I was fully expecting a grounding once I first heard the details of the second crash and saw how closely it resembled the first. I was shocked that it didn’t happen before other international agencies did it. The FAA did itself no favor here.
If you know anyone that's worked in the industry, you know there have been issues well before 2014.
Since the company merged with its competitor they had a complete management shift which incentivizes many of the failures we've seen recently.
Al Jazeera did an investigation into them in 2014; you should be able to find it available online somewhere. It was damning and surprisingly well researched.
Mind you this was well before they changed the system regarding the nose pointing down; without disclosing it to the pilots.
They are just going business as usual. I and many I know well would never willingly fly in one of their planes.
it's a shame that a lot of international agencies used to look to the FAA first as a benchmark for policies. But they really dropped the ball here and giving the perception of prioritizing Boeing's profit margins over consumer safety.
IIRC, the argument was that there exist a special manoeuvre which can make it possible to save the plane by slowing down the the plane airspeed so the pilots can manually turn the wheels controlling the trim. So some pilots were claiming that "no American pilot would let this happen", I guess due to their superior training.
It wasn't just a distasteful position, but also the largest American 737 MAX operator opted in for the extra safety package which included a second angle of attack sensor and "sensors disagree" light which would have reduced the chances of this happening anyway[0].
Making faulty planes then selling the extra features for detecting the faults and claiming that if you can't fly a faulty plane you are not a good pilot is psychopathic IMHO.
What proper training? Boeing deliberately decided not to document the new behavior, and the entire point of MCAS was to avoid needing new pilot training.
Our club has few professional pilots and iirc their more or less shared opinion was that boeing fucked up, but the expectation was that pilots training should have prevented the crashes. Regardless of Airbus, Boeing expectation still is that pilots can fly with minimum automation, and if something is wrong / odd they know how to disable it all, take full control, gain altitude and figure things out.
iirc the proper course of action for this failure condition was to perform manual cutoff of the stabilizer trim, which is considered a mandatory memory item for flying even normal Boeing 737s (non max)
apparently the differences in training have resulted in the lack of knowledge in this area for foreign pilots, which turned a recoverable failure into an irrecoverable one
disclosure I'm just going from memory from reading about 737 max analysis, there might be more to it than thi
Edit: as expected the situation is more nuanced, see here for elaboration on why even successfully performing stab trim cutoff may not have been sufficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35769100
“Flying Blind” by Peter Robison is a great book on the MAX. I am surprised no one has mentioned it. It digs into the history of Boeing and the changes in the organisation and culture of corporate America that led to the MAX. I am surprised no one has mentioned it.
Unfortunately the article is unclear: was the overruling by appointees or civil servants? This distinction is crucial for any repair to the system.
There is unfortunately a serious and destructive plan from one of the political parties to abandon the Pendleton act and return to the spoils system. If that happens we will see a lot more of this happening.
It had to be the appointee. The analysis was squashed at a low level by a procedural technicality, and the issue was too significant for the agency head to be uninvolved. On paper though, everyone's hands are clean.
If you don’t mind, I’m curious what sort of procedure and training changes occurred after the 2009 incident. The streak of no major domestic crashes (and basically no crashes at all) is really impressive and I think it should be talked about more. If the procedure and training changes are responsible for the streak we should be holding a parade or something for those responsible. Speaking of parades, I wonder what changed to make them seem lame these days. Are they just boring relative to film?
The biggest one was requiring both pilots to have ATP certificates, effectively moving the bar to co-pilot from 250 hours to 1500 hours of flying. Lots of other changes that taken on their own are small, but overall it was a pretty massive set of changes.
It's not clear whether the 1500 hour rule directly improved safety. Both the Colgan captain and the FO had more than 1500 hours at the time of the accident. What the rule did unambiguously is severely restrict the supply of new pilots to regional airlines. This significantly improved quality of life for regional pilots, who prior to Colgan were effectively making minimum wage or worse. (That may have indirectly improved safety, by making pilots more well-rested and fed...)
Another point of comparison is Europe, which has a not-dissimilar safety record, but still allows FOs to have 250 hours. That said, from what I understand, they have a very different training culture where students start in a multi-crew environment very early.
I remember reading about the typical lifestyle of a new regional pilot. Low wages, long hours, and often flying many hours as a passenger to get to work (living in Pitts, grabbing the first flight to NYC to work, etc). It sounded miserable.
Fatigue rules were changed to be more strict. Requirements for regional airlines pilots were changed to require at least a minimum of 1500 hours for both pilots, previously only one pilot was required to have 1500 hours. Standards for grading stall recovery were changed to avoid incentivising the behavior observed in the pilots in the 2009 crash.
> One engineer made a preliminary estimate that the chance of another Max crash was more than 13 times greater than FAA risk guidelines allow.
> However, this document was not completed and did not go through managerial review due to lack of detailed flight data
A plane crash is too significant for the FAA not to even disposition the analysis, meaning formally receiving, reviewing, and deciding what to do. Incomplete data would just be part of the decision process, it's not a legitimate excuse for not looking at it. Killing the report like this where no one is on record opposing it is a pretty common tactic to at least buy some time when you know what the result will be.
They were hoping to find a reason not to ground the plane. They didn't find one, so they eventually ground it.
The "safe" recommendation is to keep all planes in the sky regardless of suspected safety issues because alternative transportation is not safer than a dangerous airplane.
If the alternative to flying is not taking the trip at all, then that's certainly safest. And I imagine that's the case for many trips, especially those where the flight is more than an hour and a half or so.
(Consider that I can fly from SF to LA in an hour and a half, but it's a 6-hour drive. If my flight was canceled and I couldn't find an alternative flight, I just wouldn't go at all. Certainly there are some extreme situations where I might bite the bullet and drive, but that'd be rare.)
Put another way: when we know something is unsafe, we shouldn't keep it going just because of the theoretical risk of alternatives. And yes, I know that the risk of driving isn't "theoretical", but we can't fully predict what humans will do absent their first choice of transportation.
If I have to fly for a one-day or two-day business meeting, and I can’t find a flight, I don’t go. Driving ensures I miss the meeting. Staying put, I can at least join virtually.
Air transportation may be overall safe, but the 737 Max was a dangerous aircraft that resulted in hundreds of deaths. Youer position is extraordinarily peurile.
How about, wildly dangerous relative to other commercial passenger jets? Second in fatal accidents per million miles flown only to the Concorde, which didn't fly very much. Why would you want to continue flying a plane that was statistically 5-10x more fatal than peers? Surely there's no good reason to subject passengers to that, even if it were still relatively safer than automobile fatalities or whatever else you might compare to, not when safer aircraft are generally available?
(Note this data is only up to 2019 for 737 models, but that's exactly the time period at which decisions had to be made, of whether to continue flying it or not).
The whole point of the 737 max was that the pilots wouldn't be trained on the "max" part of the 737 -- they were qualified for the 737 and there's some hidden emulator making the "max" fly like a 737.
As soon as the emulator got bad feedback from the one sensor that was used to map "max" airframe behavor to "737" controls, all bets were off. And because the pilots weren't allowed to know they were in a Max not a 737 (which would require further training that would void the advantages of the Max) there was no SOP for how to deal with "your Max is blind and can't pretend to be a 737"
The "poorly trained" pilots weren't test pilots -- pilots aren't supposed to be able to improvise and react to things off book.
“Undertrained” because Boeing told them extra training g wasn’t necessary.[1]
Both pilots had multiple thousands of flight hours (well beyond the minimum 1500 required to co-pilot in the US). Only the co-pilot of the Ethiopian Air flight would have been deemed too new to fly for a US airline (and even then, only post-Colgan Air 3407).
IIRC the FO (copilot) of the Ethiopian Air flight correctly identified MCAS as the source of the problem, but was struggling to trim the airplane manually because it was so far out of trim that the load on the horizontal stabilizer jackscrew made it difficult or impossible for him to adjust.
This possibility was mentioned in the AFM, but the recommended response - pitch nose-down to decrease the load - was not feasible in the situation.
I thought the story was that the normal training should have sufficed, and that it did in some cases where the same issue occurred and the pilots were able to handle it (themselves not having any special training either).
The argument was that the problem could be handled as any other pitch-trim runaway situation, for which pilots were already trained.
There were, however, reasons to be skeptical. Firstly, unlike in most other cases, it was not designed to halt when opposed by the pilot’s use of the control yoke (to do so would defeat the purpose of MCAS.) Secondly, it was found in flight testing that MCAS needed to be made much more aggressive, yet the original decision was allowed to stand. Thirdly, it could stop on its own accord, only to start up again a few seconds later.
Consequently, while MCAS failure is nominally handled as a form of trim runaway, it did not present itself to pilots like the trim runaway scenarios they had trained for.
So it seems like successfully handling the situation hinges on how much the pilots have abstracted the training vs applying it by rote. This abstract vs rote distinction is a common theme in Westerners looking down on other cultures, so I guess it lines up with the “third world” comments on the situation.
Except in the second crash, as I recall it, the problem was correctly IDed, but manually adjusting the trim was impossible without adding nose down (to unload the control surface). This led the co-pilot to re-enable auto-trim, which re-enabled MCAS, which then drove the plane into the ground.
There may have been a path to saving the aircraft, but it definitely didn't seem at all intuitive. And figuring it out while the plane is actively trying to crash itself is a pretty big ask.
If a successful resolution of the problem depended on pilots making the right abstractions from their training for prior versions, then that would, in itself, establish that it was a serious error to withhold information about how MCAS operated.
I am also very familiar with both catastrophic failures of 737 MAX and I can be extremely certain that undertrained pilot is only one of the factor. Boeing's extremely fail-unsafe and irredundant design of MCAS causes the failure in the first place, and they do not provide enough training material related to this system (in the first incidence they providie not training at all. MCAS is not even mentioned in the pilot's manual, nor does most maintainence crew know the existence of such system). Blaming people, especially pilot, is the easiest way to end an air crash investigation, but the industry will never be safer if nobody take the root cause seriously.
Except no, at the time of the second crash, there had been over 20 reports of un-commanded nose down inputs by pilots. The two flights just didn't manage to diagnose the issue or turn off MCAS before it crashed the aircraft.
There was IIRC 8~16 hours of training that was intended to be mandated, but Boeing told airlines that training was not necessary. So many (not all) pilots never learned the deeper mechanisms of MCAS. This would reduce costs, and increase desirability of the aircraft.
But it gets even worse! The FAA approved Boeing's request to remove a description of MCAS from the aircraft manual! So no, most pilots wouldn't even be able to learn about it even if they wanted to!
There was 0 redundancy. The MCAS was directed by ONE SINGLE AoA (Angle of Attack) SENSOR! No backups!
Even worse! Boeing was aware of the problems as of 2016! They even knew MCAS violated Boeing's own design documents and rules for the max8!
And yet here you are blaming the pilots instead of the money grubbers at the top.
I doubt this is a feasible calculation. Firstly, grounding one type will not shut down air transport (though it will degrade service, complicate operations, and possibly have unanticipated consequences.) Secondly, the travel being disrupted will not all be completed by other means. Thirdly, it is not possible to estimate the risk of not grounding as the cause of the problem is not well-understood.
> The "safe" recommendation is to keep all planes in the sky regardless of suspected safety issues because alternative transportation is not safer than a dangerous airplane.
You're presumably taking the average deaths per miles and applying it in the sense of "those people would drive and that's more dangerous."
...that's....not how that works.
You assume:
* they would take alternate transportation, instead of canceling the trip or booking another flight not on a MAX. At the time there were just 387 MAX aircraft in the world in service.
* that said transportation would be passenger cars. Trains and busses are 10x (or more) safer than passenger cars per passenger mile. They're so safe that the danger to a passenger is basically insignificantly higher compared to commercial jet flights (and by the way, the industry very conveniently separates out "commuter" flights, which are FAR more dangerous.)
* that the overall safety of the commercial jet fleet is applicable to flights on a specific model of jet, which were clearly more dangerous, with not just two crashes in close proximity, but several close calls and almost certainly numerous other incidents that went unnoticed or unreported
Turned out China was right on this one - ground first, ask questions later.
That approach has historically been the FAA strategy.
Maybe they should stick to what works?
Especially given the airframe was so new and they also knew it had really stretched what should be allowable under the same type rating the caution was definitely warranted.
The better question still remains as to how it got to keep the type rating despite the huge changes in the flight handling characteristics without a software system that didn't need to be sold in a redundant configuration and additionally without any additional training being mandated for pilots in the case of that system malfunctioning.
Sure Boeing failed here but they are a company, companies especially of that size are absent of morals and driven only by profit.
The FAA is meant to be the backstop, the voice of reason that prevents rampant capitalism from accidentally destroying itself. Airline travel only is what it is because of perceived safety, it's best all the stakeholders start remembering that.
At some point this becomes a national security concern - the Air Force would never accept Airbus-based tankers or AWACS platforms should Boeing go under. Then perhaps I'm exaggerating, a restructuring bankruptcy can sometimes do magic to rotting corporations.
> the Air Force would never accept Airbus-based tankers or AWACS platforms should Boeing go under.
Really? Because the Airbus A330 MRTT originally won the KC-X competition (before Boeing filed a challenge):
> The USAF issued the KC-X request for proposal in January 2007,[2] then selected the Northrop Grumman/EADS team and their Airbus A330 MRTT-based tankers in February 2008.[3]
Boeing would split up before things got worrisome, BDS would be the bulk of the defense stuff, would likely get bought at some point depending on price, because BDS is doing . . eh, less awful, let's say, than other Boeing divisions. So it wouldn't precisely be a bargain for, say, Raytheon or NG.
BCA would, if things go on their current trajectory, get hoovered up by someone for cheap. Karma option would be Embraer.
In the event of a split, the nine million dollar question is how they handle their debt. Boeing took on a gargantuan debt load (for their sector, anyway), and that was before the MAX problems even hit - before COVID too, obviously. How Lockheed juggled their debt in the L3 selloff was a big part of how Lockheed survived into the 1990s, and it'll also be the theme of a Boeing breakup.
Aviation safety for FAA airworthiness generally follows SAE ARP4761, which requires risks of Catastrophic severity to have a quantitative failure rate of 10^-9 incidents per hour or less. The Air Force follows MIL-STD 882E, which generally requires risks of Catastrophic severity to have a quantitative failure rate of 10^-6 incidents per hour or less. In short, the military accepts more risk than commercial aviation. That being said, military aircraft usually are also rated to ARP4761 levels of safety so they can fly in US airspace.
There is the cynical answer, but there's also the fact that the US equipment is actually pretty damn good and can be delivered in large quantities, though it it usually more expensive. You also have to consider alliances, if you buy equipment from country X then that country will be able to provide spares/ammunition/trained personnel if shit hits the fan. And the US is not blocking allied countries from purchasing equipment elsewhere or from developing their own industries. In fact it is usually angry at countries like Germany for not pulling their weight in domestic production.
Military sales are more politics than business. The French behave much like the US, they'll buy foreign kit only as a very last resort. It is a strategic decision that a country has to make based on manufacturing capabilities, ability to generate orders (domestic and foreign) and the planned purpose for their military forces.
I'd like to believe that this was a case for engineers being overcautious and the FAA deeming the risk low enough that it wouldn't be worth the reputation damage, but honestly who knows at this point?
I don't follow aviation or Boeing actively, but in the last few years I seem to recall the max grounded for literally killing people, the 787 having tons of manufacturing issues,and something about the NASA contracts having a lawsuit from SpaceX.
Sure, but the revolving door between the FAA and Boeing is widely documented.
For decades it has been discussed the whole situation stinks and someday the consequences would start to materialize. They did with the MAX and I fear it’s just the beginning.
Let's be honest, if the two crashes had happened to top-tier US or European airlines, there would have been a grounding after two similar crashes. But the crashes happened to third world Indonesian and African airlines, and the first, second, and third instinct was to blame pilot incompentency or poor training.
If there had been one crash in the EU or US, it would have been grounded immediately. Especially on land. Lion Air were a convenient scapegoat given their past history, Boeing PR hardly needed to do anything. When the first crash happened many people even here on HN were convinced it was the fault of Lion Air, even after the MCAS system had been exposed.
Ultimately I think EASA deserves a little bit more blame. You can somewhat understand the FAA having a bias towards their own national aircraft maker, but what the hell was EASA doing? They were supposed to be the check against that kind of nationalist bias, but they were just as deferential as the FAA.
What is the record of MAX flights since the grounding was removed? Have there been enough hours to say anything about accident statistics yet? No serious accidents I gather, but perhaps some data from close calls or minor incidents in related systems?
The underlying problems here run much deeper in that the root cause of the issues has more to do with the shenanigans Boeing and any other aircraft manufacturers end up having to do in order to avoid having to certify a whole new aircraft and especially to avoid needing to obtain a new type certification.
Both cases are absurdly expensive and time consuming to the point that any new aircraft designs are basically experimental or dead on paper in terms of being able to sell the plane at a price people or even companies can actually pay.
In this case, my understanding is that, the new engines are a bit bigger which necessitated a change in mounting position relative to the main body in order to maintain ground clearance on takeoff and landing, this should have meant larger landing gear sitting a bit higher and/or a slightly different wing shape and mounting position on the body.
However, any of those kind of changes would have moved the Max8 into a new type certificate which would then require all pilots flying it to certify on that type in addition to additional flight testing and manufacturing certifications. All of that would move the cost of the plane well above the point where the efficiency gains would make it worth buying and delay production to the point where there would no longer be a market for it. So there would simply be no Max8.
And one could say, "well that's business, Airbus beat you to it, Boeing should lose then". And that would be fine as long as we're willing to accept a world where the US produces no commercial aircraft at all and airline ticket prices and accommodations continue to get even worse. Are we good with making travel by air something only the rich can afford?
So Boeing went with extending the engines forward and slightly upward which necessitated more down force from the horizontal stabilizers to balance the increased weight forward of the center of lift and introduced a potential disruption of airflow over the wings in a high pitch up situation.
Changing the size, shape, or position of the horizontal stabilizers or anything else that would address the airflow issues would also run into certification cost issues. Therefore Boeing settled on an active control solution which they integrated into the existing flight control software (poorly) and found creative ways to convince regulators that nothing much had changed in the software such that the whole design could be built at a price point and time to market that would actually make the project worth doing at all.
The reasons for it are pretty straight forward and can be seen as bad actors being bad or simply the result you are bound to get when you regulate without accounting for the reality of how people and businesses work. You can't just say "safety is our top priority" and continue to add layers of regulation until it's impossible to do anything without manipulating or bypassing those regulations. Doing so will counter-productively NOT get you safer designs.
What it will reliably get you is a shift in the focus of efforts from engineering the safest and most efficient aircraft possible to getting ever more creative about designing things you can get past the regulators. You don't want smart people dedicating large amounts of time, energy, and money to efforts to manipulate regulators.
We the public would be much better served by an FAA that regulates with safety as the top priority AND an eye for making it possible and profitable to actually introduce new designs and new ways to manufacture things.
Right now it is simply impossible to start a company with the goal of introducing a new aircraft or aircraft engine to the US market. It costs astronomical amounts to get to the point where you can sell your first plane and separately astronomical amounts to get to where you can sell your first engine. Even for single engine, fixed gear, small and light, GA planes.
This is why almost no normal US citizen can afford to fly personally, even just occasionally for fun. It is also why GA planes still use leaded gasoline and burn around 10 gallons per hour. It is also why "new" aircraft are all actually >95% similar to existing designs (even if that makes them inefficient), always use existing decades old engines, and still cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, making them priced out for all but the wealthiest potential customers.
The only possible route for any innovation in flight has been Experimental airworthiness certificates. And you can sell a few planes that way; but once you have a known good and tested design, you are still stuck in the Experimental category indefinitely because you will never sell enough planes to afford a standard category certificate.
Best of luck to the flying car startups but no pilot in the US expects them to have a snowball's chance in hell of making it to the point where they are profitably selling a genuinely new type of aircraft.
> This is why almost no normal US citizen can afford to fly personally, even just occasionally for fun.
In EU you can get to a lot of destinations for much less than 100€. And I bet EU regulations are not less stringent than US. Adding insult to injury, Airbus does fine smashing Boeing in the mid-range mid-size planes segment.
Maybe the problem is not in the regulations, but in Boeing? Which tries to circumvent the regulations, instead of following them, or at least trying to appeal the regulations in a legal way?
I think GP is saying almost no normal US citizen can afford to fly his or her own aircraft, not pay to be a passenger on a commercial airline.
Even renting the smallest of single-engine aircraft as a student pilot is beyond the resources of what most people would spend (hundreds of dollars per hour) "for fun". Owning an aircraft is out of reach for all but the very wealthy.
A small airplane is no more technically sophisticated than an automobile, yet costs orders of magnitude more.
A quick google suggests that the price of a lesson is $160-$240 an hour, including instructor's fee. Private pilot 's licence (according to the same infobox) goes for $9k-$15k.
It's not cheap, but it's not unfathomably expensive either. I would guess within reach for about half the US folk on here - based on the assumption that that population heavily skews to high-paying tech roles.
That's the entry ticket price my friend. Beyond that you also have continuing currency requirements and that basic license pretty much only allows you to fly on clear weather days.
Which is also a problem because weather changes during flight. So if you actually want to travel with a plane you rented, you're going to need an instrument rating, which costs about as much as the initial license.
So you're out the price of a new mid-tier sedan, which you had to pay in cash upfront, and all you have to show for it is a card that says you can rent someone else's plane to go somewhere, AFTER they make you do a check ride with one of their local instructors anyway. You'll also then be renting the even more expensive IFR rated planes. And I hope you're doing this with aviation renter's insurance, which most places actually don't make you carry...but planes are expensive, remember? And you're borrowing one because you can't afford your own. And you're a low flight time pilot at this point, so enjoy those insurance premiums.
Software people are well paid enough to do all this, yes. So are lawyers and doctors. But that amounts to around 1% or less of the US population.
Before I started flying, that was my imagination as well.
Small Aircraft engines are actually some of the simplest designs you will ever find in a four or six cylinder engine. They are essentially pegged at 1950s to 1970s tech level.
The main difference you will notice first in the controls is that they all still require the operator to manually control fuel mixture. Cars used to be that way too.
But having a carburetor with a manually controlled fuel inlet valve opens the door to the operator getting it wrong and running the engine either too rich or too lean, which can lead to pre-detonation and/or build up of carbon deposits in the cylinders and on the spark plugs. Both of which throw off the engine timing, wear out engine components faster, and can lead to cracking the engine housing, breaking a piston rod, or plain old sudden loss of power during flight when the spark plugs stop working.
And that's on top of the possibility that the venturi can freeze up, starving the engine of fuel and air on decent, even on a hot day outside. Which means the pilot also has to learn to use "carb heat" which is an inefficient solution that sends hot exhaust gas back through the carburetor.
The controls are just two levers, nothing complicated, but the ways one can mess that up are varied. They are also subtle mistakes, right up until you are suddenly losing power at the worst time.
The answer in the car world has been to switch to fuel injectors with computer monitoring and control.
However, even introducing FADEC systems has been a struggle in aviation, LONG after they were well proven in ground vehicles.
As a result, operating just the engine in a small GA plane is harder and more error prone than operating a car engine and the aviation world responds to that increased risk by adding even more regulation around maintenance requirements and overhaul times. Which sounds perfectly rational but there is little data behind the regulations compared to what we could have if most engines were computer controlled and monitored. And we wouldn't need to be so paranoid on maintenance hours if we could rely on issues being noticed before they become problems.
Additionally, this makes flying with those more basic engines a bigger risk because the pilot then has to know the sounds, vibrational patterns, and general "feel" of that particular engine in order to have a good chance at detecting any issues that might lead to a loss of power. But as we humans are well aware from experience making car engines, this is not good enough, there are hundreds of little bits if information that can be indications of the beginnings of an eventual and costly failure that, if noticed early and remedied at the shop, results in continued and more reliable operation.
We start our cars every day and drive to work without really even thinking about the engines. The computers have our backs there. And the vast majority of the time, if anything, the computers are a bit TOO paranoid. But that's a good thing because it means problems get fixed before you end up broke down on the side of the road.
It is even more important that the engine not fail suddenly in flight because then you are forced to land wherever you can, even if that's a farmer's field or a highway. Very dangerous for the people in the plane and somewhat dangerous for people on the ground too.
One would think that the importance of detecting issues BEFORE takeoff and as early as possible during a flight, before the engine actually starts losing power, would make us want to use every tool at our disposal to operate, monitor, and maintain those engines as best as possible. But this is not the case, largely due to the way in which aircraft engine manufacturing and certification are regulated.
700 miles is around 1127 kilometers... which I'm sure you knew and were just highlighting that US flights ain't that much longer than EU flights on average, but it's worth noting for clarity that they are indeed longer.
Yeah for some reason five years ago it was significantly lower than today, it's gone up to around 850 miles now. Not that I can tell you precisely why, but that's what the stats say.
> a new type certificate which would then require all pilots flying it to certify on that type in addition to additional flight testing and manufacturing certifications
Boeing blamed the crashes on the lack of pilot training.
> “The crew’s inadequate actions … played a role in the chain of events that led to the accident, in particular during the first phase of the flight, before the first MCAS activation,” the BEA wrote. Both agencies suggest that Ethiopian Airlines *failed to ensure its pilots were adequately trained* in the measures that Boeing recommended to counter an erroneous MCAS activation after the first MAX crash.
"Pilot Error" is the most favored scapegoat in the aviation industry. It's always possible to say the problem occurred between "the keyboard and the floor", to use the analogous software catch phrase.
But that isn't good enough when the systems are supposed to be designed for trained humans to operation without making such errors. If operating the system is error prone, change the system.
In this case in particular, if the pilots were not trained well enough that was due to the fact that Boeing's initial training materials were inadequate.
I know that article wants to push the narrative that those pilots in particular were not good enough pilots to begin with, but that was not true before they flew the Max8. Flying the Max8 is what got them killed. Kinda weird that they had this supposedly inadequate skill set all along but it was only a deadly issue with the brand new plane. It may indeed be that Ethiopia needs to up their training discipline. And that's good to address. But it does nothing to absolve Boeing's part in those crashes.
The FAA and Boeing have now established the new training requirements that should have been there from the start.
> "3. HIGHLIGHTS OF CHANGE
The purpose of this revision is to add training requirements for Maneuvering Characteristics
Augmentation System (MCAS), Autopilot Flight Director System (AFDS) enhancements,
and additional Special Emphasis Training. Appendices 2 and 3 reflect applicable table
updates from the Boeing 737-800 to the Boeing 737-8 and from the Boeing 737-8 to the
Boeing 737-800. Appendix 7 was added to delineate ground and flight training necessary to
operate the 737 MAX modified with Flight Control Computer (FCC) software version
P12.1.2."
Post incident Boeing is doing some double speaking for PR and CYA. But the investigation already proved out that they were dodging the training updates so they could get the plane to market sooner. And two things can be true at the same time as well. Accident investigations are meant to uncover ALL of the systemic and specific failures that led to the crash. And that's a really good thing.
But again, everything thing even Boeing is responsible for, was done to avoid costly extended certification requirements for the planes and time consuming re-certification of pilots.
If regulations are leading to this kind of behavior, it's not enough to even blame just Boeing. We need to make the right thing to do, the easiest thing to do. Maybe that's not possible here, but I don't really see anyone trying.
The (now) A220 is a clean sheet airplane designed by neither Boeing nor Airbus. Introduced to the US market. Boeing did some non-FAA bullying which forced Bombardier to sell the program to Airbus.
It's not impossible, but it killed Bombardier. If anything, it proves their point! Airbus now has a nice plane, but Bombardier basically lost everything and has been sold for scraps. Airbus won by not doing anything and letting someone take the massive pain of going with a new design.
Now of course what Boeing did to block Bombardier didn't help* and more or less sealed Bombardier's faith. But that was only because Bombardier at that point was basically on the verge of death and had only a few months left of runway (ha), which is crazy for a formerly massive and diversified player.
* and our government here in Canada is so weak (nothing specific to Trudeau here, the same could be said about Nortel or tons of other high tech that have been squandered in Canadian history ) that it didn't want to support bombardier more than it did.
Your point, correct me if I'm wrong was: FAA regulations are about regulating safety to the max, but not taking into account business realities and not evolving, new ones are added but old are not reviewed. Therefore only established super-well capitalized companies can play.
What killed C-Series was Boeings shenanigans about 300% import duty. Abusing US laws for sure, but nothing to do with FAA killing it.
The plane was ready, so they had already done it. So whatever you say about not being impossible is directly contradicted.
Would Bombardier have made it with a more cooperative FAA? Maybe. Same question could also be asked about whether a different airline industry in the US would have helped. We don't know and never will.
In general tho, I am not arguing against the overarching point of your original comment, regulations tend to come in and it rarely happens that they are being refactored or cleaned up.
A lot of paper is being pushed around and rigidly enforced without looking at the big picture. The friction of complexity I guess.
But the specific claim, even though it sounds about right is not strictly correct.
> And one could say, "well that's business, Airbus beat you to it, Boeing should lose then". And that would be fine as long as we're willing to accept a world where the US produces no commercial aircraft
I do not accept this at all.
This would not result in "US producing no commercial aircraft".
Boeing has a healthy and growing profit margin. They can afford to vertify a new plane properly.
You are asking me to risk my life to pad their margins.
it is exactly this king of preferential treatment to big players that ensures that there wont be competition.
The only way to rise is to have a full backing of a economkc superpower, basically Eu/US/China
The overall point is that, even if Boeing can, they can't do it often. And they are basically the only ones who can.
That's not a healthy market and it is definitely suppressing advancement and discovery of new technology that we would all benefit from. What we should like to see is a market where safety is maximized AND it is possible to start a new aviation company with a reasonable chance of success.
The public is not well served by the current regulation environment. It looks like maximum safety concern, but we don't even get to know how safe and efficient flying could be if the tech was actually moving forward at a reasonable pace.
It took forever to even get winglets on most of the big aircraft. We knew about winglets in 1897.
Boeing was and is a gigantic company, so they could do it and could do it easier than other manufacturers since the FAA is basically a Boeing department at this point.
They didn’t do it because of comercial reasons aka money in their pockets. Airlines were happy not having to do more training, they were happy, stock holders were happy, everyone was happy!
Which demonstrates the problem. When you have a market that only one or a few players can even operate in, that is bound to lead to this exact situation.
The regulations are so heavy and complicated that the best path to profit is to just capture and manipulate the regulators. Which only the biggest power players can do.
So there is effectively no competition allowed here. That doesn't serve the public well at all. We should like to see a market where many more new aircraft companies are popping up with new designs to prove out. Safety as a top concern, yes, but also a path to profit that doesn't have to involve cheating the system.
> You don't want ... people dedicating large amounts of time, energy, and money to efforts to manipulate regulators.
Yes, manipulating regulators does not create safety. If there are monetary fines and prison for those who approved the designs and testing, the corner-cutting would cease.
The 737MAX benefit was better fuel economy due to larger fans. Shortcuts were taken, and FAA and the flying public don't care to force a new type certification.
Money talks. The head of the FAA are chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Usually the heads are people who use to work for the Airline Industry or Manufactures of Airlines. So, major conflict of interest here.
No, the heads of federal agencies are external because they're political appointees. High profile jobs go to donors and those who have supported the politician in charge of the appointment.
*Some federal appointees. The head of FAA under Trump was Stephen Dickson, who was an F-15 fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, then a pilot for 27 years at Delta Airlines before becoming Vice President of flight operations [1].
The current head under Biden is Billy Nolen, a former pilot who flew the Boeing 757 and 767 and worked as an airline executive for years before joining the FAA [2].
By credentials, these two are definitely qualified.
I think the original point being made was that having such extensive airline industry experience actually makes you unqualified to lead the FAA. For instance, Dickson, through his position at Delta, has likely developed strong ties to counterparts at Boeing. This made him unable to adequately address the safety issues of the 737 MAX.
My follow-up point was that experience in regulating airlines is more important than experience running an airline when it comes to leading the FAA. However, those who regulate airlines as a career are unlikely to be big political donors, so they're unlikely to be chosen to lead the FAA.
It's knowledge you get by actually working in the field rather than reading about it in reports and white papers. It has value, it's not everything, but it is important. What actually needs to be in place are independent auditors who aren't linked to the industry and can't profit from it to review the decisions of these agencies and have full access to all data, including engineers who say "yo this is a bad idea". I have been that engineer a few times with mixed results, sometimes people listen, sometimes they don't. Never on the level of the FAA/Boeing fiasco but still it does happen all the time, everyday. That's why rules to prevent fraternizing between agencies like the FAA and Boeing are important. It's a lot harder to be tough on friend/colleague than it is someone who you don't know and are auditing.
The _entire issue_ is capture of those who regulate making planes by those making planes. Disallowing transition from one to the other seems like a good idea.
Organized sedition, maybe, but "treason" is narrowly defined in the US constitution:
>Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
>The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood¹, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
¹: "Corruption of blood" is a legal term. This passage means that treason charges cannot be carried to future generations, they only apply to the person who committed the act.
Regulatory capture is not a problem that can be solved by executing examples, because the captured officials usually don't even think of themselves as captured. The solution is to align incentives, for example by closing the revolving door
Having worked for airlines or manufacturers in the past doesn't itself present a conflict of interest. Not to say a conflict doesn't exist, but previous employment isn't itself a conflict.
Not as a strict logical consequence, no. However, it does sort of increase the probability that one has acquired insidership in social circles where people may frown if one temporarily kills off a profitable line of business.
When planes are not flying, people don't travel, so airlines don't make money, so they can't buy new planes, so manufacturers don't sell planes, so engineers don't get paid, so they leave, so they don't make better, safer planes.
It is a difficult balance to find, and sometimes the FAA gets it wrong, and sometimes people die. It is tragic when it happens, but if you want to be able to travel by plane, the industry has to keep going. Overall, the FAA has done a rather good job despite the conflicts of interest: accidents go down and air travel goes up. When they mess up, they usually take corrective action, as it was the case here.
Would you prefer that the head of the FAA have no clue about the airline industry or airplanes in general? Where do you think that these people are to be found, if not those who used to work for that very industry?
We need people ready to serve the country. Not play cozy with friends.
Nominated to work in the govt ? Elected public official ? Great! Every penny beyond your average high income (best 5-10 income avg?) is taxed at 99% for life.
Working in the government should not be a way to enrich yourself and friends... or make a "career".
Its called public service for a reason. Its not private enterprise. Its not arbitrage. Its not patronage. Not to enrich yourself and your buddies.
Government employees already face a pretty substantial pay cut compared to the private sector. For people on an engineering track, you're looking at double-digit percentage paycuts, but for the upper echelons of management track, where the comparatives are being C-suite at a medium-sized company, it's starting to look like a 90% paycut. This means you have issues recruiting people to fill these roles.
Adding on a permanent pecuniary pay element for life is most likely to result in people finding various wheezes to get around that pay cap (I suspect in the form of undeclared gifts, not unlike the recent revelations of a certain Supreme Court justice). And it would tend to increase corruption, since now the incomes of these people are more heavily reliant on under-the-table payments from patrons who now need to be kept happy.
Under the table is good. The IRS will have something to say about it.
The engineer example doesn't follow. Its also not a pay cut.
Take for example 300k comp for your avg. eng 300k avg last 5 years avg comp. Goes to Gov. High cap is set at 300k. Gets a salary of 120k while with govt. He can leave govt, and go back to earn 300k. No problem.
He can even earn the gap between 120 and 300 also during his govt job. So he can maintain his QoL
This is really not a problem at all.
It doesnt punish success before govt.
It punishes sucess after govt. (Speaker fees anyone?)
The problem currently is that govt attracts people that want to make a career (and profit) out of it. I posit, thats exactly the people you dont want in govt.
> I posit, thats exactly the people you dont want in govt.
You want highly competent people in government. If generally they can make significantly (e.g. even 10x or more, I'm talking about upper management/CEP level position of course) in the private sector more often than not they will do that. The public sector will be left with the leftovers.
The revolving door is a problem, but your proposed solution is…let’s be charitable and say it’s something that would be proposed by an academic, rather than a realist.
They already have a hard enough time finding highly qualified, competent, motivated people to staff government agencies without adding super life-limiting conditions. We really don't need to make that problem worse. Government jobs don't pay well enough to get great employees.
Great way to further disincentivize the most talented people from choosing a career in government.
I'd any day pick somebody whose highly qualified, experienced and generally 'intelligent' but somewhat corrupt over someone who "chose" to serve the country because he couldn't get a job in the private sector or is strongly motivated by his ideological beliefs but has no clue what he's doing.
>Would you prefer that the head of the
FAA have no clue about the airline
industry or airplanes in general?
Not being an industry expert shouldn't necessarily be a disqualifier. For example we don't insist that the secretary of health should be a doctor, or that the defence ministry should be run by generals. The main qualities needed is being a good manager and able to listen to alternative views and being a good politician (yes, it's important to have good politicians). If anything being an outsider actually helps the organisation more because it avoids conflicts of interest like op and it keeps the head humble.
> or that the defence ministry should be run by generals.
This is a weird exception to the rule. It's a case where there is a strong argument to be made for sacrificing competence in exchange for minimizing the risk of a coup by bringing in an outsider without close relationships with the people below him.
There is no other department where we have to worry in quite the same way that they might just choose to start ignoring the rule of law, courts, and congress, and that if they do there is nothing that could really be done about it.
You don't have to look very far to find examples of militaries seizing power. Meanwhile I'm reasonably confident in saying that no aircraft regulation agency has ever seized power in the history of the planet.
It boils down to trust. A head needs to win the trust of his political overlords as well as, in more limited circumstances the general public. That's why he needs to be good at politics. It's no point appointing a supremely qualified individual if he's poor at communications and relationships.
> For example we don't insist that the secretary of health should be a doctor.
I'll definitely want my country's Secretary of Health to be a doctor who understands public health and its related policies, not a politician whose primarily skill is being popular and getting elected.
>The main qualities needed is being a good manager and able to listen to alternative views and being a good politician.
A Health Secretary who's not a doctor would find it difficult to judge if they're being fed the right information by their advisers.
Remember that Boeing's woes began when the company ceased to be run by the engineers and aviation experts, but instead by the arrogant MBA counters who likely pitched themselves as good managers. It turns out they mostly cared about management and printing cash, but lacked engineering expertise, leading to screwups like the 737 Max.
> I’ll definitely want my country’s Secretary of Health to be a doctor who understands public health
If by “doctor” you mean, as people usually do in general conversation, an MD (or DO), why? Public health is an entirely different discipline from medicine, with its own series of professional degrees. As is public administration. As is public policy. Why would a top-level public administrator and public policy professional in the field of public health need to have a professional degree in medicine more than one in public health, public administration, or public policy?
OTOH, your Surgeon-General or equivalent should definitely be a medical doctor.
>A Health Secretary who's not a doctor
would find it difficult to judge if they're
being fed the right information by
their advisers.
That's the point of being a good manager. Being able to forge personal relationships and to trust your underlings. Having experience in an industry isn't that helpful when dealing with policy that lies outside a heads direct field of expertise.
Being a doctor doesn't automatically provide a greater insight into what would make policies more successful. Yes he might have first hand knowledge of conditions on the ground, but the longer he's been out of doctoring the less up to date he will be and he will just be stuck with old notions
of what things were like years ago.
Your point about boeing is irrelevant, because the managment these had motives beyond engineering excellence, i.e making money.
> I'll definitely want my country's Secretary of Health to be a doctor who understands public health and its related policies, not a politician whose primarily skill is being popular and getting elected.
Why not? The head of the WHO is not a medical doctor, he's a doctor in the sense that he has a PhD.
There is probably no organization more trusted than the WHO.
Boeing is basically part of the USG at this point and has been for decades. There is almost nothing they could do that would cause significant disruption to them.
This is probably the root of the reason for the problem in the first place - Boeing can ship bad planes and they won't get stopped until they fall out of the sky multiple times - and even then nothing real will change.
It's not that he knew nothing about aviation (he ran Denver International Airport), he didn't have first-hand experience as a pilot. But here's the thing - that's okay. FAA is a mess right now, and Phil Washington has experience cleaning up messy organizations. That works perfectly find for a Federal administrative position where you're generally only on the job for a few years and move on. You can argue that it's even fine in the long term - how much software or hardware engineering experience does Tim Cook have again?
Sometimes the only way to escape regulatory capture is to hire an outsider, at least temporarily.
Unfortunately the administration did Washington dirty by not properly preparing him for his confirmation hearing.
If a guy who ran an airport is qualified to regulate air safety, then a guy who owned a parking lot is qualified to regulate auto safety.
Running an airport is running a business. An airport parks airplanes and collects rent from airlines and concessionaires. It wouldn’t teach you what you need to know to regulate airlines or air safety.
