Boeing, and FAA oversight

[blind pew]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51058929
From previously redacted Boeing internal comms.
Would you put your family on a Max.......NO.
Designed by clowns overseen by monkeys...bit harsh.

[Nil by mouth]

I saw that BBC report too but thought it too risky to post because of........

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/288x288/hamster_wheeledtn_00b0c4530dd76921c24cc3c09124f084cf7e8724.j pg

[Bergerie1]

Much the same on the FlightGlobal website, what a shame for such a great company:-
https://www.flightglobal.com/airframers/boeing-releases-damning-employee-correspondence-about-max/136078.article

[sky9]

Anyone who flew in the 1960's and 70's was very much aware of the efforts made on the BAC 1-11 to avoid stalls with its doubled up stick shake and aggressive stick push. As someone who flew many thousands of hours on that aircraft and the 737-200 it was obvious there was a difference in philosophy between the CAA and the FAA when it came to certification in the area of stalls. For years the ARB wouldn't certify the B727 because of that issue.

DP Davis' book Handling the Big Jets second edition published in 1968 by the British ARB explained what he referred to as a typical stick pusher installation on page 136 then went on to describe the BAC1-11 system with it 4 "stall warning sensors" (angle of attack indicators) that was fitted to the aircraft after its deep stall crashes during certification.

The best thing the FAA could do is get out their copy of the book read it then tell Boeing take out MCAS and fit an updated version of the BAC1-11 system on the Max.

On a personal note there was a major difference in handling pitch on the BAC1-11 and the B737. On the 1-11 pilots used the elevators to control pitch then trimmed out with the stabiliser trim. The 737 has a far larger stabiliser compared to its elevators and all pilots I ever flew with learned to fly the aircraft by blipping on the trim switch effectively using elevators almost exclusively only during take off approach and landing.

[switch_on_lofty]

I've had a quick search but can't find the original messages, just the same Reuters story syndicated everywhere. Is is published anywhere?

[patplan]

I've had a quick search but can't find the original messages, just the same Reuters story syndicated everywhere. Is is published anywhere?

Here's NYT's take on that same subject...Boeing Employees Mocked F.A.A. and ‘Clowns’ Who Designed 737 MaxThe company expressed regret at the embarrassing communications it sent to investigators on Thursday, which included a comment that “this airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys.”

Boeing employees mocked federal rules, talked about deceiving regulators and joked about potential flaws in the 737 Max as it was being developed, according to over a hundred pages of internal messages delivered Thursday to congressional investigators.

“I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one of the employees said in messages from 2018, apparently in reference to interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration.

The most damaging messages included conversations among Boeing pilots and other employees about software issues and other problems with flight simulators for the Max (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/business/boeing-737-max-simulator-training.html), a plane later involved in two accidents, in late 2018 and early 2019, that killed 346 people and threw the company into chaos.

The employees appear to discuss instances in which the company concealed such problems from the F.A.A. during the regulator’s certification of the simulators, which were used in the development of the Max, as well as in training for pilots who had not previously flown a 737.


“Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. “No,” the colleague responded.

In another set of messages, employees questioned the design of the Max and even denigrated their own colleagues. “This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” an employee wrote in an exchange from 2017.....

============

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/business/boeing-737-messages.html

[Avionista]

Have a look at this site where I found links to the Boeing employee messages:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21059420/boeing-employees-messages-737-max-investigation-simulator-crash

[switch_on_lofty]

Have a look at this site where I found links to the Boeing employee messages:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21059420/boeing-employees-messages-737-max-investigation-simulator-crash

Thanks very much. I've scanned the first 2 source documents. Pretty damning tone; repeatedly discussing how to deceive regulators, referring to them as stupid, some good people seeing the problems but no-one's listening.
Not really surprising given what's come out so far but this will be very damaging.

[Loose rivets]

"I want to stress the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition from NG to Max," Boeing's 737 chief technical pilot at the time, Mark Forkner, said in a March 2017 email.

"Boeing will not allow that to happen. We'll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement."

But WHY?! Just what drove him to say that? Re the 1-11. We had a week's differences course just between two very similar marks. The MAX possibly didn't need a full type rating course, but 90 on an iPad? What was in the minds of people that though that was a good idea?

On Tuesday this week, Boeing reversed its position by recommending 737 Max simulator training (https://boeing.mediaroom.com/news-releases-statements?item=130596) for all pilots.

It just keeps coming.

[donotdespisethesnake]

Having worked on a project involving the FAA - it all rings true. Management effort goes into "messaging" rather than fixing underlying problems. Business (i.e. profit) is the overriding concern. Employees know what is going on, and are not impressed with the approach. The line between normal, aggressive profit seeking tactics and unethical behavior gets quite blurred.

[cattletruck]

Have a look at this site where I found links to the Boeing employee messages:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21059420/boeing-employees-messages-737-max-investigation-simulator-crash

Just wow. Go/No Go meeting turning into a Go/Go meeting. Nine Project Managers involved in the sim process in Miami declare they are under budget and go sailing. Meeting the schedule had higher priority over meeting minimum quality. 777X suffering from the same "leadership" fate.

Typical corporate flunkies produced by the so called modern school of business.

[infrequentflyer789]

Thanks very much. I've scanned the first 2 source documents. Pretty damning tone; repeatedly discussing how to deceive regulators, referring to them as stupid, some good people seeing the problems but no-one's listening.
Not really surprising given what's come out so far but this will be very damaging.

Wait till you get to the third document.

"Amazing what a brown envelope can achieve... FAA were neither thorough nor demanding..."
"Sometimes you just have to let things fail big so that everyone can identify a problem..."
"Best part is we are re-starting this whole thing with the 777X with the same supplier."

Oh dear.

[esscee]

Certainly does not bode well for the future, whether it is 737 NOT Max or 777X. The top of the slippery slope, the only way is downhill. That's what happens when "beancounters" who think they know better and overrule engineers and good management.

[fgrieu]

Here (http://fgrieu.free.fr/Boeing-Employee-Emails-re-Boeing-737-Max-Simulator-all3-OCR.pdf) are the 117 pages of Boeing internal communications, in their public (redacted) form, with OCR to facilitate search.
There are more gems beyond the now famous one (on page 27)
this airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys
I count 8 references to Jedi mind trick. Lucasfilm should sue!

[dufc]

Wait till you get to the third document.

"Amazing what a brown envelope can achieve... FAA were neither thorough nor demanding...".

I saw that and am still stunned by the implication.

[Skipness One Foxtrot]

Wasn't the British Midland crash at Kegworth a then new B737 model (the -400) where the crew had only had an OHP session to get to know the differences between the new -400 vs the -300, and it was the failure of this assumption that was one of the holes which drove the decision to shut down the wrong (working) engine? There's way less difference between a -300 and a -400 than between an NG and a MAX surely?

[Pilot DAR]

I saw that BBC report too but thought it too risky to post because of........

The topic caught my eye because of.....

However, I see there is a distinct important discussion point here, and have changed the thread title accordingly (I hope Blind Pew is okay with that!). So this topic is the certification relationship, between Boeing and the FAA, we're not going to drift off and repeat all the discussion about the MAX and MCAS.

The FAA acts on behalf of the US citizens, and because of reciprocal agreements, much of the world's aviation consumers. As such, all of those people have a right to expect an effective certification service. The FAA has delegated some of this service to specified employees of Boeing, who, in that role, act on behalf of the FAA. That topic merits discussion, as it is the basis of public confidence in an airplane which is compliant with the design standards.

Let's keep on topic please.....

[Ben_S]

Well, I think this just delayed RTS a bit more and delayed the 777X entry.

[LEOCh]

Certainly worth reading the whole of the internal Boeing email logs linked to above. Hard to shake the impression that the "unacceptable communications" were generally a direct result of technical staff blowing off steam in a situation where to keep their positions in a toxic management environment to get the MAX through, incremental and continuous indefensible compromises and short cuts were required. It's hard to accept the Boeing implied line that these guys are the problem.

[Fortissimo]

The FAA acts on behalf of the US citizens, and because of reciprocal agreements, much of the world's aviation consumers. As such, all of those people have a right to expect an effective certification service. The FAA has delegated some of this service to specified employees of Boeing, who, in that role, act on behalf of the FAA. That topic merits discussion, as it is the basis of public confidence in an airplane which is compliant with the design standards.

This is the heart of it all. Governments establish regulators to ensure that their citizens have no more exposure to risk than is absolutely necessary. Companies buy aircraft on the basis that it will give them an economic advantage, and safety is central to that (or should be). Crews have every right to expect their company will give them a safe system of work within which to operate, and passengers expect to survive their travel experience.

We have certification, airworthiness and operating processes for good reasons, and there is inevitably an element of trust that runs throughout - trust that people will comply, for the benefit of all. The moment individuals or entities try to circumvent hurdles rather than clearing them, we are in trouble. And it is not just manufacturing in the frame here. How many times have we seen disasters where the investigation uncovers pilot training and qualifications that have been sharp-pencilled? People lie through laziness or self-interest but proper oversight should be a strong barrier against this. You could argue that the system failed to protect Lubitz and his Germanwings victims because there was inadequate oversight of his fitness to operate.

Add to this the global move towards Performance-Based Regulation and Oversight, with PBR/PBO being heralded as avoiding un-necessary costs to industry. The question is whether we have the balance right. If you subscribe to the argument that better oversight would have prevented the MAX scenario and the Germanwings event, it follows that you also agree the balance is not quite correct. I am not suggesting we should revert to the old compliance routine, but I think it is high time the aviation system took another look at PBO to ensure that 'Oversight' means appropriate 'Overwatch' rather than inappropriate 'Omission'.

[occasional]

The Boeing statement seems to be particularly peculiar, as if the management are still living in a cloud.

[MechEngr]

But WHY?! Just what drove him to say that? Re the 1-11. We had a week's differences course just between two very similar marks. The MAX possibly didn't need a full type rating course, but 90 on an iPad? What was in the minds of people that though that was a good idea?

It just keeps coming.

Unless something specific to an AoA sensor failure leading to a crash was being specifically discussed as a training item, MCAS-specific training is unlikely to have made any difference to the accident flights. There was no difference in concept for the behavior of trim runaway and no inkling about the potential adverse effect of MCAS on trim.

That seems to be the only significant difference to the handling of the plane and, if it wasn't discovered or appropriately evaluated before shipping the planes to customers, it would never be added to training.

[MechEngr]

Here (http://fgrieu.free.fr/Boeing-Employee-Emails-re-Boeing-737-Max-Simulator-all3-OCR.pdf) are the 117 pages of Boeing internal communications, in their public (redacted) form, with OCR to facilitate search.
There are more gems beyond the now famous one (on page 27)

I count 8 references to Jedi mind trick. Lucasfilm should sue!

I have worked with a management structure just like that; enough that it is an insult to both clowns and monkeys.

[yoganmahew]

Unless something specific to an AoA sensor failure leading to a crash was being specifically discussed as a training item, MCAS-specific training is unlikely to have made any difference to the accident flights. There was no difference in concept for the behavior of trim runaway and no inkling about the potential adverse effect of MCAS on trim.

That seems to be the only significant difference to the handling of the plane and, if it wasn't discovered or appropriately evaluated before shipping the planes to customers, it would never be added to training.
Is that because the simulator did not (still does not?) accurately reflect how the plane flies?

It's sounding like there's a culture of "make it work nicely in the sims", that the sims didn't need to know about MCAS.
(software engineer)

[retired guy]

Wasn't the British Midland crash at Kegworth a then new B737 model (the -400) where the crew had only had an OHP session to get to know the differences between the new -400 vs the -300, and it was the failure of this assumption that was one of the holes which drove the decision to shut down the wrong (working) engine? There's way less difference between a -300 and a -400 than between an NG and a MAX surely?
Hi Skipness
I flew both the B Midland display EIS and the newer display around the time of the BD Kegworth - for another airline. The differences were very small. The reason that the BD crashed was similar to what happened recently. Complete failure of crew CRM and standard procedures. The dead engine was not identified and the wrong one shut down, not because of display issues, nor has been quoted due to the design of the air conditioning system giving rise to fumes, but because there was a rush to identify the failed engine and the correct procedures were not followed. There was no double check by both pilots of the failed engine 1 or 2 . Left or Right.
The FO said when asked by P1 which engine was in trouble "Its the left.....its the right" from memory. The response was "shut it down". Not direct quotes but that was the sort or CRM at work that evening.
Just found actual CVR.....AAIB report
"From the CVR it was apparent that the first indication of any problem with the aircraft was as it approached its cleared flight level, when for a brief period, sounds of `vibration' or `rattling' could be heard on the flight deck. There was an exclamation and the first officer commented that they had 'GOT A FIRE', the autopilot disconnect audio warning was then heard, and the first officer stated 'ITS A FIRE COMING THROUGH'. The commander then asked 'WHIXH ONE IS IT?', to which the first officer replied, 'ITS THE LE..ITS THE RIGHT ONE'. The commander then said 'OKAY, THROTTLE >> IT << BACK'.

After that it was game over except that there were numerous further chances to save the day right up to short final when the mistake became apparent.
That's what I remember, but then I am an old timer retired guy.
R Guy

[Chas2019]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51058929
From previously redacted Boeing internal comms.
Would you put your family on a Max.......NO.
Designed by clowns overseen by monkeys...bit harsh.
A very emotional response it seems. Its a slam on the many many engineers whose efforts got it into the sky in the first place. To me blame falls squarely on Boeing management. They failed in so many ways.

[retired guy]

FAA OVERSIGHT
On this issue or lack of FAA oversight, it is important to remember that in general the manufacturer and good airlines have generally had higher standards than the regulator. Now I agree that there seems to be evidence that Boeing have dropped the ball here and moving HQ to Chicago was a defining moment.
But when I flew test flights at Boeing over many years on 737-400/ 757. / 767. /744 The Boeing company showed nothing but the highest regard for errors we would pick up and they would be fixed right away and the production line amended if necessary.
That was then - 1988 -2003 and yes, things seem to have changed , which if so, is massively regrettable.
In UK the CAA was our regulator and generally the company I flew for knew far more about the job of flying safely than the regulator for the obvious reason that we were all active training managers/pilots flying hundreds of hours per annum and setting the bar really high, while the regulators were generally retired pilots from a variety of airlines and different former types, with little recency (a few times per year was common). We also took the CAA requirements as a minimum standard and aimed far higher than that. As the man said "if you think safety is expensive, try having an accident or two!" So true as we now see with Boeing and two MAX down.
Now that only works of course if the company is setting standards way higher than those actually required as a minimum. If you become a rogue company or just simply, like some start-ups, completely ignorant of how to operate safely, then the regulator becomes your fallback. And that is very bad indeed because it assumes that the regulator is right up there with the best. And we see where our financial regulators got us in 2007-1010.
The worst case then is a poor airline being regulated by a poor regulator.
So the idea of the FAA delegating certain roles to the manufacture is not intrinsically flawed because it has always been there and worked. I have to agree with those here who say that the standards we are seeing do not appear to support a continuation of that sort of relationship and a lot has to change.
The regulator needs to get regulating and the company has to raise its own bar. Between the two, we achieve the best possible outcome.
R Guy

[Pilot DAR]

it is important to remember that in general the manufacturer and good airlines have generally had higher standards than the regulator.

This is key. Indeed to quote the regulatory material of a regulator:

Through Delegation the [authority] has access to both a broader range and increased number of qualified certification personnel.

So yes, it is likely, and indeed intended, that the FAA delegates employed by Boeing (or any other delegate) could be more familiar with the details of design compliance within their specialty than the FAA oversight individuals. This is as it should be, as long as the delegate is free to exercise their delegation free of undue commercial influence or pressure. It would be common for the delegate to present the details of compliance to the FAA staff, through their normal interaction.

The taxpayer simply could not afford to employ enough FAA staff to carry out all of these duties, in the same way that the taxpayer or pilot community could not afford for the FAA to employ enough pilot examiners to examine every pilot candidate, the FAA delegates that to pilot examiners, whom they trust to exercise that delegation diligently. As in some many things in aviation, it's about trust.

[Ian W]

Wasn't the British Midland crash at Kegworth a then new B737 model (the -400) where the crew had only had an OHP session to get to know the differences between the new -400 vs the -300, and it was the failure of this assumption that was one of the holes which drove the decision to shut down the wrong (working) engine? There's way less difference between a -300 and a -400 than between an NG and a MAX surely?
IIRC the vibration gauges were placed one above the other instead of side by side. The side by side placement made it obvious which engine was vibrating the vertical placement not so.

AAIB Report on Kegworth Crash (https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/4-1990-boeing-737-400-g-obme-8-january-1989)

[Nil by mouth]

I noted in those exchanges between Boeing employees that two of the authors names were not obscured.
I hope that because those documents have been published and are now publicly viewable that the two concerned do not suffer as a result, e.g. present or any future employment?

[retired guy]

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/653x685/2020_01_10_16_31_15_48cdc83b7837e4969be4ba59fa0cbc69b62e6c44 .png

[sky9]

Prior to 1972 certification in the UK was delegated to the Air Registration Board that was independent of the Civil Aviation Authority. It could be the case that such a board needs to be set up again in the UK and probably in the USA as well.

[MechEngr]

Is that because the simulator did not (still does not?) accurately reflect how the plane flies?

It's sounding like there's a culture of "make it work nicely in the sims", that the sims didn't need to know about MCAS.
(software engineer)

The simulator would do whatever it was programmed to do. If no one thought it should do this it won't be programmed to do this.
There was some suggestion that the NG simulator cannot simulate an AoA sensor reporting an incorrect value. I expect it can simulate a case where it no longer provides any reading, but that wasn't the Max failure mode problem.

[DieselOx]

Sorry, but this pretty well informed SLF thinks that if you read only the exchange that starts on page 51 of the messages, about jammed elevator without DLC, ("you will crash 3-4 times until you kinda get the hang of it")- paraphrase-
Boeing people said this!!! And then go do all they can to prevent having FAA do any flight tests of the Level B training, so stuff like that would not get found out.

this is exactly why I came here in the first place, to find out, How bad is it (the MAX in general, not just MCAS). This is bad.

The plane should never fly again. Full stop. And a whole bunch of people should be in jail; this seems worse than VW.

Like I said, sorry, but I'm just quoting Boeing, and pointing out their own descriptions of their own actions.

[Bend alot]

The FAA has delegated some of this service to specified employees of Boeing, who, in that role, act on behalf of the FAA.



Not sure that is correct (now), I believe that the FAA have delegated to Boeing that then nominated employee/s that report back to Boeing management, that then report to the FAA.

The previous method was FAA selected Boeing employees that reported directly to the FAA (an unfiltered system).

[GlobalNav]

FAA OVERSIGHT
On this issue or lack of FAA oversight, it is important to remember that in general the manufacturer and good airlines have generally had higher standards than the regulator. Now I agree that there seems to be evidence that Boeing have dropped the ball here and moving HQ to Chicago was a defining moment.
But when I flew test flights at Boeing over many years on 737-400/ 757 (tel:737-400/ 757). / 767. /744 The Boeing company showed nothing but the highest regard for errors we would pick up and they would be fixed right away and the production line amended if necessary.
That was then - 1988 -2003 and yes, things seem to have changed , which if so, is massively regrettable.
In UK the CAA was our regulator and generally the company I flew for knew far more about the job of flying safely than the regulator for the obvious reason that we were all active training managers/pilots flying hundreds of hours per annum and setting the bar really high, while the regulators were generally retired pilots from a variety of airlines and different former types, with little recency (a few times per year was common). We also took the CAA requirements as a minimum standard and aimed far higher than that. As the man said "if you think safety is expensive, try having an accident or two!" So true as we now see with Boeing and two MAX down.
Now that only works of course if the company is setting standards way higher than those actually required as a minimum. If you become a rogue company or just simply, like some start-ups, completely ignorant of how to operate safely, then the regulator becomes your fallback. And that is very bad indeed because it assumes that the regulator is right up there with the best. And we see where our financial regulators got us in 2007-1010.
The worst case then is a poor airline being regulated by a poor regulator.
So the idea of the FAA delegating certain roles to the manufacture is not intrinsically flawed because it has always been there and worked. I have to agree with those here who say that the standards we are seeing do not appear to support a continuation of that sort of relationship and a lot has to change.
The regulator needs to get regulating and the company has to raise its own bar. Between the two, we achieve the best possible outcome.
R Guy

The infrastructure and processes for FAA oversight of manufacturers with organization designation authorization (ODA) is terribly flawed. Looks ok on paper, but the reality is much different. The evolution of delegated authority by rule and by legislation has stripped the FAA of effective independent technical oversight. The FAA at the engineering level does not have low standards, but is being held at arm’s length from performing the degree and nature of oversight activity it should be exercising. Furthermore, the prevailing philosophy of “stay out of the applicant’s way and let them do their business” has to be corrected. Properly done, effective regulation and independent oversight is good for safety and for business. We can readily see from current events how the lack of it has threatened irreparable harm to both. Boeing behaved as badly as they did for lack of being held accountable throughout the development and certification phases. The premise that their own ODA organization, Boeing employees and managers would hold them accountable is foolishness. First step should be to return to processes for delegation that existed in the 1990’s, and if that can be streamlined, over time, with improved processes that do not compromise independence and competent technical oversight, fine.

[Takwis]

I remember discussions in one or more of the closed MAX threads, about Synthetic Airspeed, and how it could be used to supply a third airspeed reference for comparison. Well right here on the first page of the emails, we find that the technical pilots had a problem with that:

As I pointed out in the telecom today, an introduction of synthetic airspeed to the MAX would drastically alter this Critical Action Memory Item Non-Normal Checklist, If synthetic airspeed is standard as opposed to an option, it would likely jeopardize the Program directive to maintain Level B training for our customers.

The second page shows that they are actually skirting FAA oversight, by planning to hide things from them.

The doc marked Boeing Only has questions that we plan to ask the no-RCAS group about their expectations for any alerting that they felt might have helped in the events. It is Boeing Only because the answers they provide might show a significant deviation from the current RCAS design, and we don't want to indicate to the FAA that our design conflicts with pilot expectations.

How can the FAA provide oversight if Boeing is deliberately hiding things from them?

[Dave Therhino]

The FAA's type certification process is fundamentally dependent on the applicant not lying and not misleading the FAA's technical staff. It is not designed to, and is largely incapable of, dealing with a dishonest applicant. Trust once destroyed is not easily regained. Fool me once ...

[unmanned_droid]

This is going to have very far reaching repercussions in the industry.

It's things like this that mean I have no interest in signing any document other than as the author.

[Loose rivets]

Well, here it is, 04.50 AM and I've read through the interchange of messages. Oh, MY!


I sensed, frustration, downright anger, bewilderment, logic at a brick wall and not least of all, tiredness. (goodness knows what he did to himself while off with family. )

Will big corporations never learn about tiredness? It cost American companies $117.000.000.000 in IIRC 2017 Big university studies. A lot of men denying themselves sleep WILL produce substandard results. I have the publication ISP. Fear and overwork will produce . . . well, a MAX? and a lot of other tidying up to do.

Treat tiredness with the mos routinely sold seeping aid in North America, and you'll start to kill people. It'll be hard to stop as the money involved is right up there in the big league. A different subject, but the death toll is stunning. I'll look up the data on the morrow. Not so dramatic as an aircrash, but a lot more consistent.

[UltraFan]

this seems worse than VW.

I cannot agree. The unspeakable crime of manipulating a computer chip in the engine to fake environmental readings cannot be compared to something as trivial as a system that flies a passenger plane into the ground.

[MechEngr]

I cannot agree. The unspeakable crime of manipulating a computer chip in the engine to fake environmental readings cannot be compared to something as trivial as a system that flies a passenger plane into the ground.
The diesel pollution controls are there because the production of particulates and other pollutants are known to end lives. The difference between particulate emissions and airplane crashes is that it's not evident which lives, but the statistics are such that the effect is certain to happen.

The difference between the companies is that VW and Bosch not only knew that falsifying the software would indeed increase the number of unnecessarily early deaths, they also knew that they were acting specifically towards that outcome in order to make sales. Boeing, in contrast, does not seem to have known their efforts would lead to deaths.

The two cases, though with similar outcomes based on similar capitalistic motives, are (unless some memo or whistle blower says different) entirely different in their origin and morality.

[BDAttitude]

The diesel pollution controls are there because the production of particulates and other pollutants are known to end lives. The difference between particulate emissions and airplane crashes is that it's not evident which lives, but the statistics are such that the effect is certain to happen.

The difference between the companies is that VW and Bosch not only knew that falsifying the software would indeed increase the number of unnecessarily early deaths, they also knew that they were acting specifically towards that outcome in order to make sales. Boeing, in contrast, does not seem to have known their efforts would lead to deaths.

The two cases, though with similar outcomes based on similar capitalistic motives, are (unless some memo or whistle blower says different) entirely different in their origin and morality.
This is incorrect.
VW defrauded on the NOx emission not on particulate emissions. There are no meaningful studies on the effects of NOx exposures at the level of road traffic. In fact workplace exposure limits - which in turn are based on actual studies - are 20 times higher than those for a busy road.
The numbers of premature deaths claimed by certain special interest groups are based on general studies that people in more polluted environments have lower life expectancy than in less polluted environments (suprise, suprise), no evidence that the NOx (which is by the way disintegrated to N2 and O2 when exposed to sun light) is responsible has ever been provided. Other pollutants and social economic factors are far more likely the cause.
This shall not defend the actions of VW in any way - laws and standards are to be followed by anyone be it automotive or aeronautical. But the claim that anyone died by VWs actions is rather steep.

[Bend alot]

The difference between the companies is that VW and Bosch not only knew that falsifying the software would indeed increase the number of unnecessarily early deaths, they also knew that they were acting specifically towards that outcome in order to make sales. Boeing, in contrast, does not seem to have known their efforts would lead to deaths.


VW and Bosh were only mind Jediing a test, other companies and older models had/have similar or worse emissions to the cheated VW's - without the new VW the deaths would still be the same or worse, so the companies could believe they were reducing early deaths, just not by as many as if they could pass the tests without cheating.

The 117 pages recently released paint a picture that Boeing did indeed know and were told of safety issues and two key personal would not have their families fly on the MAX. From that I can assume they expected MAX could crash fatally. They seem to have numerous points of concern of the MAX and never mentioned MCAS as one of them.

We can also note great concern in the emails about the 777X program and Boeing senior management culture.

Quote - Probably true, but it's the box we're painted into with the Level B training requirements. Remember, this is just the manufacturer's min training required. Operators can elect to make the training more robust. A bad excuse, but what I'm being pressured into complying with.

Thanks. I fear that skill is not very intuitive any more with the younger pilots and those who have become too reliant on automation.

[Pinkman]

As I understand it, these e-mails were the ones that Boeing found that presumably their general counsel agreed met some or other criteria and should be passed on to the FAA. Personally I generate about 3000 to 4000 emails per year. When you think about the thousands of people that worked on the program through design and testing and beyond, a couple hundred pages out of the tens of millions of emails that must have been sent over the project lifetime isn’t a lot. It’s in everyone’s interest that the Max flies again, quickly and safely. How does FAA know that they have caught the safety related issues that people may have been worrying themselves sick about but were not confident enough to raise. An option might be for FAA to work with Boeing to initiate a rapid amnesty program for employees and retirees who worked on the program to express their concerns privately and on a non attributable basis. Just a suggestion to increase confidence in the outcome.

[Sunfish]

Boeing took a design that was not intended to run active fly by wire systems and then added flight dynamic control software (MCAS) and perhaps other stuff onto an avionics infrastructure platform that was never designed to cope with mission critical flight control. There needed to be three systems, voting, separate busses, permanent magnet generators, etc. etc. to implement MCAS as a mission critical system.

To put that another way, 737 Max was a hot rod, not a production car. It looked like a 737, but it was a kludge.

[golfyankeesierra]

From the Seattle Times (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-internal-documents-reveal-culture-of-deceit-to-keep-down-costs-of-737-max/?fbclid=IwAR2WQVcieYKHf4sJ4MTu20ll9i1L2OdAoKhOUCUzOO6do4Px7e W0wj6QXY8) , Boeing’s apology for the foul talking in the emails..

A Boeing official added that the communications “involve a small number of employees,” primarily Boeing pilots and other personnel involved with the development and qualification of its 737 MAX simulators.

They really don’t like pilots, do they?

[BDAttitude]

It just shows that there is still no concession of wrong doing and from management perspective this is really a communication problem caused by disloyal empolyees.
Worth considering when defending the current delegation practice.
I have had the fortune in the past of having a trustful relationship with colleagues from suppliers and customers. But when kept on short lesh and gagged by superiors to sugarcoat and conceal issues nothing good will arise from such a setup. Times are like that in any international dow, ftse, dax, whatever coorp
Time to implement a new regime.

[pilotmike]

IIRC the vibration gauges were placed one above the other instead of side by side. The side by side placement made it obvious which engine was vibrating the vertical placement not so.

AAIB Report on Kegworth Crash (https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/4-1990-boeing-737-400-g-obme-8-january-1989)
That is not correct. It is unfortunate you saw fit to post (wrong) hypothesis given that you even took the trouble to post a link to the AAIB report, which says no such thing.

The quirk of the engine instruments on the 734 (and some others) was that the block of main engine instruments (in 2 columns, engine 1 on the left and engine 2 on the right) was positioned just to the left of the block of secondary engine instruments (again with 2 columns, engine 1 on the left and engine 2 on the right).

The problem was that looking only at the 2 central columns of instruments, ignoring the outer 2, you were seeing the main instruments for engine 2 (right engine) on the left, and the secondary instruments for engine 1 (left engine) to the right. So a very odd situation of engine sides apparently being reversed IF ONLY the 2 central instrument columns were examined.

In the Kegworth case, the high vibration indication of the number 1 (left) engine was positioned just to the right of the number 2 (right) engine N2 instrument. This might well have compounded confusion, appearing to confirm a right engine problem in a pressurised, high workload moment.

[SamYeager]

I have had the fortune in the past of having a trustful relationship with colleagues from suppliers and customers. But when kept on short lesh and gagged by superiors to sugarcoat and conceal issues nothing good will arise from such a setup. Times are like that in any international dow, ftse, dax, whatever coorp
Time to implement a new regime.
But how does the FAA ensure that the new regime is operated by a trustworthy manufacturer rather than gamed/ worked around as appears to have happened to the existing regime?

[GlobalNav]

But how does the FAA ensure that the new regime is operated by a trustworthy manufacturer rather than gamed/ worked around as appears to have happened to the existing regime?
I’m afraid the FAA needs a regime change of its own. Beginning with the Associate Administrator of Aviation Safety, and continuing with the “me too” managers down the line.

[GlobalNav]

I have a feeling Boeing doesn't like us humans.
I mean no defense of the Boeing emails. But they reveal the natural and unavoidable tension between the regulator and the regulated. No excuse for lies and cover-ups. But the FAA, decades degraded oversight procedures that tied the hand of certification engineers from
performing independent technical oversight of delegated engineering representatives allowed this happen. Will that change?

[pilotmike]

I cannot agree. The unspeakable crime of manipulating a computer chip in the engine to fake environmental readings cannot be compared to something as trivial as a system that flies a passenger plane into the ground.
Whilst accepting VW's apparent attempt to deceive and cheat for profit, there is a more generous way to interpret their actions.

Car manufacturers were obliged to produce cars which could pass the emissions standards tests. And they achieved that. - cars that passed emissions tests. Car manufacturers also need to have their fuel economy tested by very specific (non-real world) tests. It is no secret that cars / engines are tuned to perform particularly well in such tests, where it is well known that the real-world performance is a whole lot worse than the official figures show after some very inventive tweaking. What happened in the emissions scandal was pretty much exactly the same as that; some devious manipulation by some clever engineers, to achieve a pass for certification - it just went a step further than the economy 'tuning for the tests'. It is all a matter of degree, of optimising a car to pass tests.

An interesting analogy to Boeing 'optimising' systems to keep within the 'not different enough to need re-certifying or additional sim training'. The devil is in the detail.

[retired guy]

That is not correct. It is unfortunate you saw fit to post (wrong) hypothesis given that you even took the trouble to post a link to the AAIB report, which says no such thing.

The quirk of the engine instruments on the 734 (and some others) was that the block of main engine instruments (in 2 columns, engine 1 on the left and engine 2 on the right) was positioned just to the left of the block of secondary engine instruments (again with 2 columns, engine 1 on the left and engine 2 on the right).

The problem was that looking only at the 2 central columns, you were seeing the main instruments for engine 2 (right engine) on the left, and the secondary instruments for engine 1 (left engine) to the right. So a very odd situation of engine sides apparently being reversed IF ONLY the 2 central instrument columns were examined.

In the Kegworth case, the high vibration indication of the number 1 (left) engine was positioned just to the right of the number 2 (right) engine N2 instrument. This might well have compounded confusion, appearing to confirm a right engine problem in a pressurised, high workload moment.


Please see post NO 31 where I posted image of 737-400 EIS display. I am not sure what you guys are talking about because it seems to me that the gauges are perfectly normal with No 1 on the left and No 2 on the right. Can you be more specific ? I could be seeing things at my age!
R Guy

[pilotmike]

Please see post NO 31 where I posted image of 737-400 EIS display. I am not sure what you guys are talking about because it seems to me that the gauges are perfectly normal with No 1 on the left and No 2 on the right. Can you be more specific ? I could be seeing things at my age!
R Guy
I really can't be more specific without writing a 60 page PhD thesis on it. Please, just re-read the paragraph that I carefully wrote, being sure to have a copy of that photo in front of you as you read it, to cross reference every point I carefully made, and you'll see exactly what I am saying.

[retired guy]

I remember discussions in one or more of the closed MAX threads, about Synthetic Airspeed, and how it could be used to supply a third airspeed reference for comparison. Well right here on the first page of the emails, we find that the technical pilots had a problem with that:



The second page shows that they are actually skirting FAA oversight, by planning to hide things from them.



How can the FAA provide oversight if Boeing is deliberately hiding things from them?

Hi there Takwis
I agree that things should not be hidden, but should be the subject of robust discussion between the regulator and the design team. If the designers are correct, then the regulator should accept that. Likewise management should listen to comment from line pilots and take note of what is being suggested.
A lot of those email exchanges are in my view perfectly normal disagreements which are bound to occur between all the design people and test pilots about how to proceed.
Take the one about "we won't be forced by FAA to bring in simulator training for the MAX". What is wrong with that I wonder? I would say the same. The two planes fly pretty much the same so a sim ride in a MAX simulator,, while nice to do, is not going to make much difference. Imagine there had been MAX simulators available to Lionair and ET and that those pilots had say a two hour session? It would have made no difference at all to the two crashes, would it? An NG sim can perfectly well simulate pretty much anything that is going to happen on a MAX in terms of handling, (and could even be programmed to be more like a MAX) including MCAS if that had been known about. I could simulate MCAS today on any 737 sim by just introducing runaway stab, and the removing the fault after 10 seconds. And then repeatedly introducing it if that were something that we wish to demonstrate.

Then exchange between the two technical pilots about "....this is egregious....". He was referring to a sim ride and some aspect of the simulation - not about MCAS itself. The style of the exchange was friendly banter. Yet the exchange was presented as proof that MCAS design flaws were being hidden.

Over the years in my own airline I have heard and seen far more disparaging remarks, even ugly ones, about the "management", from line pilots than those we have seen in these exchanges - many of them unprintable. Yet the airline made money for decades and has an impeccable safety record.
What is important is that management do not refuse to listen to complaints no matter how much they seem to be a "whinge", because it might be true. The only stupid question is the one that is not asked.

Synthetic airspeed/. This is a great idea in principle but is fitted to very few aircraft world wide, and does need a total rethink on how you train pilots for a total loss of airspeed scenario. You probably could not fly a dual fleet with half of them fitted with synthetic airspeed, or indeed half of them with AOA displays.
So I fully see why this is a major issue. Now fit it to all your fleet, NG and MAX and retrain all the pilots, then you have a solution that works. In the absence of synthetic airspeed we have well understood pitch power settings which work perfectly well. If LN and ET had set 4 deg NU and 70% N1 at 1000 aal, and sat down for a while to review what was actually going on things might have turned out differently, and you don' t need synthetic airspeed to do that.
Lots of good stuff coming out of these exchanges.
Talk soon
R Guy

[Pilot DAR]

If the designers are correct, then the regulator should accept that

In between those two is the demonstration and finding of design compliance for certification. The "applicant" (in this case Boeing) desires that their product receive FAA certification. When the applicant, with uniform intent within their certification division, has determined that design compliance is ready to be demonstrated, they "declare" this to the regulator, who then may review (read/witness testing/review test data) the demonstration of compliance, and then within their scope, find that design compliance has been demonstrated. When there is a record of a finding of design compliance for every affected design requirement, design approval will be issued.

Much of the foregoing process may happen entirely within an applicant's delegated organization, and be subject to surveillance oversight, Or, the FAA may hold the findings of design compliance to themselves, in which case, the applicant waits. The regulator should only accept what they are confident about in within the terms of delegation. Otherwise, the regulator acts on behalf of the taxpayers to directly serve the applicant.

It is a reality that in our increasing technology world, there are more "novel" features being presented for certification, and in some cases, the existing design requirements do not embrace the new technology (electric power aircraft are certainly an example of this). In such case, the FAA and industry must work together to create new design standards, to which the novel design may be found to comply. When this happens, it is very likely that the knowledge base for the novel feature will reside much more with the applicant, than with the FAA, who will still be playing catch up - as they did not invent it. So it's a difficult balance for the FAA to strike to satisfy the industry by encouraging innovation, and creating new design standards to be met, yet satisfying the taxpayer expectation of bulletproof design standards to which the new feature may then be found to comply - without adding hundreds of new staff to the public payroll.

[Chu Chu]

The analogy to VW would be if instead of MCAS, Boeing developed a system that produced acceptable stick forces at the expense of (say) excessive fuel consumption, and then (somehow) programmed the system to be active only during certification tests. I think we'd all agree that was wrong, and would be even if the aircraft was not actually unsafe with the system off.

I find the emails troubling, but not conclusive. There can be legitimate disagreements about what should or should not be said to a regulator. And messages between employees could be based on misunderstandings, or be exaggerated for effect (presumably no one thinks the company was run by actual monkeys). Clearly the emails need to be looked into, and presumably that's happening. But it would take more to show fraud.

[infrequentflyer789]

Clearly the emails need to be looked into, and presumably that's happening. But it would take more to show fraud.

Agreed, like for instance regulators apparently "looking the other way" after exchange of brown envelope. Oh wait, that is in the emails...

[Takwis]

Boeing took a design that was not intended to run active fly by wire systems and then added flight dynamic control software (MCAS) and perhaps other stuff onto an avionics infrastructure platform that was never designed to cope with mission critical flight control. There needed to be three systems, voting, separate busses, permanent magnet generators, etc. etc. to implement MCAS as a mission critical system.
It looked like a 737, but it was a kludge.

There are two more new, quasi FBW systems added to the MAX that have not gotten much attention. One is the "Landing Attitude Modifier", added because of the 9" nose gear extension.
"To maintain acceptable nose gear contact margin, LAM symmetrically deploys flight spoilers on approach to reduce lift and force the aircraft to use a higher angle of attack. The amount of spoiler deflection depends on the approach speed. Deflection begins approximately 10 kt above VREF."

The other is the "Elevator Jammed Landing Assist System", added because...?
"If a jam occurs in the aft elevator control mechanism, both control columns have a limited range of motion. During approach and landing, the Elevator Jam Landing Assist System uses the flight spoilers for small changes to the flight path."

In an email exchange on 5/29/2015, our favorite Jedi Master is talking with his sidekick about the "jammed elevator/DLC" (I don't know what DLC stands for.)

"I suck at flying jammed elevator without DLC"

"It's tough, huh?"

"I crashed big time my first few times, that's what scares me about showing this to any of them. You can get decent at it after 3-4 tries, but the first few are ugly."

"They are going to tweak the elevator effectiveness a little. Yeah, we talked about using a reasonable cg to make it doable without dlc. We want them to succeed without DLC". [If they can't show that it can be flown without DLC, then it wouldn't be 'just like the NG'.] "it is easy to start chasing pitch and power and get in a PIO."

"ultimately, you have to have it trimmed up pretty well when you start your appr descent, and the thrust coupling is way more effective than the DLC, at least that's what I found. you of course have to pretty much disregard your airspeed :)"


[I can't wait to try it out. The conversation continues, a little farther down....]

"unfortunately I think she is going to suck so bad at flying them, she's going to demand this be trained in the sim. I started thinking last night, what if we mandated the training in the NG starting in 2016, so everyone was trained on it ahead of MAX, (like RCAS?) if there [sic] real concern is being trained on it in general, then it should be sufficient to get everyone trained on the NG, the theory being again that if you can do it in the NG, you can do it in the MAX."

I can't find it now, but there was another conversation about installing a system (RCAS?) on ONE NG, then it wouldn't be a change on the MAX, because the NG had it. It was somewhere in a conversation about Lion Air.

[Takwis]

^^^^^ DLC could be Direct Lift Control. The Lockheed 1011 used this system (variable spolier deployment) to stablise approach flight path without change of attitude or thrust.

Good answer...it makes sense.

[retired guy]

^^^^^ DLC could be Direct Lift Control. The Lockheed 1011 used this system (variable spolier deployment) to stablise approach flight path without change of attitude or thrust.
Thanks Takwis for the info on additional systems on the MAX.
DLC
Direct Lift Control
Indeed it did Discorde. The 1011 was a delight to fly and took some getting used to since DLC was active below, I think 2000 feet. Once you got below the trigger height of around 2000 feet, the spoilers partially deployed.
What it did was, say you were on GP and slightly high flying manually, you would push the stick slightly forward, yes, as usual.

But the spoilers would further deploy and increase ROD to get you back on GP without any noticeable change in attitude. If you got a little low, you would pull and the spoilers would partially retract.
​​​​​​​So it acted like a "smoother " to pilot inputs and make flying a 3 degree GP very easy. If you deviated significantly then of course you would push/pull harder and the attitude would change as per any other aircraft. If this is on the MAX then like MCAS it should be part of the course if it changes the handling technique.
That said, I have listened to many AA and SW pilots talking esp after Lionair and before ET, and none of them mention anything odd about the MAX at all. 300 of them flying for three years and as far as I know zero adverse comment from the largely very experienced pilots flying them.
I have asked elsewhere in Prune if anyone knows of any reports of adverse handling prior to ET and I haven't seen anything here. Does anyone know of any reports that were lodged?
It would be interesting if there were!
Cheers
R Guy

[20driver]

While it all sounds very bad you to consider context.
If someone went through the thousands of emails you sent what would they find? Would you be happy with owning everything you had written? What about emails taken from threads with no context of the previous emails?
I'm not saying there are not problems at Boeing - clearly a major house cleaning/reset is in order, but I would wary about judging a huge organization based on a few emails plucked out of the haystack.
Just saying

[retired guy]

Landing Attitude ModifierThe LAM does two things:


At flap 15-30 if the thrust is near idle it will slightly raise the flight spoilers to increase drag to increase thrust above idle.
[That seems to be a bit like the Embrair where residual thrust is high with the big engines. It needs more explanation than that though? Why would the engines be at idle unless very light in a tailwind. ]

At flap 30 or 40, the flight spoilers will raise slightly to reduce lift necessitating a higher AoA and hence nose attitude to give an "acceptable nose gear contact margin
That seems to be to counteract the longer nose wheel which if you landed at zero pitch F40, or 1 deg NU Flap 30, as per any other 737 the longer nose gear might touch down first?. Cant see that the pilot would notice that too much? But it is a change that needs to be acknowledged and not "hidden". I don't think these two were hidden, like the MCAS was.}

It seems to me from all of this that an hour on an IPAD was more than a bit optimistic.

[retired guy]

While it all sounds very bad you to consider context.
If someone went through the thousands of emails you sent what would they find? Would you be happy with owning everything you had written? What about emails taken from threads with no context of the previous emails?
I'm not saying there are not problems at Boeing - clearly a major house cleaning/reset is in order, but I would wary about judging a huge organization based on a few emails plucked out of the haystack.
Just saying

Hi there 20 Driver
Thats where I am coming from earlier. These emails taken as short comments can sound very damning, or could be almost friendly banter. Or even nasty stuff from a disillusioned employee. It is not proof of the MAX being badly designed as a plane. MCAS was badly designed without a doubt, but there are people out there trying to ground the MAX forever based on these emails and that is simply a total over reaction.
Ta
R Guy

[fizz57]

The other is the "Elevator Jammed Landing Assist System", added because...?
"If a jam occurs in the aft elevator control mechanism, both control columns have a limited range of motion. During approach and landing, the Elevator Jam Landing Assist System uses the flight spoilers for small changes to the flight path."

In an email exchange on 5/29/2015, our favorite Jedi Master is talking with his sidekick about the "jammed elevator/DLC" (I don't know what DLC stands for.)

"I suck at flying jammed elevator without DLC"

"It's tough, huh?"

"I crashed big time my first few times, that's what scares me about showing this to any of them. You can get decent at it after 3-4 tries, but the first few are ugly."

"


I found the next bit particularly interesting. They discuss the need for training for this situation, but don't want to spoil the commonality with the NG. Someone suggests incorporating the training on the NG as well - "if you can do it on the NG, you can do it on the MAX". However the problem with that is that "that would be admitting the difficulty of flying it on a model that has already been certified"

All perfectly legal and above board (at least according to some), and I'm sure it gives all 737 drivers a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

[tdracer]

While it all sounds very bad you to consider context.
If someone went through the thousands of emails you sent what would they find? Would you be happy with owning everything you had written? What about emails taken from threads with no context of the previous emails?
I'm not saying there are not problems at Boeing - clearly a major house cleaning/reset is in order, but I would wary about judging a huge organization based on a few emails plucked out of the haystack.
Just saying
I think this is a very important point. While I'm not in any way condoning efforts to deceive or hide things from the FAA/EASA, I shudder at the thought of every work email I ever wrote being made public.
We all use email for private communications, and we consider private to be exactly that. We say things in private that we'd never dream of saying in public - it's human nature. Most of the FAA people I dealt with during my nearly 30 years as a cert delegate (DER/AR) were very good - and some I considered to be good friends. I had no problem openly discussing cert issues with them - if fact one of my major complaints when Boeing became an ODA is that it sharply reduced that open communication with my FAA counterparts.
BUT, as is the case in nearly any large organization, a few FAA people were a waste of space. And in private emails (usually between myself and other cert delegates) we were not afraid to say as much. There was one FAA person that the knowledge that he'd retired resulted in a small celebration, another was so irrational that their last name became a sort of swear word - as in if you found out he was responsible for your project, it was said you'd been 'Smithed' (his name wasn't Smith, but you get the idea).
I once got into trouble due to an email. A certain operator, which had two hull loss accidents and a few major incidents in the preceding few years - had just picked up a couple new 747-400s, and had some questions which were forwarded to me by a customer engineer. Well, in my response to the Boeing customer engineer, I made a rather disparaging joke about that operator before answering the questions. Unfortunately the customer engineer didn't bother to edit out my bad joke before forwarding the answers to the operator :ugh:. The operator wasn't amused - and I had to profusely apologize.

[mini]

Whilst accepting VW's apparent attempt to deceive and cheat for profit, there is a more generous way to interpret their actions.

Car manufacturers were obliged to produce cars which could pass the emissions standards tests. And they achieved that. - cars that passed emissions tests. Car manufacturers also need to have their fuel economy tested by very specific (non-real world) tests. It is no secret that cars / engines are tuned to perform particularly well in such tests, where it is well known that the real-world performance is a whole lot worse than the official figures show after some very inventive tweaking. What happened in the emissions scandal was pretty much exactly the same as that; some devious manipulation by some clever engineers, to achieve a pass for certification - it just went a step further than the economy 'tuning for the tests'. It is all a matter of degree, of optimising a car to pass tests.

An interesting analogy to Boeing 'optimising' systems to keep within the 'not different enough to need re-certifying or additional sim training'. The devil is in the detail.

Re VW (Thread drift...) Not quite true.

Short history, every other manufacturer went common rail diesel. VW stuck with their cheap & cheerful PD system. Similar to Boeing with the MAX vs the 320 NEO they were left last at the races.

Eventually, 10 years later they adopted the CR system and played the catch up game by cheating.

[mini]

I think this is a very important point. While I'm not in any way condoning efforts to deceive or hide things from the FAA/EASA, I shudder at the thought of every work email I ever wrote being made public.
We all use email for private communications, and we consider private to be exactly that. We say things in private that we'd never dream of saying in public - it's human nature. Most of the FAA people I dealt with during my nearly 30 years as a cert delegate (DER/AR) were very good - and some I considered to be good friends. I had no problem having openly discussing cert issues with them - if fact one of my major complaints when Boeing became an ODA is that it sharply reduced that open communication with my FAA counterparts.
BUT, as is the case in nearly any large organization, a few FAA people were a waste of space. And in private emails (usually between myself and other cert delegates) we were not afraid to say as much. There was one FAA person that the knowledge that he'd retired resulted in a small celebration, another was so irrational that their last name became a sort of swear word - as in if you found out he was responsible for your project, it was said you'd been 'Smithed' (his name wasn't Smith, but you get the idea).
I once got into trouble due to an email. A certain operator, which had two hull loss accidents and a few major incidents in the preceding few years - had just picked up a couple new 747-400s, and had some questions which were forwarded to me by a customer engineer. Well, in my response to the Boeing customer engineer, I made a rather disparaging joke about that operator before answering the questions. Unfortunately the customer engineer didn't bother to edit out my bad joke before forwarding the answers to the operator :ugh:. The operator wasn't amused - and I had to profusely apologize.

+1 We've all been there

[Takwis]

Thanks Takwis for the info on additional systems on the MAX...

That said, I have listened to many AA and SW pilots talking esp after Lionair and before ET, and none of them mention anything odd about the MAX at all. 300 of them flying for three years and as far as I know zero adverse comment from the largely very experienced pilots flying them.


Right up until there is an AOA malfunction. Then the handling suffers a bit. That might affect both of these other systems adversely, as well.

[DieselOx]

"I crashed big time my first few times, that's what scares me about showing this to any of them. You can get decent at it after 3-4 tries, but the first few are ugly."

"They are going to tweak the elevator effectiveness a little. Yeah, we talked about using a reasonable cg to make it doable without dlc"


So, in an effort to not require sim training, they are talking about setting up ideal conditions for elevator jammed demo. Then, they are content to send pilots out on the MAX, knowing full well that if the holes in the cheese line up, and the not ideal conditions occur, the plane will likely crash.

Unbelievable.

[OldnGrounded]

So, in an effort to not require sim training, they are talking about setting up ideal conditions for elevator jammed demo. Then, they are content to send pilots out on the MAX, knowing full well that if the holes in the cheese line up, and the not ideal conditions occur, the plane will likely crash.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, this is way beyond the "we've all been less than careful in casual email" situation. This is evidence of very bad behavior.

[Bend alot]

The emails certainly need to be looked into.

Many of them seem to be between two guys, and it is hard to tell if they are talking simulator issues or aircraft issues.

At one point one of the guys is reaching out to the other, appearing to have concern about his mental health and offering support. They were clearly friends.

At one point one of the friends asked the other a serious question - the answer was NO!

I find it hard for that question & answer to be taken in more than one way between friends.

[Dave Therhino]

There are many of those messages that can be waved away as people popping off, talking casually and maybe not really meaning what they wrote, or joking, but not all of them.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Two main types of situations in which masses, and I do mean hundreds or more, of emails have been given to me as legal counsel to review: adversary in litigation responds to discovery request, and the other is, client provides "universe" of emails for decisions about what needs to be produced in discovery, and about possible confidentiality grounds for withholding.
Sometimes, as an employment law practitioner a third review type occurs - an employee is in a "job in jeopardy" jam, or even getting fired, and his or her entire computer(s)' worth of emails (and everything else) gets examined, sometimes microscopically.
And time and again, especially in that third situation type, impressions would filter into the tasks of understanding the communications and integrating them into the factual narrative of who did what to whom. That is, where context was lacking, the reviewer would end up....filling it in. Sometimes based on experience, sometimes just guessing, sometimes magical or wishful thinking.
For this batch of emails released by Boeing, context for much of which seems quite lacking, I'd want to see ALL of the communications on the pertinent subject areas. Maybe the federal authorities did receive a lot more than what Boeing has made public. And maybe when the Flyers' Rights FOIA lawsuit against FAA moves ahead (court stuff was scheduled for early this coming week), more impetus for more public disclosure will result. Regardless, the process of reconfiguring the certification process, not to mention resolving the grounding, demands a comprehensive disclosure.

[DieselOx]

Regardless, the process of reconfiguring the certification process, not to mention resolving the grounding, demands a comprehensive disclosure.

Absolutely.

I would offer one more observation: if any functional exculpatory narrative that would moot the disclosed emails existed, Boeing would surely have either made a huge public case around it, or counsel would not have seen the need to disclose the messages in the first place.

IOW, the fact that they disclosed them, and quickly came out in support of sim training, says it all: the concerns expressed in the messages are valid, and have not been adequately dealt with so far. Hell, the CEO lost his job over this.

And what about the dead-stick zone on rotation mentioned in the messages? Seems to me to be related to the need for MCAS and maybe issues with the pitch flutter on flaps retraction: too much power too far forward for the old bird.

[ARealTimTuffy]

Absolutely.

And what about the dead-stick zone on rotation mentioned in the messages? Seems to me to be related to the need for MCAS and maybe issues with the pitch flutter on flaps retraction: too much power too far forward for the old bird.

I have only flown the Max not the NG.. It would have been nice to be in the FCTM, and I did brief it when training new people. The aircraft has a pause in rotation at around 6 degrees that you need to pull through and then decrease back pressure once through it. Not a big deal to manage. I don’t have evidence but had always figured the elevator just lost some effectiveness when it is shadowed by the wing on rotation.

[FlightlessParrot]

I think this is a very important point. While I'm not in any way condoning efforts to deceive or hide things from the FAA/EASA, I shudder at the thought of every work email I ever wrote being made public.
We all use email for private communications, and we consider private to be exactly that. We say things in private that we'd never dream of saying in public - it's human nature. Most of the FAA people I dealt with during my nearly 30 years as a cert delegate (DER/AR) were very good - and some I considered to be good friends. I had no problem openly discussing cert issues with them - if fact one of my major complaints when Boeing became an ODA is that it sharply reduced that open communication with my FAA counterparts.
BUT, as is the case in nearly any large organization, a few FAA people were a waste of space. And in private emails (usually between myself and other cert delegates) we were not afraid to say as much.

The point is well made. But, though we might exaggerate in such emails, we are normally telling the truth, in a way that would be unpalatable to Management, because their job is profit, not truth. The only doubt is whether such emails represent temporary frustration, or a deeper concern.

[Grebe]

The point is well made. But, though we might exaggerate in such emails, we are normally telling the truth, in a way that would be unpalatable to Management, because their job is profit, not truth. The only doubt is whether such emails represent temporary frustration, or a deeper concern.
Suggest the deeper concern has been well described nearly a decade ago

When I say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money.
Harry Stonecipher, 2004, former CEO of The Boeing Company, reflecting on the late 1990s


They have changed my attitude to be “why should I care” and to look out for myself as management won’t. Also, Boeing is no longer a premium company to work for.

If I can find something—anything—somewhere else, I’m gone.

They got no loyalty to me, why should I have any to them?
Technical employee, twenty-three years at Boeing,

Grunberg, Leon,Moore, Sarah. Emerging from Turbulence:
Boeing and Stories of the American Workplace Today


And the prior book by the same team "Turbulence re Boeing . ..

Both books were the result of a major survey of employees- managers, etc with the permission and help of Boeing

Summation-

Three most important things at Boeing are PROFIT.

[wrmiles]

I think this is a very important point. While I'm not in any way condoning efforts to deceive or hide things from the FAA/EASA, I shudder at the thought of every work email I ever wrote being made public.
We all use email for private communications, and we consider private to be exactly that. We say things in private that we'd never dream of saying in public - it's human nature. Most of the FAA people I dealt with during my nearly 30 years as a cert delegate (DER/AR) were very good - and some I considered to be good friends. I had no problem openly discussing cert issues with them - if fact one of my major complaints when Boeing became an ODA is that it sharply reduced that open communication with my FAA counterparts.
BUT, as is the case in nearly any large organization, a few FAA people were a waste of space. And in private emails (usually between myself and other cert delegates) we were not afraid to say as much. There was one FAA person that the knowledge that he'd retired resulted in a small celebration, another was so irrational that their last name became a sort of swear word - as in if you found out he was responsible for your project, it was said you'd been 'Smithed' (his name wasn't Smith, but you get the idea).
I once got into trouble due to an email. A certain operator, which had two hull loss accidents and a few major incidents in the preceding few years - had just picked up a couple new 747-400s, and had some questions which were forwarded to me by a customer engineer. Well, in my response to the Boeing customer engineer, I made a rather disparaging joke about that operator before answering the questions. Unfortunately the customer engineer didn't bother to edit out my bad joke before forwarding the answers to the operator :ugh:. The operator wasn't amused - and I had to profusely apologize.
We once got a rather dumb HR e-mail sent to every salaried employee. A colleague of mine came up with a snarky comment and instead of sending it to the person he intended to, he hit "Reply all."

[Bend alot]

I very much doubt anyone believes any "brown envelopes" were actually passed to the FAA.

I expect that to be an exaggeration of excessive allowance expenditure for FAA visitors allowed by Boeing, and the secondary envelope being lucrative jobs post FAA employment at Boeing.

Many favours would still be owed to the regulators staff, if that is the case.

Could the FAA step aside and authorise EASA to re-certify the MAX? - to prove complete transparency.

[patplan]

--- snipped---
That said, I have listened to many AA and SW pilots talking esp after Lionair and before ET, and none of them mention anything odd about the MAX at all. 300 of them flying for three years and as far as I know zero adverse comment from the largely very experienced pilots flying them.
I have asked elsewhere in Prune if anyone knows of any reports of adverse handling prior to ET and I haven't seen anything here. Does anyone know of any reports that were lodged?
...

The first B38M [aka Boeing 737 Max-8] had only entered commercial service in May 1997.


From Wikipedia...
The new series was publicly announced on August 30, 2011.[10] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#cite_note-Boeing30aug2011-11) The first 737 MAX performed its first flight on January 29, 2016.[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#cite_note-ST160129-1) The series gained FAA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAA) certification in March 2017.[11] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#cite_note-FAA-TCDS-12)[9] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#cite_note-Boeing9March2017-10) The first delivery was a MAX 8 in May 2017, to Malindo Air (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malindo_Air),[12] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#cite_note-Flight16may2017-13) which placed the aircraft into service on May 22, 2017...


When it crashed in Indonesia, the MAX-8 had only been in service commercially for LESS THAN 18 months, and the second crash had happened before the MAX-8 even reached its second year of service. With almost 350 souls being taken away, it's quite an accomplishment- I would say.

[Bend alot]

The first B38M [aka Boeing 737 Max-8] had only entered commercial service in May 1997.



When it crashed in Indonesia, the MAX-8 had only been in service commercially for LESS THAN 18 months, and the second crash had happened before the MAX-8 even reached its second year of service. With almost 350 souls being taken away, it's quite an accomplishment- I would say.

The MAX has set many records - and many more to follow.

The MAX has set new standards Worldwide for Regulators.

RTS for the MAX now in March is nothing but a dream - too many secrets and no trust for that.

[BDAttitude]

I very much doubt anyone believes any "brown envelopes" were actually passed to the FAA.

I expect that to be an exaggeration of excessive allowance expenditure for FAA visitors allowed by Boeing, and the secondary envelope being lucrative jobs post FAA employment at Boeing.

Many favours would still be owed to the regulators staff, if that is the case.

Could the FAA step aside and authorise EASA to re-certify the MAX? - to prove complete transparency.
Why should EASA want to do this? The entire proceedings would either take so long that they would be accused of hindering BA or they would have to rely on questionable pre assessments from previous work by „brown baged“ FAA and dishonest Boeing. It would be a loose loose situation for them.

I don‘t think there were actually brown bags either. They were properly wined and dined and may be there were not so brown bags with merchandise well below the appropriate value limits for corruption. What is a courtesy in a symmetric relationship can look very different when the relationship becomes asymmetrical. True for private life as well.

Regarding email: Porbably anyone learned during their first two weeks at work that people are lazy and will hit forward even though a mail was supposed to be internal to the team/department/company. That‘s why you have to expect them becoming public.
What‘s new is that a lot of these mails are actually instant messages that we autosaved by Lync or Skype ... which is a deceitful feature many are not aware of causing seemingly private message exchanges being documented and company assets.
My company does offer Threema now to us .... but keys are pregenerated and I am not sure if messages could be duplicated in the infrastructure.

[Pilot DAR]

EASA to re-certify the MAX?

Re-certify would be excessive. However, it is reasonable to expect that EASA, and other authorities, will exercise the terms of the bilateral certification agreements which allow them to "familiarize" whichever elements of the certification process they wish. This won't be complete re-certification, but it will be a detailed review of aspects of the certification which could be in question.

For an initial certification program, it is common for agreements to be reached before a lot of testing is done, so that authorities may join together to witness critical testing, rather than repeating tests for each authority. Re-certification, or certification of derivative products may be a little different - more purposeful co-ordination will be require. . It could appear in the case of the MAX and the MCAS rework, that Boeing and the FAA are eager to declare the problem resolved, yet other authorities are advancing more cautiously. It would appear a serious disconnect for the FAA to issue certification for the changed MAX, without the world's authorities obviously being in harmony. So, the natural world market for the MAX, and the need for acceptance by multiple authorities more or less at the same time, will result in some assurance that it's not just the FAA declaring certification of the changed MAX, EASA will factor prominently in this.

[xetroV]

"I suck at flying jammed elevator without DLC"

"It's tough, huh?"

"I crashed big time my first few times, that's what scares me about showing this to any of them. You can get decent at it after 3-4 tries, but the first few are ugly."

"They are going to tweak the elevator effectiveness a little. Yeah, we talked about using a reasonable cg to make it doable without dlc"



So, in an effort to not require sim training, they are talking about setting up ideal conditions for elevator jammed demo. Then, they are content to send pilots out on the MAX, knowing full well that if the holes in the cheese line up, and the not ideal conditions occur, the plane will likely crash.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable indeed. It seems clear that just ticking the certification box was considered more important than actually ensuring that the pitch control degrades gracefully in case of an elevator jam, or providing crews with appropriate training on this issue.

This begs the question if that is an exclusive MAX problem or perhaps also a threat for the 737 NG’s. The NG doesn’t have direct lift control (if that’s what DLC refers to). Knowing that Boeing pilots crashed the plane in this scenario is not confidence-enhancing, to say the least. One more item to try out in the sim, next time I’m in it.

[Takwis]

Up in the post you quote, xetroV, I pointed out that the Landing Attitude Modifier was added to reduce the likelihood of a nosegear first (or tailstrike) landing. We all know why they included MCAS. But for this third hybrid FBW system, I left the reason why at "?" It raises questions, all right. Since 1968, the 737 has had a solution to a jammed elevator that has been accepted ever since. What happened that prompted a change? Was it just a new opportunity? "Hey, we've got these new FBW spoilers, what else can we do with them?" Something changed in the legacy jammed elevator system? Or just to add a new system to the list that is going to require engineering, testing, and certification? I sure don't know. The next question is, will they continue to be controlled via one set of sensors, and one FMC, or will they get the same input upgrade that MCAS is anticipated to get?

[Big Pistons Forever]

Can someone confirm that there is still no manual disconnect to mechanically separate the control columns in the event of jam ?

[WillowRun 6-3]

It's a safe bet that no serious participant or observer quarrels over the imperative for FAA's anticipated decisions to lift its grounding order to have strong, consistent credibility with EASA and everywhere else in the regulatory and certification world. Though, isn't the path from where things stand now, to a credible - sufficiently credible - outcome ill-defined at present? It doesn't appear that either FAA or Boeing really have a valid game-plan. For FAA, with the various inquiries still pending, with JATR one-and-done, with Congressional committees and legislative proposals breathing down its neck, being able to draw the line from the present point A to a point B of real credibility seems quite not to be the case. And as for Boeing and getting to credibility, well.
Maybe the looming disclosures from the Flyers' Rights FOIA lawsuit against FAA will wreak yet further havoc. I seriously doubt it will restore much credibility, on the other hand (for FAA and Boeing, that is - FR is doing a great public service here).
A suggestion......what *should have* the total interactions between Boeing and FAA regarding the Max have covered? - and "all included"? All the systems, flight characteristics, development or testing simulator results, everything.
How can a lifting of the grounding possibly make sense, and how could it hold real credibility, unless what should have been communicated, and what should have been done, in the place first, have been identified? It's simplistically comparable to realizing you're lost in the forest, no app and no map - don't you want to retrace your steps before starting out again?
WillowRun 6-3

[ARealTimTuffy]

Can someone confirm that there is still no manual disconnect to mechanically separate the control columns in the event of jam ?

There is no mechanical lever or disconnect switch like there is in some aircraft. However, there is an Elevator Control Column Override mechanism. When enough force is applied it will separate the control columns in the event of a column jam. If a elevator jam occurs there isn’t much to do about that.

However, since the Max spoilers were changed to fly by wire, there is the elevator jam landing assist, which will be switched on as part of the QRH. This will “float” the spoilers part way up and increase or decrease deflection based on the FORCE Applied to the column. It works the same as the DLC described earlier.

And trim is available in the above circumstances.

What a mess they have put themselves in.

[Takwis]

There is no mechanical lever or disconnect switch like there is in some aircraft. However, there is an Elevator Control Column Override mechanism. When enough force is applied it will separate the control columns in the event of a column jam. If a elevator jam occurs there isn’t much to do about that.


The idea is that if one elevator jams, the forced separation of the columns lets the pilot with an un-jammed elevator fly the airplane with a single elevator. Hold on, let me find the exact wording...

In the event of a control column jam, an override mechanism allows the control columns to be physically separated. Applying force against the jam will breakout either the Captain's or First Officer's control column. Whichever column moves freely after the breakout can provide adequate elevator control. Although total available travel is significantly reduced, there is sufficient elevator travel available for the landing flare. Control column forces are higher and exceed those experienced during manual reversion (!)

So, there is a system, but it sounds rather minimal. Maybe Boeing, out of the goodness of their heart, came up with the new EJLA system to make this situation better, even though the older system was certified.

[ARealTimTuffy]

The idea is that if one elevator jams, the forced separation of the columns lets the pilot with an un-jammed elevator fly the airplane with a single elevator. Hold on, let me find the exact wording...

Wording from manual.

If a jam occurs in the aft elevator control mechanism, both control columns have a limited range of
motion.

it differentiates between a column jam and a elevator jam in the aft elevator control mechanism.

[Takwis]

Wording from manual.



it differentiates between a column jam and a elevator jam in the aft elevator control mechanism.

My quote is from the original system, still in place. Yours is from the new EJLA system wording. Both deal with jammed control column (jammed somewhere in the entire cable run from Control Column to Elevator), at least as I have always understood the original system. I was told, at some point (probably 1986) that the breakout mechanism was under the cockpit floor, and that there were two separate controls runs from there to each elevator...that the Captain's control column worked the left elevator, and so on. If the elevator jams, you will feel it in the control column. Hopefully, I haven't been mistaken all this time...but, other than in a sim, it has never come up.

Here we go:
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1600x961/elevator_control_system_737_59be0c45043d97d21c3a4375e2cc795d 41e87be2.png


And just a few more inches down the page, a diagram of the breakout mechanism:
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1600x1051/breakout_mechanism_9fc071a7295ced1b60fcbe7d221e621dff1e63b8. png
(Both from satcom guru, here: https://www.satcom.guru/2018/11/stabilizer-trim.html

But since the final part of my quote continues... If the jam exists during the landing phase, higher forces are required to generate sufficient elevator control to flare during landing. Stabilizer trim is available to counteract the sustained control column force; maybe Boeing thought it was just a good idea to improve it with the addition of a DLC type system. My guess, though, is that it (so far) takes input from only one pitot tube.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Is there any other mainline jet airline in production that doesn't have proper redundancy to deal with control jams ?

It seems to me this is another just good enough kludge fix by Boeing allowing them to smoke it by the regulator for a grandfathered system that would be un-certifiable in if it had to conform to current certification requirements.......

[OldnGrounded]

Apologies if this has already been cited (I looked but didn't find it in the thread.) From the Seattle Times story (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/beyond-the-macho-pilot-trash-talk-737-max-documents-reveal-how-intensely-boeing-focused-on-cost/):

When Indonesian carrier Lion Air in 2017 asked for simulator training for its pilots, apparently at the suggestion of the country’s regulator, known as DGCA, Forkner scrambled to convince the airline that it shouldn’t do so.

He approached DGCA and argued that other regulators didn’t require sim training, so why should Indonesia.

This manipulation by Boeing of both its airline customer and a foreign regulator looks damning in hindsight, especially when the first crash was a Lion Air jet.


I find this rather mind-boggling. Not content to assure customers who didn't want training requirements, Boeing apparently felt it necessary to discourage those who did.

[CurtainTwitcher]

Apologies if this has already been cited (I looked but didn't find it in the thread.) From the Seattle Times story (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/beyond-the-macho-pilot-trash-talk-737-max-documents-reveal-how-intensely-boeing-focused-on-cost/):



I find this rather mind-boggling. Not content to assure customers who didn't want training requirements, Boeing apparently felt it necessary to discourage those who did.

Jedi mind tricking...

[OldnGrounded]

Jedi mind tricking...

Yeah. For a lot of us, Star Wars will never again be the first association that comes to mind when we hear or read that expression. Pretty sad.

[Pilot DAR]

Let's keep the discussion to certification issues, rather than restarting all of the detailed discussion about the MAX, okay? It's just too much work to moderate the MAX thread all over again. If in doubt, posters are welcome to review that thread for detailed information on the MAX flight control system. This thread is for Boeing, the FAA, some EASA, and certification in general.

[Takwis]

While there is some (much) discussion of the MAX flight controls in the closed threads, they center on the stab trim system. No mention is made of the "Landing Attitude Modifier", nor the "Elevator Jammed Landing Assist", two new systems that came with the MAX. The discussion was started here because of new information recently released in the latest email trove, some of it touching on the EJLA system and it's demonstration in the simulator, for certification purposes. Naturally, some discussion of the legacy system is necessary to understand what the new system does, and how it was certified.

[Dungdang]

As this thread is about FAA oversight, based on the in-house communication of Boeing employees, the language used indicates great frustration at the working level about decision made of higher management level, and the hope that the FAA would put an end to it, which it did not. The major missteps already identified, which FAA was not fully informed of - or has inexplicably allowed, in simple language are:
1. MCAS was decided as not necessary to be known to pilots.
2. The expansion of power of MCAS after the initial design of a more "benign" form
3. One sensor suffices for MCAS purposes
4. No simulator time needed.
The employees having those conversations should be immediately protected from their (former?) employer and given whistleblower status to be able to identify who their higher ups were for those fatal decision....

[Octane]

Apologies if this has already been cited (I looked but didn't find it in the thread.) From the Seattle Times story (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/beyond-the-macho-pilot-trash-talk-737-max-documents-reveal-how-intensely-boeing-focused-on-cost/):



I find this rather mind-boggling. Not content to assure customers who didn't want training requirements, Boeing apparently felt it necessary to discourage those who did.

Mr Forkner is the self confessed "Jedi mind tricks" specialist...

[megan]

May be of interest. Boeing Fought Lion Air On Proposed MAX Simulator Training Requirement

https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/boeing-fought-lion-air-proposed-max-simulator-training-requirement?utm_rid=CPEN1000000180327&utm_campaign=22769&utm_medium=email&elq2=4db4eb1492aa432c9881045857feedc9

[Superpilot]

They talk a lot about the LGW Max simulator. I had about an hour in that as part of a company sim ride late 2017. I remember it requiring enormous inputs to bring the nose back down/up following climbs and descents. The trim switches also did nothing initially and then 5 seconds later would put in an almighty input. Quite a hairy experience.

[Bend alot]

They talk a lot about the LGW Max simulator. I had about an hour in that as part of a company sim ride late 2017. I remember it requiring enormous inputs to bring the nose back down/up following climbs and descents. The trim switches also did nothing initially and then 5 seconds later would put in an almighty input. Quite a hairy experience.

Any chance this "hairy experience" was reported?

Or were you made to look stupid or inexperienced?

Genuine question due the email releases.

[BDAttitude]

Just to make sure ... we are talking about this facility (https://www.boeing.co.uk/news-media-room/news-releases/2017/july/boeing-expands-flight-training-centre-near-london-gatwick-airport.page)?

You did fly the actual real thing? Did it behave the same way?
Or was it part of a pre sales evaluation?

[Superpilot]

Yes, Boeing Training Centre in Crawley (formerly Alteon). My group of candidates were the first people asked to use it for the assessment and it was new at the time, or newly worked on. The assessor did ask at the end 'how was it?' I said 'difficult'. He then made a remark about the sim with his colleague, can't remember but it wasn't positive. I passed the assessment anyway.

[Nil by mouth]

Well one of the Boeing people mentioned in this thread seem to have done OK for themselves:-Former Boeing chief Dennis Muilenburg leaves with $62mhttps://www.bbc.com/news/business-51089287

[OldnGrounded]

They talk a lot about the LGW Max simulator. I had about an hour in that as part of a company sim ride late 2017. I remember it requiring enormous inputs to bring the nose back down/up following climbs and descents. The trim switches also did nothing initially and then 5 seconds later would put in an almighty input. Quite a hairy experience.

Sure sounds hairy. I wonder how many other pilots out there had similar experiences in a MAX sim and are wondering how to interpret them in light of what we now know.

[airsound]

The man who has just replaced the fired Boeing CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, has sent his employees an interesting email, which the company has chosen to publish.

In it, Dave (as he signs himself) Calhoun, talks about "return[ing] the 737 MAX to service safely", "rebuild[ing] trust", and "maintain[ing] production health", among other things. He ends with "My sleeves are rolled up. I know yours are, too."

https://www.boeing.com/features/2020/01/president-and-ceo-david-calhouns-email-to-employees.page

airsound

[Ian W]

Just to make sure ... we are talking about this facility (https://www.boeing.co.uk/news-media-room/news-releases/2017/july/boeing-expands-flight-training-centre-near-london-gatwick-airport.page)?

You did fly the actual real thing? Did it behave the same way?
Or was it part of a pre sales evaluation?

This is the critical issue - many of these comments are about the simulator behavior and not about the actual aircraft. It is really important that simulator errors and faults are not ascribed to the real aircraft. I haven't seen any thread that says that the original MCAS and failure of one AoA vane was something that could even be simulated. So 'technical pilots' talking about assessing simulator behavior cannot have been talking about the MCAS failure problems, and probably not even about MCAS operating correctly.

[Grebe]

In it, Dave (as he signs himself) Calhoun, talks about "return[ing] the 737 MAX to service safely", "rebuild[ing] trust", and "maintain[ing] production health", among other things. He ends with "My sleeves are rolled up. I know yours are, too."

MBA speak for Sign here- schedule your ethics refresher within the next two weeks, and the beatings will continue until morale improves.

To show our respect for dennis m- we suggest employees contribute sufficient funds to assure he can get a extra large tent to pitch on peoples park for his retirement.

[BDAttitude]

This is the critical issue - many of these comments are about the simulator behavior and not about the actual aircraft. It is really important that simulator errors and faults are not ascribed to the real aircraft. I haven't seen any thread that says that the original MCAS and failure of one AoA vane was something that could even be simulated. So 'technical pilots' talking about assessing simulator behavior cannot have been talking about the MCAS failure problems, and probably not even about MCAS operating correctly.
I've pointed out that Forkner could have experienced (most likely has IMHO) a real MCAS event here ​​​​:
https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/621879-max-s-return-delayed-faa-reevaluation-737-safety-procedures-165.html#post10599735
I think we have to differentiate
a) Engineering sims which hopefully have represented the aircraft well enough to fulfill their purpose in expedited development and certification (not sure).
b) Commercial full motion sims, that seem to have issues and program delays themselves which might just be another reason why mandated sim training was a no go for BA.
​​​​

[Twitter]

The quotes from and to TP Forkner put him and Boeing in quite a pickle, which while it has nothing to do with pickle forks as such, does amount to a fork-ing problem...

[turbidus]

a) Engineering sims which hopefully have represented the aircraft well enough to fulfill their purpose in expedited development and certification (not sure).
b) Commercial full motion sims, that seem to have issues and program delays themselves which might just be another reason why mandated sim training was a no go for BA.

Was it because of the SW mandate and/or the simple lack of MAX sims?

I mean there are enough differences on the flightdeck where you really cannot use an NG sim.
​​​​

[OldnGrounded]

The quotes from and to TP Forkner put him and Boeing in quite a pickle, which while it has nothing to do with pickle forks as such, does amount to a fork-ing problem...

Yes, it keeps getting worse and Boeing/Forkner keep sinking deeper. Remembering that there was (is?) a DOJ criminal investigation and that there definitely are a number of very expensive civil suits pending, it looks like Boeing is going to remain deep in this stuff for a very long time.

[Wooden_Blades]

The quotes from and to TP Forkner put him and Boeing in quite a pickle, which while it has nothing to do with pickle forks as such, does amount to a fork-ing problem...
Well done, put a fork in it...

[Bend alot]

This is the critical issue - many of these comments are about the simulator behavior and not about the actual aircraft. It is really important that simulator errors and faults are not ascribed to the real aircraft. I haven't seen any thread that says that the original MCAS and failure of one AoA vane was something that could even be simulated. So 'technical pilots' talking about assessing simulator behavior cannot have been talking about the MCAS failure problems, and probably not even about MCAS operating correctly.

Yes, they made many comments about simulator issues but - "Would you allow your family to fly in a MAX aircraft" clearly is not talk about a simulator issue.

First big issue is that, the now 34 MAX simulators will actually need to simulate correctly. It seems that they have been substandard for some time, I expect that the simulators have received far less FAA oversight and scrutiny than the MAX ever did.

Should the MAX simulator be required to accurately simulate the full envelope with and without MCAS and accurately replicate the trim wheel forces, and should the simulator be compared to the aircraft independently of Boeing and the FAA to verify it simulates true aircraft performance?

[Longtimer]

Yes, they made many comments about simulator issues but - "Would you allow your family to fly in a MAX aircraft" clearly is not talk about a simulator issue.

First big issue is that, the now 34 MAX simulators will actually need to simulate correctly. It seems that they have been substandard for some time, I expect that the simulators have received far less FAA oversight and scrutiny than the MAX ever did.

Should the MAX simulator be required to accurately simulate the full envelope with and without MCAS and accurately replicate the trim wheel forces, and should the simulator be compared to the aircraft independently of Boeing and the FAA to verify it simulates true aircraft performance?
I suspect the sims are built upon information provided by Boeing, perhaps the sims are not "substandard" but perhaps the data provided to program the sims is ?

[UltraFan]

In the midst of the Boeing 737 disaster, I'm thinking about the coming certification of 777X. The new folding-wings system would require an enormous amount of trust between Boeing and the FAA which is now lost. It would also require a whole range of previously undeveloped tests for civilian airliners with folding wings, a task that requires trust between the public and the FAA, which is also lost. And FAA wants to gain back the public trust as well as its international credibility. All that considered, will 777X be certified at all, or will it just drown in overcautiousness?

[Pilot DAR]

or will it just drown in overcautiousness?

Yeah, there's something to that! I was test flying with two staff from the authority just before Christmas. They were very thorough, while I rode PIC from right seat. I can appreciate a thorough job of it, though they were redoing flying I had already done and reported. One of the staff did offer as I taxiied in the last flight of the day, that since the MAX situation, they had to be very thorough. 'Just doing their jobs I guess, I can't criticize that, we got here because someone else didn't.

[Bend alot]

In the midst of the Boeing 737 disaster, I'm thinking about the coming certification of 777X. The new folding-wings system would require an enormous amount of trust between Boeing and the FAA which is now lost. It would also require a whole range of previously undeveloped tests for civilian airliners with folding wings, a task that requires trust between the public and the FAA, which is also lost. And FAA wants to gain back the public trust as well as its international credibility. All that considered, will 777X be certified at all, or will it just drown in overcautiousness?

I find a "mildcautioness" could raise serious issues for the 777X's legal certification.

Given what has leaked out and still is leaking out over the MAX program, it would be irresponsible not to consider the 777X program does not have it's own Jedi/s working on the project.

There was even comment about the 777X program in the emails released.

The 777X certification will (and quite rightly) be correctly regulated and without short cuts or "favours" - when you lie and cheat to your peers, expect a response you will not like.

[UltraFan]

Can we stay on this subject a little longer, please? 777X will need to prove that the folding wingtips are safe, and there are no current tests to check that. I was thinking what kind of tests they could use for that purpose. Of course proving that folding of just one wingtip is safe at all speeds. Crosswinds with folded wingtips is another.

But the biggest problem I see from my fluffy seat is maneuverability while the wingtips are in transit. Even though the system is designed to only operate on the ground, it's quite possible that an ucommanded folding or mechanical break may occur causing one or both wingtips to fold inflight. Will they try to test all that? After last year's events, I doubt FAA will write this off as "highly improbable". I also doubt CAIC and EASA will be too happy to rubber-stamp such a decision. The question is, CAN it be tested? Both low- and high-rate banking at various speeds, especially in climb when the loading is at maximum, go-arounds, emergency landing, etc. How could that be tested while ensuring the test-flight crew's safety?

Basically, any ideas on how 777X wingtips can/should be tested?

[tdracer]

In the midst of the Boeing 737 disaster, I'm thinking about the coming certification of 777X. The new folding-wings system would require an enormous amount of trust between Boeing and the FAA which is now lost. It would also require a whole range of previously undeveloped tests for civilian airliners with folding wings, a task that requires trust between the public and the FAA, which is also lost. And FAA wants to gain back the public trust as well as its international credibility. All that considered, will 777X be certified at all, or will it just drown in overcautiousness?

I don't get why some people are so bent out of shape about the folding wingtips on the 777X. It's not like it's the first time that commercial aircraft have used moveable surfaces, or even moveable surfaces that need to be prevented from moving in-flight (a thrust reverser deployment in-flight is already known to be catastrophic).
Take a look at the folded wingtips in this photo - does that look like it would be even remotely difficult to control if it happened in-flight?

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1200x570/1200px_777x_roll_out_2840407373023_29_28cropped_29_68a6e99c5 3aa3cde45738519b3038279b33edaaf.jpg

Boeing's already into the 777X development something like $10 Billion (not to mention what GE has invested in the GE9X development). Heck, last time I was at Paine Field there were at least six completed 777X aircraft parked there (and that was two months ago). Sure, FAA/EASA oversight is going to be heightened after the MAX fiasco, but if Boeing can't certify the 777X, they might as well turn out the lights because the company won't have a future.

[UltraFan]

People are not "bent out of shape" because of the moving surfaces. People are concerned about how thoroughly they've been tested. At the time when first flaps and slats and engine reversers were introduced people didn't know much about planes. Now they do. They also thought that plane makers were doing everything to make flying safe. Now they know that Boeing has been cutting corners for the past two decades, and they don't want to be the ink of "rules written in blood in aviation".

And because it's their own families travelling on those planes, they don't really mind if Boeing turns out the lights if it means safer travel. Recent developments in the world economy proves that it won't be long until another plane maker takes over.

[Bend alot]

I don't get why some people are so bent out of shape about the folding wingtips on the 777X. It's not like it's the first time that commercial aircraft have used moveable surfaces, or even moveable surfaces that need to be prevented from moving in-flight (a thrust reverser deployment in-flight is already known to be catastrophic).
Take a look at the folded wingtips in this photo - does that look like it would be even remotely difficult to control if it happened in-flight?



Boeing's already into the 777X development something like $10 Billion (not to mention what GE has invested in the GE9X development). Heck, last time I was at Paine Field there were at least six completed 777X aircraft parked there (and that was two months ago). Sure, FAA/EASA oversight is going to be heightened after the MAX fiasco, but if Boeing can't certify the 777X, they might as well turn out the lights because the company won't have a future.


I do not think or see the folding wing tips on the 777X to be an issue for certification, they are well documented and pretty hard to hide. The hidden extras in the "completed" aircraft are what will hinder certification.

Now there may well be none (hidden extras) but currently not a regulator would take Boeing's word on that. To date Boeing still have not shown a transparent side so till that changes lights are optional.

[fdr]

F4F Wildcat, F6F Hellcat, F4U, Curtis SBD Helldiver, TBF/TBM Avenger, TBD Devastator, F8F Bearcat, A1 Skyraider, A3 Whale, A5 Viggie, A6, A7, F4, F8, F9F, F11F, ... F18, C1, S2, S3, etc
Seafire, Seahornet, Sea Mosquito, Gannet, Sea Venom. Fairey Albacore, Fairey Swordfish, Fairey Barracuda.
Nakajima B5 Kate, A6M zero
JU 87

etc

yup, it's a worry trying new fangled modern technology.

The failures in the majority of fold in flight cases was taking off with the wings still folded. More than a phew Phantom Phlew with the F104 configuration, and many returned on their own pheet. Not sure that it is a major hurdle for the certification other than the advisory system reliability.

[layman]

Not directly comparable, but the "impossible" inflight deployment of a thrust reverser on the Lauda Air 767 showed a couple of things:

1. the impossible does happen
2. a deliberate test of deployment of the thrust reverser at 10,000' was controllable while a deployment at the more realistic altitude of 30,000'+ was not

Will Boeing be conducting a certifiable test of one, then both wing tips, folding at operational altitudes and weights?

And, if you want to be really perverse, what if one or both became unlocked? Would the tip 'flap'? If so, what impact would / could that have on flight dynamics and structural integrity?

[tdracer]

Not directly comparable, but the "impossible" inflight deployment of a thrust reverser on the Lauda Air 767 showed a couple of things:

1. the impossible does happen
2. a deliberate test of deployment of the thrust reverser at 10,000' was controllable while a deployment at the more realistic altitude of 30,000'+ was not

Will Boeing be conducting a certifiable test of one, then both wing tips, folding at operational altitudes and weights?

And, if you want to be really perverse, what if one or both became unlocked? Would the tip 'flap'? If so, what impact would / could that have on flight dynamics and structural integrity?
In-flight deployment wasn't certified to be 'impossible' prior to Lauda, because it was considered to be controllable. After Lauda, the T/R system was modified to make it 'impossible' since it was demonstrated to not be controllable.
BTW, what made Lauda uncontrollable was that it deployed at max climb power - the 10k flight test was with the engine already at idle. By design, the FADEC limits thrust to idle with the reverser in an uncommanded position, but aircraft control was lost and the aircraft started to break up before the engine reached idle. Oh, and it wasn't "30,000'+", it was 24k, Mach 0.78.

I don't know what the Boeing plan is for certifying the folding wingtips is - if they are going to certify 'impossible', or show it's controllable. But there are a number of systems on an aircraft that can cause a crash if they malfunction in the wrong way. All this focus on one system - which I seriously doubt has catastrophic failure modes - is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. The very sort of thing that caused the FAA to miss the consequence of MCAS while going over other systems (that have never resulted in a catastrophic accident) with a fine tooth comb (and yes, I have first hand knowledge of that last part).

[CurtainTwitcher]

- is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. The very sort of thing that caused the FAA to miss the consequence of MCAS while going over other systems (that have never resulted in a catastrophic accident) with a fine tooth comb (and yes, I have first hand knowledge of that last part).
Sorry to pick a bone with you td, always appreciate your insights into the engineering side. But for the MCAS, the FAA were totally unaware of the low speed functionality of the system, only the high speed as originally implemented, as I understand it.

[Dave Therhino]

,,,

The 777X certification will (and quite rightly) be correctly regulated and without short cuts or "favours" ....

I'm curious what makes you think this. What do you think has meaningfully changed at the FAA or at Boeing?

[Bend alot]

I'm curious what makes you think this. What do you think has meaningfully changed at the FAA or at Boeing?
The fact the FAA seem to know a problem exists and they seemed to have thrown the "phased in un-grounding idea" in the bin - not going alone and blindly expecting other regulator will follow.

The FAA seem far from knowing what the actual problem is or how to fix it - but they have put the brakes on hard.

Nothing has changed at Boeing, they just tried to put all the blame on the last CEO over the low media period.

[Twitter]

Starting from a clean aircraft we have:

Civilian aircraft with

Retractable gear
Retractable flaps
Retractable slats
Speed brakes
Variable position tail mounted air brakes
Powered flight control surfaces
Thrust reversers
Variable pitch props

Military Aircraft with
All the above plus
Flight opening tail ramps
Folding wings on ground/board
Variable Sweep in flight
Retractable flight refuelling equipment

Add to the list as required - all of these items operate in the air flow and affect aerodynamics and possibly structural integrity.
They are all long since accepted as normal.

What will be more critical than these with a folding wing tip on an airliner? Not the reliability or feasibility.
Ground handling in case of failure in open position may present a problem depending on airfield - but there will be procedures to deal with this condition.
Even better, The tip will only be actuated (extended / retracted) on terra firma, unlike some of the other accepted items which can cause in flight problems.

[alf5071h]

The history of aviation safety has been built on learning from events involving technical failure - structure, engine, aerodynamics, etc. Human misjudgements reflected the knowledge existing at that time; we learnt, adding knowledge, improving experience - safer.
In this instance (737 Max) the technical knowledge was available; the issue is not of human misjudgement, but of human failure - violation of the principles embedded in the process of design, certification, and regulatory oversight.

The industry’s surprise was that these events did not involve technical failure (although initially thought most likely), but of the ‘failure’ of the humans in the process. Initial reactions, typical of self-denial, sought to blame those nearest to the accident, pilots, maintenance, which only masked the fundamental factors.

One viewpoint is that the violation was deliberate, people knowingly set out to deceive; if so the law will judge.
Alternatively the violation was influenced by ‘environmental’ factors; commercial pressure, faster, better, cheaper, government objectives; normal pressures in the world environment requiring management: - self-management, awareness of personal behaviour and influence on others.

Thus the immensity of the surprise; human failure, not technical.
With technical failure trust can be restored because it is possible to demonstrate that technical aspects have been improved.
However, in this instance the human aspects have to be demonstrated to be ‘improved’, world wide trust re-established, recognition of the falsehood of self generated illusion of being the best - manufacturing or safety oversight, and that the culture which resulted in violation is itself wrong.

Such realisation will take time - how long, has this ever been encountered before? These events will change aviation, a change which requires management, but within a world which is changing even more quickly, and where the greatest ‘environmental’ pressure is time itself.
Aviation has to slow down, balance the pace of certification and regulation with safety. It is not possible to be faster, better, cheaper, all of the time; some aspects have to give way, it must not be safety or the processes which aim to achieve that.

But who judges these, and in a situation where previous measures of being ‘the best’ are broken. First rebuild and calibrate the measuring device - ourselves - an issue without solution, but one which might be contained.

[ZFT]

Yes, they made many comments about simulator issues but - "Would you allow your family to fly in a MAX aircraft" clearly is not talk about a simulator issue.

First big issue is that, the now 34 MAX simulators will actually need to simulate correctly. It seems that they have been substandard for some time, I expect that the simulators have received far less FAA oversight and scrutiny than the MAX ever did.

Should the MAX simulator be required to accurately simulate the full envelope with and without MCAS and accurately replicate the trim wheel forces, and should the simulator be compared to the aircraft independently of Boeing and the FAA to verify it simulates true aircraft performance?

Simulators when qualified are checked to ensure they accurately match the OEMs supplied data. Whether this simulates the true aircraft performance is somewhat immaterial as the regulators are only comparing OEM data to simulator data. Often this OEM data is gathered from engineering derived means as opposed to flight test data mainly (I suspect) as a cost saving exercise!

The TDMs and the operators very restricted (by regulators)to deviate from supplied data.

[fgrieu]

The text in the actual transcript (http://fgrieu.free.fr/Boeing-Employee-Emails-re-Boeing-737-Max-Simulator-all3-OCR.pdf#page=103) of the chat circa Feb 2, 2018 (never believe the press blindly, try to cross-check) is:
(Boeing employee A) 03:50:
Honesty is the only way in this job - integrity when lives are on the line on the aircraft and training programs shouldn't be taken with a pinch of salt. Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft?
I wouldn't
(Boeing employee B) 03:51:
No

I read this particular statement as an assertion that the MAX would be unsafe due to lousy simulator training. It's also important to understand that this was a chat between colleagues (though Boeing likely made them aware that their conversation was recorded).

[golfbananajam]

fgrieu

Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft?

we have aircraft trained by simulators?

hat, coat, door locked behind me ;)

[PashaF]

fgrieu

Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft?

we have aircraft trained by simulators?

hat, coat, door locked behind me ;)

Or maybe MAX are so unsafe it's dangerous to put your family even in MAX simulator.

[LowNSlow]

This Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-14/lion-air-idiots-sought-more-max-training-boeing-thwarted-it) article and videos don't inspire me to get on a 737 Max when/if they ever get back into service.

In fact I think I'll wait until they have been in service for a few 10's of thousands of hours before any of my family set foot on one.

[Spooky 2]

I find a "mildcautioness" could raise serious issues for the 777X's legal certification.

Given what has leaked out and still is leaking out over the MAX program, it would be irresponsible not to consider the 777X program does not have it's own Jedi/s working on the project.

There was even comment about the 777X program in the emails released.

The 777X certification will (and quite rightly) be correctly regulated and without short cuts or "favours" - when you lie and cheat to your peers, expect a response you will not like.


I know the current 777X Chief Technical Pilot and I;m pretty sure he will not be making the same mistakes as the past 737 MAX CTP.

[tdracer]

I know the current 777X Chief Technical Pilot and I;m pretty sure he will not be making the same mistakes as the past 737 MAX CTP.
Spooky, can you publicly state who the 777X Chief Pilot is? I'm curious - I know many of the pilots, although not as many as I used to as several have retired. I have a pretty high opinion of most of them (no, I didn't know the MAX pilots that have caused such an uproar).

[Pilot DAR]

can you publicly state who the 777X Chief Pilot is?

Please don't, we don't want names posted in this context. Thanks.

[retired guy]

This Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-14/lion-air-idiots-sought-more-max-training-boeing-thwarted-it) article and videos don't inspire me to get on a 737 Max when/if they ever get back into service.

In fact I think I'll wait until they have been in service for a few 10's of thousands of hours before any of my family set foot on one.
Hi low n slow
one of the great things about this forum is that we get the full spectrum of opinion.i would have flown on a 737 Max as a passenger , even unmodified post ET , with no changes to the plane, provided that the training as per the FAA AD had taken place. Ie that a 2 hour sim ride would cover loss of airspeed and MCAS induced runaway stab. So that there would be no doubt about the vexed issue of “ can the pilot manage such a scenario”. If he can show us he can, then I would have been happy. Meantime I would expect Boeing to fix the daft design asap.
Modified, even better. No qualms at all.
Ill be booking a flight on the first one back in service if it’s in Europe. My guess is it will be Ireland or UK.
r Guy

[retired guy]

The text in the actual transcript (http://fgrieu.free.fr/Boeing-Employee-Emails-re-Boeing-737-Max-Simulator-all3-OCR.pdf#page=103) of the chat circa Feb 2, 2018 (never believe the press blindly, try to cross-check) is:

I read this particular statement as an assertion that the MAX would be unsafe due to lousy simulator training. It's also important to understand that this was a chat between colleagues (though Boeing likely made them aware that their conversation was recorded).

Dear Fgrieu

Like many of these alleged “revelations”: from emails, this is , as we see , complete gobbledegook. Makes no sense at all.
Even those that do make sense “we will fight the FAA over not using sims to train for the Max” is perfectly reasonable if you believe it to be true and can show why. I have in the past had to “fight” = argue strenuously with the CAA on issues. That Boeing has dropped the ball corporately is not in question by the way in my view. But it doesn’t mean that the Max once recertified wont go on for another 30:years or more.
R Guy

[retired guy]

The history of aviation safety has been built on learning from events involving technical failure - structure, engine, aerodynamics, etc. Human misjudgements reflected the knowledge existing at that time; we learnt, adding knowledge, improving experience - safer.
In this instance (737 Max) the technical knowledge was available; the issue is not of human misjudgement, but of human failure - violation of the principles embedded in the process of design, certification, and regulatory oversight.

The industry’s surprise was that these events did not involve technical failure (although initially thought most likely), but of the ‘failure’ of the humans in the process. Initial reactions, typical of self-denial, sought to blame those nearest to the accident, pilots, maintenance, which only masked the fundamental factors.

One viewpoint is that the violation was deliberate, people knowingly set out to deceive; if so the law will judge.
Alternatively the violation was influenced by ‘environmental’ factors; commercial pressure, faster, better, cheaper, government objectives; normal pressures in the world environment requiring management: - self-management, awareness of personal behaviour and influence on others.

Thus the immensity of the surprise; human failure, not technical.
With technical failure trust can be restored because it is possible to demonstrate that technical aspects have been improved.
However, in this instance the human aspects have to be demonstrated to be ‘improved’, world wide trust re-established, recognition of the falsehood of self generated illusion of being the best - manufacturing or safety oversight, and that the culture which resulted in violation is itself wrong.

Such realisation will take time - how long, has this ever been encountered before? These events will change aviation, a change which requires management, but within a world which is changing even more quickly, and where the greatest ‘environmental’ pressure is time itself.
Aviation has to slow down, balance the pace of certification and regulation with safety. It is not possible to be faster, better, cheaper, all of the time; some aspects have to give way, it must not be safety or the processes which aim to achieve that.

But who judges these, and in a situation where previous measures of being ‘the best’ are broken. First rebuild and calibrate the measuring device - ourselves - an issue without solution, but one which might be contained.

Many thanks for that lucid expose of where the industry finds itself. I’ve said many times here that fixing MCAS or anything else will not resolve the issues of human performance esp. pilots, but including design n certification.
We are at a crossroads as serious as climate change with similar lag times/inertia issues.
We are about to train 500,000 pilots over next 25/years. To what standard one wonders?
30 years ago a BA cartoonist drew a sketch of two pilots with no control column and a hammer. .behind them was a glass case with a control column. On the glass it said “ break glass and remove in an emergency and fit to hole in floor” ! He had it spot on.
Cheers
R Guy

[alf5071h]

retired guy, thanks :ok:
Your analogy of control being behind the glass is very apt for automation - our fear of ‘being out of control’ of a technical entity.
However, because the issues arising from the 737 Max accidents are overwhelmingly human, we need to have a key behind the glass for unlocking human thought - thinking for appropriate behaviours. Unfortunately thinking does not involve just one ‘key’; in fact so many it is impossible to describe all aspects, nor provide a conclusive solution.

In this instance we have to consider the issue differently, to seek consensus opposed to a solution, a range of possible interventions - small changes so as not to upset the delicate balance of safety due to unforeseen effects, and to manage the resultant uncertainty - when is an aircraft, pilot, organisation, situation, safe enough.

The regulatory side of the divide shows promise with the introduction of the world-wide group. The current situation requires a consensus to allow the Max to return to service. Future regulation could be based on a group of like minded people - their regulations (FAR/CS 25) reaching agreement for certification, similar to current processes but not necessarily requiring a leader for best practice - FAA would be a participant in a world process.

The Boeing side is more difficult to judge. Fix Max and put it behind them, then consider what next. Boeing’s philosophy for human-machine differs from Airbus, but neither should be judged better or not. The important aspect is how each philosophy is applied; Boeing piecemeal across several types, some retrospectively; Airbus, prospectively, consistently across all types. What should Boeing do?
Being aware of the hazards of large changes, a clean-sheet aircraft will take time. Developing existing aircraft also requires a marketplace, which depends on trust, confidence, etc.

Boeing’s difficulty is not necessarily good for the industry; excellence thrives on competition. Airbus recognises this - risk of letting standards slip, complacency, not having to think too much about the immediate future.

Recent news suggest that Boeing will take a short term view of discounting the market for Max. This might challenge world competitive agreements, but that could be easier to manage than a new product line with the FAA. Time to heal the FAA, customer, supplier, relationships, which could be further eased with a world view of regulation; not Boeing vs the FAA, but Boeing with the regulatory authorities and other manufacturers.

[fdr]

[QUOTE=retired guy;10663322]
30 years ago a BA cartoonist drew a sketch of two pilots with no control column and a hammer. .behind them was a glass case with a control column. On the glass it said “ break glass and remove in an emergency and fit to hole in floor” ! He had it spot on.
R Gu[/yQUOTE]

When the humans get out of sorts with the system behaviour bad stuff happens. Human response is variable but is reasonably predictably variable. For Human, read may be random. That adds some piquancy to system design. 24,000 RPT jets and TPs fly every day, operating around 100,000 cycles a day. things go bad about every week or so, and catastropic about once a month in that part of the aviation community. My PC gives a blue screen fo death around 1 in 10 times I run some programs, my Macbook is weird straight out of the box... and needs the care of the Chinese technician who is allowed x minutes a day for a toilet break to return to it's level of Macness. My android fone locks up about once a week, my iphone has a mind of it's own. "...to really screw up takes a computer..."

As often as we have human frailty exhibited in the system, we have vastly more occasions where the human is the reason that anomalies were detected, and cascading failures were averted. The balance is heavily in favour of humans being desirable in a critical close coupled system, IMHO.

Systems that constrain human response often have issues:

In Chernobyl, the operators undertaking the fateful test were uneasy with the process, but did not know about the inherent risk of the control rod design of their reactor. When they scrammed the system, the hidden flaw resulted in a change that was essentially immediate and irrreversible. Had the management been supportive of feedback from the operators, perhaps history would have had to wait another few years for such a debacle, and maybe, just maybe, the existing research study would have come to light and been recognised as the red flag that it was later.

In Fukushima, the design (not Japanese, USA, GE) had issues, but the failure of imagination in the designs location gave little chance for human intervention. The response was not effective but the operators were hampered by the lack of information, and processes that stifled aggressive responses.

For Challenger, Boisjoly and McDonald were disregarded by the system...

For Columbia, management denied the increasingly more anxious requests by engineers to task imaging.

For the MAX, I doubt that there was no concern at the coal face on the decisions being made.

[Twitter]

Talking of cartoons, there used to be a famous one of a designer looking out of his window at a smoking wreck and sighing “Oh well - back to the drawing board!”

I guess he worked for a British company. American companies have no culture of redesigning from the ground up - they stick with what they have. The thing is, to find the “Fix”. Once you have found the fix you can move on.

If you ever looked at the convoluted system of rods, cams and threaded adjusters on a DC-8 or 9 cockpit sliding window, you can almost follow the brain waves of the designer as he he searches for the fix for the fix for...

If, as a few have suggested way back before this long delay, MCAS had been replaced by a revised trim feel mechanism, the manual trim wheel by a backup power driven system, and if more redundancy were built into the AoA system, I am guessing we would all have a better feeling about the Max. But no - we have to find the fix for what we have. A redesign would take too long.

Now maybe the British designer in the cartoon didn’t do so well as his company eventually failed. On the other hand...

[RobertP]

I totally agree with much of your post, however I do have some misgivings with respect to the “regulatory world wide group”. My not inconsiderable experience in time within the engineering aspects of the aerospace industry does not give me confidence in many of the worlds aviation regulatory authorities. Some of them authorities dating back to the beginnings of aviation.
EASA has not in my opinion shown a great improvement in standards but rather the “dumbing down” to the lower. For example back in the 1990s the UK CAA were very reluctant to just accept the B737-500 series insisting on a host of additional requirements for the grant of Uk certification and were against further “grandfathering” by Boeing for the 737 series. This was not the story in many of the EU nations. This predated full EASA authority.. I have much personal experience of rejecting US originated STCs fully approved by the FAA but woefully short of meeting UK requirements.
History tends to confirm my opinion.

[PashaF]

[QUOTE=retired guy;10663322]

In Fukushima, the design (not Japanese, USA, GE) had issues, but the failure of imagination in the designs location gave little chance for human intervention. The response was not effective but the operators were hampered by the lack of information, and processes that stifled aggressive responses.


This is GROSSLY off topic but i think you would be amused to find out that GE design was much more solid than it may looks like. Each Fukushima reactor building was build with a panel designed to fall down in case of earthquake. Aaaaaand Japanese welded them shut after they did exactly that after few minor earthquakes. So, when big one happened hydrogen gas accumulated and exploded.

Why they did that? Local population was unhappy when they saw holes in reactor buildings.

[OldnGrounded]

[QUOTE=fdr;10664054]

This is GROSSLY off topic but i think you would be amused to find out that GE design was much more solid than it may looks like. Each Fukushima reactor building was build with a panel designed to fall down in case of earthquake. Aaaaaand Japanese welded them shut after they did exactly that after few minor earthquakes. So, when big one happened hydrogen gas accumulated and exploded.

Why they did that? Local population was unhappy when they saw holes in reactor buildings.

Definitely off-topic, but . . . That's incorrect. You seem to be referring to the building blowout panels, which are supposed to "blow out," of course, to relieve pressure inside the building. In the emergency, hydrogen built up inside the reactor buildings, but with insufficient pressure to release the panels. Here's a good explanation by the Japan CNIC (yes, they're an anti-nuke organization, but they know what they're talking about): https://cnic.jp/english/?p=4255

[alf5071h]

Robert P, #150, re world-wide certification group.
The likelihood of world-wide regulation depends on the outcome of the existing group’s findings on the 737 Max.

National certification requirements either have the same basis or are sufficiently similar to form a consensus. Differences are more likely in interpretation; this could be influenced by experience and language (culture) - a risk even across the Atlantic - a significant problem in some areas, particularly in local operational application.
Inexperienced or new regulators should gain from exchanges within a group (more than currently done), but also the historical leaders of certification from alternative national special conditions, which invite explanation and discussion - benefiting both regulators and manufacturers.

Agree - the FAA STC process is weak and open to misuse - similarly DER; these would benefit revision using a world view. Also ‘grandfather’ rights could be improved, but his might not be such a major issue as implied by some Pprune views of the 737.

One UK manufacturer required all STCs to be approved by their design and airworthiness, and flight test as necessary. Any vendor or operator bypassing this, or STC rejected by the OEM, was forced to hold all of the responsibility for change - that tended to sharpen up certification practices.

The future relationship between FAA and Boeing, or any other pairing, will change in the aftermath of the Max, but the debate will be if change will improve the industry or just enable new ‘failure’ paths.
Aircraft have certification requirements for design and build, but none for human operators (excepting interpretations for system interface in 25.1302, etc). Neither are there any requirements or control of management practice - only oversight of the outcome; the balance of safety and commerce needs to be better judged with respect to certification and aircraft operation.

[Longtimer]

Panel Clears 737 MAX’s Safety-Approval Process at FAABoeing’s 737 MAX was certified as a derivative rather than an all-new planehttps://www.wsj.com/articles/panel-clears-737-maxs-safety-approval-process-at-faa-11579188086

[Grebe]

RE wsj article re FAA today Thurs 18th


By
Andy Pasztor and
Doug Cameron
Updated Jan. 16, 2020 4:14 pm ET

A federal advisory panel evaluating the safety-approval process for Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX concluded regulators adhered to policies in certifying the plane and determined it wouldn’t have been safer if it had received the scrutiny of an all-new aircraft.
Lee Moak, co-chair of the independent committee set up last year, declined to identify mistakes made during certification of the now-grounded jets, instead describing current procedures as “appropriate and effective.”
Previous reports by outside experts have sharply criticized the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval process, and the agency itself has acknowledged various errors.

Mr. Moak, former head of the largest North American pilots union, told reporters his panel concluded an overhaul of the process isn’t warranted. The panel provided its initial report Thursday.
Citing “thorough work by aviation professionals” involved in clearing the MAX to enter service in 2017, Mr. Moak urged the FAA to push ahead with delegating additional certification authority to Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers.

The report also calls for enhancing FAA-sponsored safety-management techniques, along with increasing the size and experience of the FAA staff.

The thrust of the latest study, commissioned nine months ago by Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, differs from earlier panels’ findings as well as bipartisan comments from senators and members of the House calling for reversing decades of increased delegation of such FAA oversight to industry.

With the MAX’s grounding likely to stretch into late spring, Boeing’s new management is scrambling to rebuild trust among airline customers and international regulators.

Thursday’s report and press conference largely endorsed the way the MAX was certified as safe to fly. That conclusion is at odds with recent findings by other advisory groups, testimony at congressional hearings and statements by Boeing itself, which has acknowledged shortcomings in the certification process.

The five-member panel didn’t lay out technical slip-ups or mistaken design assumptions on the part of the FAA or Boeing. The FAA, various investigative agencies and safety experts have all said such lapses, in both engineering and procedural issues, led to two fatal MAX crashes in less than five months that killed 346 people.

The panel concluded that the FAA properly followed its own regulations and processes in approving the plane, and exerted the appropriate degree of oversight regarding MCAS, the automated flight-control system that misfired and put both jets into fatal nosedives.

Reaction to the latest report by some victims’ families was immediate and negative. Michael Stumo, whose daughter was killed in one of the accidents, said the document is “divorced from reality” and “endorses the FAA as paper pushers without technical expertise and direct oversight.”

Through a spokesman, FAA Chief Steve Dickson —who has publicly blasted Boeing for pressuring his staff to accelerate approval of MAX software fixes and pilot training changes—said, “The agency will carefully consider the committee’s work, along with the recommendations identified in various investigative reports and other analyses.”

A Boeing spokesman said, “We will study these recommendations closely, as we continue to work with government and industry stakeholders to enhance the certification process.”

Mr. Moak said the panel, as part of its deliberations, didn’t consider a batch of recently released internal Boeing employee messages that ridiculed regulators, misled airlines and portrayed a cavalier attitude toward safety. Lawmakers have said the messages show Boeing employees sought to hide important safety issues and trick regulators world-wide.

The panel—also headed by retired Air Force Gen. Darren McDew —urged stepped-up analysis of human factors that could lead pilots in the cockpit to act differently than existing assumptions, in line with earlier recommendations by other groups.

The MAX’s certification was the 13th time the FAA has updated and extended its original approval for the 737 family of jets, originally approved in 1967.

How Boeing’s 737 MAX Troubles Ripple Through the Industry
Two crashes and the global grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX commercial airliner led to extensive disruption in the international aerospace industry. WSJ’s Robert Wall explains the continuing effects of the plane’s grounding. Photo: Getty Images
The panel said that during interviews with industry and government experts, there was a clear consensus that evaluating the MAX as an all-new aircraft wouldn’t have produced “more rigorous scrutiny” or “a safer airplane.” Lawmakers and other FAA critics have reached conclusions that are odds with both of those points.
In two of its potentially most significant recommendations, the panel urged earlier and greater involvement of FAA pilots and agency training experts in aircraft design considerations. And it urged the FAA to step up efforts to promote enhanced pilot qualifications as it locks in minimum training requirements for new jetliners.

[OldnGrounded]

Panel Clears 737 MAX’s Safety-Approval Process at FAABoeing’s 737 MAX was certified as a derivative rather than an all-new planehttps://www.wsj.com/articles/panel-clears-737-maxs-safety-approval-process-at-faa-11579188086

Hmmm.

The WSJ story will be locked behind the paywall for many here. So, here's the coverage from Market Screener:

Boeing : Panel Clears 737 MAX's Safety-Approval Process at FAA -- Update (https://www.marketscreener.com/BOEING-COMPANY-THE-4816/news/Boeing-Panel-Clears-737-MAX-s-Safety-Approval-Process-at-FAA-Update-29849784/) 01/16/2020 | 04:30pm ESTBy Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron

A federal advisory panel evaluating the safety-approval process for Boeing Co.'s 737 MAX found regulators adhered to policies in certifying the plane, and concluded the plane wouldn't have been safer if it had received the scrutiny of an all-new aircraft.

Lee Moak, co-chair of the independent committee set up last year, declined to identify mistakes made during certification of the now-grounded jets, instead describing current procedures as "appropriate and effective."

Previous reports by outside experts have sharply criticized the Federal Aviation Administration's approval process, and the agency itself has acknowledged various errors.

Mr. Moak, former head of the largest North American pilots union, told reporters his panel concluded an overhaul of the process isn't warranted. The panel provided its initial report Thursday.

More (https://www.marketscreener.com/BOEING-COMPANY-THE-4816/news/Boeing-Panel-Clears-737-MAX-s-Safety-Approval-Process-at-FAA-Update-29849784/)


This is so much out of step with every other report and analysis, to date, that much of the world is almost certain to see it as an attempted whitewash.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Att'y & SLF, looking in some disbelief at news article & planning to read report just released, interested to see responses, reactions etc. of the well-informed ....

Pending this reading, so are the Congress and FAA, and NTSB, and Boeing board, and the unions there and the pilots' unions, and all the otber stakeholders, particularly other regulatory agencies globally, supposed to conclude now that JATR and its report were [a] incorrect; [b] superfluous and/or unnecessary; [c] otherwise insignificant and immaterial?

Not intending to be posting in "over-reaction", but . . . . .

[Pilot DAR]

Here's more or less the same news story in Canada:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/government-committee-faa-1.5429217

[Grebe]

Att'y & SLF, looking in some disbelief at news article & planning to read report just released, interested to see responses, reactions etc. of the well-informed ....

Pending this reading, so are the Congress and FAA, and NTSB, and Boeing board, and the unions there and the pilots' unions, and all the otber stakeholders, particularly other regulatory agencies globally, supposed to conclude now that JATR and its report were [a] incorrect; superfluous and/or unnecessary; [c] otherwise insignificant and immaterial?

Not intending to be posting in "over-reaction", but . . . . .

This part of report is interesting

An area of focus regarding the certification of the 737 MAX 8 is one of the functions of the flight control system—the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). MCAS is an extension of Boeing’s speed trim system, which has been used extensively and safely on the Boeing 737-800. Boeing added a new functionality to MCAS for the 737 MAX 8, reconfiguring a flight control system that had 200 million flight hours of operational safety.

It is important to note that the FAA retained design approval of the 737 MAX 8 flight control system, including MCAS, through the end of certification process. This means the task of certifying the flight control system was only delegated to the Boeing ODA after several years of design review and discussion. It is also noteworthy that MCAS was identified and tested in both Boeing’s and the FAA’s certification flight tests. The FAA’s regulations and protocols did not require testing of MCAS for combinations of mechanical and human failures. Boeing and FAA inspectors determined that a malfunctioning MCAS system would present itself as runaway stabilizer trim, an occurrence with specific non-normal checklist procedures and for which pilots are trained to address.


Its the ' we report- you decide ' bit

[OldnGrounded]

Att'y & SLF, looking in some disbelief at news article & planning to read report just released, interested to see responses, reactions etc. of the well-informed ....

Pending this reading, so are the Congress and FAA, and NTSB, and Boeing board, and the unions there and the pilots' unions, and all the otber stakeholders, particularly other regulatory agencies globally, supposed to conclude now that JATR and its report were [a] incorrect; superfluous and/or unnecessary; [c] otherwise insignificant and immaterial?

Not intending to be posting in "over-reaction", but . . . . .

I suspect that, when the background on this committee, its selection and remit are known, it will turn out that it is largely driven by the political appointees currently occupying the top echelon at DOT, people who are ideologically committed to an absolute minimum of regulation. It's not easy to imagine another reason for a report on the MAX disaster to end up suggesting even further delegation to the manufacturer.

[WillowRun 6-3]

And were this att'y situated with the representational team appearing in the federal district court in Washington D.C. on behalf of Plaintiff Flyers' Rights (which, for any skeptics, includes Sully among other worthies) in its suit against FAA for FOIA disclosure - oh boy, does the need for independent review by FR which undergirds its lawsuit gain persuasive force, or lose such force, based on the new advisory group report? Let me think, and think real hard.

And more, the basis for the suit need be only the legitimacy of the independent review sought by FR; showing necessity isn't really critical.

Not to drift much more but what this advisory group report will do to motivate and/or accelerate the FAA reform measures percolating their way around Congress, well. (I mean, when certain other Congressional, uh, activities are no longer the only game in town.)

[slacktide]

I suspect that, when the background on this committee, its selection and remit are known, it will turn out that it is largely driven by the political appointees currently occupying the top echelon at DOT, people who are ideologically committed to an absolute minimum of regulation.

The members of the committee and their backgrounds have been known since it's formation. https://www.flightglobal.com/systems-and-interiors/us-transportation-chief-appoints-six-members-737-max-review-panel/132387.article

Co-Chairs:
Lee Moak - former president of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA)
Darren McDew - former commander of the Air Force’s transportation command

Members:
Amy Pritchett - Head of The Pennsylvania State University’s aerospace engineering department and former director of NASA’s aviation safety programme
Gretchen Haskins, chief executive of HeliOffshore, an association focused on safe offshore operation of helicopters
Kenneth Hylander - Amtrak’s chief safety officer
David Grizzle - Republic Airways board member & formerly was the FAA’s chief counsel.

So only Mr. Grizzle has former DOT ties, and none are political appointees.

If you prefer reading the original report to mass media summaries, it can be found here. https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/official-report-special-committee-review-federal-aviation-administrations-aircraft-0

[b1lanc]

Kenneth Hylander - Amtrak’s chief safety officer


Amtrak saftey officer? And there safety record is...?

[OldnGrounded]

The members of the committee and their backgrounds have been known since it's formation.

Thanks for the pointer.

So only Mr. Grizzle has former DOT ties, and none are political appointees.

And only one is a former FAA chief counsel, and so on.

Also, effectively, they are all political appointees, although, if you re-read what I wrote, you'll see that I speculated that the political ideology of high-level political appointees in the DOT (e.g., Elaine Chao, Secretary of Transportation and wife of Mitch McConnell) drove the formation and mission of the committee. It's really quite likely; these are people who believe government regulation is to be avoided whenever possible and minimized when it can't be avoided.

If you prefer reading the original report to mass media summaries, it can be found here. https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/official-report-special-committee-review-federal-aviation-administrations-aircraft-0

I shall. Thanks, again.

[Bend alot]

The report said that aviation safety experts it interviewed agreed that the FAA's decision to certify the Max as an update to previous generation 737s rather than a new type of aircraft didn't affect the Max's safety
"Each said a new TC (aircraft type certificate) would not have produced more rigorous scrutiny of the 737 Max 8 and would not have produced a safer airplane," the report said.

Is not it a new requirement for better not confusing cockpit warnings that would have been required on new Aircraft Type Certificates?

Is it not true that changes in compliance standards (the grandfathering was used for) are higher standards more safety intended + safer aircraft or were they introduced for fun?

[Pilot DAR]

Is it not true that changes in compliance standards (the grandfathering was used for) are higher standards more safety intended + safer aircraft or were they introduced for fun?

In the FAA process, every major design change to be approved is required to be considered for application of "changed product rule", which has the theme that a change to an aircraft approved to an older standard may be required to be approved to a newer, or the most recent standard, if doing so is practical, and would improved safety. Basically, you can't keep modifying an old plane to still be old. But, this, as the certification exercise itself, requires correct application by FAA staff and delegated industry people, or it doesn't work well.

[ARealTimTuffy]

A lot of talk about the global aviation community in this report. Hmm. More “blame the pilots” as far as I can read.

We western pilots have been known to wreck perfectly good airplanes as well.

:rolleyes: <—— that’s how I feel after reading that report.

[retired guy]

retired guy, thanks :ok:
Your analogy of control being behind the glass is very apt for automation - our fear of ‘being out of control’ of a technical entity.
However, because the issues arising from the 737 Max accidents are overwhelmingly human, we need to have a key behind the glass for unlocking human thought - thinking for appropriate behaviours. Unfortunately thinking does not involve just one ‘key’; in fact so many it is impossible to describe all aspects, nor provide a conclusive solution.

In this instance we have to consider the issue differently, to seek consensus opposed to a solution, a range of possible interventions - small changes so as not to upset the delicate balance of safety due to unforeseen effects, and to manage the resultant uncertainty - when is an aircraft, pilot, organisation, situation, safe enough.

The regulatory side of the divide shows promise with the introduction of the world-wide group. The current situation requires a consensus to allow the Max to return to service. Future regulation could be based on a group of like minded people - their regulations (FAR/CS 25) reaching agreement for certification, similar to current processes but not necessarily requiring a leader for best practice - FAA would be a participant in a world process.

The Boeing side is more difficult to judge. Fix Max and put it behind them, then consider what next. Boeing’s philosophy for human-machine differs from Airbus, but neither should be judged better or not. The important aspect is how each philosophy is applied; Boeing piecemeal across several types, some retrospectively; Airbus, prospectively, consistently across all types. What should Boeing do?
Being aware of the hazards of large changes, a clean-sheet aircraft will take time. Developing existing aircraft also requires a marketplace, which depends on trust, confidence, etc.

Boeing’s difficulty is not necessarily good for the industry; excellence thrives on competition. Airbus recognises this - risk of letting standards slip, complacency, not having to think too much about the immediate future.

Recent news suggest that Boeing will take a short term view of discounting the market for Max. This might challenge world competitive agreements, but that could be easier to manage than a new product line with the FAA. Time to heal the FAA, customer, supplier, relationships, which could be further eased with a world view of regulation; not Boeing vs the FAA, but Boeing with the regulatory authorities and other manufacturers.

Dear Alf
agree with al of that. It’s a multi disciplinary approach that is required to see where this Industry is headed.
My concern is that it takes years to change some things. And we’ve been dumbing down training for a decade now. Train “just enough”.
R Guy

[retired guy]

A lot of talk about the global aviation community in this report. Hmm. More “blame the pilots” as far as I can read.

We western pilots have been known to wreck perfectly good airplanes as well.

:rolleyes: <—— that’s how I feel after reading that report.
Hi Tuffy
in the last ten years out of all major accidents, only one was “western”- AF447. Two were Malaysian , missile and suicide. Then of course Germanwings. Western yes, but bizarre suicide. Two were the MAX , definitely not “western “ by location. 90%were in places that most people couldn’t place on a globe, with airlines that most of us have never heard of, and in what is politely called ‘developing ‘ world.
So I’m not sure what your point is but if you fly on “western airlines” and I won’t define that because there are plenty of “eastern airlines”:with excellent flight safety, QANTAS being a great example, you are historically much safer.
The threat is this. The world needs 500,000 pilots over next 25 years, mainly in the developing world and many are startups. No DNA on how to operate a safe airline. That is a massive challenge. There are two schools of thought
1/ train them to cope with the full spectrum of degraded airplane non normal situations including multiple failures sometimes escalating.rapidly out of control. Ie when computers fail, it’s easy for the pilots to fall back on basic flying skills and airmanship.
or
2/ Automate the problem -out so it can’t happen, and the pilots are there to conduct routine mundane tasks. So they don’t need to be extraordinarily skillful or even moderately so. Even better, set up your own flight academy to generate a constant flow of pilots. It’s a bit like marking your own homework though!
Interesting thread this! Thanks for raising this valid point.
R Guy

[piperpa46]

I'm guessing cargo aircraft accidents don't count as major accidents?
Atlas Air 3591 and UPS 1354 springs to mind as perfectly good aircraft being crashed in the last 10 years.

[Bend alot]

I'm guessing cargo aircraft accidents don't count as major accidents?
Atlas Air 3591 and UPS 1354 springs to mind as perfectly good aircraft being crashed in the last 10 years.
You guess correctly.

[Fly Aiprt]

You guess correctly.

It would appear, that regardless of 'Western' or not, crew failures revolve around the same human factors everywhere.
This is not to say that aircrew training isn't to be improved in some areas, but Western operators are not immune from inadequate training or crew performance, as recent runway excursions, AF447 and those cargo mishaps seem to show.

[alf5071h]

retired guy, #168, we think alike. :ok:
However, take care in not slipping into the ‘ditch of solutions’ - training for the front line operators.The industry trains for the perceived threat, with today’s equipment.
Who trains the trainers, who oversees that - how.
Who trains the regulators, designers, managements, governments; how to improve HF application, the human perspective in their decision making.
Who asks the questions.
Takes time - yes, but also time to change viewpoint, our thinking, in a highly reliable industry in the aftermath of an accident.
- - - -
Re ‘appropriate and effective’ certification process - new / grandfather. An important question is who created the processes, checked them, learnt from evaluation and use.
Even with adequate oversight, human judgement is the final arbiter, but that is more with hindsight than foresight.

Social media forums thrive on hindsight, foresight is just ‘uninteresting’ opinion. Alternatively with ‘facts’ interpreted after the event, they, and with debatable comparisons of others’ opinion, can be rejudged - but to what point.

The required ‘process’ is to consider what can be learnt, and what can be done which might effect the future. We cannot change the past, even with debated hindsight; but we can consider what might be changed now so that this might influence and improve behaviour - everyone, so that future operations will remain safe.

[Ian W]

retired guy, #168, we think alike. :ok:
However, take care in not slipping into the ‘ditch of solutions’ - training for the front line operators.The industry trains for the perceived threat, with today’s equipment.
Who trains the trainers, who oversees that - how.
Who trains the regulators, designers, managements, governments; how to improve HF application, the human perspective in their decision making.
Who asks the questions.
Takes time - yes, but also time to change viewpoint, our thinking, in a highly reliable industry in the aftermath of an accident.
- - - -
Re ‘appropriate and effective’ certification process - new / grandfather. An important question is who created the processes, checked them, learnt from evaluation and use.
Even with adequate oversight, human judgement is the final arbiter, but that is more with hindsight than foresight.

Social media forums thrive on hindsight, foresight is just ‘uninteresting’ opinion. Alternatively with ‘facts’ interpreted after the event, they, and with debatable comparisons of others’ opinion, can be rejudged - but to what point.

The required ‘process’ is to consider what can be learnt, and what can be done which might effect the future. We cannot change the past, even with debated hindsight; but we can consider what might be changed now so that this might influence and improve behaviour - everyone, so that future operations will remain safe.

Meanwhile in completely unrelated news airbus demonstrates automated takeoffs and plans for automated landings will follow (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/16/airbus-releases-photos-of-automatic-take-offs.html) all they need to do is automate taxi-in and nobody touches the controls. Beware the beancounters' love of autonomy. Scratch the Max issues and the beancounters scurry out be it in design, testing, simulators, training

[retired guy]

I'm guessing cargo aircraft accidents don't count as major accidents?
Atlas Air 3591 and UPS 1354 springs to mind as perfectly good aircraft being crashed in the last 10 years.
You are very observant and quite right. I do safety talks to nervous passengers a lot and I use stats that only include passenger airliners since those are the ones that are of interest to the travelling public. I flew with Dan Air once and flew the 707 that crashed the soon after in Lusaka when the tail fell off - cargo, and lost a good friend in that one.
It is a fact that cargo flights are often badly or not reported unless they hit a block of flats in Amsterdam and take out lots of people on the ground.
So yes I did exclude cargo flights and I also exclude military ones since most of my listeners are not likely to be in an F15 any time soon.
But that is why this forum is good. You don't get away with anything inaccurate or murky so thanks for bringing it up. Hope that clarifies matters
Cheers
R Guy
The list below is all major crashes on passengers planes with multiple fatalities in the last ten years sorted in the left two columns by region and the right two by airline.
It is interesting how most of them are in less well know places or with airlines that I have never heard of (my ignorance) and that I would be very unlikely to fly on in the normal course of events. The yellow ones are the exceptions. Lionair AF 447, Germanwings, the two Malaysians and Ethiopian.
If I have left out any please let me know folks because I keep updating this list.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1051x781/stats_b26a0080411de1d4e7c43d44a5490454a4388fe3.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Dan-Air_Boeing_707_crash

[Gegenbeispiel]

This was for the Ethiopia crash thread, now closed, so I'm posting it here:

Originally Posted by Gegenbeispiel
Quote:
Originally Posted by SLFstu
Hi
Thanks for noting why avionics logic can look/behave counter-intuitively.
I guess it was because in my previous job type there was the need to PRACTICALLY explain all observed actions.
Mind you, if Boeing ever did add some sort of MCAS ACTIVE annunciation then in the case I pointed out it would be a tad misleading if power to the trim motor is set to CUTOUT.
But in the overall scheme of things with this accident - 6 minutes until death - I was nitpicking about the minutest trivia.
Stay safe.

Stew
You're welcome, and thanks.
IMO, any MCAS activation is a very big deal. Boeing was wrong to try to hide MCAS from the crew.
The proper way, IMO, to annunciate MCAS ACTIVE would be as a master warning or master caution, with its own text on the warning panel. The signal for for that would be something like (((FCC1_SELECTED and FCC1_MCAS_ACTIVE) or (FCC2_SELECTED and FCC2_MCAS_ACTIVE)) and ELECTRIC_STAB_TRIM_ENABLED ) , probably implemented as hardware discrete logic. That would be an expensive modification. All the best. Arthur
PS do you mind if I put this msg exchange on the thread? I think I should.

[CurtainTwitcher]

The fundamental issue Gegenbeispiel is that any warning would violate or jeopardise the common type endorsement without simulator training with previous 737 family members. Boeing had contracted to accept a $1 million dollar penalty if simulator training was required for some 250++ jets with one operator. It also enhanced the sales pitch with other operators.

Subsequent revelations (Forkner chats logs) have revealed Boeing actively "Jedi Mind Tricked" Lionair into not requiring simulator for their own crews as Boeing were concerned other operators would be influenced to do this for their own crews, leaving the perception for potential purchasers that it was best practice to require training. This would increase the costs, and thus reduce the attractiveness of the 737-MAX relative to the Airbus A32x Neo family.

It was mentioned at one point the cost was about $2000 (assumed USD) per pilot was the cost if a training simulator was required.

[Bend alot]

The fundamental issue Gegenbeispiel is that any warning would violate or jeopardise the common type endorsement without simulator training with previous 737 family members. Boeing had contracted to accept a $1 million dollar penalty if simulator training was required for some 250++ jets with one operator. It also enhanced the sales pitch with other operators.

Subsequent revelations (Forkner chats logs) have revealed Boeing actively "Jedi Mind Tricked" Lionair into not requiring simulator for their own crews as Boeing were concerned other operators would be influenced to do this for their own crews, leaving the perception for potential purchasers that it was best practice to require training. This would increase the costs, and thus reduce the attractiveness of the 737-MAX relative to the Airbus A32x Neo family.

It was mentioned at one point the cost was about $2000 (assumed USD) per pilot was the cost if a training simulator was required.
$2,000 per pilot does not seem anywhere near correct - a break down of that would be great if anyone has one?

The emails had some redacted stuff but that was mostly redacted.

[WHBM]

Relatives of a man killed in one of two crashes involving a Boeing 737 Max have condemned a report into the disasters.

The expert panel behind the report concluded the system used to certify the aircraft as safe was "effective".

But the family of Joseph Waithaka has described the report as "an extremely appalling and disappointing attempt to defend a flawed system".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51153286

Have to agree with the family.

[alf5071h]

An alternative interpretation of the report is that the use of either process could result in a flawed outcome; same outcome, no difference, equally deficient.
The effectiveness of either process was only as good as the bounding system allowed, and apparently no one questioned the overall organisational system - FAA or Boeing.

Similarly the report could suffer flaws or influences of the larger system; who holds the responsibility for overseeing the totality of the regulatory system: - the highest levels of the governing administration, throughout and to each and every individual in that system.

The report was downwards focussed; whereas looking upwards might have provided a better balance in the findings.

“...no matter how hard they try, humans can never be expected to out perform the system which bounds and constrains them. Organisational flaws will, sooner or later, defeat individual human performance.”
Gary Parata of Air Nelson

“Responsibility lies with those who could act but do not, it lies with those who could learn but do not, and for those who evaluate it can add to their capacity to make interventions which might make all our lives the safer.”
Phillip Capper – ‘Systems safety in the wake of the cave creek disaster.’

[retired guy]

$2,000 per pilot does not seem anywhere near correct - a break down of that would be great if anyone has one?

The emails had some redacted stuff but that was mostly redacted.

Hi Bendalot. It’s hard to cost sim per hour.
I know I can rent a local 737 sim for something like 1000 per hour- maybe less pro rata for four.
First you have the cost of the sim at say 12million. Then the building rent etc. utilization. Is it generating income from third parties? But the cost that scares airlines is the time off flying the line involved and impact on rosters. And the need for more training pilots- it’s a big overhead. In a LCC it’s not uncommon for pilots to have to travel a whole day from home base to a sim in day UK . Say Poland to UK? Three flights?
For a one hour Max refresher that would be the same. And then Hotac overnight. For some airlines that’s a cost too - not all!
Two days gone. And annual duty hours affected maybe. Oh dear. And FTL or roster agreement might mean he now can’t fly next day. Is the cost of this training worth it? A thousand times yes.

I would add a whole day annually onto every pilot if I were running the train set. ( Any finance guy reading this, and maybe others, will be saying “thank God the idiot is too old) One day devoted to flying in degraded modes. No autopilots. Multiple failures. Failures that are ambiguous. Raw data. Visual approaches. The works and no pilot would join who hadnt been been trained in those skills at flight school. Somewhere like Oxford or Jerez or equivalent.
Capt G Khan over and out
aka R Guy

[retired guy]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51153286

Have to agree with the family.

does anyone have a link to the actual full report?
Yes our hearts go out to the families.
r Guy

[DaveReidUK]

does anyone have a link to the actual full report?

Official Report of the Special Committee to Review the Federal Aviation Administration's Aircraft Certification Process (https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/briefing-room/362926/scc-final-report.pdf)

[ATC Watcher]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51153286

Have to agree with the family.
Yes indeed , a family always look at the accident in different light and I really feel sorry for them . . But basically the conclusions of the report could not have been any different for one simple reason ; it would put in question all previous similar certification processes done around that time by the same people and would probably affect the KC-46 and 787 certifications . An a grounding of those 2 aircraft would probably end Boeing , putting 100 thousand jobs in danger plus the economic impact and the loss of leadership in aviation , this is simply not an option for the US.

[retired guy]

Official Report of the Special Committee to Review the Federal Aviation Administration's Aircraft Certification Process (https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/briefing-room/362926/scc-final-report.pdf)
Thanks Dave
That will keep me out of the pub for the weekend.
Have a good one
R Guy

[WillowRun 6-3]

The Dep't of Transportation / FAA advisory panel's report appears certain to complicate matters in several ways. To start, the pub, r guy, will have one more seat vacant here too.

While it seems pretty evident that the report was a result of a studied and determined effort to protect the status quo especially regarding delegation in a broad sense, there are too many other wheels in motion, for it really to be effective. Just as an example when I (SLF + att'y) conclude my weekend reading will I have seen, let alone found logical satisfaction with, this panel's rebuttal of the JATR?

Quickly to note the panel is made up (as far as I can tell) of heavy worthies. Usually it's worth noting a gap between "expertise" - which typically is for sale - and "authoritativeness" - which is earned most often the old-school way. But in this instance what matters is the full set of substantive issues, and questions, not anyone's career history to date.

One reported assertion by the panel is that policies were adhered to, that things were done appropriately and effectively. But compliance with the status quo process hardly warrants approval - if the current system is flawed, let alone deeply so. I'll not insult the dignity of the families by commenting on "appropriate" or "effective".

A second reported assertion is that certification as a new type wouldn't have improved the overall safety of the airplane. I'm going to plead dumbfoundedness on this....new type, but no bare airframe testing without MCAS? No revealing its inclusion to pilots, no simulator training? One AoA sensor only? I must be missing something (again, just SLF + att'y). At the very least, this is a stark counter-factual -- the panel is a roster of heavies but they don't have magic portals for seeing into what "would have happened" either.

Third and almost last, regarding the scheme of delegating areas of the certification process, for now my response is, "but of course the status quo will counter-attack, and this is part of that." Some other worthies on Capitol Hill are obviously angling to re-reconfigure the delegation scheme, and those efforts now have one more obstacle.

Last, and most tentative until back in the pub, I've reached the conclusion that the court got it wrong in the case brought by British Caledonian when Langhorne Bond pulled the certificate of the DC-10 after the crash in Chicago, 25 May 1979. There's a lot of lip service paid to the Chicago Convention of 1944 with regard to reciprocal acceptance of certification, and obviously after 737 Max this scheme too will need a review. (At the time the Ten was grounded the real accident causal analysis was not yet known, but the court ruled the U.S. had acted in violation of law, based on what one could call "legal-paperwork-technicalities." Which are still operative....for now.)

[fdr]

A second reported assertion is that certification as a new type wouldn't have improved the overall safety of the airplane. I'm going to plead dumbfoundedness on this....new type, but no bare airframe testing without MCAS? No revealing its inclusion to pilots, no simulator training? One AoA sensor only? I must be missing something (again, just SLF + att'y). At the very least, this is a stark counter-factual -- the panel is a roster of heavies but they don't have magic portals for seeing into what "would have happened" either.

Third and almost last, regarding the scheme [sic]of delegating areas of the certification process, for now my response is, "but of course the status quo will counter-attack, and this is part of that." Some other worthies on Capitol Hill are obviously angling to re-reconfigure the delegation scheme, and those efforts now have one more obstacle.



WillowRun, fair points.

Had grandfathering not been available, then the conditions precedent would likely have been vastly different. The plane would not have need of the geometry that the MAX assumed, gear length would have been able to balance weight/cost of gear to development potential and optimised airframe configuration. That would have also permitted TBC to establish a fuselage section that permits LD loading which would permit the TBC product a cargo capability that it sorely misses out on in its 737 design. MCAS would not have been needed, however lord knows what else would come about out of a fresh design. Certification would be in the 10B+ range and that would add directly about 2M for 5000 airframes, and double that for the cost of finance for the sunk costs of development and certification. An aircraft such as the A330 was developed with relatively modern revisions of CS 25, and yet following a well thought out design (beauty in the eye of the beholder) and testing, the A330-300 ended up a hole in the ground doing a OEI GA on automation. Any design can have issues, old ones warmed over or new ones, and time exposes the strengths and weaknesses that are missed in the relatively exhaustive certification process.

A fresh start design has "unknown unknowns".

FAA delegation is not a scheme dreamt up by the FAA to circumvent the regulatory oversight, the FAA lags behind EASA in the establishment of DOA. Any delegation is dependent on the ethical standards of the delegate, and that is always going to be a point of contention; Chinese firewalls only work so well, as was exhibited by the investment banking communities. The issue of conflicting demands exists within a system that doesn't use delegation, where the regulator is responsible for both regulation development, certification and enforcement, as is being suggested, the back to the future scenario. In all cases, the certification of designs eats up talent, and that is scarce in all areas, with regulators disadvantaged usually to the commercial end of town in maintaining and developing talented people.

A continuing concern is the marginalisation of the quality processes, which are a stain on the industry. It is a specific part of the ODA/DOA system that the system is underpinned by effective QA, and there are examples abounding on systems disregarding and in fact silencing QA personnel going about their duties. As long as that is an accepted situation, there are dark clouds on the horizon. If an entity abuses the QA staff, or whistleblowers trying to get an urgent message to responsible managers or regulators, as long as they are treated the way they are, then any process is going to be inherently unbounded and heading towards badness.

[covec]

Daily Telegraph (UK) carrying a report that “Staff emails claim that Boeing 777X shares Max problem”.

🙁

[gwillie]

.https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/800x400/1579425032_d16831bf6773651491a3280f64f6303f4218282e.jpeg
msn.com (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-news-in-cartoons/ss-AAJ7oYd?fullscreen=true#image=10)
.

[SLF3]

I found this report strained credulity and to be patronising in the extreme.

Part of a campaign to convince Americans Boeing and the FAA are trustworthy?

If you can’t make planes that foreigners can fly and operate safely, don’t sell planes to foreigners!

[fdr]

Official Report of the Special Committee to Review the Federal Aviation Administration's Aircraft Certification Process (https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/briefing-room/362926/scc-final-report.pdf)

On first look, the report is reminiscent of a missive by Sir Humphrey, of "Yes, Minister". There is some careful wording that results in a generally favourable view, all is well in the realm... That doesn't appear to be consistent with the holes in the ground.

Page 35, a description of MCAS is included, which is the final problematic variant, not what was presented. It was a surprise to the test teams what it had been morphed into. That alters the complexion of effectiveness of the processes. That change occurring was a process failure for various reasons, what was expected to be certified was not what existed.

MCAS was designed to augment flaps-up manoeuvring characteristics by providing enhanced control column force gradient. In simple terms, MCAS was designed to increase the airplane nose-down pitching moment and resulting aft column force when it detects the aircraft may be in danger of stalling. It was designed to operate only during manual flight and activate only during an abnormally high angle of attack.

The FAA reviewed the MCAS function as part of the review of the flight control system in the detailed certification plans. Intended system activation was limited to rare, non-normal, highangle-of-attack flight conditions in manual flight mode. Boeing’s analysis considered the effect of an erroneous MCAS activation throughout the flight envelope. The system hazard was assessed as less than that associated with a runaway horizontal stabilizer condition, which is a required training event. This analysis asked the question: is the human likely to be able to complete the procedure effectively? FAA and Boeing both conducted flight tests with the system fully functional and with the system inoperative. The FAA found that Boeing demonstrated compliance using accepted methods and accounted for stated assumptions, and therefore, with the information and experience before it at the time, the FAA concluded that additional training and procedures were not needed as a result of MCAS implementation.

I would suggest that these paragraphs don't pass muster to the situation that occurred. If they are actually correct, then the aircraft certification was non compliant as the fault mode is not annunciated, 25.203 and 25.672 appear to remain problematic to the MCAS as built.

Blaming the crew for being the global outcome of their training programs and what is acceptable to ICAO, doesn't fix the shambles. There is hubris in assumption of superiority on recent history, stuff comes around and bites, liek driving a serviceable B763F into the bayou, dropping a 738 off piste into the local river, and the northern neighbours trying to snag the tail of 3 jets on the taxiway at KSFO, or dumping 40 toms of wide cut over the local school grounds. Europe has had it's days where there is scuffing of the shoe in the dust, like a 744 in the lagoon at Tahiti, various others parked off in the rough, and 447 highlighting the issue that there but for the grace of god go a whole bunch of operators. We appear to have an observer bias that is close to hubris. As I have said before, the very best pilot I have ever known was from Ethiopia. The best helicopter instructors were from Japan, the best applied CRM was from a Russian pilot ex Aeroflot.

The report is disappointing, and does a disservice to all, even TBC and the FAA, as well as the dearly departed.

The average pilot is exactly that, AVERAGE. They are not Yeagers or Armstrongs, or Eric Moody nor can they be reasonably expected to be. The internal emails that show how hard the OEM pushed to stop the operator from having specific training appears incongruous to complaints that foreign crew were inadequately trained... that sticks in the throat.

§ 25.203 Stall characteristics.
§ 25.203 Stall characteristics.(a) It must be possible to produce and to correct roll and yaw by unreversed use of the aileron and rudder controls, up to the time the airplane (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.203) is stalled. No abnormal nose-up pitching may occur. The longitudinal control force must be positive up to and throughout the stall. In addition, it must be possible to promptly prevent stalling and to recover from a stall by normal use of the controls.

(b) For level wing stalls, the roll occurring between the stall and the completion of the recovery may not exceed approximately 20 degrees.

(c) For turning flight stalls, the action of the airplane (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.203) after the stall may not be so violent or extreme as to make it difficult, with normal piloting skill, to effect a prompt recovery and to regain control of the airplane (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.203). The maximum bank angle that occurs during the recovery may not exceed -

(1) Approximately 60 degrees in the original direction of the turn, or 30 degrees in the opposite direction, for deceleration rates up to 1 knot per second; and

(2) Approximately 90 degrees in the original direction of the turn, or 60 degrees in the opposite direction, for deceleration rates in excess of 1 knot per second.




§ 25.672 Stability augmentation and automatic and power-operated systems.

§ 25.672 Stability augmentation and automatic and power-operated systems.If the functioning of stability augmentation or other automatic or power-operated systems is necessary to show compliance with the flight characteristics requirements of this part, such systems must comply with § 25.671 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.671) and the following:

(a) A warning which is clearly distinguishable to the pilot under expected flight conditions without requiring his attention must be provided for any failure in the stability augmentation system or in any other automatic or power-operated system which could result in an unsafe condition if the pilot were not aware of the failure. Warning systems must not activate the control systems.

(b) The design of the stability augmentation system or of any other automatic or power-operated system must permit initial counteraction of failures of the type specified in § 25.671(c) (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.671#c) without requiring exceptional pilot skill or strength, by either the deactivation of the system, or a failed portion thereof, or by overriding the failure by movement of the flight controls in the normal sense.

(c) It must be shown that after any single failure of the stability augmentation system or any other automatic or power-operated system -

(1) The airplane (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.672) is safely controllable when the failure or malfunction occurs at any speed or altitude within the approved operating limitations that is critical for the type of failure being considered;

(2) The controllability and maneuverability requirements of this part are met within a practical operational flight envelope (for example, speed, altitude, normal acceleration, and airplane (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.672) configurations) which is described in the Airplane (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.672) Flight Manual; and

(3) The trim, stability, and stall characteristics are not impaired below a level needed to permit continued safe flight and landing.

[retired guy]

From FDR
The average pilot is exactly that, AVERAGE. They are not Yeagers or Armstrongs, or Eric Moody nor can they be reasonably expected to be.

The internal emails that show how hard the OEM pushed to stop the operator from having specific training appears incongruous to complaints that foreign crew were inadequately trained... that sticks in the throat.



Dear FDR. I think you have a lot of really good commentary here and I am working through and learning from it. Thanks. I would take a different view on one comment if that' ok.
Eric Moody is someone I have met from being around at the time, and had a long chat with the First Officer (we refer to the BA 747 that lost all four). I have also read the reports and even seen it on Nat Geographic so it must be true!

What is very clear is that the last person to say he was Chuck Yeager or Tex Johnson was Eric for any of his crew. He and his crew were truly average for the airline they worked for. The never claimed anything else. Yet their training, experience and airmanship allowed them to calmly cope with a situation "Beyond the Scope of the QRH" as the chapter in the Boeing QRH calls it. They were in a place where there was little or no advice. Improvisation came to the fore. Yes they worked the checklists, but with no expectation that they would succeed. They had to do workarounds all the time too. That is what I expect an average pilot to be able to do. Otherwise one begins to wonder what they are there for. For the expected? Engine failure on takeoff, practiced by me and every other pilot, over 100 times in my career in the sim. Could do that without heart missing a heart beat. And the other forty or so items which we all do every six months on the three year EASA training cycle. All easy enough really once you have the training. I just hope the training is not a band aid solution.

Your second para above is very true and is relatively new to me. Saw it couple of days ago. If Boeing were strenuously trying to prevent Lionair doing more training that they were actively seeking, (I have said from the start of these threads that training, or lack of training is the key), then that is very serious indeed. Until seeing those exchanges I had imagined that some airlines were just buying planes and not realising that a plane is not a bus with wings. That expression has actually been used by the way. I am glad to see that "training" is now part of the new program to get the MAX back flying and that is a major step forward in my view.
Thanks
R Guy





§ 25.672 Stability augmentation and automatic and power-operated systems.

[safetypee]

There is extensive discussion on Boeing's interaction with the investigation into the 737 accident at AMS in:- NYT: How Boeing’s Responsibility in a Deadly Crash ‘Got Buried’

The conclusions in the 'suppressed' HF report are summarised, with a link to the report at:- https://www.pprune.org/10668326-post50.html

In addition, the final conclusion notes the following about design and training, and hazardous out of trim conditions; - relevant to the 737 Max.

Back in 1996, the FAA Human Factors team recommended the creation of interim certification policy guidance, which would fill the gap until design and training guidance material would be complete. It said:
"Specifically, the HF Team believes that the following areas should be addressed by interim guidance: Pilot/autopilot interactions that create hazardous out of trim conditions; Autopilots that can produce hazardous energy states and may attempt maneuvers that would not normally be expected by a pilot; and improved airplane flight manual wording regarding the capabilities and limitations of the autopilot.”

[MechEngr]

As I have said before, the very best pilot I have ever known was from Ethiopia.

This is not the same as all pilots from Ethiopia being the best pilots in the world. Clearly Ethiopian management did not ever ascertain if their pilots could fluidly cope with the Lion Air scenario before putting passengers into the seats. Ethiopian CAA did not ascertain if Ethiopian Airline had done that check. The pilots of the accident craft did not memorize the steps even though the prior crash should have been fresh in their minds.

I believe the pilot who was there at the time, that Ethiopian was avoiding doing anything about that training. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-14/expat-pilot-turns-self-styled-whistle-blower-after-737-max-crash

It's not a matter that Ethiopian nationals are innately incapable, that's absurd; it's a matter that these pilots, their management, and their CAA were all unmotivated to cease 737 Max operations before understanding how to deal with MCAS. Except for Bernd Kai von Hoesslinm who apparently resigned rather than be associated with them.

[OldnGrounded]

There is extensive discussion on Boeing's interaction with the investigation into the 737 accident at AMS in:- NYT: How Boeing’s Responsibility in a Deadly Crash ‘Got Buried’

The conclusions in the 'suppressed' HF report are summarised, with a link to the report at:- https://www.pprune.org/10668326-post50.html

In addition, the final conclusion notes the following about design and training, and hazardous out of trim conditions; - relevant to the 737 Max.

Back in 1996, the FAA Human Factors team recommended the creation of interim certification policy guidance, which would fill the gap until design and training guidance material would be complete. It said:
"Specifically, the HF Team believes that the following areas should be addressed by interim guidance: Pilot/autopilot interactions that create hazardous out of trim conditions; Autopilots that can produce hazardous energy states and may attempt maneuvers that would not normally be expected by a pilot; and improved airplane flight manual wording regarding the capabilities and limitations of the autopilot.”

See the thread here on that story for news that the Dutch Safety Board has now published the cited report.

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/629009-nyt-how-boeing-s-responsibility-deadly-crash-got-buried.html

[fdr]

This is not the same as all pilots from Ethiopia being the best pilots in the world. Clearly Ethiopian management did not ever ascertain if their pilots could fluidly cope with the Lion Air scenario before putting passengers into the seats. Ethiopian CAA did not ascertain if Ethiopian Airline had done that check. The pilots of the accident craft did not memorize the steps even though the prior crash should have been fresh in their minds.

I believe the pilot who was there at the time, that Ethiopian was avoiding doing anything about that training. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-14/expat-pilot-turns-self-styled-whistle-blower-after-737-max-crash

It's not a matter that Ethiopian nationals are innately incapable, that's absurd; it's a matter that these pilots, their management, and their CAA were all unmotivated to cease 737 Max operations before understanding how to deal with MCAS. Except for Bernd Kai von Hoesslinm who apparently resigned rather than be associated with them.

When I had interest in the matter, the training at ET was done by.... Alteon, who were a subsidiary of Boeing, and which was later renamed as... Boeing. Whether that is the case still is unknown.

[retired guy]

On a personal note there was a major difference in handling pitch on the BAC1-11 and the B737. On the 1-11 pilots used the elevators to control pitch then trimmed out with the stabiliser trim. The 737 has a far larger stabiliser compared to its elevators and all pilots I ever flew with learned to fly the aircraft by blipping on the trim switch effectively using elevators almost exclusively only during take off approach and landing.
QUOTE

I flew 707 and all 737s plus 757 767 747
i would be unable to type this Reply if the above were true since my hands would’ve been chopped off by at least two generations of trainers. !! I think the name STAB TRIM is the clue. Quite seriously has anyone out there been trained to use the stab trim to control pitch? As opposed to trimming out the stick force ?

​​​​​​?
R Guy

[L337]

Trainer on 737 and 747. I/we trained to select the attitude using the elevator, then trim the forces out. The 737 took a little practice as the electric trim is fast and powerful. You could always tell if someone was trying to fly using the STAB TRIM... the aircraft would poipoise all over the sky, enlisiting the shout of "stop doing that."

[Bend alot]

Hi Bendalot. It’s hard to cost sim per hour.
I know I can rent a local 737 sim for something like 1000 per hour- maybe less pro rata for four.
First you have the cost of the sim at say 12million. Then the building rent etc. utilization. Is it generating income from third parties? But the cost that scares airlines is the time off flying the line involved and impact on rosters. And the need for more training pilots- it’s a big overhead. In a LCC it’s not uncommon for pilots to have to travel a whole day from home base to a sim in day UK . Say Poland to UK? Three flights?
For a one hour Max refresher that would be the same. And then Hotac overnight. For some airlines that’s a cost too - not all!
Two days gone. And annual duty hours affected maybe. Oh dear. And FTL or roster agreement might mean he now can’t fly next day. Is the cost of this training worth it? A thousand times yes.

I would add a whole day annually onto every pilot if I were running the train set. ( Any finance guy reading this, and maybe others, will be saying “thank God the idiot is too old) One day devoted to flying in degraded modes. No autopilots. Multiple failures. Failures that are ambiguous. Raw data. Visual approaches. The works and no pilot would join who hadnt been been trained in those skills at flight school. Somewhere like Oxford or Jerez or equivalent.
Capt G Khan over and out
aka R Guy
Yes so $1K just for the unit (sim only)for one hour, then the pilot needs to be paid as does his replacement and then the ancillary costs.

$2K seems way of the mark in most cases.

[pilot9250]

Hi Tuffy
in the last ten years out of all major accidents, only one was “western”- AF447. Two were Malaysian , missile and suicide. Then of course Germanwings. Western yes, but bizarre suicide. Two were the MAX , definitely not “western “ by location. 90%were in places that most people couldn’t place on a globe, with airlines that most of us have never heard of, and in what is politely called ‘developing ‘ world.
So I’m not sure what your point is but if you fly on “western airlines” and I won’t define that because there are plenty of “eastern airlines”:with excellent flight safety, QANTAS being a great example, you are historically much safer.
The threat is this. The world needs 500,000 pilots over next 25 years, mainly in the developing world and many are startups. No DNA on how to operate a safe airline. That is a massive challenge. There are two schools of thought
1/ train them to cope with the full spectrum of degraded airplane non normal situations including multiple failures sometimes escalating.rapidly out of control. Ie when computers fail, it’s easy for the pilots to fall back on basic flying skills and airmanship.
or
2/ Automate the problem -out so it can’t happen, and the pilots are there to conduct routine mundane tasks. So they don’t need to be extraordinarily skillful or even moderately so. Even better, set up your own flight academy to generate a constant flow of pilots. It’s a bit like marking your own homework though!
Interesting thread this! Thanks for raising this valid point.
R Guy

There really aren't two schools of thought there is only one.

Automate it.

There are people who may disagree with that approach, but that does not remove this is what is inevitably being pursued.

There used to be people who disagreed the earth being round. Folk even disputed gravity. That isn't a school of thought. It's just denial.

Whether or not automation is the ultimate outcome simply isn't in question. It is.

What is at challenge is whether the negative slope on training and experience is suitably aligned with the positive slope on the capabilities of automation.

[megan]

There really aren't two schools of thought there is only one.

Automate it.Automation is not the complete answer, it's a system designed by fallible humans, this very thread is about the failed attempt to automate a system. There have been at least one accident cause by automation where the aircraft was written off (an A320 where the automation wouldn't permit the aircraft to flare for landing) and a number of incidents, without dredging up the reports notable events in Oz have been to a 777 and 330.

[alf5071h]

Turb 70, automate it,
As per megan, automation is not a complete answer; even if there is an 'answer' at all.
Increasing caution is required with single focus solutions, or extreme alternatives - black or white, man or machine.

Resolving situations like the Max has to consider the middle ground; the messy grey areas of uncertainty which humans dislike and tend to avoid. Depending on viewpoint, the Max issue was a breakdown of man and machine; good people, but asked to do more than their capability (design / pilots), good technology, in theory, but poorly implemented and certified. Consider the grey areas, man and machine together as one, the processes of design and certification, but don't expect a quick or easy way forward.

So far the FAA has kept their heads down and have escaped most of the criticism, but their responsibility and oversight of the certification was equally flawed as Boeing's contribution.

In the pursuit of increased safety, both parties have a role, but which one might might lead. FAA (with other world regulators) indicate acceptable means of man and machine implementation - how much credit to be given to the human. But regulations do not design aircraft.

Boeing could propose advanced man and machine concepts; learning from research, but requiring proof of concept for regulation, which involves 'educating' the FAA. Can, or what might the FAA learn.

With a well balanced man and machine concept, the human must be seen as an advantage, not as a hazard,

The approach integrating man and machine might not be that difficult to achieve, but the necessary functions within FAA and Boeing might be more difficult as both depend on world views of the their much dented capabilities. As much as the industry needs man and machine, they need FAA and Boeing.

[ARealTimTuffy]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-01/boeing-faa-say-no-737-max-wiring-fixes-needed-wsj-reports

[pilot9250]

Alf

Yes. I agree.

I said

"What is at challenge is whether the negative slope on training and experience is suitably aligned with the positive slope on the capabilities of automation."

And you said

"the Max issue was a breakdown of man and machine; good people, but asked to do more than their capability (design / pilots), "

I think these are the same thing.

[occasional]

From Briefing.com
"Separately, Boeing (BA 341.43, +11.88, +3.6%) shares outperformed on reports that the FAA will approve the company's design fixes to the 737 MAX. New software flaws were discovered but the goal to return to service by mid-year remained intact, according to Bloomberg."

[jugofpropwash]

More issues, regarding 2009 crash:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/business/boeing-737-inquiry.html?partner=msn

[ST Dog]

There really aren't two schools of thought there is only one.

Automate it.

There are people who may disagree with that approach, but that does not remove this is what is inevitably being pursued.


Agree that appears to be the response in the last decades. More and more automation to overcome human failings and thus leading to less and less capable humans requiring more and more automation. Repeat until the human is completely out of the loop (see reference to cartoon about control column hidden behind glass).

[ferry pilot]

https://mse238blog.stanford.edu/2017/08/bgarlick/flying-smarter-ai-machine-learning-in-aviation-autopilot-systems/
This is where it is happening

[safetypee]

From AWST 12 Feb
https://aviationweek.com/shownews/singapore-airshow/faa-narrows-issues-max-ungrounding

Depending on how you wish to interpret what is reported:-

FAA 'sounded positive', "is narrowing issues"; i.e. not yet agreed.
'Are approaching a certification flight'; i.e. tests still in Boeing court - 'FAA still waiting for Boeing'.
'No rift between regulators', 'close alignment', - just differences.

P.S. Boeing view via Flight Global
https://www.flightglobal.com/singapore-air-show-2020/boeings-tinseth-upbeat-on-southeast-asia-as-max-return-eyed/136491.article

… concern that the regulatory un-grounding of the type will be staggered among jurisdictions, creating markets where the jet cannot be flown.

“There are a lot of regulators at the table,”. “We continue to work with them all across the world. Clearly we’re in a position where the FAA is the lead regulator, the regulator of record because of the US. We’re making sure that we understand step-by-step, task-by-task what we have to do. Then we’re taking those items and those tasks one by one, and working through them in a meticulous, thoughtful way.”

Re simulator training being a major issue.

“I see it having a minor impact in recurring training going forward,”. “Frankly it’s a simulator session and pilots are going to be in a simulator every six months. It will be a little bit of a cost and inconvenience as we get these airplanes back into service. But the airplane has been out of service for so long that Max pilots have to go through recurring training anyway. All-in-all [simulator training] is the right thing for us to do.”

P.P.S. Another view of the situation from NYT
https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/business/boeing-737-max-fly-again.amp.html

Certification flights 'late February or early March'.


Backtracking to the Max grounding; FAA position, somewhat tenuous.
https://www.flightglobal.com/programmes/faa-chief-defends-reasoning-to-delay-737-max-grounding/136621.article

.

[Chugalug2]

SCC Final Report :-
The U.S. system for aircraft certification is robust and proven, and the FAA is a leader in augmenting aviation safety worldwide. This system also allows the United States to lead the world in the development and implementation of innovative products in order to enhance safety.


Preaching to the converted?

[Skyray]

Pretty damning report on the FAA's oversight of Southwest's 737 fleet from the office of the IG:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2020/02/12/southwest-airlines-faa-inspectors-safety/#70066b052f94

[occasional]

Boeing Fires Supervisor of Pilots Who Sent Embarrassing Emails

https://uk.advfn.com/stock-market/NYSE/BA/share-news/Boeing-Fired-Midlevel-Executive-Following-Embarras/81736701

[megan]

Boeing Fires Supervisor of Pilots Who Sent Embarrassing EmailsProblem solved then. :hmm: Completely in accordance with the Forbes article below.

Questions are being raised about Boeings culture also after the failure of its Starliner spacecraft.“It looks as if there could possibly be process issues at Boeing, and we want to understand what the culture is at Boeing that may have led to that,” he said.https://qz.com/1799365/how-boeings-starliner-test-failed/

Forbes article on Boeing culture.However, while they (Boeing) claim that their training aims to “be responsive to emergent needs” and “be collaborative via a social component,” they fail to adequately respond to employee concerns and foster a spirit of collaboration within their own company. As a result, this has lead to the creation of a toxic company culture with employees whose voices remain unheard.For employees in general, Carnegie Mellon University professor Brandy Aven says: “There's often tension between ensuring safety and increasing profits, but when times are good, they can feel enormous pressure to stay quiet about safety concerns.”

Furthermore, there’s a tendency to avoid speaking up so that you don’t “get in the way of the success of the endeavors of the organization,” which is further exacerbated by the lack of channels available to employees to communicate these concerns in the first place.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettonputter/2019/12/18/what-boeing-has-taught-us-about-not-neglecting-company-culture-culturegene/#2aacd0b1496a

[fdr]

Boeing Fires Supervisor of Pilots Who Sent Embarrassing Emails

https://uk.advfn.com/stock-market/NYSE/BA/share-news/Boeing-Fired-Midlevel-Executive-Following-Embarras/81736701

as Megan says, problem solved.

Now they just have to go up the chain of command th whole way to the Chairman at that time, and get rid o the lot, that would be consistent with getting rid of a middle level manager who apparently was not a party to the text exchange that occurred. talk about scapegoats. If ever a group needed to be left on the aft boat deck listening to the quartet play "Nearer my God to Thee" it is BAC's board and senior management. They set the tone and accepted the practices that resulted.

Did the Chairman ever correct the behaviour of shooting the messengers of the 2003 QA debacle?

[Ian W]

https://mse238blog.stanford.edu/2017/08/bgarlick/flying-smarter-ai-machine-learning-in-aviation-autopilot-systems/
This is where it is happening

The big problem with AI is that it is not coded and then verification tested at unit level, it is a program built by the Machine Learning. While the engineers working with the ML know how the ML is generating its code they have no idea what the code is and cannot verify the code - check that the code is correct. They can only validate the code - check that the system does what it is meant to do in every test that is given to it. This does not meet the certification requirements of current systems. So an AI driven system built based on ML cannot be certified under the current approach. There is also a fundamental issue with AI/ML it cannot use analogous reasoning so something that it has not seen before happens and it cannot as a human would take action that worked in a similar 'analogous' event. Or as someone once put it if the AI/ML learns only on left hand circuits it will not be able to carry out a right hand circuit. There is a LOT of research in this area including research into the CRM aspects of a human pilot supported by an AI/ML pilot; it could be orders of magnitude more than the 'what's it doing now?' How do you brief an AI/ML first officer on what you will do in particular events so it does not jump in to stop you?

[Clay_T]

Reuters is reporting Boeing and the FAA are at odds over some wiring in the MAX.

Is "It has worked fine so far" a valid analysis?

Boeing tells FAA it does not believe 737 MAX wiring should be moved: sources (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737max-wiring/boeing-tells-faa-it-does-not-believe-737-max-wiring-should-be-moved-sources-idUSKBN2082KO)
SEATTLE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Boeing Co told the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration it does not believe it needs to separate or move wiring bundles on its grounded 737 MAX jetliner that regulators have warned could short circuit with catastrophic consequences, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.The FAA confirmed Friday it had received a proposal from the planemaker regarding the wiring issue.

The FAA will “rigorously evaluate Boeing’s proposal to address a recently discovered wiring issue with the 737 MAX. The manufacturer must demonstrate compliance with all certification standards,” the agency said in a statement.

The U.S. planemaker and FAA first said in early January they were reviewing a wiring issue that could potentially cause a short circuit on the 737 MAX, and under certain circumstances lead to a crash if pilots did not react in time.

A Boeing spokesman referred all questions on wiring to the FAA, saying the agency would make the final decision and that the company is answering questions from the FAA.

[MCAS bla...]

There are more than a dozen different locations on the 737 MAX where wiring bundles may be too close together. Most of the locations are under the cockpit in an electrical bay.

If the bundles pose a potential hazard, regulations would typically require separating the bundles or adding a physical barrier.

Boeing has noted in talks with the FAA that the same wiring bundles are in the 737 NG, which has been in service since 1997 and logged 205 million flight hours without any wiring issues.

New safety rules on wiring were adopted in the aftermath of the 1998 Swiss Air 111 crash.

A company official told Reuters last month Boeing had been working on a design that would separate the wiring bundles, if necessary. Moving the bundles could pose further delays to the return of the MAX, however, and Reuters reported Thursday that a key certification test flight was not expected until April or later.

Three U.S. airlines this week pushed back the resumption of 737 MAX flights from June until August or later. Boeing has estimated U.S. officials would lift a safety ban on the aircraft around mid-year.

It is unclear whether the European Union Aviation Safety Agency will demand the MAX wiring bundles be separated. A spokeswoman for the agency on Thursday said regulators were “waiting for additional information from Boeing.”

[Zeffy]

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-faces-dilemma-over-737-max-wiring-flaw-that-boeing-missed/


FAA faces dilemma over 737 MAX wiring flaw that Boeing missed
Feb. 14, 2020 at 7:14 pm Updated Feb. 14, 2020 at 7:50 pm
By Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

During the original design and certification of Boeing’s 737 MAX, company engineers didn’t notice that the electrical wiring doesn’t meet federal aviation regulations for safe wire separation. And the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) failed to detect Boeing’s miss.

The wiring vulnerability creates the theoretical potential for an electrical short to move the jet’s horizontal tail uncommanded by the pilot, which could be catastrophic. If that were to happen, it could lead to a flight control emergency similar to the one that brought down two MAX jets, causing 346 deaths and the grounding of the aircraft.

Because this danger is extremely remote, the FAA faces a dilemma over what to do about it. The issue has complicated the return of the MAX to service after a grounding that is edging close to one year.

Modifying the wiring would be a delicate and expensive task, and Boeing this week submitted a proposal to the FAA, arguing that it shouldn’t be required.

Yet allowing the wiring to remain as is will be difficult at a time when both Boeing and the FAA are under tremendous scrutiny.

Boeing’s argument rests on the long service history of the earlier model 737, which has the same wiring. That earlier 737 NG model didn’t have to meet the current wiring-separation standards because they came into force long after that jet was certified.

“There are 205 million flight hours in the 737 fleet with this wiring type,” a Boeing official said. “There have been 16 failures in service, none of which were applicable to this scenario. We’ve had no hot shorts.”

In addition, Boeing says pulling out and rerouting wires on the almost 800 MAXs already built would pose a potentially higher risk of causing an electrical short, because insulation could chafe or crack in the process of moving the wires.

However, an FAA safety engineer familiar with the issue, who asked not to be identified because he spoke without agency permission, said agency technical staff have been clear that the wiring doesn’t comply with regulations and have told their Boeing counterparts it has to be fixed.

A second person familiar with the FAA’s thinking said the agency has communicated to Boeing that despite the safe service history of the wiring on other 737s, it will be difficult to convince regulators that they should do nothing.

“Our people have to weigh that against the regulations and the political and public opinion risk of appearing to give Boeing a break on a regulation that’s there for a reason,” the second person said.

Furthermore, there’s also pressure from foreign regulators, including the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

“It’s probably true that if Boeing proposes to do nothing, EASA is going to say, ‘Hell, no,'” the second person said.

Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigator with both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and now an air-safety consultant, said the federal agency’s decision “will be influenced by the white-hot spotlight the FAA is under” because of the MAX crashes.

Whatever decision it ultimately makes, he said, “The FAA better have a strong case.”

On Friday, the FAA issued an official statement hinting that Boeing may be forced to comply with the wiring regulation.

“We will rigorously evaluate Boeing’s proposal to address a recently discovered wiring issue with the 737 MAX,” the FAA said. “The manufacturer must demonstrate compliance with all certification standards.”

Boeing spokesman Gordon Johndroe said that the entire range of possible options — from doing nothing to moving the wires — was considered and built into Boeing’s schedule adjustment last month.

Johndroe said that whatever decision the FAA makes “will not change the company’s estimate for the MAX returning to service by the middle of the year.”

A remote possibility
Boeing discovered the wiring vulnerabilities and informed the FAA of the problem when, after the crashes, it undertook a complete redo of its system safety analysis on the MAX, a painstaking look at all the possible system and equipment failures and the impact of each.

It was forced to do the new analysis when it realized the MAX’s original certification analysis included assumptions about pilot reaction times that didn’t match the reality of the responses during the two MAX crashes.

It’s unclear how during the design of the MAX Boeing missed the fact that the wiring didn’t meet the regulation governing separation of wires to prevent shorts.

The regulation was introduced in 2009 following study of two fatal crashes: TWA 800 in 1996, in which an electrical short is believed to have caused a spark in the fuel tank and an explosion; and Swissair 111 in 1998, when an electrical short caused a fire in the cockpit.

The FAA safety engineer said Boeing identified about a dozen positions in the 737 wiring, including one toward the jet’s tail and the rest in the electronics bay under the forward fuselage, where “significant runs of wire” failed to meet the new separation standard. The wire lengths involved were as long as 16 feet, he said.

In one instance, engineers found a hot power wire that was too close to two command wires running to the jet’s moveable horizontal tail, or stabilizer, one for commanding the tail to swivel to move the jet nose-up, the other to move it nose-down. The danger is a short that causes arcing of electricity from the hot wire to the command wire.

“If a hot short occurs between the power wire and either the up or down command wire, the stabilizer can go to the full nose-up or nose-down position,” the engineer said.

Furthermore, the electrical power in that wire could circumvent the cutoff switches in the cockpit that, in the event of such a stabilizer runaway, are used to kill electrical power to the tail. Theoretically, the pilots could be unable to shut it off.

This is unrelated to the flight control system — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that repeatedly forced down the noses of the two MAXs that crashed. However, the similarity in the potential outcome is enough to raise alarm.

The engineer described this as “a semi-remote possibility.” Boeing’s position, based on the 205 million safe flight hours on the earlier 737 where this has never happened, is that this is extremely remote.

However, the danger is scientifically established.

Michael Traskos, chairman of the industry’s wiring and cable standards committee and president of Lectromec, a Virginia-based laboratory and engineering firm specializing in wire-system component testing and consulting, said that his team did testing for NASA in 2005 and 2006, not specific to a particular airplane, “that demonstrated potential uncommanded activation in the event of arcing.”

How the FAA handles a noncompliance
Discovering that an airplane doesn’t meet all the safety regulations is not rare, and if it wasn’t for the MAX crisis it’s highly unlikely this wiring issue would have risen to attention.

In 2015, Douglas Anderson, the FAA’s deputy counsel in the Seattle-area regional office, wrote a critical internal white paper — “Achieving Compliance with Airworthiness Standards”— arguing that the agency in effect encourages manufacturers to be loose about complying with all the safety regulations because it doesn’t slap them hard when it’s discovered after a plane is certified that the design does not comply.

He noted that if there is a clear safety of flight issue, the FAA will issue an airworthiness directive requiring that the problem be fixed within a set timeframe. But absent that order, it’s left to the manufacturer to decide what to do.

Unless there is some clear flight-safety issue, he wrote, jet manufacturers “usually have no obligation to correct noncompliances, and it’s faster and cheaper to develop designs if compliance is not a priority.”

“There is rarely any significant consequence” for the airplane manufacturer, who is “free to correct the noncompliance at its convenience without threatening delivery schedules.”

He noted that 2011, a year when Boeing certified two new airplanes, saw a spike in discoveries of designs failing to comply with requirements, with 98 non-compliances found in the 787 Dreamliner and 24 non-compliances in the 747-8 jumbo jet.

“Fully compliant and substantiated designs require more time and resources,” Anderson wrote.

Anderson recommended manufacturers be held to account and forced to make fixes, the expense of which would deter coming out with non-compliant designs.

During certification of the MAX, Boeing persuaded the FAA to exempt it from meeting certain regulations, arguing that the plane was a derivative of a much earlier design and that the cost of upgrading to meet the latest regulations would outweigh the safety benefit.

For instance, during the original MAX certification, the FAA allowed Boeing not to further separate the cables to the rudder in the tail to ensure redundancy and not to meet the latest requirements for crew alerting systems.

If Boeing back in 2017 had asked the FAA for a pass on this wiring separation requirement, on the basis of the safe flight history of the earlier model, it would almost certainly have been granted more readily than the rudder cable exception.

Assessing the risk
But Boeing didn’t ask for it then, because somehow it missed the problem entirely.

Guzzetti, the safety investigator, said that although the system safety analysis was delegated to Boeing, this reveals a failure too in FAA oversight.

“How did it go undetected?” he asked. “Delegation doesn’t give the FAA a complete pass.”

Traskos, the wiring standards expert, said that leaving aside the current pressures on the FAA and Boeing, the decision on what to do now should “come down to identifying the level of risk.”

“If they identify that the failure severity is not that great, not catastrophic, and the failure probability is low, they could potentially justify maintaining the system as is,” he said. “I believe that’s something both sides would agree to.”

The FAA safety engineer said the agency will have to perform a formal risk analysis called a TARAM — a Transport Airplane Risk Assessment Methodology — to determine what type of fix is required and how soon.

Since the wiring is the same on the earlier 737 NG model, the question arises whether any wiring modification might also be needed on those aircraft, of which there are more than 6,000 flying worldwide.

However, the second person familiar with the FAA’s thinking said a TARAM is unlikely to recommend any change to the wiring on the NG. He said the risk of breaking apart wiring on thousands of much older airplanes would almost certainly be greater than the risk from leaving the wiring as is.

“You run a greater risk of introducing a short on older airplanes by going in and messing with it,” he said. “We even have people within the FAA concerned about breaking apart the wiring on the new MAXs.”

Guzzetti said discovering the wiring vulnerability so late and after two crashes makes it a harder call than if Boeing had asked for an exception during the jet’s original certification.

“They realize only now they have a problem with the wiring and they want forgiveness,” Guzzetti said. “It’s going to have to be well-documented and justified.”

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or [email protected]; on Twitter: @dominicgates.

[fdr]

Reuters is reporting Boeing and the FAA are at odds over some wiring in the MAX.

Is "It has worked fine so far" a valid analysis?

it worked for Iron Man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVsaBxOxQek

[Bend alot]

Boeing's response to many things is the NG's safety record.

They fail to acknowledge the MAX's extremely poor safety record.

The MAX is not an NG and it should be called out as that - The NG has proven with 205 million flying hours a safe aircraft for low trained crews all over the world.

The MAX has proven it is not as safe as the NG for the same crews.

What has happened to that fix that was ready many months ago? Why not release any details including bare airframe flight data? How does the new data compare of the two FC's work?

Should the MAX be a 3 crew aircraft? that is the only MCAS event that was successful!

Are the NG and MAX actual manual trim wheel forces the same or is the MAX even harder to move as the aircraft moves out of trim?

Mid Feb now and no new leaked bare airframe data leaked from all the persons and regulators involved suggests that is still Boeing's secret data. I expect we will get a few more bombshells between now and mid-year.

I think this saga has a lot longer to run.

[Dave Therhino]

"Boeing’s argument rests on the long service history of the earlier model 737, which has the same wiring. That earlier 737 NG model didn’t have to meet the current wiring-separation standards because they came into force long after that jet was certified. Boeing’s argument rests on the long service history of the earlier model 737, which has the same wiring. That earlier 737 NG model didn’t have to meet the current wiring-separation standards because they came into force long after that jet was certified." (from Seattle Times article)

Not sure who's feeding the reporter that line, but it's not true. It's a single failure that's potentially catastrophic (a hot short to the stab motor wiring). The system safety analysis regulations and policy applicable at the time of the NG application prohibited such a vulnerability. Someone is likely trying to give the impression it is EWIS issue under the relatively new (2007) 14 CFR 25.1707 and 1709 requirements, but it is also non-compliant with the long standing system safety requirements of 25.1309(b), which applied to the NG. Wire separation has always been an element of preventing catastrophic single failures under 25.1309.

[Australopithecus]

All of the wiring compliance issues, and the attendant regulator insistence on compliance are the price Boeing pays for the earlier gaming of the system. Zero sympathy, despite the merits of the technological and statistical arguments.

[Twitter]

What a lame response by B - “pulling out the wires risks chafing the other wires...”
Disconnect the wire, leave it in place and route a new wire externally to the bundle.

[DaveReidUK]

Are the NG and MAX actual manual trim wheel forces the same or is the MAX even harder to move as the aircraft moves out of trim?

Same size trim wheel, same size horizontal stabilizer and elevator in both variants. Can't see any reason why manual trim forces would be significantly different.

[safetypee]

Dave, similar forces but not necessarily the same. Consider the aerodynamic influences of wing tip changes, and the 'MCAS issues' of thrust, engine cowl and wing-pylon interface.

Whilst there should not be any mechanical increase, small but significant changes can arise from revised cable runs and pulleys, pressure bulkhead seals, etc.

If the NG was marginally acceptable, then a small change in the Max might not meet the certification requirements.

[ktcanuck]

What a lame response by B - “pulling out the wires risks chafing the other wires...”
Disconnect the wire, leave it in place and route a new wire externally to the bundle.
IIRC, not permitted. You don't leave non functional wiring in place.

[fdr]

Dave, similar forces but not necessarily the same. Consider the aerodynamic influences of wing tip changes, and the 'MCAS issues' of thrust, engine cowl and wing-pylon interface.

If an improvement in tip losses occurs from the upper and lower wing tip devices, (which would be consistent with studies on sections such as flaps) then there is a slight increase in the effective aspect ratio, and the L/D curve would be slightly steeper. That effect doesn't affect to any significant extent the downwash that impinges on the horizontal stabiliser, but the engine geometry will. The effect would be for an increase in downwash to the tailplane, but disregarding the MCAS issue, that would be a constant differential to the forces acting at any time on the aircraft for a given cg/mach/AoA, for normal range AoA. For higher AoA, the effect of the nacelle interaction with the inner wing area, would be to increase downwash at higher AoA, which for a given stab setting would result in an increased resultant trim downforce giving a pitch up tendency. in itself, that is tending towards a higher pitch attitude and reduction in speed which reduces the load that would exist on the manual trim system. Yes, that would result in non linear elevator forces, which is undesirable to the certification for HQ, but the system itself washes out the stab forces so would not have been a problem to manual trim in the absence of MCAS. May sound odd, but thats how the forces would play out.


Whilst there should not be any mechanical increase, small but significant changes can arise from revised cable runs and pulleys, pressure bulkhead seals, etc.

True, but there is apparently not much if any difference between the flavors considered here. Not sure that TBC has any drivers towards alteration of the control runs in the stab itself, or with the pressure bulkhead seals etc. Roll control architecture was altered in respect to the spoilers.


If the NG was marginally acceptable, then a small change in the Max might not meet the certification requirements.

Maybe, but as far as the manual stab trim use goes, in the absence of MCAS, it probably was slightly better due to the slight changes in the wing downwash.

​​​​​​​

[Twitter]

IIRC, not permitted. You don't leave non functional wiring in place.

You don’t? Aircraft with uninstalled options for sure have the wiring pre incorporated in the loom - which is for the time being non functional.

[Bend alot]

What would the adverse weather be?

https://www.aeroinside.com/item/12467/argentinas-b38m-near-cordoba-on-dec-14th-2018-engine-vibrations-as-result-of-weather

Other interesting issues here, a few engines, the door and the stowaway.

https://www.aeroinside.com/incidents/type/b38m/boeing-737-800max

[tdracer]

You don’t? Aircraft with uninstalled options for sure have the wiring pre incorporated in the loom - which is for the time being non functional.
On new build aircraft, the wiring for uninstalled options will often be deleted during build to save weight (wire bundles are not mass produced in the way that automotive wiring is). However it's not uncommon for wiring to be 'capped and stowed' when optional equipment is deactivated (often occurs when aircraft change hands and the new operator wants a standard configuration).

[AerocatS2A]

What would the adverse weather be?

https://www.aeroinside.com/item/12467/argentinas-b38m-near-cordoba-on-dec-14th-2018-engine-vibrations-as-result-of-weather


I don’t know, but icing would be a typical culprit for weather related engine vibrations.

[Bend alot]

I don’t know, but icing would be a typical culprit for weather related engine vibrations.
I would expect weather to be a common factor to both engines.

[Twitter]

On new build aircraft, the wiring for uninstalled options will often be deleted during build to save weight (wire bundles are not mass produced in the way that automotive wiring is). However it's not uncommon for wiring to be 'capped and stowed' when optional equipment is deactivated (often occurs when aircraft change hands and the new operator wants a standard configuration).

Thanks TD. So Boeing’s objection to the wiring change on the grounds of chafing while removing is an invalid one.

[MechEngr]

Thanks TD. So Boeing’s objection to the wiring change on the grounds of chafing while removing is an invalid one.

What the FAA wants isn't to remove an individual wire but to remove and reconfigure multiple wire bundles; apparently by re-looming the wires into entirely new bundles.

It's tough enough to correctly fabricate and maintain bundles before installation with all the room of a factory floor - my experience is military ground vehicles up to 50 feet in length. Essentially remanufacturing the wiring post install in the confines of a fuselage is asking for nearly innumerable defects.

Running a wire all by itself alongside an existing bundle is a bad idea as it will easily move and chafe and fatigue or wear through, allowing short circuits or corrosion.

[Twitter]

What the FAA wants isn't to remove an individual wire but to remove and reconfigure multiple wire bundles; apparently by re-looming the wires into entirely new bundles.

It's tough enough to correctly fabricate and maintain bundles before installation with all the room of a factory floor - my experience is military ground vehicles up to 50 feet in length. Essentially remanufacturing the wiring post install in the confines of a fuselage is asking for nearly innumerable defects.

Running a wire all by itself alongside an existing bundle is a bad idea as it will easily move and chafe and fatigue or wear through, allowing short circuits or corrosion.

Thanks for the insight Mech.

[OldnGrounded]

Issues like this one are clearly going to be met by harder looks and more rigid responses at the FAA than previously. Positioned between the US manufacturer and the other CAAs of the world is a less comfortable position that it once was. Boeing has significantly shaken the world's confidence in its trustworthiness and the consequences are already expensive and painful.

[Chris2303]

Not sure if you have seen this yet?

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/02/ship-the-airplane-the-cultural-organizational-and-technical-reasons-why-boeing-cannot-recover.html

[OldnGrounded]

Not sure if you have seen this yet?

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/02/ship-the-airplane-the-cultural-organizational-and-technical-reasons-why-boeing-cannot-recover.html

Well. I guess few will accuse Travis of mincing words with this one.

[GordonR_Cape]

Not sure if you have seen this yet?

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/02/ship-the-airplane-the-cultural-organizational-and-technical-reasons-why-boeing-cannot-recover.html

WOW, WOW, WOW!

This article says things out loud which many of us suspected a year ago, and explains them in a way which is much clearer than some of the mainstream coverage. It also addresses several points about the B737 MAX and MCAS, which I have not seen, despite reading the many thousands of posts on this forum.

[MechEngr]

WOW, WOW, WOW!

This article says things out loud which many of us suspected a year ago, and explains them in a way which is much clearer than some of the mainstream coverage. It also addresses several points about the B737 MAX and MCAS, which I have not seen, despite reading the many thousands of posts on this forum.

Quite a few of the astonishing items in that article are false. But it is written as a Gish Gallop, so an equally lengthy response is required to debunk them.
Example: That the 737 MAX was unstable and MCAS corrects that instability. So far, all facts point to False. The 737 Max is stable and MCAS is not needed to correct instability. There are many others, but since it starts off with misinformation, it is not a good sign.

[fdr]

Quite a few of the astonishing items in that article are false. But it is written as a Gish Gallop, so an equally lengthy response is required to debunk them.
Example: That the 737 MAX was unstable and MCAS corrects that instability. So far, all facts point to False. The 737 Max is stable and MCAS is not needed to correct instability. There are many others, but since it starts off with misinformation, it is not a good sign.

Pity that the conversation loses it's force in loose facts.

For the record, the strakes on the engine cowl are not fitted as an aid to stability, they make up for the decrement in CL at the higher AOA that arises from the interaction of the cowl flow and the wing with a close coupled cowl/wing design. The AOA that occurs at is high but all speeds for TO and landing are related to the stall speed, and therefore the decrement at stall impacts TO and landing requirements.

Indeed, as far as stability goes, they actually are slightly destabilising on a swept wing.... Why? Because... as AOA increases, the normal cowl will start to degrade flow conditions in the wake of the nacelle, (and a bit inboard...) and that lowers local CL. For the section it has a modest effect on Cm, but the overall geometry of losing CL inboard means that there is a shift of lift distribution span-wise towards the tip, and as the tips are swept... rearwards (makes the flutter stability nicerer) then there is an increase in nose down pitching moment as AOA increases. Yaay. That's nice. So. with the MAX-facktor, we get a biggerer effect from the interaction of the cowl, and the strakes were added... and that means we got a betterer CLmax, yaay, but it is destabilising. Fix MCAS, reset the strakes... add water and mix. Thats the aero fix, and you get a bit of a loss of performance for TO and LDG, which can be picked up with fun stuff on the TE of the flap, which also makes the wing work better in the cruise. Yet, here we are, 16 months into this debacle, awaiting a fix of a lousy software code and system architecture that could be removed completely with a hacksaw and some bondo. Now where did I put my bottle... its Miller time.

Simply put: for the restoration of CL that the strake give, you get rid of the natural negative Cm that occurs without them,... yet the program keeps them in place. Loopy $h[#.

[b]Happy pickky time:

Zhang, W., Chen, H., Zhang, Y., Fu, S., Chen, Y., Li, Y., and Zhou, T., “Numerical Research of the Nacelle Strake on a Civil Jet”, ICAS2012, 2012.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1060x1178/screen_shot_2020_02_17_at_7_37_27_pm_c3375191273e7d7c345af63 32e438f249f3f868e.png


https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1084x940/screen_shot_2020_02_17_at_7_37_46_pm_9a549620aafa165cd4b1650 0722eca1dabc55d8d.png


https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/946x1044/screen_shot_2020_02_17_at_7_37_14_pm_6d205bda6d58e954e661396 d2180ead911eeca91.png


References cited in the above paper. The understanding on the effect of the strake goes back further than these to work in the mid 80's and early 90's. The improvement in CFD gives prettier pictures though. BTW, the same effect does occur on TP aircraft dependent on their cowl design, and a strake may improve CL at modest AOA, DLR has nice work on that recently giving a 10% increase in CL.
[1] Meredith P. T. Viscous Phenomena Affecting High Lift Systems and Suggestions for Future CFD Development. High-Lift Systems Aerodynamics. AGARD, CP 315, Sep. 1993, pp. 19-1~19-8.

[2] R. Rudnik. Stall Behaviour of the EUROLIFT High Lift Configurations. 46th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit. AIAA Paper 2008-836, Reno, Nevada, January 2008.

[3] Harald Quix, Matthias Schulz and Jürgen Quest, et. al. Low Speed High Lift Validation Tests within the European Project EUROLIFT II. 25th AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Conference. AIAA Paper 2007-4298, Miami, FL, June 2007.

[4] H. Frhr. v. Geyr, N. Schade, J.W. v. d. Burg, et. al. CFD Prediction of Maximum Lift Effects on Realistic High Lift Commercial Aircraft Configurations within the European project EUROLIFT II . 25th AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Conference. AIAA Paper 2007-4299, Miami, FL, June 2007.

[5] Heinz Hansen, Peter Thiede, Frederic Moens, et. al. Overview about the European high lift research programme EUROLIFT. 42nd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit. AIAA Paper 2004-767, Reno, Nevada, January 2004.

[6] R. Rudnik, H. Frhr. v. Geyr. The European High Lift Project EUROLIFT II –Objectives, Approach, and Structure. 25th AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Conference. AIAA Paper 2007-4296, Miami, FL, June 2007.

[7] Christopher L. Rumsey, Susan X. Ying. Prediction of high lift: review of present CFD capability. Progress in Aerospace Sciences. Vol. 38, pp 145-180, 2002.

[8] Jeffrey P. Slotnick, Judith A. Hannon, Mark Chaffin. Overview of the First AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop. 49th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition. AIAA Paper 2011-862, Orlando, Florida, January 2011.

[9] HaiXin Chen, Song Fu, FengWei Li. Navier–Stokes Simulations for Transport Aircraft Wing/Body HighLift Configurations, JOURNAL OF AIRCRAFT, Vol. 40, No. 5,pp883-890, 2003.

[10] 1st AIAA CFD High Lift Prediction Workshop Gridding Guidelines, http://hiliftpw.larc.nasa.gov.

[11]Niko F. Bier, David Rohlmann, Ralf Rudnik. Numerical Maximum Lift Predictions of a Realistic Commercial Aircraft in Landing Configuration. 50th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition. AIAA Paper 2012-279, Nashville, Tennessee, January 2012.

[12]Peter Eliasson, Pietro Catalano, Marie-Claire Le Pape, et al. Improved CFD Predictions for High Lift Flows in the European Project EUROLIFT II. 25th AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Conference. AIAA Paper 2007-4303, Miami, FL, June 2007.

[13]Masahiro Kanazaki, Yuzuru Yokokawa，Mitsuhiro Murayama，et al., Efficient Design Exploration of Nacelle Chine Installation in Wind Tunnel Testing. 46th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit. AIAA Paper 2008-155, Reno, Nevada, January 2008.

[14]Yuzuru Yokokawa, Mitsuhiro Murayama, Masahiro Kanazaki, et al., Investigation and Improvement of High-lift Aerodynamic Performances in Lowspeed Wind Tunnel Testing. 46th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit. AIAA Paper 2008-350, Reno, Nevada, January 2008.

[15]Yuzuru YOKOKAWA, Mitsuhiro MURAYAMA, Hiro-shi UCHIDA, et al., Aerodynamic Influence of a Half-Span Model Installation for High-Lift Configuration Experiment. 48th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting Including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition. AIAA Paper 2010-684, Orlando, Florida, January 2010.

[16]Zhang Y., Chen H., Fu S., Improvement to Patched Grid Technique with High-Order Conservative Remapping Method, JOURNAL OF AIRCRAFT, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 884-893,2011.

[17]Zhang Yufei, Chen Haixin, Zhang Wensheng, et al., Wing/engine integrated optimization based on Navier-Stokes equations. 50th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition. AIAA Paper 2012-1046, Nashville, Tennessee, January 2012.

[18]Zhang Yufei, Chen Haixin, Fu Song. A Karman Vortex Generator for Passive Separation Control in a Conical Diffuser. SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, Vol.55, No. 5, pp. 828-836, 2012.

[Loose rivets]

Yes, having read that, it rather coloured the rest of the article. (that was of course re #238 )

[Peter H]

Quite a few of the astonishing items in that article are false. But it is written as a Gish Gallop, so an equally lengthy response is required to debunk them.
Example: That the 737 MAX was unstable and MCAS corrects that instability. So far, all facts point to False. The 737 Max is stable and MCAS is not needed to correct instability. There are many others, but since it starts off with misinformation, it is not a good sign.My emphasis.

Based mainly on the views expressed by others on pprune: what facts? (Genuine question)

a) Boeing have gone to great lengths to deny instability. As far as I am aware they have not supplied any data to support the claim. There is no requirement for them to do so in the public domain, and commercial confidentiality may be involved.

b) Several certifying authorities may have explored stability. They aren't publishing the results, and possibly have an obligation not to.

c) A stable aircraft may be uncertifiable because of "feel" requirements. It seems possible that MCAS was introduced to address this issue. I cannot remember if B has commented on this.

d) MCAS looks awfully like a flight-envelop-restriction mechanism rather than a feel-augmentation one. Which doesn't make it an inappropriate way to meet the certification requirements.

So to an interested observer this looks like a factual vacuum -- at least in the public domain.

PS
At first sight I'm not too impressed with the article either (or the preceding software view paper).

[BDAttitude]

c) A stable aircraft may be uncertifiable because of "feel" requirements. It seems possible that MCAS was introduced to address this issue. I cannot remember if B has commented on this.

Which does mean no less than that the stability margin is not large enough to satisfy the certification requirements.
Stressing repeatedly the FEEL term is just the lucent attempt to disguise that it is actually a stability requirment that is violated and give it a harmless spinn.

[OldnGrounded]

Quite a few of the astonishing items in that article are false. But it is written as a Gish Gallop, so an equally lengthy response is required to debunk them.
Example: That the 737 MAX was unstable and MCAS corrects that instability. So far, all facts point to False. The 737 Max is stable and MCAS is not needed to correct instability. There are many others, but since it starts off with misinformation, it is not a good sign.

I'm pretty sure that there are at least as many knowledgeable observers who suspect that MCAS is a longitudinal-stability/anti-stall system as there are those who accept B's assurance that it is not. The stick-force gradient explanation definitely doesn't pass everyone's smell tests.

Edit: Oops. I should have read the other responses to MechEngr's post before typing this one -- I probably wouldn't have bothered. I think the point is made that the real purpose (and need for) MCAS remains an open question.

[568]

Quite a few of the astonishing items in that article are false. But it is written as a Gish Gallop, so an equally lengthy response is required to debunk them.
Example: That the 737 MAX was unstable and MCAS corrects that instability. So far, all facts point to False. The 737 Max is stable and MCAS is not needed to correct instability. There are many others, but since it starts off with misinformation, it is not a good sign.

I think I have asked you this question before, "do you fly 737's and if so how many hours?

Please enlighten us as to what "astonishing items in that article are false".

The MAX is unstable due to various forces on the engine/airframe at high angles of attack at low speed and also at high speed!
MCAS is installed to correct for the above and possibly because of stalling aoa and other aerodynamic forces, which Boeing may have found during flight test.

[Luc Lion]

I'm pretty sure that there are at least as many knowledgeable observers who suspect that MCAS is a longitudinal-stability/anti-stall system as there are those who accept B's assurance that it is not. The stick-force gradient explanation definitely doesn't pass everyone's smell tests.
if I am not mistaken, in one of the multiple previous MCAS threads, a Boeing engineer has explained that MCAS had been designed to comply with 14 CFR Part 25.175.
https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?node=14:1.0.1.3.11#se14.1.25_1145
This requirement is definitely about stick force gradient (or stick force stable slope) and its title is "§25.175 Demonstration of static longitudinal stability."

So the difference between a "longitudinal stability system" and a "stick-force gradient correction system" might be just pedantic.

[BDAttitude]

So the difference between a "longitudinal stability system" and a "stick-force gradient correction system" might be just pedantic.
Those are synonymous even for the pedants.
There are two pedants' arguments:
- If an aircraft that has not demonstrated failed to demonstrate "static longitudinal stability" according to the FAR you kindly linked, may it be called "unstable"? Answer: For pedants, physicists and engineers no. It might still be stable but just not stable enough. For Joe Average and just about every journo, yes.
- If a system is augmenting logitudinal stability at high AOAs is this an "anti stall device"? For Boeing it is not, for most others including pedants, engineers and physicists, it is.

[OldnGrounded]

if I am not mistaken, in one of the multiple previous MCAS threads, a Boeing engineer has explained that MCAS had been designed to comply with 14 CFR Part 25.175.
https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?node=14:1.0.1.3.11#se14.1.25_1145
This requirement is definitely about stick force gradient (or stick force stable slope) and its title is "§25.175 Demonstration of static longitudinal stability."

So the difference between a "longitudinal stability system" and a "stick-force gradient correction system" might be just pedantic.

Yes, the reference has been cited multiple times. When it has, it's almost always in the context of someone claiming that MCAS isn't an anti-stall/stability-enhancement system -- because the MAX allegedly doesn't need one -- but is "only" to address the stick force requirement.

From now on, I think I'm going to save BDAttitude's post, just above, and paste it in as a response to repeated assertions that "it's not anti-stall."

[Snyggapa]

In amongst the pedantry of whether failure to meet a "stick force gradient (or stick force stable slope) and its title is "§25.175 Demonstration of static longitudinal stability" means that we can call the aircraft unstable or not, I am surprised that there is so little comment about the potential wiring bundle chafing problem identified above, where if I understand it correctly it seems that a live wire could short to the to stab trim control and drive the stab trim to the stops - without the cutoff switches doing anything about it.

Coupled with the inability to stop it or to use the now tiny manual trim wheel , how many people fancy their chances of winning that argument with the aircraft ?

Just because it hasn't happened yet (205 million safe hours) doesn't mean that it won't happen as things age and fatigue (think pickle forks)

[OldnGrounded]

In amongst the pedantry of whether failure to meet a "stick force gradient (or stick force stable slope) and its title is "§25.175 Demonstration of static longitudinal stability" means that we can call the aircraft unstable or not, I am surprised that there is so little comment about the potential wiring bundle chafing problem identified above, where if I understand it correctly it seems that a live wire could short to the to stab trim control and drive the stab trim to the stops - without the cutoff switches doing anything about it.

Coupled with the inability to stop it or to use the now tiny manual trim wheel , how many people fancy their chances of winning that argument with the aircraft ?

Just because it hasn't happened yet (205 million safe hours) doesn't mean that it won't happen as things age and fatigue (think pickle forks)

If the FAA has the same view of the risk, what might that mean for all those NGs?

[megan]

How did we get here from there? What .b737.org.uk has to say.CFM powered aircraft - Speed trim is applied to the stabilizer automatically at low speed, low weight, aft C of G and high thrust. Sometimes you may notice that the speed trim is trimming in the opposite direction to you, this is because the speed trim is trying to trim the stabilizer in the direction calculated to provide the pilot with positive speed stability characteristics. The speed trim system adjusts stick force so the pilot must provide significant amount of pull force to reduce airspeed or a significant amount of push force to increase airspeed. Whereas, pilots are typically trying to trim the stick force to zero. Occasionally these may be in opposition.LEAP powered aircraft - MCAS is a longitudinal stability enhancement. It is not for stall prevention (although indirectly it helps) or to make the MAX handle like the NG (although it does); it was introduced to counteract the non-linear lift generated by the LEAP-1B engine nacelles at high AoA and give a steady increase in stick force as the stall is approached as required by regulation.

LEAP powered aircraft - The LEAP engine nacelles are larger and had to be mounted slightly higher and further forward from the previous NG CFM56-7 engines to give the necessary ground clearance. This new location and larger size of nacelle cause the vortex flow off the nacelle body to produce lift at high AoA. As the nacelle is ahead of the C of G, this lift causes a slight pitch-up effect (ie a reducing stick force) which could lead the pilot to inadvertently pull the yoke further aft than intended bringing the aircraft closer towards the stall. This abnormal nose-up pitching is not allowable under 14CFR §25.203(a) "Stall characteristics". Several aerodynamic solutions were introduced such as revising the leading edge stall strip and modifying the leading edge vortilons but they were insufficient to pass regulation. MCAS was therefore introduced to give an automatic nose down stabilizer input during elevated AoA when flaps are up.

MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) is implemented on the 737 MAX to enhance longitudinal stability characteristics with flaps UP and at elevated Angles of Attack (AoA). The MCAS function commands nose down stabilizer to enhance pitch characteristics during steep turns with elevated load factors and during flaps up flight at airspeeds approaching stall. MCAS is activated without pilot input and only operates in manual, flaps up flight. The system is designed to allow the flight crew to use column trim switch or stabilizer aislestand cutout switches to override MCAS input. The function is commanded by the Flight Control Computer (FCC) using input data from sensors and other airplane systems.

The MCAS function becomes active when the AoA exceeds a threshold based on airspeed and altitude. MCAS will activate for up to 9.26 seconds before pausing for 5 seconds. Stabilizer incremental commands are limited to 2.5 degrees and are provided at a rate of 0.27 degrees per second. The magnitude of the stabilizer input is lower at high Mach number and greater at low Mach numbers (for the same AoA above the activation threshold).

After AoA falls below the hysteresis threshold (0.5 degrees below the activation angle), MCAS commands nose up stabilizer to return the aircraft to the trim state that existed before the MCAS activation.

The function is reset once angle of attack falls below the Angle of Attack threshold or if manual stabilizer commands are provided by the flight crew. If the original elevated AOA condition persists, the MCAS function commands another incremental stabilizer nose down command according to current aircraft Mach number at actuation.

To summarise; MCAS will trim the Stabilizer down for up to 9.26 seconds (2.5 deg nose down) and pause for 5 seconds and repeat if the conditions (high angle of attack, flaps up and autopilot disengaged) continue to be met. MCAS will turn the trim wheel. Using electric pitch trim will only pause MCAS for 5s; to deactivate it you need to switch off the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches.Notice the commonality between the purpose of the STS and MCAS? The way I read it, because the LEAP is larger than the CFM it has a greater influence

Thread on the STS https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/614997-b-737-speed-trim-system.html

[BDAttitude]

Re 248:
Well, you know, if the wire bundle is babied well enough, it might not become a problem. On the other hand, a fatality might be just a carelessly executed safety wire pig tail (or any other ridge, or forgotten screw driver) away, as we have just learned in the EMB thread.
These rules are there for a reason. And a company which consideres itself epitome of civil aerospace engineering would be honoured to comply.