Boeing 737 MAX model involved in Ethiopian Airlines crash banned from European airspace.

[Broomstick]

In other words... modern aviation accidents tend to occur at the end of a chain of events and are multifactorial.

Even so... multiple AoA sensors might have been a good thing rather than relying on just one.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Definitely- how difficult would it be to retrofit existing aircraft with additional sensors?

[Broomstick]

Impossible for me to say, I'm not an engineer. But it certainly should be possible.

[Luke Starkiller]

The aircraft already has multiple AoA sensors, for some reason Boeing didn't see the need to have both feed into MCAS. It is a software fix to add that functionality at this point.

[Beowulf]

Latest report from the flight data recorder information is that the two Ethiopian pilots DID, in fact, follow proper shut-down procedures for the MCAS. Then it turned on again. Not yet determined if they pilots did that (although it seems unlikely) or the software decided to reboot itself.

Wow.

The final report on this is going to be interesting.....

The proper shut-down procedures for MCAS physically disconnects the power to the motors that MCAS uses. If it was reactivated after they turned it off, then they must have turned the power switches back on.

[Broomstick]

The aircraft already has multiple AoA sensors, for some reason Boeing didn't see the need to have both feed into MCAS. It is a software fix to add that functionality at this point.

If that's the case then someone at Boeing is a fucking dumb-ass and should be fired and never permitted to design/build/touch an airplane again.

[Dominus Atheos]

The aircraft already has multiple AoA sensors, for some reason Boeing didn't see the need to have both feed into MCAS. It is a software fix to add that functionality at this point.

If that's the case then someone at Boeing is a fucking dumb-ass and should be fired and never permitted to design/build/touch an airplane again.

No don't worry Broomstick, they also included an "AoA disagree light" that would flash if one of the sensors registered different information than the other.

I mean, not like "included" included, more like "included as an optional addon for $20,000" which these 3rd world airlines didn't have money to purchase.

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... an-option/

[Jub]

No don't worry Broomstick, they also included an "AoA disagree light" that would flash if one of the sensors registered different information than the other.

I mean, not like "included" included, more like "included as an optional addon for $20,000" which these 3rd world airlines didn't have money to purchase.

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... an-option/

That could partially explain why the two crashes happened with aircraft operated in 3rd world countries while in the US, there were similar issues that didn't result in crashes. I'd imagine that US pilot training standards are also higher than those in other less well off nations.

Also, I know that margins are thin for airlines, but skimping on safety features just because they aren't required by regulators is pretty scummy. Boeing not including them in the base cost is also scummy but at least they offered them.

[Luke Starkiller]

The aircraft already has multiple AoA sensors, for some reason Boeing didn't see the need to have both feed into MCAS. It is a software fix to add that functionality at this point.

If that's the case then someone at Boeing is a fucking dumb-ass and should be fired and never permitted to design/build/touch an airplane again.

It's stupider than that (source): "At the press conference, Boeing defended the original design, saying that making MCAS rely on one of two sensors (in effect, creating a single point of failure) was acceptable as long as recovery “can be quickly performed by a trained pilot using established procedures.”


and (source): "Boeing’s position, endorsed by the FAA, has been that because MCAS is only supposed to trigger in extreme circumstances—high angles of attack and accelerated stalls—that additional pilot training was not necessary. The company has also said that it assumed that based on their existing training on earlier models pilots would recognize the erroneous nose-down commands and hit cutoff switches that would disable the system. "

[Broomstick]

I'd imagine that US pilot training standards are also higher than those in other less well off nations.

Actually, quite a few "third world countries" outsource their pilot training to the US - flying is less expensive in the US that most other nations, and there is (relatively speaking) a lot of air ports and flight schools. So quite a few third world pilots are, in fact, US trained. The big difference is that third world airlines often have lower requirements for both pilots and maintenance.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

The CEO of Boeing defended the company's safety record and declined to take any more than partial blame for two deadly crashes of its best-selling plane.

Chairman and CEO Dennis Muilenburg took reporters' questions for the first time since accidents involving the Boeing 737 Max in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed 346 people and plunged Boeing into its deepest crisis in years.

Mr Muilenburg said that Boeing followed the same design and certification process it has always used to build safe planes, and he denied that the Max was rushed to market.

"As in most accidents, there are a chain of events that occurred," he said, referring to the Lion Air crash on October 29 and the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Max.

"It's not correct to attribute that to any single item."

The news conference, held after Boeing's annual meeting in Chicago, came as new questions have arisen around the Max, which has been grounded worldwide since mid-March.

Link.
In essence, the "disagree signal" feature was an optional extra that hadn't been fitted on the aircraft in question, now Boeing has agreed to install it as standard and retrofit existing aircraft to incorporate this feature.

[K. A. Pital]

Where is Starglider when this happens, heh? Tireless lover of Boeing, the smart (and, turns out, manslaughter-negligent) alternative to the big bad inefficient Airbus from EuSSR?

I feel he is missing here.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

As if there was any doubt:

An Indonesian investigation has found a Lion Air flight that crashed and killed 189 people a year ago was doomed by a combination of aircraft design flaws, inadequate training and maintenance problems.

A final accident report released on Friday said Lion Air flight 610, from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta to the island of Sumatra, crashed because the pilots were never told how to quickly respond to malfunctions of the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet’s automated flight-control system.

The jet plunged into the Java Sea just 13 minutes after its take-off on October 29 2018.

Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee said the automated system, known as MCAS, relied on a single “angle of attack” sensor that provided erroneous information, automatically shoving the nose of the Max jet down.

The report also identified various missteps prior to the crash.

The aircraft, only in use for two months, had problems on its last four flights, including one the day before its fatal accident.

The Indonesian report followed another last month from US federal accident investigators who concluded that Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration underestimated how a blizzard of visual and auditory warnings would slow pilots’ ability to respond quickly enough to avert crashes.

Just five months after the Indonesian crash, the same kind of malfunction caused a Max jet to crash in Ethiopia, killing all 157 people on board.

That led to the grounding of all 737 Max jets and put Boeing under intense pressure to explain problems associated with the MCAS system.

The aircraft still has not resumed flying.

Boeing recently reported its third-quarter earnings dropped 51% to 1.17 billion dollars in part because it added 900 million dollars more in costs for the Max.

Boeing issued a statement after the release of the final report on the accident.

Boeing’s president and chief executive Dennis Muilenburg said the company is addressing the committee’s safety recommendations and working to enhance the safety of the 737 Max jet “to prevent the flight control conditions that occurred in the accident from ever happening again”.

Mr Muilenburg said the aircraft and its software are receiving “an unprecedented level of global regulatory oversight, testing and analysis. This includes hundreds of simulator sessions and test flights, regulatory analysis of thousands of documents, reviews by regulators and independent experts and extensive certification requirements.”

Lion Air crash report points to design flaws, poor pilot training and maintenance issues.