Ethiopian Airlines Crash/ B737MAX grounding

I've just looked at FR24, and as of a few moments ago, they are tracking somewhere in the region of 14,000 flights worldwide. A significant number of those flights are out of range of a cellular tower system, so to capture adequate real time data from all of these flights, a significant network of satellites, similar to the GPS network would be needed, and the reality is that the cost of putting such a network into place, and the ongoing operating costs, would be very significant, and getting worldwide international agreement for such a network would be another very significant issue, and the number of accidents that need a data capture resource of this nature is still happily very low indeed.

The unfortunate reality is that the incidents with the Max are looking suspiciously like the same sort of scenario that was responsible for the Kegworth crash, even though the reasons were different, and that failing is very much a problem of crew information and training, compounded by a lack of clarity from Boeing. Had the crew of the Kegworth accident made the right diagnosis of the fault, it was completely survivable, but for a number of reasons, they made a fatal wrong diagnosis, and shut down the wrong engine.

There have been strong arguments made for a number of years that "grandfather rights" for certification and type ratings should be disallowed when there have been significant changes to the aircraft when compared to the original certified design, and there can be no doubt that the difference between the original 737 (200) family and the Max range are very significant. At one time, Boeing produced an "analog" version of the 300 series to suit South West, as they didn't want to deal with the massive differences between the 200 and the 300, as that would have caused them a lot of rostering and scheduling problems.

Now we have the scenario where Boeing have deliberately modified the flight characteristics of the Max in order to make it fly like the earlier versions, to the extent they have not made full disclosure of some of the effects of the changes to the people "at the sharp end", so the pilots are not fully aware of the things that can happen, or why they are happening, and the worry now is that there have been changes made to the systems that are not fully fail safe, or fully fail redundant, and it is even possible that the testing of the new systems was done on the basis of making sure it worked with valid data, but it seems (worryingly) possible that tests on completely spurious and invalid data were not carried through the process, and to make it worse, check list procedures and awareness training also appear to have been compromised.

The bigger concern is that these changes appear to have been formally agreed with and approved by the FAA, and it was the case that the FAA were supposed to be the people who made sure that manufacturers did not cut corners or bend the rules, and that role seems to have been more than slightly blurred, if what is coming out at the moment is to be believed.

A very long time ago now, I did some very in depth work on the A320 family for a BAE research division, and as part of that work we had to do some detailed research on the way that the aircraft could be flown in manual reversion, a failure state that was highly unlikely, due to the number of failures across multiple redundant systems that were involved.

We discovered that we were going to have problems doing the research in simulators, in that the European regulators had allowed the airlines in Europe to not train for that scenario, as it was deemed so insignificant statistically, the costs and time involved in training for it were deemed too high compared to the likely occurrence of a "real" event.

As a result, European certified simulators were unable to correctly model the handling of the aircraft in that failure mode, and we ended up having to go to a simulator in the States, where were were able to get the information we needed, as the FAA had taken a different view, and required the airlines to train for such a failure, so the simulators correctly modelled it. When we discussed this among a number of involved parties, the strong implication was that the "local" regulators had been biased by significant pressure from the local manufacturer, and I mention this here to make it clear that this sort of favouritism is not limited to one regulatory system.

We already know that there have been issues with the 737 family, as mentioned earlier, when the 300 first was introduced, while the failure was caused by a new engine issue, the Kegworth crash was partly attributed to changes made between the 200 and 300 that meant the crew were misled by the symptoms they saw, and their training on the differences had not highlighted some of those differences. There were also fundamental crew resource management issues in the cockpit which resulted in a massive change in the whole cockpit training methodology, but that's another subject that's not really for this thread.

Then, a number of years later, there were a significant number of unexplained crashes that were eventually found to be a problem with the rudder actuator system, resulting in a full hard over rudder lock, which was initially resolved by significant changes to operating speeds, the problem being that a rudder hard over at low speeds could not be overcome by the effect of aileron and spoilers, so the aircraft effectively kept rolling, and was unrecoverable. A 10 Kt increase in speeds meant that the aileron combination could overcome this, and that, in combination with a redesign of some of the hardware does appear to have resolved the issue, but it took a long time and too many accidents before it was resolved.

Now, while it's very early, it seems that there may be issues with the way in which Boeing have made changes to minimise the difference between the Max and the earlier generations, and those issues have not been fully documented and covered in the training on "differences". I hope it is that simple, and that there are no cut corners that have come out of the woodwork to cause these fatal accidents.

We can only hope that the highest priority will be given to getting the data off the recorders, and determining if there is a bigger issue than had been thought. I don't have adequate words to express the feelings I have about the loss of close on 400 lives, I just hope that what is causing these problems will be found and resolved before there are any more losses.