> Boeing officials encouraged test pilots to “remember, get right on that pickle switch”
That just sounds like such a heartless, psychopathic thing to do. How could they not feel guilty, knowing that their actions could potentially lead to hundreds of people losing their lives?
It reminds me of Lance Armstrong's common refrain before he was outed as a drug cheat, "I am the most tested athlete in professional sports and I have never been found guilty of taking performance enhancing drugs!" All while he was a heavy drug user.
If one were to down again, it would immediately be assumed FAA is to blame for not catching yet another issue so them reapproving is putting their reputation on the line.
Also boeing is on thin ice. They would not weather another incident like this.
So in this case, I think it does mean extreme safety.
Boeing defense could be broken off and sold to others, in pieces, without impacting the defense of the US. There are not any "pure" military air vehicles being made by Boeing right now (T-X trainer). F15 and F18 used to be owned by someone else, they could be again.
I don’t think we’re beyond repair yet but it feels much more like gaping fissures than surfacing cracks. Our infrastructure, education and healthcare is a disaster.
The cracks are surfacing from a very, very deep root. The basis on which American society is built is dearly lacking. I cannot understand how America went through something like the Civil War without making any radical changes. Maybe the language of religion is appropriate, after all.
No, it wasn't at the time. It was catch up to the entire rest of the world and the mechanisms that led to slavery subsisting, IE the first ten articles of the US Constitution and the electoral college and the economical basis were not changed.
Meanwhile, France changed their entire constitution for much less. So did many other countries. It was basic incremental even for the time.
The rest of the world is irrelevant to whether or not it is radical within the context of America.
Your point makes zero sense given that American fought literally its most bloody war America to make abolishing slavery a reality.
Comparing us to other places is fallacious. Your example of France in particular makes no sense given that American and France were not in the same starting positions so saying that their ending positions are not the same and that that means it's not radical is illogical. France did not embed chattel slavery into its own foundations.
Simply put, America was much further behind and the progress it did make was a lot for where it started out from.
I used to be a huge Greenwald fan. I think he handled the Snowden era like a total pro.
But lately the guy just sounds crazy. His takes are all incredibly predictable: Biden bad, Trump actually good for this one weird reason, libs hypocrites, Obama is a murderer, etc. All the same, boring, tired takes.
I've puzzled over some of Glenn's recent writing too. But I think I'm starting to get the picture.
Although he's certainly left-leaning -- he likes Bernie Sanders -- what really motivates him is attacking the complacency of the center.
I don't find him boring, usually, though sometimes I fail to relate to something he's exercised about. But he definitely has a different bias than most journalists. I think this is very useful.
He’s also way too dismissive of Russia’s influence. They’re way more than a “medium regional power”. Dismissing the country with one of the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world and one of the most significant and extensive intelligence apparatuses this way raises serious questions about his impartiality.
No, he's talking about reality, and you're talking about the mirror-image of reality.
The CCP engaged in "elite capure" with Hunter Biden, while Joe Biden and his advisors stood by.
The libs are hypocrites. See above.
Obama's failure to honor our treaty with the Philippines over Scarborough Shoals resulted in the 9-dash line takeover of the South China Sea, resulting in the largest military buildup in the region since WW2. And none of our treaty allies trust us now.
It appears HN readers have no idea how far off course US politicians and elites are. When journalists from Venezuela and Colombia come to the US and say, "It's just like home." then you know there's a serious problem.
Well, the "congressional capture" problem makes that hard.
But even more, Boeing actually "should" want decent regulation because it gives them long term credibility. The problem others here have point out is that Boeing also wound-up "captured" by a finance/management regime that for twenty years has been gutting the company's long term prospects for short term profits - the ridiculous amalgam that is the 737 Max demonstrates this (it has paper manuals still, guess why?).
This case has Congress criticizing both Boeing and the FAA and of the two the FAA comes back with the crappiest response, trying to throw shade on the report. Congress is certainly not a collection of innocent choir boys, but here, given these responses, the FAA is the worst of the bad guys. Sorry if that fact frustrates, but that's how it is.
That particular detail doesn't really effect my overall statement. Congress may at times contradict regulators. My point would be that congress isn't going to change the regulatory capture situation because congress itself is part of the "revolving door" of regulators, corporate bureaucrats and congressional staff.
Openly criticizing may just mean that they want a lot of corrupt money in return.
What happened with the Hungarian and Polish veto was terrifying for me: the governing prime ministers got away with all the money stealing despite the huge criticism. The only rational explanation is that they will continue chanelling lots of money back to Germany through car companies.
I'm convinced that people would generally not place success above morals when isolated. But a corporation isn't a person and without regulation and oversight it will do this every time. Some will transition faster than others. Some will find success in morals (Apple's privacy policy) - but in the end it's a means to success over just doing the right thing.
If you grip the control column, there's a switch toggle with 3 push-to-hold positions under your thumb. Nose up, off, nose down. It directly turns on the stabilizer trim motor, overriding any other signal.
When you put in trim with this switch, there is a wheel, about 18 inches across, right next to the pilot that starts to turn. As long as you give input, the wheel turns.
It is not quiet. It is a mechanical device.
Push trim for a 1/2 second, the wheel turns a bit.
Autopilot puts in trim, the wheel turns.
MCAS puts in trim, the wheel turns.
This is a very obvious and continuous source of information to the pilot that the stab trim is changing.
Technically it (used to) reset the timer until MCAS activation to 5 seconds after it is released. So you'd have to repeatedly engage to get your stabilizer to where you want it and cut the power. They removed the ability for the electric switches to actuate while the FC was isolated from the stabilizer motor controls as part of the MAX design. With NG's you could flip one cutout switch which would isolate the computer, while leaving on the yoke switches. In MAX, flipping either one apparently cuts out both the computer and the switches.
> So you'd have to repeatedly engage to get your stabilizer to where you want it and cut the power.
No. The electric trim switches override the MCAS signal (in addition to resetting the timer). You can just hold them on until the trim is normal. This is indeed what both the LA and EA crews did repeatedly, they just did not then turn off the stab trim.
This procedure is detailed in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive sent to all MAX pilots after the first crash.
Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
The pickle switch overrides the MCAS command, meaning it can be used to restore normal trim. Then, the trim system can be turned off via the console cutoff switches.
No MCAS is not active with autopilot, because it's not needed. MCAS is there in manual flight to give the human pilot a specific "feel" to the control column forces at high angles of attack. Autopilot doesn't need that.
This is what happens when you patch-up airframe stability issues with code. We have gone to the point of no return to save one last buck and only the MBA types are to blame for this.
More disgrace:
"The FAA is also accused of retaliating against whistleblowers, possibly obstructing the Office of the Inspector General’s investigation into the crashes"
I feel bad for the engineers and scientists that work at Boeing. I've worked with some of the brightest people in the aviation industry and I am sure they're internally facepalming at the actions of a few bad individuals.
...inside a system that very intentionally put N people in competition to cheat, thereby ensuring that cheating would happen, and in a manner that could plausibly be blamed on the person who happened to do the cheating rather than the system that knowingly ensured that the cheating would happen.
Have any Boeing engineers publicly left due to this? I remember tons of people leaving well known tech firms just for having Homeland Security / ICE as customers. I couldn't continue to work for a company that exhibited such deprave indifference to human safety.
> A continuation after the initial error is hard to explain other than by deliberate personal moral failure.
No, just denial: Look, it's a safe plane. We know it's a safe plane. Sure, it's not exactly like the earlier model, but those rules are needlessly strict. This plane is better, we know it's better. And pilots aren't idiots. They'll figure it out.
As we all learned, there's no single feature you can point to in the MAX that was a bad engineering decision in isolation. So if you don't want to see bad engineering, you don't have to.
I encourage everyone to never, ever fly a 737 MAX under any circumstances. Boeing has not been sufficiently punished (as in their future behavior will change). If people refuse to fly the 737 MAX, hopefully they go bankrupt and the existing management can be replaced.
Why would I refuse to fly in a perfectly safe airplane?
I'm not punishing Boeing, I'm punishing Southwest and American Airlines at that point - and probably myself too, as I live immensely close to DFW (I just heard an airplane land).
This "perfectly safe airplane" has been grounded for almost two years after two crashes killed 346 people. The root cause of these crashes is a mind-bogglingly irresponsible bit of design that can be linked directly to decision makers at Boeing deciding to prioritize corporate profits over human lives.
I don't have a hard time believing that we won't see any more MCAS-related trim runaway accidents after the scrutiny of the past two years, but what evidence do we have that the dysfunctional leadership behind this particular flaw is the exception rather than the rule?
When the Max was flying, it was still extremely unlikely that you'd die on one, but dying is a pretty big deal (to me, at least). For the foreseeable future, I'll be choosing alternatives to Boeing when they're available.
The problems we have is an organization tasked with transporting millions over the timespan of a year at speeds approaching Mach 1 ended up in tge position whereby financial growth outpaced it's primary reason for existence. To manufacture and support the distribution, operation, and uptake of safe passenger airplanes.
Until you get rid of that modus operandi from the upper management, you'll not see a significant culture change.
> You could have made similar arguments after every air crash that was caused by a design flaw.
I'm not really convinced this is true. For instance, in the classic case of de Havilland Comets brought down by square windows, I think it was an honest mistake that happened because pressurized cabins were new-ish tech. They worked to understand the problem and fixed the design. Nobody was trying to cut corners AFAIK (no pun intended).
I guess we could make another category where an iffy design is made to fail by corner-cutting on the part of the airlines, as in the MD-80 pitch trim jackscrew issues.
The MAX is a case of the actual aircraft manufacturer explicitly compromising the design of a safety feature because they knew it would help them sell more planes (due to avoiding training/recertification requirements). IIRC, the investigation revealed a consistent pattern of negligence and outright malfeasance on Boeing's part to this effect. I wouldn't say this kind of thing has never happened before, but off the top of my head I have to assume it's pretty rare.
> The MAX is a case of the actual aircraft manufacturer explicitly compromising the design of a safety feature because they knew it would help them sell more planes
The error was not in the concept of the MAX nor the concept of the MCAS. The problem was twofold:
1. MCAS should have used inputs from both AOA sensors, rather than just one. MCAS had too much authority over the travel, and it should have deactivated itself if the pilots repeatedly countermanded it.
2. The pilots were not trained properly in emergency procedures with the stab trim. Boeing put out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive after the first crash with explicit instructions on how to deal with it, but the EA pilots did not follow those instructions.
> The error was not in the concept of the MAX nor the concept of the MCAS.
The reason MCAS was introduced in the first place was because the platform that Boeing chose to extend (to avoid recertification requirements) was unstable as a result of the introduction of CFM's new LEAP engines.
They insisted on correcting an emergent hardware defect with software in order to reuse an old platform to compete against a surprise threat from Airbus rather than design an inherently safe, novel platform.
The LA crew never turned off the trim after trimming to normal. The EA made a different mistake - turning off the trim when it was too far from neutral.
Neither the Seattle Times nor The Guardian are reliable sources on aviation. Aviation Week is a lot better. The Times author apparently did not read the EAD he cited. I'll quote from it the relevant bit:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
Note that the flight data recorder showed that both crews had moved the trim back to normal with the trim switches, and neither thought to then turn it off.
> No, it was not unstable. It just behaved differently enough that some additional pilot training would have been needed without MCAS.
Quoting Boeing with my own emphasis:
> MCAS, or Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, is a flight control law implemented on the newer models of the 737 to provide consistent airplane handling characteristics at elevated Angles of Attack in certain unusual flight conditions only.
Which, to be clear, means it's intended to stabilize the plane ("consistent") in circumstances where the physical design of the plane would render the plane unstable (inconsistent) in certain operating environments.
> The EA made a different mistake - turning off the trim when it was too far from neutral.
It seems you're generally suggesting that the instructions provided by Boeing were sufficient for the plane to remain airworthy without further mitigation; this was contradicted by the ECAA and others. Is this what you're suggesting?
Stability has a different meaning when applied to aerodynamic characteristics than they way you mean it (i.e. consistency). Stability in aerodynamics means if you push something off-center, it will return to center. Unstable means it will go further off-center.
Unstable is like balancing a pencil on its point. The slightest perturbation will cause it to fall over.
> Do you have a specific citation for this?
Aviation Week 19-Sep-2019
" The MCAS activated twice, and the crew countered with electric trim. Unlike the JT610 pilots, the ET302 crew
flipped the stabilizer trim motor cut out switches, which stopped the MCAS from moving the stabilizer. But after
reporting not being able to manually trim the aircraft, they flipped the cut out switches on again. The faulty AOA
data was still feeding the left-side FCC, activating the MCAS again and putting the aircraft into a dive."
(The airplane was already in a dive when they turned off the stab trim.)
> It seems you're generally suggesting that the instructions provided by Boeing were sufficient for the plane to remain airworthy without further mitigation; this was contradicted by the ECAA and others. Is this what you're suggesting?
Yes. In fact, on the flight immediately preceding the LA crash, the same MCAS problem was experienced, and the crew returned the trim to normal with the electric trim switches and then cut off the stab trim. They landed safely without further incident.
But I have to disagree with your counter around airworthiness. Even after adjusted training, a plane crashed, and ultimately two planes crashed from the same issue regardless of the fact that the latter team was trained on the matter. At that point, the correction should be in hardware and controls, not in crew expectations.
I suspect we fundamentally disagree at this point, but I'm glad the rest of the world has concluded on the in the direction of correcting the plane rather than increasing human expectations.
>The pilots were not trained properly in emergency procedures with the stab trim. Boeing put out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive after the first crash with explicit instructions on how to deal with it, but the EA pilots did not follow those instructions.
If the planes are still crashing after the "problem" was fixed, then that wasn't the problem.
(Specifically - the "emergency procedures" in question are "what to do if your plane randomly decides to fly you into the ground". The only way to save your skin is to take a specific emergency action within a time window of a few seconds. This is not a reasonable design.)
Neither crash was within a few seconds. The EA crew fought it for 5 minutes, the LA crew 25 minutes.
-- Aviation Week, Sep 1, 2019
As for being an emergency, yes it was, and dealing with emergencies is most of pilot training. Dealing with runaway trim (which is how this failure exhibited) is part of that training. The Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterated what the procedure was for runaway trim.
Runaway trim is so serious that it is a "memory item" meaning the pilots know how to deal with it without needing to consult a checklist.
While runaway trim should never happen, it is reasonable to expect the pilots to deal with it properly.
If you don't take mitigating actions within a time window of a few seconds, you are locked into an unrecoverable situation - however long you might fight it afterwards.
Specifically - the trim wheel is too stiff to correct if the stabilizer is loaded, so if the MCAS is allowed to wind the stabilizer to its extreme position, the pilot must - after disabling the MCAS (and therefore also the electric trim) - unload the control column to correct the situation, which will send the aircraft straight into the ground. Hence the undulations seen in the flight paths of the crashed aircraft.
The MCAS was designed under the assumption that pilots would respond to unexpected activation within 3 seconds:
The Seattle Times hasn't a good track record of accurately reporting the facts on aviation stories. Their aviation reporter does not read or comprehend his cited sources.
The EA crew dealt with the situation for 5 minutes, the LA crew for 25 minutes. Both crews used the electric trim switches to restore normal trim, multiple times. The trim switches are on the control column right under one's thumb. All the reports saying it was impossible or unreasonable or there wasn't enough time to do this are false, as both crews did it.
I strongly recommend a more reputable source, like Aviation Week 19-Sep-2019. Also an original source,
There's also an often-cited article going around that's written by a Cessna pilot. His opinions on how jet aircraft should be designed have little to do with reality - high altitude high speed jets are very, very different from a low and slow Cessna. (The Air Force thought it would be easy to transition their experienced propeller pilots to jets. A lot of crashes and dead pilots changed their minds.)
Thing is boeing made incredibly bad decisions that should have been avoided given current rules and procedures.
That was only done due to concern for profits and not due to any engineering flaws. (MCAS existing in the first place, it didnt have reliable sensors, pilots were not instructed on it)
How would you react if a loved one died due to boeing or any company greed?
Cynic in me is hoping this is only allowed to fly in the US until it proves safe and boeing execs and employees are forced on every damn flight.
Southwest and AA would be incentivized to pursue recourse if it turns out their faith was placed in a product as a result of deception or fraud... but this is even more true if consumers punish the airlines for falling victim to such deception in the first place.
It's worth noting that the fact that this is an international incident speaks to how safe flying is in general.
Two fatal crashes in the hundreds of thousands of flights for Boeing 737 Max alone is still a ridiculously small number for something as potentially dangerous as powered flight.
The irony is that the level of safety we enjoy today is the result of processes and procedures written in the blood of thousands of accident victims from more cavalier times. Boeing's actions go against everything the aviation industry has learned about safety, which why their misconduct is so egregious.
Humans are surprisingly bad at understanding that some solutions have to be maintained to keep the problem(s) they addressed from coming back.
I get it in the case of organizational rot but sometimes it can be staring people in the face and they still don't get it, e.g. in the case of vaccines—who needs them, when nobody gets those diseases anymore?
> vaccines--who needs them, when nobody gets those diseases anymore?
If a disease becomes rare enough that the probability of getting it if you're not vaccinated, is less than the probability of harmful side effects from the vaccine, then it is rational for an individual not to get vaccinated.
The proper response to this at a societal level is to further reduce the risk of harmful side effects from vaccines (for example, by using refrigeration more aggressively as an alternative to preservatives which have a small, but nonzero, risk of harm), not to brand people who don't want to get vaccinated against rare diseases as crackpots.
This is actually an illustration of the more general problem we have as a society: we have forgotten that there are objective criteria we can use to evaluate things, and that as conditions change, we need to re-evaluate based on those criteria instead of just assuming that things that worked in the past will continue to work. In the case of the 737 MAX, Boeing failed to realize that relaxing engineering standards was a bad idea because the company had been taken over by a different corporate culture, and a regulatory regime that had grown to trust airframe manufacturers based on past information that showed they were worthy of that trust failed to see the change in incentives that made them less worthy of trust than before.
> If a disease becomes rare enough that the probability of getting it if you're not vaccinated, is less than the probability of harmful side effects from the vaccine, then it is rational for an individual not to get vaccinated.
>The proper response to this at a societal level is to further reduce the risk of harmful side effects from vaccines (for example, by using refrigeration more aggressively as an alternative to preservatives which have a small, but nonzero, risk of harm), not to brand people who don't want to get vaccinated against rare diseases as crackpots.
Why is it so hard for people to look at the system instead of just themselves? This inability or unwillingness also seems particularly widespread in the US.
First instincts are survival of yourself and your family. The corollary is that no system or bureaucracy will ever care about you more than you care about yourself. These things drive our motivations.
Care in the emotional sense, perhaps not. But it's worth noting that bureaucracies can and do take better care of people than they do themselves. There's a reason we have mandatory seatbelt wearing, restrictions on tobacco and alcohol sales, and child protection services.
> it's worth noting that bureaucracies can and do take better care of people than they do themselves
I strongly, strongly disagree with this statement.
First, even in cases like mandatory seat belt wearing, where the benefit is obvious, the rule would be better enforced by private entities like insurance companies. Get in an accident and not wearing your seat belt? Your insurance company won't pay your medical bills. People are more likely to respond to such incentives than to nanny state laws, however well intentioned. Also, once you've passed one nanny state law, it gets easier to pass more; even proponents of such laws admit that most traffic laws, for example, are just revenue sources for local police departments and have no meaningful effect on safety.
Second, restrictions on tobacco and alcohol sales are mostly aimed at not allowing sales to people, like minors, who are presumed not to have developed the full capacity to evaluate the consequences of their actions. They don't stop adults from dying from lung cancer due to smoking or becoming alcoholics. People who really want to poison themselves with drugs or alcohol will find a way to do it: just look at the rising popularity of vaping. The law cannot stop people from doing it and shouldn't try; the US should have learned that lesson with Prohibition.
Third, citing child protective services as an example of bureaucracy taking better care of people than people do themselves is laughable. Anyone who has had personal experience with CPS can tell you horror stories, and what statistics are available do not paint a pretty picture. Based on my own and my wife's experiences (my wife was a social worker for 20 years), I would say that roughly 80 to 90 percent of children who are taken from their families by CPS are worse off than they would have been had they been left with their families, however imperfect those families were. I suspect most people who have had personal experience with CPS would give a similar figure.
> Why is it so hard for people to look at the system instead of just themselves?
Vaccines were never intended to benefit the system at the expense of individuals. Every vaccine was a net benefit to individuals when it was first made available. That is why there was never any serious objection to widespread adoption of vaccines.
There are cases where people might have to sacrifice their own welfare for the good of society, such as military service in combat. But I don't think vaccination is, or should be, one of those cases. If a person believes their risk of harm from a vaccine outweighs the benefit, they should have the right to choose not to take it.
There are also cases where people might have to forgo short-term benefits for the long-term good of society. I think far too little attention is paid to such cases, to the detriment of all of us. But vaccines are not such a case; no one is forgoing a short term benefit by taking a vaccine. Individuals gain a benefit from a vaccine, the question is whether that benefit for the individual is worth taking the small risk of harm from the vaccine.
What does seem like a case where people should forgo a (perceived) short-term benefit for the long-term good of society, is trying to justify things like forcing people to get vaccinated on the basis of flawed arguments and distortions of the facts. And of course Boeing with the 737 MAX is another such case.
One year ago I did a back of the enveloppe calculation and found that the Boeing 737 Max was two orders of magnitude less safe than other modern airliners. A320 and 737NG have fatal crashes to the tune of one per 10 million flights, while the 737 Max was crashing at about one per hundred thousand flights.
Flying nowadays is indeed amazingly safe. Boeing really dropped the ball on that one.
Absolutely and if there was no warning and only through the crashes was it discovered what the malfunction is that would be appropriate.
But if engineers are saying that something is wrong before the first customer deliveries, and if the company is choosing to take this route purely out of financial benefit to themselves, its criminal.
Gut feel tells me that's not true. Surely something should be regarded as dangerous only if it does typically incur a high probability of death? Not just if it seems as if it aught to do so somehow (because it would have been very dangerous in 1918?). Crab fishing is dangerous because fisherpeople are often swept overboard not because the big waves look scary.
That just sounds like such a heartless, psychopathic thing to do. How could they not feel guilty, knowing that their actions could potentially lead to hundreds of people losing their lives?