It hasn’t surprised anyone in the industry to hear rumours – via the pages of the Wall Street Journal – that Boeing is working on the design of a new narrowbody jet, because it’s what everyone – including Boeing – knows the manufacturer should have done instead of launching the 737 Max.
The confidence in that statement is completely un-influenced by hindsight.
Now the Max has been purged of the ghastly design mistake that was MCAS (manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system), and Boeing has radically overhauled its corporate safety culture under a new leader – former Rockwell Collins engineer CEO Kelly Ortberg – the 737 series can once again trade on the lazy confidence that comes from the fact that – with all its faults and its antique technology – it’s a known quantity.
As a result the 737 is selling well, but nothing like as well as its competitor the Airbus A320 series.
The first 737-100 entered service in 1968, initially to fly the routes that the larger 727 series trijet was too big for. Its basic control technology was – and still is – just-post-war, except that in the latest versions the power-assisted cranks and pulleys are overlaid with electronic flight instrument systems and flight management computers to the extent that the pilots could almost believe the aircraft is fly-by-wire. They know, however, that they themselves are the flight envelope protection.
The industry needs a new-technology narrowbody competitor to the A320, and if Boeing doesn’t supply it, perhaps a development of China’s Comac C919, Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100, or a new product from Brazil’s Embraer will fill the gap.
Boeing’s first fly-by-wire airliner was its highly successful 777 widebody, which entered service in 1995 with virtually no birthing pains.
In 2011 it launched the 787 Dreamliner series, also highly commercially successful, but suffering from multiple early problems, some of them still being worked on.
Right now Boeing is struggling to re-launch the 777 as the 777X. The fact that it had a planned 2019 in-service date, but now its launch customer – Lufthansa – will not receive it until 2026, suggests how difficult a task bringing an entirely new narrowbody (the 797?) to service readiness may yet be.
The challenge is always to deliver a safe, trouble-free product, but the staggeringly advanced, fully-integrated electronic technology by which the aircraft and all its systems will be managed and controlled, plus the fact that there must be fallback systems that the pilots can access easily if it all goes wrong, mean its service entry will not be quick.
Look beyond this to the fact that the new systems will inevitably employ artificial intelligence, which makes passengers – and even engineers – nervous when it comes to managing safety-critical systems, and the size of the challenge becomes clear.
So the venerable 737 series will be with us for many years yet.
The movement of two small switches on the aft end of the flight deck centre console, reachable easily by both pilots, appears to hold the key to what happened to the Air India Boeing 787-8 that crashed fatally just after take-off at Ahmedabad on 12 June.
It seems that one of the pilots selected these switches from “Run” to “Cut Off”, stopping the engines at a critical point just after the aircraft became airborne. The purpose of this article is to examine the arguments for and against deliberate action (compared with unintentional error) on the part of one of the Air India pilots.
On 11 July the Indian Air Accident Investigation Bureau published its preliminary factual report on Air India Flight AI171, a Boeing 787-8 registration VT-ANB. This has revealed the movement of the fuel control switches (FCS) mentioned above, and the resulting consequences of that movement. The data confirming this was derived from the two Enhanced Airborne Flight Recorders (EAFR) in the accident aircraft.
There are two FCSs, one for each engine in a 787. They have two settings: Cut Off and Run. The first act by any crew in starting a 787’s engines on the ground is to set the switches to Run. On the ground or in the air, setting the switches to Cut Off stops the fuel flow to the engines. (See photograph below, showing the switches just behind and below the engine power levers)
According to the AAIB report, just after take-off at Ahmedabad, these switches were moved from Run (up position) to Cut Off (down position). The left switch was moved first then, one second later, the right switch. This action cut off the fuel flow to both engines. There is no automatic function that could move these switches, so they must have been moved manually, or by something physically impacting them. Each switch has a locking mechanism so it cannot be moved accidentally, and there are guard brackets either side of the pair to deflect inadvertent contact by objects. To select the switches from one setting to the other, they must first be pulled out against a spring force to release a locking mechanism, then moved up or down.
Timeline (UTC):
08:07:37VT-ANB begins take-off roll. 08:08:39Lift-off at 155kt. 08:08:42Max airspeed achieved180kt, also No. 1 FCS switch was moved from Run to Cut Off, followed by the FCS for engine No. 2.08:08:47the Ram Air Turbine began supplying hydraulic power. 08:08:52No 1 engine FCS moved from Cut Off to Run. 08:08:56No 2 engine FCS moved from Cut Off to Run. 08:09:05Mayday call transmitted. 08:09:11EAFR recording stopped.
The report says: “In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff [sic]. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.” Each pilot is recorded on a separate channel, so the AAIB must know which pilot made each statement, but has decided not to release the information at this preliminary stage, The report confirms that the copilot was the pilot flying, the captain the pilot monitoring. So it seems that one of them, apparently, moved both FCS from Run to Cut Off (see Timeline above), and the other noticed him doing it. Then, about 10 seconds later, one of the pilots attempted to restart the engines by restoring both FCSs to Run.
The report explains the effect of restoring the FCSs to Run, first in 787s generally, then specifically what happened in this case: “When fuel control switches are moved from CUTOFF to RUN while the aircraft is inflight, each engines full authority dual engine control (FADEC) automatically manages a relight and thrust recovery sequence of ignition and fuel introduction. The EGT [exhaust gas temperature in VT-ANB] was observed to be rising for both engines indicating relight. Engine 1’s core deceleration stopped, reversed and started to progress to recovery. Engine 2 was able to relight but could not arrest core speed deceleration and re-introduced fuel repeatedly to increase core speed acceleration and recovery. The EAFR recording stopped at 08:09:11 UTC.”
Take-off and early climb is a period of intense concentration by both pilots, the joint task being to ensure the aircraft maintains a steady climb while allowing the airspeed to increase gradually in a controlled way.
Under normal circumstances, after unstick there is only one actionable task for the pilots to carry out quickly: to check that a positive rate of climb is confirmed by the flight instruments, then select the undercarriage up. This task is normally carried out by the pilot monitoring on orders from the pilot flying, and it would entail moving the undercarriage control lever – located on the forward instrument panel – manually upward. In this case, according to the report, no-one called for the gear to be retracted, and no-one selected it up.
Instead, at about the time the gear would normally have been retracted, the FCS were moved downward from Run to Cut Off, the left switch first, the right switch a second later.
It is difficult to imagine that a crew member would have made such a gross error as reaching down and slightly back to move two small switches downward, one after the other, as a substitute action for a well established routine which would have involved reaching forward to move a single lever upward. And there was no cueing request from the pilot flying to pull the gear up anyway.
Pilots have occasionally, however, carried out inadvertent gross errors that almost defy credibility. You can see here the description of how, in January 2023, a Yeti Airlines ATR72 scheduled passenger flight was inadvertently set up for disaster during a visual circling approach to land at Pokhara airport, Nepal. I wrote that linked piece based on the preliminary report, but when the final report was published by the Nepal authorities it gave the following verdict: “The most probable cause of the accident is determined to be the inadvertent movement of both condition levers to the feathered position in flight, which resulted in feathering of both propellers and subsequent loss of thrust, leading to an aerodynamic stall and collision with terrain.” The check pilot had been asked by the pilot flying to increase the flap setting from 15deg to 30deg, but instead of moving the flap lever, he moved the pair of engine condition levers (picture supplied in linked article) to the position that demands the propellers to feather and stop turning.
If one of the pilots of AI171 did know what he was doing when he moved the FCS, he must have known that his action would have more or less guaranteed the result the world has witnessed, because there was insufficient time to restore usable power once it had been cut. VT-ANB was airborne only 3 seconds before the first FCS was switched to Cut Off, followed a second later by the second FCS, then ten seconds after that the FCS were both switched back to Run. The total airborne time was 42 seconds before colliding with the buildings that began break-up of the aircraft.
As for the likelihood that professional pilots would want to cause the destruction of the aeroplane they are flying, history provides evidence that it happens from time to time.
This was the summary of the situation as presented in the FlightGlobal annual safety review for calendar year 2023, which points out that deliberate acts by pilots to bring down airliners have been carried out by aircrew from all regions and cultures: “Pilot suicide on commercial flights in the last three decades has not involved only Europeans and North Americans. A Japanese, a Moroccan, an Egyptian, a Mozambican, a Botswanan, and a Singaporean, among others, have all been involved. The Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network accident database shows that, in its records beginning the 1950s, there has been a marked acceleration in the numbers of flights brought down by pilot suicide since the beginning of the 1990s, and this acceleration has continued in the new century. It is undoubtedly a modern flight safety hazard.” Since that time, although China has not confirmed it, the rest of the world has reason to believe that the March 2022 loss of a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 was not an accident.
It is inevitable that deliberate action by flight crew should be considered when a disaster like AI171 occurs. The India Air Accident Investigation Bureau will undoubtely investigate this possibility. But just one part of the trajedy is that, when all the flight crew die, their intentions will never be known for certain.
Air India flight 171 crashed immediately after take-off from Ahmedabad on 12 June, and today, two weeks later, with no news about causes, the system is beginning to leak.
This is what happens naturally when information which people know is available to the authorities is withheld from the media and the public.
It’s easy for authorities like the Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation to believe they can justify withholding information on the grounds that it’s very complicated, and they intend to release it quite soon anyway. Unfortunately for the DGCA, today’s media environment does not have that kind of patience any longer, especially in a case like this.
This fatal accident, a first for the Boeing 787 of any marque, killed 241 people on board and many on the ground. Whatever the cause was, it was highly unusual – maybe unique. For that reason, the industry and its regulators are desperate to know if there might be an unknown latent failure in the 787, so they can stop it happening again.
This pressure is what causes the system to leak. The Air India 171 flight data recorder has been downloaded by the National Transportation Safety Board for the DGCA at the Air Accident Investigation Bureau in Delhi, so some outstanding data will already be clear, even if not fully analysed yet.
Meanwhile the NTSB is sworn to secrecy according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation protocol which states that the nation in which the accident occured is responsible for the investigation. So in this case, the NTSB provides all its data to the DGCA, but as an agency of the nation in which the accident aircraft was designed, built and certificated, the NTSB has a particular responsibility to ensure that all operators of Boeing 787s throughout the world – there are about 1,000 of the type flying today – learn as fast as possible what, if anything, they should do.
That NTSB responsibility is a heavy one, but at the same time they want, if possible, to stick to the protocols to ensure the investigation proceeds calmly.
The NTSB obviously has to tell Boeing any details that are emerging. Then Boeing has an urgent duty to provide advice to 787 operators, particularly if any system failure detected might possibly repeat. This information will be received at Boeing by many engineers and technicians who must act rapidly to frame a plan for inspections and corrective action, then communicate with the operators, where an even larger group of airline technicians must carry out the Boeing advisories, or any directives that the Federal Aviation Administration may see fit to issue.
The pressure on the DGCA is of a different kind, and arguably less urgent. It is, after all, a regulator, a bureaucracy, with the responsibility to oversee the investigation and ensure it is conducted properly and according to law. It does, however, face the reality that a lot of highly relevant information is being shared right now by hundreds of experts all over the world, and the media knows it. So if the DGCA delays release of established facts, it will face increasing censure, especially if it delays release beyond one calendar month from the date of the accident.
A month is now firmly established as the time it should take for an air accident investigator to establish the basic facts of the case, and release a “preliminary factual report”. The final report can take more than a year.
Meanwhile, what of all those FDR facts whizzing around the world between experts at the manufacturer, the investigator, the world’s civil aviation authorities, and all the airlines that operate 787s? Well, they leak, of course, because they are important and everyone knows it. But most of the time the precise source of emerging information isn’t obvious, because individuals discussing them do not want to be recognised, so responsible journalists have to be careful what we do with what we hear.
What happens, however, is that it gradually becomes clear, among the plethora of opinions and guesswork always out there, which facts are beginning to establish themselves.
Some are simple, almost obvious. For example, the one emergency radio call made by the AI 171 crew said they had lost power, and an observation of the flight path almost immediately after unstick corroborates that puzzling fact.
But double engine failure immediately after take-off is almost unheard of, so what caused it? That is less obvious.
The exception to that is the requirement to test the Electronic Engine Control System. These are computers called Full-Authority Digital Engine Controls (FADEC) that monitor the engines’ performance and react to demands by the pilots via the power levers or the flight control panel (autopilot input). These are vital, but have been established since the 1980s as highly dependable devices, and more reliable by far than the old mechanical connections.
So if both FADECs failed that would be extraordinary. In fact it makes more sense that something else failed or malfunctioned and disabled both FADECs. There is a lot of credible information gathering that backs this up, but since its precise source is not certain, I will not run it here.
Suffice to say we will soon learn what the problem was, because the DGCA knows it would look very bad to sit on it beyond 12 July 2025.
Boeing’s long-range widebody 787 has been in service since 2013, and had some worrying technical problems in early service. Those, however, were corrected and it had been crash-free until now.
There has been very little information for investigators to work with since the Air India 787-8 crashed just after take-off from Ahmedabad today.
There are reports of an urgent Mayday call from the crew during the brief airborne period. The 787 appears to have reached a maximum height of about 600ft before descending, wings-level, in a nose-high attitude, to impact with buildings about 1.5nm from the runway’s end. An explosion followed, resulting from the large amount of fuel on board contacting hot engine parts when the crash breached the fuel tanks. The aircraft had been fuelled for the scheduled ten-hour flight to London Gatwick.
Powered by twin GE Aerospace GEnx engines, the 787-8 took off from Ahmedabad at 13:40 local time in good weather, carrying 242 passengers and crew. Initial reports from the site indicate that all on board died except for a single passenger who was thrown clear, and has survived. There are expected to be many casualties on the ground, but the numbers are not known at present.
Looking at a video of the last few seconds of the flight, the landing gear still remains down, the flaps look as if they are still at a take-off setting – but the video quality is so poor that cannot be stated with certainty – and the aircraft is in a steady descent which only ended in impact with buildings and the ground.
At this point after take-off, the gear would normally have been retracted and the aircraft would have been climbing rapidly. The steady descent actually witnessed in the video suggests the crew could not command sufficient power from the engines to keep the aircraft level, let alone to climb.
If that is true, what had happened to deprive the pilots of power from the engines? Had they suffered a multiple birdstrike that damaged both engines? No-one so far has reported a flock of birds in the departure path.
And failure of a single engine should not cause a crew to lose control of a modern airliner, even in the critical early climb phase. The video shows an aircraft that looks under control, but unable to climb.
Simultaneous engine failures for unconnected reasons simply do not happen, according to the entire history of aviation accidents. So if there was a failure of both, what could have caused it?
Frankly, we don’t know for certain in this case if engine power was the problem, but if you go looking for a potential cause of multiple engine failure, fuel contamination could do it. Again, however, history is against that potential cause in observed reality.
Could the pilots not demand the nose-up attitude they actually wanted because of some technical limitation? Well, that happened in the notorious 737 Max cases, but there is virtually no commonality in the way the 737 Series controls work and the manner in which the 787 Series operates.
So we have to wait for the investigators to report. These days, if the Indian investigators follow today’s recommended protocol, after about a month they will provide factual data of which they are certain, even if the final verdict is not yet clear. The aircraft’s “black boxes” – the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder – will provide data on what the aircraft actually did, and may throw some light on why it did it.
Meanwhile, be patient. This kind of accident is incredibly rare these days, and finding the truth behind it could not be more important.
Just as President Donald Trump rushed to claim that the 29 January mid-air collision over the Potomac River was the result of air traffic control incompetence resulting from the Federal Aviation Administration’s application of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies in controller recruitment, so others have lined up to point out that there has been an unusual cluster of serious US fatal air accidents since his appointment as POTUS.
Anyone with a brain knows that neither claim has any causal connection with reality.
But I am serving notice today that this blog will examine any proposals that emerge from the Trump-appointed DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) regarding the funding or reorganization of the FAA, and I invite senior executives and employees of the FAA, the airlines and general aviation bodies to report on substantive changes ordered by DOGE by responding to this blog.
Like others who care about maintaining and advancing aviation safety, I am wary of politically-inspired tinkering with an important oversight agency by leaders who have no expertise in the management of aviation safety. Trump’s first lieutenant Elon Musk, a man of many talents, has been entrusted with heading DOGE. He has a businessman’s appetite for risk-taking.
As Boeing acknowledges, business skills wielded by those for whom safety and quality control is an important concern, but whose primary objective has become shareholder returns, can get the balance wrong and damage both.
The USA has led the post-war world in advancing civil aviation safety, with the FAA being its general and the Flight Safety Foundation its standard-bearer. If the FAA’s ability to oversee industry safety performance and to manage the USA’s airspace is diminished in the name of “efficiency”, it affects global aviation, so the world will be watching with its own interests at heart. The FAA is an agency, a public service, it is not a business.
This appeal for reader feedback will have to be carefully managed, because at this stage the proposed Trump/Musk policies inspire apprehension without advancing any substance worthy of appraisal.
But soon actions will loom, and appraisal must begin.
If a new search of the southern Indian Ocean goes ahead as proposed, the expedition may clear up once and for all the most perplexing aviation mystery since the second world war: the fate of the missing Flight MH370, and all 239 people lost with it.
The majority of those on board the lost flight – which took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing more than ten years ago – were Malaysian or Chinese. Now Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke has provisionally accepted a “no find, no fee” bid by Southampton, UK-based survey company Ocean Infinity, to search a new area of the remote southern Indian Ocean, where previously rejected data suggests the MH370 wreck could be resting on the sea bed.
Loke explained his rationale for a new search: “Our responsibility and obligation and commitment is to the next of kin…We hope [the search] this time will be positive, that the wreckage will be found and give closure to the families.”
Ocean Infinity vessels took part in a previous search near the planned fresh objective, but they were carried out under the direction of government agencies from Malaysia, China and Australia, and were unsuccessful. This time the company will be using independently supplied data from multiple expert sources, and it will consider alternative theories as to how the aircraft was directed in the last sector of its flight before it finally entered the ocean. This will take the search further south than Ocean Infinity’s vessels have scanned before.
On 8 March 2014, the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur on a scheduled flight to Beijing. Over the South China Sea, only 39 minutes into the flight, all radio communication with air traffic control was lost, and the aircraft’s data disappeared from ATC radar.
Military radar later revealed that, when it disappeared from ATC radar because the aircraft’s transponder had been switched off, MH370 almost did a U-turn and headed back across Malaysia, out into the northern Andaman Sea, and finally went out of radar range. What it did then has been the subject of endless speculation, but all plausible theories led to the south-eastern Indian Ocean, where the previous (unsuccessful) searches have taken place.
Since that time a few pieces of wreckage identified as part of the missing Boeing 777 have been found washed up on beaches around the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from the aircraft’s flight planned route.
But the resting place of the wreckage and the remains of 239 people who had set off innocently on a commercial flight are, to this day, still undiscovered.
If the Malaysian government confirms its planned agreement with Ocean Infinity, the world may finally learn the fascinating truth about this mysterious flight.
There are still two months to go before the end of 2024, but the number of fatal airline accidents worldwide this year already comfortably exceeds the 2023 total. We’re not in disaster territory yet because the previous year’s total was exceptionally good.
Prominent risks facing the airlines today, according to incidents this year, include repeated runway incursions and airport air traffic control errors causing collision risk, and a rising number of in-flight turbulence incidents in which passengers and crew are severely injured or – in one case – killed.
Two countries that have had bad safety performance levels for many years – Indonesia and Nepal – have each suffered fatal accidents already this year, suggesting they have yet to get to grips with their national aviation safety cultures.
Each year for the last 44 years I have produced the world airline safety review for FlightGlobal and Flight International, and I have been commissioned once again to carry out their reviews for the current year. As usual, in January, it will provide fine detail of significant accidents and incidents, and analyze changes, trends and safety culture issues around the globe. The last annual review is here.
We wait to see whether November and December will add to the year’s accident total. Or not.
Aircraft cabin air contamination, a persistent issue for airlines because their crew and passengers face the risk of consequent neurological harm, may soon be alleviated by advances in chemical science, according to a new scientific paper published in the UK-based Journal of Hazardous Materials.
The study, sponsored by French industrial lubricant manufacturer NYCO, says: “The research underscores the urgency to replace hazardous industrial OPs [organophosphates] due to their documented neurotoxic effects and associated risks.” The study states analysis of OP chemical structures reveals that “one of the identified clusters had a favourable safety profile, which may help identify safer OPs for industrial applications”. Those applications include aero-engine lubricants, which at present are proven to be the source of contaminants released into aircraft air conditioning systems when “fume events” occur. NYCO has, for years, been researching the possibility of producing aero engine lubricants that are as effective as existing ones, but less toxic.
Also to be presented at the conference is the detail of new tests on passengers and crew that can reveal “biomarkers” in their blood proving that they have been exposed to toxins specific to aircraft cabin air contamination, enabling appropriate remedial actions to be taken by those affected.
In terms of mitigation options while the OP risk to airline passengers and crew remains at its present level, also presenting at the conference are Sweden-based CTT on the subject of cabin air humidification and active carbon filters; BASF on dealing with volatile organic compounds and ozone conversion; and PTI Technologies which will reveal its latest bleed air filtration capabilities.
Learmount.com 