As more information comes out about two B738 Max crashes, it’s clear that a big system malfunction was at work. Not the famed “MCAS” system, designed to help a pilot avoid an aerodynamic stall, whose snafu is strongly implicated in last October’s crash of a late-model 737 MAX in Indonesia and is suspected in last week’s crash of a 737 MAX in Ethiopia.
That system seems clearly to have been badly designed, in a way neither Boeing nor the Federal Aviation Administration would have approved if they had understood what they were doing. The truth is, their own bureaucratic systems seem accidently to have delivered into the cockpit a kludge that never should have been allowed near a plane that would be carrying passengers.
And yet the fact that the two planes were allowed to crash may not be blamable solely on faulty anti-stall software that, when fed improper data, can push the nose dangerously toward the ground.
U.S. airlines have been flying the new 737 MAX for nearly two years. Pilots seem to have coped with the plane’s troubled automation system with little fuss or bother. Before last year’s crash in Indonesia, a Lion Air crew flying the same jet appears to have had no trouble responding to the system’s flawed performance. After the Indonesia crash, 737 MAX pilots around the world were coached on the system’s flaws and given remedial training. The captain in last week’s Ethiopian Airlines crash was highly proficient. So why didn’t he avoid the crash if the accidents are as similar as now suspected?
While these questions remain unanswered, Boeing’s critics have widened the search for culprits to make what they know substitute for what they don’t. First it was the software, then it was shortchanging 737 MAX pilots of training. Boeing also was blamed for how it hung a new engine on the 737’s wing, and then for sticking with the 737 at all instead of building an all-new plane.There may be something to each of these complaints but an alternative rabbit hole has been to ask whether the industry’s growing reliance on computers has left pilots unready to intervene and compensate when something goes wrong.In reality, there is no good reason to fault Boeing’s decision to keep its 737 flying rather than seeking to certify an all-new aircraft. Likewise, the fact that new engines fitted on the 737 MAX cause it to generate more lift under certain circumstances than previous models is hardly a defect.
The real screw-up seems to have been Boeing’s decision to use software code not to fix an aerodynamic problem but to make the new jet, from the pilot’s point of view, seem to handle like the old jet. In essence, Boeing tried to make the 737 MAX a simulator of the 737 NG.That is, when manually flying the new plane, pilots could add the same amount of power and stick as they did in the old plane and get the same result—because software would secretly compensate for the tendency of the new plane’s nose to rise.Boeing compounded this choice with the hard-to-believe decision to make MCAS dependent on data from a single, fallible “angle of attack” indicator. We’ll see what comes out of the many investigations now under way, but the solution could be as easy as junking MCAS altogether and training pilots to fly the new plane in accordance with its actual flying characteristics.Still, Boeing has 4,600 outstanding orders for the 737 MAX. This would seem to refute definitively the argument that the market wanted an all-new aircraft. In fact, the mystery of recent crashes may be telling us the opposite: The time is not yet ripe for a new plane.Boeing, for one, has said its air-cargo customers already are clamoring for an aircraft that can fly itself. Unmanned aerial drones are acquiring operational experience and hours of flight data that may soon give us more information about how such systems perform under every kind of real-world scenario than we have about human pilots.Meanwhile, though automation is credited with improving safety, an important question is: Which automation? Should we thank the kind that helps airplanes stay on course and intervenes if the pilot makes an ill-advised maneuver? Or the kind that increasingly takes the pilot out of the loop altogether? Notice that Boeing’s faulty software was designed to operate in those rare moments when a pilot is flying the plane by hand.
These questions, sadly, relate to more than just accident prevention. As the overall crash rate declines, incidents of suicide-by-pilot have started to account for an alarming percentage of air fatalities. Think the Germanwings Airbus crash of 2015, the EgyptAir crash of 1999, and quite possibly the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 in 2014.We hope the implications are clear. Replacements for the 737 or Airbus’s comparable A320 would be expected to carry the industry for the next 50 years. Before launching new planes, the companies and their customers and regulators need to decide what exactly they want the pilot to do in the future, and if they want a pilot at all.