Rogue Boeing 737 Max planes 'with minds of their own' | 60 Minutes Australia

So now we are on the takeoff list, we are just passing 100 knots and for the moment everything is fine. Veteran 737 pilot Chris Brady is about to take me on a terrifying flight approaching rotation speed. There we go, so he just backs off. In the elevators, he moves the stick back and you will see the plane rise into the air. In this simulator, we are replicating the 12

minutes

that the pilots aboard Indonesia's Blind Air Flight 610 experienced before crashing into the sea in October last year. Now the flaps have retracted. this is the point at which the damn cats would work the line without two pilots of this new plane the Boeing 737 max a computer flight control system called MCAS hidden in the plane suddenly activates 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 7,000 I'm stopping there because that already looks very awkward Wow and I'm going to try to get out of it.

I'm going to have to use trim to help me get out of it. MCAS has the ability to automatically and repeatedly take control of the plane and in this slide the aerial flight, it did exactly that so you can see how dramatic what is happening was, regardless of anything you are trying to do, this It just happened whether you like it or not. Yes, MCAS malfunctioned and allowed pilots only five-second intervals. to regain control, so now I think the problem is gone. I think the problem is solved, but what we don't know is that behind the scenes, in the black boxes, they count to five and as soon as they count to five, here we go. again Vincent misbehaves and you look out the window oh my god you're on the dive again he has a mind of his own his logic is programmed 10 seconds with five seconds off and we don't know because where is he?

Pilots have never been told it was never in our manuals time and time again Chris Brady fights the wayward M care system, but it's a losing battle, it'll start to taper off, so let's go two, three, four, five, six , seven, eight, nine, ten, and you've seen it. that we are now in a very, very steep decline. I'm not a pilot, but it almost makes me sick to think about her. I think so, me too, it's such a horrible situation and it's unimaginable to lose contact with air traffic control at 6:32am. local time on October 29 last year Line Air 6:10 crashes at extraordinary speed, friends, if those on board seemed helpless and killed the 189 men, women and children on board, we learned that there was a system on the plane we had.

We weren't aware of it, it wasn't in our books, maybe we hadn't been trained for it, it was an absolute blindfold for us in a dark forest, but five months later, despite Boeing's assurances,

their

new plane was safe. , another 737 max crashes in the mountains of Ethiopia. They are pilots fighting to the death to take control and this voice said is this Susan Riffle and I said yes and they said are you alone? Then I found out and I said they're both boys and he said, I'm so sorry 346 lives and the reputation of Boeing, the world's largest airplane company, scattered in the waters of Indonesia and on the soil of Ethiopia, the last six

minutes

Your life must be horrible, it's just that it will haunt me for the rest of my life, my life now.

It has been taken away from me that the 737 max was Boeing's most successful aircraft so far, the entire fleet is grounded and many question its future. Airlines around the world had already ordered 5,000 of Boeing's new 737 Max, but with two Jets down, the company was now facing the It is unthinkable that the news star of its fleet had a serious design defect. This is now one of aviation's biggest scandals and is the subject of two criminal investigations. Pilots around the world are furious. 350 people died as a result of this. What else has happened? Did you know? there could be something else on board that we haven't seen yet and it's relentless it's powerful it was a monster in a cage design engineers ask how this happened when you come home at night and put your head on the pillow you wonder what's wrong with me I missed?

How is it possible that an airplane could apparently have a life of its own? Suddenly, the nose of the plane dropped to 40 degrees. Now 40 degrees is awfully steep. This is literally kamikaze stuff. Now the whistleblowers are speaking out. We were under pressure to Minimize changes to reduce costs and do so quickly and Boeing was asked if there was a flaw in the system. It was all triggered by this intense competition because he put profits before people. Boeing was always playing catch-up as pilots climbed the hidden falls. We were saying what's going on here and a company denies responsibility, it's clear that after that accident, Boeing's immediate impulse was to suggest that it was pilot error the following in 60 minutes.

The Boeing 737 has been the most successful airliner of all time since it first flew. In 1967, more than 10,000 were renewed several times, but in 2011 Boeing decided it was time to design something new, until its competitor Airbus launched its neo, an advanced version of its A320 coin was always catching up. Seattle Times aviation reporter Dominic Gates has long covered local giant Boeing. I mean, many of our readers work and remember the company's alarm when Airbus launched its ultra-modern Neo in July 2011. Boeing executives learned that American Airlines was about to order 200 A320neos with this Nuri-powered plan. and there was complete Panic here in Seattle, almost overnight, Boeing found itself in a fight with its biggest competitor, Airbus, so it made a decision rather than start from scratch and develop a completely new airplane.

Boeing decided to roll one more roll of the dice with the 737 they made. They didn't have a maximum, they didn't have a plan, but right away they said okay, we'll change the gender. An American said yes. We were under pressure to minimize any changes to reduce costs and do so quickly. In my opinion, Boeing was making decisions based on the stock price. These claims come from a Boeing Insider who cannot be identified and is now an FBI informant in a criminal investigation into this company's most profitable single-aisle aircraft. was involved in the design and development of the 737 Max and says part of the sales pitch to potential buyers was that this new plane would not require costly pilot retraining.

The main requirement driving the design of the max was that there could be no changes that would require flight simulator training by the pilots. We really could have improved that plane, but the company's mandate against additional training prevented us from upgrading the old 737 to keep up with its new Airbus rival. It was easier said than done. Its new fuel-efficient engines were too large to fit under its 53-year-old body. They moved the engines forward and up, but Boeing later discovered that this caused a serious problem in flight, an active defect that forced the plane's nose up, risking a stall, and the stall can literally make a plane fall out of the sky. .

Boeing knew that the design and location of the engine would make the plane bank with a higher risk of stalling, especially at low speed, but we were too close to certification to change the design. I'm sorry. Boeing came up with a solution: a computer program called that would automatically force the plane's nose down and that could be activated by just a sensor, the decision was made to add a software program to the flight control system. I'm Cass, but M cast wasn't reviewed in depth, we didn't really understand its failure modes, mechs became a runaway success. Boeing believed the MCAS system would automatically take care of it. any stall issues and that the plane would handle the same as the previous version and that meant that to fly the new plane the pilots only needed to upgrade by completing a course on an iPad this was the upgrade was it yes when we first received the maximum?

They were provided with a 56-minute iPad course that we could take anywhere at home or at a Starbucks. Dennis Teja is a veteran American Airlines pilot and spokesperson for American pilots. It's pretty much the same thing, so go ahead and fly, we accept that in your job, but nowhere in the iPad course the pilot's flight manual my Boeing ever mentioned the MCAT anti-stall system no mention of the case M not a single mention of it it's not in our books it's not in our lesson plan American Airlines no I didn't even know about it Boeing's mistake in not informing pilots about the existence of the MKS system would soon have catastrophic consequences.

The crash of Line Air Flight 610 off the coast of Indonesia killed all 189 people aboard the flight path of this new 737 max. dramatic changes in altitude until its final high-speed fatal dive into the sea, it is clear that after that accident Boeing's immediate impulse was to suggest that it was pilot error and I think that because of its legal liability, Boeing is very, very reluctant to say anything that would indicate there is something wrong with our plan until it became very clear that there was in fact something wrong with the plan, how quickly did you realize that this was an aircraft issue we were looking at ?

I think almost immediately, as soon as we saw the plane at the end of it fell directly into the water that indicated that something was wrong with the plane. Peter Lemmy is a former Boeing engineer, an aviation expert who is now cooperating with an investigation by the US Department of Justice on Boeing, reviewed the Glein Air flight data log as an aviation engineer, I imagine when you look at that your heart sinks to see the pilot fighting an aircraft system, it's very hard to see that the pilots were saying what's going on here. I'm having to deal with the system I didn't know was on the ground.

London aviation expert David Lee of Global International Flights Group. I think a lot of confidence in his people also suspected that the cause of the accident was not pilot error. I think one of the smokescreens is that Indonesia does not have a brilliant safety record. It's not really like that, then you have an accident in Indonesia and some people at the end will say what do you expect after the Lion Air accident. Boeing finally revealed the existence of its new MCAS flight control system. Pilots around the world were shocked. I called our security experts and they said where is this in a book and they said no and I said well, does an American top line have it?

No, and we later found out that no one in the entire world had it on

their

books. It was unacceptable. an unforgiving profession that relies heavily on the knowledge and training of the pilot and lives depend on it. Why didn't Boeing name this system in the flight crew operations manual? What's the analogy for those of us who don't fly? Shots of what it must have been like to find out something new in your cabin. Well, is this if you buy a new car and you're driving and it suddenly swerves and hits a wall and you didn't? anything and you ask the dealer what was going on there and, well, it was a system, what system, self-driving system, self-driving system, yeah, when it's raining with the windows ajar, it automatically tries to find a garage and just turns on the right. even the nearest well turned into a wall and I didn't know it that's how it felt like a shock of betrayal how could you do that?

I don't think I want to buy you another car. Representing thousands of American pilots, Dennis Teja met with Boeing executives and asked them why the pylons had not been informed about MCAS and their response was that they did not want to inundate the pilot with additional information that they did not believe was necessary. to fly the plane that I thought would overload him with information if he knew this, yes, so our response was to try, but it sent us a very strong signal that somewhere near the philosophy had been contaminated and poisoned, it was simply illogical.

Boeing stated that any malfunctions of the MCAS system could always have been fixed if the pilots had followed a safety checklist. The problem is that the pilots didn't know what they were dealing with, it was a monster in a cage and when it came out when it shouldn't, it had no limits and the pilot was left after all those distractions by simply referring to a very common checklist, give me a break, that's not how it really happens in a booth. Boeing knew a week after the ground plane crash that there was something wrong with that system, but then they thought they had fixed it and they thought they had fixed it and they said there is a way to handle it maybe we didn't tell you about this before you didn't know that the system was on the plane but now you know and if This happens again you do this so yeah they knew the problem and thought they had a solution for five months.

Boeing continued to push out the maximums and assured theaviation industry that the MKS software installed on the 737 Max was safe on March 10 of this year. The security would prove tragically wrong: five four three two one six of terror, there would have been a calamitous noise in the flight deck, so all this is happening in seconds and then comes the chainsaw and the unimaginable torment of a family that will haunt me for a long time. the rest of my life continues on 60 minutes as brothers were chalk and cheese 26 year old Melvin Ripple was the life of the party and loved outdoor sports Bennett was three years younger and the quietest who preferred the solitude of nature but Together these kids from Redding in Northern California were a close-knit team with their mom Susan and dad Ike.

They were a loving family and liked to explore the world. It looks like it is. Melvin traveled more than Bennett. Bennett talked about traveling more and I think Melvin probably challenged him a little bit Say you're talking about that so let's go and so they did in February of this year Melvin and Bennett set out on the Brothers' Odyssey around the world. I imagine that as parents they saw this trip like others as a great adventure for them, oh yeah, you didn't have it. any particular fearFor them, you know, I personally had some fears like I was some kind of warrior, you know, but the last thing on my mind was that it was going to be a plane crash at 8:38 a.m. m.

On March 10, Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 takes off. Since Addis Ababa is considered one of the safest airlines in the world and on board the new Boeing 737 Max were our Melvin and Bennett, but shortly after takeoff, the Ethiopian flagged 302 suddenly goes out of control, a critical sensor sends information to the The plane's new flight control system called MCAS malfunctioned. MCAS believes the plane is in a stall and literally takes over the controls, causing the plane to plummet. It's almost identical to what happened to Line Air Flight 610 just five months earlier in Indonesia. Boeing had since assured pilots that more disasters would follow. avoidable as long as they followed the safety checklist, what Boeing described to us was that you just go to a known checklist, but what they didn't recognize is that this was a complex and intense emergency because the

planes

were telling you that you were about to stall, so that's what happens right after takeoff, a few meters from the ground five four three two one zero In this flight simulator, British 737 pilot Chris Brady replicates what happens in the cockpit every time you notice we're descending, the Ethiopian pilots wouldn't be trying to follow Boeing. checklist, but what they didn't know was that the MCAS system will cycle on and off repeatedly, meaning they only have five seconds of control before the MCAS overrides the plane and forces it into a nosedive a few at a time. .

How long would it take me to get there? find a runaway stabilizer on this list and go to it on page nine point nine of the book as its plummet and it's barely enough time for pilots to consult Boeing's checklist that can only be found in a manual on paper, okay, that took me about two or three seconds mm-hmm, so now I only have potentially two more seconds before the MCAT comes to life and starts slicing me. To me, this is all outrageous on so many levels that they are unintended consequences of a bad idea. In addition, it was reported that there would have been a calamitous noise on the flight deck, the plane was going faster and faster, and faster, so there was a noise that would warn the crew that they were accelerating too much and give them an indication of how overloaded those pilots were nothing even though they tried the checklist it wasn't working for them so all this is happening in seconds it's a sledgehammer to the head followed by ball hammers to the forehead and then comes the chainsaw it will be nominalism for us and that chainsaw cuts through that cockpit and it's relentless the pieces were literally in a tug of war with their own plane the plane that's running in a 40 degree nose down attitude, which would have been a terrifying six minutes, they must to have realized, oh God God, yes, it is horrible, yes, unimaginable what the flight must have been like.

What passengers have thought on both flights, would they have known fairly quickly that things are not right? It's very sad, it's been scary because of those dives. sure of it the accident sites full of personal effects the witnesses gave their version of the last seconds he went straight to the ground with his nose then exploded I guess you received a phone call we made Can I Susan rifle were home that Sunday morning Susan I had just seen a headline about the accident when the call came in and when I answered it and this voice said, "It's this Susan Riffle" and I said yes and they said, are you alone?

Then I knew I told our kids and they said, I'm so sorry when you give news like that, where do you start when you want to try to understand? you know there's no understanding there's still no understanding now and it's and it's and I guess I just don't I don't believe it at first, you know, you think, okay, I'll wake up and this will all be over and then the next day and the next day you'll wake up. , this is not true, how could something like this happen? For her daughter-in-law Brittany, the news was devastating: she had not long returned from the Australian leg of the holiday with her husband Melvin returning home to rest and prepare for the birth of their first daughter, who they had already named Emma.

Can you describe your life now? My life has now been taken from me. You know, I get the feeling that it's just unfair that Emma has to grow up without her father here and he was so excited about this next chapter of her life. And so he has been and he was very excited to be an uncle and to have that taken away from them and from us as a family is really difficult to deal with on a daily basis, obviously it will continue that way for the rest of our lives. For this family, the loss of two brothers, two children in the prime of their lives is unimaginable.

I feel like our family is just gone. The loss of no one to convey something to. You know, the stories she and Emma will hear. stories from your grandparents since we've been here, but that's not the same, all the family isms, all the things that we, as a family of four, all of that seems like it's been ripped out and gone, and it's all for nothing. little things like that that only the children in us would know and I'm very aware that these were your only children, yeah, you know, we really got lucky. I told you this exactly, but we were very lucky to be a family where we all loved each other and we all loved each other's company and being together and doing things together and stuff with dad and it's and so you know, you know, Susan, I was understanding, you know, we're getting, we're getting later in life, we're looking. in retiring and traveling and and and and just watching and you know watching our children grow and get old you didn't know they were supposed to bury us you know?

Do you think about the fact that they were together? Yes, I do. I was wondering if they were sitting together because you never know and maybe, but I was wondering if they were really together at that moment and I wish they were, but I don't really want to know if they were. You know something I'm not going to do? The last six minutes of their life is something that haunts me, even though it's what they had to do, but yeah, so when everyone on that plane had to spend six minutes, the last six minutes their life had to be horrible, it's just that will haunt me for the rest of my life at this point, what else has happened, our commitment to safety is unwavering and Boeing's response, we regret the impact this has had. had two passengers angers grieving father he gets angry at 60 Minutes Embattled Boeing CEO Dennis Muhlenberg stands next to his plane thank you and I appreciate you joining us here this morning hello everyone the cash cow of the company, the 737 minutes, that is despite damning evidence of a fatal software flaw in its flight control system called MKS again our commitment to safety is unwavering and we regret the impact this has had on passengers, but it all sounds like public relations for the reform of Ike and Susan, who lost their only children Melvin and Bennett in the Ethiopian Airlines accident just two months ago I feel like if I had to talk to Boeing they would say that I feel cheated because you don't know , I can't see our son being a father, our other son being an uncle, a software malfunction. memories you know I feel cheated I'm very angry I mean I'm very angry Ike is a former private pilot so understand Deming's revelations about the plane who are you angry with I'm angry at Boeing for not addressing the problem too but find out what really happened, I guess you know the 737 max was a big seller for Boeing and they had a lot of orders, they had a lot of air

planes

flying and I don't think they wanted to take them away from them. line at the time and it's pretty obvious at this point that they should have.

I think this will be one of the biggest cases against Boeing in its history. Mark Lindquist is a former US district attorney and now he is said to be taking Boeing to court. On behalf of the families of the victims of the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes, there is almost no doubt here about Boeing's legal responsibility. Boeing is to blame for its plane crashing twice. The real question here is rather one of moral culpability and the difference is with legal responsibility. You're just saying okay, we're legally responsible with moral culpability, you're saying we did something wrong, we own it and we're going to try to make it right.

Central to determining Boeing's guilt will be the company's failure to inform its airline customers and pilots of the flight control system called MCAS that could take control of the plane, most of the airlines' safety systems. Aircraft rely on two or more sensors, so the fact that MCAS could be activated by a single sensor is almost unheard of and is absolutely basic in aviation design. that no critical system should depend on one thing, yet Boeing did just that, according to Seattle aviation journalist Dominic Gates, and no one saw the potential of what could happen if it failed or some aspect failed correctly and that seems like a terrible feeling, how can a The system in the plane take over the plane and not allow the pilot to fly the plane if you have a system that is going to move the nose of the plane so it doesn't stop, why isn't it going to move the nose up when it is? flying towards the ground I think Boeing now has to ask itself did we really do it?

Did we really design a system so fragile that it could cause accidents like this? Did we really do it? Experts around the world are shocked by Boeing's decision, including David Lee. quantity in London, I think they must be in a state of disbelief because they did not comply with many of the rules that they have always respected before former Boeing engineer Peter Lemme in Seattle agrees for the general public, it is mind-boggling that a Defective sensor could bring down a plane, but that's what happened, that was the trigger, the catalyst for the whole process, yes, it only took one defective sensor.

The Boeing whistleblower working with the FBI confirmed that making the MKS flight control system rely on just one sensor was a deliberate decision to avoid the need for expensive level D training or flight simulator. The caste was designed using data from only one of the sensors because we knew the FAA would not have certified a sensor system without Level D training and made those pilots who were expected to fly the mechs even more incredulous. I've been doing this for over three decades. I have never heard of a system that is so dramatic that it has such a dramatic effect on the aircraft by relying on an unacceptable sensor.

You are taking control away from the pilots and letting a software engineer who has probably never flown an airplane in his life make the decisions for the airplane. You know that the ultimate sensor on an airplane should be the pilot. It has now been revealed that while Boeing was claiming that this 737 max was safe, pilots around the world have reported more than 200 sensor failures. However, when the question arises about the plane, Boeing says that the problem has been solved and these 737 max will fly in the sky again. Would you ever fly on the 737 max? I could understand passengers thinking: I don't think I want to get on that plane in your zoo and neither do we until we're sure it's ready, that's what's next in 60 minutes, the impact of two crashes of the new 737 max has shocked the aviation industry and has shed light on the world's largest aircraft manufacturer.

Boeing is in serious damage control, dealing with falling profits and an ongoing criminal investigation and growing questions about its relationship with America's aviation watchdog, the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. It is the regulator the rest of the world trusts to approve the safety of all Boeing aircraft. now the airline industryworld wonders how it is possible that the FAA has overlooked software flaws when it is supposed to certify these 737 max. It seems that Boeing has betrayed us at the FAA that we know today for two of the latest jet aircraft models: they crashed. - in a period of less than half a year, what did they do wrong?

Many have said the relationship between the FAA and Boeing is too cozy. Oh, it's absolutely too comfortable. FAA oversight simply wasn't good enough. Basically, it was certified. on Boeing's part, this scandal has revealed that for years the FAA has allowed Boeing to heavily certify its own airplanes and, in particular, the 737 max that was rushed into service to recover lost sales to its largest competitor , Airbus, the FAA guys were under pressure from their managers to approve quickly they were not given time to evaluate properly, but where was that pressure coming from? It came from managers within the FAA because the whole push is to not get in the way of the industry, we cannot allow Boeing to slow down in its pursuit of Due to its competition with Airbus in the world of aviation, there is now a feeling of concern about how Boeing did business.

International agencies, including the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority, will now be part of a team examining whether these 737 maxes should be allowed to fly again. Passengers who are scared to death, have they considered resigning at a shareholders meeting last week? Boeing CEO Dennis Muhlenberg continued to defend the company. We are going to work very closely with our airline customers and with the FAA and with regulatory authorities around the world, as we finish the certification process. Boeing says that it has solved the problem and that these 737 max will fly again but, of course , there is a whole flying public whose confidence has been seriously shaken, so perhaps the true test of whether the problem has been solved or not will be based on how many people are willing to get on board and you can understand why passengers think : "I don't think I ever want to get on board." on that plane absolutely and neither do we until we are sure that it is good to leave we are with our passengers it is that simple it is that elementary I want to fix it I do not want another family to go through this never it is already taken 300 and some lives, you know , and all those people had mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles there and I don't want to see people going through what we've gone through and if somehow this can, you know, make a positive change in the industry. and make it safer we will be happy about that, whatever Boeing does, the fact is 346 lives were lost to grieving families and industry experts, it will take a long time to understand how this could have happened, there is no other way to describe this It's not a design flaw.

Do I care what the motivation is? You know Boeing is a great company. Why did they do this? We asked Boeing to be interviewed for this story, but they declined. The company also rejected our request. film at its 737 production facility in Seattle here Virgin Airlines is the only Australian airline with plans to fly these 737 max 8 aircraft a few days ago announced that it would postpone delivery of this model saying that it will not introduce any new aircraft into its fleet unless that you are completely satisfied with your safety. Hi, I'm Liz Hayes, thanks for watching to stay up to date with the latest news from 60 Minutes Australia.

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