BOH

Schind

I think this is more of an issue than people realise. Ethiopian have a MAX simulator but it was only delivered in January so not all their pilots had been on it and, apparently, it wasn't designed to replicate the current issues anyway. No American airlines have a MAX simulator yet - one or two will be getting one this year. I'm wondering if the airlines will wait until they have the simulators and have retrained enough pilots before they'll start flying the aircraft again.

lhrpete

I have wondered about the two 7M8 crashes more than a few times. The first Lion Air in Indonesia and second Ethiopian in Ethiopia. While both were shocking at least the planes did not come down over a populated area perhaps thanks to the pilots but we'll never know. The behaviour of Boeing and the FAA is well documented.

Now just imagine if the first one had been American Airlines on departure from JFK and the second one Air Canada on departure from Toronto and neither was able to avoid coming down in an urban and populated area.

I wonder how different the reactions of Boeing, the FAA and the rather ill informed Sam Graves: “Pilots trained in the United States would have successfully been able to handle” the emergencies on both jets, said Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

I suspect it would all have been very different.

And BA want to buy Boeings.

bisonrav

orbitmic

I'd say:

1) Do some soul searching to understand how things got so wrong and notably how could warnings be "buried under the carpet" instead of using them as a prompt to conduct more checks at a time disasters could still be averted;

2) Revise their policies and operations to ensure that it cannot happen again and be clear about what they have changed;

3) Be specific about the new levels and processes of safety testing that they will use for the revised 73X and how they differ from the previous processes that they used;

4) Possibly allow some volunteer external auditing of their current and proposed safety processes

In a way, it seems that you consider it is enough that they are simply complying with their regulatory obligations by "cooperating", but for many of us, it is not. None of what you describe as Boeing now doing corresponds to anything voluntary or going beyond their strict obligations and all the qualifications ("intense" scrutiny, "fully" cooperating, etc) are merely interpretations which merely seem to be Boeing's self-description of their own attitude and not corresponding to any specific fact that I have personally read about. For anyone considering that the safety culture has been found to be insufficient (ie in cruder words, that the whole incident suggests that Boeing has not specifically and voluntarily put safety above their financial and operational goals throughout the 73X crisis), merely complying is, by nature, not going to come across as a change of attitude as it merely exposes Boeing as doing the minimum that they are obliged to.



Individual accidents yes. This was not an individual accident, that is the whole point.

lost_in_translation

Without wishing to be rude, your attitude seems very much to be one that was considered appropriate about 50 years ago, but, thankfully, isn't really seen in aviation today. The reason aviation has developed from being a relatively unsafe method of transportation into by far the statistically safest method of getting somewhere over the last 50 years is because both airlines and aviation regulators have taken the view that "oh well, s*** happens" is a totally inappropriate response to uncovering safety issues. "Accidents happen" is absolutely not the expected response to two planes full of people dying due likely to exactly the same issue in 2019. Personally I'm quite happy for that to be the case.

Oaxaca

BOH

In your opinion it may be. But I described quite accurately how a proper safety culture should operate, based on some 30 years combined of working in military test flying, civil aviation as a licensed avionics engineer and rail signalling where a SIL4 environment is standard in both.

How you are describing things is what it was like decades ago where the culture was more, "accidents happen". Thankfully the days you live in are long gone, these two accidents with the MAX were entirely preventable and some basic foresight, anticipation and running some critical "what-if" scenarios (the absolute bedrock of a safety culture) would have prevented these.

Tiger_lily

Oh dear...

In line with FT Rules, a small snippet to give you the gist

Source: MSN.com

"It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.

The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.

Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India."

Full article here -> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/comp...ADzCXz?ocid=sf

W213Sal

I work in the engineering consulting industry, this is nothing new, if you aren't doing a significant portion of the design work in india, you're not getting the job. Doesn't matter how competitive you are, it's the perception you can be cheaper and faster if you get the work done in india. It's a race to the bottom. Having said that, some of the best engineers I've worked with are indian, so it's a bit silly to say they lack an understanding of aerospace technology, or biotech etc etc. Where the project struggles is communication and difficulties of multi office execution primarily from tight deadlines, differences in time zones, cultures etc etc, i.e. you're coming in and they're going home, 4 of your local leads are taking 2 weeks off for diwali etc and you're in deep .....

P.S.
9$ is very generous, last consultancy I worked for, the cost was about 5€ for jr engineers, and we were still billing them for same amount as the irish engineers (>50€/hr for jr, 65-75€/hr for 5+yrs exp, 85€+ for 10+ yrs exp, 110€+), multiplication factor for margins was 2x for local employees (bare rates, so cost of someone billed at 50 was about 25 give or take) and 1.404 for contractors (so contractor billed at 65€ made 46€/hr), so you can see how it works, you're making 2x on local guys, 20x on indians.

Edit of course the above is for reimburse projects (holy grail), fixed price is more tricky, you off load more and more stuff on to the indians to keep up the margins which the clients tend to prefer these days (they know how much money we're making and they don't like it)

PJSMITH0

bisonrav

Who said anything about suggesting an "accidents happen" mentality? I didn't. What I said was explicitly "don't rush to judgement", and I went through in some detail the progression of events as they have emerged that led from a pilot aid function agreed by the FAA to be non-critical to safety to being something that appears to be a major contributory factor to an accident. When the report is published we will know better. That is the point at which to draw conclusions. I think everyone agrees that aviation accidents are complex combinations of unlikely events, and understanding why they happened and learning lessons is the entire point of the investigation. If it becomes an article of faith that "boeing bad" or "pilots heroic" you can miss important conclusions. And the plane is grounded, it will remain that way until the FAA are satisfied the accident is understood and lessons have been learned, so what precisely are people worrying about here?

The idea that Boeing corporate culture has led to safety deficiencies is just conjecture. Nothing more than that until it has been proved. Boeing are heavily restricted in what they can say for legal reasons. End of. And it is perfectly sensible for Willy Walsh to take a purchase option - it's a bet to nothing as far as he's concerned. It does seem that that offends people who would prefer to extract a pound of flesh from Boeing, but what exactly is he doing wrong? First sign of further trouble and the option gets torn up. By the time the option vests, the 737max will be the most scrutinised airliner in the sky, and I'll happily fly in one.

I don't think any of this is unreasonable, but hey ho. It may well end up that Boeing design practices end up being criticised, but wait for the report. Why is that so difficult for some to accept as a proposition? Apart from asking Boeing to come out and make commercially impossible statements before all the facts are known, or shutting the programme down completely and putting tens of thousands out of a job, what is the desired state exactly?

USA_flyer

Schind

USA_flyer

That's not my point. My point is, should IAG need 200 Airbus to replace their Maxes, they will have to join the queue. I said nothing about the Airbuses they have on order.