Boeing never provided their customers with the “clear explanations” the safety certifications required it to deliver, suggesting breaches of legal requirements and of trust.
It has been reported by several media outlets already that for maximum profit, the safety tests of Boeing’s autopilot system were rushed through and pilots were neither informed of the changes nor trained to counter its failure.
The new addition known as the “maneuver characteristics augmentation system” or MCAS, depended on one single sensor and when the sensor provided flawed data, MCAS engaged and pointed the planes towards the ground. This error has now resulted in a two major air disasters.
A manual override was required to regain flight stability, but sadly pilots were not made aware by Boeing of these pivotal changes.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and foreign regulators were kept in the dark and their certification of the 737 MAX was based on misleading data, as Boeing did not inform the regulators when it quadrupled the maximum effect the MCAS system could have.
The original certification for the 737 MAX was issued by the US regulator FAA. The European regulator, the European Aviation and Space Agency (EASA) had based its provisional certification on the fact that dangerous situations would be discussed in “additional crew procedures and training material”, which Boeing never included these in the training materials for the airlines that bought the planes.
As a Reuters report highlighted, Boeing essentially sold incomplete planes to its customers by providing the plane without the required training material.
Also, the FAA clearly should not have allowed Boeing to install a MCAS that depended on a sole sensor.
In 2010, when Airbus announced the A-320 NEO as a better alternative to the Boeing 737 NG, Boeing had neither the engineering capacity nor the money to counter the NEO.
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