What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

It might make everyone feel better if he was fired, but little else. He became CEO one month before the first fuselage was completed and six months before the first flight, having been in charge of the defense unit. Perhaps a better but less satisfying target would be Ray Conner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner) who was head of commercial aviation from 2012 to 2016, or perhaps Jim Albaugh, his predecessor. Crucial engineering decisions would have been made during these years.

If an analogy didn't fall down at a deep enough layer of inspection, it wouldn't be an analogy.

To someone who has no idea what "trim" is, let alone electric assist versus manual trim, MCAS, aerodynamic loading,... the brake pedal analogy gets the general point across of what it must have felt like to the pilots, to be fighting against the machine.

I read the whole article. It is long.

The TLDR is something like: the 373 max crashes are the result of a lack of “airmanship” by pilots of the airlines of developing countries, a quality the author acknowledges he can’t define. But he feels the pilots make many “really dumb” errors and are incompetent. And the airlines that employ and often train them are crappy.

Meanwhile, Boeing is mostly blameless. Sure, there were “bewildering” design decisions but those didn’t have much to do with it. The article suggests Boeing’s mistake may have been that, unlike Airbus, it failed to appreciate how idiotic pilots have become.

Ok, I failed to make my TLDR short.

This article doesn’t go over very well with me. The problem with blaming the problem on an unmeasureable quality (“airmanship”) is that it leaves no room for a rational solution. He suggests the max should be ungrounded, but how can you do that without improving airmanship, and how can you do that if you can’t meaningfully quantify it?

While it does a great job of presenting many facts across several threads, it reads like the author wants to minimize Boeing’s responsibility and interprets all the facts through that lens.

A more accurate car analogy may be a lane assist system with access to the steering system having an undocumented fire hydrant avoidance module added that causes a car to veer into a jersey barrier because it happened to have a truck loaded with fire hydrants pull in front of it and brake.

At least in terms of the pilot's POV. I can't quite torture anything else to sufficiently resemble what chain of business decisions Boeing made to end up having their process drive them into this error state. It'll just have to stand on it's own merit. Though I've commented on it many times with much greater detail this year.

Can someone validate my thinking here, please? I’ve been watching this saga for a while and there is something that doesn’t seem to be said that really bothers me about this whole situation: the failure mode is negative, not neutral. Here is what I mean.

An aircraft has a flight envelop that defines its flight characteristics. Not only does it define in how fast or slow or high it can operate, but how that operation changes if something changes in performance. For instance, engines under the wing and on the tail cause differences as power is gained or lost. Under the wing, an increase in power will push the nose up, and a loss in power will cause the nose to drop. This is the opposite of tail mounted engines. The whole point of training a pilot is make it instinctive to expect what the plane will do when things go wrong, ie. if you are in a tail engine plane and loose suddenly power, expect that you are moving closer to a stall. The plane will both be raising the nose and losing speed. Again, vice versa for wing mounted engine. There is also another important point. If the pilot kills/loses the engine, is a neutral failure: the flight envelope does not change. The engine is no longer providing thrust so the plane orients merely to a new position in its flight envelope. But, failure in the flight system for the Max does something totally different.

The whole point of the MCAS flight computer is make the plane appear as though it has a different flight envelope. The computer automagically adjusts the flight services, notably by moving the trim. What really bothers me about the idea of using software to alter the flight characteristics is that any failure results in the plane not only falling back on a fight envelope that isn’t what the pilot trained on, but also to a point in the flight envelope that the pilot didn’t even choose (ie. trim being in some arbitrary position). Worse than that, an MCAS failure is negative. The very point of the computer system is “out guess” and compensate for the pilot’s expectations of his or her trained flight envelop; thus, if the computer believes it is operating correctly but is not, it is actively making an arbitrary flight envelope that could be constantly changing. The pilot must deduce the MCAS software is at fault while the MCAS software is deducing the pilot is at fault.

Everything I have ever seen is that the whole point of airplane design and pilot training is to reduce flight problems to known solutions as to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. The very design of MCAS is failure must put the pilot into an unknown position and likely be actively combating the pilot’s understand of the situation. If this logic is correct, I cannot fathom how any of this is acceptable.