Posted on 03/23/2019 6:16:02 PM PDT by NorseViking
New York (AFP) - A fix to the anti-stall system suspected in the crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet that killed 189 people in Indonesia is ready, industry sources said Saturday, as the company tries to avoid a lengthy grounding of its planes.
Boeing was due to present the patch to officials and pilots of US airlines -- American, Southwest and United -- in Renton, Washington state, where the plane is assembled, other sources said.
"Boeing has already finalized the necessary corrective measures for the MAX," an aviation sector source told AFP on condition of anonymity.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Explain please. The new functionality was deployed without being documented; and it was deployed without training; the fact that they are reprogramming it confirms it didn’t work. So what did I miss here?
Had an "Angle of Attack" indicator on an experimental CH101. Nice to know info BUT to have it take over the controls..., HELL NO!
I fly a lot and prefer flying and American Boeing plane than an EU Airbus, so I am very bothered that Boeing screwed up on this.
Ethiopian Airlines, if I recall correctly, is one of the better run airlines with a rather impeccable safety record. It think it is a distraction to dismiss the crash because it was 3rd world, that the co-pilot was new, etc. Misses the point that the software was bad, maybe design issues, wasn’t documented, and not trained. From reports I’ve read, other airlines did not get documentation and training either. So not a solely Ethiopian Airlines problem. If it was, there would be no need to ground all of these planes around the world.
Most likely what they’re doing with the software is simply disabling the anti-stall system. Yes, you could design, develop, test and certify a simple “antistall.sys=off” patch this fast.
Sued out of existence? Thousands upon thousands of flights by the 737 and two crashes and we are ready to bury an American company? Rather have the Frenchies Airbus rule aviation?
Counterfeit aircraft replacement parts are a big problem in overseas maintenance departments. Up to 10 percent are fakes.
The option to turn off redundancy in a critical system should never have existed - all vital systems in aircraft are made redundant for a reason!
That is a criminal failure on the part of Boeing’s decision makers.
Other parties who catastrophically failed here are the safety regulators and the buyers who should have known better than to buy a designed-inferior version of the product with a critical safety flaw.
> Most likely what they’re doing with the software is simply disabling the anti-stall system. Yes, you could design, develop, test and certify a simple “antistall.sys=off” patch this fast.
Most likely, the “fix” is simply giving out the not-intentionally-broken version of the software for free.
> Thousands upon thousands of flights by the 737 and two crashes and we are ready to bury an American company?
The choice to design and produce a vital safety system with no redundancy is prima facie evidence of criminal negligence. It’s unprecedented in modern aircraft design.
A bit of an over-reach there. Boeing has so many Government contracts they're not going anywhere.
I fly first row in first. That way I will be one of the first passengers at the crash site.
It was reported that both planes that crashed did not have an add-on safety feature which added to the cost of the plane. This feature could have saved all of the lives lost and Boeing has said it is standard on all planes now. So there was no defect and yes Boeing knew about it. This is a case of cost of product versus the cost of life argument that went very wrong. Since Boeing already had the safety feature as an optional item, the solution was already there and just needed to be installed. Pilot training is an issue with individual corporations. However, since Boeing touted the new 737 as being an upgraded version of the older, training was not as important to corporations who bought the new version. However, there were more changes to the new version than just mere upgrades such as the airelon function which caused the nose of the aircraft to go down.
I live in WA, have generally been a Boeing supporter (since at least the 70s), but simply can not believe the simple circuit to signal disagreement between the two AOA sensors (vanes), had to be ordered as an expensive option. I believe this was criminal with the FAA sharing culpability.
8k hours is only 4 years. Is that as Captain or combined captain and co? My point was that pilots in general have been so tech dependent for years on these planes if there is the least little glitch, they may not know how to pull it out.
Remember the AA 191 crash in Chicago? Left engine rips off, taking with it hydraulic lines and other stuff that lets the pilots know the plane is stalling. The pilots are pulling up, further putting the plane in more of a stall without knowing that they need power over altitude. I’m guessing, but this crash MAY have been just a LITTLE like that — not in a mechanical way, but in the sense that if there was a technical glitch that the pilots didn’t understand or hadn’t experienced, they might not have known how to manually recover the plane and fly out of it where a trained pilot would be able to bypass all the tech stuff and go back to the basics of flying the plane.
Think of it like your car — the auto transmission goes out but (somehow) has a manual backup. A clutch pedal magically appears and allows you to shift gears manually. But that assumes you know how to drive a standard transmission. I don’t know if this analogy translates to what happened on this crash but my thought is that if Boeing is reacting NOW with this software fix, they’re making a pretty good guess as to what went down (so to speak).
I will preferentially fly in an aircraft with a stuck nose gear anytime compared to one in which elevator or elevator trim function is out of control.
The Dash-200’s, uncontrolled rudder movement.
They never were able to recreate it in testing.
Boeing put new engines on the last unmodified 200 in the world, a plane that had been donated to Purdue several years before by United, and flew it around for a year trying to recreate that situation, and were never able to do it.
Later theories think it could have been wake turbulence from aircraft in front of them, but nothing was ever proven.
The automatic anti-stall system uses one sensor in all cases. The option that Boeing charged more for was a indicator that lit when the two AOA sensors disagreed
According to the Times, a "source familiar with the changes" said that the AOA disagree light will be added to the digital flight displays as part of an update to MCAS software. That update is expected to be deployed by no later than the end of April. The AOA indicator on the digital display will remain an add-on option.
Again, I don't know if the NY Times story is BS or not, but there is just an indicator that tells the pilot to fly and ignore both sensors. Redundant AOA input to the automatic system is not an option. If there was, which sensor would the automatic system use? Neither.
There may be criminal negligence, but your description might not be accurate.
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