> The FAA allowed the regulations to be modified to fit the 737’s preexisting design
Terrible.
I wonder, if the FAA gives the 737 MAX the all clear, but no one else does, what does that mean for the aircraft? Would a US-only certification still be an effective grounding in all but name? I guess there are a bunch of routes within the US, but there must be crap-tons elsewhere too (and presumably international from US<->* that formerly used 737 MAX)?
If it goes ahead and gives the green light when the rest of the world isn't sold on it, then we can unambiguously say the entire regulatory institution is irredeemably defective.
At that point the only real fix is an absolutely amazing change in the Executive branch, or a Legislative solution; and I have doubts on the efficacy of the latter, since a regulator is only as good as the people staffing it at the best of times.
I agree and I'd like to add that in my opinion the airplane now needs to actually be better than its competitors.
If it isn't and there is another accident (big or small, that might or might not involve deaths but which might even slightly be related to MCAS or other systems having similar design flaws) then I think that there would be again another (bigger?) round of repercussions: for the plane itself, for Boeing and for the FAA.
Saying this because I imagine that a negative event might become a final public and/or political confirmation that 1) the FAA & Boing cannot be trusted and that 2) the airplane has just too many flaws that need to be addressed.
Therefore, to avoid this, the plane must be absolutely rock-solid otherwise if anything happens people will immediately ask Boeing and especially FAA "why did you create/approve this thing - are you incompetent and/or stupid and/or unscrupulous?".
A very interesting topic, in my opinion :)
Turns out competent safety regulation matters, who knew?
Ignoring the training issue (which is already long gone), the inability to take the Max abroad would be a serious hindrance for sales. It means that it would require that airlines track them separately for routes, making sure to never take the Max 8 outside of America, which is exactly what Boeing was hoping not to do with the Max 8.
It contained vague statements like 'rare set of circumstances' with ZERO data on the expected probability. As we know in the software world, a 1 in a billion chance could happen many times per interval given the scale of any particular problem.
I'm never stepping foot on a MAX.
I will never fly on that plane
There are really two separate questions: first, should the FAA address other deficiencies particular to the 737 MAX, and second, should the FAA go beyond that to require Boeing to fix issues that are common to all 737 models?
I agree with Mr. Ewbank that the answer to the first question is yes; but he also argues that the answer to the second question should be yes, since the issues he points out in the latter part of the paper are not specific to the 737 MAX, as far as I can tell, but affect all 737 models. I don't agree that Boeing should be forced to address those issues, since that would amount to decertifying all 737s, which is not justified by the safety data; no other 737 model has an accident record that justifies any such decertification.
It bothers me that when lives are lost, our first response as a greedy capitalistic society is to cut funding, considering there aren't really many competitors, and the switch-over costs for airlines would be prohibitive.
We should be funding efforts to investigate the heck out of this and make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm not sure how one would structure such funds to make sure they aren't abused, but I certainly don't want Boeing cutting more corners and hiring less-competent lower-salary aircraft engineers because they are now low on funding and need to get the plane out before some damn quarterly earnings report.
Boeing paid $11.7 Billion dollars in stock buybacks in the two years preceding this fiasco. All the money they ever needed was already there.
Instead, they spent the money inflating executives portfolios. And now you want more money going to them? If they want to privatize the gains, they can privatize the losses. Your sympathy is very misplaced, IMHO.
No, I clearly said "I'm not sure how one would structure such funds to make sure they aren't abused". I want more money going to engineers, not the executives. But I do like to think with a forward-thinking mindset about how to make that possible instead of dismissing the problem and saying cutting funds in the right answer, because that definitely doesn't get more money in the hands of engineers to debug problems.
Perhaps more money to engineers + a third party audit company appointed by the court + fire the executives that did wrong, I don't know, but I'd like to be optimistic about it. Taking away funds is only going to strip engineers even further of funds for fixes, make unsafer planes, that's for sure.
The executives that inflated their portfolios while knowing there was going to be safety issues -- I support punishing those individuals. Not Boeing as a company though, since we pretty much depend on them.
I didn't know that. What kind of development budget did the Max have? If they'd taken 10% of that to do $1B more safety related engineering during the project, might that have helped?
That, except for money.
However, some of them seem completely over the top. A complete review of the 737 control system for example, given its operating record across the fleet, would as likely result in introducing new failures as eliminate some as yet unknown failure mode.
What is the downside for Boeing to just say "let's put the plane back in the sky"?
I think you scrap the plane, then start over with a wholly compliant design. This whole ordeal is a great example of regulatory capture. You have a plane with a ton of new flaws, and all the flaws of the old design, and business decided it was cheaper to pressure the regulator to be okay with these flaws and to kill a few hundred people than to build a proper plane, but let's give them one more chance to kill a few hundred more people, so they're not financially inconvenienced over a problem of their own making.
"Got to hit those quarterly sales figures." An aircraft that crashes is pretty detrimental to achieving this goal. Achieving sales figures doesn't preclude safety
Eventually, the company pays for it, but it can take a while.
The culture at Boeing has changed, and it seems to me that the quarterly numbers are more important now than previously.
No, obviously it didn't, since the redesign changed the fundamental flight dynamics of the plane. It was not improving the design, it was piggybacking off the good record and past training of the old design to push out a fundamentally different product as quickly and cheaply as possible.
>Achieving sales figures doesn't preclude safety.
Then how did these fatal 737 MAXs ever get released in the first place?
While I'm not a 737 expert, I have evaluated flight software (FSW) and vehicle management systems (VMS) on Gov't programs. Mr. Ewbank points out systemic deficiencies in the 737 VMS and controls.
It would seem the question to be answered by the FAA is whether they intend to address these systemic deficiencies or just the proximate causes of the crashes. It would be a valid, and more rigorous view that since these aircraft are already out of service in an unprecedented way, these systemic issues should be addressed as well. To be clear, it will involve significant engineering work to do so.
There will be immense pressure on the FAA, especially since the aircraft has been out of service and damaged Boeing economically so much already, to just deal with the proximate cause (i.e., stay the course they're on now). That will come from Boeing of course, but also internal management and their perceptions, as well the implicit or explicit pressure from the political class.
Speaking purely for myself, I hope the FAA does force the root causes to be dealt with as Mr. Ewbank advocates (I don't know him, but have immense respect for his coming forward like this - you have to know and understand the systems to be able to provide this kind of critical review).
However, I wouldn't at all be surprised if the fact they have already started down the path they're on causes them to retrench and leave these root causes unaddressed.