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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.
grounding all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft on March 13, citing new data
New data my ass. The planes have been grounded because all the countries worldwide were banning them, including China and the whole EU. Grounding them from the very first moment would have been much more sensible from Boeing.
You're a bit early to be running off at the mouth about that AC, until investigations start making reports
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.
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This was published in november: https://christinenegroni.com/7...
By then it was already clear that Boeing had quietly added a new MCAS antistall mechanism to make the new plane somewhat act like the old plane and in this way allow pilots to switch from the old plane to the new plane without costs of retraining, and the FAA had let it pass.
Since then the MCAS documentation has been made available to the pilots but that is not enough. MCAS has been badly implemented.
You missed "Eyewitness report notoriously unreliable"
It has fuselage from the 737, Engines from the 787, flight controls from the A320 (the famous plane where the automation led to crashes. Now 737 Max has taken that mantle)
Boeing should have done a clean sheet design as a replacement of 737 instead of putting engines so big on an airframe meant for much smaller engine.
They created and unstable plane and tried to fix it in software.
While this is an approach often used in fighter jets which are deliberately made unstable so that they can change directions easily its not something you do on a civilian airplane. A civilian pilot does not have the reflexes of a fighter pilot to fix things if the computer is misbehaving
To recap the plane was too small for the engines they wanted to put on it. So they put the engines in a cantilevered position so now the center of thrust was significantly away from the centre of gravity and the plane had a tendency to pitch up and stall. To avoid this they added MCAS which would pitch the nose down in case of a stall detection. To detect the stall they used the AoA sensor and in a freshman Fault Tolerant Computing bug depended on only one sensor when they had 2. They made the warning light showing the AoA sensor is broken an option (only American signed up for this option which is probably why American hasnt had a crash). Then to make things worse they didnt tell the pilots. Also in the NG if the auto trim was runaway pulling back on the yoke would disengage the auto trim. With MCAS they changed this. The auto trim would only disengage for 10 seconds and then MCAS would add more trim and it would keep adding more and more trim till the pilots could not counter even if they pulled the yoke all the way back. Again a software bug. Further to make things worse THEY DID NOT TELL THE PILOTS ABOUT THIS CHANGE. So the yoke maneouver does not work so the only maneovour that works is disengaing the trim using the 2 cutoff switches but this only disengages the Auto trim. If the plane is already nose down it doesnt go back to normal trim. Now you have to pull back on the yoke which was not working till a moment ago or spin two manual trim wheels to get the trim back. All this is happening close to ground as MCAS only engages at low speeds found at takeoff.
Boeing could have avoided this in many ways
1) Build a clean sheet design which is stable with the larger engines
2) Failing that build a MCAS which is fault tolerant with multiple sensors or can be countermanded by the pilot by pulling back on the yoke (This is what they are doing now with the software fix). Not ideal for if the pilot is really flying badly now he can stall the plane
3) Failing that tell the pilots about the MCAS system, the change in the yoke behaviour and have them go through difference training.
They did not do 1 as it would cost too much money
They did not do 3 as they wanted to avoid airlines having to train pilots making the plane easier to sell. One of the reasons there are 5000 737 Max orders is that it needs no crosstraining to fly (officially)
They did not do 2 because of sheer laziness or stupidity in the engineering team
So the Engineering team is now fixing their error No 2. But the Exec team's error No 1 and the Marketing team's error no 3 are still not fixed.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Perhaps in the case of plane crashes behaving irrationally isn't a bad thing. Lives are at stake and waiting a short time for data to prove or disprove the need to ground the model of aircraft in this type of situation may be the better policy. Not that we'd expect a third crash in the few days required to examine the flight data, should one have occurred, the FAA would look pretty bad for not grounding these planes.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
It was made in Israel so there's nothing bad you can say about it without being labelled an anti-Semite.
Indeed the flight software might not be the core cause of problem and there might be no single code update that will fix the problem. GIGO applies to software as much as it does to every system that requires data input to do work. Until the actual cause of the incident(s) are completely know we are just spouting bullshit. The rest of your comment needs to be taken for what it is, another asinine statement that deserves to be down modded.
My bet is that the software is fine and the component system design is the problem. It will take replication of the series of events that lead to the crash to nail down the cause. It could take months of simulation with different input situations as well as the ones from the data recorders to nail down exactly what occurred. If there is no quick fix that is reasonably safe then these planes could be mothballed for a very long time, especially if a complicated redesign of both the software/hardware input system is necessary.
Learn how moderation works and ac posts won't be a problem.
Granted it'd be even better if Slashdot wasn't run out of the back of someone's cigarette-stained efficiency and had the money to update - god help me - the ol' hosts.deny file. It's 2019; the shitters here are hardly intelligent enough to route around simple IP blocks. Half the contributing users aren't, after all.
Overcomplexifabulocation.
Aerospace "Mission critical" software is made very different than consumer software. It is done this way to avoid potential fails from the likes of function calls, goto's, procedures calls, etc. by not using such methods and by using development tools that automates a lot of code creation. There is well defined mathematics involved in the coding.
With this in mind it'll be interesting to see where the software fail happened. I wouldn't be surprised if competing software development tools were used as they tend to not be compatible for market lock in.
Other countries: Ban the U.S. manufactured plane based on nothing but a feeling.
U.S.: Bans plane based on actual compelling link between two crashes.
I wonder who behaved more rationally and correctly here...
If the plane had been an Airbus, you would have seen equal caution from other countries in an outright ban on the model.
Of course given the FAA is pushing towards more industry self-regulation, I'm sure Boeing would be jumping at the opportunity to ground their airplanes and bring into question the safety of their products, and the inevitable drop in stock value...
Two seconds of looking at data from Flightradar 24 shows very similar profiles from both flights.
The Pratt And Whitney engines used by AeroBus, PW1000, have very low fuel efficiency compared to other engines of the same size, they could be swapped in for older engines onto new AeroBus airplanes very easily. Boeing was trying to compete with these but had to use larger engines that did not benefit from the same technology (patents?). It used software, however, to make the MAX airplane fly like a 737, even though its not really a 737. Because airlines do not want to retrain pilots, it glossed over the differences between MAX and 737 in the manual and did not cover important issues relating to the software, to give the impression it was a simple plane to fly. So when the plane misbehaved, the pilots did not know what was happening and how to handle the situation.
Southwest was the one airline that decided to give pilots additional MAX training and retrofit the airplanes to detect failed sensors to prevent problems with MAX. They deserve a reward for this.
All Max plans should have redundant sensors and raise an alarm if a sensor problem is detected.
Of course given the FAA is pushing towards more industry self-regulation, I'm sure Boeing would be jumping at the opportunity to ground their airplanes and bring into question the safety of their products, and the inevitable drop in stock value...
Funny you should say that ....
"Boeing continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX. However, after consultation with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and aviation authorities and its customers around the world, Boeing has determined -- out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraftâ(TM)s safety -- to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft."
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/n...
I'm not a stock holder yet; I'm actually waiting for it to drop some more before I buy. Want to maximize my profits. All the gloom-and-doom idiots are doing me a favour in that respect, but they're still fucking annoying.
Americans can be *very* loyal to Boeing. Kind of like the few people who still insist GM or Ford are the greatest, even though Japanese manufacturers make far better vehicles. ;)
Now if you want to get Canadians riled up, say something bad about Bombardier... no most of us hate them too.
Rampant corruption in the US means that two planes HAD TO CRASH prior to anything being done.
Remember Ford Pinto?
Well, the Boeing 737 Max saga is a rehash of what happened back in the late 1970's.
https://users.wfu.edu/palmitar...
In both case NTSB didn't do nothing UNTIL massive backlash from the userland !!
It seems like the number of highly trained aviation experts in the world increases by an order of magnitude every time a plane crashes.
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So there's been a crash in which the erroneous intervention of an automated system was a factor, a number of incidents in which pilot intervention saved the airframe (including one with the aircraft that crashed) and a second crash which looked like it might be related (and the evidence in that direction has only got stronger since the first grounding notifications).
I think I would ground the aircraft.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe