Boeing B737-8 and -9 grounding

Antonio wrote:

We don’t need to be [Chuck Yeager] to figure you need to throttle back from t/o power when levelling off at 5000ft… that is for sure.

You may even need to do it in a SEP with fixed-pitch prop to avoid engine overspeed! Ask me how I know.

Antonio wrote:

One example: yesterday in Mallorca we were celebrating the inauguration of the seaplane base at Pollensa

Another example: try to fly into Cambridge on a weekend. The “can’t do” attitude around British aviation is disgraceful.

While a lot has been written in this thread and elsewhere about the MAX, two things are still a mystery to me:

• Often I read something like “Properly trained western crews would handle this emergency well” – did this really happen to anyone before the two tragic flights? If yes, did the relevant crew report it as a life threatening issue? If yes, why it has not been addressed in time?
• The European CAAs played their role in a very aggressive way. As far as I know, while FAA said something like: “MAX takeoff banned, whoever is in the air can land”, the European CAAs just blocked access to their respective airspaces. Why? I heard about aircraft helplessly holding over Mediterranean when flying from Cabo Verde awaiting clearance to pass through to the European destination, then it got a promise of landing clearance from Malta, flied there, got to holding again, then that CAA blocked that as well, and finally landed in Tunisia. Another aircraft I know about, flying from Dubai, had a similar story, and I believe there are many more. I read it as the CAAs endangered the lives of passengers and crews. Funny – later the CAAs issued a permit to fly empty aircraft to their respective destinations.

Yes, IMHO, the reaction was way too aggressive.

One day, years from now, the details of the decisionmaking may come out. In the meantime, one might speculate that if it was an Airbus the reaction may have been different…

I agree, the CAA reaction caused higher real risk than the potential one they meant to address

A trim runaway is an emergency situation requiring immediate action. As to whether that is reported as life threatening, I would say it ranks much lower than say engine failures or go around due to technical faults during auto land approach below 500ft. I don’t know if Boeing was taking action prior to the Lion Air accident, but it was indeed prior to the Ethiopian. The reporting system does not classify them as life threatening. It is either a serious incident under Annex 13 or a non-serious incident. A trim runaway would rank in the latter category unless an accident was averted by a very small margin.

An interesting thing is that the MCAS, as described, is not a new system in the aircraft but just a new additional rule/law in the Flight Control Computers.(ie if flaps are up and AOA is higher than x then trim down at double speed for ten secs, wait, if after y secs AOA still more than x then trim again and so on…)

Airbuses have had numerous changes of FCC- (or ELAC- or SECU- , flight control computers anyway) laws due to safety issues including accidents. Never has it been treated as a standalone system (just a new rule in the s/w) and rarely have the details been shared with crews or even operators. It has never been treated by the CAA’s like the MAX though, admittedly, there had not been two accidents of the same type in such a short sequence.

The MCAS saga was about roles and responsabilities on Boeing/FAA, there are load of aviation designs elsewhere (MD, Airbus) that are really flawed but those limitations tends to be well documented and understood by manufacturers, regulators and users rather than sweeping dirt under the rug and paying the bill at later stage

Of course you can blame it on crew training but such major modification is worth few lines in poh and some hours of pilots training, it was a “all in” upgrade driven by sales to catch up with competition and all efforts to avoid separate type certification, the latter will happen before B737Max flies again as there are no engine/design options to revert to (unlike the case for A320Neo), pitty as same company did really well turning the B787 into a successful business with all regulatory approvals and market pressure (they had load of delays as it was a full composite airframe)

The MCAS saga was about roles and responsabilities on Boeing/FAA

I think the same “relationships” exist in Europe, with Airbus/EASA being very close (after all, EASA was created for the specific purpose of generating Airbus certification paperwork, and it was only later that the politicians in Brussels got other ideas for it ), Airbus having lots of latitude to do in-house certification, etc. The “cultures” in these two situations are quite similar. I think the main difference is that the US is not too bothered about what Europe does (so long as it doesn’t compete with Boeing, etc, and doesn’t start yet another war which consumes a few hundred k US lives to sort it out ) while Europe’s intellectual elite has a positive dislike of the US.

Of course Airbus has load of shortcuts in their design and in-house validation/approvals guys and EASA as their gatekeeper but still the engineers/pilots have big say what is minor & major changes, when Boeing went for max upgrade it was merely sales/regulator/politics pitch (it was not the same case for Dreamliner)