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"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” m

"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...
      - sanj 7y ago
        That whole article read as some weird neo-colonial piece, blaming other countries training processes rather than a badly designed aircraft.
        HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
        It is very rare that any accident has a single cause.
        briandear 7y ago
        Should those training processes not be blamed? After all, it wasn’t Southwest Airlines that crashed and the sketchy founder of Lion Air certainly didn’t have safety as a core value.
        HarryHirsch 7y ago
        The weird remarks about Ethiopia were quite out of place, Ethiopian Airlines has an excellent safety record. It's also telling that Ted Cruz insisted very quickly after the second crash that the MAX be grounded, it would be have very bad for his career if one had crashed in Dallas and he had declared them safe.
        WalterBright 7y ago
        Training is an issue, because the pilots had at their fingertips the means to recover from the malfunction (turning off the stab trim via the cutoff switches).
        ncallaway 7y ago
        This doesn't strike me as correct. The plane was traveling fast enough that the strain on the air control surfaces meant pilots weren't able to manually trim the plane back into alignment. The only way to overcome those forces was to use the electronic motors to adjust the alignment of the rear stabilizer trim. However, those motors also are disabled with the stab trim cutoff switches. After the fact simulations confirmed that such forces could well have prevented manual control. See prior discussion and news articles here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19573893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19573893 and https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeings-emergency-procedure-for-737-max-may-have-failed-on-ethiopian-flight/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
  - mantap 7y ago
    Much is said about the FAA's relationship with Boeing, but the failure of other worldwide authorities to question the FAA's line after the first crash was also a tragedy, because if they had been a little bit less deferential and more independent then perhaps the Ethiopian crash wouldn't have happened. There were pilots unions writing letters of concern about MCAS after the first crash, it wasn't taken seriously by any regulator and the result was deadly.
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      > There were pilots unions writing letters of concern about MCAS after the first crash If true, very serious. Can you provide some references for this as I've not heard of it?
      - iforgotpassword 7y ago
        https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/13/us/pilot-complaints-boeing-737-max/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/13/us/pilot-complaints-boein... Back in march there was a link to a raw CSV dump of that database here on HN, but I can't find it again...
        salawat 7y ago
        Ask and he shall receive... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19373216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19373216 Other news article about it: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/it-pitched-nose-down-us-pilots-previously-reported-boeing-737-max-8-aircraft-problems https://www.sbs.com.au/news/it-pitched-nose-down-us-pilots-p...
  - matt-attack 7y ago
    No and I'm actually shocked it took two crashes for all of this to come to light. You'd think that over 100 dead passengers would have sent shock waves through the industry. I would have guessed every 737 MAX pilot in the world would have been scouring resources on learning about the crash and how it might impact them in the future.
    - ralph84 7y ago
      The first crash was by an airline that regularly crashed 737s, so everyone assumed it was the airline's fault not the plane.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

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...
    - sanj 7y ago
      That whole article read as some weird neo-colonial piece, blaming other countries training processes rather than a badly designed aircraft.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
        It is very rare that any accident has a single cause.
      - briandear 7y ago
        Should those training processes not be blamed? After all, it wasn’t Southwest Airlines that crashed and the sketchy founder of Lion Air certainly didn’t have safety as a core value.
        HarryHirsch 7y ago
        The weird remarks about Ethiopia were quite out of place, Ethiopian Airlines has an excellent safety record. It's also telling that Ted Cruz insisted very quickly after the second crash that the MAX be grounded, it would be have very bad for his career if one had crashed in Dallas and he had declared them safe.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        Training is an issue, because the pilots had at their fingertips the means to recover from the malfunction (turning off the stab trim via the cutoff switches).
        ncallaway 7y ago
        This doesn't strike me as correct. The plane was traveling fast enough that the strain on the air control surfaces meant pilots weren't able to manually trim the plane back into alignment. The only way to overcome those forces was to use the electronic motors to adjust the alignment of the rear stabilizer trim. However, those motors also are disabled with the stab trim cutoff switches. After the fact simulations confirmed that such forces could well have prevented manual control. See prior discussion and news articles here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19573893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19573893 and https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeings-emergency-procedure-for-737-max-may-have-failed-on-ethiopian-flight/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
- mantap 7y ago
  Much is said about the FAA's relationship with Boeing, but the failure of other worldwide authorities to question the FAA's line after the first crash was also a tragedy, because if they had been a little bit less deferential and more independent then perhaps the Ethiopian crash wouldn't have happened. There were pilots unions writing letters of concern about MCAS after the first crash, it wasn't taken seriously by any regulator and the result was deadly.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    > There were pilots unions writing letters of concern about MCAS after the first crash If true, very serious. Can you provide some references for this as I've not heard of it?
    - iforgotpassword 7y ago
      https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/13/us/pilot-complaints-boeing-737-max/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/13/us/pilot-complaints-boein... Back in march there was a link to a raw CSV dump of that database here on HN, but I can't find it again...
      - salawat 7y ago
        Ask and he shall receive... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19373216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19373216 Other news article about it: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/it-pitched-nose-down-us-pilots-previously-reported-boeing-737-max-8-aircraft-problems https://www.sbs.com.au/news/it-pitched-nose-down-us-pilots-p...
- matt-attack 7y ago
  No and I'm actually shocked it took two crashes for all of this to come to light. You'd think that over 100 dead passengers would have sent shock waves through the industry. I would have guessed every 737 MAX pilot in the world would have been scouring resources on learning about the crash and how it might impact them in the future.
  - ralph84 7y ago
    The first crash was by an airline that regularly crashed 737s, so everyone assumed it was the airline's fault not the plane.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]