Who Do You Trust?

[Winstonm]

Do you fly or take a pass on your personal no-fly list for the Boeing 737 Max?

[shyams]

Do you fly or take a pass on your personal no-fly list for the Boeing 737 Max?

If the final decision was taken by an independent body like the EU Aviation Safety Agency, yes I would start flying pretty much immediately. Sad to say this, I no longer trust the word of the NTSB or equivalent US Govt. agencies.

[Winstonm]

If the final decision was taken by an independent body like the EU Aviation Safety Agency, yes I would start flying pretty much immediately. Sad to say this, I no longer trust the word of the NTSB or equivalent US Govt. agencies.

 

You have more faith in Boeing than I do. I am in the almost never category.

[steve2005]

they haven't fixed it yet

[Manastorm]

In principle I don't have a problem with 737 max. Automatic trim control, which was more or less the reason of the two accidents, can be switched off by one button. The result is manual trim control by the pilots. Even if the manual control of the trim fails the plane should be flyable using the yoke, although it can become very heavy. However if the pilots are unaware how mcas works and how to deal with its fail, then the plane should stay grounded.

[kenberg]

It depends. If I had a choice, I would choose something else. But if I wanted to get somewhere and that was the only choice, I would take it.

 

I can say this with some confidence. Growing up in the 1940s and 50s, I had never been on a plane. In the 1960s I was on a canoe trip in northern Manitoba and, when we got back to the railroad tracks that we had come up on, from The Pas, the hermit fisherman there told us that the trains were shut down over a strike. So we left the canoes with him with shipping instructions and walked 40 miles or so along the tracks north to Flin Flon to fly out, back to our cars in The Pas. At least at that time the only way back to The Pas was by plane/ train, and the trains were on strike. The plane going in and out was one that was then banned for safety reasons in the USA. Ok, I can stay in Flin Flon until the strike is over or I can fly out on a plane the USA doesn't think is safe. I flew out. And in a fairly substantial storm.

 

So: Of course I would try an alternative.But I hardly think it is suicidal to fly on it. I suppose the pilot wishes to see tomorrow.

[Chas_P]

However if the pilots are unaware how mcas works and how to deal with its fail, then the plane should stay grounded.

 

Perhaps it's the pilots who should be grounded. I think too often now pilots are taught computer skills rather than stick and rudder skills. Remember Asiana 214?

[kenberg]

Perhaps it's the pilots who should be grounded. I think too often now pilots are taught computer skills rather than stick and rudder skills. Remember Asiana 214?

 

If so, then Boeing should have announced: "We have this really great new system that we believe will be too complex for many of the pilots who are working today, so be forewarned."

 

Yesterday I made my first attempt ever to respond to an Instant Message. At one point, finishing a paragraph, I hit the return key, which apparently is one way to send an IM. I had not yet finished and I had not proofread what I had so far written. Ok, nothing regrettable had slipped in but still, they might have warned me. Putting a plane out there that is too complicated for experienced pilots to fly is seriously irresponsible. And that's assuming that pilot error is really the explanation. My guess is that they just didn't properly test it, no matter who the pilot was going to be. Either way, Boeing cannot dodge this with clever words.

[y66]

It will be interesting to see how other countries respond when the FAA declares the 737 Max safe to fly again. As Dominic Gates at the Seattle Times recently noted:

 

The politics of getting international consensus as well as restoring the confidence of the traveling public may prove lengthy.

 

It’s unclear if the FAA would move forward without key players on its side, including the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the Canadian civil aviation authority. But Elwell seemed to suggest that the US will take the lead and move first.

 

Because the U.S. is where the MAX was designed and issued its initial certification, which was then separately validated by regulators around the world, the ungrounding of the aircraft must follow a similar pattern, Elwell said. When its analysis is complete, the U.S. will certify the fix and lift the grounding, then other countries must validate the FAA’s work and make their own decisions, he said.

 

Countries such as China have indicated that they want to study the safety of the new system for a longer period and do their own assessment of it rather than just following the FAA.

I will not be flying on the 737 Max until EASA signs off.

[barmar]

If so, then Boeing should have announced: "We have this really great new system that we believe will be too complex for many of the pilots who are working today, so be forewarned."

Modern jet airplanes are complex systems, they all require significant training and experience. Should Boeing really have been able to predict that this one new feature would be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and pilots couldn't handle it?

[Winstonm]

Modern jet airplanes are complex systems, they all require significant training and experience. Should Boeing really have been able to predict that this one new feature would be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and pilots couldn't handle it?

 

I don't think it was Boeing alone. The entire air safety network failed. Why? IMO, the push to match its competition placed safety concerns behind speed of delivery of a new aircraft - really, a chase for profits that made safety secondary.

 

I guess you might say a market-based approach worked - but only after 346 people died.

 

When certifying the MAX, safety was not a top priority. Time was. Airbus was miles ahead on the A320neo and Boeing were desperate to catch up.

[y66]

Modern jet airplanes are complex systems, they all require significant training and experience. Should Boeing really have been able to predict that this one new feature would be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and pilots couldn't handle it?

Predict as in estimate the risk of failure of a new critical system component tied to a single sensor and the risk of crashing before pilots who have not been briefed on the new system component figure out what's going on? Yes, this is called engineering.

 

It is not in the realm of possibility that Boeing engineers and their FAA counterparts failed to understand these risks and clearly communicate them to their managers.

[shyams]

A relevant twitter thread that went viral a few months ago

 

[y66]

Jack Nicas, Natalie Kitroeff, David Gelles and James Glanz at NYT have the latest scoop on the massive communication failures that led to the certification of a design that was quite different from the actual final configuration in ways that one engineer who helped design MCAS summarized thusly: "that's nuts." Boeing and the FAA's reply? "We followed standard procedures".

[johnu]

As if the the 737 Max didn't have enough problems,

 

Boeing notifies FAA that parts in 737 Max and other planes may be 'susceptible to premature failure'

 

Boeing has notified the Federal Aviation Administration that parts on the 737 Max and 737 NG may have been improperly manufactured and may not meet regulatory requirements for strength and durability.

 

The FAA issued a statement on Sunday saying it had conducted an investigation with Boeing which found that up to 148 leading edge slat tracks manufactured by a sub-tier supplier are affected by the problem.

 

Boeing has identified the serial numbers of the aircraft in which the suspect parts may have been installed.

 

The agency said 32 NG and 33 Max aircraft are affected in the U.S. Worldwide, 133 NG and 179 Max planes are affected.

[Winstonm]

Maybe Boeing should start its own airlines with all those 737 Max planes and name it Libertarian Air.

[Winstonm]

The Federal Aviation Administration has discovered another potential problem with Boeing's (BA - Get Report) grounded 737 Max model that could further delay its return to service.

 

The agency said in a statement late Wednesday that it had "found a potential risk [with the aircraft] that Boeing must mitigate.

[y66]

This is a fascinating example of investigative reporting by the NYT.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/business/boeing-737-accidents.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

 

Today, faced with a public outcry over the Max crashes and demands for reforms, Boeing and the F.A.A. have agreed that more attention should be paid to the engineering discipline Dr. Dekker applied in his study.

 

Both the N.T.S.B. and a panel of international experts found that Boeing and the F.A.A. had not sufficiently incorporated lessons from this human-factors research when developing and certifying the Max.

 

But even though the research has been around for decades — an F.A.A. study recommended in 1996 that the industry and regulators embrace the approach more readily — accident investigations have tended to focus on pilot errors while minimizing or ignoring systemic factors, such as design and training problems, experts said.

 

“It’s really easy to blame it on the dead pilots and say it has nothing to do with our improperly designed system,” said Shawn Pruchnicki, who teaches at Ohio State and has worked on accident investigations for the Air Line Pilots Association.

 

Dr. Pruchnicki, who studied under Dr. Dekker, said he had participated in numerous investigations in which human-factors experts were largely ignored. “It just gets frustrating because we keep having the same types of accidents,” he said.

 

Dr. Woods, the Ohio State professor who has advised the F.A.A., wrote an email to colleagues shortly after the first 737 Max crash, in October 2018, of Lion Air Flight 610, which killed 189 people just minutes after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia. The initial details, he wrote, indicated it was an automation-triggered disaster of the sort that he and others had studied for almost 30 years. He cited research from the 1990s and pointed to the Turkish Airlines crash.

 

“That this situation has continued on for so long without major action is not how engineering is supposed to work,” he wrote.