trump has blood on his hands! His reckless government shutdown caused protracted delays in the FAA’s techical reviews of 737 Max problems. While foreign regulators worldwide were imposing flight suspensions, the FAA didn’t act because of Boeing executive appeals directly with trump. Also it is important to note that trump’s degligent laxness in appointing a FAA director compromised aircraft safety diligence in general.
38
To update a saying: If it *is* Boeing, I'm not going.
31
346 dead...
And God knows how many families obliterated by grief. But the Boeing employees who did the killing are having nice expense account lunches right about now. Making plans for the weekend. Making good money. Even though they didn't inform the pilots of the death in the machines Boeing built until the pilots were dead. Perhaps these Boeing employees would be better off having their lunches inside a federal prison. They probably aren't prepared to shack up with real murderers. They like to let their planes to the dirty work. Imagine how instructive incarcertaion would be.
29
Imagine the safety of our meat if we gave all the meat packing houses total inspection oversight?
Oh,we are almost there now.
The FAA is Boeings lapdog.
6
As a major USA airline Captain having flown the Boeing 737-300,757,767 Airbus A-310 during my 31,000 hours I am appalled and disgusted at how Boeing and their lapdog the FAA has behaved.
It is criminal at best and many deserve prison.
They all exchanged your and my own safety for cash.
Lazy ,inept,Union busting and cheap is all that Boeings upper managers care about,and it clearly shows in all airplanes that they built.
The 737s,787s,767 Tankers,and new 777s all have zero quality control.
And these will fly for the next 30 years.
I say make all Maxs into beer cans as they have proven to be Frankenstein airplanes.
15
Boeing's failure to enter mcas systems into the airplane flight manual is inconceivable to say the least.
Pilots need to know what is in the cockpit whether it is a general aviation type or an airliner.
A pilot cannot aviate competently if they are not brought up to speed on every system that the manufacturer has installed.
And Boeing knows this!
9
I have been skydiving for a long time and have had four main parachute malfunctions at 3,000 feet. My instructors gifted me with the necessity of practicing emergency procedures for different types of emergencies. Without that frequent repetition, I might not have survived those unexpected emergencies. Falling at 120mph and being just seconds from dying, made me bless the guys that packed my emergency reserve parachute and those instructors. Boeing cannot be excused for its negligent disregard for pilot, crew and passenger safety in a rush for revenues.
11
"The safety board recommended that the F.A.A. require Boeing and other manufacturers to consider the effect of multiple cockpit warnings when assessing how quickly pilots will respond to a malfunction. It also suggested that the agency direct plane makers to develop technology that could diagnose a problem during flight and tell pilots what procedure to follow."
So, to cope with the problem of too many messages the NTSB is suggesting adding additional messages for the pilots?
Interesting solution.
4
It looks like Boeing is still more inclined to stonewalling than to solve the problems so that it can leave this ugly episode behind it. It makes me curious what is happening now behind the screens at Boeing.
4
If it's Boeing I'm not going
1
Mr. William Langewiesche wrote what in my opinion is an excellent article “What Really Caused The Deadly Crashes Of The 737 Max” for the NYT Magazine last Sunday 9/22/19. Recommend that anyone wanting to point fingers read it. Anyone in the flying public would do well to read it carefully.
Just as in nearly all tragedies there are multiple factors combining to lead to disaster. While Boeing obviously made mistakes and changes need to be made to the 737 Max there are other areas that the airline industry desperately needs to address.
9
Boeing executives must be jailed for criminally willful negligence, period.
6
@Bill Greene I agree.
1
Some observations from a former test pilot. Although I have been out of the aerospace industry for many years I still hold to the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principal.
If a pilot cannot fly the plane without the a computer assisting him/her, he shouldn't be in the cockpit.
If the plane cannot be flown without AI it should not be certified.
Pilots need more and better training and automated systems should be easier to turn off and overridden.
21
After following these stories about this debacle, I intend to avoid flying.
2
My 30 plus year career as an IT Network technician has taught me that when there is a failure in a complex system the thing that gets your attention is not usually the thing that caused the failure. On some failures I have spent hours looking through logs, and testing to find the “root cause” of a problem. As a pilot with just a few seconds to impact, and multiple alarms, I am sure instinct is to try to fix the problem before you pull the plug and go for the full “emergency procedure”.
11
It is terrible that these two planes crashed and that mistakes were made at Boeing and the FAA but we shouldn't forget, the airline industry is safer and cheaper than it has ever been. Be critical but don't go overboard.
@Michael Green Ask the people in the two crashes what they think about the safety of the airlines and if they're happy with the cost of their tickets. Wake up.
7
I have a background in aviation software and I will never again fly on a 737 Max, no matter how many kludges they apply to the software.
Although I once held only the greatest respect for Boeing I will do my best to avoid flights on any of their aircraft in the future. They have the FAA in their pocket and clearly care more about profit than the safety of the people who fly on their planes.
18
The CEO oif Boeing, the one who fired numerous software engineers, continues to hold his job. WHY? and WHY would this many get a golden parachute if he did leave. It is time to sue Boeing board and hold them accountable.
16
The abilities to cope with alarms and notifications are well known from much work in aviation and industrial settings.
In a fully digital cockpit there is no excuse to not have an integrated system that, say, only shows the 3 or 5 most critical alarms and dulls or hides the others.
Possibly even adjust the presentation of alarms for the particular experience or skills of the crew flying.
No fancy AI, just hard work up front working through all the scenarios and possibilities, ranking them, defining expected actions for alarms, so on and so on.
The above is illustrative only - it is not necessarily that simple, there is first up alarming, blocking, grouping etc but these are all well known problems and techniques regularly dealt with on the ground in industrial settings.
But these studies are expensive and time consuming, and they need expertise that is not abundant, but that is the cost of the enterprise and if you can't afford it, you shouldn't do it.
8
Doesn't appear anyone did their job here. The FAA sold out the flying public and Boeing put profit over safety. The lesson should be clear, it will take years for the FAA to regain it's credibility and for Boeing many of us get the creeps even thinking about stepping on a 737 Max. In both cases it cost the lives of hundreds of innocent people. Shame on both of them.
19
I was in a safety sensitive job. When management says it’s a one in a million chance. And you do it a million times it could happen once
4
A very friendly Boeing 787 Dreamliner captain told me that, under some circumstances, there would be just four (4) seconds to get it right (instead of ten minutes at high altitude). Just four seconds. He was looking at that as a fact he was ready for.
He felt confident he could, personally, react in four seconds, because of extensive special training. The captain also said that, under some circumstances, one had to immediately forget all the fancy electronics, and "just fly the plane using the most basic mechanical instruments like an old fashion Spitfire "... In other words, superlative airmanship. His handshake was very firm, his gaze frank and direct.
The problem is that air travel has expanded so much, one can't depend upon having enough as superlatively trained captains. Also there is the problem of what to do when clueless copilots are in charge, as in the case of AF447, because the captain is resting (the copilots kept on applying TOGA power brainlessly, fully pulling on the stick ("cabrer"), while the plane was falling like a stone from FL 350... They weren't smart enough to try something else).
12
I will never invest in Boeing . I will avoid flying on Boeing airplanes where possible.
5
Two questions need answering:
1. How can Dennis Muilenburg still have a job with Boeing?
Well, the answer can be found simply by reviewing the people who make up their BOD. Only two individuals have any aerospace experience, let alone expertise. One is the token retired Pentagon admiral who bought a ton of Boeing products. The other is the former chairman of an airline company that bought a tone of Boeing products. All the others are window dressing; Caroline Kennedy is a BOD member with zero experience as are the others, veterans of financial companies.
2. How long will the FAA be permitted to be an empty suit organization of revolving chairs to the aerospace and airline industry it is supposed to regulate?
The answer is as long as Congressmen and women enjoy the same revolving doors between their offices and the lobbyist jobs and BOD seats in industries they oversee via legislation and committee assignments.
We have a crony capitalist system wherein the top military brass, the congressional representatives, their staffs, their families, all have their snouts in the troughs of the industries they are supposed to regulate.
18
This is BOEINGS fault. The blame does not lie with the pilots.
9
"... the company had not considered the chaos that ensued inside the cockpit." Don't they rehearse in a real cockpit and make a video? I assumed outfits like Boeing, the major airlines or NASA do incremental, then full stand-up rehearsals on all their major systems. Don't get it.
4
So American to see a boardroom of millionaires sitting there in leather chairs confidently predicting the actions of an aircrew frantically trying to save themselves from certain death.
10
the fundamental error is on Boeing: they designed, tested, certified and delivered an airplane with an undocumented Both accidents were caused by a fatal design error that violated the "Prime Directive" of airliner design: a single failure must NEVER EVER result in the loss of an airplane.
Whether or not the LionAir and Ethiopian pilots could have controlled their aircraft's sudden dive is irrelevant. A single failure caused each dive, ending 346 lives.
That catastrophic result of a single failure was Boeing's fault.
Sep 21, 2019. 05:47 AM
Link
9
The Boeing technical pilot who suggested that MCAS not be included in the manual took the Fifth when asked by he grand jury to produce relevant documents:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/former-boeing-official-subpoenaed-in-737-max-probe-wont-turn-over-documents-citing-fifth-amendment-protection/
3
Gregory Travis, a software developer and pilot wrote a fascinating analysis of the MCAS system in a trade journal for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Its worth a read.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer
6
@chris Very informative for the layperson. Thanks for posting.
This has nothing to do with so called "cockpit chaos".
It's about FAA privatizing and outsourcing its regulatory review responsibilities to protect public safety - and reliance on private corporate certifications.
It's about corrpoate greed.
It's about a fatally flawed airplane design.
It is about its and coverups - by FAA and Boeing.
14
The NTSB is making some good recommendations but the article is very Boeing focused, this same risk exists in planes made by Airbus to Cessna. Though due to the max incident Boeing has become the focus, the press needs to start reporting this looking at the industry has a whole. The same alerts, and confusing alarms exist in airbus aircraft also!
2
@John
Agree with you John but let the facts speak for themselves: 346 lives were lost in a short time period, not in one but two crashes. This won't be taken lightly and the drive will always be the need to improve safety ahead of those gambling with complacency.
1
@John "John Smith" does not sound too real of a name for someone purporting to know what goes on inside an aircraft. It sounds to me more of an attempt to smear Airbus by deflecting some of the attention from the real problems at Boeing.
1
Most readers will probably agree, that the argument of this report is convincing: Sensory overload in critical situations leads to human errors. The flight deck alarm system was responsible for creatin this sensory overload the two crashes.
But what are the consequences now? Dominic Gates in his Seattle Times article about the report mentions that all modern Boeing models feature a centralized pilot alerting system called EICAS, a state-of-the-art system providing "visual, aural and tactile warnings as well as written messages on the main flight display when anything goes wrong, and then also recommends the remedial action needed". Boeing decided against introducing this system into the Max, as it lacked certain sensors and as its introduction would have meant re-certification of the type. Imho it should be made a condition that Boeing retrofits this system into the Max before it can be ungrounded, in addition to the software fixes surrounding the MCAS system.
8
Boeing should have known better, or at least the key-decision makers in their company, but oh well...they seem to care more about Wall-street than their qualified engineers in light of what happened at the end.
I agree with the NTSB. In quality engineering, there is a step-by-step approach in identifying all possible failures in a design or manufacturing process called FMEA - Failure Modes & Effects Analysis. The different ways a system can fail and its associated consequences are known as FAILURE MODES. In the report it points out that Boeing was inadequate in this approach. The MCAS system was tied to one single-sensor, a single point of failure. But because somebody decided that AoA vanes don't break often, they were also negligent in ignoring its critical impact when you introduced A NEW SYSTEM reliant on a single AoA sensor source. With this new system (MCAS) now providing flight control authority through AoA inputs, the FAILURE MODE for a faulty AoA significantly increases its risk category. It's category of "major" should have been much more than that because the CONSEQUENCE of a failure goes up significantly through loss of control authority. How can this be overlooked?
Easy, because the engineers weren't at the helm, upper management was. Keeping in compliance with FAR PART 25 to prevent full re-certification should not have been an issue, but time and money was far more important than safety in this case.
13
@John G
I doubt the avionics/electrical engineers overlooked the problem presented to pilots by the failure of the MCAS. Rather, it seems that those engineers characterized an MCAS failure as equivalent to a "runaway stabilizer" type failure. Every pilot "memorizes" the procedure to correct a runaway stabilizer which correction is simple and straightforward.
While the two failures have the same result and the procedures to correct the problem are identical, they appear different to the pilot, because the MCAS keeps engaging and disengaging.
As NTSB implies, Boeing needs more human-factors engineers.
4
@ellen1910 I'm a retired military avionics technician who worked on Boeing planes. During my years of fixing broken avionics integrated systems, using the Fault Isolation Manual was very important, as it addressed fault modes via "fault isolation trees". These logic trees helped technicians diagnose potential failures (electrical opens/shorts, switching units, etc.) by narrowing down failure possibilities from the results of different troubleshooting methods (visual inspection, multi-meter readouts, etc.). These experiences have helped me learn how different systems exhibited different characteristics under different failures.
Going back to MCAS, misfires may or may not exhibit the same characteristics as a "runaway" trim. It's called "runaway" because the trim wheels continuously move, hence "runaway". MCAS DOES NOT runaway, it actually resets (stops moving) and triggers again, which can give the pilot a false-positive sense that the problem is temporary or addressed. So no, the two failures DO NOT have the same result. Boeing and the FAA was wrong in their ASSUMPTION you could treat this as a runaway trim. It's misfires have intermittent nose-down commands and even flaps down inhibits MCAS. Can flaps-down inhibit runaway trim as well? See how important to know what's going on? Understanding system characteristics is crucial and pilots where never given any basic knowledge of MCAS. They appear different to pilots because Boeing/FAA erred in this entire MCAS debacle.
6
@John G
I participate in these studies all the time for industrial plant and safety systems.
The most common failing is wishful thinking, followed by excessively pessimistic thinking. Both are dangerous in their own way.
The other thing that gets me though, is it is a design process primarily. I am usually the person actually responsible for doing or architecting the the design and often I look around in the room and see I am the only person in it that ever designed and built anything from scratch.
Yet others might be the majority and have significant input into the "quorum" decisions that heavily impact the design requirements defined, yet they have no idea of the design consequences and trade offs of the barrows they push.
You need a spread of experience, users, maintainers, money guys etc in these things but the democracy involved means you sometimes see things slip by that you really feel should be addressed.
3
Maybe I am mistaken, but shouldn't we at least mention the claim that the special software was needed only because the physical design was not airworthy to begin with. Maybe we're so advanced now that it will become normal and accepted that software will safely compensate for such design flaws. But even if that's true, it should be acknowledged as a fundamental change in the way aviation works.
10
Its not the case that the airframe with the LEAP engines in the new position wasn't airworthy. What is true is that the new configuration created additional lift at some attitudes that, without MCAS, would have resulted in reduced forces on the yoke, which is a violation of FAA rules.
We are definitely in an environment where software is used to address issues that arise from hardware design decisions, which can't necessarily be classed as "flaws." It happens fairly often, now.
It's quite likely that a properly-designed and -tested MCAS, with explanation and training provided to aircrews, could have done what it was supposed to do safely and effectively. The system that was delivered was very far from that, and hundreds of people died because of it.
It's also true that it is long past time for Boeing to design a new narrow-body replacement for the 737, from scratch. This 55-year-old design doesn't need to be tweaked, yet again..
6
Agreed! Shouldn’t an aircraft’s physical design be aerodynamically sound such that computer intervention isn’t necessary for it to fly safely?
4
@Aimée Girard
Aimee, there are many automated computer systems on planes now and it is very much needed. Without them, the efficiencies and safety in current air travel demand would be significantly reduced.
For example, planes would have to fly with a minimum 2000 ft clearance instead of 1000 ft because you would need computer intervention in case of potential traffic conflicts. This is addressed by RVSM (Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum), which requires computer intervention of many sorts.
Also, a plane can be aerodynamically sound without computer intervention. But you should also be thankful that with computer intervention and advancements in aerospace, more flights and passenger volumes are achievable that we take for granted today.
3
Boeing performed some of the critical quality assurance (QA) testing of the cockpit software in India. This is what you get when you outsource testing (considered drudge work in the IT world) that far from the design and manufacturing resources.
Which is a polite way to say you get what you pay for, India is very cheap compared to labor costs in the US, but not as good. Boeing is responsible for the deaths on these two crashes and should pay the victim's families.
5
@Pitz
From the articles I've read, this seems to be more of a design and user interface problem rather than a QA issue. In particular, it was a failure in system engineering. The tests are only written to verify the given design.
5
@Pitz
India? They didn't even consider their money-saving secondary facility in South Carolina?
2
@MNResident
Test Engineers don't just test a given design. They do failure mode and effects analysis.
2
The real story is the cozy relationship that Boeing enjoyed with the FAA. Similar to drug makers and the FDA.
11
@Rishard Roehl, it has certainly made it worse, but that situation has been going on for a long time. It's nothing new.
3
@Gabe Is Trump's "deregulation" of the government involved in this?
1
Are you a Boeing engineer or software developer? If so, do you work in a crowded, noisy distracting office where it is difficult to concentrate on the many technical details related to the design, development and testing of a commercial airplane?
1
“They did not look at all the potential flight deck alerts and indications the pilots might face,” said Dana Schulze, the director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the safety board.
It seems inconceivable that Boeing a) was unaware of this vulnerability in the design of the 737 MAX and b) that pilots were not prepared to deal with it.
Who precisely needs to be held to account -- and when ?
1
>>> "Who precisely needs to be held to account -- and when?"
Boeing. Yesterday.
Pilots *couldn't* be "prepared to deal with it," because they didn't know MCAS existed.
3
Boeing is fully culpable. The FAA allowed for their bad behavior and shares accountability. But it is Boeing who designed a plane that when operated is faulty and deadly from the get go, so created a software “fix” instead of a redesign of a dangerous plane. Unacceptable. Time to put lives ahead of street expectations and macho competitive posturing. Time for new leadership at Boeing. Time for the Conquistadors to be put out to pasture. There’s a golf course waiting for them.
13
A golf course? Really. They should be jailed.
1
Perhaps a major error was designing the 737 Max so it could be grandfathered in under the 737 certification -- instead of just designing the best way without compromise. Moving the larger engines forward slightly out from under the wings to fall within the height limit allowed under the certification would have an effect on the balance...
9
Seems like a bit of a soft-pedal from the NTSB. Rather than saying gee it sure is chaotic in that cockpit, wouldn't it be better to recognize that this system probably never should have been in the plane in the first instance, and certainly not without alerting pilots to it and requiring training on it, and providing as standard "extra" features that would likely have prevented these two crashes? NTSB perhaps wants to steer away from finding Boeing guilty of hundreds of deaths but that's really the case here.
4
Boeing needs to hire back more engineers, and get rid of bean counters and money-minded management.
15
So Boeing built an airplane that has as part of its design a mechanism that will plunge the nose of the airplane into the ground from 10,000 following take off, and their response is that there are flight procedures the pilots could follow to avert a crash? I don't know about you, but I don't intend on flying in an airplane whose design and construction will, at some random and indeterminate moment, plunge the nose of the plane toward the ground, unless and until the pilots go over some procedures in sufficient time to avoid the plane crashing into the Earth at Mach 2. Tell me what part of the flight plan is supposed to involve plummeting into the ground? "During our Plummeting Phase, we ask that you please remain in your seats." It's not a problem you put on an airplane. It's a problem you put in an Escape Room.
32
Airbus has a similar problem and an immediate response required by the pilots actions to counter act. Otherwise the plane will continue to nose over.
Airplanes are hard to fly even when nothing goes wrong. Certain maneuvers in difficult situations require hand flying (autopilot off) to react faster than a pilot has time to tell the computer controlling the autopilot how to react.
1
@DA....mmmmm, no similar crashes or loss of life on Airbus planes, so plz stop diverting attention from the real source of the problem, Boeing, and it's enabler, the FAA.
3
Why has the CEO who rushed this plane in to production not been fired? Will criminal charges be considered?
19
@Terry Dailey Boeing appointed a new CEO in 2015. He is not responsible for the decision to build the MCAS plane.
"Boeing did not fully inform pilots about how MCAS functioned until after the first accident." Absolutely Criminal. There is NO excuse. None. There should be criminal charges.
31
Boeing does not seem to realise, or is deliberately following a strategy of denial, about the immensity of the consequences of rushing through an inadequately engineered aircraft, when faced with a challenge from Airbus. The weaknesses or complicity of the US Regulators in certifying this aircraft as fit to fly ,is apparent in assertions by Regulatory outfits elsewhere, that positive reports by US regulators would henceforth, need to be carefully vetted by their own regulators. Had such an event occured in any other country ,one can imagine the shindig that would have been raised by the US. The top level officers at Boeing should be dismissed by its board, especially considering that there is a total lack of acceptance of guilt, and instead, false bravado and attempts to foist their guilt on inadequately skilled non US pilots.
10
Boeing assumed pilots would be able to keep their cool. Seems like last week's opinion on the causes of the crash being in good part due to inexperience is validated.
3
@Bradley Bleck Why blame the pilots? The aircraft's poor design makes the nose of the plane suddenly turn down, not pilot inexperience. Should pilot experience include dealing with poorly designed systems that should never be allowed in public use in the first place?
21
@Jenny There was an editorial about this last week. It seems, that because the argument is that Boeing didn't account for the pilots cracking under the pressure, that mistakes were made. That was the thesis of the editorial and that's what is being reported here. It's not like pilots don't make mistakes. This doesn't absolve Boeing, but by the same token, the pilots who were flying those planes didn't have a huge amount of time in the plane. Experience matters, regardless of how many safeguards are in place.
@Bradley Bleck Because that is a terrible assumption to make, especially when lives are at risk. Furthermore, how can one assume that pilots would be experienced to handle the runaway MCAS when the pilots weren't told it existed?
The Times' article last week highlighted the fact that Boeing KNEW that many pilots in developing countries are not trained to the standards as pilots in the EU and USA. So assuming these pilots would be able to handle this is absurd.
1
One general improvement they can do is to place more external cameras. Pilots, under stress, should be able to look at the cameras and go aha, am missing an engine, elevators stuck, and like it or not, training for flying manual when everything else fails, no shortcut there.
It is no wonder that civil aviation authorities in other countries and no longer taking the FAA at their word. The FAA and Boeing have done more to damage the US aircraft industry than any foreign competition.
18
An MCAS activation presents as an airspeed unreliable malfunction, a totally different procedure. In no way does it look, sound or feel anything like a pitch trim runaway, a tired canard that Boeing has chosen over accountability and honesty.
Boeing has a history of avoiding the consequences of poor design by simply blaming pilots.
The Max’s certification process featured Boeing misrepresenting both the magnitude and repetitive nature of MCAS to the regulators. That’s criminal negligence, plain and simple.
That we pilots were given no information, not even lies of omission, tell you everything you need to know about Boeing’s lack of concern about safety. They’ve got a long way to go to regain my trust. And I’m the person operating their product.
32
I am an engineer and long time aviation and space enthusiast.
Yes, Boeing messed up big time. So did the FAA. But the real issue has not yet been discussed. Airbus and Boeing each have been culpable in recent aviation disasters that never should have happened. And for the same reason. Aircraft companies such as Boeing and Airbus are not sharing sufficient information with pilots. Even worse, their engineers, who are not pilots and have never been subjected to cockpit overload in critical situations, hav e recently been guilty of building in pseudo pilot responses that creat the wrong responses and make it difficult for the real pilots to recover stability. This hubris needs to stop. Any function that can wrest control from the pilots and put them and their passengers in harms way should not be approved. Or as a minimum there should be a simple reset command that restores all control to the flight deck and deactivates robotic interference. Any real pilot will support such a fail safe option. In the event of an emergency, at least the pilots can then simply concentrate on being pilots. Not trying to troubleshoot some faulty or mis designed app created by a non pilot. This is not a video game. If in the case of the Max such an app crutch is needed to qualify this design of a plane, then the basic design is faulty and should not be manufactured and sold. Period. Take the time to design the new version of the plane properly from scratch. Do your jobs.
33
"Boeing Underestimated Cockpit Chaos"
The plane was diving directly into the ground. Boeing executives criticize the pilots who failed to correct this situation. Perhaps they should have built an airplane that didn't do that.
25
Boeing executives are not pilots. Maybe they need a board of directors where the majority of the board are actual pilots. Hmmmm..... Too radical?
2
On Sept 18, 2019, NYT published opinion piece titled "what brought down the Boeing max 737 Max." The piece blamed Ethiopian airlines as well training of pilots in the "third world"-basically inferring that it was the pilots faults and lousy "third world" pilots standard that brought down the two Boeing 737 Max planes. However, Karma came early-thanks to the N.T.S.B conclusion that it was boeing, through its design of the plane as well corporate strategy on cost cutting (no adequate training to airlines) were the main contributors to these crashes. I know, it is always easy to cast blame on the so-called "third world."
13
@AishaJen
I reckon that's a simplification and mischaracterization of a long piece that spends considerable time discussing Boeing's multiple "bewildering failures." That's an actual quotation from the piece you mention. "Third-world," meanwhile, appears exactly once in the piece, as a quotation of the founder of Lion Air in Indonesia, an airline with a terrible safety record.
I also probably disagree with the idea that it's easy to cast blame on the countries with bad aviation safety records, at least among readers of the NYT. As far as I can tell, the dominant reaction is to blame Boeing without considering any other factors, or even dismissing the consideration of other factors as racist or colonialist. Rusdi Kirana should be pleased.
2
@AishaJen I agree with Max that the article you reference does not solely place the blame on the pilots. The article was well balanced in that it cited the corruption and poor training of pilots which may have contributed to the two accidents, but it also squarely blames Boeing for putting the pilots in the situation which it knew they were likely untrained to handle.
1
Will any corporate heads ever roll for this?
13
@Greenman
Exactly. Corporate CEOs have been forced to resign for a lot less than the deaths of 346 people. When are Dennis Muilenburg and his senior staff going to accept responsibility for this loss of life and stand down? They have blood on their hands.
10
@Greenman
I see many similarities between this and the VW scandal. ie; management's willingness to go forward with a poorly designed product for financial reasons when they should have known better. Lets hope Boeing's leaders see the same type of legal consequences as VW.
1
Why isn't anyone addressing the root cause of the problem - why the software has to push the nose down in the first place.
I guess it's just easier to blame the pilots.
12
@Deb. Yes! That is so true. Like everything else in this calamitous affair it began with the CEO’s original blunder. In his haste to catch up with rival Airbus he commissioned a stretched new version of the 737. To accommodate the larger engines they were positioned higher and further forward on the wings. The CEO then approved a secret software system to settle the plane’s aerodynamic deficiencies. QED.
11
@Deb. You can read through a number of articles that explain why a hidden patch was needed. There were two basic reasons, one of which was explicitly to avoid FAA asking for recertification. The other related to a potential stability issue. You can also, without having to be a pilot or engineer, fairly easily see the difference between error and intent. Intent is culpable.
6
Yes. Faulty aircraft design is the real root cause. As an engineer I am sorry to say my Boeing brethren screwed up and did not stand up to their executive suit level people who are neither pilots nor real engineers. This plane should never have been certified by the FAA as air worthy. Another culpable party.
I am just a member of the flying public, with zero knowledge of aeronautics, but the question to me is why would you build a plane that is inherently unstable, and then rely on a computer to make up for its lack of air worthiness? Why not just build a well-designed plane to begin with?
13
@Laurence Hauben, With the 737 MAX Boeing was responding to market pressure from Airbus who had introduced a competitive plane. Their loyal customers in the US pushed for a new plane and their investors clamored for results. Boeing had neither the time nor resources to build from the ground up and they found what in business is called "an elegant solution". What started off as elegant became a disaster.
7
@M.E. Realist I understand the market pressures, but one would think that a giant company like Boeing, with presumably the ability to hire some of the best engineers and CEO in the world, would have the foresight to create new efficient designs rather than rely on a 50 year old model, and not find itself behind the 8 ball scrambling to catch up to Airbus?
6
@M.E. Realist
Boeing had and has the resources. They were afraid of being beaten to the market. That's all.
3
Interesting bookend to the NYT Magazine piece that predominately blamed the pilots, and their companies’ business plans.
Taken with the comments, I’m fascinated by the way many pilots - and their passengers - have bought into the comfortingly macho, seat-of-the-pants vision of the masterful individual wrestling a recalcitrant plane into submission, saving all concerned. After all, it’s always worked in movies. I think pilots literally have come to believe their own hype. The alternative is stark, disempowering.
So something more realistic: I drove a motorcycle for decades. The number of cognitive operations required, I learned, was 20,000 per second, or about 10X that of driving a car. Bikes operate in 3D: Hands steer, clutch, brake. Feet shift and brake. Body leans and balances. Eyes scan everywhere.
I had some close calls. But at those moments, I was not attending to a cacophony of warnings and gauges and switches, and thinking through a mental checklist. I was just staying up, feeling the basic physics of my bike interacting with my body and the road.
Even with that basic task, once in a great while I’d fail. On a bike, failure need not be fatal. In a passenger jet, crashes usually kill.
It’s time both designers and pilots admitted that our neural capacity to process data and react in real time inside an aircraft’s cockpit is hitting its limit. It’s time either to scale back the bells and whistles, or go all the way and trust AI to run everything.
20
As an Economic professor, I am appalled at the reaction of Boeing. I understand why they feel this way, but reality is not reality. Denial prevails.
10
Boeing has been pointing the finger of blame at the "third world" pilots since day one. It is a strategy conceived entirely by lawyers concerned with countering liability claims. The business plan for the Max was driven by the desire to save time and money by pretending that the new plane could be legitimately designed and reviewed as a straightforward modification of the existing 737. Requiring a radically revised pilot training component would have exposed the deception hidden in the "simple" modification concept.
The original Boeing took pride in building quality airplanes. The new improved Boeing seeks instead to be the darling of Wall Street. It's been that way for about twenty years now. But only with the Max scandal have the consequences of this basic change in corporate focus become publicly apparent.
24
@woofer
"The new improved Boeing seeks instead to be the darling of Wall Street." I wonder how much that has to do with their moving corporate headquarters away from the factories in Seattle to a comfortable life in Chicago.
3
I am neither a pilot nor an engineer but have read enough about this controversy that Boeing made a critical error circa 2010. At that time, Airbus had just introduced jets with larger engines and better fuel efficiency.
Airbus was able to put larger, heavier engines on an existing airframe because that airplane had sufficient clearance between the wing and the tarmac. The Boeing 737 airframe lacked sufficient clearance.
This forced Boeing to either develop a new airframe with adequate ground clearance or move the new, larger engines higher and more forward on the wing. Critically, this resulted in a change in weight balance and flight characteristics. Ergo, the MCAS software was developed to automatically correct for the tendency of the plane to stall.
In my view, this was the original sin of Boeing management and shockingly, is ongoing. I believe that when the two crashes occurred, Boeing should have scrapped the old airframe and started over by developing a new airframe with adequate ground clearance. This would allow the engines to be placed in a balanced position, thus eliminating the stall tendency and obviating the need for the deadly MCAS software.
Instead, Boeing is continuing to build and warehouse the current version in the hopes their software “fix” can make up for a fundamentally unsound aircraft design. In my view, this is lunacy.
51
There are ~500 planes grounded worldwide. Boeing is going to explore every possible option to fix this issue with software (vs a total system redesign.)
Boeing will be culpable or they won't. But for everyone saying the the Co. puts profits before safety and lives, that is ludicrous. The company's reputation and branding is critical to it future success. In the midst of all this are you failing to remember the billions of people who have safely flown on Boeing aircraft. In essence the company has saved a thousand times more lives in the innovations it has designed into modern airliners. If the malfeasance was bad as whats being implied why are these the first crashes where the much of the blame may be on the design.
Sure the company often acts like a typical corporation in how it treats workers, suppliers, etc. Why don't you take some time to think about the problem critically. I think you will surmise that mistakes might have been made, assumptions incorrect, but none of it done with malice or a disregard for safety.
1
Of course Boeing did not set out deliberately to murder people. No one is saying that they did. But it is painfully obvious that they rushed out an inherently unsafe design because they did not want to admit to themselves that the unsafe configuration would ever cause harm. They were guilty of self-delusion in the pursuit of profits, and they did not have the robust regulatory oversight that the law should have required. If the FAA had done its job Boeing might have been spared from this debacle.
16
@Jerry It is sad but clear, people died so Boeing could profit. Yes, Boeing has flown safely in the PAST. Tell that to the families who lost love ones on the Max.
6
@Jerry When an accident kills people we don't change the subject and talk about all the other people who didn't die. That's an old deflectionary tactic that's probably been in use since workers were killed building the pyramids.
15
From the information in other articles, Boeing made basic safety items an upsell for low cost carriers, who would never be motivated to buy them. Scenarios like these make it clear what you are sacrificing when you choose the cheapest carrier.
10
@Dee Every winter I think of the car salesman who told me "You don't need antilock brakes." to get a car off his lot.
1
@Peter S Jack—-that said, anti-lock takes some getting used to. For those who learned to drive before AL breaks, the normal functioning of the system can be initially disconcerting. That much is true.
Between the wrongful-death lawsuits (I don't know if any of them will bear out, but I definitely expect at least a fat set of settlements) and the lawsuits from the airlines that paid for functional airplanes and got flying deathtraps which they had to store for months on end, I suspect Boeing's going to have a bad time.
3
@Amanda It sounds like you want Boeing to have a bad time, but actually you don't. If Boeing failed, if there were no Boeing, if Airbus were the one and only aircraft manufacturer, that would produce problems you couldn't imagine.
This article undoes some of the slippery assertions and assumptions in the long recent NYT Magazine article that glosses over so many issues with pat statements like "MCAS has been fixed," which is patently misleading.
It's important to step backwards to the genesis of this issue. There are 3 understated components:
1: When Boeing moved its corporate HQ to Chicago, the essential link between engineering and management was compromised. This is the result.
2: In its zeal to design a new plane without all the certification that would require, Boeing committed the cardinal sin of aircraft design: It built an unstable plane, due to the larger engines that disrupted the critical airflow and balance that allows planes to restore stable flight on their own.
3: Boeing fired its core software engineering team, replaced with young Indian inexperienced engineers at $15/hr. Their errors required so many fixes, they cost more than keeping the original team. Why did they do this? Because they had a Billion dollar order with Air India contingent on "investing" in Indian tech. That's how they satisfied that contractual requirement.
All three are what happens when you let corporate tools determine critical engineering decisions.
55
@Craig
The move to Chicago is surely part of the problem, though mainly a symptom of management becoming detached from the product. It makes those "corporate tools" look like corporate fools.
1
@Thomas Zaslavsky Boeing fired its core software, engineering team....
NOW FIRE THE MANAGEMENT AND HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR NEGLIGENCE.
3
Philosophically, Boeing designs planes meant to give the pilot control while Airbus designs planes that are automated and meant to remove pilot decision making as much as possible.
To take a 50+ year old airframe and move the engine housing so far in front of the wing that you are forced to add automation features that only pilots of the most experienced background can tackle in an emergency was pretty short sighted. In the end, the worst error is Boeing (for the sake of profit) rushing a plane to consumer and insisting that other pilots can just hop on and fly like a Classic or NG. And then insisting that an NG flight sim was sufficient. In the end it’s always money before lives.
24
@Anonymous
But I still prefer Boeing‘s philosophy over Airbus, Give me Control over the airplane when I need it.
Except that MCAS didn’t give the pilots control of the aircraft. It wrestled control away from the pilots by continuously pushing the nose down against the pilots’ actions.
1
So, it logically follows that the families of the hundreds that paid for this corporate malfeasance/negligence/incompetence with their LIVES can now start filing wrongful death lawsuits. And it logically follows that top level decision makers should be convicted on the evidence and sentenced to jail time.
Correct? I mean, someone is responsible for these deaths, right?
12
@Matthew you would have to prove negligence. No one in the US is going to jail.
@Jerry
Would it be enough to prove perfidy in the form of concealing substantial changes to the operating characteristics?
4
@Jerry
There's a pretty good case the way these stories coming out read. I'm sure you agree, for no one would be an apologist for corporations being immune to responsibility, right?
2
Like I first thought a system such as MCAS should have a redundant or triple redundant sensor system like many Aerospace systems are designed; anticipate worst-case failure, And design around that rather than save money an/or charge the customer (Airlines) for its subsequent inclusion or implementation. MCAS wasn’t made for fresh off the boat airline pilots; it was made for pilots with“hi airmanship” abilities. Does with the ability to ignore ” cacophony of alarms” and cockpit confusion, and sift through the situational awareness that some of these alarms may not be valid while the ones that are should be entirely paid attention to. And then of course the plane is heading towards the ground, as one commenter put it, ... good old “mother earth”
4
Apparently Boeing overestimated the competence ans/or experience of pilots on non-primary carriers.
2
No. Boeing recklessly and incompetently designed a system that could fly an airplane into the ground and then (1) failed to realize the consequences of faulty activation and (2) kept that system a secret from pilots.
Here's what our most famous recent pilot-hero, "Sully" Sullenberger, had to say:
"We shouldn't have to expect pilots to compensate for flawed designs."
And:
"These two recent crashes happened in foreign countries, but if we do not address all the important issues and factors, they can and will happen here."
14
@ron are you insulting pilots who lost their lives because a billion dollar corporation like Boeing cut corners where they shouldn't have, self regulated and self evaluated the competency of their own planes and charged extra for safety features on their defective planes? Those poor people lost their lives because of corporate greed and malfeasance and you'd best believe they did everything in their human power to save their lives and the lives of their passengers.
7
@ron
That's an interesting take; alternatively, perhaps Boeing interpreted pilots' likely reaction to MCAS, leading them to remove mentions from the 737MAX handbook
1
To paraphrase a former Secretary of Defense: You need to design an airplane for the pilots you have, not the ones you wished you had.
17
Anything happening with civil/criminal lawsuits? When is someone going to be locked up as well as fined for loss of life from a in this case very defective product. Boeing execs, FAA execs --I don't really care which or who... but someone's head needs to roll.. Esp. as nothing was done -- i.e. grounding the plane, IDing the problem until after the SECOND crash. Maybe Congress needs to think about this as well as Impeachment hearings and the shipment of fentanyl from China -- 30-40K drug deaths per annum --many many from fentanyl laced heroin -- via the USPS?? (That needs to be stopped pronto.)
Lock somebody up!
3
Cockpit chaos estimation is not the relevant independent variable. Its cause is. The cause may be pilot training standards, culture and experience. The most powerful current and verifiable data is the accident country of origin similarities vis-a-vis pilot qualifications, training records, and maintenance standards. As there is still no verified third-party forensic investigation yet complete, one must otherwise wonder why speculation is so pitched. Regards. ATP, CFI, ERAU graduate, 5,000 hours jet PIC.
3
"Boeing Underestimated Cockpit Chaos on 737 Max, N.T.S.B. Says"
So . . . where was the FAA when all this was happening?
4
More numbers please: What was total number of 737 Max flying at the time of the 2 crashes, and how many 1000's of flights did these planes represent? What was the total number of 737 Max pilots that were interviewed after the crashes, and finally, how many of these pilots experienced a similar MCAS situation?
8
Maybe next time you can wait to publish the essay that blames the pilot for Boeing's failures until after authorities release their expert opinions on the issue.
12
I do miss 2 points of the puzzle:
An number of individuals who signed of on important parts of the certification as FAA employees are now staff of Boeing! No conflict of interest there.
There new ununionised and inexperienced staff in the plant building the MAX cannot (yet) build up to required standard. The Al Jazeera documentary on the design, certification and build of these new planes showed a timing and budget prevalence over quality thus safety.
Employees selling and doing drugs, if it does not fit I hit mentality, employees going straight from burger flipping to aircraft builders. And no experience of building planes in sight.
This disaster is long from being over!
4
@Yvo van der Hoek which production (i.e building) processes failed.
The longer Boeing tries to shift blame on others, the deeper the damage to its reputation.
But most importantly, the company is never going to be able to resolve these deadly technical problems if it doesn't even readily acknowledge them to be in its own hands.
12
Boeing knew but they wanted the fame and fortune. Now they have neither.
6
@Tom
Oh they got the fame part alright, just not the kind they wanted but definitely the kind that they deserve.
3
In a effort to make things cheaper, everything has been, included accountability and consciousness. REAL Value is in longevity, sacrificing your reputation is the ultimate Price.
3
Remember that the 737Max is derived from a 1960 design with underwing engines and a lengthy series of modifications. But the instrumentation still looks analog and it is not a true fly-by-wire plane.
Boeing pushed the design too far.
9
"The F.A.A. also continues to face criticism for its handling of the Max certification. " The era of "self-certification" has to come to an end. The "dereg" mentality that allows "self-certification" has to be replaced by a "rereg" mentality. The FAA needs to be funded so that all aspects of quality control can be performed by the FAA. Doing so will help restore trust in the aircraft industry of the United States.
21
1. Did the FAA provide the original and complete whistle-blower complaint to Congress?
2. Has this MCAS error ever occurred before and been safely managed by a pilot while in flight?
3. Were the sensors, safety devices, and software configurations of the 2 tragic planes in any way less than that of Boeing 737 MAXs sold to and flown by USA flight corporations?
4. What has Boeing modified on their MAX 737 to prevent a recurrence of crashes?
5. Should plane manufacturers build their planes to be safely flown by pilots that they think should be flying them or for pilots that are flying the planes of their customers today?
11
@Joel H
You should read the New York Times magazine story on this; it's far, far more in-depth.
I know the answer to #2 is yes. In fact, it had even been done on one of the doomed planes on a previous flight by another pilot.
10
And the magazine story essentially says the crashes happened because the pilots were incompetent
2
@Michael Kaufman
No, the article argued that the crashes were the result of undertrained--not incompetent--pilots and deficiencies in the design of the aircraft (specifically the design and implementation of the MCAS system, the lack of explanation by Boeing of that system, and the general insufficiency of training for the specific MAX features).
3
Not too long ago there were several major airline manufacturers... Boeing, Douglas, McDonnell (as McDonnell-Douglas), Lockheed and Convair.
Boeing has had a monopoly on airliner construction for some time and, as tends to happen with monopolies, as time went by the pressure to make the best product possible simply diminished for the simple reason that "If not Boeing, what else?"
That changed as Airbus became a serious competitor particularly in recent years when Airbus offered the A320neo as competition for the 737 in a size range that projected a market of around 5000 planes.
Boeing should have offered a new design, but the A320neo was available now so Boeing again modified the 50 year old 737 design to compete. The 737 MAX with the lethal MCAS modification to deal with an unstable flight condition was the product of this rush to offer a competitive plane.
Boeing's failed bet on again modifying the ancient 737 is what eventually resulted in the deaths of 346 people.
21
@GerardM, you just made an argument for oligopoly not more competition
@GerardM
Boeing's design would have been fine if they would have simply used three angle-of-attack sensors and have them all evaluated by the flight control computer instead of, stunningly, having only two sensors, with neither of them being compared to the other (presumably). Having three sensors allows the computer to compare all three and determine which is the defective sensor. With only two sensors, the computer cannot conclusively determine which is the actual faulty sensor. The probability of two sensors becoming defective at the same time is extremely low. The concept of triple redundancy for critical control elements is certainly nothing new and I'm sure the nuclear power industry has been using it for a very long time. But hey, money.
5
@Echis Ocellatus
It's not clear to me whether the MCAS was utilizing 1 or 2 sensor inputs. My understanding until now has been that although the aircraft was equipped with 2 (or 3?) sensors the MCAS was only utilizing one sensor. Is this correct?
September 26, 2019
What needs to be discussed is how A I can and will have safety intergration to aid in safety and indeed give everyone reassurances that our advance computer technologies can and must be in the best practices and flight on going - as well with complete clarification and verification 100 percent in all events for lessons learned. This article is on the right path and very impressive how Boeing is gracefully taking best solutions and with compensation to those families that lost love ones.
1
>>> " This article is on the right path and very impressive how Boeing is gracefully taking best solutions and with compensation to those families that lost love ones."
This article is about an NTSB report that finds that Boeing and the FAA did not even come *close* to "taking best solutions," gracefully or otherwise.
As for the offer of compensation to families of victims, the amount so far offered has been dismissed as insulting by family members and their representatives. It appears to be an attempt to buy off some of them to minimize the size of the plaintiff pool in the upcoming lawsuits.
17
@Joseph John Amato
I don't think you understand the subtleties of the problem. Adding more automation in the form of artificial intelligence (A.I.) would make this aircraft less safe, not more safe. What Boeing needs to do is put a big red override button on the console. When the pilots push that button, then the aircraft should return to manual stick-and-rudder controls.
And for the record, the only thing meant by 'A.I.' is that the controls become adaptive. That means that what the control system learns on one flight would be implemented on the next. Thus, the operation of the aircraft would change from flight-to-flight. That would be a nightmare for pilots, and a nightmare for investigators.
1
@W
There already is an override switch. It is located on the center pedestal behind the throttles. It shuts off electric stabilizer trim and returns trim to manual control. If the plane is not going too fast, a manual wheel can then be used to make trim adjustments.
There was also an electric override. The yoke-mounted manual electric trim (MET) switches interrupt MCAS. The pilots can use MET to reverse the nose-down trim from MCAS. The pilots can use MET to restore the plane to an in-trim condition and then shut off electric trim with the center pedestal CUT-OUT switches.
The Lion Air captain used MET to restore the plane's trim condition but never took the additional step of using the CUT-OUT switches. MCAS repeatedly activated (5 seconds after each time the captain released the MET switch). When the captain turned control over to the First Officer, the FO failed to use MET the way the captain had and lost control.
The Ethiopian Airlines crew used MET to trim back up but did not fully-restore the plane to an in-trim condition before using the CUT-OUT switches. After struggling with the out-of-trim airplane for a couple of minutes, they turned electric trim back on, failed to re-trim, and left it on long enough for MCAS to re-activate. They then used the CUT-OUT switches but left the plane severely out of trim.
So the problem was not the lack of an "OFF" button, The problem was that the Lion Air crew didn't use it and the ET302 crew used it improperly.
2
Having worked there, I can pretty confidently say that Boeing's management didn't really want to know what the cascading effects would be on crew workload and response, partly because they weren't required to spend the time to look at it in depth and partly because it's a lot easier to justify disregarding what you don't know about. Airplanes like most products are engineered to meet the minimum existing certification requirements, whether those are sufficient or not. There was no incentive to make a better, safer product just because you can and perhaps should, although that mindset may be different now.
63
@Penguin
That's because the current definition of capitalism has some stuff about return to stockholders.. However, if people can't afford or won't buy your product... ….. firing all the workers and eventual bankruptcy will be the result.
Just sayin.
1
Fly Amtrak---do yourself and the climate a favor.
10
@Rob, I do that as often as I can.
But Amtrak is run by Delta's former CEO, and they've just announced that they're getting rid of the dining cars (something about "giving Millenials a choice"). I fear the direction they're headed is the same one the airlines have taken.
Not to mention that Amtrak's infrastructure is showing its age.
18
@Rob
Amtrak can be expensive -- it can also be cheap... and the food is awful... as are the station offerings in most places not major cities.
It is slow and delays occur when a freight train needs to pass... BUT on the really plus side.... there are wonderful vistas -- DC to Chicago via W. VA (a very scenic state; NYC to Pitts...I want to do Chicago -LA northern or southern route one of these years.
2
@Valerie Oh No!! That's awful! The dining car experience on Amtrak is a big part of the joy of riding the train some place!
4
Three hundred and sixty-four lives . . . 364 human beings.
And the best the National Transportation Safety Board has to say is, "A monthslong federal investigation into Boeing’s 737 Max plane has called into question some of the most fundamental assumptions used by manufacturers and regulators when certifying aircraft, and challenged Boeing’s repeated assertions that pilots should have been able to easily handle a malfunction on its jet."
". . . has called into question . . " Isn't that what might also be called criminal negligence?
20
@Christopher Beaver Too much money at stake for the lobbyists to call it criminal negligent
3
Of course, hindsight is 2020.
Unfortunately, no one really has eyes in their hinds.
There is no doubt pilots of both doomed aircraft panicked. And there is no doubt that Ethiopian pilots did not learn anything from Lion of Indonesia - even though they were specifically made aware of MCAS.
As that superb article in NYT showed - all four pilots lacked "airmanship" or a "situational awareness"
I am an engineer with 4 decades in the oil patch and hold a couple of patents.
Human engineering or ergonomics is an issue in my industry too. Especially with control systems giving out too many alarms.
One incident i investigated in Siberia was exactly that issue. An inexperienced operator was looking at so many alarms - he kept pushing override or not important to many of these alarms.
And one alarm was telling him that a failure was imminent.
But you would think - pilots with hundreds of hours if not thousand - would have seen it all.
I dont think Boeing or any manufacturer can anticipate a panicky pilot.
Or for that matter - design a system to look after them.
Though, i think as that excellent NYT article pointed out - more simulator training that is relevant and rigorous may be required going forward.
But i am ready to fly Max today - if flown by Americans for a major US airline.
12
>>> "But you would think - pilots with hundreds of hours if not thousand - would have seen it all."
You might think that, if you didn't understand what actually happened on the accident flights, which you clearly do not. As a matter of fact, *no one* had seen what happened to those two aircrews, because the MCAS system was new (and secret) and its inappropriate activation when AoA indicators failed created a brand new set of problems.
Mr. Langewiesche's article was an offensive attempt to blame victims -- the crews of those two airplanes -- and to mostly whitewash Boeing and the FAA. It revealed not only his unfounded prejudgement but also his lack of understanding of newer versions of the 737.
84
@Douglas Mr. Langewiesche's article does not solely blame the pilots... not does he let Boeing off the hook either. He offers a sound and compelling explanation that air safety is a system and when the system breaks because of poor airmanship and bad design, accidents happen. But that does not fit the political narrative that I'm sensing from you, doesn't it?
Putting an irrational political spin on this tragedy will only detract from resolving the root causes of the problem. Shame on you.
4
@Neil. Too bad simulation of the Max wasn’t available anywhere, and the single partial version didn’t incorporate MCAS until after all those people died. Boeing did not want to spend the money for retraining, and did not. The plane’s response was unknown to all pilots, not only those ‘foreign’ ones so grossly insulted in that article.
8
"...Light touch regulation..." at its finest.
Boeing is in big, big trouble. Many countries around the world are not going to buy any explanation that the 538 Maxx is fixed, not even if the a so-called fix passes the FAA.
Come to think of it, the FAA is in big trouble, too.
It would be interesting to learn when the FAA started with the so-called inspection and approval process under which Boeing engineers ultimately approved things.
Interesting that no paper seems to be looking into that.
21
@Lefthalfbach
It was reported eons ago that the FAA allowed Boeing laissez-faire inspections -- the company certified its own product as safe... and did no inspections so to speak on its own. (All these people with salaries, benefits, good pensions.... but in the end the CEO's head must roll..(with a gold parachute??)
3
@Lefthalfbach, The Seattle Times
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-revamps-safety-oversight-after-review-of-737-max-crashes/
Cockpit automation is the standard way to manage limited human attentional resources. But when the automation breaks, the pilot needs to switch to a simple mode of manual control and fly the aircraft. There are many examples in the NTSB literature that deal with this issue.
Here are some definitions from the American Psychological Association that might apply to the 737 MAX:
"attention overload - a psychological condition that results from excessive demands on attention. The effect is temporary depletion of available attention and an ability to cope with tasks that demand attention. Attention overload can occur in work tasks, such as supervising activity of commercial aircraft in an airport control tower. In resource models of attention, such as the unitary resource model, overload refers specifically to situations in which the demand for attentional resources exceeds the supply. See also information overload." (p. 83)
"capacity model - one of a number of models of attention that characterizes attention as a limited-capacity resource. Attentional deficits occur when the demands on this resource exceed the supply." (p. 146)
"information overload - the state that occurs when the amount or intensity of environmental stimuli exceeds the individual's processing capacity, thus leading to an unconscious or subliminal disregard for some environmental information." (p. 480)
Cite:
VandenBos, Gary R. (Ed.) APA Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association, 2007.
12
Please also read William Langewiesche’s NYTimes 9/19/19 article on pilot error/lack of training by Indonesian budget carriers in particular (of which Lion Air is one). His explanation of “airmanship” is riveting.
Boeing continues to engineer planes and cockpits for pilots with a great deal of airmanship. Pilots flying Boeing commercial jets 50, 40, even 30 years ago were more likely to have spent time in combat cockpits in Vietnam. Their knowledge of aircraft in stressful situations was simply greater than today’s pilots hired directly from universities and the general population by airlines, then trained in simulators.
39
@SeattleMama If that is the case in terms of the experience of Boeing pilots 30-50 years ago, then their planes shouldn't have been flown by pilots/airlines that were not American as many international pilots would not have Vietnam experience.
1
@SeattleMama
Very good point... And the young uns don't usually want to listen to the old ones anyway. What an awful way to learn "truth."
In addition to the cascade of alarms, Boeing took for granted the pilots would be physically able to manually re-trim the aircraft with the trim wheel after the MCAS had thrown it into a nose-down out-of-trim condition during a critical phase of flight at low altitude. If the pilot follows the Boeing procedure and disables the electric-powered pitch trim, the only option is the wheel. The loads on the trim jackscrew are extremely high as the plane begins to dive, and a pilot who isn't exceptionally strong won't be able to move the trim wheel. To reduce the loads, pilots must push forward on the yoke, increasing the dive angle, trim like crazy with with other hand, then recover, then repeat, all with passengers on board and mother earth getting closer with each repetition. It's not insignificant that one of the last things Captain Yared said on Ethiopian 302 was to ask the co-pilot to "trim with me."
141
Human versus machine: the machine usually wins. Over-powering an Electrohydraulic (or whatever it is) system can be very demanding and yes the bigger, stronger pilots will win out.
7
@Mr. Bill
The manual trim wheel is not the only option. The Emergency AD says the pilot can use manual electric trim (MET) to relieve control forces before placing the electric trim switches in the CUT-OUT position.
The ET302 crew, supposedly fully-briefed on the Emergency AD, never did that.
The lengthy analysis in the NYT Magazine reported that the aircraft was never powered down from full takeoff power and that this level of thrust made it impossible to adjust the trim either manually or automatically. This failure to power down (even in the face of a stall warning) was one of the things for which the author faulted the pilots.
So, if the faulty stall warning caused the pilots to maintain full power, no method of trim correction was going to work. The author posited that the pilot in command should have divined that his stall warning was faulty, cut power, and transferred control to the first officer, while then engaging manual trim. All of this presumably while whistling “Dixie”.
5
And that is what happens when you starve the agencies that are supposed to do oversight to industries. People die in the name of saving money letting the corporations to just evaluate themselves.
Same thing is happening at FDA, EPA and you name it.
59
@Eduardo
Government is as good as the people who run it. It stands to reason then do not put people in charge who want to "break" government...we all know what to do. Vote straight Democratic.
5
"Boeing Underestimated Cockpit Chaos on 737 Max, N.T.S.B. Says"
"The agency said Boeing had underestimated the effect that a failure of new automated software in the aircraft could have on the environment in the cockpit."
If those Boeing beliefs were true, those two 737 Max's would still be flying. It almost incomprehensible that Boeing could be so dense as to not step back at the programing and think that they had not created a monster. They put a computer in charge above and beyond the pilots and that should never be the case.
10
In other words... the two crashes were a direct result of Boeing negligence, NOT pilot errors.
Sorry Boeing and Boeing fanboys.... when you set up conditions in the cockpit that can overwhelm the pilots with alarms.... you are at fault.. and are contributing to homicide.
Futher.. the fact that Boeing so underplayed the possible failure modes and issues with MCAS.... by deliberately NOT documenting it well in the documentation to pilots, nor evey require (in fact discouraged) any simulator training on the new features of the MAX.... just compounds the corporate negligence.
People DIED here... in large numbers, on two fatal crashes within 5 months of each other... by completely different airlines, crews, and circumstances. Boeing MUST be held criminally accountable.
96
This article seems to completely debunk the debut piece by William Langewiesche in the Magazine last week, in which he asserted the pilots in the 2 Max crashes should have easily handled the failing MCAS and that Boeing was largely blameless....
75
Beware of those „back seat pilots“ who, for whatever reason, feel they know better. The accident report is the only reliable source available to judge on an accident or incident. Let‘s just WAIT...
11
@Arjan
I regard these as different contributing factors that all combined led to the fatal outcome. Put inexperienced pilots into a cockpit of an ill designed plane. Cut corners in training and system instruction, add a malfunctioning sensor and an cockpit alert system that creates a sensory overload and you get a mix that leads to disaster.
What I take as a contributing factor from this article is the insight that the human factor cannot be neglected: Faced with sensory overload, contradicting messages and simply a fear of life one cannot expect all pilots to remain calm and follow the right procedures. Some pilots will succeed thanks to experience, excellent training and airmanship (Sully comes to mind). Others will inevitably fail. Passenger planes should never be designed for the rare excellent pilots, but for the worst ones in mind.
6
@Arjan: Yes, and debunking Langewiesche's wrongheaded and ignorant op-ed is both appropriate and badly needed. Far too many readers bought his ignorant and unfounded opinions because he was once a pilot, is a pretty good writer and is the son of a famous pilot-author father.
The most dangerous voices speaking about this issue are those of pilots who imagine that Sky Gods like themselves and their buddies could easily have handled the baffling and overwhelming cascade of failures and alarms that faced the crews of the two accident flights. *Those* are the pilots you don't want to fly with.
18
Oh so it's not just "those Indian and Indonesian pilots" as one of your op-eds suggested (claiming that American pilots are way oh so much way more prepared to deal with emergencies).
Shocking.
Figured it was just a "them versus us" thing. Another if not totally "white man 'theory' of 'competence,'" bites the dust. Next?
52
Hmmm. Just last week, the NYT ran an extensive article by a pilot/author stating that the MCAS defect could easily be handled by pilots who were skilled "airmen." (Of course, the author appeared to count himself among said group, which represented mostly Western-trained aviators.)
I'd side with the NTSB's human factors findings instead, which state that a plethora of warnings caused a distraction that the pilots weren't prepared to face.
Bad design is much easier to correct than less-experienced piloting.
34
Waiting for the bankruptcy.
Anyone want to buy a plane that cannot fly?
15
@steve boston area Any company that has absolutely no regard for human life deserves bankruptcy.
2
@steve boston area
You and I and other taxpayers will be expected to bail Boeing out.
1
Two immediate takeaways:
1) Aircraft should always have a simple, prominent, and unmistakable warning that instantly alerts the pilots when an automated system is overriding manual control inputs. My inexpensive subcompact car has a big yellow warning light that blinks when the traction control or stability control intervenes. It is inexcusable that the 737 MAX, or any other transport aircraft, lacks such a straightforward warning system.
2) Boeing's decision to make the angle of attack (AoA) disagree warning light optional is a critical failure in this case. Although very skilled and astute pilots (such as FAA examiners or Boeing test pilots) may understand enough about aerodynamics and flight controls to quickly deduce that an AoA disagree condition exists—and may be able to keep their cool in an emergency—the same is not necessarily true of the average pilot.
30
@C Walton. Worse, those carriers who ordered the optional indicator didn’t know it wasn’t connected. That, plus the single sensor, plus no connection to the flight computer, plus the hidden repeat actuation, plus removing mention from the manual - that’s how grotesque this was. And lethal.
3
William Langewiesche said the same in the brilliant 9/18 NYT magazine article, albeit with far more detail. I've flown Lion Air and Garuda numerous times and after reading that article, I feel lucky to be alive. Will also think twice before visiting Indonesia again, for this reason.
5
De-regulate more that'll fix it.
18
We should be amazed that the corporate and government bigwigs who supervised this calamity are still running the show. But we are not. Who among us doubts that FAA and Boeing would still be touting the great safety of the MAX, if international outcry had not tipped the scales? The rot of corporatism, political corruption and deregulation has penetrated all aspects of our lives. We are just beginning to pay the price.
16
Of course it has to be the safest plan; it’s got all the bells and whistle’s to prove it!
“They did not look at all the potential flight deck alerts and indications the pilots might face...”
I'm so glad to read this. A recent article in this newspaper was written in a way that made it easy to start placing blame on the pilots of the doomed flights.
The MCAS system seems to be a hack designed to compensate for fatal flaws in the design of the 737 MAX.
The fact that some airlines hire pilots lacking sufficient flight experience is irrelevant to this fact. This is surely a serious problem, but it isn't the cause of the 737 MAX's inadequacies.
The blame for the 737 MAX's problems needs to stay squarely with Boeing. Boeing needs to fix the plane or scrap it.
66
@Valerie. I won’t board a “fixed” 737 MAX. The crashes were due to insufficient “fixes”. I agree with the remainder of your excellent comment. Thank you.
5
They didn't watch Miracle on the Hudson?
3
Exactly! In the movie, Sully’s response to the simulation showing that he had plenty of time to land the plane safely at Teterboro was that it failed to account for the human factor of the pilot and copilot figuring out what had happened.
7
faulting airmanship is easy armchair piloting.
Boeing created a robot that would throw any cockpit into
severe turmoil with crew assumptions ranging from runaway trim
to loss of elevator command.
Inability to control altitude
is primordial to every pilot so a simple reach back and flip a switch off can easily be overlooked especially on a new system.
Why not make the robot turn itself off if it corrects 3 times more than 15 degrees?
brian moore
pp/sel/pa28-180, j-3 out of 900 ft of grass
18
Boeing simply did not care about human life but profits.
20
The NTSB has now reviewed the design and approval of Boeing’s 737 Max and, as expected, have found fault with both. However, the report goes on to state “Boeing had underestimated the effect that a failure of new automated software in the aircraft could have on the environment in the cockpit.”
This authoritative report is well timed to put to rest the brazen argument that the pilots’ poor "airmanship” was an equal contributor to the two tragic crashes (9/18/2019 feature article in the NYTimes Magazine by William Langewiesche titled ‘What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?’)
20
The company made erroneous assumptions during the development. This reads like an excuse. This is precisely what threatens the safety of any new planes or their modification - the failure to ENSURE to the ultimate extent possible that there are no erroneous assumptions. Like - "oh the MCAS will never have to be activated". And "if we can avoid re-certification we can avoid more training, save a lot of money AND we can make a safe aircraft." Chaos in the cockpit? We underestimated chaos in the aircraft when the system reactivates every five seconds and pilots do not even know the source of this action, MCAS? Hey. We know too much at this point. This is totally Bogus. I can only imagine the chaos in the passenger section as the plane goes through 22 roller coaster dives and recoveries before crashing.
19
My main concern surrounds the entire development of MCAS. It was a software 'fix' to compensate for the larger engines, yet it was designed to only assess angle-of-attack from ONE sensor, not two, which in itself, was a horrendous single-point-of-failure design choice. This mistake should have been caught in Boeing's internal design reviews because everything is redundant on a plane. If not caught there, then the FAA (aka, essentially Boeing employees) should have discovered this flaw when they reviewed the MCAS design. To top it off, Boeing then decided to not fully disclose the severe impact of MCAS when activated and left Max pilots in the dark. I don't care how they trained pilots on an iPad, I want pilots on a new generation of aircraft to get stick time in a simulator where an MCAS failure could have been injected and handled by pilots without killing everyone on board. I want this thoroughly investigated by the FBI over some of the decisions made here. Individuals who covered up the MCAS design failures need to go to jail (and be very glad they weren't a passenger on one of the fatal Max flights). If this is the new design paradigm at Boeing, I surely want someone, anyone, at the various aviation agencies around the world, to thoroughly vet their next 'new' aircraft design prior to any passengers boarding it. I simply can no longer trust the FAA to be the gold standard in aircraft certification and that's absolutely pathetic that we've fallen this far...
34
@Mike
"Horrendous" is the right word. It was insane, from the engineering standpoint. That tells us who was running Boeing -- financiers, B-school grads.
Dana Schulze, director of Aviation Safety at the NTSB, wrote,
"Multiple alerts and indications have been shown through years of research to have potentially an impact where pilots will not respond as perhaps you might have intended.”
Having seen multiple failures, in the simulator (I am both Airbus and B-767 type rated) with a stick shaker going off, and STALL flashing on the Captains PFD display, there would have been a lot going on . So maybe the pilots didn't respond as quickly to a slow nose down trim acting intermittently, with all the other warnings and rattling stick shaker..
It's also too easy to say, the runaway trim scenario "is something all Boeing pilots train for ", and these (by implication 3rd world pilots) were deficient pilots.
17
@skier 6
But both crews DID promptly respond to the intermittent nose down trim. This is not a situation where lots of stuff was going on and the crews failed (due to distraction, tunnel vision, task saturation, or whatever) to respond in enough time to correct the problem.
The JT610 captain successfully countered the nose-down trim commands with MET for something like 6 minutes. He knew he had runaway nose-down trim and used MET to reverse it. They lost it when the captain handed the controls to the FO and the FO stopped countering with MET.
The ET301 crew also successfully countered MCAS using MET, so they too recognized they had a runaway trim problem. They did place the switches in the CUT-OUT position, but failed to fully relieve control forces first. Nobody has explained what they were doing when they turned electric trim back on (again, maybe a full CVR transcript will help) but they didn't use MET except for brief, ineffective blips. If they had held MET for another couple of seconds after the second MCAS activation, they would have been back in trim. Or if they had held MET for more than a couple of blips after they turned electric trim back on, they would have been back in trim.
The people who want to implicate cockpit noise should explain more specifically why that noise prevented the JT610 crew from placing the switches in the CUT-OUT position or prevented the ET301 crew from using the MET switches more effectively.
Sunday's NYT Magazine contained a long and detailed article arguing that the 737 Max crashes resulted from pilots' lack of airmanship---frank incompetence---in circumstances that competent pilots would have handled easily.
The human engineering should allow for the possibility of pilots with marginal skills, but responsibility for the crashes should be shared among the aircraft systems, the pilots, and the system that put marginally qualified pilots in the cockpit.
8
"Cockpit chaos."
The two words America's airline passengers were just waiting to hear before they purchased tickets for the holidays.
17
Boeing should be dismantled and disappear. The corporation is guilty of negligent homicide on a massive scale.
14
Trump Says 'No President Has Ever Cut So Many Regulations ...
NYT 2018/02/23
58
@Kekule
He, and most republicans, don't care. Their wealth allows them to live lives that are outside the ramifications of ridiculous reg rollbacks.
4
@Kekule He should have stopped after the first two words.
2
"Results of an internal review by Boeing, which its board made public on Wednesday, recommended changes to the design of cockpits and the company’s organizational structure to improve safety."
What curious phrase, changes to the company's organizational structure to improve safety. Does this mean that sales and profit will no longer take precedence over engineering and safety? Does this mean that in the corporate pecking order, engineering will have authority over all others in deciding safety issues? Certainly, corporate structure was involved in the decision to use the MCAS system so as to avoid training and re-certification costs. Why doesn't the FAA intervene to assure that the corporate structure is appropriate to the needs of the public safety, and continue to monitor it so that any changes in corporate structure are reviewed by the regulatory agency before being implemented?
38
@Brud1
"Does this mean that sales and profit will no longer take precedence over engineering and safety? Does this mean that in the corporate pecking order, engineering will have authority over all others in deciding safety issues?"
If I remember what I read, the answer is at least partly "Yes".
@Brud1
When I read the article describing Boeing's changes, the phrase that came to mind was "corporate figleaf". Time will tell.
1
I'm not sure what Boeing thinks they're doing. Even if the 737 Max is fixed from a technical standpoint (which is still open to doubt--if a software fix were viable, we would already have seen it), as a commercial aircraft it's dead.
No one wants to fly it and no one wants to buy it.
Their best bet is to redesign the aircraft from the ground up and give it a new name. If they're not working on that, they are more incompetent than I had even imagined.
The Boeing Company, at this point, is a victim of deregulation and corporate intransigence. I hope they can recover, but doing so means that they will have to start putting customers first. And listening to engineers rather than MBAs.
181
@Justin Unless the airlines get a huge push back from customers, it will continue to be one of the best selling aircraft ever. It's just too good of a bargain for them. Southwest and Ryanair alone will operate close to a thousand by the time the plane is in the middle of its lifecycle.
1
@Justin
Trump says a name change is all that is needed. MAGA!
1
@RMurphy In that case, thank you for the reminder not to fly those airlines.
5
It is scandalous that after presiding over the sacrifice of safety standards and warnings form their own engineers, that Boeing executives irresponsibility and their hold on the FAA lead to so many deaths, and that notwithstanding, these same CEO and executives are still in their jobs and we are asked to trust them THIS time. No way.
42
Perhaps it is time to reduce the automated "security". The more automation, the less independent and the less aware the pilots. Especially true is that in this case, where the automated elevation controls were used to simplify and save on the education of the pilots. Severeal of them, including pilots who managed to avoid the crash, had not been drilled in the new procedures, to save time from the introduction programme of the new planes, we could read in European newspapers.
If that is true, Boeing have some more explaining to do.
10
@Bjarte Rundereim
Airbus has gone to more complete automation, and hasn't had crashes as a result.
1
@Jonathan Katz: Not exactly, sir. See for example Air France Flight 447, June 1 2009:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
The issue with pilot training vs. cockpit automation is a bit more complicated than this brief NYT article lets on.
7
@Jonathan Katz
Riiiight. Air France 447 didn't stall into the ocean from 38,000 feet. Here are a few others:
Gulf Air 072
Armavia 072
XL Airways 888T
Air Asia 8501
Lufthansa 1829
Airbus flight Test 129
Qantas 72
Afriqiyah 771
Complete automation does NOT make airplanes immune from accidents and incidents.
8
The plane has a significant fault in the how the MCAS works, but if you actually read the accident reports and cockpit transcripts, you'll see a chain of errors and omission beginning before the planes even left the ground. Poor training, in the case of Lion Air, apparently falsified or ignored maintenance. In both cases, the pilot confusion was caused by poor pilot training combined with the MCAS defects that ultimately led to these terrible accidents.
Planes are highly computerized. The design philosophy of Boeing is to let the pilot have authority over the computers; Airbus lets the computers override the pilots to a limit. Neither philosophy is right or wrong, just different. If you think Airbus planes are safer, just look at accidents such as AF334 where confused pilots stalled the aircraft into the Atlantic or the A320 which crashed on demonstration while piloted by Airbus' most senior test pilots. Confusion in the cockpit and a lack of airmanship - a quality of understanding the physics of flight - not flying video games.
Air travel remains a wonder of the age we live in. It is safer per mile, per trip or per passenger-mile than any other mode of travel. Unfortunately we sometimes over reach and learn lessons only on the tombstones of those who perish because of our collective hubris.
24
In response I would ask how Boeing can be characterized as having an approach of giving pilots power over computers when the very piece of software at issue is one which overrides the control inputs of the pilots, and this not even in a sustained manner, but in pulses of downward pressure unlike normal ‘runaway trim’ as I understand it.
20
@Dubliner - the pilot has the authority in Boeing planes to keep turning off flight systems until only the direct flight controls remain. In Airbus aircraft, the computers are instrumental in providing the fly by wire connections to the control services. There is no turning off the computers in an Airbus. Compare the cockpit layouts between a 737 and an A320 to get a sense of the degree of automation in an Airbus.
4
@Lexington The "stall into the Atlantic" flight wasn't AF334, it was AF447.
6
Obviously, Boeing didn't assign employees to this project who possess enough depth, wisdom, or sensitivity to anticipate real-life scenarios.
26
"It also suggested that the agency direct plane makers to develop technology that could diagnose a problem during flight and tell pilots what procedure to follow."
Planes are already quite smart, and on good days fully capable of managing the entire flight, including landing, without pilots.
Pilot error is just one of the types if problems the planes encounter and attempt to fix. MCAS, after all, was designed to take action to push the nose down when it thought the pilots were making a mistake by not doing that.
What MCAS could have noticed, but didn't, was that the pilots were continually pushing back and undoing what MCAS had just done. Detecting and dealing with this disagreement is just like the copilot and pilot disagreeing, noticing it, and responding appropriately. It can be done, and probably should be done for ALL cases where the plane and pilots disagree. It's not just sensors that fail -- entire mental models of the situation can fail to match. Dig there.
There is a relevant rule of thumb that could have helped focus the system validation, thanks to John Gall's wonderful book "Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail": the component most likely cause the system to fail is the last component you added to make the system safer. Again, dig there.
There are numerous examples. At one university, the entire computer network went down because the "uninterruptible power supply" batteries caught fire. It's a good rule.
29
@Wade
It would also be helpful if MCAS had a rule to not drive the plane into the ground.
6
Whenever I see one of the articles I can't help but recall the initial responses by engineers noting the reduction of personnel and the time line of the project, pointing to the competition with expected model releases from AirBus. But please go ahead with the "rehabilitation " of Boeing.
47
Please let me fly only Airbus whose planes are safe, comfortable, and regulated by the Europeans (rather than the FAA).
11
@Nanette
A quick Google search will show you that Airbus has had its share of technical problems, faults and accidents too. Overall they are no safer than Boeing planes.
10
Overall they are not safer than previous generations of planes from Boeing. Current one looks bad...
@Yvo van der Hoek
The 737 Max is only one variant of the series, other varieties still being in production. Same goes for various types of 777’s and 787’s.
2
The Boeing design did not account for the poor airmanship and insufficient training of pilots in some or many foreign carriers. Boeing assumes a certain amount of skills that evidently do not exist in many cases. This is clearly now a mistaken assumption that obviously needs correction. Planes need to be designed to consider the reality of the skills of the pilots who will be flying them. There is not a commercial pilot in the US that would have made the errors that these overwhelmed pilots did. Another obvious fix is tightening the training of pilots and doing something about the falsification of maintenance records in some carriers, which were contributing problems in both incidents. The people commenting here attacking "corporate greed" billionaires and other politically biased comments are at best uninformed, and haven't looked at the facts behind these tragedies. Pointing fingers in the wrong direction creates a distracting background noise that never helps finding real solutions to problems.
23
@James Haupert
'There is not a commercial pilot in the US that would have made the errors that these overwhelmed pilots did.'
Easy to say that when nobody has reported encountering those conditions during actual flights.
46
Except that after the grounding several American Airlines in the sim who knew the failure was coming ended up vertical anyway , so there’s that ..,
30
@James Haupert
Yet... Sully Sullenberger... a true and capable pilot.... publicly stated that in fact most any pilot, including the much vaunted US pilots so many hide behind in these comments.... would have failed to save the aircraft from a crash. Period.
Further.. actual US trained pilots, who knew in advance about the failure and what would happen... stepped into flight simulators operating under the same failing conditions.. AND CRASHED in simulation.
In addition, the US Pilots Associations for multiple airlines have stated that they were agast at Boeing not properly documenting, and disclosing, the differences, and possible issues with the MAX. NO... Boeing sold it to pilots as a plug and play equivalent to every other 737 ever produced.
116
The focus on MCAS is starting to obscure the fact that the certification of this aircraft is compromised. Problems with software are a small part of the problems facing Boeing.
The certification issue arose as a direct result of the push to deregulate and allow aircraft companies the ability to self certify their products.
In this instance the MCAS system appears to have been an attempt to compensate for a design deficiency in the least expensive manner. The appropriate aerodynamic fix would have required an immensely expensive re-certification.
The blame for all this ultimately lies at Congress door.
It is time to start refunding and restoring the authority of the FAA.
168
@Andrew Smallwood There are many more failures aside from Congress failing to fund the FAA adequately which results in "self certification" by using company-employed designees.
In the regulations there are many "loopholes" that can be exploited that would alleviate the need for a new type certificate for the Max. And apparently those loopholes were flown through, so to speak by Boeing.
In light of the fact that regulators cannot set the calendar back to the first days of Max development and require a new type certificate for the Max, at least do something that will give the operators and public some degree of confidence in the aircraft.
15
@Dan No, Dan. The focus should not be giving operators and the public some degree of confidence in this aircraft. The FAA's job should not include marketing.
Their focus must be making sure that all commercial aircraft are airworthy. Even if it means grounding the 737 Max permanently.
47
@Andrew Smallwood
RE " to compensate for a design deficiency in the least expensive manner"
An airplane with a design deficiency should not be allowed to be produced.
From the get go, this was a software patch on faulty aeronautical design - adding over sized engines to an airframe for which it was NOT designed.
3
This episode *should* signal the end of Boeing, but it won't. Not only is Boeing too big to fail -- there's no other U.S. company left that could replace it. "It's good to be king."
35
@RR. If every company that made a fatal error went out of business, we'd soon be back in the Stone Age.
4
Why isn't there an outcry amongst the billionaires? Oh wait, they all have private jets and are not concerned with the safety risks faced by us plebians -- they just want to keep is alive long enough to drain our bank accounts.
Where is Max Robespierre when we need him?
18
As someone who flies on occasion, I can tell you that I will never set foot on a Boeing 737 Max. Never. I think a lot of other people feel the same way I do (or they should for the safety of their families and themselves). Furthermore, if I had the power, I would never fly in a Boeing plane ever again. This incident highlights the extent to which Boeing placed profit above the safety of their customers. The FAA has a lot to answer for
131
sorry, accidentally hit send) the FAA has a lot to answer for as well, but ultimately, I don't trust Boeing.
22
@mrfreeze6 Do not worry, they will rename it alright.
4
@mrfreeze6 You'll fly on a Boeing unless you plan to only fly on airlines that are Airbus exclusive. In the US, that's JetBlue, Spirit, Alliegiant, and Frontier. There are just way too many plane changes and other logistical complexities to be able to avoid them booking with other airlines.
2
Huge engines on a plane designed originally in the 1960's is lipstick on a pig.
I just flew on the 737 700 and 800 and found them to be just fine.
The 737 Max should not have been designed to mandate a computer to fly. It is not a stealth plane flown by a fighter pilot without 150+ passengers.
82
Boeing has acted like Purdue Pharma: it made a product that is deadly if not used very carefully, then sold it to anyone whether they could use it in the proper manner or not.
169
@Ryan VB Perfect analogy. Hubris run amok.
2
@Ryan VB
Retired engineer and private pilot here. I think your assertion is overly harsh. True, Boeing miscalculated the MCAS impact on cockpit dynamics. It is hard from me to accept that they did this intentionally or maliciously. Sure market dynamics and profit pressure are contributing factor. 100% fail safe engineering does not exist and is impossible. Innovation has a price.
Buyers are airlines; not anyone. Boeing is a reputable company making aircrafts almost since the dawn of flying. The safety of its plane is similar to planes made by other manufacturers - Airbus, Bombardier, etc.
I wish the process of reviewing the MAX's safety had started just after the first crash. It dd not and I think this is the main failure both from Boeing, the airlines, and the regulator. But again, all participants in this fiasco have to learn, and I will believe will learn.
Purdue was evil from the beginning as they expanded the distributions of opioids.
3