By Andy Pasztor
Plane maker Boeing Co. didn't tell Southwest Airlines Co. when
the carrier began flying 737 MAX jets in 2017 that a standard
safety feature, found on earlier models and designed to warn pilots
about malfunctioning sensors, had been deactivated.
Federal Aviation Administration safety inspectors and
supervisors responsible for monitoring Southwest, the largest MAX
customer, were also unaware of the change, according to government
and industry officials.
Boeing had turned off the alerts which, in previous versions of
the 737, informed pilots if a sensor known as an "angle-of-attack
vane" was transmitting errant data about the pitch of a plane's
nose. In the MAX, which featured a new automated stall-prevention
system called MCAS, Boeing made those alerts optional; they would
be operative only if carriers bought additional safety
features.
Southwest's cockpit crews and management didn't know about the
change for more than a year after the planes went into service.
They and most other airlines operating the MAX globally learned
about it only after the fatal Lion Air crash last year led to
scrutiny of the plane's revised design. The FAA office's lack of
knowledge about Boeing's move hasn't been previously reported.
"Southwest's own manuals were wrong" about the status of the
alerts, said Southwest pilots union president, Jon Weaks. Since
Boeing hadn't communicated the modification to the carrier, the
manuals still reflected incorrect information.
Following the Lion Air crash, Southwest asked Boeing to
reactivate the alerts on planes already in its fleet. This move,
along with questions about why they had been turned off, prompted
FAA inspectors overseeing Southwest to consider recommending that
the airline's MAX fleet be grounded while they assessed whether
pilots needed additional training about the alerts. Those internal
FAA discussions, however, were brief and didn't go up the chain,
according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Boeing hasn't specifically addressed why it turned off the
feature, called "AOA disagree alerts," without informing customers.
Questions surrounding that move have remained unanswered since
October, when the Lion Air accident killed 189 people, followed by
an Ethiopian Airlines crash in March of the same model that took
157 lives. MAX planes remain grounded. Boeing recently said it
would book $1 billion in expenses tied to the groundings and
related business disruptions.
In previous 737 models, the computer-generated alerts appear as
colored lights in the cockpit when a plane's twin angle-of-attack
sensors provide significantly different data from each other. In
the MAX, they serve the same purpose but additionally are intended
to warn pilots that MCAS, the new automated system implicated in
both accidents, could misfire because of faulty sensor data.
MCAS commands that automatically push down the nose of a plane
can overpower a pilot's efforts to get out of a dive. In the
Ethiopian jet, which lacked the disagree alerts, it took four
minutes for the pilots to realize that incorrect data was coming
from one of the sensors, according to investigators' preliminary
report.
A Boeing spokesman said that from now on, "customers will have
the AOA disagree alerts as standard" on all MAX aircraft, including
those coming out of the factory and already delivered to airlines.
Boeing is currently devising a new software package that aims to
fix MCAS by making it less powerful, while also restoring the
alerts. The moves are among the safeguards the plane maker and FAA
have embraced to make MCAS less hazardous if it misfires, and to
get the fleet back in the air.
A Southwest spokeswoman said that before the loss of Lion Air
Flight 610, the carrier had assumed the alerts "as operable on all
MAX aircraft." Boeing "did not indicate an intentional
deactivation," she said. Today, the reinstated feature offers "an
added cross-check on all MAX aircraft," even though none are
flying.
Although the alerts were reactivated, some midlevel FAA
officials who oversaw Southwest briefly considered the possibility
of grounding its fleet of roughly 30 of the 737 MAX aircraft until
the agency established whether pilots needed to receive new
training, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.
Less than a month after the Lion Air jet went down, one FAA
official wrote that AOA-related issues on 737 MAX jetliners "may be
masking a larger systems problem that could recreate a Lion
Air-type scenario."
Roughly two weeks later, other internal emails referred to a
"hypothetical question" of restricting MAX operations with one
message explicitly stating: "It would be irresponsible to have MAX
aircraft operating with the AOA Disagree Warning system
inoperative." The same message alluded to the FAA's power: "We need
to discuss grounding [Southwest's] MAX fleet until the AOA Warning
System is fixed and pilots have been trained" on it and related
displays.
The email discussions, previously unreported, were fleeting red
flags raised by a small group of front-line FAA inspectors months
before the Ethiopian jet nose-dived last month. The concerns raised
by the FAA inspectors never progressed up the agency. Within days,
they were dismissed by some involved in the discussions who
concluded that the alerts provided supplemental pilot aids rather
than primary safety information, and therefore no additional
training was necessary. During that stretch and beyond, Boeing and
the FAA continued to publicly vouch for the aircraft's safety.
These very concerns, however -- ranging from potential training
lapses to confusion by many aviators about the specifics of
angle-of-attack alerts -- have now emerged as high-priority items
as Boeing's design decisions face scrutiny. The issues are among
those being pursued by various congressional, criminal and
Transportation Department investigators, say people with knowledge
of their lines of inquiry.
On Wednesday, a Boeing spokesman said that while the internal
FAA discussions were under way last year, "there was no data that
indicated the fleet should be grounded."
An FAA spokesman said the agency expects to mandate that all 737
MAX aircraft include working disagree alerts. But government and
industry officials said questions about why the alerts were turned
off in the first place remain central to uncovering the history and
safety problems surrounding the MAX fleet.
Testifying before a Senate panel last month, acting FAA chief
Daniel Elwell said one important factor is prioritizing data pilots
receive. "Every piece of real estate in a cockpit is precious," he
said. "You put one gauge up there, you are sacrificing
another."
At American Airlines Group Inc., one of the few carriers that
initially had working angle-of-attack alerts as part of a broader
array of optional MAX safety features for which it paid extra,
pilots are still anxious to see Boeing and the FAA get all the
steps right to end the grounding.
In a meeting about a month after the first crash, a Boeing
executive told American Airlines pilot union officials that
American's MAX cockpit warning lights would have helped them avoid
problems like those encountered by the Lion Air pilots, union
officials who attended the meeting said. A Boeing spokesman has
previously said the executive didn't recall making that
statement.
"Our minds are not at ease on this," said Dennis Tajer, the
pilot union spokesman.
Andrew Tangel, Robert Wall and Alison Sider contributed to this
article.
Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 28, 2019 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Boeing (NYSE:BA)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Boeing (NYSE:BA)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024