After listening recently to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s apology and his promise that the aircraft company will do better to deliver on its promise of passenger safety, I like many other Americans remain unconvinced that enough has changed.
My assessment comes as a computer systems engineer who is also a pilot; and what I didn’t hear was either an acknowledgment of the multiple faulty decisions that led to the deaths of 346 people or a promise to change the way such decisions are made to avoid such a possibility in the future.
In fact, as I understand the 737 Max 8 “fix,” the solution still does not address the major deficiency of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — it is capable of putting the aircraft into a situation that is not recoverable even by trained pilots and even after the system has been turned off.
Rather than a vague promise to “do better,” I think the public and flight crews deserve some specific promises about Boeing passenger aircraft:
- Boeing will never again attempt to qualify an aircraft as requiring zero training without sign-off by pilot unions having full knowledge and understanding of the aerodynamic changes and all programmed control systems employed to counter them.
- Boeing will never install a software system capable of rendering an aircraft uncontrollable even after it is disengaged. My understanding of the “fix” for the Max 8 MCAS is that it appears to fail this test, since turning off MCAS necessitates turning off power trim controls when manual trim may be inadequate to bring the aircraft under control.
- The fact that a programmed control system is influencing the aircraft should be prominently displayed to the pilots. It was not that the angle of attack sensors may have been in disagreement that caused these crashes but that MCAS was forcing the aircraft into a dive. Why it did so is much less relevant to the outcome.
Disengagement of a programmed control system should be easy and a mandatory element of training, and its disengagement should not cause loss of any of the other critical aircraft systems.
Boeing’s response is not even close to taking real responsibility.
Increasingly, software will be used in lieu of much more difficult and expensive designs. Despite its 102-year history as an aircraft manufacturer, Boeing has not shown an adequate respect for the adage that all programmers know — a software system is never fully debugged and its deficiencies are totally unpredictable, following no laws of physics or dynamics.
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Dave Sullivan, of Palm Beach Shores, Fla., wrote this for The Palm Beach Post.