News: 1622131331

As opposed to the nose-down-into-the-ground guidance sensors previously fitted ...

“Boeing has paid the US Federal Aviation Administration $17m…”

Rather than paying the US FAA, maybe they should donate the fine to the families of the people they have killed on their aeroplanes.

It won’t bring anyone back of course, but still.

Rather than fining, frankly IMHO their management should be investigated for fraud, both to the buyers *and* the stockholders for years of apparently inflating company worth through improper and illegal actions, PLUS involuntary manslaughter charges for the deaths incurred by their decisions.

Italy has just arrested 3 individuals and charged them with involuntary manslaughter in regards to the recent cable car disaster, which is the right choice - but notice how in America, as long as you are shielded behind Big Corp. you just get a slap on the wrist with a (modest) monetary fine, but no prison sentence, no matter how many people your corrupt decisions kill (see: Warren Anderson).

America. We have the best government that Big Business could possibly pay for.

On one hand, the FAA has a philosophy that encourages the reporting of problems by forgoing penalties in all but the most egregious of cases. Flight crew makes a mistake. Better to find a solution, pass it on to all the operators and maybe get some training than have it hidden to protect careers.

On the other hand, this is management within the manufacturer, not the flight crew. And for many positions, the FAA has little or no prior say on their being promoted to their positions (things like DERs being the exception). So demanding any level of training and/or qualification after the fact when the initial job qualiification was that they could fog a mirror might be a hard sell.

My GUESS would be that fitting uncertified sensors was a screwup, not deliberate malfeasance. Incredibly complex product. Tens of thousands of workers. Unnumerable individual parts. Misunderstandings are going to happen.

Still, though. It's Boeing's responsibility to make sure mistakes are detected and rectified before their aircraft get into the air. $17m seems to me to be entirely too low a fine unless there were very strong mitigating circumstances.

Unlikely, as they have teams of people responsible for tracking certification; you would hope that the process was automated so that parts could not be released for use without it being in place.

you would hope that the process was automated

Oh yes, I bet they had an ENORMOUS spreadsheet automating all that

Just when you think you are big enough and important enough to ignore the law, you discover your arrogance kills people and costs you money as well.

A pity nobody has been thrown into a dungeon over Boeing's disregard for legal requirements and passenger lives.

Boeing turned over USD15.2B in 2020; the USD17M fine is about a 1000th of that. Unless the people responsible for making these decisions spend some quality time at the American equivalent of Her Majesty's Pleasure then nothing will change.

Now Philip has gone to meet his maker I guess Her Majesty isn't getting much of that oft mentioned "pleasure" any more...

That's just... where's the mind bleach?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S9noIBH14k

This should help build up the mental picture :-D

Yes the Boeing trim system malfunctioned. How were most pilots able to recognize a runaway trim condition and land safely while 2 others crashed their planes? Pilots are trained to deal with trim malfunctions by disabling or counteracting them. Both options were available to those pilots. In the case of the Ethiopian 737 the throttles were left at takeoff power which severely hampered their ability to recover. It's too easy to blame Boeing or the pilots but facts are stubborn things.

The problem is the manual trim wheel on a 737 is a real pig to operate and when your aircraft is pointing severely downhill you haven't got long.

The fix was to either engage the autopilot or keep the flaps extended to at least flaps 1 as that disabled MCAS. Of course if you've never been briefed by the manufacturer such a system was fitted...

Autopilot is inhibited by a stall detection. The correct thing is to trim the airplane to zero control wheel load, which also brings the trim wheel load to zero, before pulling the plug on the trim enable. It also helps not to exceed the maximum maneuvering speed by leaving the thrust set to take-off while trying to re-engage the autopilot.

Of note is day one of "stall warning" training is to immediately disable autopilot and autothrottle; the Ethiopian pilots did the opposite. In the update to the FCOM it clearly says to never re-engage the trim enable after it has been disabled - the Ethiopians re-enabled the trim enable so they could try to re-engage the autopilot.

What this exposed is the pilots would have done the same wrong thing in the event of a shorted wire in the trim system, no software problem required at all. It's just that up until now there has apparently never been a trim problem with any Boeing 737; at least it's not been included in the analysis of the crashes.

More than that, the final report on the Lion Air crash and the preliminary report from Ethiopian say absolutely nothing about training of the pilots on trim runaway, which is especially problematic as the Lion Air crash involved a plane that had been flown to a safe landing on a scheduled flight with exactly the same defect the day before, suggesting that pilot handling was the critical difference. Ethiopian had that information and seems to have done nothing with it.

Politically, Ethiopian, a property of the Ethiopian government, was in a tough position. It took delivery of the crash aircraft just after the Lion Air crash. It took delivery of 737 Max simulators. It offers flight school training and is the prize jewel of Ethiopia. The President of Ethiopia is referred to in their press as "Nobel Peace Prize winning President" but has a civil war simmering. It's not like the government could tell everyone they had pilots who were unprepared to fly the newest, best airplane on the continent and jeopardize their standing as a supplier of training by holding the planes on the ground if the US FAA wasn't making that demand.

The Ethiopians were briefed on the trim system, including the flaps, before they took delivery and months before their crash. There was an emergency AD, there was an update to the FCOM, and there was a preliminary report from Lion Air.

Instead of referring to the autopilot and using words like “apparently”, “‘suggests”, and “seems”; why don’t you start with pages 8, 9, and 10 of the FAA crash report, and take it from there?

https://www.faa.gov/foia/electronic_reading_room/boeing_reading_room/media/737_RTS_Summary.pdf

MCAS fed by a single-point-of-failure sensor is the issue; moreover it worked behind the pilots’ backs in a manner that wasn’t properly documented in order to falsely convince regulators that a 2020s jet was essentially the same as its 50 year-old grandfather

You are right. Going downhill with takeoff thrust doesn't leave much time to solve problems.

As I mentioned in another reply, manually correcting trim on a 737 MAX turned out to be functionally impossible in real-life tests. It turns out that Boeing [had] to reduce the diameter of the manual trim wheels on the MAX in order to fit them into the more crowded center console; the smaller wheels, upon testing, proved to not grant sufficient mechanical leverage to actually work the trim manually when required, even with both pilots working together against both wheels.

https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/simulator-tests-demonstrate-737-max-manual-trim-difficulties/137651.article

https://www.wsj.com/articles/physical-strength-of-pilots-emerges-as-issue-in-returning-737-max-to-flight-11560937879

You are right that physically turning the 737 trim wheel against aerodynamic forces is near impossible. However, the trim button on the yoke would have overridden the MCAS. No need for strength, just light finger pressure on the rocker switch.

BTW ... The aerodynamic forces are reduced if the throttles aren't left at takeoff power.

The official reports seem to strongly contest your opinion.

I can't be sure, but those look like Aer Lingus planes, they don't fly Boeing...

https://www.aerlingus.com/experience-aer-lingus/our-aircraft/

Those are 737 MAX before painting, they're usually a pretty odd mixture of colours before going into the shop!

I read that the dark green in the photos is representative of unpainted planes, in my continued reading after posting.

Really? Lousy 17 million? That's what Boeing allot s to the coffee machine!

This should HURT the company. The whole concept of fining is "I will bleed so much money from You, all your bean counters will be left crying, in a fetal position".

If the fines don't do that, then it doesn't work. It will be inserted on a column, on a spreadsheet, as "cost of doing business".

The fine MUST be catastrophic.

>The fine MUST be catastrophic.

Which will simply be added to the bill for the next fighter jet.

At this point Boeing and the DoD are essentially indistinguishable, just like BAe/Thales and the MoD

Fucked up wiring, fucked up MCAS, unreliable AoA sensors, unlicensed parts, two fatal crashes and multiple groundings. Far less than that killed off the Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed Tri-Star, yet the airlines are still gagging for the Max. Am I insane or is somebody not telling us something?