MAX May Be Grounded, But Boeing Selling Its Safety
With hundreds of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft parked and the production pipeline shut down, Boeing is busy trying to sell airlines on its inherent safety and offering ways to entice passengers to fly it. But it may be an uphill battle in the wake of a survey that revealed 40 percent of frequent fliers don’t want to fly the MAX.
Even as Boeing’s embattled CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, was shown the door this week, The New York Times reports that the company has been buttonholing airlines with carefully prepped PR and checklists on how they might reassure passengers. The Times reported that Boeing held a series of 30-minute conference calls last week to convince customers that the MAX will be a safe aircraft when it reenters service. However, no date for that reentry is on the horizon.
“We routinely engage with our airline customers’ communications teams to seek their feedback and brief them on our latest plans,” Gordon Johndroe, a Boeing spokesman, told the paper on Monday.
“Each airline is different in their needs, so we provide a wide range of documents and assistance that they can choose to use or tailor as they see fit,” he added.
These materials include infographics, a video and a checklist-style document on how gate agents and flight attendants might respond to allay passenger concerns. In extreme cases, they’re advised to handle the situation much as they would an inflight medical emergency. According to Boeing’s own surveys, the 40 percent of passengers unwilling to fly the MAX has remained unchanged since May of this year.
Boeing is also pushing back on the idea that the aircraft was defective because it was developed under intense deadline pressure and competition with Airbus, which already had a new version of the A320 headed to market. Boeing enlisted the aid of airline pilots and its own in-house pilots to sell the airplane’s enhanced safety features.
Farnborough 2016 - Photo: Per Gram
AINsight:
Max Fallout and Recovery
- December 26, 2019, 10:44 PM
FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson recently delivered a fresh blow
to Boeing by confirming that the 737 Max
recertification plan and re-entry into service would slip into 2020.
The grounding of the Max is now likely to be extended into a second year; March
is the one-year mark and most airlines have removed the troubled airliner from
their schedules until June 2020. The fallout from two 737 Max crashes and its
subsequent grounding has become the top aviation/aerospace story of 2019, but
did it have to?
As the story unfolds, the duration of the 737 Max groundings—the
longest of any airliner—might be more related to a lack of leadership and
politics than an engineering blunder related to an aircraft subsystem.
The repercussions from the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines Max crashes
that claimed 346 lives, only five months apart, have rocked Boeing and stunned
the FAA. A vacuum in leadership at the top of each organization would
escalate the crisis and fuel an epic kerfuffle that pitted Boeing against
the FAA and the rest of the world’s regulators. Only now, with new
leaders at the helm of Boeing and the FAA, does a recovery appear to be
plausible.
For Boeing, production of the once “best-selling” 737 Max will be suspended, its CEO has
been fired, and the company has lost more than $50 billion in market
value. Most damaging has been a major hit to the company’s reputation and trust
among its customers and pilots.
The FAA has been widely criticized for inaction. Following
the second 737 Max crash, aviation authorities around the globe began to ground
the aircraft; the FAA reaffirmed its airworthiness. The FAA would
be the last to pull its airworthiness certificate only after finding additional
evidence that linked the two crashes.
Go
beyond the headlines with AIN’s free weekly digest of the news shaping the air
transport industry.
Other criticisms would center on a certification process that was
perceived to be overly reliant on a system of
organization designation authorizations (ODAs)—often employed by
the manufacturer. The FAA’s standing as the world’s leading aviation
authority is now in question.
These two crashes exposed the worst of Boeing and the FAA. Under
now-fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing attempted to control the
narrative by establishing false timelines. These actions created confusion and
antagonized the regulator. Likewise, a lack of transparency in providing
information to pilots and airlines built on the mistrust.
The FAA, under then-acting Administrator Daniel Elwell, earlier
this year did little to instill confidence and assurances that the
re-certification process was sound. As a result, in the ensuing months after
the two crashes, regulators from around the globe, not limited to EASA and
Transport Canada, would begin to splinter from the traditional practice of
honoring certifications from the FAA and thus began their own
evaluations.
For the rest of us, it is now time to recover. From each crash, the
primary causal factor was directly related to the aircraft and more
specifically the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system (MCAS). MCAS is
a subcomponent of a secondary flight control system; it’s well documented that
version 1.0 was poorly designed. Other factors cited by investigators focus on
suspect maintenance practices and poor airmanship but, for whatever reason,
that’s become a footnote during this whole saga.
The Max is, after all, a 737. Historically, the 737 family with more
than 10,500 deliveries is the most popular airliner ever built. Each model
introduced was more successful, and each model was statistically safer than its
predecessor; the Max should have been no different.
As an example, the 737NG with more than 7,000 aircraft in service (and over 100
million flights) had a fatal accident rate of only 0.06 per million
departures—making it one of the safest airliners ever and on par with the
Airbus A320 series. The 737NG has been in service for more
than 22 years and has only nine fatal mishaps.
One the other hand, time was not on the side of the Max. At the time of
the second crash, it had less than 500,000 flights with only 387 aircraft in
operation. Two fatal accidents, just as the aircraft was beginning to operationally
hit its stride, was catastrophic. In the five-month period surrounding the two
crashes, the Max fatal accident rate would increase to 3.08 per million
departures—second only to the Concorde, another aircraft that was grounded.
The expectations for the Max was that it would be safer and more
efficient than the 737NG. Equipping the Max with the CFM International
Leap-1B engine and several aerodynamic tweaks provided a 12 to 15 percent fuel
savings. The addition of the Leap—its size and placement—necessitated a new
supplemental flight control system to replicate the handling qualities of
the 737NG at low speeds and high angle of attack (AoA).
MCAS as originally designed required the input of only one AoA
sensor. In each of the Max crashes, a single damaged or faulty AoA sensor was
to blame for the erroneous activation of MCAS. This system has been
identified as the trigger for each chain of unfortunate and fatal events. Early
on during each investigation, the faulty system was isolated as a contributor.
Boeing has since identified the MCAS fix by adding in the
necessary redundancy of a secondary AoA sensor input and reprogrammed the
software logic to limit systems authority and its ability to misfire. So
with the cause of these accidents isolated to a single poorly designed
system—the MCAS (its software and system logic)—and a fix in place,
why has it taken more than a year to redesign the system and recertify the
aircraft?
The recertified Max with its redesigned MCAS will be safe.
With the absence of MCAS version 1.0, the Max would still be flying
and have an enviable safety record. As re-entry into service nears, there will
be more questions related to flight crew training (academics and simulator),
but those are secondary to getting the aircraft certified.
FAA Administrator Dickson been clear that he is the
“pilot-in-command” and won’t be pushed around. In fact, he insists that he will
take the “first leg” by personally piloting the Max before recertification.
After the new year, David Calhoun will take over as Boeing’s new CEO.
He has already signaled a decidedly different tack than his predecessor, and it
appears as if he’ll be fine sitting in the right seat. Together, the FAA and
Boeing can work together to get the Max flying again. Over time, trust and
confidence will be rebuilt.
Pilot, safety expert, consultant and aviation journalist Stuart “Kipp”
Lau writes about flight safety and airmanship for AIN. He can be reached at stuart.lau3@gmail.com.
Ingen kommentarer:
Legg inn en kommentar
Merk: Bare medlemmer av denne bloggen kan legge inn en kommentar.