Boeing 737 Max Recertification Testing - Finally.

[WillowRun 6-3]

These last few posts are fascinating. .... for a couple different reasons.

First, the fallout from the various things that went wrong resulting in the 737 MAX accidents continues. As SLF/attorney I can't and don't claim to understand enough of the NTSB comments - along with the factors s.p. has noted - to say that this latest development will affect, or have any real influence upon, how the pending crew-alerting certification issues play out, as between FAA, EASA, and other CAAs. Other posters who are quite knowledgeable about the systems involved, and their integration and operation, lead an observer to believe that the issue is more complicated than just "go to the state of the art, or stay with the grandfathered system". (For example, what to do with or about stick-shaker activations... ) But having said that, if I was forced to guess, I'd say that the technically virtuous senior-level people who sooner or later will have to rule on this issue will see the NTSB-Ethiopia subtext as relevant.

I recall that the Dekker report surfaced on one or more threads on the forum some time ago, in the context of the two MAX accidents, and given the recent posts here, and a second factor, it just moved up higher on my reference/reading list.

Secondly, for some time now I have wanted to agitate, or at least try to find influence and apply it, to make aviation law curricula include a lot more study of the Annex 13 process. I am not saying that lawyers as lawyers ought to have more authority in these matters or that the overall process should become or needs to become more legalistic. To the contrary, the point emerging from Dekker's report surfacing again is that in order to be both knowledgeable about and useful to the aviation safety ecosystem, lawyers need to have a better understanding of the complications of piecing together what happened in an accident. I'd say every lawyer who really practices in public international air law, and most who practice in private int'l air law, can recite cold the basics about Annex 13. But ask them to read s.p.'s insightful post and then offer answers to the questions posed with regard to the NTSB comments on the Ethiopia report? Maybe some grizzled old-timers could tackle it. No one I've met in various aviation law settings could, though (neither can I, just to be clear). And out of some sense of decorum I'm not referring to any "lawmakers" here.

I realize this is could be drift worthy of the recent storm in the U.S. but there's a precedent in the law books proving that better understanding of accident investigation processes and the actual nuts-and-bolts cause-and-effect analysis is needed. When the U.S. FAA grounded DC-10s in the aftermath of the May 1979 accident in Chicago, operators of the type holding certificates from other CAAs sued over the denial of recognition of those airworthiness certificates. In the British Caledonian case, the U.S. federal appellate court ruled that the foreign operators had been unlawfully denied access to U.S. airspace. The problem with the court decision, though, is that at the time the U.S. was denying access despite the airworthiness certificates issued by foreign CAAs, it was not yet known how the loss of Flight 191 had occurred. As a poster on a different thread some months ago stated, it was still a perfectly flyable airframe - it just had suffered an increase in stall speed due to the ripping off of the engine from the left wing, severing of hydraulic lines, retraction of slats - none of which the tragically ill-fated aviators or other people aboard could have known. So unless the foreign operators of the DC-10 type (or their respectiive CAAs) knew, at the time they were denied access to U.S. airspace, how the accident had occurred -- and I have never yet found any information that they did know - the denial of access was proper in the interest of safety. The court decision was correct legalistically (under provisions of the Chicago Convention) but wrongly decided in a context of how the airplane operated, and did not operate.

Unless I've botched up understanding of the timeline regarding Flight 191 (SLF that I am), it would be quite a "case study" in a course intended to train future aviation lawyers about how little we legal types actually know, yet how much we must understand, even so.