OT: Boeing 737 MAX

[goonster]

Originally Posted by unterhausen

I think blaming it on airmanship is blaming the victim.

Having now read the full NYT piece, Langewiesche lays it out really well. The core point is that MCAS malfunction presents, and should be diagnosed as, runaway stabilizer trim (albeit of a novel sort), for which there is a known remedy.

(Langewiesche is a former commercial pilot, and claims to have experienced four stab trim runaway events in cargo planes)

He's really looking at this purely from a pilot performance point of view, and the piece is premised by his conclusion that the MCAS failure should be well within the range of events to be dealt with by a competent airman.

The problem is:
- This analysis cannot be made without the benefit of hindsight
- The piece underscores that crews like those at Lion Air and Ethiopian are increasingly representative of customer crews. Manufacturers should probably take that into account.

[goonster]

Originally Posted by unterhausen

briefing charts from the space shuttle disaster.

That's a very different realm of risk acceptance. Space travel settled into a perceived fatality rate of approx. 1 per 1000 missions which, post-Challenger, turned out to be closer to 1/50.

[akelman]

Has someone linked this article already? If so, I apologize. Either way, I think it's a more interesting and perhaps more telling account than Langeweische's.

I like Langeweische a lot. He's a clear thinker and a talented writer. But in this case, he accepts that there were major systemic failures at Boeing and then, despite that, insists that pilots were the key players. He's much more interested in the different cultures of pilots—in fairness, this is interesting stuff—than he is in the ways that the new systems seemingly tied the hands of the people flying the planes.

I obviously don't know who's right and who's wrong. I just know that the Langeweische story feels incomplete after reading this more recent article.

[GregL]

Originally Posted by akelman

Has someone linked this article already? If so, I apologize. Either way, I think it's a more interesting and perhaps more telling account than Langeweische's.

I like Langeweische a lot. He's a clear thinker and a talented writer. But in this case, he accepts that there were major systemic failures at Boeing and then, despite that, insists that pilots were the key players. He's much more interested in the different cultures of pilots—in fairness, this is interesting stuff—than he is in the ways that the new systems seemingly tied the hands of the people flying the planes.

I obviously don't know who's right and who's wrong. I just know that the Langeweische story feels incomplete after reading this more recent article.

I certainly don't claim to have the "right answer." But as an aeronautical engineer and an ATP with thousands of hours of jet time, I do feel qualified to express an opinion.

Fundamentally, Boeing was wrong to (a) implement MCAS with single points of failure and (b) fail to train the pilots about the system. Full stop, Boeing failed. But it's also appropriate to note the airmanship issues. I'm not blaming the victims, I'm blaming the system that allows the lack of airmanship to occur. Commercial passenger flight is at its safest point in history. This is due to better training, better aircraft design, and better regulation. At the same time, the level of airmanship has (IMO) declined. That's what the NYT article pointed out.

Professional pilots are expected to properly handle all failures that they are trained on. They are also expected to handle the unexpected. That's part of airmanship. Examples abound where skilled pilots handled unexpected emergencies. American 96 (1972), United 232 (1989), and US Airways 1549 (2009) are just a few examples where a skilled, experienced flight crew handled an emergency that wasn't in their checklists. Sadly there are also examples where failures of basic airmanship led to tragedies (e.g., Colgan 3407 (2009), Asiana 214 (2013), Air France 447 (2009)).

I suggest that we not argue among ourselves over who's right and wrong, but instead look at all the lessons of these terrible crashes with open minds. Hopefully the lessons learned will contribute to even safer flying in the future.

Greg

[djm]

Originally Posted by akelman

I obviously don't know who's right and who's wrong. I just know that the Langeweische story feels incomplete after reading this more recent article.

Neither. Aircraft accidents are almost always the result of a chain of error or fault events. Safe flying depends on checks and redundancies employed to break the error chain. The recent crashes of the B737 Max are the result of failures in Boeing engineering and oversight, FAA regulation and certification, pilot training, and airmanship. I respect Langewiesche's points regarding the pilots involved, but they should never have encountered the long chain of faults that preceded those flights. Requiring pilots to perform perfectly and quickly in novel situations for which they are not trained is never acceptable from a safety perspective.

[unterhausen]

The New Republic article makes an interesting point. The first crash happened after 12 minutes of flying and correcting for the problem. Then Boeing put out a checklist for the issue, and it only took 6 minutes for the plane to crash. Maybe that second crew wasn't as good as the first pilot, but if it was a problem that could be fixed with crew awareness, it doesn't look like it from here. And the fact that the airmanship question was pushed heavily by Boeing advocates as a defense is troubling. We really have no way of knowing how good those guys were, it's mostly just stereotyping.

I know airbus has problems, but after reading about what Boeing has become, I really am questioning flying with companies that use newer Boeing aircraft.

[Tony T]

NYT: Before Deadly Crashes, Boeing Pushed for Law That Undercut Oversight

[alancw3]

737 MAX saga continues with a new problem and dilemma:

https://www.seattletimes.com/busines...boeing-missed/

[Tony T]

FLYING BLIND
The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
By Peter Robison
336 pp. Doubleday. $30.
NYT Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/b...oeing-737.html

Robison, an investigative reporter at Bloomberg, wrote about Boeing only occasionally in the wake of the second crash. That has not left him at any disadvantage. Through archival research, the benefit of the extensive reporting on the crashes and their aftermath, and interviews with many of the key players, Robison has produced an authoritative, gripping and finely detailed narrative that charts the decline of one of the great American companies.