This goes beyond aircraft at the moment. The NTSB and America in general used to lead. Now it seems the world is going to get on without them.
IMO, It's only a matter of time before public pressure forces either the government, or the carriers themselves to ground the planes.
Is that actually an option for Kayak?
The usual sites I use to search for flights do not allow filtering on airplane type (except maybe "exclude prop planes").
I had heard on my local NPR this morning that they had already done so, apparently they have just been receiving ever increasing requests for this feature.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-booking-hldg-kayak/kayak-...
Boeing brought $70B into Washington State's economy in one year.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeingrsquos-economic-...
Boeing is a major defense contractor, providing transportation, weapons, and other supplies to the US Military.
The plane is not unstable. A pilot who is trained for the actual flight characteristics absolutely can handle the plane. The problem is they weren't required to get that training, because 737's still all share the same type rating as if they all have substantially the same flight characteristics. Which is generally true except one particular attitude, high angle of attack.
It's an open question to me (I'm no one, but I am a pilot and a flight instructor in a previous life) exactly how different stall avoidance could be with MCAS disabled (which is indirectly done by setting stabilizer trim to cutoff) once it has already induced a dive by having fought with it a little bit too long. If it's a normal procedure to disable the very software abstraction that means you don't need a type rating for this airplane, but the stall avoidance technique is substantially different from other 737s - that's very concerning to me. Not that the plane is unstable or unsafe. But that there's a disconnect in pilot knowledge and actual airplane flight characteristics with this abstraction turned off.
Before fly by wire, it was always worth going for stability because pilots couldn't fly unstable aircraft. Fly by wire enabled making flyable unstable aircraft, and so trading off some inherent stability for more maneuverability (military) or higher efficiency (civilian) became an accepted design option.
In the case of the Max8, it's always on and there is additional training needed to react quickly when this happens. I think all current pilots who are watching this situation should know what to do at this point, but the needed the awareness brought by the situation. In the two crashes so far, it seems like the pilots had years of commercial experience.
On another note, I don't think the 737 Max is inherently unstable, so I'm not even sure this line of reasoning applies at all or even in part.
I suspect the blame lies with Boeing's management and with the FAA for being complicit with Boeing.
>Boeing swapped out the engines for new models, which, together with airframe tweaks, promised a 20 percent increase in fuel efficiency. In order to accommodate the engine’s larger diameter, Boeing engineers had to move the point where the plane attaches to the wing. This, in turn, affected the way the plane handled. Most alarmingly, it left the plane with a tendency to pitch up, which could result in a dangerous aerodynamic stall. To prevent this, Boeing added a new autopilot system that would pitch the nose down if it looked like it was getting too high.
Because of the changes to the autopilot system it functions differently than pilots expect it to during an emergency situation on this particular plane.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/ethiopian-air-crash-whe...
But that's more expensive for Boeing's customers, so to make it more attractive, they decided to "paper over" the differences in behaviour with software. Fly it like any other 737, and if it starts to stall in conditions where other 737s wouldn't, the software corrects things!
Except, except, like all abstractions, this one's leaky -- and they've only shifted the difference in behaviour from "stalls at angles that would surprise a 737 pilot" to "noses-down in ways that would surprise a 737 pilot" along with "can't be muscle-overridden the way the autopilot on other 737s can be".
What's new in the MAX is the autotrim doesn't terminate when the pilot gives back pressure on the yoke if MCAS senses high angle of attack, it will do an uncommanded nose down (every I think 10s). This is to compensate for the MAX engine nacelle which provides a meaningful amount of lift to cause a pitch up moment in high angles of attack, unlike previous 737's.
I wonder whether the stall behavior between 737's is slightly dissimilar or very dissimilar without MCAS, between 737NG and 737 MAX? And then quantifying that difference. I also seriously wonder if it's even slightly more likely for a pilot to induce a stall as a result of not knowing about the natural uncorrected stall behavior of the new design compared to previous designs. MCAS is not my concern, it's how the plane flies without it that I wonder about.
Also, WSJ is reporting that the MCAS software update mandated by the FAA in an airworthiness directive was delayed due to the nearly five week government shutdown. I'm already imagining the tweets...
The biggest problem here is that the new autopilot system relies on a pair of Angle of Attack sensors. Those sensors are prone to damage, and if the sensor is damaged, the erroneous information it reports can engage the new autopilot system. One of the reasons why Southwest thinks it's immune to this problem, by the way, is because they paid extra for a system that displays an alert when the Angle of Attack sensors disagree with each other, so pilots are aware of what's wrong and can take action to stop it. Most other carriers, including Ethiopian and Lion Air, didn't.
Also, other autopilot systems can be disengaged by pulling back on the stick. This one can't: you have to manually disengage the system.
Pilots were never informed of any of this because Boeing wanted to maintain the fiction that the 737 MAX is no different than previous versions of the 737.
Boeing announced that it had been working on a flight control software upgrade that includes updates to the MCAS flight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training. It's coming in few weeks and expected to be made mandatory by April by an FAA airworthiness directive.
If so, wouldn't that suggest a failure mode other than the one that's viewed as a training issue?
See, eg, " Reliability of Eyewitness Reports to a Major Aviation Accident" https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&co....
A plane crash is a very fast, horrifying tragedy to witness. It shouldn't be surprising that peoples' imperfect memories afterwards are completely scrambled
> almost all the eyewitnesses, including experienced pilots, gave grossly inaccurate accounts when compared to the film record
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airplane-witness...
The current "admin" is full of Boeing people. Also, there's no one doing anything at the FAA.
Ah, good old kleptocracy. Who could have predicted this?
The right thing to do is ground the plane and figure out a proper remediation going forward.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169555027...
Let's not be naive that any major political party can be ethical, Obama simply had a nicer public image but there were still scandals* during his administration.
* = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obama_administration_...
No, real differences in ethical conduct (both in overall level, insofar as that is meaningful, and more importantly in particular details) do exist between administrations, even within the same party.
> there were still scandals during his administration.
A scandal can exist without an actual ethical lapse, and in any case, not all scandals, even among those involving actual ethical lapses (much less, all sets of such scandals) are equal.
For example, this is on that list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One_photo_op_inciden...
Not sure why many people can't fathom seeing both parties as unethical.
I cannot fathom seeing every administration as being equally and indistinguishably unethical, however.
I think you are looking too hard for things to be upset about if you mistake someone referring to Obama's administration as ethical in contrast to Trump's as claiming Obama's was perfect.
Obama's administration was run grossly different than Trump's administration. Case in point: FAA doesn't even have a Trump-appointed administrator yet (Daniel Elwell was only appointed to the position of Deputy administrator and is only "Acting Administrator" for now).
The FAA has always had the "Boeing is a large employer and defense contractor" conflict. I'm perfectly fine with a "current management is bad" assertion.
The EU produces the only real competitor (Airbus A320), and China is in the middle of a 'Trade War' with the U.S and is trying to create a serious airplane manufacturer of their own.
>Boeing is a major defense contractor, providing transportation, weapons, and other supplies to the US Military.
I don't even know what that has to do with it, do you think if the FAA grounded 737's Boeing would... cancel all existing contracts with the World's largest military?
Maybe I'm very wrong. I hope I am. But it's the sense I've gotten about American politics and regulatory capture.
There seems to be a lot of feelings going around. I just don't get why they're only going against the U.S and Boeing, who obviously don't want another 737 Max crash if only because that would definitely call the entire program (and $500 billion) into question, when the EU hosts literally the only competitor to Boeing.
Correction: America used to dictate.