Indonesia to Fault 737 MAX Design, U.S. Oversight in Lion Air Crash Report | Hacker News Reader

Indonesia to Fault 737 MAX Design, U.S. Oversight in Lion Air Crash Report

wsj.com

38 pointscmurf13 comments

I'm calling it now: The US Government will pass a law protecting Boeing from litigation over this, or they will bail them out, because "too big to fail".

At least I as the consumer can avoid any airline using Boeing or flights that are operated with boeings. It's small potatoes but I did what I could and if everyone does the same it will hurt Boeing.

Good luck. At least in the US, the vast majority of airlines use Boeing planes in most, if not all of their fleets. In Europe it's a different story, but that limits you to almost no carrier in the US.

For a counterpoint:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...

It's a useful article. But as a pilot and former CFII, I do not agree with Langewiesche's assertion that AF447 was "an exercise in poor airmanship". That's a callous disregard for the final report that put blame on Airbus and Air France, for training deficiency, simulator deficiency, and cockpit UI/Ux confusion contributing to the problem of pilot panic.

Is it poor airmanship that resulted in US Air 427? How is what happened on AF447, Lion Air 610, Ethiopian Airlines 302, anything to do with pilot competency and airmanship, while US Air 427 pilots don't get any of that criticism? Is it American pilot versus foreign pilot bias? It would seem so, but it's also a distraction from the question of pilot role: is it really appropriate to consider them the last line of defense as if the airplane and now automated flight systems are capriciously trying to kill everyone at any moment and if the pilot can't intervene that "airmanship" has to be brought into the discussion?

I just think it's a cheap shot. Only from the mistakes of these dead pilots, and a bunch of dead people, is their the concern that leads to fixes from manufacturers. And Langewiesche didn't bother to bring up Boeing's previous track record with 737 defects either, and how unconscionable their intentional misdirection was.

as a CFII you are well aware that US has the most strict regulations around livery pilot training requirements. you cannot fly a large jet without 2000+ hours. LA610 and EA302 had copilots with <2000 hours. Boeing even said they need to redesign their planes to account for lesser skilled pilots. sounds like culpability of the foreign government, boeing, airlines, and pilots.. in that order.

and yeah pilots will always get the final blame because they're the ones ultimately in control. or, dead (wo)men can't defend themselves.

I don't understand your point. You throw out a factoid thinking it's relevant, and that it speaks for itself. How is experience related to these two crashes?

Only FAR 121 operations require ATP certification, which has a 1500 hour total time experience attached. And that ATP certification requirement follows the Colgan Air 3407 crash, just ten years ago. And the extra time experience probably wouldn't have made any difference in that crash, because the NTSB dinged the captain more than the first officer, and the inadequacy of training overall. It was the captain flying, he was the one apparently startled by the stall warning, and he was the one who did the exact opposite of what his training should have told him. And he met the newer experience and certification requirements already. https://www.flyingmag.com/safety/accident-investigations/aft...

I'm going to go on a soapbox here and authoritatively state by correlation that fatal accidents from narrow-body jets where pax have survived have only occurred with pilots with extra time. I don't have any raw data to share to back this up, but I have read enough NTSB reports to see this one nugget of information stand out. And if you want to determine a cause, an obvious and likely to be denounced as a red-herring, is the additional time spent learning the aircraft.

Pilots with additional time on the MAX were able to spend more time in the simulator. The previous pilot of LA610 recognized the malfunction and was able to correct. We can't ignore the evidence here. The outcome is very binary. Either we dumb down airplanes so your commander-in-chief can fly one ala an Icon A5 or we continue to keep a minimum of 5000 combined flight time on deck.

You keep getting basic facts wrong. A jump pilot on LNI 043 recommended stabilizer trim cutoff, not the flying pilots. That flight also didn't exhibit nearly as aggressive MCAS upset as the crashed flights. The action you credit to LNI 043, is the same action taken by ET302. The MCAS induced mistrim was so quickly severe they could not manually retrim, reenabled electric trim to get assistance to retrim, and in an instant MCAS activated and shoved the nose 20 degrees down. It was so aggressive flight recorder data shows negative G forces. They were literally lifted iff their seats.

You have blinders on, fixated on unproven relevance of experience, while being resistant to available facts showing a deadly aircraft design flaw.

Url changed from https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/462541-indonesia-t..., which points to this.

Well we couldn't expect them to blame the former airport hustler who made billions ignoring safety and bribing government investigators now, could we?

Nor could we expect them to blame the pilots for being so poorly trained and under-prepared for a simple runaway trim situation that they allowed aircraft to fly fast enough that any control input would fatally damage the control surfaces, could we?

Noooo. We don't let the facts interfere with our opinions here. We just dance to the tune set by our masters in St. Petersburg and destroy the second largest US defence contractor.

Because facts are soooo tired. I can't possibly be expected to read and understand complex technical material before having an opinion. Nooo. We don't want that.

What facts demonstrate the pilots are poorly trained? What facts demonstrate this was a case of simple runaway trim? What facts indicate control surfaces were damaged, let alone related to speed or improper control input?

What we do know is MCAS can so rapidly induce mistrim, that it's not possible to recover from at low altitude. No one was informed of or trained on this possible failure vector and it's not at all clear it looks like the kind of runaway trim they are trained for.

United 585, US Air 427, Eastwind 517. The facts there are this was the result of PCU malfunction causing rudder reversal. In the case of US Air 427 the pilots pulled back on the yoke the entire time, progressing the stall, and making recovery impossible. But the direct cause of the accident is still Boeing's responsibility, the instigating action that led to the crashes was rudder hardover due to a mechanical defect.

Just because pilots may have, with perfect information, been able to recover the plane, does not absolve Boeing's defective design and implementation for MCAS, the deception from the FAA, the lack of documentation about its function and malfunction in the flight manual or training materials, the lack of any procedure for its malfunction that would require additional training.

And now they're changing the behavior of MCAS in the case of angle of attack sensor disagreement, such that MCAS is disabled. That's a very clear sign that the previous behavior is inappropriate. And the ensuing change in airplane behavior without MCAS will certainly require additional training, the very thing they sought to avoid.

So all the faults that Boeing are fixing now are imaginary, you do not absolve Boeing of it's fault because some super pilots would have saved the plane. Maybe you should have followed your advice and read about all the mismanagement of the project and how important details were hidden from the pilots.

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