Union for FAA’s safety engineers urges more changes to Boeing 737 MAX before it can fly again A union representing Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) airplane safety engineers who work on certifying new aircraft called Monday for substantial upgrades to the flight crew alerting systems and other changes on Boeing’s 737 MAX before the plane is allowed to return to the air.
During the original certification of the 737 MAX,
Boeing successfully argued to the FAA that the jet shouldn’t have to meet all the latest certification requirements governing how cockpit warnings tell the pilots that something is wrong.
The MAX was duly granted exemptions to five of the regulatory stipulations so that it could retain the legacy 737 instrument panel and crew alert system.
The FAA technical staff union argued Monday that those exemptions should be rescinded and the crew alerting system on the re-certified MAX updated accordingly as a condition of the jet’s return to service.
If accepted, that would require major revisions to the instrument displays on the airplane as well as more pilot training on the revised systems, and would likely further delay the MAX’s return.
In early August,
the FAA published its final list of required design changesto the Boeing 737 MAX and invited public comment.
The comment period ends Monday and last-minute responses came in from various parties with substantial expertise.
The National Safety Committee of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) — a union that represents air traffic controllers and about 600 aircraft-certification technical experts at the FAA — submitted a detailed response with a series of recommendations for additional changes to the MAX, including rescinding the crew alerting exemptions.
The NATCA comments follow closely the critique of Boeing whistleblower Curtis Ewbank, a
safety engineer who filed an ethics complaint internally at Boeing after the second MAX crash in Ethiopia.
In a letter to the U.S. Senate this summer,
Ewbank publicly repeated his charge about safety issues on the MAX, especially with regard to the inadequacy of the crew alerts. On Friday, covering much of the same ground, he submitted his own comment on the FAA return to service plan.
The changes the FAA plan mandates
will fix the flight control system — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that activated erroneously in the two crashes and brought both planes down. It also moves some wiring to ensure proper separation of wires controlling the horizontal tail. And it switches the avionics architecture of the airplane so that it uses both flight control computers on a given flight instead of only one.
However, the FAA return to service plan leaves the instrument panel displays and the pilot warning systems largely untouched. Updating them would require a major remake of the 737’s human/machine interface that would be both expensive and lengthy.
In the original certification of the MAX, in arguing for the exemptions, Boeing estimated the cost of full compliance in terms of new training for pilots worldwide at more than $10 billion.
In its submission Monday, NATCA declared that argument not valid.
“The cost of the two accidents that resulted in worldwide grounding of the 737 MAX fleet has well exceeded the stated $10 billion flightcrew training costs,” NATCA states.