Didn’t another transatlantic carrier just do this not that long ago, stranding at least a couple people in the US? This all seems eerily familiar.
The thing that really makes me sad about the Ethiopian crash is that the info was out there, even if not formally trained, had the pilots read any discussion on the Lion Air flight. Hell, I’m just an aviation aficionado, and the Lion Air crash had a unique enough cause that it stuck with me.
You would think if you flew an aircraft type professionally, and you read it had a crash, that professional- and self-interest would cause you to follow the reports on it. It may not be legally obligated as part of the job, but it makes sense to do it.
Now, it’s easy to armchair quarterback from the safety of a desk compared to being in the cockpit of a plane that’s actively trying to kill you, and a pilot’s training sends them to checklists, not to gut concerns based on news reports and pilot talk. But as soon as I read the report of the crash, I wondered if it was MCAS-related, and it’s a shame those pilots didn’t have that reaction.
I wonder, if Boeing wasn’t fixing things now and the grounding handn’t happened, if there are seriously pilots out there who still wouldn’t know to shut off the MCAS if this happened a third time, because they’re so fixated on their systems training and procedures?
They may be too busy flying planes to visit discussion forums.
WSJ reports that the preliminary investigation confirms MCAS was activated prior to the Ethiopia crash
Was reading the Vox report on the fiasco so far and there was mention that the FAA’s anonymous reporting database showed a number of 737 Max pilots had nose-down-after-takeoff incidents, but these pilots knew to disable the MCAS.
So software flaws aside, if pilots had been informed of the system and how to disable it in training, those poor passengers would likely be alive today.
At this point, it’s all about wondering how many zeroes will be on the check that Boeing has to write to two planeloads of victims’ families.
To that end, I wonder if the insurance company will payout on their behalf or say that it was Boeing’s negligence that led to the crashes and refuse to pay, leaving Boeing with the bill.
Liability insurance insures against negligence. It does not cover intentional harm. This is the same principle as your automobile or homeowners insurance. If you negligently forget to pick up your kid’s toy and someone trips over it, you’re covered. If you deliberately spray water on your front steps on a freezing day, you’re not.
In the case of a large company like Boeing, they most likely are self-insured up to a certain amount and have excess liability insurance above that amount. The excess liability insurance will reinsure that exposure, so the loss will be spread out and likely not put anyone out of business.
Can you expand on this?
Airbus received a loan of almost a billion € from Germany for the development of the A380 and the repayments were tied to deliveries of the planes. With the premature end to production, only a third of the loan has been repaid so far and it looks like taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.
You’re probably still better off than us. We keep throwing ridiculous subsidies and low, tax, no tax, and sometimes negative tax at these companies even when they’re making billions, soaking us taxpayers of every cent we have, meanwhile it’s all crab and lobster for them.
I was disappointed by that link - from the URL I thought there was going to be lobster AI and was thinking fiction (Accelerando) somehow becoming reality.
Lolol
(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)
Holy Shit
The pilots of Ethiopia apparently followed the instructions on how to properly disable MCAS at least once.
n.b. there is no separate way to disable MCAS independent of the other electric trim systems. What they would have turned off is the electric pitch trim motors altogether. Those motors are the only way the computer system can affect pitch input. Turning them off limits you to making pitch trim inputs with the trim wheels on either side of the throttle quadrant; there’s no way for MCAS to get in the loop without the trim motors.
The story says the pilots then turned the trim motors back on later, for unspecified reasons, which would have let MCAS make inputs again.
Genuine Boeing 737-300 series throttle quadrant converted for flight simulator use. Trim wheels spin on input from the electrical trim switches on the yoke.
Astounding.
The Seattle Times (one of the only non-specialist media outlets whose reporting on this has been reliably solid) has some reasonable speculation on why they might have done so.
The short version: the stabilizer trim happens by jackscrew, which acts on the front edge of the stabilizer. If it’s trimmed nose-down, the jackscrew is in its upward position. If you’re pulling back on the control column, the elevators act on the back of the stabilizer, which would tend to lift the front of the stabilizer higher. If the plane is sufficiently badly trimmed, the upward force on the jackscrew from elevator input might render it impossible to turn the trim wheels by hand. The pilots might have followed the procedure, been unable to trim manually, and turned the electric trim back on, so they could use yoke switches (and therefore the trim motors) to correct the trim setting.
Way back in the 737-200, there was a procedure detailed in the flight manual for what to do if you got yourself into a trim-locked situation: release the control column briefly, which relieves the upward force on the jackscrew and permits manual trim again. Get in as much trim as you can before you get into a dive, pull up, and repeat until you’re stable. It’s not clear why that procedure was removed from the manual. Maybe the systems which could cause runaway trim got more reliable, and nobody remembered for the Max.
This website has some solid technical information on MCAS.
One thing I’m still looking for is information on how much trim input one turn of the manual trim wheel causes. MCAS did 2.5 degrees over about 10 seconds. I’m curious how much cranking it takes to revert that change.
Edit: here’s a video which shows some of the trim systems in operation on a 737-200. At about a minute in, there’s a split-screen view showing the trim wheels turning and the stabilizer moving; it isn’t enough to answer the question posed in the final sentence of the preceding paragraph precisely, but it suffices for the answer ‘a lot’.
Thanks for the informative posts. This reminds me about a lot of projects I’ve been involved in where hack gets piled upon hack over time, a bunch of exceptions get appended to the original operating concepts and it gets harder and harder to keep track of all the moving parts.
Yea no doubt. What a mess.