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According to Bloomberg:
Boeing Co. told U.S regulators on Friday that it didn't see the need to undertake a potentially costly fix for a wiring issue on the company's grounded 737 Max, according to two people familiar with the briefing.
The planemaker found in an audit last year of the 737 Max that wires were bundled improperly in a way that could trigger a failure similar to what happened in two crashes of the plane in which a total of 346 people died.
U.S. law requires wiring that could cause a hazardous condition in a failure to be separated from other wires. [...]
The wiring issues have been found in more than a dozen locations on the 737 Max.
From The Seattle Times [May require that Ad-Blockers be switched off, or at least disable style sheets]:
During the original design and certification of Boeing's 737 MAX, company engineers didn't notice that the electrical wiring doesn't meet federal aviation regulations for safe wire separation. And the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) failed to detect Boeing's miss.
The wiring vulnerability creates the theoretical potential for an electrical short to move the jet's horizontal tail uncommanded by the pilot, which could be catastrophic. If that were to happen, it could lead to a flight control emergency similar to the one that brought down two MAX jets, causing 346 deaths and the grounding of the aircraft.
Because this danger is extremely remote, the FAA faces a dilemma over what to do about it. The issue has complicated the return of the MAX to service after a grounding that is edging close to one year. [...]
"There are 205 million flight hours in the 737 fleet with this wiring type," a Boeing official said. "There have been 16 failures in service, none of which were applicable to this scenario. We've had no hot shorts."
In addition, Boeing says pulling out and rerouting wires on the almost 800 MAXs already built would pose a potentially higher risk of causing an electrical short, because insulation could chafe or crack in the process of moving the wires.
However, an FAA safety engineer familiar with the issue, who asked not to be identified because he spoke without agency permission, said agency technical staff have been clear that the wiring doesn't comply with regulations and have told their Boeing counterparts it has to be fixed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:17PM (1 child)
MCAS appears to be fly by wire with consistent lack of attention to detail.
On the business side,
You can only milk the reputation cow so long before it runs dry.
Then you get this kind of oversight.
Interesting choice for a business plan.
A little different than to make money as an X company, you have to be good at making X.
On the technical side,
I can see that, moving those wires would probably make things worse.
The MCAS software will be better, but unlikely trustworthy at this level of oversight.
A trustworthy path might be to give the pilots a real manual control switch in the cockpit which is likely new wiring.
I wonder if AirBus could stand up to the same level of design review?
Maybe yes unless their managers went to the same schools.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday February 16 2020, @04:48PM
The MCAS software was perfectly fine as far as we can tell.
The problem was that it got input from only one sensor at a time. This was intentional: they didn't want redundancy here because it would look to the regulators like a critical system, and this would mean needing to certify the jet as a new aircraft instead of simply a small modification of the 737 as they've been trying to pull all this time, and that would mean all new type-certification, training procedures, etc. which would prevent 737 operators like Southwest from just dropping this plane into service along with its existing fleet.