Training, Regulation, and the 737 Max

On March 18, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Previously on this topic: “Is It Time to Worry About the Boeing 737 Max?”, “A Shorter Guide to the Ethiopian Tragedy and the 737 Max,” “What Was On the Record About Problems With the 737 Max,” “‘Don’t Ground the Planes, Ground the Pilots,’” and “The Implications of the 737 Max Crashes.”

As the investigation goes on, additions for today:

1) The Seattle Times. Over the decades The Seattle Times has been a leader in aerospace reporting, no doubt in part because of Boeing’s huge presence in the area. In the 1980s, our friend Peter Rinearson won a Pulitzer prize for his Times coverage of the Boeing 757. In recent years our friend Dominic Gates has broken a number of important aerospace stories for the Times.

His latest one, today, is about the 737 Max and is very much worth reading in detail. Here is its summary of Boeing’s internal assessment of MCAS—the automated pitch-control system that is known to have been involved in the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last fall, and may or may not have played a part in this month’s Ethiopian Airlines crash.  

Gates writes of the Boeing internal analysis, which he has seen and discusses with industry experts:

The safety analysis:

• Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.
• Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.
• Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor—and yet that’s how it was designed.

The whole story is worth reading carefully, as is all of Gates’s coverage.

(By the way, looking for a reminder of why local- and regional-based news operations matter? Look again at The Seattle Times on this topic.)

2) Veteran pilots, on the fundamental training question. I continue to learn from, and be grateful for, a stream of messages from professionals within the aerospace community, about their views on the 737 Max tragedies.

The first note comes from a long-time pilot for a major U.S. airline who flies a different model Boeing plane. It responds to a previous dispatch, “Don’t Ground the Planes. Ground the Pilots.” In that post, another long-time pilot, Wally Magathan, said that one technical approach would be to require all 737 Max pilots to stop flying until they had undergone additional training.

This pilot writes:

By way of background, I’ve been flying at [a major U.S. airline] since 1985, and am currently a 777 Captain. I have never flown any model of 737.

Here are a couple of my own considerations about the 737 MAX grounding:

First, had the two recent tragedies occurred within a few months of the first MAX deliveries, there surely would have been no debate about the wisdom of stopping operations with that aircraft until causes and solutions were clear.

However, apparently there have been more than 350 MAX aircraft put into service in the last two years.  I have read that worldwide the MAX has flown more than 70,000 flights.  So while it’s now clear that some Boeing engineers and FAA certification people made egregious and unfortunate errors with the MCAS system precisely as Mr. Magathan indicated, it seems quite unlikely to me that MCAS was a singular causation either of the recent crashes. [JF note: Extra emphasis on the word “singular” in this sentence. Given the redundant safety systems of modern aircraft, when they crash, the reason usually turns out to be a complex “accident chain” of mistakes or failures. Usually it appears that the “chain” leading to a crash could have been interrupted at any point—and the plane would not have crashed—if a mechanical part or sensor hadn’t failed, or if some person involved with the flight had made a different choice. For instance, in the ASRS reports quoted earlier, U.S. airline pilots noticed a pitch anomaly with their 737 Max planes—and switched off the automated systems, “breaking the accident chain,” and flew on.]

In short, if the MCAS system was flawed to the point that the 737 MAX was inherently dangerous to fly, it seems to me that pilots, NASA, FAA, and the airlines would have been screaming at Boeing long before the Lion Air crash.

At the same time, great focus has been placed on the fact that both accidents involved this new version of the 737. But given the astronomical numbers of airline flights every single day and the small number of aircraft types that make up the vast majority of the worldwide airline fleet, is it really that improbable that two accidents involving similar flight profiles and the same aircraft type might occur?  Might we have something on the order of two Black Swan events here?

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Last, the hair on my neck has been standing up since I heard news of the Ethiopian First Officer’s lack of experience. [JF note: the Captain on the Ethiopian flight was highly experienced, but the reportedly the First Officer, the pilot sitting in the right-hand seat, has only 200 hours total flying time, which is hardly any at all.]  As you probably know, numerous countries, not least Germany and Mexico, have long employed “ground up” training systems for airline pilots. [JF: In these programs, new pilots start practically from the beginning flying alongside experienced pilots, in the airline fleet. This is in contrast to the U.S. approach of having prospective pilots “build time” elsewhere—in the military, as instructors, as charter pilots, etc—before switching to the airlines.]

The selection process of U.S. airlines has always seemed far superior to me, but of course for many reasons our nation has long had the luxury of a far greater pool of available experienced talent.

One more note: This comes from a very long-time military pilot and instructor. He stresses that, even as technology changes, fundamental questions about approaches to training remain:

I am a retired B-52 pilot/flight instructor, ATP [Air Transport Pilot certification], with extensive other experience in regional airlines and as a Flight Safety instructor in King Air.

In 1968 Boeing modified the flight control system (stability augmentation system, as I recall) for half the B-52 fleet, which took several months/years to accomplish.  I was an Air Force copilot at the time, and for several months we regularly sent our planes to depot maintenance or Boeing factories to install the new system.  They simultaneously sent out factory representatives to each base to accomplish classroom training in the new system …  

Each crew was briefed and given classroom training, but despite the effort, it was still possible to be assigned later to fly an airplane without notice which had the new system installed, and some confusion to be experienced.  One of the aircrew reports you quoted echoed, 50 years later, the same complaint.

The fault, in my opinion, lies with the airlines involved and their associated training.  Flight positions are coveted, nobody in one wants to rock the boat and admit his inadequacy.  A recipe for accidents.  The manufacturer, airline, and pilots themselves all share some of the blame for putting up with less than adequate training.

The Max versions of the 737 could/should be considered a different type aircraft which would require the type rating for that specific model, not just the basic 737.  

In the Vietnam war, in 1968 the Air Force started augmenting flight crews flying the b-52D models in theater with other flight crews who had been retrained at Castle AFB from newer models.  Even then for the first two flights in the D models in theater, an experienced pilot and navigator instructor on that plane flew (over the shoulder) along to insure adequate training in that plane.  Boeing could do the same here, send avionics representatives along with each crew on a training flight to insure adequate training.

Bonus: This Twitter thread, by Trevor Sumner, is worth reading and considering.

Yes, They REALLY ARE Coming For Your Kids

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

News from the UK:

The parents of an autistic teenage boy were warned he would be taken into care after they objected to him being given powerful hormone drugs to help him change sex.

Doctors at an NHS clinic had recommended he be given puberty-blockers – which delay adolescence – after the youngster declared he believed he was female.

But his mother and father, fearing the potential side-effects of the drugs, stopped him going to the clinic. And they suspected his abrupt decision to change sex was a result of his autism.

After the boy told the school he had been barred from treatment, a teacher told his parents that they should find alternative accommodation for their son or else he would be put into temporary foster care. And the school reported the couple to children’s services for being ‘emotionally abusive’ to their son by not supporting his wish to change gender.

A month later, the local authority placed him in a child protection plan after social workers concluded he was likely to suffer ‘significant harm’ under his parents’ care.

The Mail On Sunday reports that at least three children in Britain were put into foster care by the state last year because their parents wouldn’t agree to transgender treatment. The boy was struggling to cope with school because of his Asperger’s and autism. When he started to self-harm, his parents asked his doctor to refer him to children’s mental health services.

When the child met with a child psychotherapist, he said he believed he was female. According to the parents, that was the first the boy had ever said of such a thing. They assumed that it was another of his autistic obsessions (parents of kids on the spectrum are well aware of how these kids become obsessed with particular topics, and then drop them as suddenly as they acquired the obsession). Too late! The state therapy bureaucracy already had its claws sunk into the boy.

Read the whole thing. 

Americans need to wake the hell up. We need legislation right now to protect families from these fixers. Congressional Republicans, where are you?

Readers, I strongly urge you to follow 4th Wave Now on Twitter. It’s the Twitter feed of a politically non-partisan website for concerned parents of gender-dysphoric kids. Here’s a link to an interview with Denise, who founded the site when her daughter Chiara told her a few years ago that she was a trans male. Chiara has since desisted, and has started the Pique Resistance Project, a movement of detransitioners/desisters. The interview is actually with both Denise and Chiara — neither of whom are right-wing in any way, shape, or form. Excerpt:

Denise, as every parent knows who has experienced something similar, hearing your daughter suddenly declare she is transgender and tell you she needs hormones immediately is very stressful. How did you cope?

Starting the website—which was initially a cry into the wilderness, just hoping to find and speak to other parents who were skeptical of their teen’s desire to embark on medical transition—was crucial in helping me to cope with the situation. I suspect there would have been more arguments and difficult times between Chiara and me if I had not had the outlet of writing and finding others online who were in the same boat.

Pretty much all my “in real life” friends at the time were lifelong liberals/lefties like me, who saw (as I had) everything to do with trans activism as purely and simply the next civil rights movement; they hadn’t had a reason to look into some of the more controversial aspects because their lives hadn’t been touched by the issue. So, for the most part, I couldn’t talk to them openly about what was happening in my family.

Here’s a bit from Chiara, who identifies now as a lesbian:

Was there a lot of talk about suicide online? If so, did that influence you in any way?

There was a large amount, the most notable being the case of Leelah Alcorn, an MtF teenager who committed suicide in 2014. Her death affected me, along with many others, as it was sensationalized and widely held up as a warning to parents: “This is what happens when you don’t let your kid transition.” This mantra continues to be repeated online and everywhere, and perpetuates the idea that suicide is the “only way out” for kids whose parents will not accept their gender identity—this is a false statement that should under no circumstance be peddled to impressionable young people.

What made you feel unhappy about being a girl?

I was dealing with trauma, which caused me to want to escape my body. This, in addition to my resistance to accepting my same-sex attraction, resulted in a rejection of being female.

How did your dysphoria manifest itself? What “triggered” it for you?

It came on in the span of a couple months, but was still a fairly gradual process. The main triggers were my increased usage of social media, which facilitated my exposure to trans ideology and activism, as well as my social isolation and beginning to learn about and come to terms with past trauma. My dysphoria caused me to adopt an appearance that was as masculine as possible—I cut my hair short, wore men’s clothes, bound my chest, and packed off and on for over a year. I even used the men’s bathrooms in public, and felt good about myself when I passed successfully.

More from Chiara:

You mentioned that you had no desire to transition until you heard about others doing so. Did your dysphoria increase the more you learned about gender identity and transition?

Absolutely. The more information I consumed on the topic, the more adamant I was that transition was right for me. Other people’s hormonal and surgical results appealed to me at the time, and I desperately wanted that for myself. It was a vicious circle: the more I watched, the more my dysphoria grew, and the more my dysphoria grew, the more I needed to “escape” in the form of this addictive media.

Parents! Wake up! The smartphone and unfettered Internet access is not your child’s friend.

Read the entire interview. Educate yourself. The mainstream media is not going to do it for you.

Christchurch, the White Victim Complex and Savage Capitalism

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Despite his own denials, anti-Muslim xenophobia underwrites the 74-page manifesto compiled by Australian mass murderer Brendan Tarrant. The title itself, The Great Replacement, references a far-right conspiracy theory holding that white genocide is being engineered by useful idiots amongst the liberal elite advocating mass migration, demographic growth and cultural diversity.

To this conspiracy theory, the failure to uphold cultural and racial supremacy is identified with the destruction of whites. The politics of the dummy spit underwrite the belief that acknowledging the existence of and respecting other cultures and ethnic groups is tantamount to the death of the Self. It reflects the mentality of the infantile ego, yet to discover the existence of others outside of the realm of the known, associated in practise with the ego.

It is not a little telling that this atrocity was carried out on the same day as the latest in a series of large-scale climate strikes by secondary students throughout Australia and the world. On the one side, those directly threatened by a very real crisis took active measures to do something positive and constructive. On the other, a small group of people preoccupied with the threat of the existence of others carried out a negative and destructive atrocity. The contrast could hardly be clearer.

What to make of the difference between the two? In an eponymous 2017 work, anthropologist Ghassan Hage enquires, is racism an environmental threat? Hage explicitly links the global rise in racism, demagoguery and bigotry, of which we can quite easily include this latest Christchurch massacre, with a reaction amongst elite groups to the social consequences of climate change.

In awakening a need for meaningful and profound social change amongst increasingly vast sectors of the world’s population, Hage argued, the climate crisis has come to present increasingly clear and present threats to elite privilege. It has done so in the main, he contended, through rude infringements of scientific fact and lived daily experience on the ideological mores that have upheld a world order of haves and have nots built on 500 years of colonialism.

Not the least of these was the Self vs. Other binary that had been at the core of what Edward Said called ‘Orientalism.’ Orientalism referred to the paternalistic frame of reference for subjugated peoples used to rationalise colonial extractivism as ‘civilising the savages’—a mentality with roots in the Roman propensity to view everyone not under their control as ‘barbarians,’ until they were ‘civilised’ (with all the attendant tributes for the imperial power).

Such formed the basis, Hage argued, for a tendency within advanced capitalism to oscillate between what he called‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ capitalism—the ‘savage’ being that of the racialised associated with the early period of colonialism. The ‘civilised,’ by contrast, was of the type commonly associated with modern industrial capitalism and the liberal democracies associated with it.

This oscillating tendency reflected in essence a scapegoating dynamic, deriving from the fact that capitalist development remained an ongoing process after it had reached an advanced stage. This was specially insofar as late capitalism is plagued by periodic crises driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or by democratic challenges from below. This, Hage argued, drove the oscillation between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ modes, as privileged elites returned to violence to rescue their privilege from the shortcomings of the system that upheld them, or from democracy, or from both.

Periodic returns to the ‘savage’ modalities and mentalities accompanying the conditions that produced its birth was encouraged then as a stopgap against crisis—in the manner documented by sociological research into moral panic and the documented tendency of elite-controlled corporate media to manufacture consent through scaremongering and the production of deviance. Herman and Chomsky produced a classic work exploring this phenomenon; more recent scholarship has identified moral panic in the process.

The Islamic bugbears and hobgoblins in particular were created as a result of the power of the corporate media to control the meaning of deviance and impose their definition on public discourse—not on the features of those so demonised. The global instability created by a world order in which the richest one percent owned half the world’s wealth and the richest ten percent owned ¾ of it could be blamed on the Islamic Other.

Which brings us back to this latest example of white supremacist terrorism in Christchurch. Nothing about this atrocity and the terrible loss of life is special, other than the fact that it took place on the same day as the latest round of climate strikes lead by secondary students. The contrast between the preoccupation with conspiracy and manufactured crisis and the very clear scientific understanding of climate crisis reflects with a unique conspicuousness the function of the former in dodging the reality of and constructing scapegoats for the latter.

If whites are feeling insecure, this has nothing to do with the social and environmental consequences of global economic modality built on the assumption that the world is an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump—it is the fault of those existing outside of the culturally hegemonic and supremacist monoculture for existing. Herein lies the scapegoating dynamic of savage capitalism, built on a white victim complex refusing to acknowledge any difference between respecting other cultures and the death of the Self.

As Ghassan Hage noted, the impetus for the scapegoating of savage capitalism and the white victim complex arises out of accumulation crisis, as the very real social, economic and environmental consequences of maintaining the world of haves and have-nots becomes harder and harder to sweep under the rug. As corporate-captured governments around the world continue to fail to act on climate change in prioritising profit over the planet, opposition from the young in particular can only ever grow.

In the face of this dire threat of democracy, the value of manufactured conspiracy theories alleging racial existential threats to be used as scapegoats increases accordingly—all the more so as the climate crisis continues to worsen, presenting an increasingly unavoidable existential threat to human society.

Atrocities like those perpetrated in Christchurch in the final analysis are driven by the impulse to blame the consequences of the social and economic modalities behind climate change on the victims and any other convenient scapegoats. They are driven by the impulse to reassert the fundamental modalities and mentalities that produced the interconnected crises of our age in the first place.

As long as they continue to be useful in suppressing the ultimate reality that there is no class privilege on a dead planet, prominent Islamophobes in the corporate media and politics (Andrew Bolt and Cori Bernadi here in Australia being prime examples) will continue to promote the conspiracy theories driving the likes of Brendan Tarrant and Anders Brevik to deadly violence. In the end, the terror that these atrocities produce for the affected communities only reflects the racialised terror from which the Western-dominated world order was born, and whose consequences condemn us all to ecological Armageddon.