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Review of 737 Max Certification Finds Fault with Boeing and FAA

258 points by awad 7y ago

markdown 7y ago
The content of this article is paywalled.
- cm2187 7y ago
  It wasn't to me. Try clearing your cookies perhaps.
- pdpi 7y ago
  Alternative source of pretty much the same news: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/faa-failed-to-properly-review-737-max-jet-anti-stall-system-jatr-report-idUSKBN1WQ0H8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/f...
  - markdown 7y ago
    Thanks!
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  The NYT and WaPo paywalls can be trivially worked around by disabling JavaScript on those domains. Sites run remarkably faster, too.
visarga 7y ago
If an article gets published behind a paywall does it still exist?
- tyingq 7y ago
  Here: https://outline.com/UpA4Gy https://outline.com/UpA4Gy
  - kiwijamo 7y ago
    That just shows a blurb for Outline on my iPhone.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Try reloading. The first request doesn't always work. Outline had previously blocked (or been blocked by) the NY Times, but now seems to work.
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRMvca3nXCDJdjyyt8cWFtkbhPHiuztsZRMU9FYDvZADi/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRMvca3nXCDJdjyyt8cWFtkbhPHiuztsZRMU9F... https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmRMvca3nXCDJdjyyt8cWFtkbhPHiuztsZRMU9FYDvZADi/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmRMvca3nXCDJdjyyt8cWFtkbhP...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dangus 7y ago
  If nobody pays for journalism will it still exist in a form that considers the reader the customer and not the product? NYT doesn’t paywall until you’ve read multiple articles in a month. Since you already like it perhaps you should subscribe. Or clear your cookies.
  - showdead 7y ago
    Or just turn off javascript for the site, and the paywall doesn't happen.
  - bottled_poe 7y ago
    I’m not convinced that a financial incentive is best aligned with the interests of the public, but I suppose it’s the best instrument we have.
  - serf 7y ago
    >NYT doesn’t paywall until you’ve read multiple articles in a month. Since you already like it perhaps you should subscribe. Just to play a bit of devil's advocate, I don't like NYT, but as a willful participant of HN I must read the articles linked for discussion, which inevitably eats up NYT hits. The problem is that I like HN, and I feel a duty to read the article that is up for discussion if I am to participate in the discussion itself. tl;dr : paywall news hits coming from a news aggregator and discussion site is not an espescially useful metric in determining how much of your user base 'likes' your service.
bluesign 7y ago
"The task force said the certification documents that Boeing provided to the F.A.A. “were not updated during the certification program to reflect the changes” made to MCAS. It added that two critical documents that describe the potential dangers of a system like MCAS, the system safety assessment and the functional hazard assessment, “were not consistently updated."
- noir_lord 7y ago
  Don't think anybody involved in this is coming out looking good except maybe the aviation authorities who grounded Max's early. From outside the US it's shredding the soft power the FAA has world wide. Decades of earned trust burnt so quickly.
  - XJ6 7y ago
    Did anyone ground the max after the first crash or was it all in response to the second?
    - the_duke 7y ago
      Only after the second. Interesting tidbit: after the second crash, the Ethiopian authorities decided to send the black box to Europe for analysis, apparently not trusting US investigators with the data.
      - gshubert17 7y ago
        > Interesting tidbit: after the second crash, the Ethiopian authorities decided to send the black box to Europe for analysis, apparently not trusting US investigators with the data. William Langeweische [0] describes lack of airmanship as contributing to the 737 Max crashes and cites another reason for distrust: "In the case of the Ethiopian investigation, we have an airline and an investigative body that historically have not been able to isolate themselves from the country’s dysfunctional political life." "After the cockpit voice recorder was dug out of the wreckage, it was shielded from the N.T.S.B. and whisked to Paris. There, for reasons unknown, French accident investigators agreed to download its contents in private onto a drive for an immediate return to Addis Ababa, where the information remains mostly locked away today and has been withheld in full form from any outside observers." [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...
the_duke 7y ago
I wonder if publishing this just to get a headline before everyone else is a ethical move by the NYT. Couldn't the publicity conjure a lot of lobbying/political pressure to change the report?
- seren 7y ago
  On the other hand, if the final report released today is much more benign that what is reported here, wouldn't it make the suspicion of conflict of interests a lot worse ? It is forcing hand, but in the other direction.
- Bluestrike2 7y ago
  Possibly, but I don't think there was much of a risk. Boeing already had--presumably--at least a pretty decent idea about the review's contents by piecing together hints from document requests and questions or maybe even someone calling in a favor to get a draft copy. The Joint Authorities Technical Review (JATR) involved a lot of agencies and personnel from multiple countries. On the other hand, that also poses a problem for any attempt to change the report. There are a lot of iterative copies out there, with both Reuters[0] and the Times obtaining copies independently. Pressuring the JATR team to change its findings would leave an absolute ton of fingerprints, and be instantly obvious once reporters start reviewing a diff of the report. 0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/faa-failed-to-properly-review-737-max-jet-anti-stall-system-jatr-findings-idUSKBN1WQ0H8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/f...
DrScientist 7y ago
The question is: Conspiracy or incompetence? I normally favour the latter all things being equal. However in this case, I sense that the battle with Airbus was ( and the key role of the 737 Max in that ) considered strategic and failure possibly an existential threat for Boeing and hence the US aviation industry.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Thinking along those lines isn’t helpful. Big complex systems fail, sometimes there is a good target to point fingers, sometimes there isn’t. Fear of punishment is a really bad way to reduce future failures, and being satisfied having found somebody to punish makes you stop looking for systematic issues which caused and will continue to cause failures. The FAA/Boeing oversight process failed or more correctly happened much too late (this report being a part of that, post mortem)
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    > Thinking along those lines isn’t helpful. It is though. It isn't enough to have strict regulations. You need to have regulators that are willing to enforce them and companies that follow them. We have neither, thus it's time to punish the people who are responsible for not only what lead to the accidents, but the people who are responsible for the state of these agencies and companies.
    - colechristensen 7y ago
      You do though, air travel is very regulated and incredibly safe, and definitely is not by default. Focus on punishing people and one, you teach people to be better at avoiding punishment and two, you keep punishing new people for doing the same thing over and over.
      - 737maxtw 7y ago
        Well in that case... IF a company shortchanges safety to beat someone to market... I think a good look at corporate personhood is in order. If a company causes deaths due to their rush to get a product to market, charge the company, and if guilty, the board at the time of the crime must serve the sentence. Do that, and you'd see a lot less shitty behavior from corporations.
colechristensen 7y ago
The NTSB does a fantastic job and should be held up as a model of how to include post-failure analyses and actions into your process. When the report is released, it should be good reading for many in the tech and engineering world. >The Joint Authorities Technical Review, which produced the report, was led by Chris Hart, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, and included representatives from the F.A.A., NASA and aviation regulators from Europe, China, Brazil and other countries.
- dvt 7y ago
  Sometimes I read NTSB reports for fun. It's a pleasure to read such well-thought-out analyses that perfectly straddle technical minutia dissection with layman accessibility. In my opinion, it's the pinnacle of technical writing. It's also incredibly important work: these kinds of reports have made air travel magnitudes safer than it was just 50 years ago.
  - wuunderbar 7y ago
    Are there any particular reports you found most interesting? Can you provide a link?
    - metanoia 7y ago
      Any of these, these are major investigations carried out by the NTSB: https://huntlibrary.erau.edu/collections/aerospace-and-aviation-reports/ntsb/aircraft-accident-reports https://huntlibrary.erau.edu/collections/aerospace-and-aviat...
    - dvt 7y ago
      The Galloping Ghost is one of my favorites: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAB1201.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... It's a terrible accident (that happened during an air show/race), but the work that went into figuring out exactly what went wrong and where is awe-inspiring. Also a very interesting (but tragic) story from a human standpoint. Here's the video of the accident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyWUTXuXjr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyWUTXuXjr0 (No gore, but still: viewer discretion advised. Eleven people lost their lives and sixty-nine were injured.)
swasheck 7y ago
AA seems to trust the recert process. http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2019/The-Latest-Information-About-737-MAX-Operations/default.aspx http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2019/The-Latest-Informa... That would make one of us.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Given how much they have at stake (they've cancelled ~10k flights so far due to the grounding), it's hard to perceive them as neutral.
jokoon 7y ago
meanwhile, airbus got itself a cyber attack, and will get sanctioned
- jacquesm 7y ago
  This article is about the 737 Max, not about Airbus.
salawat 7y ago
Nice to see the rest of the world isn't content to let Boeing/the FAA off the hook. I'm also seeing every indication I was confident would be found back in March... Poignant points follow. >The report found that while the F.A.A. had been made aware of MCAS, “the information and discussions about MCAS were so fragmented and were delivered to disconnected groups” that it “was difficult to recognize the impacts and implications of this system.” >The task force said it believed that if F.A.A. technical staff had been fully aware of the details of MCAS, the agency would probably have required additional scrutiny of the system that might have identified its flaws. This troubles the crap out of me. I was under the understanding aviation used a radically different development process specifically designed to avoid this type of thing. However, this rings of a bad attempt at courting with some sort of Lean or Agile process methodology. I certainly hope that's not the case, but I've seen those same exact symptoms when pressure is put on not properly documenting/analyzing things beyond the bare minimum required by law. >A broad theme of the report is that the F.A.A. was too focused on the specifics of the new system and did not put sufficient effort into understanding its overall impact on the plane. In certification documents that Boeing submitted to the F.A.A., MCAS was not evaluated as “a complete and integrated function” on the new plane. >The report also said Boeing had failed to inform the F.A.A. as the design of MCAS changed during the plane’s development. A New York Times investigation revealed that the system changed dramatically during that process, making MCAS riskier and more powerful, and that key F.A.A. officials were unaware of major changes to the system. >The task force said the certification documents that Boeing provided to the F.A.A. “were not updated during the certification program to reflect the changes” made to MCAS. It added that two critical documents that describe the potential dangers of a system like MCAS, the system safety assessment and the functional hazard assessment, “were not consistently updated.” These three points are consistent with a regulation scheme where the primary regulator is no longer the primary driver of the regulation process and is dependent on the regulated to raise awareness of "there may be issues here." Active participation of an adversarial regulator is absolutely essential. >Boeing also failed to thoroughly stress-test the design of MCAS, according to the report, which found that “the design assumptions were not adequately reviewed, updated or validated.” This is straight up unwillingness to test, "Steve says this'll never happen" cultural attitude. There is always a push against testers to minimize the cost of their testing as much as possible. This reinforces for me how strong that pressure really was. The single-event upset testing they did back around June-ish, while an admittedly highly unlikely occurrence is a textbook bog standard test case in any aerospace/safety critical design. To not have it accounted for, is tantamount to heresy from this humble tester's point of view. Lord only knows what other tests were shot down because everyone else in the management chain were more interested in getting the plane out the door. >In addition, the report criticized Boeing for not adequately assessing the extra effort pilots might have to make to deal with MCAS, and it noted that Boeing had removed mention of MCAS from a draft of the pilot’s manual. As a result of that decision, some key F.A.A. officials were not fully aware of MCAS and were “not in a position to adequately assess training needs,” the report found. This and the previous statements w.r.t tests undone, and documentation/awareness raising failures constitute for me sufficient evidence of a potentially deliberate regulatory hack. I'm glad we have Attorney's General conducting a criminal probe in this case. The convenient way the failures just happen to fall into line and that everything just happened to go off without any of the people who could have stopped the process of this error chain from propagating seems to me a bit far-fetched. Accidents happen, yes. This represented too many disparate failure modes in the process to not have been the result of a deliberate optimization decision made by someone; and that decision maker needs to be held to account. >To address some of these shortcomings, the report recommends that the F.A.A. update the certification process to allow the agency to be more involved in the design process early on. >Overall, the report found fault with the process for certifying a new plane based on an old design, saying that it “lacks an adequate assessment of how proposed design changes integrate with existing systems.” These two points revolve around the grandfathered certification process in general, which has been a big motivator in terms of disincentivizing designing new planes. I'm fairly sure that there needs to be a greater threshold of proof tacked onto a grandfathered design after this point. I understand the intent to streamline by utilizing already proved design elements, but it is fairly obvious it invites in design complacency from the ground up as it were, and encourages the financial side of the house to feel emboldened in attempts to pressure engineering into skipping large portions of the work needing to be done. >It recommended that the F.A.A. confirm that the Max is in fact compliant with regulations having to do with the plane’s flight guidance system, flight manual and stall demonstration. This last point may doom the MAX depending on how accommodating regulators are willing to be. Without MCAS, the airframe fails FAR 25.173 from the pilot's point of view. Period. That is beyond contention at this point. There will need to be a judgement call with regards to the delta in control forces as to whether or not a regular pilot, through training alone can be educated to safely compensate for those longitudinal stability prescriptive behavior divergences. In the end, it is left to the certifying authorities. If it were me in that position, with the authority to make a binding proclamation on it; my answer would be no. Absolutely not. I've dug into the history of aircraft certification enough to agree with some of the older school regulators from times before electronics were a given for flight control systems. We must make flyable planes first. If we let the viability be compromised by economic factors compensated for by gadget wizardry, then we're walking down the path where pilots are not "flying" the plane. This is unacceptable in my eyes. If we are going to put as much trust in pilots to the point that we lock the occupation behind years of education and draconian requirements for physiological conditioning and educational refresh, then the pilot should be as much a design consideration in the flying of the plane as possible. Which means at a minimum, the pilot needs to be able to fly the machine with minimum automation functional by virtue of passive flight characteristics. I'm not against fly-by-wire as a means of control signal translation to provide common interface for the pilot, mind, but the computer should not have to be resorted to to mimic passive longitudinal stability. That is a sin that cannot be pardoned in aerospace design for Civil transport, and yet we've had more than enough history of attempts to do so to make it clear it's a bad idea. First the MD-11, now 737 MAX. It needs to stop.
S_A_P 7y ago
The more I think about this, the more I think that the top levels of management and anyone who was just trying to "get this plane out the door" needs to be held accountable. Fear of competition shipping before you is no excuse to cut corners especially when the consequences of doing so are so grave.
- zacharytelschow 7y ago
  Do you also feel we should hold the regulators who let it happen accountable?
  - Vraxx 7y ago
    doesn't seem nearly as malicious. Part of the problem with regulation is constant cuts and never expansion in budget despite the workload usually being expanded, it's very easy to believe that a poor job being done in this situation is just the only way they could get it to still work given the constraints. Actively cutting corners to try to beat competition is much more of a deliberate decision that bears more responsibility.
  - S_A_P 7y ago
    Sure- but I think that there are differing incentives for regulators than Boeing management. The only situation I can think of that would hold them equally accountable is if there were collusion/corruption. I think in this case it was lack of resources/laziness or overly trusting/naive to what Boeing was telling them.
- techie128 7y ago
  I respect Apple's style of releasing products. Rather than releasing half-baked crappy product (think Samsung Galaxy Fold), take your time and make a truly remarkable product. First mover advantage is worthless if your product crashes (pun intended).
  - ptmcc 7y ago
    I see you haven't upgraded to Catalina yet
cmurf 7y ago
The corporate spokesperson should be automated. Just have a robot do this job. It's boilerplate language. It requires no adaptation or creative thinking. And it'd be no more or less credible if delivered by a robot.
ilaksh 7y ago
> The review also said there were signs that Boeing employees who worked on behalf of the F.A.A. to certify the Max had at times faced conflicts of interest. LOL. 100% of the time they have a conflict of interest. But from the article it sounds like they plan to continue with the employees regulating their own company.
- salawat 7y ago
  If I recall they've restructured things a little. >https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/industry-news/boeing-management-restructures-to-improve-safety-oversight.html https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/industry-... The Engineers now report those concerns to the company Chief Engineer, who reports to Mullenberg/the CEO. There is also a committee tasked with oversight and investigation of anonymously submitted concerns.
  - ilaksh 7y ago
    So the engineers are not even allowed to report concerns directly to the FAA.
    - salawat 7y ago
      Ah. Found the Seattle Times article. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeings-board-calls-for-revamping-company-structure-in-wake-of-737-max-crashes/?amp=1 https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... Relevant pieces: >The board called for revamping oversight of a controversial program that delegates Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authority to company engineers and technical experts, allowing Boeing to help certify its own airplanes as safe and airworthy. >That recommendation calls for Boeing experts, known as “authorized representatives” under the FAA’s Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, to report to a new aviation safety organization within the company, called Product and Services Safety, rather than to business and program managers. So this would be the FAA "blessed" folks reporting to an internal board separate from sales/business/project management. So technically, yes. The FAA is not directly in the loop. >Boeing said the new internal organization would be headed by a vice president who reports directly to company leadership. It also would be tasked with overseeing Boeing’s Accident Investigations Team, safety review boards and investigations of “cases of undue pressure and anonymous product and service safety concerns raised by employees,” according to the announcement from CEO Dennis Muilenburg and board members detailing the recommendations. >The new structure “should increase awareness and reporting of, and accountability for, safety issues within the company,” Boeing said. cough That's an unfortunate acronym... Boeing Accident Investigations Team, henceforth known as B.A.I.T.
techie128 7y ago
My consumer confidence in civil aviation is shaken. I think there should be a way to opt out of flying on aircrafts that I deem unsafe. Additionally, airline and travel websites should be required, by law, to display the safety record of the airplane that will fly me. Finally, if the airlines pull a bait and switch at the airport, the airline should be required to put me on a different flight that meets my aircraft criteria.
- ip26 7y ago
  Every time you buy a ticket, it says what type of plane you'll be on. You already have this information available to you.
- WWLink 7y ago
  It would be cool if you could see the maintenance record of any plane on request, but I'm guessing that'll never happen. Ever.
outworlder 7y ago
"In a statement, the Boeing spokesman Gordon Johndroe said “safety is a core value for everyone at Boeing,”" If that were true, such a critical feature would have redundant sensors. There is no reason not to have them except costs. Even more so if one considers that other sensors ARE redundant, they even feed either the pilot or co-pilot displays, never both.
- salawat 7y ago
  The costs in this case was $1000000 per airframe sold if Class D simulator training was required, which resulted in the decision to go with the single sensor design. This was discussed in the 60 Minutes Expose. https://youtu.be/QytfYyHmxtc https://youtu.be/QytfYyHmxtc

258 points by awad 7y ago

markdown 7y ago

The content of this article is paywalled.

cm2187 7y ago
It wasn't to me. Try clearing your cookies perhaps.
pdpi 7y ago
Alternative source of pretty much the same news: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/faa-failed-to-properly-review-737-max-jet-anti-stall-system-jatr-report-idUSKBN1WQ0H8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/f...
- markdown 7y ago
  Thanks!
ceejayoz 7y ago
The NYT and WaPo paywalls can be trivially worked around by disabling JavaScript on those domains. Sites run remarkably faster, too.

visarga 7y ago

If an article gets published behind a paywall does it still exist?

tyingq 7y ago
Here: https://outline.com/UpA4Gy https://outline.com/UpA4Gy
- kiwijamo 7y ago
  That just shows a blurb for Outline on my iPhone.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Try reloading. The first request doesn't always work. Outline had previously blocked (or been blocked by) the NY Times, but now seems to work.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRMvca3nXCDJdjyyt8cWFtkbhPHiuztsZRMU9FYDvZADi/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRMvca3nXCDJdjyyt8cWFtkbhPHiuztsZRMU9F... https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmRMvca3nXCDJdjyyt8cWFtkbhPHiuztsZRMU9FYDvZADi/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmRMvca3nXCDJdjyyt8cWFtkbhP...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dangus 7y ago
If nobody pays for journalism will it still exist in a form that considers the reader the customer and not the product? NYT doesn’t paywall until you’ve read multiple articles in a month. Since you already like it perhaps you should subscribe. Or clear your cookies.
- showdead 7y ago
  Or just turn off javascript for the site, and the paywall doesn't happen.
- bottled_poe 7y ago
  I’m not convinced that a financial incentive is best aligned with the interests of the public, but I suppose it’s the best instrument we have.
- serf 7y ago
  >NYT doesn’t paywall until you’ve read multiple articles in a month. Since you already like it perhaps you should subscribe. Just to play a bit of devil's advocate, I don't like NYT, but as a willful participant of HN I must read the articles linked for discussion, which inevitably eats up NYT hits. The problem is that I like HN, and I feel a duty to read the article that is up for discussion if I am to participate in the discussion itself. tl;dr : paywall news hits coming from a news aggregator and discussion site is not an espescially useful metric in determining how much of your user base 'likes' your service.

bluesign 7y ago

"The task force said the certification documents that Boeing provided to the F.A.A. “were not updated during the certification program to reflect the changes” made to MCAS. It added that two critical documents that describe the potential dangers of a system like MCAS, the system safety assessment and the functional hazard assessment, “were not consistently updated."

noir_lord 7y ago
Don't think anybody involved in this is coming out looking good except maybe the aviation authorities who grounded Max's early. From outside the US it's shredding the soft power the FAA has world wide. Decades of earned trust burnt so quickly.
- XJ6 7y ago
  Did anyone ground the max after the first crash or was it all in response to the second?
  - the_duke 7y ago
    Only after the second. Interesting tidbit: after the second crash, the Ethiopian authorities decided to send the black box to Europe for analysis, apparently not trusting US investigators with the data.
    - gshubert17 7y ago
      > Interesting tidbit: after the second crash, the Ethiopian authorities decided to send the black box to Europe for analysis, apparently not trusting US investigators with the data. William Langeweische [0] describes lack of airmanship as contributing to the 737 Max crashes and cites another reason for distrust: "In the case of the Ethiopian investigation, we have an airline and an investigative body that historically have not been able to isolate themselves from the country’s dysfunctional political life." "After the cockpit voice recorder was dug out of the wreckage, it was shielded from the N.T.S.B. and whisked to Paris. There, for reasons unknown, French accident investigators agreed to download its contents in private onto a drive for an immediate return to Addis Ababa, where the information remains mostly locked away today and has been withheld in full form from any outside observers." [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...

the_duke 7y ago

I wonder if publishing this just to get a headline before everyone else is a ethical move by the NYT. Couldn't the publicity conjure a lot of lobbying/political pressure to change the report?

seren 7y ago
On the other hand, if the final report released today is much more benign that what is reported here, wouldn't it make the suspicion of conflict of interests a lot worse ? It is forcing hand, but in the other direction.
Bluestrike2 7y ago
Possibly, but I don't think there was much of a risk. Boeing already had--presumably--at least a pretty decent idea about the review's contents by piecing together hints from document requests and questions or maybe even someone calling in a favor to get a draft copy. The Joint Authorities Technical Review (JATR) involved a lot of agencies and personnel from multiple countries. On the other hand, that also poses a problem for any attempt to change the report. There are a lot of iterative copies out there, with both Reuters[0] and the Times obtaining copies independently. Pressuring the JATR team to change its findings would leave an absolute ton of fingerprints, and be instantly obvious once reporters start reviewing a diff of the report. 0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/faa-failed-to-properly-review-737-max-jet-anti-stall-system-jatr-findings-idUSKBN1WQ0H8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/f...

DrScientist 7y ago

The question is: Conspiracy or incompetence? I normally favour the latter all things being equal. However in this case, I sense that the battle with Airbus was ( and the key role of the 737 Max in that ) considered strategic and failure possibly an existential threat for Boeing and hence the US aviation industry.

colechristensen 7y ago
Thinking along those lines isn’t helpful. Big complex systems fail, sometimes there is a good target to point fingers, sometimes there isn’t. Fear of punishment is a really bad way to reduce future failures, and being satisfied having found somebody to punish makes you stop looking for systematic issues which caused and will continue to cause failures. The FAA/Boeing oversight process failed or more correctly happened much too late (this report being a part of that, post mortem)
- jplayer01 7y ago
  > Thinking along those lines isn’t helpful. It is though. It isn't enough to have strict regulations. You need to have regulators that are willing to enforce them and companies that follow them. We have neither, thus it's time to punish the people who are responsible for not only what lead to the accidents, but the people who are responsible for the state of these agencies and companies.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    You do though, air travel is very regulated and incredibly safe, and definitely is not by default. Focus on punishing people and one, you teach people to be better at avoiding punishment and two, you keep punishing new people for doing the same thing over and over.
    - 737maxtw 7y ago
      Well in that case... IF a company shortchanges safety to beat someone to market... I think a good look at corporate personhood is in order. If a company causes deaths due to their rush to get a product to market, charge the company, and if guilty, the board at the time of the crime must serve the sentence. Do that, and you'd see a lot less shitty behavior from corporations.

colechristensen 7y ago

The NTSB does a fantastic job and should be held up as a model of how to include post-failure analyses and actions into your process. When the report is released, it should be good reading for many in the tech and engineering world. >The Joint Authorities Technical Review, which produced the report, was led by Chris Hart, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, and included representatives from the F.A.A., NASA and aviation regulators from Europe, China, Brazil and other countries.

dvt 7y ago
Sometimes I read NTSB reports for fun. It's a pleasure to read such well-thought-out analyses that perfectly straddle technical minutia dissection with layman accessibility. In my opinion, it's the pinnacle of technical writing. It's also incredibly important work: these kinds of reports have made air travel magnitudes safer than it was just 50 years ago.
- wuunderbar 7y ago
  Are there any particular reports you found most interesting? Can you provide a link?
  - metanoia 7y ago
    Any of these, these are major investigations carried out by the NTSB: https://huntlibrary.erau.edu/collections/aerospace-and-aviation-reports/ntsb/aircraft-accident-reports https://huntlibrary.erau.edu/collections/aerospace-and-aviat...
  - dvt 7y ago
    The Galloping Ghost is one of my favorites: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAB1201.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... It's a terrible accident (that happened during an air show/race), but the work that went into figuring out exactly what went wrong and where is awe-inspiring. Also a very interesting (but tragic) story from a human standpoint. Here's the video of the accident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyWUTXuXjr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyWUTXuXjr0 (No gore, but still: viewer discretion advised. Eleven people lost their lives and sixty-nine were injured.)

swasheck 7y ago

AA seems to trust the recert process. http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2019/The-Latest-Information-About-737-MAX-Operations/default.aspx http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2019/The-Latest-Informa... That would make one of us.

organsnyder 7y ago
Given how much they have at stake (they've cancelled ~10k flights so far due to the grounding), it's hard to perceive them as neutral.

jokoon 7y ago

meanwhile, airbus got itself a cyber attack, and will get sanctioned

jacquesm 7y ago
This article is about the 737 Max, not about Airbus.

salawat 7y ago

Nice to see the rest of the world isn't content to let Boeing/the FAA off the hook. I'm also seeing every indication I was confident would be found back in March... Poignant points follow. >The report found that while the F.A.A. had been made aware of MCAS, “the information and discussions about MCAS were so fragmented and were delivered to disconnected groups” that it “was difficult to recognize the impacts and implications of this system.” >The task force said it believed that if F.A.A. technical staff had been fully aware of the details of MCAS, the agency would probably have required additional scrutiny of the system that might have identified its flaws. This troubles the crap out of me. I was under the understanding aviation used a radically different development process specifically designed to avoid this type of thing. However, this rings of a bad attempt at courting with some sort of Lean or Agile process methodology. I certainly hope that's not the case, but I've seen those same exact symptoms when pressure is put on not properly documenting/analyzing things beyond the bare minimum required by law. >A broad theme of the report is that the F.A.A. was too focused on the specifics of the new system and did not put sufficient effort into understanding its overall impact on the plane. In certification documents that Boeing submitted to the F.A.A., MCAS was not evaluated as “a complete and integrated function” on the new plane. >The report also said Boeing had failed to inform the F.A.A. as the design of MCAS changed during the plane’s development. A New York Times investigation revealed that the system changed dramatically during that process, making MCAS riskier and more powerful, and that key F.A.A. officials were unaware of major changes to the system. >The task force said the certification documents that Boeing provided to the F.A.A. “were not updated during the certification program to reflect the changes” made to MCAS. It added that two critical documents that describe the potential dangers of a system like MCAS, the system safety assessment and the functional hazard assessment, “were not consistently updated.” These three points are consistent with a regulation scheme where the primary regulator is no longer the primary driver of the regulation process and is dependent on the regulated to raise awareness of "there may be issues here." Active participation of an adversarial regulator is absolutely essential. >Boeing also failed to thoroughly stress-test the design of MCAS, according to the report, which found that “the design assumptions were not adequately reviewed, updated or validated.” This is straight up unwillingness to test, "Steve says this'll never happen" cultural attitude. There is always a push against testers to minimize the cost of their testing as much as possible. This reinforces for me how strong that pressure really was. The single-event upset testing they did back around June-ish, while an admittedly highly unlikely occurrence is a textbook bog standard test case in any aerospace/safety critical design. To not have it accounted for, is tantamount to heresy from this humble tester's point of view. Lord only knows what other tests were shot down because everyone else in the management chain were more interested in getting the plane out the door. >In addition, the report criticized Boeing for not adequately assessing the extra effort pilots might have to make to deal with MCAS, and it noted that Boeing had removed mention of MCAS from a draft of the pilot’s manual. As a result of that decision, some key F.A.A. officials were not fully aware of MCAS and were “not in a position to adequately assess training needs,” the report found. This and the previous statements w.r.t tests undone, and documentation/awareness raising failures constitute for me sufficient evidence of a potentially deliberate regulatory hack. I'm glad we have Attorney's General conducting a criminal probe in this case. The convenient way the failures just happen to fall into line and that everything just happened to go off without any of the people who could have stopped the process of this error chain from propagating seems to me a bit far-fetched. Accidents happen, yes. This represented too many disparate failure modes in the process to not have been the result of a deliberate optimization decision made by someone; and that decision maker needs to be held to account. >To address some of these shortcomings, the report recommends that the F.A.A. update the certification process to allow the agency to be more involved in the design process early on. >Overall, the report found fault with the process for certifying a new plane based on an old design, saying that it “lacks an adequate assessment of how proposed design changes integrate with existing systems.” These two points revolve around the grandfathered certification process in general, which has been a big motivator in terms of disincentivizing designing new planes. I'm fairly sure that there needs to be a greater threshold of proof tacked onto a grandfathered design after this point. I understand the intent to streamline by utilizing already proved design elements, but it is fairly obvious it invites in design complacency from the ground up as it were, and encourages the financial side of the house to feel emboldened in attempts to pressure engineering into skipping large portions of the work needing to be done. >It recommended that the F.A.A. confirm that the Max is in fact compliant with regulations having to do with the plane’s flight guidance system, flight manual and stall demonstration. This last point may doom the MAX depending on how accommodating regulators are willing to be. Without MCAS, the airframe fails FAR 25.173 from the pilot's point of view. Period. That is beyond contention at this point. There will need to be a judgement call with regards to the delta in control forces as to whether or not a regular pilot, through training alone can be educated to safely compensate for those longitudinal stability prescriptive behavior divergences. In the end, it is left to the certifying authorities. If it were me in that position, with the authority to make a binding proclamation on it; my answer would be no. Absolutely not. I've dug into the history of aircraft certification enough to agree with some of the older school regulators from times before electronics were a given for flight control systems. We must make flyable planes first. If we let the viability be compromised by economic factors compensated for by gadget wizardry, then we're walking down the path where pilots are not "flying" the plane. This is unacceptable in my eyes. If we are going to put as much trust in pilots to the point that we lock the occupation behind years of education and draconian requirements for physiological conditioning and educational refresh, then the pilot should be as much a design consideration in the flying of the plane as possible. Which means at a minimum, the pilot needs to be able to fly the machine with minimum automation functional by virtue of passive flight characteristics. I'm not against fly-by-wire as a means of control signal translation to provide common interface for the pilot, mind, but the computer should not have to be resorted to to mimic passive longitudinal stability. That is a sin that cannot be pardoned in aerospace design for Civil transport, and yet we've had more than enough history of attempts to do so to make it clear it's a bad idea. First the MD-11, now 737 MAX. It needs to stop.

S_A_P 7y ago

The more I think about this, the more I think that the top levels of management and anyone who was just trying to "get this plane out the door" needs to be held accountable. Fear of competition shipping before you is no excuse to cut corners especially when the consequences of doing so are so grave.

zacharytelschow 7y ago
Do you also feel we should hold the regulators who let it happen accountable?
- Vraxx 7y ago
  doesn't seem nearly as malicious. Part of the problem with regulation is constant cuts and never expansion in budget despite the workload usually being expanded, it's very easy to believe that a poor job being done in this situation is just the only way they could get it to still work given the constraints. Actively cutting corners to try to beat competition is much more of a deliberate decision that bears more responsibility.
- S_A_P 7y ago
  Sure- but I think that there are differing incentives for regulators than Boeing management. The only situation I can think of that would hold them equally accountable is if there were collusion/corruption. I think in this case it was lack of resources/laziness or overly trusting/naive to what Boeing was telling them.
techie128 7y ago
I respect Apple's style of releasing products. Rather than releasing half-baked crappy product (think Samsung Galaxy Fold), take your time and make a truly remarkable product. First mover advantage is worthless if your product crashes (pun intended).
- ptmcc 7y ago
  I see you haven't upgraded to Catalina yet

cmurf 7y ago

The corporate spokesperson should be automated. Just have a robot do this job. It's boilerplate language. It requires no adaptation or creative thinking. And it'd be no more or less credible if delivered by a robot.

ilaksh 7y ago

> The review also said there were signs that Boeing employees who worked on behalf of the F.A.A. to certify the Max had at times faced conflicts of interest. LOL. 100% of the time they have a conflict of interest. But from the article it sounds like they plan to continue with the employees regulating their own company.

salawat 7y ago
If I recall they've restructured things a little. >https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/industry-news/boeing-management-restructures-to-improve-safety-oversight.html https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/industry-... The Engineers now report those concerns to the company Chief Engineer, who reports to Mullenberg/the CEO. There is also a committee tasked with oversight and investigation of anonymously submitted concerns.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  So the engineers are not even allowed to report concerns directly to the FAA.
  - salawat 7y ago
    Ah. Found the Seattle Times article. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeings-board-calls-for-revamping-company-structure-in-wake-of-737-max-crashes/?amp=1 https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... Relevant pieces: >The board called for revamping oversight of a controversial program that delegates Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authority to company engineers and technical experts, allowing Boeing to help certify its own airplanes as safe and airworthy. >That recommendation calls for Boeing experts, known as “authorized representatives” under the FAA’s Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, to report to a new aviation safety organization within the company, called Product and Services Safety, rather than to business and program managers. So this would be the FAA "blessed" folks reporting to an internal board separate from sales/business/project management. So technically, yes. The FAA is not directly in the loop. >Boeing said the new internal organization would be headed by a vice president who reports directly to company leadership. It also would be tasked with overseeing Boeing’s Accident Investigations Team, safety review boards and investigations of “cases of undue pressure and anonymous product and service safety concerns raised by employees,” according to the announcement from CEO Dennis Muilenburg and board members detailing the recommendations. >The new structure “should increase awareness and reporting of, and accountability for, safety issues within the company,” Boeing said. cough That's an unfortunate acronym... Boeing Accident Investigations Team, henceforth known as B.A.I.T.

techie128 7y ago

My consumer confidence in civil aviation is shaken. I think there should be a way to opt out of flying on aircrafts that I deem unsafe. Additionally, airline and travel websites should be required, by law, to display the safety record of the airplane that will fly me. Finally, if the airlines pull a bait and switch at the airport, the airline should be required to put me on a different flight that meets my aircraft criteria.

ip26 7y ago
Every time you buy a ticket, it says what type of plane you'll be on. You already have this information available to you.
WWLink 7y ago
It would be cool if you could see the maintenance record of any plane on request, but I'm guessing that'll never happen. Ever.

outworlder 7y ago

"In a statement, the Boeing spokesman Gordon Johndroe said “safety is a core value for everyone at Boeing,”" If that were true, such a critical feature would have redundant sensors. There is no reason not to have them except costs. Even more so if one considers that other sensors ARE redundant, they even feed either the pilot or co-pilot displays, never both.

salawat 7y ago
The costs in this case was $1000000 per airframe sold if Class D simulator training was required, which resulted in the decision to go with the single sensor design. This was discussed in the 60 Minutes Expose. https://youtu.be/QytfYyHmxtc https://youtu.be/QytfYyHmxtc