Is a Boeing 737 MAX the safest plane in service?

Just getting ready to takeoff to Iceland from JFK on a 737 Max.
Forecast. Snow and lava.
Wife is happy!
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Did "western aircrews" receive training on the MCAS system that wasn't offered to "eastern" crews?

 

Nope.

 

I flew on one a couple of weeks ago from Denver to Las Vegas. No one seemed to care it was a Max.

 

Flew the Dreamliner round trip from Denver to Munich business class on the same trip I had the Max. Great plane.

 

People have short memories. I bet 8 out of 10 has no recollection of the crashes and the remaining 2 don't realize they are sitting on the same plane.

Me, I like them. Seats are better and if its my time, well c'est la vie.

 

Also I bet 90% of the people flying have no idea what kind of airplane they are flying on. So many mid sized planes look alike. If you really weren't paying attention all 737's look the same.

 

And 90% of the people don't realize they are safer flying than driving.

Me? I realize **** happens, it can be perfect out and you 'could' crash, or some other
plane can come out of the blue and hit you, on takeoff or landing or wherever.
Or a turbine blade could separate and cut your controls like the Sioux City crash...

Driving down a 2-lane road at 55, it takes .001 of a second for a car or truck to veer out
of an oncoming lane and hit you head-on...

Point is, we don't REALLY have control over most accidents....

 

The Max crash that really bothered me was the Ethiopean. The pilot turned the auto pilot back on after all the problems it was having due to the bird strike that tore the Pitot tube out. A real shame. Ethiopean also put an NG into the side of a mountain 10 years ago in clear weather.

 

The large majority of airplane accidents are pilot error. But yes, as a passenger you have zero control.

 

I read an Op Ed in the WSJ shortly after the second crash written by an aeronautical engineer. He described the plane as fundamentally flawed. It was over my head, but the gist was:

1. Boeing put bigger engines on the plane (I believe to improve efficiency, under pressure from the airlines)
2. To make room for the engines, they had to raise the wings higher on the fuselage
3. This caused a predictable aerodynamic imbalance that would tend to cause the nose to climb under thrust; this creates the risk that the wings would stall

The author asserted that this design would never have been contemplated in years past. But they thought they could compensate for mechanical and aerodynamic flaws with electronics. Those systems failed tragically twice.

Will I ever fly one? Probably. But given the choice, I'd prefer a plane without such a fundamental flaw.

 

The wings are NOT higher on the fuselage, but the engines are higher relative to the wing. The electronics were added to make the airplane fly the same as the older version, but that was not probably necessary. I would not consider the redesign to be a "fundamental flaw".

 

Apologies, I'm going off memory and am no expert - far from it. I'm sure you are correct.

I wish I could find the article. The author certainly had the credentials to comment believably, but I have no idea what his biases were. He did not instill confidence that this was a well-conceived design. If I remember correctly, he stated/insinuated that the MCAS was necessary to reliably ascend safely - that pilots would be too likely to stall without it. You don't think that's accurate?

I'd love to be convinced otherwise since, like I said, I'm sure I'll end up flying on them.

 

Poorly trained low time, 3rd world pilots had problems without fully functional systems. Well trained, experienced western pilots did not. Similar can be said for other accidents in highly automated aircraft. Lesson to be learned here is technology should not be used to replace qualified, well trained pilots. Teenage video game players should not be operating large passenger aircraft. The perfectly flyable Air France Airbus that flew into the South Atlantic was an example of that. The Japanese 777 that crashed at San Francisco airport was a similar situation. Perfectly good airplane with non existent flight deck teamwork crashed on the runway relying on the technology to land it.

Airplanes need pilots, not data entry specialists.

 

Brian- Korean, not Japanese. The Japanese are as anal as we are.

 

It was Asiana out of Korea. My mistake.

 

@NGooding : The MCAS was added to the MAX to make it behave like the NG in specific pitch situations (the high-AOA near-stall situation you refer to being the most different one apparently). I believe it was only mentioned once in passing in the entire MAX training syllabus. It was designed to operate strictly in the background, for fear that it would add more complexity to the training. In and of itself, it's not a bad system, but it was originally reliant on too many non-redundant systems. As I recall, Ethiopian and Lion Air, among many other operators, both had single-source AOA input. Most Western operators opted (and yes, it was an option), for dual-source which added another layer of safety.

The number of crashes or near-crashes I have read about due to faulty pilot response to single-source data is simply astonishing--in many cases, even though PFDs will indicate airspeed decorrelation on takeoff, for example, the pilot flying in many of these instances will continue referring to their own known erroneous airspeed readings and stall a plane while the PM's and standby indicators are working fine. It ultimately boils down to a difference in mentality concerning how much control/oversight to give the pilot vs. the machine. Expanding on that, every single aircraft accident in the last ~40 years can be ascribed to human error at some stage, whether in construction, maintenance, or operation.

@Rifledriver the issue with the Asiana crash is that they weren't relying on the tech (ILS in this case, which was unserviceable). They were given a visual approach, which the crew (due to company and national tendencies) were not at all used to doing; they almost always performed full or partial ILS approaches, and so their hand-flying skills were inadequate, and so they pancaked.

That's why we still have pilots. Aircraft these days are perfectly capable of flying themselves (and almost even taxi themselves too) on their own. The pilots are there in case a system fails. Much as I hate to say it, for large transport aircraft their primary role is machine operator and troubleshooter 99% of the time, and so their skills for the remaining 1%, abnormal situations, are becoming rusty to the point of becoming inadequate (gross generalisation). That's why I personally prefer the Airbus design mentality on a global level, as it gives more authority to the frankly more reliable machine.

 

Does this not compound the problem of pilots getting rusty and then being unable to respond correctly when the machine makes a bad choice (bad input data, insufficient input data, or faulty logic)?

I get that at this point, the machines will likely make bad decisions less frequently than pilots, but I'd imagine that they'll still happen.

(I get that the Airbus approach could still be the lesser of the two evils.)

 

That is what simulators are for so you can see these types of malfunctions before they happen for real. In the military we practiced dampers off, single engine, no flap, no slat and other similar approaches for real, but obviously not possible with a bunch of pax.

 

Asiana didn't set the auto throttle and their cultural inability to correct a superior would not let those on the flight deck tell the senior pilot at the controls. He flew a beautiful approach without enough speed and the crew on the flight deck stood back and let him do it.

 

I believe this is false - before updates, all 737 Max ("Western" and/or "Eastern") relied on info from a single AoA sensor even though there were more than one, so a failure in that single sensor would cause MCAS to malfunction.

An "AoA Sensor disagree" cockpit annuciator was an option (now it's standard), but even if one were present in the two crashed planes it's not clear how that alone may have assisted the pilots.

Amen. Which makes Boeing's insistance on absolutely no simulator training required for 737 MAX and it's MCAS system all the more galling.

As Sully Sullenberg testified to Congress, expecting any pilot to correctly diagnose and act on an emergency situation they had no prior training or knowledge of in less than 10 seconds is acbsolutely unreasonable.
Be they Western, Eastern, Southern or Northern pilots.

 

No question but expecting pilots of very low experience and training levels to save an aircraft whose automation is failing to safely operate the aircraft is more smoking holes in the ground waiting to happen.

 

Two months off of the assembly line according to the article.

https://katu.com/news/local/alaska-airlines-flight-1282-returns-to-pdx-after-a-depressurization-just-after-takeoff-boeing-737-max

Hats off to the pilots and their training for a successful return to PDX.

 

Not specifically related to the Max as this same door is on the 737-900.

Guess the plug door really wasn’t a plug door.

 

Oooops. Alaska Air grounds all Maxs

https://apnews.com/article/alaska-airlines-portland-oregon-emergency-landing-b522e36ff228b5ea9a89ea13ee24f597

Alaska Airlines grounds 737-9 aircraft after midair window blowout on flight from Portland, Oregon
Alaska Airlines grounded all of its Boeing 737-9 aircraft late Friday, hours after a window and piece of fuselage on one such plane blew out in midair and forced an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon. No one was seriously hurt.

The incident occurred shortly after takeoff and the gaping hole caused the cabin to depressurize. Flight data showed the plane climbed to 16,000 feet (4,876 meters) before returning to Portland International Airport. The airline said the plane landed safely with 174 passengers and six crew members.

“Following tonight’s event on Flight 1282, we have decided to take the precautionary step of temporarily grounding our fleet of 65 Boeing 737-9 aircraft.” Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci said in a statement. “My heart goes out to those who were on this flight – I am so sorry for what you experienced.”