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.

Comments

Re:737 Max is a frankenstein's monster

[LinuxIsGarbage]

flight controls from the A320 (the famous plane where the automation led to crashes.

Which famous crashes? I only quickly browsed through the List on Wikipedia and the only one that stood out was Lufthansa Flight 1829, that due to TWO faults AoA sensors (unlike 737-MAX's 1 faulty AoA sensor), commanded a nose down stall recovery. Pilots disconnected the system and recovered.

There is Air France 447, on an Airbus A330. There was a sensor malfunction which led to a sensor discrepancy. The plane detected this, deactivated Auto pilot, and switched to Alternate law. Allowing the pilot to operate outside the protected operating envelope that people blame fly by wire on. They pulled the nose up, the plane responded to the command, told them they were going to enter a stall, then let them enter a stall, and the plane continued to respond to their command for nose up elevator, with 100% thrust, in a stall, all the way from 38,000 ft to the ground. You also had poor crew management where they were both trying to fly the plane with opposing commands on the controls. How should the plane know how to react to such poor crew resource management?

You do also have the A320 that successfully ditched on the Hudson. One of the only cases of a commercial jet successfully ditching.