ET crash ADD NBO

[Capetonian]

No, Cape, that is not my point - I am talking about MALFUNCTIONS of the system, not crew actions/training/awareness

I understood that. The cre actions/training/awareness is the point I'm making, hence why I try to avoid travelling on third world airlines and AF.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

On a slightly lighter note, seen elsewhere

"What's a jackscrew?"

"Orange juice and Jack Daniels"

[Pontius Navigator]

On a slightly lighter note, seen elsewhere

"What's a jackscrew?"

"Orange juice and Jack Daniels"

Surely our dark blue brethren would know

[Boac]

I thought it was 'Anything that breathes (unless desperate...)'

[llondel]

Interesting remark I heard the other day was that Boeing have had a fix for a while but the US government shutdown prevented it from being approved for deployment in a timely manner because the relevant people weren't in the office. Anyone able to shed some light on that claim?

[Wodrick]

"What's a jackscrew?"

I would call it Screwjack, it's a Boeing thing The main and cruise trim motors mount on it, turn it and it drives the leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer up or down to trim. Main trim is controlled manually by the"pickle switches" on the control wheel the cruise trim by a little rocker switch on the pedestal.
This is how it was on earlier boeings they are unlikely to have changed it 'cos they don't do change.

[Boac]

Ho-ho?

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Thanks Wodrick, very useful.

[Boac]

No 'Cruise trim' switch on the 737 1-900. Just a '2-speed' trim motor.

[Wodrick]

Yes, sorry, cruise trim is 727. It's been a long time.

[OFSO]

Worth taking a look at the past - in the excellent "Boeing 737 Technical Guide" by Chris Brady eight pages are devoted to 'The Rudder Story'. Incidents listed are:

- 3rd March 1991 UA585 737-200 (the Colorado Springs accident);
- 11th April 1994 CO 737-300 (Honduras);
- 8th September 1994, US427 737-300 (Pittsburgh);
- 9th June 1996, EA517, 737-200 (Richmond);
- 19th Feb 1999, UA 737-300 (Seattle/Tacoma);
- 23rd Feb 1999 Metrojet 737-300 (Baltimore).

Regarding the US 427 crash, NTSB Investigator Malcolm Brenner said "The pilots were trying to deal with emergencies with reasonable actions but could not understand what was happening in the time available."

Relating to the same incident, The NTSB report dated 16th April 1999 stating that "although there was no hard physical evidence (the crashes) were probably caused by an abrupt rudder movement that surprised the crew and sent the aircraft into an uncontrollable dive."

In a preliminary report dated 12th April 2000, the Flight Control Test and Evaluation Board wrote: "..the jammed or restricted rudder procedures formulated by Boeing were 'confusing and time-consuming'. Pilots showed a lack of training and situational awareness in controlling malfunctions and as they prepared to land never checked to be sure that the rudder was operating properly. Boeing seemed to be surprised at this and promised to revise it." Presumably the 'it' was the procedures.

The Board said it had detected 30 failures and jams "that could be catastrophic on take off and landing...16 were at higher altitudes which would be hazardous....requiring prompt pilot action to prevent a crash".

13th September 2000 - The FAA reaches an agreement with Boeing to redesign the rudder; when completed, the redesigned hardware would be implemented in all new aircraft, but Boeing would have five years to make changes in planes currently flying.

5th June 2001 - final report on UA585 cites probably cause the same as of US427, "loss of control caused by (full) rudder deflection in a direction opposite to that commanded by the pilot as a result of a jam of the main rudder PCU servo valve...."

12th November 2002 - FAA issues a new directive requiring Boeing to "Within six years...install a new rudder control system..."

By 12th November 2008, 17 years after the Colorado Springs accidents, all 737s should have been retrofitted with a new rudder control system.

[Boac]

Boeing now claim a 'fix' for MCAS 'within 10 days'.

[Undried Plum]

Excellent post, OFSO.

[Boac]

Further to my point about 'geographic' issues with the MAX, the CEO of Southwest has tweeted this:

"Our experience with the MAX, along with the other U.S. operators, has been phenomenal. We've operated over 40,000 flights covering almost 90,000 hours. There is a ton of data collected, which we continuously monitor. In all our analysis since our first flight in 2017, nothing has presented any flight safety concerns. It has been a superb addition to our fleet."

Suggesting NO MCAS failures in 90,000 hours - unless his idea of 'flight safety' differs from mine.

[OFSO]

1) You can never build a true system deriving data upon which human life depends from just one sensor......

2).....unless you continually evaluate the honesty of that data......

3) ......and provide that evaluation in easily assimilated form to a human supervisor....

4).....and provide that person with the ability to override that data AND enable them to rectify immediately and logically the consequences of a faulty input.

[Mrs Ex-Ascot]

This is what Sully has to say about the co-pilots low flying hours; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... crash.html

I know it's the Daily Wail, but at least they have published what Sully actually wrote.

[Undried Plum]

Sullenberger's post is worth repeating here, verbatim. I have only added the paragraph punctuation which Faecebook does not allow.

We do not yet know what caused the tragic crash of Ethiopian 302 that sadly claimed the lives of all passengers and crew, though there are many similarities between this flight and Lion Air 610, in which the design of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 is a factor.

It has been obvious since the Lion Air crash that a redesign of the 737 MAX 8 has been urgently needed, yet has still not been done, and the announced proposed fixes do not go far enough.

I feel sure that the Ethiopian crew would have tried to do everything they were able to do to avoid the accident. It has been reported that the first officer on that flight had only 200 hours of flight experience, a small fraction of the minimum in the U.S., and an absurdly low amount for someone in the cockpit of a jet airliner.

We do not yet know what challenges the pilots faced or what they were able to do, but everyone who is entrusted with the lives of passengers and crew by being in a pilot seat of an airliner must be armed with the knowledge, skill, experience, and judgment to be able to handle the unexpected and be the absolute master of the aircraft and all its systems, and of the situation.

A cockpit crew must be a team of experts, not a captain and an apprentice. In extreme emergencies, when there is not time for discussion or for the captain to direct every action of the first officer, pilots must be able to intuitively know what to do to work together. They must be able to collaborate wordlessly.

Someone with only 200 hours would not know how to do that or even to do that. Someone with that low amount of time would have only flown in a closely supervised, sterile training environment, not the challenging and often ambiguous real world of operational flying, would likely never have experienced a serious aircraft malfunction, would have seen only one cycle of the seasons of the year as a pilot, one spring with gusty crosswinds, one summer of thunderstorms. If they had learned to fly in a fair-weather clime, they might not even have flown in a cloud. Airlines have a corporate obligation not to put pilots in that position of great responsibility before they are able to be fully ready.

While we don’t know what role, if any, pilot experience played in this most recent tragedy, it should always remain a top priority at every airline. Everyone who flies depends upon it.

https://nyti.ms/2TCgcfr

Copyright acknowledgement to the author, Captain Sullenberger

[Alisoncc]

One suspects that Sully has the wrong end of the stick. More likely to be 200 hours on type, not a total of 200 hours flying. The FO would have needed at least 200 hours just to get a PPL far less a CPL surely.

Typical Septic assuming the rest of the world are stoopid, and just jumping in with limited knowledge.

Bear in mind it's American software engineers that have stuffed up, but since when have the facts had any relevance.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Assumptions, hmmm.
Are you sure they are American software engineers, not inexperienced foreigners on H1B visas?
Boeing hired 4 data scientists and 4 engineers in the last month alone on H1Bs.
And is there a shortage of natives, or just a desire to hire cheap people who won't ever argue with management or report failings?
http://blog.optimation.us/is-there-an-e ... ted-states
My experience in the UK and Canada is that there is no real shortage, there's just a shortage of jobs with a decent salary and work conditions, both deliberately lowered to encourage, and further lowered by, hiring foreigners. I would still be working if there was a half decent job out there.
My BIL could tell you the same thing about working in software engineering for a big bank in London. Everything Sully said about low time pilots applies to these guys on visas, and one look at how they got their degrees shows you what they are worth.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video ... xams-video
And finally, I don't think this is a software problem, it's a design problem. They are attempting a software fix for a design problem, which cannot work. It isn't even mostly a MCAS design problem, it's at the higher level where they are pretending that MCAS isn't an incidence limiting system so as to get the aircraft through Certification, and pretending the 737 MAX isn't sufficiently different to need a new type rating by suppressing necessary crew training. There will be guys on the MCAS team now shouting "This isn't my fault. I wasn't told." and they have a case. Nobody designs a simplex safety-critical system, so I conclude they designed a simplex system because they were told it wasn't safety-critical. It's also why it was named an augmentation system when it isn't. Most software engineers know less about aerodynamics than their pet cat, so wouldn't know what the in depth consequences were.

[Alisoncc]

Ethiopean have one of the best safety records amongst airlines operating into Europe. That doesn't happen by accident. The best data I can track down relating to ET-302 is the Aviation Herald.