Autothrust Blue
Welcome aboard the Washington State Ferries
I find how APA and ALPA are approaching this very interesting. APA appear to be willing to call something unairworthy, unairworthy.
Boeing Lounge Boeing 737 LRD
- Thread starter ZapBrannigan
- Start date
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Tajer has always come off as kind of alarmist. Not that he's wrong.
Also, is "this is fine" ALPA national's official position? I fly the 737 for an ALPA carrier And haven't seen this, but we don't have MAXes, so I don't really know, truthfully. If national has taken an official position, it hasn't trickled down to us lowly NG crews.
roundout
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Autothrust Blue
Welcome aboard the Washington State Ferries
Sculprit
Well-Known Member
Any chance you can copy paste? It’s paywalled
Cherokee_Cruiser
Bronteroc
FAA response to Boeing MAX engine issue comes under scrutiny
Lauren RosenblattApril 16, 2025 at 6:05 pmBy
Seattle Times business reporter
The Federal Aviation Administration is facing new scrutiny about its decisions following two incidents where smoke filled the interior of Boeing 737 MAX planes.
In both incidents, which occurred on Southwest Airlines flights in March and December 2023, bird strikes damaged the engine and caused smoke and toxic fumes to enter the plane. In one event, smoke filled the cabin, while the other led to smoke in the cockpit.
Pilots landed the planes safely in both instances, but the situations taking place just months apart raised concern among some safety regulators and pilot unions about what went wrong and how to ensure it didn’t happen again.
Nearly a year after the second incident, a team of investigators at the FAA recommended a design change to fix an engine vulnerability. Because a design change can be a lengthy process, that FAA team also recommended changes to takeoff proceduresto avoid the “potential catastrophic risk,” according to an internal memo that leaked.
But another FAA office later reversed course. That office, the Aircraft Certification Service, proposed a mandate to update engine software, but it opted against recommending changes to takeoff procedures.
On Wednesday, a government watchdog agency said it would audit the FAA’s decisions.
“Our objective is to assess FAA’s actions in response to recent incidents of toxic smoke and fumes entering aircrafts’ cockpit or cabin,” the Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General said in a memo published Wednesday.
The memo said the audit would begin this month but did not provide further details about what to expect.
A spokesperson for the FAA said Wednesday, “We welcome outside scrutiny and will fully cooperate with the audit.”
Boeing declined to comment.
Related
It’s not uncommon for a bird strike to take out an aircraft engine, but it is unusual to get smoke in the plane as a result.In both 2023 instances, the bird strikes caused damage to the engine oil sump, which allowed leaking oil to enter the hot core of the engine and burn. That smoke was then funneled into the airplane’s interior.
An October report from the FAA’s Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention, which led to the recommendation to change takeoff procedures, found the oil leak was caused by a new system on the MAX engines.
That system — called a load reduction device — had been used on other planes, including Boeing’s 787 and 777, but was new to the MAX.
CFM International, a joint venture between GE and the French company Safran and the exclusive engine provider for the 737 since the 1980s, makes the engine, called the LEAP. It is also the most popular of two engine choices on Boeing’s rival Airbus A320 jet family.
The load reduction device, or LRD, is designed as a safety feature that kicks in if the engine is damaged in-flight, for example, by a bird strike.
Boeing sent an alert to airlines in February 2024, after the Southwest incidents, to make sure pilots knew the correct procedure in such an emergency to stop the smoke and fumes from filling the plane.
But pilot unions said they still had questions and hadn’t known about the new LRD system on the engine.
The lack of information about the new system reminded some of Boeing’s withholding of information about another new software system on its MAX planes years earlier. That software, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, was the prime cause of two fatal MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019.
The October FAA memo that recommended design and procedure changes was highly critical of Boeing for not informing pilots about the LRD system.
A month after that memo, a review board appointed by the FAA decided the risk “does not warrant immediate action” beyond the instructions Boeing had issued to pilots in February.
Rather than following the October recommendations, the “FAA will follow its standard rule-making process,” the safety agency said in November.
The DOT inspector general has been critical of the FAA in the past, particularly about its oversight of Boeing.
In a scathing report released in October, the inspector general said the FAA hasn’t done enough to address risks within the aerospace manufacturer’s factories and issued 16 recommendations to improve what it called a “failing system.”
Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.
Autothrust Blue
Welcome aboard the Washington State Ferries
The short version is that the Aircraft Certification Service initially recommended an interim AD with changes to takeoff procedures while a permanent fix in the form of a long-term design change was worked out, then backed off. Apparently, the DOT Inspector General's office (we still have one of those? cool, I guess) is going to look into how the FAA made the sausage on this.
ERfly
Well-Known Member
Yeah, I think it's headed by Puck and the guy in the cowboy hat from the Los Angeles season.