To quote: ""Boeing “inappropriately coached” some FAA test pilots to reach a desired outcome during the re-certification tests, and some were even performed on simulators that weren’t equipped to re-create the same conditions as the crashes. ""
“In one particular FAA test performed on the right simulator, a whistleblower says Boeing officials were present and told the test pilots when to hit the switch that killed MCAS.
When these actions were reported by whistleblowers, they were often ignored or retaliated against, according to the report.”
It's just another expense. If US authorities have shown anything so far it's that they're very forgiving especially with companies with government contracts.
I was not planning to fly on a 737 Max for at least a few years without crashes, just because there's no point taking what still seems to be a risk when there are so many alternatives.
Reading the Verge article and the senate report findings (linked in laydn's comment) just confirms that there is still cause for caution.
I would have preferred Boeing to be required to redo the test, and be dinged by the airlines for the delay, just to make it clear that this sort of nonsense is not tolerated.
The fact is, however, that everyone going into the test was aware of what the issue was, so it could only give information about best-case response times (which is not useless information, at least if done on suitable simulators.) For a while, every Max pilot is also going to be primed about this issue.
I still don't understand why the pilots of ETH302 weren't primed about this issue. I seem to recall it being common knowledge within the aviation community that there was a likely trim system fault that downed LNI610. With that backdrop, I'd expect anyone sitting in the front seats of a 737-Max to be aware of the recent crash of the type and reasonably fresh on the systems procedures/memory items to remedy.
It's certainly true today, but I suspect it was also true on 2019-03-10 and being primed wasn't enough.
I believe the captain was primed - IIRC, did he not, in his position as a senior captain, write a memo to other pilots of the airline about the issue?
Again IIRC, and reading between the lines, I think the Boeing/FAA response to LNI610 was to remind pilots of the existing trim runaway procedure, in keeping with the story that no significant change had been made to the aircraft handling. They were still being cagey about the existence of MCAS, let alone its power and its dependence on a single sensor on any given flight, and the people writing the airworthiness directive were apparently unaware that the power of MCAS had been increased after initial flight testing. Did the directive even mention that, unlike the behavior in previous versions, using the yoke switches to countermand a system-driven trim change did not stop it, if that system was MCAS? It would seem to have worked, but then MCAS would do it again.
I believe the crew had trouble manually re-trimming on account of the load on the stabilizer jackscrew, which in turn was due to how far MCAS had driven it out of trim. I think someone (Blancolirio on Youtube?) said that training rarely, if ever, got that deep into the issue.
At least two things have changed since then: the power of MCAS has been reduced, and pilots have been fully primed about it.
The issue of the second pilot's inexperience in some countries is an issue that goes beyond the Max, as it means that the captain effectively has to deal with emergencies single-handedly, at least if they go 'out-of-book' like this.
Boeing just didn’t care about them. The risk of having to re-certify pilots was considered greater than the risk to the passenger’s lives, at least from Boeing’s perspective.
Emergency Airworthiness Directive 2018-23-51 was issued in between the two crashes, essentially at Boeing’s request. That does not strike me as “just didn’t care about them”.
The pilots were inexperienced. The right seat guy had less than 250 hours total time in any airplane. At that level of experience, he’s lucky to remember where the landing gear controls are. (He didn’t have 250 hours in the 737, but less than 250 hours in any airplane!) Even the captain had fewer hours than an average United first officer. At those low levels of experience, it’s just unrealistic to expect them to be that good with non-standard situations.
ETH302 was not operated by a US airline. There's a reason why I'll blindly get on a US major and make more checks and be more choosey about boarding airliners operated by countries with far looser training standards.
Even prior to 2013, you could be an SIC ("first officer") for a US operator with just 250 hour minimums required then by the ATP certificate. Colgan Air 3407 ended that.
Yet another American institution/system that has failed. The FAA has demonstrated that they care about Boeing profits above passenger safety, and Congress has lost the ability to actually use their branch’s prerogatives to bring the executive to heel.
I’ve noticed both Google flights and Southwest both have removed the generation number from the plane description. Now it just lists 737, without -300/700/800/Max etc
No matter if the vehicle is safe to fly or not, some people may not feel comfortable flying on one. The only justification of overturning 80+ years of airliner industry precedent in eliminating the specific vehicle type from the descriptions is to deceive.
What if both were true? And designers and engineers worked together to clean the UI from possibly wrong and noisy information in the results brief? Teamwork makes the dream-work.
You can avoid the airlines that fly the Max altogether. Unfortunately it looks like Delta is the only major US airline that does not own any. Spirit and JetBlue also do not have any. United, American, and Southwest all operate the Max. I would avoid those airlines for routes that could be serviced by the Max.
Odd that it doesn't mention the sawtooth pattern on the rear of the engine cowling, or the flat bottom shape of the engine as you look into the intake, versus the normal round shape for non-max/leap engines. Either of those is easy to spot from far away.
The CFM 56 on the 737 (NG or Classic) also has a flat bottom. E.g., [1] shows a 737-800 with an engine with a flat bottom, and [2] shows a 737-300 with an engine with a flat bottom.
I don't think that's right. Didn't several generations of 737 before MAX have that flattened engine bottom? I think I've been seeing it for considerably longer than MAX has been around.
I don't think Southwest removed anything. From what I recall, it's always been on the flight status pages for both mobile and desktop. For the flight shopping pages, it's always been on desktop, but never on mobile.
Do you have a "before" screenshot to show it used to show this information with mobile? I didn't remember seeing it on mobile before, but again I don't really use it frequently.
But you're still at the mercy of the airline. If they do an equipment swap, you're not entitled to change or cancel. You'd only have the option not to fly, forfeiting the cost of your ticket.
As someone else in this thread said, just fly Delta (domestically).
Your second line is simply not true. Both American [1] and United [2] have committed to waiving change fees if you don't want to fly on a 737 MAX. Southwest is farther away from bringing the MAX back into service, so they have less detail on their site [3], but it sounds like they'll do something similar.
Southwest doesn't have change fees, so long as you cancel at least 10 minutes before the scheduled flight time. Assuming they had all their aircraft flying, the MAX aircraft are about 5 percent of the fleet.
Southwest's service is pretty thin in some places. Highly likely you won't get a flight the same day if you cancel to avoid the 737-HCF. Then, you have to explain to Great Aunt Greta why you won't be at Thanksgiving.
The 737 Max does not provide additional capacity, it provides cheaper capacity. It has modern engines that use less fuel and wouldn't fit on the existing lineup. Right now the ability to cut costs at the cost of a few hundred passengers a year is probably the kind of news the airlines need to keep investors happy.
The investigation turned up a few non-MCAS-related things, and required that they be fixed. I don't recall specifics - something about a wire that could become damaged?
It appears they need to change which wires are bundled together to avoid an "unlikely" crossed circuit issue.
I wonder if that is done or if pilots have been warned that "in rare occasions button X can activate system Y and if that happens you must do Z". Or maybe they'll wait to see if there is another crash before highlighting it.
I'd imagine many people just don't know or don't care what plane they fly on. The number of enthusiasts who want to fly (or not fly) on a particular plane model isn't that large.
I doubt this will be a factor. Some people will care but most people will continue to be unable to tell the difference between an Airbus and a Boeing and generally not have type numbers, incident history, etc. memorized. Most of the bad press is already ancient history for the general public.
Of course, there's not a lot of flying happening currently anyway. So, good moment to do this. By the time traffic picks up again, the fixed model will have months/years incident free flights behind it.
But I agree, it will be interesting of the general public cares at all for anything else than $/flight, which is the reason why cattle class is a thing: people are happy to sacrifice comfort, dignity, etc. to save a few dollars on a flight.
Not everyone feels that the Maxes will still be significantly more risky than the alternatives. I suspect that risks from other factors dominate, and few people choose not to fly if the weather is bad. It would probably be more useful to know how long the flight crew has been on duty, or where the airline gets its maintenance done, than what airplane is being used.
The revenue management systems will add more discounted fares to underbooked flights to drive bookings. So you would likely have to watch average fare as well. Certainly there's a large portion of the public that don't care or don't know.
The problem is that carriers don't "marry" equipment to itineraries at booking. You could book something that was theoretically planned for one variant of plane, and then delays or mechanical issues happen and end up on something else.
I haven't seen a definitive count anywhere. It is certain that not all flights involving the MCAS problem led to a crash. The LionAir crash flight was preceded by a flight were the pilots first experienced the MCAS problem due to the failed pitot on the plane; they disabled the trim system and completed the fight manually. It was the subsequent flight the actually crashed.
One of my best friends is a 20,000 hour 737 captain (and check pilot) at United and spent the past several weeks getting training on the new Max. He says the primary win for the new MCAS is that there is no longer a single point of failure (in the prior version the system only took data from a single AOA source even though there were two AOA indicators already on the airplane. At least on the United versions of the plane.) The new version uses both AOA sources. Additionally, the MCAS system now has limits on the amount of “correction” to prevent extreme compensation by the system. My friend is just a single anecdote, but I trust pilots highly experienced in type more than articles written by journalists who don’t actually fly or even bureaucrats who have never spent significant time with the airplane in real world conditions. If mainline airline pilots are confident in the system, so am I. Even with the old system, no US (or major European) airline ever had problems with the old system because European and US have far higher pilot experience requirements to fly in the bigger jets. For example, at United, you need at least 3000 hours before even being allowed in the right seat of a 737. For RJs, you have to have 1500 hours before being allowed in the right seat. That is a significantly higher standard than Ethiopian which has right seaters with less than 250 total flight hours. At Ethiopian or Lion Air 5000 hours is an “experienced” captain. At United that would be a rookie first officer. I don’t know anyone at Southwest, but they have very high entry level minimums as well. The first 737 Max had flaws, no question, but statistically, why didn’t any American carriers have any crashes despite flying an order of magnitude more hours in the airplane compared to Ethiopian or Lion Air? The US and European airlines are simply far more rigorous in training and pilot requirements as well as maintenance requirements. Fixing the Max is not addressing the bigger, far more significant issue of pilot training in non-US/Euro airlines. I have almost 1000 hours and am commercial and instrument rated but I am barely qualified to fly FedEx feeder Cessna 208s or perhaps right seat in a King Air. If I were outside the US/Canada/Europe, I could be flying 737s with 150 passengers.
We still have the significant issue of “fake pilots” [1] and all sorts of chicanery that has yet to be addressed. Despite flaws inherent in any government agency, the fact is the FAA has made American skies among the very safest in the world, at least according to the data. If US and Euro airlines start crashing, then we can revisit that theory.
I get what you’re saying, and your friend is likely very trustworthy. But the fact still remains that the previous planes that crashed were flown by pilots too, and people trusted them with their lives.
I won’t trust this plane for a while, especially given the behavior i’ve seen from Boeing.
To quote: ""Boeing “inappropriately coached” some FAA test pilots to reach a desired outcome during the re-certification tests, and some were even performed on simulators that weren’t equipped to re-create the same conditions as the crashes. ""