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Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337
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: 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.