I wonder if Boeing survives this in its current form…
How things can change. As much as everybody did criticise Airbus because of the A380 lately at least so far none of those did crash…
It sounds like the first thing the NTSB/FAA & Boeing will check in the black boxes is if the pilots followed the AD guidance to move the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to the cutout position. Boeing’s communications to date seem to indicate that while they acknowledge a software problem, they feel that if the AD instructions are followed then the aircraft is controllable because the new software is taken out of the loop.
I hope those that cry about cost saving (not that I support this) at Boeing or minimum training at Airlines are also not flying for 19 Euro a ticket. However, hundreds of millions of people don’t blink an eyelid when they board a jet for this little kind of money. „It’s not my fault, I just take advantage of the airline’s low ticket prices, surely they must follow the regulations and are to be safe!“. A bit shortsighted, because no matter who is to blame in the end, these things are of causality.
“A bit shortsighted, because no matter who is to blame in the end, these things are of causality.”
You can’t be a business killer under a heavy safety argument or leave safety to be decided by consumers, that is why you have an independent national/international regulators: you can’t just leave the whole lot to be decided by “offer/demand” or “safety idiologists”…
Note also politics do get into the way (maybe Beoing/FAA have gone a bit fast with B737Max given the “regulatory stimulus” around) and while you can always blame “crashes” on low level consumers or top level administration, none of that does matter after the facts, but you just have to find the person/process who did not do their job properly fix it and move on, that does not mean you will not have another one later
You can’t see the MCAS trimming system apparently. The trim doesn’t move and shutting off all automation won’t stop it. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Rwy20 wrote:
Has Ethiopian just been lucky so far and really have such deficiencies in their training department? Or is there another tilt to this failure mode?
That, or it’s something unrelated. Witnesses have seen fire in the tail before it crashed apparently, pointing to something else, APU maybe ?
It is hard to believe Boeing would do something quite so dumb, but then we have seen this sort of thing before e.g. in AF447 with the stall warner getting disabled below 60kt; even allowing for the inept crew that was perhaps one of the holes in the cheese…
because of the A380 lately at least so far none of those did crash
One very nearly did, when the engine failed and caused the loss of many systems, including the one for transferring fuel between tanks so it was good fortune it happened not miles from anywhere.
LeSving wrote:
That, or it’s something unrelated. Witnesses have seen fire in the tail before it crashed apparently, pointing to something else, APU maybe ?
I wouldn’t put much credence in witnesses claiming to have seen fires. A stalled engine can produce a lot of burning fuel in the exhaust which is often mistakenly taken for the engine being on fire.
Ibra wrote:
You can’t be a business killer under a heavy safety argument or leave safety to be decided by consumers, that is why you have an independent national/international regulators: you can’t just leave the whole lot to be decided by “offer/demand” or “safety idiologists”…
That’s how it should be, best practice. The pressure due to cost saving is having effects on all levels, influencing regulations etc..
The argument is always „costs us money“. Add a third AOA vane. Costs us money. More training in the sim? Costs money. Can’t do that.
The simple truth is safety isn’t the main concern. It’s profit.
by the looks of it there are several problems. One I learnt of yesterday was that they eliminated what is called a stabilizer brake, which activates the moment you pull the control column in the opposite direction of the trim movement. In all the other 737’s, if the trim moves nose down and you pull on the yoke, the trim wheel gets blocked and stops until you release controls. In the Max, this is gone, the only way to stop trim, MCAS nor not, is by either trimming electrically or use the cut off switches.
And it appears that this little tidbit of information was also not really stressed through the conversion training. And in many cases there are no Max simulators only NG sims.
So in practice, you end up with a situation where in a trim movement which can occurr in a critical moment, you are trained to pull on the yoke but get no response. The time required to even call up the procedures may then be too short and you run out of elevator authority before you can even realize what is going on. Totally unacceptable in my view.
