Insight: Thursday 24 September 2020: Will the MAX with the FAAs Fixes be Safe?

News:

The FAA issued its proposed order on the Boeing 737 MAX for public comment and review. The comments from a number of sources have been somewhat scathing, focusing beyond MCAS to a number of other problems that also need to be addressed to improve the safety of the aircraft. While Boeing’s may claim that the airplane will be one of the most investigated planes in history and will as a result have a great safety record and become one of the safest aircraft flying, we find that hard to swallow given the issues that have emerged.

Several issues have emerged during the comment period on the FAAs

proposed modifications to the 737 MAX that include the MCAS system, wiring, and flight computers on the MAX. Most of the comments illustrate further deficiencies in this aircraft, which utilizes a number of older and newer technologies that do not integrate well and also would not meet the requirements for new aircraft, being grandfathered under the original 1967 type certificate.  These include:

• Crew alerting flaws have emerged that could impact pilot workload and safety of flight and the aircraft lacks a modern EICAS system;
• The trim system may still be difficult to operate at high speeds, requiring heavy force;
• The information from faulty AoA indicators impacts systems other than MCAS that have not been corrected;
• There is no way for the crew to override annoying alerts, including the stick shaker and overspeed clacker, to turn them off to avoid distraction;
• Procedures in an emergency may require two pilot intervention rather than the traditional one fly the airplane and one fix the problem mode normally used;
• The airplane lacks “synthetic airspeed” software that could decide between an operating and failed sensor to determine which to believe;
• The rudder cables do not meet current requirements and could be subject to damage should an un-contained engine failure occur;

The fuselage for the MAX is the same as the NG version, which tends to break into three pieces after hard landings, with 5 similar instances recorded;

Should those flaws be addressed before the MAX returns to service?

Analysis:

The Boeing 737, including the 737NG family, has operated millions of flight hours and has a relatively good, albeit not perfect, safety record. Despite deficiencies that are similar to those on the MAX, the 737NG is an aircraft that can be safely flown by well-trained pilots who understand the archaic systems that date from the 1960s that are installed on the aircraft. The argument is that while the systems may not be modern if they are well understood by flight crews they can be flown safely.

Today, the problem is that new flight crews will lack the experience of having flown older aircraft and may be unfamiliar with traditional systems that require interpretation rather than alerting the crew to a root cause of a problem. New and younger pilots will need to gain experience with the 737, even if they have been trained on light aircraft with new Garmin panels that are as sophisticated and integrated as those used on the MAX.

The goal for many Boeing customers was to minimize differences between the 737NG and 737 MAX to ensure pilots could easily transition between airplanes. The MCAS system was introduced to make the aircraft handle similarly, rather than to fulfill a safety of flight need. The MAX is a stable aircraft aerodynamically, but handles differently in some circumstances from the NG because of how its larger engines are positioned higher and forward on the wing.  It isn’t necessarily dangerous, just different.  But pilots would need to know how to deal with that different handling.

To avoid additional training and make the two 737 models fly similarly, MCAS was introduced. Unfortunately, Boeing botched its implementation as it tried to hide the system from regulators, customers, and pilots to avoid additional training requirements. MCAS was fed by a single sensor, operated multiple times rather than once, and much higher movement than initially planned, sending aircraft into nosedives that became unrecoverable unless the pilots quickly disabled the system. An assumption that pilots would be able to disable the system in under 5 seconds also proved fatally false.

Insight:

The improvements to MCAS mandated by the FAA are appropriate and will improve the safety of the 737 MAX. But will it become one of the safest airplanes in the sky with the deficiencies that remain? The answer, in my opinion, is no. Without further changes, the MAX will not be as safe as it should be.

There is a long way to go if Boeing is to make the safest narrow-body in the sky. I for one, am not buying into the propaganda and won’t be flying on a MAX anytime soon.