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Boeing 737 Max: US committee denounces sloppiness and cover-up

2020-09-16T14:53:20.329Z


Two Boeing 737 Max crashes killed 346 people. The final finding of the US House of Representatives: The cause was the greed of the group, the aviation authority, which is too bona fide, is to blame.


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737 Max aircraft should be allowed to take off again soon

Photo: Nick Oxford / REUTERS

Technical errors and oversight failure led to the devastating crashes of Boeing's 737 Max crisis pilot.

That is the conclusion of the final report of a committee of inquiry of the US House of Representatives published in Washington on Wednesday.

Violent allegations of sloppiness, cover-ups and a lack of controls are made against Boeing and the US aviation authority FAA.

"Culture of Concealment"

According to the report, four main factors played a key role in the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, which killed 346 people.

  • The desire to keep up with the competition, especially with the Airbus A320 neo, led Boeing to

    give more importance to production targets and cost reductions than to safety,

    according to the report

    .

  • Boeing relied

    on the control software MCAS

    , which lowered the noses of the machines dangerously.

  • The group

    withheld crucial information from the US aviation safety authority FAA

    .

  • At the same time,

    the FAA left supervisory tasks to Boeing employees

    .

"The Max crashes were not the result of a single failure, technical error or poorly handled event," says the 245-page document.

"It was the terrible culmination of a series of false technical assumptions by Boeing engineers, a lack of management transparency and grossly inadequate oversight by the FAA."

Boeing is accused again in the report of a "culture of concealment".

The allegations are not new and had already been raised in the preliminary final report in March, but they have now been substantiated with further evidence and formulated even more drastically.

Republicans: Report Partial and Exaggerated

Responsible for the settlement with Boeing and the FAA are primarily members of the Democratic Party, which has the majority in the House of Representatives.

Some Republican politicians said the report was biased and excessive to the US media.

The flight ban for the Boeing bestseller 737 Max, which has been forced to stay on the ground for a year and a half, could soon fall.

The necessary test flights by the FAA and the European air traffic control authority EASA have already been carried out.

The 737 Max could fly again in the USA in November, in Europe and large parts of the world the flight ban is likely to be lifted a little later.

It is precisely at this time that another report on the failures comes at an inopportune time for Boeing.

In addition, the group has problems with the long-haul aircraft 787. (Read more about this here.)

"We have learned many hard lessons from the accidents and from the mistakes that we have made," said Boeing in response to the report.

The FAA also admitted errors: They are concentrating on improving general aviation security through improvements in the organization, processes and corporate culture, "it said in a statement.

According to the report, Boeing employees had reported problems with the MCAS software system, but the warnings were ignored.

MCAS was supposed to automatically prevent a stall, but in fact it mistakenly forced the aircraft involved in the accident into a dive.

Boeing has kept "crucial information from the FAA, its customers and the pilots themselves," according to the report.

The pilots wouldn't even have known that the MCAS even existed.

The system could be activated by data from a single sensor.

Before the 737 MAX can go into the air again, the system must be reprogrammed so that it reacts to data from two sensors.

Icon: The mirror

koe / dpa / Reuters

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2020-09-16

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