Posted on 10/29/2019 4:43:56 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz ripped into embattled Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg at a high-profile Senate hearing on Tuesday, criticizing the manufacturer’s response to two deadly 737 Max plane crashes and questioning the company’s safety culture.
The Republican zeroed in on recently released internal Boeing messages that appear to show top officials raising concerns as early as 2016 about the flight-control system at fault in the crashes.
In those exchanges – described by Cruz as “stunning” – Boeing’s chief technical pilot for the 737 Max told a co-worker that the system in question was “running rampant” in simulator tests and that he “basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly).”
When Muilenburg explained that he read the messages’ content only a couple weeks ago – despite Boeing providing them to the Department of Justice in February – Cruz unloaded.
“You’re the CEO, the buck stops with you,” the senator said. “How did your team not put it in front of you, run in with their hair on fire, saying, ‘We’ve got a real problem here’? How did that not happen? What does that say about the culture at Boeing?”
Muilenburg on Tuesday opened the hearing with an apology, saying he was “deeply and truly sorry” for the fatal accidents.
“We made mistakes and got some things wrong,” said the Boeing chief, who’s enduring continued pressure over his performance and who recently lost his title as the Chicago-based manufacturer’s board chairman. “We own that, and we are fixing them.”
“Both of these accidents were entirely preventable,” said Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the panel’s chairman, lamenting a “disturbing level of casualness and flippancy” in the relationship between Boeing and federal regulators.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
Funny that of all the 737 MAX aircraft that were being flown worldwide the only two that crashed were being operated by Third World airlines. Coincidence?
NO coincidence at all.
The very worst thing about DC are the preening, attention whore, politicians in both parties.
many people died
.....who at Boeing is going to make the personal face-to-face visit with the families of the deceased.
[Funny that of all the 737 MAX aircraft that were being flown worldwide the only two that crashed were being operated by Third World airlines. Coincidence?]
All products involve some degree of compromise between ship date and perfection. Whether due to bad luck or incompetence, this CEO chose wrong and should probably be replaced, in order to reassure regulators and customers that this won’t happen again.
I am a “Boeing Guy.” I have flown 7 different types* of Boeing airplanes for thousands of hours. But, I can’t forgive the company for not being forthright in their giving the proper and full information about the trim system and its operation in flight. Yes, the pilots were inexperienced but, if they had a clue as to what was happening, two accidents, killing hundreds of people, would not have happened. The most damning quote was from a Boeing spokesman who said, We did not tell the pilots about the MCAS system because they have a lot to learn and we didn’t want to overload them. (note: not an exact quote but paraphrasing)
PS Avoid flying 2nd or 3rd World Airlines. Experience is lacking. Do so at your own peril.
* B-52, B-727, B-737, B-747, B-757, B-767, B-777.
In this case, Senator Ted Cruz is absolutely right!
It has nothing to do with politics. The issue is responsibility.
The culture at Boeing is that the managers have all the authority. Engineers have zero, none, nada. That may have changed some lately with the new executive Chief Engineer being established, but it probably won’t have any real effect.
Boeing was frantic to get the 737 Max out the door and stop competitors from taking sales. NO ONE was going to stop the 737 Max from happening, not even if a million people had to die. Boeing couldn’t have cared less about safety at that point. They were frantic to get 737 Max sales. Hindsight says that was a poor choice since other factors weighed in and getting those sales didn’t mean much.
Any engineer who spoke up about the 737 Max would have been terminated very quickly.
Sadly, there are lots of great people at Boeing. I know many of them. Solid engineers and managers. Solid and safe engineering. Unfortunately, Boeing is run by bean counters and very few aviators. They have more affirmative action hires as executives than people with solid credentials. It is how Dennis Muhlenberg got to be Chairman, CEO, and President of Boeing. He hired Affirmative Action hires as his corporate cheerleading squad.
Frankly, this is how Boeing has been for more than 70 years.
“We did not tell the pilots about the MCAS system”
Yet, Boeing claimed MCAS was part of the training all along. They lied.
“Funny that of all the 737 MAX aircraft that were being flown worldwide the only two that crashed were being operated by Third World airlines. Coincidence?”
Not really. They took a plane that could be flown safely by crappy pilots for decades and, without telling anyone, changed the plane to require that only pilots at the top of their game, with top-rate training, could safely fly it.
The rules changed without notifying the operators. Crashes happening was a given at that point. Most likely, eventually, some of the non-Third World airlines would have started to experience the crashes as even some pilots in the West aren’t always at their sharpest (especially with the EEOC requirements). And don’t forget, it took other countries to finally get us to ground the plane...shows a seriously broken system on our part.
“Coincidence?”
Nope. Better training, sure, but also some dumb luck.
I’d said in prior threads that it’ll come out that engineers became 2nd to managers. There’s just no way that multiple levels of engineers and architects didn’t see a problem.
This was a business decision, likely withheld deliberately from the CEO - thee problem never reached his desk and it should have. Either that or he is lying.
Somebody should be going to prison.
“ikely withheld deliberately from the CEO”
He’s lying. Boeing micromanages all the way to the top. Daily standups with executives. There is absolutely no way Denise didn’t know engineers did not approve of MCAS.
Sorry. I am not buying the theatrics.
Assess responsibility and solve the problem. Pretend there are no cameras. That’s all.
The third-world aircrew had no skills or air sense— incompetent.
Same issue affected a couple US jets.
No big deal, the pilots just toggled off the auto-trim and wrote it up after landing.
Not a safety of flight issue unless you are incompetent.
“Runaway” trim is in the books and something we practiced on various occasions and we did it in-flight.
If you have no skills and no air sense and blindly sit and ride and not fly you are a fool.
Harsh but true.
Video of Cruz’s grilling. Internal docs look pretty damming. CEO - I know nothing.
The Angle of Attack sensors were miscalibrated on both flights and the problems were never reported or fixed by the maintenance people. Neither plane should have been allowed to fly before this was repaired.
Boeing underestimated the probability of AOA failure and did not assess the software risk correctly. The MCAS was a software tweak to the flight control system to make the yoke pressure feel the same on the 737 Max as it did on the 737 in certain unusual regions of the flight envelope such as high angle of attack. It was not an anti-stall system as reported by the media. They added the MCAS so that pilots certified on the 737 would not need to get another type cert for the MAX.
Under normal conditions it would not even be activated but when the AoA sensor misreported a high angle of attack at relatively low airspeed it kicked in to lower the nose by applying electric stabilizer trim.
The flight crews did not recognize the runaway stabilizer trim emergency that resulted quickly enough to switch off the electric trim and regain manual control of the aircraft. In the Indonesian flight they actually did switch it off but then switched it back on when they couldn’t get control at high speed. This is a violation of training discipline which teaches never to switch something back on once it is off.
The email messages regarding the flight simulator software had nothing to do with the actual flight director MCAS software that was onboard the aircraft.
Piling on Boeing and making the CEO a blood sacrifice may make the politicians and media feel like they are doing something but they only serve to scare and misinform the flying public. Dennis Muilenburg should have stood up to the horse whipping better but he has to play his part. When that idiot Senator said he would rather walk than fly on the 737 Max Muilenburg should have said he would fly on it, he would have his wife and kids fly on it, and he would be surprised if any Boeing employee would have the slightest concern to fly on a MAX.
Not sure what a face to face apology accomplishes?
Is this the new requirement? Every person who dies because of a product problem needs a face to face apology?
Who in the alcohol industry is apologizing for all the deaths they cause?
Does every family of a smoker who died from lung cancer need a face to face apology?
“Boeing underestimated the probability of AOA failure and did not assess the software risk correctly.”
I’m a software architect that has been in the position of signing off on safety software processes. The general concept, regardless of the industry standard (ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC61508...), is to leave nothing to chance regarding the software. The failure matrix should have included multiple variants of the “AOA sensor failure” and respective tests should be traceable to these requirements.
My point is that this is either a failure of following safety process (ignorance, incompetence, or laziness at multiple levels within engineering) or the issue was raised within engineering and ignored, which I don’t believe. Either senior engineering managers ignored the problem or senior executive managers did. The safety processes for software would have included testing for this. It’s a simple input problem causing an output problem. Testing should include mis-calibration. It’s not hard to know that if calibration is needed for software to function properly that you must either be able to detect mis-calibration or bad data (like no data or erratic data or data that doesn’t make sense).
I get that a CEO is probably not a software expert. I just don’t buy that, at some level, the safety processes didn’t expose the need for such tests and “bad sensor” mitigation.
Self certification, where government oversight could be easily corrupted, isn’t something I agree with. The problem is the costs of the alternative. I believe this led to bad safety decisions being made, maybe not by the CEO, although as they said, the buck stops with him. That they knew there was a problem after the first crash and didn’t ground them all is a real problem for me. They were already working on a software fix - stated after the second crash in mere days after the event without needing to analyze the data recorder. Unacceptable.
Quite likely. See my prior post.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.