The “safe” recommendation is to ground all the planes of that model any time there is a suspected issue.
That said, the FAA has a long history of not implementing safety recommendations. NASA had this issue with the space shuttle.
The counterpoint is that their safety record speaks for itself. When was the last commercial airliner crash in the US? 2009?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
If you mean domestic airline, then it was probably the 2009 Colgan Ait crash that led to major procedure and training g changes in the US.
The biggest one was requiring both pilots to have ATP certificates, effectively moving the bar to co-pilot from 250 hours to 1500 hours of flying. Lots of other changes that taken on their own are small, but overall it was a pretty massive set of changes.
It's not clear whether the 1500 hour rule directly improved safety. Both the Colgan captain and the FO had more than 1500 hours at the time of the accident. What the rule did unambiguously is severely restrict the supply of new pilots to regional airlines. This significantly improved quality of life for regional pilots, who prior to Colgan were effectively making minimum wage or worse. (That may have indirectly improved safety, by making pilots more well-rested and fed...)
Another point of comparison is Europe, which has a not-dissimilar safety record, but still allows FOs to have 250 hours. That said, from what I understand, they have a very different training culture where students start in a multi-crew environment very early.
If we count smaller craft like commercial single engine float planes, then the Puget Sound plane crash in 2022.
> One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow.
> However, this document was not completed and did not go through managerial review due to lack of detailed flight data
A plane crash is too significant for the FAA not to even disposition the analysis, meaning formally receiving, reviewing, and deciding what to do. Incomplete data would just be part of the decision process, it's not a legitimate excuse for not looking at it. Killing the report like this where no one is on record opposing it is a pretty common tactic to at least buy some time when you know what the result will be.
They were hoping to find a reason not to ground the plane. They didn't find one, so they eventually ground it.
The "safe" recommendation is to keep all planes in the sky regardless of suspected safety issues because alternative transportation is not safer than a dangerous airplane.
This must be your position if you were to post this.
(Consider that I can fly from SF to LA in an hour and a half, but it's a 6-hour drive. If my flight was canceled and I couldn't find an alternative flight, I just wouldn't go at all. Certainly there are some extreme situations where I might bite the bullet and drive, but that'd be rare.)
Put another way: when we know something is unsafe, we shouldn't keep it going just because of the theoretical risk of alternatives. And yes, I know that the risk of driving isn't "theoretical", but we can't fully predict what humans will do absent their first choice of transportation.
If I have to fly for a one-day or two-day business meeting, and I can’t find a flight, I don’t go. Driving ensures I miss the meeting. Staying put, I can at least join virtually.
I only know a few people who fly willingly.
There's absolutely no way it was a more dangerous form of travel than driving.
I am intimately familiar with both catastrophic failures of the 737 Max, which involved undertrained pilots from third world airlines.
As soon as the emulator got bad feedback from the one sensor that was used to map "max" airframe behavor to "737" controls, all bets were off. And because the pilots weren't allowed to know they were in a Max not a 737 (which would require further training that would void the advantages of the Max) there was no SOP for how to deal with "your Max is blind and can't pretend to be a 737"
The "poorly trained" pilots weren't test pilots -- pilots aren't supposed to be able to improvise and react to things off book.
Both pilots had multiple thousands of flight hours (well beyond the minimum 1500 required to co-pilot in the US). Only the co-pilot of the Ethiopian Air flight would have been deemed too new to fly for a US airline (and even then, only post-Colgan Air 3407).
1 - https://fortune.com/2020/01/14/boeing-lion-air-extra-737-max...
There were, however, reasons to be skeptical. Firstly, unlike in most other cases, it was not designed to halt when opposed by the pilot’s use of the control yoke (to do so would defeat the purpose of MCAS.) Secondly, it was found in flight testing that MCAS needed to be made much more aggressive, yet the original decision was allowed to stand. Thirdly, it could stop on its own accord, only to start up again a few seconds later.
Consequently, while MCAS failure is nominally handled as a form of trim runaway, it did not present itself to pilots like the trim runaway scenarios they had trained for.
There may have been a path to saving the aircraft, but it definitely didn't seem at all intuitive. And figuring it out while the plane is actively trying to crash itself is a pretty big ask.
This possibility was mentioned in the AFM, but the recommended response - pitch nose-down to decrease the load - was not feasible in the situation.
There was IIRC 8~16 hours of training that was intended to be mandated, but Boeing told airlines that training was not necessary. So many (not all) pilots never learned the deeper mechanisms of MCAS. This would reduce costs, and increase desirability of the aircraft.
But it gets even worse! The FAA approved Boeing's request to remove a description of MCAS from the aircraft manual! So no, most pilots wouldn't even be able to learn about it even if they wanted to!
There was 0 redundancy. The MCAS was directed by ONE SINGLE AoA (Angle of Attack) SENSOR! No backups!
Even worse! Boeing was aware of the problems as of 2016! They even knew MCAS violated Boeing's own design documents and rules for the max8!
And yet here you are blaming the pilots instead of the money grubbers at the top.
https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
(Note this data is only up to 2019 for 737 models, but that's exactly the time period at which decisions had to be made, of whether to continue flying it or not).
You're presumably taking the average deaths per miles and applying it in the sense of "those people would drive and that's more dangerous."
...that's....not how that works.
You assume:
* they would take alternate transportation, instead of canceling the trip or booking another flight not on a MAX. At the time there were just 387 MAX aircraft in the world in service.
* that said transportation would be passenger cars. Trains and busses are 10x (or more) safer than passenger cars per passenger mile. They're so safe that the danger to a passenger is basically insignificantly higher compared to commercial jet flights (and by the way, the industry very conveniently separates out "commuter" flights, which are FAR more dangerous.)
* that the overall safety of the commercial jet fleet is applicable to flights on a specific model of jet, which were clearly more dangerous, with not just two crashes in close proximity, but several close calls and almost certainly numerous other incidents that went unnoticed or unreported