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U.S. Grounds Boeing Planes, After Days of Pressure
After days of mounting pressure, the United States grounded Boeing's 737 Max aircraft on Wednesday, reversing an earlier decision in which American regulators said the planes could keep flying after a deadly crash in Ethiopia.
The decision, announced by President Trump, followed determinations by safety regulators in some 42 countries to ban flights by the jets, which are now grounded worldwide. Pilots, flight attendants, consumers and politicians from both major parties had been agitating for the planes to be grounded in the United States. Despite the clamor, the Federal Aviation Administration had been resolute, saying on Tuesday that it had seen "no systemic performance issues" that would prompt it to halt flights of the jet.
That changed Wednesday when, in relatively quick succession, Canadian and American aviation authorities said they were grounding the planes after newly available satellite-tracking data suggested similarities between Sunday's crash in Ethiopia and one involving a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Indonesia in October.
Previously: Second 737 MAX8 Airplane Crash Reinforces Speculation on Flying System Problems
Related: Boeing 737 MAX 8 Could Enable $69 Trans-Atlantic Flights
(Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Thursday March 14 2019, @07:34AM (3 children)
MCAS was added because the bigger engines had to be put higher and far forward, changing the plane's behavior slightly.
MCAS is extra SW supposed to make it seamless for a regular 737 pilot.
But they didn't document it (before the first crash).
And they seem to be a lack of redundancy (preliminary result from the first crash, faulty AoA sensor blamed).
And it may override pilot orders unless explicitly disabled (change in behavior).
At this point, everyone has heard about it, so every 737 pilot should have checked how to disable it if it misbehaves.
The MCAS software update after the first crash prelim report got delayed by the FAA shutdown.
BUT this is all speculation until the black boxes are thoroughly checked, and there might be another failure mode than the AoA sensor and MCAS. It just happens that symptoms seem to be similar.
At already over 300 bodies, the safe answer is to err on the side of caution, even if 2 crashes in over 40000 flights means it's not epidemic.
After the 787 batteries, one would have thought Boeing would have been careful to be spotless on the next plane and new features, but apparently there was a ... problem.
(Score: 5, Informative) by isostatic on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:39AM (1 child)
At this point, everyone has heard about it, so every 737 pilot should have checked how to disable it if it misbehaves.
That was after Lionair. Every 737 pilot knew about lionair, yet a major airline still had a crash. Until it's proven that the crash wasn't caused by the same problem it makes perfect sense to ground the planes.
At already over 300 bodies, the safe answer is to err on the side of caution, even if 2 crashes in over 40000 flights means it's not epidemic.
There are 687 A320neos, they've been flying since 2016. No crashes.
There are 376 737-maxes, been flying since 2017, two crashes, the first one attributed to a feature of the new plane, the second with a very similar flight profile.
On a terms of fatalities per mile, the 737-max has flown less than 1 billion miles since introduction (average age about 12 months, say 5 flights a day at 1000 miles a flight is 2 million miles per plane, 350 planes delivered is 700m miles), and had 346 deaths in two separate instances, at least 189 deaths related to the new design
So 737-max fatalities per billion mile are in the 300-500 range.
By comparison general airline fatalities per mile are int he region of 0.03-0.05 range.
A 737-max is 10,000 times more dangerous than a normal plane. Only the de Havilland Comet, back in the 50s, had such a terrible start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @05:41PM
I was going to retort to you to compare against car driving, but apparently there is an average of about 12 fatalities per billion miles traveled [wikipedia.org].
So this really is worse than I had taken it for. (Not listed are the maimings and other life-changing effects of car accidents.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:07PM
Software... agile mantra: release early, release often.
Translation: let the user's be your QA, you'll fix the bugs within the boundaries of your (evershrinking) budget.
Nothing wrong with that, right? After all, it does increase the profits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford