Officials inspecting wreckage recovered from the crash of a Boeing 737 MAX jet that plunged into the Java Sea last year. Photo: Donal Husni/Zuma PressBy
Andrew Tangel andAndy Pasztor
July 31, 2019 5:32 am ET An internal risk analysis after the first of two Boeing 737 MAX airliner crashes showed the likelihood was high of a similar cockpit emergency within months, according to a Federal Aviation Administration official familiar with the details and others briefed on the matter.The regulator’s analysis, not previously reported, showed that it “didn’t take that much” for a malfunction like the one confronted by the pilots of the Lion Air flight that
occur, one of the people briefed on the analysis said.
Based on the findings, the regulator decided it was sufficient to inform pilots about the hazards of an onboard sensor malfunction that led to
a flight-control system pushing down the plane’s nose. The belief was that if pilots were aware of the risk and knew how to respond, it was acceptable to give Boeing and regulators time to design and approve a permanent software fix to
MCAS, the flight-control system
implicated in the crash, according to the agency official and people briefed on the findings.The FAA’s early goal, one of these people added, was: “Get something out immediately and then mandate something more permanent.”Specifically, the FAA’s analysis suggested that a warning to pilots would be enough to provide Boeing about 10 months to design and implement changes to MCAS, according to a person close to the manufacturer. Boeing had been planning to complete the changes by April, within the 10-month period, this person said.Boeing and the FAA’s risk projections faced a real-world crisis in less than five months. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302
went down on March 10 in a similar nosedive prompted by the same type of automated MCAS commands pilots couldn’t overcome. The dual crashes took a total of 346 lives.
Investigators quickly focused on the central role of MCAS, and regulators around the world grounded the aircraft. The FAA has said it doesn’t have a deadline for approving the final package of fixes but won’t allow the planes back in the air until all safety issues are resolved.A Boeing spokesman said: “Boeing and the FAA both agreed, based on the results of their respective rigorous safety processes, that the initial action of reinforcing existing pilot procedures…and then the development and fielding of a software update, were the appropriate actions.” He added: “The safety of everyone flying our airplanes was paramount as the analysis was done and the actions were taken.”The FAA’s internal analysis, prepared in the days immediately following the Oct. 29 Lion Air crash, is called a TARAM, an acronym that stands for Transport Airplane Risk Assessment Methodology. It essentially involves a spreadsheet with formulas that consider a number of factors—such as fleet size, probability that sensors will fail, passenger counts—and aims to predict how many people could die over a certain period because of potential hazards, according to people familiar with the process.There is also a subjective analysis that, along with the TARAM’s numerical forecasts, informs FAA managers and engineers about what types of actions to take and when—for major but also less-serious air-safety issues. “It’s kind of a cold way of looking at it,” the person briefed on the analysis said, adding: “It’s not foolproof. It’s a tool.”The analysis determined that the underlying risks from the MCAS design were unacceptably high without at least some FAA action, that they exceeded internal FAA safety standards and that the likelihood of another emergency or even accident “was over our threshold,” according to the FAA official. “We decided…it was not an acceptable situation,” the official said.