Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire B737-Max8 global grounding-- following two recent catastrophic crashes...

I'm going with Rock for now. I hope Boeing isn't going the Airbus route...

Runaway pitch trim (up OR down) is a common, well practiced emergency. That is why all airplanes, at least all the ones I flew in, had a pitch trim disconnect button right on the stick and all flight control circuit breakers were easily accessible in the cockpit.

Here is what a guy who flies the Max 8 said on another board.

This is all just my opinion. After the Lion Air incident, if any pilot flying the 737 isn't fully aware of that problem, and how to deal with it they probably shouldn't be sitting in the seat. Dealing with an unusual MCAS trim actuation isn't hard. The normal trim switches we use all the time, that sit right under our thumbs will stop the MCAS from trimming the stabilizer, and even trim opposite the MCAS trim commands. That will only stop the trim temporarily, there are two stabilizer trim cutout switches behind the throttles that will disable the trim all together (MCAS or otherwise), and then you can use the manual trim wheels.

The bigger problem is probably recognition. In a situation like lion air, with a bad AOA, there will be a bunch of other things going on, including a stall warning, and stick shaker. But if you apply the unreliable airspeed procedures we train in the simulator, every time we go for training, you can keep flying the airplane just fine. Pitch plus power equals performance. My airline also has an AOA indicator installed in our airplanes, but I don't believe the two airplanes in question had that option installed.

I'm not at all convinced the Ethiopian accident had anything to do with MCAS though. We will all see in due time.

It looks like the FAA is grounding the Max 8's and 9's now.

That was my thinking also. My FIL hated the airbus and refused to work anywhere that he might be forced to fly them. I’ve flown on an airbus a few times and much prefer anything Boeing over Eurotrash.

Whelp, the FAA just grounded them.

And Trump wimps out to the Lower Slobbovia aviation safety experts on the bases of MSM caterwauling. Hell, let's ground all US built heavies, they all go through the same certification process which is fraudulent. Buy Air Bus. Must be better, after all it is a consortium and Europeans, like most other people, are smarter than we are. .And the EU wouldn't fudge the certification process. Well as long as VW doesn't build aircraft anyway.

Why not an AD of a potential problem with required refresher training on how to overcome the problem while we actually find some facts? Oh yeah, that MSM caterwauling.

Not so fast. Actual US pilots have been voicing some concerns for the last several months. There might be some software glitches above and beyond what we are even talking about.

https://www.dallasnews.com/business...lained-feds-months-suspected-safety-flaw

And they all survived nicely. Flight software is extremely complex and hard to diagnose as you have to test every conceivable set of variables. And then some pilot finds a flight regime or there is some combination of failures engineers thought impossible. Best practices for writing and testing software come from aviation. They have a lot of bucks on the line. Software development is a never ending process (Microsoft updates your OS at least monthly). Ever so much more so aviation software.

One constant in airplane accident discussions is the jumping to conclusions that always happens before anyone knows the facts. Government investigators are always going to have access to more and newer information than the general public by nature of being first on the scene. I don't know, and neither does anyone here know, what caused this accident and we won't know until the investigations have been completed and the reports released, until then all we have is heresy. If there is a possible flight control problem with the 737 MAX then the prudent path is to ground them until it can be sorted out, that's just basic safety common sense.

This was in a Fox news report about Trump directing the FAA to ground them in the U.S. It appears that the FAA has some new information that could possibly indicate a similar problem to the Indonesia crash:

"The FAA said it decided to ground the jets after it found that the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that crashed had a flight pattern very similar to the Lion Air flight.

“It became clear that the track of the Ethiopian flight behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight," said Steven Gottlieb, deputy director of accident investigations for the FAA."

It's my understanding that the flight data recorders are on their way to Germany to be read, once that happens investigators will have a much better idea of what happened. In my opinion as an airline pilot and Boeing fan the precautionary grounding of the fleet is not premature. If it turns out the two accidents were not related then they'll know that after the data recorders have been read and the grounding orders can be lifted. Right now it's the reasonable and safe thing to do.

Is it? What is the nature of the problem? Can range from nuisance - requires a pilot to lift a finger, to dangerous requiring a fast acting pilot who knows the system intimately. Which you would hope all pilots do, not just which page of a checklist to punch up. So far reports and theories indicate it's more of the nuisance variety. Turn off the autopilot and fly the damned thing manually to get back into the proper flight regime.

That's where my suggested solution comes in. Put out an Airworthiness Directive alerting pilots they may encounter the problem and have them demonstrate they can recover control of the aircraft.

Meanwhile work to duplicate the event in a simulator or test aircraft to find the bug. May take a while since it appears to be a rare event in the real world. If you can't duplicate the problem you can't say it's systemic.

It would potentially be much easier for a 737 captain to take manual control of the aircraft,
if Boeing had included in the Operations Manual where the two (2) switches were
that turn oFF the MACS.

and one would reasonably think when one modifies a 737 to the point where the potential for Stall
requires the manufacturer to install MACS, the manufacturer would also show due diligence to properly
educate/inform the carrier companies and their pilots about such.

and to be honest MACS is not 'trying to kill them'...Id like to see anyone prove the 'murderous-killer motive'
of MACS in a courtroom...maybe the motives one should really question are those of the big brass at Boeing...

So, Boeing says that it didn’t tell anyone about it because it didn’t want to overwhelm monkey crews with too much info. But, how much info is it to tell monkey crew to “push this button” and turn off the automatic trim?

The real reason Boeing didn’t tell is because the airlines would have asked, “Why is this feature necessary? Is there something wrong with this airplane that causes it to stall? You said it was just like the other 737s only longer. That wasn’t a problem in the other 737s. Does Airbus have this problem?”

I don't know the nature of the problem and neither do you unless you're privy to the information the investigators have.

These are airliners we're talking about with live people in the back, not an F-16 with an ejection seat. They're flown by young guys with low time, third world pilots, good pilots, bad pilots, and old guys with coke bottle glasses & the reaction time of a slug. Saying "it's a training problem" doesn't cut it, you don't want an airliner that needs a Chuck Yeager to safely fly or even an average pilot having a good day to fly. You want an airplane that can be safely operated by a mediocre pilot that's having a chitty week while he's going through a divorce and trying to hold his eyelids open at 3 am in bad weather. If the plane is throwing curve balls at him when he's 200' above the ground then it needs to be modified so it doesn't do that. I don't know if that's the case with this airplane, but the FAA announcement I quoted seems to indicate that they see some similarities between the Lion Air flight and the Ethiopian crash so somebody with more info than us made the decision ground them until it's figured out, I don't see that as a bad thing.

An Airworthiness Directive? Those things get round filed unless they're backed up with regulatory enforcement. So you're going to make them do a simulator where they practice flipping the stabilizer trim cutout switches? You can flip them a million times in the simulator but it doesn't make any difference unless you do it at the right time before it gets away from you. Planes are certified to be able to be flown with the stab completely nose up/down on the trim but it's again a case not of whether they're capable of flying but can a mediocre pilot on a bad day fly it safely. You don't get Yeager every time you get on an airliner.

Ok, I know better, but I'll take a bite of this... What do you mean "This is not an Airbus?" I flew three models of the Airbus in my career... Flight time in the left seat of those aircraft is about 14,000 hrs. They are an excellent aircraft. Are they better than Boeing products? Nope, but they are a different animal and they are, in my opinion, very safe.

Issue date -November 6, 2018

“The FAA has issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive (AD) that addresses possible erroneous angle of attack (AOA) inputs on Boeing 737 Max aircraft.
These erroneous inputs can potentially make the horizontal stabilizers repeatedly pitch the nose of the airplane downward, making the aircraft difficult to control.
The AD orders operators to revise the airplane flight manual (AFM) to give the flight crew horizontal stabilizer trim procedures to follow under certain conditions.
The AD is effective immediately. Operators have three days to revise the AFM. The FAA continues to work closely with Boeing, and as a part of the investigative
team on the Indonesia Lion Air accident, may take further appropriate actions depending on the results of the investigation. The FAA has alerted foreign
airworthiness authorities who oversee operators that use the 737 MAX of the agency’s action. “.

Issued March 11, 2019

Continued emergency Airworthiness Notification.(AD) 2018-23-51 of November 2018
https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/media/CAN_2019_03.pdf

The end of this Atlantic Magazine Article has four individual NASA incident reports made by 737 Max pilots in the US about the airplane and their ability, or inability, to pilot it. Very interesting.

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2...-about-problems-with-the-737-max/584791/

Boeing has gone from ardently saying the 737 MAX is safe to continue flying, ..to now recommend the grounding
of the entire global fleet of 370+ units....this follows the emergence of fresh evidence from the Ethiopian incident
and newly refined satellite tracking data.

interesting times for a company that has had until very recently orders totalling some 5000
for the 737 Max.

It’s a short but very factual analysis by an airline pilot. He does a good job without injecting his opinion

https://youtu.be/AgkmJ1U2M_Q

Good video.

One of Boeings primary selling/marketing points of the 737 MAX was that it could be sold to air carriers with low time
pilots specifically in the developing world market segment , because (according to Boeing and FAA ) it was deemed
not to require any additional certification above previous 737s ...or simulator time and/or with an appropriately
experienced captain (to fly a few legs under supervision) before letting pilots loose on the new modified aircraft.

....The cost of simulators and training programmes is a significant purchase, more responsible carriers invested in them, but many
carriers across the globe jumped at the chance to get a higher capacity, longer range , more fuel efficient 737 without the need for
further mandatory training of pilots.

It has brought into question (in the past and more recently) the type of relationship that exists between Boeing and the considerable
number of in-house FAA staff permanently stationed at Boeing plant locations.

Boeing does so much to help the stretched resources of the FAA, that it has been suggested that the FAA has morphed into a role
of appeasing Boeing , rather than the FAA taking a proper standback and independent regulatory approach.