The 737 MAX Saga Is a Total Disgrace for Boeing and the FAA

The Worship of Mammon by Evelyn De Morgan.

One of the first things to become apparent as I began reading about the deadly crash of Ethiopian Airlines’ Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane on March 10th, was the fact that nobody seemed to trust U.S. authorities.

As Fortune noted:

Ethiopia’s aviation authority is unable to read the black box recorders from the Boeing 737 Max plane that crashed Sunday, but a row is brewing over just where the flight recorders will be sent for analysis.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is pushing to have its experts analyze the data and voice recorders, which were partly damaged, the Wall Street Journal reports, but Ethiopian authorities would prefer to work with the U.K.’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch to ensure that U.S. experts won’t have undue influence in the probe of the American-made plane.

At the same time, pretty much the entire world had started to ground 737 MAX planes as this was the second time this model had crashed within the span of five months. By early last week, Canada and the U.S. had become increasingly isolated in insisting the planes were safe to fly, and then Canada folded too.

This represented a huge rebuke to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which continued to defend the aircraft until the very last moment. In a ridiculous stunt, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao even rode in a 737 MAX two days after the latest crash.

Many people, including myself, saw this lack of trust in the FAA as a watershed moment. Politico noted:

It was a sharp contrast to the typical way such decisions have been made in the past, in which countries would follow the lead of the agency that had certified the aircraft in question. In this case, that would be the FAA, which has historically been seen as the gold standard among aviation safety regulators.

Given the plethora of information to emerge in recent days, it turns out the rest of the world was correct to distrust the FAA and Boeing. The most illuminating article on the subject was published yesterday in The Seattle Times, titled: Flawed Analysis, Failed Oversight: How Boeing, FAA Certified the Suspect 737 Max Flight Control System.

If you read one article today, that should be it. It becomes perfectly clear that both the FAA and Boeing played major roles in allowing flawed planes to fly all over the world, and it took two disastrous crashes, as well as the whole world grounding them, to finally act.

Here’s some of what we learned. First, the FAA essentially outsourced much of its certification process for the 737 MAX planes to Boeing itself. Yes, you read that right.

The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes. Early on in certification of the 737 MAX, the FAA safety engineering team divided up the technical assessments that would be delegated to Boeing versus those they considered more critical and would be retained within the FAA.

But several FAA technical experts said in interviews that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process. Development of the MAX was lagging nine months behind the rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing.

As usual, it’s all about the money.

A former FAA safety engineer who was directly involved in certifying the MAX said that halfway through the certification process, “we were asked by management to re-evaluate what would be delegated. Management thought we had retained too much at the FAA.”

“There was constant pressure to re-evaluate our initial decisions,” the former engineer said. “And even after we had reassessed it … there was continued discussion by management about delegating even more items down to the Boeing Company.”

We also learn that the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) was seemingly central to both fatal MAX crashes, and according to The Seattle Times, “the System Safety Analysis on MCAS, just one piece of the mountain of documents needed for certification, was delegated to Boeing.”

Even worse, Boeing gave inaccurate details to the FAA about MCAS and only informed it of the discrepancy after the first crash.

After the Lion Air Flight 610 crash, Boeing for the first time provided to airlines details about MCAS. Boeing’s bulletin to the airlines stated that the limit of MCAS’s command was 2.5 degrees.

That number was new to FAA engineers who had seen 0.6 degrees in the safety assessment.

“The FAA believed the airplane was designed to the 0.6 limit, and that’s what the foreign regulatory authorities thought, too,” said an FAA engineer. “It makes a difference in your assessment of the hazard involved.”

As such, according to The Seattle Times, Boeing gave inaccurate information to the FAA and foreign aviation regulators, an oversight that may have made a difference between life and death.

But there’s still more. Pilots weren’t even made aware about the MCAS in the first place so Boeing could sell more planes and save money on costs.

We learn:

Since MCAS was supposed to activate only in extreme circumstances far outside the normal flight envelope, Boeing decided that 737 pilots needed no extra training on the system — and indeed that they didn’t even need to know about it. It was not mentioned in their flight manuals.

That stance allowed the new jet to earn a common “type rating” with existing 737 models, allowing airlines to minimize training of pilots moving to the MAX.

Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association at American Airlines, said his training on moving from the old 737 NG model cockpit to the new 737 MAX consisted of little more than a one-hour session on an iPad, with no simulator training.

Minimizing MAX pilot transition training was an important cost saving for Boeing’s airline customers, a key selling point for the jet, which has racked up more than 5,000 orders.

The company’s website pitched the jet to airlines with a promise that “as you build your 737 MAX fleet, millions of dollars will be saved because of its commonality with the Next-Generation 737.”

Finally, in case you don’t think that’s bad enough, make sure you read through the following thread.

This whole affair seems like a perfect microcosm for our twisted and broken modern U.S. economy and culture in general. Greed, regulatory capture and death — it has it all.

Unfortunately, we appear determined to ride this freight train straight into a brick wall.

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13 thoughts on “The 737 MAX Saga Is a Total Disgrace for Boeing and the FAA”

  1. It’s worse. I reported the Boeing Uninterruptible Auto Pilot to FAA and ALPA ( pilot union in US) on 10 December 2006. FAA, ALPA and airlines failed to inform pilots. See you tube “Boeing Uninterruptible Auto Pilot” Field McConnell Delta retired

    Reply
  2. In addition, part of the issue with “modern technological advancement” is complexity for complexities sake – the simpler avionics did not have this failure. The 737 Max 8 is extremely complex, yet that complexity led to catastrophic failure. We should recognize this destructive aspect as a culture, and move beyond the “worship” of complexity and “more technology” for those “items” that “function” in a user friendly fashion, and ironically are durable and “serve the purpose”.
    It would be appropriate that a number of countries cancel their orders for this plane.

    An ex pilot.

    Reply
    • > – the simpler avionics did not have this failure

      …but it also was much more expensive for consumers

      “Simpler avionics” would just collapse the market of air travels

    • Unfortunately the Boeing Max series is inherently too unstable for pilots to control fully manually due to the need to place the engines up and forward of the original 737 design. “Type approval” (or the same paper-engineering process by other names) is a common hi-tech industry practice. I ran into this in the nuclear industry where testing/qualification of safety-related components is very expensive and highly regulated. In the nuke power industry, the original tested/qualified materials are often no longer available. As but one example, Viton rubber of 2019 is not the identical in composition or performance to Viton rubber rubber that was approved nearly a half century ago. But some engineer sat in an office and looked at the specs of the successive generations of viton and decided that they were essentially the same, even though no actual thermal/radiation/longevity testing was done. I left the nuke industry because my boss wanted me to sign to say current components/specs “matched” the original or worse, tighter, modern specs/qualification requirements. He had his engineering ticket and wouldn’t sign it either (hypocrite), so the subsidiary of the US company I worked for colluded with an intermediary engineering firm which made that declaration with zero re-testing. In one door as one spec, repackaged and re-labelled and shipped out another door as a “qualified ” product. Total BS. So if the US nuke industry is getting away with it, no surprise Boeing is too.

  3. Good for the Ethiopians, refusing to cave to US pressure. The FAA has been a joke for a while and it’s nice for people to acknowledge it. The deterioration of trust continues!

    A lot of people work for Boeing in my area and I once worked for a Boeing subsidiary. I assume they’ve gotten lazy due to their cozy relationship with the MIC and the easy money that entails. Then again, pretty much every company I’ve worked for seems to care little about the end consumer. Once the transaction has concluded, the product is your problem. Glad I haven’t worked in a customer-facing position in a long time, that must be awful.

    Reply
  4. Can you say, manslaughter and criminal negligence? By rights the Boeing management should be arrested and charged with this. In addition, Ethiopian Airways should sue Boeing’s pants off. And I’m another ex-pilot who puts safety and people’s lives ahead of making a buck.

    Reply
  5. Trevor Sumner is wrong is some his claims.

    Fore example, he claims Boeing charged extra for redundant AoA sensors and for consequent showing AoA problems to pilots.

    He is half-wrong. All Boeing 737 do have redundant sensors. However, informing pilots about the fault of sensors is indeed an extra option.

    It goes into the pattern of infamous Three Miles Island accident. Or, to a degree, into Chernobyl.

    To compare, dozen years ago Airbus by Quantas airline had much worse AoA sensors failure. But because informing pilots about emergences was not a deluxe option on Airbus, but a core functionality, pilots managed to give ground maintenance service enough information so the latter managed to think out the operation of cutting off faulting subsystems and regaining control. From initially much worse emergency they managed to land the plane safely. Because of being informed.

    If someone want to sieve above 300 comments for technicalities and opinions welcome to
    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/03/boeing-the-faa-and-why-two-737-max-planes-crashed.html#comments

    Notice, most of those comments were written before Seattle Times article. However S.T. article – revealing really damning glares – did not added quantitatively new information about how disasters happened, while revealing a lot why it had to happen.

    Reply
    • I meant, qualitatively new, not quantitatively.

      Still, MCAS was a last-minute “ugly hack”. From the no-documentation problem up to the fact that having redundant AoA sensors MCAS only used one single of them.

  6. This is absolutely another in your face example of what we have become. This version of capitalism is corrupted absolutely, profit over quality, over safety, over everything. Is it any wonder young people want something different after what they have seen every day. No I don’t believe our answer will come from any other top down socially engineered “ism.”
    Self governed, voluntarily cooperation, decentralized self aware conscious people.
    It’s clearly time to turn our backs, close our wallets and walk away from this “Den of Vipers”

    Reply
    • The silver lining in this situation IMO is that all around us the established global order is losing control of the programmed narrative.
      The tighter they squeeze the more of us slip through their fingers.

  7. Boeing is the keystone of one of our biggest states-within-a-state known as the Military Industrial Complex. They can do no wrong. And if they are accused of doing so, all the powers of the formal state will be turned to make sure the accusations (and accusers?) are destroyed.

    Reply
  8. We live in the era of regulatory capture. But to the FAA’s credit, it has historically done a good job of staying clear of that trap.

    But obviously Boeing has managed to sink its money hooks into the FAA to an extent.

    So if there’s anything good that comes out of this, it should be that it now comes to an end.

    We shall see.

    Reply

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