Lionair 610 crash

[amaroo]

Wonder if Boeing self insure...

 

[juddles]

Wonder if Boeing self insure...

I suspect they have a huge and extremely well paid legal branch - not just to respond to incidents, but to very proactively guide legislation.....

 

[amaroo]

I suspect they have a huge and extremely well paid legal branch - not just to respond to incidents, but to very proactively guide legislation.....

Looks like they’re going to need it + some!

 

[oz_mark]

Really? A bulletin that says RTFM is a bit pointed, I thought.

Working in the industry I do, I can smell butt covering wording at 100 paces!

I don't see the need for that at all....

We'll see...

 

[MEL_Traveller]

Wonder if Boeing self insure...

It seems Global Aerospace is boeing’s underwriter, With four companies standing behind them.

 

[Quickstatus]

Boeing has introduced a very ugly unintended consequence from making a minor tweak to reflect a perceivrd issue from slightly larger engines.

It is the philosophy that allowed installation of software that was trying to "help" the pilot which he did not want nor need, nor even knew of the existence of.

The MAX design mainly centres around larger diameter higher bypass and more powerful turbofan jets as the main element that improves fuel economy - the main selling point of the Max.

The consequence of this and the way the engines need to be mounted to achieve ground clearance on an existing airframe is that it has a stronger than previously significant tendency to pitch up when accelerating forward. The additional systems installed are to moderate these effects. Certainly not a perceived issues or something that the pilots would not want

The implementation seems to be designed to work in the background without pilot even needing to know about it. That the pilots do not need to know - like they don’t know every detail about the aircraft is the first flaw in the design

The second design flaw is that it does not use the same flight control surface that the pilot uses to control pitch but actually adds Stabiliser movement as a second flight control surface controlling pitch.

The problem is that pilots don’t use trim to pitch the aircraft nose up or down - they use the elevators, and the Stabilisers are much more powerful aerodynamically than the elevators. Reminds me of the Men in Black movie when one of the MiB is given a tiny pistol, while his friend is given the Blaster. Here the computer is given the much more powerful flight control surface while the pilot is given the teensy weensy elevators. Who wins?

 

[serfty]

Article regarding Loinair from the "Straits Times":

'Spend the minimum': How Lion Air hid equipment failures and beat regulators

JAKARTA (NYTIMES) - The government safety inspector had spent all night at the Makassar airport, in eastern Indonesia, several years ago, poring over a Lion Air jet that suffered a hydraulic failure.

Telling airline employees that the plane was to be grounded until the problem was fixed, the inspector went back to a hotel for a quick shower.

When the inspector returned, the plane was on the runway, about to take off.

Furious, the inspector demanded that the passengers disembark. But a supervisor with Lion Air explained how the airline had gone over the inspector's head: Federal transportation officials in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, had given permission for takeoff. The plane was in the air minutes later. ...

...
Captain Hasan Basri, a pilot for Lion Air, said that two years ago, he checked the logbook to find that the weather radar nestled in the nose of the plane he was to fly wasn't working.

The problem should have been fixed within 10 days. But Capt Hasan said the carrier had a habit of simply moving the faulty radar to another plane.

As the clock wound down on the next 10 days, the radar would then be switched to another plane, he said, in a dangerous game of hot potato. ...

 

[Quickstatus]

Despite fingers are being pointed at Boeing, some need to be pointed at the LCC's who operate at the edges of the safety envelope and seem to get away with it - the cheap and nasty ones.

Unfortunately some only find out about it after the fact.

 

[Archphoto]

NYT reporting on black box data:

Black Box Data Reveals Pilots’ Struggle to Regain Control

 

[AviatorInsight]

NYT reporting on black box data:

Black Box Data Reveals Pilots’ Struggle to Regain Control

I had a feeling, and have been talking with colleagues over this, that Boeing will just come back and say “but there were already existing procedures for an encounter such as this” pointing the finger to the flight crew who are unable to defend themselves about the runaway trim.

 

[oz_mark]

Despite fingers are being pointed at Boeing, some need to be pointed at the LCC's who operate at the edges of the safety envelope and seem to get away with it - the cheap and nasty ones.

Unfortunately some only find out about it after the fact.

Seems to be plenty of blame to be shared around with this one. If this problem was going to surface, it wasn't the best operator to find out about it.

But still, it's Boeing and the regulators that decide where the edge is.

 

[Major]

I hope this is all sorted before VA receive their first MAX aircraft.

Not sure when but I think the end of next year

 

[moa999]

First report
(Rehosted by FR24)
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-c ... Report.pdf

 

[MEL_Traveller]

From reading the first part of the report doesn't it seem to suggest there was something wrong with this particular airframe? Other max aircraft are presumably in operation but haven't experienced the same issue. The sensor was replaced, but still triggered during the operaion of this aircraft. Unless Lion happened to aquire a batch of faulty AoA sensors?

 

[jb747]

Very interesting reading.

I may have missed it, but the previous flight's fault write up didn't mention the fact that the stabiliser power had been cut off, nor was anything signed off about it. It wasn't faulty, simply behaving as the MCAS was supposed to, but if entered it would have had to be written off somehow. Who put the switches back to normal?

 

[Quickstatus]

Who put the switches back to normal?

Could the Stab trim cutoff switches be pulled back to On as part of the Preflight checklist/s?

Is the Stab cutoff switch in Off position an abnormal condition which would cause a engineers comment?. Or does some part of the testing require the switches to be in the On position? Or maybe not even noticed by engineers?

 

[jb747]

Could the Stab trim cutoff switches be pulled back to On as part of the Preflight checklist/s?

Is the Stab cutoff switch in Off position an abnormal condition which would cause a engineers comment?. Or does some part of the testing require the switches to be in the On position? Or maybe not even noticed by engineers?

They are never in the off position. So, whilst a pre-flight would almost certainly pick up the position, you'd have to ask why they were off in the first place. It's a bit like finding a fire switch has been pulled. You wouldn't just push it back and move on.

 

[moa999]

Anything to be made of the fact that they moved back from Flaps 0 to Flaps 5 for 5 minutes early in the flight (which I believe may prevent MCAS) but then back to Flaps 0 for the remainder. We

 

[Quickstatus]

They are never in the off position. So, whilst a pre-flight would almost certainly pick up the position, you'd have to ask why they were off in the first place. It's a bit like finding a fire switch has been pulled. You wouldn't just push it back and move on.

My reading suggests that the pilots of the flight prior to the event flight did not informed the engineers that they had to move Cutoff switch to off.
That flight was so abnormal that it required a PAN-PAN, but the report in the AFML did not reflect the gravity of that abnormality. I don’t understand that incongruity.

 

[jb747]

Anything to be made of the fact that they moved back from Flaps 0 to Flaps 5 for 5 minutes early in the flight (which I believe may prevent MCAS) but then back to Flaps 0 for the remainder. We

The configuration should have been left static, until they'd worked out the issue. From the query about speed to ATC, I wondered if the retraction might not have been because they suddenly realised they'd oversped them (who cares really). 0 to 5.... I don't know what prompted that.