Posted on 10/24/2024 11:41:54 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Newly revealed correspondence indicates that a Boeing senior official counseled that the company could answer a pilot’s safety questions, but it did not.
The questions came in the form of an email on Dec. 1, 2018, to Boeing from the chief pilot at Ethiopian Airlines. They were detailed and filled with aviation jargon. One of them was 452 words.
But in essence the pilot was asking for direction. If we see a series of warnings on the new 737 Max, he posed, what do we do?
What ensued was an email conversation among a number of Boeing senior officials about whether they could answer the pilot’s questions without violating international restrictions on disseminating information about a crash while it was still under investigation.
That restriction was in play because a 737 Max flown by Lion Air had crashed a few weeks earlier leaving Indonesia.
The inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines would prove chillingly prescient because just months later one of its 737s would go down because of a flight control malfunction similar to the one that led to the Lion Air crash. The Ethiopian Airlines crash would kill everyone on board and leave questions about whether Boeing had done everything it could to inform pilots of what it had learned about the malfunction and how to handle it.
In response to the inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines, Boeing’s chief pilot, Jim Webb, proposed to his colleagues that he thank the airline for attending a previous briefing on the flight control system, called MCAS, but otherwise decline to answer the pilot’s first two questions and just refer the airline to training materials and previously issued guidance. Most of those on the email agreed.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Boeing lied and committed fraud, they are guilty of no less than 346 murders in the second degree and not one single fucking person responsible will ever see the inside of a jail cell.
I agree
It’s one of the rare PBS shows that was worth watching. Though the NYT gal was hard to watch it was what they found out that was important.
I’m no expert on aviation but I can’t help but notice that the only two crashes were aircraft being piloted by Third World airlines. I’d be willing to bet that I’m not the only Freeper who’s ever had a white knuckle flight on a Third World airline but I can guarantee that there’s a huge difference between Lufthansa and Air Malawi.
Boeing wanted you to think that, but if you watch the HBO movie "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing" you will find out the real story.
Sorry but had nothing to do with the pilots being third world. Boeing tried that lie while trying to cover up their malfeasance.
Boeing lied, lied to pilots, lied to regulators lied to everyone.
They are murders, period.
The flight control system, called MCAS was initially written by H1B Indian computer programmers.
And Being implemented it without informing the airlines or the pilots, because it would have required expensive flight simulator sessions for every pilot.
It only used one sensor instead of the standard redundancy of two. When the sensor failed the crew had ten seconds to turn the system off before the plane would enter an unrecoverable dive.
My recollection is that the problem stemmed from having a single sensor that detected pitch or wind speed, and that sensor controlled the automatic trim system they installed to compensate for the bigger engines on the 737 Max.
When the sensor failed, the elevator trim started pushing the nose down, and the forces on it became so great that you could not manually correct it.
It should have had a redundant sensor to make certain there wasn't a single point of failure that could cause this issue.
The MCAS system was just supposed to assist pilots on takeoff by compensating for the larger engines installed on the 767 Max. They did not have to have it and they could turn it off.
In one of the crashes, they did turn it off and sort of regained control of the plane. Then they turned it back on, and it screwed the elevator trim further to push the nose down.
It was pretty much a design error, and lack of training people to deal with the new MCAS system.
A lot of people blamed Boeing's HB-1 Visa engineers/programmers from India. I don't know if that was even a factor, but Boeing should have caught this problem before releasing the aircraft to the airlines.
Well I think we may have a problem...
That is the real problem. In the US, rarely is anyne held accountable for these kind of issues that kill people criminally.
At best, the company gets a fine, and those in charge get a golden parachute at worst, or nothing at all at best.
almost.
The extra redundant sensor was an option that the airlines in this case declined.
Any single point of failure that can take down an aircraft is not engineering, it is beyond stupid Bean Counting, but that was the profit driven culture at the time.
When I was building large Datacenters, I spent lots of time looking for these potential single points of failure.
one of my friends used to have nightmares about a bad actor inserting something into “windows update” another was the single security guy for .Net his hair turned grey prematurely.
Would that be because they failed to inform them about the MCAS system and how the pilots would have ten seconds to turn it off before the plane was in an unrecoverable dive?
The MCAS system was required because of a fundamental flaw in the aircraft’s design, namely that they had taken a 1960’s design and retrofitted it with larger, more fuel-efficient engines by moving them forward and up, which changed the aerodynamics making the aircraft’s nose rise and therefore vulnerable to stalling.
They also produced greater thrust, which caused the "nose up" condition, for which MCAS was supposed to compensate.
That does not jive with what I recall of the problem. My recollection is that Boeing simply did not build it into the system. You couldn't get one with a redundant sensor in it. They were all built with one sensor.
The exact same aircraft made 60,000 flights, in North America, Europe, Japan, Aus-NZ, and the Persian Gulf, without one crash, and without even one Incident Report, about the software that allegedly crashed the two planes in Ethiopia and Indonesia.
It only used one sensor instead of the standard redundancy of two.
************
Yep, this what my son the aerospace engineer told me. He works on rockets though, not planes.
Nope. The extra sensor was part of an options package. When ti should have been standard and required for obvious reasons. And that is just the tip of iceberg on the stupidity Boeing design on that aircraft. I believe that one of the design flaws still exists. The “STAB” switch does not have a position to cancel all computer control and still have Electric control from the yoke.
bttt
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