Slashdot Mirror
Boeing 737 Max Jets Grounded By FAA Emergency Order (nbcnews.com)
President Trump announced an emergency order from the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday grounding Boeing 737 Max jets in the wake of an Ethiopian Airlines crash Sunday and a Lion Air accident in October that together killed 346 people. The emergency order comes two days after the FAA said the Boeing 737 Max planes are still airworthy. NBC News reports: Trump's announcement came as the FAA faced mounting pressure from aviation advocates and others to ban flights of the planes pending the completion of investigations into the deadly accidents. Sunday's crash killed 157 people and the one in Indonesia in October left 189 dead. "We're going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 Max 8 and the 737 Max 9 and planes associated with that line," Trump announced, referring to "new information and physical evidence that we've received" in addition to some complaints.
The FAA said it decided to ground the jets after it found that the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that crashed had a flight pattern very similar to the Lion Air flight. "It became clear that the track of the Ethiopian flight behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight," said Steven Gottlieb, deputy director of accident investigations for the FAA. United States airports and airlines reacted to the order Wednesday, acknowledging that it will lead to canceled flights. American has roughly 85 flights a day on the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 jets. United Airlines has about 40 such flights. Southwest Airlines has the most, about 150 flights per day on these types of jets out of the airline's total of about 4,100 flights daily.
The FAA said it decided to ground the jets after it found that the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that crashed had a flight pattern very similar to the Lion Air flight. "It became clear that the track of the Ethiopian flight behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight," said Steven Gottlieb, deputy director of accident investigations for the FAA. United States airports and airlines reacted to the order Wednesday, acknowledging that it will lead to canceled flights. American has roughly 85 flights a day on the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 jets. United Airlines has about 40 such flights. Southwest Airlines has the most, about 150 flights per day on these types of jets out of the airline's total of about 4,100 flights daily.
The A320 series had the ground clearance necessary to accomodate the new engines without needing to reposition them, hence no stability issues due to the engine placement that might have required an equivalent MCAS system.
He just had to do it. I'm a dictator Donnie made the completely authoritarian decision to ground them.
And had he not done so, he would be a corporate stooge endangering innocent life.
This reminds me of the people who read in the paper that so far in January there have been 30 murders as compared to 15 in the previous January, and then run around screaming about how the murder rate has doubled.
Only if you ignore the actual details.
Yes, if two planes of the same model have crashes for unrelated reasons that's just bad luck, it doesn't really mean anything about that specific model.
But in this case we've had two crashes that seem to have the same root cause, a defect specific to that model of plane and that pilots have been raising the alarm about well before this latest crash.
The fact that this defect caused both crashes, and it's a defect not shared by other planes, means the crash rate of other planes is much less relevant, you need to start recalculating the crash rate based on the (very limited) observations of this plane.
To hijack your example, say there have been 30 murders in January instead of the regular 15, and there's no discernible pattern otherwise, then it's probably just noise.
But if there's 15 extra murdered women between the ages 20-30, well then, you seem to have a serial killer on your hands, and if you waive it off as statistical noise you're liable to get 15 more in February.
I stole this Sig
I would argue that either the pilot can recognize whether the plane is about to stall and ignore the AOA sensor entirely, in which case both sensors are non-essential, or the pilot can't, in which case the pilot also can't reliably determine which sensor is wrong. More importantly, if the pilot can, then the avionics systems should be able to do so as well. And if not, then that single backup is only useful when the sensor fails outright (e.g. no output, wiring fault, etc.).
And in this case, because the plane makes critical decisions that impact the airworthiness of the aircraft in response to that data and apparently cannot determine which AOA sensor is lying, having only two AOA sensors just means that the risk of the entire system failing because of incorrect data is twice as high as if it had only one AOA sensor. Assuming it is practical to fly the plane with both stall warnings and MCAS disabled, then everyone would arguably be better off if the aircraft had only a single AOA sensor, statistically speaking. If that were the case, we'd have probably had only one crash in the first two years, instead of two (not that such numbers would be good, mind you, just less appalling).
IMO, having too little redundancy can actually be worse than not having any at all. It seems likely that this aircraft, as designed, cannot be made safe unless Boeing adds either a second pair of independent AOA sensors or a couple of Pitot tubes as backups for resolving disagreements. Two sensors clearly isn't enough, given their apparent propensity for failure at low altitudes.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Which Egypt Air flight would that be? The incidents involve Lion (Singapore) and Ethiopian (Ethiopia). You don't even have the airline straight. Switching to manual trim control won't work - pressing the trim control button on the yoke will override the MCAS for five seconds before it will re-engage. You need to actually hit the MCAS disable switch on the centre console to stop it. If your training hasn't covered the MCAS properly, you very likely won't make the mental connection to realise this is what you need to do. The Ethiopian crash happened after six minutes in the air. Given the MCAS won't engage until flaps are raised, and optimistically assuming they raised flaps after two minutes airborne, that gives them four minutes maximum to have worked out what was going on and fix it. Evidently it wasn't enough.
More accurately, Dick Donnie saw FOX reporting other countries grounding the planes. At first, he thinks that would be bad for American business and after that nice CEO from Boeing gave him a ringy-dingy to pump his ego. However, aides were also watching and realized the danger that Dick Donnie would be in were one of those planes go down in America while the the FAA hadn't grounded the planes. He'd be blamed. It was unconscionable that he could be blamed, after all he is a genius. So he mouths off in a statement to the press including the bit about planes becoming too complicated for pilots...not for him, of course, he is a genius.
Meanwhile, over at the FAA and the Dept. of Transportation where Madame Chao, Mitch McConnell's wife, had been supporting the previous policy of "those crazy foreigners and their grounding OUR American planes", they get wind of Dick's pronouncement and immediately issue their own press release that claimed with consultation with Canada, they had heroically decided to ground the planes. Dick's ego is preserved, all is well.