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Boeing Co. limited the role of its own pilots in the final stages of developing the 737 MAX flight-control system implicated in two fatal crashes, departing from a longstanding practice of seeking their detailed input, people familiar with the matter said.
As a result, Boeing test pilots and senior pilots involved in the MAX' development didn't receive detailed briefings about how fast or steeply the automated system known as MCAS could push down a plane' nose, these people said. Nor were they informed that the system relied on a single sensor, rather than two, to verify the accuracy of incoming data about the angle of a plane's nose, they added.
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Boeing’s Own Test Pilots Lacked Key Details Of 737 Max Flight-Control System
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @12:23PM (1 child)
It stinks of a lazy, broken procedural system that just didn't bother to communicate essential information through the training channels because, "well shit, Martha, we've been doing this for decades now and it's just a boring, annoying, pain in everybody's ass that costs all kinds of time and money for no good reason. Can we just let this one slide out there, huh? You'd have to be a god-damned moron to not figure it out on the fly."
Heads up, Boeing, not every pilot in the world has your same background and experience, and they might not even be morons, but still not "figure it out on the fly."
As I recall, the first crash was preceeded by a near-miss event where a pilot did figure it out "on the fly" but the next crew wasn't as fortunate. If we want to throw all pilots into a homogeneous pool and talk odds, it might be one in 500 that didn't "get it" in time to fly safely, but you put enough combinations in the cockpit and sooner or later you'll come up with a combo where neither the captain nor the co-pilot "got it" quickly enough.
Unfortunately, not all populations of pilots are equally intuitive about what a Boeing engineer might be thinking, so I think the true picture was something more like one in 100 in those "at risk" populations from less Boeing-engineer-thinking cultures, so it was more like one in 10,000 crew combinations that were put in mortal danger.
This time it's going to cost Boeing pretty dearly - they screwed up before Airbus did. Airbus isn't perfect, their reliance on computer modeling in the 1980s showed up as a whole lot of "doublers" around the doors and engine pylons in the 1990s due to real-world realities that just didn't make it into the 1980s theoretical models. However, if I had to rate the two on procedural compliance, I think Airbus does have a more compliant culture and that has paid off for them in this go around.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:59PM
Yet another person trying treat problems as "random". Doing that IS the root problem. Pilots didn't just randomly fail to figure it out, there is a reason.