Boeing 737 Max Is Cleared by FAA to Resume Flights
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm looking forward to seeing a video of him and his family on this plane, unless this is just marketing speak. It sure would help raise the public image of the FAA and Boeing slightly if they put their money (family?) where their mouth is.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/10/13/china.mining...
Sounds like an application of the Hammurabi code
You're right. So I raise my bid: Instead of just putting him and his family on one flight, let's put them on one flight per day for a month.
> After that, I flew the aircraft for about two hours to evaluate its handling qualities and the functionality of the flight control system. Now, based on all the activities that we've undertaken during the past 20 months, and my personal experience flying the aircraft, I can tell you now that I am 100 percent comfortable with my family flying on it
So, he done 2 hours of what pilots will do for more hours, every single day they work. He also haven't trusted other pilots, let's say from Ethiopian Airlines, with his family.
Maybe your comment was sarcastic and I missed that. Sorry if that was the case.
To spell it out again, the idea is to put the dude on a long flight with the 737MAX he just recertified.
I'm not against my idea of putting this man and his family on a flight. I'm against starting a gofundme (basically raise money for him) to fund this adventure, when he or his employer should be able to pay for this just fine.
Can I buy you a sarcasm/black humour detector? :)
They aren't going to bust over this, sure, but this has still been a very costly black eye for them, no? Even if they get their FAA approval, I imagine fewer airlines will be buying Boeing. (Discounting the enormous impact of the pandemic, that is.)
Why? Plenty of airlines kept ordering the DC-10 after its grounding was lifted. If the aircraft is certificated it's good to buy, in business terms.
Buying Boeing right now is an excellent idea for most airlines since discounts will be deep in order to get the order book filled.
I'll bet Ryanair will announce a big top-up order soon.
What's still troubling to me is that the FAA was allowing Boeing to parlay it's way into 2017 using 1967 certifications.
"The 737 was first certified by the FAA in 1967. Like every new 737 model since then, the MAX has been approved partially with the original requirements and partially with more current regulations, enabling certain rules and requirements to be grandfathered in. Chief executive Dai Whittingham of the independent trade group UK Flight Safety Committee disputed the idea that the MAX was just another 737, saying, "It is a different body and aircraft but certifiers gave it the same type rating."
I know the airlines can switch planes without notice, but it seems possible to improve your odds at least.
Additionally you can look up an airline's fleet on Wikipedia and avoid ones with the Max.
You prefer a plane that stalls?
MCAS was a type certification workaround, not a stall workaround.
The problem was never that the plane's flight characteristics were unsafe, it was that they were different enough from the older 737's that it wasn't reasonable to fit them under the same type certificate. So MCAS was added not to make the plane not stall, it was added to make the plane not stall if flown like any other 737.
This is both why a failure of this magnitude could slip past the regulators (MCAS was never described as critical for flight, so it could do with less redundancy. In a failure condition, the crew could always just turn it off and fly without.), and why it's failure is so goddamn galling (a barely-tested computer program that was not needed for safe operation was given the controls to literally fly the plane into the ground for reasons that were best described as marketing).
That's why they added MCAS. Based on the FAA's testing, it helps when it works.
I understand the temptation to lean into anti-intellectualism when a plane crashes. But there is sunlight between criticizing an agency in general and playing armchair aerospace engineer.
Finally, recovering from a stall (even if one happened, which it didn't in either crash) is Day 1 of every flight training course. It is probably the most basic and thoroughly-drilled skill in all of flying.
I expected to see this fallacy.
MCAS does not operate normally during any flight regime routinely encountered. It should remain entirely inactive until things get more exciting than they should ever get on a passenger flight. What you are talking about is a malfunctioning MCAS, which isn't operating by design.
> recovering from a stall (even if one happened, which it didn't in either crash) is Day 1 of every flight training course
Yes, of course it is. It is also very rarely encountered by passenger jets, and when it does happen things are very exciting indeed. Your odds of hitting the ground have already gone up quite dramatically at that point, MCAS or not.
I'm aware of this. I'm also aware that it failed twice within a couple of months -- which is far too frequently -- and the consequences of each failure were complete loss of the airframe. Anybody who has ever done risk analysis can see that MCAS was improperly designed and poorly implemented and the people who signed off on it should probably go to jail.
No new system whose failure could result in all souls lost and is known to have a single point of vulnerability should ever have been added to a commercial passenger aircraft. Period.
They have actually done this with some of their other planes before.
The negligence of that group of individuals led to the deaths of over 300 people.
I'd much rather ride some boring old design that's been flying safely for decades without needing fancy software to keep it in the air.
The problem was that it was unstable in a way that wasn't exactly like previous 737 models. Except actually that probably wasn't a problem so much as an annoyance. The problem was that, since retraining pilots for the MAX's quirks would have been unpalatable for customers, they decided to try and use software to sweep it under the carpet. Except perhaps the even more fundamental problem was that the FAA was so deeply asleep on their post that this glaring snow job apparently flew past them without notice.
Was thought to be perfectly stable. Turns out it wasn't, in their new edition.
> problem is that the new MCAS was much worse
It's common in airplane industry to never blame users nor the instruments, but the process. Things should be able to fail, and pilots should be able to recover. Now both Boeing and the FAA failed catastrophically in their certification process, leading to missing vital information about the MCAS.
Overall the core problem wasn't the MCAS but the process (or lack of process) that didn't find out the edge-cases where it didn't work.
- if Boeing would have designed MCAS better
- if anyone inside Boeing or the FAA would have flagged the bad design before the accidents
- if Boeing would have enabled the "Angle of attack sensor disagree alert" by default on all MAX airplanes (https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/64020/is-the-73...)
- if the issues with the AOA sensors on the crashed planes would have been fixed before the accidents
I appreciate that Boeing themselves have made this difficult by their PR line that MCAS makes it fly like other 737s. If you have ever been involved in something like this being managed in the public perception you'll understand this is pretty typical of how technical issues are dumbed down for public consumption. In this case it also happens to be technically correct, in that other 737s have certifiable behaviour in this flight regime, so MCAS makes it fly more like them.
My guess is that people will forget very quickly. The planes will be rebranded to de-emphasize the MAX name, and flying will return to normal in 2021. Boeing will benefit from the cluster of a year 2020 has been. People have had plenty of distractions since the crashes.
So no MAX planes flying immediately. But soon.
This Companies products are designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys.
Is the better version of this take "I won't fly Boeing anymore"? With the possible exception of this plane given its recent scrutiny.
The other planes in use are updated on a rolling basis, they've had "minor" changes here and there, potentially the same level of "minor" that the Max was – and we know how that performed.
Even before the fix, the probability of an occasional flyer getting in a crash was already negligible. For someone taking the same flight twice a week, or worse for the cabin crew spending half of the year in this plane, the risk was unacceptable.
So unless you fly very often, it is rational to not worry which model you board. One dodges small risks all day long, crossing the street, eating food, being exposed to animals or germs, etc. It’s just one more.
I'm not risking ever getting on a Boeing ever again.
I'd love not to, but that basically means not flying domestically anymore ever, only directly out of the US, and even then it may still be Boeing.
Not sure I’d personally prefer a Cessna 208 to a MAX 8, though.
Uncomfortable as hell.... I hate them
And usually old and beat to hell. Plastic interiors melting from contact with people's heads, creaking interiors, creaking structure (actually had one make a terrific crack that reverbrated through the airframe during some turbulence on my last flight). I'm not really a fan of the CRJ either.
When a pilot is given clearance to land they punch numbers into the flight computer corresponding to the airport and approach. The plane will automatically line up with the correct runway. The glideslope will also tell the plane where it needs to be as it is descending.
The planes are also able to land themselves. Pilots are there to make people feel comfortable and handle rare edge cases. They will be monitoring the autopilot at all times.
Although in reality it's kind of hard to imagine any qualified pilot missing the 737Max memo, so I'm probably awfulizing.
It's still a poorly-designed plane built by a poorly-managed company with its flaws spackled over by software, and that alone makes me want to avoid it.