Investigators have released their
findings on the Ethiopian Airlines
crash. They say the crew followed all the
manufacturer's instructions for the 737 Max
plane. Critics of the Federal Aviation
Administration say the agency delegated to
Boeing much of the testing of its jets —
basically allowing the company to certify its
own planes through self-regulation. The FAA
isn’t alone in this.
Why aren’t Boeing executives be
ing prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes?
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 and 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. With the help of liberal icon Edward Kennedy, 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.
Boeing CEO praised “streamlined” oversight of 737 plane that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia
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.
“That’s helping us more efficiently work through certification on some of our new model aircraft such as the Max as it’s going through flight test and entering into service,” Muilenburg told the financial analysts. “So we’re already seeing some benefits there of some of the work that’s being done with the FAA.”
Four months later, the first 737 Max 8 commercial jet was brought into service. Since then it has become the giant aircraft makers' best-selling plane, accounting for 30 percent of its profits, which grew 24 percent in 2018 to $10.5 billion.
It is this aircraft that crashed in Indonesia in October of 2018 and on March 10 of this year in Ethiopia, killing all passengers and crew on board, a combined total of 346 people. In both cases, investigators have identified an automated system designed to counter the plane's tendency to stall, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), as a key factor in the fatal crashes.
Muilenberg’s touting of the gutting of serious government oversight points to the systemic subordination of safety concerns to profit and market share and the transformation of regulatory agencies into rubber stamps for the major corporations.
CNN reported Muilenburg’s remarks on Thursday, the same day that the Ethiopian Transport Ministry released the results of its preliminary investigation into the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 just six minutes after takeoff from the airport in Addis Ababa. As in the Lion Air disaster just five months before, which crashed just 13 minutes after takeoff, the plane repeatedly pitched downward and the pilots were unable to regain control.
The Ethiopian report, based on information from the recovered flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, as well as communications between the pilots and air traffic controllers, contradicted attempts by Boeing and some media commentators to imply that pilot error, not design flaws or faulty equipment and software, was responsible for the disaster. It concluded that just a minute into the flight, one of two angle of attack sensors on the plane began emitting false readings, triggering the MCAS anti-stall mechanism and forcing down the nose of the aircraft.
Particularly damning for Boeing and the FAA was its finding that the pilots followed the emergency procedures provided by Boeing to counter such a development and manually stabilize the aircraft, but were unable to regain control of the plane. This shattered the claims made by both Boeing and the FAA after the Ethiopian crash that the steps provided to pilots to overcome such an emergency and manually fly the plane were simple and easy to carry out, and their suggestions that the Flight 302 pilots had failed to follow the prescribed emergency procedures.
The preliminary report issued by the Transport Ministry’s Accident Investigation Bureau explained that the pilots disengaged MCAS, but the plane continued repeatedly to pitch downward despite their efforts to manually raise the nose. It further concluded that the manual control in the cockpit designed to lift or lower the nose, called the manual trim, failed to work.
The Initial Findings state, in part:
- After the autopilot disengaged, the DFDR (digital flight data recorder) recorded an automatic aircraft nose down trim command four times without pilot’s input.
- The crew… confirmed that the manual trim operation was not working
It was at this point, some four minutes into the flight, and only then that the pilots reengaged MCAS, presumably in a desperate, last ditch attempt to save the plane. In the event, MCAS forced the nose down at a 40 degree angle, leading the plane to plunge to earth at an impact speed of 575 miles per hour.
The report’s Safety Recommendations unambiguously place the onus for the disaster on Boeing and US regulators and imply that a far more serious and thorough examination is needed than the software patch on which Boeing is working before there is any return to service by the 737 Max.
- Since repetitive un-commanded aircraft nose down conditions are noticed in this preliminary investigation, it is recommended that the aircraft flight control system related to flight controllability shall be reviewed by the manufacturer.
- Aviation authorities shall verify that the review of the aircraft flight control system related to flight controllability has been adequately addressed by the manufacturer before the release of the aircraft to operations.
This evaluation was underscored by Ethiopian Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges at a press conference in Thursday. She said, “The crew performed all the procedures repeatedly provided by the manufacturer but was not able to control the aircraft.”
Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union and 737 pilot, was quoted Friday in the New York Times as saying:
“The captain was not able to recover the aircraft with the procedures he was trained on and told by Boeing.” Speaking of the MCAS system, he continued, “It was too aggressive. They left the pilot with no ability to gain control of the aircraft if it went to the full limit.”
Muilenburg, in a statement Thursday following the release of the Ethiopian report, acknowledged for the first time that faulty sensor data and MCAS played a role in the crash of Flight 302. However, the company and the FAA are planning only to add a software patch to MCAS that will prevent the system from being triggered by only one, instead of both sensors, and moderate the aggressiveness of its downward push of the nose.
However, virtually nothing is being said about the highly unusual design that allowed MCAS to be triggered by only one sensor in the first place. The standard design for systems that are critical to the safety of a commercial aircraft has always included some form of redundancy, so that the malfunction of a single sensor does not lead to disaster. Why the 737 Max was designed without such redundancy for the critical MCAS function, and why no change was made after the Indonesian crash last October, has not been explained.
Even as Muilenburg and Boeing reaffirmed the “fundamental safety” of the 737 Max, the company announced Thursday that it had discovered another problem requiring an additional software patch, further delaying the implementation of changes to the MCAS system. While a company spokesman called the new problem “relatively minor,” the Washington Post cited two officials “with knowledge of the investigation” as saying the new problem related to software affecting flight control hardware and was there classified as “critical to flight safety.”
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