Four questions Boeing needs to answer on 737 Max

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board

A week after a Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger jet crashed in Ethiopia, that country’s transport minister said recovered flight recorders from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 showed “clear similarity” to a deadly accident in Indonesia last October involving a Lion Air plane of the same model.

When two new, highly sophisticated airplanes fall from the sky in similar, mysterious circumstances, passengers have a right to be alarmed. This is a crisis for Chicago-based Boeing and CEO Dennis Muilenburg. The company has a stellar reputation for aircraft design and building; a reputation now on the line.

Here are four questions for Boeing that require investigation while the Renton-built 737 Max 8 and 737 Max 9 models remain grounded:

What, precisely, caused the crashes of these two jets within the space of five months?

The Ethiopian 737 Max 8 jet, delivered in November 2018, took off in clear weather from the capital, Addis Ababa, on March 10, but the pilot almost immediately reported problems and asked to return to the airport. The plane crashed within minutes. Similarly, Lion Air Flight 610, a 737 Max 8 delivered in August 2018, went down just after departure, moments after the pilot sought to return to the field. In both cases, the 737 Max apparently failed to maintain a steady climb, veering erratically as if the pilots were struggling to keep control of the aircraft.

The focus of scrutiny is an automated anti-stalling program known as MCAS, or Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, that pushes the nose down if it senses the risk of a stall. MCAS is intended as a safety measure to compensate for the airplane’s larger engines, which can affect the 737 Max’s aerodynamics. In the Lion Air crash, sensors possibly misread the plane’s performance and sent the jet into a dive to avoid a phantom stall. The pilot evidently lost a battle for control. Did the Ethiopian Airlines flight suffer a similar fate?

-more-

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/commentary-four-questions-boeing-needs-to-answer-on-737-max/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=3aa2b8f787-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-3aa2b8f787-228635337

[Thunderbeast]

1. These days of lax oversight have been good to Boeing

Quality issues are not new. This Australian documentary about defects in the manufacture of the 737 "Next Generation" airframes is scary. Boeing ignored their own supplier management quality control team to cover up sub-contractor deficiencies. These are planes manufactured before the MAX series was introduced.

Structural components that were supposed to be precision tooled were hand cut. The assembly teams needed to modify these components and sometimes hammer them into place....covering blemishes with spray paint.

Certification of the design was dependent on precision machining and fitting techniques that were not implemented. The "whistle blowers" were fired and ignored by Boeing management, the FAA, and the Dept. of Justice. Thousands of these defective 737s are in the air.

While these defective struts have not caused any planes to fall from the sky, several accidents on the ground (runway overshoots) have resulted in fatalities when the fuselage broke at critical stress points. Lives may have been saved if the plane had remained intact.

[jmowreader]

2. Make that five questions

1. Why didn't you idiots put longer landing gear on this plane?

One hundred percent of the problem can be directly attributed to Boeing building the 737 MAX with the same distance between the floor of the passenger compartment and the ground that the 737-100 has. In 1967 the floor needed to be as low as it is for a reason - many of the airports you might have wanted to serve with the 737 didn't have the equipment you needed to board passengers on a taller airplane. That's not a problem anymore; airports have jet bridges, and jet bridges can be set to any height you need.

If 737 MAX had the same floor height as a 767, they could have installed the engines at a natural balance point and not had to worry about writing software to compensate for the CG of the plane being forward of the wings.

[SeattleVet]

3. There's barely enough room for the existing gear.

The 737 doesn't even have doors over the wheels when they are retracted; they use a special seal and 'hubcap' to reduce drag on the exposed side of the wheels.

The gear was redesigned and extended a bit for the MAX (and NG) variants, but there were some engineering constraints that required them to keep the planes within 95% commonality.

http://www.b737.org.uk/landinggear.htm