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It’s scary to think how complicit the FAA was in granting Boeing’s wish that this 30 year newer plane with substantially larger engines only required 2-3 hours

• av_throwaway_19 8y ago
  It isn't just the FAA and Boeing. Where I work many of us have a "common type rating" between the A330 and A350 (-900 and -1000). While I commend Airbus for making them similar they are in no way common enough to justify the minuscule training course. Flying the A350 you get lots of brilliant features like brake-to-vacate, auto wing leveling during a crosswind landing (when you de-crab), differential flap setting in the cruise for CP control and better fuel efficiency. And so on. However, coming back to the 330 after lots of 350 flying it's very easy to forget just what you have and don't have. Both have very different cockpit layouts. Even something simple like cockpit lighting is totally different. They have significantly different limitations, speeds and procedures for dealing with abnormal situations. Additionally, the A350 still has a fair share of teething problems. The list of Temporary Abnormal Behaviors is quite long and hasn't shortened much in the last couple of years. Throw some fatigue into the mix and it's not much fun. My company's error rates have increased on the "common fleet" by almost triple. Yet our regulator thinks it's all good.
  • poof131 8y ago
    > My company's error rates have increased on the "common fleet" by almost triple. That is Terrifying. It seems like the FAA has optimized for allowing the Manufacturers and Airlines to streamline changes and operations while slowly letting safety deteriorate. Perhaps these accidents will force what seems like a needed change in type ratings.
    • sib 8y ago
      From GP's comment, it appears that s/he is not referring to the FAA. "It isn't just the FAA and Boeing."
      • keko039ndnfm 8y ago
        He/she is saying “It’s the FAA and $plane_manufacturers.”
      • OldSchoolJohnny 8y ago
        "they" is a historic and accepted gender neutral pronoun.
      • av_throwaway_20 8y ago
        It isn't the FAA. It's a country in Asia to give you a hint. If you google for the fleets mentioned you can probably work it out!
  • raverbashing 8y ago
    > However, coming back to the 330 after lots of 350 flying it's very easy to forget just what you have and don't have. Yeah that seems to be an important issue. You easily "get used" to a feature and I wouldn't be surprised if a pilot used to the 350 got in a bad situation on the 330. Are those error rates taken from FOQA? And is the company raising the issue?
    • av_throwaway_20 8y ago
      They come from a regular internal audit and QAR data. They can set triggers on certain items. For example, certain configurations (or lack of) at certain altitudes can trigger a data point for the safety department.
  • improbable22 8y ago
    I'm curious to hear more. I understand that common type means that much less training is required to fly the new plane for the first time. But once you are trained for several kinds of aircraft, does the airline treat them differently? For instance, will they happily schedule you to fly anything you are type-certified for, tomorrow? Or do they keep you on one type for a block of time, perhaps with a simulator day to remember before switching?
    • av_throwaway_20 8y ago
      They treat them as the same type with only a few conditions regarding recency. For example, out of three simulator checks you need to do one in each type (330/330/350 or 350/350/330 for example). Also need to do at least one takeoff and landing in each (in addition to the three takeoffs and landings in 90 days), in 60 days. Otherwise they treat them the same. I routinely get rostered to fly one type on a short sector, get in, change aircraft to the other type and fly it somewhere else. Literally only an hour to adapt to the other type.
  • xkcd-sucks 8y ago
    Temporary Abnormal Behaviors, now there is a nice piece of jargon
    • av_throwaway_20 8y ago
      My favorite: Controlled Sunlight Blocking System (CSBS) aka: window shades
  • carlmr 8y ago
    >Both have very different cockpit layouts. Even something simple like cockpit lighting is totally different. They have significantly different limitations, speeds and procedures for dealing with abnormal situations. This sounds like a UX design problem. Things that are the same should be the same, things that are different should be different. The most dangerous thing from a UX perspective is always the slightly different, especially in sequences. Everybody knows if their way to work and way to the store is partially the same it's easy to take the wrong fork when you want to go to the store. So if the things are slightly different, it often makes sense to make the sequence different from the beginning. Otherwise people often make these common path mistakes.
• ryannevius 8y ago
  American lives have been claimed in these incidents as well.
  • rbanffy 8y ago
    I'm unsure about what you are implying here.
    • keiferski 8y ago
      Near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — At least eight of the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines crash were confirmed Tuesday to have been Americans, including Melvin and Bennett Riffel from Redding, California. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ethiopian-airlines-crash-victims-americans-boeing-737-max-flight-et302/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ethiopian-airlines-crash-victim...
      • rbanffy 8y ago
        How is that relevant in FAA's decision not to ground the planes? Do you think they'd ground the planes if the majority of the victims were American?
        • beart 8y ago
          If both of these crashes happened on US flights, they would most definitely have grounded these planes, but I don't really think that's a surprising or significant observation.
        • seszett 8y ago
          The original post in this thread said: > all the FAA can be thankful of is the dead are foreigners so it’s unlikely they’ll be held properly accountable and that's what the answers are responding too, saying it's wrong and there are American victims as well.
• prostoalex 8y ago
  While you may end up being entirely correct, it is too early to start finger-pointing before the investigations are finished. Neither Lion nor Ethiopian had stellar safety records, e.g. * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/world/asia/lion-air-crash-safety-failures.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/world/asia/lion-air-crash... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_accidents_a... The training hours should also be looked in the context of the total hours flown on that specific model - a pilot who just sat through the short training session would have a different perspective than a pilot who sat through the same training session but has also flown the plane for hundreds of hours. It's also not a brand new airplane - it's a modification of 737, so the training is transitional. It's not like Boeing took a freshly minted Cessna 152 pilot, gave them a 2-hour seminar, and type-rated them for the 737 Max.
  • kalleboo 8y ago
    > It's not like Boeing took a freshly minted Cessna 152 pilot, gave them a 2-hour seminar, and type-rated them for the 737 Max This ASRS report almost makes it sound like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19374386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19374386
    • sokoloff 8y ago
      The author of that ASRS report almost surely holds an ATP, a 737 type rating, and has passed the -MAX differences training. That's quite a stretch from a 4-cylinder single engine, 110mph prop plane transition.
  • tibbydudeza 8y ago
    Nonsense. Ethiopian airlines is rated Category 1 by the FAA and can thus fly direct to the US and they are a member of the star alliance. Just because they are the largest carrier in Africa does not imply dubious safety or maintenance.
    • briandear 8y ago
• briandear 8y ago
  Does the FAA set the rules for Indonesia? Did the FAA tell Lion Air not to repair the broken airspeed indicator that crashed plane experienced during the flight before the crash? Also, did the FAA tell the pilot to turn off the anti-stall system in the Lion Air plane? Because that’s what happened, a pilot turned off that system due to the unrepaired airspeed indicator. In the US, no airline would have allowed that plane to fly, but Indonesia’s airlines are operated like they’re flying bush planes and not technologically sophisticated airliners. People are dead, a lot of them, because of a history of third-world style seat-of-the-pants duct-tape piloting and maintenance. Look at Lion Air’s safety record and compare it with Southwest Airlines. Flying similar planes, but vastly different outcomes. The FAA must be doing something right. Lion Air wasn’t a failure of the airplane, but a failure of the airline. This isn’t the first time Lion Air crashed a 737 either. Considering Southwest Airlines has flown over 40 years with only a single air mishap fatality, it’s pretty fair to say that Lion Air is horrific by comparison, considering their fatal crash record over just the past 10 years. If we want to start complaining about the FAA, considering more people have died in Indonesian and Malaysian air crashes in the past 10 years than have died in American crashes despite the US flying several orders of magnitude more flights. Lion Air wasn’t even allowed into the E.U. until 2016 because of safety. The FAA and NTSB are among the best agencies in the world when it comes to aviation safety and the data supports it. If anyone should be held accountable for the Ethiopian Air crash, the airline itself should be at the top of the list: the copilot only had 200 total hours! That FAA you are complaining about requires 1500 hours of experience to sit in the right seat. But apparently in Ethiopia, a 200 hour student pilot is good enough to fly right seat when over a hundred lives are at risk.
  • cmurf 8y ago
    >did the FAA tell the pilot to turn off the anti-stall system in the Lion Air plane? Because that’s what happened, a pilot turned off that system due to the unrepaired airspeed indicator Do you have a source for this? This sounds anachronistic, or you've got parts confused with some other flight. If by anti-stall you mean MCAS, if it was disabled then what caused the erratic pitching, unstable vertical speed, and the eventual nose down and dive? MCAS is already implicated in that flight the question is whether it was disabled at all prior to the accident, which would have been the normal procedure. Yet you're suggesting that disabling it was wrong, on what basis? Also MCAS takes angle of attack, altitude and flap setting as inputs. It doesn't take airspeed as an input. Further there are three separate airspeed sensors, each with their own airspeed indicators, as separate systems. A inoperable indicator is a deviation that will be evaluated by accident investigators, and it might be a cause for confusion and delay in making decisions if the pilots didn't know about the problem in advance. But if they knew about it advance as you're suggesting, they'd just placard the bad one, make a log entry and fly on. There's no evidence flight experience is related to the crash. It's really common in most of the rest of the world, including Europe, and used to be common in the U.S., to pair very experienced pilots with less experienced pilots - which happens to have been the case with Ethiopian Airlines flight. The whole bush plane, third world, and "apparently in Ethiopia" commentary sounds ignorant bordering on racist to me.
• erokar 8y ago
  Interesting Reddit comment below. If true, this means the AoA probe does not need to fail for the MCAS to trigger, but be caused by transient bursts of high AoA. If this is true -- a big if of course -- and Boeing knew about it as early as August 2018, it's pretty damning. https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/b08h03/737_max_mega_thread/eidycdx/ https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/b08h03/737_max_mega...