09 October 2024

Doesn't Care About Making Planes

I have been saying for some time that Boeing can no longer make planes.

Based on the revelations from previously undiscovered communications between Boeing and Ethiopian Airlines, it's now clear that they just did not care.

In late 2018, Ethiopian Airlines’ chief pilot sent an urgent message to Boeing, the manufacturer of the 737 Max airliner.

Barely a month earlier, a 737 Max operated by Lion Air of Indonesia had plunged into the sea, killing everyone on board. The cause appeared to be a problem with the plane’s flight control system.

The Ethiopian carrier also flew the 737 Max, and the chief pilot wanted more information from Boeing about the emergency procedures to follow if the same problem that doomed the Lion Air flight should recur. At the time, Boeing was providing detailed briefings to pilots in the United States who were asking the same types of questions about how to respond.

But Boeing chose not to answer the Ethiopian pilot’s questions beyond referring him to a public document it had already issued after the Lion Air crash. Boeing said in its response that it was prohibited from giving additional information because it was providing technical support to Indonesian authorities investigating that crash.

………

Three months after the request by Ethiopian Airlines, one of its 737 Max’s nose-dived into the ground after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, killing all 157 people on board. The main cause was found to be the same flawed flight control system responsible for the Lion Air flight crash, a failure that presented the Ethiopian Airlines pilots with the very same kinds of life-or-death decisions about how to respond that the chief pilot had asked about months earlier.

Or maybe they just don't care about Black pilots:

………

After the Lion Air crash, Boeing executives sought out U.S. pilots to brief them on topics that were not discussed with the Ethiopian pilots, including long-term strategies for improving flight safety, a recording of the briefing shows.

………

The company’s representatives highlighted efforts to address and clarify what they called misunderstandings related to MCAS. They pushed for training that would extend beyond routine checklists, focusing instead on equipping pilots with a thorough understanding of system behaviors and potential failures.

………

Despite the constraints Boeing described in the response to the Ethiopian chief pilot, Boeing officials discussed numerous details of the Lion Air crash.

………

The Ethiopian report, released in December 2022, found that if Boeing had provided more information to the carrier’s pilots about how to respond in the event of a software malfunction, they might have been able to regain control of the aircraft.

“The investigation found the questions raised by the airline to be safety critical, and if Boeing had answered the questions raised by the training department either directly or indirectly,” the report said, the outcome might have been different.

The Ethiopian investigators also had access to the emails between the chief pilot and Boeing and included them in their report. But Boeing’s unwillingness to provide the airline with more detailed guidance went largely unnoticed at the time.

………

The emails — which were not made available to congressional investigators in the United States and only came to the attention of some families of those killed in the crash last year — are now part of an effort by the families to block the plea deal.

The families argue that the agreement does not do enough to hold Boeing and its executives responsible for the crashes or to address what they see as deep-rooted problems in Boeing culture and operations that are leaving air travelers at risk.

There are not many problems that one can arrest one's way out of, but this is one of them.

Frog march every executive in the authority over the MCAS debacle out of their offices in handcuffs.\

That will make the useless MBA types think twice about f%$#ing the company to get this year's stock options.

 

0 comments :

Post a Comment