MAX’s Return Delayed by FAA Reevaluation of 737 Safety Procedures Mk II

[JPJP]

It’s been reported that Boeing is fighting back against ‘the unfair media reporting’ that is sullying their reputation. They don’t seem to understand that merely presenting the facts, is enough.

Attached below is The Wall Street Journals editorial. Written by a business reporter with zero apparent background in aviation or flying. He’s obviously being fed a pilot blaming narrative, and seems to be leading Boeing’s newest PR defence. His conclusions are certainly bizarre - two crashes where a lack of information was a factor. Lead to less education ?

As Manuel would say - ‘Que ?’

Ghosts and goblins are keeping the troubled newBoeing 737 MAX out of the air now. So much so that the company this week announced it will stop an assembly line that was producing dozens of planes a month to be stored in parking lots.

After the first MAX crash took place in Indonesia in late 2018, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration decided to keep the plane flying. Consternation followed a Journal report last week showing that at the time the agency anticipated a MAX crash rate three times that of comparable airplanes. In the FAA’s defense, it also presumed that Boeing would fix the MAX’s faulty flight-control software well before another crash occurred. In the meantime, impressed upon pilots would be that any glitch could be quickly neutralized by throwing a couple of prominent switches.

Which makes all the more urgent understanding why the next crash, involving Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, happened just months later. For the last three minutes of what was a six-minute flight, the offending software system, as per Boeing’s instructions after the Indonesia crash, was disabled. Yet the pilots never cut takeoff thrust despite a loud clacker warning that their airspeed was exceeding the plane’s design limit. With so much force acting on the plane’s control surfaces, they were unable, as Boeing’s new checklist also specified, to move the trim wheel manually to correct the nose-down trim imposed by the faulty software.

They didn’t use the three minutes to heed the clacker and reduce their speed or briefly to relax pressure on the control yoke, which also would have helped free up the trim wheel. Instead, against all advice, they turned the software back on, which promptly put the plane into an unrecoverable dive. How much the Ethiopian crash even belongs in the same category as the Indonesia crash is debatable when all the facts are considered, albeit depending on whether you are more interested in focusing on aircraft design or on crew training.

To pilots who came up with lots of hand-flying through the military or even the way hobbyist pilots do, it seems possible that understanding the impact of excessive aerodynamic forces on the trim wheel would have been second nature. Perhaps not so with the tens of thousands of classroom- and simulator-trained pilots who staff today’s fast-growing airlines in the developing world.

A misplaced sensitivity has been working overtime to suppress discussion of this issue. The goal is not to excuse Boeing’s appalling original software implementation or rush the 737 MAX back into service.

The discussion is unwelcome in aviation circles partly because the corollaries are unwelcome. If airplanes today must be designed so mass-produced, classroom-trained pilots can’t crash them, planes tomorrow will be designed to eliminate the pilot completely. In the meantime, better crew training could always be required, but the benefit might not be worth the cost given today’s already low accident rate thanks to the advance of automation.

All this explains the bitterness that has crept into the debate, with a U.S. pilot union accusing Boeing of “blaming dead pilots for its mistakes” and Ethiopian Airlines threatening never to fly the 737 MAX again.

For its part, the FAA knows it can’t guarantee against another Boeing crash any more than it can guarantee against another Airbus crash like the 2009 Air France disaster in the South Atlantic or 2013’s Asiana Airlines mishap at San Francisco’s airport. In all three cases, and in almost all crashes nowadays, flyable planes are flown into the ground by pilots either accidentally or intentionally (as with the 2015 Germanwings pilot-suicide crash).

Boeing decided this week to curtail production of the grounded MAX for cash-flow reasons. The company knows the plane will fly again (as it should) partly because the global economy’s demand for air travel can’t be met without the MAX.

Meanwhile, regulators have been throwing requirements at Boeing less related specifically to the MAX and very definitely related to new doubts about pilot readiness to deal with unexpected situations. Afoot in global regulatory circles already was a tendency, now accelerated, to reduce expectations about what pilots must know and do from memory. The goal will increasingly be to give them detailed checklists for every occasion. This will likely include, in any failure related to the automatic trim system, an explicit reminder not to overspeed.

Whether or not this has much to do with the MAX anymore, it certainly has to do with the future of flying until robots finally push the pilot out of the cockpit altogether. - Holman W Jenkins Jr.



https://www.wsj.com/news/author/5469