Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

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Jun

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by Jun »

fountainhall wrote: Mon Jun 03, 2019 9:46 am Yet more trouble for Boeing's troubled aircraft.
The biggest trouble for Boeing in this instance is the media bandwagon now reports every minor & non-critical defect with Boeing aircraft.
The article says even complete failure of these parts would not cause the loss of an aircraft. In normal circumstances, this would not be reported.

We saw exactly the same thing with Toyota a few years ago. They had a problem with accelerator pedals which was high profile. So for about 2~3 years afterwards, the media reported every minor rectification campaign from Toyota. Meanwhile, the other car manufacturers were able to continue with their rectification work without such media scrutiny. There is quite a lot of it, as can be seen on the websites that list rectification campaigns.

Journalists typically have a lazy herd following mentality.
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

Jun wrote: Mon Jun 03, 2019 3:40 pmThe biggest trouble for Boeing in this instance is the media bandwagon now reports every minor & non-critical defect with Boeing aircraft.
The article says even complete failure of these parts would not cause the loss of an aircraft. In normal circumstances, this would not be reported.
Not sure I agree with your comments. It's part of a journalist's job to follow up on issues like this. Like it or not, they are the hot topic issues of the day.

What worries me about the cracks to the leading edge slat tracks is this from the FAA which I quoted earlier.
“The affected parts may be susceptible to premature failure or cracks resulting from the improper manufacturing process,” said the FAA.. It added, however, that even a “complete failure” of the parts would not lead to the loss of an aircraft.
I wonder what "complete failure" means in this regard. If a part is susceptible to cracks, I imagine that as in the case of the aft pressure bulkhead failures in at least two Boeing 747 crashes (caused in one incident by the back of the fuselage hitting the runway as a result of too high an angle at take-off and in the other metal fatigue and the subsequent imperfect repairs to both - JAL 123 and China Airlines 611) it can break whilst in flight. That alone might not cause the loss of the aircraft. And it's unlikely that a broken part could be ingested into an engine since on a 737 the front of the engine is some way ahead of the wing slats. But what if part of a slat broke off and damaged the rudder, elevators or horizontal or vertical stabilisers at the tail? That possibility alone surely makes the issue worth investigating.

And the fact that the FAA has given the airlines only 10 days to carry out the inspections and any necessary repairs indicates, rightly or wrongly, that there is more than a degree of urgency about this.
Jun

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by Jun »

A good journalist would keep all this in perspective and ensure his reporting is balanced & complete.

On the one hand, we have the major incident which has caused the crash.
Then all the issues NOT directly linked to this are a separate matter. For those, a good journalist might trawl through all the unexpected fatigue & wear issues for Boeing and Airbus for the last 5 years and compare the performance of the planes AND the incidents arising from these issues, plus the overall safety record of the industry. To be fair, such good work is sometimes seen in the FT and particularly The Economist.

As for the potential failure of the wing components, they could be aerodynamic enhancements to improve the efficiency of the wing and the plane would work safely without them. The FMEA process SHOULD consider all the potential consequences of failure and document these. I say should, since the MCAS system seems to have slipped though that net.
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

I rarely read the Economist or the FT, and so I fully accept your knowledge of their journalistic practices is much greater than mine.

But I do find it interesting that several of the facts which have come to light regarding the 737 Max since the two crashes have not been a case of trawling through years of articles. They have all come directly from Boeing, the FAA and various pilots and engineers at Boeing's own plants. Even the most recent leading edge slat problem has come from Boeing itself and reported by the company to the FAA. So I have to wonder: if there had not been the two fatal crashes and the resultant massively detailed inspection of all parts of that aircraft, would that slat issue which affects several 737 models actually have come to light? It is after all the second problem with parts to be so exposed.

The MCAS system slipped through a whole basket of nets and not even Boeing's test pilots were aware of the major changes made to it. Someone or some group in Boeing made a decision that this was an insignificant issue in terms of aircraft safety and it was not even mentioned to a host of other key departments. In my view, it is vital that information about such a decision is made public, if only to ensure greater inspections in future so that similar problems do not occur again. And it illustrates the sort of problems that Boeing must address to do so.

As for the 747 crashes due to faulty repairs to the aft pressure bulkheads, these failures were both stated in the official accident reports as the reason for the accidents.
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

The President of Emirates, Tim Clark, has stated he does not believe the 737 Max will take to the skies commercially again before December
"because the global regulators are not going to approve this aircraft to fly any time soon and I think we have to face that reality and so does the manufacturer."
Emirates regional partner airline, Flydubai, currently has more than 100 737 Max 8 planes on order. Clark made the comments at IATA's Annual meeting in Seoul. A Bloomberg vdo is included in the attached link.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/news/em ... vp-AACi5pF
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

And so it continues! American Airlines has now announced it has cancelled all 737 Max flights by another three weeks until September 3. American also announced its pilots will require 45 days of training once the new software fixes are in place. Previously it had said pilots would only require 14 days of training. That certainly seems to be a good move in helping repair public confidence in the plane.

https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/american- ... d=63591306
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

The date keeps being put further and further back. Now the FAA is echoing the view of the Boeing CEO that the 737 Max will be back in the air by December! December? Wasn't it the same CEO who said its fix would enable the aircraft to fly again within a few weeks of the grounding?
Boeing Co.’s 737 Max aircraft, grounded since March after two fatal crashes in five months, should be back in the air by December, a top U.S. regulator said.

It’s not possible to give an exact date as work progresses on safety fixes to the aircraft, said Ali Bahrami, the Federal Aviation Administration’s associate administrator for aviation safety, in an interview Wednesday at a conference in Cologne, Germany.

While the FAA is “under a lot of pressure,” he said the Max will be returned to service “when we believe it will be safe,” following reviews of the design, flight testing and other checks. Bahrami was reluctant to provide a timeline, but when asked whether the plane would resume service this year or next, he said remarks by Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg projecting a return by the end of 2019 sounded correct.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- ... story.html

Now Boeing's high powered team of lawyers is trying to stiff the passengers who died on their two crashed aircraft. Instead of the lawsuits being heard in the USA, Boeing is doing everything possible to have the jurisdiction moved to Indonesia and Ethiopia. As lawyers have pointed out, this would mean the passengers' families ending up with peanuts. Shame on Boeing! Clearly it's a try-on to persuade passengers' families to accept a low out-of-court negotiated pay out.
One expert said having a trial in another country with a different legal culture, and less scope for close scrutiny of Boeing, would render the cases "worthless."

Lawyers for the families say the cases must be heard in the US, where Boeing is headquartered and the 737 Max was designed and built . . .

Mike Danko, an aviation attorney and pilot, who is not involved in these cases, told Business Insider that if Boeing successfully pursued this strategy, the families could be left with almost nothing.

"If Boeing can get the cases sent back to either Indonesia or Ethiopia, those cases really become worthless," he said
https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing- ... ers-2019-6
firecat69

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by firecat69 »

Don't worry! Trump will contribute some of the money he and his family have stolen over the last 30 months!
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

Having just been through the last couple of pages on the prune.org professional pilots chat site (although not all contributors are pilots or engineers), there are clearly still worrying signs ahead for Boeing. The obvious design feature that would have avoided the need for any software MCAS system would have been to extend the length of the landing gear so there was no risk of the new larger engines hitting the ground. The engines could then have been fixed further back on the wing exactly as on all other 737 models. The problem is that the airframe of all aircraft in the Boeing 737 series is basically the same as it was on the original models more than 50 years ago. These were intended for airports where airbridges would not be common. So the fuselage had to be low to the ground and passengers would enter and exit by steps. The problem Boeing discovered is that the way the airframe was originally designed, it is not possible to extend the landing gear to the required length. Hence the need to push the engine positioning further ahead and higher on the wing. Hence the greater tendency to nose up and possibly stall.

Some posters have pointed to Trump's trade war with China as being a very potent factor which may make it much more difficult to get the 737 Max flying commercially again. China is developing its one short haul single aisle aircraft that is due into service in about 2 years. If Trump does not ease up, China could easily withhold certification of the Max over its territory and this would scupper a worldwide agreement. Its new aircraft may not be as economical as the Max but it might have quite a large new market in some parts of the world if the Max cannot get back into the air by the end of this year. Order Books for the Airbus Neo are full for at least six years. The Chinese aircraft might be seen by some airlines as filling their 737 Max hole.

Then there is ther public perception issue. The law suits have not yet started. When they do, all of Boeing's and the FAA's dirty washing is going to be on show to the world. As this drips out, the pubic's lack of confidence in the plane will inevitably increase. Will they trust the fixes on the Max enough to fly on it? If not, then there will be a lot of scrap metal around.

As several pilots have written, Boeing executives must be tearing their hair out that they made the financially motivated decision merely to revamp and upgrade the 737-800 instead of designing a new plane from scratch as Airbus did with the Neo.
fountainhall

Re: Boeing 737 Max8 Crashes

Post by fountainhall »

Apologies for two small errors in my earlier post today. The professional pilots site is pprune.org. In the second para, it should read "China is developing its own short haul aircraft . . . "
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