Notable and disturbing here is the lack of Max simulators in existence. It looks like neither Lion Air nor Ethiopian nor any US airline had access to one.
Also linked in this article is the original FAA table of differences between the Max and other 737 models. It makes no metion of MCAS.
The banner of the EAA website says they have a Full 737MAX simulator [1].
From this Press Release [2], it would seem they were rolling out in Oct, 2017.
Not sure what the meaning of your comment is. The Stab Trim cutout switches have been in the 737, in the same place aft of the flap selector, since the original 737. These were not a new feature related to the MCAS system.
Yes, the "correct procedure" would be for the pilots to recognize the MCAS problem (whether they know about the existence of MCAS or not) as a runaway stab trim problem, and treat it as such. One of the steps for the runaway stab trim emergency checklist (which I believe is a memory item for 737 pilots) is to set the stab trim switches to cutoff. At that point, they can manually (with the wheels in the cockpit) return the stabilizer to a better trim position, then recover control of the aircraft.
I'm not a real-world airliner pilot (I just play with them in simulators), so I can't comment on whether it's reasonable to expect pilots to recognize the situation and react accordingly in this new failure mode. Without knowledge of the existence of the MCAS system and how it can fail, with uncommanded nose-down, it's unclear that pilots would think there were any factors they recognize that would cause a runaway trim situation and think, "oh, I need to run the runaway trim checklist." I think that's the crux of the argument "any 737 pilot should have been competent to save the plane because they should have recognized runaway stab trim" versus "the set of conditions that caused this problem involved systems that pilots weren't trained on, so it's not reasonable for them to recognize what was happening and realize they can fall back on different training that they did have."
Anyway... comment I was replying to seemed to imply the existence of the stab trim cutout switches implied that the MCAS system was made known to pilots, which is why I pointed out those switches had been there forever.
And (agreeing with you here), if MCAS was only moving the trim 2.5 degrees at a time, it might not look like runaway trim, because it was running away slowly.
Yeah. As much blame as Boeing and the FAA certification process seems to deserve here, it's worth pointing out how much of the cascade of failures is in the airlines and cockpits too.
I mean, yes, the trim system was being driven by input from a single nonredundant sensor, which is a violation of the kind of engineering for failure process that airliners should be designed in. But at the same time that trim system is, by design, not strong enough to overpower pilot input to the other control surfaces. I mean, it's supposed to have been possible for the pilot to just fly the aircraft to a landing in the face of outrageous trim problems.
But the actual pilots didn't, not because they weren't strong enough to push the yoke but because they simply didn't know what to do and didn't have the presence of mind to just yank hard on the controls. Somehow the culture of "just fly the ?!@#! plane" got lost in all those training iPads.
The discrepancy over this number is magnified by another element in the System Safety Analysis: The limit of the system’s authority to move the tail applies each time MCAS is triggered. And it can be triggered multiple times, as it was on the Lion Air flight.
One current FAA safety engineer said that every time the pilots on the Lion Air flight reset the switches on their control columns to pull the nose back up, MCAS would have kicked in again and “allowed new increments of 2.5 degrees.”
“So once they pushed a couple of times, they were at full stop,” meaning at the full extent of the tail swivel, he said.
Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight controls engineer who is now an avionics and satellite-communications consultant, said that because MCAS reset each time it was used, “it effectively has unlimited authority.”
You're misunderstanding that quote. It's talking about "authority" in the sense of software's authorization to move the trim tab, not the aerodynamic authority of the tailplane.
The 737 has a 60 year old, very conventional elevator with a trim tab. The tab changes the resting angle of the overall elevator, and thus the "center point" of tailplane force on the airframe. Being out of trim means that the aircraft might naturally want to pitch up or down, and forces the pilot to apply to force to the stick (which moves the elevator, not the trim tab!) to correct it.
This stick force can be significant and surprising, but it's designed to (and the certification surely requires it to) be achievable by a pilot under all conditions. That is: it's not supposed to be possible for any trim failure on a 737 to render an aircraft uncontrollable, and I don't see any assertion in the analysis of the MAX 8 that changes that.
At the end of the day, what happened here is that the aircraft had a runaway trim failure. That was a failure that was understood and forseen (albeit not under software control) in the aircraft's original design, and the redundancy to treat it was the pilot's physical ability to override the trim. This was supposed to have been a recoverable failure within the cockpit, and it wasn't.
[1] Style note: why do people do this on the internet? Ah hah! You fool! You are WRONG! Stuff is complicated folks, be nice, assume competence, assume lack of malice, try to teach and not argue.
> You're misunderstanding that quote. It's talking about "authority" in the sense of software's authorization to move the trim tab, not the aerodynamic authority of the tailplane.
> The 737 has a 60 year old, very conventional elevator with a trim tab. The tab changes the resting angle of the overall elevator, and thus the "center point" of tailplane force on the airframe. Being out of trim means that the aircraft might naturally want to pitch up or down, and forces the pilot to apply to force to the stick (which moves the elevator, not the trim tab!) to correct it.
I don't think so. The 737 has a trimmable horizontal stabilizer. Stab trim moves (and MCAS moves) the big and leading-edge airfoil and not a trailing-edge tab on a trailing-edge elevator control surface: https://my.mixtape.moe/tkyyzt.png
I think you should perhaps reconsider your line of argument in relation to your own footnote.
What you are saying is directly contradicted by the article unless you apply a very unconventional reading to the word "authority". What you're saying is also contradicted by just looking at an image of a 737's tail arrangement. Lastly, you're claiming that two pilots fell out of the sky to their deaths and it simply never occurred to them to try pulling back hard. I find that not just implausible, but bordering on poor taste.
I appreciate your style note, but I think you should really follow your own advice (look at the style of your own comment). If you don't fly the airplane in question for a living, it's perhaps best not to make categorical statements that turn out to be incorrect. As others have pointed out, stabilizer (not elevator) trim on large aircraft works differently from what you might expect from looking at smaller planes. People don't always realize the whole stabilizer can move, because it moves slowly and never on the ground, and you can't see it from the airplane's windows. The stabilizer has a substantial range of motion because it needs to maintain aerodynamic efficiency while offsetting the range of off-center of mass forces at the edges of the flight envelope. Runaway trim on the stabilizer can result in loss of control authority by the pilot.
A comment from a pilot citing the 737 flight manual [1] contradicts this:
"Excessive air loads on the stabilizer may require effort by both pilots to correct mis-trim. In extreme cases it may be necessary to aerodynamically relieve the air loads to allow manual trimming. Accelerate or decelerate towards the in-trim speed while attempting to trim manually."
Your footnote is really appreciated. I think there is a lot of trauma in this world and coping is a daily struggle for many of us. My hat is off to you.
I don't know -- in discourse, it's perfectly fine to dispute ideas (it's the foundation of Western civilization and of analytical thought, and is a means to knowledge and wisdom).
If we cannot argue in a marketplace of ideas, we are prevented from having hard but necessary conversations. We need to adhere to parameters of civility of course, but to me, a necessary freedom is the freedom to disagree/dispute. Some ideas are truly wrong and they need to be put through the crucible.
That said, I've always been told to always "address the ideas, not the person" (never attack someone's character) and to adopt a pose of "curiosity".
> But at the same time that trim system is, by design, not strong enough to overpower pilot input to the other control surfaces.
That is incorrect for the 737 and many airliners. Elevator input is way less strong than trim. Trim moves the entire surface, not just the elevator control surface.
I had the same misconception, my brain was translating GA aircraft knowledge to airliners.
Most light GA aircraft have a trim system that works by using a smaller trim surface to aerodynamically deflect the larger control surface. In such a system, the horizontal stabilizer has a fixed relationship to the fuselage. Later 182s definitely have this system (I owned a 182K for 16 years).
Some light GA aircraft have systems with jackscrews that deflect the horizontal stabilizer as in airliners. These systems are more efficient aerodynamically, but can overpower pilot input, at least in theory. The aero trim system (in prior paragraph) cannot.
> But at the same time that trim system is, by design, not strong enough to overpower pilot input to the other control surfaces.
No this is not true. In near stall situations for which the MCAS is designed, a full deflection of the elevators is not enough to counter the stabiliser effects. I'm not sure about the entire flight envelope, but I guarantee there are other situations where the elevator cannot counter the stabiliser.
The right way to "regain control" isn't to overpower the stabiliser by inputs to other flight control surfaces, but to disable automatic stabiliser trim and manually trim the aircraft.
This article seems to be second-hand reporting some of the information originally broken here [1].
There's a lot of damning information, not only for Boeing, but also a lot of negligence at the FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves.
I often submit original scientific articles and reports here that achieve no traction. When I then submit less technical versions appearing in more mainstream media — New York Times, Wired, Verge, The New Yorker, etc. — they frequently appear on the home page, generating hundreds of comments. I'm always in a quandary as to which approach to take: after all, if a tree falls in a forest....
Yes, that's a common pattern. Experience has taught us that it's best to submit the highest-quality popular article on a topic and link to the original paper in the thread. If an article is too specialist-oriented it probably won't do well here regardless of how interesting it is. Papers on computing are an exception, because a significant subset of the audience here is able to read those.
AFAIK, the FAA, like many regulating bodies take everything at face value, making sure they are not getting lied to isn't their jobs.
An audit usually goes like: "I see that you mentioned a change in document X, show me the corresponding test report", "who is responsible for that part?", "does document Y match document X, as required by norm Z?".
They will never check that you actually did the tests, or that the analysis is correct. Only that the paperwork is done correctly and that the person responsible is identified. Their field of expertise is in the process, not software or mechanical engineering.
But now that they have a list of names, and if one of them rubberstamped something that wasn't actually done, things won't go well for him. It can get really serious, possibly resulting in prison time, so managers usually don't that this duty lightly.
Exactly. I worked at Boeing for a couple years (on a different aircraft project, on software tools that would never fly on an aircraft), and my boss made it very clear that our job was not to make sure the airplane didn't crash. It was to make sure if anything went wrong, we had the proper paper trail.
As a software person, this led to some results that seemed rather counterintuitive.
Then again, this level of detachment seems necessary for complex systems. The chef at your favorite restaurant doesn't personally test all raw ingredients to ensure they're safe. They get them from a reputable source, and make sure they're stored and prepared properly when under the restaurant's care.
I suspect that this concept is foreign to much of the software world (and hopefully only temporarily) because our raw ingredients are so low quality, and there's no regulation or certification. Half the libraries I'm using (even first-party ones) have significant bugs that I have to work around. If instead of workarounds I just said "That bug you found is actually a bug in <library X>", my app would be completely unusable, and there's be no upstream pressure for these libraries to ever get fixed.
> AFAIK, the FAA, like many regulating bodies take everything at face value, making sure they are not getting lied to isn't their jobs.
I don't think this is accurate whatsoever. USDA has inspections all the time, they don't just check a report you file with them and go "Oh yeah, they know what they're doing over there." Similar with other industries.
If a regulatory body doesn't validate the tests of a manufacturer, what good is that body?
I work at a company that builds software for Flight School operators. The operator is required to physically demonstrate our software to a FAA inspector before they can use it. In this case the FAA actually checks that our system works as intended.
Friend of mine was working for a medical device group. One of the managers removed some negative patient data from the reports they filed with the FDA. The FDA when they figured it out responded with an outright rejection that was final.
Since I keep seeing partially-informed comments about 737 pitch controls here's some notes and terms and links: It's not obvious, it's not simple, and other planes work in other ways - you can not just assume the 737MAX is like them.
The 737 horizontal tail externally looks like 3 moving parts:front-to-back (and large to small) is: Stabilizer : Elevator : Balance Tab.
Stabilizer moves in response to trim - this is what we are mostly looking at.
Elevator moves in response to the control column.
Balance tab has several modes depending on flaps and hydraulic system
health - but it mostly serves to offset aerodynamic force on the elevator in case the hydraulics fail and the elevator has to be controlled manually.
(there is one other pitch control, I learned - the spoilers on the wing can give some help in landing in case the elevator controls fail.)
There are many modes of operation and simple generalizations will not help.
>, “Boeing 737-800 pilots were required to receive some additional training on the MAX 8, which included an hour lesson on some differences. Additional training was not required, as the 737-800 and the MAX 8 have same type certification.”
How are those type certifications determined? It seems to me that there should be an instance checking if the type certifications make sense.
Or perhaps they did, and they just really look like similar planes. In which case I wonder if the threshold for 'versioning' should be changed.
(I know nothing of how this actually works, it just baffles me that seemingly different planes get the same certificate)
EDIT: I read the FAA does check this, but I wonder on what _grounds_ it makes the decisions.
More and more of this has been delegated to the manufacturers themselves.
They simply assert to the FAA that the aircraft meets the type requirements.
Boeing showed the FAA their test results, said that with MCAS the aircraft meets requirements, doesn't require extra training, and the FAA took their word for it. Authorities in most other countries trust the FAA, so they took their word for it too.
That's an oversimplification, but more or less what happened.
As to whether Boeing was deliberately deceptive, we'll probably find out in due time as investigations have begun and subpoenas issued.
More and more of this has been delegated to the manufacturers themselves.
They simply assert to the FAA that the aircraft meets the type requirements.
To assert this, but also change such a critical emergency procedure, which is made more critical by a decision motivated primarily by economics -- this just sounds bad.
Basically, we've set up a situation where short term thinking is eventually, over many thousands of iterations of such decisions which go into producing such a complex product, going to override long term safety thinking.
Unfortunately, substituting regulations for good thinking has the potential to nonsensically stymie progress if done incorrectly.
I would say more that this is a case of gaming the metrics - regulation is looser for variations of the same plane (This Is A Good Thing) and so Boeing did shady shit to classify this new plane as a variant. The only way to prevent this is to sufficiently fund the regulators so that a human can do a sanity check and reject the gaming; but decades of defunding of regulatory agencies and the resulting regulatory capture made the FAA incapable of doing that.
The purpose of MCAS was precisely that it didn't change procedure. There was already an existing procedure for runaway trim control. In the case of the Lion Air crash at least, applying that existing procedure would have allowed the pilots to fly the plane normally, albeit without the benefit of automatic trim. For reasons we will never fully know, the pilots did not apply that existing non-MAX specific procedure.
The very likely reason they didn't follow that procedure is that they didn't recognise the failure as runaway trim, which in turn is likely related to the apparent fact they didn't know MCAS existed. So couldn't know that the behaviour they experienced was what MCAS runaway trim felt like.
I don't think it's wise to speculate, but the stabilizer is coupled to a very large trim wheel in the cockpit that both audibly clicks as it spins and is market with white stripes (on a black wheel) to make the movement apparent. It's possible the pilots didn't realize what was happening, but it's not as if MCAS was silently causing a runaway.
Regulation is why Boeing felt the need to construct and jump through such elaborate hoops to avoid losing the 737's original certification. The better approach would have been to treat the Max as an entirety new aircraft model, and not try to fool pilots into thinking it was just another boring old 737 variant. But the regs are written to encourage the latter approach.
The regulation encouraged this how? Do you have an example?
Model doesn't matter. It's possible to have two different models with the same type rating (Airbus A320 vs A340), and it's just as possible to have a derivative that requires a different type rating.
It would have been better for whom to treat the MAX as something different, requiring its own type rating? It's pretty clear it was overwhelmingly the airlines who wanted a new 737 in the existing 737 type rating.
That doesn’t follow. The FAA allowed Boeing to self-regulate, with somewhat disastrous results. I don’t understand how the regulations forced Boeing to take the approach the did. My read is that they took advantage of loose regulations to avoid recertification, all in the name of profit.
Having said all that, I’m open to hearing how you think regulation was the real culprit here.
Nonsense. The primary reason Boeing wanted to retain the same type rating is because their buyers, the airlines, don't want to pay out to retrain all the pilots. Which as you say, is the correct thing to do - but regulations aren't preventing that, simple economic forces are.
Are you suggesting that regulation in this instance would not help with safety?
Not at all. Often regulations help with safety in the short and medium term. The problem is that they aren't written by oracles, so they can become outdated and fail to account for changes in technology. (How does "stymie progress" translate to not helping with safety?)
It makes sense that very minor differences don't require extra training if the differences have no meaningful impact on cockpit design or flight characteristics. But in this case, flight characteristics were clearly different, and MCAS was supposed to compensate for those differences.
I don't know how they measure such differences, but you'd think that different engines, different aerodynamics, and a new control system to compensate for those differences, are enough to warrant a new type certification.
They should really have type certification diffs. If 90% of the airplane is the same as the previous version, the manufacturer should expect a type certification procedure that costs about 10% of a fully new design and pilots should gain the new type rating with about 10% of the effort and hours of what would be required for a completely new plane.
It sounds really cumbersome to have it either-or way, making it difficult to develop planes too much incrementally and keeping it very costly to start from scratch with a completely new design.
well, yes, exactly, MCAS was supposed to compensate for these differences, to make sure that the flight characteristics are close enough to not require additional training. But tragically, what was supposed to be part of the solution turned out to be part of the problem...
The system, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, was incorporated because the plane has larger engines placed further forward on the craft, and so has a chance of facing a stall at lower speeds than earlier 737 variations.
> has a chance of facing a stall at lower speeds than earlier 737 variations
No, that's not the issue. The issue is that, because of the pitch up moment created by the engines, at higher angles of attack the force required to move the yoke decreases instead of increasing. That's (a) a highly undesirable characteristic since the changing feedback confuses pilots and makes it hard for them to know when a stall is imminent, and (b) a violation of FAA certification requirements. MCAS was added to compensate for the pitch up moment from the engines by adding nose down trim, so the yoke force would be similar to that of previous 737 models.
You're correct, however without MCAS it could be easier for the pilot to accidentally pitch into a stall when flying manually. That is why the requirement for consistent feedback, as you say. So the people who say the MAX engine placement makes it "more prone to stall" are not entirely wrong.
The media has done a poor job of communicating exactly what MCAS does and why it was developed. With today's media motivated by virality, ad clicks and eyeballs, most seem more interested in reporting this as dramatically as possible.
With today's media motivated by virality, ad clicks and eyeballs, most seem more interested in reporting this as dramatically as possible.
In 2019, we need to wise up to these shenanigans. Fear isn't the only mindkiller. It turns out that Outrage Virality is very synergistic with fear. Our society needs to become very skeptical and notice when something is evoking that particular emotion. We need to view people hawking outrage like we now view medicine shows.
EDIT: If someone has gotten one to really hate a person, really want to harm them, and wonder if they're really sentient, or wonder if they're looking at the same reality, or wonder if they're really human -- this is a big red flag. This is precisely the state of having those in-group/out-group instincts tweaked. Word to the wise! Expert tip: It even counts when one is shocked at someone else's groupthink! Perhaps especially so.
> the people who say the MAX engine placement makes it "more prone to stall" are not entirely wrong.
Agreed. But "more prone to stall" in this sense ("easier for the pilot to accidentally pitch into a stall") is not the same as "stalls at lower speeds", which is what the post I responded to was claiming.
Thank you. MCAS is not an anti-stall mechanism and should not be confused with one. Yes, pitch the aircraft too much and you will stall. But MCAS would allow a stall regardless, it is not its job. The job, as you point out, is to keep the aircraft handling similar to existing models.
This is not just splitting hairs. These distinctions matter.
I don't think the comment you are responding to means "the speeds at which it will stall are lower compared to earlier 737 variations," but rather "at low speeds, it has a greater chance of stalling compared to earlier 737 variations."
It doesn't matter which of those two the poster meant; they're both wrong as descriptions of the effect of the new engines on the 737 MAX. See my other post upthread.
There is a big difference between how you behave when you're calm, vs how you behave when you're under stress. Basically, you start hitting sub-sentient "defaults." You default to your training. You default to inherited flight or fight behaviors. Emergency procedures and training need to be designed with this in mind, or they will fail.
(Presentation preparation is like this. My last presentation failed because by self-training wasn't designed with this in mind.)
I had an organ teacher that (gently) reprimanded me at a lesson after I exclaimed, "But it went great while I was practicing!" after making some mistakes while playing through a piece. Yes, I might have learned it to the point that I could play it well under no pressure, but I hadn't learned it to the point that I could do the same during a lesson—let alone a performance.
Even with pilots aware of the MCAS system, I don't see how anything short of simulator time can really make these planes safe.
How would you design presentation preparation with that in mind?
Rehearse. Repetition strengthens associations and so increases the chance that you will fall into the same behavior.
Or anything for that matter?
Masaad Ayoob revolutionized police gunfighting techniques by simplifying movements and changing techniques to more closely resemble the natural stance people take when in the "Fight or Flight" mode.
When an airplane is diving into the ground, the natural inclination for pilots is to pull back on the stick. Making the override resemble this would be a way of following this design principle. I think the situation which caused the accident is a bit more complicated and nuanced than just that idea, however.
This is a pretty damning statement, with respect to the original safety analysis submitted to the FAA:
"The safety analysis... assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed."
Neither Boeing nor the FAA should have given this a pass.
Most of those knobs below the glare shield are things like dimming the displays, setting what appears on each display (notable as there was an AIRS report from a pilot who struggled with the displays and presentation).
But the key controls in these accidents are identical. Namely the electronic trim on the yoke, the trim wheels in the middle and the cut-off switches to the right and below the throttles.
Note the two black wheels on either side of the center console. These spin and make a loud clacking sound when the stabilizer trim is running. It should have been quite obvious that the trim action was what was causing the pitch down.
I don't know nearly enough to have a respectable opinion on this, but those screens can display different information configured to display different information at the user's choice.
The discrepancy over this number is magnified by another element in the System Safety Analysis: The limit of the system’s authority to move the tail applies each time MCAS is triggered. And it can be triggered multiple times, as it was on the Lion Air flight.
One current FAA safety engineer said that every time the pilots on the Lion Air flight reset the switches on their control columns to pull the nose back up, MCAS would have kicked in again and “allowed new increments of 2.5 degrees.”
“So once they pushed a couple of times, they were at full stop,” meaning at the full extent of the tail swivel, he said.
Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight controls engineer who is now an avionics and satellite-communications consultant, said that because MCAS reset each time it was used, “it effectively has unlimited authority.”
...
Boeing insists that the pilots on the Lion Air flight should have recognized that the horizontal stabilizer was moving uncommanded, and should have responded with a standard pilot checklist procedure to handle what’s called “stabilizer runaway.”
If they’d done so, the pilots would have hit cutoff switches and deactivated the automatic stabilizer movement.
Boeing has pointed out that the pilots flying the same plane on the day before the crash experienced similar behavior to Flight 610 and did exactly that: They threw the stabilizer cutoff switches, regained control and continued with the rest of the flight.
However, pilots and aviation experts say that what happened on the Lion Air flight doesn’t look like a standard stabilizer runaway, because that is defined as continuous uncommanded movement of the tail.
On the accident flight, the tail movement wasn’t continuous; the pilots were able to counter the nose-down movement multiple times.
In addition, the MCAS altered the control column response to the stabilizer movement. Pulling back on the column normally interrupts any stabilizer nose-down movement, but with MCAS operating that control column function was disabled.
These differences certainly could have confused the Lion Air pilots as to what was going on.
Yup. That's fucking insane. 4x the pitch initially reported, and the system 'resets' each time so you're at max elevator down after a couple cycles. Good luck trying to fly that.
These crashes are captivating, especially given how astonishingly safe air travel has been in the past decade or so. If I remember correctly 2017 was the safest year in the history of aviation.
And airplanes, particularly modern jets, are fascinating no matter what they're doing. I remember twenty, thirty years ago looking out the towering floor-to-ceiling windows at the airport, marveling at how many different technological fields had to come together to make air travel possible: materials, energy, engineering, radio, logistics, physics, process control, weather prediction, mapping, software development—nowadays even spaceflight and the freakin' theory of relativity come into play where GPS is in use. As a budding geek it was (and still is) catnip.
And then these two MAX jets go down within months of each other. Three hundred and forty six people killed. Three hundred and forty six families shattered, forever. When I think about them, I'm reminded that these weren't just malfunctions to be debugged in my terminal, these were three hundred and forty six tragedies that will ripple out to their friends, families, coworkers, and beyond, for decades to come.
I wonder if we are being hasty in our speculation about the causes. I know we are all intensely curious—that intense curiosity is, I think, a defining feature of the community that frequents this site, and something a lot of us owe our successes to. I notice though a tendency for speculation to evolve into factual claims through repetition, and I wonder if we should be more careful not to allow repetition to take the place of evidence.
Accident investigation is a slow process, and slow processes are frustrating. Information comes in a trickle. It's natural to want to piece together whatever details we have, wherever we can find them. In our hunger to find out what happened, how these 346 people lost their lives, let's not lose sight of the fact that the information we have right now is incomplete.
Let's also not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about people. For the loved ones, this isn't an interesting puzzle; this is a gut-wrenching sorrow. I try to keep that at the center whenever someone asks me what I think about these crashes.
I'm glad the MAX is grounded. And I'm intensely curious about what happened. I try to temper my thoughts on the matter according to the amount and quality of information I have, and the degree of knowledge and experience I've acquired. I don't always succeed. But I can at least rest easy knowing that the investigative team has access to a wealth of information and experience, and that they will make their data and findings public when their work is complete.
> Accident investigation is a slow process, and slow processes are frustrating. Information comes in a trickle. It's natural to want to piece together whatever details we have, wherever we can find them. In our hunger to find out what happened, how these 346 people lost their lives, let's not lose sight of the fact that the information we have right now is incomplete.
Slow, and possibly corrupted process. If we believe the FAA has been captured by industry, do we trust the outcome of their investigation to be impartial? Do we trust their investigation to be at all competent?
I think it's incredibly important we all remain skeptical of the FAA and Boeing in this; the FAA's reluctance to ground the MAX 8 until it was ordered by the president shows their bias. Any sensible human with a safety-first mindset would have immediately grounded the aircraft after the second crash until a complete investigation was done.
Also has a lot of the specialized hardware and equipment required - Ethiopian Air tried shopping their blackbox around to Germany, but they didn't have the hardware to connect to so badly damaged a specimen.
If we believe the FAA has been captured by industry, do we trust the outcome of their investigation to be impartial? Do we trust their investigation to be at all competent?
Correction: US accident investigations are conducted by the NTSB, not the FAA. By design, it's not even part of the DOT, the parent org of the FAA.
From their Wikipedia entry—
"From 1967 to 1975, the NTSB reported to the DOT for administrative purposes, while conducting investigations into the Federal Aviation Administration, also a DOT agency.
To avoid any conflict, Congress passed the Independent Safety Board Act, and on April 1, 1975, the NTSB became a fully independent agency."
So what's the most likely outcome for all the grounded planes at this point? As someone who has some fear of flying I'll definitely make sure none of my trips include a 737 max in the future, no matter how many patches or upgrades boeing releases
> According to a detailed FAA briefing to legislators, Boeing will change the MCAS software to give the system input from both angle-of-attack sensors.
> It will also limit how much MCAS can move the horizontal tail in response to an erroneous signal. And when activated, the system will kick in only for one cycle, rather than multiple times.
> Boeing also plans to update pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS.
> These proposed changes mirror the critique made by the safety engineers in this story. They had spoken to The Seattle Times before the Ethiopian crash.
> The FAA said it will mandate Boeing’s software fix in an airworthiness directive no later than April.
After the fixes are implemented I wouldn't worry too much about it. Lots of planes have had terrible design flaws that were fixed. The pre-MAX 737 included.
IMO, the most likely outcome is: initially, they'll stay grounded until the flight recorders from the latest crash are analyzed, and it's confirmed that it's probably the same or a related cause (if the cause was unrelated, they might be allowed to resume flying earlier). Then a fix to the software will be developed, taking into account the preliminary results of the investigation; Boeing has a head start here, since they started developing the fix after the previous crash. After it's validated that the fixed software would have prevented both accidents, the authorities will change the rule from "all planes of this type are grounded" to "all planes of this type are grounded, unless they have software version at least X.YY on that subsystem, or are flying with no passengers to a maintenance facility to install that software version". And then the companies which own these planes will install the fixed software, and normal flying will resume.
They'll be patched to take input from both angle-of-attack sensors (it has two, but the MCAS only used input from one of them) and limit how much the MCAS can override pilot input.
I'd be more concerned by the regulatory capture that permitted this to happen than the specific model of aircraft.
My uninformed assumption is that once a suitable issue is isolated some sort of remediation (training/software/airframe/cockpit) all under the onset of various international gov bodies. No idea if the is a 1 year or 5 year process.
I would expect them to be flying prior to the end of the year. The airplane has two AoA inputs and, between that and limiting the authority of the MCAS and adding an MCAS indicator on the panel, I suspect this is a short, mostly flight control software patch. ("Short" in aviation still might be 3 months.)
Actually, assuming this article is correct, the 737 MAX will possibly be safer than other planes because Boeing's leash with the FAA is about to get a lot shorter.
Ignoring all other issues pointed out in TFA, two really stand out: The use of a single AoA sensor for a "Hazardous" component seems flat out wrong to me. The ability of MCAS to cause maximum deflection of the trim, rather than some limit (2.5 vs 0.6 is a quibble compared to 2.5 vs unlimited) also seems bad.
"Both Boeing and the FAA were informed of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago, before the second crash of a 737 MAX last Sunday."
i.e. people were following up on this before the public outcry started.
The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.
Funny, I've never heard the FDA make a statement like that. If it takes longer to certify a new pharmaceutical because of lack of resources, so be it. It needs to take longer.
Instead of applying pressure on the FAA to cut corners, Boeing and Airbus should lobby Congress to increase FAA funding.
The details provided by the article read rather badly for Boeing for several reasons.
Firstly, I think the whole issue is not going away any time soon which is bad enough.
But what looks worse is the article points to high levels of incompetence, if not gross negligence in the design and testing of the MCAS.
Like all 737s, the MAX actually has two of the sensors, one on each side of the fuselage near the cockpit. But the MCAS was designed to take a reading from only one of them.
Lemme said Boeing could have designed the system to compare the readings from the two vanes, which would have indicated if one of them was way off.
Alternatively, the system could have been designed to check that the angle-of-attack reading was accurate while the plane was taxiing on the ground before takeoff, when the angle of attack should read zero.
I can see this headed to the courts and if the details in the article are found to be correct, there's a good chance Boeing would be up for a rather big settlement, not to mention a massive dent to their reputation
I think the underlying problem is that a control system was designed with the assumption that its purpose was to make the pilot force feedback feel right, for regulatory compliance reasons. Therefore it was designed with low reliability requirements, presumably on the basis that if it doesn't work, no biggie because it's only there to make the controls feel right, and that only happens when the plane is about to stall, which never happens...
Then...it turned out that when this control system malfunctions (which is can, quite often, due to aforementioned low reliability requirements), it will actually crash the plane.
The lesson is probably: make sure that some system you're designing with low reliability characteristics (only uses one sensor, doesn't have redundant power supplies...) will fail with safe or benign outcomes.
How did Boeing decide to kill the 757 and to continually delay the "New Midsize Airplane", and to progressively extend and modify the 737 until it reached 757 size in the 737 MAX 9?
I would bet good money that there is a wonderful book to be written about competing design teams, rival marketing plans, and mahogany row politics at Boeing about events resulting in the MAX kludge.
Also: "An airline pilot reveals why a plane Boeing discarded 12 years ago is the one they desperately need"
> How did Boeing decide to kill the 757 and to continually delay the "New Midsize Airplane", and to progressively extend and modify the 737 until it reached 757 size in the 737 MAX 9?
> Southwest Airlines has only operated Boeing 737 jetliner models, except for a period from 1979 to 1987
I expect that sort of things was part of the decision. Even more so as Boeing never really try to unify their offering and provide airbus-style CCQ[0][1] so there is a very strong incentive & pressure to update frames and keep them in the same rating to avoid crew retraining costs.
[0] moving from an A320 to an A380 can take as little as 15 days, other moves are much shorter (down to 2 days CCQ for — I believe — moving between the A330 and the A340)
[1] boeing does have some common type rating courses but only between a few pairs e.g. between the 757 and 767, or from the 777 to the 787
Because having a single "Type Rating" allows pilots to work 3 generations of 737 at a given time, meaning airlines don't need to train their pilots as much or hire new ones with the required type ratings.
Is there a way to figure out where the 737Max is still being flown? I ask selfishly as I have a flight on Norwegian Air Argentina coming up and according to their seat map I appear to be on a 737 Max8, but there is no indication about the actual metal being flown for their flights, as far as I can tell.
Norwegian suspended its use of the 737 Max8 for their main airline, but I haven’t seen anything about their use on their subsidiary airlines.
Redesigning the landing gear means redesigning the wing. I'm not an aerospace engineer, but I do work at an aerospace organization. I've been told my multiple AE's that redesigning the wing is basically the same amount of work as designing a new plane from scratch. In light of that, I'm still not sure we're there yet in terms of purely monetary costs.
I am losing my mind over some of this (and trying to reserve some judgement because we don't have all of the facts yet).
In the age where "engineers":
(1) can automatically land a "VW bug sized" rover on Mars
(2) can land booster rockets practically from orbit
(3) can make an adaptive flight control system that can fly a drone even when half a wing is blown clean off mid-flight (on purpose). https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=JyyN-qWWNfQ
How does this MCAS system, as part of a larger flight dynamics system, have so little understanding of what the hell it is doing to the flight dynamics?
This will all fall on the shoulders of Boeing. They installed a feature without properly notifying pilots and airlines. Thus when things went haywire, the pilots had no idea what was going on.
And will it also fall in part on the passengers who demand cheap and cheaper air fares? (Not only to the detriment of their own safety but also to further increasing ecological debts).
On the passengers directly I wouldn't expect so, the passengers didn't keep demanding reuse of the same old airframe.
It might fall on the airlines, especially Southwest which refuses to fly anything but 737 and thus keeps demanding new ever more altered revisions of the same original frame without type change.
But even then at the end of the day if Boeing can't fulfil those demands properly and ethically they are the ones to blame.
In the aggregate, consumers will likely flock to the cheaper version of commodities, that doesn't mean it's legal let alone ethical to e.g. sell talc full of asbestos because that's cheaper than selling asbestos-free talc.
You can't put this on passengers. What are they supposed to do? Pay more voluntarily in the hope that the money goes to safety and not just towards a bigger bonus for the execs?
I started to compose a reply to your comment, and it turned out to be a deceptively hard question to answer.
My attempt at a succinct answer is that carbon should be more expensive, and that Boeing very likely moved too aggressively to meet the market with a more fuel efficient plane.
In some ways – based on my probably naive understanding – consumer desire for a cheaper flight results in increased fuel efficiency, since the cost of flying is heavily dependent on the cost of fuel. Environmentally speaking, that's good. However, better fuel efficiency resulting in cheaper flights leads to people flying more. That's bad.
Pricing carbon to reflect its true environmental cost could fix that issue, by raising the price floor. Consumer choice would still drive higher efficiency, but ideally the overall higher cost of carbon would keep flying to a 'sustainable' rate. (Whatever that turns out to be.)
What I don't have a clear sense of is whether point-to-point travel with planes like the Max are better for the environment. Theoretically, hub-and-spoke travel is more fuel efficient. The reality ends up being more complicated, with airlines flying half-empty 747s. From what I understand, that makes airlines like Southwest (which operates point-to-point) more fuel efficient.
But I'd love to hear a more clear explanation from someone who better understands the subject.
> However, better fuel efficiency resulting in cheaper flights leads to people flying more. That's bad.
This part sounds complicated. It might be good for the people but bad for the environment. On the other hand, it probably also displaces some long-distance driving, and we have to estimate how much that is. Even if the environmental impact of reduced driving doesn't cancel out the cost of added flights, it's probably worth putting a value on the safety benefit. (Even though the current thread is about plane crashes, flying is overall much safer than driving, and reducing driving by even a little saves lives.)
It's also extremely well known especially in environmental economics, if not well understood / solved: it's Jevon's Paradox (more efficient use of a resource can lead to an increase in demand which causes an increase in total resource consumption).
Sure, it falls on the passengers in the form of increased risk and, in the case of crashes, actual death. Otherwise though, no it doesn't fall on them. They're not in the chain of responsibility for building and certifying planes as safe and free of defect.
Come on, way to blame the victim. Of course we all want cheaper things, but everyone got on those 2 planes with the faith that it would take-off and land safely, it's not like they signed a disclaimer saying "I accept the risk of death to the fact that the plane is an unairworthy rust bucket but I deemed it OK because the airfare was cheap.".
This series of incidents is pretty clear cut it seems (we know that a feature Boeing made caused the crashes), and the investigations IIRC are not being done by the American agencies.
I was automotive engineer and software engineer. Both have a proper sense of QA, both do their own testing and both know what's right and wrong. Bad product managers certainly not.
Unfortunately, regulation doesn't fit with the narrative of self-determination and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"
Instead the narrative is about big, bloated bureaucracies, ignoring the fact that they got so big by having to respond and add additional layers every time someone figured out a new way to screw things up, as with Boeing.
I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Or are you just making a general politicized point about deregulation?
On the other hand I've seen many people complain about "regulatory capture" between FAA + Boeing repeatedly. That's even on the Wikipedia for FAA.
> The FAA has been cited as an example of regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation, but placing key people to head these regulators."
Which is an entirely different problem than a culture of "pulling up your bootstraps".
Yes, I have an example. The parent comment was about regulation in general, and mine was in response to that. However, there was the massive deregulation of the FAA in 1978 due to this sort of pressure. It had one effect of creating more competition in the industry, but it arguably went too far and has had an impact on safety as well. [0]
I am not sure if you know what you are talking about. The FAA can’t be “deregulated” as it is the regulatory body. And the airline deregulation that happened in ‘78 was deregulation of airline routes, not airline safety requirements. Furthermore, that 1996 Brookings opinion; that hasn’t held up very well considering that US aviation has an extraordinary safety record since that time and an even better record than during the regulated days. More people are killed by trains every year than die in commercial airliners, but are we suggesting that train regulation is deficient? About 16 people a week are killed by trains in the US, yet with commercial airliners in the US, we’ve had a just single fatality since 2009.
By any measure, the FAA and industry have done an exceptional job of keeping the American flying public safe.
I think you're cherry picking and looking for reasons for me to be wrong because you don't like my conclusion. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and FAA were closely affiliated agencies until the '78 deregulation, and in the wake of it the FAA picked up some of the CAB's former duties. The CAB was deregulated out of existence.
And simply saying the Brooking's opinion isn't relevant isn't actually a supporting argument. Neither is stating that trains have more deaths: so do cars, but neither point is relevant to whether or not airplane safety was damaged by deregulation. Besides which, I think your estimate misses the much higher casualty rates among private aircraft, which do in fact rival cars [0]
The question has little to do with whether the FAA has done a good job, it's about what happened after the deregulation, and whether it would be even better without it.
> I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this?
Numerous aspects of the FAA have been politicized for decades (going back to at least the ATC strike under Reagan). The FAA also has a number of complex and lengthy programs (https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ etc) that are have drawn extensive criticism from Congress, industry, and airport operators due to the cost, delays, and scope of proposed regulation etc. Even FAA reauthorization is a politically contentious issue.
Projects tend to be fair game to criticism for failing to meet goals after funding. My question was about examples of airline manufacturers getting "deregulated"? Particularly top-down pressure from congress related to aircraft safety at the manufacturer level (rather than the aircraft manufacturers getting special treatment from the FAA or freely gaming the system - by bypassing protocols of "new" plane models without any pressure from the regulatory body).
Great, lets hope congress now has the incentivize to properly analyze the incident and determine if a lack of adequate resources was the source of the problem and then acts on it.
Regulation for regulations sake (as in telling the public it's "regulated" by pointing to current scale and existing policymaking, while in reality it is not having the intended effect) is even worse than having no regulation at all.
The current congressional majority is hardly composed on the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" types being blamed by the GP. At least in terms of rhetoric and campaign platitudes they are known. Even among a significant percentage of the republicans camp is far from fitting into the anti-government oversight camp.
The article mentions of a lack of "funding" but I haven't been able to find any evidence where funding for aircraft safety has been reduced in the last few decades. If there was a crisis of funding, where new planes aren't getting sufficient oversight or controls, then this regulatory body have either failed to make it a public issue, shutdown whistleblowers, or (more likely) it's a failure of regulatory capture and/or the monopoly-esque companies have learned how to navigate the political system (checking the right checkboxes) without any disincentives for doing so.
As an individual, you probably want some kind of life insurance in the event of catastrophe. Your insurance carrier may require you only ride in such and such certified aircraft (eg, an aircraft that is insured against loss of life). An aircraft may only obtain insurance if it meets certain requirements, etc.
Unfortunately, we've got a regulatory body asleep at the wheel, telling people things are safe when they're not. This is distorting the insurance marketplace.
In a system with regulations, there has to be some meaningful method of enforcing penalties, and IMO this is particularly needed in the are of liability.
It shouldn't matter if Boeing got a defective part from a manufacturer, or bad software, or what have you from a 3rd party. It's still their primary responsibility to ensure safe travels. If that means certifying each and every nut and bolt that comes into their supply chain, then so be it.
$50m per dead passenger should be a suitable amount. We'll see just how confident they are in this MCAS and all this automation nonsense then.
Looking back a hundred or more years when the market was more free, your vision of how things might work does not hold. There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider.
The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems. Arguably for a very long time some degree of freedom has been better than the alternative of centrally controlled economies, but that doesn't mean that no better alternative or balance of the forces exists.
> no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider.
Probably because the culture of the time was that everyone knew horses were dangerous and if you borrowed a horse and it threw you, it was your fault, not the lender's.
Really? Because at the time "everyone knew" sea-bound shipping was dangerous and if you were directly tied to that industry the "culture of the time" was very much bound up in insurance markets that protected against loss.
There, the free market did provide a solution, but not for my original example. Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market.
As far as I know, the insurance for shipping was for loss of the cargo, not liability for injury or death.
As for the free market resulting in utopia, that's an impossible standard. What the free market does do, however, is solve problems in an efficient way thereby bringing prosperity to every country that tries it.
Well, we don't have the department of horse safety, do we? I'm sure operators of business that do horse rides have general liability insurance. So, in effect, the free market did solve this problem.
> Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market.
If it's a solvable problem, it can be solved with the free market. If a solution is possible that is merely not implemented, that means the market decided it wasn't of sufficient utility.
Your counter is that now, a hundred years after they ceased to be widely used for personal transport, the free market has a solution? After centuries of their use where it did not solve the problem? That is pretty weak reasoning. I'm honestly not sure if you're just trolling me now. It amounts to saying something like "evolution can solve all problems". Even if true, the timeline leaves a bit to be desired, and a bit of manual intervention can do better. Not only that, but insurance happens to be a regulated industry, so your argument is flawed on that account as well.
My argument doesn't say the free market can't solve problems. It's not terribly difficult to think of theoretical free-market solutions to many problems. My argument is that the free market doesn't solve all problems. Or if I grant your reasoning on the horse problem, they don't appear anything like as quickly as we'd want.
You're talking about cultural norms while the examples we're using here are in the context of economic transactions. Even still, yes, there were differences in who was considered responsible for problems. 100 years ago and more, the government was seen as less responsible, i.e, less regulation. This is why I chose it: Closer to an unregulated free market. That makes it more apt for examples where the free market had an opportunity to arrive at solutions for common problems, yet failed to do so.
> There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider.
Insurance markets have appeared for all manner of things now. This argument doesn't really make any sense.
> The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems.
I haven't heard of a problem it doesn't solve yet. How much safety regulation (via insurance) would an airline industry need? I don't know, but the market would surely tell us. It may decide that more or less safety is optimal, based on market inputs. Surely there are proponents of more regulation and surely there are proponents of less regulation, how do we decide who's right?
Your right, insurance markets have appeared for many things. I'm not sure why you think that's evidence against my argument. I cited an example where they did not, where the free market did not come up with a solution.
Your argument amounts to an article of faith. "The free market solves all problems, because if we let it, it would find a way." The crux of your comment when given an example where there was no such solution was to repeat your article of faith.
Just because the marketplace didn't do something 100 years ago doesn't mean that it never would. Obviously, there wasn't a need for such a thing, so what problem is being solved here? You just contrived some set of circumstances that you believe fits your hypothesis; in no way is this a reflection on the free market's capabilities.
It's not contrived, it's an actual problem that existed for centuries coinciding with insurance markets during which the free market did not provide a solution. Saying there wasn't a need for the thing because the free market didn't provide a solution is tautological.
If centuries is an acceptable time scale for obtaining a solution, then we're not really arguing about the same thing at all. I'm sure we could both come up with theoretical free market solutions to just about any issue. The problem is they don't always materialize, and it's not terribly difficult to see any number of issues in history that existed before widespread regulation that were not solved by the free market.
Totally unrealistic. Insurance companies typically assess risk with actual data, they are very reluctant to insure completely unknown risks without a loss history that can be evaluated. Who's going to be the initial ones dying so that the risk can be estimated?
FTA: The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.
Self-regulation as a consequence of the FAA getting insufficient funding is distinctly on-topic.
That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess.
>Still, the US DOT mandated that the FAA begin the process of review to reduce regulations. The FAA assigned this task to ARAC, effectively putting the question of what rules to cut and which to eliminate before creating new ones in the hands of a body that includes representatives from manufacturers and airlines.
But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.
Our government is quite vulnerable to corruption by the rich and powerful. You will watch some propose that, since the rich have corrupted the governement's protections for the people, that those protections should be removed. But this is the original goal in the first place: Remove protection for the people against the abuse by the powerful.
>> That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess.
> But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.
It's a failure of regulation that the regulated would lobby to weaken regulation?
Is the solution to eliminate regulation, so the regulated don't have to bother to "capture it" -- and just decide to live with all the problems regulation can solve or mitigate?
When someone reports a software bug to you, do you often ask them if the solution is to abandon the entire product? This doesn't seem like a productive methodology.
No, that's why I phrased my comment as a question. When the implementation difficulties of regulation come up on libertarian-leaning forums, it often seems like it's really an indirect way of arguing against the whole concept and practice of regulation (e.g. like this comment describes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19424511). I just wanted to see if that was the case here or not, hence the question.
Libertarians probably don't often advocate the strawman position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies, such as is the case in the kosher food certification industry, or the Underwriters Laboratories, or PCI compliance.
> position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies
I think these positions are essentially the same, at least in the case of most consumer-facing regulation. The latter would cause a myriad of captive "independent regulatory" bodies to emerge to confuse consumers, complete with slick websites and easy to confuse names and logos (or outright fraudulent ones). It would be hard to sort through them, and no one will have the time to do it.
Kosher labeling seems to work decently, even though "nobody has the time" to figure out what any of the logos mean.
Meanwhile, evidently "nobody has the time" for knocking on enough congressmen's doors to override Big Business' billion-dollar lobbying efforts, and so here we are watching planes fall from the sky.
> Kosher labeling seems to work decently, even though "nobody has the time" to figure out what any of the logos mean.
Mainly because it relies on government regulation to function, namely trademark law. It's also probably a fairly unique case, since I doubt there's a ton of money in kosher food production (meaning the payoff for abusing the system is low), and the people who care about keeping kosher care about it a lot and can focus on it due to the presence of other regulation.
If a suspect nicely asks a police officer not to arrest them, and the officer complies, that's a failure of policing.
The only difference here is that the vulnerability of regulatory bodies to asking nicely is so well-recognized that it has a fancy name ("Regulatory Capture"), and is backed by loads of published research, and quite frankly is probably the reason that the business class even submits to this sort of regulation at all.
If the police chief was asked on a golf course not to arrest someone, but instead do "self policing", and he complied, it's still a failure in policing, and not any failure of whatever "self policing" is supposed to be.
Maybe we need a regulation solution that doesn't involve handing over ultimate authority half the time to a party that is consistently on record as opposing regulation?
Not to diminish the role of the FAA in this, but do other nations not do their own certifications of new aircraft? Is it a nation of origin thing? e.g. Boeing is regulated by the FAA and everyone trusts the FAA, then Airbus gets regulated by EASA and everyone trusts EASA?
That's basically how it works for complex aircraft. The 777 was the first airliner to receive automatic EASA approval after FAA acceptance.
Smaller nations follow FAA or EASA. Russia and China have their own certification systems but defer largely to the Big Two for imports. However it is notable that the Chinese regulator took a long time and much persuading before they accepted the Max.
Why it isn't done at an international level I don't know. Small aircraft could still be certificated nationally if they're not intended for export.
How many 737s crashed while under FAA jurisdiction? The US has had one commercial airliner fatality since 2009, so it would seem that the FAA is doing something right. Maybe Kenya and Indonesia need some improvements?
In effect two, because the countries in which crashes occurred deferred to the FAA certification rather than require their own, as compared to Brazil. And what's Kenya got to do with this topic?
Why is this downvoted? It’s a fact. The FAA doesn’t regulate the training, maintenance or competency of Indonesia or Kenya. Under FAA regulations, the copilot on the Kenya crash would have never been allowed to fly: he had just 200 total hours. So somehow that’s the FAA’s fault?
With all the sensors on an aircraft, obviously the ones physical exposed out side the aircraft are more likely to malfunction, but I’m sure there are many unexpected behaviors that have yet to be discovered when other sensors fail too.
Also linked in this article is the original FAA table of differences between the Max and other 737 models. It makes no metion of MCAS.