Countries Restricting 737 MAX Flights After Second Crash

[TC215]

I was amazed to see the Lion Air captain had 8,000 hours at only 30 years old. That seems like a ton, while still having pretty limited airmanship skills.

There’s a difference in having 8,000 hours and having the same hour 8,000 times.

[HJB]

The significant amount of time that it seems to be taking to get these planes back in the air is a sure signal to me that it was more than some mickey mouse software glitch that needed to be re-programed.

I am guessing it is a serious enough problem that someone at Boeing or FAA, or maybe both, need to be going to prison !

[AKDoug]

The significant amount of time that it seems to be taking to get these planes back in the air is a sure signal me that it was more than some mickey mouse software glitch that needed to be re-programed.

I am guessing it is a serious enough problem that someone at Boeing or FAA, or maybe both, need to be going to prison !

You did catch in the article that Boeing and the NTSB have been unable to get complete access to flight recorder data as well in both these crashes, right? I imagine that has something to do with it as well.

[HJB]

Maybe so, but I still think there is something that I bet both the FAA and Boeing would be embarrassed by if it got out. I think they are busy trying to figure out how to cover their butts when the lawsuits come for the deaths in those two crashes.

[GJM]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/plane-t...es-11569506401

Snippet:

Federal accident investigators called for broad changes in decades-old engineering principles and design assumptions related to pilot emergency responses, the first formal U.S. safety recommendations stemming from two fatal Boeing Co. BA +0.45% 737 MAX crashes.

As part of lessons learned from the crashes that took 346 lives and grounded the global MAX fleet, the National Transportation Safety Board suggested the plane maker and the Federal Aviation Administration used unrealistic tests to initially certify the jets to carry passengers. The board also urged the FAA and Boeing to pay more attention to interactions between humans and cockpit computers to ensure safety. The board wants Boeing and the FAA to reassess—and potentially jettison—what senior investigators portrayed as overly optimistic assumptions about the speed and effectiveness of cockpit-crew reactions to complex automation failures.

Five of the NTSB’s seven recommendations, released Thursday, called for the use of more-objective methods to predict likely responses of airline pilots in such scenarios when automation goes haywire. The board’s announcement challenged long-held industry and FAA practices that largely use the nearly instantaneous responses of highly trained test pilots, rather than those of average pilots who typically have less experience, to verify the safety of new jetliner models. Some of the recommendations cover future airliner designs, not just the MAX.

[Guinnessman]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/plane-t...es-11569506401

Snippet:

Federal accident investigators called for broad changes in decades-old engineering principles and design assumptions related to pilot emergency responses, the first formal U.S. safety recommendations stemming from two fatal Boeing Co. BA +0.45% 737 MAX crashes.

As part of lessons learned from the crashes that took 346 lives and grounded the global MAX fleet, the National Transportation Safety Board suggested the plane maker and the Federal Aviation Administration used unrealistic tests to initially certify the jets to carry passengers. The board also urged the FAA and Boeing to pay more attention to interactions between humans and cockpit computers to ensure safety. The board wants Boeing and the FAA to reassess—and potentially jettison—what senior investigators portrayed as overly optimistic assumptions about the speed and effectiveness of cockpit-crew reactions to complex automation failures.

Five of the NTSB’s seven recommendations, released Thursday, called for the use of more-objective methods to predict likely responses of airline pilots in such scenarios when automation goes haywire. The board’s announcement challenged long-held industry and FAA practices that largely use the nearly instantaneous responses of highly trained test pilots, rather than those of average pilots who typically have less experience, to verify the safety of new jetliner models. Some of the recommendations cover future airliner designs, not just the MAX.

The NTSB says average, these pilots were well below our standard for average in the USA.

[GardoneVT]

The NTSB says average, these pilots were well below our standard for average in the USA.

True, but high importance hardware must be designed around the lowest common denominator. This is routine for most manufacturing companies. It is unfair , yet tools and software have to be built with the idea John Q. Dumbass is gonna drive.

[GJM]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-...ds-11569754800

Snippet:

BA -1.04% Boeing Co. BA -1.04% engineers working on a flight-control system for the 737 MAX omitted key safeguards that had been included in an earlier version of the same system used on a military tanker jet, people familiar with the matter said.

Accident investigators have implicated the system, known as MCAS, in two deadly crashes of the jetliner that killed a total of 346 people.

The engineers who created MCAS more than a decade ago for the military refueling plane designed the system to rely on inputs from multiple sensors and with limited power to move the tanker’s nose—which one person familiar with the design described as deliberate checks against the system acting erroneously or causing a pilot to lose control.

“It was a choice,” this person said. “You don’t want the solution to be worse than the initial problem.”

[runcible]

Nosing down sans stick input or warning during aerial refueling sounds pretty disagreeable, when you think about it. Given that aerial refueling services everything from rotary winged to high performance jet fighter platforms, and I'd imagine a broad range of airspeeds to accommodate such; behavior as described with the 737s of note has a pretty low-percentage chance of being anything but prohibitively expensive and upsetting.

[JDD]

There’s a difference in having 8,000 hours and having the same hour 8,000 times.

This was the biggest takeaway for me when I was in class for my motorcycle license, and it is a lesson that is remarkably transferable to so many different fields and skills.