[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Skybird

A good news in all the bad news for the families of the pilots. The cheap get-out-of-dodge-theory of "pilot error" is almost ridiculous by now.

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

Not really, but you've already decided.

NOT AFTER TODAY'S WSJ ARTICLE; AS A FORMER AMATEUR CESSNA PILOT, THIS REALLY REEKS OF MALFEASANCE:

Boeing Co. didn’t tell Southwest Airlines Co. and other carriers when they began flying its 737 MAX jets that a safety feature found on earlier models that warns pilots about malfunctioning sensors had been deactivated, according to government and industry officials. Federal Aviation Administration safety inspectors and supervisors responsible for monitoring Southwest, the largest 737 MAX customer, also were unaware of the change, the officials said.
The alerts inform pilots whether a sensor known as an “angle-of-attack vane” is transmitting errant data about the pitch of a plane’s nose. Accident investigators have linked such bad data to the deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash in March and the Lion Air crash last year; both planes lacked the alert system.
In the 737 MAX, which features a new automated stall-prevention system called MCAS, Boeing made those alerts optional. They would be operative only if a carrier bought a package of additional safety features. A LITTLE PROFIT MOTIVE ??
Southwest’s management and cockpit crews didn’t know about the lack of the warning system for more than a year after the planes went into service in 2017, industry and government officials said. They and most other airlines operating the MAX learned about it only after the Lion Air crash in October led to scrutiny of the plane’s revised design.
“Southwest’s own manuals were wrong” about the availability of the alerts, said the Southwest pilots union president, Jon Weaks. Since Boeing hadn’t communicated the modification to the carrier, the manuals reflected incorrect information, he said.
The FAA grounded all 737 MAX jets on March 13, three days after the Ethiopian Air accident. Boeing recently said it would book $1 billion in expenses tied to the groundings and related business disruptions.
Boeing hasn’t addressed why it turned off the feature, called “AOA disagree alerts,” without informing customers. After the Lion Air crash, Southwest asked Boeing to activate the alerts on its MAX planes.
This move, along with questions about why the alert system had been turned off, prompted FAA inspectors overseeing Southwest to consider in December recommending that the airline’s MAX fleet be grounded while they assessed whether pilots needed additional training about the alerts. But those internal FAA discussions didn’t go up the agency’s chain of command, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
A Southwest spokeswoman said that before the Lion Air crash, the carrier had assumed the alerts were “operable on all MAX aircraft.” Boeing “did not indicate an intentional deactivation,” she said.
In previous 737 models, the computer-generated alerts appear as colored lights in the cockpit when a plane’s twin angle-of-attack sensors provide significantly different data from each other. In the MAX, they serve the same purpose but additionally are intended to warn pilots that MCAS, the new automated system implicated in both accidents, could misfire because of faulty sensor data.
MCAS commands that automatically push down the nose of a plane when it appears to be in danger of stalling can overpower a pilot’s efforts to get out of a dive by pulling the nose up. In the Ethiopian jet, which lacked the disagree alerts, it took more than four minutes for the pilots to realize that incorrect data from one of the sensors were prompting MCAS to push the jet’s nose down, according to investigators’ preliminary report.
A Boeing spokesman said last week that from now on, “customers will have the AOA disagree alerts as standard” on all MAX aircraft, including those already delivered to airlines. Boeing is devising a new software package that aims to fix MCAS by making it less powerful, while also restoring the alerts.
The moves are among the safeguards the plane maker and FAA have embraced to make MCAS less hazardous if it misfires, and to get the MAX fleet back in the air.

Although the alerts were reactivated, some midlevel FAA officials who oversaw Southwest briefly considered the possibility of grounding its roughly 30 MAX aircraft until the agency established whether pilots needed new training, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.
Less than a month after the Lion Air jet went down, one FAA official wrote that AOA-related issues on MAX jetliners “may be masking a larger systems problem that could recreate a Lion Air-type scenario.”
About two weeks later, other internal emails referred to a “hypothetical question” of restricting MAX operations, with one message explicitly stating: “It would be irresponsible to have MAX aircraft operating with the AOA Disagree Warning system inoperative.” The same message alluded to the FAA’s power: “We need to discuss grounding [Southwest’s] MAX fleet until the AOA Warning System is fixed and pilots have been trained” on it and related displays.
The email discussions, previously unreported, were fleeting red flags raised by a small group of front-line FAA inspectors months before the Ethiopian jet nose-dived last month.
Within days, the concerns were dismissed by some involved in the discussions. These people concluded that the alerts provided supplemental pilot aids rather than primary safety information, and therefore no additional training was necessary. Boeing and the FAA continued to publicly vouch for the aircraft’s safety.
However, these concerns—ranging from potential training lapses to confusion by pilots about the specifics of angle-of-attack alerts—have emerged as high-priority items as Boeing’s decisions about the MCAS face scrutiny. The issues are being pursued by congressional, criminal and Transportation Department investigators, people with knowledge of inquiries said.
On Wednesday, a Boeing spokesman said that while the internal FAA discussions were under way last year, “there was no data that indicated the fleet should be grounded.”
An FAA spokesman said the agency expects to mandate that all 737 MAX aircraft include working disagree alerts.
Testifying before a Senate panel last month, acting FAA chief Daniel Elwell said one important factor is prioritizing what data pilots receive. “Every piece of real estate in a cockpit is precious,” he said. “You put one gauge up there, you are sacrificing another.”
American Airlines Group Inc. was one of the few U.S. carriers that paid for the package of MAX safety features that included the sensor warning lights. The airline has said it did so in part to obtain the warning system.
In a meeting about a month after the first crash, a Boeing executive appeared to acknowledge the importance of the sensor warnings. The executive told American Airlines pilot union officials that American’s MAX cockpit warning lights would have helped them avoid problems like those encountered by the Lion Air pilots, union officials who attended the meeting said. A Boeing spokesman previously said the executive didn’t recall making that statement.

SO FAR NOTHING HAS ALTERED MY PREVIOUS VIEW (POST#3) OF THIS THREAD...EXCEPT THAT IT'S THE AOA SENSOR AND NOT A MACS SENSOR PROBLEM...AND BOEINGS' STOCK PRICE IS REFLECTING MY POSITION....

On Monday, Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg faced tough questions from shareholders about the crisis involving the grounded 737 MAX plane. It is becoming clear that the company was opaque with regulators and airlines in explanations of the jet’s safety features, and there are concerns that heightened scrutiny around certification will push up costs.
Yet evidence of the plane’s importance to the U.S. economy may discourage authorities from punishing the company more than is strictly necessary....Boeing’s commercial aircraft business has been a front-line ambassador of U.S. economic interests abroad, particularly in China.
On Thursday, official data showed a drop in March aircraft shipments. Some economists see this detail of an otherwise encouraging durable goods report as the first sign that the grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX jet is having a small—but visible—macroeconomic impact.
Airlines, too, are dependent on the jet. Most can’t really switch from the 737 MAX to a competing jet—like Airbus’ A320—because they rely on many other Boeing products.
Friday’s first-quarter gross domestic product data wasn’t affected by the crisis, probably because the company only reduced output in April. In the second quarter, however, the damage to equipment spending and exports—not wholly offset by inventory buildup of undelivered planes—is likely to reduce U.S. economic growth by about a fifth of a percentage point, according to analysts both at Wells Fargo Securities and Goldman Sachs. (BOTH WITH REPUTATION MALFEASANCE ISSUES OF THEIR OWN)
It’s a small impact, which is likely to be partially reversed in the third quarter if Boeing ramps up production again. Still, not every company can boast about showing up in GDP data.
Investors can expect more unnerving Boeing headlines. The company urgently needs to fix its relationship with airlines and regulators to secure its multiyear backlog of jet orders. On Monday, Mr. Muilenburg appeared to deviate from his recent conciliatory tone and outright rejected criticism of how Boeing designed the faulty flight-control system. There are also concerns that heightened scrutiny around certification will push up costs—for starters, it may affect programs such as the 777X and the project for a new midsize airplane.
Yet investors can take some comfort from the company’s unusual degree of market and political power. Airlines and government officials have every reason to find a fix too. The Boeing 737 Max is simply too big to fail.

Originally Posted by AKBBY

between Boeing and the ’ kissin cousin' FAA's 'apparent lack of impartial integrity in approving the craft and it's faulty MCAS, a universal truth of aviation holds true: profits first...sardine packed expendible passengers second...small wonder the Ethiopian investigators have turned over the flight recorder data to the French to avoid a FAA cover-up!