Boeing’s efforts to save its customers money contributed to the “fatal mistake” of failing to give pilots the crucial information and training they needed to safely fly 737 Max jets, according to the president of a union representing 15,000 American Airlines pilots.
“Unfortunately, as pilots know, improvements in aviation are often written in the blood of the unfortunate victims of airplane accidents,” Captain Daniel F. Carey said in remarks prepared for a hearing before the House aviation subcommittee.
Two new Boeing 737 Max jets crashed within five months – one in Indonesia and the other in Ethiopia – killing 346 people, after investigators say pilots in both crashes were unable to control an automatic anti-stall system that kept pushing the planes’ noses downward based on faulty information from a sensor. Three days after the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March, the Federal Aviation Administration followed its counterparts in other countries and grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9. The jets remain grounded.
Carey, who is president of the Allied Pilots Association, said Boeing’s mistakes were also compounded by company engineers who created the automated feature, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. The feature was meant to give the planes the same feel to fly as their predecessors, but were not well integrated into the plane, Carey argues.
“The point was to provide Boeing’s customers with a new advanced aircraft while minimizing the training cost associated with a different aircraft certification,” Carey wrote in his planned testimony.
Wednesday’s hearing is part of a broader probe by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure into the causes of the Max tragedies, decisions by Boeing and oversight by the FAA. Members are also scheduled to hear from the industry group Airlines for America, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, former FAA administrator Randy Babbitt, and Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III.
Investigators say faulty information from an external sensor on both planes caused the MCAS system to repeatedly misfire, contributing to the crashes. Carey said such a “single-point-of-failure design” meant that “any redundancy to the system, if it failed, was completely dependent on the Captain and First Officer of the aircraft.”
“The huge error of omission is that Boeing failed to disclose the existence of MCAS to the pilot community. The final fatal mistake was, therefore, the absence of robust pilot training in the event that the MCAS failed,” Carey wrote.
Boeing did not immediately respond to questions about Carey’s planned testimony.
