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That sounds interesting, but I still blame Boeing, liability is about blame and Boeing has been bending over backwards to blame pilots for its own technical fai

That sounds interesting, but I still blame Boeing, liability is about blame and Boeing has been bending over backwards to blame pilots for its own technical failures.

_-___________-_ 7y ago
This kind of absolutism really doesn't help. Air travel has made absolutely enormous strides in safety mostly because of rational investigations that don't focus on one party but try to understand all the factors that lead to an incident. The irrational, emotional response to the MAX incidents is eroding that. Boeing and the FAA definitely have significant issues in culture and oversight. They should be resolved so that Boeing can continue to build safe aircraft and the FAA can effectively oversee the US aviation industry. At the same time, not every pilot in every flight deck is the same. Some are more capable than others. Some have been trained better than others. Some come from a culture where the "power gradient" between captain and first officer is hard to overcome in order to provide effective CRM. Some come from a culture where they're afraid they'll lose their job if they accurately report incidents. All of these things, and more, are factors in air safety. Focusing on one factor or one company really doesn't help.
- DrScientist 7y ago
  Hmm. Agree willingness to own up and discuss errors is critical to long term airline safety. However you only seem to be applying this to pilots and not to Boeing! Isn't the issue with the MAX, and potentially now earlier episodes, that for perhaps perfectly understandable commercial reasons, Boeing and even the FAA haven't been upfront and honest about engineering issues and how to improve stuff - ie they have been guilty of playing the blame game - on to pilots - who are often conveniently dead.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    I think I've been quite clear that I see significant issues within Boeing and the FAA and that they should be resolved. If you ignore the shrill media and look at the actual investigative work going on, I don't think anybody is seriously suggesting that the pilots were the sole cause of the MAX issues, and certainly nobody is "blaming" them. At the same time, I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines. There are always multiple factors in play. My personal view on it is: the MAX was a flawed design due to the expectations it placed on pilot training, competency and in particular, instinct in a surprising situation. That's it. The aircraft was still capable of flying if the pilots reacted correctly to the failure, and the reaction was one that they were in theory trained for, but it's not reasonable to expect an average pilot to be able to do that instinctively in the time available. Talking about "cost-cutting" or whether a certain engineering decision was made to save money is irrelevant, because engineers make trade-offs every day - that's an important part of their job - and every single aircraft flying (yes, including Airbus!) has a design that involves trade-offs, even in safety-related things. For reasons that are now being explored, Boeing's engineers made faulty assumptions when evaluating those trade-offs, probably augmented by pressure to avoid mandated additional training of pilots, and the regulatory oversight didn't catch it, or didn't want to due to being in a too-close relationship with Boeing. Those are the problems that need to be solved on the aircraft side. I'm sure that given enough time you would have seen MAX crashes from other airlines, but it's no surprise to me that the first crashes (and, in an alternate reality where the MAX continued to fly, likely the majority of the crashes) were with airlines that are well-known in the industry to have lower standards of hiring, training and maintenance. Digging into that might well find some problems that need to be solved on the human side.
    - ShamelessC 7y ago
      > I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines. Sorry, I'm not as up to speed on this fiasco as I should be. Which two airlines did the first crashes occur with? And is the implication that they are subpar airlines? I understand there are many factors at play here and Boeing is mostly responsible but I'm just curious about this.
      - _-___________-_ 7y ago
        The first was Lion Air. I know of several multinationals in Asia that ban employee travel on Lion Air and its subsidiaries. They've recently been caught attempting to bribe transport safety officials, with the knowledge of senior management at Lion; a number of their pilots and other crew have been caught using crystal meth; and they were formerly banned from EU airspace (the ban was lifted a few years ago). Indicative of their company culture is that on the MAX accident flight, there was a maintenance engineer in the jump seat observing in an attempt to diagnose the AoA issue which had also occurred on the previous flight of the same aircraft. On the previous flight, the specific combination of factors to cause the trim runaway didn't occur. This aircraft should have been grounded while the issue was resolved, and instead was taken for a test flight with unwitting passengers on board. The second was Ethiopian, who are growing rapidly and thus hiring rapidly. The first officer of the accident flight had flown an aircraft (any aircraft) for a total of 350 hours. FAA wrote to Ethiopian in 2016 decertifying them, with 60 findings identifying a systemic failure of the entire quality management and training management systems. They were recertified in 2017 but there have been whistleblower reports that nothing significant changed, with politically-oriented decisions, nepotism, unsafe practices, task cards being signed off without executing the required maintenance actions, etc. EASA still doesn't consider the issues resolved. Look up Yonas Yohannes Yeshanew, who used to be Director of Aircraft Engineering there.
    - bumby 7y ago
      >the MAX was a flawed design due to the expectations it placed on pilot training, competency and in particular, instinct in a surprising situation. That's it. As you eluded to earlier, there are usually multiple causes. One that the above statement seems to overlook is the poor application and adherence to the system safety analysis. According to their own process, even though they misclassified the failure they should not have relied on a single sensor.[1] It seems to me there's engineering, process, and human factor causes involved. [1]https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/failed-certification-faa-missed-safety-issues-in-the-737-max-system-implicated-in-the-lion-air-crash/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...
kayfox 7y ago
Until planes are fully automated, which I don't think will happen anytime soon, pilots are going to be part of every accident. To improve the safety of flying, pilot actions should be considered after every accident and if there are improvements to be made, they should be made. We cant shy away from "blaming" the pilots (which we are not blaming them as much as highlighting issues) because thats not nice, we should identify issues and make sure they are worked on in training or procedures. Even with the higher levels of automation, the pilots are literally there to monitor the automation and intervene when it does something wrong. The 737 tells you when it will stall in on the speed tape on the PFD, auditory and through the feel of the stick shaker.

That sounds interesting, but I still blame Boeing, liability is about blame and Boeing has been bending over backwards to blame pilots for its own technical failures.

_-___________-_ 7y ago

This kind of absolutism really doesn't help. Air travel has made absolutely enormous strides in safety mostly because of rational investigations that don't focus on one party but try to understand all the factors that lead to an incident. The irrational, emotional response to the MAX incidents is eroding that. Boeing and the FAA definitely have significant issues in culture and oversight. They should be resolved so that Boeing can continue to build safe aircraft and the FAA can effectively oversee the US aviation industry. At the same time, not every pilot in every flight deck is the same. Some are more capable than others. Some have been trained better than others. Some come from a culture where the "power gradient" between captain and first officer is hard to overcome in order to provide effective CRM. Some come from a culture where they're afraid they'll lose their job if they accurately report incidents. All of these things, and more, are factors in air safety. Focusing on one factor or one company really doesn't help.

DrScientist 7y ago
Hmm. Agree willingness to own up and discuss errors is critical to long term airline safety. However you only seem to be applying this to pilots and not to Boeing! Isn't the issue with the MAX, and potentially now earlier episodes, that for perhaps perfectly understandable commercial reasons, Boeing and even the FAA haven't been upfront and honest about engineering issues and how to improve stuff - ie they have been guilty of playing the blame game - on to pilots - who are often conveniently dead.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  I think I've been quite clear that I see significant issues within Boeing and the FAA and that they should be resolved. If you ignore the shrill media and look at the actual investigative work going on, I don't think anybody is seriously suggesting that the pilots were the sole cause of the MAX issues, and certainly nobody is "blaming" them. At the same time, I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines. There are always multiple factors in play. My personal view on it is: the MAX was a flawed design due to the expectations it placed on pilot training, competency and in particular, instinct in a surprising situation. That's it. The aircraft was still capable of flying if the pilots reacted correctly to the failure, and the reaction was one that they were in theory trained for, but it's not reasonable to expect an average pilot to be able to do that instinctively in the time available. Talking about "cost-cutting" or whether a certain engineering decision was made to save money is irrelevant, because engineers make trade-offs every day - that's an important part of their job - and every single aircraft flying (yes, including Airbus!) has a design that involves trade-offs, even in safety-related things. For reasons that are now being explored, Boeing's engineers made faulty assumptions when evaluating those trade-offs, probably augmented by pressure to avoid mandated additional training of pilots, and the regulatory oversight didn't catch it, or didn't want to due to being in a too-close relationship with Boeing. Those are the problems that need to be solved on the aircraft side. I'm sure that given enough time you would have seen MAX crashes from other airlines, but it's no surprise to me that the first crashes (and, in an alternate reality where the MAX continued to fly, likely the majority of the crashes) were with airlines that are well-known in the industry to have lower standards of hiring, training and maintenance. Digging into that might well find some problems that need to be solved on the human side.
  - ShamelessC 7y ago
    > I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines. Sorry, I'm not as up to speed on this fiasco as I should be. Which two airlines did the first crashes occur with? And is the implication that they are subpar airlines? I understand there are many factors at play here and Boeing is mostly responsible but I'm just curious about this.
    - _-___________-_ 7y ago
      The first was Lion Air. I know of several multinationals in Asia that ban employee travel on Lion Air and its subsidiaries. They've recently been caught attempting to bribe transport safety officials, with the knowledge of senior management at Lion; a number of their pilots and other crew have been caught using crystal meth; and they were formerly banned from EU airspace (the ban was lifted a few years ago). Indicative of their company culture is that on the MAX accident flight, there was a maintenance engineer in the jump seat observing in an attempt to diagnose the AoA issue which had also occurred on the previous flight of the same aircraft. On the previous flight, the specific combination of factors to cause the trim runaway didn't occur. This aircraft should have been grounded while the issue was resolved, and instead was taken for a test flight with unwitting passengers on board. The second was Ethiopian, who are growing rapidly and thus hiring rapidly. The first officer of the accident flight had flown an aircraft (any aircraft) for a total of 350 hours. FAA wrote to Ethiopian in 2016 decertifying them, with 60 findings identifying a systemic failure of the entire quality management and training management systems. They were recertified in 2017 but there have been whistleblower reports that nothing significant changed, with politically-oriented decisions, nepotism, unsafe practices, task cards being signed off without executing the required maintenance actions, etc. EASA still doesn't consider the issues resolved. Look up Yonas Yohannes Yeshanew, who used to be Director of Aircraft Engineering there.
  - bumby 7y ago
    >the MAX was a flawed design due to the expectations it placed on pilot training, competency and in particular, instinct in a surprising situation. That's it. As you eluded to earlier, there are usually multiple causes. One that the above statement seems to overlook is the poor application and adherence to the system safety analysis. According to their own process, even though they misclassified the failure they should not have relied on a single sensor.[1] It seems to me there's engineering, process, and human factor causes involved. [1]https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/failed-certification-faa-missed-safety-issues-in-the-737-max-system-implicated-in-the-lion-air-crash/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

kayfox 7y ago

Until planes are fully automated, which I don't think will happen anytime soon, pilots are going to be part of every accident. To improve the safety of flying, pilot actions should be considered after every accident and if there are improvements to be made, they should be made. We cant shy away from "blaming" the pilots (which we are not blaming them as much as highlighting issues) because thats not nice, we should identify issues and make sure they are worked on in training or procedures. Even with the higher levels of automation, the pilots are literally there to monitor the automation and intervene when it does something wrong. The 737 tells you when it will stall in on the speed tape on the PFD, auditory and through the feel of the stick shaker.