No call for simulators in new Boeing 737 Max training proposals
reuters.com
reuters.com
In the video he goes over what an MCAS failure/runaway stabilizer would feel like to the pilots, the troubleshooting steps, and at the end of the video he shows a simulated runaway MCAS failure in a sim.
He also has a few other videos on the MCAS accidents. I'd highly recommend watching all of them; he does a very good job at putting everything into perspective in a way that the news does not.
'I am not doing that...' is now on my most terrifying phrases to hear.
I thought the communication was really interesting. Air France Flight 447[1] crashed due to the pilot flying pulling back on the stick for over a minute while in a stall, overriding the command inputs of the pilot monitoring. The other pilots realized that the pilot flying had been pulling the stick back the entire time only a few seconds before impact, and at that point it was too late to recover. The transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder are pretty chilling.
That exact situation isn't exactly possible in a Boeing because the sticks are linked, but there were a several crashes in the modern era that occurred because of communication issues in the cockpit. Of course, in addition to better communication, we have systems like MCAS which are designed to prevent pilots from repeating the mistakes of AF447. In this case it obviously didn't work out that well.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
2. https://quizlet.com/45297265/crew-resource-management-crm-th...
3. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/u-s-p...
People are right to be out for blood. This mistake cost hundreds of lives, and was clearly a case of criminally negligent behavior.
(I'm posting this as ancillary information, not to be contrarian! I might be entirely wrong; that was just my interpretation of Mentour Pilot's video. His resources are absolutely fantastic[3], and I think anyone interested in aviation should certainly take a look!)
[1] Juan Browne is a former USAF pilot who's currently an FO on the 777 and has 40 years flying experience. I don't think he has experience with the 737, but I think his coverage is valuable too.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ora-yZCTtpg
[3] You're absolutely right! Mentour is a training captain on the 737 (737-800, I believe) and oversees certifying new pilots/captains. One of the things I like about him most is that regardless of seniority, he's incredibly humble and has said in earlier videos that he occasionally flies right seat to maintain that skill for training others. Great guy! I really wish more people were like him.
The checklist to fix MCAS and runaway trim is supposed to be the same, so I guess the question is whether the trim wheels move in a substantially less noticeable way with an MCAS failure. I certainly can't say.
I could totally see someone hearing the trim wheels running when they are trying to trim out the MCAS adjustments and assuming that the wheel is moving in the opposite direction that it actually is. In a high-stress situation a mistake like that seems incredibly plausible.
Pilots have to take less training to operate a proven deadly aircraft, with software patch on top, than I have to take to work in an office job... that's fucking insane.
How can we make Boeing feel some pain for this? You know, actually enough for them to start taking this seriously.
Not saying they are right, but they just don't have many good moves.
Doing the Right thing leaves them years behind. It will also limit airline expansion. Airbus cannot pick up slack and there are no other players in the market.
It is a clusterfuck but like it or not 737 MAX is too big to fall(pun intended) .
No, they don't.
They deserve for their executives and PEs to be behind bars, and for the company to go out of business. Let Airbus or the Chinese buy it and take it over. We've shown that we're completely unable to properly regulate companies like this where safety is so critical, so we need to let someone else take over that task. Foreign ownership of Boeing would put those regulators in charge, which would only be an improvement.
Sounds a lot like America these days... Worse, regulation is seen as bad here, and Trump has directed everyone under him to eliminate as much regulation as possible, and then some. Why would you trust regulation from a country that explicitly doesn't believe in regulating?
This isn't some stupid race. This is making a machine that can safely be flown.
The market doesn't need a risk profile that drops plane loads out of the bloody sky Because a company pushed their people into hiding things from their customers.
I'm normally all for free market optimization when it makes sense, and all actors act in reasonably good faith concomitant with the magnitude of lives they are endangering. That didn't happen here, and the regulatory agency responsible for making it happen was powerless to do it's job to stop or raise a red flag on it either.
By no definition of sound risk assessment should this plane have flown without training. Period. Boeing failed its job at being a trustworthy corporate citizen in a high-impact infrastructural industrial vertical.
Honestly, I'm not sure how to get over this one. I don't believe some sort of fine and move on is really sufficient in terms of contrition. It won't bring those people back, and it seems a bit too "cost of doing business"-like to successfully act as a deterrent to future malfeasance.
Breaking up maybe? Clearly competition in the sector seems to have devolved into a duopoly to some degree.
>Breaking up maybe? Clearly competition in the sector seems to have devolved into a duopoly to some degree.
You can't really break up a company like Boeing; they aren't even vertically integrated anyway. Just like a carmaker, they get their components from other companies. They don't even make their own engines (those come from Pratt & Whitney, GE, Rolls Royce, etc.) the way car companies do.
How we "get over" this is simple, though I don't see it happening in Trump's America any time soon: you prosecute Boeing executives and engineers (the PEs) for criminal negligence, and throw them in prison. The company goes under, and gets bought out by one of its competitors.
As for duopoly, that's currently the case, but China's aircraft manufacturer is working hard on getting their aircraft certified, so if that happens there will now be 3 big competitors in the market, which is generally the sign of a mature but competitive market. If Boeing gets bought out, it'd probably be 2. But I'd feel much safer with Airbus using Boeing's facilities to build Airbus-designed airplanes, which have been properly certified by European regulators.
In my estimation, a culture change is critical. There cannot be an attitude that sees airworthyness certification as something to be gotten around. There cannot be a tolerance for short cuts. The project isn't done until it is done. A baby takes 9 months as it were.
Perhaps review the practice of type certificate grandfathering? Seems like if anything, any new plane, even if based on an old design should still have it's own type, even if most of the data is the same as the old one.
Prove negligence as the facts allow, keep a thumb on Boeing until ample evidence of cultural improvement has taken place, and possibly tune up the regulatory framework to make sales oriented pitches like "no-retraining required" less likely? Or at least define some degree of modification that legally requires pilot/operator retraining?
Then just let the legal system resolve the remaining civil suits?
I don't think the entire company needs to be rendered no more, but a line in the sand was crossed, so I believe regulatory escalation is in this case both warranted and justified.
If foreign airlines all cancel their orders for 737MAX planes, they could very well be forced into bankruptcy.
The type certification could have been a non-issue with proper communication. That didn't happen because someone at Boeing made a terrible call, and persists in asserting they've done nothing wrong, when the fact of the matter is that the error is so obvious in it's nature, that the rest of the world is capable of piecing the failure together even without having seen the actual data, which as it comes out, proves to only be reinforcing the case against Boeing.
Maybe it isn't enough to stand up in a court of law...yet. Everything that has been publicized thus far, however, paints a picture where criminal negligence is looking more and more like a foregone conclusion.
In short, rationality be damned. Someone made the irrational decision that the upside of getting to market sooner by cutting corners was worth risking 300+ innocent lives. People who put their faith in Boeing that they did their due diligence as required by law of executive and PE alike.
I agree with you ReptileMan. It isn't somehow beyond the human mind. Only a human being would put a financial windfall ahead of ensuring the safety of eventual passengers, have the decision blow up in their faces, then dig in and insist they did nothing wrong despite evidence to the contrary.
The corporation will be fine if they can manage to maintain goodwill. I don't envy those involved with approving the MAX however.
As for airline expansion, Airbus can certainly pick up the slack and double their production capacity in short order. All they have to do is buy up the facilities from a now-defunct airplane manufacturer in the Seattle area. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of recently-unemployed engineers, technicians, and other manufacturing personnel happy to take a job there too.
A once-proud engineering company that has become nothing more than a money-grabbing machinery it seems.
There's abundant evidence contrary to that.
If the US pilots unions are okay with it, I'll be okay with it. They haven't crashed any 737 Max yet.
Ordinarily sensor disagree would give you some idea what could be affected because you've had training to tell you this. Not in the MCAS upset due to faulty AOA sensor case.
Until the reports are complete, I think it's getting out over one's skis to say would would have been obvious to U.S. pilots.
Of the three US airlines that have Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 jets in their fleet, only two — American and Southwest — paid for these upgrades, the Times confirmed. A United Airlines spokesperson told the Times that its jets don’t include these upgrades because its pilots use other data to fly their planes.)
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/22/18277694/boeing-737-...
What does this mean? Pure PR spin? Isn't MCAS a mandatory system?
Anyone doubting that Boeing needs to have its authority wrt. to airplane certifications cut should ponder what they are proposing here.
Manifestly not.
(And why are you trying to "get around the regulations" anyway? Shouldn't you be complying with the regulations, not getting around them?)
Regulations are a double edged sword. Now... a cheap extra sensor and better choices would have saved lives here, but the reason they made the choices they did was because of the regulations placed on them.
To your wording, complying with a regulation doesn’t mean landing dead in the middle of a range, but teetering on the ragged edge if needed.
If your immediate thought it “well just add more regulations” I’m afraid you may not grasp how building things in regulated markets work. There is always something to skirt. Government can never be big enough.
Apaprently only when it's determined that the sensor is in the hazardous and not in the catastrophic category.
While Boeing self certified it as hazardous I, for one, would think that two losses of brand new planes within month of each other is a pretty catastrophic event.
I dealry hope that the Europeans and others are not as complacent to accept the "no simulator training required" shtick by a borderline criminal organization.
Despite HN not liking the truth about the situation, causes, and effects... Boeing was within all regulations at all times it seems.
Even their poor PR now, and anything short of scrapping the plane as the other thing many will accept, they’re working within the rules.
If pilots rotated into training time these changes could be addressed in simulators on a scheduled basis the airline could plan for.
The 737 was a smaller complement for the 707 and 727 when introduced, it was never the largest plane flying.
In any case, the 1960's foreign body impact regulation has not been updated so far as I know, and at the time it was designed for the largest civilian passenger aircraft then flying. The 737 fits in, the 747 (introduced only two years later if I'm not mistaken) does not.
That's why having the same type number is attractive.
I think that they are still trying to save the type rating, but I feel this ship has sailed.
That trip would no doubt be statistically safer than the flying we already do in single engine piston aircraft (itself an operation that prioritizes cost over the safety of flying a twin turboprop or twin jet that we can’t afford to own and feed).
Maybe, but it'd be statistically less safe than flying on a different model of aircraft, such as one from Airbus.
Boeing's decision not to require simulator training may backfire on it, however, if enough passengers say that's not good enough, and vote their concerns by avoiding flights on this model, or if other regulators (or even the FAA) insist on simulator training. Boeing is doubling-down on the issue.
I imagine that effectively cripples the value of using the plane without those remedies.
There may in fact be some obscure treaties and trade deals, among ICAO complexities, that complicate sovereignty on this issue.
Seems to be a trend these days.
They did until the 737MAX had two crashes within a month. This changed everything: the FAA refused to ground this plane until literally every other ATC organization in the world stood up and restricted it from their airspace. The FAA only capitulated to save face after the plane was effectively banned from leaving US airspace.
Over the years I've designed/ implemented small scale industrial systems and whenever there was an important set of data to be read in via sensors, there'd always be a backup, or ideally triple redundancy. Sensors are cheap & using multiple can simplify a whole lot of issues.
Even once, I made an uber simple 'level' sensor on a front end loader (using two slightly rotated Mercury switches). It's only time I didn't consider redundancy, because it was not important at all if it failed.
What I don't get is how the engineers at Boeing didn't use redundant sensors. Have I misunderstood something? I just assumed that working on aircraft means that something like sensor failure should be baked into all decisions and implementations because of the -ve ramifications of things going wrong: like 2 planes dropping out of the sky!
Historically, yes, but within the last decade or less it's all gone to pot.
Detroit used to be a great city with a booming economy. Not now.
How many models of car have a 1 in 175 total loss rate?
> it would still be more dangerous to drive to the airport than it would be to fly on a 737 Max
context is relevant in a discussion.