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.
I did and it would be they way I’d explain it to someone not in the field.
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I go by what the NTSB reported. This is not a technical forum or site, however ...
Your tag line says, “Eat Sleep Fly Repeat ~)” which reminds me of the year after we bought our first general aviation aircraft. I was dragging my wife out to the airport almost every day and wearing her to a frazzle. One night she woke up in the car on the way home and she screamed, “ Where is the prop! “
I know this isn't a technical forum. But this makes it more important for those of us who have actual aviation experience to try and pass on a little of the basics so that they might be able to relate some of what we are talking about to something that makes sense to them.
Automatic electrical assisted vertical trim control is roughly to an airplane what cruise control is to a car. They both are used to reduce the effort that It takes to control the speed of your vehicle, and both can be easily switched off. They are both nice to have and trim control especially is important for reducing work load but they are both just a convenience. If you got pulled over doing 50mph through a school zone, would the police officer give you a break if you said that you couldn't figure out how to turn off your cruise control?
People who don't understand the actual mechanics of piloting an aircraft should probably start out by reading Wolfgang Langewiesche's classic, Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying. Better yet they should go to an airport and get a couple hours of instruction. Then they wouldn't sound so damned silly when parroting technical terms and other nonsense from the MSM or technical resources that they actually do not understand.
The thing to do is to point them to those sites which talk about those various subjects. My mistake here was to get into a technical discussion while initially trying to keep something simple. It won’t happen again.
at all costs.
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My adage is: KISS
I made a few hundred dollars with YouTube firearm videos years ago. They all eventually were demonetized also. I didn’t put them up expecting to make anything. It was kind of a surprise actually. Looks like an interesting channel the guy has. I went ahead and subscribed.
I swear Android autocorrect loves to change words to screw up your meaning. I typed lively discussion which it changed to lovely. I usually catch it.
I like your attitude.
On my wall is a plaque made up by a friend, that has a longtime saying of mine.
"ANYTHING DONE IN MODERATION SHOWS A LACK OF INTEREST". - Tom
No worries, either way was okay.
Love your saying. It has kind of defined various periods in my life. When I am not completely obsessed with something... I am just in a transitional situation.
I should say that I do not agree with him on the major point of his 737 MAX update video, but he makes some very valid points. This is especially true about airline and military pilots not being prepared to fly general aviation aircraft. We actually were visiting with a pair of Boeing test pilots and they said the same thing. They said they wouldn’t be able to fly any of our aircraft without some remedial instruction.
Juan has covered this from the first crash
I don't have the expertise to validate his
conclusions but they seem reasonable enough to me.
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Any system that relies on a single sensor to make decisions is a single point of failure.. no way, none whatsoever that this design was approved and certified as is. Someone lied about how the system behaved or how it was designed.
To believe the FAA would knowingly certify a system with a single point of failure on a commercial airplane is laughable.
You do not seem to understand what the actual purpose of the vertical trim system is. It is roughly equivalent to cruise control on a car. It greatly reduces the work load on the pilots but is not essential for flight safety and can be turned off.
I think that his videos are really good and he makes a valid point as does the article that all the electronic warnings distracted the pilots. He still agrees with Mr. Langewiesche however, who is distinguished aviator whose dad wrote the best book ever on the art of flying... that disaster could have been averted if the pilots had just turned off the electrical assist and trimmed vertical stabilizer themselves. But he said in his latest 737 MAX update video that Langewiesche didn’t understand the mentality of current military and airline pilots and concluded that this somehow excused them from crashing these planes. I disagree with this.
Our neighbors two doors down on the airport are a family of airline pilots. The two parents have now retired but they still own a Cessna 182. Both their son and daughter now fly for United. The daughter bought a 1951 T6 Harvard trainer. T6 trainers with that big old heavy radial up front can be a handful. If the automatic trim malfunctioned on any plane she was flying I have no doubt that she could handle the situation.
There are some other details about changes made to the vertical trim system in the MAX, but nothing changes the fact that this was a runaway trim situation, something that pilots have been trained to recognize and correct for over five decades. I do not believe that Boeing is to blame for this fiasco.
And you don’t seem to understand that the MCAS system is a system that over rides pilot controls... in the model of the plane that crashed in these cases is a model of the plane that allowed the MCAS system to override the pilot based on a single sensor input, That is a single point of failure and there is no way the FAA would certify air worthiness for this model had they known this. someone(s) lied, they either lied about it kicking in with only one senors input, or they lied about only having one sensor as input in that model.
I’ve done government hardwares and software certifications, there is no way this model got airworthiness certification without fraud. None.
It makes zero sense to explain an issue like this by making up a component (attitude vane) and misstating a key concept (pitch attitude does not equal AoA).
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