BOEING 737 MAX CRISIS
{background information on the crisis}
As airlines and safety regulators worldwide scramble to understand why two Boeing 737 Max 8 jets crashed in chillingly similar accidents, more indications are pointing to how an automated anti-stalling system may be linked to the model’s unusually deadly debut.
The safety feature—the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS)—appears to have sent both planes into their fatal dives as pilots struggled to keep aloft. The 737 Max 8 and 9 were grounded by regulators around the world last week.
Boeing designed the 737 Max 8 to be similar enough to existing 737s that it could keep the same “type rating”—meaning, as the Times reported, that pilots who already flew 737s wouldn’t have to be retrained on a new plane and airlines would save a lot of money.
Yet the Max 8 is different from previous 737s in one major way: It has larger engines placed farther forward on its wings. The new design increased the risk that the plane could stall if pilots angled the nose too high. To counteract this risk, Boeing introduced the MCAS, which automatically nudges the nose down if onboard sensors detect that the plane risks stalling.
The software is designed to work automatically and only in extreme situations. Boeing decided pilots didn’t need any new training to understand MCAS. In fact, they didn’t even mention the system in flight manuals. Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union, told Quartz that the training prior to the Lion Air crash for pilots qualified to fly the 737-800 amounted to “an iPad lesson for an hour.”
When the MCAS activates, it automatically tilts the horizontal tail at the back of the plane, lifting up the rear of the plane and nudging the nose down. If the system gets triggered erroneously—and the plane dives for no reason—a pilot can pull back on the control column to lift the nose up again.
But every time a pilot straightens the plane out, the MCAS resets. That means the system can be triggered again, nudging the nose down and forcing the pilot to once again yank on the control column to set the plane back on track.
Preliminary findings from the black box of the Lion Air flight show that the pilot and the MCAS repeated this tug-of-war cycle 21 times in the minutes before the crash.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), along with European aviation regulators, sets the tone for much of the world’s flight safety standards. The FAA has delegated many of its safety inspections to airplane manufacturers like Boeing, claiming that the agency doesn’t have the budget to complete all the work itself.
Boeing did much of the work of certifying that the 737 Max 8 was safe to fly. In fact, the Seattle Times reports that FAA managers pressured safety engineers to delegate more and more of the safety analysis to Boeing to get the plane approved faster. In some cases, FAA engineers didn’t even read the technical documents Boeing sent them—managers delegated the task of reviewing Boeing’s findings back to Boeing. The task of reviewing the safety of the MCAS fell to Boeing.
The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported that US federal authorities are weighing a criminal probe into how the 737 Max was cleared to fly. Both cited anonymous sources confirming what would be a highly unusual prosecution.
What you will be required to do:
Using concepts relating to Managing Responsibly and ethically, you will produce a paper analyzing Boeing’s decision to produce the 737 Max, the management issues involved in this case and answering the question of social responsibility, managing organizational performance, factors leading to ethical and unethical behaviour and management’s role in encouraging ethical behaviour.
What should have Boeing done, when the decision was made to build this new plane? What other recommendations would you suggest.
- Managing Responsibly and ethically
- Article Summary
- Analysis-Point out issue
- Conclusion and recommendation