(WSJ) Regulators Found High Risk of Emergency After First Boeing MAX Crash
https://www.wsj.com/articles/regulat...d=hp_lead_pos4
July 31, 2019 12:59 pm ET
An internal risk analysis after the first of two Boeing 737 MAX airliner crashes showed the likelihood was high of a similar cockpit emergency within months, according to a Federal Aviation Administration official familiar with the details and others briefed on the matter.
The regulator’s analysis, not previously reported, showed that it “didn’t take that much” for a malfunction like the one confronted by the pilots of the Lion Air flight that crashed into the Java Sea last year to occur, one of the people briefed on the analysis said.
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The analysis determined that the underlying risks from the MCAS design were unacceptably high without at least some FAA action, that they exceeded internal FAA safety standards and that the likelihood of another emergency or even accident “was over our threshold,” according to the FAA official. “We decided…it was not an acceptable situation,” the official said.
The directive to pilots essentially reiterated that cockpit crews should counteract and then disable an MCAS misfire by following long-established emergency procedures for a related flight-control problem that can similarly push down an aircraft’s nose.
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Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, referring to The Wall Street Journal’s story, said: “What troubles me about this is if the agency’s own analysis found MCAS to be an unacceptable risk, why did the FAA not take immediate action to address those risks?”
Ali Bahrami, the FAA’s associate administrator for aviation safety, said it is routine for the FAA to take interim actions while undertaking longer term measures to fix problems.
“From the safety perspective, we felt strongly that what we did was adequate,” he said. “We felt we had sufficient time to be able to do the modification and get the final fix,” he added later. Mr. Bahrami said that based on pending outside reviews, the agency plans to reassess whether it handled the safety issues appropriately.
First, I would note that it is ridiculous for the FAA to suggest "disabling MCAS" when that's NOT POSSIBLE.
The steps which pilots were suppose to take is a matter of preventing MCAS from implementing its directives by removing built-in functionality from the 737 Max. The pilot must give up the use of the electrical trim motors in order to prevent the malware-MCAS from crashing the plane. It's the equivalent of claiming that the user can "fix" a broken caps-lock on their laptop through the use of the "Shift" key. That's not fixing the problem at all, and it's not possible to disable MCAS.
Secondly, the crash and the analysis clearly enumerate that Boeing
lied to the FAA by submitting outdated design specs for MCAS. The coverage over past months amply illustrate that as far as official certification goes - MCAS was the original dual-sensor edge-case automation. When FAA's analysis discovered that the reality of MCAS differed so much from the official specs, how the heck could they simply permit the certification to stand?!?!
Especially since the software in question just contributed to a fatal crash?!?!?!?!
As far as giving Boeing 10 months... I think it would have taken no more than 2 months, tops, if Boeing was ordered to push an emergency update which creates an on-screen shutdown tool for MCAS. That would let the pilots shut it down
(heck, maybe even before takeoff) instead of having to disable trim-motor control in order to prevent the malware from taking over the plane.
IMO, that was never considered seriously because Boeing still believed it was possible to keep the facade that 737 Max didn't require full retraining.
The more the incident is investigated, the more it's clear that both FAA and Boeing has lost sight of the importance of safety versus market share.
My perspective is that the key issues with the 737 is not aircraft design, or pilot procedure. It's that Boeing has a corporate culture problem and are incredibly incompetent at software architecture. They discard the basic principles of enterprise software design, possibly because they think that aviation software is somehow special and that they know best.
Clearly they do not. Boeing's entire software architecture and QA team leadership should be fired and replaced with more competent folks. This is not about aircraft-specific code - it's general incompetence/arrogance.