MAX Oppdatering - Curt Lewis

MIT Professor Says FAA Estimate Of 15 Catastrophic Boeing MAX Crashes Is Way Too Low UNITED STATES - OCTOBER 30: Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Stumo, was killed in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, holds a picture of Boeing 737 Max jet crash victims, during the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing examining the design, development, and marketing, of the Boeing 737 Max, in Rayburn Building on Wednesday, October 30, 2019. The world is a risky place. Get in a car and you have a 1:103 chance of dying in an accident. Step into an airplane and the odds of dying are more like 1:5,000,000. If you had boarded a Boeing 737 MAX aircraft after the October 2018 crash of Lion Air 610, an FAA study conducted after that crash concluded that the odds of being in a catastrophic accident were far higher. Yet the FAA decided not to ground the MAX but to let it keep flying - subject to reminding pilots of how to handle a misfiring flight control system. It was only three days after the March 2019 crash of the second 737 MAX - Ethiopian Air 302 - that the FAA finally grounded the fleet. What's of even more concern is that an MIT Sloan School statistics professor told me that this alarming FAA accident forecast was vastly understating the MAX's risk. Here are more details. On December 11, the House Transportation Committee released a November 2018 FAA internal analysis which concluded that without FAA intervention, "the MAX could have averaged one fatal crash about every two or three years. That amounts to a substantially greater safety risk than either Boeing or the agency indicated publicly at the time," according to the Wall Street Journal. After the October 2018 and March 2019 tragedies, a passenger's risk of dying in a MAX is many times greater than that risk for the average airplane flight - due largely to the MAX's MCAS navigation system, according to my December 11 interview with MIT Statistics Professor Arnold Barnett, who has written extensively about the MAX crisis. Barnett argues that the passenger death risk for the MAX is a whopping 20 times greater than for all flights. As he said, "The worldwide passenger death risk (passenger killed/passengers carried) was one in eight million between 2008 and 2018. That covers all reasons for crashes. The corresponding statistic for the MAX to date is [at least] one death per 400,000 passengers." Moreover, Barnett says that the FAA's November 2018 forecast of 15 MAX crashes over the next 30 to 45 years was way too optimistic. As he said, "When FAA's analysts projected one crash every two to three years (15 over 30 to 45 years), they made a risk estimate that seems too low by a factor of at least 24." He questions the FAA's assumptions and logic. "Given that their calculation explicitly assumes that no changes in the system [are] implicated in the Lion Air crash, I cannot understand their reasoning. If they perhaps thought that warnings to pilots were enough to counteract erroneous MCAS deployments, then why were they projecting 15 future catastrophes?" The FAA said it was following standard procedure. According to a December 12 statement, "...The FAA's Corrective Action Review Board relied on a scientific risk-assessment tool called Transport Aircraft Risk Assessment Methodology (TARAM). TARAM weighs a number of factors and is used solely for the purpose of helping us quantify risk." "The FAA used TARAM- as well as information from the ongoing investigation into the accident of a Boeing 737 MAX in Indonesia - to validate the agency's immediate decision to issue a Nov. 7, 2018, Emergency Airworthiness Directive (EAD)...which reminded pilots of the important procedures to promptly correct runaway stabilizer trim," the FAA explained. The FAA assumed this EAD would be effective because, as the New York Times reported, the previous crew that flew the Lion Air plane that crashed the next day was able - after a very panicky struggle - to keep the MCAS system from crashing the plane. However, the crew flying the same plane the next day - Lion Air 610 - could not handle the misfiring MCAS. The FAA concluded that the "control risk" - that a 737 MAX would crash again if it issued this EAD - was 1% (one out of 100 flights). This means, the FAA assumed that if it communicated this information to pilots, one in 100 flight crews would still get it wrong. The FAA was assuming that if Boeing was able to fix the MCAS system within 200 days with a fleet of 300 MAX aircraft still flying, the control risk would remain under 2% - the threshold level at which the FAA would have grounded the aircraft. After the March 10, 2019 Ethiopian Air crash, the FAA ran another TARAM forecast. "On March 12, the agency completed a subsequent TARAM that considered the most likely scenario for the 737 MAX accident in Ethiopia. The accident investigation team also worked overnight to collect and analyze satellite data that might corroborate the hypothesis while investigators provided additional information from the accident site. The FAA acted immediately to ground the aircraft on March 13 after verifying the satellite data, which was reinforced by evidence from the crash site," according to the spokesperson. Boeing said it shared the FAA's analysis and conclusions. According to a December 12 statement, "Based on a TARAM analysis, the FAA Corrective Action Review Board...determined that Boeing's and the FAA's actions in early November [2018] to reinforce existing pilot procedures through issuance of an Operations Manual Bulletin and Airworthiness Directive sufficed to allow continued operation of the MAX fleet until changes to the MCAS software could be implemented." Boeing said its own TARAM analysis was consistent with the FAA's conclusions and the November communication to pilots about how to promptly correct runaway stabilizer trim was "fully consistent with the FAA's analysis and established process." Barnett is not buying the FAA's analysis. "Look: during a two-year period when the number of MAX's averaged about 200. (it started at zero in early 2017 and rose to 370 by March 2019), there were two fatal MAX crashes that killed everyone on board. That's essentially one per year at a fleet size of 200. Yet the TARAM says that, with a fleet of 4,800 MAX's, crashes would average one in three years (15.4 over 45 years)." Barnett emphasized that "the existing evidence supports a far-worse risk estimate." By his math, "4,800 is 24 times 200 so [the FAA's assumption of one crash per year] at 200 translates into 24 crashes per year at 4,800, or 72 every three years, not one. It follows that the TARAM assumes that the experience to date will not remotely persist in the future." He says that the FAA was assuming that Boeing would develop a somewhat successful MCAS fix. "Rather than assuming no change to MCAS, more likely [the FAA is] assuming that some countermeasures are taken and that they are partially successful. But how could these measures be so inadequate that we lose 15 additional planes? I don't know what they are thinking, but I lack confidence that they are thinking straight." Barnett's lack of confidence makes me nervous about whether the FAA is doing enough to protect the flying public. His advice to the FAA: "It should consider why its risk estimates were far too low and think more clearly about how it should react to its risk estimates, even when they are accurate."

American Airlines Cancels Boeing 737 Max Flights Until April American Airlines has removed the Boeing 737 Max plane from its schedule until at least April, the latest delay for the beleaguered aircraft, the company said in a statement Thursday. The move follows this week's release of a damning Federal Aviation Administration risk assessment of the first of two fatal crashes that eventually led to the grounding of the plane around the world. At the time, the assessment had determined that at least 15 more crashes over the next 45 years would be likely if Boeing didn't make design changes to the plane. American Airlines said in a statement it was in "continuous contact" with regulators and Boeing, but they would extend the cancellation of the plane "based on the latest guidance." The carrier estimates this will result in about 140 flights cancelled each day through April 6. Southwest Airlines and United Airlines, which both count the 737 MAX in their fleet, have cancelled flights on the troubled jet until at least March, according to Southwest's website and CBS News. The 737 MAX has been grounded since March following two fatal crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed a total of 346 people. Earlier this week, the FAA said it would not certify the planes as safe to fly before the end of the year, CBS News reported, an outcome Boeing had been pushing for. "When the 737 Max is returned to service, it will be because the safety issues have been addressed and pilots have received all the training they need to safely operate the aircraft," FAA Administrator Steve Dickson told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, according to CBS News. "This process is not guided by a calendar or a schedule." For its part, Boeing said the company met with the FAA in what they called a "productive" session, according to NPR. "Boeing reaffirmed with the FAA that safety is our top shared priority, and we committed to addressing all of the FAA's questions as they assess MAX certification and training requirements," the company told NPR. "We will work with the FAA to support their requirements and their timeline as we work to safely return the Max to service in 2020."