Boeing 737 Max8 Aircraft Crashes and Investigations [Part 3] 36

[Sparweb]

This is the continuation from:

thread815-445840
thread815-450258

This topic is broken into multiple threads due to the long length to be scrolled, and many images to load, creating long load times for some users and devices. If you are NEW to this discussion, please read the above threads prior to posting, to avoid rehashing old discussions.


Some key references:

Ethiopian CAA preliminary report

Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee preliminary report

The Boeing 737 Technical Site

No one believes the theory except the one who developed it. Everyone believes the experiment except the one who ran it.
STF

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

Ok the none FAA people on the committee will be on first class tickets home and 5 star hotels and billing by the min with a sizable daily allowance. At Boeings expense.

The FAA people will be in the holiday inn and eating at MacDoanlds on federal allowances.

EASA creates the requirements the regulators enforce them if that makes sense. I very much doubt that central EASA carrys the skill set to be able to deal with the issues so will have to sub contract it out to a selection of people from various regulators.

So they will send over a selection of nationality's to represent EASA and then report back.

You guys will know better than me if the FAA is struggling for funding.

 

[saikee119]

The FAA people will be in the holiday inn and eating at MacDoanlds on federal allowances

I doubt that will be the case.

To a layman it would be fair to expect the team doing the certification of a new plane will have at least

(1) a top professional engineer with knowledge on the mechanical components
(2) a top professional engineer with knowledge on airframe structure
(3) a top professional engineer with knowledge on instrumentation and controls or avionics
(4) a top professional in aircraft safety
(5) a top pilot with experience on aircraft similar or close to the one to be certified
(6) a lawyer experienced in enforcement of safety regulations in aviation.
(7) a project manager for the team

This group of professionals will have status commanding remuneration equivalent the highest paid pilot. If they eat at a MacDonalds on business expenses it would not be the norm.

If what you have said previously some years ago it costed 2 million GBP to certify a Saab 2000 sized aircraft to fly world wide and a time scale of say 3 months (similar to the current JATR on 737 Max) I would venture to estimate the cost per above professional 2,000,000/3/7 = GBP 95,238/month or 1,142,000 per annum charge out rate. Assuming a ratio of charge out rate to raw labor rate of say 4.5 the annual salary of such a professional would be about 0.25 million pounds which is not far off from what I expect. For mundane electrical and mechanical engineering consultants the charge out rate to raw labor is about 3 to 3.5 in other industries and I know a newly qualified pilot can command 0.12 million pounds remuneration with a medium size carrier.

These people doing certification will be top dogs and will be fully compensated by their regulatory agencies. Theoretically at such remuneration level they should be immune from any conflict of interest with Boeing.

 

[GregLocock]

Are you referring to professional engineers or Professional Engineers? Given that aviation is an exempt industry...

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

the 2 million was for what's called an air operators certificate which is for when you want to charge money to the public to transport them from A to B.

It has a part for it which includes maint standards and procedures. But also covers training operational control etc etc.

The aircraft used comes with its own certificate of airworthiness which starts life with the OEM certification as it comes out the production hanger. Then its history stays with it until 5 years past its removal of service ie scrapped or written off or parted out. If the paper work history disappears then its virtually impossible to use the aircraft again for public transport.

The systems run in parallel. One for operating the aircraft and the other its physical health and maint. The two are linked and need each other.

Highly paid pilots quite often have to resort to petrol station and fast food on expenses.... usually because they are the only thing open when you finish work at some disgusting hour in the middle of the night. BTW its a bit of a myth that pilots are highly paid these days. The conditions of the First officers are to be honest quiet disgusting you would earn more as a brick layer.

 

[saikee119]

GregLocock,

Not familiar with if PE is mandatory in the design of aircraft in USA but I would have thought the people selected to certify a new plane would need to have considerable experience as well as in-dept technical knowledge in the subject if not already the leader in his/her field.

Certification shouldn't be a one-pass process as the regulatory representatives can refuse certification justified by reasons that can stand up in court. The manufacturer can of course choose to carry out amendments/changes/modifications to seek compliance if it can't fight the technical/safety argument.

 

[3DDave]

Professional Engineering license is not a requirement in Aerospace engineering. Instead of following code compliance, aircraft systems undergo extensive testing.

My opinion is that MCAS got to where it did because one person made a sufficiently compelling case for the limited evaluation that it was never submitted for evaluation outside of creating the software and wiring specifications. I do not believe the potential for pilots to be caught out was ever evaluated and then dismissed for cost savings reasons. Knowingly building a systemic flaw into an aircraft would be insane.

The only way to catch this is to have a parallel team that has no contact also designing an aircraft to the same initial requirements and note where the two teams don't come to the same answers.

Otherwise there comes the problem that the work of the first team is trusted. It takes a particularly hostile team to do nothing but question every decision and it takes a gifted team to understand whether the answers are correct and a team with access to similar levels of resources to verify those answers. By which I mean, another full-up aircraft development company with meaner and smarter people.

But where would those people come from? Boeing and Airbus should already have hired the smartest people interested in designing aircraft. People hostile to aircraft development would be unlikely to have expertise.

I'd suggest that Boeing create their own version of IBM's Black Team.

https://www.themarysue.com/ibm-black-team/

 

[SwinnyGG]

I do not believe the potential for pilots to be caught out was ever evaluated and then dismissed for cost savings reasons. Knowingly building a systemic flaw into an aircraft would be insane.

I would agree with this statement. I'm suspicious that the reasoning for, let's say, a 'reduced' level of exploration/validation of the MCAS concept may have been related to engineering time and budgets, but I do not think that someone saw a hazard and ignored it.

I have a great deal of respect for the engineering done by companies like Boeing and Airbus, and naive or not I think they are all doing their level best. If any of my previous posts have implied that I think there was some negligent or malicious decision making happening at Boeing, that wasn't my intent.

I do hope that this results in the right parties, be it at Boeing or the FAA or wherever else, taking a long look at the approval and validation process for software fixes like this. Developing robust software is an immense challenge, and it's also a significantly younger discipline than mechanical or electrical design. Happenings like this make me think that as far as we've come, we're still not 'there' yet.

 

[Sparweb]

Professional engineering in aerospace:
There are so many differences, I don't know where to start. The ICAO member nations have their own professional accreditation system. Every nation is different, though EASA does carry a very wide umbrella. FAA is very different, while Canada, Australia, China, Japan, Brazil do their own thing when it comes to how they manage the credentials of personnel charged with aircraft and product certification. I should only speak from my personal knowledge; Canada's federal government ministry of transport relies on aerospace engineers who maintain their professional credentials with local professional associations in each province. But some of the provinces are... well... "provincials" who know nothing of aerospace matters and some don't have such a classification on their membership roll. It's best not to talk of such things in the esteemed community such as Eng-Tips.

FWIW, it has always been, and still is, a system geared toward human examination of all decisions, but growing in complexity. Software, and perhaps all digitally controlled hardware, is growing in capability at an exponential rate. Can we ask if it has evolved to the point that there aren't enough humans to go around to review every critical decision, every assessment, every assumption, every test result in proper context? If someone says something about adding more humans to review the analysis then I can easily reply to let the complexity grow more, until yet again there still won't be enough people to go around.

I respect what 3DDave just said, but I'd rather amplify what jgKRI wrote. I believe it's actually just a combination of oversights that led to this problem.
As Alistair as mentioned before, the "swiss-cheese" in the failure barriers lined up, but in this case not in operational practice, but the holes were in the design and conception of the system in the first place. Those holes should have been plugged by compliance with the Fault Tree Analysis if they had done a proper evaluation (SAE ARP 4754 or RTCA DO-178/254) but the system sailed through an analysis that normally supposed to prevent these kinds of errors from getting through.

Which leads to a strange kind of "failure analysis"... what is the likelihood of failure of an engineer to identify and resolve a potential design flaw when conducting a functional hazard analysis?

I swear, if you're an aerospace engineer, you are ROTFL right now.

No one believes the theory except the one who developed it. Everyone believes the experiment except the one who ran it.
STF

 

[verymadmac]

A series of observations that may provide some general insight

According to a senior engineer from Transport Canada complaining about the grand fathering on the 747-8 series, Boeing spent 1200 hours of meetings (not man hours apparently) with the FAA negotiating the certification standard for the 747-8 Series. So this might not be the only airframe type with a few grand fathering issues.

When representatives from the FAA turn up to the design / certification conferences they have here in NZ every couple of years, they seem to express a preference for the EASA system of Company based design approvals than the Designated Engineering Representatives (DER) system currently used (principally it appears due to what they perceive as unwieldiness of the current DER system). Having worked in the NZ system where its sort of a mix of both systems, I don't think there is really any difference, its more about the level of engagement between the FAA and their DERs that matter. I certainly won't trust any NZ companies to run an internal design personal approval program with no oversight.

There are many in the US who would like the FAA to go a fee based system as currently it appears the FAA's certification resources are somewhat rationed (often one open STC application per company, etc).

Its funny, none of the aerospace engineering job titles mentioned so far relating include "certification", because that's typically at-least half of the job.

 

[Spartan5]

The FAA tells CNN it received the four hotline submissions on April 5, and it may be opening up an entirely new investigative angle into what went wrong in the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max commercial airliners -- Lion Air flight 620 in October and Ethiopian Air flight 302 in March.

Among the complaints is a previously unreported issue involving damage to the wiring of the angle of attack sensor by a foreign object, according to the source.

Boeing has reportedly had previous issues with foreign object debris in its manufacturing process; The New York Times reported metal shavings were found near wiring of Boeing 787 Dreamliner planes, and the Air Force stopped deliveries of the Boeing KC-46 tanker after foreign object debris was found in some of the planes coming off the production line.

Other reports by the whistleblowers involve concerns about the MCAS control cut-out switches, which disengage the MCAS software, according to the source.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/26/politics/faa-hotline-reports/index.html

 

[Sparweb]

When representatives from the FAA turn up to the design / certification conferences they have here in NZ every couple of years, they seem to express a preference for the EASA system of Company based design approvals than the Designated Engineering Representatives (DER) system currently used

There are two sides to that particular coin.
DER's usually have more authority granted than the individual members of an ODA (organization design approval),
The ODA's have management systems that oversee the members, which is often missing from DER's in independent practice,

So when the FAA interacts with DER's they are dealing with an independently-minded person with more authority that is based on experience, business practice, and personal risk management. When the FAA interacts with ODA members, they are dealing with a bureaucratic organization much like their own, and many ODA members are isolated from the customer's project nor concerned with the outlook of their company. Do I need to ask you who the FAA engineers find easier to talk to?

No one believes the theory except the one who developed it. Everyone believes the experiment except the one who ran it.
STF

 

[RVAmeche]

Boeing CEO statements during a recent shareholder meeting

 

[TehMightyEngineer]

This video is the best one I've seen showing how a runaway trim looks like in the cockpit and the forces they have to fight to keep the aircraft flying:

https://youtu.be/aoNOVlxJmow

Didn't see this posted here so forgive me if this is a repeat.

Ian Riley, PE, SE
Professional Engineer (ME, NH, VT, CT, MA, FL) Structural Engineer (IL, HI)

 

[Sparweb]

It was posted before. Not a big deal; worth repeating.
Now you owe 2 stars to the first member to post that video, though.

No one believes the theory except the one who developed it. Everyone believes the experiment except the one who ran it.
STF

 

[TehMightyEngineer]

Found them and gave them two stars. Should have guessed, they post in this thread a lot.

Ian Riley, PE, SE
Professional Engineer (ME, NH, VT, CT, MA, FL) Structural Engineer (IL, HI)

 

[itsmoked]

atta boy Teh!

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[Denial]

TME, SparWeb (and Alistair_Heaton).[ ] As nothing more than an academic experiment, I put the partial URL
[ ][ ][ ][ ]aoNOVlxJmow
into Eng-Tips's seach capability.[ ] It surprised me by finding the two posts.

 

[itsmoked]

Denial; About 2 years ago we got a nicely tuned-up search engine going.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[Sparweb]

Thanks TME!


No one believes the theory except the one who developed it. Everyone believes the experiment except the one who ran it.
STF

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

we call the sim the sweat box.....

As an aside and give some background on the training side of pilot life.

In 3 weeks time I have what's called a LPC/OPC check.

It comprises of 1 4 hour session training called LOFT which we have a couple of made up story's which will result in various hardware emergency procedures being run and between the two of us victims we have to work out what's going on and deal with it.

Second day is a license type rating renewal of the instrument rating which is required to fly in Class A airspace and when you can't see out the windows due cloud.

We have loads of engine failures and flying around on one engine, go-arounds, rejected takeoff's evacuations etc. These are done with all the automation working and also what we call raw data which is just the pilot interprating what they see on the instruments and hand flying.

This year is hydraulics and gear failures for me along with the normal engine failures. Which no doubt will have me landing with no flaps at some 175 knts and only emergency brakes which at 28 tons will be 3 km of runway required.

At the end its doing the low visability qualification which allows us to takeoff in 150 meters visibility and land when its cloud at 100ft and visiual range of 300 meters.

And that will be until Dec/January when the next check will be in the sim. We basically have a full proffessional skills check every 6 months.