Boeing Was ‘Go, Go, Go’ to Beat Airbus with the 737 Max
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This was a particularly weird detail, I thought.
The Max cockpit eliminated the five remaining standby gauges, but all primary flight information had already been moved to flat screens.
His internal assembly designs for the Max, he said, still include omissions today, like not specifying which tools to use to install a certain wire, a situation that could lead to a faulty connection. Normally such blueprints include intricate instructions.
I hope that all these failures are investigated and addressed before the plane is allowed to fly again.
(1) 3 sensors plus majority voter.
(2) A mandatory AoA disagree indication plus some training on how to react to it.
They chose option (3): Neither. Frankly when I heard there were just two sensors and no disagree indication, my first thought was well that’s just as good as one sensor and hoping for the best, isn’t it? The “challenger moment” would have been after the meeting they decided on this.
(2) sounds like it could be airworthy, but I think Boeing might instead find that it has to add that third sensor. Airbus has three, and any rationale that Boeing only needs two because the disagreement consequences are not severe seems atop quicksand at this point.
[1] https://mooneyspace.com/topic/19801-stall-warningaoa-failure...
I do not accept that pilots must have disabled auto trim in order to prove they are the more valid input source, compared to a single alpha vane sensor. That's perverse. Pilots have to flip switches to prove they are working correctly? Yet the sensors don't have to have self-verification/disqualification, or cross check with an available second sensor?
I'm sure there are other checks as well. Also not sure if I'm missing something with this armchair analysis.
The point of the plane variant was to not perform any additional training, too.
Anyone saying that to the engineers should be considered a criminal. There is probably a whole incentive structure that lead to this and that should be upended completely.
Pilot solution:
A) turn off autopilot
B) learn how to play MCAS override, current high score 6 minutes.
Plane maker solution: Get rid of MCAS and deal with the fallout that will broadcast, and stop trying to ONLY blame pilots.
First, we don't have final reports from the investigators yet, so it's awfully early to point the finger.
Second, every major aviation accident is multi-factorial. It's never just one failure that causes it.
If it does turn out to be the faulty AOA indicator causing the electric trim to go nose-down, there are still a number of other obvious contributing factors in addition to the faulty sensor.
The public is demanding low airfare prices because they are getting squeezed by the increasing disparity of wealth worldwide. Wages are not rising as fast as prices, and as the cost of doing business with China slowly rises due to the trade war, prices start to creep up and the squeeze increases.
Airlines respond by flying pilots with lower time and lesser training, paying them less, and working them harder.
Pilots spend less time in the simulator working on abnormal conditions, and while they are undoubtedly great at monitoring normal flights and navigating controlled airspace, they have less experience hand-flying approaches and dealing with rare equipment failures and emergencies.
Every pilot should have adequate simulator time to be competent with every emergency procedure for which there is a checklist, but that is not the reality. The three seconds allotted by the FAA to diagnose critical systems failures is simply not enough if you can't find and execute the correct checklist in that time period.
In the old days, every single pilot from a Cessna 152 on up knew exactly what a badly trimmed airplane felt like and how to fix it instantly. When you felt that extra force on the controls, you would instinctively rotate the trim wheel in the direction of the force that you were needing to apply.
Same for electric trim systems: if the force doesn't ease the way it should, you have a runaway and you need to interrupt power to the electric trim system.
But that is hand-flying, stick-and-rudder-type stuff. If you're not getting the hand-flying time and the simulated failure time, you just don't develop that instinct.
It's not entirely Boeing's fault that an aircrew can't recognize and counter a runaway electric trim, no matter what the details in the flight manual. It's only reasonable to assume that basic level of competency.
This isn't even approximately true. Pretty much all passenger jets since the 50s and 60s have had yaw dampeners, for example.
Put yourself in the seat of a pilot who has flown an electro-hydraulic 737 for years. Something "funny" seems to be going on with the trim, so you take control and the trim seems to be working perfectly while you manually toggle it, but then the MCAS kicks back in after 5 seconds and tries to push the nose down again. This kind of behavior is coming from a system Boeing did not tell the pilots about.
No, but a rudder hardover might ;). The 747 and 767 were sometimes equipped with stick pushers as well.
True for the first crash. However, no longer true by the time of the second crash.
The first crash can be chalked up to engineering errors, corner cutting and the desire not having to retrain and recertify pilots.
The second crash is outright criminal by Boeing, for not immediately pulling that plane out of circulation after the Lion Air disaster. Regardless of the cost (which will be much, much more expensive after crash 2).
Their cozy relationship with the FAA also didn't help and I hope the people responsible pay dearly for that.
Throwing the pilots under the bus is how they tried to handle that PR desaster. Doesn't seem to work well, though.
Now whether or not such information is widely known among all pilots is another matter altogether.
I think it takes around thirty seconds for the trim motor to move you from one end (where both crashed planes had it) of the jackscrew to the other. And that's with the motor! If you cut out the motor because it was literally trying to kill you -- and as Boeing advises you to -- you'll have to use the hand crank and it will take much longer. Runaway trim at low altitude is death.
It really seems to me that the MAX as shipped was not plausibly airworthy (due to the use of a single sensor). I think even Boeing's going to agree eventually.
I have to preach the idea that networks and computing are not magic. While yes, I cam talk to people all over the world, the information I'm trying to communicate still has to be put in front of a person to be communicated.
An aircraft company should treat information dissemination to pilots as as critical a toolchain as their supply and manufacturing processes.
If your tool cannot be used safely, your job isn't done, no matter what your marketing people say.
If it were a financial services, or big data cpmpany maybe I'd lend credence to the safety of leaving that out.
Not aviation. There is too much at risk there. Flight is the equivalent of riding a bubble of air to your destination, which necessitates the continuous balancing of aerodynamic forces, facilitated by increasingly complex hybrid systems of direct human control and automation.
At the end of the day though, a pilot/plane combination should be able to be salvaged even with catastrophic loss of piloting aids, even with catastrophic loss of integrity of the automation on board.
Automation should make flying a plane easier. Not render pilots ineffective when it malfunctions or fails.
There have been nearly 1,400 fatalities with the A320, with some pilots blaming the fly-by-wire systems, but many of those happened before the age of Twitter and social media virality of this sort of thing so who knows what the public reaction would be today.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-plane-denial-sb/ai...
These incidents are almost always the result of a combination of errors ranging from negligent engineering and documentation to mechanical defects to human (pilot) error. We simply don't know all the facts in these two crashes.
The publicly available information to me indicates negligent documentation (pilot manuals should have been updated to reflect the new mode and how to treat the issue similarly to runaway trim), negligent sales practice (the AoA disagree feature shouldn't be an option), and poor reactions by the pilots involved. But that's purely speculation at this point: there could very well be some other causes instead of or in addition to these.
Im not a comercial plane enthusiast either.
There's no serious argument here. It isn't airworthy on an airliner to have a system with flight control capability using one sensor with no redundancy. It doesn't happen anywhere else and there are regulations that forbid it. Airbus uses AoA for autopilot and therefore puts three AoA sensors on the plane with majority voting.
It appears that Boeing (during certification) either lied about the severity of MCAS failure, or lied and said they were using two sensors when they weren't.
Looking at the chart since 1980, the 737 and 320 lines have had eerily similar sales records: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_between_Airbus_and...
So it's quite possible that Boeing will see limited impact from these crashes. But no clocks are getting cleaned.
The MD-11 even included "a partly computer-driven horizontal stabilizer. Updates to the software package made the airplane's handling characteristics in manual flight similar to those of the DC-10" [1]
Sounds like Boeing might have dusted off an old MD idea.
I think you're probably right, they will improve the systems, improve the training, probably pay some sort of settlement, and as long as no smoking-gun evidence of deliberate malfeasance is found (ala Volkswagen Dieselgate), they will survive. Heck, Volkswagen survived, anyway.
Also, there's already a 737-700, 737-800, 737-900.
And airbus cannot ramp up production enough to fill the whole midrange single isle market.
So Boeings will be bought by airlines. Or the exopansions will be crippled and tickets will fly trough the roof.
It is go go go all the time. Except, it is not a plane.