YARS, keeping “flawed” in 737 MAX context is sound. I think.
The more I read, the more I doubt. The more I doubt, the less I am inclined to fly anything that I do not own. If I need to get anywhere I will walk, ride my bike, ride my motorcycle, drive my car, truck, fly my airplane, or, I won’t go. Period. No hand wringing here.
“So an aircraft with an out-of-service lavatory (clearly a flaw) is an “unsafe aircraft?”
If you do not have a lavatory it cannot be out of service, therefore, it cannot be flawed, or, unsafe.
“There is no spoon.”
If you do not have an airplane, it cannot be unsafe.
I think that there are cultural differences in how people will approach machinery. If you come from a culture which understands that mechanical devices will kill without warning because of an underlying problem then you will understand it is your job to stop the disaster before it can go further. If you assume the machine knows better the operator you won’t be able to stop it before the situation gets out of control. Airline pilots who fly and understand the systems logic of their airplanes understand mechanical faults and how they will jump out at the worst time. The “SAM255” is an example. The Air France 447 crash and the Tesla Harry Potter beheading are example of when the operator does not not understand his place in the chain of events.
“There is no fork.”
The second “not” was a mistake. Sorry.
So Why Would You Fly A 737 MAX? Or Not. It’s an entirely different kind of flying… altogether.
>I will walk, ride my bike, ride my motorcycle, drive my car, truck, fly my airplane.
Every one of those things is a greater risk statistic than a commercial airline flight.
Yeah, sure Dave, whatever you say…
The FAA has completely punted on the issue of whether it is legitimate to use a mere software patch to paper over a fundamental instability issue in a transport category aircraft.
To be sure, Boeing has been very careful to couch the existence of MCAS (when they were forced by circumstances to actually acknowlege its existence) as one of correcting the “feel” of the pitch axis in certain high AOA regimes of flight. “Feel” is merely a euphemism for instability, a word that Boeing shall not breathe.
The fact remains that if the lift of the much larger engine nacelles (forward of the CG) and higher thrust of the new engines causes the airplane to want to pitch up so badly (in high AOA and high thrust flight) that Boeing needed to add MCAS to crank in nose-down stabilizer trim, its is unstable. This violates a basic tenet of certification gospel: aircraft must be naturally stable throughout the flight envelope.
The FAA has, by their RTS approval, tacitly signaled that software patches for instability defects are now OK. I think this is dangerous. We need to have a full and thorogh debate about this question and not allow the FAA to sweep it under the carpet.
These software patch solutions might, in fact, be doable with modern technology but the issue needs to be thrashed out by healthy debate and design requirements stipulated so that the sort of sophomorically half-baked engineering errors Boeing demonstrated with the MCAS are not repeated.
In fact, the current “fix” for the MAX (now rebranded as the 737-8) ignores (among other things) the engineering principle of “critical triangles of agreement”; critical systems must have three inputs with a comparator routine to identify and disregard the outlier. As an example, modern jets have three pitot tubes, three Air Data Computers, three autopilots, etc. Boeing is still trying to do it on the cheap.
The FAA is allowing Boeing to get away with it.
I won’t ride on a MAX (-8).
Sent from my iPad
I followed the 737 MAX accidents closely, and I’ve flown in Indonesia.
I wish the racism card would not be played so often, either for or against the two accident crews, as it obscures the realities of foreign operators.
Indonesia is literally on the other side of the world, gets delayed information, and struggles to maintain enough aircraft parts. So they are at a disadvantage that should be recognized. The least manufacturers can do is to not guinea pig operators that already have their hands full.
The Indonesian NTSB determined that blame for their accident shared equal blame between the pilots, mechanics and Boeing.
Boeing put those pilots into situations where they became test pilots, with a couple hundred passengers in the back.