A bit of American Airline marketing is behind this. An AOA display, a quarter-sized circle on the PFD, would have been just about worthless. They have it. Good for them. That plus $5 will buy a cup of joe at Starbucks. And since MCAS only needs one bad sensor to activate, you can install twenty and the result is the same.
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Thereâs probably also a training aspect at work here. The bigger airlines that can afford to have higher training standards are probably not going to succumb to this as easily as the ones that cut corners to make a buck.
I donât think anyone will disagree the amount of conversion training from the NG to Max was probably lacking, the question is if that qualifies as dangerously lacking or if the crews on these flights just needed more of it because everyone learns at a different pace.
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This lack of redundancy is, to me, the big issue. I donât think it is sufficient to design a critical flight safety system with a single point of failure, and justify it by saying âwell, if the system goes wrong the pilots can just disable the trim and everything will be fineâ. An emergency procedure should not be considered adequate redundancy.
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@JediMaster I would agree with that except it is a little more complicated. I personally do not believe that sim training is needed. But Iâm just some dude. SOMEBODY, either at Boeing or the FAA must have believed that if the handling characteristics werenât modified, the differences WOULD require training. This whole thing may well have been a workaround to avoid that. See what they did there? They took a sensable airplane and added a secret feature because they were trying to avoid training. Itâs complicated. And just a little bit evil.
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Whatever the outcome will be, it will be messy for all involved and possibly damage the FAAâs international reputation and standing.
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No doubt that the FAA has been damaged. America was the last nation to ground the plane. And that decision only came about because BOEINGâS CEO personally called the president to tell HIM to do so. Howâs that for leadership!
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Why do you think the Ethiopian government had the flight data recorders sent to France instead of here? That in itself is incredibly telling.
The FAA and the NTSB are not the same thing, though.
This. Extremely.
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According to a friend who just left a Boeing subcontractor, everybody along the way has been feeling the strain of trying to meet all the orders from this plane, thereâs been a pretty good turnover rate, and everybody is working overtime. Mistakes happen when lots of people are pushed to rush through work, and thereâs not a strong base of institutional experience-based knowledge.
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True, but it still suggests shade being thrown in the direction of the US government.
Oh dear. Now stuff is really piling up.
I am stunned by what I read today.
Boeing self-certified the system???
And about the FAA and the impact of this case on the trust others put into it (and rightfully did so in the past, the FAA had an excellent reputation, in Germany too).
And related to that:
Lion Air voice recorder seems to show that the Pilots just werenât aware what the hell was happening and tried to find something in the manual but couldnât.
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Aviation Week has posted a pretty lucid article about MCAS but its paywalled so I canât link it. It is in agreement with our discussion here.
Both Boeing and the FAA were informed of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago, before the second crash of a 737 MAX last Sunday.
Thatâs a grizzly coincidence to be quite honest. That article is damning of the whole process though in line with the rumour mill that has been going on for years. Anyone remember that Al Jazeera documentary from I think 2012?
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From the Seattle Times (Pulitzer if thereâs justice) article linked above:
âWhen the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.â
This just breaks my heart. It also better explains the, âwhy didnât they justâŠâ question that I kept getting in November from non-737 pilots who couldnât grasp the severity of what the system was doing to the plane. I love the 737. I have 15,000 hours in the thing. Thereâs a fair chance that someday I will return to it once my airline parks these aging 757/767s. Right now though, the plane is nothing but an ugly reflection of an ugly system. It is similar to the corruption and complicit oversight that allowed the VW TDI scandal. VW was justifiably spanked even though no one was killed. Boeing on the other hand is more powerful than ever. They build most of the worldâs defense equipment. They build half the worldâs airliners. Their low interest loans to foreign airlines to purchase Boeing airliners are subsidized by the US taxpayer. In a way, all Americans are complicit.
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It would be bizarre enough to give anybody goosebumps if only half of that is true.
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After reading that article, if it is all confirmed, I can definitely say I and my family will never get on a 737 MAX. I have never said that about any aircraft before. The culture that that article describes of prioritising the bottom line over all is not conducive to continued trust in the safety of the MAX. If they were too busy to do a proper safety analysis, or EVEN TO REVIEW THE TECHNICAL SPECS(!), then there is no telling how many other âgotchaâsâ they have also missed. Having managers sign off on safety analyses because it would take too long for experts to properly review them is practically criminal, and runs counter to the very purpose of aviation authorities. If it canât act independently, then what is the point of the FAA?
Apologies for the rant, but I am thoroughly disgusted with the way this has been handled.
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I am with you brother! Except for the ânot flying itâ part which I totally understand. But I also understand the 737 really well. It, even the Max, is as safe as any airliner ever made. Now the crews ALL know about the system and how to quickly disable it. Plus the system is going to change or perhaps even be eliminated altogether. If the Max survives this eoisode of corporate malfeasance heaped on top of human tragedy and blind oversight, it will be totally safe. Having said that, I see avoiding it as rational.
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Oh, dear lord, thatâs heartbreaking.
@smokinhole Thanks for the appreciation, but I donât think I made my point very well. I wonât fly on the 737 MAX because of the culture of cutting corners to meet the deadline during its certification.
Sorry in advance for the upcoming rant: 
I work in the medical technology sector, and there are a number of parallels between that and aerospace. The process of risk management when designing / introducing new equipment relies on checks made along the way. But each check must necessarily have the potential to miss a serious problem or defect. For example, physical tests can generate erroneous results, risk assessments can fail to identify sources of risk or their consequences. The way that risk to the end user is minimised is by having a large array of checks of a variety of types and, like layers of Swiss cheese, you hope that all the holes donât line up.
When corners are cut because of pressure to get things done quickly the quality of those checks is reduced, and the holes in the Swiss cheese effectively get bigger. If you add pressure to reach a predetermined outcome the effect is worse, because those checks are not performed with the correct degree of criticality. The end result is that the confidence in the checking process is impaired.
In the case of the 737 MAX, that is what appears to have happened. And therefore, if one system (MCAS) can get through the net, and there will be other safety critical systems that have been tinkered with and potentially not been properly scrutinised, there is a higher chance of other flaws being present and undetected.
Nothing less than a complete review of everything by the FAA with a critical eye, and possibly repeat safety tests and analyses, can bring that risk estimate back down where it should have been in the first place, because the system of checks was broken during certification. Only that would get me on those planes. I am happy to fly on any other 737 though - as you say they have demonstrated their airworthiness over many years.
Oh, and this is all just my opinion, and as ever I may well be completely wrong.
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