Plane and Pilot

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