken out of service for technical design reasons, then some of those airline costs might be shifted back to Boeing.
3
We seem only to value the bottom line and the top 1% who fly in their own private planes. It,s all about money. The rest of us are just grist for the mill.
5
This is the right decision out of an abundance of caution. 400,000 flights of this aircraft in the last 12 months and two accidents.
Boeing is a superb company but it seems under certain very rare circumstance a catastrophic event occurs due to faulty sensors and/or the autopilot engagement.
They will figure this out, correct the problem and recover.
I feel so sorry for all those who lost their lives and their families.
16
The criticism is falling on the wrong parties here.
The Boeing 737 Max does not reach the FAA threshold required for (1) training airline pilots on the differences and (2) grounding airplanes due to the crash events.
This is a policy issue.
6
I actually really appreciate Donald Trump for doing this (which kind of makes my head spin).
15
@AnnH
But, he did it last (in the whole wide world).
Think about it.
8
What's the old adage? Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.
13
Not out to right and good. Trump did this from pressure and Rachel Maddows expose last night.
5
Do not let the FAA take the fall for this long-term problem.
Follow the money as it funnels through the executive, senate and house. What we call "lobbying" and contributions are pay for play. Boeing's financials are good place to start.
Note: and I'm not saying the FAA is without fault.
14
I think it's important to grasp the impact economically, on the airliners that gain few profits and likely finance the planes. Some forgiveness of late payments and perhaps determining minimum payments to keep them financially viable until the planes are corrected and recertified airworthy. Absolute minimum finance charges might be a help to keep the airlines in business.
3
@PATRICK The passengers would have liked to stay in business too...
Too little too late for me. Never going to trust the Boeing run FAA again. Never going to fly Southwest or American again either. They made it clear they are in on the political game that puts profit over people.
Also makes me wonder about our other ‘regulatory ‘ agencies like the FDA. Are they ‘self’ regulated also. Wouldn’t put it past Big Pharm to be politically corrupt as well.
No more trust in US ‘regulatory agencies’ for me. Too think that that trust was just a given not so long ago.
40
In my opinion, the FDA has always been in bed with big Pharma. Corporations control EVERYTHING in this country: media, courts, etc.
19
Not always. In the early 1960s, Dr Frances Oldham Kelsey of the FDA stood up to Richardson-Merrell, who wanted to introduce thalidomide in the US. The company insisted it was safe, and pointed to it’s use in Europe. Dr. Kelsey stood her ground and insisted on scientific proof. The drug was not approved . Thank God. And Dr. Kelsey.
7
I've come to believe the only thing I can trust is what I can see with my own two eyes and figure out with informed, critical thinking. If I see it on television, I can’t trust it or if I read it just about anywhere in the media or on the internet, I probably can’t trust it. I am so disillusioned about everything I used to believe in.
I no longer believe in my government. It protects who- or what-ever has lobbyists with big bucks to stuff into the pockets of our elected officials. Example: we don’t have universal healthcare because insurance companies have BIG money and don’t want to lose out on health insurance premiums from healthy people while they leave those who have no money and are chronically ill to be paid for by the government via Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare supplements, for those who can afford them, provided through insurance companies should be termed "US Government-backed Insurer Welfare." If we all paid to Medicare the premiums we pay to our supplement providers, Medicare would probably become/remain solvent while insurance CEOs and their companies would feel what they would consider a catastrophic pinch—and we should, and they should. That is but one example of the corporate welfare system that exists.
4
Seriously, what do you think Sully would do?
6
He would fly without autopilot!
5
Just reflecting now on that incredible Opinion piece in the NY Times by Jaclyn Corin, published Feb. 13, 2019: Would Congress Care More if Parkland Had Been a Plane Crash? And the answer is yes, yes it would. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/opinion/parkland-anniversary-guns-reform.html
25
A corrupt Trump "administration" crony -- in this case McConnell's wife -- take the side of "industry" and thumbs the nose at the safety of the US public? Again...?
Why isn't this this malfeasance by Elaine Chao being more clearly made known? And where are the demands for "accountability" from the likes of Chao?
Enough of hiding behind the curtain of "the administration" of the great and powerful Oz!
37
I thought he would announce the Max 8 as Air Force One replacement, automated nose-diving would be a nice touch for this presidency
25
@SFR
President Trump signed an executive order to ground the planes and it should be recognised. He made it happen. He stood up to Boeing or FAA. It is such a fanaticism in people that makes them blind to the reality.
@Dziewinska He is the boss of the boss of the FAA, does not stand up to them and should not have to...
These comments need to be updated.
4
My guess is that Boeing is trying their utmost to compensate for a physical problem with engines and their placement with a software solution. You'd think they'd have that by now if it were possible. If they are faced with the nightmare of a design change, who will hold them to going through with that? The FAA (nope)? Donald? Canada?
8
Boeing grounds the 737 Max. The FAA grounds the 737 Max. And Trump issues an executive order grounding the planes. Was the last one really necessary? Why not simply instruct the FAA to ground the planes. Will Trump then issue another executive order to rescind this one once Boeing resolves the problem?
It's a shame the FAA and Boeing have been so slow to react to what seems obvious to everyone; an abundance of caution is always essential. But Trump has once again inserted himself into an issue unnecessarily and in a manner unseemly for a President. It would be better if he focused on having competent agencies instead.
14
Pres made the right call here.
7
Ya the first of his presidency
3
@Wenga
But dead last in the world.
8
It would be a travesty if the Boeing CEO received a compensation bonus this year.
12
Can we also ground Air Force One so Trump can stop wasting taxpayer dollars on golf trips and travels to rallies to boost his delicate ego?
48
can we trust the FAA?
clearly, this plane should not have been certified.
the changes adopted at the FAA in 2005 prove that America has been hijacked by big industries and money. the Reagan years are taking root. the future of America is jeopardized. corruption is growing and more and more people are lacking moral compass.
it'll kill America without a doubt. just take a look at Boeing's stock and compare it to Airbus's... more events like this one will be lethal to this country.
Trump is bad for America but he's just a symptom, the consequence of decades of concervative's attacks on America's core.
time to pull up or America will crash hard. but is there a manual somewhere?
21
Finally......For once!!! Hallelujah! Trump made the right decision to ban these planes.
Of course, I do wonder if he has a hidden agenda.
2
@Rose because who knows! the air force one plane might have flaws too! he must be scared for his own skin!
@RoseHe had no choice, because the blackbox is being examined by a European country and therefore the findings can’t be fixed or concealed.
3
@heinrich zwahlen
Exactly; the blackbox went from Ethiopia to France, which has a highly respected record in this technology.
Last country on the planet! That's Leadership.
22
Thank you Mr. President. Finally.
2
I implore you, at this moment, to reread Jaclyn Corin’s oped published on Feb. 13 : ‘Would Congress Care More if Parkland Had Been a Plane Crash?’.
11
Finally. Trump does something I agree with.
2
@Steve C.
After China, the EU and Canada acted? What choice did he have?
Trump's 2020 slogan: "America Last".
18
a broken clock is right twice a day
10
Amusing to read some of the latest comments praising Trump for making a decision. Same as declaring the Hanoi Summit a success because he walked out. Has he really set the bar this low?
14
@RNS. Yes he has, if a day goes by and he doesn't embarrass us world wide or destroy some segment of our population is a day to celebrate.
10
He had to hear from his handler at Boeing first by phone this morning before he could “decide”.
21
Campaign Contributions Boeing, in descending order
Tops 3
Cantwell, Maria (D-WA) Senate $54,065
McCaskill, Claire (D-MO) Senate $48,416
Casey, Bob (D-PA) Senate $38,366
Note : All Democrats
House Leader
Pelosi, Nancy (D-CA) House $11,704
Senate Leader
McConnell, Mitch Senate 0 (zero)
President
Trump, Donald (R) Pres $10,535
I know it's fun to criticize the Donald, but the data show that Boeing mostly influences Democrats.
Personally, I voted for Sanders in the Primaries. Boeing gave him ZERO
Data
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2018&id=d000000100
5
What about the $1,000, 000 Boeing gave to Trump?
Has anyone looked into Trump’s and Jared’s and Ivanka’s, etc investment behavior prior to these types of announcements? Does anyone doubt that he’s selling/buying right before a big tweet?
9
I've never said these words before: Thank you, President Trump.
3
You're giving him WAY TOO MUCH credit. His ears were pinned to the wall.
4
Finally Trump did something I can agree with! A few days late... but better late than never.
2
As Winston Churchill supposedly said (but probably didn't) : "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else."
4
Here is what I have learned about the 737-MAX:
1. The reports of the first crash strongly indicate a design issue. The crew battled the controls against the auto-pilot.
2. The enhanced autopilot was designed to allow experienced 737 pilots to transition to the newer aircraft without the need for extensive training by masking the differences in operation.
Q: How much training specific to the differences in aircraft performance was given? Did it include practice in disabling the auto-pilot? In flying with the autopilot off?
3. One difference in the training of most US pilots vs those in the rest of the world is lots of actual aircraft flying using the flight controls and cockpit instruments. (This is thanks to the US military pilot training, and our many flight schools.) The recent reports of many US pilots seeing the same issue on the MAX, disabling the auto-pilot and hand-flying the aircraft have recently been published.
4. Boeing has critical non-redundant sensors in this system. The fix they are working on does not appear to add redundant sensors. A sensor can fail or degrade by ice or insects lodging in them etc. Are all failure modes detected now?
Given the reports from US pilots, training to detect and leave auto-pilot when it is trying to crash the plane would help.
Removing the propensity of the auto-pilot to enter "crash mode" does not yet seem to be fully in the proposed fix. Rather, the fix reduces the down-force applied to the controls. Is this fix OK?
4
I agree with Trump. I don’t understand how them newfangled planes work ergo nobody does.
4
so what have we learned in recent days? donald trump "believed" the chairman of boeing when the latter assure him the planes were safe. just as he "believes" vladimir putin that russia had nothing to do with election meddling and "believes" kim jong-un that north korea has no plans to build nuclear bombs. what changed his beliefs? nothing. what changed, period? easy. russians and north koreans don't vote in this country, at least not yet, and personal safety trumps (excuse the pun) election meddling and vague threats from third-world nations. the takeaway? public pressure helps. step up, folks. this ain't brain surgery.
5
I know the 2 crahses involved 737 MAX 8 planes, is the MCAS system, which is believed to be the culprit on the 737 MAX 9 as well?
And we are the world leader! Shame on us! 44 countries, big and small grounded the Boeing Max planes. And it took the FAA and the President days before they followed other countries. I'm seriously re-considering going to Orlando. Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse will have to wait for my kids.
4
The knee-jerk, outrage reaction to this crash is terrifying. No real information on the crash and calls for grounding by politicians who have no understanding of the issue. More than a 737's worth of people have died in the US in traffic since this crash - nobody cares. The procedure to inhibit the MCAS is identical to that of many airliners with electronic trimming/pushing systems. Should we now ground ALL airliners due to the possibility of the similar problem of a trim runway crashing them (I've seen this crash occur many times in the simulator)? The probability of this occurring while we get the facts about the Ethiopian crash is minuscule, especially in the US. This unreasoned uproar is far scarier than any plane crash.
3
@Nu11us I think it was not entirely reflexive. After the initial crash Boeing was pretty sure the problem was the software override of the pilots and they started working on a software fix. Apparently this was due out in January, but was severely delayed by the govt shutdown. Thus, the hints from many sources that this was a well understood problem may be correct. If that is the case and the fix takes until late April, we may have some continuing disruption. If there is a takeaway from this event it could be that having the world heavily dependent on a single plane (something like monoculture in agriculture) is dangerous. My ancestors had a strong dependent on the potato, and one potato disease hit Ireland pretty badly.
3
@Nu11us
Car accidents are almost always due to user error. When a identified design flaw causes multiple fatalities, there is typically an investigation and a recall (ie: faulty brakes). If there is a clear design flaw that causes two of the same model planes to crash in similar circumstances within months of each other, who would be crazy enough to wait until the next one? I mean, clearly Boeing thought they had enough time to fix the problem after the Lion Air disaster. Evidently not.
5
@Nu11us yes let’s ignore the pilots complaints for many months about this plane like Boeing did. The lack of response by this giant company to the complaints of many pilots about this system is what’s really scary
3
So, for 48 hours U.S. airlines risked millions of lives simply because the CEO of the company said ' we are safe' and the President said ' He told me everything is OK so nothing to see here'
Have we not heard this before??
10
Boeing CEO is crazy denying the possibility of anything being wrong. If one more plane had crashed, the stock would drop faster than their planes. Grounding the fleet at least gives them a chance to test and rollout a comprehensive fix. This is not an app and you can’t ‘move fast and break things’.
3
The disgrace here is that Trump is involved in what should be a technocratic decision by professionals at the FAA. First, it was a a mistake for the CEO of Boeing to call Trump to discuss this, suggesting that he needed the President to intercede on the company’s behalf. Second, it was a mistake for Trump to make or announce the decision the ground the planes. This morning, I was of the view that I trusted the FAA on this one: if it wasn’t grounding the planes, and if the pilots at American and Southwest were willing to keep flying them, I would have been fine as a passenger flying on one.
Now, it appears that the decisions to ground aircraft are made by Trump based on G-d knows what (probably what Fox & Friends recommenced). Next he’ll be telling the FDA when to order a recall of a drug and telling the NRC when to order the shutdown of a nuclear power plant.
Weirdly, on this one it may turn out that he was right, and that the correct decision WAS to ground the planes. As they say, “even a blind hog sometimes finds an acorn.”
For the conspiracy theorists, I wonder if Trump did Boeing a favor here: if Boeing had told American and Southwest to ground the planes, Boeing would have had some economic responsibility to them. Now, Boeing can say “it wasn’t our decision this was government action, so we have to liability for your lost revenue. Sorry, but not our problem.”
2
Now that Trump wants to ground the aircraft, I'm convinced it must be perfectly safe.
1
Two 737 MAX crashes in five months is just not okay. The reason Lion Air flight 610 crashed was because a new system was put into place to keep the aircraft from stalling. In order to make the plane more fuel efficient they changed the engines. When they did this, they were forced to change the position of the engine, causing the plane to be slightly back heavy. This could cause the plane to tip back and stall during the flight, and this new system was to prevent it. However, in Lion Air flight 610, the angle of attack sensors were giving false information. This caused the system to think the plane was stalling, and then forced the plane into a nose-down position. The system overrode the pilots, so there was nothing they could do. The system can be turned off by flicking two switches and turning a wheel clockwise, but the pilots had not flown in the MAX 8 before, so they didn't know about this new system. The system also doesn't have an alarm when it's activating, so the pilots didn't know what was happening. There is not much information on the Ethiopian airlines crash, but witnesses reported strange sounds and smoke, so this system might not be the problem there. Also, on Lion Air flight 610 the reason the system forced the nose down was because of false info from the angle of attack sensors. So that needs to be looked into, and it also means that the new system might not be the problem at all. All in all, the 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 need to be grounded until they are safe.
6
You know somethings wrong when you have to switch off the autopilot to manually correct an event being controlled by the autopilot.
5
Donald Trump is in charge of the agencies who should have made this call.
He doesn’t get a cookie for overruling the corrupt, swampy, unqualified staff that he appointed and oversees.
7
This could well be the first Twitter post by this Trump individual that would give the rational amongst us food for thought.
1
meanwhile, this model of aircraft has flown millions of miles. Yes, two tragic crashes. But evidentiary data is lacking; its still early, folks.
The rush to judgment
the public shaming
the self righteousness of the armchair quarterback headline readers who don't understand statistics...
3
If the on-board computer detected the plane nosing up too much, and compensated pushing the nose down, shouldn't the
same computer have detected that the plane was going too hit the ground, and pulled the plane out of the dive?
1
“The safety of the American people, OF ALL PEOPLE, is our paramount concern,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the White House.
What a rogue.
4
Nobody on the right or the left wants a respected and strategically important company like Boeing to fail, the same way nobody on the right or the left wants to see airplanes full of people fall out of the sky because of a software glitch.
This issue has become so politicized like everything else touched by this toxic Presidency, while there should be unity of purpose to ground the planes, allow Boeing to apply the necessary modifications, and eventually return the MAX8 to the skies as the excellent aircraft that it undoubtedly can be.
I find it maddening that these days everything appears to be politicized to the extreme. If you are pro safety, you are a liberal snowflake; if you are pro Boeing, you are a capitalist pig.
This is absolutely ridiculous. We should all unite together and do the right thing. The FAA, Boeing, the White House, the traveling public - we all share the same goals: to ensure safe, efficient travel with state-of-the-art planes built by profitable and healthy companies. There's no "right" or "left" about this.
8
The WH decision to ground the Boeing 737 Max, was a wise decision, and long overdue.
The tenor of PR’s and comments, since the incident in Ethiopia, seemed rooted in nationalism.
Boeing calling the WH and “doubling down”, on the planes safety was a mistake.
This plane has had problems and I suspect that some piece of data, from the Ethiopia crash, created the need to change the narrative.
3
An open question to those who might know.
Are the newly installed Boeing flight control system susceptible to being hacked in the same manner hackers hack into computer systems?
4
The acting head of the Department of Defense, Patrick Shanahan was with Boeing for 30 years at a very high level
What was his involvement with the Supermax and in getting it approved by the FAA without proper training for pilots?
At a minimum if he goes before confirmation hearings we need to learn more.
2
Yup! had to do it out of basic common sense apart from the highly technical aspects. It's not like you can walk away from a bus that breaks down on the Interstate.
The F.A.A. is clearly not to be trusted especially if took Trump to call it right.
4
Evidently Boeing's CEO contributed a hefty sum of money to Trump's inauguration, so of course when he called Trump to beg him not to ground the plane, Trump complied. And notice who makes the announcement today when we finally do what every other smart country has done - not the FAA or the DOT, but Trump himself, in order to milk the moment for all the attention he can get. This has to be a new low: politicizing public safety in order to please a donor.
8
Crashing right after take-off. Obviously not a result of unforeseen or encountering new flying conditions.
Did the software wrongly detect a 'stall' and nose the aircraft downwards?
2
Thank God. My brother flies a lot and I begged him to make sure not to fly on one of these planes. He thanked me for being his big sister and informed me that he flys Delta. So, I’m less afraid about my little personal world. I know nothing about planes or piloting. But when I FEEL into these planes, I get the heebee jeebies. Maybe that sounds dorky, but that “feeling in” has saved my life many times.
3
My nephew is a young commercial pilot. I am thankful he will not be flying one of these planes.
8
And what is your nephew's opinion? This might be more helpful.
1
I've read nothing anywhere about the possibility of sabotage, but that surely must be considered.
It could be corporate sabotage against Boeing, economic sabotage against US industry. It could even be political sabotage to destabilize, dismay, and distract millions of people.
If it IS sabotage - some planted bug in flight control software - it's unfortunately working very well.
1
@Carpe Diem Why would we consider this possibility if there is no evidence for it? And if someone did have access to flight control software, and was planning to sabotage it to spread fear - why make the sabotage so subtle and minor it only really leads to a major accident every 100000 flights or so?
2
In all, 12,000 Boeing factory workers in a Seattle suburb, Renton, were turning out 52 of the new aircraft every month.
The new 737 MAX was one of the company’s most successful aircraft in terms of initial sales.
As of January, the backlog for the MAX was 4,661 aircraft.
@Jean
Any info on the software fix? There might be a backlog there as well. Best to leave the plane on the ground until the software fix has been installed. Not a big fan of cost benefit analysis when lives are at risk.
President Trump issued an emergency order after he studied the situation and concluded that to his superior knowledge the autopilot was at fault due to its complexity. What would we do without his expertise?
10
@DSS Hillary was going to make the call but then she remembered that she lost.
@Rich Striker tell that to Trump, he still thinks she is running.
2
@Rich Striker
She took the popular vote by 3M votes. If we can get rid of the Electoral College Civil War/Reconstruction era artifact, and gerrymandered voting districts, we might join the rest of the Western industrialized world. A federally monitored independent vote would allow a national vote for President, separate from State and local elections. I don't know how well Hillary plays golf; however, I am pretty confident that she does know how government works. She also knows how a decent President works.
I fully support POTUS decision.
I spent 43 plus years in the oil patch. I fly a lot. I have flown in MiG 29 to some 60,000 plus ft. So, I know flying has risks.
But in face of these two accidents, risks now appear too high. Not just to folks on board but what if it occurred over a crowded city.
The best way to mitigate is to stop them flying.
In our industry, grounding is a stand down
When similar incidents happen in close proximity of each other at a location or even at different locations.
We stand down - that is suspend all operations for one day.
Gather all folks around in large or small gatherings.
Discuss the incident, share preliminary investigation, but more importantly, seek input so all have assurance they are being heard.
The stand down ends with sharing lessons learned, identify individuals to watch these operations where incidents occurred.
And most critically, give them permission to restart but with abundance of caution - and give the local chief authority to suspend again.
So, this grounding is an excellent idea.
6
This is about the only way Trump can be neutralized: unrelenting pressure.
8
We can thank airline deregualtion under Reagan for the airlines getting what they want. Prior to the 9/11 attacks the airlines refused to tighten security even after all the signs pointed to increased terrorist threats. The government let them dictate how , when andwwhere to provide security and look what happened. After 9/11 the airlines got scared and let the government take over airport security all the while never being held responsible for the lax security that resulted in 9/11. Big money= big influence in politics and governmental decision making.
10
@lou Andrews
Remember the big fight over hardened cockpit doors, because it might inconvenience a pilot or co-pilot who had to use the bathroom? I forget how that got resolved; was it a private cockpit bathroom? Finally, the Saudis whose American trained pilots took down the Towers were allowed to leave the U.S. from FL after all flights were grounded. Now we have another President who values his business interests with Saudis over the death of a U.S. resident who was a Saudi dissident. He also puts his loyalty to Israeli interests over a reasonable foreign policy Agreement with Iran, put in place by Obama. No weaponized plutonium production for 10 yrs. He has now put us on a possible war footing with Iran; we will support Saudi bombing, as we have done in Yemen? How does that benefit the ordinary American taxpayer? Haven't we given enough to corporations with a huge permanent tax cut? Do we also have to honor Trump's personal business interests in a foreign country?
This may be the first time I have sided with the President, but you have to give the devil his due. (pretty appropriate saying, don't you think?). The FAA seems as slow and broken as the FDA who have helped give us the opioid crisis through lax labeling decisions. Both federal agencies primary missions are to protect and serve the American people. Both are failing.
8
@Dennis W
Unfortunately, I am not sure but I believe that I read in the Guardian that Boeing's chief was begging Trump not to ground the planes and he didn't - until he had to. No reason to think Trump did the right thing immediately. All other countries did it first. When all else fails, do the right thing. Somebody in the administration got to him.
8
Trump’s first good decision. And yes, this is what emergency orders *should* be used for.
11
I never thought I would say this, but Trump made a good decision. There are too many unknowns at this point to allow flights of this new model to continue. Let's see what the investigators discover before allowing 787-Max's to resume passenger flights.
11
There was something missing in the world, and it was the phrase "abundance of caution". I'm really pleased to see it back, just like an old friend. Will AI have any use for it?
4
I realize this is a contrarian view, but the 737 Max shouldn't have been grounded, in my opinion. And no, it has nothing to do with concern for Boeing's stock price.
The 737 Max has been in service for nearly two years now. Before the most recent accident, it was being used on over 1,000 flights a day worldwide. The cumulative total was well over 600,000 flights to date, not counting testing. While the jet certainly isn't without flaws - among others, I'm aware of the fact that Boeing basically had to shoehorn its larger engines in for purposes of cost savings - it is not a "flying coffin" or "deathtrap with wings."
We also wouldn't be in this situation but for what was essentially a fluke: the terrible, but nonetheless coincidental, fact that two 737 Max jets crashed within a relatively short time frame. Rejecting an entire model on such a basis isn't really much different than rejecting an entire airline because of its short-term crash record, never mind the millions of other trouble-free flights it provides each year.
Yes, I get why people are concerned. I also get that people also overreact with regards to commercial flying in general (e.g. entirely irrational control-based fears of it) and crashes in particular. The fact that Trump is agreeing with this sentiment - and encouraging Americans to embrace their irrational fears - is understandable given his general political worldview, but nonetheless offers no real solution to the problem.
6
How does the 737max safety record compare to the 777 or 787 or 757 or 767 in their first couple of years of approval for commercial flights?
1
I'm sorry but you're assuming away precisely what is being debated: whether it was, indeed a coincidental series of events or not. Given your diagnostic is false, your prescription is false too.
5
@Jeff
There were 350 new aircraft flying. Two of them flew into the ground for no apparent reason. Those are not great odds. Also... it's not just a technical or statistical exercise, the confidence of passengers is of vital importance and a safety concern in itself.
4
Mr Trump acted wisely in the best interests of US residents. His mistrust of the FAA’s over-cozy relationship with the air industry is all too well founded. May it lead to reform.
5
Nothing to say about Trump's "over-cozy" relationship with Boeing or his idiotic tweets which reveal his total ignorance of the role of technology in making aviation safer than it has ever been?
Whoever is the villain here the available evidence points at Boeing first not the FAA.
2
What I want to see revealed are the other sets of blueprints that surely were drawn with a bigger set of wings and landing apparatus to accommodate the larger engines on the proposed aircraft. The software and the tubes used to calculate pitch used in this fatal iteration obviously was the design picked which would be most "cost efficient".
I fear this entire series will need to be scrapped and the other designs will be used.
The only and I mean only good thing that will come out of this tragedy will be a lesson to all designers and manufacturers that the product quality comes before the calculated max return on capital. This is the modern day triangle shirt fire.
8
When there may be issues (with a company that is advertised as providing safe-venture) with a potential product defect that may have recently caused ~ 350 instantaneous deaths, I guess you have to hesitate when the CEO of Boeing is influenced with a visit to Mar a Lago. . .
2
Right call by pres. The cynic in me assumes that there is a financial impact to Boeing depending on the circumstances of the grounding. Insurance or whatever. If Boeing makes the call (which, on the surface would have seen like the obvious move and is stunning that they didn't) versus having the individual airlines make the call. No doubt the emergency declaration (which seems out of character) was orchestrated to this end. Some liability and risk lawyer could probably explain it.
(sigh)
2
The FAA grounded the planes. Trump demanded to be allowed to make the announcement so his name would be on it. Poor man needs so badly to look presidential. It isn't working.
18
RE: Fixes to the Boeing Max
The fix, as well as all other changes, must be approved by the FAA before implementation.
Many persons, both professionals and others, warned that the government shutdown would result in an aviation safety incident or worse.
Boeing blames the five week delay of the safety modification in part on the government shutdown.
They are absolutely correct.
18
@NYT this is critical information. Can you please amend your story to include it?
Mr. Trump said: “They are working very, very hard right now and hopefully they’ll very quickly come up with the answer..."
In fact, the needed software update was already formulated in response to the initial crash... when Trump shut down the government, setting back the Boeing/FAA coordination/implementation plan by 5 weeks.... and 157 more lives.
Mountains of life-saving cancer research had to be scrapped during these constant shutdowns, costing countless more lives.
We'll be feeling the effects of Trump for the rest of our lives. Well... at least those of us that are still living when he's gone, that is.
25
Had the two accidents occurred anywhere in the USA, Canada or Europe, the grounding would have been instantaneous. It goes without saying that lives in developing countries are more expendable.
In a post-Trump world this may sadly be the new norm. Thank God it took only 3 days for the President to ground the fleet rather than play Russian Roulette... Oops.. ..
11
This is Trump playing into his "I alone can fix this" mantra. Not good for Boeing or the FAA.
4
A colleague pointed out that exactly the same argument was used by countries that grounded the Max 8 and the US for not grounding it: there was not enough data to know for sure what the problem is.
Interesting how Republicans also use that same argument not to take action climate change.
Now that President Trump has seen the light with the Max 8 that sometimes you need to take action BECAUSE we don't have all the answers, can we hope that he'll soon have the same epiphany for climate change?
14
Is anyone else confident that the FAA does indeed know what's appropriate and that their decision NOT to ground the 737 Max 8/9 was based on science? And that we can trust the agency that has left the US safe from flight fatalities since 2009?
I, for one, find the greed-and-politics motivation to keep the plants flying not only unduly cynical, but frankly reactionary and simplistic. And, yes, my politics are as left as many NYT readers.
3
It’s clear that the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) was a poor solution to avoiding potential problems that could have been caused by design changes in the Boeing 737 Max 8 from previous 737 versions. But no one has addressed the issue as to how, why and what could have caused the flight speed indicator(s) to fail on these brand-new passenger jets, which sent false readings and triggered the MCAS? Is this the same instrument failure that caused fatal crashes of an Air France plane and two other passenger jets in the 1990's? Is there no way to check the physical readings from these critical on-board systems against satellite data such as GPS and take faulty systems off-line when they’re obviously producing false data?
3
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm - afraid I can't let you fly - that Boeing Max 8"; "Trump acquiesced to - Boeing until the public - pressure got too great"
12
The decision of the FAA not to ground the 737 Max screams regulatory capture.
9
No matter what one thinks about Trump's decision to ground the 737 Max aircraft; you can rest assured that he arranged to short the Boeing stock prior to his announcement.
15
In a somewhat perverse way, this delayed coulda/woulda/shoulda reaction is not that different than believe Saudi Arabia's
MBS was innocent in the killing of an American journalist working abroad, that North Korea's Kim Jong had no idea of young Otto Wambier's tortured fate and Putin's puppets played no role in stealing our elections.
At least in this case, someone high up enough in this kakistocratic government had the courage to channel his/her outrage by speaking truth to power and succeed.
Vote.
8
@Guido Malsh
Good comment, superior perception. I wonder if we will ever know the route that truth took?
1
OK, as much as it kills me, I gotta give props to Trump on this.
9
@Colleen
Why? He didn't do the right thing until it was clearly a PR disaster. He deserves absolutely zero props on this.
2
When I read the comments of outrage about the handling of the situation by Boeing, the FAA, the Secretary of Transportation and the POTUS, it becomes obvious what is wrong with the whole picture.
The safeguards in place that are supposed to protect the well-being and happiness of the citizens of this nation are not what the Declaration of Independence or Constitution seem to have had in mind.
It is rather the interests of the Corporations (of course thanks to that famous philanthrop Mitt Romney we know that they are people too) that dictate the modus operandi.
Only when the proverbial biomass hits the fan that we see some pathetic action in the end of the day.
There are even commenters who think that what was done finally was ok as if any human being with half a brain and heart would have acted much earlier.
We have to change the order of things in this country. We are following leaders the same way sheep follow a shepherd.
I have had enough. Enough of Elaine Chao, enough of Mitch McConnell, enough of Trump and enough of Democrats like Hillary and Joe Biden.
I want change. I want progressives to run my country. Honest and intelligent progressives.
I want Bernie, I want Liz.
17
@Blunt
Amen to all that!
1
I wonder whether a Trump company sold Boeing stock during his long delay.
12
Please examine how this decision was made.
4
Last to the party.
Sad.
8
Hey Trump! Boeing KNEW -- and appear not to have shared everything with pilots... YOU said today that you didn't have to ground the planes... Makes ya think, huh?
1
These poor pilots... upon realizing their passengers were in such peril. And the fear the passengers must have experienced in the final moments.
Devastating.
17
Trump issuing an emergency order is just another occurrence of him saving his image in the eyes of the public.
The 737 Max should have been grounded by the FAA from the start. It wasn't because of compromised Trump appointees that cater towards "citizen" corporations.
When it got world wide attention, Trump acted to save his image. The only thing he really cares about.
14
A rough estimate indicates that even with these crashes these planes are much safer than driving. Per wikipedia, the plane has a 3825 mile range, a capacity of 230 passengers, and 376 have been built.
As a rough estimate, assuming the planes are flown and average of 3000 miles a day with an average of 140 passengers (these are conservative underestimates), and the recent fatalities of 459 people recur every year (a conservative over estimate), the result is 80 fatalities per 10 billion miles traveled. Traveling by car is twice as dangerous with 150 fatalities per 10 billion miles traveled.
To the extent that grounding a whole fleet of planes restricts the availability of flights and drives up prices, causing travelers to drive instead, this ban may cause more fatalities than it prevents.
Airline safety is important, and resources should be devoted to solving the safety problem. But grounding the planes is an over-reaction that limits the availability of the safest transit method.
Banning cars would be a better method to improve safety.
4
It took power to ground these planes. Trump made the decision.
2
We are on a United flight next week that is on a 737 Max 900. It's very confusing but am I right in concluding that the Max 9 is a newer version of the Max 900?
1
@Edie Clark
Different planes in 737 MAX series. Operation of both 737-8 and 737-9 prohibited in Emergency Order, see https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/media/Emergency_Order.pdf
1
Even with this announcement, the FAA has validated the concerns of former NTSB head Jim Hall cited in the Times' editorial that the FAA and aircraft manufacturers have become too cozy. Today, FAA administrator Daniel Elwell said, "My hope is that the FAA, the carriers, the manufacturer, that all parties will work very hard to make this grounding as short as possible so that these airplanes can get back up into the sky." WRONG! The only correct response is, "The FAA, the carriers, the manufacturer, all parties will take whatever time it takes to fully correct the issues with the MAX, and these planes will not be returned to the air unless and until they are airworthy beyond all doubt."
30
What makes no sense was that while Boeing was saying the aircraft was safe, they said they were coming out with a software fix in a couple of months to correct the problem. Huh? If there is no problem then why the need for a software fix? It makes no sense. Also, we are just learning that American pilots have been complaining about the downward nose pitch problems on takeoff with this plane for months and have been forwarding these anomalies to the FAA and Boeing. I think congress needs to hold hearings on this and drag these Boeing executives in to testify under oath what they knew and when they knew it. The families of the two crashed planes deserve at least that.
24
@FXQ
The planes are safe in the same way the air quality around the Twin Towers was safe on 9/12/01. Ask the rescue workers who are dying of cancers about that one. Republican administrations always put the welfare of the corporations ahead of the welfare of the citizenry.
2
Honestly Trump probably just saved Boeing’s you know what. I’m about as far as you can get from a Trump fan, but he made the right call here. Pretty upsetting that peer pressure is what causes the US to make this decision, rather than true leadership. Not surprising (ahem, climate change..).
5
@I’ve Got Questions
Trump only "made the right call" because of peer pressure, which as you said is far from true leadership.
11
Trump to the world: "Drop dead!" His quote is actually disgusting. "The safety of the American people, of all people, is our paramount concern.” Of all people? Translation: It's ok if people of other nations die because of Boeing's incompetence.
7
I am always amazed at how:
1) Trump manages to get his name attached to every major news story
2) How you let Trump attach his name to every major news story
17
Trump did a good, thoughtful deed? Donald Trump? The White House guy? I’m...impressed.
@Ken Nyt
Consider that somebody pushed him to the wall and showed him it was the smart move to make given the public clamor--that otherwise when another plane went down he would own it. Saving face.
1
I cannot believe that I actually agree with the person in the Oval Office (cannot stand the man), but thankfully he grounded the planes. But what made him do this? There's got to be a backstory. He does nothing for anyone but him.
6
Good for trxmp. He did the right thing. Fortunately it wasn't too late. But he made the choice because it finally got through his thick skull that if another plane went down, especially one operated by a US airline, every finger in the world would point to him, and that just wouldn't do for his self image as a hero. But still, yes, he did the right thing.
4
The browsing tracker, seeing that I've been focussed on the horror in progress with aviation today, has decided that it's a good time to present me with a plethora of fly/drive vacation options. And if that doesn't tell you how brilliant AI, machine learning or whatever you want to call it is, you have no sense of the absurd world we live in. We've merely automated stupidity to unparalleled levels of efficiency.
7
Once again Trump demonstrates his leadership by following everyone else. Xi Jinping did it first.
8
Ah, the great leader from behind woke up.
He probably dumped his Boeing stock after talking with Boeing's CEO.
10
The next thing I hope Trump will announce, " Let's get back to Climate Paris Accord. " Would that be wonderful. !!!
3
Leading from behind. MAGA indeed.
8
Trump now throws Elaine Chao under the bus. She issues a statement and he immediately undercuts it. She was the only cabinet member who seemed immune from Emperor Donald's whims. Couldn't he have consulted with her first and let her make the pronouncement after some discussion?
Oh, yes, and this cripples Boing, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines. The airlines are in red states who all voted for Trump. What a great move by our Incompetent-in-Chief.
So much winning!
7
@William O, Beeman
I guess you are counting a small number of votes against a "small" number of lives lost? Those who lost family members would probably not agree with your cost benefit analysis.
A 737's grounded or just the 737 Max?
@Will
Just the Max 8.
I have family coming back from the Caribbean in a few days on a Delta 737-800. Believe me: I checked, immediately. Delta has no Max 8 in its fleet.
4
No Head of FAA has been appointed to run agency. Why didn't Mrs. McConnel make the decision? Same old problem, politicians family appointed to run government for their benefit and not ours. The SWAMP lives on because it never left.
12
@Double Duece Elaine Chao is not in office to make decisions regarding public safety. She is there to assist corporations including her father's shipping business.
2
I am glad I don't need to fly anywhere in the near future. Having to consider flying on the 737-Max seemed terrifying. Now, all that capacity removed from the air throws air travel, both domestic and international into chaos. And Ethiopia is sitting on their hands with the black boxes they are not able to process themselves, delaying possible resolution of the issue.
It is noteworthy that the U.S. pilots who encountered an autopilot problem knew what to do and did it...and reported it.
I consider Boeing at fault for not recognizing the potential for problems and preparing comprehensive documentation and training.
As a retired programmer, I have a level of dread certainty that a programming bug will be found. I cannot believe that a belt-and-suspenders approach to control this feature was not part of the design, bug or not, both to recognize repeated conflict with the pilot's manual input and to use alternative redundant measures to validate the inputs causing the problems. GPS and gyroscopes both could be used to verify the piton tube inputs.
Sometimes "Programmer's Pride" can turn out to be arrogance.
6
Thankfully Boeing's greed and the compromised FAA were overruled before another planeload of people died.
4
Wow, Trump putting safety over profit, I am almost impressed.
3
No doubt just after he dumped his stock. Last one to the rodeo does not a leader make.
1
@mjbarr
Read more about why he FINALLY did it - after all the other countries, of course.
1
If our President had done this immediately after the most recent crash he’d have been skewered for controlling fascist authoritarian tendencies. Having taken a resolute and considered approach he waited to assess not only the actions and comments of Boeing, but of the FAA. As a result, he made an informed, rational move, not controlled by hair afire opponents in the media or those of convulsing forum wags.
1
@JBC
He waited to make an informed rational move?
Uh,no. He tweeted.
7
@JBC Trump gets rent from Boeing at some of his properties. Boeing is one of the top lobbyists in Washington. Decades ago Trump bought millions of dollars in jets from Boeing. Trump has not appointed a head of the FAA; airlines now make policy. Every other major country in the World grounded the planes. Trump finally woke up to the Political and economic costs if another plane crashed and killed Americans. Weakest "president" ever. Ray Sipe
11
Blind squirrel finds nut, nothing more.
1
Mr Trump again demonstrates he is not a leader but just a basic follower.
5
The browsing tracker, detecting that I've been focused on the horror in progress with aviation today, has decided that it's a good time to present me with a plethora of fly/drive vacation options.
And if that doesn't tell you how brilliant AI, machine learning or whatever you want to call it is, you have no sense of the absurd world we live in. We've automated stupidity to unparalleled levels of efficiency all around us, not just in the air or on the drawing board.
2
@Quite Contrary tell me about it. Yesterday while reading a medical article on the myth of “adrenal fatigue” and the bogus supplements being peddled for it, an ad was embeddded in the middle of it for...you guessed it...hormone supplements to treat “adrenal fatigue.” Brilliant
2
I imagine the Green New Dealers are happy about this, a portion of the world's aircraft which operate on fossil fuel is taken out of service. I imagine they want all vehicles powered by fossil fuel taken out of service. Well how would they get to climate meetings? Have they ever thought about that? Last night Tucker Carlson interviewd the founder of Greenpeace, who stsred the Left's position on climate change is nonsense, especialy the elimination of fossil fuels. What fools. Thank you.
2
Stock price down a total of 13% in two days, and appearing to be the world’s safety pariah, are powerful motivators. But it took the President to apparently force the issue. I loathe the man, but he did something right. Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.
1
Get this - there is no Administrator for the FAA. Daniel Elwell has served as Deputy Administrator since January, 2018. Trump has not appointed another Administrator since.
That is why Trump is making this decision regarding shutting down these planes. He thought no one would notice how remiss he has been - having no Administrator for a department as important as the FAA. Another shame, shame, shame.
12
Finally... America Last it would seem.
7
Not that I am a huge Donald fan but how much do you want to bet that now that he has grounded the 737's that he will be beat over the head for the decision? I am a neutral politically but it does seem no matter what he does it is wrong simply because the guy is arrogant and childish. But this does not mean he is wrong about EVERYTHING. The guy could refund every citizen in the country with $10k and they will still hate him. Cant wait to see the criticism he gets on this one!
1
@Weatherguy
Actually, despite the fact that Trump waited to do this until it was clear that his image was taking a big hit, everyone here is rushing to give him (entirely undeserved) credit.
Far from being overly criticized, Trump is always being given second chances to look "Presidential." Enough. He has squandered all benefit of the doubt.
11
@Weatherguy
When did you become aware of this issue? We were the only major country still allowing these planes to fly. The CEO of Boeing was in touch with Trump to keep the planes in the air and it worked - until the cost in loosing face became too high. It is not about saving lives. It is about saving his own hide.
2
1) The Lion Air crash was caused by a faulty AOA (angle of attack) sensor feeding faulty data to the air data computer system. This then caused false airspeed indications to the pilots, as well as to the MCAS system, which is a focus is of the safety debate. The false data was signaling that the airspeed was too slow for safe flight. The MCAS system did what it was designed to do, lowering the nose of the aircraft to regain airspeed. It does that by automatically changing the position of the horizontal stabilizer on the tail of the aircraft.
2) The horizontal stabilizer can be and commonly is adjusted by either pilot in two different ways. a) via an electric motor that is controlled by a switch located on the yoke (steering wheel) in the cockpit. b) by manually turning a wheel located within easy reach of both pilots. Both of these controls will override the MCAS automatic movement of the horizontal stabilizer.
3) The powered movement of the horizontal stabilizer can be disconnected within seconds by either pilot. It's very simple and takes just seconds. The procedure is part of 737 training.
4) The false airspeed indications (and false altitude indications, according to preliminary reports) combined with aircraft nose down actions undoubtedly made it very difficult for the pilots to know exactly what procedure use. I think most 737 crews would struggle to understand what the correct response would be.
Continued below-
4
But it happened again.
1
Great timing by the president. He makes the announcement on the same day that Manafort receives a new prison sentence. Evidently he hopes that the announcement will deflect attention from another of his cronies headed to prison. This could have been addressed long before now.
6
-Continuation
The FAA is reluctant to ground the MAX 8 because the Lion
Air crash was primarily caused by the faulty AOA.
The FAA is looking at thousands of hours of flight data recorded with the MAX 8 model, MCAS system installed, with no safety related anomalies that would indicate a safety related issue.
The cause of the Ethiopian Flight 409 crash is unknown.
However, using for decision making the vast body of safe operational data is appropriate, reasonable and defensible.
What is not defensible is for politicians (around the world) and talking heads believing they have enough real-world information and understanding to make a decision regarding the safety of the MAX 8. For MAX 8 operators, fear of legal repercussions drives many decisions.
For the public, try not to over react. Clear minded people with expertise have a microscope on this issue, and will get it right.
5
@Rick, and until they do, would you get on a 737 MAX? We are humans, not algorithms.
1
FAA "collusion" with the airline industry—
And what about our other critical and protective government agencies, like the FDA and the EPA.
Beginning with George W. Bush they have been defunded and demoralized and their independence impaired.
And it continues with the absurd administration of Donald John Trump.
But we depend upon these agencies. We should all be profoundly distressed.
4
Did Trump actually do the right thing for once? One more right thing and he becomes officially a broken clock!
American exceptionalism at it's finest, but not in a good way.
3
Trumps fool-hardy shutdown owns responsibility for 157 lost lives because they could not do their jobs and apply the software fixes. Once Boeing troubleshooted and understood the sensor issue and implemented a planned install date they should have NOT been put on hold by a GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN. I'm very upset. Trump reckless statement - 5th Ave. and a gun is being played out. Has he spoken up YET to offer condolences for the lives lost? Will he? Will he own it? No...
3
I think Trump resisted grounding the planes because he just wanted to be contrary. Only he can fix it. If they zig, he'll zg.
"You can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility."
2
Do you think Trump came out with this because the WSJ reported this week that Boeing had a software update but it was delayed because of the government shutdown? Did he worry that if anything happens in the US he would look bad?
8
It's the third year of the Trump Administration and Trump finally did something right when he ordered the grounding of the 737 Max.
1
The U.S. used to be first in so many things. Under Trump, we are nearly always last.
7
Experts vs management/mob. I recall I once heard that the essence of Post Moderism is ‘my opinion is just as valid as your facts’, we’ll exemplified by the US’s Administration “alternative facts.’ Recalling too the tragic accident when management insisted on a NASA space shuttle launch when the engineers advised against because of the effect of the cold on ‘O’ rings. So who do I believe, engineers and experts who can land a rover on the moon or mars and reboot it from earth, or the Donald’s Paris Accord, no global warning mod? Easy question for me.
2
I pity Boeing, caught between a rock and a hard spot. The software patch they are frantically working on has been delayed at least a couple of months because the FAA has to approve it and they are at least a couple of months behind due to the government shutdown caused by the man who just grounded their planes!
4
I think it would be better to reserve pity for the families of the bereaved.
9
@Geof Rayns
They have my upmost sympathy. When the shutdown was dragging on many in the aviation industry were concerned about the impact on safety. We won’t know until later, but perhaps the victims of this crash payed the price.
2
Listen up! Elaine Chao in my opinion needs a job and because Mitch McConnell is leader of the republican senate and trump is president, Elaine will constantly be Secretary of Transportation.
2
So POTUS declares an actual national emergency. Grudging credit, I suppose.
“We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution,” Mr. Muilenburg said.
No, you are supporting this late reactive step out of public outrage and common sense, Mr. Muilenburg. Don't try to change the facts or the context.
8
I'm sorry, but thinking that Mr. Trump "decided" to ground the planes is laughable.
9
“We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution,” Mr. Muilenburg said.
Right.
Kudos to those who did the good reporting on this issue and to the uncorrupted aviation officials around the world.
7
Indeed there are similarities between the two crashes; both happened to third world airlines with small fleets and inadequate in-house training resources. The question that should be asked is wether such airlines should be allowed to own and operate these increasingly sophisticated airplanes.
2
Looking from outside the USA it seems to me that Mr Trump is trying to gain kudos for an inevitable action that the US was shamed into. Shouldn't Congress be asking deep questions about the FAA? Is this a case of regulatory capture, as has occured with the FDA and others?
9
It took awhile, but President Trump and assumably Elaine Chao have made the right decisions - to ground Boeing's 737 Max aircraft until the causes of the recent crashes have been identified and the repairs made known and carried out.
There is no way President Trump could not have made this decision with the rest of the civilized world and in view of the two recent crashes still unaccounted for.
4
There's an expression, "You don't have a dog and bark yourself"
Putting the FAA's slowness to react to one side, I find it strange that Trump had to announce the grounding of Boeing's 737 Max planes.
Surely he could have phoned the FAA, raised his concerns and let them them make the call.
4
@Mike He wants to be seen as The Boss.
1
A good move to ground these Aircraft. I'm confused about the systems on this new version. As a Air Force trained Autopilot technician; and many fliers don't know this, the Autopilot is engaged just as soon as the wheels leave the runway. But, the systems should allow the pilots to manually take off using the engine throttles and flight surface pedals. Is this aircraft not made to fly manually? Not good.
5
FAA dragging its feet is no surprise. Long a captive agency, it takes its orders from the corporate executive suites.
7
I can remember a time when the US was a world leader. Now we are a follower, and a slow follower at that.
15
"An abundance of caution". This phrase would be laughable if it weren't so tragically sad.
If this is an abundance of caution, only reluctantly after two similar crashes, what does ordinary caution look like, the standard caution practiced at Boeing each day? Does standard caution mean rushing out flawed designs and shoddy software patches and seeing how it flies?
The software mantra "move fast and break things" is great for Facebook, not for aviation.
3
The decision to ground these planes is the first, and probably the only, time I agree with Trump. These planes should be grounded till the investigators definitively find the problem. I also want to know how two fatal crashes in a short period of time, and multiple complaints by highly qualified pilots, does not meet the FAA standard of "systematic performance issues?"
10
Why did Trump make this announcement?
The decision to ground planes should be made and announced by the FAA and Boeing.
What's going on with our country?
24
@EnoughAlready...Trump says, please let me make the announcement so people will think I care.
6
Temporary grounding was the right decision. I've noticed that when the Navy has a cluster of accidents, they pause operations to take stock, see if there's something systematic wrong, and take corrective actions. I think airlines should do the same for paying customers.
One question I've had about this situation is whether there is recurring simulator training in how to deal with how the MCAS might behave if the angle of attach indicator malfunctions. I can imagine that the change in pitch, the load on the flight controls, and the speed of acceleration when nose-down at high power settings could startle and quickly overwhelm a crew, especially if they hadn't practiced that particular failure repeatedly in the sim. Crews would need to recognize if very quickly, disable the powered trim, and not just keep overriding it. That's a lot to ask, at low altitude, if pilots aren't trained for it. Once the system is off, the plane would fly normally, using manual trim which would be unfamiliar but quite doable. Crews have to survive long enough to realize the problem, deactivate the system, and recover.
4
Once upon a time the world looked to the FAA for leadership in airline safety. Now the US waits until every other country sees the danger and our country only looks for loss of profits.
20
Only a flash poll reflecting that his based did not approve his earlier decision could have changed the president's mind. Money or power. People come second or third unless they are core Trump voters.
6
Wow. This is really appalling .... it seems almost certain that it will be found that design and/or software flaws were responsible for both crashes. Which leaves us all to ask, why weren't these planes grounded after the FIRST crash that took nearly 200 lives? Or, for that matter, why was this plane rushed to market in the first place, with pilot training on a very significant change completely ignored?
8
@bob that's called greed
2
Terrorism should be the second biggest item on the check list of possibilities. It is so highly unusual for well designed aircraft for planes to be falling, or to be pushed, out of the skies that terrorism cannot automatically be ruled out. Boeing is the largest, most successful commercial aircraft builder in the world and has a strong reputation of reliability.
Presumably, the pilots of the recent crash were well briefed on the circumstances faced by Lion Air when that plane went down. If so, it raises the question of whether the automatic stall avoidance computing system can be turned off or whether it can be turned off quickly.
Another question is why such a system was installed in the first place. Stalling a commercial aircraft is very rare; the pilots are highly experienced and generally know how to keep the aircraft flying. It's their job. What conditions was the software created to counter? A pilot asleep? Furthermore, pushing a plan nose down when it is close to the ground is rather counterproductive. Keeping it nose down until it crashes, it would seem, is something that should have been programmed out of the system.
If these two crashes were caused by software error, then we have a case of "death by computer". This is a prospect that we are facing in many areas of our lives, including the highly promoted driverless cars. Engineers seem intent on taking "the human factor" away from humans and forcing decisions on computers. This is unacceptable.
8
The fact that both of the recent crashes happened on the other side of the world also raises the potential that terrorism was involved. Things are much looser in many places than in Europe and the US and it would not be extremely unusual for some outside forces to get access to aircraft. Also, computer hacking is a world wide phenomenon and gets more sophisticated and aggressive all the time.
The pursuit of safety comes at a price, both economic and political. The quest for the facts related to an accident take time to determine, way longer than the economic necessity to solve the problem or the political necessity to do something. Add the immediacy of social media, driven as it is by fear, opinions, and out right deception, and you have a recipe for rapid answers and actions for complex problems.
Aviation safety is the envy of most forms of transportation and many other industries. We expect perfection because the industry, regulators, and users have seen quantifiable improvements. There may very well be a "smoking gun" between the Lion Air crash and the latest. If so, Boeing can only hope the answer comes quick and the fix is simple. If the answer is anything but, it may be a long time before we can fly/ride in the aircraft with certainty that it is truly safe.
If this turns out to be a human factor problem, ie: pilot error for different reasons, than distrust will continue with a press, public, and political class grappling for answers they either don't like, beleive or don't understand.
3
It was announced a few hours today that the DoD Inspector General will investigate whether Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan violated ethics rules by promoting Boeing weapons systems while serving as a government official.
Shanahan, 56, worked at Boeing for more than 30 years.
It's no wonder the FAA couldn't act - Boeing has their own guy in another top government post - and he is still receiving compensation from Boeing.
22
@UTBG Yikes. And here is something else worrisome: Shanahan was head of the Board of Regents at the University of Washington in Seattle before his DC job. The University is well funded by Boeing, and by many many security and military grants- Has Shanahan's etc influence pushed the University towards more enmeshment with the military and weapons, with war? Of course. It is not only the federal government and private military contractors such as Boeing, but the universities who profit by war, who tell us war is inevitable.
2
The pushback from those in the know has worked. I listened to those who understood the architecture of the aircraft and had experience in flight. In particular I was impressed by the response of aircraft mechanics, pilots and flight attendants who spoke up. Politicians can irresponsibly talk about “accidents ready to happen” but those who daily work the system raised the issue responsibly in measured tones and I am grateful for their voices.
15
Glad that the U.S. finally got around to halting boeing max flights until it can be further studied to find out what is causing these crashes. But I have to wonder why the president is the one making the announcement. Despite his deep seated belief that he is the only one who can fix things, there are agencies in place to make such a decision (hello faa). The idea that the planes are too complicated is just another desire to return to the 1950's and perhaps even coal fired airplanes
8
If the reason given for this decision had been really sincere, it would have been made days ago.
16
I am curious to know if there have been non-tragic reports/complaints by pilots about this serious automatic flight system flaw. How many times has it happened and been overridden?
9
I wondered the same thing. In an earlier article, “Ethiopian Airlines Crash Updates: Holdout U.S. Grounds Boeing Plane,” it was noted that at least a few pilots in the US had complained in a NASA database about how the nose of the plane dove shortly after going on autopilot. Others had complained about not being adequately trained on the model.
Although it likely goes without saying, it is unfortunate these claims weren’t taken more seriously.
7
@Lily
There were 11 complaints by pilots on 737 Max to FAA prior to the accident. One complaint stated that the Boeing manual is "inadequate and almost criminally insufficient".
15
The internet wins again. Now Boeing and the FAA are going to market “safety first” . This after waiting two whole days to ground the planes Never forget....they didn’t want to ground the planes.
18
There used to be a saying "If it isn't Boeing, I'm not going".
Truth is that Airbus has had its share of problems too. Technical issues brought down the Air France A-330 several years ago .
We've been living a very jaded aeronautical life in recent years with a very good safety record. But remember that aviation can be a deadly exercise no matter what you're flying as the ground is very unforgiving.
8
@Mike P Do you mean the Airbus 330 that crashed in a severe Atlantic storm? The weather was severe, and the crew made some errors from which they could not recover. Is there a report of a technical issue that would affect other A330's? It was not all like the current situation where flights in good weather following standard procedures led to loss of one and likely two of new aircraft with a cited design problem.
2
@Mike P You are absolutely wrong about the Air France crash. That was due to incompetent pilots who turned a small problem into getting everyone killed. Several other A330 flights had encountered Pitot tube icing and arrived safely, because their crews did what the flight manual says -- set the pitch and power using a few simple rules. The AF447 Pilot Flying tried to climb over the storm, an insane maneuver and he stalled the airplane at 35000+ feet. Then both pilots ignored the airplane's stall warnings until the captain arrived in the cockpit, understood the problem, but it was too late. Captain Sullenberger was asked to explain why the PF did what he did and he could not. Sullenberger is a real aviator. Someone like him can't conceive of doing something this stupid when you are in charge of the lives of a couple of hundred people.
@Grandpa
It depends upon which accident analysis you believe. There was an issue about faulty airspeed indications
Due to pitot tube icing that confused the crew as to what they were seeing , felling , and how to respond . I stand corrected - I should have stayed that the possibly erroneous information from the pitot- static system CONTRIBUTED to the crash
We have not succeeded in solving all your problems.
The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions.
In some ways, we feel we are confused as ever, but we believe we are now cornfused on a higher level and about more important things.
The Management.
3
I think it is important to realize that 99% of the countries grounding planes are doing it out of an overabundance of caution not any knowledge of a problem. This is more precautionary political decision than a solid engineering decision. The logic is simple with so few of these planes in the air (only a little over 300 of the over 4,000 B737 in revenue service) why risk having to answer why you allowed the plane to fly if there is another incident.
Most will be cleared to fly in a few days once the public's interest in this case subsides.
Thank you Canada. I will still try to avoid flying Southwest and American Air since they willingly kept these possibly dangerous planes in the air. Would have been a great PR move and smart decision to ground them before the Pres ordered it.
23
Apparently Trump's 2020 new campaign slogan will be "Make America Great Again by Leading from Behind"
If there is truly a safety concern with this aircraft then it is beyond reprehensible that this was not done immediately. If the groundings are more political while a final safety determination is made then this is still an awful look for the US.
11
@lad
And if Trump had ordered the aircraft grounded 5 minutes after the Ethiopian crash he'd have been wrong then too. You'd be howling at his uninformed, knee-jerk overreaction in the absence of data to support such an impactful conclusion.
It's raining in Minneapolis today. I'm sure that's Trump's fault too.
As a 13000 pilot and expert in computer programming, I have to wonder why an autopilot system would apparently be designed to rely on so few inputs if the reported accounts are accurate. Surely altitude, gps air speed, ertical airspeed, terrain avoidance data, horizontal situation would appear as important as angle of attack and pitot airspeed. If those were included In the softwares calculation, the software who not point he airplane nose down toward the ground. As pilots we are always trained, first fly the airplane Surely if the pilots were given the chance to easily disengage the system, they would have been able to steady and fly the airplane by visual reference to the terrain and horizon. Boeing’s motto always used to be...the pilot gets the last chance. It’s a Motto worth remembering
24
After retiring from the Air Force, I was a software, systems and test engineer on the B-1B bomber for 13 years, and the F-22 fighter for 11 years. My son-in-law was a B-1B command pilot for many years. The autopilot on the B-1B was designed to fly at low altitudes following the terrain. It’s fail-safe system was to execute a steep fly-up maneuver at any hint of computer problems. On one flight, a fly-up was executed and the pilot followed your advice and pushed the stick forward to bring the nose down. The bomber impacted a granite cliff at a speed of 600 knots. If he had let the software do its thing, he might be alive today.
This is what an emergency actually looks like: Hundreds of people have recently died on a type of aircraft that appears unsafe. That type of aircraft is being flown in the US. An emergency executive order to shut down use of the aircraft until it is shown to be safe makes sense. An emergency executive order to build a wall across our southern border? Not so much.
24
The problem with this decision is that it feel capricious and driven by politics. Have we lost the technical capability of our independent regulatory agencies?
6
@Kathryn Aguilar
It only feels driven by politics because anti-Trump hysterics politicize (negatively) every last thing the guy does.
Government of the Profit, by the Profit and for the Profit.
8
Trump our savior. NOT. Normally, the FAA announces this and that's it. Now is the time to get the FAA totally independent again and out from under the manufacturers' controls. That includes Airbus in Mobile, AL as well.
14
I am glad he finally decided to do this. For once I agree with him.
6
A question for Mr. Trump:
Is there “collusion” between Boeing and the FAA, a critical government agency that we depend on?
13
It has been in the media that the safety upgrades to the Boeing 737-Max 8 were delayed by 32 days because of the partial shutdown of the U.S. government ordered by President Trump.
20
Dennis A. Muilenburg needs to resign. The FAA needs to be looked at, their symbiotic relationship to large corporations, the exchange of money, favors, whatever. Trump's political cronies who work for or around the FAA need to be fired. This is people's lives we're talking about. Nobody trusts the FAA anymore and by not grounding the 737 MAX8s until after the whole rest of the world had done it, is a national embarrassment, an admission that peoples' lives are totally expendable when it's them vs. a high profit corporation. When do we get to stop telling this story?
15
Even Donald Trump ultimately can be shamed into doing the right thing under the right circumstances.
In the case of grounding the Boeing 737 Max, the right circumstances came when Trump learned that his most loyal supporters were deserting him.
4
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not getting on a 737 Max anything until this falling out of the sky thing gets cleared up.
22
Good for him!
I can finally say, "Thank you, Mr. President."
4
Winston Churchill: You can count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.
33
The 737-Max 8 has new engines that needed to be moved closer to the fuselage to maintain ground clearance. This led to instability at low speeds. To counter this Boeing added two stall sensors near the nose which command a nose-down if they sense a stall.
Problem 1) Boeing included complete information about the new system in the maintenance manual, but not the FLIGHT MANUAL which is what pilots read. Boeing got the FAA to agree that the new feature did NOT require new training which kept cost down.
Prob 2) The new system wasn't tested with faulty data to the sensors.
Prob 3) When pilots override auto-pilot all automatically controlled flight features are DISABLED. This new system requires a switch. That is a poor design and easily fixed. When a pilot says MY AIRCRAFT it should be theirs, not the computer's.
Prob 4) The core problem is the FAA outsources aircraft certification to the manufacturers themselves. Self policing isn't a good idea.
At 8,000+ flights a day, two crashes do not make these "flying coffins". Pilots have been reporting problems with this system for months and the FAA, part of the DOT, hasn't done as much as send out a warning, let along require additional training, AND require an update.
Where was our Secretary of Transportation? Why did donnie have to make the decision? Is the secretary incompetent or is donnie hogging the limelight? Both?
One thing is certain: losing 8000 flights a day will cost the global flying public.
44
@Jonathan Jaffe
Very good points
@Jonathan Jaffe Thank you. We all suspect where our SecTransp Elaine Chao was: right in the pocket of the airline companies in my opinion.
4
As a citizen of this great nation, I hereby demand the immediate resignation of Elaine Chao, the Transporation Secretary and of course the person responsible of the FAA by definition.
The callousness of such people who delay the decision despite the huge risks to human life is beyond belief. What a husband and wife team! They really make me feel nauseous.
50
If this doesn't show Trump delusion syndrome at its max, I don't know what would. Earlier, Trump was in bed with Boeing, corrupt, on the take, whatever. Now, he grounds the planes and -- he's doing it for the wrong motive, he should have done it sooner, he's trying to drive up the stock market.
Come on. Any regulatory issues with Boeing et al predate Trump and you know it. But any event that occurs, whether Trump is involved or not, is ample reason for....bashing Trump. Regardless of what he does.
3
@Ralphie
Totally correct! The anti-Trump hysteria pervading the country is on full display in this.
The president waited for needed data and then made an informed, economy-impacting decision. Good for him and well done.
@Ralphie Because Trump is not a trustworthy individual.
1
Now that the 737 Max 8&9s are on the ground two issues can be pursued in parallel: 1) Identify the plane's root cause of failure during take-off: 2) Preserve and study FAA history and its decision making over the last 72 hours.
12
But what about the 8500 safe flights of this aircraft in the last month of our well trained pilots... And only crashes where training could not have been complete. Trump knows nothing about planes. He's going to hurt this economy based on his hubris..
3
What a terrible idea to have politicians making technical decisions based on fear, emotion or herd mentality. We rely on the FAA and NTSB to be reasoned, rational actors and understand the problem that actually underlies these issues.
Another terrible precedent set by Trump.
10
At last one event this egotistical President has done that I agree with. Boeing re design this aircraft's software , the ghosts of the dead passengers are calling on you to do so...this is a failure and making it worse is the absence of direct and sensitive comment from your company.
Large companies have to learn of the textbook case of the tainted and deadly Tylonel pain pills when that incident happened the company addressed that issue right away in news media giving their customers on updates on how they were preventing criminal tampering of their product and advice as to what to do with their
products already bought by their customers.
This saved the company and no one thereafter became afraid that they might be the next victim of a Tylonel poison tampered product.
1
@Carlyle T.
Don't hold your breath.
PM Trudeau of Canada will have to follow.
@Roland Berger Canada ground the Boeings well before the US.
1
Today's announcement of the Boeing 737 Max ban is extremely unprecedented and extraordinary.
My only request is that the NYT stay on top of this, and keep the world informed as how the investigation is going and what conclusions are being drawn.
Anything can happen in a New York minute which would shift the focus on any given story, including this one.
Thank you for the fantastic and behemoth job of covering this situation and for enlightening us readers. You folks are awesome!!!
6
@Marge Keller
Get your facts straight. It's not a ban, it's a grounding, and it's anything but unprecedented or extraordinary. In 2013 the FAA grounded the entire fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliners due to battery problems. In 1979 the FAA grounded all DC-10s due to safety concerns.
Aircraft problems happen. We have a system to address public safety concerns when they do. It's worked before and it's working now.
I highly doubt that Trump, all of a sudden, had a moment of clarity or compassion. Trump's decisions always favor big business or himself and it wouldn't surprise me if Trump owns stock in Boeing (that's sitting in his "fake" trust.) He is BFFs with Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO of Boeing, who, I might add, is a member at Mar-a-Lago and has unfettered access to Trump. Maybe during a risk/reward analysis they calculated that the cost of all the lawsuits was higher than the temporary financial hit that Boeing would take. Either way, Trump's decision was not altruistic.
First off, the FAA's decision not to ground these planes when all these other countries saw the potential for another disaster makes me question a) if Trump told them not to do it and b) where safety is on the list of priorities.
I'd like to think that Elaine Chao (and Mitch McConnell by association) stood up and pressured Trump to do the right thing. If not them, then thanks to whomever was able to exert enough pressure on Trump to change his (the FAA's) mind.
1
@BG
Trump isn't the only one subject to public opinion. Boeing saw the way the wind was blowing globally and nodded to Trump it was OK to cave while while they "fix the problem". Pure damage control from all sides - but watch what happens next carefully.
Tylenol case was baby aspirin compared to what rocket fueled PR campaigns these giants can mount.
1
Donald Trump told reporters, “The safety of the American people, of all people, is our paramount concern.” He reversed the decision of American regulators. Trump has done nothing wrong here. His instincts are correct.
3
@Redneck
Trump overruling regulators is believable. Trump overruling Boeing is not. He's just giving them cover to fabricate a good story.
What's insane is the amount of hysteria over something the general population utterly fails to understand but is entirely comfortable judging. Let's be perfectly clear - There is ZERO indication so far that these two crashes share a common root cause, regardless of excessively PR-conscious and belated statements by the authorities. The FAA resistance to grounding the model was completely correct by their own rules. Just because everybody is running around screaming doesn't mean there's actually something to fear. if you still have a brain and the ability to think, take some time and read ALL the stories on this topic, and you'll find a mismanaged maintenance issue with a finger-pointing PR cover-up, a pilot not adhering to his training, a plane trailing smoke and debris with a mid-air data cutout, and nary a wisp of credible causal connection between two tragic crashes.
2
@RUREADY
"Correct" decisions do not equal wise ones. This is one case where the urge to panic is entirely justified by what we don't know. Boeing and the FAA have a lot of 'splaining to do. Until then, I agree with Trump - they're an in-credible, or rather un-credible company. And I am sure they're working like dogs to bury their bones.
3
@RUREADY
Not so fast. Read the article..
"..the F.A.A. also cited “newly refined satellite data” as supporting the decision to ground the jets.
Marc Garneau, Canada’s transport minister, had said that satellite tracing data of the vertical path of the Ethiopian jet at take off and comparable data from the Lion Air crash showed similar “vertical fluctuations” and “oscillations.”"
It's certainly not conclusive but neither is this decision ungrounded hysteria. Given the data I commend the FAA and the president for making the decision to err on the side of caution and safety.
I think Trump did the right thing--for once. I look forward in the coming days to hearing him claim he knows more about aviation than anyone.
5
Days late, faint praise. If another plane had gone down, say, yesterday in the U.S., 2020 would have been a fantasy for Trump. Whatever this president does, he does it first for himself.
4
So, I don't get this... what prompted trump to make this call, especially since the regulatory agencies seemed to be dragging their feet?
It's a bit unlike trump to make a rational decision such as this. Did he listen to advisers? Did he listen to public comments, congress, senators?
He apparently had a discussion with Muilenburg, which appeared as though he was inclined to bow to the business decision for at least a while.
This isn't a sarcastic question. I'd honestly like to understand this one.
2
As a political decision this one seems easy. The downside is all for Boeing and is frankly not large given the planes are already grounded elsewhere and presumably will be allowed to fly again after a software update. The downside of not grounding them was potentially extremely large, on the other hand, and quite large even in the highly likely case that no further crashes occurred with every eye on the flight path of every 737 MAX flight for the next week or two.
@j s
Hannity and Windbag's market orders to sell their Boeing and Southwest AIrlines stock were confirmed...as soon as they sold, Trump said OK pull the plug....
Boeing and Southwest stock tanked immediately after the announcement.
@j s
Read the article. New data has come to light that shows possible parallels between the pre-crash flight paths of the Ethiopian jet and the Indonesian one, which could mean that the whole fleet is at risk. The FAA and the president did what they're supposed to do (and have before, in 2013 with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner fleet and 1979 with the DC-10 fleet), they gathered the necessary data to make an informed decision and then made it.
Boeing is incredible? Well, only if "incredible" means "not credible."
5
How long does it really take to review the black box data and pilot conversations?
@Harris Silver
It depends on the condition of the boxes. Retrieving that data coupled with other complicated parameters is more complex than merely crossing off items on a check list. They also review wreckage, metal damage and fatigue, and a host of other varying components. At least, that's what I recall from the NTSB reports from the AA 191 crash.
This process is not simple, it's not quick, and it's not easy. These investigators are like homicide detectives - they scour and search and follow up with tons of reports and interviews and detailed information.
3
"Marc Garneau, Canada’s transport minister, had said that satellite tracing data of the vertical path of the Ethiopian jet at take off and comparable data from the Lion Air crash showed similar “vertical fluctuations” and “oscillations.”
I don't state this enough - Thank you Canada! I've always known our neighbors to the North would have our back!!
10
I trust the NYT isn't angry that Trump is actually doing the right thing today. May god bless all the 350 lost lives due to Boeing's disgraceful efforts to aggressively push for (i) sell more planes, and (ii) keep costs of training low.
5
Well done, Mr. President...
PS
Sensors are like yes-men...
Having more of them won’t help, if a problem is more deep-set than revised narrative can fix...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw
PPS
Everybody wanted to help fix Tesla by putting outsiders on their board...
Perhaps it might help fix some companies to put Elon Musk on their board...
1
What's with the strange nature of the comments here? Are these carrried over from a previous version of the story where Trump was sitting on his thumbs?
It appears the trumptster just took his first real MAGA step.
1
I hope Trump at least had the decency to notify his people first so they could all dump their Boeing stock.
5