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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 RedBear on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:07AM
You may want to check a channel on YouTube called Mentour Pilot, where an actual commercial airline pilot explains many things about airplanes. He did a very thorough video on the issue a few months ago, related to the findings after the LionAir crash. Search for "mentour pilot mcas".
Or just clicky the linky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfQW0upkVus [youtube.com]
Basically a part of the autopilot system in the 737 MAX can take over and run the plane straight down into the ground if it gets faulty data from an air speed or Angle of Attack sensor that leads it to think the plane is about to stall. There seems to be a dangerous lack of redundancy for the system that will cause it to just keep trying to force the nose of the plane downward more and more as long as it believes there is a danger of a stall. A faulty sensor means the system will end up sending the plane straight down or even flipping the whole plane over forward. I wonder how many pilots could recover from that at 1500 feet?
The pilots need to know this system (MCAS) exists and how to disable it immediately, because even both pilots pulling back on the stick together can't physically overpower the system if they don't disable it. It's mechanically augmented to be more powerful than the pilot input. That's probably the ultimate reason for the fatal results. The pilots can't just fight with a misbehaving system for 15 minutes while they try to figure out what's wrong, they literally have to immediately understand what is happening within a minute or so (depending on height above ground) before everyone is dead.
It's implied that the MCAS behavior was poorly documented by Boeing prior to the LionAir crash, but since the FAA results came out a few months ago every pilot on Earth should have known about the MCAS, when it might kick in, and how to disable it.
Needless to say I was dumbfounded by the apparent stupidity of the design and implementation of this system after I watched this video.
All details I've heard of the new incident so far are very similar to what happened to the LionAir flight. The fact that it happened again even though the pilots should have been perfectly aware of how to prevent the issue is very scary, and it's embarrassing that the US took so long to finally ground all 737 MAX planes while the cause is being confirmed.
I can't vouch for the usefulness of the following content yet because I've just started watching it, but here is a cached livestream video from yesterday (also on the Mentour Pilot channel) dedicated to the current 737 MAX situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJwUk5HH4KI [youtube.com]
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¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ