Report: FAA Overruled Engineers, Let Boing Max Keep Flying (apnews.com) 65
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Some engineers for the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to ground the Boeing 737 Max soon after a second deadly crash, but top officials in the agency overruled them, according to a government watchdog. The inspector general of the Transportation Department said in a new report that FAA officials wanted to sort out raw data about the two crashes, and held off grounding the plane despite growing international pressure. The inspector general's office said that it reviewed emails and interviewed FAA officials. The investigation "revealed that individual engineers at the Seattle (office) recommended grounding the airplane while the accident was being investigated based on what they perceived as similarities between the accidents."
One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow. An FAA official said the analysis "suggested that there was a 25% chance of an accident in 60 days" if no changes were made to the planes. "However, this document was not completed and did not go through managerial review due to lack of detailed flight data," the report said. FAA officials at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the agency's Seattle office opted not to ground the plane. "Instead, they waited for more detailed data to arrive," the watchdog said in the report, which was made public Friday.
The first Max crash occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia and was followed by the second in March 2019 in Ethiopia. In all, 346 people died. The FAA was the last major aviation regulator to ground the Max -- three days after the second crash. The FAA did not let the planes fly again until late 2020, after Boeing altered a flight-control system that autonomously pointed the plane's nose down before both crashes. The inspector general's office said the FAA's caution on grounding the Max fit with its tendency of waiting for detailed data -- an explanation that agency officials offered at the time. Still, the watchdog recommended that FAA document how key and urgent safety decisions are made and make several other changes in how it analyzes crashes.
One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow. An FAA official said the analysis "suggested that there was a 25% chance of an accident in 60 days" if no changes were made to the planes. "However, this document was not completed and did not go through managerial review due to lack of detailed flight data," the report said. FAA officials at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the agency's Seattle office opted not to ground the plane. "Instead, they waited for more detailed data to arrive," the watchdog said in the report, which was made public Friday.
The first Max crash occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia and was followed by the second in March 2019 in Ethiopia. In all, 346 people died. The FAA was the last major aviation regulator to ground the Max -- three days after the second crash. The FAA did not let the planes fly again until late 2020, after Boeing altered a flight-control system that autonomously pointed the plane's nose down before both crashes. The inspector general's office said the FAA's caution on grounding the Max fit with its tendency of waiting for detailed data -- an explanation that agency officials offered at the time. Still, the watchdog recommended that FAA document how key and urgent safety decisions are made and make several other changes in how it analyzes crashes.
more accurate headline (Score:1)
would be that the FAA delayed grounding the 737 Max for a total of three days while waiting for more complete data.
But that's a little less sensational.
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Re:more accurate headline (Score:4, Informative)
A more accurate headline would spell the name of the company correctly, too.
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Boing?
MCAS Boing Boing Boing (Score:2)
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would be that the FAA delayed grounding the 737 Max for a total of three days while waiting for more complete data.
But that's a little less sensational.
If there's a 25% chance of an accident in 60 days, then there's a 1.25% chance of an accident in three days. So that means there was a one in 80 chance that delaying the decision for three days could have killed up to 210 passengers, or you could also write that as an estimated 0.875 dead passengers per day of delay, or an estimated 2.63 expected dead passengers over those three days.
Less sensational doesn't seem like a very good idea given those odds.
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If my math is correct, and assuming they would finally ground the plane after the next accident, about a 3.5% chance of an accident happening in three days would give you about a 25% chance of an accident happening in 60 days.
If you're talking about leaving the plane in service for 60 days no matter what, and figuring for at least one accident in that 60 days rather than exactly one accident, then t
No one went to jail, iirc (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone should have gone to jail for the first crash.
A *LOT* of people should have gone to jail for the second crash.
Why bother having a government agency in charge if they don't do their number one core job reason for existing: keeping us safe even if it costs Boeing's stock price.
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all your post was good, until you arrive to the racist part ...
first, i'm white, but your racist comments are really bad...,what is the problem with Black Americans, Black European and the small Black Japanese comunity? and how about Native Americans? Korean? Chinese Americans, Latinos? Arab? Women?!
The problem is not the color or place, but quality of the developer and experience. There are very good Chinsese, Indian, Arab, Africans... true, in percentage they are much less than in EUA, EU, RU JP, but they
Re:No one went to jail, iirc (Score:5, Informative)
What this did change was the international regulatory stance - previously, the European aviation authority (EASA) and the US authority (FAA) just signed off each others approvals with minimal checking because it was assumed that the other body was competent, but this changed after the MAX saga. Now aircraft manufacturers are required to submit for full certification to both bodies, and its a much more involved process than it used to be - no more rubber stamping the other authorities approval.
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How much red tape do you think there should be for aircraft with a unit price of $130m?
I know even ultralight certification is not cheap or easy, but when more lives are on the line, I expect more stringent safety requirements.
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> if they don't do their number one core job
We have proof here that it's not.
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Unfortunately true, but air safety is _supposed_ to be their core job.
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Indeed. Criminally negligent homicide is a thing and should definitely have been applied to the decision makers.
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Why bother having a government agency in charge if they don't do their number one core job reason for existing: keeping us safe even if it costs Boeing's stock price.
Why bother allowing it to be called a "government agency" when it's largely a tool of the aviation industry [bnnbloomberg.ca]?
The FAA should be renamed "Federal Aviation Industry Liaison" and become the lobby group it really wants to be. The folks there who actually care about passenger safety could move to the NTSB, which might, you know, actually regulate the airline industry.
"Boing"? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: "Boing"? (Score:4, Funny)
You can buy tickets on Boing Boing.
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deliberate or not, most awesome typo ever, considering the plane went up and down during the malfunction.
Re:"Boing"? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not even the lack of proofreading - that can slip by. But surely they've noticed and could have fixed it. This place is just fire and forget, being allowed to coast on once great laurels until they've squeezed every drop of revenue out of it without having to actually do anything.
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For once though the error was a good one, because that is indeed their nickname these days. It's the sound of tools forgotten in the wing during a flight! It's also the sound of parts falling off of the airframe and hitting the tarmac!
Merging with McDD destroyed Boeing. What we have now is a zombie wearing its nametag.
Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some engineers for the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to ground the Boeing 737 Max soon after a second deadly crash, but top officials in the agency overruled them, according to a government watchdog.
Sounds like the o-ring engineer vs manager situation on the Challenger. One wonders if officials/managers (think they) know better than the engineers why do they even have engineers?
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Some engineers for the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to ground the Boeing 737 Max soon after a second deadly crash, but top officials in the agency overruled them, according to a government watchdog.
Sounds like the o-ring engineer vs manager situation on the Challenger. One wonders if officials/managers (think they) know better than the engineers why do they even have engineers?
Of course the managers think they know better, why else would they be managers? And what's the engineers for? They are for taking the blame when shit happens.
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Not really; everybody knew it was a shit-storm after the second crash. The first crash was a little ambiguous (unfortunately partially due to the airline's terrible safety history). There was a side of politics that was a little hard to address though.
The real problem was most of the certification work is actually done by Boeing and not the FAA.
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So if you have a large group of engineers saying it is good and one who is warning that it might be bad and cannot back it up your thinking as a manager would be to go with the one who is warning that it might be bad?
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So if you have a large group of engineers saying it is good and one who is warning that it might be bad and cannot back it up your thinking as a manager would be to go with the one who is warning that it might be bad?
I understand your point, but I don't think it has to be a binary situation. I would take the stance of: if someone has a concern, especially in any industry where human safety could be jeopardized, let's all look into it. You know? Design review, get more people looking into it. Deal with the facts, rather than turn project management into the human political / chess game it too often becomes. When "management" is more about ego against ego, innocent people die. Sure, we're all human and have egos and
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One wonders if officials/managers (think they) know better than the engineers why do they even have engineers?
Because someone has to do the actual work. Now shut the fuck up and do what you are told.
FAA, and the government, doesn't care if you die (Score:1)
The lesson here is that the FAA, and by extension, the government doesn't care if you die. As long as the relevant companies are profitable.
If only some of you were smart enough to transfer that lesson over to "That Which Can Not Be Named".
Was the flaw that bad? (Score:3)
From my understanding of the MCAS that seems reasonable but is there a 737MAX rated pilot here who can confirm or correct me? Does anyone have information that indicates that pulling the trim breaker would not have fixed the problem?
If that were true, the two fatal crashes were largely pilot error. But I'm interested in the opinion of anyone rated in the 737MAX's opinion.
Re:Was the flaw that bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
From my understanding of the MCAS that seems reasonable but is there a 737MAX rated pilot here who can confirm or correct me? Does anyone have information that indicates that pulling the trim breaker would not have fixed the problem?
If that were true, the two fatal crashes were largely pilot error. But I'm interested in the opinion of anyone rated in the 737MAX's opinion.
You can disable stab trim to stop MCAS.
The main purpose of MCAS was not requiring a separate type rating for MAX's. Many pilots were never even informed of its existence.
What terrifies me the most about these incidents are people saying it was pilot error. An aircraft randomly takes an automated nose dive due to amateur hour criminally negligent design defects without warning and people somehow see fit to blame pilots.
Blame the pilot when they pull up when the stick shaker goes off. Blame them when they get themselves killed over blown gear indicator lights... FFS when the aircraft is repeatedly trying to kill them by crashing into the ground due to ridiculous design don't fucking blame the pilot.
The max should have never existed in the first place. Boeing should have designed a better aircraft rather than bolting massive high bypass engines on to the 737.
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I thought the "blame the pilot" thing was obvious: it's all about passing the buck, and onto dead people who can't defend themselves. All part of the weaselness of Boeing and FAA.
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Some pilots survived MCAS misbehaving, others did not. That means some fault lay on the pilot. That being said, none of the pilots should have had to deal with this.
Unwitting passengers had no idea they were submitting their lives entirely to the unmanaged risk that MCAS presented. This is criminal negligence on the part of Boeing management and the FAA. This should be prosecuted with great exuberance or else trust in the US aviation industry is not advised. (and, since no charges are being pursued, I do no
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Not a pilot but have been in small planes, and have 1.5 hours in my FAA flight log- did many take-offs, landings, touch-and-goes, high-banked turns, rudder use, engine idle glides, etc.
First, you may not remember, but MCAS was a hidden system that compensated for the MAX planes' engine size and placement. IE, so that normal 737 pilots could fly the MAX and it would handle exactly the same as a non-MAX 737.
MCAS has been discussed here before and I've never gotten an answer to this question: is the MAX so mu
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MCAS has been discussed here before and I've never gotten an answer to this question: is the MAX so much different that an average commercial pilot would have a terrible time with it? AFAIK, it just pitches up more on throttle up, which could cause a stall, but you're going to know that, if you didn't figure it out, the stall warning would let you know.
Not a pilot, obviously, but I think it's not that the pilots wouldn't be able to deal with it, but it was sufficiently different that extra training would be required. Which would cost airlines money which in turn would decrease demand for the Max. So they had the software fix to emulate the behavior of the regular 737 in order to avoid that.
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Not a pilot, obviously, but I think it's not that the pilots wouldn't be able to deal with it, but it was sufficiently different that extra training would be required. Which would cost airlines money which in turn would decrease demand for the Max. So they had the software fix to emulate the behavior of the regular 737 in order to avoid that.
Yes, thank you, quite correct. I didn't rewrite that part because I thought that was well-known, and implied in the discussion.
My point was supposed to be: did MCAS have to be hidden? IE, if a pilot knew of MCAS, and had the power to turn OFF MCAS, crucially without turning OFF electric trim assist, would they be totally unable to handle the plane?
I'm kind of posing what is now obvious in hindsight, but if I had been part of the engineering, I would have pushed for pilots to be able to disable MCAS _onl
Re:Was the flaw that bad? (Score:5, Informative)
IANAP, but I stumbled upon an in-depth analysis form an aviation insider back when this was still fresh. I am a bit hazy on the detes, but I freshened up my memory as best I could right now. The story went something like this:
The purpose for the MAX was bigger engines for greater range and fuel efficiency. The bigger engines did not really fit under the wings of the 737, wanting to hit ground, but Boeing did not want to spend the money to develop a new plane. So they slapped the engines on the plane anyway, forwards and upwards, changing the center of gravity of the plane and therefore, flight characteristics - biasing the plane for pulling it's nose up, threatening a stall.
Since this new nose up bias would mean expensive pilot retraining, Boeing decided to compensate for it in software and hide the fact from everyone to avoid recertifications.
For the compensation the on-board computer would rely on angle-of-attack sensors, and ideally also on g-force sensors. But they could not get the combo to work properly, so they scrapped the g-force sensor from the algos input. Also, while the 737 already for some reason only had two angle-of-attack sensors, the grave mistake they made was to only hook up one sensor to the actual flight computer, and the other one to the backup computer.
So you can probably see where this is going. But there's more! The nose-up corrector, MCAS, had no memory of what had already happened. So when it went into a nose-dive based off a faulty sensor, the pilot would correct it, but the MCAS would have yet another go in every ten seconds.
Since the pilot had no idea about the MCAS existence, they would most probaby get stuck in a correction loop with the computer until they hit the ground. There also was the theoretical possibility to use the mechanically connected trim wheel, but with the forces acted upon the plane at the speeds involved, you would need Superman to operate it, as the late Ethiopian Airlines crew found out. There would also be the possibility to switch to the backup computer, but that would mean you at least had some hunch of what was going on, and were willing to risk with your plane being basically offline for quite some minutes until the damn thing booted, and this in an already extreme situation.
All the while this kerfuffle was going down, there were reports from MAX pilots saying the plane was trying to kill them. These got ignored and swept under the rug. In a perfect world there would be the FAA to step in, but the FAA in the real world, like any other US regulatory agency, runs on the make believe of industry self-regulation. Cannot even blame them, really, because like any other US regulatory agency, they are underfunded and cannot afford to hire any real competency nor do any actual work even if they wanted to. Anyone worth their salt will easily go for triple the salary in the industry itself - why would they work in the FAA? So all the FAA really can do is rubber stamp everything and call it a day.
As for the Europeans, well, they assumed their US counterparts were competent and rubber stamped everything that already had the US stamp. At least that has changed now.
So in the end, the MAX was basically set up to fail, and made sure in many ways that it definitely would fail. A good old story of greed, negligence and incompetence. But for a brief moment in time, it created great value for Boeing shareholders, i guess.
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The backup computer isn't on hot standby??
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Maybe I shouldn't be, but it seems so obvious that a backup should be able to take over immediately.
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IIRC, this is untrue. The problem was that once the deflection of the trim tab passed a certain point, the forces acting on it made using the manual trim wheel effectively impossible--even if you could move it, you couldn't move it far enough fast enough to recover.
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Apparently the pilots in the Ethiopian crash did disable the electrical trim stabilization. They were unable to manually crank the trim back to neutral due to the high speed.
MCAS activating inappropriately wasn't a death sentence, there were several reports, including on the crashed planes on previous flights, of it acting up. But in both fatal cases it happened right after takeoff. A major control malfunction in a critical phase of flight is dangerous. You can reduce the danger with training, but eventuall
OMG what 3 days? (Score:3)
So the FAA acted 3 days after the crash instead of what, immediately? What's the point here? That the FAA should have knee-jerked and grounded the plane without reviewing the data from 3rd party regulators?
The Lion Air crash was a group effort. If you read the investigation report, it's clear that the airplane was just one slice in the Swiss Cheese accident model. (and no, you don't get to be excused for being one slice, but it's not all your fault either.) Given that, I rather think that if I were a regulator, and heard of the ETH crash, I might want to look into the facts before grounding the airplane.
Hindsight says that Boeing screwed up MCAS. That doesn't make every single related effort culpable.
Re:OMG what 3 days? (Score:5, Insightful)
So the FAA acted 3 days after the crash instead of what, immediately? What's the point here? That the FAA should have knee-jerked and grounded the plane without reviewing the data from 3rd party regulators?
Yes absolutely when two of the same model planes crash in the same way 5 months apart and there are multiple related complaints from pilots of their aircrafts trying to kill them in the same way you absolutely knee-jerk ground them all without delay.
Hindsight says that Boeing screwed up MCAS. That doesn't make every single related effort culpable.
The FAA signed off on removing any reference to MCAS from the manuals. Even after the Indonesia crash they still tried to keep its existence a goddamn secret. Boeing new about the issues with MCAS long before hundreds of people died.
It didn't take any hindsight to find out Boeing "screwed up" MCAS or to determine the FAA had lost its fricking mind.
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yes, those 3 days were a problem
go read the summary again:
"One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow."
even if not yet confirmed, it is already a too high estimate, the risk was too high... what if another plane crashed, this time in the EUA? Over the FAA history other planes were grounded for some time for potential problem and in this case, there were already other reports of the plane miss behaving during tak
while it is worth looking into (Score:2)
...let's be clear: ANY project is going to have people spouting a multiplicity of opinions.
To Monday-morning quarterback and say "well you overruled the guy over there in the corner who it turns out was right" isn't, by itself, meaningful or indicative of something broken.
Boeing hasnt apologized (Score:2)
Right, with Commissioners... (Score:2)
appointed by TFG.
USA is not EU or Asia (Score:1)
The FAA has authority over US carriers and US airspace. The 737 max accidents were partially a result of chronically deficient training of Asian pilots. The FAA, being aware that US and EU pilots are much better trained, did not see an immediate need for drastic action in the US.
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not only that, boeing also had extra paid features, that could help... and EUA and EU companies had more money, so many choose the extra features, while poorer companies got cheaper planes, with less sensors and redundancy, that could be more easily fooled
But that excuse is also weak, EU grounded the planed in line with all other aviation authorities, at that time it was not known that the training had problems, there were just suspection of a possible sensor or software bug