Canadian Ministry of Transportation just issued safety notice grounding all 737 Max and banning the overflying of Canadian Airspace based on satellite evidence that the erratic flight path was similar to the lion air flight. Bad news for Boeing!

Edited March 13, 20197 yr by Guest

18 hours ago, John_Cillis said:

Oh, again did not know that, I am learning more, but what surprises me is we have not heard of the older models having this same issue.  Could this problem be caused by inadvertent spoiler deployment?  Or again, 

I’m surprised by the fact that the flight characteristics of the max is totally different than that of previous generations of the 737 due to the forward and raised engine placement on the Max .....the main reason for the new mcas, hasn’t been brought up in this thread.....sorry if I missed it.

Edited March 13, 20197 yr by FunknNasty

32 minutes ago, Avidean said:

Canadian Ministry of Transportation just issued safety notice grounding all 737 Max and banning the overflying of Canadian Airspace based on satellite evidence that the erratic flight path was similar to the lion air flight. Bad news for Boeing!

I wonder where Marc Garneau got his satellite data from? I believe this to be a wise decision. However, it’s an election year in Canada and that might be a large part in the decision.

But; better safe than sorry.

2 hours ago, w6kd said:

By this standard, we'd be grounding entire fleets every time an accident of unknown cause occurred. 

Well that's not really a very good comparison to this. It's not just an "accident of unknown cause": It's two catastrophic crashes in a few months time in which nearly 300 passengers/crew were killed.

2 hours ago, w6kd said:

I was just reading that the FO on Ethiopian 307 had 200 hours of flying time...not 200 hours in type, but 200 hours TOTAL flying time.  Good grief, that captain was essentially flying solo.

I was wondering along the same line as you, and yet I have seen on the news earlier today that over the last several months, U.S. airline flight crews (presumably very well trained) have reported a number of incidents where a similar control anomaly occurred - 737 Max where the MCAS was causing nose down action when stall was not imminent - but the crews were able to overcome the problem and stabilize the aircraft. So there is little doubt that there is an issue with the MCAS. It is still unknown if a well-trained crew can recover in all instances. It's also unknown if maintenance could be an issue (blockage of the sensors?). So what are the candidate causes? MCAS system faults, crew training, maintenance lapses? I understand that Boeing is already planning modifications to the MCAS (software mods and more sensors), yet they don't even know what the problem is and what is causing it.

Two accidents of the same aircraft in a few months resulting in nearly 300 deaths certainly seems serious enough to ground them until more is known. The fact that nearly every major country in the world, except the US, has prohibited flights of the 737 Max 8 in their airspace is hard to ignore. What if there is a third crash in the U.S. with fatalities? I just think we are currently using a different standard in the U.S. FAA than we have when in the past when we had this much evidence of fatal crashes associated with a particular aircraft model.

1 hour ago, Avidean said:

Canadian Ministry of Transportation just issued safety notice grounding all 737 Max and banning the overflying of Canadian Airspace based on satellite evidence that the erratic flight path was similar to the lion air flight. Bad news for Boeing!

Since now the biggest country still holding out, is the US, apparently the lobbyists that Boeing has funneling money to the  US politicians is having a positive effect on the FAA not grounding the 737. . 

37 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

Since now the biggest country still holding out, is the US, apparently the lobbyists that Boeing has funneling money to the  US politicians is having a positive effect on the FAA not grounding the 737. . 

do you have any evidence that backs up your claim? 

4 minutes ago, 757FO said:

do you have any evidence that backs up your claim? 

They are spending nearly $15m per year on lobbying the US government. It must be doing something for them.

10 minutes ago, 757FO said:

do you have any evidence that backs up your claim? 

Oh please, wake up, do you have any idea how much Boeing pay's lobbyists?   https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/lobby.php?id=D000000100

 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/12/politics/boeing-capitol-hill-lobbying/index.html

 

 

Edited March 13, 20197 yr by Bobsk8

1 hour ago, FunknNasty said:

I’m surprised by the fact that the flight characteristics of the max is totally different than that of previous generations of the 737 due to the forward and raised engine placement on the Max .....the main reason for the new mcas, hasn’t been brought up in this thread.....sorry if I missed it.

It’s not totally different, but just different enough in certain situations to warrant the addition of a new feature. The placement of the new bigger engine was determined by the decision to not redesign the landing gear and wing to accomodate the increased size. This in turn, resulted in a deficiency in stall recovery discovered during flight testing. The deficiency was increased difficulty in avoiding a secondary stall when power was applied during stall recovery. The different thrustline enhanced the nose up pressure when increasing thrust, making the aircraft more susceptible to reentering the stall during recovery. Since moving the engine back to the original position was out of the question, a fix was conjured up by engineers to add a compensation into the flight controls by automatically trimming nose down for up to 10 seconds during a stall.  Unfortunately, the system only took input from only one aoa sensor at a time, leaving open the risk of an inappropriate 10 second nose down trim input should an aoa sensor give erroneous information. One would think that a system such as this would have been designed to receive from both aoa sensors and cutout the system if there is a failure or disagreement from its input channels. This would be how the design convention of similar antistall systems like stick pushers in other aircraft work.

Edited March 13, 20197 yr by KevinAu

Hello

I cannot understand how the MACS could have been designed and then certified  without any redundancy. I thought it was mandatory. One  defective AOA (Lion air) led to a catastrophe: incredible

Yes, I believe that is something they will have to address, instead of just reiterating that there are long established procedures for dealing with a runaway trim, whatever the cause.

4 hours ago, w6kd said:

I was just reading that the FO on Ethiopian 307 had 200 hours of flying time...not 200 hours in type, but 200 hours TOTAL flying time.  Good grief, that captain was essentially flying solo.

Speaking once again from a position of ignorance of how the world of aviation works, how do flight crew amass flight experience?

If both crew members were inexperienced, I would understand the comment.

Persumably at some point, all flight crew have 200 hours of experience.

Should they not be placed with someone with 8000 hours, presumably now regarded as experienced?

On the same subject, how do flight crew amass thousands of hours experience on an aircaft that they have

only had access to for a few months?

Or does the world of aviation turn in a different way?

Edited March 13, 20197 yr by nolonger

They’re all grounded now 

It seems that President Trump has decided to ground all 737 MAX planes in the USA....

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/13/donald-trump-says-he-signed-order-ground-boeing-737-max-8/3152157002/

27 minutes ago, nolonger said:

Speaking once again from a position of ignorance of how the world of aviation works, how do flight crew amass flight experience?

If both crew members were inexperienced, I would understand the comment.

Persumably at some point, all flight crew have 200 hours of experience.

Should they not be placed with someone with 8000 hours, presumably now regarded as experienced?

On the same subject, how do flight crew amass thousands of hours experience on an aircaft that they have

only had access to for a few months?

Or does the world of aviation turn in a different way?

hiring ab intio vs hiring experience. in the usa, airlines hire experience, in the rest of the world, airlines often hire ab initio, that is zero experience that they train to suit.

when hiring experienced, you hire pilots with flighy hours obtained in various ways, instructing, charter, cargo and military. hopefully, the weeding out of poor pilots will have happened at those levels.

when hiring ab intio, the airline rely on other arbitrarily created metrics to hopefully weed out would be poor pilots from beginning your training program. the airline teaches them to fly from cessnas to boeings in a few hundred hours. not unlike the military. that is how 200 hr total time pilots end up in the cockpits of passenger liners.