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

You don't need a lot of time to open the book and learn the systems. You do need a modicum of intelligence to apply that knowledge to overcome a problem. What the hell good is a pilot if he can't do that? May as well go with a chock-to-chock automated aircraft and save the salary.

Were those Ethiopian Airlines pilots properly made aware of the Nov. 2018 AD changes to the AFM for the 737 MAX ..?

The emergency AD in November 2018 was sent by FAA to all known US owners and operators, but the FAA is not responsible for
directly notifying all known owners and operators abroad...The FAA did send such AD details to the relevant foreign airworthy authorities,
.....it is then the responsibility of those authorities to notify the owners and operators of the 737 MAX covered under their jurisdiction.

It just sounds like you are shooting off the hip and blaming the pilots, when it may well not be their fault that they were possibly unawares
of the emergency AD concerning MACS.

Don't know enough to blame the pilots.

But damn right it is THE PILOT'S responsibility to know the systems and be able to operate the systems to keep the damn thing in the air. Not sit around with their thumb up their butt until someone provides them with the Cliff's Notes version. If they find learning their aircraft too boring or too hard they need to make a career change to bus driver. Then they can pull over to the curb when their vehicle farts and not kill anyone.

You are still harping on about the pilots, you sound angry and somewhat potentially condemning of them.
The pilots can only competently know the new MACS system if the appropriate information had been passed on to them.

It was Not long ago Boeing and the FAA didn't expect or require 737 pilots to be given prior training experience with the 737 Max MACS.

In any case you seem a bit slow to the party yourself....I got a chuckle when you suggested an AD should have been issued,
without bothering to know an emergency AD was issued 6th Nov. 2018 and reiterated on 11th December 2018 and again on 11th march 2019...
thankfully, folks like me here can spoon feed you with such rudimentary information.

If you come back whining about the pilots again without any pertinent updates or substantiated contributory facts about them,
then it will be evident you just have an agenda or some sort of axe to grind.

Boeing and FAA Oversight of the 737 MAX 8 Was Flawed: Report

BY RITA DEVLIN MARIER / BLOOMBERG MARCH 17, 2019

http://time.com/5553275/boeing-faa-737-max-flawed/


(Bloomberg) — In one of the most detailed descriptions yet of the relationship between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration during the 737 Max’s certification process, the Seattle Times reported Sunday that the U.S. regulator delegated much of the safety assessment to Boeing and that the analysis the planemaker in turn delivered to the authorities had crucial flaws.

The newspaper’s report was based on interviews with current and former engineers directly involved or familiar with the evaluations, all of whom asked not to be identified, and was under way even before the Ethiopia crash.

Boeing told the newspaper Saturday that the FAA had reviewed the company’s data on the plane and “concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements.” The company, which is based in Chicago but designs and builds commercial jets in the Seattle area, said there are “some significant mischaracterizations” in the engineers’ comments.

Boeing’s System Safety Analysis of the flight control software — suspected to have contributed to the Lion Air jetliner crash in October and also under the spotlight in the Ethiopia accident — understated the power of the system, the engineers told the Seattle Times. The newspaper said the analysis also failed to account how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded — in essence, gradually ratcheting the horizontal stabilizer into a dive position.

FAA technical experts told the newspaper that as the agency’s certification of the 737 Max proceeded, managers prodded them to speed up the process as development of the MAX was nine months behind that of the rival Airbus’s A32neo.

The Seattle Times said the safety analysis ranked a potential failure of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentataion System, or MCAS, as “hazardous,” one step below “catastrophic.” But even that designation should have been enough to prod reliance on more than just one input sensor, the engineers told the newspaper.

http://time.com/5553275/boeing-faa-737-max-flawed/

Starman, see the video. Any pilot that doesn't know what the switches on the panel in front of him do should be grounded. You think he'd at least be curious. I hold pilots to the highest standard, there are hundreds of lives involved, sometimes including mine.

And yeah, I am pissed. As a mere private pilot SEL I required the best of myself not only in flight proficiency but in mechanical and aerodynamic knowledge of the aircraft. Commercial pilots, with innocent lives in the balance, should do at least s much.

BFaucett, Let's do the whole analysis: MCAS (or whatever) was flawed and could put the aircraft into an unsustainable flight regime. The automated system could be manually overridden to restore the aircraft to a sustainable flight regime. The pilots, whose purpose in life has become to monitor automated systems, failed to monitor and override the faulty automated system.

I'll rely on the video for the moment, unwise I know. The flight manual documented the horizontal stabilizer trim system including MCAS. Appears it didn't document exactly what to do if the MCAS spazes. But pretty easy to figure out if you understand the system (and don't panic) - turn the damn thing off and spin the trim wheel with your hand.

"Runaway Pitch (or roll) Trim"
* 1. Trim Disconnect- PRESS

Hey, let’s put this MCAS into the airplane because lots of pilots aren’t trained well enough to keep from stalling this airplane. But let’s not tell them about it and assume that they are well trained enough to recognize the problem if it ever malfunctions.

How plain do you have to make it?


Pitch trim is applied to the stabilizer. Trim can be applied by electric trim switches, autopilot or a manual trim wheel. Electric and autopilot trim may be disengaged by cutout switches on the control stand in the event of a runaway or other malfunction.

737 -8 /-9 Flight Crew Operations Manual

The aircraft is pitching down and the trim angle is changing. Hm. I wonder where the problem could be.

Part of our preflight/launch procedure was a ops check of all the flight controls. IIRC the first item on the checklist was to verify the stab trim had full range of travel and moved in the correct direction. The stab trim cut-out switch operation was also verified at that time. But then again we were professionals...

So the manual trim wheels were spinning while this new anti-stall system was doing its thing and you can go into manual mode merely by grabbing and turning the wheel if you don’t know what disconnect buttons to push?

Meanwhile these guys were fighting the automatic pitch control which successively cranked in a tad more pitch with each recovery?

I’m wondering when was the last time they had flown where they had to do everything by hand.

Whatever it was it must have been a friggin’ nightmare for the passengers

Boeing and FAA can issue all they want, fact remains you still don't know if the foreign based Pilots
were appropriately provided any AFM or FCOM notifications by the aircraft operators that employ them.
further , you also don't know if foreign aviation authorities did everything correctly with providing the
Aircraft operators under their jurisdiction concerning any AFM or FCOM EAD notifications received from
the FAA and Boeing.

The Aircraft are not registered to the pilots, hence they do not directly receive notification of changes to AFM and FCOM,
pilots rely on aircraft operators they are employed by to provide such current information for the aircraft in their operational fleet.
.ie; ..pilots have no mandatory procedural requirement to receive such directly from Boeing , FAA, or their own
respective aviation authority....nor do they haven any mandatory obligation to chase up such.

Instead of constantly raising conjecture or implying some unsubstantiated level of blame toward the pilots,
you may like to also consider [or potentially factor in] a number of other things that may have contributed to such a disaster,
that are beyond or outside the control, management, or deemed responsibility of the pilots.

you can start with Boeing and take it up/down the line from there...




modify an aircraft with a MACS system that will in effect direct the aircraft into the ground , market it to developing nation air carriers
as a substantial cost saving high point in the sale - to customers who are keen to legally avoid the high costs of valuable additional training
that would have assisted their pilots in dealing with such crisis ..

.. what could possibly go wrong?

I can see a few more asses that need potential kicking than just the pilots like some are hung up on.

Clarify:

Are you contesting

1) That before now the manual did not address the trim system as it does in the cited page

or 2) The pilots were happy to fly the aircraft without access to the manual

or 3) The airline intentionally hid flight critical information from its pilots?

Interesting read, I think you’ll enjoy.
https://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/101/4287-full.html

how about you just show CF readers the actual version of FCOM that was in possession by Ethiopian Airlines
and confirm that such version was appropriately issued to their pilots before the crash?

that way we will have something concrete/reliable to go on, rather than waste time with more of your conjecture.




thanks BB , and for your other valuable post as well.



The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation (MCAS) system at the center of investigations into two fatal crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8
was misunderstood and mischaracterized in a flawed certification process as Boeing and the FAA rushed to bring the new jet to market,
a Seattle Times investigation published Sunday alleges.

Citing named and unnamed sources, the Times’ Dominic Gates says the final certification of the system, which was intended to give pilots
a control feel on the aerodynamically different MAX similar to that of previous iterations of the 737, not only gave “unlimited authority” to
the stabilizer for nose-down trim, it literally fought the pilots’ attempts to correct the condition possibly to the point where they were physically
unable to fight the stabilizer down force any longer.

“It had full authority to move the stabilizer the full amount,” Peter Lemme, former Boeing flight controls engineer, told the Times. “There was no
need for that. Nobody should have agreed to giving it unlimited authority.”

The Times story said the profound ability of the system to take over a key flight control action should have resulted in close scrutiny
in the certification process.

But the original specifications of the system called for MCAS to limit its ability to move the horizontal stabilizer .6 degrees at a time.
By the time deliveries began, it could pitch the stabilizer 2.5 degrees, about half its total travel, in one movement, the result of flight testing
tweaks aimed at finessing the flight control feel.

The system would also pivot the stabilizer that much repeatedly as long as data inputs indicated the aircraft was about to stall, regardless
of the pilots’ strenuous efforts to overpower the system. In the October Lion Air crash, which killed 189 people, the flight data recorder
counted the captain countering the system 21 times with the first officer taking over for few tries before the captain’s final futile efforts
to arrest a 500-MPH dive. The data indicated the nose-down yoke forces peaked at a little more than 100 pounds.

The newspaper’s investigation said that engineers involved in the safety assessment of MCAS were not aware the system could move
the tail five times more than the original specs called for. The certification documents should have been amended to reflect the final
configuration but they apparently were not, according to the Times report. If they had been, the seriousness of a potential failure of the
system would have required it to receive data from at least two sources.

MCAS gets data from only one of two angle of attack indicators on the MAX and the flight data recorder on the Lion Air airplane showed
the AOA feeding MCAS was malfunctioning. “A hazardous failure mode depending on a single sensor, I don’t think passes muster,” said Lemme.

The newspaper is reporting that Boeing’s software fix will wire MCAS to both AOAs and only allow the system to move the tail feathers once,
instead of repeatedly battling manual control inputs. It will also require additional pilot training and operating manual changes, both of which
were called for by pilots unions following the Lion Air crash.

Boeing’s position, endorsed by the FAA, has been that because MCAS is only supposed to trigger in extreme circumstances—high angles
of attack and accelerated stalls—that additional pilot training was not necessary. The company has also said that it assumed that based on
their existing training on earlier models pilots would recognize the erroneous nose-down commands and hit cutoff switches that would disable
the system. This is a standard runaway trim scenario for all aircraft.

“The assumptions in here are incorrect. The human factors were not properly evaluated,” the Times quoted an unnamed FAA safety engineer as saying.

The story also suggests that due to budget cuts the FAA’s certification managers were under increasing pressure to delegate more and more
of the safety assessments to Boeing itself. The unprecedented levels of self-certification in the MAX were compounded by the urgency to get
the airplane into service because of competitive pressure from Airbus’s new A320neo series. “There wasn’t a complete and proper review of
the documents,” the former FAA engineer is quoted as saying. “Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates.”

Scroll down to view article after clicking the link.....

http://now.eloqua.com/es.asp?s=9669...8928&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=16128

I have a question that just occurred to me. So, to fix runaway trim you are supposed to use the button on your yoke then throw the switch that cuts electric power to the jack screw in the tail.

So what happens if you throw the switch cutting power without having corrected the trim with the button on the yoke and the trim is still in a position forcing the nose down? Does it automatically disengage back to a neutral position or have you just frozen the trim in a position forcing the nose down?

JoeBob, Bear with me, I am not a commercial pilot , I have friends that are and we have been discussing this situation.There is a runaway trim cutout switch, actually two next to each other, right by the engine start levers on the center console. The trim setting stays where it is. Then it's a matter of manually setting w/ the big trim wheel in both sides of the pedestal. Not particularly difficult to move. If I have not explain this properly please chime in with the appropriate answer, Thanks,Tom

You will never know how competent a pilot is till something goes wrong... that's what pilots are supposed to be good at. Not always, I guess..sad

Some interesting reading.

https://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/101/4293-full.html

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media...n-concerned-about-foreign-pilot-training