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Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

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Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#81

Can anyone at this point provide a legitimate argument for not grounding this model?

A best it's reactionary as we simply don't have enough data. The FAA said it will review once the crash investigation has been completed.

Sometimes clustering occurs, such as Maylasian airlines being shot down and lost in an ocean and never found. We didn't ground the whole airline.

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#82

Some context: 1. There have been 865 737 related ASRS reports since 1/1/2018 2. I don't know how to quickly separate out 737-MAX reports from the non 737-MAX reports, as the ASRS database doesn't include 737-MAX as an airplane type! From scanning, I can say that there are more than five MAX related reports, though. [1] All 865 737 reports since 1/1/2018 CSV - http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=5466867979406…

Great links! Here are the three 737-related ASRS reports that mention MCAS: ACN: 1597286 "Day 3 of 3 departing in a MAX 8 after a long overnight. I was well rested and had discussed the recent MAX 8 MCAS guidance with the Captain. On departure, we had strong crosswinds (gusts > 30 knots) directly off the right wing, however, no LLWS or Micro-burst activity was reported at the field. After verifying LNAV, selecting ge…

In both the first two cases, the pilots knew about potential MCAS issues and discussed them with each other before take-off -- and they still had (terrifying) problems.

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#83

Some context: 1. There have been 865 737 related ASRS reports since 1/1/2018 2. I don't know how to quickly separate out 737-MAX reports from the non 737-MAX reports, as the ASRS database doesn't include 737-MAX as an airplane type! From scanning, I can say that there are more than five MAX related reports, though. [1] All 865 737 reports since 1/1/2018 CSV - http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=5466867979406…

Great links! Here are the three 737-related ASRS reports that mention MCAS: ACN: 1597286 "Day 3 of 3 departing in a MAX 8 after a long overnight. I was well rested and had discussed the recent MAX 8 MCAS guidance with the Captain. On departure, we had strong crosswinds (gusts > 30 knots) directly off the right wing, however, no LLWS or Micro-burst activity was reported at the field. After verifying LNAV, selecting ge…

Holy shit this almost explain all there is.

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue is that the engines on the Max version are larger than the NG version and didn’t fit under the wing. So they had to raise the mounting point forward and up as well as extend the nose gear 18 inches. These changes caused the plane to have a different flight profile to the NG version. However it would have been disasterous if pilots already certified for the 737 couldn’t fly the 737 max. So boeing impleme…

I'm ignorant of aviation, oversimplifying, but my summary: they fixed issues with the hardware in software. A little scary?

From a software development standpoint, it sounds like it. And that is scary (and unfeasible).

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#85

This is off topic. But I've been skeptical of the commercial aviation accident risk compared to cars. I'm not saying cars are safer. But using accident count per mileage seems a bit odd, especially when the most risky parts of flying are taking off and landing. A plane travelling 400 more miles doesn't incur much more risk. But a car travelling 400 more miles incur a much bigger risk (e.g. fatigue, car malfunctioning…

The relevance of the metric depends on what you're using it for. If you decide whether to drive or fly to a destination based on how safe it is, risk/distance is a perfectly reasonable metric. Since flying is a means of transportation, it seems reasonable to judge the risk relative to the amount of transportation you get out of it.

That doesn't discount the fact that most of the risk is in take-off/landing, so if you use fleet-average statistics you'll bias the risk of short flights low and long flight high. Air safety studies do also use additional metrics like accidents/hour and accidents/segment, but those are mostly useful for comparing between different types of aviation.

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great links! Here are the three 737-related ASRS reports that mention MCAS: ACN: 1597286 "Day 3 of 3 departing in a MAX 8 after a long overnight. I was well rested and had discussed the recent MAX 8 MCAS guidance with the Captain. On departure, we had strong crosswinds (gusts > 30 knots) directly off the right wing, however, no LLWS or Micro-burst activity was reported at the field. After verifying LNAV, selecting ge…

These all sound extremely serious and damning, but it's hard to know whether these match the typical tone and content of these kind of reports. Is this is well inside the standard for adjusting to a new aircraft or does this suggest a serious hazard left unaddressed?

> I would generally assume it was my automation error, i.e., aircraft was trying to acquire a miss-commanded speed/no autothrottles, crossing restriction etc., but frankly neither of us could find an inappropriate setup error (not to say there wasn't one).

Regardless of the usual tone, I find this particular paragraph a fairly terrifying indictment of cockpit human factors across the board. Apparently it's not unusual for aircraft behave unusually with the pilots not understanding why - and the poor pilots "generally" blame themselves!

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#87
post #67

This is off topic. But I've been skeptical of the commercial aviation accident risk compared to cars. I'm not saying cars are safer. But using accident count per mileage seems a bit odd, especially when the most risky parts of flying are taking off and landing. A plane travelling 400 more miles doesn't incur much more risk. But a car travelling 400 more miles incur a much bigger risk (e.g. fatigue, car malfunctioning…

We use it because there is really no good metric to compare the two.

Maybe just # of accidents in vehicle/# of trips taken in vehicle ?

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#88
post #66

This is off topic. But I've been skeptical of the commercial aviation accident risk compared to cars. I'm not saying cars are safer. But using accident count per mileage seems a bit odd, especially when the most risky parts of flying are taking off and landing. A plane travelling 400 more miles doesn't incur much more risk. But a car travelling 400 more miles incur a much bigger risk (e.g. fatigue, car malfunctioning…

I'd say it's accidents per person/hour. And I've read somewhere that the figures used to be similar for cars and airplanes (though aircraft safety is constantly improving, cars probably less).

Per passenger might be off because a passenger doesn't affect the risk. The number of flights vs. the number of trips might be more fair.

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#89

This is off topic. But I've been skeptical of the commercial aviation accident risk compared to cars. I'm not saying cars are safer. But using accident count per mileage seems a bit odd, especially when the most risky parts of flying are taking off and landing. A plane travelling 400 more miles doesn't incur much more risk. But a car travelling 400 more miles incur a much bigger risk (e.g. fatigue, car malfunctioning…

It's a useful metric because, when comparing auto and plane safety, consumers are usually deciding between taking a plane and a car for the same distance. We could give them risk as a function of distance by taking the increased takeoff/landing risk into account, but generally people only compare the two for fairly long trips.

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#90
post #44

This article is less compelling than the title would suggest. After the Lion Air crash the FAA released a Emergency Airworthiness Directive, these five comments are in response to that directive. That differentiates it from pilots that had a negative run-in with MCAS or other defects in the 737 Max 8 (which would be significant news). This article might inform you pilots are unhappy, but that fact has been widely cir…

The comments seem to be recounting personal experiences of those pilots though, not their reactions to the initial disclosure.

Many of them are recounting how they didn't receive enough training and only found out after the initial disclosure. Nobody said they weren't personal experiences, just that those experiences are about the FAA directive/training rather than with the aircraft itself/MCAS.
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