US regulators to examine Boeing 737 Max production
aerotime.aero
aerotime.aero
The whole exercise seems like a way to officially do nothing while not looking like nothing is being done.
But what a joke.
When did this kind of activity ever save a life where airplanes are involved?
I'd prefer the NTSB run the review, at least they don't fuck about playing political games.
Once a human life ends, that's it.
In time my and your turn will come, too, without exception. Too many people have died early already due to Boeing's negligence.
1. FAA let Boeing do its job.
2. Boeing screwed up.
3. Pilots raised concerns but dismissed without any investigation.
4. Planes crashed and people died.
5. Boeing CEO walked away with packages and nothing happened to FAA.
6. Pseudo investigation concluded and 373 Max flew again.
7. Sh*t happened again.
I'm wondering if Boeing would still be able to get away with it.
If FAA no longer sets the standard other countries use, then that is a real loss of power.
Yes Boeing inspects and audits itself as FAA employees
No joke, I wish I was....
FAA during the beginning of the jet age punted and delegated inspections and other functions to the OEMs but they are still FAA based employees just hired by Boeing.
And little can change until Supreme Court revisits that doctrine.
Looking at factories which assemble an unsafe design is theater to distract the public.
My understanding is that there is mandatory training for MAX pilots that airlines must track, but it does not require a new type certification. The latter is likely due to regulatory capture, southwest has the largest fleet of 737s and did not want to recertify their pilots[0]
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/legal...
Air carriers transported more than 330 million passengers worldwide on Boeing aircraft in 2021.1 With the return to service of its 737 MAX aircraft2 and increasing demand for air travel, Boeing delivered more than 160 new aircraft to air carriers in the first half of 2022, with a backlog of nearly 4,200 aircraft on order. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is responsible for overseeing the safety of passenger aircraft in the United States, including ensuring that aviation manufacturers such as Boeing meet safety requirements when producing and delivering new aircraft.
However, since 2019, a number of concerns have been raised regarding production of the Boeing 737 and 787 aircraft—the two production lines with the largest number of aircraft on order. Boeing has not delivered any 787 aircraft in over a year due to production quality issues, and in December 2021, FAA mandated inspections on certain previously delivered 787 aircraft due to reports of missed requirements during assembly. In addition, a number of complaints to Congress, FAA, and our office have alleged ongoing production deficiencies and undue pressure on Boeing staff in the 737 and 787 production lines.
In light of these concerns, the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and its Subcommittee on Aviation requested that we evaluate FAA’s oversight of Boeing aircraft production. Accordingly, our audit objectives will be to evaluate FAA’s oversight of Boeing 737 and 787 production, specifically its processes for (1) identifying and resolving production issues and (2) addressing allegations of undue pressure within the production environment.
We plan to begin the audit in July and will contact your audit liaison to schedule an entrance conference. We plan to conduct our audit at FAA Headquarters and regional offices responsible for overseeing Boeing production, as well as relevant Boeing locations. If you have any questions, please contact me or Tina Nysted, Program Director.
It’s only 17 pages and it has humor and is a page turner. It’s a good or a bad story depending on points of views, nonetheless a great behind the scene story.
I believe the general concept people cite here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance although it's interesting that Feynman hypothesised the 'loss of a common cause' as the fundamental issue - in other words, NASA had lost a unified purpose after successfully going to the moon and in trying to justify its existence had effectively turned the managers into a political class who could lie better to secure funding and political support if they were unaware of engineering problems. The actual engineers in Feynman's story hadn't normalised deviance, they just were essentially blocked from effecting change upwards.
> More than 42 incidents involved equipment malfunctions, and on more than 40 occasions, flight crews chose to ground the affected aircraft while problems were fixed.
> …
> In one incident on an American Airlines flight in April last year, multiple systems including both autopilot functions stopped working soon after take-off. On landing, the crew found the backup power unit, considered vital for safe flight, had failed and was emitting a strong electrical smell.
>…
> He said some other reports raised by the ABC were bizarre, such as an incident involving a United Airlines flight last August where fuel was found leaking into an overhead passenger bin. Fuel reserves are located in the wings.
>…
> One mechanic said they observed sub-standard manufacturing and testing of the planes, which resulted in wires being left exposed and debris such as rubbish, metal slivers and washers lodging itself inside various parts of the plane, which could lead to electrical short circuits or fires.
>…
> Griffith University's Dr Carim Jr reviewed several incidents from last year involving malfunctions with the MAX's stabiliser trim and said failures involving the component were "quite concerning".
etc
Even the Chinese are giving up on Boeing even though they were supposed to be forced to buy them per the Trump phase 1 trade deal.
Eg Ryanair operates a completely uniform fleet, 100% 737s, and their current operating model relies on all of their pilots and crew being able to operate whatever aircraft is available. Adding a few airbuses means a split fleet, causing significant logistical and training costs. And their customers are evidently happy to prioritize flight cost over their aversion to the 737max, so why would they switch?
Also, an aircraft being on the market doesn't mean you can actually order one and get it anytime soon. Airbus has like a 10-year backlog for A32x deliveries.
For example the 737-NG was called 737-600 through 737-900 (different versions)
They did indeed drop the MAX branding and replaced it with the numeric designation because MAX got a bad name after their screwup. But they didn't invent the new name, it was always there.
1. Boeing was running multiple studies to replace the 737 -- and possibly the 757 with the same plane -- https://web.archive.org/web/20090615055919/http://www.flight...
2. Boeing Chairman President and Chief Executive Officer Jim McNerney in 2011 February said
> We’re gonna do a new airplane. We’re not done evaluating this whole situation yet, but our current bias is to not re-engine, is to move to an all-new airplane at the end of the decade, or the beginning of the next decade.
For source, put that quote into Google, it's everywhere.
3. Less than a year later, Southwest Airlines bought 150 of this very re-engineered plane. The 737 replacement plane disappeared. The 757 still has no replacement, twenty years after it was canned. The hole this created for the above 200 seats segment is well visible: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qc47G.jpg (I posted this image to SE after digging it out of some ancient blog post)
4. The MCAS system exists because SWA insisted on no retraining
> Not only did Southwest management not want their pilots who flew the earlier model 737 NG to have to train in a flight simulator for the MAX, they insisted to Boeing that even classroom training be off the table, the filing shows. Southwest insisted on a clause in the sales contract stipulating a penalty of $1 million per airplane delivered if that standard wasn’t met.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/legal...
Rumor:
It was Southwest Airlines threatening Boeing to buy Airbus instead if it delivered anything but a 737 to them that created the 737 MAX in the first place.
Now you know how far a single-plane airline would go to avoid buying a different plane.
This is somewhat inaccurate (and appears to trade on the oft-repeated but completely incorrect misunderstanding that the MCAS acts as a sort of “normal 737 emulator”).
In fact, the MCAS exists because without it the MAX would be 100% uncertifiable for commercial flight.
The central problem is that, due to the lopsided aerodynamics of the MAX, as the nose of the MAX moves up and approaches a stall, the forces on the pilot’s stick “invert” such that it becomes easier to continue to pull into the stall than push away from the stall.
Commercial aircraft are not allowed to have inverted stick forces at any angle. When Boeing realized this, they decided to implement a kind of hack that would use the trim to put pressure on the nose downwards to counteract the forces on the stick such that they never invert. The MCAS is the system that commands this downwards trim.
The desire to avoid retraining led Boeing to conceal the existence of the MCAS, but it is not why it exists. The plane flatly is uncertifiable without it. No amount of training would change this, as inverted stick forces are a failure of fundamental airworthiness requirements.
I didn't know that. In that case though, would it even be allowed to disable MCAS as part of any SOP? As far as I recall the documentation did mention one obscure process indicating to the pilot to disable MCAS when it acted up like it did during the accidents.
But I can't imagine it would be allowed to even have this as an operating procedure this when it puts the plane in a situation where it can't be certified?
The whole thing is such a mess... It's clear they should have just redesigned the whole airframe to modern standards IMO.
Anything can be allowed with enough omission, lawyers, scapegoating, campaign donations, and enough tolerance for blood on one's hands. It's called regulatory capture and it's the fundamental conflict-of-interest between most engineering orgs and their in house Quality programs, with the exacerbating effect that if you can coerce the external regulatory forces to give you a pass, there's really nothing your Quality people can do but resign in a gesture of "I won't build that".
You will never see the regulatory apparatus work as designed if it isn't willing to just say "No" to that which clearly violates prescriptive certification criteria.
So if something goes wrong with MCAS during a flight making it interfere with normal operation of the aircraft, then disabling it is quite reasonable. The odds that you will end up later in a situation where MCAS actually has to do something are extremely low, and the odds are even lower that the pilots won't be be able to handle it without the help from MCAS.
And that's assuming you are in a stage of flight where it would even be used. MCAS is only active when flaps are up and the autopilot is disengaged, so most of the time for most flights it is out of the picture.
MCAS seems to be one of those things that needs to have great care taken in its implementation because the danger from it mistakenly activating when it should not seems to be orders of magnitude higher than amount of safety benefit it provides when it correctly activates. They did not take that great care.
[1] https://theaircurrent.com/aircraft-development/mcas-may-not-...
My understanding is that they had to change some things about the plane due to efficiency regulations, which should have resulted in a new plane which would require flight lessons. They kept the things that they had to to escape FAA definitions of "different plane" and MCAS made the resulting monstrosity airworthy. If, so we are back to MCAS being a "737 emulator" required by SWA's mandate to receive the exact same airplane for all eternity.
Not that this is an excuse.
Again, not really. They wanted to put more efficient engines on the 737 to compete with the A320Neo, but keep the 737’s basic height in order to be compatible with the huge number of gates at old regional airports that are essentially built for the exceptionally low shape of the 737. Compatibility with those airports is essentially a competitive advantage for Boeing, as it’s what’s been keeping Airbus from eating their lunch with more efficient planes.
But the new engines were essentially too big for the low slung 737, so they moved them super far out from under the wing, making the plane basically unstable. Yeah, if they’d solved this by redesigning the plane to have more room under the wings it would have moved them out from under the 737’s grandfathered approval and thus required a lot more certification certainty and new training – but it would also have messed up the fundamental sales pitch of “buy this instead of the A320 Neo so that you don’t have to renovate your gates at every regional airport you fly to”.
the big engines moved so far forward creates the inverted stick forces that aren’t a training issue – no amount of training would have permitted them. It’s a Fundamental Airworthiness Requirement that they not occur, and the MCAS exists explicitly to make them not occur.
eg)
> Engineers observed a tendency for the plane’s nose to pitch upward during a specific extreme maneuver. After other efforts to fix the problem failed, the solution they arrived at was a piece of software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that would move a powerful control surface at the tail to push the airplane’s nose down.
Again, that “tendency for the plane’s nose to pitch upward” isn’t a training issue – it’s flat out illegal for commercial planes to have that characteristic:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.175
So the MCAS is just an airworthiness issue caused by the legacy market Boeing was trying to continue to be compatible with. They were careful not to call attention to the MCAS to avoid the FAA adding training requirements that would have upset Southwest, is the main thing where that factors in.
Long term maybe BAA is screwed.
Instead of making assumptions, you could easily just find the facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...
There are over 4000 orders still outstanding. Hence the ABC investigation repeatedly finding engineers on the project citing time pressure in the manufacturing process: they’ve got a huge backlog of orders.