Boeing Knew the AOA Disagree Alert on the 737 Max Didn’t Work

https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/05/06/boeing-angle-of-attack-disagree-alert/

by samrohn • 7 years ago

93 66 7 years ago

basicplus2• 7 years ago

<The company said that a Boeing-convened safety review board affirmed in December that the absence of the AOA disagree alert from flight displays would not have presented a safety issue.

The FAA confirmed the discussion and that it deemed the issue "low risk" at the time.>

So the FAA is culpable as well as Boeing

cottsak7• 7 years ago

That is true, but at some point it's hard to distinguish between parts of the FAA and parts of Boeing, owed to the simple fact that Boeing have so much influence over the FAA. Statements about how Boeing more or less "certified itself" speak to this. Just go and look at the LinkedIn history of the folks that move between Boeing/FAA.

If you accept this, then the question might turn to how it was possible for the FAA to be weakened to such a degree that this corporate influence was possible. FAA are the regulator - at the end of the day, safety lies with them. Perhaps it's the responsibility of committee and congressional oversight to the aviation regulator? Perhaps the buck stops with the government representatives who have allowed this mess to be possible in the first place?

briandear3• 7 years ago

How is the FAA culpable? No American planes crashed? The FAA doesn’t control regulations for Indonesia do they? Indonesian maintenance standards are atrocious. Look at Lion Air’s record. Is it a coincidence that one of the world’s worst airlines also happen to crash the 737 and yet Southwest Airlines that flew an order of magnitude more flights on the Max never had even a scratch? Lion Air knew they had a problem on the penultimate flight — but they ignored it. The FAA would never allow that level of negligence in the US: that plane would have been grounded. The FAA has a better safety record than anyone else — and that includes the Europeans.

frostburg3• 7 years ago

The FAA let Boeing do the certification of its own plane. The system is broken.

salawat4• 7 years ago

Doesn't matter. The design itself was unsafe. The reason the FAA has historically been so highly regarded is that it has fostered a design environment of generally implicit design safety.

Ironically, however, Europe has called the FAA to task before on several models of Boeing aircraft that weren't implicitly design safe. See the D.P. Davies Interview w.r.t the Boeing 727 certification process.

They cut corners, and did not inform pilots of the inherent risk that existed in a manner concomitant with the severity of the result. This originated in a desire to submit an aerodynamically deviant aircraft, yet attain type airworthyness certification with minimal friction.

Lion Air may be last in safely operating aircraft, but the design standards were generally written in such a way where even the worst operators stood a good chance of going up, and getting back down free of harm.

Obviously, that is no longer the case.

aaronbrethorst• 7 years ago

"Senior company leadership was not involved in the review and first became aware of this issue in the aftermath of the Lion Air accident."

i.e. the buck stops somewhere else!

pauljurczak2• 7 years ago

Scapegoating begins...

raverbashing• 7 years ago

And the damning thing was that they still thought it was ok to keep it absent

There are a couple of reasons why "the existing functionality was acceptable" is a poor excuse:

- It was present on early models (it was not an optional feature)

- Its triggering indicate to the pilots that something is amiss. Especially after the 1st accident there should have been an association "AOA problems -> potential MCAS problems"

seren• 7 years ago

It is possible to not be in a review or aware and still be responsible if you instill a culture of fear and instruct your team that the plane should keep flying whatever the means.

I don't have any information whatsoever to say it happened at Boeing, but saying you were not aware is sometimes not enough.

CamperBob2• 7 years ago

This is an interesting point. Some will argue that the AOA disagree indicator wouldn't have made any difference in either crash. But it seems like it would have caused Lion Air to take their aircraft out of service and fix the problem after it occurred on the penultimate flight.

Of course, the fact that they kept the aircraft in service without bothering to diagnose the issue that almost got everyone killed on the previous flight is a counterargument in itself. There's more than enough gross negligence to go around in this case, unfortunately.

Edit: actually, it appears that Lion didn't spring for the "optional" warning indicator feature in the first place.

mormegil• 7 years ago

actually, it appears that Lion didn't spring for the "optional" warning indicator feature in the first place.

AIUI, there was no "optional warning indicator feature" at all. The AOA disagree warning should have been a standard feature. Only the indicator of the current AOA was the optional feature.

pergadad• 7 years ago

Optional indicator that was previously - and should have been - standard issue. With the MAX being sold with the explicit promise that there is little/no additional pilot training need.

Clear negligence on both sides, with Boeing being responsible at much grander scale.

jdsully2• 7 years ago

It’s not clear the AOA disagree light would have saved the two flights, so waiting for the next release was reasonable.

The critical jump pilots had to make was that this was a trim runaway event. AOA indicators were not connected to the trim system before.

pauljurczak2• 7 years ago

It’s not clear the AOA disagree light would have saved the two flights

Unless you change it to "It’s certain the AOA disagree light would not have saved the two flights", you are basically arguing for presence of AOA disagree light.

jdsully2• 7 years ago

The FAA provides time to fix issues if its deemed to not be a critical issue - because if every problem results in grounding planes then people just won't report issues. The added stress of millions in losses could also result in subpar fixes that cause more problems.

In this case I agree with the FAA's initial decision for this indicator. Its extremely unlikely having it working would have prevented the two crashes. The mere fact that it might have helped doesn't make the original decision incorrect.

dagaci• 7 years ago

It seems that the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) system depended upon the AOA.

cottsak7• 7 years ago

Yes but not in an absolute way. I think we can only assume that MCAS uses this as one of it's many inputs in order to determine it's flight control logic.

frostburg3• 7 years ago

Boeing should be fined enough that "shareholder value" would be roughly zero after all the assets are sold to pay the fine.

That (besides any personal penalty that might be appropriate, of course) might realign the incentives for the next set of managers facing similar choices somewhere else, but it won't happen.

dahdum3• 7 years ago

It might feel good to do that, but you’d be putting tens of thousands out of work, and handing the industry over to Airbus, which last I read, had an ever so slightly worse safety record (though both are quite good). That’s bad for cost and safety long term.

By all means I support axing those responsible and criminal charges where/if appropriate, but a company death sentence does not serve the public interest.

MarkSweep• 7 years ago

I think the argument for making it a corporate death sentence is that future companies and shareholders will know it is in their interest to make airplanes that don't kill people.

More abstractly, if you value human life at a high enough dollar value and make corporations liable for loss thereof, they will expend effort to preserve human life. It appears that currently the externality of killing people is priced at a level where Boeing does not mind killing people.

I don't know if lawsuit liability is the best way to police corporate behavior, but it is big part of the system we currently have in the USA.

dna_polymerase• 7 years ago

Like those factories and workers would just disappear. Something new would be established, hopefully something better. We can't keep looking away when companies behave like Boeing did, actively killing people, only because we would put people out of work.

arcticbull• 7 years ago

So break off the civilian plane division and kill it off. No reason to hurt all 100,000 employees, just the division that was responsible. It sucks to hear “sheesh I wish there were more competitors” after Boeing just kicked Bombardier in the Crown Jewels for daring to compete with the C-Series, which is only an Airbus product now because Boeing took advantage of the US political system in the first place (a severe miscalculation in retrospect).

Monopolies aren’t capitalist. Monopolies keep putting us in uncomfortable situations like this. There’s a reason we have regulations to keep them from happening (or at least break them apart post facto) even if we choose not to use them.

cf4982• 7 years ago

If you have companies who are to big to fail they behave that way. We just had that with banks and the financial crisis. Leaving such institutions as is is incredibly dangerous and incentives risky and reckless behavior at the cost of society as a whole.

If saving those jobs is the goal, we should work towards that instead of saving the company in hopes that this will also save jobs.

mdekkers2• 7 years ago

Airbus, which last I read, had an ever so slightly worse safety record

[citation needed]

gzu2• 7 years ago

Check out their balance sheet. It’s already at zero! They already have been spending so much on buybacks (9B a year, ~eq to net income) that there isn’t any equity left in the company since their liabilities have exploded.

On a side note check a lot of large companies today, corporate debt has gone crazy due to buybacks. They’ve converted any stockholder equity remaining into debt, especially after tax cuts and low interest rates. In a bankruptcy, bond holders get paid first.

panarky2• 7 years ago

Yet they have 500m shares outstanding with a market value of $200b.

briandear3• 7 years ago

So destroy the company, put at least 165k people out of a job as punishment? Can we sell off Airbus for their numerous bribery scandals?[1] Should we destroy Tesla because of their autopilot crashes, battery fires and other mishaps?

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/suspicions-of-...

salawat4• 7 years ago

Yes. I see no issues here.

If you can't do what you set out to do without being grossly negligent, or resorting to bribery, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing what you are at all.

Businesses seem to have forgotten they are not money pumps first and foremost. They are there to do a job, and are currently failing epically at doing so in an ethical manner.

I'd put down a corporation like I'd put down a dog should it show a tendency for wanton destruction and bloodshed..

CaptainZapp2• 7 years ago

Airbus should absolutely be punished if found guilty for bribery. Same goes for Tesla, if found guilty of neglicence (including lying in their marketing literature).

The difference, however, is that you can hardly acuse them of mass murder for corporate greed and profit.

And that's exactly what Boeing management did after the Lion Air crash. They knew, or must have known, that they're selling a potential death trap and did exactly shit about it (except promising a fix, delivered eventually, which should compensate for "incompetent pilots").

Look up whataboutism. Because your argument is quite a perfect example.

hkai• 7 years ago

No, you should not destroy businesses for any transgressions, even for extremely serious ones.

Would it be correct to say that your suggestion stems from a general dislike of corporations, rather than from the circumstances of this particular case?

HelloNurse• 7 years ago

Well, the intent is precisely that they cease to exist. They shouldn't be making airplanes because they are a threat to public safety, it's not a mere "dislike".

frostburg3• 7 years ago

No; I don't trust corporations, but I don't have a specific a priori distaste for them.

I want to point out that I don't want everyone working for Boeing out of a job, I want people that invested in Boeing to lose that investment (so that other boards in the future are incentivized to hold other management teams accountable) and to erase the obviously dangerous safety culture that currently exists in the company. I'm sure that their employees and assets could be useful for their competitors.

philjohn2• 7 years ago

There's a philosophical argument to be made wrt corporate personhood. If we lock up and/or execute people for serious transgressions, are corporations let off too easily (fines usually a fraction of their yearly profit, and therefore just a cost of doing business)?

jandeboevrie• 7 years ago

First line: In 2017, Boeing learned that the angle-of-attack (AOA) disagree alert — a standard feature on all 737 MAX aircraft — didn't work on the majority of the planes. The company determined that the alert was not necessary for safe operation, so it did not inform operators or the FAA.

So all those lives could have been saved and they knew it in 2017? And they let two crashes happen? Explain that to the ones who got left behind...

ealexhudson2• 7 years ago

Previously, the thinking was that most airline pilots weren't using the AOA information anyway - they had included the feature because some airlines had ex-military staff who were used to having it, but most didn't. So the AOA being wrong wouldn't necessarily be that urgent a problem, if it was only the pilot we were talking about.

Unfortunately, it wasn't only used by a small number of pilots, but also by MCAS. It seems that MCAS kicks in during scenarios that weren't originally intended - i.e. take-offs as well as stall scenarios - and they got two other things wrong:

* MCAS was revised to be more aggressive toward the end of testing;

* MCAS has a bug / design flaw that allowed the system to command an increasingly steep nose-down each time a pilot overrode it.

There were lots of little signs all over the place that there was a problem. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to join the dots, and each seemingly-reasonable decision they made when taken together added up to a dangerous scenario.

cottsak7• 7 years ago

"they didn't seem to join the dots" is what it will be made to look like.

IMO, there would have been engineers and even some of the management chain who knew these risks, but for whatever reason, would have been pressured to make this go away. It seems like a conspiracist thing to say, but I've seen this in software engineering for years. There are heaps of perfectly legitimate pressures which will result in reduced quality and cutting of corners.. just in my work, lives are not at risk.

m_mueller• 7 years ago

Or alternatively they didn't want to join the dots.

josefrichter2• 7 years ago

No, your deduction logic is wrong. They did not "know in 2017 that all those lives could be saved". Because in 2017 they believed it's not a security issue.

julienfr112• 7 years ago

Well, when first plane crash, and the second one, they blamed the pilots ...

ulfw• 7 years ago

They better explain to me why I should trust a Boeing aircraft after the 777 (in my humble opinion the last aircraft built by the engineering-driven Boeing Company rather than McDonnell-Douglas masquerading as Boeing).

Deimorz• 7 years ago

This is blogspam from over a month ago.

Here's the official release from Boeing that this is just reiterating (from May 5): https://boeing.mediaroom.com/news-releases-statements?item=1...

NYTimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/business/boeing-737-max-w...

HN discussion of that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835608

acqq• 7 years ago

More important than "the execs believed all planes have the feature" is that the claim after the Lion Air's crash was that at least these companies which did pay for the "extra" would be able to not fly the dangerous planes, as the technicians would discover that one of AoA vanes is not working while the plane is still on the ground. But that was also a lie (from the NYT article):

"“We were told that if the A.O.A. vane, like on Lion Air, was in a massive difference, we would receive an alert on the ground and therefore not even take off,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the union representing American Airlines pilots. “That gave us additional confidence in continuing to fly that aircraft.”

But in the last several weeks, Boeing has been saying something different. Mr. Tajer said the company recently told American pilots that the system would not alert pilots about any sensor disagreement until the aircraft is 400 feet above the ground."

afarrell• 7 years ago

Boeing has over 100,000 employees. What does it mean when a sentence says that "Boeing knew X"?

Tempest1981• 7 years ago

At least 1 of the engineering teams knew X, is my interpretation.

maltalex• 7 years ago

This was my question too. The real question isn't whether someone in the company knew. It's whether someone with decision power knew, and who was that person? And also, if people with decision power did not know - then why?

cottsak7• 7 years ago

I tend to agree.

And if this can be traced to someone with influence, how was it possible for the company to be structured so that a single point of failure was possible - that speaks to a larger problem and then puts the senior exec on the chopping block too.

josefrichter2• 7 years ago

I'd be curious to read more about those cases when MCAS was engaged, but the pilots were able to recover. There were a number of them.

philjohn2• 7 years ago

IIRC there was one on the Lion Air plane that crashed, but because they had a 737 instructor aboard helping aleviate the pressures when things started going wrong they were able to land.

dfeojm-zlib• 7 years ago

Still wondering about why 737 NGs (-600,-700,-800,-900) are still deemed "airworthy" despite the 2010 investigative report on Boeing's intentional deception and cover-up of Ducommun's absurdly dangerous and substandard critical structural fuselage components. Several passengers have already died from fuselage breakups from hard landings and runway overruns when previous aircraft have survived similar situations intact; plus the possibility of aircraft catastrophically breaking up in heavy turbulence.

Boeing Knew the AOA Disagree Alert on the 737 Max Didn’t Work

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