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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

#181

Post by dralley »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #122
sundaeofshock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unfortunately, substituting regulations for good thinking has the potential to nonsensically stymie progress if done incorrectly.” Help me understand this statement. Are you suggesting that regulation in this instance would not help with safety?

Regulation is why Boeing felt the need to construct and jump through such elaborate hoops to avoid losing the 737's original certification. The better approach would have been to treat the Max as an entirety new aircraft model, and not try to fool pilots into thinking it was just another boring old 737 variant. But the regs are written to encourage the latter approach.

Nonsense. The primary reason Boeing wanted to retain the same type rating is because their buyers, the airlines, don't want to pay out to retrain all the pilots. Which as you say, is the correct thing to do - but regulations aren't preventing that, simple economic forces are.

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

#182

Post by sundaeofshock »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #122
sundaeofshock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unfortunately, substituting regulations for good thinking has the potential to nonsensically stymie progress if done incorrectly.” Help me understand this statement. Are you suggesting that regulation in this instance would not help with safety?

Regulation is why Boeing felt the need to construct and jump through such elaborate hoops to avoid losing the 737's original certification. The better approach would have been to treat the Max as an entirety new aircraft model, and not try to fool pilots into thinking it was just another boring old 737 variant. But the regs are written to encourage the latter approach.

That doesn’t follow. The FAA allowed Boeing to self-regulate, with somewhat disastrous results. I don’t understand how the regulations forced Boeing to take the approach the did. My read is that they took advantage of loose regulations to avoid recertification, all in the name of profit.

Having said all that, I’m open to hearing how you think regulation was the real culprit here.

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

#183

Post by dmix »

rconti wrote: post #135
dmix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Or are you just making a general politicized point about deregulation? On the other hand I've seen many people complain about "regulatory capture" between FAA + Boeing repeatedly. That's even on the Wikipedia for FAA. > The FAA has been cited as an example of regulatory capture,…

The article specifically cited funding cuts at the FAA.

Great, lets hope congress now has the incentivize to properly analyze the incident and determine if a lack of adequate resources was the source of the problem and then acts on it.

Regulation for regulations sake (as in telling the public it's "regulated" by pointing to current scale and existing policymaking, while in reality it is not having the intended effect) is even worse than having no regulation at all.

The current congressional majority is hardly composed on the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" types being blamed by the GP. At least in terms of rhetoric and campaign platitudes they are known. Even among a significant percentage of the republicans camp is far from fitting into the anti-government oversight camp.

The article mentions of a lack of "funding" but I haven't been able to find any evidence where funding for aircraft safety has been reduced in the last few decades. If there was a crisis of funding, where new planes aren't getting sufficient oversight or controls, then this regulatory body have either failed to make it a public issue, shutdown whistleblowers, or (more likely) it's a failure of regulatory capture and/or the monopoly-esque companies have learned how to navigate the political system (checking the right checkboxes) without any disincentives for doing so.

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

#184

Post by dmix »

knz wrote: post #46
dmix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Or are you just making a general politicized point about deregulation? On the other hand I've seen many people complain about "regulatory capture" between FAA + Boeing repeatedly. That's even on the Wikipedia for FAA. > The FAA has been cited as an example of regulatory capture,…

> I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Numerous aspects of the FAA have been politicized for decades (going back to at least the ATC strike under Reagan). The FAA also has a number of complex and lengthy programs ( https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ etc) that are have drawn extensive criticism from Congress, industry, an…

Projects tend to be fair game to criticism for failing to meet goals after funding. My question was about examples of airline manufacturers getting "deregulated"? Particularly top-down pressure from congress related to aircraft safety at the manufacturer level (rather than the aircraft manufacturers getting special treatment from the FAA or freely gaming the system - by bypassing protocols of "new" plane models without any pressure from the regulatory body).

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

#185

Post by AceyMan »

linuxftw wrote: post #115
danaliv wrote: post #92

These crashes are captivating, especially given how astonishingly safe air travel has been in the past decade or so. If I remember correctly 2017 was the safest year in the history of aviation. And airplanes, particularly modern jets, are fascinating no matter what they're doing. I remember twenty, thirty years ago looking out the towering floor-to-ceiling windows at the airport, marveling at how many different techn…

> Accident investigation is a slow process, and slow processes are frustrating. Information comes in a trickle. It's natural to want to piece together whatever details we have, wherever we can find them. In our hunger to find out what happened, how these 346 people lost their lives, let's not lose sight of the fact that the information we have right now is incomplete. Slow, and possibly corrupted process. If we belie…

If we believe the FAA has been captured by industry, do we trust the outcome of their investigation to be impartial? Do we trust their investigation to be at all competent?

Correction: US accident investigations are conducted by the NTSB, not the FAA. By design, it's not even part of the DOT, the parent org of the FAA.

From their Wikipedia entry—

"From 1967 to 1975, the NTSB reported to the DOT for administrative purposes, while conducting investigations into the Federal Aviation Administration, also a DOT agency.

To avoid any conflict, Congress passed the Independent Safety Board Act, and on April 1, 1975, the NTSB became a fully independent agency."

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

#186

Post by CaptainZapp »

ams6110 wrote: post #14
Insanity wrote: post #11

>, “Boeing 737-800 pilots were required to receive some additional training on the MAX 8, which included an hour lesson on some differences. Additional training was not required, as the 737-800 and the MAX 8 have same type certification.” How are those type certifications determined? It seems to me that there should be an instance checking if the type certifications make sense. Or perhaps they did, and they just real…

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…

Authorities in most other countries trust the FAA, so they took their word for it too.

I wonder i that remains the case.

Up to now the FAA's certification was the gold standard upon which every other certification agent use to ruberstamp their own certifications.

I wonder what happens after this overly cozy relationship came to light.

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

#187

Post by CaptainZapp »

kalleboo wrote: post #53
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 als…

Lots of planes have had terrible design flaws that were fixed.

Sure, but none of those planes (in the last 30 years or so) had two full hull losses within month of each other with brand new planes.

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

#188

Post by SiempreViernes »

0xffff2 wrote: post #60
stcredzero wrote: post #23

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. 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.

The very likely reason they didn't follow that procedure is that they didn't recognise the failure as runaway trim, which in turn is likely related to the apparent fact they didn't know MCAS existed. So couldn't know that the behaviour they experienced was what MCAS runaway trim felt like.

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

#189

Post by bookofjoe »

dang wrote: post #79
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...

Ok, we've changed the URL to that article from https://qz.com/1574878/pilots-trained-for-boeing-737-max-wit... in keeping with the guidelines' call for original sources. Thanks!

I often submit original scientific articles and reports here that achieve no traction. When I then submit less technical versions appearing in more mainstream media — New York Times, Wired, Verge, The New Yorker, etc. — they frequently appear on the home page, generating hundreds of comments. I'm always in a quandary as to which approach to take: after all, if a tree falls in a forest....

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

#190

Post by 0xffff2 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #188
0xffff2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The very likely reason they didn't follow that procedure is that they didn't recognise the failure as runaway trim, which in turn is likely related to the apparent fact they didn't know MCAS existed. So couldn't know that the behaviour they experienced was what MCAS runaway trim felt like.

I don't think it's wise to speculate, but the stabilizer is coupled to a very large trim wheel in the cockpit that both audibly clicks as it spins and is market with white stripes (on a black wheel) to make the movement apparent. It's possible the pilots didn't realize what was happening, but it's not as if MCAS was silently causing a runaway.
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