Boeing 737 Max
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Friday, August 21, 2026 17:40
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American Airlines quietly announced that it would return the Max to its schedule next month.
European regulators have already declared the Max is safe to fly. What's curious is that Boeing hasn't yet made the software change that European regulators insisted was necessary. This is one software update that simply cannot go wrong. It has to be perfect and enjoy the absolute confidence of those who use it. Therefore I was a little disturbed to read: "Southwest, American pilots say new Boeing 737 Max manual may lead to errors in emergencies."
The pilots are concerned that the Federal Aviation Authority's manual for handling the new software in the event of an emergency is inadequate. They say there are simply too many steps to remember. This, they insist, has been proved in simulator flights.
An intriguing element is whether American and other airlines will tell customers they're flying in a Max at all. At the end of last year, they began referring to it as the 737-8. Which is quite bizarre, given that there's already a 737-800, a bastion of flying for many years. Could it be, then, that one of the ways airlines will try and reassure passengers is to only tell them it was a Max after they've landed?
More at https://www.zdnet.com/article/american-airlines-is-quietly-bringing-ba
ck-the-737-max-heres-why-thats-disturbing/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Federal Aviation Administration cleared Boeing’s 737 MAX for flight Wednesday, ending the 20-month grounding of the jet in the United States.
The nation’s air safety agency announced the move early Wednesday, saying it was done after a comprehensive and methodical 20-month review process.
https://www.king5.com/article/tech/science/aerospace/boeing/faa-will-l
ift-us-grounding-of-737-max-on-wednesday-according-to-sources/281-c37fe280-9e68-42e9-b693-91f658652a7c
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How many got fired at Boeing?
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Quote:None. How many got fired at the FAA? None, again, but Boeing and the FAA are colluding together to make the redesign of the 737 MAX look far better than it actually is. How? By reminding, just before the test in the simulator, what the test pilots must do during an emergency in order to make the redesign look good. In a real life emergency, there won't be somebody reminding the pilot what to do during an emergency. That is why a simulator test of the redesign must NOT have somebody coaching the pilot.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
How many got fired at Boeing?
Boeing officials "inappropriately coached" test pilots during recertification efforts after two fatal 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people, according to a lengthy congressional report released on Friday.
Reuters reports:
The report from the Senate Commerce Committee Republican staff said testing this year of a key safety system known as MCAS tied to both fatal crashes was contrary to proper protocol.
The report citing a whistleblower who alleged Boeing officials encouraged test pilots to “remember, get right on that pickle switch” prior to the exercise that resulted in pilot reaction in approximately four seconds, while another pilot in a separate test reacted in approximately 16 seconds.
The account was corroborated during an FAA staff interview, the committee added.
Numerous reports have found Boeing failed to adequately consider how pilots respond to cockpit emergencies in its development of the 737 MAX.
More at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737-max/boeing-inappropriate
ly-coached-pilots-in-737-max-testing-u-s-senate-report-idUSKBN28S314
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Wicker Releases Committee’s FAA Investigation Report of Boeing 737 MAX
December 18, 2020
U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today released the Committee’s investigation report on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This investigation began in April of 2019, weeks after the second of two tragic crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, when Committee staff began receiving information from whistleblowers disclosing numerous concerns related to aviation safety.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2020/12/wicker-releases-committee-s-fa
a-investigation-report
Click here to read the Committee’s report, which includes a one-page executive summary and a six-page overview.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/FFDA35FA-0442-465D-AC63
-5634D9D3CEF6
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A lot of deaths a lot of PR disasters
Sad to see a good manufacturing and aviation company go this way
Hopefully they will get their shit together
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'What the Truth Is': FAA Safety Engineer Slams Oversight of Boeing's 737 MAX
The Seattle Times reports:
Haunted by the two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 MAX jets and his agency's role in approving the plane, veteran Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety engineer Joe Jacobsen is stepping forward publicly to give the victims' families "a firsthand account of what the truth is." In a detailed letter sent last month to a family that lost their daughter in the second MAX crash in Ethiopia two years ago this week, and in interviews with The Seattle Times, Jacobsen gave the first personal account by an insider of the federal safety agency's response to the MAX crashes...
He believes additional system upgrades are needed beyond Boeing's fix for the MAX that was blessed by the FAA and other regulators.
And Jacobsen argues that the plane would be safer if Boeing simply removed altogether the new software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that went wrong in the two crashes that killed 346 people. Jacobsen also calls for the replacement of some of the people at "the highest levels of FAA management," whom he blames for creating a culture too concerned with fulfilling the demands of industry. In his letter and interview, Jacobsen also described in more depth than previously reported how an autothrottle system issue may have contributed to the crash in Ethiopia in March 2019.
Boeing and the FAA said in separate statements they believe the MAX is fixed and safe, and that regulators worldwide have validated this conclusion...
A week after the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, 2018, Jacobsen received an email from a colleague asking if there was an issue paper on MCAS. "This was the first day that I heard about MCAS," he wrote. "We had no issue papers, and if we had, I would have been the engineer responsible for providing technical content and comment on such an issue paper." When he did get a look at the system, Jacobsen said he was "shocked to discover that the airplane was purposely designed and certified to use just one AOA (Angle of Attack) input for a flight critical function."
If given the chance during the original certification, he's certain that he and "6 to 8 of our most experienced engineers in the Seattle office" would have identified that as a serious design flaw because there's "a long history of AOA sensor failures."
Instead, Boeing minimized MCAS and kept the details of its assessment to itself...
The article also argues that Boeing itself didn't grasp the danger of its system. "Michael Teal, 737 MAX chief engineer, testified to Congress that he first learned only after the Lion Air crash that MCAS relied on a single sensor.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-safety-engi
neer-goes-public-to-slam-the-agencys-oversight-of-boeings-737-max/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The autothrottle problem
The instructions Boeing and the FAA gave pilots immediately after the first crash — instructions the Ethiopian pilots tried to follow — have been heavily criticized.
Boeing’s procedure failed to emphasize that pilots need to bring the nose of the jet back up electrically before hitting the cutoff switches to stop MCAS acting.
Jacobsen’s letter adds something new about the inadequacy of those instructions: There was no mention of an issue with the autothrottle — the automated system controlling the thrust of the engines — that added to the jet’s excessive speed and made it impossible to manually bring the jet’s nose up.
According to the interim investigation report released a year ago, the faulty Angle of Attack sensor on Flight ET302, even before it triggered MCAS to push the plane’s nose down, interfered with other sensor readings of altitude and airspeed.
Registering the plane as still below 800 feet above the ground even after it passed that threshold, the jet’s computer had the autothrottle maintain full takeoff thrust for 16 seconds after it should have reduced the power for the climb phase.
More significantly, seconds later the pilots set the jet’s speed target at 238 knots, but the autothrottle didn’t follow through.
Again because of the faulty sensor on the left, the flight computer detected the discrepancy between the left and right airspeed values and flagged the data as invalid. Unable to validate the aircraft’s speed, the computer stopped sending thrust instructions to the autothrottle.
As a result, the engines remained at maximum thrust for the rest of the fatal flight.
The plane eventually exceeded the 737’s maximum design speed of 340 knots. This so increased the forces on the jet’s tail that the pilots couldn’t budge it manually.
Some pilots faulted the Ethiopian crew for allowing the plane to gather so much speed.
Jacobsen recalls how he was angered listening to Rep. Sam Graves, R-Missouri, say during a May 2019 House hearing that U.S.-trained pilots would have been able to handle the emergency.
The Ethiopian crew indeed should have throttled back the engines manually. But apparently they were confused by the cacophony of alerts going off. Those alerts did not include any autothrottle warning to indicate it had stopped responding to their speed setting.
Boeing has said that for this kind of emergency it relies on pilots to execute a standard checklist from memory that includes an instruction to disengage the autothrottle.
The FAA, in a statement, said this checklist tells pilots “to turn off all automatic systems, including autopilot and auto-throttle.”
The ET302 pilots, however, jumped immediately to the step in the checklist that Boeing emphasized in its bulletin after the Lion Air crash: hitting the cutoff switches to stop MCAS from pushing the jet’s nose down. In their rush to do that, they didn’t first bring the nose back up with the electrical switches and didn’t disengage the autothrottle.
And Jacobsen points out that the FAA’s emergency directive after the Lion Air crash lists the procedure pilots should follow — but omits the instruction on the autothrottle and fails to mention that it could malfunction.
“I think it was just a miss,” said Jacobsen. “I don’t think anyone recognized the Angle of Attack malfunction would also mess with the autothrottle.”
In an interview, Capt. John Cox, a veteran pilot and founder of Washington, D.C.-based aviation safety consultancy Safety Operating Systems, called this autothrottle behavior on ET 302 a “hard-to-detect failure.”
“To fail this way and not tell the crew, that bothers me. Humans are not good at picking up omissions,” Cox said. “It’s a significant miss.”
Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the celebrated pilot from the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” emergency, agreed that Boeing and the FAA provided pilots inadequate information after the Lion Air crash, including a lack of warning about the autothrottle issue.
The ET302 crew “did take affirmativ
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A "simple flaw" caused by a language difference led to a "serious incident" for a flight from Birmingham last year.
All female passengers whose title was "Miss" were classified as children - not adults - on the Tui flight after a software upgrade, a report said.
That meant that their average weight used for take-off calculations was lower than it should have been.
The difference could have had an impact on take-off thrust, but the report said flight operation was not compromised.
Take-off prep documents told the pilot that his Boeing 737 jet was 1,244kg lighter than it actually was after using 35kg as the average weight of the females involved rather than 69kg.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56690529
That "load sheet" is used to determine how much weight is safe, how the plane is balanced, and other important information for a safe flight within safety regulations.
The AAIB report on the incident said the reservation system that produces the load sheet had been upgraded in the downtime caused by the coronavirus lockdown last year, when the airline suspended flights "for several months".
Safety officials said the problem was that the software had been programmed in a foreign country where "Miss" is used to refer to children, and "Ms" to adult women.
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