Countries Restricting 737 MAX Flights After Second Crash

[Suvorov]

Jackscrews are used to move the horizontal stabilizer on pretty much EVERY airliner that has a movable tail plane (and that is pretty much all of them). The position of the jackscrew is what matters here not the fact that the airplane has a jackscrew.

The Alaska MD-80 accident was caused because the threads of the jackscrew had been stripped which allowed the stabilizer to move about on its own leading to the inability to control the pitch of the airplane. The contributing factor was the fact that the crew allowed maintenance to have them continue on and troubleshoot the problem when stabilizer problems began to manifest themselves instead of performing a precautionary landing.

Also in reference to the article - A pitch trim runaway is a very serious issue and as such something that pilots are VERY WELL trained to deal with. It was a problem with the ERJ as well the plane I flew cargo in. The pitch trim system on the 737 (including the MCAS) is designed to allow pilots to override a runnaway and then shut it off. A WELL TRAINED and on the ball crew should be able to handle such an emergency.

[Stephanie B]

Yup. A review of any major airlines 10Q statements will explain why. The rate of return for even the highest performing US airlines is horrible.There are consumer bank accounts that pay more return then the net profit of many major airlines , and every publicly traded regional I’ve analyzed is operating at a loss.

That's how it's been in the airline industry pretty much since they were carrying the mail in war-surplus DH-4s.

[GardoneVT]

That's how it's been in the airline industry pretty much since they were carrying the mail in war-surplus DH-4s.

Not necessarily.

This diverges from the scope of the thread slightly, but the airline industry worked differently before October 1972.

Insofar as the topic goes...bad training practices would be consistent with the trands. It’s not Boeing’s fault if their client airlines refuse to properly train crews.Once again we are back at the point of international vs US/Canadian/European cultural norms in aviation.

[GJM]

Jackscrews are used to move the horizontal stabilizer on pretty much EVERY airliner that has a movable tail plane (and that is pretty much all of them). The position of the jackscrew is what matters here not the fact that the airplane has a jackscrew.

The Alaska MD-80 accident was caused because the threads of the jackscrew had been stripped which allowed the stabilizer to move about on its own leading to the inability to control the pitch of the airplane. The contributing factor was the fact that the crew allowed maintenance to have them continue on and troubleshoot the problem when stabilizer problems began to manifest themselves instead of performing a precautionary landing.

Also in reference to the article - A pitch trim runaway is a very serious issue and as such something that pilots are VERY WELL trained to deal with. It was a problem with the ERJ as well the plane I flew cargo in. The pitch trim system on the 737 (including the MCAS) is designed to allow pilots to override a runnaway and then shut it off. A WELL TRAINED and on the ball crew should be able to handle such an emergency.

My ground school instructor at FlightSafety one year, was a chief pilot from an Alaska Airlines base when that crash happened. He said that the crew noted the problem early in the flight, when a landing was still possible, but maintenance was trying to get them to SoCal, where they had a maintenance base. By the time they got that far, they had burned enough fuel, with a resulatant CG change, that the plane became uncontrollable. Apparently the pilots continued to transmit information, that helped with the investigation, as they were in an uncontrolled descent to the crash.

[JDD]

If this new model 737 can only be safely flown by highly skilled US flight crews, with many logbooks full of stick and rudder skills, when previous generations of the 737 could be reasonably safely flown by most third world flight crews, with only the typical CFIT, runway overrun and loss of control accidents in monsoon conditions, something is wrong with Boeing’s new design. No doubt it will be fixed soon.

I agree.

I also want to highlight a fairly significant and incorrect assumption that has cropped up quite a bit in this thread:

Ethiopian Airlines is a pretty sophisticated carrier, they are not the wing and a prayer half-assed developing world organization. They would be my go-to for flying out of my country if they served it. They currently operate 30+ Boeing wide-bodies (777's and 787's), and they have a large fleet of 737's. If they are crashing, there is every possibility that it could happen on a US domestic carrier with the same result.

I have flown a number of super sketchy, developing world airline flights; the kind where the pilots say Salah over the intercom during takeoff roll. Ethiopian is not that airline.

Hopefully Boeing figures out how to fix whatever this problem is in very short order. I just bought 20 shares of BA during the dip, so dammit they better not let me down!

[entropy]

Training should not be an acceptible substitute for safe design.

While ET is an established carrier (I knew several very experienced guys who went there after the last “poof!” In 2008.) it is indeed a known item that the FO was a very low time “ab-initio” crewmember. Whether this ends up being a contributing factor will be decided in the upcoming investigation. See my statement above. There is no way that a 300hr pilot is anything more than a liability in a serious situation on a transport catagory aircraft. There is a reason why our FAA takes things like this seriously.

[jwperry]

A few things to touch on...

AI - there won't be passengers on the first AI flown or drone aircraft. That'll be cargo. Remember, UPS is the largest 121 operator in the world. They'll fly drone aircraft for a decade before it migrates to passenger aircraft.
That will happen after we get AI/automated trucking. The biggest hurdle for our 72hr distribution setup are the folk who drive the trucks. Amazon has talked about drones, but Tesla self driving trucks will be the first step.
Honestly, the next step for the 737 line, to lower cost, is removing windows and adding augmented reality screens. From a structural stand point, windows are expensive.

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

[entropy]

We actually had a R&D program at Virgin for that. The ceiling was going to be basically one huge projection that would follow the sky as you flew. I saw the mock-up at a annual company kool-aid fest. The designer was lured to HK to work for Panasonic, the bean counters began to move in, and our FAs all gained 15lbs. Down hill from there.

Nighty night...projects for me tomorrow.

[peterb]

No sim training for the Max when introduced.

———————-

For many new airplane models, pilots train for hours on giant, multimillion-dollar machines, on-the-ground versions of cockpits that mimic the flying experience and teach them new features. But in the case of the Max, many pilots with 737 experience learned about the plane on an iPad.

“We would have liked to have had a simulator” from the start, said Jon Weaks, the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association. “But it wasn’t practical, because it wasn’t built yet.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/b...-lion-air.html

[David S.]

To be fair, that’s how most “differences” training is handled, regardless of type.