general

As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 MAX, FAA managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis. But the original safety analysis that Boeing delivered to the FAA for a new flight control system on the MAX had several crucial flaws. That flight control system, called MCAS (Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System), is now under scrutiny after 2 crashes of the jet in less than 5 months resulted in Wednesday’s FAA order to ground the plane. Several technical experts inside the FAA said October’s Lion Air crash, where the MCAS has been clearly implicated by investigators in Indonesia, is only the latest indicator that the agency’s delegation of airplane certification has gone too far. <br/>

French cockpit crew representatives have highlighted the potential risks posed by increasingly advanced technology, while simultaneously urging restraint over speculation regarding the Boeing 737 Max accident in Ethiopia. French pilots’ union SNPL states that air transport has previously suffered from accidents linked to the “extremely sophisticated” logic of computer technology intended to make flight operations safer. “These systems…are developing so quickly that certification authorities are struggling to assess their side-effects,” it warns, particularly regarding crew training. The union adds that such systems, in turn, can depend on potentially “unreliable” sensors. This pace of technological evolution, it says, makes the decision to implement a precautionary grounding of the 737 Max understandable. <br/>