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American Airlines says it will resume flights with Boeing's 737 Max jets in January
American Airlines will resume flights with Boeing's 737 Max jets in January 2020. In a statement posted online on October 9th, the airline says it expects software updates to result in the beleaguered jet's re-certification by federal aviation authorities "later this year."
Boeing is expected to submit its final certification package to the FAA later this year. Anticipating this, American says it expects to "slowly phase in the MAX for commercial service" starting January 16th, and will "increase flying on the aircraft throughout the month and into February."
The FAA ordered the grounding of all Boeing 737 Max jets after two deadly crashes in October 2018 and March 2019 that killed a total of 346 people. Both crashes have been linked to a piece of software that Boeing had installed on the 737 Max known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.
[...]A flight attendants union issued a statement calling on American and other carriers to prioritize safety. "It will be imperative that my members are assured of the complete safety of this aircraft before taking it back up in the air," said Lori Bassani, national president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents 28,000 flight attendants at American Airlines. "Our airline crews and passengers deserve to have the highest level of assurances prior to re-entry into the air space. Our lives and passengers' lives depend on it and our lives are not for sale."
Remind me not to fly in January.
[Sure! "Don't fly in January." =) --martyb]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by eravnrekaree on Thursday October 10 2019, @04:11PM (4 children)
I doubt it. It was not scrutinized at all originally. The scrutiny it gets now is what an aircraft should normally receive. You are comparing the scrutiny it gets now, to what it was getting before, which was nothing. The FAA finally was jolted awake and decided to take some interest and just act like they are a regulator doing what they minimally should do. Boeing is still a greedy, corrupt company using $9 an hour third world programmers, just screaming at, chaining and down and whipping $9 an hour third world programmers to desks hoping they can finally come up with something that won't crash. So, nothing has changed really, except trying to abuse underpaid workers instead of changing the process, hiring well paid American engineers and actually making any substantial change and reverting to what made Boeing great in the first place, valuing quality and excellence and hiring well paid American engineers and not treating everything like a disposable commodity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @09:19PM (1 child)
Nice rant, got any backup for all your allegations?
I'm no shill for Boeing, but both of the fatal accidents were with pilots that received relatively poor training. By comparison, USA pilots faced with the same situation, in the 737Max, just figured it was another annoying case of trim runaway. They turned off the power trim system and went on flying the airplane. Note "flying" as opposed to "turning on the autopilot".
Of course it's more complex than that, and Boeing has some problems, but in this case the pilots made all the difference. The source for my ramblings are this recent NY Times story https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html [nytimes.com] by William Langewiesche -- an experienced pilot who also happens to be the son of the author of well known pilot text, "Stick and Rudder".
Don't get the NYT, it's available on popular archive sites...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @07:59AM
It's not more complex than that.
1) It's pretty obvious you're doing something wrong when your system only relies on one sensor (at a time) of the type that has been known to go wrong from time to time ( https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-max-faa/index.html [cnn.com] ).
2) Of course the pilots received "poor training". Because Boeing and gang were telling the airlines et all there's no need to retrain the pilots for the 737Max- it flies just like a 737. Except when it doesn't. ( https://medium.com/@baumhedlund/here-are-2-major-issues-with-how-the-boeing-737-max-8-was-approved-888b3f2d5615 [medium.com] )
It's like a bus manufacturer selling a 2019 model of a bus with a bigger engine which throws it off balance in some cases and so they add a system to auto-steer the bus so it behaves more like the older models. And the auto-steering system relies on one sensor whose failure rate isn't close to zero enough.
The bus manufacturer tells everyone "Buy it! It's just like the old buses just bigger and better, there's no need to retrain your drivers and there's no need to do a full recertification of the buses". Of course in the 2019 manual in page 133 there's a note that explains the new behavior and recommended workarounds. But most of the drivers think it's just like the old buses.
And then stuff happens, the buses crash and people die.
Then idiots/shills like you crawl out of the woodwork to blame the drivers.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday October 10 2019, @10:03PM (1 child)
Third world programmers get $9/hr? They must be living like (third world) kings.
MAX had two problems, the inadequacy of the manual trim controls which was inherited from the previous generation of aircraft, and MCAS. The problem with MCAS was not the programming, it was that they deliberately designed it to be half-assed. Management was doing what management does best, gaming the rules/metrics. They realized that the plane was different enough that there was a risk of pilots stalling, and they didn't want to train pilots to handle that difference because that would cost money. MCAS was a bandaid meant to tweak the controls behind the scenes to keep pilots out of trouble. They could have made MCAS more robust (ie. using more than one sensor) or more transparent (having additional indicators/controls available to the pilots) but they deliberately avoided that, again because they wanted minimal regulatory scrutiny and didn't want to train pilots. Engineers didn't design a shoddy system for no reason, there was a reason and it was $$$. And they must have figured that if it malfunctioned pilots could recover using manual control, but this proved to be excessively difficult.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @09:44AM
3rd world programmers get $20+/hr