Ethiopian 737-8 MAX down. No survivors.

If such an essential warning light is indeed sold at extra cost, it’s irresponsible from the manufacturer to deliver it without and also from the purchaser’s to not order it.

 

Reads like a typical dumbass “news” story. The moron journalists who write these stories are the same type of people who would say they heard the engine “sputter” before the plane crashed.

It’s not a warning light.......it’s a message followed by a caution annunciator.
It’s not uncommon to see angle of attack indicators pointing in different directions on the ground. I would imagine they don’t even come into play until probably 60+ knots. At which point they would align with the airflow.
After all doom and gloom and shock factor he goes on to say he doesn’t even know if Ethiopian had that “warning light”.

 

This is amazing.

The Lion Air Max 8 that crashed had the same malfunction the day before! Fortunately, an off-duty pilot riding in the jump seat, recognized the problem and intervened to prevent a crash dive.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/lion-air-boeing-737-max-8-was-reportedly-saved-by-off-duty-pilot-day-before-deadly-crash-in-indonesia

 

Yep! That's what all of my professional aviator associates have said all along. Turn it off and fly the airplane!

 

What is so remarkable about that is that it took someone slightly removed from the situation to figure it out.

 

Or, perhaps, better trained.

 

I learned a long time ago that when it hits the fan there are some people I hope are no where around. People handle bad situations differently. Part training, part experience and part personality.

 

Maybe, but I wouldn't count on that.

 

This ain't good... Its Lion Air, but the two events seem to be similar

Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-19/how-an-extra-man-in-cockpit-saved-a-737-max-that-later-crashed?srnd=premium

As the Lion Air crew fought to control their diving Boeing Co. 737 Max 8, they got help from an unexpected source: an off-duty pilot who happened to be riding in the cockpit.

That extra pilot, who was seated in the cockpit jumpseat, correctly diagnosed the problem and told the crew how to disable a malfunctioning flight-control system and save the plane, according to two people familiar with Indonesia’s investigation.

The next day, under command of a different crew facing what investigators said was an identical malfunction, the jetliner crashed into the Java Sea killing all 189 aboard.

The so-called dead-head pilot on the flight from Bali to Jakarta told the crew to cut power to the motor in the trim system that was driving the nose down, according to the people familiar, part of a checklist that all pilots are required to memorize.

By contrast, the crew on the flight that crashed the next day didn’t know how to respond to the malfunction, said one of the people familiar with the plane’s cockpit voice recorder recovered as part of the investigation. They can be heard checking their quick reference handbook, a summary of how to handle unusual or emergency situations, in the minutes before they crashed, Reuters reported, citing people it didn’t name.

 

What I found interesting from the penultimate incident is that the malfunction occurred two (2) times in a row (reproducible?) rather than being an isolated incident the second time. Hopefully this bit of information can help to narrow down the troubleshooting for the cause.

 

Even in my private pilot training, dealing with runaway trim was a memory task. I just don’t get why they didn’t know how to disable the system.

 

That's because they get their 10 hours of training from MS Flight Sim 4.0. These bass-ackward bozos are going to cost Boeing a lot of money.

 

The same reason four guys sitting in the front of a 777 allow it to stall on landing in perfect weather.

 

So a Malfunction happened and

1. pilots did not know how to address but should have known.
2. the plane was allowed to fly the next day - was the malfunction addressed/fixed over night? ignored?
3. Was the next day crew aware of the malfunction and if yes, how did they not learn how to address it?

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/business/boeing-safety-features-charge.html

Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras
As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockpits.

One reason: Boeing charged extra for them.

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them.

Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

It is not yet known what caused the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 and Lion Air Flight 610 five months earlier, both after erratic takeoffs. But investigators are looking at whether a new software system added to avoid stalls in Boeing’s 737 Max series may have been partly to blame. Faulty data from sensors on the Lion Air plane may have caused the system, known as MCAS, to malfunction, authorities investigating that crash suspect.
That software system takes readings from two vanelike devices called angle of attack sensors that determine how much the plane’s nose is pointing up or down relative to oncoming air. When MCAS detects that the plane is pointing up at a dangerous angle, it can automatically push down the nose of the plane in an effort to prevent the plane from stalling.

Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public.

 

Your item 1) is incorrect. There was no training or documentation about the particular failure that they suffered, so you can't make the case that they "should have known" how to address the issue. They figured it out, though, with the help of the third pilot in the cockpit.

in regard to 2) and 3), I believe there was some corrective action taken, but I'm not sure what.

 

I get add-ons can be lucrative but a second sensor and a light seems petty. I'm sure Boeing is well aware of the different standards in pilot training, for those lessor trained countries perhaps they shouldn't have made it an option.

I've always had a sense of relief when I've heard an American or Australian accent from the flight deck when flying through Asia or Africa.

 

I agree with the last sentence. As for the first I don't agree. Is it Boeing's responsibility to deliver an idiot proof airplane? If in fact they properly made everyone aware of all systems and how to properly use and care for them it is the individual airlines to be responsible to educate their crews and maintence people.

I cannot hold the Stanley screw driver people accountable if I poke myself in the eye with their screw driver. If this is one of those cases I think Boeing is only responsible for tragically bad PR.

 

What I cannot understand is if a similar problem happened on the second crash how the crew was not able to shut of the MCAS. We even had reports in the media of how to shut it off. Maybe the new FO was no help so the captain was to busy flying the aircraft and forgot what to switch off??

Sounds like Boeing should have had and automatic shut off if the MCAS system received erroneous conflicting readings but that would require extra sensors I suppose. Why would the MCAS not pick up on other info coming from the aircraft rather than just rely on it's sensors?

 

Take it for what it is worth, but one news report I heard said that the crew was going down a checklist but ran out of time before they got to the item to disconnect and crashed first. Perhaps the MCAS needs to have a higher priority in the scope of things.

 

I suspected earlier in this thread that a FO with only a couple hundred hours was probably still going by the book and down the checklist. How sad to run out of time like that.

The saying "just fly the plane" or whatever is kind of hard as they showed when in manual mode the MCAS is still interfering...sad.

 

All I can say is that I'm sorely disappointed in Boeing. I've posted here that I felt that Airbus was pursuing a dangerous approach to flight control software and had stacks of bodies to prove it. I always felt that Boeings' approach of making a basically good airplane and then minimizing the electronic "band aids" was the right one. Clearly the Max deviates from that in that it doesn't have stellar flying qualities and needed an electronic "crutch" to attain certification.

Given their lack of experience in this arena it is clear that Boeing didn't understand that there is a maximum that those of us who have been through the certification process using electronic systems understand: The first is that any and ALL electronic sensors will fail at one time or another. The second is that you CAN NOT rely on even two sensors for any flight critical electronic system. The reason for this is that if you have only two sensors and one fails, the computer doesn't know which one is right. So if you go by the FAA requirements the computer can just throw up its hands and give control to the pilot basically defeating what they were trying to do with the system in the first place.

Boeings' contention that the MCAS system would not lead to a possible loss of the aircraft and that they didn't need redundant sensors was flawed. The problem was that it kept kicking in and was not limited in the amount of nose down trim it could invoke. It was supposed to hit a limit and stop according to the software descriptions, and it didn't, so there appears to be a glitch in the software that some one didn't catch and it killed people. The real failure here is that someone didn't do the FMEA properly, and didn't look deep enough to see the flaw. Easy to do when there is so much code to go through.

We had a situation where we had a poor quality sensor that was frequently failing. So even though our system met the FAA requirements (it took two sensors to fail the control) the reality was we really only had one. When that other sensor failed the waring lights all went off and then the pilot didn't recognize what was wrong so didn't do what he was supposed to and while no one got hurt it could have been a lot worse. The real scary part was when we were sitting around the table reading the recorder data line by line. As the girl who wrote the software was reading the data it hit me exactly what happened. I looked up and across the table was another controls engineer and he had the same startled look that I must have had. While the rest of the "brains" at the table were still reading and looking down we both saw the flaw in the system at the same time and knew instantly what cased the crash. The pilot leveled off and since the throttle was failed fixed in climb, leveling off with climb power caused a rotor overspeed which tripped the rotor overspeed shut down everything. After we explained it to the rest of the controls folks the software designers attitude was "well, the failure was two levels deep and that's all the FAA requires, so we did our job just fine".. That's when we basically replaced her and got on with fixing the issue. (then again after that she became a DER!!).

The lesson we learned and implemented was that you can't base a system that could crash you or override all the pilot control inputs on even two sensors, even though that satisfies the FAA. What the FAA doesn't understand is that today's electronic systems aren't like magnetos, where if one fails you still have a good one and you keep on trucking. Today's sensors like airspeed and AOA can produce data that is bad, if they just dropped of it would be fine, but that's not what happens. You have to be able to identify not that a sensor has failed, but you need to know if it is "working" but supplying bad data. Airbus uses 3 AOA sensors so they have obviously learned this the hard way. We stayed with 2 sensors but we went further than that. We used the control computer to synthesize the third sensor input, and if your two sensors disagree, then you compare them both with the synthesized input and use the one that is still good. For this situation the FC computer should be looking at airspeed, rate of climb and altitude and with those inputs the computer could readily compute the AOA and from that decide which sensor was good and ignore the bad one (or two). The bottom line is that the FAA's level of redundancy is sorely lacking for flight control system inputs. If you want a safe system you have to go well beyond that.

I won't go into training, we had that problem too. Some pilots are no better than a box of rocks. These pilots, had they identified the problem as the one the day before had, never would have had an issue, but the didn't see it and died because of it. Same thing as with Air France, if they'd have realized they stalled they would have flow out if it, but they didn't. You can't totally blame the pilots because there will always be bad pilots. OTOH if one pilot caught it the day before why didn't these guys get it?

Sorry for the long post, but it appears that Boeing screwed up, the software was poor, someone missed the FMEA, the FAA didn't catch it, the training on the system wasn't there. The pilots flying never had Max sim time, the aircraft was faulty on takeoff and never should have left the gate, the airline didn't buy the optional equipment, Boeing made the second sensor an "option" (totally dumb since it cost them nothing). As someone noted above it usually isn't one or two things that kills ya in aviation. It usually takes three too cause a crash. In this case there were probably a half a dozen things that contributed to this crash but the reality is that it was probably avoidable had any one of them not occurred.

 

Yes, the perfect Swiss Cheese model. All the holes lined up ...yet again.History repeats itself in almost all accidents.

 

Right now I bet Boeing is wishing they were Stanley. I suspect they aren't going to be put in the corner with a dunce cap by their PR teacher.

But don't you think even a warning light or voice would be a nice feature in the base model? Something telling he pilots, Hey I'm doing the MCAS thing! At a minimum Boeing failed not having that. I know my traction control is doing something because I can feel and hear it but just in case that idiot light flashes on the dash. If Nissan can figure it out I'm sure Boeing could as well.

 

I read that there were people from 35 countries on that Ethiopian airliner - a real melting pot, and probably the largest number of countries that have ever had victims in a single plane crash.