I've always held the FAA in high regard, and think they do a good job. Are they really being negligent here? Or is the media just looking for something to spark outrage?
Can anyone with more specific knowledge of aircraft safety weigh in?
The US can tacitly blame "third world" pilots all they want, but with 300 people dead already, I think it's important for the FAA and Boeing to say exactly what is going on, especially since the planes are in use in the USA.
There is a debate over if the plane's hardware, software, or pilots are at fault-- either the planes should be grounded or the exact protocol should be published all over for the world to know, since it is the passengers' lives at stake.
[1 https://www.economist.com/gulliver/2015/01/29/a-crash-course...].
[2 https://www.riskcomm.com/visualaids/riskscale/datasources.ph...].
EDIT: The Economist source that estimates a plane's p(crash) is questionable, for a passenger plane. If anyone wants to dig into this further, I found this source too: http://www.baaa-acro.com/crash-archives
Meaningless and misleading comparison at best.
According to numbers released by Boeing [1] itself, the original 737 designed back in 1967 had a hull loss of 1.75 per million flights, the 737 NG designed in the late 1990s to early 2000s had a hull loss rate of 0.27 per million flights. So Boeing 737 had a 7X less likelihood to crash as the results of 30 years of improvements. 25X difference is going to send the highly unsafe 737 MAX design back to the WWII level. Now think again whether WWII era aircrafts with similar crash likelihood should be allowed to carry passengers in huge volume in 2019.
You number proves one thing and one thing only - FAA has the legal and moral obligations to ground all those highly dangerous 737 MAX immediately.
[1] http://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/company/about_b...
I have a suspicion that if you were to remove all instances of terrorism and look at the crash rate of Boeing vs Tupolev, almost all Boeing planes would be way better except for the MAX 8.
That is probably a meaningful piece of data too.
The FAA and NTSB are very good at what they do, one of the very few examples of government services that work well together with industry, give them some time.
If we assume this airplane is safe, we can apply that probability to it and then ask P(2 Crashes|N Miles & 350 New Planes).
You would then have a probability for this just being bad luck, and compare that against your prior that this is a safe plane.
I haven’t done the math, but my gut says it would point to grounding the plane.
The MAX8 fleet has been operational for about six months. Assuming 3 flights per day: 350 * 6 * 30 * 3 = 0.189 million flights.
To estimate the probability of two accidents, we can use a Poisson distribution with x = 2 and μ = 0.189 * 0.39 = 0.0737
P(x=2) = e^(-μ)μ^x / x! = 0.25%
I.e your gut feeling is correct (if my math is correct, that is). If one uses the estimate from a sibling comment of 1 crash in 11 million fights, the probability decreases further to 0.01% Actually the correct calculation is:
1 - P(x=0) - P(x=1) = 0.26%
since we are looking for the probability of there being more than one plane crash -- not just the probability of there being exactly two plane crashes.
Look at things like Alaska Airlines Flight 261 [0] - safe airframe, deficient maintenance, plane loses all pitch control and impacts ocean. Yes, this still means that Boeing needs to improve things - single points of failures are never OK on a plane - but it also doesn't (IMO) mean the plane is fundamentally unsafe without those fixes.
(You can pretty much always make statistical inference, with uncertainty going up with the lack of data)
If we assume that the average MAX 8 has been in service for a year (first delivery was a little less than 2 years ago), and conducts 4 flights a day, we get this [0] - a mean of 1/250000. Still worse than 1/11000000, but only by a factor of 50 instead of 50 thousand.
0: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?x=0&y=0&i=beta+distribut...
I suggest you try the math as the odds are reasonably high.
This changes if you start talking about crashes since the first commercial flight, but those are again different numbers.
"Guts" are notoriously good at statistical inference
And no, the FAA is not really that good, general aviation pilots die all the time from negligence and the FAA doesn't enforce the rules when pilots violate them (in particular low altitude flying).
That being said, the government gives general aviation pilots a fair amount of freedom once they get their license. There are rules and they are enforced; particularly when violations put the general public at risk. But there's also recognition that it's quite possible to regulate GA out of existence like a lot of other countries have, and that has pretty negative consequences in terms of pilot availability for other purposes. Therefore, regulations scale with the amount of danger the public is exposed to.
For example, ultralight aircraft (single place, <254 lbs, <=5gal fuel, <=55kts) are virtually unregulated; the idea being that they're so small and light that they aren't much danger to others. LSA/sport (1-2 place, <=1320lbs, <=120kts) are regulated; require a license and inspections but less stringent than a private license, and so on. Private licenses can't be used for commercial purposes, and generally speaking more training and endorsements or ratings are required for eg. aircraft with multiple engines; those that are >=12,500 lbs, those that land on water, those that have old-school landing gear, etc. etc.
§ 91.119 Minimum safe altitudes: General.
Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes:
(a)Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
(b)Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
(c)Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.
(d)Helicopters, powered parachutes, and weight-shift-control aircraft. If the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface -
(1) A helicopter may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (b) or (c) of this section, provided each person operating the helicopter complies with any routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the FAA; and
(2) A powered parachute or weight-shift-control aircraft may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (c) of this section.
Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes:
(a) Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
A perfectly good airframe can have its reputation ruined with 2 incidents in a short time period.
and
"the plane is safe to fly with additional training, when given"
If the 737 MAX planes remain in the air in the USA, Boeing and US Govt are de facto saying "third world pilots clearly just don't understand how to fly our planes".
If they ground the planes, they de facto admit there is an actual safety issue.
If that is ultimately the conclusion, then it still gives the FAA and EASA a black eye, since they allowed the aircraft update without additional training for MCAS.
Best case scenario for Boeing is that the Ethiopian Airlines crash turns out to be something else. If it is MCAS related Boeing, the FAA, and EASA amongst others that green-lit the update without training have a lot to answer for.
Here's the thing. The additional training is not strictly necessary. The same procedures pilots are already trained for in previous models should have saved the aircraft. Unless investigations turn up a new problem.
Of course, one could argue that, by disclosure changes to the system, that the pilots would be able to react faster. But that's not really for us to decide.
0: Which action, if either, is definitive might differ if the stakes weren't inconvenience vs death, or if the FAA openly didn't care.
Not saying I think these are completely random. But since we don't even know the cause of the Ethopian crash yet, who's to say? The causes may very well be unrelated.
If it's random chance, Boeing should be able to prove it is random chance. Until then, the FAA should ground them.
The Ethiopian Air copilot only had 200 total hours of experience. In the US, you need an ATP certificate with a minimum of 1500 hours to even be a first officer.
Before we start throwing sand at the FAA, why not ask how a 200 hour pilot gets into the copilot seat of an airliner. Let’s also ask why Lion Air failed to fix a problem with the airspeed indicator. During a previous flight the day before the crash, the pilot reported a problem with the airspeed indicator and deactivated the anti-stall system. Lion Air didn’t fix the problem and the airplane crashed the next day. But that’s Boeing’s fault? Lion Air is a shit airline with a horrible safety record. Southwest Airlines uses only 737s and you can count their major incidents on one hand and their fatalities in over 47 years? Just 1.
Lion Air fatalities? Hundreds over multiple incidents. Ethiopian Air? Much safer than Lion Air, but much less safer than Southwest. Ethiopian has a fleet of 108 airplanes and Southwest has a fleet of 754, including 35 Max 8 planes — yet not a single incident despite flying an order of magnitude more frequently than those other airlines.
Air Canada has 24 8 Maxes in the air as does American. Along with Southwest, that’s hundreds of flights per day without incident, but then there is a crash with some third world Lion Air plane where maintenance is provided with proverbial duct tape and Ethiopia Air who has a student pilot as the first officer? Perhaps instead of grounding specific airplanes, we should ground specific airlines, because it’s clear than Ethiopian and Lion Air ought not be flying until they can figure out the basics such as maintenance and pilot training.
They have jurisdiction over the type certification as the responsible regulatory body for the nation of origin of the airframe.
These supposedly awful third world pilots and aircraft engineers have somehow been managing to fly earlier models of the 737 for decades, but when they upgrade to the MAX variant somehow two of them crash in quick succession?
That either indicates that these two events are freak accidents, or that the MAX shouldn't have the same type rating, the latter of which is on the FAA and Boeing.
Is it fair? Maybe not all of it. But I think it's completely predictable.
Hasn't news always been for-profit? If not: which news organizations (newspapers, magazines, wire services) have been run on a non-profit basis?
The only recent change (IMHO) has been higher time-to-market pressures (minutes versus hours/days).
Honestly why not ground a few hundred planes just to be safe? It doesn't bother the Netherlands or Singapore. There are other aircraft, nobody is running out.
Those dastardly politicians and bureaucrats, how dare they consider the broader consequences of their actions. /s
Alternatively:
Those poor politicians and bureaucrats, how terrible that they be forced to consider the broader consequences of their actions for once. /s
I'm not going to lose any sleep over politicians having to deal with a complex trade-off for once.
It’s mean, but I’m not surprised, given the money in the game, that Europe is acting up much faster than FAA for a Boeing airframe, and the opposite for an Airbus/DC airframe.
2) McDonnell Douglas (maker of the DC planes) is now owned by Boeing and was an American company.