What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My god, the PR on behalf of Boeing by The NY Times is embarrassing. The accidents were the result of various actions which increased the risk and decreased safety. All beginning with moving the engines forward and up which changed the flight envelope, requiring more complex systems. Followed by not informing pilots of said new systems, and additionally selling as an add on (for profit reasons) indicators which would have informed pilots whether this system was activated.
Imagine your cruise control automatically was turning on in your car, but you had no idea, and hitting the brake pedal did nothing. This is what those pilots were experiencing.
Planes aren’t hard to fly if you follow basic principles, take appropriate safety measures, and know the physics.
Responsibility for these deaths rests with Boeing.
Vehicles have predictable failure mode and systems that are integrated with each other in known and fairly standardized ways. Short of catastrophic mechanical failure (i. e the front fell off) someone with sufficient experience to recognize what is going on should be able to disable systems until some level of basic control is restored. Your brakes have nothing to do with cruise control other than having a little switch on them (usually two switches) to tell cruise control to turn off when you press them. I feel like airline pilots should in theory have that level of understanding of the systems in their aircraft since they are trained professionals and the stakes are very high so they need to be able to handle failures gracefully.
And before anyone puts words in my mouth I'm not saying Boeing isn't the most at fault party in all of this.
To someone who has no idea what "trim" is, let alone electric assist versus manual trim, MCAS, aerodynamic loading,... the brake pedal analogy gets the general point across of what it must have felt like to the pilots, to be fighting against the machine.
I agree. But you need to knowe that a system exists in the first place.
Something the manufacturer failed to document to begin with.
At least in terms of the pilot's POV. I can't quite torture anything else to sufficiently resemble what chain of business decisions Boeing made to end up having their process drive them into this error state. It'll just have to stand on it's own merit. Though I've commented on it many times with much greater detail this year.
Sounds like another smear the pilots job paid for by Boeing in order to deflect blame from their abyssimal performance.
Games like the ones Boeing was trying to play (overhauling an entire aircraft without having to change type rating and retrain pilots) directly lead to situations like this. Yes, the FAA / NTSB should have been more effective, but regulatory capture like this is common. It's ultimately Boeing's job to manage the risk: losing 2 airframes in a matter of months because pilots weren't trained on the aircraft as a result of Boeing's mismanagement has done catastrophic damage to their reputation that will take decades to repair. They will now be under a microscope for everything they do, which means they can't use a lot of the less risky cost-cutting they were likely doing before.
The net result of Boeing's machinations to keep the 737-Max at the same type rating led directly to a situation where pilots were not sufficiently trained in the functionality of the aircraft. So I have zero sympathy for the view that Boeing is not entirely responsible for this situation.
> His co-pilot was an Indonesian 10 years his elder who went by the single name Harvino[...]. Like thousands of new pilots now meeting the demands for crews — especially those in developing countries with rapid airline growth — his experience with flying was scripted, bounded by checklists and cockpit mandates and dependent on autopilots. He had some rote knowledge of cockpit procedures as handed down from the big manufacturers, but he was weak in an essential quality known as airmanship. Sadly, his captain turned out to be weak in it, too.
[...]
> [“Airmanship”'s] full meaning is difficult to convey. It includes a visceral sense of navigation, an operational understanding of weather and weather information, the ability to form mental maps of traffic flows, fluency in the nuance of radio communications and, especially, a deep appreciation for the interplay between energy, inertia and wings. Airplanes are living things. The best pilots do not sit in cockpits so much as strap them on.
Am I reading an article about airplanes or some pamphlet for essential oils or audiophile gear? "Crisp sound, deep basses, muddy mid-range, decent airmanship".
On another forum that'd make for nice copypasta:
> “31337 h4x0r”'s full meaning is difficult to convey. It includes a visceral sense of Vim motions, an operational understanding of Virtual Memory mapping and paging information, the ability to form mental maps of callstacks, fluency in the nuance of various calling conventions and, especially, a deep appreciation for the interplay between energy, scripting engines and multithreading. Computers are living things. The best coders are artisans more than engineers.
I'll be sure to keep this one saved somewhere for the next time I crash something in production.
This is really embarassing to read, due to the intense naivete to have these two sentences side by side.
I don't have time to read the article in detail at the moment but suffice to say that this is subject to considerable debate.
It sounds like Lion Air were victims of not knowing the systems in place. Ethiopian Air didn't seem to have the altitude to figure things out in a timely manner.
This isn't to say that there's not corruption and other things going sideways in these investigations, but to lay blame squarely on the countries and the airlines is really disingenuous.
An aircraft has a flight envelop that defines its flight characteristics. Not only does it define in how fast or slow or high it can operate, but how that operation changes if something changes in performance. For instance, engines under the wing and on the tail cause differences as power is gained or lost. Under the wing, an increase in power will push the nose up, and a loss in power will cause the nose to drop. This is the opposite of tail mounted engines. The whole point of training a pilot is make it instinctive to expect what the plane will do when things go wrong, ie. if you are in a tail engine plane and loose suddenly power, expect that you are moving closer to a stall. The plane will both be raising the nose and losing speed. Again, vice versa for wing mounted engine. There is also another important point. If the pilot kills/loses the engine, is a neutral failure: the flight envelope does not change. The engine is no longer providing thrust so the plane orients merely to a new position in its flight envelope. But, failure in the flight system for the Max does something totally different.
The whole point of the MCAS flight computer is make the plane appear as though it has a different flight envelope. The computer automagically adjusts the flight services, notably by moving the trim. What really bothers me about the idea of using software to alter the flight characteristics is that any failure results in the plane not only falling back on a fight envelope that isn’t what the pilot trained on, but also to a point in the flight envelope that the pilot didn’t even choose (ie. trim being in some arbitrary position). Worse than that, an MCAS failure is negative. The very point of the computer system is “out guess” and compensate for the pilot’s expectations of his or her trained flight envelop; thus, if the computer believes it is operating correctly but is not, it is actively making an arbitrary flight envelope that could be constantly changing. The pilot must deduce the MCAS software is at fault while the MCAS software is deducing the pilot is at fault.
Everything I have ever seen is that the whole point of airplane design and pilot training is to reduce flight problems to known solutions as to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. The very design of MCAS is failure must put the pilot into an unknown position and likely be actively combating the pilot’s understand of the situation. If this logic is correct, I cannot fathom how any of this is acceptable.
You are absolutely, 100% on the money. Got it in one.
The entire MCAS fiasco was born out of deadlines and deliveries at at all costs, sound engineering be damned.
The entire thing was very specifically orchestrated in such a way as to minimize the chances that any external authorities or pilots would ask any inconvenient questions.
This is the salient paragraph in this comment. It's ridiculous to blame pilots for figuring out recovery conditions when they can't be certain of the parameters in which they're operating.
The TLDR is something like: the 373 max crashes are the result of a lack of “airmanship” by pilots of the airlines of developing countries, a quality the author acknowledges he can’t define. But he feels the pilots make many “really dumb” errors and are incompetent. And the airlines that employ and often train them are crappy.
Meanwhile, Boeing is mostly blameless. Sure, there were “bewildering” design decisions but those didn’t have much to do with it. The article suggests Boeing’s mistake may have been that, unlike Airbus, it failed to appreciate how idiotic pilots have become.
Ok, I failed to make my TLDR short.
This article doesn’t go over very well with me. The problem with blaming the problem on an unmeasureable quality (“airmanship”) is that it leaves no room for a rational solution. He suggests the max should be ungrounded, but how can you do that without improving airmanship, and how can you do that if you can’t meaningfully quantify it?
While it does a great job of presenting many facts across several threads, it reads like the author wants to minimize Boeing’s responsibility and interprets all the facts through that lens.
"I don't know whether you recognized the name of the author. He is a well-known aviation writer and journalist, and the son of Wolfgang Langeweische, author of the book Stick and Rudder. Stick and Rudder has been the bible for pilots of how planes fly since its publication in the 1940s."
Who actually reads articles like this? I am genuinely curious. Comes off as information overload to me and it's hard to know what to believe.
I can listen to or view content that are hours long but in text format it's kind of overwhelming to me. Mainly because I cannot do anything else than read while I am reading which makes reading such a piece a very time-consuming task. I'd rather do something else than read such an article but it's probably for the best that there are people like you who like it as well.
His central thesis in this article might be:
Boeing became the world’s pre-eminent commercial airplane manufacturer in part because it developed a coherent design philosophy that relied on pilots’ airmanship as the last line of defense.
And that's come up before in various discussions like Langewiesche's. And here I'll underscore this article is a discussion, it's not an analysis. He does bring in myriad relevant factors like airline's being cheap, foolhardy, downright wreckless at times, literally expecting pilots to paper over their decisions. I think that is a real problem all airlines have to contend with, but the safest airlines have mostly solved it, and the least safe airlines still struggle with it and it's mostly about systemic corruption, not pilot incompetency. It's just that if you don't have particularly skilled and experienced pilots all of the time, you're playing roulette - you don't have your last line of defense all of the time. Eventually, things aren't going to work out well. And on that part of the discussion, I agree with him.
The good old boy culture of training men inadequately so that they can, at best, monitor an aircraft's systems, and then pretending that they are pilots is what killed those people.
You don't like it, but it's the truth.
I mean, I agree with you to a point. There is a delight taken by manufacturers being able to ostensibly cut training costs.
But in this case, the fact was the plane itself was unsoundly engineered. Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator. The pilot cannot be the primary carrier of blame when the equipment in the best hands available had only a 66% chance of having the pilot recover AFTER being made aware of what to expect.
Boeing is definitely the right one on whom to shoulder the blame here.
EDIT: Okay, On further consideration, I do see where you're coming from with the article's focus on "airmanship". My primary contention, however, remains. You can put a dangerous plane in the hands of a good airman, and you still have an airman flying a dangerous plane. That is the issue most seem to be bothered by. Even if the "modern pilot" doesn't have that visceral connection to their planes, that's no excuse for a manufacturer to produce one that requires extreme levels of airmanship to divine the existence of a system they couldn't admit the existence, severity, or implementation of to regulators for fear of not meeting deadlines.
Again, I agree with you to a point, and believe you did make a good point. Just wanted to make it clear that I don't think it should detract from Boeing's clear malfeasance here.
This is utter nonsense that you either made up or obtained from some unreliable source. It is categorically false.
The third pilot in the jump seat "rescued" the Lion Air accident aircraft on the previous flight by simply telling the pilots to disengage the stabilizer trim. This "rescued" aircraft continued 600 miles safely to Jakarta.
You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist.
In the words of the Air France 447 pilot just before he died from his own gross incompetence, “[Expletive], we’re dead.” And in this, I am referring to the human species.
I'm referring to the test pilots test flying the original proposed software fix before they were forced to reclassify the FCC failure condition to catastrophic severity due to one of them not successfully saving the aircraft in a simulated single-event upset. Three pilots were tapped by the FAA to try to recover from a single event upset which would result in erroneous MCAS activation.
The two military pilots saved the plane. The civilian test pilot didn't, resulting in an elevation of failure in the FCC on which MCAS runs to catastrophic, requiring a fundamental redesign.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/newly...
I assume the Seattle Times is an acceptable source?
>You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist.
Okay. Just stop. I've been knee deep in the investigation and follow-up of these disasters since about March, and had honed in on the most likely root cause given a combination of information on motives (Southwest rebate), culture issues (McDonnell Douglas management strategy from their merger), fundamental hardware/software design (single AoA sensor, no cross-checking), basic aerodynamics (consequences of the engines on end behavior), test piloting (Royal Aeronautical Society, D. P. Davies interviews), experience with control systems, and research into regulatory minutiae.
Take a spin back through my comment history if you'd like. I was working on reverse engineering with only publically available information, and got to the right conclusions within about a month. Got to sit back and check conclusions off until the Seattle Times formally published their inside story in June. Suffice it to say, I'm probably the absolute last person you'd want to accuse of "not knowing anything and being manipulable". The 737 MAX MCAS fiasco was an absolute travesty from the get go, and any competent computer scientist would have told them that a computer handling such a critical function must be very carefully designed, programmed, and clearly communicated to the end user.
I'm very opinionated in this case, mainly because I've taken the time to become informed enough to truly comprehend how badly Boeing screwed the pooch. And considering they've had whistleblower testimony that the single AoA sensor, no cross-check decision was made specifically to avoid having the FAA refuse to certify the plane on time, that eliminates the idea this was "good-faith", as good-faith would have been honoring your responsibility to the public to design a fundamentally safe and well documented aircraft in full compliance with all regulations.
Whistleblower testimony first mentioned here, in a 60 Minutes Expose on the MAX.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QytfYyHmxtc.
Thank you muchly, sir, and kindly take your misinformed speculation about my subject area knowledge elsewhere. It's my business to know why things fail, even if everyone involved is trying to do their best from keeping me from finding it. Physics don't lie. People, and especially businesses with everything on the line, on the other hand, do.
I have a great deal of respect for pilots, but I'm enough of an engineer to know when someone is putting an operator in serious danger. Boeing checked ALL the boxes.
I've said my piece. Good day, sir.
You are trying to hold pilots accountable in some vague sense, so what of holding Boeing and the FAA accountable in a non-vague sense? How is the actual delivered form of MCAS reasonable? How do you expect, given available factual flight data from both flights, MCAS induced mistrim to be avoided? Do you agree that it must be avoided at the low altitudes both of these flights were at, because it's not possible to recover from mistrim at low altitude?
If this were just about pilot training and certification, why are these airplanes grounded around the world? You really think the problem is just with a handful of "3rd world" pilots? Do you even realize that the Ethiopian Airlines pilot was one of their most experienced, and this experience as a fighter pilot is demonstrated in his recovery attempts shown in the flight data?
I mean, it's almost like some people don't know what they're talking about, yet call their nonsensical prattle "the truth" because they enjoy trying to aggravate thinking people, quite possibly the only actual skill they have.
This simple fact has simply been ignored by the broder community on hackernews who are not pilots. The airspeed indicator is tied into the AoA sensor. The moment the AoA fails the pilots recieve an airspeed disagreement warning that must be fixed using the unreliable airspeed checklist. If your analysis of what happend on either of the accident flight ignores this critical fact you are wrong.
Welcome to the Danning-Krueger effect in action
Once mistrim happens, there is no possible way to get either of the two flights in question, to either 4 degrees pitch up and 75% N1, let alone 10 degrees pitch up and 80% N1. Any power reduction will cause a pitch down and make the problem worse. All your advise would do is kill them faster. Mistrim must be avoided at low altitude, and in these two cases MCAS induced mistrim faster than it could be identified and avoided. It takes significant altitude to recover from it, assuming you even know the procedure, which hasn't been in the 737 FOM for decades. Neither flight had sufficient altitude for that procedure.
If all of this were just about training and checklists, these airplanes wouldn't be grounded around the world.
I also find it hilarious you misspell your insult.