I recall a lot of fingerpointing minutes after the crash by people blaming the presumably foreign maintenance crew.
Even now there is a lot of uncertainty around this crash, maintenance - or lack thereof - or even wrong maintenance could still be a factor. But given the location of the part asking for a 'visual inspection' is a pretty strange move, the part is all but inaccessible when it is in its normal position and even with an endoscope it would be pretty hard to determine whether or not the part had weakened. That's just not going to show up visually until it is way too late unless the part has been especially prepared to announce the presence of hairline cracks.
You'd have to disassemble a good chunk of the wing to gain access to the part based on the pictures I've seen of how it all holds together when assembled.
As a matter of fact, the same issue did occur to US-based-airlines, and the pilots did catch it. That does not however answer the question of whether they just got lucky, or were more skilled, though there are some indications that it may have been skill.
> As a matter of fact, the same issue did occur to US-based-airlines, and the pilots did catch it.
There was an optional 'AOA disagree' system that an airline could buy that could help pilots know when the MCAS was going crazy. US airlines, perhaps having more money, may have bought those (helping pilots with situational awareness), but airlines in developing countries (with presumably less money) may not have gotten them.
See perhaps §6.4 about Boeing giving that functionality to everyone:
I’m pretty sure no American airline had the same situation that the airlines with the crash had because they paid extra for the redundant AOA sensor.
The MCAS issue was a major issue, but the ultimate fundamental flaw was Boeing not including a redundant sensor (which is the one that was malfunctioning in the crashes) in the base package as they should have.
The inexplicably considered redundancy in this part an optional extra, and as far as I’m aware there were no US airlines that hadn’t taken the optional extra package.
Correct. And you could pay for the MCAS to use both sensors which all US airlines did.
Edit: I was misremembering. Both sensors were enabled on all planes and MCAS only used one at a time on all planes.
What was disabled, unless paid for, was software which displayed to the pilots that the 2 sensors were disagreeing, which would immediately have alerted them to what may have been wrong.
> According to Bjorn Fehrm, Aeronautical and Economic Analyst at Leeham News and Analysis, "A major contributor to the ultimate loss of JT610 is the missing AoA DISAGREE display on the pilots' displays."[109]
> The software depended on the presence of the visual indicator software, a paid option that was not selected by most airlines.[110] For example, Air Canada, American Airlines and Westjet had purchased the disagree alert, while Air Canada and American Airlines also purchased, in addition, the AoA value indicator, and Lion Air had neither.[111][112] Boeing had determined that the defect was not critical to aircraft safety or operation, and an internal safety review board (SRB) corroborated Boeing's prior assessment and its initial plan to update the aircraft in 2020. Boeing did not disclose the defect to the FAA until November 2018, in the wake of the Lion Air crash.[113][114][115][116] Consequently, Southwest had informed pilots that its entire fleet of MAX 8 aircraft will receive the optional upgrades.[117][118] In March 2019, after the second accident of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing representative told Inc. magazine, "Customers have been informed that AoA Disagree alert will become a standard feature on the 737 MAX. It can be retrofitted on previously delivered airplanes."[119]
Boeing: Do you want a two line code which triggers a potentially life-saving warning when your flying sausage with wings has an important sensor malfunction?
Customer: Of course!
Boeing: That'll be $25K, thanks.
Also, no-smoking light toggle labeled Off - Auto - On is being relabeled and rewired to On - On - On is hilarious.
Such a terrible business decision considering the crashes and their impact on Boeing's reputation. If you think a feature will keep the product from catastrophic failure, it should be standard on every unit you sell.
This kind of thing is not new. In 1998 I worked for a large corporation (I think they were an F100 at the time) that built machines with a feature that could only be enabled if the customer paid an extra fee and had a field technician come out to "install" it.
Unknown to the customer was that all machines were identical. The technician's "installation procedure" was to enter the Service Mode password, select the feature enable option, and exit Service Mode then run a test to make sure it worked.
This is pretty common in commercial/industrial manufacturing. The exception cost to omit certain hardware subsystems when building a product is often higher than the cost of the hardware itself, so it makes more sense to build everything identically and enable/disable features in software.
I'm sure that a flaw in the plane can be handled more gracefully by the more skilled set of pilots however that's not the point really. Their point was that the flaw in the plane wasn't a big deal and the loss of life and equipment wasn't Boeing's fault, which wasn't true.
The reason we focus on the OEM more than the pilots is that Boeing getting its act together (or being regulated to do so) is more scalable than every pilot in the world becoming more skilled. Individually blaming pilots isn't effective, regardless of whether you're morally for or against it.
Given the number of studies on pilot workload and the many harsh lessons learned about how to put together a manual and a training program that has intended outcomes mrktsn is ignoring the realities of operating a vehicle where a second of delay can make a huge difference.
The most stark example was the ambiguity around 'take-off power' and 'take off power', and that is when the writers of the documentation and their management are not trying to pretend a new aircraft is the same as a complete redesign of an older one with which besides the name and the operational niche it has relatively little in common.
I always wondered why there were no whistleblowers before this led to accidents. Or were there?
Ah, whistleblowers. Always and forever committing suicide. Turns out thinking you can stab the gorgon with no consequences is a form of mental illness.
> That does not however answer the question of whether they just got lucky, or were more skilled, though there are some indications that it may have been skill.
What a load of bullcrap. Full stop.
The crews of the two crashed 737Max were also well trained, skilled professionals.
That the US-based crews decided to re-engage the auto-pilot, and with that action, by sheer luck, managed to bypass the fatal MCAS issues, shows you exactly what it was: sheer luck.
These pilots reacted to a system malfunction of a system they hardly knew existed (thanks to Boeing's lies), that changed the aircraft subsystems behaviour in fundamental, undocumented ways compared to the previous generation of 737s, and that they were therefore not trained to handle. So skill differences did not enter the equation, luck did.
The choice was between doing the manual procedures they were trained to do to try to regain control, and the hail mary approach of re-engaging the autopilot wtith the hope the problem went away. With no time to do both. The crashed crews chose option 1, the US crews option 2.
I am with you, this is just BS. The whole point of 737Max what that experience with 737 was enough, with maybe some small adjustments. Now claiming that you need to be some kind of super-pilot to keep the 737Max in the air when the thing tries to kill you is total bullshit.
This is like Tesla claiming that all crashes due to autopilot failures are driver faults because they are not properly trained... it is supposed to be a car driveable with a regular car license! If you need extra train to drive it properly, be explicit.
No, that's why I put a disclaimer. Can you show me you work demonstrating that US pilots are superior? I will replace the grok link with your work if you like.
Until then, the AI generated one is much better sourced than the "US pilots are superior and would have handled MCAS" claim.
Or you can simply delete the message. You've posted a race-loaded analysis from an AI that called itself MechHitler because "somebody" decided to mess with the prompt.
Mmmm…. Not saying us pilots are universally great, but I have definitely seen a significant regression from the mean in many foreign cohorts. I imagine it’s due to fundamental differences in the concept of training. It’s one of the things besides war that fear based societies seem to do better than shame based societies.
There exists a concept called "regression to the mean". I don't think "regression from the mean" means anything.
There is no way pilots form all over the world could "regress to the mean". They could not have been all, or most, "above the mean". The mean would be higher then.
Civilian pilots have to consider that they are flying in heavily congested airspace with 200 passengers in the back. They are not LARPING Chuck Yaeger in the right stuff.
Well, not with that attitude, they aren't. But I've been on some charters where I'm pretty sure that they were, in fact, larping Chuck Yeager. I've seen a solid 2.5-2.8G turns in a 737, as well as some cornea-peeling rotations to max climb. It's kinda funny how things sometimes change when the plane isn't full of paying passengers.
I mean, those are pretty standard maneuvers, up to 4gs or so, in small aircraft, and I used to fly aerobatic frequently... but it just hits different somehow on an aircraft that weighs 70 tons and flexes visibly.
Between US pilots having to lie about their mental health and then having average pay far lower than people who use Claude code daily, they really aren’t sending their best.
Unironically whatever you think pilot training involves, we should probably double it. This would be extra good as raising the prices of flights will make fewer people fly. Far too many people right at this moment who shouldn’t be flying are flying.
If we could finish by forcing all airline seats to be at business class quality (thus average flight ticket costs are about 2X now as economics of scale kick in), than flying would become a humane practice rather than war crimes in the sky.
It's not really the same. Pilots need extensive training for how to handle emergency situations and maintenance crew don't. It's not super harsh to say that pilots in different regions are at different levels for those weird situations. It is super harsh to say that maintenance crews in some regions can't do their baseline job.
That's entirely false, the maintenance crew are highly trained people they don't figure out things on the go and when they have to figure out solution to an issue, it's based on what they know about the aircrafts from their training.
Maintenance crew are highly trained people that in strange situations can pause their work to figure out a fix and ask experts what to do.
Very different from how a pilot has to handle strange situations. Being ready for anything in an airborne plane without a pause button is so much harder, impossibly hard, and not every air authority tries as hard to reach the impossible.
Stand outside an engine test cell for a while and tell me that maintenance crews don't deal with emergencies. I'll bet they do so more often than pilots, we just don't hear about it because there are no passengers at risk. Nobody is going to make a 'Sully' like movie about the maintenance mechanic that spotted an issue with a part under test before it led to one or more catastrophic failures. They're more likely to make a lawyer the lead than the mechanic.
This is not just filling out reports and looking at stuff, they're in no way comparable to your local garage mechanic (and not to dump on them either: they too have to deal with out of the ordinary situations).
The responsibility issues are the same as with the pilots as well, they fuck up people die.
I didn't say there aren't any emergencies, but the emergencies are not on the same level. And I said they're highly trained, you don't need to convince me of that. Nor do you need to convince me they're important. Those are entirely separate issues.
Also what fraction of engine test cell use is for engine maintenance? Is it a big amount?
But if that kind of test goes wrong the main outcomes are "hit stop" and "oh no it's too late". An emergency like that is not where much of their expertise is needed, their expertise is in other parts of their job.
> Also what fraction of engine test cell use is for engine maintenance? Is it a big amount?
After every overhaul. Typically every 2500 to 15000 hours depending on the type of engine and the workload. It depends on many economic factors whether or not an overhaul is economical, in some cases it is cheaper just to buy a new engine.
Totally agree. Maintenance staff often get ignored. It is worth pointing out how skilled these people are and, in general, how dedicated they are to their task. It is also worth pointing out that often maintenance do get involved in emergencies, especially those that work on the line. I had a guy catch a bleed air leak and signal fire in seconds, saving the engine and potentially a lot more. We like to think of the pilots, but maintainers deserve a lot of credit.
Boeing themselves, including their CEOs, kept repeating that bullshit. Even after the FAA finally realised the issue, and refused Boeing's first attempted fix that relied on pilots being able to identify the situation and enact the procedure within 10 seconds (in various tests in a Southwest training center, it was around 30s on average). Then the FAA mandated a full redesign of the MCAS system to actually rely on two sensors and handle disagreements. And Calhoun kept repeating that "this wouldn't have happened with American pilots".
Even now there is a lot of uncertainty around this crash, maintenance - or lack thereof - or even wrong maintenance could still be a factor. But given the location of the part asking for a 'visual inspection' is a pretty strange move, the part is all but inaccessible when it is in its normal position and even with an endoscope it would be pretty hard to determine whether or not the part had weakened. That's just not going to show up visually until it is way too late unless the part has been especially prepared to announce the presence of hairline cracks.
You'd have to disassemble a good chunk of the wing to gain access to the part based on the pictures I've seen of how it all holds together when assembled.