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Boeing 737 Max grounding hits Southwest’s pilot hiring

"Southwest Airlines said it delayed hiring for two classes of new pilots, which have about 25 apiece, and postponed captain upgrades for two other classes of current pilots because it isn’t clear when the Max planes will fly again. Dallas-based Southwest is the biggest U.S. operator of the Boeing 737 Max with 34 in its fleet of around 750 aircraft.

“All of these classes were scheduled to take place in either September, October, or December of this year to support our previously anticipated delivery of 37 MAX 8 and 7 MAX 7 aircraft in 2019,” Southwest said in a statement. “Once we have more clarity on the return-to-service date of the MAX, and future MAX delivery timelines, we will look towards reinstating classes, as needed, to support the expected growth of our fleet.”"

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This may be a duplicate of another problem besides the AoA sensor..or it may be a clarification of that other problem.

Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software

"As U.S. government test pilots ran through dozens of flight scenarios on the Boeing Co. 737 Max in recent weeks, a potential failure got their attention.

The plane’s flight computer tried to push the aircraft’s nose down repeatedly during a simulator run, prompted by a stream of erroneous flight data. The Federal Aviation Administration pilot concluded commercial pilots might not have time to react and avoid a tragedy in a real plane.

That flaw -- the latest discovered on the family of jets involved in two fatal crashes since October triggered by a different failure that pushed their noses down -- was revealed by FAA last month. It threw new uncertainty on the return to flight of the Chicago-based company’s best-selling model and sent its engineers scrambling for a fix."

"In the fault, a wing at the tail of the Boeing jet known as the horizontal stabilizer was rotating in a way that lowered the nose, according to both people. That same scenario occurred during fatal accidents off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia when a safety feature known as Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System activated during a malfunction.

However, the newly discovered problem wasn’t triggered by MCAS, said one of the people.

It was prompted instead by multiple erroneous data streams in a flight computer that occurred simultaneously, the person said. It was simulated in tests even though it has never been documented to have occurred during flight, the people said. Anticipating every possible outcome of even the most unlikely failures is part of how safety assessments are conducted during certification.

The failure scenario was known previously and had been assessed in a safety analysis when the plane was certified before entering service in 2017. At that time, Boeing concluded that pilots could overcome the nose-down movement by performing a procedure to shut off the motor driving the stabilizer movement.

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This may be a duplicate of another problem besides the AoA sensor..or it may be a clarification of that other problem.

Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software

"As U.S. government test pilots ran through dozens of flight scenarios on the Boeing Co. 737 Max in recent weeks, a potential failure got their attention.

The plane’s flight computer tried to push the aircraft’s nose down repeatedly during a simulator run, prompted by a stream of erroneous flight data. The Federal Aviation Administration pilot concluded commercial pilots might not have time to react and avoid a tragedy in a real plane.

That flaw -- the latest discovered on the family of jets involved in two fatal crashes since October triggered by a different failure that pushed their noses down -- was revealed by FAA last month. It threw new uncertainty on the return to flight of the Chicago-based company’s best-selling model and sent its engineers scrambling for a fix."

"In the fault, a wing at the tail of the Boeing jet known as the horizontal stabilizer was rotating in a way that lowered the nose, according to both people. That same scenario occurred during fatal accidents off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia when a safety feature known as Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System activated during a malfunction.

However, the newly discovered problem wasn’t triggered by MCAS, said one of the people.

It was prompted instead by multiple erroneous data streams in a flight computer that occurred simultaneously, the person said. It was simulated in tests even though it has never been documented to have occurred during flight, the people said. Anticipating every possible outcome of even the most unlikely failures is part of how safety assessments are conducted during certification.

The failure scenario was known previously and had been assessed in a safety analysis when the plane was certified before entering service in 2017. At that time, Boeing concluded that pilots could overcome the nose-down movement by performing a procedure to shut off the motor driving the stabilizer movement.

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They need to wipe to computers and start from scratch sounds like

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What a clusterfuck.

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Why not disable the automatic function of MCAS and train the pilots to fly the aircraft due to the new CG?

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We're a far cry away from the -200 aircraft,  Delta flies the -900 as do other airlines and I believe their level of training would not allow such an incident to happen.

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So when are the going to shit down the 737 factory? Sounds like more to fix.

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We're a far cry away from the -200 aircraft,  Delta flies the -900 as do other airlines and I believe their level of training would not allow such an incident to happen.

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Only the "max" variant is off concern. There are other 737s that come off that line.

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Boeing is burning a lot of time and money trying to patch a plane that nobody's going to want to fly.

When you have top management getting massive salaries and only a few years from retirement, wouldn't expect anything else.

Five years down the road it will be someone else's problem.

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If SW and Ryan have their pilots trained for a new type with Boeing money, they may be more open to the idea.

Though that goes back to the whole 757 dying off again.  It was apparently a decade or so ahead of its time.   I don't think a 757 would be the optimal replacement, something like an modern 757 remake.  The A321 with New Engine Option (neo), and I'm not an airbus fan at all.

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corporate officers should get life in prison.

it;s the only way to prevent the next Indian or Asian CEO from outsourcing all of our jobs overseas to third world countries.

you the CEO of Fisher Price? You signed off on releasing a product without the basic testing? kids getting killed at home? You don't get to walk. You pay the price.

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Disable MCAS, fly the aircraft.

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corporate officers should get life in prison.

it;s the only way to prevent the next Indian or Asian CEO from outsourcing all of our jobs overseas to third world countries.

you the CEO of Fisher Price? You signed off on releasing a product without the basic testing? kids getting killed at home? You don't get to walk. You pay the price.

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Wow, why is the 787 not selling?

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Wow, why is the 787 not selling?

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So they flip a coin to decide which one is correct when they don't agree?    Same failure of 1 AoA sensor would have 2 flight computers wanting to do vastly different things, not exactly solving the problem, unless they're distributing the workload between them for more processing power from the idle one.    I could see that happening by trying to shoehorn in 2 sensor inputs to the computer that was designed for  one input, can't keep up and get garbage data.

Adding a third system to bet the arbiter would add a lot more grounded time.

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The Democrat party (the media) seems to have an interest in taking down Boeing.  For that reason it's only logical to presume this is bullshit.

I'd trust Boeing waaaaaaaaaaaay before ANY MSM.

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The problem I see is what I stated several pages ago.  The CEO of Boeing came out and said the Max was perfectly safe, nothing wrong with it, and only bad pilots crashed.

Now there are 3 major issues that have been found, 2 with MCAS and a 3rd with another system able to move stabilizer unrelated to MCAS that have "glitches".

Kind of hard to come back and say "It's safe now" when they started out of the gate with that line, and no detailed modification plans or even a tentative FAA certification ready date have been published.

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About 25 years ago, I worked with Dennis Muilenburg on a project. He seemed like a decent engineer back then.

What Boeing did on the 737Max8 is inexcusable. No competent engineer would design a passenger carrying aircraft where a single sensor failure would cause a catastrophic loss-of-control of the vehicle. No competent/honest regulator would sign off on such a design. The fact that Boeing didn't see fit to keep a single-thread catastrophic failure from ever being implemented in the first place causes me to think the FAA should revoke their entire DER certs and review ALL of their aircraft certifications for the last decade or so to see what other idiotic/stupid/amateur hour mistakes have been made and missed. Boeing should have to make good all the lost monies to every single airline for every minute those aircraft are sitting on the ground. And, Boeing should have to pay for all aircraft to be fixed in such as way as to prevent any possibility of this or any other single-point-of-failure catastrophic loss of control. In fact, if I were the FAA, I'd require Boeing to re-do every single one of their FMEAs, safety case analyses, and flight control validation tests on these and any other Boeing aircraft that I had even the remotest suspicion there might be a problem with.

As for the FOD problem, back in the 80's when I worked for a defense contractor, we had a program called "FOD Busters" where everyone in the company had to take training on how to keep FOD out of the aircraft. The actual manufacturing folks got a heavier dose of that training. I would have thought that Boeing, of all places, would have a super-tight FOD control program. There again, it sounds like Boeing currently has a bad case of amateur hour stupid.

I suspect Dennis didn't know all the details of these shenanigans. If he did know or approved them, not only should he be summarily fired, but charged with a crime along with anyone who worked on the effort. Based on what has come out so far, there's absolutely no excuse for what Boeing apparently did (and didn't do). There's ample reason to put Boeing's ability to design, manufacture, and certify aircraft in doubt. And, they did it to themselves.

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The Four-Second Catastrophe: How Boeing Doomed the 737 MAX

Interesting read if accurate.

"Regulators have focused since the crashes on MCAS, its reliance on a single sensor and Boeing BA 0.75% ’s decision not to tell pilots about the new system. At the root of the miscalculations, though, were Boeing’s overly optimistic assumptions about pilot behavior.

In designing the flight controls for the 737 MAX, Boeing assumed that pilots trained on existing safety procedures should be able to sift through the jumble of contradictory warnings and take the proper action 100% of the time within four seconds.

That is about the amount of time that it took you to read this sentence.

Boeing bet nearly everything on those four ticks of the clock. The company’s belief in its engineering, and its reliance on pilots to be flawless cogs, enabled Boeing to speed the latest iteration of its most important airliner to market and ultimately saved money for its customers."