davebaker123
CRM triumphs again! Instead, they should have a stripe shirted referee in the jump seat.
CRM triumphs again! Instead, they should have a stripe shirted referee in the jump seat.
Sounds like a management problem:- Not banging enough heads together!
“…leave before I am forced to taunt you a second time”
Years ago now, in the Spain training two Russian pilots converting from TU154 (3 engines 5 crew & steam driven instrument display) to the then state of the art 2 crew Boeing 737NG, the captain would strike his First Officer lightly over the wrists if he made an error of any kind. I mentioned that this practice had fallen out of use in the UK in recent years, but with little impact, either on their vision of CRM or the F/Os wrists.
Simple response: “You are fired!” Maybe pilots in other careless incidents should’ve received the same.
There’s more to this story and the public may never read about it since no one was harmed and the aircraft landed without issues. Suspending both, separating them from ever working together again and attending anger management classes may help. Unfortunately, if pilot shortages hamper discipline, these two may operate separate from each other.
In my 40+ year career, there have been one or two times where a difference of style or opinion caused significant friction between a colleague and myself. It can be psychologically debilitating, sometimes profoundly so for one or the other. Is this problem somehow not obvious to Airline Management or HR?
There should be (must) a mechanism in place to anonymously de-select a colleague with whom you have a major rift with. Bad blood in the cockpit is dangerous.
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License should be yanked for life, for dereliction of duty.
AF should have to justify retaining its operating certificate.
(Recall crashes where no one was flying the airplane and a control got bumped - L1011 into the Everglades as all crew focussed on troubleshooting an indicator light, and crashes where one pilot refused to listen to the other (First Air B737 into hill beside runway at Resolute Bay - probably control wheel bumped which put autopilot into heading hold before airplane had reached centreline of localizer beam).
And Northwurst Airlines pilots arguing about a company policy, overflew destination, finally cabin crew asked them when they expected to land at scheduled destination.
Spilled blood in the cockpit is dangerous-er. Whoever hit the other first needs to be given the iron parachute.
Sadly, that’s a part of CRM that seems to be never covered.
I am not sure that can happen in Boeings, just an airbus thing
Now that’s funny. But I thought it was aviate, navigate, communicate, prevaricate.
I have a mental picture of an engineer in a small sub-basement office next to the boiler room whose job it is to catalog for investigation all possible “Extremely improbable failure conditions” inherent in a new design. (Definition: “A failure condition that is not anticipated to occur during the total operational life of all airplanes of a given type.”)
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Any system needs competent people to make the system work. From my perspective, the Max was in trouble at the beginning when it was decided that Max was a “minor” change and did not affect training. Max failed the “Fit, Form, Function” test and should have been a major change. Once Max was was deemed a “minor” change – the die was set… (Hindsight is 20-20.)
It may take money to get competent people and the government may not have the budget to fix the problem. Some of the self-certification was caused by the government not having enough competent people.
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… and NOW … many of them are STILL working in their BVD’s in their basements answering phone calls and emails.
I said all 737 Max should have been grounded after the first crash. Am I that much smarter than NTSB and the engineers? What a shame it took a second crash to take action!
Such people do exist; I work with them, in large commercial turbofan certification.
Certainly it was presented as a minor change; merely an augmentation system. But then it was gifted supreme powers of control, and then given a single point of failure. What could possibly go wrong?
BZZZZT, “Hey Wally, you got room for another desk down there? We need to get the documentation moving on the single-pilot A9999 and it’s WAY more complex than the last one…”
I was that guy. Not on airplanes, but helicopters. Demonstrate compliance with CFR 14 FAR 25.1309/29.1309.
Yes…the process was deep and onerous, and I had cases for undetected flight control system failures. Yes…potentially catastrophic, especially when you add a layer of autonomy on them. Yes…the process says that you have to design it out, not put on bandaids or training or caution lights…and design it out to a prescribed level of reliability. And yes…autonomous flight control systems (to include FBW) require even more rigor.
My understanding is that the design relied on input from a single AoA sensor…so no idea how you can meet goals with a system like that. Again, full autonomy primary flight control, single sensor so no means to detect/isolate/control a failure condition.
I could go on, but I’ll just add that this article suggesting there was more than one AoA sensor involved goes against everything I’ve read, and considering the criticality of the system I would expect more than two to be involved.
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Boeing will be better off to get rid of this so-called new technology which really is not necessary. A simple warning display or alarm for the critical attack angle is quite enough for any pilot.
Sincere (non sarcastic) question: As pilots we are trained to identify contradictory information from instrument failures. We aren’t supposed to just fly the attitude indicator into the ground if our VSI and Altimeter are telling us that we are descending. So my question is - what happened at Boeing that caused/allowed them to design a system that would cause the aircraft to respond based only on AoA and disregard other information (vertical speed, altitude, etc) without causing the system itself to say “Hey, this doesn’t all add up. Something is WRONG.”
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Well, it started when Harry Stonecipher came Boeing and and couldn’t understand why we had so many engineers! It’s because it takes a lot of engineers to make a new airliner. McDonnell-Douglas didn’t make a new, clean-sheet airliner since they merged back in 1966. The DC-8 was out already and the DC-9 had recently started delivery. The DC-10 was already on the drawing boards. So the people who took over management of Boeing had no idea how hard it was to actually make a new, or greatly modernized, airliner!
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Automated systems should take in all available data, from multiple redundant sensors; build a model of what the aircraft is doing; throw out any bad data or sensors; and finally issue commands to the flight controls.
They lost their way, and now they are trying to find it again … with a little help from the FAA.
You are correct. The system relied on data from one AOA sensor but there were two AOA sensors available and the disagreement wasn’t alerted because that feature was optional and neither airline bought it. I didn’t make that clear.
There was a lot of issues that caused these accidents. Could Boeing done a betterment job of developing the MCAS system ( using bothe AOA probes), answer, yes, but that was nothing that couldn’t have been changed with service bulletin’s and or AD notes.
The stabilizer operating system did not change really from when they made the change from the JT8 engines (200/291 generation), to the CFM engines (300 series and up), that is when we got speed trim. The electrical operation of the trim is controlled by Manual Electric, Autopilot, and Speed Trim, all three of which go thru the same 2 switches that have been in the aircraft series starting with the 300’s.
The stabilizer trim runaway checklist has not changed since the 300 generation A/C were certified and used to be a memory item.
Crew factors were a very big factor in both accident’s, but the press does not want to hear about that. The individual airlines operating philosophy’s were a factor, but again the press does not want to talk about that either.
Most airlines in the US have a very high experience level to be initially employed, and even then a very rigorous training curriculum is employed to bring the new hire’s up to the individual airlines level of proficiency. During that training a lot of time and effort is given to some sort of CRM, and verbalize, verify, monitor, intervene (VVMI) is given, short statement, our crews talk and exchange ideas.
My professional and personal opinion is that Boeing was forced into adding the MCAS system to the speed trim system by the airlines due to union/ labor issues, not due to a faulty design.
As for the FAA, they are no longer an asset to aircraft safety. Our FAA burocracy has lost a lot of old school knowledge and has found a great way to protect themselves by just not approving anything, us GA guys see that all the time.