Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings - NY Times Blames Third World Pilots Without Air Combat Training - (Spiegel) 24 Sept 2019

It took Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 about six minutes to travel from Addis Ababa to Ejere, a sprawling cluster of small farms on the edge of the Abyssinian highlands. By car, the journey takes around three hours and winds past unfinished buildings in the Ethiopian capital's southeastern suburbs before continuing down the immaculate, six-lane Addis Adama Expressway, which was built by the Chinese and opened in 2014. After the exit, there's a narrow, bumpy gravel road that's barely wide enough for a single car or carriage. It is out here that the scene of the accident can be found -- or the scene of the crime, depending on what investigators find.

In this undulating terrain 2,000 meters (6562 feet) above sea level, the earth seems scorched. The only green comes from eucalyptus trees, which dot the landscape and provide precious shade for goatherds and their animals. Along the paths are head-high stalls that transform into storefronts come market day, when farmers sell their homemade schnapps. It's a barren region.

The crater the airplane made when it slammed into the ground at 8:44 a.m. on March 10 is around 10 meters deep. Its diameter is difficult to determine now that the excavators are done salvaging what they could find, but people standing on the edge of the pit look tiny by comparison. The plane smashed into the ground at a speed of 926 kilometers per hour (575.4 mph) -- and physics did the rest. The aircraft drilled deep into the ground, dislodging earth and stones, hurling them 50 meters into the air, along with parts of what only seconds ago had been an airplane.

The fuselage, landing gear, wings, engines, doors, windows, seats, luggage -- and people -- were brutally crushed, torn into pieces and strewn around. The grotesque contortions displayed by some pieces of metal come in part because in a last ditch, and ultimately futile effort at survival, the plane entered into a steep curve. The kerosene in the tanks didn't explode and nothing burned. The fuel evaporated instantaneously due to the extremely high speed at impact.

Difficult questions began arising almost immediately after the crash. The most difficult of all is whether this misfortune was, in fact, avoidable. Indeed, whether it should have been prevented. It is unbearable to think the 157 victims from Ejere might have died because of an industrial scandal. And if they were, then the crater is indeed a crime scene -- and it's where the search for clues begins.

Immediate Grounding
 
From here, there's a direct connection to Indonesia, where only five months earlier, on Oct. 29, Lion Air Flight 610 likewise entered a steep dive, slamming into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff. Together, these two crashes plunged the aviation world into turmoil. And all eyes were suddenly trained on an airplane that had only just gone on the market: the Boeing 737 Max.

Within hours of the second crash, China ordered all planes of that model to be grounded. The United States needed three days to follow suit. Since then, 550 of the new planes around the world, with a sticker price of around $135 million, have been paralyzed. If it were up to Boeing, the aircraft would have been back in service long ago, patched up with a software update. But following the failure of the update in question in tests conducted in late June, the crisis has been ongoing. The 737 Max remains grounded and all eyes are still fixed on Boeing.

       (Ethiopian Funeral for victims of 737 Max crash)

Human Error? But not the human bosses at Boeing - New York Times

The lead article of the September 22 print edition of the New York Times Magazine, titled “What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?” is a 14,000-word cover-up. It is an attempt to whitewash the profit-driven negligence of Boeing and complicity of the industry-dominated Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that led to two crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft and the deaths of 346 human beings.

The premise of the article, written by new writer-at-large William Langewiesche, is that the pilots of the two Max 8 flights—Lion Air Flight 610, which crashed last October in Indonesia, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed this past March—are primarily responsible for the lives lost, not Boeing or the FAA. Langewiesche writes that the pilots should have been able to “decipher a variant of a simple runaway trim” and “were the deciding factor here—not the MCAS, not the Max.”

This contradicts the preliminary report by Ethiopian Airlines, based on an analysis of the recovered flight recorder and cockpit recorder and other data, which exonerates the pilots and blames the crash on the failure of critical functions on the aircraft. According to press reports, the Indonesian government is about to release its study, attributing the Lion Air crash to design flaws in the Boeing Max and lack of oversight by the FAA.

The Times seeks to absolve the giant US airplane maker and defense contractor and the government regulators who are in its pocket by focusing on airlines in the “Third World” and their tendency to hire less experienced pilots. Langewiesche writes that these pilots’ only flying experience is “scripted, bounded by checklists and cockpit mandates and dependent on autopilots.” He compares them to pilots trained by the United States Navy, who are required to go through “rigorous classroom instruction” and then “fly at bank angles without limits, including upside down.” Such military dog-fighting techniques should be a requirement for pilots flying civilian air routes, he argues.
Langewiesche echoes statements made early on by Boeing executives and comments by Representative Sam Graves (Republican of Michigan) to the House Aviation Committee in May. Graves declared that the type of catastrophic flight control failures that doomed the Max 8 aircraft “are easily countered by the pilot” by “flipping a couple of switches.” The Lion Air pilots supposedly did not resort to this “simple solution.”

Graves argued that the pilots should have known how to fix the problem, adding that “you do not need an idiot light to tell you what is going on.”

He made these statements despite acknowledging that Boeing had not put any information in the flight training manuals for its new 737 Max 8 concerning an automatic anti-stall system it had installed, called MCAS (for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) to compensate for a design problem associated with the mounting of a bigger engine on the old 737 body frame. In both crashes, MCAS was triggered shortly after takeoff due to a faulty angle-of-attack sensor, pushing the nose of the plane down and overriding attempts by the pilots to assume manual control.

The decision to adapt the old 737 model for the new 737 Max rather than design a new plane was driven by commercial and profit concerns, not the safety of the passengers and crew. Boeing was in a mad scramble to bring to market a new, more cost-effective short- and medium-haul workhorse aircraft in order to compete with its European-based rival, Airbus, which had introduced its own new generation plane and was threatening to cut into Boeing’s market share, particularly in the critical and expanding Chinese market.

And to make its plane more attractive to airlines and cheaper to bring online, Boeing said the Max 8 required virtually no new training for pilots who had flown its previous 737 models. Hence its decision to omit the existence of MCAS from its training manuals.

Boeing itself knew that MCAS was a faulty system and was in the process of releasing a software patch when the Ethiopian Airlines crash occurred on March 10. It was doing so in response to analyses by its own engineers of the potential problems of the system made both before and after the Lion Air crash that had occurred five months before.

All of this—and other damning facts that have been revealed since the grounding of the 737 Max 8 aircraft last March—are ignored by the Times. These additional facts include:

• The Max 8 relied on a single angle-of-attack sensor, rather than two sensors, to feed data to MCAS, lacking the redundancy that is standard for critical functions.
• Cockpit warning lights alerting pilots of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor were optional features on the Max 8, not mandatory as they have been in the past.
• Pilot training for the new plane consisted of a single one-hour course on an iPad.
• The autopilot fails to disengage properly, as discovered in tests by the European Aviation Administration.
• The manually operated trim wheel, which is part of the solution Langewiesche claims was “simple,” is difficult to turn, and the pilots in the doomed aircraft were apparently unable to turn it and thereby correct for unwanted changes in airspeed.

The so-called “newspaper of record,” in reality the “newspaper of Wall Street,” has published an article written in behalf of Boeing and its major investors—one that could have been written by them as well.

It does not take a stretch of the imagination to link this with the fact that the Max 8 is Boeing’s biggest-selling aircraft, accounting for up to 40 percent of its recent profits, and that Boeing’s profit and stock price surge since the election of Trump has been the biggest driver of the overall stock market binge.

The presentation, content and tone of the article express the desire of the aerospace giant’s executives and Wall Street as a whole to shift the blame for the disasters onto pilots who are dead and cannot defend themselves, and get the Max 8 back into the air as quickly as possible. The company has already reported a loss of $1 billion and is in danger of losing more sales to Airbus.

These are not innocent oversights. Langewiesche himself is a pilot and is no doubt aware of comments by aviation safety expert “Sully” Sullenberger, who testified to Congress in June that the Max 8 was “fatally flawed” and that planes should never be designed with “inherent flaws that we intend pilots will have to compensate for and overcome.”

Spiegel Online   
https://outline.com/pqAtX4