Two airline crashes, hundreds of passengers dead, but the concerns about Boeing and their B737 MAX is not getting resolved. Even more safety dangers were revealed by pilot testimony during Wednesday’s House Aviation Subcommittee, according to Paul Hudson of Flyersrights. They include:
The MAX requires a higher take-off speed of 23 mph higher than previous versions, making it difficult to clear obstacles at the end of shorter runways at some airports like Chicago Midway, especially in wet or icy conditions. This also applies when operating in regions with hot weather, such as in Ethiopia (and other geographical locations) where the Ethiopian Airliner crashed in March killing all.
The FAA has reduced mandatory pilot simulator retraining from every six months to every 12 months. Furthermore, there are about 100 emergency conditions that pilots need to practice according to manuals and the training time is woefully insufficient.
There are only four full simulators for the MAX
(two in Canada, one in the U.S. and one in Ethiopia) so it is impossible for tens of thousands of MAX pilots to get full simulator training.
The pilot flight manual checklists need revision to ensure pilots can actually perform the tasks listed. Capt. Sully noted that pilots faced G-forces of +2 to -2, making some emergency tasks impossible to perform, especially when pilots have to look up emergency-condition procedures with very little time.
Bad plane designs like the MAX increase the number of possible dangerous emergency conditions pilots must deal with.
The FAA lacks experts qualified to evaluate computer systems with advanced artificial intelligence, which is now being used to control airliners in flight.
Pilots, especially foreign pilots, fly 90% of the time using automation and only 10% manually.
Safety starts at the top and Boeing board lacks any pilots, and has only one engineer –the CEO came out the military aircraft division not the commercial airplane division.
It is unclear to American Airlines pilots whether the Boeing proposed MAX fix that turns the plane over to manual pilot control when MCAS senses anomalies is viable as they have been unable to test this proposed Boeing solution in actual flight or simulator tests. A recent test was canceled by Boeing. Why?
Boeing is looking to fire about 900 human safety inspectors at its manufacturing plants, as it wants to replace them with robots and computer software.