On the recent two crashes of Boeings 737 Max

[Skybird]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/b...ane-crash.html


Oh ha!

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Catfish

Shouldn't there be always two systems, for redundancy?
Especially when it comes to flying and failure of components, what i learned is "Two is one, one is none".

Originally Posted by Aktungbby

MEETS BOTTOM LINE: A SUCCESSION OF SMALL ERRORS (ALA TITANIC) CAUSED TWO AIR DISASTERS; THE ERRORS STARTED AT THE VERY TOP (PROFIT AND DESIGN) AND WORKED DOWN TO FOUR PEOPLE; THE TWO PILOTS IN TWO AIRPLANES INSUFFICIENTLY BRIEFED TO DEAL WITH THEIR AIRCRAFT STALL SENSOR ISSUES...EVERYONE ELSE WAS...'JUST ALONG FOR THE (SHORT) RIDE'! https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-crash-problems-human-error-mcas-faa

Originally Posted by Catfish

So.. deregulation played a part?
" ... the conservative republicans fighting for a "small government" have already diluted, delayed or abolished dozens of protections in almost all sectors. [me thinking of EPA and this !"§$%&!!! Pruitt] The reason for this is called cost, redundancy and annoying bureaucracy. In truth, this happens at the request and pressure of the industry."

Google translation of the german »Spiegel«:
"Control out of control"
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sp iegel.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Funternehmen%2Fdonald-trump-boeing-max-737-und-die-us-flugaufsicht-faa-ausser-kontrolle-a-1258713.html

And a british article
"The Boeing scandal is an indictment of Trump’s corporate America":
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...porate-america

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/boeing-737-max-crash.html

Originally Posted by TODAY'S NYTIMES

The fatal flaws with Boeing’s 737 Max can be traced to a breakdown late in the plane’s development, when test pilots, engineers and regulators were left in the dark about a fundamental overhaul to an automated system that would ultimately play a role in two crashes. A year before the plane was finished, Boeing made the system more aggressive and riskier. While the original version relied on data from at least two types of sensors, the ultimate used just one, leaving the system without a critical safeguard. In both doomed flights, pilots struggled as a single damaged sensor sent the planes into irrecoverable nose-dives within minutes, killing 346 people and prompting regulators around the world to ground the Max.
But many people involved in building, testing and approving the system, known as MCAS, said they hadn’t fully understood the changes. Current and former employees at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration who spoke with The New York Times said they had assumed the system relied on more sensors and would rarely, if ever, activate. Based on those misguided assumptions, many made critical decisions, affecting design, certification and training.....As Boeing rushed to get the plane done, many of the employees say, they didn’t recognize the importance of the decision ....
The current and former employees, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigations, said that after the first crash, they were stunned to discover MCAS relied on a single sensor.
“That’s nuts,” said an engineer who helped design MCAS.
“I’m shocked,” said a safety analyst who scrutinized it.
“To me, it seems like somebody didn’t understand what they were doing,” said an engineer who assessed the system’s sensors.

BOTTOM LINE: EVEN AFTER THEY SAY THEY GOT IT ALL FIXED I'LL NEVER FLY ON ONE!

[Catfish]

Edited: too off topic i think.



FAA and Boeing's relationship. "America First nationalism, indulgent free market economics, Republican libertarianism and a political system in hock to corporate lobbying has just contributed to killing 356 innocent people." (The Guardian)
Will there be any accusation or indiction? So the the Boeing CEO says he "takes responsibility". Which means.. nothing.

Like Aktung I would prefer other planes than the 737 max right now.. and what will Boeing do? I mean the basic design is flawed, and while you can add gadgets and electronical helpers here and there it all boils down to if this plane is aerodynamically safe and able to control and fly if electronics fail.

[Skybird]

And more good news.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48503610

[Dowly]

US regulators have uncovered a possible new flaw in Boeing's troubled 737 Max aircraft that is likely to push back test flights.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48752932

[Skybird]

The chain of revelations and new bad details about Boeing's failure - its safe to put it in this term now - has not broken off in past weeks. I came to think of the story of the 737 Max not being a self-standing isolated incident anymorek, but just a stellar symptom of deep-rooting background collapse of company structure and policy.



Like so often when companies turn from "quality for the sake of quality and own reputation", to "pleasing the shareholders". Usually the latter comes at the cost of the first. Health care being a superb example.



This is usually not being talked about when stating that "people should by stocks". But when you really think it consistently to the end, and although I defend stocks over any other form of investment and value papers, holding stocks with the expectation and demand to get a regular profit from it, in the end ist just: immoral. You should get a one-time-compensation for the risk you take when lending money. Not more.



https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49142761


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources...deadly_crashes


This isnot to slam one US company for beign what it is, a US company. There may be other foulplayers as well. But this thread de facto is about Boeing and two air disasters it has to accept responsibility for, and not any other company or other events in the world.

[Skybird]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/b...gtype=Homepage


A Boeing pilot working on the 737 Max said in messages from 2016 that a new automated system was making the plane difficult to control in flight simulators, more than two years before it was grounded following two deadly crashes.
The existence of the messages strike at a central part of Boeing’s defense over how the plane was certified to fly. For months, the company has maintained that the Max was certified in accordance with all appropriate regulations, suggesting that there was no indication that MCAS was unsafe.
Yet in the messages, the pilot, Mark Forkner, complained that the system, known as MCAS, was causing him trouble in a flight simulator. “It’s running rampant in the sim,” he wrote to a colleague. The messages are from November 2016, months before the Max was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration.
“Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” he went on to say, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed on Friday by The New York Times.


The 737 Max was grounded earlier this year after crashing twice in five months, killing 346 people. In both cases, MCAS malfunctioned based on erroneous data, sending the planes into unrecoverable nose dives.
Mr. Forkner was the chief technical pilot for the 737 Max and in charge of communicating with the F.A.A. group that determined how pilots would be trained before flying the plane. The Times previously reported that Mr. Forkner had failed to tell the F.A.A. that the original version of MCAS was being overhauled, leaving regulators with the impression that the system was relatively benign and would only be used in rare cases.
In the messages, Mr. Forkner states that during tests, the simulator reflected unexpected movements by the plane through a process called trimming.
“The plane is trimming itself like craxy,” he wrote to Patrik Gustavsson, a fellow 737 technical pilot at Boeing. “I’m like WHAT?”
Mr. Forkner went on to say that he had lied to the Federal Aviation Administration.
“I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” Mr. Forkner says in the messages, though it was not clear what he was specifically referring to.


Eight months earlier, Mr. Forkner had asked the F.A.A. if it would be O.K. to remove mention of MCAS from the pilot’s manual. The F.A.A., which at the time believed the system would only activate in rare cases and wasn’t particularly dangerous, approved Mr. Forkner’s request.
[The New York Times was the first to report on Mr. Forkner’s role in the development of the 737 Max and his request to the F.A.A.]
“This is the smoking gun,” Representative Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview. “This is no longer just a regulatory failure and a culture failure. It’s starting to look like criminal misconduct.”
As chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Mr. DeFazio’s office is overseeing the investigation into the crashes.
Mr. DeFazio said he had reviewed other internal Boeing documents and emails that suggested employees were under pressure to produce planes as fast as possible and avoid additional pilot training.
“Boeing cannot say this is about one person,” Mr. DeFazio said. “This is about a cultural failure at Boeing under pressure from Wall Street to just get this thing out there and make sure that you don’t open the door to further pilot training.”


A lawyer for Mr. Forkner downplayed the importance of the messages, suggesting Mr. Forkner was talking about issues with the simulator.
“If you read the whole chat, it is obvious that there was no ‘lie’ and the simulator program was not operating properly,” the lawyer, David Gerger, said in a statement. “Based on what he was told, Mark thought the plane was safe, and the simulator would be fixed.”
Flight simulators replicate real cockpits and are used to test planes during development. They can sometimes behave unpredictably, depending on their configuration.
Mr. Forkner, who is now a pilot for Southwest Airlines, and Mr. Gustavsson did not respond to requests for comment.
Reuters was first to report on the existence of the transcript.
Boeing provided the transcript to lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Friday morning, in advance of hearings this month at which the company’s chief executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, will testify about the crashes for the first time.
Boeing had provided the transcript earlier this year to the Department of Justice, which is conducting a criminal investigation, according to two people familiar with the communications who spoke on condition of anonymity because the exchange was not yet public.
The F.A.A. administrator, Stephen Dickson, sent Mr. Muilenburg a letter Friday morning demanding that the company account for why it did not provide the messages to the agency earlier.


“I expect your explanation immediately regarding the content of this document and Boeing’s delay in disclosing the document to its safety regulator,” Mr. Dickson wrote.
A Boeing spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said the company was “voluntarily cooperating” with the congressional investigation and provided the messages to lawmakers as part of that process.
Jon Weaks, president of Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said in a statement that “this is more evidence that Boeing misled pilots, government regulators and other aviation experts about the safety of the 737 Max.”
“It is clear that the company’s negligence and fraud put the flying public at risk,” Mr. Weaks added. “As pilots, we have to be able to trust Boeing to truthfully disclose the information we need to safely operate our aircraft. In the case of the 737 MAX, that absolutely did not happen.”

[Skybird]

https://www.investors.com/news/boein...gulators-meet/

Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee's report claims that Boeing 737 Max design flaws, lax oversight and pilot and maintenance errors were all responsible for last year's Lion Air crash, sources told the Wall Street Journal. But Lion Air is pushing back on the report, saying that too much blame was being put on Indonesia, sources told Bloomberg.

Short time earlier, Boeing's former top manager for the Boeing Commercial Airplanes department, Kevin MacAllister, was ousted.

[Skybird]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50177788

[Skybird]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50225025


Who would have thought that it all would lead this far when the mess started... Seems to have been about time, although still too late.

[Skybird]

And more good news for Boeing.


https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50293927

[Jimbuna]

Things just go from bad to worse it would appear.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Aktungbby

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!

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Things just go from bad to worse it would appear.

Originally Posted by 2DAY'SWSJ

U.S. regulators decided to allow Boeing Co. BA -0.90% ’s 737 MAX jet to keep flying after its first fatal crash last fall even when their own analysis indicated it could become one of the most accident-prone airliners in decades without design changes.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s November 2018 internal analysis, released during a House committee hearing Wednesday, projected that without the agency’s intervention the MAX could have averaged one fatal crash about every two or three years. That amounts to a substantially greater safety risk than either Boeing or the agency indicated publicly at the time.
Mr. DeFazio said more than 500,000 documents gathered by his panel from the FAA and Boeing, combined with emails and interviews, have “uncovered a broken safety culture within” the company and the agency.
“The FAA failed to ask the right questions and failed to adequately question the answers that agency staff received from Boeing,” he said. “Our investigation has revealed that many of the FAA’s own technical experts and safety inspectors believe FAA’s management often sides with Boeing rather than standing up for the safety of the public.” The FAA analysis projected as many as 15 similar catastrophic accidents globally over the life of the MAX fleet—spanning 30 to 45 years—unless fixes were made to the automated flight-control system implicated in the October 2018 crash.
The projected crash total, according to the Journal’s calculations, was roughly comparable to all fatal passenger accidents over the previous three decades—from any cause—involving Boeing’s 757, 767, 777, 787 and latest 747 models. The MAX fleet was expected to eventually number nearly 5,000 jets world-wide; the other fleets together total slightly more than 3,800 aircraft.
The potential for 15 projected crashes “would be an unacceptable number in the modern aviation-safety world,” said Alan Diehl, a retired FAA and Pentagon air-safety official, who hasn’t had any involvement in the MAX crisis.
The MAX’s safety record when it was grounded, after two years in service, amounted roughly to two catastrophic accidents for every one million flights, according to estimates by industry officials relying on unofficial data. By contrast, the 737 model that preceded the MAX has suffered one fatal crash for every 10 million flights, according to data from Boeing.
The 2018 global accident rate for all scheduled Western-built jetliners—including those made by Europe’s Airbus SE as well as regional passenger planes from Canadian, Brazilian and other manufacturers—was one fatal crash per approximately three million flights.
After the hearing, Mr. DeFazio told reporters the FAA’s analysis far exceeded the agency’s safety threshold for a potential catastrophic accident.
Pressed on whether the FAA took sufficient action following the agency’s internal risk analysis, Mr. Dickson said Wednesday that was “something that we need to look at very closely,” adding the “result is not satisfactory.”
Mr. Dickson said he didn’t want to second-guess decisions made following the first accident, but that based on what he knows today he would have grounded the aircraft then.

PILOTS ARE COMPELLED TO GAZE THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD
.....FORESIGHT<At the root of the company’s miscalculation was a flawed assumption that pilots could handle any malfunction. ....THE FAA HAS THE LUXURY OF ...HINDSIGHT??!!

[Aktungbby]

Boeing is now showing...FORESIGHTand has suspended production of the 737 MAX! This will ultimatly have an effect on the economy with 600+ suppliers to the assembly plant and 12,000 employees...even as the once-mighty FAA seeks to restore its own tarnisheld credibilty as an independant regulatory agency. The grounding of the existing MAX aircraft has caused airlines operating the MAX to pare routes, cancel thousands of flights; and in the case of Southwest airlines, seek agreement to redress $830,000,000 in lost operating income, of which $125,000,00 will be distributed to its employees-a serious economic ripple!

[Mr Quatro]

Originally Posted by Aktungbby

Boeing is now showing...FORESIGHTand has suspended production of the 737 MAX! This will ultimatly have an effect on the economy with 600+ suppliers to the assembly plant and 12,000 employees...even as the once-mighty FAA seeks to restore its own tarnisheld credibilty as an independant regulatory agency. The grounding of the existing MAX aircraft has caused airlines operating the MAX to pare routes, cancel thousands of flights; and in the case of Southwest airlines, seek agreement to redress $830,000,000 in lost operating income, of which $125,000,00 will be distributed to its employees-a serious economic ripple!

What do they do with all of the 737's on the ground now? They might be wise to install the options that would've prevented such castorphe's. I understand that the back up indicators were an option on both crashes.

They should change the name of the 737 Max and make it longer or something to justify the name change, but all of those jobs lost

I wonder if Boeing has a tax break with their losses.