Daily Insight: Monday 4 February 2019: How Culpable Are Boeing and the FAA in Lion Air Crash?

News

This story from the New York Times expounds in detail the nature of the regulatory approval processes from the FAA the tacitly endorsed Boeing’s failure to disclose a new system to pilots during transition training.  It appears that a failure of that system, and a lack of training in how to shut it off, were major contributing factors to the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737MAX that killed 189 people.

Analysis

The focus of the investigators is the MCAS, the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, which can push the nose down to compensate for a potential aerodynamic stall of the airplane in certain circumstances.  It appears that the system malfunctioned, and since pilots were not trained on that system, were unaware of its characteristics or how to shut it off.  Boeing’s position is that the Lion Air pilots should have known how to handle the emergency, even not knowing about the modification in the MAX model

that was not in previous models.

Insight

Our judgment is that a dangerous element in flight is a software system that reacts to faulty inputs.  We have seen a crash of an Airbus A330 off the coast of Brazil that appears to be related to a pilot tube failure, and now this Lion Air crash that may have been caused by a faulty angle of attack sensor.  In either case, had the pilots been able to quickly revert the aircraft to manual mode and simply fly the aircraft, both accidents could have been avoided.  The key may be a master switch to shut off all automated software, enabling pilots to do what they do best – fly the airplane and safely bring it down to correct the malfunctions.  Maybe it is time that an emergency kill switch be installed to instantly revert the aircraft to fully manual mode to enable pilots to quickly and simply do their jobs in the event of an emergency or system failure.