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Transportation Government

Is Boeing's '737 Max' Safe Now? (seattletimes.com) 178

America's Federal Aviation Administration "laid out the proposed fixes for the design flaws in the MAX's automated flight controls," reports the Seattle Times, "starting a clock that could see Boeing get the green light sometime next month — with U.S. airlines then scrambling to get a few MAXs flying by year end."

But the newspaper also asks two big questions. "Is fixing that flight control software good enough? Will the updated 737 MAX really be safe?" Former jet-fighter pilot and aeronautical engineer Bjorn Fehrm is convinced. Though he calls the design flaws that caused the two 737 MAX crashes "absolutely unforgivable," he believes Boeing has definitively fixed them. Fehrm, a France-based analyst with aviation consulting firm Leeham Company, says that with the updated flight control software, scenarios similar to the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes simply cannot recur and the aircraft is no longer dangerous.

And Mike Gerzanics, a 737 captain with a major U.S. airline, is ready to fly a MAX — despite a Boeing whistleblower's scathing critique that even with the planned upgrade, the jet's decades-old flight deck systems fall far short of the latest safety standards and in the two MAX crashes created confusion in the cockpit. Gerzanics, a former Air Force and Boeing test pilot and an aviation safety expert, concedes the dated MAX flight deck is far from ideal. "It's basically 1960s technology with some 21st century technology grafted onto it. The overhead panels could be right out of the 707," he said. "But I've been flying it since 1996. I'm used to it. It's safe and it works....."

In a statement, the FAA said that in collaboration with three major foreign aviation safety regulators it has extensively evaluated the MAX redesign. "The modified aircraft will be fully compliant with the applicable rules, using the most conservative means of compliance," the FAA said... After a grounding that's stretched now to 18 months and counting, and the close attention of regulators from all over the world, Boeing insists the MAX will be the most scrutinized and safest airplane ever when it comes back. Still, even though the European and Canadian air safety regulators seem set to follow the FAA in green-lighting the MAX's return to service, both are pressing Boeing sometime afterward to make further design changes.

And Boeing concedes that the new generation of younger pilots may need more training focused on automation.

Test pilots at both Boeing and the FAA "have now conducted extreme flight test maneuvers close to a stall, both with MCAS on and with the system turned off," according to the newspaper.

Aeronautical engineer Bjorn Fehrm tells them that "If MCAS is deactivated, you can still fly the aircraft and it is not unstable. The MAX without MCAS is a perfectly flyable aircraft."
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Is Boeing's '737 Max' Safe Now?

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  • Obviously not! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday September 13, 2020 @05:35AM (#60501248)

    Even Betteridge knew that years ago and he's no engineer.

    • by Cylix ( 55374 )

      Part of their budget is going to be a campaign to convince people they are safe. I would expect several more articles that are like, “it’s totally safe and you probably won’t fall out of the sky now! Promise!”

      I’m going to avoid them for at least three years.

    • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @11:34AM (#60501956) Journal
      I would argue that it possibly is safe to fly now, at least from a purely technical point of view. The problem Boeing has is that the nature of the fault and their initial handling of it has severely damaged passenger trust in the company. Since the vast majority of us are not aeronautical engineers capable of accurately judging for ourselves that a plane is now safe to fly that lack of trust is a very serious issue.

      So the question should not be "is it safe?", because really we cannot answer that question accurately, it is "do we trust Boeing enough to believe them when they say it is now safe?" and there my answer would still have to remain "not sure enough to risk it" and, since Boeing has already demonstrated that they can get dodgy things approved by regulatory authorities, having those authorities say it is safe is also far from convincing.
      • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        I would agree with you on both points: That it's possibly (I would argue, likely) safe to fly on, and that Boeing's reputation as taken a hit. But I'm also willing to bet that people aren't going to care after a while. There's enough planes out there already that the operators will have no choice but to fly them. Some customers may actively pick a flight that doesn't fly on one, but I have the feeling that will be a small number. Unless another one goes down in short order, people are going to find som
  • by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @05:40AM (#60501252)

    Same manufacturer, same certification authority, same pressure to deliver profits to the same people who happen to own both... Why would be the outcome be any different?

    • We should get Laurence Olivier to ask the chairman of Boeing "Is it safe?".
    • by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:01AM (#60501334)

      Since they aren't adding a second sensor. I would say it suffers from the same flaw

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        They had a second sensor all along. They *did* hook it up to the MCAS algorithm.

    • by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:08AM (#60501352)

      Same manufacturer, same certification authority, same pressure to deliver profits to the same people who happen to own both... Why would be the outcome be any different?

      More to the point, the answer to the question asked is: "why are you asking us?" Nobody on Slashdot is equipped to answer the question. Without access to the code involved plus all the flight models plus pilot training plus fundamental understanding of aerodynamics and flight-control systems, we're just making stuff up. Experts exist for a reason. Wait for the people who are equipped to answer the question, and as long as there isn't overriding reason to not accept it, accept it.

      • "why are you asking us?" Nobody on Slashdot is equipped to answer the question. ... we're just making stuff up. Experts exist for a reason. Wait for the people who are equipped to answer the question, and as long as there isn't overriding reason to not accept it, accept it.

        You must be new here; welcome to /. :-)

      • Good point, totally true. However, no one is actually asking us. The "question headline" is a cop-out journalistic technique that allows the journalist to write a story that does not have to reach a conclusion, or even to have adequate facts.

        See also Betteridge's Law [wikipedia.org].

        "Are gnomes taking over the world's food chain?"
        "If you eat a lot of fish, will you be able to breathe under water?
        "Is The Rise of Skywalker the best example of cinematic excellence, ever?

        See?
    • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:16AM (#60501358) Homepage
      The parent comment seems correct to me.

      There seems to be no information indicating that the sociology of Boeing has changed.

      See this Boeing page about the present CEO: Executive Biography of David L. Calhoun [boeing.com]. Quoting: "He has served as a member of Boeing's board of directors since 2009..." Is there any evidence he didn't accept the slowly worsening sociology of Boeing top management?

      Another quote: "He oversees the strategic direction of the Chicago-based aerospace company..." Boeing top management is in Chicago! Not near where Boeing does the manufacturing, which is in Washington state and one facility in California. [boeing.com]

      Why are Boeing corporate offices in Chicago? Apparently because Boeing manufactures military products like the F-15 [airspacemag.com] in St. Louis, Missouri, and the managers don't want to live there. Military products are easy money, apparently. Customers of the military dying doesn't get as much attention as the dying of passenger aircraft customers. The U.S. military has a long history of not managing money carefully, in my opinion.

      It seems to me that healthy management of passenger aircraft would be done by management by walking around. [wikipedia.org] Understanding the sociology of a company requires direct contact with many people. (Sometimes people say that a CEO doesn't need to be concerned about details like that.)

      One of the many previous stories: Boeing Employees Mocked F.A.A. and 'Clowns' Who Designed 737 Max [nytimes.com]. (Jan. 9, 2020)

      You can download "Internal Boeing communications about the 737 Max". [nyt.com] (PDF file, 35 megabytes)

      See this quote about the PDF file in this New York Times story: I Honestly Don't Trust Many People at Boeing: A Broken Culture Exposed [nytimes.com]. (Jan. 13, 2020):

      "... 117 pages of damning internal communications".
      • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @11:07AM (#60501892)

        Why are Boeing corporate offices in Chicago?

        For most of its existence, Boeing’s corporate offices were here in western Washington - they moved to Chicago in 2001. At the time, locals widely believed Boeing was trying to gain some political distance from both their own workers (which have a powerful union) and from state interests which didn’t always back what the company leadership wanted. There had also been previous speculation that they intended to attempt a complete pullout from Washington, and the headquarters move was a precursor to that.

        Boeing set up production lines in South Carolina several years after the headquarters move, which lends some credence to the idea they were trying to pull power away from the rather strong aerospace union here in Washington state.

        • Quoting the parent comment: "Boeing was trying to gain some political distance from both their own workers (which have a powerful union) and from state interests which didn't always back what the company leadership wanted."

          Instead of solving the problems, Boeing management tried to escape from them???

          That's exactly the kind of management that led to the crashes and many other problems, it seems to me.

          Boeing top managers distanced themselves from the manufacturing, which led to the crashes and other
          • Boeing's management has always seemed both very insular and tone-deaf, at least during my lifetime.

            Because of the size of its workforce, it was always fairly big news in the Puget Sound region whenever the old union contract was nearing its end and a new set of contract negotiations was starting. One time - it might've been during the early-1980s recession, but in any case it was a period when business was down - the union accepted pay cuts because the company's profits were (supposedly) way down. Well, a c



      • Boeing 737 problems caused by design deficiencies? See the List of accidents and incidents involving the Boeing 737. [wikipedia.org]

        These quotes from a few incidents on the list seem to show more design deficiencies. (There are people who know a LOT more about these incidents than I do.)

        737 Original (-100/-200) aircraft

        1) Several accidents of the 737 Original and Classic series were due to a design flaw in a power control unit (PCU) causing uncommanded rudder movement under thermal shock: see Boeing 737 rudde [wikipedia.org]
      • The U.S. military has a long history of not managing money carefully, in my opinion.

        That was kinda the gasoline they ended up dousing that fiscal fire with.
        From David Dayen's "Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power":

        But whether the TINA (Truth in Negotiations Act) contracting regime reined in procurement abuse or not, when the Berlin Wall came down, the defense budget fell with it.
        Even a few years before that, the Reagan buildup had peaked, in part because of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act, which put constraints on all spending.

        But after 1989, policymakers started to cash the Cold War dividend, even during the Pentagon leadership of defense secretary Dick Cheney, who was nobody's dove.
        According to figures from Gordon Adams, a professor emeritus at American University who worked in the Office of Management and Budget in Bill Clinton's first term, George H. W. Bush dropped the defense budget 26 percent in constant dollars over the course of his tenure, while Clinton in his first four years dropped it only 10 percent.
        "The statistical policy reality, this was the Bush-Cheney-Powell drawdown more than the Clinton drawdown," said Adams.
        R&D and procurement were slashed in particular, making military officials more reliant on the commercial marketplace, and with less expertise to demand the best equipment at the lowest prices.

        That deflating balloon of military spending set the context for an event that came to be known as the "Last Supper."
        Defense secretary Les Aspin, his top deputy and eventual successor William Perry, and undersecretary for acquisition and technology John Deutch held a dinner meeting at the Pentagon with a dozen heads of the major defense contracting companies.

        "Part of it was a face slap," Adams said. "Perry was blunt: 'Some of you are going to live, and some will have to either die or merge. You have to figure it out among yourselves.'"
        This amounted to a direct order to the permanent armaments industry. They were told to consolidate, because there just wasn't enough money to spread around to facilitate their existence.
        Perry put a number to it: he wanted half as many contractors within five years.

        And he got his wish, with $55 billion in mergers in that span. In 1994, Northrop purchased Grumman to make Northrop Grumman.
        Lockheed bought out twenty-two suppliers, taking over Loral, Unisys Defense, Ford Aerospace, and Martin Marietta, which partially provided the current name Lockheed Martin.
        Raytheon gobbled up the defense units of Texas Instruments, Chrysler, and Hughes Aircraft.
        Boeing took units of Rockwell International and McDonnell Douglas.
        General Dynamics absorbed Bath Iron Works and pieces of Lucent Technologies and Ceridian.
        The consolidation has continued to this day: seventeen thousand firms exited the industry between 2001 and 2015, and in 2019 Raytheon bought United Technologies to create the nation's second-largest aerospace and defense company, behind only Boeing.

        These five companies became America's leading prime integrators, in control of the vast majority of contracts for weapons and delivery systems.
        A 2006 research paper on aerospace consolidation by U.S. Air Force major Judy Davis found that between 1990 and 1998 the number of tactical- missile contracts dropped from thirteen to four, fixed-wing aircraft makers went from eight to three, and makers of expendable launch vehicles from six to two.
        ...
        Below the top, the roster of manufacturers dedicated solely to defense has been narrowed significantly.
        "There's no such thing as a defense industrial base because over a long period of time, it has come to rely on civilian technology and commercial inputs to build equipment," Adams explained.
        Pieces of equipment that go into a plane, a periscope, or a battleship come mostly from a commercialized technology sector (with the minor exception of Raytheon, one of the few military contractors still producing technology).
        And since our commercial sectors trend toward monopoly, that translates into a lot of sole suppliers.
        ...
        Plus, the new laws gave defense firms a broader "commercial item" exemption. This meant that if the part was available in the commercial marketplace, the contractor didn't have to reveal what it cost to make it.
        The contracting official would have to consult price lists, historical pricing data, and other sources to determine a fair and reasonable price.
        But the assumption that this could be done was a fallacy, says Loeb: "There's no market price. Sometimes the market consists of either no actual sales or an infinitesimal number of sales."
        Even noncommercial items were dubbed commercial, in order to cut through the red tape; in the George W. Bush administration that was made stated policy.
        In 2004 Lockheed Martin listed its entire C-130J cargo plane as a commercial item.

        Also, "sociology" of Boeing predates Calhoun - as it is the "sociology" of the USA, not just of one "too big to fail" company.
        From the same book:

        As Max planes were grounded worldwide, people started wondering how they were ever approved for commercial use. It turned out that Boeing approved them.
        FAA managers delegated most of the safety assessments directly to the manufacturer, to help meet tight production schedules.

        This has been the norm for decades: a 1993 government report shows that the FAA delegated 95 percent of the safety certification to Boeing for its 747 jumbo jet.
        In the case of the Max, the assessments came back flawed, particularly for the flight automation system, the catalyst of the crashes.
        The FAA waved them through anyway; the office "defaulted" to Boeing, according to former officials.
        Lower-level employees lived in fear of calling out Boeing for errors and being dressed down by superiors; several of them called an FAA hotline to confidentially report issues with the 737 Max. Still nothing happened.

        Pressed for answers, acting FAA administrator Daniel Elwell told the Senate that it would take $1.8 billion in federal funds and ten thousand new employees for the government to certify aircraft.
        In other words, outsourcing safety determinations to monopoly corporations - Boeing is the only major manufacturer of commercial aircraft in the United States, making it in many respects too big to fail for America - is a budget-saving feature, not a courting-disaster bug.

        As the government investigated the breakdown, Boeing assigned its general counsel J. Michael Luttig as its point person.
        Luttig, once a federal judge, personally hired dozens of law students as clerks who are now seeded throughout the government, including Christopher Wray, the FBI director.
        Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr worked for Boeingâ(TM)s longtime law firm Kirkland & Ellis, as did the deputy attorney general and the head of the DOJ's criminal division.
        The web of connections is borderline obscene.

        "The airline industry is an abusive industry," Hudson (an aviation attorney, president of Flyers Rights [wikipedia.org] said.
        "They're exempt from all consumer protection regulations; they've essentially bought off Congress with special privileges that don't apply to anyone else.
        There's a point where you say this should not continue."

    • Same Douglas management that caused the problems with Max and the Dreamliner. The FAA incestuous relationship with Boeing with FAA personal taking lucrative Boeing jobs after helping them on the regulatory side doesn't appear to be fixed so... I'm going to assume we've got 'outsourced' quality happening.
    • Look up, planes made by this manufacturer are flying over your head all the time and have a great safety record, much better than most companies that have built commercial aircraft.

      You're going to need to look a bit deeper. And hint: "The MAX without MCAS is a perfectly flyable aircraft." The faulty system was added in the first place not because it was needed to fly the plane, but because it was needed to pass a certain weird test that they make planes undergo. Now, the story of that system is a story of d

  • by vague disclaimer ( 861154 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @05:52AM (#60501260)

    A passenger aircraft that is inherently unstable (a design feature previously reserved for combat aircraft with an extreme need for agility) is not safe, no.

    "Is it good enough" isn't even close to the right question.

    It evident that the major problem isn't really the Max, but the modern management culture at Boeing (see also Starliner)

    • by Strider- ( 39683 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @06:32AM (#60501294)

      The change that the MCAS software was trying to hide isn't instability, but it is a difference in behaviour from the previous generation 737s. The MCAS software attempted to hide that difference, and in the process made the aircraft unstable. The whole point was to hide it from the pilot, thus not requiring any additional training.

      The basic issue is that with the change in engine position, the aircraft pitches differently when the thrust is changed. All aircraft with the engine pods under the wings (so most airliners) do this to some extent. This is because the thrust is not in line with plane's Centre of Mass. The 737 Max has the engines higher and further forward, which changes this behaviour from the previous CFM-56 engines.

      The problem with the MCAS system was that when the the Angle of Attack sensor (note singular) went wonky, it would keep pitching the aircraft, eventually forcing it into a stall, thus making the aircraft unstable.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by hankwang ( 413283 )

        The basic issue is that with the change in engine position, the aircraft pitches differently when the thrust is changed. All aircraft with the engine pods under the wings (so most airliners) do this to some extent. This is because the thrust is not in line with plane's Centre of Mass

        My understanding is that it is not so much the trust resulting in a torque that pulls up the nose of the plane, but that if the pilot pulls up the nose (in order to gain altitude), the angle of the bottom surface of the engine causes additional lift, which will lead to the nose getting pulled up even further in a sort of runaway process*, unless the pilot counteracts this effect by pushing the nose down.

        *It's only a runaway process if the pilot keeps pulling the stick with the same force. An airplane is sup

        • This definitely aligns with my understanding of the matter; I've grown tired of people making claims like:

          That CoG has anything whatsoever to do with this - it has not really changed, and can be trivially compensated for during loading (the safe range of CoG is quite large on most passenger aircraft, for all flight phases).

          Altered thrust centerline and higher thrust engines - very well understood property of all low-engined jets, and compensated by the STS (Speed Trim System). This can, of course, be ove
          • Exactly. The design goal was engines with bigger fans for better fuel economy on the existing airframe. Normally they'd hang bigger engines but wings are too low and not feasible to make the landing gear taller. So they pushed the engines forward on longer mounts so the top of the engine could be higher. So now the engine is lower, but also further forward so it torques the wing differently.

            The FAA requires pilots to expensively retrain when there is a difference like that, which'd screw up airline crew
      • The problem with the MCAS system was that when the the Angle of Attack sensor (note singular) went wonky, it would keep pitching the aircraft, eventually forcing it into a stall, thus making the aircraft unstable.

        That is a problem with the MCAS system.

        Pretty bad, but alone it wouldn't be fatal, it's almost always a confluence of a number of other design choices, most shockingly that applying manual pitch disables the system temporarily (leading the pilot to think its fixed) but then reenables automatically

      • by rwyoder ( 759998 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @10:04AM (#60501688)

        The problem with the MCAS system was that when the the Angle of Attack sensor (note singular) went wonky, it would keep pitching the aircraft, eventually forcing it into a stall, thus making the aircraft unstable.

        No, you have it reversed. MCAS kept pushing the nose down, forcing the a/c into a dive, (just the opposite of a stall). That was what happened in both crashes.

      • The question is a lot broader than have they fixed the fault that caused several crashes. The question is whether it is now safe to fly in. To know that you would have to know that there are no other fatal flaws in the design of the aircraft. While I believe that they have probably fixed this particular issue, given what this incident revealed about how Boeing operates I find it hard to trust them when they say it is now safe. Even if they have now started behaving properly again and are being completely ho
      • As far as I know, the 737 Max is unstable to a degree that pilots might not expect. It is not unstable in the combat fighter fly-by-wire sense, but behaves badly in a nose up situation. From what I have read, standard practice in a stall is to increase thrust. This would work for most aircraft, but for the 737 Max, It could increase the stall, and flip the aircraft out of control. Pilots should have been made aware of this. There are plenty of maneuvers you should avoid in a large aircraft. But instead of t

    • All safety engineering is a question of "good enough" with the current "good enough" being the relevant agency's rules and guidelines. Your car is only "safe enough" to pass government crash tests to get certified. We could probably build something considerably more safe, but it could easily be twice as expensive as "safe enough" and very few people would buy it. People will gladly buy cheap phone chargers from China that are massive potential fire hazards just to save a dollar. "Safe enough" is just an arb
      • 1. If a particular phone charger caused actual fires, it would be a big scandal and yes, something would be done about it. Do you think, say, Apple could get away with an actual, hazardous charger as opposed to some speculation because something is cheap and comes from China that it offers "massive potential fire hazards?"

        2. The problem with the MCAS is not that it caused a stall, rather, when a single faulty sensor channel, a "wonky" angle-of-attack sensor indicated that the plane was in or near a sta

    • A passenger aircraft that is inherently unstable

      Fortunately it's not inherently unstable so that's not an issue. The plane elevates differently with varying thrust, pilots cope with that, ensuring that it remains level at constant thrust, trim copes with that. MCAS existed purely to make the plane feel like the previous one for which pilots are certified for. Without it the plane is still very much safe to fly and the FAA would approve it as such, albeit require pilot re-certification.

      Let's leave the assessments to the experts.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Aeronautical engineer Bjorn Fehrm: "If MCAS is deactivated, you can still fly the aircraft and it is not unstable."

      Vague Disclaimer, Slashdotter: "A passenger aircraft that is inherently unstable (a design feature previously reserved for combat aircraft with an extreme need for agility) is not safe, no."

    • FAA requires commercial airframes to be inherently stable. The 737 fuselage is a stable design. Donâ(TM)t know where you are getting your bogus fake news from but stop spreading it.

    • A passenger aircraft that is inherently unstable

      From the summary: "The MAX without MCAS is a perfectly flyable aircraft."

      Derp harder, or get back in the pile.

  • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @05:53AM (#60501262) Journal

    TFS says:
    --
    that with the updated flight control software, scenarios similar to the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes simply cannot recur and the aircraft is no longer dangerous.
    --

    Oh I'm sure the new MCAS control has been checked and rechecked and checked again. The MCAS software is by now probably the most carefully analyzed piece of code on any aircraft still flying*.

    But have they fixed what CAUSED the MCAS mess, the culture? Culture is hard to fix; this was a big friggin deal, so maybe it was enough motivation. Maybe.

    * The space shuttle code was some of the most reliable code ever written. Only one known big existed - the display for rhe position of the starboard manipulator arm was 1 unit off. Which was okay because the starboard manipulator arm was never installed. The shuttle is, of course, no longer flying, so MCAS may now be the most reliable software still flying.

    • by ganv ( 881057 )
      Culture changes slowly. I agree about the safety of the MCAS. I suspect the overall safety of the flight control systems on this plane are probably now much better than the typical plane the public flies in. It is just how short sighted culture works...obsess over the thing everyone is talking about today. So I am happy to fly in a 737 MAX when it is flight certified. The problem is that short sighted culture isn't just Boeing. It is everywhere from consumer electronics to civil engineering infrastru
    • by gTsiros ( 205624 )

      the hp48gx rom has complete self-programming capabilities and the bugs it has are known, possible to work around and countable on one hand

      i still think it is one of the best engineered consumer computer products

  • I'll be happy to fly on one of these aircraft just as soon as all those folk telling me that it's safe are prepared to fly with me.

    Along with Boeing executives.

    • Even before the fixes probability of crash was pretty low (high for a plane, but low in absolute values) - I see no reason they would avoid flying it, especially if they provide their own very experienced pilot. I bet they would even happily fly their plane without all those fixes if it somehow erased the reputation damage it suffered.

    • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:36AM (#60501392)
      Forget the FAA and execs, I want all the engineers and technical teams to go on multi country trips, using pilots from foreign airlines trained with the airlines published procedures. If they are all happy to do that then I think I can feel safe on it too. Right now I think given a choice I will pick a flight that is NOT a max as I just don't have any faith in the authorities or boeing to do the right thing.
  • Last time they outsourced the software overseas to save money after laying off US based staff. Have they done the same thing again? Perhaps safety systems are important enough that they should not be outsourced overseas?

    The other thing that baffled me is that I understand training for the new system was an option. How can training for a new safety system on mass transit be an option? Seriously, whether it's based in the US or not should be moot, especially when the very nature of aircraft is to spend their

  • by chx496 ( 6973044 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @06:08AM (#60501278)

    The 737 max without MCAS was never an unstable aircraft - it just handled differently than the previous 737s. Boeing introduced the MCAS so that it would appear to the pilots that the plane reacted in the same manner as previous models, so there would be no need for retraining, making it financially worth it for airlines to buy the 737 max if they already had a lot of pilots qualified on the 737. (If a new type certification were necessary, airlines might decide to switch over to Airbus's A320 neo, instead.)

    The two crashes occurred because of two reasons: the MCAS only reacting to a single sensor that delivered faulty data in those two cases, and the pilots being unaware of the MCAS (or at least of the true extent of what it was doing) and unaware of how to completely disable it. The question now is: after all this, what amount of training will be required of pilots so they can fly the 737 max? Because if they do need the equivalent of what amounts to a new type certification (even if it's just in cost due to simulator hours, but not in name), then I don't see that Boeing has a good argument to thier customers why they should keep buying the aircraft, because the original reason they were competitive has now completely disappeared.

    At the very least, because the FAA has actually taken a lot of time here (Boeing was putting pressure onto the FAA to re-certify the 737 max by the end of 2019, and it's now 9 months later), I actually have quite a bit of confidence that they did indeed do their due diligence this time around (which they failed to to the last time). I'd actually be quite surprised if the same system had any more serious issues. That said, the FAA still has a long way to go to restore my trust in them when it comes to certifications in general, because in this case there's a lot of media attention on them and they simply can't afford to fail twice here, they have yet to prove that they've regained their level of diligence they once had when there aren't so many eyes looking their way.

    • Boeing is paying all recertification costs for the first two years of new planes. Win-win for all airlines involved

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        That would utterly destroy potential profitability of the aircraft, massively overcrowd the simulators and training courses for many years to come as they do not have needed throughput, and keep most of the relevant aircraft grounded for years due to life of certified pilots.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      >If a new type certification were necessary, airlines might decide to switch over to Airbus's A320 neo, instead.

      It's worse than that. Many airlines invested in 737MAX specifically because they were told that they didn't need a full certification course for older 737 model certified pilots. If this was to suddenly change to full certification, it would create a massive temporary bottleneck in certification courses.

      As this would be temporary, flight schools would not be interested in getting new teachers,

    • There is a problem with trusting Boeing, and this is not unique to them. Large companies can afford in-house legal teams, and the accountants might decide that the costs of being sued can be balanced by savings on the engineering and approvals. From what I have read, engineers at Boeing were not happy with the fixes applied to make the 737 Max fly like a normal plane, but I assume that a cost-benefit analysis ruled out various things that engineers recommended.

      Engineers are always moaning about something. W

  • OK, so the 737-Max is supposedly safe now, but is the 737-8 safe?
  • Put the whole board of Boeing into one and send it on a cross continental flight.

    If they put their money where their mouth is, let 'em fly again.

    • You do realize that for a freshly maintained plane probability of crash is minuscule, even for the pre-fix MAX, right? Especially if you give it an experienced pilot.

      • The pitot that initially caused the problem HAD been 'maintained'. Can't rely on perfection, need redundancy. And they still haven't got it!
      • It would at least tell me whether they themselves consider it safe or whether they don't give a fuck about passenger lives, only care about their bonuses and just hope it won't happen again.

    • Not really. Thomas Midgley inhaled the vapour of tetraethyllead on a press conference to show how safe it is and afterwards left his job for a while to cure his lead poisoning.

  • Is saving someone else 14% in fuel costs (airlines) worth us taking the collective risk on a fundamentally unstable aircraft whose development was rushed and corrupted?
  • It is safe. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eravnrekaree ( 467752 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:06AM (#60501348)

    It is safe. The problems have been so reviewed at this time and addressed. Boeing has a working and safe MCAS in 767, it is a concept which is itself sound, the implementation was badly botched on 737. People who say automation is a problem clearly don't have a clue because planes have been heavily automated for decades with the flight engineer being automated, autopilot, and the entire Airbus line being fly-by-wire, the successful 777 being fly-by-wire, etc. An aircraft is a complex machine with a million things that can go wrong and a fly by wire system is not more vulnerable than many other parts of the airplane.

    The MCAS was used in a previous 767 version. The concept itself is sound, it has been used before successfully.What was unsound was the education and training around it, and implementation details. The 767 version was disclosed and there was a switch that would disable it without disabling the electric trim (which the pilot needs for correcting the aircraft) , and was better designed. Had MCAS been properly implemented on 737 max with sensor redundancy and more safeguards in the code to limit adjustments and had the pilots been informed and provided a way to disable it, we wouldn't be talking about this. The 767 MCAS had all of that so its kind of absurd that Boeing simply didn't do a duplication of that for 737.

    Boeing has become unable, here is the problem, to it seems execute anything properly. The big problem at Boeing is serving Wall Street and it needs to get back to being engineer focused. The solution to Boeings quality issues is for the structure of the Board to be reformed so that it is controlled by engineers.

    Boeing should go on to develop a 797 and come back to a 737 replacement later on.
    Boeing needs to change its internal culture to being engineer driven.

    • The concept is not that sound - it is an attempt to retrofit partial envelope protection into an ancient non fly by wire airplane. The KC-46 (normal 767 don't have MCAS) is several decades newer, hence I doubt a duplication of its MCAS on the 737 is even possible.

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:07AM (#60501350)

    ... making an air trip. Neat plane, everthing's fine, I even got Internet. I really don't understand all the fuss and think this thing is totally blown out of proportion and ... [NO CARRIER]

  • by CohibaVancouver ( 864662 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:24AM (#60501368)
    I am amused by the people posting on social media saying "I will NEVER fly on this plane."

    The vast majority of the flying public have no clue (nor do they care) what airframe they're on.

    I'm an aviation geek and used to fly quite regularly for business. You would often hear people onboard would insist they were on a Boeing when they were on an Airbus and vice versa. They wouldn't even know if they were on a narrow or wide-body until they walked on board.

    Most passengers book the cheapest fare, full stop. They're not certainly not choosing an Airbus over Boeing if the fare to Disneyworld on the Airbus is $30 more.
    • by Strider- ( 39683 )

      Bingo. I used to fly so much that I actually tracked individual tail numbers/registrations for the flights I was on. I wanted to see how much of Air Canada's fleet I could fly on.

      I am glad that I got to fly on C-GAUN (aka the "Gimli Glider") before she was sent to the boneyard.

  • by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:58AM (#60501436)
    knowing that Boeing has hacked the 737 by chopping the wings to fit larger engines on it, then had to hack the software to make it work, i will NEVER fly on such an abomination, i wont fly on anything anymore considering that is the level of morals that Boeing engineers have, i rather drive myself even if it takes several days to get from point A to point B
    • by Strider- ( 39683 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @08:16AM (#60501462)

      They didn't chop the wings. They moved the engines forward and higher, which changed the handling characteristics. Rather than require pilots to undergo additional training to compensate for this change in handling characteristics, they tried to fix it with a combination of firmware and sensors. And failed. They actually have a similar system on the P-8 Poseidon (military varient) which did require additional training, and it's worked properly.

      Had they bitten the bullet and required additional training and not fucked up the Angle of Attack sensors, we wouldn't be here.

  • Is the Boeing 737 MAX actually needed to carry passengers, or can they simply be the last ones to pull from mothball, because there are not nearly as many planes needed to fly routes these days?

    • Depends. On the one hand it has a lower fuel consumption than a 737NG, on the other hand, many airlines mothball their new and shiny jets and use their old ones because right now fuel is cheap.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The 737 is exactly the kind of airplane you want to have right now. It's small so you can serve your routes with decreased capacity. Also, since it's small, you can add or remove capacity in smaller increments.

      Airlines are sending their 747s and A380s off to the graveyard and would like to mothball some of their 777s and 787s in favour of A320s and 737s wherever possible.

  • I don't recall anyone mentioning whether a second AoA sensor will become standard equipment. Also what becomes with hundreds 737-8s already built with just one sensor? If the "fix" constitutes only changes in software and no mandatory pilot retraining, it can be really sloppy.

    • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday September 13, 2020 @10:20AM (#60501744)

      The MAX always had two AoA sensors. Each feeding its own flight control computer (FCC). What it didn't have was an algorithm to compare the two and raise an alarm if they disagreed. Only one FCC managed the elevator commands generated by MCAS. So if its AoA sensor got stuck, problems ensued.

      The argument for having no cross-checking is that the result, an alarm, would have been new to the 737 model line. It would make the 737-MAX 'different' than previous models and require extra pilot training. Which airlines didn't want to pay for.

      • by Ed_1024 ( 744566 )

        I think that is what scares people still. That the most powerful flying control on the aircraft could be moved repeatedly against the wishes of the pilots on the output of *one* sensor which had no range/validity checking.

        For something like this to make its way from specification to production in a, despite all the jokes, *engineering* company, is such a gross failure of design, testing and general common sense that it beggars belief. A 1st year student would not make mistakes like these in their first proj

        • What would you do if you were an auto manufacturing company and your customers said that they would no longer purchase your product if you eliminated the spark advance lever and moved the throttle to the floor? Because that's what your customers trained with and they didn't want to change?

  • This would be the time when airlines would start flying a small number of Maxes whose passengers agree to risk being on a plane with the new modification. A random half of the aircraft would be flying without the fix, and neither the FAA nor the pilots would know which was which.

    In 2024 a paper would be written summarizing the results of the testing. The FAA would then decide whether to approve the change.

  • No, the 737 MAX isn't safe. But that's not because of anything in particular about the aircraft or it's systems. It's because the pilots flying it generally have very little experience flying jumbo jets of any type and haven't been taught how to fly an aircraft, they've only been taught how to manage the automation that flies the aircraft and when the automation fails they're suddenly in unknown territory. That is always an inherently unsafe situation regardless of the hardware.

    • There is an important grain of truth in your comment: Pilots these days, particularly younger pilots trained in nations with far less history of publicly accessible aviation, definitely did not and probably still do not have the raw flying experience to handle the sort of emergency that the runaway MCAS caused.

      1) MCAS was switched with the same power as electric trim, so cutting MCAS killed electric trim was an extra cost option
      3) MCAS is not automatically disabled (while leaving electric trim enabled) by g

      • by lenski ( 96498 )

        The damn editor killed the end of point (1) and all of (2):

        1) MCAS was switched with the same power as electric trim, so cutting MCAS killed electric trim
        2) MCAS is informed by only one of two AOA sensors, and for Lion Air and for Malaysian Air, the AOA disagree indication was an extra cost option that the two airlines did not purchase with the MAXes.

  • The whole air-frame is unsuitable for the engines used. No amount of software is ever going to fix that. Hence it may take a bit longer, but the next time one of these gets into the right a bit more extreme conditions a modern plane should survive, it will not.

  • I hear of FAA do inspections but where do these inspectors come from? What kind of profession where they before working for the FAA? I am confident many are competent and most likely very smart but the organization? We all witness how Trump administration is dismantling federal agencies. For agencies that get budget boosts, there is also dismantling action on federal workers.

    Some say simply contract out inspection, licensing, and certification duties of FAA to contractors (that might be the case for some

  • Aeronautical engineer Bjorn Fehrm tells them that "If MCAS is deactivated, you can still fly the aircraft and it is not unstable. The MAX without MCAS is a perfectly flyable aircraft."

    This doesn't match with data I received earlier here [zerohedge.com] that indicated that disabling the MCAS also disabled the electronic controls for the horizontal stabilizer trim. This matters because, from the same source, the pilots of the EA flight were not able to mechanically change the stabilizer trim (with the handwheel) once those

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