Posted on 09/27/2019 7:33:26 AM PDT by Yo-Yo
Federal safety investigators on Thursday said Boeing overestimated how well pilots could handle a flurry of alerts when things go wrong on its 737 Max planes, which have been grounded since March after two fatal crashes killed a total of 346 people.
The National Transportation Safety Board issued a series of recommendations for aircraft safety assessments, including factoring in human responses when things go awry, the first formal guidelines since the crashes.
A flight-control system designed to prevent the planes from stalling misfired on both crashed flights: a Lion Air 737 Max in Indonesia last October and an Ethiopian Airlines plane of the same type in March.
“We saw in these two accidents that the crews did not react in the ways Boeing and the FAA assumed they would,” said NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt. “Those assumptions were used in the design of the airplane and we have found a gap between the assumptions used to certify the MAX and the real-world experiences of these crews, where pilots were faced with multiple alarms and alerts at the same time.”
Those multiple alerts can increase pilot workloads, the NTSB warned.
Boeing based its safety assessment of the planes, which the Federal Aviation Administration approved, on those fast response times, the NTSB says.
The agency said Boeing should be required to factor in the effect of all flight deck alerts in its safety assessment of the 737 Max, and to include design changes or pilot training and procedures to minimize potential safety risks if pilots take actions inconsistent with what Boeing expects.
Boeing and the FAA are facing several investigations into the design and certification of the jets, Boeing’s best-selling aircraft ever.
“Safety is a core value for everyone at Boeing and the safety of our airplanes, our customers’ passengers and crews is always our top priority,” Boeing said in a statement. “We value the role of the NTSB in promoting aviation safety. We are committed to working with the FAA in reviewing the NTSB recommendations.”
The FAA said it welcomed the NTSB’s recommendations.
“The agency will carefully review these and all other recommendations as we continue our review of the proposed changes to the Boeing 737 MAX. The FAA is committed to a philosophy of continuous improvement,” it said in a statement. “The lessons learned from the investigations into the tragic accidents of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 will be a springboard to an even greater level of safety.”
Boeing has said it expects to submit its software fix and new pilot training materials for the 737 Max to the FAA in the coming weeks, in an effort to get the planes flying again, which it expects to do early in the fourth quarter. The manufacturer is hosting pilots from airlines including United and American to try the Max software changes in its simulator.
The FAA has said several times that it has no set timeline for allowing the planes to fly again.
Boeing shares were little changed in afternoon trading.
Boeing added the flight-control software, known as MCAS, to give the planes the feel of older 737 Max planes. Myriad computer systems are now at the center of a debate about the state of pilots’ skills as aircraft become more automated and complex. Pilot training varies around the world, with some of the strictest requirements in the U.S., where pilots need to have 1,500 hours of flying before they can work for a commercial airline, unless they have military or other specialized training. Airline pilots globally need at least of 240 hours of flight time, which includes flying in a simulator, under guidelines from the United Nations aviation agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization.
At the ICAO triennial meeting in Montreal this week, the U.S. delegation is urging international regulators to examine pilot training around the world.
“At a global level, if the potential for automation dependency and degradation of manual flight operations skills is not satisfactorily addressed in existing standards, there may be a high level of variation in the approach utilized by individual States regarding how associated risks may be addressed in regulation or guidance,” the U.S. delegation said in a paper it prepared for the meeting.
It’s really hard to read this.
Reading the word “assumption” over and over. In safety processes there’s is no such thing. Everything is supposed to be tested, nothing left to chance - including the ability of a pilot to interact with the system in all use-cases. It seems they made assumptions about how pilots would react but never put it to test.
I don’t believe there weren’t those at Boeing that didn’t highlight this fact. Somebody made the conscious decision to skip being thorough because of MONEY and people died because of it.
I still believe somebody will end up in prison over it - and justly so. The only wiggle room is that the government is allowing them to self-certify, outside of independent certification. This is what happens.
An attitude vane? Is that one of those tubes that stick out from the front?
[Today’s cadre of airline pilots, especially in second-tier markets, are more likely to have started in light private aircraft, and worked their way up through commuter aircraft to larger passenger jets, with no prior military or other high-stress experience. ]
Sales dept should be fired.
Extra safety feature here for an extra charge.
Also includes training. Don’t buy then you crash : )
Added incentive!
Boeing and the FAA made the faulty assumption that with two trained professionals in the cockpit at least one of them would figure out how to handle a runaway automatic vertical trim event with the two cutoff switches next to the trim wheels. The cutoff switches have been mounted next to the trim wheels for this purpose on all Boeing aircraft for approximately 50 years. Electrically assisted vertical trim in any aircraft always has the possibility of malfunctioning for a wide variety of reasons... faulty wiring, faulty switches, faulty sensors, faulty motors, mechanical damage, and these days faulty software.
Up until all the politically correct non-pilot armchair experts got involved in analyzing these two mishaps caused by third world pilots and airlines... pilots were expected to know how to turn off malfunctioning vertical trim and not auger their aircraft into the ground. And believe me if the pilots responsible were American white males you had better believe that they would have been blamed and their names would be on a permanent sh*t list for destroying their aircraft and killing their passengers. But these pilots were from a protected class and in our brave new world they cannot be blamed... so scapegoats must be found. Boeing and the FAA are now being blamed for not designing a completely crash proof airplane. Despite the almost incomprehensibly good safety record of modern airliners, airplanes will probably always be capable of crashing when handed over to incompetent people.
So this nonsense is being rehashed over and over and the same parade of bozos are parroting nonsense with no real experience or concept of what it a really like to be a pilot. I have been a pilot for many decades... I have witnessed what ambulance chasing lawyers have done to the general aviation manufacturers. They sucked them dry. Now they are going after the big fish and once again people who have never been pilots are falling for this pathetic BS. Excuse me but it makes me pretty damned sick.
Whitewash. No way a system with a single point of failure, like the model involved in both crashes could have ever been certified for flight unless someone engaged in fraud.
Period
There’s usually two per side on the front. If it’s a tube it’s usually to collect air - like a pitot tube.
Electrically assisted vertical trim is not a critical flight system. That is why there are two cutout switches next to the trim wheels so that the pilots can turn it off. You are getting yourself worked up about something that you haven’t got a clue about. Period...
...attitude vane...
You mean AOA vane?
It may be the pilot's fault for not being able to react to an emergency for which they were not trained, or the airline's fault for cutting costs and putting poorly-trained pilots in the cockpit, but it is all Boeing's fault in the end.
Boeing is selling a system, not merely a mechanical device and software known as an airplane. Boeing can easily foresee that competition will cause some of their customers to employ inexperienced pilots not able to deal with every emergency that a well-trained pilot with good airmanship could handle. The result is again foreseeable: passengers will die, and their airplanes will be blamed, fairly or not.
Boeing needs to sell not only the airplane, but absorb in their overhead cost an outreach program to monitor their customers and train their pilots to the point where they won't kill the passengers. It's easy to say that's not Boeing's responsibility, but if they want to sell their products and stay in business it is.
Yes - some folks don’t know that so I wanted to keep it simple. AOA(Angle Of Attack) same as attitude.
“Electrically assisted vertical trim is not a critical flight system. That is why there are two cutout switches next to the trim wheels so that the pilots can turn it off. You are getting yourself worked up about something that you haven’t got a clue about. Period...”
Juan Browne’s latest 737 Max update explaining why this wasn’t a simple runaway stabilizer trim issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlocOX7tuU0
Yes - some folks don’t know that so I wanted to keep it simple. AOA(Angle Of Attack) same as attitude.
No, not even nearly the same. Your pitch attitude can be 45 degrees with a very low AoA. But thanks for "keeping it simple".
Credibility = 0
An attitude vane? Is that one of those tubes that stick out from the front?
There is no such thing.
Again - just trying to keep it simple w/o getting technical.
PS: And you fly for?
We know Boeing test pilots, we live on an airport and have neighbors who fly 737s; my brother has been a Captain for Southwest about 20 years. None of them have characterized the issue the way that you have.
The thing that no one seems to mentioned in this or most other threads is what vertical trim is actually used for in an airplane. It is for the convenience of the pilots. When you take off you set the trim for your climb out speed. Then you trim for the speed that you want to use to get to your cruising altitude. Then you trim for cruising speed. You use your throttle for gaining or losing altitude. When you arrive at your destination you start trim your speed back using your vertical stabilizer trim for approach, downwind, base, and final. Is a pattern starting to become obvious to anyone here?
Your vertical stabilizer trim is used for speed control, so that you are not constantly having to maintain forward or backward pressure on your control yoke to maintain the speed that you want to fly at. When you have electrically assisted trim there has always been the possibility of runaway trim where the motor starts running one direction or the other and doesn't stop. That is why every electrically assisted trim control has cutout switches next to the trim wheel or wheels. Our airplane also has trim that is used to keep The wings level as you use fuel out of the wing tanks. We have one airplane that has no trim control at all.
The analysis here by non-pilots who have informed themselves by reading and watching mainstream media accounts and then looking up further information on the internet is typically so silly that it is worse the old Emily Latella bit by Gilda Radner when she was on Saturday Night Live. It is a perfect example of how people with no understanding of the basics of flight and flying an aircraft can come to conclusions that have no validity at all.
I assume that with your monicker that you have some association with flying. If so you should be able to conclude that this entire episode is mostly a sham. It is a shakedown on Boeing that threatens to make them less competitive in the aviation marketplace. It is a sham to excuse 3rd world airlines and 3rd world pilots for their incompetence and responsibility. They don't have deep pockets, so the lawyers don't want to blame them. because we have a pack of ambulance chasers hoping always to line their pockets from other people's tragedy. The ones who will pay are people who use the airlines. I suspect that the left wants to exploit this sham to try and get people to fly less, because that is one of the tenants of the global warming scam.
Every 737 pilot I have talked to said that malfunctions happen and reacting to them correctly is what they are being paid to do.
On edit, perhaps a bit too harsh. It was based on me giving you a gentle nudge up thread...a chance to read up on the subject and correct yourself. You didn't.
Maybe you will now.
But you are incorrect. And now trying to change the subject.
I would expect in a large business, a profit would be their top priority. - Tom
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