[conspire] Added carrier scrutiny

[Rick Moen]

Subject header is a running gag between me and my wife Deirdre:  In
the late Michael Crichton's truly excellent 1996 novel _Airframe_, 
protagonist Casey Singleton, VP of quality assurance at a fictional
aircraft manufacturer, investigates the causes of an in-flight
disaster at her firm, and is bemused by the very diplomatic nature of 
written reports by the Incident Response Team (IRT), such as wording
recommending 'added carrier scrutiny' in response to serious incidents,
and the fact that you must therefore read between the lines.

The IRT summary reports in the novel implied but didn't outright claim
that the problem lay with the carriers, the airlines.  After many
twists, it emerged that this wasn't _quite_ the case, but that a problem
with the slats design and consequent dodgy information from a sensor,
use of cheap off-brand parts by carrier maintenance, and a poor decision
on the flight deck indirectly caused violent vertical pitching (killing
four and injuring 56) before control was returned to autopilot.  Not
understanding interactions between crew and the automated systems had
put lives at risk.

The novel ends with an IRT summary report, in a bit of subtle humour:

  AIRCRAFT INCIDENT REPORT [...]
  SUBJECT: Severe Pitch Oscillations in Flight
   [...]
  ACTION TAKEN: 
   [...]
  Review of human factors revealed the following:
  1. Flight deck procedures require added carrier scrutiny.
  2. Foreign repair procedures require added carrier scrutiny. 

(High recommendation for the novel.)

As it happens, air disasters involving a loss of vertical control
because of airframe defects and problems with the automated systems the
pilots weren't warned about is a thing familiar to my family.[1]  And, 
gosh, everything old keeps being new again, including that.


Rather recently, I bicycled across the Peninsula, and then drove a car
around the Peninsula, and then walked up and down some stairs, thus 
checking off the third, first, and second most dangerous actions I most
often take (as I keep reminding people around here using cars and
stairs, more than the cyclists).  Way, way, way down the list would be 
traveling on a commercial airliner, because that's statistically an
extremely safe thing to do (and reading Crichton's novel will make you
feel better about that, justifiably, as that much-missed novelist outdid
even his usual impeccable research on _Airframe_, and it shows that the
saying about high airframe safety is true).

The exception lately would be if you're on Boeing's latest main
moneymaker, the B-737 MAX 8.



Back in November, I wrote in this space briefly about the stunning
catastrophic loss (shortly after takeoff) of Lion Air Flight 610,
killing 189 people, just offshore from Jakarta, Indonesia:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2018-November/009451.html

Summary:  Erroneous reporting from a sensor caused an automated 'safety' 
feature (that the pilots hadn't been briefed on enough to understand)
to make the craft undergo severe pitch (vertical) oscillations in
flight.  Over the couple of minutes during which the crew struggled to
regain control, they had no idea the automated system was sabotaging
them, as it gave no audible alarm or other feedback.

Seen this before.  When it happened on Dec. 26, 1968, it was 59.2
seconds of occupant terror while the pilots were sabotaged just after
takeoff by a Boeing 'safety' system, before collision into terrain.
This decade, about two minutes of terror.  Progress?


About the same time I was doing dangerous task #3, the bicycle ride,
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 encountered (it appears, but I'll admit to
getting ahead of the data) _exactly_ the same problem Lion Air Flight
610 did -- at least, judging by descriptions.  A few minutes after
takeoff, exactly as with Lion Air, the crew reported severe pitch
oscillations in flight, got permission to return to the departure
airport, but could not maintain control, so everyone (157 people) died
after a couple of minutes of terror.

The airframe?  Another Boeing 737 MAX 8, with the same infamous
automated system to override pilot control and strongly nose-down the
plane if a sensor thinks the crew's AoA [angle of attack] and airspeed
might be risking a stall -- with no audible alarm or tactile feedback to
tell the crew what the frak is happening,  (It is at this point believed
that the Lion Air craft's AoA sensor was knackered.)

Now, what would one imagine Boeing's corrective actions since last
November have been?  If you say 'nothing', you can join me at the
cynic's table, but the correct answer is 'almost nothing, too little,
too late'.  Boeing's A-track remedial measure was to recommend that FAA
issue an Airworthiness Directive saying 'Hey, dudes, your plane might
receive bad data from the AoA sensor and therefore decide to auger
itself into the ground.  Thought you should know.'

Pilot associations smelled a rodent, and checked:  Turns out, most
pilots at American Airlines and Southwest Airlines were not even getting
told of the problem at all, and that the 737 MAX flight crew operations
manual (FCOM) wasn't being amended.  The pilots raised holy hell, it being,
y'know, a little personal.

(In fairness, once pilots are aware of the automated pitch-adjusting
system's existence, they can shut it off if it starts initiating
dangerous nose-down motions.  The hottest issue has been failure to make
its existence and operation known to affected pilots.)

The question, then, was what else Boeing intended to do.  It mentioned
to a _Wall Street Journal_ reporter that the firm had 'decided against
disclosing more details to cockpit crews due to concerns about
inundating average pilots with too much information'.[2]  But Boeing
mostly covered itself using the B-track remedial measure:  Boeing CEO
Dennis Muilenburg has been making frequent telephone calls to his buddy
the Toddler-in-Chief (Mr. Trump), to reassure him that 737 MAX 8 fleets
are perfectly safe and _certainly_ don't need to be grounded.

Most of the world does not agree.  Shocker!

Following the Lion Air disaster and Boeing's absence of real response,
the entire European Union banned the 737 MAX 8 from flight operations,
as did China, India, Indonesia (obviously), New Zealand, Malaysia,
Australia, and Mongolia.  Airlines that began grounding their entire 737
MAX 8 fleets after Lion Air are the national airlines of Argentina,
Mexico, Cayman Islands, Ethiopia (but, sadly, not all at that time),
Brazil, Mongolia, and Morocco, along with some smaller airlines.

So far today, the individual governments of Singapore, Australia,
Vietnam, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the U.K., France, Turkey, Germany, Italy,
Ireland, Poland, and the Netherlands summarily halted all flights of 737
MAX 8 craft.  The UK and Poland even went further and now won't even
permit overflights by the damned thing.  All of _these_ responses
followed by hours a declaration by the Federal Aviation Acting
Administrator of the plane's 'continued airworthiness'.

(Stop for a moment to consider The Toddler's administration's
unprecedented achievement, there:  Now, FAA makes an official
recommendation and within hours 13 major governments do the opposite,
all those decades of trust and respect being a thing of the past.)

Not on that groundings-orders list:  the United States.  The FAA could
have ordered this.  And who's in charge of the FAA?  The Toddler,
presumably in order to sidestep Senate confirmation, has declined to
appoint an FAA Administrator, and instead appointed a buddy, Daniel
K. Elwell, to be FAA Deputy Administrator and then Acting Administrator.
He's best known for having been head of the airline industry lobby
(Airlines for America, previously named the Air Transport Association),
and then as Senior Advisor to Toddler-appointed Secretary of
Transportation Elaine Chao.

WashPo reported[3] today:

  But acting FAA administrator Daniel K. Elwell said late Tuesday that
  his agency's extensive review of "aggregate safety performance from
  operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 MAX . . . shows no systemic
  performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the
  aircraft."

  Other nations' civil-aviation authorities had not "provided data to us
  that would warrant action," Elwell said.

Since FAA failed to act, they could of course be overruled by the
Department of Transportation -- in other words by Secretary Elaine Chao.
Chao is best known for having worked for plutocrat think-tanks The
Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute, and for being married to
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

(Hey, what's that I hear about swamp-draining?)

Meanwhile:  Added carrier scrutiny.  And watch those stairs, streets,
and bicycles.


[1] https://deirdre.net/ntsb-fatality-family-mh370-stress/
[2] https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the-boeing-737-max-maneuvering-characteristics-augmentation-system-mcas-jt610/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/european-aviation-officials-break-with-faa-and-boeing-and-ground-737-max-8-aircraft-involved-in-crash/2019/03/12/cd64a8d0-44d4-11e9-90f0-0ccfeec87a61_story.html