Launch failed, Boeing space capsule returns to Earth
The Boeing space capsule on its way to the International Space Station (ISS) is not going to reach its goal and will come back to Earth on Sunday. The spacecraft lost its course after the launch, Boeing reports.
The CST-100 Starliner was launched in Florida in the early afternoon. It was a test flight without astronauts on board.
The Starliner is in the wrong orbit around the earth.
The intention was that the Starliner, who in the future will have to bring astronauts to the ISS, would arrive at the space station tomorrow. So that is not going on now. The capsule is expected back on Sunday in the US state of New Mexico. …
The Boeing CST-100 Starliner was on top of an Atlas 5 rocket. It must compete with the SpaceX Crew Dragon.
SpaceX is owned by billionaire Elon Musk. SpaceX’s Starship rocket prototype experienced a major failure during pressurisation testing in November 2019.
Boeing and SpaceX signed billion dollar contracts in 2014 with space agency NASA.
Two Boeing airplanes have fallen out of the air and crashed in the past six months. On the surface, this is a technical failure. But the real story is about a company’s desire to beat their rival.
THE US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has the responsibility for aircraft safety, did nothing to ground Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft despite their own analysis that the plane was inherently unsafe.
After the first crash in October last year of an Indonesian Lion Air 737 Max, in which 189 people lost their lives, the FAA carried out a risk assessment of the plane focusing on the controversial anti-stall computerised system, known as MCAS.
The findings of this report, a month after this crash, was damning of the plane and predicted that there could be as many as 15 further crashes over its lifetime unless urgent design changes were made.
Despite this incredible warning from its own expert investigators for the FAA did nothing to ground the 737 Max planes, the most widely used aircraft throughout the world with over 4,800 in service at the time.
Instead, they decided to certify it as airworthy hoping that Boeing would sort out the cause of the crash at some time in the future by introducing a fix to the software.
This decision to declare the plane safe came just months before a second crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max in March this year, when it dived straight into the ground as pilots fought to control it after the MCAS system pushed the nose down.
This was an exact repeat of the first crash but this time killing all 157 passengers and crew on board.
The FAA’s analysis was revealed this week during a US congressional hearing into these two crashes during which the head of the FAA, Steve Dickson, was asked if it was a ‘mistake’ not to ground every 737 Max immediately after the first crash to which he replied: ‘Obviously the result was not satisfactory.’
A total of 346 people killed is written off by the FAA as a ‘not satisfactory’ result!
The committee also heard from Edward Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing’s 737 factories, who testified that he ‘had grown gravely concerned that Boeing was prioritising production speed over quality and safety.’
The committee also heard from Edward Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing’s 737 factories, who testified that he ‘had grown gravely concerned that Boeing was prioritising production speed over quality and safety.’
His were not the only warnings Boeing chose to ignore.
The month after the first crash, representatives of the US Allied Pilots Association had met with Boeing executives to urge the company to take immediate action to fix the MAC system, only to be met with the response from Boeing’s vice-president Mike Sinnet that it was ‘unclear’ if the anti-stall system was the sole cause of the crash – implying that pilot error was to blame.
All the warnings and even the first crash didn’t stop Boeing, with the assistance of the FAA, trying to keep these flying coffins in the sky and the profits rolling in.
The lust for profit at any cost is at the centre of what is not so much a tragedy but an act of corporate murder by Boeing, aided and abetted by the government and its federal agencies.
From the start profit was the only concern of Boeing not safety.
The company shoe-horned more seats and bigger engines into an ageing 737 as a cheap alternative to designing and building a new short-haul plane.
This had the effect of making the plane inherently unstable and Boeing tried to overcome this with a single computer sensor to overcome this instability.
Even after the second crash Boeing and the FAA refused to ground the 737 Max, it was only when countries around the world grounded their fleets that they were forced to follow suit.
Boeing is not an exceptional case of corporate greed – it embodies the entire capitalist system that places profit above human life as we have experienced in the UK with the Grenfell fire.
The only way to stop capitalism from killing for profit is to put an end to the capitalist system itself through a socialist revolution and advancing the world to a socialist society that places human life above all else.
Boeing executives must be tried for murder. 13 December 2019. Former Boeing senior manager Ed Pierson testified on Wednesday before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Commerce Committee that he warned senior company management twice in the summer of 2018 that “deteriorating factory conditions” at the Renton, Washington Boeing 737 production facility would inevitably produce faulty and potentially deadly aircraft: here.
THE GIANT US aircraft manufacturer Boeing has finally called a halt to all production of its 737 Max aircraft after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told the company last week that it is withholding safety approval on the plane until 2020: here.
A whistle-blower has told the BBC, passengers could be left without oxygen in case of a loss of cabin pressure. A former quality control engineer says about a quarter of the planes’ oxygen systems fail to deploy properly.
Meanwhile, Boeing’s 737 NG is also facing problems, with dozens now grounded worldwide. Ryan Air is the latest to suspend some of its planes after finding cracks in their wing structure.
Around 50 Boeing 737 NG planes have faults, grounded until repair
Crisis-hit Boeing faced fresh safety concerns on 31st Oct. The firm admitted cracks were found in at least 50 of its popular 737 NG planes. Boeing had previously reported a problem with the model’s “pickle fork”, a part which helps bind the wing to the fuselage- prompting US regulators to order immediate inspections of aircraft that had seen heavy use.
The French press agency AFP reports that Boeing is holding fifty 737 NG aircraft on the ground after reports of cracks. They are in the ‘pickle forks’, parts that attach the wings to the fuselage of the aircraft. Boeing already reported those cracks earlier this month, after which the US American aviation authority FAA called for an investigation.
… The FAA’s request was to check all aircraft that went up more than 30,000 times.
Less than 30,000 flights
Even aircraft with fewer flying hours seem to have the problem. The Australian airline company Qantas has announced that it does not have 737 NG aircraft that have been deployed more than 27,000 times. Nevertheless, the cracks were found in a plane. Tomorrow Qantas wants to have checked all its own aircraft. Each check takes approximately one hour.
The Australian trade union for aircraft engineers AEA wants Qantas to keep the entire fleet on the ground immediately, but Qantas dismisses that as sensationalism. …
Boeing‘s profit is under considerable pressure due to problems with the Boeing 737 MAX, which has been on the ground for eight months. That happened after two air disasters in a short time, first in Indonesia and in March this year in Ethiopia. The trade dispute between the United States and China also seems to have consequences for Boeing’s production.
In Miller’s play, the chief culprit, Joe Keller, offloads the blame onto a subordinate and later finds out that 21 pilots died as a result of his actions, including one of his sons. Keller commits suicide out of shame and regret.
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg showed no such human emotions when he sat before the Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Wednesday. Knowing he had nothing to fear from the Democratic and Republican politicians deferentially lobbing questions at him, he stonewalled and evaded, defending his decision to ignore and conceal multiple warnings from engineers and pilots and rush the deadly Boeing 737 Max 8 into service in 2017.
He even defended the “delegation” of oversight by federal regulators to Boeing itself and called for a further “updating”, i.e., gutting, of regulations.
Within two years of the launch of the new plane, two 737 Max 8 planes had crashed as a result of the malfunction of an automatic anti-stall mechanism called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), whose very existence had been concealed from pilots. A total of 346 men, women and children were killed.
At this week’s hearings, Muilenburg acknowledged that he knew of the red flags, yet not a single congressman or senator suggested that he, or his coconspirators in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), should be criminally prosecuted. Nor did the corporate media.
The first disaster occurred just over a year ago when Lion Air Flight 610 plunged into the sea outside of Jakarta, Indonesia, killing 189 people. The second came five months later, when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 nosedived into the ground near Addis Ababa, extinguishing the lives of another 157 human beings.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Muilenburg did not even acknowledge the presence of family members of the deceased who stood behind him holding up photos of their lost spouses, children, parents and siblings. He turned around to face them only after a member of the group demanded that he “look at people when you say you’re sorry”.
Investigations by both Indonesian and Ethiopian flight safety officials have concluded that both Boeing and the FAA were culpable in the crashes.
By now, facts have emerged, some of which were raised at the hearings, which demonstrate incontrovertibly that Boeing knowingly put into service an aircraft that was not safe. These include:
Emails from pilots and engineers warning of the dangers, including one from Mark Forkner, Boeing’s chief technical pilot, noting that MCAS was out of control, “egregious” and “running rampant” during a test run on a flight simulator.
An email to Muilenburg from a senior manager recommending that the entire Max 8 program be shut down because standard safety protocols were being ignored in the race to launch the plane before Boeing’s European-based rival Airbus captured a slice of its market share. He wrote, “All my internal warning bells are going off and for the first time in my life I am hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.”
A 2016 warning to Congress from the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, which represents workers at the FAA, that deregulation had reached a point where regulators would be able to intervene in problems with an airplane only “after an accident has happened and people are killed.”
The removal of any mention of MCAS from flight training manuals and the reduction of pilot training on the new aircraft to a one-hour video on an iPad.
Boeing’s expansion of the power and scope of MCAS shortly before the Max 8’s launch without any notification to the FAA, other regulatory agencies, pilots or airlines.
Boeing’s decision to attach a new and bigger engine to a five-decade-old airframe, rather than redesign the airplane, in order to cut costs, reduce labor, rush production and speed up certification. The resulting tendency of the Max 8 to stall, which MCAS was intended to correct, rendered the new plane “fatally flawed”, according to former pilot and aviation safety expert Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.
The failure of Boeing and the FAA to ground the 737 Max 8 after the October 2018 Lion Air crash, even though Boeing had been aware of problems with MCAS before the disaster. Even after the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 five months later, Boeing and the FAA refused to ground the plane until every other authority in the world had done so.
While the grounding of the Max 8 and lawsuits by pilots and relatives of victims are expected to cost Boeing $8 billion, the company increased in value by nearly $200 billion from the time that the deathtrap was announced in 2011 to when the planes were grounded.
The anarchy and irrationality of the capitalist market have been given unbridled rein by the deregulation of the airline industry—and every other sector of the capitalist economy—which began under Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1978 and has continued under both Democrats and Republicans for the past four decades. It is of a piece with the financialization and deindustrialization of the economy and the destruction of jobs, wages and social services.
For his part, Muilenburg laid off 16,000 workers in 2016 and 2017, his first two full years as CEO. As a reward, he draws a salary of $30 million a year. This year, nearly a third of his compensation has come from selling off a sizeable chunk of his Boeing stock a month before the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
Boeing is only one example of the lawlessness of the operations of big business. The recent past has seen the BP oil spill, the lead poisoning of Flint, the opioid epidemic, the wildfires and power outages linked to PG&E and the Wall Street crash of 2008. Not a single CEO has gone to jail as a result of these disasters driven by corporate greed and criminality. As Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder told Congress in 2013, America’s corporate barons and their business empires are “too big to jail”.
These are not aberrations or the products, at root, of subjective avarice—although blind greed exists in abundance. The criminalization of the American ruling class is the product of the degeneration and crisis of the entire social and economic system of capitalism.
The Boeing disasters underscore the need to put an end to capitalism and replace it with socialism, which is based on the satisfaction of social need, not private profit. This means mobilizing the working class to expropriate the private owners of the banks and major corporations and transform corporate giants such as Boeing into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities. It means ending the dictatorship of the corporations over the workers and placing the control of economic life in the hands of the producers.
The entire political system and both bribed parties of big business … will oppose this to the bitter end. To establish safe, efficient, comfortable and affordable air travel requires the independent and revolutionary mobilization of the working class in the US and internationally in the fight for socialism.
Mechanical problems and design errors contributed to the crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 of airline Lion Air in October last year. Indonesian researchers shared those conclusions with the relatives of the 189 victims of the air disaster. The findings of the study will be presented later this week.
The flight from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang on the island of Bangka crashed into the sea last year. All people on board were killed.
All Boeings 737 MAX types have been grounded since March this year after another aircraft crashed, this time in Ethiopia.
Certification investigation
Immediately after the crash in Ethiopia, the US Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation into the way in which the aircraft were inspected by Boeing. The role of the American aviation authority FAA is also being investigated. Earlier, the Seattle Timesreported that Boeing, which has its headquarters in Seattle, was given too much room to inspect systems itself. The FAA is said to have put pressure on its own engineers to have Boeing carry out that inspection.
Final report into Boeing crash shows bosses ignored warnings: here.
When a commercial airplane crashed off the coast of Indonesia in October 2018, global aviation authorities were shocked.
The aircraft was a 737 MAX, one of the newest models of US manufacturer Boeing.
And then when a second MAX dropped out of the sky in Ethiopia in March 2019, investigators said they believed that software on the airplane played a role in both crashes.
With 346 people dead and the MAX now grounded, aviation authorities around the globe have asked what went wrong, how the US certified the aircraft in 2017 and how oversight failed. Families and investigators are still searching for answers.
A former Boeing engineer who worked on the plane, and asked to remain anonymous, recalls that the design and testing of the 737 MAX took place amid immense commercial pressure.
“Cost pressure and time. Time pressure was the biggest impact, biggest driver … [There was] immense pressure on getting the airplane to market as soon as possible”, he told Fault Lines.
“On the 737 MAX there was constant pressure to not change anything. From a cost perspective, change costs money. The business side drives the culture.”
Captain Dennis Tajer from the Allied Pilots Association believes “the system failed”.
“The system is Boeing, the FAA, other oversight areas from within those groups,” he says. “What’s the measure on that judgment? These crashes. It’s that simple: the system failed. It failed our passengers, it failed the globe.”
Fault Lines traces what led to the two plane crashes and asks if US aviation regulators have allowed the industry too much control over safety.
A leaked conversation between two Boeing employees provides further evidence that even though the aerospace giant was well aware of potentially catastrophic problems of the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet, it still decided to introduce the aircraft for commercial flights. Within two years of executives making the decision to put it into service, the deadly aircraft crashed twice—first in October 2018 and then in March of this year—killing 346 men, women and children.
So why aren’t any of Boeing’s executives facing criminal charges?
The exchange between Boeing pilot Mark Forkner and his colleague Patrick Gustavsson, first published by Reuters, again reveals that the company subordinates passenger safety to the drive for profit. With only six months to go before the release of the aircraft, Forkner noted “fundamental issues” with the Max 8 that other Boeing officials “claim they’re aware of”. He specifically mentioned that “MCAS” was “running rampant in the [simulator]” and that “the plane [was] trimming like crazy.”
These comments by two Boeing employees dovetail with black box recordings and other data collected on the two crashes, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which show that a previously unknown system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), forced the planes into an unrecoverable nosedive. The system was ostensibly installed so that pilots of previous Boeing 737s would require next to no training on the new aircraft, a major selling point the company used to push its plane onto customers over European rival Airbus’s A320neo aircraft.
The real reason MCAS was developed, however, was to correct for a tendency of the Max 8 to stall. In order to shorten development time for the aircraft, Boeing essentially welded on new engines to a half-century old airframe, which meant the jet constantly had a slight pitch up. Instead of designing a new body for the engines, company executives determined it would be much quicker and cheaper to apply a software fix to faulty hardware.
Moreover, Boeing did everything it could to hide this development from regulators. Forkner, who at the time was a technical pilot for the company, told Gustavsson “I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)” because neither he nor his coworker had been informed of how much control MCAS could assume over an aircraft. Despite this incident, which was likely one among many, Boeing not only hid the dangers of the system from aviation safety officials, it kept the software out of Max 8 flight manuals. Even after the Lion Air crash, many pilots in the US and internationally were unaware of MCAS and the potential dangers it posed.
There is no innocent explanation for these omissions. They indicate reckless and criminally negligent behavior on the part of Boeing executives to rush into service a flying deathtrap in order to gain market share over its corporate rivals.
That none of them have been prosecuted, much less arrested, speaks to the incestuous relationship between airline companies and the US government. Ali Bahrami, one of the heads of the aerospace industry’s lobbying group, was one of the leading members of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) during the initial development of the Max 8. FAA Acting Administrator during both crashes was Dan Elwell, a former American Airlines executive. Stephen Dickson, the new head of the agency, was a Senior Vice President at Delta.
It also indicts Boeing’s Wall Street investors, which see lives lost only as the cost of doing business. This includes The Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price Associates, the Newport Trust Co., SSGA Funds Management and Blackrock Fund Advisors, among others. They collectively control 27.9 percent of Boeing’s stock, valued at $59.4 billion, which is more than twice what it was when Boeing first introduced the Max 8.
Boeing’s executives themselves also made a tidy sum. During the meteoric rise of the company’s stock in January and February, Chief Financial Officer Gregory Smith, Executive Vice President John Keating, General Counsel Michael Luttig and Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenberg all sold shares worth $9.5 million, $10.1 million, $9.5 million and $6.5 million, respectively. That the second Max 8 crash occurred within a month of these and other similar windfalls raises questions about what else corporate executives knew.
The relationship between Boeing, its executives and its Wall Street investors, however, is only a symptom of the logic produced by the deregulation of the airline industry as a whole, an effort spearheaded by the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter in 1978. Aided and abetted by Professor Alfred Kahn … Carter pushed through the Airline Deregulation Act, which smashed the existing setup that treated interstate airlines as a regulated public utility, setting routes, schedules and fares.
At the same time, Carter drew up plans to smash the air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO, which were carried out in 1981 by his Republican successor Ronald Reagan—with the support of a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. This began an assault on airline workers and all sections of the working class … which accelerated the growth of financial speculation and parasitism which has dismantled much of the country’s industry.
The Boeing 737 Max 8 disasters are the outcome of the capitalist ownership of the airline industry and the financial system. They point to the inherent incompatibility between the basic interests of the working class and the private ownership of essential industries, as well as the division of the world’s economy into rival nations. These catastrophes were driven by both the greed of Boeing executives and big investors and the intensifying trade conflict between the United States and Europe.
The only way forward is the opposite, the transformation of the airlines and other major corporations and banks into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class. This will be a key part of a political fight against the corporate-financial oligarchy and both of its parties, as part of the establishment of a planned economy based on social need, not private profit.
The interviews with Rick Ludtke and Adam Dickson, published last week by Bloomberg Businessweek, confirm that the company subordinates all considerations, including passenger safety, to the drive for profit. From the outset, the design and production of the 737 Max 8, which was introduced to compete with European rival Airbus’ 320neo aircraft, were carried out to minimize costs. As Ludtke describes in his interview, a key aspect of the focus on reducing costs was ensuring that pilots switching from older 737 models to the Max 8 never had to participate in Level D training. Ludtke recalled, “We showed them all these scenarios, and then we’d ask, ‘Would this change equal Level D?’”
Level D refers to the highest standard of flight simulators used by commercial airline pilots. These devices fully simulate every aspect of flying a particular type of aircraft. Pilots are typically required to train hundreds of hours on such simulators for each type of airplane they wish to fly before they are allowed to enter a real cockpit. They generally have to retrain on them every six months to maintain their qualification.
In order to cut down training time and reduce costs—each Level D simulator costs up to $15 million—Boeing claimed that the changes it made required only “Level B” training, which could be done in an hour on a tablet. The company worked closely with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in order to ensure that no one from that agency would challenge Boeing’s decisions.
“[Stacey Klein] had no engineering background, her airplane experience was very limited,” Ludtke said, suggesting that the head of the FAA team in charge of overseeing the development of the Max 8 training requirements was not particularly qualified to do so. “It was just an impossible scenario,” he added.
The very fact that one of the formal requirements of the FAA, as well as the European Aviation Safety Agency, for someone to fly an aircraft might be a mere hour’s worth of work on a computer speaks to the level of integration between the airline regulatory agencies and the companies they are supposed to oversee.
Moreover, the outcry from pilots after learning about the previously unknown Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), the software likely responsible for both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, shows that the training given by Boeing was insufficient. Many have said they were unaware of the system, an automated anti-stall mechanism that in both crashes repeatedly forced down the nose of the airplane, overriding the pilots’ efforts to right their aircraft. Pilots complain that MCAS was not even mentioned in manuals or in the Max 8 flight training. This is despite the fact that Boeing was aware months before the Lion Air crash of design flaws, including MCAS, that were hidden from pilots, airline companies and the regulatory agencies.
The most recent exposure of flaws involves the cockpit design of the Max 8. The report notes that switches that trigger manual or automatic control of the aircraft’s horizontal stabilizer were changed from previous 737 aircraft, making it more complicated to turn off automated systems such as MCAS in the event of an emergency. It is not clear at this time if this change was included in Boeing’s training documents for its new jet.
The second interview in Bloomberg Businessweek was given by Adam Dickson, who managed fuel systems engineering on the Max 8. He retired partly in protest over the rush to bring the new plane into service. “It was engineering that would have to bend,” he said. Company executives in 2018 warned in “very direct and threatening ways” that the salaries of Dickson and others were at risk if they didn’t meet performance targets.
These targets included keeping the selling price of 737 Max 8s for delivery four years out to levels that were not feasible from an engineering standpoint, forcing managers such as Dickson to cut corners in order to drive down costs. This was bound up with a 7 percent cut imposed by Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg in the company’s workforce, removing more experienced engineers and technicians in favor of junior employees less likely to dig in their heels. “How long do you want to keep polishing that apple?” was a phrase Dickson repeatedly heard managers toss at engineers who wanted to continue testing longer than the company demanded.
Boeing categorically denies that it prioritizes costs over safety. “At no time did our performance targets reward or encourage a trade off against safety,” it said in a statement.
This is belied by the company’s current plan to move some 900 inspectors to other jobs, replacing them with electronic safety checks. Some 451 inspectors will be cut this year and a similar number next year, cutting by a third a second layer of inspections used to oversee Boeing’s commercial aircraft operations in the Seattle area. This plan has not yet been endorsed by the FAA.
Such cuts are part of the incentive plans for Boeing executives. Dickson stated that a manager’s annual evaluation of an engineer said, “Idea’s [sic] are measured in dollars.” No doubt Muilenburg and previous Boeing CEO James McNerney agree, after having made a combined $209 million since 2012, a portion of this the result of continually imposing cost-cutting measures across the company.
There is a fear among Boeing’s leadership that the continued exposures of its internal practices will impact its bottom line. The two Max 8 crashes have already cost the company $1 billion, both from the lack of aircraft sales and from settlements with the crash victims’ families. Boeing is poised to lose billions more in profits if airlines defer or cancel their Max 8 orders, or if regulatory agencies do not approve the Max 8, grounded since March 13, for flight. The company’s stock has fallen 20 percent since the Ethiopian Airlines crash, though it is still up 10 percent from the start of the year.
US pilots confronted Boeing over safety before Ethiopia crash and were ignored: here.
Ethiopian Airlines tells Boeing, FAA to stop blaming dead pilots for 737 crashes: here.
MORE THAN 300 BOEING PLANES MAY HAVE FAULTY PARTS The Federal Aviation Administration said a joint investigation conducted with Boeing found over 300 planes worldwide may include parts that may have been improperly manufactured by a Boeing supplier. As many as 148 parts may be affected. [HuffPost]
After two crashes that killed 346 people, Boeing rejects pilot simulator training for 737 Max 8: here.
FAA DISCOVERS NEW BOEING 737 MAX RISK The Federal Aviation Administration discovered another potential risk in Boeing’s 737 Max 8 jets, which were grounded in the U.S. and abroad in March after 346 people died in two separate crashes involving the plane. [HuffPost]
THE GIANT US aircraft manufacturer Boeing is once again at the centre of a storm over the safety of its planes, this time concerning another of its flagship craft the B787 Dreamliner. Boeing has been forced to issue an alert to airlines that a vital switch which activates fire extinguishers and cuts off the supply of fuel in the event of an engine catching fire has failed in a ‘small number’ of instances. The switch is designed to prevent flames spreading across the entire wing of the plane if an engine catches fire: here.
New reports by Bloomberg reveal that, as part of a cost-cutting measure, the aerospace giant Boeing outsourced the software development for the 737 Max 8 aircraft to recent college graduates for as little as $9 an hour. It was the plane’s “fatally flawed” software that caused the deadly airplane crashes of two Max 8s, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which together claimed 346 lives: here.
A leaked document from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) details five major problems with Boeing’s 737 Max 8 aircraft, including a previously unknown issue with the plane’s autopilot. The agency says it will not authorize the jet, grounded around the world since the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March, to resume flying until these problems have been resolved: here.
An international team of representatives of aviation safety agencies submitted its Joint Authorities Technical Review (JATR) to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last Friday, detailing 12 major problems with the FAA’s oversight of the development and certification of Boeing’s 737 Max 8 jet. The report makes clear that the agency made no attempt to determine the safety of new flight control software that led to the crash to two 737 Max 8 flights and the loss of hundreds of lives: here.
Boeing engineers identified a fault with a pilot warning system on its 737 MAX aircraft in 2017, a year before the deadly Lion Air crash, the company said Sunday.
Boeing said that management was unaware of the issue until the crash in Indonesia, which killed 189 people, and the planes were not grounded until after another of the type operated by Ethiopian Airlines went down several months later, leaving a further 157 people dead.
According to Boeing, a supposedly standard piece of equipment that tells pilot about disagreements between angle of attack (AOA) indicators — which measure the plane’s angle vis-a-vis oncoming air to warn of impending stalls — did not in fact activate unless an additional optional indicator was purchased by airlines.
That left airlines that did not buy the optional indicator — including both Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines — without the safety feature.
Faulty angle of attack indicator information may have played a role in both of the deadly crashes, causing the 737 MAX anti-stall system to unnecessarily activate and push the nose down toward the ground even as pilots fought to maintain altitude.
“In 2017, within several months after beginning 737 MAX deliveries, engineers at Boeing identified that the 737 MAX display system software did not correctly meet the AOA Disagree alert requirements,” the aircraft manufacturer said in a statement.
“The software delivered to Boeing linked the AOA Disagree alert to the AOA indicator, which is an optional feature,” it said. “Accordingly, the software activated the AOA Disagree alert only if an airline opted for the AOA indicator.”
Yet, Boeing did nothing about the potentially deadly problem. They did not warn the airlines that had been too poor or too stingy to save human lives.
They now claim that the Boeing big bosses supposedly did not know, shifting all blame onto engineers.
Either the big bosses really did not know, and then they are unfit managers. Or they did know, and then Boeing public relations is lying now.
BOEING BLEW ITBoeing said Sunday that some of its 737 Max jetliners were accidentally delivered with a cockpit warning light as an option rather than a standard feature, and that the company knew for months before informing the Federal Aviation Administration. [HuffPost]
US aerospace giant Boeing released a statement Sunday attempting to whitewash its culpability in two deadly airplane crashes involving the company’s new 737 Max 8 aircraft. The statement was released more than six months after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610, which killed 189 people, and nearly two months after the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which killed a further 157 people, for a total of 346 men, women and children: here.
Ethiopia pilots ‘could not stop nosedive’ – BBC News
A preliminary report into the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane last month says the aircraft nosedived several times before it crashed. Pilots “repeatedly” followed procedures recommended by Boeing before the crash, according to the first official report into the disaster.
Despite their efforts, pilots “were not able to control the aircraft”, Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges said.
Flight ET302 crashed after take-off from Addis Ababa, killing 157 people.
“The crew performed all the procedures repeatedly [that were] provided by the manufacturer but were not able to control the aircraft”, Ms Dagmawit said in a news conference in Addis Ababa.
Investigation shows that a malfunctioning Boeing sensor caused Ethiopian Airlines crash: here.
All eyes are on aircraft manufacturer Boeing after it was announced this morning that the Ethiopian Airlines pilots of the aircraft which crashed last month made no mistakes.
The first results of the investigation into the air disaster with an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX aircraft were presented this morning. In the crash last month, all passengers were killed.
“If it is true that the pilot cannot be blamed, then pressure on Boeing will increase”, says aviation lawyer Jochem Croon. …
Europe used to assume that you could rely blindly on the opinion of the US American aviation authority, says lawyer Jochem Croon. If the Americans stated that a device was safe, they would take it for granted.
But that trust has suffered a great deal. “You saw that after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, when the European authorities did not wait for the Washington decision and introduced a flight ban for all MAX aircraft.”
Trust is gone
Croon warns that confidence in the American aviation industry will not just return. “Not only the European authorities, but also the airlines and passengers are wary. This is a long-term issue.”
Why aren’t Boeing executives being prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes?
4 April 2019
It is nearly a month since the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which slammed into the ground only six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa airport, killing all 157 people on board. That disaster came less than five months after the fatal crash of Lion Air Flight 610 only 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta airport, killing all 189 passengers and crew members.
Both crashes involved the same airplane, the Boeing 737 Max 8, and both followed wild up-and-down oscillations which the pilots were unable to control.
In the weeks since these disasters, there have been no calls within the media or political establishment for Boeing executives to be criminally prosecuted for what were evidently entirely avoidable tragedies that killed a total of 346 people. This speaks to the corrupt relationship between the US government and the aerospace giant—the biggest US exporter and second-largest defense contractor—as well as the company’s critical role in the stock market surge and the ever-expanding fortunes of major Wall Street investors.
Black box recordings and simulations show that in the 60 seconds the pilots had to respond to the emergency, faulty software forced the Lion Air flight into a nose dive 24 separate times, as the pilots fought to regain control of the aircraft before plunging into the ocean at more than 500 miles per hour.
Evidence has mounted implicating in both crashes an automated anti-stall system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was installed by Boeing in response to the new plane’s tendency to pitch upward and go into a potentially fatal stall. On a whole number of fronts—design, marketing, certification and pilot training—information from the black boxes of the two planes points to a lack of concern for the safety of passengers and crew on the part of both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, reaching the level of criminality.
The most recent revelations concerning the March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash, based on preliminary findings from the official investigation, show that the pilots correctly followed the emergency procedures outlined by Boeing and disengaged the automated flight control system. Nevertheless, the nose of the plane continued to point downward. This strongly suggests a fundamental and perhaps fatal flaw in the design of the aircraft. Numerous questions have been raised about the design and certification process of the 737 Max 8 and MCAS, including:
Despite the presence on the plane of two angle-of-attack sensors, which signal a potential stall and trigger the automated downward pitch of the plane’s nose, MCAS relied on data from only one of the sensors. This means the standard redundancy feature built into commercial jets to avert disasters resulting from a faulty sensor was lacking. Boeing’s main rival to the 737 Max, the European-built Airbus A320neo, for example, uses data from three sensors to manage a system similar to MCAS.
Boeing Vice President Mike Sinnett admitted last November that cockpit warning lights alerting pilots of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor were only optional features on the Max 8.
The MCAS system was absent from pilot manuals and flight simulators, including for the well-known flight training program X-Plane 11, which came out in 2018, one year after the first commercial flight of the 737 Max 8.
Pilot training for the 737 Max 8, which has different hardware and software than earlier 737s, was a single one-hour computer course. Pilot certification for a commercial plane typically requires hundreds of hours of training, both in simulators and in actual flights. Boeing itself is now mandating at least 21 days of training on new Max planes.
There is no innocent explanation for these obvious safety issues. They point to reckless and arguably criminally negligent behavior on the part of Boeing executives, who rushed the new plane into service and marketed it against the Airbus A320neo on the basis of its cost-saving features. Threatened with a loss of market share and profits to its chief competitor, Boeing reduced costs by claiming that no significant training on the new Max 8 model, with the money and time that entails, was necessary for pilots with previous 737 experience.
Such imperatives of the capitalist market inevitably downgrade safety considerations. This is highlighted by a press release the day of the Ethiopian Airlines crash in which Boeing stated that “for the past several months and in aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610,” the company “has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX.”
In other words, both Boeing and the FAA were aware, possibly even before the October 2018 Lion Air crash and certainly afterward, that a system critical to the safe operation of the aircraft needed to be fixed, and still allowed the plane to continue flying. The wording also suggests that the plane shouldn’t have been certified for flight in the first place.
This was aided and abetted by the Trump administration, which shielded Boeing as long as it could by not ordering the FAA to ground the plane immediately after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. There were no doubt immense concerns that such a move would cut into Boeing’s multibillion-dollar profits and affect its stock price, which has nearly tripled since the election of Trump in November 2016, accounting for more than 30 percent of the increase in the Dow Jones index since then.
Trump himself received a call from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg two days after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, during which Muilenburg reportedly continued to uphold the Max 8’s safety. The FAA finally grounded the plane on March 13, after every other country in the world had done so.
The relationship between Trump and Muilenburg is only a symptom of the much broader collusion between the airline industry and the US government. Starting in 2005 and expanded during the Obama administration, the FAA introduced the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, which allows the agency to appoint as “designees” airplane manufacturers’ employees to certify their own company’s aircraft on behalf of the government.
As a result, there was virtually no federal oversight on the development of the 737 Max 8. FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell told Congress, “As a result of regular meetings between the FAA and Boeing teams, the FAA determined in February 2012 that the [Max 8] project qualified… [a] project eligible for management by the Boeing ODA.” This extended to the MCAS system as well.
This is the logical end of the deregulation of the airline industry as a whole that was spearheaded by the Democratic Carter administration, which passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. … the legislation disbanded the Civil Aeronautics Board, which up to that point treated interstate airlines as a regulated public utility, setting routes, schedules and fares.
In a rational world, the ongoing Senate hearings and Department of Justice investigations would have already brought criminal charges against Muilenburg, Sinnett, Elwell and all those involved in overseeing the production, certification and sale of the 737 Max 8. This would include the executives at Boeing and all those who have helped to deregulate the industry at the expense of human lives.
Under capitalism, however, Boeing will get little more than a slap on the wrist. Experts estimate the company will likely be fined at most $800 million, less than one percent of the $90 billion Boeing expects in sales from the Max 8 in the coming years. As in Hurricane Katrina, the Wall Street crash in 2008, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017, the brunt of this disaster will be borne by the working class.
The Boeing 737 Max 8 disasters point to the inherent incompatibility between safe, comfortable and affordable air transport and private ownership of the airline industry, as well as the division of the world economy between rival nation-states. These catastrophes were driven by both the greed of Boeing executives and big investors and the intensifying trade conflict between the United States and Europe.
The technological advances that make it possible for travelers to move between any two points in the world in a single day must be freed from the constraints of giant corporations and the capitalist system as a whole. Major airlines and aerospace companies must be expropriated on an international scale and transformed into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities, as part of the establishment of a planned economy based on social need, not private profit.
In a conference call with Wall Street firms in April of 2017, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg lauded the Federal Aviation Administration’s “streamlined” certification process for enabling the aircraft manufacturer to rush its new 737 Max model into service: here.
“Why did Boeing make it like that? Pure negligence and greed. There is simply no other answer.” Aviation reporter Rytis Beresnevičius speaks to WSWS on Boeing 737 crashes: here.
New details have emerged about the final moments of the Lion Air flight that crashed last October and the FBI has joined the investigation into the planes’ certification process.
Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras
So, if airline companies don’t contribute enough to Boeing profits, then Boeing bosses take revenge for that by gambling with the lives of their passengers.
The pilots who tried their best to prevent crashes with the Boeing 737 MAX in Ethiopia and Indonesia flew without the necessary safety updates being installed in their aircraft. That’s because airlines Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air didn’t pay for those “extras”, The New York Times reports.
Just as with car manufacturers, it is normal for aircraft manufacturers to make a ‘standard model’ to which the buyer can add extras. With a new aircraft, airlines have to pay a lot for options that offer comfort such as extra comfortable seats, better lighting or toilets.
In addition, there are also options on communication, navigation and safety systems. These are important components for the safety of a device. Many airlines, such as budget airline Lion Air, do not buy these extras and aviation authorities do not oblige them to do so.
Make it free
After the two fatal crashes with a Boeing 737 MAX in March and October, the aircraft manufacturer will partly change this method. According to The New York Times, Boeing is going to make one of the safety options that currently costs money free and deliver it as standard.
So, ‘dear’ Boeing fat cats, after you contributed to killing 346 human beings, now at last one of the life saving devices will become standard. Only one life saving device. How about the other life saving devices, Boeing gentlemen?
Nose pressed down
The two crashes were probably caused by a defective sensor in the so-called MCAS system. That is a new part of the autopilot, which intervenes if the aircraft ends up in a dangerous situation. Because of the broken sensor, the aircraft probably thought it flew with its nose up, while it wasn’t. The nose was therefore pressed down, resulting in [two] plane crash disasters.
One of the optional safety updates that Boeing is selling could have partly helped the pilots to detect this sensor failure. Because of this they could have acted faster. Whether the aircraft could have landed normally is not certain, “but it would certainly have helped”, an expert told The New York Times.
The Boeing disasters: 346 more victims of capitalism
In the wake of two deadly airplane crashes that have killed 346 people, it has become clear that executives at aerospace giant Boeing repeatedly subordinated basic considerations of safety to profit, aided and abetted by the federal government.
The first disaster occurred on October 29, when a Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Lion Air crashed thirteen minutes after leaving Jakarta, Indonesia, killing 189 people. That same plane only narrowly averted disaster a day earlier, Bloomberg reported this week, when a third, off-duty pilot who happened to be on the flight, intervened under similar conditions that ultimately caused the crash.
Less than five months later, on March 10, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed about six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing a further 157 men, women and children.
Beginning on March 11, every country in the world grounded the 737 Max 8, citing overwhelming safety concerns. The United States was the final holdout, but it grounded the aircraft on March 13.
This 20 March 2019 CBS TV video from the USA says about itself:
Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger criticized both Boeing and FAA over the 737 Max 8 in an op-ed published Wednesday. CBS News transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleve spoke about it on CBSN.
The Bryan Dyne article continues:
“Boeing, in developing the 737 Max 8, obviously felt intense competitive pressure to get the new aircraft to market as quickly as possible,” wrote Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger in a column in MarketWatch this week. Sullenberger is the pilot who safely landed an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River in 2009 and a leading air safety expert.
“When flight testing revealed an issue with meeting the certification standards, the company developed a fix… but did not tell airline pilots about it. In mitigating one risk, Boeing seems to have created another, greater risk,” he wrote.
Sullenberger added, “After the crash of Lion Air 610 last October, it was apparent that this new risk needed to be effectively addressed.” But instead of grounding the aircraft and immediately fixing the problem, Boeing did everything it could to conceal the deadly defect and keep the aircraft flying.
In other words, Boeing executives evidently acted in a reckless, negligent manner, contributing to the deaths of 346 people.
Sullenberger concluded, “It has been reported that Boeing pushed back in discussions with the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] about the extent of changes that would be required, and after the second crash, of Ethiopian 302, the Boeing CEO reached out to the US President to try to keep the 737 Max 8 from being grounded in the US.”
Both the FAA and the Trump administration, for their part, were more than willing to run interference for the company.
The close integration between the airline industry and the agency nominally tasked with regulating it is well documented. In 2005, the FAA introduced a new program whereby aircraft manufacturers could choose their own employees to serve as FAA “designees”, charged with certifying the safety of their commercial planes. Since then, there has been virtually no independent oversight of the safety of any new civilian planes, those produced at Boeing or elsewhere.
During the 737 Max 8 rollout, Boeing told its pilots that they could learn all they needed to know about flying a new type of airplane from a 56-minute presentation on an iPad and a 13-page manual. Both were approved by the FAA … and neither included any information about the system likely responsible for the crashes, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmenting System, or MCAS.
US officials, moreover, have deep connections to the airline industry. FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell was an American Airlines executive. US President Donald Trump’s new nominee to head the administration, Stephen Dickson, is a former Delta head.
Boeing is a top defense contractor with extensive ties to the military-intelligence apparatus. Patrick Shanahan, the deputy secretary of defense, has worked for Boeing for three decades. Moreover, the current secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, is the wife of Mitch McConnell, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign financing from Boeing.
Moreover, Boeing is a key part of the US financial elite’s war for control of markets. Since the 737 Max 8 series was released in 2017, the sales of just 350 of the 5,011 orders Boeing has received have accounted for 50 percent of the company’s profits. Boeing itself has maintained its status as the world’s fifth-largest defense contractor and is currently the largest US exporter.
Shares of Boeing have more than tripled since the election of Donald Trump and his promises of further deregulation, making it the highest-priced stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company has accounted for more than 30 percent of the increase of the Dow since November 2016.
The tragic and preventable deaths of nearly 350 people demonstrate certain realities of contemporary social and political life. The capitalist system is based on the maximization of shareholder profit, not the satisfaction of the needs of society. If endangering the lives of hundreds of people will lead to higher profits, such a risk is justified.
Governments, in their turn, serve to protect the interests of the corporations, a reality demonstrated by the Trump White House’s efforts to protect the largest US exporter, and the repeated actions of the FAA to cover up the series of disastrous shortcuts taken by Boeing.
These disasters highlight the need to take the airline industry out of the hands of Wall Street so that air travel can be brought into harmony with human and social needs.
CREW FOLLOWED BOEING RULES BUT COULDN’T CONTROL JET The Ethiopian Airlines crew of the airliner that crashed last month performed all the procedures recommended by Boeing but could not control the jet, states a preliminary report. The doomed flight experienced uncommanded “nose dive conditions,” according to the investigation. The preliminary report recommends that Boeing review the flight controls and that aviation authorities verify it before the now-grounded planes are cleared to resume operation. [AP]
Dear Kitty. Some blog 