[_-___________-_]

This kind of absolutism really doesn't help.

Air travel has made absolutely enormous strides in safety mostly because of rational investigations that don't focus on one party but try to understand all the factors that lead to an incident. The irrational, emotional response to the MAX incidents is eroding that.

Boeing and the FAA definitely have significant issues in culture and oversight. They should be resolved so that Boeing can continue to build safe aircraft and the FAA can effectively oversee the US aviation industry.

At the same time, not every pilot in every flight deck is the same. Some are more capable than others. Some have been trained better than others. Some come from a culture where the "power gradient" between captain and first officer is hard to overcome in order to provide effective CRM. Some come from a culture where they're afraid they'll lose their job if they accurately report incidents. All of these things, and more, are factors in air safety.

Focusing on one factor or one company really doesn't help.

[DrScientist]

Hmm.

Agree willingness to own up and discuss errors is critical to long term airline safety.

However you only seem to be applying this to pilots and not to Boeing!

Isn't the issue with the MAX, and potentially now earlier episodes, that for perhaps perfectly understandable commercial reasons, Boeing and even the FAA haven't been upfront and honest about engineering issues and how to improve stuff - ie they have been guilty of playing the blame game - on to pilots - who are often conveniently dead.

[_-___________-_]

I think I've been quite clear that I see significant issues within Boeing and the FAA and that they should be resolved.

If you ignore the shrill media and look at the actual investigative work going on, I don't think anybody is seriously suggesting that the pilots were the sole cause of the MAX issues, and certainly nobody is "blaming" them.

At the same time, I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines. There are always multiple factors in play.

My personal view on it is: the MAX was a flawed design due to the expectations it placed on pilot training, competency and in particular, instinct in a surprising situation. That's it. The aircraft was still capable of flying if the pilots reacted correctly to the failure, and the reaction was one that they were in theory trained for, but it's not reasonable to expect an average pilot to be able to do that instinctively in the time available.

Talking about "cost-cutting" or whether a certain engineering decision was made to save money is irrelevant, because engineers make trade-offs every day - that's an important part of their job - and every single aircraft flying (yes, including Airbus!) has a design that involves trade-offs, even in safety-related things. For reasons that are now being explored, Boeing's engineers made faulty assumptions when evaluating those trade-offs, probably augmented by pressure to avoid mandated additional training of pilots, and the regulatory oversight didn't catch it, or didn't want to due to being in a too-close relationship with Boeing. Those are the problems that need to be solved on the aircraft side.

I'm sure that given enough time you would have seen MAX crashes from other airlines, but it's no surprise to me that the first crashes (and, in an alternate reality where the MAX continued to fly, likely the majority of the crashes) were with airlines that are well-known in the industry to have lower standards of hiring, training and maintenance. Digging into that might well find some problems that need to be solved on the human side.

[DrScientist]

> and certainly nobody is "blaming" them.

Not now the facts have come out, but originally - how about:

Congressman Sam Graves:

"In May, Graves insisted that “facts in the preliminary report reveal pilot error as a factor”. He went on to claim that “pilots trained in the US would have successfully been able to control this situation”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/sd9LGK2S9m/battle_over_blam...

> At the same time, I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines.

And here you are effectively repeating that.....

You basic premise is ridiculous. The idea that because some airlines/pilots aren't as good as others, then it absolves Boeing.

Boeing should not be selling a plane into a market that don't cover markets natural variant in pilots and airlines. That's like selling a car only F1 drivers can safely drive to the general public ( and crucially without telling them it's really F1 driver only... ) and claiming it's perfectly safe despite lots of crashes because Lewis Hamilton doesn't have a problem with it.

You could also argue the second crash happened because of the blaming of the airline/crew on the first crash.

Sure there are other factors - it's a question of how many times do you have to roll the dice before you get a crash - clearly far too few in this planes case - and that is entirely Boeing's fault.

[_-___________-_]

I'm not claiming that anything absolves Boeing, and I can't see how any of my words can be interpreted in that way. I encourage you to read what I'm actually writing rather than imagine what I'm thinking.

There are serious issues to be resolved by Boeing and the FAA. There are issues to be resolved around airline company culture. There are issues to be resolved around pilot training and other human factors.

This "entirely Boeing's fault" stuff just encourages a blinkered view of the situation and is exactly the absolutism I was referring to in my grandparent post.

This absolutism is encouraged by the media (just look at that BBC headline: "Battle over blame") and is thankfully absent from the actual investigative work.

While I have no idea why hot air from a congressman is relevant here, the first quote from Graves is accurate. Pilot error was identified as a factor in the preliminary report, and every subsequent report has also identified it as a factor. Obviously there are far more important factors, but it's still a factor, and every factor should be considered and possibly acted upon. As I mentioned in a grandparent comment, the multi-factor approach to accident investigation is one of the reasons air travel is so safe today.

The second quote is pretty much impossible for him to back up and should probably be treated as the usual political noise -- he is, after all, a congressman.

[DrScientist]

I said:

> Sure there are other factors - it's a question of how many times do you have to roll the dice before you get a crash - clearly far too few in this planes case - and that is entirely Boeing's fault.

You said:

>This "entirely Boeing's fault" stuff just encourages a blinkered view of the situation and is exactly the absolutism

You haven't understood what I wrote.

Let's say there is a dice - that represents the chances of a combination of different factors occurring ( weather, pilot experience, plane maintenance, chance of debris hitting sensor, cosmic ray hitting computer - whatever )

What numbers that dice rolls is entirely out of Boeing's control.

However what is entirely in it's control is what happens when particular combinations, represented by the numbers, come up.

So if there is a plane that crashes only when you roll a six, and a plane that crashes when you roll a five or a six, clearly the second plane is 100% worse and yes the individual crash depends on what the dice rolled - but the relative safety of the plane doesn't!!!

Do you understand now?

[DrScientist]

> While I have no idea why hot air from a congressman is relevant here, the first quote from Graves is accurate.

Because you wrote, "certainly nobody is "blaming" them"

Clearly that was wrong - here's another article: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/23/boeing-737-...

Where the Amercian airlines pilots union is saying Boeing blaming pilots is inexcusable - whereas you say 'nobody is blaming them'.....

> I encourage you to read what I'm actually writing rather than imagine what I'm thinking.

Hmm - see above.

[_-___________-_]

The sentence of mine that you selectively quoted starts with "If you ignore the shrill media and look at the actual investigative work going on,"

[magduf]

>Boeing should not be selling a plane into a market that don't cover markets natural variant in pilots and airlines. That's like selling a car only F1 drivers can safely drive to the general public ( and crucially without telling them it's really F1 driver only... )

This reminds me of that fatal crash with "Fast and Furious" star Paul Walker: the Porsche he was driving really wasn't fit for the road, and was only safely driveable by a race car driver. It was too powerful and the center of mass was too far to the rear (thanks to Porsche's idiotic rear engine placement), giving it a strong tendency to fishtail and lose control.

[orangeplanet]

the car was mid-engine (porsche carrera gt)

[bumby]

>the MAX was a flawed design due to the expectations it placed on pilot training, competency and in particular, instinct in a surprising situation. That's it.

As you eluded to earlier, there are usually multiple causes. One that the above statement seems to overlook is the poor application and adherence to the system safety analysis. According to their own process, even though they misclassified the failure they should not have relied on a single sensor.[1] It seems to me there's engineering, process, and human factor causes involved.

[1]https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

[ShamelessC]

> I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines.

Sorry, I'm not as up to speed on this fiasco as I should be. Which two airlines did the first crashes occur with? And is the implication that they are subpar airlines?

I understand there are many factors at play here and Boeing is mostly responsible but I'm just curious about this.

[_-___________-_]

The first was Lion Air. I know of several multinationals in Asia that ban employee travel on Lion Air and its subsidiaries. They've recently been caught attempting to bribe transport safety officials, with the knowledge of senior management at Lion; a number of their pilots and other crew have been caught using crystal meth; and they were formerly banned from EU airspace (the ban was lifted a few years ago).

Indicative of their company culture is that on the MAX accident flight, there was a maintenance engineer in the jump seat observing in an attempt to diagnose the AoA issue which had also occurred on the previous flight of the same aircraft. On the previous flight, the specific combination of factors to cause the trim runaway didn't occur. This aircraft should have been grounded while the issue was resolved, and instead was taken for a test flight with unwitting passengers on board.

The second was Ethiopian, who are growing rapidly and thus hiring rapidly. The first officer of the accident flight had flown an aircraft (any aircraft) for a total of 350 hours.

FAA wrote to Ethiopian in 2016 decertifying them, with 60 findings identifying a systemic failure of the entire quality management and training management systems. They were recertified in 2017 but there have been whistleblower reports that nothing significant changed, with politically-oriented decisions, nepotism, unsafe practices, task cards being signed off without executing the required maintenance actions, etc. EASA still doesn't consider the issues resolved. Look up Yonas Yohannes Yeshanew, who used to be Director of Aircraft Engineering there.

[petschge]

> At the same time, I don't know anyone working in aviation who thinks it's 100% a coincidence that the first crashes happened with those two airlines. There are always multiple factors in play.

I don't know much about Lion Air, but Ethiopian is considered a good airline. IT actually does a lot of training and maintenance for several major airlines in Africa. Their crews tend to be young, but that is because they are rapidly growing.