I follow pilot and aviation forums. I’ve always liked looking at planes, even though I generally dislike flying and avoid it when I can. Aircraft are remarkably engineered items, but at the end of the day, you’re still sitting in a metallic tube hurtling several miles above the Earth’s surface at hundreds of miles an hour, propelled by flammable fuel.
That fact means they have to be engineered to stay safe, so the hundreds of millions of people flying places every day get there alive.
Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 series is apparently a machine with a gremlin in it---and it’s not the first time the 737 series has had one.
The 737 series plane is old. The first 737s entered service in 1968. Those aircraft left the factory with a flaw that reared its head in the early 1990s in a series of horrific accidents.
Pilots had, up to the early 90s, complained about the 737’s rudder issues---so, when the first mysterious crash occurred in Colorado Springs in 1991, the NTSB had its suspicions. In that accident, it was unable to come to a conclusive conclusion, the aircraft was obliterated and parts of the recovered rudder’s control unit vanished while in Boeing’s care. A second crash near Pittsburgh in 1994 sparked one of the longest investigations in aviation history, one that Boeing hotly fought. In the end, it turned out that it was indeed the long-rumoured rudder issue, but Boeing and the PCU’s manufacturer somehow survived. This is a good analysis of what happened. To this day, I avoid 737s if I can.
McDonnell Douglas designed a wide-body jet with a bad cargo door---one whose manufacturer told the company could fail in-flight. In order to accommodate more cargo, the door opened outward, but its locking mechanism was not sufficient. The company decided that the chance of failure was slim. Not so.
One aircraft survived the loss of its cargo door in flight and landed safely. Another, after leaving Paris Orly and losing its cargo door, did not. A memo surfaced that showed the company did indeed know about the flawed door, and the door was then redesigned. Still, the DC-10’s reputation was then shot, and another accident caused by American Airlines’s negligence hampered it even more, along with yet another DC-10 accident in Antarctica, also caused by management negligence and pilot error. McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997.
What’s the backstory have to do with the present? My distrust of Boeing’s corporate management. Their history has not been good, even though they make popular, safe for the most part, and solid aircraft. But, like the rudder issue, pilots have been complaining about the MCAS system which appears to be the focus of investigator’s attentions for some time now, especially since it appears Boeing released it with no real training to pilots.
“One high ranking Boeing official said the company had decided against disclosing more details to cockpit crews due to concerns about innundating average pilots with too much information---and significantly more technical data---than they needed or could digest.”
Yikes.
This plane is right to be grounded. A fix was in negotiations when the shutdown occurred which would have been mandated by an airworthiness directive, and it’s extremely tempting to blame the deaths of all 346 aboard both aircraft on our shutdown, but it increasingly looks like Boeing knew this was an issue long before---like the rudder, and like McDonnell Douglas did with the cargo door.
I must have been on a break of sorts in November (actually, I was at the time, from life in general) so I missed Major Kong’s diary on the Lion Air crash. I’d be remiss in not linking it so here it is.