Boeing safety system not at fault, says chief executive
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I watched the actual event and this is generally accurate. He maintained that all accidents are a result of a series of events, all of which would have to occur for there to be a crash.
He did not say that MCAS was not at fault - the opposite, in fact, since he said they were testing a new version of MCAS to prevent future crashes.
The reason MCAS is there is that the 737 was too low to the ground to fit newer, bigger, more fuel-efficient engines under the wing, which is what Boeing’s customers wanted, so they had to move the engines forward and compensate for the resulting handling effects in software.
Without some form of MCAS there would be no 737-MAX at all, and it’s not fair to say that the whole plane was a corner cutting exercise either, it was an attempt to improve an older, proven design driven by customer demand.
I would argue that they applied a software kludge on a design, which is basically no more fit to fly in such a configuration.
They did that because Airbus' 320 NEO put them into full throttle panic mode. Espeically since American, a lifelong Boeing customer, considered a pretty big order with Airbus.
So, instead of a completely new clean-sheet design (which they considered) they rushed a plane to market, which needed to be fixed with software because it's inherently not fit to fly without such fixes and slapped a 737 sticker onto the plane because of competitive advantage.
The obviously dodgy shenanigans applied in the certification process also don't really help.
Is that what it was designed and certified to do? Ouch.
So it was designed and certified to be able to nudge the nose down a certain amount. Then they changed it to be able to force the nose down much more severely. And it did.
Without being an expert, it sure sounds like the Boeing "safety system" is at fault here...
===
After the Lion Air Flight 610 crash, Boeing for the first time provided to airlines details about MCAS. Boeing’s bulletin to the airlines stated that the limit of MCAS’s command was 2.5 degrees.
That number was new to FAA engineers who had seen 0.6 degrees in the safety assessment.
“The FAA believed the airplane was designed to the 0.6 limit, and that’s what the foreign regulatory authorities thought, too,” said an FAA engineer. “It makes a difference in your assessment of the hazard involved.”
If your design and certification criteria are insufficient, you can meet your design and certification criteria and still experience a failure.
He's saying that's what Boeing said. I'm sure it isn't what they meant, but it is what they said.
And as a result nobody analyzed the software design to determine whether a fault in the AoA sensor could cause the MCAS to perform in a state inconsistent with aerodynamics. And nobody who was working on the AoA readout was aware that the AoA sensor fault indicator would also indicate a problem with MCAS. What he's strongly implying is that this was a mistake on Boeing's part.
However what he can't do is come out and say "I'm sorry guys. We fucked up. Our systems people failed to fully and properly account for this new system in the design criteria and as a result we failed to dedicate enough engineering resources to ensuring that faulty sensor inputs to this system couldn't result in a crash."
Not sure if he is trying to push the blame onto the FAA or imply that the FAA agrees MCAS isn't at fault.
The thing is: if Boeing can’t precisely pinpoint the fault, how should anybody else? And if nobdy else can and Boeing won’t, why would you trust them as a customer?
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...
"The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes."
"Crappy sensor failure, crappy software failure, crappy aerodynamic failure" would be the chain of events, because the pilots did everything right.
The pilots in Ethiopian and all the passengers paid with their lives for a whole world to learn that.
The world knows because one pilot tried to partially reconstruct the conditions on his own in an older simulator, as there were effectively almost no new simulators because the Boeing's selling point was that the new model of the plane is same as an old one model, just to avoid the recertification and pilot retraining. So the said pilot did the test for youtube, showed that what the pilots probably did matched the emergency procedure, and that exactly that following the procedure most probably results in the crash, but had to remove the video once his employer became aware of what he did.
I've posted the link to that original source then, but HN moderators marked it then as a "dupe":
https://leehamnews.com/2019/04/03/et302-used-the-cut-out-swi...
Of course there are always multiple factors, but all the evidence points to the MCAS system as a major contributor to these catastrophes.
I don't know who's advising Boeing on their crisis management and media strategy, but they're doing it wrong.
Every time Boeing attempts to sidestep or minimize this it makes me trust them less.
Take a lesson from the Tylenol poisonings [0] and the Rogers Commission investigation of the Challenger disaster [1].
Step 1 in enlightened crisis management: accept responsibility.
Major fuckup by Boeing that cost many lives. They've already lost the narrative on this. The CEO's equivocation isn't helping.
Agreed completely, but let me be devil's advocate here.
If he accepts responsibility then boeing is presumably fully and immediately legally liable. I guess that, particularly under US culture of suing anything that moves, everyone will try to cash in to the maximal extent possible. Including airlines possibly cancelling their existing orders - might they cancel 4,700 plane orders? What would that do to the company? By how much would boeing's liability increase on a straightforward "mea culpa"?
I can't agree with his butt-covering but I can see why it's happening. There seems to be little upside to accepting the blame. Could it destroy boeing? How many jobs lost?
"Boeing employs more than 153,000 people across the United States and in more than 65 countries" <https://www.boeing.com/company/general-info/> and a whole long-tail of US jobs indirectly.
How would it affect the US economy and standing in the world (I mean, more than it's already doing now)? I'm sure he's being leant on from above.
etc.
(please note I'm presenting a possible explanation, not endorsing it. There seems no moral way out of this. The real cause is the historical stupidity that allowed this to occur, for which he should definitely swing, and a few more suits. I am NOT endorsing these things I wrote but they seem things he will have considered. NB am a brit so I'm looking at this from the outside).
This makes sense in a short-term, myopic view limited to first-order effects.
Enlightened crisis management isn't about the moral way out just for the sake of morality. It's about looking ahead to the second- and third-order effects.
When Tylenol was poisoned with cyanide, Johnson & Johnson could have taken the short-term, myopic approach. They could have held press conferences to explain how this wasn't their fault, it wasn't their responsibility, that many factors contributed to the catastrophe. They could have lobbied regulators to leave Tylenol on store shelves because it was an isolated incident.
Instead, Johnson & Johnson took responsibility. They communicated continuously. They to the initiative to remove all Tylenol products from the shelves. They redesigned the product to make it tamper-evident. And they led a campaign to educate people to inspect the seal and return any product where it was broken.
This was very expensive. In the short term, Johnson & Johnson would have made more profit just concerning themselves with first-order effects.
But in the long term, second- and third-order effects dominate. J&J enhanced their image, they made the Tylenol brand more valuable, and they built a deep reservoir of trust.
Boeing should take a lesson.
In Boeing's case, the issue almost certainly is due to intentional actions taken by a number of people, and buying back existing 737 MAX8s + cancelling all future orders would amount to billions and could very well sink the company.
I think the parent comment is spot-on. Boeing is playing a game of damage control, and they're presumably being advised by some smart and experienced people. They're not accepting blame, an act which we can assume is motivated by the legal implications of doing so.
Which they've mostly already failed, so that strategy is a wash
You have to consider the four possibilities. Whether the media strategy is in the interest of
1. The flying public.
2. The Boeing as a company.
3. Boeing's stockholders.
4. The perceived interest of Dennis Muilenburg.
I'm assuming #4
That statement is a truism to deflect blame. He also blamed the pilots for not following the checklist.
Ethiopian is an interesting crash because they followed Boeing's procedure, were still in imminent danger, and then had to diverge from procedure (i.e. re-enable electronic trim to electronic adjust) but that only worsened the problem since MCAS's five second delay had elapsed.
I'd hope we're well passed blaming pilots for this one. Even Lion Air's maintenance team might deserve a little slack, as the MCAS system kept on switching between faulty AoA sensor and working one every time the aircraft was restarted, meaning the maintenance team might not have been able to reproduce the issue.
They did not follow it completely, the last item is to leave the cutout switches in cutout, which they did not.
They cut the electric trim back in and inexplicably did not correct the trim or further manage it. I suspect that Crew Resource Management was not effective at that point and both pilots were distracted.
> They cut the electric trim back in and inexplicably did not correct the trim or further manage it.
That's incorrect. They did in fact apply manual trim adjustments after the trim cutout were reset (see the graph on page 26, specifically the TRIM UP-MAN).
> I suspect that Crew Resource Management was not effective at that point and both pilots were distracted.
And I suspect you haven't read enough about this topic (or half read it like the post you're replying to) and are jumping to unfounded conclusions.
From [1] : Boeing CEO says 737 Max was designed properly and pilots did not 'completely' follow procedure
So he still can't resist smearing the pilots, despite the facts coming to light until now.
In my book Boeing changed into the epitome of an evil company, putting profits vastly before safety of their (end) customers. I would be very, very reluctant to set foot into this murder machine. Despite the additional software kludges they try to apply.
Kludges onto a 50 year old designe rendered aerodynamically unstable by bigger and diffferent positioned engines.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/29/investing/boeing-annual-m... (warning! auto-play video)
First admit full responsibility. Then at least you have a shot at people trusting you to fix it.
Personally I don't see anything wrong with the idea of the redesign. It's the execution that was the problem.
If he came out and said, look we screwed up. There should have been a backup sensor/proper training/proper manuals/software that took a bloody hint and maybe there should be more gov oversight in general because this kind of cock up should not be possible. At least then you'd believe they're actually tackling the problem.
Reading all that back, it is actually quite a lot to ask for isn't it.
You don't think that there's anything fundamentally wrong with designing an aerodynamically unstable airframe, that needs software overrides to keep the plane flying?
A 737 shouldn't fly like a fighter jet.
If they had known that MCAS is disabled for 15 seconds by pilot trim inputs, they could have saved the plane. Toward the end of the flight they went off-book and re-enabled auto trim, blipped the trim a few times and 15 seconds later MCAS jumps on and dives them into the ground. All they needed to do was keep making small trims.
I understand it as "if they were able to consistently, all the time, until they land, fight the plane which was trying to kill them every 15 seconds turning the nose to the ground, resulting all the time in even harder position (due to the forces involved) they would..."
Flying death trap indeed.
He says MCAS is a “system that’s designed to provide handling qualities to the pilot that meet pilot preferences.” That’s somewhat economical with the truth. It’s designed more to meet the airline’s preference not to have to retrain their pilots, and Boeing’s preference to recover lost market share from Airbus.
For my entire life I'd thought (rightly) that "aircraft are the safest mode of travel" - this issue has for the first time ever made me realize that aircraft safety is not an absolute. People making planes put up with all the same crap I do at work.
As if Boeing wasn't responsible for the faulty data and the poor programming that caused the plane to nose into the ground?
I suppose we should just go ahead and blame the earth for being in the flight path as the leading factor in the crash.
Really, after all that they're still going to hide part of that arguably critical system behind a (presumably paid-for) option ?
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-crash-boeing-ao...
He is selling this point hard. The problem is the chain is short and every chain has Boeing's fingerprint on it.
The longer he takes about it, the worse it will get.