Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post Reply
firecat69

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by firecat69 »

Could not agree More. Absolutely Correct. A great company disgraced by bean counters who are only interested in having more money for huge bonuses.

By the way first time this site was extremely slow loading for me.
Jun

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by Jun »

I presume all Boeing statements are taking into consideration how they might defend any future litigation. I cannot see any other reason for their stance.

One would expect Boeing statements to completely disproven in due course, followed by firing of their senior management.
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

I wonder how major the losses for Boring will end up being. Boeing has announced it is likely to take a hit of at least one billion dollars. Yet that could well be just the tip of a Titanic-size iceberg.

Some of the families of those killed in the two crashes have already joined law suits. If all do so in the USA and Boeing is found to be at fault - surely this is likely to be the case in the light of what we so far know - I imagine payouts with aggravated damages will be very large. Even if each of the 346 souls killed is awarded $10 million, that alone would total around $3.5 billion with costs.

The loss of the two planes will presumably be covered by Boeing's insurance, although if the company is found to be at fault, will the insurers actually pay up? By far the largest cost is likely to be the inability of airlines to use their grounded planes. At the start of April, the Conversation website gave some likely estimates.
This is a costly situation for the airlines. If we assume that an airline operating in the US uses its 737 MAX aircraft for three round trips a day and carries 145 passengers on an average flight, we can estimate some of the losses involved.

According to the US Department of Transportation, the average airfare in the US is US$343.28. Under the assumption that this is for a round trip, a 737 MAX aircraft will generate around US$150,000 of revenue for the airline per day. Of course, about 10-15% of this is taxes, but then the US transport department data does not account for any revenues the airlines may get for ancillaries such as checked luggage.

Southwest Airlines – the largest 737 MAX operator in the US – currently has 34 of these aircraft grounded. This means that a day of all these planes not flying might be costing the airline as much as US$5m in lost revenue.

For all the 737 MAX planes now grounded, the total revenue airlines are losing per day might be close to US$60m. And these calculations only account for the potential lost revenue – airlines are bound to bear additional costs associated with the mitigation planning involved, rescheduling, and potential longer-term loss of business due to routes being suspended as a result.

Of course, the US$60m figure above is to be viewed with caution. It may not be entirely appropriate to extrapolate the figures for the US market to calculate a number for the rest of the world, and at best one tenth of the above amount is profit. Nevertheless, we can easily foresee Boeing facing lawsuits from the airlines amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, should the planes remain grounded for any extensive time period. There is no international convention to limit the amount of liability that aircraft manufacturers may face if they are found to be at fault.

Hundreds of millions of dollars may seem like a manageable amount for a company that earned US$10.5 billion profit in 2018 alone. But longer term costs to Boeing due to lost business will likely be in the billions of dollars. For instance, the order of 50 planes, which was cancelled by Indonesian airline Garuda was worth US$4.9 billion.
By using older and leased aircraft, it is unlikely that an airline like Southwest will be losing as much as $5 million in daily revenues. But if it is, the grounding by tonight will total 51 days. We are told the aircraft is unlikely to fly again until mid-July at the very earliest. That would result in almost 130 days - $650 million just to Southwest! With around 400 aircraft grounded and at $150,000 or so per plane per day, in theory total losses claimed by airlines could amount to $7.8 billion!

It is unlikely that all carriers will be able to justify that level of losses. What they will have to cope with is the lack of public confidence once the planes are back in the air. Who will voluntarily fly on a revamped 737Max no matter how many Boeing executives are on board? It is bound to take months for the public to be convinced. This is not like the Dreamliner fires where no-one died. The 737Max has claimed 346 lives. That will take a long time for most people to forget.

Last, but by no means least for Boeing shareholders, is the cancellation of orders. Garuda has already cancelled 50 losing Boeing $4.9 billion. Virgin Australia has just deferred delivery of the first of its 48 737Max order from November 2019 to July 2021. The longer it takes to get them into the air, more will surely follow.

Looking forward five years, Boeing will no doubt have recovered. In the next few years, though, the claims against the company and the accumulated losses are likely to be way above the $1 billion initial estimate. Upwards of $10 billion is surely much more likely.

https://theconversation.com/boeing-737- ... any-114863
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

Yet more revelations that spell really bad news for Boeing. It has been revealed that Boeing's reliance on a single sensor for its 737 Max had been flagged 216 times to FAA.
Former Boeing engineers and aviation analysts interviewed by CNN have criticized Boeing's original software design for relying on data from a single AOA sensor, claiming that those devices are vulnerable to defects.

FAA data analyzed by CNN supports that assessment.
These reports extend back to earlier 737 models and other planes. Yet Boeing continued to reply on it for the Max series
Those reports, about one-fifth of which involve Boeing planes, include incidents in which AOA sensors were frozen, improperly installed, struck by lightning or even hit by flying birds. In some cases, faulty sensors led to stall warnings, forcing pilots to abort takeoffs or perform emergency landings.

In one 2011 case, the flight crew on a Boeing 737-800 reported that the "angle of attack and airspeed failed" and declared an emergency. An AOA sensor was then replaced. The FAA also issued two directives for various Boeing aircraft models before the 737 MAX was released, indicating that Boeing was aware of the potential for the sensors to cause problems in its planes . . .

While those directives did not involve the 737 Max, Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and a CNN aviation analyst, said AOA sensors fundamentally work the same on different aircraft models.

"This is a fairly simple external device that can get damaged on a regular basis," Goelz said. "That's important because Boeing made the decision to rely on them as single sources for streams of data."
Even worse -
"From the beginning it should have been a fail-safe design, which would have relied on two inputs to make sure that you weren't sensitive to one failure," said Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight-controls engineer who helped design systems for the 757 and 767.

Lemme, who was subpoenaed by a grand jury in an investigation into the 737 Max, said he doesn't understand why it took two fatal crashes for Boeing to make those changes.
And it gets even worse for Boeing -
In addition to not including inputs from two AOA sensors in its original design, Boeing did not flight test AOA sensor malfunctions and how MCAS software would respond, according to several sources.

A former Boeing pilot who tested the 737 Max, who requested anonymity due to fears of negative repercussions, told CNN "I don't think we appreciated the ramifications of a... failure of an AOA probe."
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/30/poli ... index.html
Jun

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by Jun »

If all this is true, it seems Boeing are not following established engineering practice.

They must have done an FMEA (Failure Modes and Effect Analysis) to assess the effects of failure of each sensor & every other part of the system. If the failure mode is safety critical, then mitigating steps need to be taken.
Such as plausibility checking sensor readings against other sensors, or indirect calculation of the parameter & including suitable logic to ensure failure cannot occur. If this has not occurred, senior people need to be held accountable for not overseeing the process properly.

In the long term, I think this exercise will of course improve airline safety. Lessons will be learned and applied to the development and approvals process. Boeing and Airbus might be re-checking some of their existing systems in response to this.
Also, we have to remember that Boeing and Airbus have contributed the lion's share of the impressive improvements in airline safety in the last few years & will probably continue to do so.
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

Jun wrote: Wed May 01, 2019 3:21 pm They must have done an FMEA (Failure Modes and Effect Analysis) to assess the effects of failure of each sensor & every other part of the system . . . If this has not occurred, senior people need to be held accountable for not overseeing the process properly.
After hundreds of pilot reports about the AOA sensor being faulty and two full hull loss crashes in a short period of time due, we believe, to problems with the AOA and the new MCAS software, surely it cannot have occured in the case? If so (and I accept that we must await a full report), I trust holding people accountable is the least of the penalties. This is especially true when after the grounding Boeing itself found a second fault (albeit not critical) which it had not picked up prior to delivering the 737Max as airworthy. That aircraft will require the most thorough and exhausting critical examination of every part before the travelling public will start flying in it.
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

It seems things are going from bad to worse for Boeing and their executives who put the 737 Max in the air. These are two of the headlines today -

From CNN -
Boeing knew about problems with the 737 Max the year before Lion Air crash and did nothing about them

From ABC -
Boeing knew about 737 MAX problems for months, but didn't tell FAA until after 2018 Lion Air crash
Boeing told airlines that the warning light was standard equipment on all MAX jets.

Boeing engineers quickly learned, however, that the warning light only worked if airlines also bought an optional gauge that told pilots how the plane's nose was aimed in relation to the onrushing air.

Boeing said the problem stemmed from software delivered to the company.

A Boeing spokesman declined to name the software vendor to Associated Press.

In its statement on Sunday, Boeing said that because in-house experts decided that the non-working light did not affect safety, the company decided to fix the problem by disconnecting the alert from the optional indicators at the next planned update of cockpit display software.

Boeing did not tell airlines or the FAA about this decision.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-06/ ... s/11084326
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

There is a discussion on the prune.org website (Professional Pilots Rumour - although not all posters are pilots) about the date when the 737 Max series might be flying again. As we know, the Department of Justice’'s Fraud Section has opened a criminal investigation into the development and certification of the aircraft by both the FAA and Boeing. Federal attorneys are gathering evidence through a federal grand jury seated in Washington, D.C. Yet another Committee has been established by Boeing. Yet Boeing's investigative committee contains not one engineer!

One poster recently pointed this out. The Transportation Department'’s Inspector General is conducting a separate administrative audit into the certification of the MAX. At a Senate subcommittee hearing in March, Inspector General Calvin L. Scovel III said such audits generally take about seven months, but could take longer given the complexity of the issue.

Seven months or even longer? That means the likelihood of the aircraft taking to the skies again until next year are surely slim. And even when the FAA recertify the plane, it remains to be seen if regulators in other countries will be prepared to do so until the final accident reports on the Lion and Ethiopian crashes. That would lead to further delay. IMO the longer the delay, the less likely passengers the world over will be to fly the plane until its safety has been proven on commercial flights for quite a long time.
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

Pilots confronted Boeing about 737 Max before second crash
Airline's pilots union demands to know why Boeing did not disclose flight control system currently under investigation.

American Airlines pilots confronted a Boeing official over the state of the 737 Max just weeks after the first crash of a Lion Air plane in October.
In a tense recording obtained by CBS News from American's pilots union, pilots pressed Boeing on why a flight control system under investigation as the cause of the crash was not disclosed to them when the 737 Max was originally launched. "We flat out deserve to know what is on our airplanes," one pilot says on the recording.

The unidentified Boeing official responded that knowing about the system would not have changed the outcome of the crash. "In a million miles, you're going to maybe fly this airplane, maybe once you're going to see this, ever," he said, while not appearing to know he was being recorded. "So we try not to overload the crews with information that's unnecessary so they actually know the information we believe is important."
https://www.cnet.com/news/pilots-confro ... ond-crash/

I cannot believe any Boeing official actually stated that it was not necessary for pilots to be aware of a problem because they would only encounter it once in a million miles! This is surely more than gross negligence. I maintained some weeks ago that Boeing is technically guilty of murder. As more and more evidence is leaked, I still maintain that belief.
gera

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by gera »

Post Reply