April 8, 2020

The COVID panic has reduced air travel to almost nothing. U.S. carriers have grounded up to 90 percent of their flights. Survival comes down to perseverance, bailout money, and innovation.

As to the latter, Alaska Airlines has a strategy to help it remain in markets where ridership has plummeted. Instead of relying on nonstop “spoke” flights from its Seattle hub, the airline will run consolidated, connect-the-dots style flights that take in multiple cities in a single run. For example, rather than operating one flight from Seattle to Pittsburgh, and another from Seattle to Baltimore, there’s now a single aircraft going Seattle-Pittsburgh-Baltimore. Seattle-Dallas-Houston and Seattle-Minneapolis-Columbus are two others.

It’s a useful way of adapting to the current environment. What it’s not, however, is new. Back in the proverbial day, this is what most cross-country flying looked like. Flights going coast-to-coast would often make two, three, possibly four stops along the way. I have a collection of timetables from the 60s and 70s; even then, well into the jet age, multiple-stop itineraries were common. A Boston to Miami flight with Eastern, for instance, might have stopped in Philadelphia and Atlanta. In PHL or ATL, passengers destined for those cities would disembark while additional Miami-bound passengers came aboard. “Through” passengers, as they were called, remained in their seats. The same thing was common in long-haul markets overseas. A flight from London to Singapore might have gone via Rome, Istanbul, Karachi and Bombay. How about: London-Rome-Khartoum-Nairobi-Johannesburng? In the 1940s, Qantas’ so-called “Kangaroo Route” made six stopovers between London and Sydney. When I traveled to Montana with my family in 1980, our Northwest flight went Boston-Detroit-Milwaukee-Minneapolis-Billings-Bozeman. The only change of planes was in in Minneapolis.

These were known as “direct” flights. Today the terms “direct” and “nonstop” are used interchangeably, but in the old days a “direct” flight merely meant there’d be no change of aircraft or flight number.

A lot of this was necessity. The range and payload constraints of older generation aircraft made nonstops unfeasible beyond a certain distance. But part of it, too, was efficiency. Carriers needed fewer planes and fewer crews.

Modern examples still exist. Southwest operates a number of multiple stop directs. Traveling to Bhutan in 2017, I boarded a direct flight from Bangkok to Paro. Along the way we spent 35 minutes on the ground in Gauhati, India, a city I had never heard of before. “Through” passengers like me stayed on board. On a recent flight from Phnom Penh to Doha on Qatar Airways, same thing, this time with a short stopover in Ho Chi Minh City. Ditto for an Emirates flight that went Phnom Penh-Yangon-Dubai. Plenty of examples are out there, but the remain-on-board option is increasingly rare.

The maps above (and below) are lifted from “Airline Maps, A Century of Art and Design,” a new book by Mark Ovenden and Maxwell Roberts.

I’ve been infatuated by airline route maps my whole life. They are what turned my passion for commercial aviation into a love of travel as well: a way of graphically understanding the airplane as something bigger than a means to an end. There’s something oddly meditative and Zen about them. As a kid, whenever I got hold of an airline timetable (back when such things existed) the first thing I’d do is open to the route map. The best were the center fold-outs, with the extra third page. I could spend hours studying those those arcs and lines. “Next time you’re wedged in economy, flip to the map section in the back of the inflight magazine,” I write in the introduction to my book. “Those three-panel foldouts and their crazy nests of city pairs were, for me, a kind of junior pilot porno.”

Now there’s 140 pages of them, spanning nine decades.

As you’d maybe expect, the authors spend most of their time in the decades between 1930 and 1970, when airline iconography and graphic design became an artform all its own. The selections from this period range from cartoonish to elegant, many of them nothing short of cartographic marvels. Almost all of them are colorful, whimsical, and historically evocative. Now departing for Leopoldville, Leningrad and Calcutta: it’s the history of air travel, design, geography and geopolitics all at once.

Most carriers still produce route maps, viewable online or in their magazines. They’ve become a lot simpler, and the presentation can be confusing. Some have done away with lines and rely only color-coded dots for destination cities, giving you only half the story. Worse are the ones that include the flights of code share and joint-venture partners, leaving the maps so cluttered you can’t make sense of them.

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HOMAGE TO THE BOARDING PASS WALLET

Boeing bet the future on a 50 year-old design. Did it lose?

December 16, 2019

I’M DEPRESSED. I’m depressed because the word on the street has it that Boeing will not be moving forward with its so-called “new midsize airplane,” or NMA, also known as the 797. That’s the rumor, at any rate.

If built, the 797 would bridge the range and capacity gap between the narrow-body 737 family and the much larger 787 and 777 families — a slot occupied by the now-geriatric 757 and 767. The concept was formally unveiled at the Paris Air Show two years ago, and the planemaker has been mulling it over ever since. The uncertainty around the project has become a simmering backstory to the ongoing 737 MAX saga.

The two are not unrelated.

Back about fifteen years ago, Boeing had a decision to make. It’s popular 757 was getting long in the tooth. Orders were drying up and the company would need to develop a replacement. This wouldn’t be easy, because the 757 was, and still is, a very special machine. You might call it the most versatile jetliner Boeing has ever built: a medium-capacity, high-performing plane able to turn a profit on both short and longer-haul routes — domestic or international; across the Mississippi or across the North Atlantic.

And along the way it meets every operational challenge. Short runway? Stiff headwinds? Full payload? No problem. With 180 passengers, the plane can safely depart from a short runway, climb directly to cruise altitude, and fly clear across the country — or the ocean. Nothing else can do that. And it’s a great-looking plane to boot.

Essentially three options were on the table. The first was to come up with a plane from scratch — a brand-new jetliner of roughly the 757’s size and capabilities. A second, less expensive option would be to equip the existing airframe with new engines, modern avionics and other upgrades — a 757-X, if you will. Option three would be to abandon the 757 template altogether and, instead, turn to the company’s favorite cash-cow, the 737, and somehow push it, squeeze it, force it, into the role of the 757.

Although Boeing hasn’t — at least not yet — officially abandoned the idea of new airplane, it is option three, if only by default, that seems to have won. Production of the 757 ceased for good in 2004, and the 737 remains Boeing’s only non-widebdoy replacement option. Need a 180-ish seater? If you’re buying from Boeing, it’s a 737 or nothing: the -800, the -900, or the beleaguered MAX.

None of these, however, can do what the 757 does. The 737’s range allows U.S. coast-to-coast and limited transatlantic pairings, but anything further is out of the question. And what it can do, it doesn’t do particularly well. On longer routes it’s often payload and/or altitude restricted, and for a jet of its size it uses huge amounts of runway with startlingly high takeoff and landing speeds.

I was jammed into the cockpit jumpseat — more of a jump-bench, actually — on an American Airlines 737-800 not long ago, flying from Los Angeles to Boston. Man, if we didn’t need every foot of LAX’s runway 25R, at last getting off the ground at a nearly supersonic 165 knots. What would it be like on the westbound leg, I wondered — a longer flight, from a shorter runway, in the face of winter headwinds?

By contrast, I recently piloted a 757 from Boston to San Francisco. At flaps 20, we lifted off at a docile 130 knots from Logan’s stubby, 7000-foot runway 09, with nearly half the runway still remaining! With every seat full and seven hours’ worth of fuel, we climbed directly to 36,000 feet and flew all the way to California. That’s performance. A 737 cannot come close to that.

In the 737, Boeing took what essentially was a regional jet — the original 737-100 first flew in 1967, and was intended to carry a hundred or so passengers on flights of around 400 miles — and has pushed, pushed, and pushed the plane into roles it was never intended for. Bigger and bigger engines, fancier avionics, MCAS. Five decades and ten variants later, the MAX is a monsterized hybrid of a thing — a plane that wants, and needs to be something that it’s not: all muscle and power and advanced technology, jammed into the framework of a fifty year-old design.

From the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Airbus line features a similar gap. The A310 died away a long time ago, and size-wise there’s nothing between the A320 family and the long-haul A330.

Or is there? The biggest Airbus narrow-body is the A321 — a stretched-out version of the basic A320. Two upcoming variants, the A321LR (long range), and the A321XLR (extra long-range), are about to hit the market. With two-class seating for around 200 passengers and a range of almost 5,000 nautical miles, these aircraft have enormous potential. JetBlue is among airlines planning to use the LR on routes across the pond, serving Western Europe from New York and Boston.

Whether you’re an airline CEO, a pilot, or a passenger, there’s a lot to like about the A320 family generally, certainly when matched against the 737. It requires less runway, for one, and uses tamer takeoff and landing speeds. On the inside it’s quieter and more spacious, A few weeks ago I rode aboard a 737 for the first time in a while. I normally find myself on an A320 or A321, and I was startled at how uncomfortable the 737 was. I had a window seat about a third of the way down, and the narrower cross-section meant my shoulder was pressed into the sidewall the entire time.

And the noise. The 737 is a loud airplane. On a two, three, or four-hour trip such comfort levels are acceptable. But six? How about a seven-hour nonstop from Gatwick or Shannon?

And if you think it’s noisy in the cabin, you should hear the cockpit, where the sound of the onrushing air must push a hundred decibels. Loud and tight, with barely enough room for the crew’s hand luggage. It’s interesting how both the A320 and the 737 families have roughly the same exterior dimensions, yet somehow the A320’s cockpit is three times roomier and five times quieter. How can that be? Well, look closely at the nose section of the 737. Do you recognize that? The old-fashioned flight deck windows, the shapes of the radome and fuselage? It’s the 707. Unchanged in over sixty years.

Take a MAX and put it next to an old 737-100 from the late sixties. It’s at once the same and yet completely different. You can virtually see the airplane straining, stretching, reaching — trying so hard to become something else. And therein is the problem. Boeing desires the commonality, the simpler training footprint and all the good things that the 737 family offers. But it also wants a plane that can take 200 people across the ocean. What it’s finding out is that perhaps, after all, they cannot be the same thing. You can only reinvent so many times.

Indeed the A321LR will be the closest thing out there to a 757. Comfort-wise it’ll be equal, if not superior, with almost the range, almost the capacity, and almost the muscle. Sure, those are a lot of important almosts. Eventually, however, the last 757 will be put to pasture, and when that happens, the lack of a 797 all but assures the A321’s domination of the mid-market niche.

Until that day, U.S. carriers continue holding on to their 757s. Hundreds remain in service on trunk routes and transcons. United and Delta have flown 757s from their East Coast gateways on eight-hour services to Western Europe, Scandinavia, even Africa. Of course, you’ll also see it on 60-minute segments into Kansas City, Cleveland, Tucson and Tampa. Nothing can match it across such a wide swath of markets, with little or no concerns as to weather, payload or runway length.

As to its relunctance in committing to the 797, Boeing says that the sales potential for such a plane, estimated at anywhere from three-hundred to a thousand examples, is possibly too limited. As a point of comparison, the company claims that it won’t break even on its 787 program until at least 1,500 aircraft have been delivered. If true, that’s a sad testament to how expensive it has become to develop new aircraft. If a thousand airplanes can’t justify a new line, what can?

Still, it seems that filling such a niche should be well within the technical expertise, and certainly the imagination, of the world’s largest and most prolific plane-maker. Wouldn’t the 797 borrow much of the 787’s architecture, and thus be cheaper to produce? And isn’t this the same company that, fifty years ago, created the 747, an airplane more than double the size of any existing plane, taking it from a napkin drawing to an actual, in-the-air prototype in less than two years! Forgive me for looking at this romantically, but what happened to that sprit and vision?

And if Boeing does press ahead with the 797, will they build the right plane? Preliminary renderings of the NMA from 2017 show us a jetliner seating between 220 and 270 passengers, with a composite fuselage and wings, and a range of around 5,000 nautical miles. Is it just me, or is this much too big? I like the twin-aisle idea; two aisles make for faster boarding and deplaning, and give the cabin a roomier feel overall. But, otherwise, how is this not just a 787 with a shorter range? A 757 replacement should be a plane that tops out at around 220 passengers, not one that starts there.

“It strikes me that the airplane Boeing ought to be putting out there is one that already exists, at least as a template,” I wrote on my website about a year ago. I was talking about the 767, Boeing’s venerable quasi-widebody that dates to the early 1980s. Although a passenger version hasn’t been ordered in years, the jet remains in production as a freighter and as a military midair refueler. Why not upgrade it, I asked in my article, with new engines, a new cockpit, and overhauled internal systems? Is that not a better option — especially considering the limited market that Boeing sees — than spending billions on an all-new airframe? “Call it the 767-X,” I wrote.

Well, in October of 2019 Boeing released a proposal for a 767 derivative called, guess what, the 767-X.

However, the 767 I had in mind as a baseline was the original -200. The -200, which debuted in 1982, is a long-since obsolete aircraft that, by today’s standards, would be laughably uneconomical. In terms of size, range, and capacity, however, it’d be just about perfect. Imagine a modernized, re-engined version delivering twin-aisle comfort for 180-200 people, containerized luggage and cargo, and all the range and unbeatable brawn of the 757. What’s not to like?

Boeing, though, says the -X would build not on the platform of the -200, but on that of the -400, and would be aimed at the cargo market. The -400, which sold very poorly, has seats for around 250 people. Again this is too big. In any case, Boeing eyes the 767-X chiefly as a freighter, not a passenger carrier.

Which leaves us… where?

While Boeing makes up its mind, the 737 MAX drama continues at center stage. And here’s the part we hate to ask but need to: why did the MAX need to exist in the first place?

What if, back in 2004, Boeing had gone ahead with the 797 in lieu of yet bigger and heavier 737s? And were the MAX tragedies, on some deep-down level, an inevitable result of Boeing’s decades-long obsession with its 737 — its determination to keep the production line going, variant after variant, seemingly forever? Where in the blame pie does poor corporate strategy and stubborness fall?

There’s a place for the 737 and always will be. I just don’t know if that place is as far and wide as Boeing would like it to be. And although you won’t see it any reports, but what happened in Africa and Indonesia is, maybe, fate’s way of telling Boeing that the time has come to move on.

This article appeared originally on The Points Guy website and is being used with permission.

 

 

 

 

Photos courtesy of Alberta Riva, Justin Hu, Daniel Shapiro, Nicholas Susilo, Joao Zymot, Bing Hui Yau and Unsplash.

 

September 20, 2019

WHEN WILLIAM Langewiesche takes on an airplane crash, he almost always nails it. Nobody is better. His dissection of the Air France 447 disaster, for example, was brilliant, and his exploration of the 2007 midair collision over the Amazon is one of my all-time favorite aviation pieces. And just a couple of months ago I sang the praises of his conclusions on the Malaysia 370 mystery.

That doesn’t mean I always agree with him. He knows this. We’ve spoken a few times and argued a point or two. In no way does it diminish his journalist expertise or his understanding of aviation, but every so often, on this or that point, we see things differently.

Which takes us to Langewiesche’s feature in the most recent New York Times Magazine, looking into the 737 MAX disasters — the Lion Air crash in particular. It’s all the things it should be — exhaustively researched, technically accurate, eloquently written and styled — and getting a lot of attention. But it leaves me with a bit of a sour feeling. I’m just not sure the story is — what’s the best word here? — fair. It’s insulting to airline pilots in several spots: dismissive, condescending, even a little flip. In the end, the impression people are left with is that the MAX crashes — both of them — were more the result of operator error than a technical malfunction or defective design. I don’t believe the author intended this; the piece is very complex and nuanced. But Boeing certainly loves the idea, and based on mail I’ve received and comments I’ve heard, for many that’s the takeaway. This is compounded by the title: “What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max.” While probably an editor’s pick, it’s misleading and inflammatory.

William is absolutely correct that the global pilot shortage is creating a hazard, in some cases putting woefully inexperienced crews at the helm of sophisticated jetliners. How and whether that plays into the MAX crashes, however, is maybe not as clear as he thinks. I also worry that the story will only serve to encourage the prejudiced subset of pilots out there who believe that non-Western pilots are categorically inferior. If only the two doomed planes had been crewed by U.S. or European pilots, their thinking goes, rather than pilots trained in Ethiopia or Indonesia, they wouldn’t have crashed.

Most of the author’s analysis involves the Lion Air flight. A case can be made that the crew of flight 610 turned a survivable situation into a non-survivable one through some poor decision making (specifically, by attempting to troubleshoot a control problem rather than immediately land). But it’s just that: a case. There were a lot of moving parts in that cockpit, both figuratively and literally, and what seems the safer choice in a tidy postmortem analysis isn’t always obvious in the heat of battle.

As to the pilots aboard Ethiopian flight 302, I’m not sure anything could have saved them. The issue that, to me, needs emphasis galore, is the aerodynamic lockout they purportedly faced…

The investigation shows the Ethiopian pilots did, as they should have, engage the plane’s pitch trim disconnect switches in a frantic attempt to regain control after a malfunctioning MCAS system forced the plane’s nose toward the ground. This pair of switches, on the center console near the thrust levers, killed power to the entire automatic pitch trim system, including MCAS, and should have allowed the pilots to maintain a normal flightpath using manual trim and elevator. Manual trim is applied by turning a large wheel mounted to the side of that same center console. Elevator is controlled by moving the control column forward or aft.

Yet they did not, could not, regain control. The reason, many now believe, is a design quirk of the 737 — an idiosyncrasy that reveals itself in only the rarest of circumstances. That is, when the plane’s stabilizers are acting to push the nose down, and the control column is simultaneously pulled aft, a sort of aerodynamic lockout forms: airflow forces on the stabilizers effectively paralyze them, making them impossible to move manually.

Aboard flight 302, the scenario goes like this: Commands of the faulty MCAS are causing the automatic trim system to push the nose down. The pilots, trying to arrest this descent, are pulling aft on the control column. The trim forces are stronger than the control column forces, which is why pulling back on the column has no effect. But now, with power to the trim system shut off, they should be able to lift the nose by manually by rotating the trim wheel aft, relieving that unwanted nose-down push. But the wheel won’t move. Believing the manual trim is itself broken, the pilots then reengage the auto-trim. MCAS then kicks in again, pushing the nose down even further. What’s worse, as the plane’s speed increases, the lockout effect intensifies. And so, with every passing second it becomes more and more difficult to recover.

The correct course of action would be to relax pressure on the control column, perhaps to the point of pushing the nose down even further. This will free the stabilizers of the aerodynamic weirdness paralyzing them, and allow the trim wheel to move, realigning the stabilizers to a proper and safe position. For the pilots, though, such a move would be completely counterintuitive. Instead, they do what any pilots, with pretty much any background and any level of experience, would be expected to do under the circumstances. Turns out it’s the wrong and deadly thing, but they have no way of knowing.

A friend and former colleague of mine — an experienced, American-trained pilot who spent most of his career at U.S. carriers — worked for a time as a training captain at Ethiopian Airlines. He knew the captain of flight 302 and has only the most positive things to say about his skills and professionalism. Maybe Langewiesche ought to have spoken to Seth. He at least could have spoken more of the 302 crash, the dynamics of which, unfortunate as they were, remind people that even the most talented and experienced pilots can find themselves in impossible situations. It would have rounded out the story and given it a more even-handed feel.

Additionally, I wish he’d more cleanly critiqued Boeing’s decades-long obsession with its 737 platform, and its determination to keep the production line going, variant after variant, seemingly forever. Instead of starting from scratch with a new airframe, they took what was essentially conceived in the 1960s as a regional jet, and have pushed and pushed and pushed the thing — bigger and bigger engines, fancier avionics, MCAS — into roles it was never intended for. At the heart of this whole fiasco, maybe, is bad corporate strategy and stubbornness.

 

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THE RIDDLE MAY NOT BE DEEP
ETHIOPIAN, LION AIR, AND THE 737 MAX

February 19, 2020

THE TIMELINE of an aviation career, for some of us, is punctuated with dark occurrences. Furloughs, rejection letters, bankruptcies. And now, sigh, I’ve lost my beloved calculator.

I bought the thing 23 years ago, if I remember right, at the old Osco store on Highland Avenue near Davis Square. It was your basic flip-top model, dual solar and battery, with fat buttons and an oversized screen for better low-light viewing. I paid about four dollars for it.

When you own anything for 23 years, you grow fond of it. The same chemicals and synaptic energies that attach us to pets, or even people, I suspect, are the ones that, albeit on a lesser level, attach us to inanimate objects. These objects mark the passage of time. They carry with them the memories of past jobs, past relationships, former eras of our lives. I hope that isn’t being too oddly sentimental, or insulting the very nature of what it is to be human. Regardless, I miss my calculator.

Two weeks ago I was working a flight to Edinburgh, Scotland. I was the relief pilot on this leg, sitting in one of the cockpit jumpseats with the calculator on my knee. It was shortly after takeoff and I’d just finished running through the waypoint times and working out the breaks schedule. I was about to put it back into my briefcase bag when something distracted me. I placed it on top of my roll-aboard bag, which was stowed standing up, an arm’s reach away to my left — and promptly forgot about it.

That’s the last time I saw it. At some point it must have gotten jostled to the floor, where I presume it still is, kicked into a corner and set upon each flight by heavy luggage. Perhaps another pilot picked it up and tucked it into one of the cockpit cubby holes. (Sure we have a lost-and-found boxes in our crew bases, but who’s going to return a cheap plastic calculator?) Or maybe he threw it away. The truth is, most pilots don’t bring or use calculators. It would’ve been a peculiar artifact to find.

You can see the calculator in the picture below, taken in 1998. No, that’s not a U-boat circa 1944; it’s the flight engineer’s station of a Douglas DC-8. This was my office for about four years, shuttling cargo to and from Europe and across the U.S. The calculator is on the ledge, lower left. Notice it has an orange sticker on its case. I added the sticker for the same reason that I use a bright red bumper on my iPhone: to keep me from leaving it behind. So much for bright ideas, literally.

The calculator was a necessary instrument on the ancient Douglas. The weight, balance, and fuel calculations were all done by hand. It was simple arithmetic, but these were big, six-digit numbers. Not so much on the 767. It’s the dispatchers, loaders and planners who do all the serious number-crunching. They upload the results to us and we plug them in. About the only things we calculate manually are the waypoint crossing times and maybe the start/end times of our crew rest breaks. This is hardly anything technical; they’re just figures of convenience jotted down in the margins of the flight plan, requiring nothing more than adding or subtracting a few simple numbers.

But there are fewer things that I am worse at than adding or subtracting simple numbers. I am, in fact, so bad at even basic math that I can barely make change for a dollar. Solving a problem like “14 plus 28” is, to my mind, like contemplating quantum physics. And running the times, forget it: If you cross one waypoint at 14:26, and the next one is 47 minutes later, what time will that be? Are you kidding? Where the hell is my calculator?

I guess I’ll start using my phone. On the bright side this means one fewer thing to carry around.

And what do pilots carry around?

Once upon a time — meaning not very long ago — we lugged with us heavy black briefcases stuffed with maps, charts, and manuals. Pretty much all of this technical arcana now lives electronically in an iPad or other tablet device. Of all the advances seen in commercial aviation over the past two decades, this is probably the one most welcome by pilots. Because not only did those books weigh a ton, they required almost constant revising. Every two weeks a thick packet of pages would show up in your mailbox. The tiniest addendum to any approach or departure procedure, and bang, eighteen different pages needed to be swapped out. A particularly hefty set of revisions could take an hour or more to complete. Page in, page out, page in, page out. Side effects included dizziness, blindness, repetitive motion injuries and suicide.

Now all we do is tap a button that says UPDATE. United Airlines says that its switch to iPads saves twenty million sheets of paper annually. I can believe it. It also has saved time, fuel, and visits to the chiropractor.

We still carry flight bags, but they’ve gotten a lot smaller and contain mainly personal items and sundries. Some pilots use a soft-sided briefcase; others use gym-stye bags or even backpacks. My preference, at the moment, is an offensively overpriced Tumi briefcase that I bought about six years ago and quickly learned to hate, with a series of undersized exterior pockets that are exactly too small for anything I try to fit in them.

Inside this Tumi is a repurposed toiletries bag. This is where I keep my flight essentials. The most substantial object in here is a headset. The headsets supplied in our cockpits are old David Clark models — those Space Age green things that NFL coaches used to wear on the sidelines. They’re heavy, bulky, antiquated. So, like many pilots, I bring my own. I’ve been thinking about splurging on a noises-canceling set, but for now I use a cheap, reliable Telex. I also have a 26 year-old Sony that I sometimes bring. This was a present that I bought for myself in 1993 when I checked out as a Dash-8 captain.

You’ll also find pens, earplugs, a solar-powered flashlight, a calculator (RIP), sunscreen, masking tape, and a big packet of wet-naps used to wipe away the dust, crumbs, and grime from the radio panels and other cockpit surfaces, which are routinely, astonishingly filthy. And three or four clothes pins. The cockpit sun visors are flimsy things that don’t do much in the way of blocking the sun. To keep from going blind, I augment the visors by clothes-pinning up sheets of paper, a map, or maybe a folded garbage bag.

In the shirt pockets of my uniform you’ll always see three things: a ballpoint pen, a highlighter, and a red Sharpie.

The pen is used for all the things people use pens for. The highlighter I use mainly for marking up the flight plan. I’ll go through it page by page, striking the important parts in yellow: the flight time, the alternates, the dispatcher’s desk number, the airport elevations, deferred maintenance items, ETP coordinates, etc. Every pilot does this in his or her own style. Many don’t do it at all. I have a bad habit of coloring the flight plan even when it’s not my leg to fly, irritating the pilot whose turn it actually is.

The red Sharpie is my tool for what we’ll call high-emphasis tasks, the most critical of which is putting my initials on the cap of my water bottle, to keep anyone else from drinking from it. If there’s a redispatch point along our route, I’ll mark it on the flight plan with a red “RDP.” I also use it for my scratch-pad notes. When I’m in the first officer’s seat there’s a clipboard along the bottom ledge of the window, just to my right. I keep a folded piece of paper there on which I jot down various quick-reference figures: the flight number, en route time, block fuel, minimum takeoff fuel, transition levels, planned oceanic crossing altitudes and speeds, radio frequencies. All in red.

That’s aviation for you. Where the smallest and most mundane things — I mean physically, tangibly, the smallest accoutrements — are often the marks of experience. I’ve been flying commercially for thirty years now. My advice to the aspiring aviator is this: bring a Sharpie.

August 15, 2019

ON AUGUST 3rd, two United Airlines pilots were arrested at the airport in Glasgow, Scotland, after allegedly failing a breathalyzer test prior to operating a flight to Newark, New Jersey.

Curiously, this is not the first time a United crew arrested in Glasgow for the same alleged offense. In August, 2016, at the very same airport, a pair of United pilots were taken into custody under almost identical circumstances.

This is a tough one for me — maybe the most difficult of any subject to tackle. Incidents like these are a shameful black eye for the profession. The sound you heard was that of thousands of pilots everywhere groaning with embarrassment, if not anger. And they have kept alive a lingering stereotype of the airline pilot: the hard-drinking, renegade divorcee, with crows’ feet flanking his eyes and a whiskey-tempered drawl, a flask tucked into his flight case. And it’s easy to jump to conclusions. For every pilot nabbed, there must be ten others over the legal limit, right?

No, frankly. I have to acknowledge that yes, pilots have, on several occasions now, been found guilty of flying, or attempting to fly, under the influence. At the same time, it needs to be made clear how unusual this is. Tens of thousands of commercial flights depart daily around the world. Of all the things might endanger even one of these aircraft, intoxicated pilots is about as statistically insignificant a threat as might exist. I understand and expect that passengers will worry about all sorts of things, rational and otherwise. But as a rule, whether or not your pilots are drunk should not be one of them. These rare and isolated incidents deserve the attention they receive, and they need to be taken seriously. But they are not a symptom of some dangerous and unseen crisis. My personal observations are hardly a scientific sample, but I’ve been flying commercially since 1990 and I have never once been in a cockpit with a pilot who I suspected was intoxicated.

This is not something pilots play fast and loose with. Why would they, with their careers, to say nothing of the lives of their passengers, hanging in the balance? Violators are subject to immediate, emergency revocation of their pilot certificates.

The FAA blood alcohol limit for airline pilots in the United States is .04 percent, and we are banned from consuming alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. Pilots must also comply with their employer’s in-house policies, which tend to be tougher. (In the wake of the most recent Glasgow incident, United as moved to a minimum twelve-hour rule.) Above and beyond that, we’re subject to random, unannounced testing for drugs and alcohol. Overseas, the regulations are even tighter. In Britain, the legal limit is set at twenty milligrams of alcohol per one hundred milliliters of blood. That’s four times lower than the British limit for drunk driving and equates to about .02 percent blood alcohol level.

Not for nothing, though: Scottish regulations are more strict that those of the FAA. The legal limit is about .02 percent blood alcohol level. It’s not impossible for a pilot to be in full compliance with the time restrictions and not feel any of the typical signs of intoxication, yet still be in violation. The same can sometimes be said for our own .04. That’s not an excuse; I have no problem with a requirement that pilots abide by a higher, more conservative standard than others. If we need to be extremely careful, so be it, that’s part of our job. But it’s something to think about, and passengers should realize that “flying drunk” isn’t as clear-cut as it might seem.

It’s also true that more than one airline pilot has been pulled aside after a passenger, TSA guards, or other airport worker wrongly suspected the pilot was intoxicated. Typically in such cases, the papers and TV news hastily report the initial suspicion, but not the vindication.

Having said all that, it should go without saying that alcoholism exists in aviation. Just as it exists in every other profession, including many with public safety To their credit, air carriers and pilot unions like ALPA have been very successful with proactive programs that encourage pilots to seek treatment. This has helped keep the problem from being driven underground, where it’s more likely to be a public safety issue.

Not long ago I flew with a colleague who participated in the highly successful HIMS program — an intervention and treatment system put together several years ago by ALPA and the FAA. HIMS has treated more than 4,000 pilots and records a success rate of near 90 percent, with only 10-12 percent of participants suffering relapse. I asked that colleague if, prior to going into HIMS, he’d ever knowingly flown under the influence. His answer was a firm and very believable no.

Some of you may be familiar with the tale of former Northwest Airlines captain Lyle Prouse. Prouse, together with the other two pilots in his crew, was arrested one morning in Minnesota in 1990. All three had spent the previous evening’s layover at a bar in Fargo, North Dakota, downing as many as nineteen rum and Cokes. Tests showed their blood-alcohol levels far beyond the legal limit.

Prouse was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison. An alcoholic whose parents had died of the disease, he later became a poster pilot for punishment and redemption. AFter a remarkable and improbable sequence of events, he was able to return to the cockpit on his 60th birthday and retire as a 747 captain.

Once out of jail, Prouse was forced to requalify for every one of his FAA licenses and ratings. Broke, he relied on a friend to lend him stick time in a single-engine trainer. Northwest’s then-CEO, John Dasburg, who himself had grown up in an alcoholic family, took a personal interest in Prouse’s struggle and lobbied publicly for his return.

You’ll see Prouse in interviews from time to time, and inevitably you’ll be struck by how forthrightly he takes responsibility, without resorting to the sobby self-flagellation of most public apologies. Always one is left, unexpectedly, to conclude that this convicted felon deserved his second chance. In 2001 he was granted a Presidential pardon from Bill Clinton.

 

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February 25, 2022

THE SITUATION in Ukraine brings me back to my visits to the capital city, Kiev, some years ago, when my airline was still flying there.

Kiev really surprised me. It was green, hilly, with parks and museums and onion-dome churches. Nothing of the bleak, Soviet-looking city I expected. Our layover hotel was the Premier Palace, an expensive place done up in chandeliers and marble. It was the kind of hotel in which you always felt underdressed. But it had an edge to it — that unmistakable vibe of post-Soviet decadence. There was a strip club on the sixth floor.

Of the various day trips available in and around Kiev, none was more extraordinary than the chance to tour Chernobyl, only two hours away by car.

In April of 1986, reactor four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, sending plumes of radiation across Europe in what is still, by far, history’s worst nuclear accident. Prevailing winds saved Kiev from disaster, carrying the fallout in the opposite direction, north into Belarus. From there it diffused across northern Europe.

To this day, a 30-kilometer “Exclusion Zone” surrounds the site, accessible only to researchers, temporary workers, and a small number of villagers — most of them senior citizens — that the Ukrainian government allows to live there. And, believe it or not, to tourists.

I took one of those tours in October of 2007. At the time of my visit, a full-day Chernobyl excursion cost about $250. It included transportation to and from the site, plus all the admission formalities — and a radiation scan on your way out. The photographs below are from that day.

A guide accompanied us the entire time, but we were more or less free to wander as we pleased. We had the site almost entirely to ourselves, walking through apartment blocks, kindergarten classrooms, a high school, a hotel.

I have not captioned the pictures. They more or less speak for themselves. Most of them were taken in Pripyat, the abandoned city inside the Exclusion Zone that was once home to 50,000 people. The entire population of Pripyat was forced to flee, leaving everything behind. It exists as a sort of Soviet time capsule, a bustling city left in suspended animation, complete with hammers, sickles, and no shortage of radioactive detritus that was once the stuff of regular, everyday lives: kids’ toys, a ferris wheel, a classroom chalkboard. It’s these everyday items that leave the most lasting impression — a perversion of normalcy that drives home the magnitude of the tragedy.

When the reactor blew, Soviet helicopters dumped sand and clay over the exposed core, and later the building was encased in thousands of tons of concrete — a structure that become known as “the sarcophagus.” In the photo above, our guide aims his dosimeter at the sarcophagus. The reading you see on the machine is about sixty times normal background radiation. We were allowed to remain here only for about ten minutes.

I should note that reactor four no longer looks like this. In 2016, authorities completed the installation of a mammoth protective dome, concealing the remains within a 25,000-ton shell, made of steel, that looks like a cross between a football stadium and an airship hangar. What you see today is a much more sterile, less jarring aesthetic.

 

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK SMITH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The items below are souvenirs, I guess you’d have to call them, scavenged from Pripyat. Among them are a 1984 copy of Pravda, the Soviet state newspaper; some vintage postage stamps, and what appears to be a school report card, found inside the Pripyat high school. Perhaps some Ukrainian speakers out there can help translate some of this. I’d love to know more about the report card — names, dates, anything.

The bottom shot is from a roll of exposed film, found on the floor near the high school gymnasium.

 

Hopefully these items haven’t turned my apartment radioactive.

Two decades before my trip to Chernobyl, I’d been to the Soviet Union, visiting both Moscow and Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was known at the time). This was March of 1986, about a month before the reactor accident. Among the highlights of that trip were my flights aboard Aeroflot. I got to ride a Tupolev Tu-154 from Moscow to Leningrad, and then a Tu-134 from Leningrad to Helsinki.

Apple juice. I remember the Aeroflot flight attendants serving plastic cups of apple juice.

It dawns on me, too, that my travel habits are at times decidedly macabre. In addition to my trip to Chernobyl, I’ve been to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Poland, and to the various Killing Fields sites around Phnom Penh, in Cambodia. Some people make a hobby of such trips. They call it “disaster tourism,” or some such. Everyone has their own motives, but I like to believe there can be a deeper purpose to these visits than morbid thrill-seeking.

 

UPDATE: November 19, 2020

Two years after the crashes of Lion Air flight 510 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, the Boeing 737 MAX has been cleared to reenter service. Its twice deadly stall-avoidance system has been redesigned and pilot training protocols modified. FAA chief Steve Dickson gave the formal go-ahead on Wednesday afternoon, permitting U.S. carriers to once again operate the aircraft in scheduled service. Foreign regulators are expected to follow suit. American Airlines say it will begin phasing its MAX jets back into service as soon as December. United and Southwest will do so early in 2021. Some predicted the plane would never fly again. They were wrong. The MAX is back.

My feelings are mixed:

Is the 737 MAX safe, now that it’s been upgraded and tested out the wazoo? Absolutely. Will passengers trust the jet enough to fly on it? Probably, yes. Most people have little idea or concern about what airplane model they’re stepping onto, and I doubt that will change. The DC-10 and the Comet recovered with similarly scandalous legacies. The 737 will too.

Does that mean it’s a good design, and that Boeing can be forgiven for developing the decrepit corporate culture that led to this mess? And can the company be excused for having forgone the 797 concept years ago in order to push out more 737 variants instead? Heck no.

What they needed to do is not build the damn thing in the first place. As previously discussed on this site, the MAX is the ultimate monsterization of the 737 platform. A plane designed in the 1960s as a regional jet was pushed and pushed and pushed into roles it was never intended for. The “Frankenplane,” as I call it, was the result. It’s cramped, noisy, has a miserably uncomfortable cockpit, and can’t match the performance of its closest competitors — or, especially, of the plane it effectively replaces, the 757.

Such are the times. We don’t get spiffy new airplanes anymore. We get add-ons, variants, knockoffs.

 

UPDATE: December 29, 2019

Air travel has never been safer. This we can’t really argue. How we reached this point, however, and how we might improve upon it, is open to some debate. “Getting to this level wasn’t easy,” I said not long ago during a radio interview. “And is owed chiefly to three things. The first two are better pilot training and better technologies.”

So far, so good. But what about the third one? “Thirdly,” I said, “we have the seldom-acknowledged collaborative efforts of the airline industry and regulators.”

And that’s true, I suppose. Until it’s not.

Sure, the FAA and the airlines have a vested interest in keeping passengers alive. The stakes are enormous for all parties involved. In the past I’ve cited different examples of collaborative successes: the mandating of certain cockpit equipment, the establishment of proactive substance abuse programs, the tightening of pilot rest requirements, and so on. But this partnership only only works to a point. When the culture goes rotten and the checks and balances fail, the results can be catastrophic. The 737 MAX debacle is a perfect illustration of this.

For a deeper understanding of how, I recommend the recent New Yorker story, “After the Crash,” by Alec MacGillis. This is maybe the best exploration of the MAX saga that I’ve seen to date — worlds better than William Langeweische’s foul analysis that ran in the New York Times Magazine in September. It’s a sobering look into how the FAA and Boeing failed one another in certifying the MAX. (And how ironic that the grand-neice of none other than Ralph Nader was a passenger on the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight?)

It’s also a sad indictment of what’s become of Boeing’s corporate culture since its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas. The company today is just another corporate entity whose masters see nothing but the bottom line. The many engineers, systems designers and pilots, whose talents were, for generations, the heart and soul of what made Boeing special, have been cast aside or ignored. Indeed, what this whole mess really comes down to is Boeing’s stubbornness and lack of vision: how, rather take the time and care to come up with a new airplane, it took a 55 year-old design and made a monster out of it.

What Boeing should do is the one thing it almost certainly won’t do: say goodbye to the 737. Cut its losses and pull the plug on a plane that should have been put to pasture a long time ago. Then pool its resources, bring those engineers and pilots back into the loop where they belong, and build an all-new, high-performing 200-seater.

Meanwhile, on and on it goes. How wrong I was. What I predicted would be fixed and forgotten in a matter of weeks is now in its ninth month of crisis. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg was forced out last week. The planes remain grounded. Lawsuits are pending.

UPDATE: October 25, 2019

For months now I’ve avoided publishing any updates on the 737 MAX saga. Things have spun in so many different directions that I wouldn’t know where to dig in. The media, both big and small, has done a surprisingly good job with the story — and all of its various substories — and there hasn’t been much to add, from a pilot’s perspective, that I didn’t already say in my early installments.

This week, though, we’ve seen a couple of big developments. First, Indonesian authorities released their final report on the crash of Lion Air flight 510, the disaster that touched off the whole mess. Here’s a decent summary from the BBC. The findings echo much what William Langewiesche wrote in his scathing Times story a few weeks ago, throwing a portion of the blame on the flight crew and faulty maintenance.

The investigators cite nine — nine! — separate failures, both human and mechanical, that led to the crash. Although this spreads the blame around, it does not absolve Boeing. The BBC reporter nails it with this one paragraph: As Boeing’s chief executive Dennis Muilenburg has repeatedly stated, there was a chain of events. But at the heart of that chain was MCAS — a control system that the pilots didn’t know about, and which was vulnerable to a single sensor failure.

And there’s still the Ethiopian crash, the dynamics of which were somewhat different (see below).

Boeing, meanwhile, might at last be closing in on a solution. The beleaguered planemaker is moving forward with a suite of software and training upgrades that it believes will get the MAX back in the air soon. You can see a bullet-point rundown here. What “soon” might be is still anyone’s guess. I expected the plane to be flying again by now, and for the controversy to have long since died away. That hasn’t happened, and the repercussions for Boeing cannot be overstated. The company has taken a huge hit to its bottom line, as well as its reputation.

And here’s the part we hate to ask but need to: why did the 737 MAX need to exist in the first place? Were these catastrophes, on some level, the inevitable result of Boeing’s decades-long obsession with its 737 platform — its determination to keep the production line going, variant after variant, seemingly forever?

Instead of starting from scratch with a new airframe, Boeing took what was conceived in the 1960s as a regional jet, and has pushed and pushed and pushed it — bigger and bigger engines, fancier avionics, MCAS — into roles it was never intended for. Five decades and ten variants later, the MAX is a monsterized hybrid of a thing, a plane that wants, and needs to be something that it’s not: all muscle and power and advanced technology, jammed into the framework of a fifty year-old design. Call it a software failure, or call it bad corporate strategy and stubbornness.

The MAX will fly again, safely. Boeing has invested far too much money and effort to abandon the program. But here’s hoping this is the end. You won’t see it any reports, but what happened in Africa and Indonesia is, maybe, fate’s way of telling Boeing that the time has come to move on.

UPDATE: April 13, 2019

What a mess. Boeing is getting knocked around by everyone from members of Congress to late-night comedians. The MAX’s certification program is under scrutiny, airlines are canceling orders, and passengers everywhere are scared. The FAA is facing accusations that it took far too long to order the MAX’s grounding (after numerous other countries had already done so), and that it basically permitted Boeing to self-certify an unsafe aircraft.

We keep hearing, too, about what a horrible black mark this is not merely against Boeing, but against American aviation’s place in the world. We are no longer the global leader in air safety, no longer the “gold standard,” whatever that means exactly, as several articles have described it. This is maybe just another example of the weird phenomenon known as American exceptionalism, but each time I hear it, I keep going back to the DC-10 fiasco in the 1970s.

In 1974, in one of the most horrific air disasters of all time, a THY (Turkish Airlines) DC-10 crashed after takeoff from Orly Airport outside Paris, killing 346 people. The accident was traced to a faulty cargo door design. (The same door had nearly caused the crash of an American Airlines DC-10 two years earlier.) McDonnell Douglas had hurriedly designed a plane with a door that it knew was defective; then, in the aftermath of Paris, tried to cover the whole thing up. It was reckless, even criminal. Then, in 1979, American flight 191, also a DC-10, went down at Chicago-O’Hare, killing 273 — to this day the deadliest air crash ever on U.S. soil — after an engine detached on takeoff. Investigators blamed improper maintenance procedures (including use of a forklift to raise the engine and its pylon), and then found pylon cracks in at least six other DC-10s, causing the entire fleet to be grounded for 37 days. The NTSB also cited design flaws in the engine pylon and wing slats, quality control problems at McDonnell Douglas, and “deficiencies in the surveillance and reporting procedures of the FAA.”

That’s two of history’s ten deadliest air crashes, complete with design defects, a cover-up, and 619 dead people. And don’t forget the 737 itself has a checkered past, going back to the rudder problems that caused the crash of USAir flight 427 in 1994 (and likely the crash of United flight 585 in 1991). Yet the DC-10, the 737, and America’s aviation prestige along with them, have persevered. If we survived those scandals we can probably manage this. I have a feeling that a year from now this saga will be mostly forgotten. Boeing and its stock price will recover, the MAX will be up and flying again, and on and on we go. This is how it happens.

There’s also a lot being made of the FAA’s more or less outsourcing aircraft certification to Boeing. This is frustrating, and ironic, because air travel has never been safer, and it’s partly because, not in spite of, the close relationship and collaborative efforts between regulators, airlines, manufacturers, pilot groups, and so on. (A good example is the self-reporting program between pilots and FAA, which has been very successful and has kept dangerous trends from being driven underground.) Bear in mind how much these parties stand to lose should a tragedy occur. A crash can destroy an airline outright. It’s in the interest of all these entities to play things as safely as possible.

Did something go wrong in the 737 program? Are Boeing and the FAA jointly responsible? Probably. But I don’t believe anybody was intentionally reckless. That’s an important distinction, and for the most part the relationships between industry and regulators has been a productive one. You can’t say that about banking, perhaps, but in aviation it seems to work. The remarkable safety record we’ve enjoyed over the past twenty years bears that out, absolutely.

For the airline passenger, these can seem like scary times. Air crashes, perhaps more than any other type of catastrophe, have a way of haunting the public’s consciousness, particularly when the causes are mysterious. My best advice, maybe, is to turn off the news, take a step back, and try to look at this through a wider lens. The fact is, Lion Air and Ethiopian notwithstanding, air travel has never been safer than it is today. Two fatal crashes in five months is tragic, but in decades past it wasn’t unusual to see ten, fifteen, or even twenty air disasters worldwide in a given year. Nowadays, two or more is downright unusual. Here in the United States there hasn’t been a large-scale fatal crash involving a mainline carrier in nearly twenty years — an absolutely astonishing statistic. There are far more planes, carrying far more passengers, than ever before, yet the accident rate is a fraction of what it once was.

UPDATE: April 6, 2019

This just makes you shake your head.

What seems to be the case, based on analysis of the voice and data recorders from the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, is that the pilots did, as they should have, engage the plane’s pitch trim disconnect switches in a frantic attempt to regain control after a malfunctioning MCAS system forced the plane’s nose toward the ground. This pair of switches, on the center console near the thrust levers, killed power to the entire automatic pitch trim system, including MCAS, and should have allowed the pilots to maintain a normal flightpath using manual trim and elevator. Manual trim is applied by turning a large wheel mounted to the side of that same center console. Elevator is controlled by moving the control column forward or aft.

Yet they did not, could not, regain control. The reason, many now believe, is a design quirk of the 737 — an idiosyncrasy that reveals itself in only the rarest of circumstances, and that few 737 pilots are aware of. That is, when the plane’s stabilizers are acting to push the nose down, and the control column is simultaneously pulled aft, a sort of aerodynamic lockout forms: airflow forces on the stabilizers effectively paralyze them, making them impossible to move manually.

Aboard flight 302, the scenario goes like this: Commands of the faulty MCAS are causing the automatic trim system to push the nose down. The pilots, trying to arrest this descent, are pulling aft on the control column. The trim forces are stronger than the control column forces, which is why pulling back on the column has no effect. But now, with power to the trim system shut off, they should be able to lift the nose by manually by rotating the trim wheel aft, relieving that unwanted nose-down push. But the wheel won’t move. Believing the manual trim is itself broken, the pilots then reengage the auto-trim. MCAS then kicks in again, pushing the nose down even further. What’s worse, as the plane’s speed increases, the lockout effect intensifies. And so, with every passing second it becomes more and more difficult to recover.

The correct course of action would be to relax pressure on the control column, perhaps to the point of pushing the nose down even further. This will free the stabilizers of the aerodynamic weirdness that is paralyzing them, and allow the trim wheel to move, realigning the stabilizers to a proper and safe position. For the pilots, though, such a move would be completely counterintuitive. Instead, they do what any pilots would be expected to do under the circumstances. Turns out it’s the wrong thing, but they have no way of knowing.

It’s possible that the pilots of Lion Air flight 610 faced exactly the same situation, with the same result.

Apparently, pilots of older-generation 737s — long before there was MCAS — were aware of the lockout potential, and some were trained accordingly. (I flew the “classic” 737-200, briefly, about twenty years ago, but have no memory of it one way or the other.) However, as an obscure phenomenon that no pilot was likely to ever encounter, it was eventually forgotten as the 737 line evolved, to the point where no mention of it appears in the manuals of later variants.

 

UPDATE: March 29, 2019

ON MARCH 10th, Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302, a Boeing 737 MAX bound for Nairobi, crashed after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing 157 people from more than thirty countries. Five months earlier, 189 people perished after Lion Air flight JT610 went down near Jakarta, Indonesia, under eerily similar circumstances. Both planes were brand new 737 MAX jets. Both crashed shortly after takeoff following a loss of control.

Although findings from the voice and data recorders pulled from the Ethiopian wreckage haven’t been released yet, it’s all but assumed that flight succumbed to the same flight control malfunction that brought down Lion Air. The 737 MAX has a deadly design problem, and Boeing needs to fix it. In the meantime, all MAX jets remain grounded worldwide.

The culprit is something called MCAS, which stands for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, a system that adjusts control feel as the plane’s nose pitches upward, effectively nudging it downward.

MCAS operates in the background, transparently and automatically — there’s no on or off switch, per se — and only during a very narrow window of the jet’s flight envelope. This is not something that occurs in normal, day-to-day operation, but certification requires it for those occasions when, for whatever reason, the plane reaches unusually steep climb angles. To raise a plane’s nose, the pilot pulls back on the control column. As the nose pitches further and further upward, the control forces required to maintain this action are supposed to become heavier. This helps keep pilots, and/or the autopilot, from inadvertently stalling the plane — that is, exceeding what we call the “critical angle of attack,” at which point the wings run out of lift and the plane ceases to fly. On the 737 MAX, however, certain aerodynamic factors, including the placement of its very powerful engines, result in control forces actually becoming lighter as it approaches the point of stall. Because of this the plane would not meet certification standards. And so MCAS was engineered in to properly adjust the feel.

Thus there’s a certain beauty to MCAS — provided it works correctly. What’s happening, apparently, is that faulty data is being fed to MCAS by the plane’s angle of attack indicator — a small, wedge-shaped sensor near the plane’s nose that helps warn pilots of an encroaching aerodynamic stall. An impending stall is sensed when there isn’t one, triggering the plane’s stabilizer trim — stabilizers are the wing-like horizontal surfaces beneath the tail — to force the nose down. This sets up a battle of sorts between the pilots and the trim system until the plane becomes uncontrollable and crashes.

What leaves us stymied, though, is the fact that any MCAS commands, faulty or not, can be overridden quickly through a pair of disconnect switches. Why the Lion Air pilots failed to engage these switches is unclear, but unaware of the system’s defect in the first place, we can easily envision a scenario in which they became overwhelmed, unable to figure out in time what the plane was doing and how to correct it. From that point forward, however, things were different. “Though it appears there’s a design flaw that Boeing will need to fix as soon as possible,” I wrote in November,“passengers can take comfort in knowing that every MAX pilot is now acutely aware of this potential problem, and is prepared deal with it.”

Or so it seemed. With the Lion Air crash fresh on any MAX pilot’s mind, why did the Ethiopian pilots not immediately disconnect the trim system? Did a disconnect somehow not work? Was the crew so inundated by a cascade of alarms, warnings, and erratic aircraft behavior that they failed to recognize what was happening? Or, was the problem something else completely? This is the most perplexing part of this whole unfolding drama.

While we wait for the black box results, Boeing this week revealed a suite of hardware and software tweaks that it claims will rectify the issue. This includes incorporation of a second angle of attack indicator, and an alerting system to warn pilots of a disagreement between the two.

The largest MAX operators in the U.S. are American Airlines, Southwest and United. Other customers include Alaska Airlines, Air China, Norwegian, FlyDubai, China Eastern and China Southern. The type is most easily recognize by its 787-style scalloped engine nacelles, which earlier 737s do not have.

Founded in 1945, Ethiopian Airlines is the largest carrier in Africa. Westerners hear “Ethiopia” and tend to make certain, unfortunate associations, but this is company with a proud history and a very good safety record. It flies a state-of-the art fleet, including the Boeing 787 and A350, on routes across four continents. Its training department, the Ethiopian Airlines Aviation Academy, has been training pilots for 55 years. Ethiopian’s pilots are distinguished by their handsome, olive green uniforms.

The captain of the doomed flight ET302, Yared Getachew, was a graduate of the highly competitive Ethiopian Airlines Aviation Academy, and had more than 8,000 flight hours — a respectable total. “Yared was a great person and a great pilot. Well prepared,” a former Ethiopian Airlines training captain told me.

The first officer, on the other hand, had a mere two-hundred hours. Airline training is intensive, and as I’ve written in the past, the raw number of hours in a pilot’s logbook isn’t always a good indicator of skill or talent. Nonetheless, if indeed that number is correct (it’s unclear if this refers to his total flight time, or his number of hours in the 737 MAX), that’s pretty astounding. By comparison, the typical new-hire at a U.S. major carrier has somewhere on the order of 5,000 hours. Whether the first officer’s lack of experience had anything to do with the accident, however, is another matter.

 

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