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Bjorn Fehrm, a Swedish pilot and aerospace engineer who is an analyst for Bainbridge Island-based Leeham.net, said the report assumes the accidents could have been avoided by “a really proficient pilot … on a good day.” But he said Boeing and Airbus cannot rely on the roughly 300,000 pilots flying worldwide having a good day and being perfectly trained for every emergency. The veteran U.S. airline captain said that the American aviation community needs to avoid getting “too cocky about U.S. pilots being immune from mistakes.” He said he’s spent a lot of time flying with local pilots in western...

The Allied Pilots Association grabbed national headlines this week when its president released a secret audio recording, in which American Airlines pilots can be heard asking Boeing officials tough questions about the safety of the 737 MAX aircraft. But some association members are furious with the decision to release the audio by President Dan Carey, who is in the midst of a heated runoff election to keep his seat at the top of the pilots’ labor union. The comments by pilots heard in the recording, which was first published by The Dallas Morning News, seemed to contradict the official position...

Just months before a second deadly crash of a Boeing 737 Max airplane, American Airlines pilots angrily confronted a Boeing official about a computerized anti-stall system that preliminary reports have now implicated in both deadly wrecks, audio obtained by CBS News reveals. On the audio, a Boeing official is heard telling pilots that software changes were coming, perhaps in as little as six weeks, but that the company didn't want to hurry the process. The pilots indicated they weren't aware of the 737 Max's computerized stability program -- the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. "We flat out deserve to...

An Aeroflot passenger jet burst into flames during an emergency landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport yesterday, resulting in a conflagration that left 41 of 78 people aboard the plane dead. While the plane was not a Boeing and did not involve a control system like the one implicated in the recent crashes of Lionair Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, the overall circumstances eerily echo the conditions that led to the loss of the two 737 Max jets. In all three cases, pilots suffered a dangerous and unexpected emergency during takeoff, lost the automation that they were used to...

On March 26, a Southwest crew was ferrying a 737 Max 8, without passengers, from Orlando to Victorville for long-term storage. Shortly after takeoff, pilots experienced what was described at the time as a "performance issue" with the No. 2 engine, leading to an engine overheat. The plane returned to Orlando and landed safely and the incident is still being investigated. Southwest Chief Operating Officer Michael G. Van de Ven said, "The working theory on that particular airplane was that there was coking around the fuel nozzles and it created a variance in the hotspots and cold-spots in the engine."...

Boeing didn’t share information about a problem with a cockpit safety alert for about a year before the issue drew attention with the October crash of a 737 MAX jet in Indonesia, and then gave some airlines and pilots partial and inconsistent explanations, according to industry and government officials. It was only after a second MAX accident in Ethiopia nearly five months later, these officials said, that Boeing became more forthcoming with airlines about the problem. And the company didn’t publicly disclose the software error behind the problem for another six weeks, in the interim leaving the flying public and,...

In 2016, as Boeing raced to get the 737 MAX certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a senior company engineer whose job was to act on behalf of the FAA balked at Boeing management demands for less stringent testing of the fire-suppression system around the jet’s new LEAP engines. That June he convened a meeting of all the certification engineers in his unit, who collectively agreed with his assessment. Management initially rejected their position, and only after another senior engineer from outside the MAX program intervened did managers finally agree to beef up the testing to a level the...

Boeing limited the role of its own pilots in the final stages of developing the 737 MAX flight-control system implicated in two fatal crashes, departing from a longstanding practice of seeking their detailed input, people familiar with the matter said. As a result, Boeing test pilots and senior pilots involved in the MAX’s development didn’t receive detailed briefings about how fast or steeply the automated system known as MCAS could push down a plane’s nose, these people said. Nor were they informed that the system relied on a single sensor—rather than two—to verify the accuracy of incoming data about the...

In the wake of two recent crashes seemingly caused by Boeing's design decisions for their 737 Max 8 and Max 9 airplanes, is it any wonder that people are concerned about Boeing's new models, the 777-8 and 777-9, that feature folding wing tips? The new planes are scheduled for delivery in 2020... The reason for the folding wing tips is that the wingspan of the new aircraft, at 235 feet, is too long to fit at the gates of most airports. Once folded, the wings will be only 212 feet in length. The purpose of the longer wing is to...

Just when did the airlines know that they had to pay extra for a key warning system on the Boeing 737 Max? The Wall Street Journal reported last night that it wasn’t at the point of sale. Until a crash in Ethiopia last October, Southwest Airlines thought the system came standard with the platform — so much so that their operating manuals included them.Somehow, the news that the safety feature was an upgrade didn’t get mentioned to the FAA, either: Boeing Co. didn’t tell Southwest Airlines Co. and other carriers when they began flying its 737 MAX jets that...

Boeing announced Tuesday that deliveries for all of its 737 jets fell to 89 in the first quarter, a dip from 132 last year. (-32%) The plane maker halted deliveries of its 737 Max following the global grounding of the jets that were implicated in two fatal crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia that killed a total of 346 people. Total orders fell to 95 aircraft in the first quarter, a drop from 180 a year earlier. There were no new 737 Max orders in March. (-47%) Boeing announced Friday that it’s cutting production by 20 percent as it tries to...

This Boeing 737 Max 8 problem, again, just to reset this, traces back to 2011. I’ll tell you what this is about. It’s about the bloodletting that is competition in capitalism...I think the competition in capitalism is one of the great things in the design of our country, but it can lead to some things as well. But it’s far better than anything else. What happened was in 2011, Airbus (which really doesn’t fairly compete because they’re a government entity. The Airbus plane is the result of a coalition of governments in Europe.) But the Airbus A320 was able to...

Video Only. Search Google for: "Boeing CEO accepts blame for two plane crashes, apologizes to families of victims: 'We own it'" -USA TODAY The story can't be posted on FR.

A special election for a House of Commons seat in Wales on Thursday with the Labor Party holding the seat well ahead of the Conservatives 40 percent to 31 percent with the party of Brexit, UKIP, more than tripling their share to nine percent of the vote..... The "Daily Mail" publishing a poll with 48 percent calling on Mrs. May to resign..... Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini meeting in Paris Friday with France's leading opposition politician, Marine Le Pen of the National Rally.... Debate and discussion in France's National Assembly over giving the government of French President Emmanuel Macron new...

SEATTLE/PARIS (Reuters) - Boeing anti-stall software on a doomed Ethiopian Airlines jet re-engaged and pushed the jet downwards after the pilots initially turned it off due to suspect data from an airflow sensor, two people familiar with the matter said. It was not immediately clear whether the crew chose to re-deploy the MCAS system, which was designed to push the nose of the 737 MAX down to prevent one kind of emergency but which is suspected of exacerbating a scenario linked to two crashes.

It’s horrible news, but with a silver lining for Boeing and the FAA. Investigators have determined that the stall-detection system at the heart of an earlier Boeing 737 Max jet crash late last year also activated in the Ethiopian Airlines crash earlier this month. No final conclusions have emerged in either investigation, but the news confirms suspicions that Boeing’s new MCAS system on the 737 Max platform played significant roles in both deadly crashes:

ORLANDO, Fla. (FOX 35 ORLANDO) - A Southwest plane that was on its way to be grounded had to make an emergency landing at the Orlando International Airport on Tuesday. A Southwest Boeing 737 Max 8 took off from Orlando International Airport at 2:50 p.m on Tuesday. Airport officials said that it experienced a malfunction and had to return to Orlando for an emergency landing. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the plane experienced an engine problem. Officials went on to say that there were only two passengers: a pilot and a co-pilot. The plane landed safely and the FAA...

The office of Prime Minister of Ethiopia disclosed on Friday that US president Donald Trump had a telephone conversation with Abiy Ahmed. Although the office did not say how long the conversation was, the two leaders have reportedly expressed condolences for victims of ET 302, crashed on March 10, 2018, claiming the lives of 157 people on board of the plane. The US president ordered on Wednesday that Boeing 737 Max – 8 planes be grounded in the US after his administration admitted striking similarities of circumstances between Indonesian Lion Air plane, crashed in October 2018, and Nairobi bound Ethiopian...

A screw-like device found in the wreckage of the Boeing 737 Max that crashed last Sunday in Ethiopia indicates the plane was configured to dive. ============================================================== A screw-like device found in the wreckage of the Boeing 737 Max that crashed last Sunday in Ethiopia indicates the plane was configured to dive, a piece of evidence that helped convince U.S. regulators to ground the model, a person familiar with the investigation said late Thursday night. Federal Aviation Administration chief Daniel Elwell on Wednesday cited unspecified evidence found at the crash scene as part of the justification for the agency to reverse...

The software fix that Boeing said it is working on could take as long as six months, according to Bank of America. Boeing earlier this week said a software change is in the works as well as updates to pilot manuals and training and the Federal Aviation Administration said it would mandate those changes by April. “Once Boeing identifies the issue on the 737 MAX, the most likely scenario, in our view, is that the company will take about 3-6 months to come up with a fix and certify the fix,” the bank’s analyst Ronald Epstein said in a note...