Do you think so Dave?

EASA has stopped all MAX flying from 1900Z

One TUI MAX was circling Bologna at 1859z - ?? where to park the upcoming static display whilst en route with pax from Egypt to BRU ??

Political decission
 

It appears that air safety and airworthiness is a political decision in the end? When most of the western world has grounded the MAX, US is still arguing it's business as usual.

Neither the CAA nor the EASA restrictions preclude a ferry/positioning flight back to base.

You may well believe it's that simple. There are plenty of distractions in the real world from ATC, terrain, weather/turbulence etc. That's before the stick shaker activates and the autopilot disconnects. Whilst you are trying to work out why that has happened (because it could be a variety of reasons) and fly the aircraft (including trimming), the aircraft is working against you. And this aircraft trims automatically on every departure, often against you.

Sat typing at a keyboard it appears obvious. All pilots will be able to tell you the memory items.

Pilot error
 

"Pilot induced oscillation" and "some pilots are not as well trained as pilots in US": https://video.foxnews.com/v/60130558...#sp=show-clips

IF (of course it's still a big IF) a faulty AOA sensor input is at fault again here feeding MCAS invalid AOA position, a person might want to look into the recent Quality assurance and manufacturing of those AOA probes. I would assume the Lion Air and ET Max's are not too far off of each other, which may have a similar batch of AOA probes.

I agree that the simple and appropriate fix to the system would be to have to see 2 valid AOA inputs for a stall or near stall position. It's hard to believe they would engineer such a critical system with only one AOA input required.

I've not seen the EASA notice, but can you help me to understand how the CAA one permits a positioning flight? Does "must not be flown" (2.1a, 2.1b) mean something different to the interpretation I'm giving it?

Remember , stick pushers will only work if the elevators are big enough. The whole issue is that they're not. Hence the MCAS inputs a change to the angle of the whole tailplane. The whole back end should have had a redesign years ago, and also any critical AoA detectors should be triplicated (not just two).

Thank you Oldeberon. My recollection has subsequently been validated. It would appear my technical details were incorrect, in so far as it being the FCCs that are cycled - as opposed to their input AOA sensors.... Interesting to note that after a full power-off, FCC1=>AOA1 is always the first used. Same scenario for both flights?

12MAR 20:35
European Countries applying B737-8 MAX and B737-9 MAX Airspace Restrictions

AO's are informed that below mentioned European States are not accepting entry into their airspace of any airline operating their flight with B737-8 MAX and B737-9 MAXtype of aircraft.

Please find the list of valid NOTAMs below :

NOTAM B0386/19 refers for UK/Northern Ireland ACC.
NOTAM B0235/19 for Irish ACC.
NOTAM A0612/19 for Vienna ACC.
NOTAM F0373/19 for all French ACCs.
NOTAM A0822/19 for Belgian ACC.
NOTAM A0177/19 for all German ACCs.
NOTAM C0206/19 refers for Warsaw ACC.
NOTAM B1615/19 for Canary ACC.
NOTAM A1673/19 for all Italian ACCs.
NOTAM A0333/19 for Amsterdam ACC.
NOTAM B1614/19 for all Spanish ACCs.
NOTAM A0499/19 for Vilnius ACC.
NOTAM A0123/19 for Swiss ACCs.
NOTAM A0253/19 for Slovenian ACC.
NOTAM A0355/19 for Cyprus ACC.
NOTAM G0036/19 for Tbilisi ACC.



Please note that B737 800 is not affected by this.


NMOC Brussels

The 737 is very much fly-by-wire - big thick 5mm steel wires.

.
What Boeing REALLY needs to do is have multiple inputs to the MCAS, so it is not reliant on a single AoA sensor. At the very least MCAS needs to drop out if it senses a mismatch between the AoA sensors, and just flag an error-fault. The last thing MCAS should be doing is activating its protocols, when it must know that the AoA sensors are in disagreement.

Silver

The last B38M Smartwings revenue flight QS1201/TVS1201 has been caught off-guard over the Black Sea. Flying circles, nowhere to land...

I fully agree that it might not work out as simply as the words I provided above might lead one to believe. As you say the stick shaker may be going off (probably would be if MCAS is active as both are driven by having high indicated AOA) and there might also be unreliable airspeed indication to deal with.

Two important things to keep in mind with MCAS:
- It will not activate with flaps down and thus will not be active on climbout until the flaps are retracted. If there is a gross AOA error (as on Lion Air) the stick shaker will be firing as soon as you get into the air. With this scenario you get a heads up that something is wrong with AOA before experiencing MCAS.
- If you continue to fly the airplane with the column and followup with pilot pitch trim to drive the column forces to zero you will have plenty of pitch control authority to fly your intended path.

Not really. It departed Dubai hours ago and surely has not been caught off guard when approaching EU airspace.

QS4160 SID-PRG is taking a very unusual routing, currently heading in the direction of Malta.

Good question.

The CAA's initial announcement of the restriction on its website and its Twitter feed (both still up) say specifically "[we have] issued instructions to stop any commercial passenger flights from any operator arriving, departing or overflying UK airspace." See UK Civil Aviation Authority statement.

I agree that the Safety Directive (which I hadn't seen) appears not to allow any flights at all (even though the EASA Emergency AD does).

I guess the proof of the pudding will be whether that TUI Max 8 does in fact position back to the UK.

I disagree. Dubai-Prague flue normal route until it was denied entry to European a/s. Had to do some cicles over water until they seemingly negotiated their landing at IST.
UPD. The poor guys are still circling closer to Turkish coast.

This I entirely agree with and have stated previously myself! Why would critical software ever rely on unverified data from one single item of hardware? It doesn't make sense. If you have foolproof and fail safe redundancy then throw on whatever software that you want. The software only acts on the data, if the data's always good then the software always does what it's meant to do. You don't build a luxury palace on sand, you put in solid foundations first- safe and secure infrastructure then the luxury add-ons.

How can an aircraft's certification be reliant on one single AoA vane always functioning correctly? I know it's been brought up about Airbus having 3 sources, but if you designed it correctly, you could have 100 mini AoA sensors for this function, and only let the software control flight surfaces when at least say 60 are in agreement! The software isn't the problem, the problem is the fact that the software relies on a single data source that isn't verified. Others have commented about the AoA being cross-checked against ASI etc. before making control inputs, that would be a good start.

AND... if you're going to throw in different functions and automated controls onto an aircraft, please have the decency to let the professional crew know what they are and how they work first, just in case they do something they shouldn't!

P.S. How many backdoor, certification reliant, automated controls are there that can function when AP is off? Or is MCAS the the only one so far?

it sure as hell takes increased engine power to maintain that AOA increase