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> FAA for making this process difficult- see 737 certification as an example, leading to the max accidents.

The certification process being "difficult" isn't why the 737 Max was unsafe. The FAA allowed Boeing to self-certify its safety, and voices inside the company were ignored or silence. They literally created a system to save a buck for their clients then outsourced development of that system to save another buck, then rubber-stamped it themselves.

Blaming this on too much or too difficult regulation is farcical.

PS - I also find the entire thrust of this argument contradictory: "Equipment built in the 80s wasn't high enough quality for the new 5G operating environment, so we need to weaken 'difficult' regulation today to make producing lower quality equipment cheaper, tomorrow be damned."

Regulation has more than one dimension.

We are not limited to talking about 'weakening' or 'strengthening' regulations. We can talk about making saner rules, too.

Going through the process to type certify the Max as anything other than a 737 would’ve been far more expensive, slow and painful for Boeing and all its customers because of how slow and difficult the FAA is.

They added the MCAS because they didn’t want the Max to be a different type, which meant starting the certification process from scratch. They were able to self certify precisely because it was a 737 type.

Yes - there were many issues that lead to the accidents and you can’t really point to just the one thing; but ultimately it did boil down to a culture at the company created by the environment it operates under.

I’m not defending Boeing here - if anything, I’m more upset at them as they had the engineering will and talent, the political and financial backing to make meaningful changes to the regulatory environment and make aviation safer as a manufacturer - but they chose greed.

Lastly, that’s nowhere near what I said but I can see how you can get to that conclusion. I’m an aviation enthusiast and a Pilot (feel free to go through my post history) - and it’s not a question of weakening regulation; it’s a matter of streamlining ways to get new technology certified faster - it only took 3 decades for the FAA to give the STC for unleaded gasoline etc etc.

Just to add a bit to this, as far as I understand, they didn't want the Max to be certified as something other than a normal 737, not because of certifying the aircraft, but because it would also mean all pilots would need additional training or even new type ratings to fly it.

Though, adding the MCAS, which in certain circumstances overrides the pilots instructions, should most certainly have triggered new training for the pilots for those situations, at the very least.

I'm pretty sure the reason that Boeing didn't want to certify the Max as anything other than a 737 is that this would have required expensive pilot-retraining for all airlines purchasing that aircraft, and this would have put Boeing in a bad position relative to Airbus, with the main factor being 'fuel burn per seat' where the Airbus A320neo had an initial advantage. The plane designs are nicely compared here (2014), esp. Fig 2:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/2765285-the-battle-on-the-n...

The shoddy software primarily responsible for the Boeing 737MAX disasters was introduced so that Boeing could market the planes to airlines as a standard 737 that required no expensive pilot training programs, as far as I can tell. The nature of the FAA's regulatory process seems mostly irrelevant here, unless rushing poorly designed products with huge risk profiles to market to help Boeing improve sales is something the FAA should promote... note also that Boeing lost around $30 billion in market value over the MAX debacle, which could have been avoided by FAA being more strict, even if that mean fewer plane orders.

you are 100% correct about retraining. Flying Blind is a great book about the MAX failures at both Boeing and the FAA that I just finished a few weeks ago, highly recommend.

> Going through the process to type certify the Max as anything other than a 737 would’ve been far more expensive

Nonsense. Boeing regularly does that.

> They added the MCAS because they didn’t want the Max to be a different type, which meant starting the certification process from scratch.

Also nonsense.

They added the MCAS because they didn’t want the Max to certify as anything but a different type because the entire point of the Max program was for customers who exclusively fly 737s (like Southwest) to be able to fly a more efficient plane without needing to recertify pilots.

Unlike Airbus, Boeing does not have unified profiles and accelerated cross-type training[0], so changing type is close to a full certification for crews, which translates to the crews being grounded for several weeks / a few months.

[0] IIRC they have something along those lines for some planes released close to one another, but Airbus has it across most of the range, with the exception of the older types and the A220 which is not an Airbus plane per-se (it's a rebadging of the Bombardier CSeries)

> PS - I also find the entire thrust of this argument contradictory: "Equipment built in the 80s wasn't high enough quality for the new 5G operating environment, so we need to weaken 'difficult' regulation today to make producing lower quality equipment cheaper, tomorrow be damned."

No, the problem is that the altimeters didn't meet spec.

These altimeters are NOT supposed to be susceptible to these frequencies. However, people cut corners decades ago and now it's being found out.

The FAA should have told the airlines "You have N years to get these replaced. Start now." But they didn't--because they're in the pocket of the big aerospace companies.

Well, so the FCC rolled it out. Now the FAA and the aerospace companies have to deal with it.

No, blame the FCC for not properly clearing frequencies used by safety-critical equipment before reassigning them to 5G. They wanted to stick cellphones right next to altimeters, it should be their burden to make sure all the altimeters currently deployed won't get hit with sideband noise.

The FAA's approach is reasonable because safety-critical equipment is, well, critical to safety. The FCC got rolled by the 5G hype train and failed to do its job - i.e. allocate frequencies to avoid unintended interference.

there is a 220MHz buffer between the two bands. that's eleven (11) terrestrial commercial FM radio bands worth of gap.

220MHz is sufficient if your altimeter radar has the proper selectivity.

ground radars are so selective that you can have two radar devices operating at the same frequency aimed at each other without interference.

Sorry? Would you mind explaining that for a layman?

How do two devices on the same frequency, pointing at each other, not interfere?

because they look for reflected signals, which changes how the waveform is shaped, and there is circuitry which ignores unreflected inputs.

additionally, the radars sweep through their bands rather than broadcast on all of it at once, so the chance of them looking for the frequency that the other radar is sending at the exact moment it is being sent is very small, and when it does happen it is easily ignored.

the sweeping is what provides the ability to easily detect movement and change in distance from radar to target.

this is all based on a book I read years ago, so I apologize if any of it is not exactly on the dot accurate.

Hey that's great, thankyou - even if it's not 100% you've given me a leg up to start looking into it further some rainy afternoon.

Sorry, but no. It's 220mhz away.

That's insane. No properly operating equipment needs that sort of gap, and certainly not radar altimeters built with the proper selectivity.

This is a 100% solved problem, and a 100% failure on the part of the equipment manufacturers, and whatever certification procedures exist for them.

It simply is not that hard to test this, certify this, etc.

This is just as much the FCCs fault as the FAA. They were the ones that certified the frequency usage of these altimeters, and they should have noticed that these altimeters could experience interference from satcom frequencies over 400MHz (!!!) away. They could have stopped this decades ago, but they let it go on long enough to become a massive problem.

A lot of people don't seem to grasp the magnitude of the spectrum lost to this snafu. At today's realizable spectral efficiencies, that is 2.5 TB/s of usable data throughput lost to the 400MHz guard band alone. It's also ~$130B worth of revenue that the FCC could have had if they could actually sell it.

Sure, the receivers could experience interference from satcom frequencies in theory, but in practice satcom broadcasts are very low strength, so there was not much risk of harmful interference until the frequency was repurposed for terrestrial, high power broadcasts.

You don't put hurricane windows on buildings that have no hurricane risk, and you don't put tight bandpass filters on receivers in the satellite bands.

When hurricane patterns or satellite bands change, you get problems though.

Satcom downlinks might be low power, but uplinks, especially from dedicated base stations (as opposed to satellite phones) can easily run into the hundreds of watts.

The problem here was sort of ideal for falling through the cracks.

The FAA is an executive administration ultimately organized under Dept. of Transportation. The FCC is an independent executive agency overseen, ultimately, by Congress.

As a result, neither org has unilateral authority to tell the other to go pound sand, nor do their up-org leadership (ultimately, the President v. Congress).

Their inability to find a resolution that didn't leave American pilots floundering is reflective of the inability of the Legislative and Executive branches to work together in modern federal governance, in general. Expect more issues like this in the future.

We enjoy accessible and safe air travel in no small part due to the strict regulations by FAA and EASA.

Aviation is an industry where new products absolutely should not be fast tracked into deployment. The rules and regulations that are in place today were written in blood.

If anything it's the weakening of these regulations (i.e. manufacturer self-certification) that enabled the MAX disasters.

The FAA being archaic was absolutely not the cause of the MAX incidents. Boeing released a plane with a single point of failure that failed, and they also neglected to tell pilots and FAA about this single point of failure because pilots unions would have insisted on training in a simulator (which costs Boeing money) and the FAA may have insisted on a redesign or also simulator training.

Your comment is a complete mischaracterization of the MAX incidents beyond what even Boeing public relations was willing to do.

It's relevant, at least.

The single point of failure was a bad implementation detail of a bad feature, and that feature mostly existed because of how all-or-nothing the "aircraft type" training is.

It doesn't matter how easy the new certification process is, or how the technical specification said it _should_ have worked; this was existing technology that was otherwise working. You can't come in and step on existing infrastructure, then declare ex post facto that it should have gotten out of the way before you got there.

Cat IIIc landings are no joke.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/september/...