Countries Restricting 737 MAX Flights After Second Crash

[GardoneVT]

Respectfully- You don’t know what you’re talking about.

I fly 737s for a living, and have time in all the variants that I mentioned. The procedures ARE the same.

Two crashed because the pilots weren’t skilled enough at hand-flying and appropriately knowledgeable of procedures.
Erroneous MCAS activation is essentially uncommanded/undesirable pitch trim activation. It can be countered and overridden with the trim switch on the control yoke, and entirely disabled with a cutout switch that’s used to address runaway trim. The pilots in Indonesia and Ethiopia did not respond correctly to the situation they were presented with. It appears to me that simple runaway pitch trim (nose down) would have probably killed them, too.

Maintenance and safety practices need to be looked at in these accidents, too, since the Lion Air plane had exactly the same thing happen on a prior flight (either same day or day prior). A jumpseater (riding along in the cockpit to get somewhere) had to prompt the crew to activate the stab trim cutout switch to properly address the situation (as the checklist would have directed them to for runaway trim). But the same thing happened again to the next crew. Did they write up the malfunction? Was it diagnosed and fixed? And a new AOA sensor failed on the next flight? That strains credulity.

Again - I fly these planes. The method of operation, and flying characteristics are essentially the same. They are nothing like two different “types.”

So am I to understand this entire problem comes down to substandard training at foreign operated airlines? If so, then shouldn’t Lion Air and Air Indonesia be held entirely liable for the massive loss of life in these incidents?

[Suvorov]

The erroneous MCAS activation was the main contributing factor to these accidents, however the crew's inability to handle the situation, maintain aircraft control, and run the appropriate checklists in an appropriate time frame is what doomed them.

[entropy]

If it was simply a foreign pilot training issue, the planes wouldn’t be stacked up collecting pigeon poop at airfields from VCV to BFI. What that problem is, how deep it goes, and what the .feds are going to decide covers everyone sufficiently is another story.

[TheNewbie]

I have flown into pretty much every medium to large city in Mexico. Hundreds of flights. My former airline actually had more destinations into and out of Mexico than any other airline in the world including the Mexican carriers.

Mexican commercial aviation is a mixed bag.

As far as ATC goes - they are generally very professional but very limited. Radio coverage in Mexico is decent at the higher altitudes but can be spotty down low. Radar coverage only exists at the high altitudes and at the major airports such as Mexico City and Guadalajara. At the smaller airports the approach controllers are simply using a plotter to check where you are in relation to other airplanes and thus rely upon you to give them position reports. This tends to work fine during good an moderate weather but can really get a little sketchy when you have convective weather "Thunderstorms" that require you to deviate during your arrivals. Dealing with convective weather is often above what Mexican ATC can really help you with. This is both good and bad. Good from the standpoint that when you ask for a deviation they generally give you the old "Royer" and let you on your own. Bad from the standpoint that they are not (nor can they often) going to warn you of bad weather or give you advisories. In theory they are still providing aircraft separation but I don't count on it and keep a close eye on the TCAS and sky.

Communication is generally not an issue. Some of us gringo's have a harder time understanding the controllers than others but generally speaking most of the major airspace Mexican ATC guys/gals are US trained and speak pretty good English. When you get to the more remote Mexican airports this can be an issue though. One other issue is that the Mexican aircraft will usually speak Spainish to ATC and on the common frequency which means that us gringos don't have as good of an idea of what is going on around us. Pilots are trained to listen to ATC chatter in order to develop a mental model/situational awareness - if you don't understand what the other pilots are saying then this severely limits this ability. Also the Mexicans tend not to have as much respect for the concept of using the radio for "required transmissions only" and you will often hear them chatting away with each other on the freq.

The other BIG threat in Mexico is the terrain. The mountains down in Mexico make what we have in the US look like hills. Guadalajara is at over 5000 feet elevation and is less than 100 miles from the coast. This is what we call rapidly rising terrain! Additionally there is a 16000 foot mountain between Mexico City and Puebla. Going into the mountainous regions of Mexico is always time to have your shit wired and be doing things by the book, but when you are doing it at night time, with weather, and out of radar coverage (which is not uncommon) and there is really little room for error. Still - I loved being able to cut my teeth down there and really enjoyed visiting the "real Mexico." Mexico City on the other hand - If I ever fly into that place again it will be too soon. It is a guaranteed Charley Foxtrot...... I can say that our flight data recorders recorded more than one instance of our crews not being prepared or just flat out criminally negligent and ended up missing hitting mountains by a couple hundred feet! They were LUCKY - that said the crew that was screwing off were fired pretty quickly right after the fact.

As for the Mexican Airlines - I see them as a mixed bag. The death of Mexican was in many ways good. AeroMexico took up the "Flag Carrier" position and this allowed smaller airlines like Interjet to be successful. Most Mexican pilots I know have come to the US to get their training but I suspect that some of the airlines there have a cadet program. Most of the time once the Mexican pilots have enough time to be a pilot at their airline (which I think is still just commercial license = 250 hours) then they are put in the right seat of an RJ or even 737/A320. All the guys I knew in flight school who were Mexican were well connected and part of the Mexican Elite (light skin) and all they needed were the hours. Still - life as a pilot in Mexico is not as good of a gig as it can be here and I've know guys who have left the Captain seat of airlines like Interjet to take a job at a Regional in the US. I understand that jobs at AeroMexico are pretty good but they are hard to get and only for the well connected. As far as safety goes - I'd say pretty typical of the 2nd world airlines. A lot of the guys down there are young and display they typical Latin American "machismo" which is not conducive to good CRM, add to that the terrain and I would say that if my kids were wanting to go on a EcoAdventure into Saltillo - I would feel much better with them being on a US flagged plane. That said - the Mexican airlines have not had any catastrophic losses for quite some time despite their challenges....

Fascinating and thanks.


In regard to Mexico City.....Yikes! I fly there a lot. Mainly on AA.

The climbout from D.F always seems more fun than DFW.

[GyroF-16]

If it was simply a foreign pilot training issue, the planes wouldn’t be stacked up collecting pigeon poop at airfields from VCV to BFI. What that problem is, how deep it goes, and what the .feds are going to decide covers everyone sufficiently is another story.

This assumes that foreign aviation agencies and the FAA are acting in a rational, non-political manner as they make their grounding decisions.

As Suvorov said, the erroneous MCAS activation was the “trigger event” in the two fatal accidents, but, contrary to popular press reporting, it did not doom them to an inevitable crash.
Two low-competence crews responded slowly and inappropriately to what was essentially uncommanded nose-down trim.
Boeing certainly needed to document MCAS functionality better, and address the lack of redundancy in AOA input.

However, US airlines have dramatically more MAX flying time then Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, and a US carrier has not experienced an AOA failure, nor an erroneous MCAS activation. I would submit that maintenance practices in the United States, and the caliber of pilots flying for the majors would combine to make the existing MCAS situation a non-issue. It should be fixed, but this extended grounding is a political game to avoid ever mentioning that sub-par pilots in third-world airlines couldn’t hack a straightforward problem - one that was possibly induced by poor maintenance practices.
I think that both Boeing and the FAA are afraid of the political fallout (being called racist) for stating the truth about the primary cause of the fatal accidents.

[entropy]

We shall see. <shrug>

[TiroFijo]

I'm not a pilot, but my humble point of view is that mechanical/electronic devices should be as forgiving as possible, and safety procedures redundant...
Hoping for a flawless pilot reaction in every case is a recipe for failure.
I know it is a balancing act, we shall see.

[archangel]

I'm not a pilot, but my humble point of view is that mechanical/electronic devices should be as forgiving as possible, and safety procedures redundant...
Hoping for a flawless pilot reaction in every case is a recipe for failure.
I know it is a balancing act, we shall see.

Planes today are so automated that they practically fly themselves. But no matter how forgiving or redundant the systems are, you can still lose an engine or sensor or control surface to a bird strike. It's for that those emergency situations that we insist on having pilots in the cockpits, and those pilots had better know how to manually fly the airplane in those situations.

If you only train your pilots to babysit the autopilot... That's the recipe for disaster. It's like (since this is Pistol Forum) training cops how to shoot with 2 hands, but because Glocks are so reliable and hold so many rounds, not bothering to train them how to clear a malfunction, or reload, or shoot one handed. Or Firefighters training how to sit around the firehouse waiting for a call, how to wash the trucks, where to store their boots, but never actually practicing how to put out a fire.

[TiroFijo]

I know, I'm not talking about the pilost merely "babysitting the autopilot". But waiting for a perfect human response in case something fails (which they always do) is the other extreme.

The trick is finding the middle ground, knowing how forgiving can you make a system before detracting from some othe qualities, or adding too much complexity, cost, etc....

[Stephanie B]

Bloomberg is reporting:

The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.

Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.

They must have killer customer service.



The article goes on to discuss that Boeing hired Russian engineers who didn't understand that smoke detectors need to be hardwired into the airplane.

Yet another reason to stay off Russian airliners.