Cayman Airways Grounds 737-8 MAX Planes

[jdcpa]

In an abundance of caution, Cayman Airways has grounded two of their four planes, their new Boeing 737-8 MAX jets, due to the recent crashes of those jets.

I can't imagine what that will do to their flight schedules. I can only assume that some flights will be cancelled until those planes are back on line.

 

[Todd C.]

We were scheduled to fly on one of those planes from Denver to GC this Saturday. Haven't heard anything, but we're holding our breath.

 

[FindingMenno]

We've been informed that Denver services will continue, with either:
a) other 737 in the fleet with a fuel stop.
b) hired planes from other airlines with Cayman Airways flight attendants.

 

[Doctorfish]

Logistical question. With virtually every major airline worldwide grounding their Max 8s, are there going to be any aircraft readily available for temporary charter by Cayman Airways?

 

[KathyV]

I think that most airlines have grounded their Max 8 aircraft, but for those that have not yet done so the UK air authorities have now banned these planes from operating in their airspace, and the Cayman air authorities have done the same; see the link below:
Cayman bans Max aircraft from the skies | Cayman Compass

We still have a month and a half left of the "high season" for Spring Break and Easter travel so I think that a lot of airlines must be scrambling right now to find planes. Maybe they will add some extra flights to the most popular routes to accommodate the demand?

 

[AggieDiver]

Supposedly Boeing was already working on a software update for the 737-Max aircraft after the Indonesia crash, and regulatory approval of that update was delayed for 5 weeks by the federal shut down. So if the Ethiopia crash is determined to follow the same pattern of control glitches, it is likely that the software update will come through quickly and the aircraft hopefully won't be grounded long.

My understanding from reading comments from pilots who fly the Max aircraft on another site is that the larger and heavier engines on the Max planes sit further forward on the wing, and there was concern about stall risk increasing, so Boeing added an automated system that would force the nose down when the plane sensed a stall was imminent. The scuttlebutt was that they didn't try to train the pilots about this system because it was "too complicated" which probably forms part of the genesis of Trump's tweets about overly complex flight systems. Reportedly, the system can be turned off very easily, but many pilots were not aware of how to do it, and it is suspected that in both the Indonesia crash and the Ethiopia crash, the stall sensors were sending faulty info causing the plane to try to force the nose down. Presumably the pilots fought the system instead of disabling it and eventually the plane crashed.

 

[caydiver]

We had some idiots on the flight down on Tuesday that were complaining about being on such on old plane. Some people are just foolish.

 

[Joneill]

Supposedly Boeing was already working on a software update for the 737-Max aircraft after the Indonesia crash, and regulatory approval of that update was delayed for 5 weeks by the federal shut down. So if the Ethiopia crash is determined to follow the same pattern of control glitches, it is likely that the software update will come through quickly and the aircraft hopefully won't be grounded long.

My understanding from reading comments from pilots who fly the Max aircraft on another site is that the larger and heavier engines on the Max planes sit further forward on the wing, and there was concern about stall risk increasing, so Boeing added an automated system that would force the nose down when the plane sensed a stall was imminent. The scuttlebutt was that they didn't try to train the pilots about this system because it was "too complicated" which probably forms part of the genesis of Trump's tweets about overly complex flight systems. Reportedly, the system can be turned off very easily, but many pilots were not aware of how to do it, and it is suspected that in both the Indonesia crash and the Ethiopia crash, the stall sensors were sending faulty info causing the plane to try to force the nose down. Presumably the pilots fought the system instead of disabling it and eventually the plane crashed.

As an engineer, this all sounds like a fundamental flaw/compromise in the aircraft design in that it places the center of gravity in such a positon that they need all these extra control systems to prevent a stall. These are not high performance fighters which need to be aerodynamically unstable in order to provide extreme maneuverability.

Hopefully, they find the absolute assignable root cause and can prove a software update completely corrects this issue. Pushing software updates to my PC or phone to fix issues over time is one thing - but I don't think that any of us want to be guinea pigs flying on aircraft receiving software patches that may actually be attempting to fix inherent design issues!

 

[AggieDiver]

As an engineer, this all sounds like a fundamental flaw/compromise in the aircraft design in that it places the center of gravity in such a positon that they need all these extra control systems to prevent a stall. These are not high performance fighters which need to be aerodynamically unstable in order to provide extreme maneuverability.

Hopefully, they find the absolute assignable root cause and can prove a software update completely corrects this issue. Pushing software updates to my PC or phone to fix issues over time is one thing - but I don't think that any of us want to be guinea pigs flying on aircraft receiving software patches that may actually be attempting to fix inherent design issues!

I agree. It sounds like Boeing wanted to use an existing airframe with a proven design and just slap newer engines on it. When that created signs of instability, they just added a new system to fix the instability instead of stepping back and changing the engine mounting or positioning to avoid creating it in the first place. Overall, the concept of how the crashes might be happening sounds eerily similar to Michael Crichton's Airframe, in that an automated system is trying to correct for a problem that doesn't exist and the pilots are trying to manually fight the system instead of just disabling it.

 

[Doctorfish]

I think this throwing of mud is very premature. Boeing is the premier aircraft company in the world. I'm sure their aeronautical engineers would have worked through all of this before signing off on the new plane. I'm waiting to see what the black box shows and what the experts then have to say.