Ethiopian Airlines Crash/ B737MAX grounding

Reati

Mebuntu wrote: »

Yes, but I'd have thought that MAX pilots would have had a unique interest in the earlier high-profile Lion Air crash (and that aircraft's previous flight incident) and how it came about and would be on high alert after takeoff even without any input from Boeing. I find it difficult to believe that when it happened to them they were "wondering what might be wrong here ".

You can't understand what a persons thought train will be. It's easy from the comfort of a chair with hindsight to say "surely they know what was happening" but no one can know that. If they knew what it was and how to overcome it, they wouldn't have crashed.

cnocbui

jasper100 wrote: »

That's an extremely serious allegation right there, with nothing at all to support it.

Are you kidding? Boeing have been strenuously pushing the blame on Lion Air and the pilots since that accident happened.

However, Boeing pushed back, stating that standard operating procedures would have address the MCAS failure. Also, a Lion Air ground crew may have inadvertently tampered with the MCAS sensor on the doomed flight.

with Boeing hinting it thinks poor maintenance practices may be to blame for the crash and Lion Air pointing the finger at "design changes" and "anti-stall" features built into the plane's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).

Rusdi Kirana, the co-founder of the Lion Air Group, is “furious” over Boeing’s attempts to deflect attention from the recent design changes and blame the airline for the crash.

Such blame has been put over the poor maintenance records from the carrier, suggesting that its aircraft are not very well looked after.
...
Boeing has said all information necessary to fly the 737 safely is available to pilots and that its workhorse model is safe.

Nijmegen

I guess it could be pretty simple arrogance (send it to us, because we trust ourselves most) but it does breed conspiracy theory. When China grounded the a/c it was "trade war", but by the time Australia, Europe, and many other countries had got round to it but it's still flying in North America; combined with Boeing's PR strategy post Lion; combined with the backgrounds of political appointees running many other agencies in the current US government; it just doesn't pass the smell test when it appears they're demanding to get first sniff at downloading the data. Nobody in their right mind can question the professionalism or competency of the UK AAIB.

The truth will out, no amount of aggressive PR will fix a fundamental flaw if one exists; and if it doesn't, then that will out too.

Quin_Dub

Trump speaks to Boeing CEO following tweets on airline technology

The officials did not share details of their conversation, but both confirmed the call to CNN. Later, a Boeing spokesman said Muilenburg "reiterated to the President our position that the MAX aircraft is safe."

Muahahaha

cnocbui wrote: »

I have stalled an aircraft many times - saying they fall out of the sky is melodramatic hyperbole. In a stall, the wings lose lift and so long as the plane isn't in a turn, the plane noses over sharply and enters a dive, which causes the airspeed to increase very rapidly - re-establishing lift over the wings and returning full control to the pilot allowing them to pull the nose up and to continue flying.

Thats very interesting. Can I ask when you say that in a dive the airspeed increases very rapidly how rapidly are we talking? Like if a plane was at 30,000ft how much atlitude would you expect to lose in the nose dive before it corrects itself? And in a stall/nose dive situation what would happen passengers without seatbelts, how do they experience it?

bryangiggsy

Norwegian to operate Dreamliner from Dublin following suspension of Boeing 737 MAX

cnocbui

Muahahaha wrote: »

Thats very interesting. Can I ask when you say that in a dive the airspeed increases very rapidly how rapidly are we talking? Like if a plane was at 30,000ft how much atlitude would you expect to lose in the nose dive before it corrects itself? And in a stall/nose dive situation what would happen passengers without seatbelts, how do they experience it?

I was flying gliders. After a stall, you would have enough airspeed to sustain level flight in as little as 4 seconds. Obviously a commercial passenger plane could be expected to take a bit longer to reestablish lift in the thin air at 9,500m, but this plumetting into the ground stuff is ridiculous.

Time to take a 737 up in X-Plane and suck it and see.

Hotblack Desiato

murphaph wrote: »

It has this commercial role to promote aviation that must clash sometimes with their role as regulator.

Quite. Many's the time the NTSB made safety recommendations which would have prevented future accidents, but the FAA didn't implement the recommendations.

plodder

Irish Steve wrote: »

Sky news are now saying that a spokesman for Ethiopian has gone on record stating that the black boxes are being shipped to Europe for analysis.

Happy to see that, hopefully there will be some clarity soon, for the sake of all concerned.

Does that mean I wonder that no data had been extracted by yesterday afternoon? There was speculation here that maybe some back channel was used to provide some information to other safety authorities already. If that's not the case, then I wonder what basis they had to ground the aircraft. There seems to be very little official data to actually go on at this point.

Muahahaha

cnocbui wrote: »

I was flying gliders. After a stall, you would have enough airspeed to sustain level flight in as little as 4 seconds. Obviously a commercial passenger plane could be expected to take a bit longer to reestablish lift in the thin air at 9,500m, but this plumetting into the ground stuff is ridiculous.

Time to take a 737 up in X-Plane and suck it and see.

So if a passenger jet stalled and goes into a nose dive for are you looking at bodies going flying through the cabin?

cnocbui

plodder wrote: »

Does that mean I wonder that no data had been extracted by yesterday afternoon? There was speculation here that maybe some back channel was used to provide some information to other safety authorities already. If that's not the case, then I wonder what basis they had to ground the aircraft. There seems to be very little official data to actually go on at this point.

When the media reported the Germanwings Flight 9525 black boxes had been found and recovered, the black boxes had actually been found many hours previously and had been taken to somewhere in France and the data had already been recovered at the time the media were reporting the recorders had just been found.

I speculated that the Ethiopian Air black boxes had already had their data downloaded and been made known as it would explain the actions of multiple countries taking such prompt action, due to the known lag between the media being told things and them actually happening.

cnocbui

Muahahaha wrote: »

So if a passenger jet stalled and goes into a nose dive for are you looking at bodies going flying through the cabin?

Very probably, if they weren't in their seats and belted in, but that shouldn't be an issue for a plane still climbing to cruising altitude with the seatbelt light still on. In order to get a plane to stall, dramatically from level flight, you would first have to pitch the nose up quite significantly, and for a while, in order to get it to bleed off airspeed enough to initiate a stall and passengers might find themselves shifting in the cabin due to that, before the nose down bit.

Mebuntu

Reati wrote: »

You can't understand what a persons thought train will be. It's easy from the comfort of a chair with hindsight to say "surely they know what was happening" but no one can know that. If they knew what it was and how to overcome it, they wouldn't have crashed.

I'd agree with you under normal circumstances but if the exact same thing is happening on your MAX as that which you know happened to Lion Air fairly recently and brought it down would you not recognise it as such. Of course, maybe they didn't know about Lion Air or MCAS or maybe the exact same thing didn't happen. We shall see.

plodder

Grounded by Canada now.

Limpy

Nikki Haley is on the boeing board. No doubt she has huge influence in the government and is a senator.

I'm sure they will be funding her future presidential campaign too.

There is some much overlap between state departments and private companies. Politics are always at play.

murphaph

plodder wrote: »

Grounded by Canada now.

Apparently they got "some new information this morning" which influenced their decision.

The FAA position looks very odd now. I suspect Canadian firms are big suppliers to Boeing given the geographic proximity.

Tenger

I would agree. Canada and Russia were the only 2 non-US countries not issuing a grounding as of late last night.
So the FAA are the sole holdout with approx 58 jets active between 2 US airlines.


Interesting article on how we ended up in this position:
https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/the-world-pulls-the-andon-cord-on-the-737-max/

The B737MAX is a 50+ year old design, a marvelous design but one that’s been upgraded and enlarged well beyond its first form. Meanwhile the A320 is only at its mature stage (1st flight 1987)
I feel the A320neo is almost akin to the B737NG in terms of development cycle.

murphaph

You'd need your head examined to board one of these remaining flying Max's. If there is a flaw that brought two of them down within months then you have a pretty good chance of it happening to you.

Hard to believe the unions at the remaining airlines aren't pushing for voluntary grounding though. Any word on that?

Tenger

Posted earlier in the thread that American Airlines flight crew were raising objections.

murphaph

Spiegel Online reports that the FDRs will be sent to Germany. Strange that there is so much confusion about this.

circular flexing

murphaph wrote: »

You'd need your head examined to board one of these remaining flying Max's. If there is a flaw that brought two of them down within months then you have a pretty good chance of it happening to you.

Hard to believe the unions at the remaining airlines aren't pushing for voluntary grounding though. Any word on that?

Don't forget the Concorde flew with a known serious design flaw for years and this flaw eventually led to a serious crash. At the end of the day airlines and manufacturers are bean counters who do put a value on a human life and make decisions based on that.

I was due to fly 737 MAX 8 later on today from Canada, plane has since been swapped for a 777.

Bob24

Sorry if this has been posted already, but more on US pilots expressing strong concerns about the 737 Max 8: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263751/boeing-737-max-8-pilot-complaint-autopilot-mcas

One sample comment which is not good publicity for Boeing:

In one incident, an airline pilot reported that immediately after engaging the Max 8’s autopilot, the co-pilot shouted “DESCENDING,” followed by an audio cockpit warning, “DON’T SINK! DON’T SINK!”

“I immediately disconnected AP (Autopilot) (it WAS engaged as we got full horn etc.) and resumed climb,” the pilot writes in the report, which is available in a database compiled by NASA. “Now, I would generally assume it was my automation error, i.e., aircraft was trying to acquire a miss-commanded speed/no autothrottles, crossing restriction etc., but frankly neither of us could find an inappropriate setup error (not to say there wasn’t one).”

plodder

murphaph wrote: »

You'd need your head examined to board one of these remaining flying Max's. If there is a flaw that brought two of them down within months then you have a pretty good chance of it happening to you.

The drip feed of groundings certainly creates that impression, but there's 350 of them flying multiple times a day over the last year or two and only two crashes.

I'm just amazed at how this has mushroomed in the space of 24 hours. It's going to be interesting to hear what the additional information received by the Canadian agency (and the others) was. One has to assume that it is significant enough to justify this.

Bob24

plodder wrote: »

The drip feed of groundings certainly creates that impression, but there's 350 of them flying multiple times a day over the last year or two and only two crashes.

Two out of 350 is a 0.57% rate of deadly incidents over a fairly short period. One could argue it is a statistical anomaly and the dataset is too small, but besides that I think it is understandable for some people to be worried about it.

plodder

Bob24 wrote: »

Two out of 350 is a 0.57% rate of deadly incidents over a fairly short period. One could argue it is a statistical anomaly and the dataset is too small, but besides that I think it is understandable for some people to be worried about it.

Ok, but that's the percentage of airframes that have crashed. It doesn't account for the number of flights they have flown successfully.

murphaph

plodder wrote: »

The drip feed of groundings certainly creates that impression, but there's 350 of them flying multiple times a day over the last year or two and only two crashes.

I'm just amazed at how this has mushroomed in the space of 24 hours. It's going to be interesting to hear what the additional information received by the Canadian agency (and the others) was. One has to assume that it is significant enough to justify this.

2 out of 350 is 0.6% of the fleet lost in just 2 years. I think that's very high and if the cause is related the aircraft is definitely very dangerous.

Also remember that 350 have not been flying for 2 years. The Ethiopian aircraft was just 4 months old.

q85dw7osi4lebg

US now grounded too.

Roger_007

plodder wrote: »

Ok, but that's the percentage of airframes that have crashed. It doesn't account for the number of flights they have flown successfully.

Do we have any idea of how many occurrences there have been of the problem that the Lion Air plane had? Are these type of incidents reported to other aviation authorities or airlines? I assume they are always reported to Boeing.
Maybe that's the type of information that's now becoming known and causing the reactions that we have seen.

Inquitus

FAA Ground all 737 Max 8 / 9's, they complete to destination and grounded thereafter.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-faa-will-ground-boeing-737-max-8-737-max-9-planes-following-deadly-ethiopian-airlines-crash

L1011

Makes the "continuing airworthiness" thing a total joke that doesn't reflect well on their reputation at all