“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” — Ronald Reagan

“I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” — Grover Norquist

This was a regulatory failure. But when you’ve got these guiding principles in the DNA of the government then bad will happen as a cost of “freedom” from regulation. And so many other freedoms: freedom from medical insurance, freedom from pensions, freedom from living wages.

It’s why we have, and need, unions. Oh. They’re freeing us from those too.

 

Amazing how all of this could have been avoided even without “the fix” if Boeing had just included a second AOA sensor with a miscompare feature in the standard cost of the aircraft. What gross misjudgment about additional profits on optional features.

The MCAS code would have still been “bad”, but the AOA miscompare would have saved the day, and a fix implemented without the whole fleet being grounded for an entire year, along with a complete loss of confidence in Boeing.

 

Do some research on the matter, in particular the European crew that saved the airplane which allowed the NTSB to figure out exactly what the fault was.

 

WTF are you even talking about?!?

 

Eastwind not European... auto correct.

Like I said... your post was factually inaccurate especially when talking politics. No cause could ever be determined for the USair and United crashes. Training changes was grasping at straws. It wasn’t until the Eastwind crew could be interviewed was the NTSB able to determine an inherent flaw in the PCU that could lead to rudder reversal.

Completely different situation, and by the FAAs own admission after the Lion Air crash they new more would come. Trump and political correctness had zero to do with grounding of the Max. If anything politics kept it flying to long, or worse turned it loose on the public. There’s a clear distinction from gross neglect, and what happened back in the 90’s

 

History repeats itself, again. American 191, the DC-10-10 disaster at ORD in May of 1979. The stick shaker came as standard equipment on the Captain’s control column only. The FO side was optional equipment. American didn’t buy the option. The Captain side lost power as a result of the No. 1 engine separation at rotation. There was no warning of the uncommanded slat retraction on the left side and no subsequent stick shaker activation. Had the nose been lowered in reaction to a stall warning, the aircraft could have been saved based on numerous simulator tests. As it was, the FO was the flying pilot on AA 191 and otherwise flew a by the book V1 cut. Stick shakers on both sides were mandated afterwards. It wouldn’t surprise me if a single engineer that worked on MCAS was even old enough to have ever heard of AA 191.

 

I think his point is that even after the NTSB and FAA determined that the rudder PCU had caused two catastrophic mishaps (and perhaps others abroad) and nearly another, they didn’t ground the 737. They mandated training and new PCU’s for all 737’s, but the deadline was three and a half years from the conclusion of the investigation. (March 1999 to November 2002)

That would have been like telling Boeing to come up with updated training for the MAX and setting a deadline for new software/hardware three years from now. It’s a very similar situation and it has been handled very differently.

 

Now we’re talking...


https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...ts/AAR9901.pdf

Good reference in this report. Notice how long the investigation took place. I don’t recall any 737 groundings.

Peacock nailed it.

 

It’s been a long time, but as I recall the manual said that with slats disagree, all computed speeds, including ALPHA could not be relied on. Shaker may not have worked.

 

Got me curious so I looked it up. The loss of the No.1 gen bus took out power to the lone stick shaker motor, the left stall warning computer and the slat disagree indication. The left and right stall warning computers did not compare information by design anyway. Good memory there. The accident report dinged the stall warning system for overall lack of redundancy. Lack of data comparison between sensors / computers being highlighted. And here we are 40 years later.