When two sophisticated jetliners fall out of the sky in the span of five months, many questions arise. And while we should not be quick to jump to conclusions regarding the answers, the most important question is: What will Boeing do to assure the public that its 737 Max 8 is safe for air travel?
Getting to that point of reassurance will be a laborious task, following an October crash in Indonesia and another two weeks ago in Ethiopia. The crashes resulted in 346 deaths, leading many nations, including the United States, to ground the plane pending investigations.
Considering that there have been more than 5,000 global orders for the 737 Max — the latest iteration of the aerospace giant’s workhorse plane — and Boeing’s importance to the economy and the zeitgeist of Washington, the hope is that those investigations result in necessary fixes that allow the aircraft to fly safely.
To get there, one question that must be answered involves the Federal Aviation Administration’s certification process for new planes. A detailed report by The Seattle Times found that “FAA managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis.” The Times also reported: “The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.”
If shortcuts were, indeed, taken to speed the 2017 delivery of the 737 Max to market, changes will be required. No industry in which catastrophic death tolls are possible should be allowed to police its own safety measures.
Beyond that, many of the questions surrounding the 737 Max involve a new flight control system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. Designed to prevent high-speed stalls, the system can push down the nose of the plane; if the pilot resets the system, the MCAS will repeat the action. A preliminary investigation of the Indonesia flight indicates that the cycle was repeated at least 21 times before the plane dived into the sea at more than 500 mph.
In the aftermath of the crash, pilot unions at American and Southwest airlines criticized Boeing for failing to provide information about the maneuvering system — or its possible malfunction — in pilot manuals.
Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the pilots association at American, said his training for moving from a previous 737 model to the 737 Max consisted of little more than a one-hour session on an iPad. “When the sheets are pulled down and we find out a whole lot more about the aircraft that we weren’t provided information on, then we have to say, ‘OK, all bets are off here. Now we have to re-evaluate this,'” Tajer said in an interview on National Public Radio.
Following the second crash of a 737 Max, Boeing outlined “a flight control software enhancement.” The Seattle Times reported that the company will enhance the plane’s input for MCAS readings, limit how much the system can move the horizontal tail in response to that input and update pilot training on the plane.
Boeing will need to answer questions about why those changes were not included in the original design — or at least after the first crash. Meanwhile, the FAA should be required to answer questions about its safety certification.
We hope the answers restore the public’s faith in Boeing and the United States’ air travel system.
