Originally Posted by
megan
The Aviation Week article doesn't provide a copy of the 2015 e-mail. Natalie Kitroeff posted the Fazio's' PPT slide onTwitter but it is heavily redacted, partially obscured by a big blue circle with a quote pull-out, and generally difficult to read.
1) Has anyone seen a cleaner copy of this e-mail and if so, would you please post it?
2) Any idea why so much stuff was redacted? It doesn't look like they were redacting names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Rather, it looks like they redacted substantive comments.
3) I haven't seen any substantive reporting about this e-mail. It is mentioned in NYT, Seattle Times and Aviation Week articles, but just to mention that Muilenburg got hit with it at the House hearing. Has anyone seen any more in-depth reporting on this e-mail? E.g., when did Boeing become aware of the e-mail, who sent and received it, and are they still employed at Boeing, what was the context of the thread?
4) Why has the reaction to this been so much more subdued than the reaction to the Forkner e-mail about the simulator running rampant? There hasn't even been much discussion here. I know there are the optics attached to Forkner's language, but the AoA Disagree issue cuts to the heart of some of the engineering errors.
5) At the time of the e-mail, Boeing believed that it had AoA Disagree functionality built in, as it was in the NG (they didn't discover the bug making it dependent on the optional AoA Indicator until much later). Assuming the FCC processors detect the disagree condition, or that it is input to the FCC, the response to this e-mail couldn't have been "it's too hard for MCAS software to detect AoA disagree." Was the problem that the disagree state was not readily available to the FCC in MCAS 1.0? What other possible reason could there have been not to detect this condition in the MCAS software?
6) Also, focus on vulnerability to a single AoA failure should have provoked some kind of more general discussion of the ability to detect invalid inputs and limits on outputs, which was never added. I continue to be mystified by the failure to do even the most coarse filtering, and this e-mail makes it even worse.