Page 5 - AAA OCTOBER - DECEMBER 2019 Online Magazine

[ COVER STORY ]

Hazy Future

THE 737 MAX MAY START FLYING AGAIN
IN THE U.S. IN JANUARY NEXT BEFORE
REGAINING THE TRUST OF THE PUBLIC AND
THAT OF REGULATORS IN OTHER REGIONS

Arun Sivasankaran

It is not a good time to be Boeing CEO Dennis on a 737 Max before the two crashes, Muilenburg had a tough
Muilenburg. Just when it seems like Boeing time in the spotlight.
was making progress in its attempts to get the
737 Max back in the air comes news of trou- In the Firing Line
ble for its 737 NG aircraft. A predecessor to Indonesia’s National Transport Safety Committee (NTSC), which
the 737 Max, about fifty 737NG planes have investigated the Lion Air crash that killed the 189 people on board
been grounded after several operators, includ- on October 29, 2018, mainly points fingers at Boeing and the
ing Qantas, Korean Air, Southwest Airlines, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The design and certifica-
Gol Linhas Aéreas, Lion Air, Sriwijaya Air and tion of the 737 Max 8 is the primary cause of the accident, the
Garuda Indonesia Airways, discovered cracks committee said in its report made public in October, days before
on the aircraft. Muilenburg took the heat from lawmakers. “During the design and
For a company that is desperately trying certification of the Boeing 737 8 (MAX), assumptions were made
to shore up its safety reputation, the task of about flight crew response to malfunctions which, even though con-
earning the confidence of operators and the sistent with current industry guidelines, turned out to be incorrect,”
flying public just got a whole lot harder. If that investigators wrote. The design of the Maneuvering Characteristics
wasn’t enough, there was the grilling by law- Augmentation System (MCAS) system itself was a contributing
makers for two straight days, in front of an factor, as it relied on information from a single external sensor,
audience that included people who had lost “making it vulnerable to erroneous input from that sensor.”
family members in the twin crashes that killed Investigations by the committee revealed that Boeing was able
346 people. From admitting at a congressional to design and test its own system without proper oversight or a
hearing that he knew, before the second deadly thorough safety assessment from the FAA. Boeing engineers did
crash of the 737 Max in March, that a test pilot not expect the MCAS system to fail continuously and repeatedly,
had raised questions about the safety of the the report stated, and failed to seriously consider that possibility.
jet, to acknowledging mistakes in the design The cwasn’t the only panel to take Boeing and FAA to task for
of a Max flight-control system and revealing, the two deadly crashes. An international flight safety panel, which
perhaps unwittingly, that he had never flown included representatives from NASA, the FAA and civil aviation

ASIAN AIRLINES & AEROSPACE October/November/December 2019 | 5