How profit, poor oversight were behind fatal crashes
Regulators, Boeing have a lot to answer for
It is the rarest of things for the same model of passenger aircraft — Boeing Co.’s bestselling 737 Max — to crash in what appears to be a similar way in different parts of the world within just five months.
Those tragedies have cost the lives of a total of 346 passengers and crew, including 18 Canadians, on doomed flights operated by Lion Air in Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines in east Africa.
Testimony on Capitol Hill this week about the ill-fated flights might have further unnerved even veteran frequent flyers.
So, it’s worth noting that flying is by far the safest means of travel. In 2017, there were no deaths on airline flights worldwide. By contrast, this newspaper has calculated that 42 pedestrians and five cyclists were killed on Toronto streets last year. In this town, at least, walking is more dangerous than flying.
But urgent questions have arisen over Boeing’s rushed development of the 737 Max, and about credulous aviation regulators who certified the new plane on Boeing’s word that it was a modestly tweaked 737.
The entire global fleet of 371 737 Max aircraft has been grounded for three weeks. It is likely the plane won’t return to service until the summer, as investigations continue into the crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 on Oct. 29 and of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10.
Many parties are complicit in these tragedies, whose cause might trace in part to profit maximization and complacent regulation.
Boeing Co.: The 737 Max was designed in a hurry to counter a threat to Boeing’s workhorse 737 from Airbus SE, whose planned A320neo was intended to cut into the 737’s market share.
Boeing responded with a 737 Max whose larger, fuel-efficient engines would have to be placed higher and farther forward on the wings to provide adequate ground clearance.
That configuration risked destabilization in certain manoeuvres — notably tight turns at lower speeds — in which the nose of the aircraft would be pushed up.
When an aircraft reaches too steep a vertical angle, it can stall, and go into an unrecoverable nosedive.
To counter that phenomenon, Boeing devised an anti-stall software program to automatically force the nose of the plane down if it detected undue lift. Inside Boeing, the program was called the “maneuvering characteristics augmentation system,” or MCAS.
To simplify the system, Boeing decided that MCAS should be fed data from only one of the plane’s two fuselagemounted sensors that monitor the plane’s angle of ascent or decent, depending on which of the two redundant flight control computers was active on that flight. The decision streamlined the system, but also made the aircraft vulnerable to faulty data provided by a single sensor.
A primary theory for investigators of the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 is that its MCAS system was receiving faulty data, sent by the sensor on the pilot’s side of the aircraft. The erroneous data was signalling that the plane was at too steep an angle, and the flight-control system was automatically trying to correct for it.
Pilots routinely override faulty data, and can maintain the desired trajectory by taking manual control of the plane’s stabilizers, located in the tail. But the Lion Air Flight 610 pilots didn’t know that MCAS existed and might have been the cause of their plane’s nosedive.
According to the flight data recorder from Lion Air Flight 610, the nose of the plane pitched down more than two dozen times in the few minutes available to the pilots to prevent disaster. Preliminary investigation of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash points to a similar malfunction.
In the aftermath of the Lion Air crash, Boeing argued that by following the aircraft’s emergency procedures checklist, the pilots could have regained control of their plane. But the checklist doesn’t mention MCAS, and what to do if it is putting your plane into a nosedive.
This month, pilots using flight simulators to recreate the Lion Air emergency found they had less than 40 seconds to override the 737 Max’s automated flight-control system and avert catastrophe.
Even extending the response time to several minutes might not be enough to regain aircraft control, John Cox, an aviation safety expert and former 737 pilot, told the New York Times this week.
“There is a limited window to solve this problem,” Cox said, “and this crew didn’t even know that this system existed.”
Boeing’s sales pitch for the 737 Max included the claim that airlines would save millions of dollars per fleet from not having to retrain pilots on the new flight-control system. “If Boeing minimized the risks of its new design to sell more planes, that would be an extraordinary corporate scandal,” Bloomberg editorialized March 24.
It could also be, pending results of the crash investigations and government inquiries into how the 737 Max was designed and certified, that Boeing executives truly believed they had made only a modest modification to a flight-control system well-known to 737 pilots, an adjustment pilots needn’t be told about.
Then again, Boeing’s current actions speak for themselves. Boeing is rushing development of a software patch for the MCAS. Among other changes, it will take data from both aircraft-angle sensors, which experts say should have been done in the first place. After insisting pilots don’t need specialized retraining for the 737 Max, Boeing is offering to compensate airlines for that training.
The regulators: In certifying the 737 Max, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was convinced by Boeing’s assertions that the new aircraft would not require pilot retraining. The chief European regulator, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EUASA), effectively replicated the FAA’s certification of the 737 Max, as did Transport Canada, in 2017.
Today, a humiliated FAA’s certification process is under investigation by a sister agency, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). And the EUASA and Transport Canada have each pointedly said they will conduct their own tests of Boeing’s proposed software upgrade regardless of what the FAA concludes.
The FAA has long been accused of “regulatory capture,” of obliging the aircraft makers and airlines it is supposed to regulate. A dysfunctional regulation system was the focus of hearings on Capitol Hill this week. But genuine reform – transferring aircraft certification and safety to a new agency or to the highly regarded NTSB — is unlikely.
On March 17, a Boeing still in a defensive crouch said “aircraft certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs.” That was among the series of non-apology apologies issued by Boeing’s Chicago head office since March 10. The loved ones of 346 victims of a flawed aircraft certification process might disagree with that assertion.