Prosecutors Were Already Investigating Whether Boeing Provided 'Incomplete or Misleading' 737 Information (yahoo.com)

Fox Business News reports:

- "Federal prosecutors are investigating whether Boeing provided incomplete or misleading information about its best-selling 737 Max aircraft to U.S. air safety regulators and customers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal."

- That investigation began five months ago -- after the first crash that killed 189 people, but before the second one.

Nine days after that November 7 crash, America's Federal Aviation Administration had issued an international emergency order "warning that Boeing had discovered an 'unsafe condition' that is 'likely to exist or develop' in other planes," reports the Washington Post: The FAA directive said if erroneous data is received by the 737 Max jet's flight control system, the plane's nose could be pushed down repeatedly. Failing to address that "could cause the flight crew to have difficulty controlling the airplane," push the nose down and lead to "significant altitude loss, and possible impact with terrain," according to the notice. The notice told pilots that, if bad data causes problems to appear, they should "disengage autopilot" and use other controls and adjust other switches to fly the plane....

Investigators scouring black box data believe an automatic anti-stalling feature was engaged before a Boeing 737 Max jet crashed and killed 157 people in EthiÂoÂpia, an administration official said Friday. The feature, known as MCAS, also was a factor in the October crash in Indonesia, according to investigators. The investigators said inaccurate information from an outside sensor led MCAS to force the nose of the plane down over and over again.
That explanation is also supported by the positioning of equipment on the aircraft's tail "in a way that would push the plane's nose downward, consistent with the black box finding," reports the Washington Post.

Fox Business also reports that Boeing currently has over 4,600 "unfilled" orders for its 737 Max jets.

Comments

Bad handling all around.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't let them inspect and self-authenticate their designs as safe, you don't have an automatic safety system ever rely on a single sensor under any circumstances, and you don't send people out untrained on the new system.

In this case all three major fails contributed. The FAA failed oversight, Boeing failed systems design and oversight, and Boeing and airliners and the FAA failed to ensure training was adequate for a new system.

Re:Bad handling all around.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll avoid flying on US made aircraft from now on if I can help it. Regulators there have zero powers.

Re:Bad handling all around.

[Richard_at_work]

The problem with self-certification being "bad" is that its an extremely intensive process, involving a significant investment in time and personnel to achieve, and it happens relatively *rarely*.

So for the FAA to independently certificate an aircraft manufacturers changes, they would have to maintain a significant number of employees or contractors through relatively short periods of intensive work (certification of a new aircraft or a new model) and relatively long periods of little work (small upgrades to existing aircraft parts, no new aircraft or models in progress).

The real problem is not self certification.

No, the real problem is grandfathering.

Grandfathering is the ability for an aircraft manufacturer to take an existing design, one which on its own would not meet *current* safety requirements, and significantly refresh it. So long as the changes to the aircraft stay within a certain set of parameters, the aircraft manufacturer doesn't have to certify the entire aircraft, meaning they can incorporate some changes extremely cheaply while working around issues such as those on the MAX where changes introduced handling issues.

Take, for example, the Boeing 747 - under safety requirements dating back decades, the Boeing 747 would not be certified to carry passengers forward of its front passenger doors, as it violates current evacuation requirements. And yet it is still sold as a passenger model in the 747-800i. Because its grandfathered in and not required to meet current safety requirements as a result.

The handling issues on the MAX are a similar issue - Boeing attempted to manage handling differences by introducing a system to attempt to bring the handling characteristics back in line with those of the 737NG, so they could get away with certifying the aircraft under the grandfathering rules. They could have not introduced that system and instead detailed the changes, but that would have meant they could no longer have grandfathered in the handling characteristics of the MAX, meaning pilots would have been required to undergo specific conversion training to the MAX from the 737NG.

So yeah, get rid of grandfathering - it will drastically hurt aircraft manufacturers, but at the same time it will stop those same manufacturers from being allowed to introduce new models of aircraft that do not meet current standards.

Re:Bad handling all around.

[aaarrrgggh]

Using your simple example of no passengers forward of the exit door on the 747, does the safety record of the 747, over its millions of flight hours, suggest that this is unsafe? If not, why should it not be allowed to be certified?

“Grandfathering” just avoids certification to current standards of elements that have not changed and the regulator does not feel would have an adverse impact on safety.

There are real things on the 737 that should have been upgraded to current standards, like the exit doors. MCAS was a miserably implemented system which should have never been certified as designed, but the next logical step is almost a fly by wire flight envelope protection, where things start to look a lot less like a 737.

Re:Bad handling all around.

[Luckyo]

The training part was intentional. Certification for piloting a new aircraft type ("type rating" in lingvo of this field) is prohibitively expensive. Therefore Boeing made a great effort to make 737 MAX to only require "same aircraft, different model" kind of training for adapting it for other 737 certified pilots. The new anti-stall system is in fact one of the key parts of this effort, it's there to make aircraft behave more like other 737 models in spite of the fact that it had very different aerodynamic characteristics due to engines sitting in a different position.

Example of this shows on flight school sites, such as this one:

https://panamacademy.com/boein...

This is for NG, the previous variant of 737 but it makes a solid example. It takes 21 days to get the certification, but only 4 days to get differences training. And flight and simulator times are a small fraction as well. So this wasn't some kind of an anomaly. This was a conscious effort, and the problem appears to be the fact that this effort lead to the situation where pilots were insufficiently trained in some of the new systems and how to disengage them specifically because Boeing made those systems to be transparent to the pilot to make it easier to retrain from other 737 types. Which in turn lead to critical omissions from training programs entirely, as they were likely judged unnecessary, "since this is the aircraft designed to fly like the older 737s".

Good intention, good effort, one small miss and two crashes. Welcome to the world of aerospace, where best intentions can sometimes lead to worst outcomes.

Re:Bad handling all around.

[mvdwege]

But it gets worse. If the MCAS is there to make the MAX behave like an NG, so that pilots can fly it with just variant retraining, what is the implication if the plane reaches a flight regime where the MCAS is a hindrance or a danger and has to be turned off?

I'll tell you: you now have two pilots with only variant training flying an aircraft that they actually need a type rating for, that they don't have because the MCAS was there to obviate it.

Who ever thought this was a good idea in safety terms?

Now, before we blame anyone...

[bogaboga]

The notice told pilots that, if bad data causes problems to appear, they should "disengage autopilot" and use other controls and adjust other switches to fly the plane....

Let's understand that time is a factor in the successful disengagement of this MCAS. Pilots had less than a minute to figure out what was going on.

Imagine a car doing its own thing even as you try to tame its erroneous behavior. You literally run out of time resulting in a catastrophic outcome.

Revolving door

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they were. And the revolving door if executives running between the FAA and Boeing and probably law firms were in no way impeding the proper scrutiny and oversight of aviation safety.

What a crock of shit. More cya press from the executive caste. First they blamed the pilots, next the software, next the pressure from airbus. The fucking plane was unstable. Probably Boeing is such an MBA'd clusterfuck the planes are literally only just able to fly anymore.

In a just world the entire c suite would be made to fly 10000 hours in these death traps before they were allowed a single press release. Evil fucking cunts.

Re:Revolving door

[Richard_at_work]

Add to the mix the fact that Boeing has railed against Airbuses flight envelope protection software since it was launched in 1988 with the A320, insisting that Boeing pilots have final say at all times under Boeings ethos. And then they go and add this, without telling pilots....

Now thats indicative of something endemic in Boeing.

Re: Revolving door

[Type44Q]

Now thats indicative of something endemic in Boeing.

It certainly is; they're called "MBA's."

Re:Already losing orders...

[Travelsonic]

and ill advised maintenance short cuts breaking things.

You cannot reasonably blame the DC-10, or McDonnell-Douglas for crashes caused by maintenance shortcuts airlines performed despite their (MDD's) disapproval (such as the shortcut that caused the metal fatigue that brought down American 191), that'd be quite absurd.

Re: Already losing orders...

[Tough Love]

You did not. You found the guy who knows why the 737 is obsolete junk and would advise friends to avoid flying in them.

But I guess, we found the Boeing stockholder.