In the days after the second Boeing 737 Max crash, no-name pilots and independent writers with obscure blogs out-explained many of the world’s best newspapers. The variance in quality between journalists outsid
Fig. 1. Angle of Attack Sensors Credit: Boeing/Mentourpilot. 3. Why a MCAS on B-737 MAX? On the B-737 MAX there are two AOA sensors, but only one feeds data into the MCAS. In both accidents this sensor seems to have malfunctioned, driving the software to command the nose-down mane...
Congressional hearings on Boeing and the 737 MAX this week didn’t just focus on Boeing’s failures but brought stern criticism of the FAA’s certification process and the decisions that led to MCAS, its reliance on a single Angle of Attack sensor, and not to train pilots on the design. ...
Boeing engineering has been sadly deficient for years. More than a decade ago (Feb 2009) a 737 landing at Schiphol crashed. It wasn’t a MAX, but it was a 737. The cause was traced to a faulty radio altimeter that thought the plane was on the ground so it set the throttle to idl...
The grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX resulted from design flaws with the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that caused two fatal crashes. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner was grounded due to electrical incidents caused by faults in its lithium-ion batteries. The McDonnell Douglas DC-...
The Boeing 737 MAX - Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) accidents have demonstrated how cumulative factors may lead to accidental autonomy. Accidental autonomy emerges when differences in models compete over resources and control. In the operational domain, one manifestation is failure ...
Surprisingly, initial findings found “similarities” between the two accidents related to the anti-stall software of the aircraft. The pilots had a tug of war with the software causing the plane to nose dive.
(Kang et al.,2015). For instance, the reliance of a Boeing 737 Max on a single sensor for its Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) can be considered a defect, whereas accidents caused by a malfunction of the sensor would represent a failure (Travis,2019). This definition ...
The public claim from Boeing top management was: “everything is under control”, a software fix would be implemented in six weeks, so there is no need to ground the 737 MAX airplanes. The possibility that the same flaw of MCAS would lead to another crash was ignored in a way that ...
Abdication of FAA’s oversight responsibility proved fatal by allowing Boeing to portray the 737 Max and its single-point-of failure MCAS system as mere modifications to an existing airframe, thereby avoiding a lengthy and expensive re-certification process. ...