[Jeroen]

Boeing’s answer to the Max problems; Revert to the original factory designation of 737-8 and drop the Max label:

https://www.theguardian.com/business...land-enter-air

In all honesty, the Guardian seems to be making a somewhat bigger thing of it, but then again that’s the Guardian business. What must be obvious that neither Boeing nor any carrier are very keen to keep using the Max name for obvious reasons. Irrespective what they would do, rename, rebadge, rebrand or leave it as it is, it is likely to get press attention.

Jeroen

[Sutripta]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

Boeing’s answer to the Max problems; Revert to the original factory designation of 737-8 and drop the Max label:

Now if they were also car manufacturers they would know everything about all new/ refreshed/ facelift (not nosedive!) sticker jobs, and how to sell it to the public.

Sutripta

[Jeroen]

Remember Ralph Nader and his “unsafe at any speed” book.

We just need someone to come up with the book “unsafe at any altitude” I guess!

Surprised the Internet has not come up with that one!

It will be interesting if people will board a 737-8 / Max once re-certified. My guess is they will, with some exceptions, broadly spilled out on all social media.

Jeroen

[Jeroen]

The latest report on the 737 max saga. This time a congressional report in which both the Max and the FAA are being reviewed.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/16/p...ort/index.html

A few snaps:

The report on the 18-month investigation, published Wednesday by the House Transportation Committee, charges in a new level of detail that the plane-maker intentionally downplayed the significance of the MCAS computerized flight-control system, which it concluded had led to "346 unnecessary deaths," including in a second crash a few months later.
The 246-page report goes into minute detail about the plane's design by Boeing and approval by the Federal Aviation Administration, and describes missed opportunities by the company to prevent the crashes. It details a litany of ways the plane-maker ensured that simulator training would not be required for many pilots -- which the House committee said makes the plane less safe.
Boeing responded to the report by saying it has incorporated feedback from multiple investigations and reviews into its redesign of the aircraft and that it has "learned many hard lessons as a company from the accidents."

The report was also critical of the FAA's oversight of the company, which included a program approved by Congress that allows Boeing employees to sign off for the FAA on meeting certain safety standards. Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio of Oregon said Tuesday that he is working on legislation to change that system.
Investigators wrote that they had "documented several instances" of Boeing employees failing "to disclose important information to the FAA that could have enhanced the safety of the 737 MAX aircraft," including how the MCAS system was presented.
Boeing's focus on developing a plane that wouldn't require simulator training was to the detriment not only of the pilots but also of the aircraft's safety itself, the investigators said. For example, company officials rejected including a synthetic airspeed indicator in the cockpit because that new feature "may have jeopardized the no simulator training goal."
"The problem is it was compliant but not safe, and people died," DeFazio said. He believes the focus on avoiding simulator training "drove a whole lot of really bad decisions internally at Boeing."

[Jeroen]

The link to the full report:

https://transportation.house.gov/imo...%20Release.pdf

[Sutripta]

^^^
Between 'sensational popular press reports' (written by people who do not know anything about flying) and 'final official reports', where does this fall?

Sutripta

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by Sutripta

^^^
Between 'sensational popular press reports' (written by people who do not know anything about flying) and 'final official reports', where does this fall?

I have not read it all, just glanced through it. It is certainly a very lengthy report, the commission has interviewed a lot of people, looked at lots of articles that appeared in the general and aviation press.

To what extend people are experts remains to be seen. remarkable I see a lot of references to various reports that have appeared in various journals/media. Even articles in news-outlets.

So it appears to be a (almost random) but very extensive collection of interviews of various stakeholders, experts and bystanders.

If anything it does appear to be given a pretty detailled chronological overview on what happened around the design of the 737 MAX and the (lack of) oversight of the FAA.

It is very light on real technical details and I don’t see the commission digging into real technical issues at all. It refers numerous times to parts of interviews, or emails etc.

So I don’t think it is a very well thought out detailled investigations. It’s more a collection of a lot of stuff that happened, put in chronological order. The executive summary is 34 pages alone! So it does make for an interesting read I found.

It is not your typical accident investigations report. In my view it lacks detail insights and looses itself too much in general stuff. Although some reference is made to more detailled report.

It is certainly a lot more and more thorough than a sensational popular press report. I am not quite sure how much weight is/will be attached to this report by Boeing and or FAA. Will be interesting to see how / if it is followed up at all.

Jeroen

[Sutripta]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

If anything it does appear to be given a pretty detailled chronological overview on what happened around the design of the 737 MAX and the (lack of) oversight of the FAA.

...

I am not quite sure how much weight is/will be attached to this report by Boeing and or FAA. Will be interesting to see how / if it is followed up at all.

If laws are going to be changed because of this report, Boeing and FAA can't afford being nonchalant.

Sutripta

[Jeroen]

The introduction of this report:

This report concludes the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure’s 18- month long investigation of the design, development, and certification of the 737 MAX aircraft, and related matters. The Committee’s investigation has revealed multiple missed opportunities that could have turned the trajectory of the MAX’s design and development toward a safer course due to flawed technical design criteria, faulty assumptions about pilot response times, and production pressures. The FAA also missed its own opportunities to change the direction of the 737 MAX based on its aviation safety mission. Boeing failed in its design and development of the MAX, and the FAA failed in its oversight of Boeing and its certification of the aircraft.
At the direction of Committee Chair Peter DeFazio and Subcommittee on Aviation Chair Rick Larsen, this report is being released to help inform the public’s understanding of what went so horrifically wrong and why. Despite the sweeping and substantive problems that have been identified by this Committee’s investigation as well as various other investigations, both Boeing and the FAA have suggested that the certification of the 737 MAX was compliant with FAA regulations. The fact that a compliant airplane suffered from two deadly crashes in less than five months is clear evidence that the current regulatory system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be repaired.

So the purpose of this report appears to be:

this report is being released to help inform the public’s understanding of what went so horrifically wrong and why

This report doesn’t come with recommendations. What needs changing and how is left up to the legislators, the FAA and Boeing.

I have been trying to follow what is happening with the Max recertification and what reforms the FAA/Boeing is going to pursue. Not easy to get a real understanding what is going on.

Jeroen

[Jeroen]

I just came across the following on PPRUNE, which I thinks puts some perspective on how this report came about:

About the political posture of the Committee report . . . all the work was done by "staff" (or very nearly all of it). But there are two types of staffers. One type consists of individuals whose jobs on Capitol Hill are tied to the Representative (in this case, or the Senator), and happen to get assigned to Committee or Subcommittee work for that particular office. Their experience and, where they possess it, expertise is found mostly in managing communications to and from their Congress(person) loyally and without deviation from the office's intended line of approach.

It is the other type of staffer who matters in the context of reports like this. Committees and Subcommittees develop their own separate rosters of staff, up to and including Chief Counsel. These are not quite career civil servants, but the best essentially do conform to that concept of the role.

The 737 MAX report released by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman and the Aviation Subcommittee chairman on the 16th is the work of the staff. While obviously the professional (more or less) Committee staffers have party allegiances, their work does tend to be heavily, well . . . professional. This having been said, the report is not endorsed by the Democratic members of the Committee or, presumably, by the professional staff who work with and on behalf of the current "minority".

Maybe I'll have a more thoroughly cynical view about this specific report once I have read it as if it had been produced in discovery by a party adverse to a client, but on present preliminary evidence, the often crazed polarization that dominates political life and public service in the U.S. did not infect the Committee professional staff into political cheap shots or litigation-fanning publicity stunts.

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/...l#post10887028

[Jeroen]

So it looks like the Max is on it’s way back into the air. Not a done deal yet, but from what I gather most aviation authorities are well on the way to approve.

In true American fashion there are still a large number of law suits being filed, left, right and centre. It is impossible to follow it all. But I thought two particular cases interesting. The below is mostly cut and paste from various posts on PPRUNE. I have just re-arranged it:

There are parties bringing the lawsuit in Washington which are led by a group known as FlyersRights which, as the name implies, is about advocating for the rights of flyers (sorry for this amazing bit of legal reasoning). The prime mover of the group is a gentleman named Paul Hudson.

The lawsuit is about two basic issues. The first is that the FAA should not be trusted to make a decision about returning the 737 MAX to service without some independent group of experts having a look at its decision-making and its reasoning. And in order to do that, the independent group needs to have all of the documents Boeing gave to FAA about the return to service - so the lawsuit says, anyway.

This kind of lawsuit is known as a FOIA action, which stands for Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. federal government and most if not all of the 50 states have FOIA statutes on the books. There are exemptions to the requirement of disclosing documents in a FOIA lawsuit, the most important one here being an exemption for a company's proprietary and confidential information. ("Exemption" is perhaps a lawyer word but then, everyone knows about exemptions from their tax returns, probably.)

Where the lawsuit stands at present is that FAA has completed its disclosure of the requested documents. The parties (FAA, and FlyersRights and Mr. Hudson) have met and conferred and narrowed down their dispute over the FAA's contention that some documents are just too confidential, as far as Boeing is concerned, to be disclosed. Legal briefs about these confidentiality issues are now on a calendar and the court is kind of kicking the lawyers' backsides to get on with things. (Trust me when I say, a federal court judge's kick in the seat of the pants is not something to be desired.)

In my posts, I have said, or tried to say anyway, that given the gross failures of Boeing as well as the FAA in the events that led to the two crashes, the ordinary respect for confidentiality issues given to the manufacturer should be reduced. I do not know if the parties suing FAA will argue this in their briefs or not. I also have said that, just as in many other kinds of cases, documents carrying confidentiality interests can be protected by a court order requiring that the lawyers and litigants who see them cannot disclose their contents anywhere to anybody on pain of contempt of court. It's called a Protective Order and they work.

The litigation has significance for several other very important developments still in progress. Key among these is the FAA reform legislation pending in the House of Representatives, It has been widely reported that in the previous FAA-related legislation just a few years ago, Boeing succeeded in obtaining yet more independence in the certification process, and many have observed it had become almost self-certification without meaningful FAA oversight. So rebalancing the certification process is going to be important - I don't think this is a controversial observation whatsoever.

The FOIA lawsuit also holds significance for the liability lawsuits against Boeing, and for the reportedly ongoing criminal inquiries, but since I have accepted being admonished for legalese, these are noted without further expansion.)

There is also another case building:

About 2500 pilots from airlines around the world are claiming, in a proposed class action lawsuit, that Boeing is liable to them after they gained type ratings on the 737 MAX only to find, after the grounding, a highly negative impact on their careers. The essence of Boeing's defense at this point? Never mind the negligence, or worse, in the design and interactions with FAA....and never mind too the misleading if not deliberately lying statements Boeing made about training requirements and other aspects of the aircraft. Complexities of some legal doctrines prevent the pilots, Boeing claims, from having any legal rights even if all the alleged wrongdoing took place exactly as alleged. Boeing's legal brief is very polished! very strongly argued!...and highly troubling.

In fact, Boeing argued (IIRC) that pilots whose careers were derailed and harmed by the 737 MAX debacle and Boeing's wrongful conduct are no more entitled to their day in court than cafe baristas employed at airports whose jobs also might be negatively impacted by the grounding. Interesting, that the once great and proud airframer now argues, in the United States District Court in Chicago, that flying an airplane made by Boeing for an air carrier in any of many countries around the world carries no legal obligations owed by Boeing any greater than a variation of "coffee, latte or me?"

Source: https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/...inally-22.html

Sully (Captain Sullenberger) is involved in the first case I made. Sully is of course just about the most famous and respected pilot in the USA. Whether a very experienced pilot is an expert in all aviation matters remains to be seen, but still.

I predict that the Max will take to the air, long before anything becomes of these court cases.

Jeroen

[BoneCollector]

FAA clears the B737 MAX for flights again.

B737 MAX

After nearly two years and a pair of deadly crashes, U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has cleared Boeing’s 737 Max for flight.

The nation’s air safety agency announced the move early Wednesday, saying it was done after a “comprehensive and methodical” 20-month review process.

[fhdowntheline]

Its an interesting and a daunting prospect. Had it not been for the lack of transparency around the design issues, people would have taken the FAA's authorisation at face value. This isnt something similar to say, the Comet case, where the Comet 4 was re-engined and strengthened (perhaps excessively as per some experts) to overcome the structural issues of Comet-1.

[dragracer567]

Given that other countries don't trust the FAA anymore, I guess that the EASA, CAAC and the Indian DGCA would want to clear the 737 MAX on their own terms and not rely on the FAA like they used to. I did read somewhere though (I think BBC) that EASA certification is imminent as well. This whole fiasco cost Boeing $ 20 billion plus any other future lawsuits and 346 precious lives lost.

I know that previous design flaws such as with the DC-10 did well after their flaws were fixed but we live in different times where social media is very prevalent and people are extremely opinionated.

Boeing is losing the match now, with Airbus coming up with the Airbus A321XLR and Airbus is taking a clear lead, the aviation industry is an interesting space to watch for now!

[AirbusCapt]

Let's wake up and smell the coffee please!! The entire recertification of the max reeks of political manipulation. The premise of the max being recertified is by using improved control software. There is no mention of actual re-engineering involved which makes the aircraft aerodynamically stable!
The reason why a stupid bit if code (MCAS) was put in, was to ensure that the angle of attack doesn't exceed too high in a climb, which could happen because the bigger engines were shoehorned under the wings, leading to a change in the center of gravity and center of lift. airbus too faced a similar issue with the Neo, however they could work around the problem by tweaking the fly by wire logic and adding invisible (to pilots) protection. On an old conventional aircraft like the 737 (using pulley and cable controls) boeing tried to add a dumb box (MCAS) which simply forced the nose down each time it thought the nose was too high.