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How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

seattletimes.com

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Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#51

Post by linuxftw »

GuB-42 wrote: post #49
linuxftw wrote: post #28

This article seems to be second-hand reporting some of the information originally broken here [1]. There's a lot of damning information, not only for Boeing, but also a lot of negligence at the FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves. [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

AFAIK, the FAA, like many regulating bodies take everything at face value, making sure they are not getting lied to isn't their jobs. An audit usually goes like: "I see that you mentioned a change in document X, show me the corresponding test report", "who is responsible for that part?", "does document Y match document X, as required by norm Z?". They will never check that you actually did the tests, or that the anal…

> AFAIK, the FAA, like many regulating bodies take everything at face value, making sure they are not getting lied to isn't their jobs.

I don't think this is accurate whatsoever. USDA has inspections all the time, they don't just check a report you file with them and go "Oh yeah, they know what they're doing over there." Similar with other industries.

If a regulatory body doesn't validate the tests of a manufacturer, what good is that body?

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#52

Post by MockObject »

wnevets wrote: post #30

>FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves. How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulation is a fool's errand?

If we're discussing a failure of the FAA, that's the right context to bash regulation, not "self regulation".

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#53

Post by kalleboo »

trt808 wrote: post #41

So what's the most likely outcome for all the grounded planes at this point? As someone who has some fear of flying I'll definitely make sure none of my trips include a 737 max in the future, no matter how many patches or upgrades boeing releases

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

> According to a detailed FAA briefing to legislators, Boeing will change the MCAS software to give the system input from both angle-of-attack sensors.

> It will also limit how much MCAS can move the horizontal tail in response to an erroneous signal. And when activated, the system will kick in only for one cycle, rather than multiple times.

> Boeing also plans to update pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS.

> These proposed changes mirror the critique made by the safety engineers in this story. They had spoken to The Seattle Times before the Ethiopian crash.

> The FAA said it will mandate Boeing’s software fix in an airworthiness directive no later than April.

After the fixes are implemented I wouldn't worry too much about it. Lots of planes have had terrible design flaws that were fixed. The pre-MAX 737 included.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#54

Post by gdubs »

johnsea wrote: post #39
ineedasername wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully it will also fall in part on the FAA, which greenlit the thing for use without checks that might have caught this.

And will it also fall in part on the passengers who demand cheap and cheaper air fares? (Not only to the detriment of their own safety but also to further increasing ecological debts).

I started to compose a reply to your comment, and it turned out to be a deceptively hard question to answer.

My attempt at a succinct answer is that carbon should be more expensive, and that Boeing very likely moved too aggressively to meet the market with a more fuel efficient plane.

In some ways – based on my probably naive understanding – consumer desire for a cheaper flight results in increased fuel efficiency, since the cost of flying is heavily dependent on the cost of fuel. Environmentally speaking, that's good. However, better fuel efficiency resulting in cheaper flights leads to people flying more. That's bad.

Pricing carbon to reflect its true environmental cost could fix that issue, by raising the price floor. Consumer choice would still drive higher efficiency, but ideally the overall higher cost of carbon would keep flying to a 'sustainable' rate. (Whatever that turns out to be.)

What I don't have a clear sense of is whether point-to-point travel with planes like the Max are better for the environment. Theoretically, hub-and-spoke travel is more fuel efficient. The reality ends up being more complicated, with airlines flying half-empty 747s. From what I understand, that makes airlines like Southwest (which operates point-to-point) more fuel efficient.

But I'd love to hear a more clear explanation from someone who better understands the subject.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#55

Post by ajross »

mimixco wrote: post #10

Notable and disturbing here is the lack of Max simulators in existence. It looks like neither Lion Air nor Ethiopian nor any US airline had access to one. Also linked in this article is the original FAA table of differences between the Max and other 737 models. It makes no metion of MCAS.

Yeah. As much blame as Boeing and the FAA certification process seems to deserve here, it's worth pointing out how much of the cascade of failures is in the airlines and cockpits too.

I mean, yes, the trim system was being driven by input from a single nonredundant sensor, which is a violation of the kind of engineering for failure process that airliners should be designed in. But at the same time that trim system is, by design, not strong enough to overpower pilot input to the other control surfaces. I mean, it's supposed to have been possible for the pilot to just fly the aircraft to a landing in the face of outrageous trim problems.

But the actual pilots didn't, not because they weren't strong enough to push the yoke but because they simply didn't know what to do and didn't have the presence of mind to just yank hard on the controls. Somehow the culture of "just fly the ?!@#! plane" got lost in all those training iPads.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#56

Post by [deleted] »

jcims wrote: post #35

Unvetted image comparison of the cockpits 737 MAX 8 Cockpit - https://i2.wp.com/thepointsguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/0... 737 800 Cockpit - https://i.imgur.com/eRULoST.jpg I don't really know my way around an airliner but the key displays seem to be quite different and there's a lot fewer knobs on the MAX 8.

[deleted]

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#57

Post by ineedasername »

linuxftw wrote: post #44
ineedasername wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, regulation doesn't fit with the narrative of self-determination and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" Instead the narrative is about big, bloated bureaucracies, ignoring the fact that they got so big by having to respond and add additional layers every time someone figured out a new way to screw things up, as with Boeing.

The free market answer would be insurance. As an individual, you probably want some kind of life insurance in the event of catastrophe. Your insurance carrier may require you only ride in such and such certified aircraft (eg, an aircraft that is insured against loss of life). An aircraft may only obtain insurance if it meets certain requirements, etc. Unfortunately, we've got a regulatory body asleep at the wheel, te…

Looking back a hundred or more years when the market was more free, your vision of how things might work does not hold. There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider.

The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems. Arguably for a very long time some degree of freedom has been better than the alternative of centrally controlled economies, but that doesn't mean that no better alternative or balance of the forces exists.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#58

Post by refurb »

GuB-42 wrote: post #49
linuxftw wrote: post #28

This article seems to be second-hand reporting some of the information originally broken here [1]. There's a lot of damning information, not only for Boeing, but also a lot of negligence at the FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves. [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

AFAIK, the FAA, like many regulating bodies take everything at face value, making sure they are not getting lied to isn't their jobs. An audit usually goes like: "I see that you mentioned a change in document X, show me the corresponding test report", "who is responsible for that part?", "does document Y match document X, as required by norm Z?". They will never check that you actually did the tests, or that the anal…

That might be true for the FAA, but it's not true for the FDA. They will ask companies for original data and then replicate analyses.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#59

Post by oconnor663 »

gdubs wrote: post #54
johnsea wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And will it also fall in part on the passengers who demand cheap and cheaper air fares? (Not only to the detriment of their own safety but also to further increasing ecological debts).

I started to compose a reply to your comment, and it turned out to be a deceptively hard question to answer. My attempt at a succinct answer is that carbon should be more expensive, and that Boeing very likely moved too aggressively to meet the market with a more fuel efficient plane. In some ways – based on my probably naive understanding – consumer desire for a cheaper flight results in increased fuel efficiency, s…

> However, better fuel efficiency resulting in cheaper flights leads to people flying more. That's bad.

This part sounds complicated. It might be good for the people but bad for the environment. On the other hand, it probably also displaces some long-distance driving, and we have to estimate how much that is. Even if the environmental impact of reduced driving doesn't cancel out the cost of added flights, it's probably worth putting a value on the safety benefit. (Even though the current thread is about plane crashes, flying is overall much safer than driving, and reducing driving by even a little saves lives.)

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#60

Post by 0xffff2 »

stcredzero wrote: post #23
ams6110 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more of this has been delegated to the manufacturers themselves. They simply assert to the FAA that the aircraft meets the type requirements. Boeing showed the FAA their test results, said that with MCAS the aircraft meets requirements, doesn't require extra training, and the FAA took their word for it. Authorities in most other countries trust the FAA, so they took their word for it too. That's an oversimpl…

More and more of this has been delegated to the manufacturers themselves. They simply assert to the FAA that the aircraft meets the type requirements. To assert this, but also change such a critical emergency procedure, which is made more critical by a decision motivated primarily by economics -- this just sounds bad. Basically, we've set up a situation where short term thinking is eventually, over many thousands of…

The purpose of MCAS was precisely that it didn't change procedure. There was already an existing procedure for runaway trim control. In the case of the Lion Air crash at least, applying that existing procedure would have allowed the pilots to fly the plane normally, albeit without the benefit of automatic trim. For reasons we will never fully know, the pilots did not apply that existing non-MAX specific procedure.
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