[conspire] Added carrier scrutiny

Wed Mar 13 19:19:51 PDT 2019

Rick,

Some reports now are fingering the auto-pilot system, not the stall recovery system.
Engaging the auto-pilot disconnects the stall recovery system. The crashes of the
planes in question seem to have occurred after the auto-pilot was turned on.

Ross

> On Mar 13, 2019, at 12:23 AM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> conspire mailing list
> conspire at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire