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Boeing 737 Max Crashes 'Linked' By Satellite Track Data, FAA Says (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft on March 13, citing new data that showed a possible link between the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight and the crash of a Lion Air flight off the coast of Indonesia last October. In an interview with NPR's David Greene this morning, acting FAA Director Dan Ewell said that "newly refined satellite data" from a flight telemetry system had led the agency to make the move. Both Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (ET302) and Lion Air Flight 610 (JT610) were recently acquired 737 MAX 8 aircraft, and both were lost with all aboard just minutes after take-off. According to the emergency order issued by the FAA, "new information from the wreckage concerning the aircraft's configuration just after takeoff that, taken together with newly refined data from satellite-based tracking of the aircraft's flight path, indicates some similarities between the ET302 JT610 accidents that warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents that needs to be better understood and addressed."
The source of the data in question is a combination of telemetry feeds from the flights' Automatic Dependent Surveillance(ADS) system. Introduced in the US in 2001 and more widely worldwide in the wake of the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 in 2014, Europe has required most aircraft to carry the UHF-band ADS-Broadcast (ADS-B) system since 2017, and the FAA has mandated ADS-B for most aircraft by 2020. While ADS-B data was initially meant to be picked up by other aircraft and ground stations, it is also tracked by satellites. Other, less-granular telemetry data sent in the subscription-based ADS-addressed/Contract (ADS-A/ADS-C) format, the Future Air Navigation System(FANS), and the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) are also picked up by satellite.
The source of the data in question is a combination of telemetry feeds from the flights' Automatic Dependent Surveillance(ADS) system. Introduced in the US in 2001 and more widely worldwide in the wake of the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 in 2014, Europe has required most aircraft to carry the UHF-band ADS-Broadcast (ADS-B) system since 2017, and the FAA has mandated ADS-B for most aircraft by 2020. While ADS-B data was initially meant to be picked up by other aircraft and ground stations, it is also tracked by satellites. Other, less-granular telemetry data sent in the subscription-based ADS-addressed/Contract (ADS-A/ADS-C) format, the Future Air Navigation System(FANS), and the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) are also picked up by satellite.
It was made in Israel so there's nothing bad you can say about it without being labelled an anti-Semite.
They have shed $30+ billions from their market cap and it's continuing to plummet. But the worst is to come: the lawsuits could do to them what it did to Pan-Am back in the day. This is shaping up to look like gross negligence on the part of Boeing.
They will be facing an unprecedented liability over this due to the choices they made for the purpose of putting profits over human lives. This thing should never have been force-fit into the 737 type rating to "save money" and doing that led directly to a mess of an airplane. Combine that with the engineering choices made over insufficient redundancy and not telling pilots about the new "software" managed systems which were shoehorned in, and it's not looking very good for the survival of Boeing. Some market analysts are predicting a bankruptcy out of this, before all is said and done.
Pity they decided not to train the pilots on when they should do this.
They put the MCAS system in to reduce the need to retrain existing 737 pilots. They should have:
a) wrote better software, that uses both angle of attack sensors and only intervenes when both provide good data. The current software reacts to either sensor
b) Trained the pilots on how the MCAS system works, when it operates, what its full capabilities are and how it could malfunction, so they know when it needs to be disabled.
Actually it is very much sounding like they should have been grounded after incidents of the plane diving, when engaging auto pilot based upon false stall warnings. The data was all available from flight recorders, why the fuck would pilots not report it, oh that's right SHOW ME THE MONEY. Rampant corruption in the US means that two planes HAD TO CRASH prior to anything being done. They should have been grounded already, based upon several instance of this happening and pilots catching it before it was too late. A proper investigation now needs to happen to check for a greed based coverup, Boeing and the US government are in serious shit now, for the deaths of those people in those two instances where it could have been avoided.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen