Who Boeing Waters Off Hawaii Rescued?

Who Boeing Waters Off Hawaii Rescued
A 737-200 cargo aircraft operated for Transair by Rhoades Aviation made an emergency landing in the water near Honolulu after reportedly suffering engine trouble. The FAA reports that both crew members have been rescued.

How did Boeing solve MCAS?

The 737 MAX MCAS Software Enhancement The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight control law was designed and certified for the 737 MAX to enhance the pitch stability of the airplane – so that it feels and flies like other 737s.

MCAS is designed to activate in manual flight, with the airplane’s flaps up, at an elevated Angle of Attack (AOA). Boeing has developed an MCAS software update to provide additional layers of protection if the AOA sensors provide erroneous data. The software has been put through hundreds of hours of analysis, laboratory testing, verification in a simulator and numerous test flights.

Before it is finalized, the software will be validated during in-flight certification tests with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) representatives. The additional layers of protection that are being proposed include:

  • Flight control system will now compare inputs from both AOA sensors. If the sensors disagree by 5.5 degrees or more with the flaps retracted, MCAS will not activate. An indicator on the flight deck display will alert the pilots.
  • If MCAS is activated in non-normal conditions, it will only provide one input for each elevated AOA event. There are no known or envisioned failure conditions where MCAS will provide multiple inputs.
  • MCAS can never command more stabilizer input than can be counteracted by the flight crew pulling back on the column. The pilots will continue to always have the ability to override MCAS and manually control the airplane.
  • These updates are expected to reduce the crew’s workload in non-normal flight situations and prevent erroneous data from causing MCAS activation.
  • We continue to work with the FAA and other regulatory agencies on the certification of the software update.

To earn a Boeing 737 type rating certificate, pilots must complete 21 or more days of instructor-led academics and simulator training. To be certified to fly a 737 MAX, a pilots must either complete a 737 MAX specific type-rating course or, if a pilot is already certified to fly the 737NG, they must complete the NG to MAX Differences training.

In preparing for a safe return to service of the MAX, Boeing has proposed a comprehensive training package with new training requirements that will be evaluated and validated by regulators before the aircraft returns to service. After evaluating Boeing’s training proposal, regulators will make the final determination on what the training requirements will be.

Boeing’s training proposal includes a new suite of computer-based training modules, new and updated documentation, and simulator training. These instructional materials are designed to provide 737-type rated pilots with an improved understanding of 737 MAX flight control systems, reinforce their technical knowledge of associated flight deck effects and operational procedures, and restore confidence in the 737 MAX.

We continue to work with regulators as they review the proposed training, and with our customers to understand their training needs and how we can continue to support them as we work to safely return the 737 MAX to service. All primary flight information required to safely and efficiently operate the 737 MAX is included on the baseline primary flight display.

This is true of all our commercial products. Boeing doesn’t put a price on required safety features. Crew procedures and training for safe and efficient operation of the airplane are focused around airplane roll and pitch attitude, altitude, heading and vertical speed, all of which are integrated on the primary flight display.

  • All 737 MAX airplanes display this data in a way that is consistent with pilot training and the fundamental instrument scan pattern that pilots are trained to use.
  • The AOA (angle of attack) indicator provides supplementary information to the flight crew.
  • The AOA disagree alert provides additional context for understanding the possible cause of air speed and altitude differences between the pilot’s and first officer’s displays.

Information for these features is provided by the AOA sensors. There are no pilot actions or procedures during flight which require knowledge of angle of attack.

  1. Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) – flight control law implemented on the 737 MAX to improve aircraft handling characteristics and decrease pitch-up tendency at elevated angles of attack.
  2. Angle of Attack (AOA) – the difference between the pitch angle (nose direction) of the airplane and the angle of the oncoming wind.
  3. Angle of Attack Sensor / Vane – hardware on the outside of the airplane that measures and provides angle of attack information to onboard computers; also referred to as an AOA vane.

Angle of Attack Disagree – a software-based information feature that alerts flight crews when data from left and right angle of attack sensors disagree. This can provide pilots insight into air data disagreements and prompts a maintenance logbook entry.

  • Control law – a set of software that performs flight control function or task
  • FCOM (Flight Crew Operations Manual Bulletin) – supplementary operations information
  • FOTB (Flight Operations Technical Bulletin) – supplementary technical information
  • Speed trim system – a system that uses multiple components to provide additional speed or pitch stability when needed

: The 737 MAX MCAS Software Enhancement

Who from Boeing is going to jail?

Who Boeing Waters Off Hawaii Rescued A screengrab from “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw,” the September 2021 FRONTLINE and New York Times documentary investigating the 737 Max disasters. March 24, 2022, update : A federal jury in Fort Worth, Texas, found Mark Forkner not guilty and acquitted him on all charges on March 23.

  • Forkner remains the only individual to have been criminally charged by the federal government in connection with the flawed 737 Max.
  • On Oct.14, the U.S.
  • Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury had criminally indicted Boeing’s former chief technical pilot for the 737 Max airplane, Mark Forkner, on fraud charges.

The following day, Forkner pleaded not guilty, Reuters reported, Forkner is the only individual to be criminally charged to date in connection with the 737 Max catastrophe, in which planes bearing what would prove to be a fatal design flaw involving the software system MCAS entered commercial service.

Two planes crashed shortly after takeoff within the span of five months in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. The indictment alleged that Forkner provided “materially false, inaccurate and incomplete information” to the Federal Aviation Administration about MCAS and, per the DOJ’s announcement, that he “schem to defraud Boeing’s U.S.‑based airline customers to obtain tens of millions of dollars for Boeing.” “In an attempt to save Boeing money, Forkner allegedly withheld critical information from regulators,” Chad E.

Meacham, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said in the announcement. “His callous choice to mislead the FAA hampered the agency’s ability to protect the flying public and left pilots in the lurch, lacking information about certain 737 MAX flight controls.

The Department of Justice will not tolerate fraud – especially in industries where the stakes are so high.” After an initial court appearance in Fort Worth, Texas, on Oct.15, Forkner attorney David Gerger told the press : “Everyone who was affected by this tragedy deserved a search for the truth, not a search for a scapegoat.

If the government takes this case to trial, the truth will show that Mark did not cause this tragedy, Mark did not lie, and Mark should not be charged.” According to the indictment, Forkner left Boeing in summer 2018. The company has not yet issued a statement.

Forkner’s role at the airplane maker leading up to the crashes was detailed in Boeing’s Fatal Flaw, a September 2021 FRONTLINE documentary with The New York Times that explored what Boeing knew about the potential for disaster with the 737 Max — the fastest-selling jet in Boeing’s history — and when the company knew it.

The documentary also examined flawed oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration. As the film recounts, both the October 2018 and March 2019 737 Max crashes involved MCAS, an automated software system that was supposed to keep people safe but instead contributed to tragic deaths when triggered by a single faulty sensor.

  1. Inside the company, there had been early signs of potential trouble involving MCAS on the new plane, including a 2012 incident in which a Boeing test pilot’s simulated flight of the Max resulted in what he called a catastrophic event when MCAS was activated.
  2. It showed that, if that had been in real life, he have lost the airplane,” Doug Pasternak said in the documentary.

Pasternak led the 2019-2020 congressional investigation into the 737 Max and spoke publicly in Boeing’s Fatal Flaw for the first time about what he had found. “They realize, from that moment on, even a Boeing test pilot may have trouble responding to MCAS.” Yet internal communications explored in the film show that Boeing was determined to maintain the status quo: avoiding potential scrutiny by the Federal Aviation Administration that would add costs; keeping new simulator training for pilots to a minimum; and even requesting that MCAS be removed from pilot training manuals.

Forkner was a key figure in those efforts, sources said in the film. “He had played a definitive role in making sure that there was minimal pilot training on the Max,” New York Times reporter Natalie Kitroeff said in the documentary. Pasternak described instant messages and emails Boeing shared with his committee during its investigation: “In one of these emails that Mark Forkner sent out, he says, ‘I want to stress the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition to Max.’ And he said, quote, ‘Boeing will not allow that to happen.'” New York Times reporter David Gelles described Forkner as a “key liaison between the company and the FAA.” ” He was the person who personally emailed the FAA, asking for MCAS to be removed from the pilot manual,” Kitroeff said.

“That was an important piece of this, because we understood that the FAA really didn’t know that MCAS became more powerful.” According to Gelles, Forkner “was speaking, absolutely, on behalf of the company. This was not some low-level employee. And he was asking for something that was really quite substantial: that a new piece of software that made the plane behave in ways that it previously hadn’t be concealed from the pilots.

  1. This is where the commercial pressures from the executive level come right down to the development of the airplane.” At one point, Gelles said, Forkner received an award for minimizing training on the 737 Max.
  2. Mark Forkner certainly was not a lone actor in what he did,” Pasternak said.
  3. He was following through on a policy by Boeing to ensure that the program did not have to put pilots in a flight simulator.” Months after requesting that MCAS be removed from pilot training manuals, the film recounted, Forkner texted a colleague with a shocking realization.

” This appears to be the moment where Mark Forkner learns that MCAS has been expanded. He writes in that message, ‘I basically lied to the regulators, unknowingly,'” Kitroeff said in the film. The Oct.14 indictment alleged this was when Forkner realized MCAS was kicking in at speeds lower than he and others at Boeing had previously told the FAA.

  • The indictment said Forkner confirmed this with a senior Boeing engineer on the 737 Max program.
  • But he never went back and corrected the record,” Gelles said in the documentary.
  • He never went back and fixed the error.” In other documents, the former Boeing pilot who had written notes assuring MCAS would not be put in training manuals joked about swaying regulators with “Jedi mind-tricking.” Additional documents even showed Forkner dismissing the idea of pilot training for Lion Air.
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” When Lion Air, the airline that ultimately flew the first plane that crashed, was asking for simulator training, he was disparaging them to his colleagues, calling them stupid,” Gelles said in the film. “I mean, seriously?” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), chair of the House Transportation Committee, said in the film.

Did that ever cross their minds, that they were going to let something go into the air that could potentially kill people?” Forkner wouldn’t speak to FRONTLINE in connection with the documentary, but his lawyer told The New York Times reporters that Forkner’s communications with the FAA were honest and that “he would never jeopardize the safety of other pilots or their passengers.” According to the DOJ’s announcement, Forkner, if convicted, could face up to 20 years in prison for each of four wire fraud counts and 10 years each for two fraud counts related to aircraft parts in interstate commerce.

No one other than Forkner has been criminally charged in connection with the failures leading up to the 737 Max crashes. Dennis Muilenberg, the CEO of Boeing at the time of the 737 Max crashes, was dismissed from the company in December 2019. “Senior leaders throughout Boeing are responsible for the culture of concealment that ultimately led to the 737 MAX crashes and the death of 346 innocent people — Mark Forkner’s indictment should not be the end of the accountability for this colossal and tragic failure,” DeFazio said in a statement after the indictment was announced.

Earlier this year, Boeing resolved a criminal charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States brought by the Department of Justice and admitted to “misleading statements, half-truths and omissions” about MCAS. It agreed to pay a $2.5 billion settlement: a nearly $244 million fine, $500 million to the families of the victims and $1.77 billion to compensate the airlines affected by the 20-month grounding of the 737 Max.

Boeing declined to be interviewed for the documentary. In a statement, the company said safety is its top priority and it has worked closely with regulators, investigators and stakeholders “to implement changes that ensure accidents like these never happen again.” Watch Boeing’s Fatal Flaw, the story of how intense market pressure and failed oversight contributed to tragic deaths and a catastrophic crisis for one of the world’s most iconic industrial names, in its entirety above, or stream it in FRONTLINE’s online collection of documentaries, in the PBS Video App or on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel,

Why didn t Boeing tell pilots about MCAS?

Early in the development of the 737 MAX, engineers gathered at Boeing’s transonic wind tunnel in Seattle to test the jet’s aerodynamics using a scale model with a wingspan comparable to that of an eagle. The testing in 2012, with air flow approaching the speed of sound, allowed engineers to analyze how the airplane’s aerodynamics would handle a range of extreme maneuvers. Who Boeing Waters Off Hawaii Rescued This is the story, including previously unreported details, of how Boeing developed MCAS, which played a critical role in two airliners nose-diving out of the sky, killing 346 people in Ethiopia and off the coast of Indonesia. Extensive interviews with people involved with the program, and a review of proprietary documents, show how Boeing originally designed MCAS as a simple solution with a narrow scope, then altered it late in the plane’s development to expand its power and purpose.

Still, a safety-analysis led by Boeing concluded there would be little risk in the event of an MCAS failure — in part because of an FAA-approved assumption that pilots would respond to an unexpected activation in a mere three seconds. The revised design allowed MCAS to trigger on the inputs of a single sensor, instead of two factors considered in the original plan.

Boeing engineers considered that lack of redundancy acceptable, according to proprietary information reviewed by The Seattle Times, because they calculated the probability of a “hazardous” MCAS malfunction to be virtually inconceivable. As Boeing and the FAA advanced the 737 MAX toward production, they limited the scrutiny and testing of the MCAS design.

Then they agreed not to inform pilots about MCAS in manuals, even though Boeing’s safety analysis expected pilots to be the primary backstop in the event the system went haywire. In the wake of the two crashes, despite an outcry from the public and from some pilot and airline industry officials, Boeing has defended the processes behind its MCAS design decisions and refused to accept blame,

The grounding of the MAX has entered its 15th week. Safety officials around the world are scrutinizing the changes to MCAS that Boeing has proposed to ensure such accidents won’t happen again. And they are assessing what training pilots may need on the new system.

Who was blamed for 737 MAX?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two Boeing 737 MAX crashes that killed all 346 passengers and crew aboard were the “horrific culmination” of failures by the planemaker and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a U.S. House panel concluded after an 18-month investigation.

  1. The crashes “were not the result of a singular failure, technical mistake, or mismanaged event,” the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Democratic majority said in its highly critical report released on Wednesday.
  2. They were the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA.” The 737 MAX was grounded in March 2019 after the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 near Addis Ababa which killed all 157 aboard.

In October 2018, a Lion Air 737 MAX had crashed in Indonesia killing all 189 on board. “Boeing failed in its design and development of the MAX, and the FAA failed in its oversight of Boeing and its certification of the aircraft,” the report said, detailing a series of problems in the plane’s design and the FAA’s approval of it.

  1. Boeing said it “learned many hard lessons as a company from the accidents,
  2. And from the mistakes we have made”.
  3. It said it had cooperated fully with the House committee and that revised design work on the 737 MAX had received intensive internal and external review involving more than 375,000 engineering and testing hours and 1,300 test flights.

The FAA said in a statement it would work with lawmakers “to implement improvements identified in its report.” It added it was “focused on advancing overall aviation safety by improving our organization, processes, and culture.” The report said Boeing made “faulty design and performance assumptions” especially regarding a key safety system, called MCAS, which was linked to both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes.

MCAS, which was designed to help counter a tendency of the MAX to pitch up, could be activated after data from only a single sensor. The FAA is requiring new safeguards to MCAS, including requiring it receive data from two sensors, before it allows the 737 MAX to return to service. FILE PHOTO: Boeing 737 Max aircraft are parked in a parking lot at Boeing Field in this aerial photo taken over Seattle, Washington, U.S.

June 11, 2020. REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson/File Photo The report criticized Boeing for withholding “crucial information from the FAA, its customers, and 737 MAX pilots” including “concealing the very existence of MCASfrom 737 MAX pilots.” The FAA “failed to ensure the safety of the traveling public”, the report said.

Lawmakers have proposed numerous reforms to restructure how the FAA oversees aircraft certification. A Senate committee will take up a reform bill Wednesday. Lawmakers suggested Boeing was motivated to cut costs and move quickly to get the 737 MAX to market. “This is a tragedy that never should have happened,” House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio told reporters.

“We’re going to take steps in our legislation to see that it never happens again as we reform the system.” Reporting by David Shepardson; editing by Jason Neely and Mark Potter for-phone-only for-tablet-portrait-up for-tablet-landscape-up for-desktop-up for-wide-desktop-up

Who did Boeing pay the fine to?

The Boeing 737 MAX aircraft is displayed at the Farnborough International Airshow, in Farnborough, Britain, July 20, 2022. REUTERS/Peter Cziborra WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (Reuters) – Boeing Co (BA.N) will pay $200 million to settle civil charges by the U.S.

Securities and Exchange Commission that it misled investors about its 737 MAX, which was grounded for 20 months after two fatal crashes killed 346 people, the agency said on Thursday. Boeing knew after the first crash that a flight control system posed a safety issue, but assured the public that the 737 MAX airplane was “as safe as any that has ever flown the skies,” the SEC said in announcing the settlement.

The SEC also said former Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg had agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges. Both Boeing and Muilenburg did not admit or deny the SEC’s findings, the agency said. A fund will be established for the benefit of harmed investors, it said.

Boeing shares rose 0.4% in after-hours trading. “In times of crisis and tragedy, it is especially important that public companies and executives provide full, fair, and truthful disclosures to the markets,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement. Boeing and Muilenburg “failed in this most basic obligation,” he said.

The SEC charged Boeing and Muilenburg “with making materially misleading public statements following crashes of Boeing airplanes in 2018 and 2019.” Boeing, which noted that it did not admit or deny wrongdoing in the settlement agreement, said it had made “fundamental changes that have strengthened our safety processes” and said the “settlement is part of the company’s broader effort to responsibly resolve outstanding legal matters related to the 737 MAX accidents.” The crashes were linked to a flight control system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).

The SEC said “after the first crash, Boeing and Muilenburg knew that MCAS posed an ongoing airplane safety issue, but nevertheless assured the public that the 737 MAX airplane was ‘as safe as any that has ever flown the skies.'” The first crash, of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia, occurred in October 2018.

After the second crash, in Ethiopia in March 2019, the SEC said, “Boeing and Muilenburg assured the public that there were no slips or gaps in the certification process with respect to MCAS, despite being aware of contrary information.” Boeing has resolved most claims from the two fatal crashes.

  • Last year it acknowledged liability for compensatory damages in lawsuits filed by families of the 157 people killed in the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash.
  • A small number of trials are expected to begin in 2023 to help resolve claims.
  • The Federal Aviation Administration required 737 MAX pilots to undergo new training to deal with MCAS as well as mandating significant new safeguards and other software changes to the flight control system before allowing the planes to return to service.

The crashes cost Boeing more than $20 billion and led Congress to pass sweeping legislation reforming how the FAA certifies new airplanes. Boeing faces a December deadline to win approval from the FAA of the 737 MAX 7 and 10 variants, or it must meet new modern cockpit-alerting requirements.

In January 2021, Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion in fines and compensation to resolve a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation into the 737 MAX crashes. The Justice Department settlement, which allowed Boeing to avoid prosecution, included a fine of $243.6 million, compensation to airlines of $1.77 billion, and a $500 million crash-victim fund over fraud conspiracy charges related to the plane’s flawed design.

The families of some people killed in the Boeing crashes have asked a judge to declare the government violated their legal rights when it reached the settlement. In December 2019, Boeing fired Muilenburg after the company clashed with regulators over the timing of the 737 MAX’s return to service.

  • A lawyer for Muilenburg, who did not admit or deny wrongdoing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
  • Muilenburg departed Boeing with $62 million in compensation and pension benefits but received no severance pay.
  • Boeing and Muilenburg put profits over people by misleading investors about the safety of the 737 MAX all in an effort to rehabilitate Boeing’s image following two tragic accidents that resulted in the loss of 346 lives and incalculable grief to so many families,” said SEC Enforcement Director Gurbir Grewal.
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Last November, Boeing’s current and former company directors reached a $237.5 million settlement with shareholders to settle a lawsuit over the board’s safety oversight of the 737 MAX. Reporting by David Shepardson, Editing by Franklin Paul and Jonathan Oatis Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Where did Bill Boeing get his money?

Early life – Metal plaque, Lenneuferstraße 33, Hagen-Hohenlimburg William Boeing was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Marie M. Ortmann, from Vienna, Austria, and Wilhelm Böing (1846–1890) from Hohenlimburg, Germany, Wilhelm Böing emigrated to the United States in 1868 and initially worked as a laborer.

  • His move to America was disliked by his father and he received no financial support.
  • He later made a fortune from North Woods timber lands and iron ore mineral rights on the Mesabi Range of Minnesota, north of Lake Superior,
  • In 1890, when William was eight, his father died of influenza and his mother soon remarried.

He attended school in Vevey, Switzerland, and returned to the US for a year of prep school in Boston, He enrolled at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, dropping out in 1903 to go into the lumber business.

What was the average age of 9/11 victims?

World Trade Center – September 11 Memorial fountain at base of where one of the towers once stood, and the associated museum at left An estimated 2,606 people who were in the World Trade Center and on the ground perished in the attacks and on the subsequent collapse of the towers,

This figure consisted of 2,192 civilians (including eight EMTs and paramedics from private hospital units); 343 members of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY); and 71 law enforcement officers including 23 members of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), 37 members of the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD), four members of the New York State Office of Tax Enforcement (OTE), three officers of the New York State Office of Court Administration (OCA), one fire marshal of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) who had sworn law enforcement powers (and was also among the 343 FDNY members killed), one member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), one member of the New York Fire Patrol (FPNY), and one member of the United States Secret Service (USSS).

This included a bomb-sniffing dog named Sirius, who was not included in the official death toll. The average age of the dead in New York City was 40. In the buildings, the youngest victim was Richard Pearlman, an 18-year-old emergency medical technician, and the oldest was Albert Joseph, a 79-year-old maintenance worker from Morgan Stanley. The Tribute in Light on September 11, 2014, the thirteenth anniversary of the attacks, seen from Bayonne, New Jersey, The tallest building in the picture is the new One World Trade Center.

Are 737 Max fixed now?

Boeing – Stock Code: BA Date Founded: 1916-07-15 CEO: Dave Calhoun Headquarters Location: Chicago, USA Key Product Lines: Boeing 737, Boeing 747, Boeing 757, Boeing 767, Boeing 777, Boeing 787 Business Type: Planemaker

Since the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX was lifted in November 2020, the airplane has made a strident return to the fleets of dozens of airlines around the globe. Despite all the worries about the reputational damage done to the type from the two high-profile accidents, Boeing’s flagship narrowbody has been inducted back into service with confidence. Around 45 airlines are flying the MAX today. Photo: Lukas Souza | Simple Flying With around 45 airlines flying the MAX today, the aircraft has been thoroughly put through its paces over the last year and a half. So how is it performing? Simple Flying caught up with Stan Deal, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, who told us, “The 737 MAX fleet has operated for 1.8 million flight hours – about 800,000 flights – since November 2020.

Fleet reliability is above 99.5% – that is actually where the Next-Generation 737 was at, so it’s on par with the airplane it’s replaced.” Schedule reliability of 99.5% is an impressive number indeed. In effect, this means that 99.5% of the flights due to be operated by a 737 MAX have been conducted as planned (not accounting for interruptions caused by external factors).

It’s just 0.1 percentage point off the 737 NG and A320neo, Who Boeing Waters Off Hawaii Rescued Operators are enjoying reliability of more than 99%. Photo: Getty Images

How did Boeing handle the 737 MAX crisis?

When two of Boeing’s new 737 MAX passenger jets crashed within five months of each other in late 2018 and early 2019, killing a total of 346 people in Ethiopia and Indonesia, the company faced the worst crisis in its 100-year history. According to reports, an automated flight-control system had sent the airplanes into nosedives.

  1. The entire MAX fleet was grounded for 20 months.
  2. After Boeing made changes in design, software and crew training, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the 737 MAX to resume flights in December.
  3. Ahead of that, Gordon Johndroe, vice president of global media relations and public affairs for the Chicago-based aircraft manufacturer, spoke to members of PRSA’s Corporate Communications Professional Interest Section in a Nov.5 webinar.

Here, he shares in his own words what the 737 MAX experience has taught him about crisis management:

How did Boeing fix the battery problem?

Resolving the problems – The NTSB report blamed several parties: the Japanese battery manufacturer for design issues, Boeing for failure to consider and test battery failure, and the FAA for not requiring tests. The immediate solution for the aircraft was to encase the battery in a fireproof box and add venting for any possible smoke.

The battery voltage for charging was also reduced. With this done, the FAA allowed US 787s to return to service from April 19th 2013. Other regulators did the same. Lithium-ion batteries continue to be used in many aircraft. After the 787 issues, Airbus considered switching batteries for the A350 to standard nickel-cadmium batteries.

These are heavier but would avoid the potential new problems. Ultimately, it decided to also use lithium-ion batteries. The 787 battery problems are a rare case of an entire type being grounded for safety issues. There is plenty more to discuss here – and other items raised by the NTSB report.

Did Boeing disable MCAS?

Movable horizontal stabilizer of the 737 MAX The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System ( MCAS ) is a flight stabilizing feature developed by Boeing that became notorious for its role in two fatal accidents of the 737 MAX, which killed all 346 passengers and crew among both flights.

  1. Systems similar to the Boeing 737 MCAS were previously included on the Boeing 707 and Boeing KC-46, a 767 variant.
  2. On the 737 MAX, MCAS was intended to mimic the flight behavior of the previous generation of the series, the Boeing 737 NG,
  3. During MAX flight tests, Boeing discovered that the position and larger size of the engines tended to push the nose up during certain maneuvers.

Engineers decided to use MCAS to counter that tendency, since major structural redesign would have been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Boeing’s goal was to have the MAX certified as another 737 version, which would appeal to airlines with the reduced cost of pilot training.

  1. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved Boeing’s request to remove a description of MCAS from the aircraft manual, leaving pilots unaware of the system when the airplane entered service in 2017.
  2. After the Lion Air crash in 2018, Boeing and the FAA, still not revealing MCAS, referred pilots to a revised checklist procedure that must be performed in case of a malfunction.

Boeing then received many requests for more information and revealed the existence of MCAS in another message, and that it could intervene without pilot input. According to Boeing, MCAS was supposed to compensate for an excessive nose up angle by adjusting the horizontal stabilizer before the aircraft would potentially stall,

  1. Boeing denied that MCAS was an anti- stall system, and stressed that it was intended to improve the handling of the aircraft.
  2. After the Ethiopian Airlines crash in 2019, Ethiopian authorities stated that the procedure did not enable the crew to prevent the accident, which occurred while a fix to MCAS was under development.

Boeing admitted MCAS played a role in both accidents, when it acted on false data from a single angle of attack (AoA) sensor. In 2020, the FAA, Transport Canada, and European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) evaluated flight test results with MCAS disabled, and suggested that the MAX might not have needed MCAS to conform to certification standards.

How did Boeing respond to Lion Air crash?

EVERETT, Wash. — The artifacts displayed in a museum at Boeing’s corporate campus are meant to show how tragic accidents in the company’s history have given rise to major advances in airplane safety. A wristwatch frozen at 6:56 honors the moment when Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashed into a mountain in 1985, a deadly crash that led to improved repair protocols across the industry.

A photograph shows the 18-foot hole that ripped open an aging Aloha Airlines jet mid-flight in 1988 and swept a flight attendant to her death; this prompted new limits on the number of times one plane is permitted to fly. Boeing opened the museum to employees in 2017 and this year added a fountain honoring the 346 people who died in the two recent crashes of 737 Max jets.

The memorial says nothing about what caused the crashes or what lessons Boeing has learned from them. “It’s too early to tell,” John Hamilton, chief engineer of Boeing’s commercial planes division, said during a tour through the facility in early October.

  • The crashes, he said, are still “under investigation.” One year after rescuers hoisted fragments of the wreckage of Lion Air Flight 610 out of Indonesia’s Java Sea, Boeing has apologized for the loss of life but has not detailed what mistakes it made in its design of the 737 Max.
  • Indonesian authorities’ 320-page final report on the accident, released Friday, faults Boeing for developing a powerful flight-control system called MCAS that relied on a single problematic sensor, and for failing to adequately inform pilots and regulators how it works.

The report, which also cited problems with Lion Air’s maintenance and lapses on the part of a Florida sensor manufacturer, added to a growing body of evidence feeding public concerns about safety oversight at Boeing. Boeing’s response to the public uproar over the 737 Max follows a historical pattern for the company, according to interviews with 11 former employees, government officials and aviation safety experts, all of whom worked on crash investigations involving Boeing.

For decades, the aerospace giant has tried to carefully shape public perceptions around the causes of plane crashes — both to limit its legal liability and to maintain the confidence of customers, employees and investors in the integrity of its planes, those interviewed said. The company has earned a reputation in the aviation community for withholding information, favoring theories of pilot errors over product flaws and being slow to make engineering changes to planes that could prevent future crashes, said Jim Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that oversees investigations into all crashes that occur in the United States.

” In my opinion, they are just not transparent with factual information,” Hall said. Gordon Johndroe, a Boeing spokesman, acknowledged that “we know we need to be more transparent with information.” However, Johndroe said in a statement: “Boeing has cooperated fully with accident investigators to understand the root causes of all accidents.

  • We are committed to sharing data to improve the overall safety of the transportation system — which has undeniably improved over the last three decades.” Chief executive Dennis Muilenburg will face questions from U.S.
  • Lawmakers this week at a Senate hearing on Tuesday and a House hearing on Wednesday — part of Boeing’s campaign to win back the trust of regulators and the flying public amid a crisis that has grounded hundreds of planes, prompted a probe by the Justice Department’s criminal division and halted sales of the company’s flagship jetliner.
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“We know we made mistakes and got some things wrong. We own that, and we are fixing them,” Muilenburg planned to say in his opening remarks to the Senate, according to a copy of his prepared testimony provided by Boeing. He did not elaborate on what mistakes the company made.

Boeing and the Justice Department have declined to comment on any possible federal investigation. In response to the Lion Air report, Boeing said it has made changes to the 737 Max to “prevent the flight control conditions that occurred in this accident from ever happening again,” including activating MCAS only when two separate sensors agree the plane is approaching a stall.

The company said it is updating crew manuals and pilot training “to ensure every pilot has all of the information they need to fly the 737 MAX safely.” Because Boeing planes dominate the sky, the company has more experience with crashes than anyone else.

Boeing commercial jets have been involved in more than 240 fatal accidents over the past 60 years, according to the company’s own research, nearly as many as all other active manufacturers combined. Boeing makes two of the three most produced planes of all time — the 737, the Airbus A320 and the 777 — and its planes have historically had some of the lowest accident rates in the industry.

Boeing draws on this experience every time a plane goes down, dedicating millions of dollars, hundreds of staff, state-of-the-art flight simulators and other resources to assist with major investigations. Jim Hall led the NTSB during the 1990s, when a five-year investigation concluded that a malfunction in the Boeing 737’s rudder system most likely caused two fatal crashes, resulting in a total of 152 deaths.

  • Boeing declined to follow an NTSB recommendation to modify the rudder system after the first crash, in 1991, and repeatedly argued that a pilot was to blame for a second crash in 1994 despite strong similarities between the two incidents.
  • Over several years, Boeing investigators built a case that one of the pilots of 1994’s USAir Flight 427 overreacted to turbulence and slammed his foot on a pedal, causing a loss of control.

The NTSB determined in 1999 that a defect with the rudder’s hydraulic valve was the “most likely” cause. At the time of the final report, Boeing maintained that the rudder failure could not be replicated, despite years of attempts by investigators, and the Federal Aviation Administration said questions remained unanswered about the accident.

The FAA directed Boeing to upgrade the rudder system in all 737s — a complex and costly task the company completed in 2008. “When they run into a problem like the rudder, it is very difficult for them to step back and look at it in a critical way,” Peter Goelz, a former NTSB administrator, said of Boeing.

“That represents the fundamental philosophy of the company: They designed a good plane and wouldn’t put it in the air if it wasn’t.” When an Aloha Airlines plane ruptured in 1988, resulting in the death of flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing, Boeing blamed the air carrier for failing to address corrosion of the plane’s metal fuselage.

  1. The NTSB’s final report faulted Aloha Airlines for poor maintenance but also said Boeing and the FAA knew about the problem of corrosion and cracking from overuse of the 737 many years before the incident.
  2. Boeing should have issued a “terminating action,” a mandatory fix for all operators of affected airplanes, and the FAA should have required it, the report said.

After another crash of a Boeing commercial jet in Thailand in 1991, the company was slow to admit a flaw in the plane’s design had caused the crash, according to an essay in the Guardian written by Niki Lauda, the owner of the airline that operated the downed airplane.

Lauda, also a well-known Formula One driver, said he visited Boeing offices and demanded that the company explain it made a mistake that caused the plane’s thrust reverser, a braking mechanism, to mistakenly deploy mid-flight, causing a loss of control that led to the deaths of all 223 people on board.

“What really annoyed me was Boeing’s reaction once the cause was clear,” Lauda wrote in 2006. “Boeing did not want to say anything. It was absolutely clear why the plane had crashed. But the legal department at Boeing said they could not issue a statement.” At Boeing’s production facility in Renton, Wash., work on the 737 Max presses on.

A small city of engineers works around the clock building more than a dozen planes at a time, completing one to two new 737 Max per day. In the early morning hours, completed jets are towed off the production line and flown to one of Boeing’s storage facilities in Washington state or San Antonio, where they sit waiting for the regulatory grounding to be lifted.

Boeing executives have defended the company’s design and manufacturing process in court rooms, news conferences, analyst calls and internal company meetings over the past year, repeating the message that the 737 Max met the company’s rigorous standards for safety and suggesting that pilots on both flights could have prevented the accidents if they had followed protocols. Satellite images taken from March 2019 to July 2019 of Boeing Field in Seattle show 737 Max airplanes accumulating during the worldwide grounding of the jet. Images provided by Planet Labs. That opinion conflicts with the conclusions of Indonesian authorities, who said Boeing’s design decisions on the 737 Max directly contributed to the crash.

Boeing made incorrect assumptions about how pilots would respond to MCAS, a software system that was vulnerable to error because it relied on a single angle-of-attack sensor, the report said. A separate report earlier this month by the Joint Authorities Technical Review, an international panel of aviation safety experts, found Boeing provided regulators vital information about MCAS in a “fragmented” fashion, leading to an “inadequate awareness” of the system by authorities tasked with overseeing the plane’s safety.

Boeing spokesman Johndroe said the company understands that “crews felt MCAS should have been called out explicitly in the flight crew operations manual,” and it plans to “review the recommendations of the JATR report and the accident reports.” The FAA recently asked Boeing why it waited several months to bring forward messages that show high-level executives appearing to discuss concerns with the MCAS years before the crashes.

In a series of 2016 text messages only recently shared by Boeing, Mark Forkner, the former flight test engineer for the 737 Max, wrote about an “egregious” problem he experienced while testing MCAS in a simulator and said he “basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)” about it. The FAA said in a statement that it “finds the substance of the document concerning” and is “disappointed that Boeing did not bring this document to our attention immediately upon its discovery.” Boeing says it did provide these text messages to investigators earlier this year and says Muilenburg has called the FAA to address the agency’s concerns.

Forkner’s attorney has said the text messages referred to a problem with Boeing’s simulator rather than the functionality of the flight-control system itself. Boeing employees are trained to avoid discussing safety in ways that may open the company up to liability, former employees said.

New workers are given a one-day seminar from Perkins Coie, Boeing’s outside law firm, on how to “watch your language” when discussing and documenting anything involving safety, said one former employee who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal company matters. Attorneys review the public statements prepared by Boeing’s crash investigators and have suggested avoiding words like “failure,” a word that means different things to engineers and lawyers, said another former employee who was not authorized to discuss company matters.

Many companies exposed to the legal risks of product liability exercise caution when making statements about safety, said Christopher Hart, a former NTSB chairman who led the JATR international safety group in its recent report on the 737 Max. Curtis Ewbank, a Boeing engineer who filed an internal whistleblower complaint this year, alleged the company rejected a safety feature in the development of the 737 Max that may have prevented the crashes.

In a copy of his complaint reviewed by the Seattle Times, Ewbank said the company has “a suppressive cultural attitude towards criticism of corporate policy — especially if that criticism comes as a result of fatal accidents.” Boeing says it encourages employees to come forward with any concerns and has recently expanded its internal anonymous reporting system to elevate any potential problems with safety.

Boeing also named a new internal safety czar to oversee safety reviews and a new board member with experience in aviation safety. Hamilton said the safety museum in Everett is part of an effort to get employees thinking about their responsibility to build safe planes.

  1. When they come through here, I want them to come out thinking: ‘What am I going to do different? How am I going to make a difference going forward?’ ” he said.
  2. Some people who have lost friends and family members in plane crashes say Boeing’s resistance to admitting mistakes prevents it from making planes safer.

The company failed to recognize the urgency of the MCAS problem after the Indonesian accident, leading to a disaster in Ethiopia five months later, said Michael Stumo, whose 24-year-old daughter died in the Ethiopian crash. “Our daughter died in vain,” he said.

  1. Family members of people who died in 737 Max crashes are in settlement negotiations with Boeing.
  2. At an Oct.17 court hearing in Chicago, the company said it had settled 17 cases related to Lion Air.
  3. Boeing has separately set up a $100 million relief fund to support families.
  4. A group of family members of the victims of USAir Flight 427 still gather for a memorial service each September in a cemetery near Pittsburgh.

No bodies had been fully recovered after the crash, so the scattered remains of the 132 deceased were collected and spread across 40 caskets. Insurers for Boeing and USAir paid up to $25 million to settle the wrongful-death claims of each victim, with neither company admitting fault.