Originally Posted by
Derfred
Which is why I posted this a week ago:
I don’t work for Boeing, but given the track record of this operator, I am really surprised at the outburst against Boeing on this thread. Boeing is not in charge of maintenance standards or training standards at customer airlines. If you want to buy a ticket to fly on a low cost airline, you carry a risk. Until the planes start crashing, low cost operators will continue to reduce standards. Eventually they will reach a point where the planes start crashing, and tragically, people will die. I will leave it to the community to decide when that point has been reached.
True, maintenance and operations will most likely be found to be causal factors in this one, but so will the possible lack of adequate briefing for a new system and also the engineering design of said system, including the (possible lack of appropriate) hazard assessment for possible failure modes including the handling of erroneous input data. System engineers cannot simply say "our system always works perfectly given correct input data." Designing the system to expect and handle totally wrong, missing, delayed, corrupted, slightly wrong and all sorts of other less-than-perfect input data is part of due diligence. This includes estimates of the probability of such wrong data, and thorough analyses of what could possibly go wrong in the worst case.
This was supposed to be a system to prevent accidents, but it is quite clear that in this case it was a causal factor of an accident. It is hard, or maybe impossible to say how many accidents it has prevented (plausibly: none). Given the law of small numbers one cannot yet say that the MAX would be better off without the system altogether, and some system was also arguably required to fulfill certification criteria for longitudinal stability. Such systems have a long tradition, often in the form of stick pushers, to mitigate adverse aerodynamic effects. Using hardware already available is a "cheap" solution, compared to the complexities of an actual pusher, but in terms of certification, "just good enough" is good enough.
And despite your protestations, Boeing does have a word to say about maintenance standards and training standards at an airline wishing to operate their hardware.
Bernd