[AR] 737-MAX (was: Fly By wire Flight Control System)
- From: Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2019 23:16:59 -0400
On Sun, Jun 02, 2019 at 07:28:25PM -0400, Henry Spencer wrote:
You should expect the testing requirements to be severe, especially in the
wake of the 737-MAX fiasco, which has made people more sensitive to such
issues.
That's indeed probably going to be the public reaction, though my own
reaction is the opposite: Boeing would have done a much better job if
they *had* moved to a fully fly by wire system, rather than bolting on
the MCAS intervention to a plane that's basically manually controlled
(because they were trying to avoid the need for pilot retraining when
coming from older 737s). If you do stability augmentation the way a
fighter plane does, it's on all the time, doing all the little
adjustments that the pilot would otherwise constantly have to do, and
making an unstable aircraft seem stable. It's not just an if
statement that cranks the horizontal stabilizer by a fixed amount and
only activates in rare circumstances.
I suspect Boeing may end up bolting new, larger horizontal stabilizers
onto these aircraft; that's the traditional way to fix stability
problems. (If there's actually any stability problem that really
needs fixing, that is -- supposedly that was the issue, it stemming
from them moving the engines farther forward, though apparently it was
only a problem at high AOA.)
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