Peacedog wrote:Some background information for people outside the aviation industry.
First, aircraft are becoming increasingly automated, particularly those models sold outside the US to developing nations. The primary factor driving this is that worldwide demand for Western standard trained aircrew is outstripping supply. The reality is that many of the aircrew in lesser developed nations have far lower flying hours in many cases and much lower quality training. I've seen pilots flying Airbus equipment in some cases that have as little as 500 flying hours. So, manufacturers responded by making aircraft easier to fly via increased automation. Airbus is leading the way on this for those that care. With increased automation, the ability to respond to anomalies is decreased. But it makes up on the whole when involving lower skill aircrew.
And this leads to the second issue...
Maintenance for these more heavily automated aircraft is really stretching the limits of what most non-First World countries are capable of pulling off. This gets into military grade equipment issues as well, but in general civil aviation is much simpler than cutting edge military grade gear. This is mainly due to a much higher requirement for safety in the civilian market as well as a less stressful operating environment. FYI, gen 5 tech is something only a handful of developed Western countries are capable of employing. Even the Russians at this point have basically given up trying to develop this kind of equipment.
Many air lines use 3rd party off shore maintenance facilities to do the work on the aircraft, the problem being they may not have the training or equipment to actually do the work
So, the black box recordings on at least one of these flight reported problems with flight controls. This could be something unexpected that the automation is incorrectly correcting for. Or, as Steve pointed out, it's more likely a maintenance problem.
Either way, it appears to only impact one variant of the aircraft so far. And, as I mentioned earlier, significant differences may exist between the domestic and international production models of the same variant.
Hopefully, they will figure it out sooner than later. In the meantime, I'd stick with US flagged carriers if you can when flying the 737 Max variant.
Experts Concerned S. Korean Pilots Too Reliant on Technology
Flying computers - that’s how aviation experts describe today’s sophisticated airplanes, which often require little hands-on flying. But they say reliance on automation can lead to danger and confusion when pilots are forced to execute basic manual flying procedures. Some experts call it “automation addiction.”
Captain Vic Hooper says he wasn’t surprised by the crash and that it could have happened anytime since 2000. Hooper flew with Asiana, a South Korean airline, until 2011. As a captain on the 777, the same type of plane that crashed, he found many co-pilots unable to fly a visual approach.
The FAA has told VOA that it has temporarily banned foreign pilots from using visual approaches in San Francisco.
FAA officials took this action after seeing an increase in aborted landings, or go-arounds, by foreign pilots attempting visual approaches, including one by Asiana less than two weeks after the crash.
Pilots tell VOA that air traffic controllers hesitate to approve visual approaches until they know who’s landing the plane.
A former Asiana pilot who spoke with us on condition of anonymity said, on one flight, he was circling a U.S. airport when he called air traffic control to tell them his plane had 23 minutes of fuel before he would be forced to divert to another airport.
The controller asked him a few coded questions first to determine if he was American.
“He says, ‘Okay you’re cleared out of the holding pattern, you’re clear for the visual approach.’ Expats [expatriates] whose first language is English will let the tower know that they speak English and get much more expedited and better handling.”
Vic Hooper agrees.
“Unless they [air traffic controllers] heard a Western voice on the radio, [they] would never offer a visual approach unless there was not any choice.”
In a statement Tuesday, acting FAA administrator Daniel Elwell said the agency is looking at all the available data from 737 operators around the world, and that the review “thus far shows no systematic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding aircraft.” Elwell said the FAA “would take immediate, appropriate action” should such problems be identified. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board both have teams at the crash site outside Addis Ababa to investigate and collect data.
The agency did note in a directive published Monday that it would probably mandate flight-control system enhancements that Boeing is already working on, come April. And after the Lion Air crash, the FAA made a Boeing safety warning mandatory for US airlines.
“We have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX,” Boeing said in its own statement Tuesday. “Based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators.”
A number of US senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Dianne Feinstein of California, have called for the US to ground the aircraft. But it’s the FAA chief who has final say. (Elwell has been the acting administrator since January 2018, though Politico reports that the Trump Administration is close to nominating Delta Air Lines executive Steve Dickson as administrator.) He doesn’t make that decision alone, says Clint Balog, a flight test pilot and human factors expert with the College of Aeronautics at Embry-Riddle University. Any grounding goes through a “semiformal” process, full of discussions with experts on the specific aircraft and crash situation, both in and outside the federal government.
“The FAA looks at all of this information and decides, ‘OK, if it’s just likely that there's a significant problem here, it doesn’t matter what the cost to the traveling public is—we have to put safety first and ground this aircraft,’” Balog says. “However, if they look and say, ‘Well, jeez, grounding this aircraft is going to be a monumental cost to the world and we simply don’t have enough information to know what the risk really is with this aircraft, do we really want to ground it at this point in time?’”
The FAA has grounded aircraft before. In 1979, the FAA grounded all McDonnell Douglas DC-10s (and forbid the aircraft from US airspace) after a crash in Chicago killed 273 people. An investigation found that the problem was maintenance issues, not the aircraft design, and the FAA lifted the prohibition just over a month later.
What I'm saying is that increasing technology is making maintenance much more of a challenge, particularly in the Third World.
"I didn't want to take any chances. We didn't have to make this decision today," he said. "We could have delayed it. We maybe didn't have to make it at all. But I felt it was important both psychologically and in a lot of other ways."
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