Boeing Faces Safety Questions After Second 737 Crash In Five Months

[rainman + 263]

Boeing's bestselling passenger jet is facing increased scrutiny after being involved in two deadly crashes in less than five months, a situation that threatens to tarnish the US plane maker's reputation for safety. Chinese aviation authorities on Monday told airlines in the country to ground all their Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, citing the need for "strict control of safety risks." Some individual airlines are taking similar action elsewhere. And Boeing (BA) has postponed the debut of its new 777X jetliner, which was scheduled for this week, as it deals with the fallout from Sunday's disaster in Ethiopia. The flurry of negative headlines unsettled investors. Boeing shares dropped nearly 9% in premarket trading early Monday in New York. All 157 people on board a 737 MAX 8 operated by Ethiopian Airlines were killed when the plane crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday morning. In late October, a 737 MAX 8 flown by Lion Air went down off the coast of Indonesia, killing 189 people.Both the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air planes were brand-new aircraft. And both crashed minutes into flight. Ethiopian Airlines said Monday that it was grounding its fleet of 737 MAX planes as an "extra safety precaution," and Cayman Airways, the main carrier of the Cayman Islands, said it would do the same until "more information is received.

[pinto + 293]

Bad! Something is not good. It will take a year to analyze this crash.But, don't jump to conclusions before the end of investigation.

[Pavel + 384]

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

They have to err on the side of caution, can't afford to not jump to conclusions.

[damirUSBiH + 327]

5 minutes ago, pinto said:

Bad! Something is not good. It will take a year to analyze this crash.But, don't jump to conclusions before the end of investigation.

Unfortunately, 157 people died.... “The plane, which was only four months old, had flown in from Johannesburg earlier the same morning and had undergone safety checks, according to The Washington Post.”

[Pavel + 384]

Actually, B777 has a very good safety record. 
There a lot of things needed to be explained by Boeing right now. This 2 fatal accident are happened in quite close to each other....

[rainman + 263]

Human lives are worth more than billions....

[ThunderBlade + 231]

Boeing said on Monday the investigation into the Ethiopian Airlines crash is in its early stages and there is no need to issue new guidance to operators of its 737 MAX 8 aircraft based on the information it has so far. “Safety is our number one priority and we are taking every measure to fully understand all aspects of this accident, working closely with the investigating team and all regulatory authorities involved,” a Boeing spokesman said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

[shadowkin + 584]

@Pavel 

Your stats would be more helpful if they included the airline operators, fatalities due to pilot error or mechanical error, and miles flown. In fairness I haven't seen a (free) convenient graph with this info myself. FWIW the majority of airline crashes are due to pilot error.

Here is some more info. If you think Boeing manipulated their data I tend to doubt it since they'd be ripped to shreds by everyone and would reflect badly on them and it's pretty hard to hide a plane crash. Correct me if I'm wrong.

As you can see US/Canadian operators are by far the safest compared to the rest of the world. There were almost 110 times more fatalities on non-US/Canadian operators from 2007-2016 and 4 times more fatalities from 1959-2016. Boeing airplanes included in these stats have flown 70% of all flight hours since 1959.

In other words it strongly suggests, surprise, maintenance and pilot training are big factors in airline crashes which corresponds with the stat that most crashes are due to pilot error.

The other recent Boeing 737 crash was an Indonesian carrier.

Indonesia was only recently allowed to fly to the US (ban lifted in 2016). EU also lifted a ban on the remaining Indonesia airlines in 2016. Unfortunately I think this will turn out to be a mistake.

No pun intended but I wouldn't be caught dead flying on any carrier from Africa or the ME or even India or China.

If you fly on carriers from US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, or Australia you're in good hands. Otherwise all bets are off.

 

Edited March 11, 2019 by shadowkin

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

8 hours ago, Pavel said:

Nice table.  Now, perhaps, a little better data.  Give the A320 another 20 years and let's look at the numbers again.  But, to be honest, all aircraft designs are safer in this day and age, and getting better every day, so the statistics should continue to improve for all operating and future models of aircraft.

 

Edited March 11, 2019 by Dan Warnick

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

By comparison to road crash fatalities, aviation is still far safer:

ROAD SAFETY FACTS

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

Suspiciously, the first column says number CURRENTLY operating. The next column says fatal accidents, but what was the denominator? The number currently flying or (better) the number That Have Flown? Given how popular and how long the 737 has been in production, I suspect the Real "number" is dramatically higher

10 hours ago, Pavel said:

 

[Illurion + 894]

15 hours ago, Pavel said:

both of the planes we are discussing are the new MAX8's......

How many of the "4644"  Boeing 737's are  MAX8's ....?

Edited March 12, 2019 by Illurion

[Illurion + 894]

6 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

By comparison to road crash fatalities, aviation is still far safer:

ROAD SAFETY FACTS

agreed.

both of the crashes involve new Boeing 737 Max8's.........

Ten bucks says that when this is resolved,  IF it is a Boeing issue,  they will find it is some NEW FEATURE THAT IS ONLY BEING ADDED TO MAX8'S.............

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

1 hour ago, Illurion said:

agreed.

both of the crashes involve new Boeing 737 Max8's.........

Ten bucks says that when this is resolved,  IF it is a Boeing issue,  they will find it is some NEW FEATURE THAT IS ONLY BEING ADDED TO MAX8'S.............

There are reportedly between 350-387 737 Max's operating worldwide (China grounded their total fleet of about 96 aircraft yesterday, as did some other carriers).

For the Lion Air crash:

Nervous reaction to Ethiopian crash creates uncertainty for Boeing

(Excerpt)

Actions taken after Lion Air crash

While Monday’s notice from the FAA to MAX operators put off any action on the Ethiopian crash, it itemized a series of actions undertaken following the Lion Air crash.

A preliminary investigation into that accident pointed to a faulty “angle of attack” (AOA) sensor, which then activated a new flight control system on the MAX — called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) — that repeatedly pushed the nose of the aircraft down.

The FAA’s actions in response include an airworthiness directive in November that informed pilots of the standard procedure to handle a malfunction of that flight control system and ongoing work with Boeing to approve a redesign of the system that will enhance its safety.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

1 hour ago, Illurion said:

both of the planes we are discussing are the new MAX8's......

How many of the "4644"  Boeing 737's are  MAX8's ....?

It's probably better if you go by the table I added above for the total 737s in service, but here is an excellent table published by active.boeing.com where you can see the total 737 MAX deliveries is 350 out of 5011 orders so far.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

My table again:

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

9 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

By comparison to road crash fatalities, aviation is still far safer

Ah, but you know what they say about this comparison: your chances of surviving a car crash are a lot better.

I'm beginning to suspect there's a bit of overreliance on software and this could be problematic. 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

9 minutes ago, Marina Schwarz said:

Ah, but you know what they say about this comparison: your chances of surviving a car crash are a lot better.

I'm beginning to suspect there's a bit of overreliance on software and this could be problematic. 

Sorry Marina, I have to call BS on that.  Because.......your chances of being in a car crash are a lot higher.  After that, your chances of being in a car crash AND DYING are far higher as well.  1.25 million deaths per year?  Versus less than 100,000 deaths by airplanes in the last 50 years?

To your second point, you may be right.  Fact is, there is an acute shortage of pilots in the world and it is only getting worse.  Therefore, mass pilot training with as little reliance on the pilot as non-humanly possible is the name of the game now, IMHO anyway.

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

But I guess you'll need to factor in the chances of being in a deadly car crash versus a deadly plane crash. Also, the ratio between flights and car trips needs to be taken into account to get a relatively accurate picture of risk. I don't believe there are as many flights in the world daily as there are car trips. It would be interesting to see if anyone's tried to do that.

Why the shortage of pilots? I've been reading up on the topic of commercial air travel recently and I gather the training is brutal and expensive. Can't anything be done about that instead of leaning more and more on software? Another interesting topic...

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

6 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said:

But I guess you'll need to factor in the chances of being in a deadly car crash versus a deadly plane crash. Also, the ratio between flights and car trips needs to be taken into account to get a relatively accurate picture of risk. I don't believe there are as many flights in the world daily as there are car trips. It would be interesting to see if anyone's tried to do that.

Odds are someone has.  In fact, oddly enough, someone has. 

According to the Insurance Information Institute.

Odds of dying from accidental injuries

All motor vehicle accidents - 103 to 1

Air and space transport accidents - 10,764 to 1

Therefore, the odds of dying in a car accident are much better, if you will.  However......

How many car journeys are made globally every day?  According to one Michael Barnard, over on Quora, he estimates the number at 2.6 Billion.  How many car journeys are made globally every day? (Sorry, that's the best I could come up with, but his formula makes enough sense for our purposes.)

How many people fly every day?  According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), in 2017 the number reached 4.1 Billion, or 11,232,876 Million people per day.  Traveler Numbers Reach New Heights

So, to your specific point about the ratio between people travelling by car/day vs by air/day, it is roughly 231 to 1.  Touche'   

 

Edited March 12, 2019 by Dan Warnick

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

3 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said:

Why the shortage of pilots? I've been reading up on the topic of commercial air travel recently and I gather the training is brutal and expensive. Can't anything be done about that instead of leaning more and more on software? Another interesting topic...

This topic is interesting enough.  Learning to fly is not that tough, IMHO, although I'm sure some of our pilot friends might beg to differ.  What's difficult is training pilots to know what is the proper action to take in any given dangerous scenario.  What I'm driving at here is the fact that pilot training these days is about getting pilots into the cockpit as fast as they can.  Software is designed to help with that goal by taking a certain amount of the normal pilot "workload" away from the pilots.  Unfortunately, in some countries and in some companies, that means teaching pilots to "fly" and hoping they can pick up the training and experience to handle the avoidance of catastrophe as they go about their duties, ON THE JOB!  So, in some cases, hopefully not too many cases, we run the risk of lesser trained pilots being faced with advanced software systems that they have not been sufficiently trained to use, either in classroom or practical format.  That seems to have been the case in the Indonesian Lion Air crash last year and MIGHT be part of the reason for the crash in Ethiopia last week.  Of course, these are just my opinions based on my years in the industry, and paying attention.

Here's a good article on the numbers from our friends at Aviation Week Network:

Pilot Shortage Is Real and Getting Worse

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

Thanks for the numbers, Dan. Very informative.

[Illurion + 894]

11 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

There are reportedly between 350-387 737 Max's operating worldwide (China grounded their total fleet of about 96 aircraft yesterday, as did some other carriers).

For the Lion Air crash:

Nervous reaction to Ethiopian crash creates uncertainty for Boeing

(Excerpt)

Actions taken after Lion Air crash

While Monday’s notice from the FAA to MAX operators put off any action on the Ethiopian crash, it itemized a series of actions undertaken following the Lion Air crash.

A preliminary investigation into that accident pointed to a faulty “angle of attack” (AOA) sensor, which then activated a new flight control system on the MAX — called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) — that repeatedly pushed the nose of the aircraft down.

The FAA’s actions in response include an airworthiness directive in November that informed pilots of the standard procedure to handle a malfunction of that flight control system and ongoing work with Boeing to approve a redesign of the system that will enhance its safety.

So it is something new.........

Something only on the MAX,,,,,,,

And apparently Boeing and the FAA knew about it as far back as 4 months ago in November,,,,,,,,,,,,,

 

NOT just big lawsuits......

Someone at both BOEING and FAA may go to prison over this.............

 

If MY FAMILY had died on that flight,   i would be demanding prison for those that could have prevented it,  and sat back and let it happen........

[Illurion + 894]

2 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

This topic is interesting enough.  Learning to fly is not that tough, IMHO, although I'm sure some of our pilot friends might beg to differ.  What's difficult is training pilots to know what is the proper action to take in any given dangerous scenario.  What I'm driving at here is the fact that pilot training these days is about getting pilots into the cockpit as fast as they can.  Software is designed to help with that goal by taking a certain amount of the normal pilot "workload" away from the pilots.  Unfortunately, in some countries and in some companies, that means teaching pilots to "fly" and hoping they can pick up the training and experience to handle the avoidance of catastrophe as they go about their duties, ON THE JOB!  So, in some cases, hopefully not too many cases, we run the risk of lesser trained pilots being faced with advanced software systems that they have not been sufficiently trained to use, either in classroom or practical format.  That seems to have been the case in the Indonesian Lion Air crash last year and MIGHT be part of the reason for the crash in Ethiopia last week.  Of course, these are just my opinions based on my years in the industry, and paying attention.

Here's a good article on the numbers from our friends at Aviation Week Network:

Pilot Shortage Is Real and Getting Worse

I have a very good friend who is not only a Commercial Pilot in Europe,  but used to be a pilot trainer,  and is also a PILOT RECRUITER in the middle east.........

 

He says that "outside of the United States",  pilots are NOT PAID very much..........

He says that overseas pilots go from airline to airline building up hours, and slowly getting small pay increases until they reach the flight-hours threshold for a USA Airline to hire them....

ONLY USA Airlines pay good money he says.......

But he says the USA Airlines do not want foreign pilots,  and prefer to hire "ex-American-Military-Pilots" instead.........

He also says that for some reason,  VERY FEW AMERICANS are seeking these jobs......

He says the Americans say the job isn't worth the trouble......

He says the Americans that he has talked to about it say that the money is too low,  and the hours worked are too long,  and they do not want to be away from their home and family......