Report: Boeing Trained 737 Max Pilots on iPads to Save Cash – By Bess Levin (Vanity Fair) / March 18 2019
According to a new report, the system that may have triggered two deadly crashes was not even “mentioned” in pilots’ flight manuals.
As investigators race to determine whether the M.C.A.S. flight-control system on Boeing’s 737 Max was the cause of two deadly crashes in the space of less than five months, new reports have provided stomach-churning details about how the company fast-tracked the process of getting the highly lucrative jets approved and into airlines’ hands.
For one, the Federal Aviation Administration was reportedly more than happy to let Boeing take the reins vis-à-vis determining if its aircraft was safe to fly. According to the Seattle Times, for years the F.A.A. has “delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes,” citing a lack of resources and funding. But in the case of the 737 Max, F.A.A. technical experts say they were pressured by managers to speed up the certification process and, halfway through, were asked to “re-evaluate” what would be reviewed by the government and what would be delegated to Boeing. “Management thought we had retained too much at the F.A.A.,” a former safety engineer told reporter Dominic Gates. Even the work that remained under the purview of the government, though, was “sometimes curtailed,“ such as reviewing technical details provided by Boeing. “There wasn’t a complete and proper review of the documents,” the former engineer added. “Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates.”
Boeing was in a hurry to get the Max planes approved because, per The Wall Street Journal, a lot of money was on the line:
. . . in 2011 Boeing learned that American Airlines, one of its best customers, had struck a tentative deal with Airbus for potentially hundreds of A320neo planes to renew its short-haul fleet. American invited Boeing to make a counter-offer. Boeing realized it needed to act fast, and offered what would become the Max . . . American eventually bought 260 Airbus planes and agreed to take 200 upgraded 737s from Boeing.
As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 Max, Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis.
But the race to get the planes certified—a process that, again, Boeing pretty much spearheaded—resulted in “several crucial flaws” in the safety analysis the company provided to the F.A.A., in relation to the new flight-control system (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, a.k.a. M.C.A.S.). According to the Seattle Times, the analysis:
Understated the power of the new flight-control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall.
Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.
Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor—and yet that’s how it was designed.
Another retroactively horrifying decision Boeing made in order to edge out competitors was to train pilots in a way that was . . . questionable at best:
To win customers, and avoid more defections to Airbus, Boeing also made commitments that there would be minimal requirements for new pilot training, which can be costly to airlines, especially if expensive flight-simulator sessions are needed, according to people familiar with the matter. So Boeing tried to minimize differences from its existing fleet. Pilots were never specifically trained, for instance, on the M.C.A.S. system.
Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association at American Airlines, told the Seattle Times that his 737 Max training “consisted of little more than a one-hour session on an iPad, with no simulator training.” As for M.C.A.S., the system now implicated in two deadly crashes, “Boeing decided that 737 pilots needed no extra training . . . and indeed that they didn’t even need to know about it. It was not mentioned in their flight manuals.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/boeing-trained-737-max-pilots-on-ipads-to-save-cash
