They finally fired the Boeing CEO:
The official hourly Boeing employee response to the above news. Big whoop. Nothing is going to change.
I suppose that by the time you have to consider shutting the line down altogether there’s no way around that. And still it shows little of the level of urgency one would expect.
Bumped for Preliminary Report from the House Transportation Committee.
Article:
Boeing’s ‘culture of concealment’ led to fatal 737 Max crashes, report finds
From the report, relevant to this thread:
GreenWyvern’s synopsis of the recent report certainly seems to damn Boeing.
It’s challenging — and therefore fun! — to read reports on a complex topic of which I’m completely ignorant! 
The following post is a good discussion of some of the complexity …
… but it just exposes my ignorance. Do all adjustments of the horizontal stabilizer work by turning the same screw? I assume that screw can be operated either electrically or hydraulically? Why could “the MCAS run the trim much faster than the normal electric trim”? Does this mean the MCAS was “stronger” than amplified human muscles, and if so, is it reasonable to view that as a good thing?
Yes it’s the same screw. Image a scissor jack used to lift a car up. It’s virtually them same mechanical set up. And just like a scissor jack it has to be maintained and properly lubricated or it binds up.
I know it sounds bad that it could get of control in 10 seconds but 10 seconds of trim is a LOOOOOONNNNNGGGG time in a cockpit. It would be like your car’s cruise control continuing to push on the gas pedal. You’d know it pretty quickly. If for some reason the brakes didn’t disengage it then you would simply turn off the cruise control. The brakes on your car would be like the trim switch on the yoke. In the case of the MCAS system the yoke switch overrode it but after a short period of time it would start up again. If the pilot did nothing at all the plane would continue to pitch up or down in a runway trim situation and it’s not rocket science to reach down and turn off the trim before it gets out of control.
Not all cockpits are the same but in this case there is alarge wheel in view of the pilot that shows trim movement. It has hash marks on it so you can see the movement and it also makes a clacking noise.
Whether the pilots know the reason it’s spinning in an uncontrolled manner is irrelevant to the fact that it is occurring. the switch to deactivate it is front and center of the spinning wheel. It’s prominently located up front and in relation to the trim wheel so don’t have to hunt for it. you can easily see the trim setting next to the wheel. There’s a pointer that moves back and forth and shows the degree of trim. The green area of the trim indicator is a quick reference point to see where you’re at. Presumably it’s the area of normal operation for level flight.
Not all aircraft are configured this way but this system is arguable THE most ergonomic set up for feedback to the pilot.
What is strange is that there were 3 of these incidences discussed. All 3 crews reacted appropriately to counter the MCAS trim with pilot trim. Only 1 of the crews took the added measure to turn off the electric trim when it continued to repeat the problem. That crew flew it manually and it was a non-event.
In all cases the crews were faced with 2 tasks. Flying the plane and diagnosing a sporadic runaway trim. The first task takes priority over the second. If you can’t diagnose the problem and it can be overridden then that’s the appropriate action. It appears that they allowed intermittent trimming to exceed the flight envelope while trying to diagnose the problem or there is something else that occurred that hasn’t been mentioned yet.
The Boeing design did not seem to take into account the mis-match of signals going to the computer. The crew should have had enough information from the other gauges in front of them to figure it out but chaos reigns supreme when confusion sets in.
Bumped
Has anyone seen this new Netflix documentary, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing?
I just watched it, and it’s an absolutely searing indictment of Boeing.
Their stock price meant more to the executives than safety or anything else, and there was a deliberate deception and cover up of the problems.
There was one shot of an airline captain almost in tears as he said that the Ethiopian pilots got it right. They did what Boeing told told them, and it didn’t work.
They switched off the stab trim and the MCAS, but by then they were going too fast to be able to adjust the trim manually, and switching on the stab trim again would simply engage the MCAS and push the nose down more. There was no way to recover.
I will watch this. The question is, were we ever safe from bottom-line driven business culture? What needs to be done in the regulation sphere, the agencies charged with ensuring planes (and other forms of transport we all depend on) are safe, are keeping up with their madate, to ensure that companies like Boeing are addressing potential problems and not covering them up with crossed fingers?
Prosecute the executives with hundreds of counts of manslaughter, plus personal accountability for the damages.
Make every US executive in the future terrified to choose bottom line over the lives of the public.
I have been told that prior to their merger with McDonnell-Douglas, Boeing was pretty much run by engineers and had a much better safety culture. Apparently it was around that time that the bottom line driven Wall Street executives took over.
I’ll probably watch it, but some of the reviews I’ve read suggest that it doesn’t really present any new information, but just stitches together all the facts already known. As someone who’s been following this story from the beginning, there was no question in my mind that Boeing was seriously at fault, and so was the FAA for delegating so much oversight responsibility to the manufacturer that they were supposed to be regulating.
That’s the impression I’ve gotten from current and former Boeing employees. Boeing may have taken over M/D on paper, but when corporate culture is concerned it was exactly the opposite.
The term I’ve heard regarding that, as observational humor, that in a de-facto sense “MD bought Boeing with Boeing’s money”.
This.
I watched the Frontline version and it would likely be the least bias. Boeing is responsible for a poorly thought out system that wasn’t needed in the first place. The entirety of the problem was the upgrade to more powerful engines on an old platform. That platform was designed for much narrower engines so the original landing gears were too short for the bigger engines. The solution was to move the engines forward and up. That changed the flight characteristics of the plane. At this point it’s a no-harm no foul bit of engineering. However, It means the pilots had to be trained differently to fly it and that negates the benefit of a one-traiing-fits-all fleet.
Enter the MCAS system. It’s designed to simulate the feel of the older versions of the plane. That’s it’s only function. It’s completely unnecessary. The plane will fly just fine without it but requires a different training program because the nose pitches up under certain power and pitch settings.
This system was deliberately under-reported and left out of training (for failure modes). It was kept in the shadows during the certification process. the thought was that a runaway trim scenario was already covered.
I am in no way excusing Boeing for this because I’m all about safety training. But there is a logic to this. Unfortunately that logic was based on an assumption of skill levels. It was a flawed assumption.
The idea that they “got it right” is an emotional post-mortem. They didn’t get it right until it was too late. there is a point of no return on a runway trim scenario. At some point the elevator has too much force against it to correct with yoke input or manual rotation of the trim wheel.
.
I don’t think they were aware of the MCAS system which is the crux of the problem. it was the trim system they shut off. The MCAS was aggressive in it’s trim corrections so a damaged sensor aggravated the situation. Had they been properly trained they may have been faster to react to it.
Boeing most assuredly screwed this up.
Yes, we all know your racist theory that Black pilots can’t fly as well as White pilots.
But the fact is that they were well trained and capable, and no God-fearing all-American White Trump-supporting pilot could have done better in the circumstances.
The Lion Air pilot was trained in the USA , and was unaware of the existence of MCAS. Lion Air was ridiculed by Boeing when they requested 737 Max simulator training for their pilots.
The Ethiopian pilots correctly diagnosed the problem, and acted correctly according to Boeing’s instructions within the 10 second timeframe that Boeing had given (in internal documents) before catastrophic failure. There was nothing more that even a white American pilot could have done, no matter how many times you insist on that.
Sorry, my mistake in the post above – they did not cut out the stab trim within 10 sec. It took longer than that to go through the checklist and identify the problem.
From Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger:
I am also one of the few who have flown a Boeing 737 MAX Level D full motion simulator, replicating both accident flights multiple times.
I know firsthand the challenges the pilots on the doomed accident flights faced, and how wrong it is to blame them for not being able to compensate for such a pernicious and deadly design.
These emergencies did not present as a classic runaway stabilizer problem, but initially as ambiguous unreliable airspeed and altitude situations, masking MCAS.
melanin has nothing to do with this. that you think this way is appalling. Your remarks are completely inappropriate.
What you don’t seem to remember or are unaware of is a crew previous flew the same plane with the same problem of runway trim and simply turned it off and completed the flight. It’s not a visual oddity that can be ignored. The plane is nosing over out of control. The two go together.
If you look at this video of the 737 trim system you will see how visually obvious the trim wheel is. It’s indexed with white stripes to show motion and it clicks so you can here it moving. A runaway trim situation is very noticeable.
In the video you show them going through a check list for an intermittent trim issue. You see them turning off the 2 switches that are up front to stop it. It’s no accident that is where the switches are located. They are by themselves and in close proximity to the trim system.
THIS is why Boeing thought they could get away with downplaying the MCAS system. They wanted it to be invisible so as to ensure it didn’t require a separate training.
What you don’t seem to understand is that each airline has it’s own training and maintenance program. They are not all the same from one airline to the next and it has nothing to do with race, sex, nationality or any other metric you want to apply. There are all manor of failures in every airline. You can see it with the American Airlines engine swap procedures that took down a DC-10. their authorized procedure tried to save time and the result was stress on the pylon connections and they failed. Flight 191.
He’s talking about an intermittent issue and how they would work through it. The video I just linked to shows that process. And that’s fine when you’re at 30,000 feet and the nose is level. but the issue changes when it continues to trim and is not corrected at low altitude. There is no wiggle room to play with. It was ALWAYS about the the plane continuing to trim hose down. the previous crew to the Lion Air flight simply shut the electric trim off and flew it with manual trim. It was a virtual non-event. Diagnostics is fine if you need to fix something but it ceases to be relevant when there is an immediate need to end the problem.
The problem was a nose down attitude caused by inappropriate engagement of the electric trim system. The solution involved 2 switches that are isolated so the pilots don’t have to hunt for them. The training bolls down to understanding that excessive trim will be met with forces against the elevator that will exceed human strength to correct. Before this occurs flip these 2 switches.
So either the Lions Air crew that disengaged the switches in a timely manner are better than average pilots or they followed procedures for an uncontrolled trim situation before it got out of control.