Thread by @arapaho415

<Thread>
1/ "John Keast, a former principal at Cornerstone Government Affairs, lobbied the House and Senate last year on Boeing's behalf, according to lobbying reports filed with the Senate. #Boeing spent $200,000 last year with Cornerstone..." (more)

https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/1105894296782282752

2/ In 1994, John Keast managed @SenatorWicker's (R-MS) first successful House campaign and "previously served as Wicker's chief of staff in the US House of Representatives." (more...)

3/ "@SenatorWicker aides indicated that Keast would work on aviation safety issues for the panel b/c: 'While at Cornerstone Gov't Affairs, John Keast lobbied for a variety of clients including Boeing on defense issues only,' Wicker spokeswoman... said in a statement... (con't)

4/ She said @SenatorWicker 'has personally been actively engaged' with the leadership of the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board on Sunday's accident." (more...)

5/ Boeing contributes millions every congressional election cycle, but "divided its political giving to candidates roughly evenly between Dems & Republicans."
"But the aircraft giant made up for the gap after the [2016] election w/a $1million donation to Trump's inaugural cmte."

6/ Gobsmacking update, Mar 17, 2019: h/t @arlebear @sujilu
"As #Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus & certify its new 737 MAX, FAA managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to 🚨delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself🚨(con't)

https://twitter.com/dominicgates/status/1107266584865841153

7/ ... and to speedily approve the resulting analysis."
"Both Boeing and the FAA were informed of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago, 🚨before the second crash of a 737 MAX last Sunday🚨." (more...)

8/ "Several technical experts inside the FAA said Oct’s Lion Air crash where the MCAS [more on MCAS downthread] has been clearly implicated by investigators in Indonesia, is only the latest indicator that the agency’s delegation of airplane certification has gone too far (con't)

9/ ...and that it’s inappropriate for Boeing employees to have so much authority over safety analyses of Boeing jets."
MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) is Boeing's flight control system "now under scrutiny after 2 crashes of the jet in less than 5 months."

10/ "Since MCAS was supposed to activate only in extreme circumstances far outside the normal flight envelope, Boeing decided that 737 pilots needed no extra training on the system—& indeed that they didn’t even need to know about it. It was not mentioned in their flight manuals.

11/ That stance allowed the new jet to earn a common 'type rating' with existing 737 models, allowing airlines to minimize training of pilots moving to the MAX.
Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association at American Airlines, said his training... (con't)

12/ ...on moving from the old 737 NG model cockpit to the new 737 MAX consisted of little more than a one-hour session on an iPad, with no simulator training.
🚨Minimizing MAX pilot transition training was an important cost saving for Boeing’s airline customers🚨 (con't)

13/ ...a key selling point for the jet, which has racked up more than 5,000 orders"
"PeterLemme, a former Boeing flight controls engineer...now an avionics & satellite-comms consultant, said... bc MCAS reset each time it was used, 'it effectively has unlimited authority.' (con't)

14/ 'It had full authority to move the stabilizer the full amount,' Lemme said. 'There was no need for that. Nobody should have agreed to giving it unlimited authority.'"
(more...)

15/ "Like all 737s, the MAX actually has two of the sensors, one on each side of the fuselage near the cockpit. But the MCAS was designed to take a reading from only one of them." “'A hazardous failure mode depending on a single sensor, I don’t think passes muster,' said Lemme."

16/ Here's what Boeing failed to mention in their self-assessed "Safety Analysis" to FAA:
(i) "Understated the power of the new flight control system...MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than 4 times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document." (more)

17/ (ii) "Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward." [The 'unlimited authority' described in tweets #13 and #14 of this <thread>.] con't

18/ (iii) Assessed a failure of the system as one level below 'catastrophic.' But even that 'hazardous' danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed." (more...)

19/ "The FAA, citing lack of funding & resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes. Early on in certification of the 737 MAX, the FAA safety engineering team divided up... (con't)

20/ ...the technical assessments that would be delegated to Boeing versus those they considered more critical & would be retained w/in the FAA. But several FAA technical experts said...that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process. (con't)

21/ ...Development of the MAX was lagging 9months behind rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing."
Result of this fatal arrangement:
"Going against a long Boeing tradition of giving the pilot complete control of the aircraft, the MAX’s new MCAS... (con't)

22/ ...automatic flight control system was designed to act in the background, without pilot input. It was needed because the MAX’s much larger engines had to be placed farther forward on the wing, changing the airframe’s aerodynamic lift. (more...)

23/ Yet black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor — a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane’s 'angle of attack,' the angle between the airflow and the wing — triggered MCAS multiple times... (con't)

24/ ...during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash."😢💔 /end

Update 2, Mar 17, 2019:
25/ Elaine Chao's "Transportation Department’s inquiry was launched in the wake of the Lion Air accident and is being conducted by its 🚨inspector general🚨, which has warned two FAA offices to safeguard computer files... (con't)

https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/1107601370201362433

26/ ... according to people familiar with the matter. The internal watchdog is seeking to determine whether the agency used appropriate design standards and engineering analyses in certifying the anti-stall system, known as MCAS." (more...)

27/ "A Department of Transportation spokesman declined to comment about the investigation by the inspector general, whose office couldn’t be reached on Sunday." (more...)

28/ "The Department of Transportation inquiry is casting a wide net for documents about potential agency lapses just as House & Senate [see upthread⤴️] cmtes prepare for public hearings in the coming weeks that are expected to grill the FAA’s sr leadership on the same topics."

29/ "in 2011 Boeing learned that American Airlines , one of its best customers, had struck a tentative deal with Airbus for potentially hundreds of A320neo planes to renew its short-haul fleet. American invited Boeing to make a counteroffer. (con't)

30/ ...Boeing realized it needed to act fast, & offered what would become the MAX." "The goal [of MCAS, see tweet 9 for more] was to make cockpit controls behave the same as they did in previous models, even tho' behind the scenes the automated system was doing much of the work."

31/ "as the engineering effort & flight tests progressed...the Boeing team saw the same feature as a potentially important safety net for a different hazard highlighted in previous crashes: lower-altitude stalls in which startled pilots mistakenly pulled back on the controls...

32/ ...and sometimes crashed aircraft. FAA officials also recognized the potential benefits and approved the system as part of the overall MAX approval. (con't)

33/ Outside experts now contend both Boeing & the FAA 🚨underestimated the accompanying risks🚨—& 🚨installed a system that wasn’t highlighted in manuals or pilot training🚨" because "Boeing also made commitments that there would be minimal requirements for new pilot training...

34/ ...which can be costly to airlines, especially if expensive flight-simulator sessions are needed, according to people familiar with the matter. So Boeing tried to minimize differences from its existing fleet. (con't)

35/ "🚨Pilots were never specifically trained... on the MCAS system🚨, according to people familiar with the matter."
747 background:
"The 737 has been a cash cow for Boeing since shortly after it entered service in 1967."
"Boeing started building he first MAX in Jun 2015." /end