FAA Chief '100% Confident' of 737 MAX Safety As Flights To Resume (yahoo.com) 170
Hmmmmmm shares a report: U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Steve Dickson is "100% confident" in the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX but says the airplane maker has more to do as it works to improve its safety culture. Dickson on Wednesday signed an order to allow the best-selling plane to resume flights after it was grounded worldwide in March 2019 following two crashes that killed 346 people and led to Boeing's biggest crisis in decades. The order will end the longest grounding in commercial aviation history and paves the way for Boeing to resume U.S. deliveries and commercial flights by the end of the year. "We've done everything humanly possible to make sure" these types of crashes do not happen again," FAA Administrator Dickson told Reuters in a 30-minute telephone interview, adding the design changes "have eliminated what caused these particular accidents." The FAA is requiring new training to deal with a key safety system called MCAS that is faulted for the two fatal crashes as well as significant new safeguards and other software changes. "I feel 100% confident," said Dickson, a former airline and military pilot, who took over as FAA administration in August 2019 and took the controls for a 737 MAX test flight in September. In a video message released on Wednesday, he said that the 20-month review was "long and grueling, but we said from the start that we would take the time necessary to get this right." Dickson said he emphasized to Boeing the importance of safety. "I understand they have a business to run but they don't have anything if they don't have a safe product," Dickson said. Dickson suggested Boeing has more to do to improve safety.
Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a dynamically unstable airframe made "stable" in software. That might be fine for an F-16 or B-2, but not for my family.
I'm crazy excited to fly on SpaceX's Starship when that begins E2E transportation services. But I won't fly on a 737 with huge oversized pylons bolted on to hang huge oversized engines out too far forward and then a computer trimming the elevator to compensate. I'd rather fly the 1.2% less efficient 737 Classic, and you can gladly add 1.2% more to the cost of my ticket for letting me enjoy a stable, well-developed and decades-proven airframe design.
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Different engine nacelles/placement thereof appear to have introduced aerodynamic changes that cause center of lift to move forward at high angles of attack, presumably leading to pitch control forces that don't meet certification requirements.
Not CoG - irrelevant, easily fixed by adjusting loading charts. Engine is not that much heavier (in the context of a 100,000 lb plane, < 1000 lbs extra engine weight, not too far from center mass)
Not center of thrust either, nor engine power - thrust centerline hasn't moved much, and the engines aren't hugely more powerful. Thrust pitch up is still managed by the Speed Trim System, and is a basic characteristic of aircraft with low-mounted jets. For all their faults, I suspect the engineering team at least got this part right (though I can understand doubts)
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't understand why the instability misconception gets repeated over and over. MCAS was there to make the 737 MAX flight characteristics the same as previous 737 version, to avoid the need to retrain pilots. MCAS is not remotely fast enough to stabilize the aircraft. Unstable aircraft must be fly-by-wire, which the 737 is not.
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MCAS was there to make the 737 MAX flight characteristics the same as previous 737 version, to avoid the need to retrain pilots.
This is not correct. MCAS is there (not was, it is still there) because the regular flight control surfaces are insufficient to keep the plane from stalling in situations with high engine power and low speed. The only thing that has sufficient authority is the trim, because that moves the entire horizontal stabilizer.
They could have redesigned the plane with sufficiently large control surfaces, or they could have placed the engines more sensibly, but either of those would mean that the aircraft would have t
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MCAS is not an anti-stall/stall prevention device. Based on all available information, the name Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System seems to fit very well - meant to make the plane handle the same as the older models. Nee
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Re:Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
So increasing the angle of attack beyond a certain point increases the moment of lift in such as way as to increase the angle of attack more, which presumably increases the moment of lift, etc.? That sounds unstable to me, at least at high enough angles of attack for the MCAS to kick in and try to undo the effect.
That said, though, the actual deadly problem was that the MCAS kicked in when it shouldn't have.
Re: Meh... (Score:2)
The sad fact... (Score:2)
Like me, I guess you do not know the true degree of instability either -- Boeing's engineering simply isn't releasing that data to the general public. So you just have to "Trust the Techsperts!" (TM) -- Boeing and the FCC. Or trust other experts like MIT's director of air transportation (who says below this tendency is not acceptable, but seems to change his opinion in a later interview, and think MCAS is acceptable for transport category aircraft after all)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p... [forbes.com]
As I understand it, at high angles of attack the Nacelles -- which are the tube shaped structures around the fans -- create aerodynamic lift. Because the engines are further forward, the lift tends to push the nose up -- causing the angle of attack to increase further. This reinforces itself and results in a pitch-up tendency which if not corrected can result in a stall. This is called an unstable or divergent condition. It should be noted that many high performance aircraft have this tendency but it is not acceptable in transport category aircraft [emphasis mine] where there is a requirement that the aircraft is stable and returns to a steady condition if no forces are applied to the controls.
If "not even remo
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Incorrect. The Boeing 737 airframe's flight characteristics and detailed aerodynamic properties are not public. I'll grant you that calling the design dynamically unstable may be (founded) speculation, but so would be calling it dynamically stable. In reality, the airframe is probably neutral when staying within design flight parameters.
And that is the problem. Gusts, drafts, wind sheer, all could bring an airplane closer and closer to the limits of the design parameters. And airplanes already have the tightest safety margins of any vehicle.
I'm interested in keeping flight the safest form of transportation ever devised. And that means not flying on aircraft that are "almost" dynamically unstable. I trust their FEM to design wings that won't fail because materials' properties are well known, and have a rigorous procurement and manufacturing path. But I'm far less willing to be lenient in aerodynamic properties.
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I wonder how you get to the airport or use the escalator at the airport.
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But that's just a slander that was posted on the interwebs by short sellers
[citation needed]
The fact that they left the MCAS in place is not a good sign. The MCAS was an ugly patch to ameliorate the flight characteristics of the 737 and if it is still there, it means that the 737 MAX is still an ugly duckling and not a swan.
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Unfair to the crews. The scenario they encountered was specifically not trained for, even though it should have been, because the failure mode is all but guaranteed during operation over a long enough time period (a single sensor failure would cause the problem). The reason it wasn't trained for, was, of course, that there would be issues with the type rating.
If I understand correctly, if diagnosed quickly enough (as runaway trim, which is not what's actually going on, but close enough) then the aircraft
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Your choice - For me and my family it's not a problem.
This is going to be the most scrutinized aircraft in the sky. All of them are nearly new, still under warranty with the airlines keeping them well maintained. Pilots will all be re-trained and certified recently and any minor issue will be given prompt attention.
This will literally be the safest aircraft in the sky from my perspective.
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Hopefully it will also have less frightened, stupid people on it.
Re: Meh... (Score:3, Informative)
(The former has stupid people that have a smaller amount of fright. The latter has smaller number of frightened, stupid people.) :-)
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Only from your perspective. But in reality it is nowhere near being the safest aircraft since it is built using 1960s safety standards. It has neither envelope protection nor EICAS. The 737 is the only airliner still in manufacturing that doesn't have either. Even the last two Soviet jets had it.
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So, you feel EICAS is required for safety? Envelope protection?
Up to you, but how many crashes of 737 would have been prevented by these things? This aircraft has been flying for decades, surely you can show how these things are necessary for safe operating. I think that looking back on an aircraft's operational history is important, and that making such a radical change to the 737's operation by adding in an EICAS system could be argued as being risky too. So just throwing automation and safety syste
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Even the FAA feels that EICAS is required for safety, but has allowed Boeing to grandfather the 737 design.
https://www.seattletimes.com/b... [seattletimes.com]
In a fly by wire aircraft the MCAS wouldn't have been needed in the first place because it would fly the same way
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And the ECAS system in the 320 has *caused* accidents too.. but we digress.
Look, the thing I'm trying to say is that apparently there are valid reasons why the FAA did this. Often the FAA has to weigh the financial costs against the risks and they are supposed to be the party not motivated by profit who referees this whole process. IF you don't like the FAA's choice, blame them, but there ARE considerations here beyond just the cost. Just having equipment on the aircraft does nothing for safety unless y
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All of them are nearly new, still under warranty with the airlines keeping them well maintained.
Except for, you know the hundreds that have been sitting on the ground for the past 2 years. Have they been getting regular checks? Sure, probably. But that takes a while, and with covid working hours/staffing has been cut everywhere, so how thorough have the latest checks been? Modern aircraft are complicated, and there's a lot of things that can be affected when in aircraft is grounded this long.
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That is actually an excellent point
https://www.flightglobal.com/s... [flightglobal.com]
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Which is why the FAA is going to require a test flight before an individual aircraft can return to commercial service. They all have to be brought in to specifications and up to date, then they have to have at least one test flight before they can take passengers.
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Your choice - For me and my family it's not a problem.
This is going to be the most scrutinized aircraft in the sky. All of them are nearly new, still under warranty with the airlines keeping them well maintained. Pilots will all be re-trained and certified recently and any minor issue will be given prompt attention.
This will literally be the safest aircraft in the sky from my perspective.
Literally the most scrutinized, but not the safest.
During development, if Boeing realized the plane was fatally flawed they could easily scrap it and start over.
Now they have something like $10 billion in unsold inventory... that's a lot of pressure to get something certified as "safe".
Couple that with an FAA administrator who was approved in a party-line vote (lots of Trump nominations did get bi-partisan support) because he allegedly retaliated against a safety whistle-blower [politico.com] and there's reasons to doubt
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Trick is to just wait till the EASA certifies it safe for return to flight. There is no mechanism for Boeing to buy them off.
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The reasons for the 737 Max still exist and their are a number of less than obvious financial reasons for the airlines to take delivery.
Now the COVID thing is going to be a damper on the industry for awhile, but I don't think that's going to be all that long lasting. However, that accounts for the short term slump, well that and the grounding, which has prevented Boeing from delivering already completed aircraft. This will slowly change as the world returns to flying and the reasons the airlines where o
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I never really know what to make of comments like this. I don't know you personally; I assume most Slashdot users don't know you personally; you're communicating to a diffuse audience here, rather than people who care about you individually. (That's not to say I don't care about you, just that it's the sort of care I extend to strangers.)
And there's no argument in your comment, no appeal to evidence or emotion or anything, just speaking up with your opinion -- the opinion of a stranger, which doesn't invali
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what effect are you hoping that comment will have
Frist Post! You can't get first post while putting time and thought into a rational comment.
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Maybe. But there's similar comments further down, so I don't think that's the only potential motivation.
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First post, got upvoted to the highest level, and set the tone of the conversation. I agree it may not have been very informative or thought-provoking but I thought the desired effect was obvious, and it was apparently effective as well.
Re: Meh... (Score:2)
Set the tone of the conversation? Nah. That was implicit in the topic; Slashdotters love to show how cynical they are. Any story where authority X says Y is Z, the tone of the response is how Y is not actually Z at all. I suppose one could just put it down to karma whoring, but that seems like an awfully quick deductive leap.
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I'm still not setting foot in one of those things.
I never ordinarily paid much attention to the type of aircraft I booked a flight on.
From now on I will.
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Dump the software that makes it "fly" like a 737 certify it as the new plane it is and let the pilots re-certify on the new plane. That they were ever able to claim it was a 737 with some small adjustments just so the pilots didn't have to certify on the new design is criminal and all C levels should go to jail for manslaughter.
Re:Meh...Nope, nope, nope. (Score:2)
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Good (Score:2)
He can be the first passenger on the first flight.
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Trump appointed an actual pilot to run the FAA? Weird. Thankfully we'll get back to running things with conventional lawyer-bureaucrats in a couple months, like the one [wikipedia.org] that ran things for most of the time the 737 MAX was being pencil whipped.
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Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.
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Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.
Actually it's his second FAA administrator appointment and the first was a pilot as well.
But as I said, the good news is we'll get back to normal and replace all these Trumpster fascists with well connected lawyers next year.
When's the Perp Walk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every member of the flying public ought to refuse to fly a 737max until the decision makers at Boeing and the FAA are charged criminally.
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Every member of the flying public ought to refuse to fly a 737max. The public should fly on dynamicly-stable airframes. Leave the dynamically-unstable airframes to the fighter jets and stealth bombers.
Especially when the consideration for making this airframe dynamically unstable was not maneuverability, nor reducing flight control surfaces for stealth, but rather to save money. No, I'll not let you fly my family on a dynamically unstable airframe to save you money.
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So the public should not fly on the majority of planes that have carried consumer air traffic?
There's nothing unsafe about the 737MAX's airframe and it would happily have been certified without MCAS, albeit as a different plane requiring pilot type certification.
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There's nothing unsafe about the 737MAX's airframe and it would happily have been certified without MCAS, albeit as a different plane requiring pilot type certification.
If that had been the case, Boeing would simply have removed the MCAS and saved themselves at least a year of grounding.
MCAS is a necessity, the elevator is insufficient to keep the 737 MAX from pitching up and stalling. Only the trim can do that, and you cannot require pilots to use the trim instead of the elevator in normal flight.
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If the only reason they were charged was that a mob eventually demanded it, wouldn't the correct legal outcome be to dismiss the charges with prejudice and fine the prosecutors?
Cite the laws they violated. (Score:2)
Else there's no grounds for legal action.
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Lying to a federal regulator (FAA) [nytimes.com]
Violating federal production safety rules and safeguards [wsj.com]
Re:When's the Perp Walk? (Score:5, Informative)
For what crime?
Serious question.
Look, I know it's popular to bash "big bad Boeing" for malfeasance, but if you truthfully review how this all happened there wasn't anything criminal here. Like all disasters of this kind, it was caused by a series of mistakes, misunderstanding and a process that failed to catch them. Nobody at Boeing or the FAA said anything close to "screw safety, save a buck and just do it!" regardless of all the media coverage and Boeing bashers suggesting otherwise. Everybody followed the process, nobody knew there was an issue or imagined that there would be a chance of two planeloads of people dying.
The MCAS was added late in the certification process. Test flights had turned up an issue and the solution was to pull the MCAS off the shelf (the MAX wasn't the first air frame to use this) and put it on the MAX. Remember this was LATE in the test flying, used an off the shelf solution and was only supposed to address a narrow part of the flight envelope where the control forces where not within the prescribed regulations. The process allowed this, and the "fix" wasn't seen for the danger it turned out to be and the risk management process didn't catch these failure modes. It also caused the information the pilots needed to deal with the malfunction from reaching them. The pilots manuals and training had already been written and approved when flight testing was in progress. I'm sure it would have been in future documentation, but it was absent from the initial versions, and that was a problem.
All of these things are understandable and don't require negligence or malfeasance on Boeing or the FAA's part. This wasn't criminal, it was a series of mistakes, mistakes the process should have caught, but missed. Who's responsible for this? So how are these people now criminally liable for this? I don't think anybody is.
To me, the issue has ALWAYS been the process, not the people of Boeing or the FAA. Nearly 400 people died because the process failed and that let a series of events happen that crashed two aircraft. This wasn't criminal... This was really just a "normal accident" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] That was unfortunate but an inevitable part of fielding such complex systems and infrastructure.
Re:When's the Perp Walk? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This. I do not understand how there are so many Boeing apologists on Slashdot. Boeing designed a faulty system, realized it was faulty, and hid it with false statements to the FAA.
Because Boeing used to be good (Score:2)
EASA has not approved it (Score:5, Insightful)
The European Aviation Safety Agency has not approved the 737 MAX for passenger flights.
None of these agencies are trusting the FAA to do this testing and are insisting on their own testing (which is new - the FAA was trusted, but not any more):
EASA (Europe)
TC (Canada)
DGCA (India)
CASA (Australia)
CAAC (China)
EASA, in particular, is insisting on more engineering work from Boeing.
I will not be getting into a 737 MAX until at least EASA has approved it, and preferably other regulators as well.
The FAA are not trusted on this (by me and most of the world) - it's lost competence (due not least to lack of staff and budget) and has suffered regulatory capture by Boeing. The FAA may be trustable in future, but they will have to earn the trust again.
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I will not be getting into a 737 MAX
You will not be getting into a MAX, but a MAX might get into you
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The European Aviation Safety Agency has not approved the 737 MAX for passenger flights.
None of these agencies are trusting the FAA to do this testing
It is as if you started watching the news this year, and haven't yet figured out exactly what "countries" are yet, and if a regulatory approval in one country normally is just "trusted" by other countries, or if they actually have little (formally) to do with each other.
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A regulatory approval in one country has, in the past, been pretty much "just trusted" by other countries. That changed with the MAX.
https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/a... [faa.gov]
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Technically true - But misleading.
The EASA has signaled that it WILL approve the 737 MAX for flight without the additional software work to provide the additional "virtual AOA" sensor to allow additional cross checks when the actual AOA sensors disagree. What they have said is that they will allow the 737 MAX to fly in the FAA approved configuration with the understanding that at some point in the future, when the new software has been fully vetted and certified, the new software will be added to the mini
The grain of salt lies heavy (Score:4)
Remember, that's the same guys who certified that abortion of a redundancy-less DAL-A add-on to the 737 as flightworthy. Forgive me if my eyes remained slightly glazed after this announcement.
Re:The grain of salt lies heavy (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the problem was that the original design limited the authority of the MCAS trim commands. And analysis showed that there wouldn't be problems with it. But Boeing went on to tweak the design parameters without warning the FAA that major changes had been made. So the FAA just said, "Looks good to us." Not realizing that the production implementation differed significantly.
I worked at Boeing years ago. And one of my assignments was to do an FMEA [wikipedia.org] on a system. Management ordered that the worksheets be hand written. No word processors. Supposedly so we could claim that they were not produced by cutting and pasting. But in actuality so that it was practically impossible for the certification agencies to do a 'diff' and find changes. I don't know how the MAX certification was done. But I suspect that the Boeing practice of shipping truckloads of documentation made independent reviews of their work difficult.
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Remember, that's the same guys who certified that abortion of a redundancy-less DAL-A add-on to the 737 as flightworthy. Forgive me if my eyes remained slightly glazed after this announcement.
With hindsight this was a bad call, but if you look at the situation objectively I think you would see that what happened is understandable. This was what is known as a "normal accident" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Such accidents are difficult to prevent, and as systems get more and more complex the difficulty increases geometrically. What happened is the process failed. It wasn't that any individual or group of engineers didn't do their jobs, it wasn't that the FAA was asleep a the wheel and missed
First flight (Score:2)
They really should put all the FAA committee members, and the Boing execs and engineers on the first flight!
'100% Confident' of 737 MAX Safety! (Score:2)
The first time you gave them authorization to fly that deathtrap you said the exact same thing.
So, no thanks.
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The first time you gave them authorization to fly that deathtrap you said the exact same thing.
So, no thanks.
To be fair, Dickson wasn't the FAA head when the 737MAX was approved.
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"To be fair, Dickson wasn't the FAA head when the 737MAX was approved."
Sure but his predecessor didn't tell us they were only 70% sure.
What do you expect him to say (Score:3, Informative)
737-MAX (Score:2)
I Used To Like 737s (Score:3)
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This [wikipedia.org] is what I was talking about when I mentioned Canadair. The Airbus A220 is a narrow body regional aircraft that can seat up to 150 people, roughly. It started life a the Bombardier C Series project. So, Airbus can compete.
Boeing used unscrupulous means (including outright lies) to keep Bombardier out of the market with their C Series planes in the USA. Bombardier actually had significant orders there severely delayed because of the bullshit Boeing pulled, including with Delta Airlines, to the point the
100% safe ... (Score:2)
... but there's more work to do?
I'm walking to New Orleans.
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Why? They canceled Mardi Gras this year.
Confident until the next one goes down (Score:2)
Yeah, you can drive a car with one tire missing, you have the other four, but not as desirable to drive as a car with 4 tires.
I'm 100% confident I will be avoiding them. (Score:2)
Not Gonna Do It (Score:5, Insightful)
With that said, I will never step foot on a 737 Max as long as it has MCAS. The entire point of that system is to translate the way a pilot is used to flying a completely different aircraft to the actual flight characteristics of the 737 Max. As a software developer with a lot of experience, user input translation rarely ever goes well and is not something that should ever be put in safety-critical systems. I believe it's quite plausible that Boeing fixed all of the known issues with MCAS but it's quite possible there are other unknown bugs as well as potential regressions added during the MCAS overhaul. And Boeing's cavalier attitude of "just disable MCAS if it misbehaves" really rubs me the wrong way. As I understand the situations that led to the two previous crashes, MCAS sent the plane hurtling towards the ground shortly after takeoff. The pilots were then forced to attempt to disable MCAS and perform emergency maneuvers on a plane that now has flight characteristics unlike anything they've been trained to handle with little time to do so before crashing into the ground. The entire concept of having pilots fly a plane that they aren't trained to handle and software will interpret and adjust their inputs is inherently unsafe by design in my opinion.
The only way I would be fine with flying on a 737 Max is if it had no trace of MCAS and it was flown by pilots that have trained extensively with its particular flight characteristics. But everyone is free to gamble their own lives and the lives of their families if that's their prerogative.
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Exactly. Either the plane is safe for its pilots without MCAS, in which case it is not needed at all, or it is unsafe, in which case the option of "turning off MCAS" should not be on the table.
And there is no distinction of "safe, but only after pilot training". If the pilots need to operate it without MCAS even only in case of emergency, surely they would have to be trained at flying without MCAS. So, is it safe or not. Take the stupid system off completely or don't certify the plane, certifying it "safe"
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The 737 MAX is not safe without MCAS, which is why the system is still there with only a band-aid "fix".
It can be flown without MCAS in an emergency, of course.
Don't care (Score:2)
I'm all in... (Score:2)
No you can't be 100% (Score:2)
Nah, You Test Them For Me (Score:2)
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Thanks to Trump America is now a shit-hole country.
I think I'll pass on the 737 Max until a European regulator approves it.
What's the rush? Thanks to Trump's mishandling of Covid-19 getting on an airplane is about as safe as base jumping.
It doesn't matter a whole lot. Most aviation regulation (that I've seen, not going to say I know everything) doesn't check that your airplane wont crash, it just verifies you have a method of verifying and validating that your airplane does what your requirements say it should. When the company (Boeing) identifies MCAS as not being safety critical due to being limited in the range it can control the flight surfaces (I'm not sure I agree with that assessment), then the software is deemed not able to preven
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Title 14 of US Regulations (A.K.A. Federal Aviation Regulations, or FARs) covers the required design and performance characteristics for transport category aircraft in Part 25 (https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?node=14:1.0.1.3.11). This section covers things like take-off and landing performance, stall characteristics, single-engine operation, and much more. It goes on to cover structures, design, construction, equipment and much more.
Unfortunately the regulations are very slow to adapt and change with
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Title 14 of US Regulations (A.K.A. Federal Aviation Regulations, or FARs) covers the required design and performance characteristics for transport category aircraft in Part 25 (https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?node=14:1.0.1.3.11). This section covers things like take-off and landing performance, stall characteristics, single-engine operation, and much more. It goes on to cover structures, design, construction, equipment and much more.
Unfortunately the regulations are very slow to adapt and change with the times, so they don't necessarily cover things like modern flight control systems to nearly the same level of detail that they cover more established practices.
It is said that the FARs are written in blood, in other words, accidents and tragedies drive the regulations much more than foresight and planning. I would expect to see some level of new regulation to come out of this, though it does seem like those should be established prior to recertifying the aircraft.
Part of why I didn't mention FARs, the last time I worked with them, they were extremely valuable, but not really that applicable to the latest technologies. So the regulatory system (IIRC) was more based on the developers having the right processes in place, rather than meeting specific criteria with the newest technology.
Re:That makes one of us... (Score:4, Informative)
Canada's Minister of Transport, Marc Garneau, who was a navy captain and 3 time astronaut on the space shuttles, isn't convinced of the Boeing 737 MAX's safety yet and is keeping the planes grounded until additional requirements can be met.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politic... [ctvnews.ca]
hmm
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Thanks to Trump America is now a shit-hole country.
Are you referring to the same 737-MAX that started development in 2011 and had its first flight in Jan 2016?
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WHOOSH!!!
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Flying is indeed a dangerous activity - But so are a lot of things we do.
The problem with flying is two fold. First, aviation has very little margin and is sometimes very unforgiving of lapses in good judgment. You need to be careful, follow the rules, keep yourself on the safe side of the margins, but that's hard to do, time after time, flight after flight. Second, when something goes wrong, they can go very wrong very fast and large numbers of people all die at once. Where these accidents are exceedin
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Were they not 100% confident before when they certified it? Because if they weren't, and certified it anyway, I can't trust them.
Were they 100% confident before when they certified it? Because if they were, I can't trust that they got it right this time either.
Trust is a delicate thing which breaks easily. If you want people to trust you, you need to work at it, not make risky gambles with it.
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You realize any aircraft with low mounted engines will have a pitch up moment when you apply power, right? Now take a look at the airliners in the world.
There are a few with high mounted engines. Of course, high mounted engines will provide a pitch *down* moment.
So looking at the airliners in the world... I hope you enjoy road trips.
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High-mounted jet engines are amusing, and as a counter to OP's claim, I cite the An-74, whose engines are... v
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Just to make sure, my reply to the OP was sarcastic. We all fly on aircraft that have various non-ideal characteristics all the time. That doesn't make them "dynamically unstable" or dangerous.
As you note, the pitch up effect of thrust in airliners with low-mounted engines is managed automatically, at least in the modern ones. Although in a high speed stall situation (the same as made famous by the MAX) most low-engine airliner pilots, including all models of 737, are trained to manually reduce thrust as pa
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Not at all. I just realized I forgot to include the sarcasm tags, which can be dangerous around here.
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Stephen Dickson is a presidential appointee. Now, normally being a presidential appointee wouldn't make a difference but this is not a normal administration. There have been too many instances of appointees doing and saying things that we'll say, counter reality. As a result, people should be skeptical of his claims.
Except Dickson comes from an airline that owns no 737MAX and as of earlier this year flew aircraft from 4 different manufacturers (Airbus, Bombardier, McDonnel-Douglas, and Boeing), and the FAA has essentially been apolitical this entire administration. So there is no immediate indicator of bias.