What's Next for the Max?

As an aviation blogger, the past few days have been simultaneously hope inspiring and depressing. Hope inspiring as many people understand, or make a good faith attempt to understand, the underlying issues surrounding the 737 Max. But also depressing as random fanbois, trolls, and low information, yet self proclaimed experts, happen by my comments section to disgorge their dubious wisdom on things about which they know little or nothing.

Mencken was Right: No One Ever went Broke Underestimating the Intelligence of the Public

One commenter offered, based on no information other than two 737s had crashed, that all of them should be grounded. I pointed out that by that logic, it would be even more beneficial to ground all airplanes everywhere as it would be safer still. The response was "I didn't say all airplanes should be grounded" displaying an ironclad grip on logical fallacies.

When I noted that the MCAS system could be completely deactivated using two switches mounted on the center console, a commenter replied that well, "maybe the switches reconnected themselves". Other than the testing of those switches being a mandatory preflight item, this commenter has obviously confused the Boeing 737 with the SkyNet model T-1000 Terminator which can rewire itself automatically.

Lastly, when one commenter [Hi Scott!] boldly opined that the 737 was the worst airplane he'd ever flown on, I replied that my passenger experience is usually more dependent upon the particular airline and class of service rather than the aircraft type. This big brained person assured me, however, that no, none of that mattered. He apparently would rather sit in a non reclining 28 inch pitch economy seat on a Spirit A320 than a first class seat on a JAL 737.  [Sigh]

Public Relations and Marketing Wins

So the FAA bowed to international and media pressure and grounded all Max aircraft, which is proving to be a minor inconvenience to most operators of the aircraft. I was personally walking out to a Max to fly to Phoenix when the announcement came. Someone somewhere had done some preparations and an -800 was towed to the gate by maintenance about 10 minutes later for a slightly delayed departure.

We of course are now treated to the circular logic of all the "I told you so" stories. The process starts as media sensationalism whips up a gullible and credulous public followed by outraged calls for the aircraft to be grounded. After weather-vaning politicians cave into public pressure, preening media talking heads then get to state that something must have been really been wrong. And so it goes.

Make no mistake: this grounding has more to do with public relations and marketing than safety. As of yet, there is very little evidence that the two Max crashes are in any way related other than the most superficial of circumstances. But the tsunami of media scare stories and sensationalism showed no signs of abatement, so this was the correct decision. 

The FAA cited "newly" discovered satellite data which finally swayed their decision.They are referring to the ADS-B tracking system which relays flight parameters to air traffic control through satellite. This information, however, was publicly available shortly after the crash and it does show some minor altitude excursions, though nothing is conclusive.

The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from the Ethiopian crash have been recovered and sent to France for analysis. Again, prescient commenters noted that this was a good thing because, of course, had they been sent to the US, American investigators would falsify any result finding the US producer of the aircraft at fault. I actually agree with this decision in spite of the slander against the integrity of the NTSB and other US investigators. Having French investigators analyze the data will deflect the inevitable cries of bias should the investigation find fault in anything except the aircraft itself.

What Next?

What happens next is we wait for the data from ET302 to be downloaded and released. When that happens and a likely cause of the accident can be discerned, the Max will be cleared to fly. Notice that I didn't say that this clearance will in any way be dependent on the outcome of the investigation. The aircraft will be flying again in a matter of weeks regardless of the findings.

Why you ask? Should the MCAS system be implicated in this crash (unlikely in my opinion), there will be software fixes and training updates offered. As I've noted many times, the system can be deactivated completely through the use of two center console mounted switches. Even then, the system should only activate in the case of gross pilot negligence resulting in an aerodynamic stall or, as in the case of the Lion crash, an errant sensor input due to a mechanical malfunction. 

The software fixes will preclude the activation of the system due to the failure of a single sensor. The training updates will reemphasize to all operators that undesirable electric trim inputs can be inhibited through the use of the center console mounted stab cutout switches. 

Should the MCAS system not be implicated in the ET302 crash, the Max will be back in the air that much sooner. Make no mistake, all airline crashes are tragedies of the highest order for everyone involved. The object of any investigation is to find out what happened and to take measures to prevent any future recurrence. Commercial aviation is one of the safest, if not the safest means of transportation available. 

What will be left is a mopping up by the lawyers.


Captain Rob Graves is a veteran airline pilot and retired Air Force officer. He currently flies a Boeing 737 for a major American airline where he has over 25 years of experience. His Air Force career included instructing future USAF pilots in the T-37 primary jet trainer, aerial refueling in the KC-135 Stratotanker, and conducting worldwide logistics in the C-5 Galaxy cargo aircraft. He is the author of This is Your Captain Speaking, an aviation blog. It can be found at robertgraves.com. He also writes for Avgeekery.com. 

If a Drone Hits a Plane, Who Pays?

Drone ordering a drink at a cafe

You're probably thinking (to the extent that you think about this at all) that the owner of the drone probably pays. Or perhaps the drone pilot if negligence can be shown. Or maybe the drone manufacturer might be at fault if there was a malfunction in the drone. But how about the company that wrote the software that controls how the drone flies? Or the person who programmed the flight path?

You can bet that when one of these things flies into the engine of an airliner (notice I said when and not if), legions of lawyers will be battling over these questions in a legal melee. Because while most drones are just toys for backyard entertainment, they are only growing in size, weight and capabilities. But even the smallest drones can cause quite a bit of trouble if they tangle with an airplane or wander where they shouldn't.

The FAA has recently released guidelines for the operation of small drones defined as under 55 pounds. Included in the new rules is a requirement for drones to remain within visual line of sight (VLOS) of their operator. This requirement is sticking in the craw of commercial operators who wish to use drones for extensive operations such as powerline inspection or package delivery.

But assuming that these restrictions are eventually eased, a drone which flies on its own out of sight of an operator or without a human operator will need to have some autonomous functions. Things like navigation, collision avoidance, communications loss protocols and emergency landing capabilities would have to be built into any drone designed to work on its own. Each of these functions may be sourced from different manufacturers with their own software as they are on a plane. Here's where the liability fun really begins.

Robots Behaving Badly

Now think about the liability problems that would manifest were a driverless car or pilotless airliner to crash. The problem of liability for autonomous robots which operate around the public is a new one and is likely to prove difficult (though not impossible) to solve. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins sums up the autonomous robot problem as it applies to driverless cars:

Those lusting after the self-driving car ought to pay attention to the Toyota litigation, which suggests that Software Sammy is not about to become everyman's personal chauffeur anytime soon. 

Toyota had been vigorously fighting hundreds of complaints that its cars are prone to unintended acceleration. Now it's moving toward a global settlement as a consequence of a single Oklahoma lawsuit that appears to establish that Toyota can't prevail if it can't prove a negative—that its software didn't go haywire in some untraceable and unreplicable manner.

Toyota lost a liability lawsuit here over an alleged yet unreproducible fault in its cruise control software (which wasn't even being used at the time). In this sort of legal climate, who wishes to risk their net worth making robots when a jury can be convinced that the inner workings of a computer are as mysterious and unpredictable as the dark arts in a Harry Potter film?

Where There is Human-Robot Interaction, There is Liability

In the aftermath of the crash of Asiana 214 in San Francisco on a clear and calm day, Asiana blamed the 777's autothrottle system for not maintaining the proper airspeed. They claimed that the pilots were led to believe that the system would maintain speed and were too late to correct the error when the system did not behave as they expected.

Here again is an argument over whether the people who designed the machine or the people who oversee the machine should shoulder ultimate liability. These sorts of lawsuits have been around for awhile but automation is adding an unpredictable dimension.

At some point in the not too distant future, we've been told to expect both single pilot and pilotless airliners. The problem is not the future vision of pilotless airliners (they're coming), but rather the transition period between human and autonomous control.  During the interim, a human may still be aboard the aircraft and perhaps even be called a pilot but he will just be there to oversee the computers which do the actual flying.

A "pilot" who never actually flies the airplane won't have the skills necessary to manually fly an airplane especially in an emergency or when the machine gives up. Jenkins again:

And soon, except for landing and takeoff, manual flying may be all but impossible in densely used airspace as controllers pack in planes more tightly and precisely to save fuel and time and to make way for a horde of unmanned vehicles. Already, even as the skies become safer, the greatest risk to passengers is pilots accidentally crashing well-functioning aircraft during those rarer and rarer parts of the flight when they are physically in control.

So if an airplane with a "system operator" aboard crashes due to computer failure, who is at fault? The "operator" who's not really a pilot in any real sense, the designer of the automation system itself, or the airline that decided that this was all a good idea to begin with?

It is beginning to appear as if the lawyers may actually have the final say over the engineers when it comes to the widespread deployment of robots for public consumption.