October 26th 2023

Let me introduce Martin: he is a highly respected figure in the aviation industry and has written many papers relating to aircraft safety and has lectured widely on the subject.

He is cited on the ‘net as being variously a retired Head of aircraft structures at Australia’s Civil Aviation Authority (now the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, CASA), a retired Aeronautics Engineer and a retired Airworthiness Engineer. Amongst other things, he is now a lecturer at the University of the Third Age (U3A).

Today he is here with us at the Shed, giving us at his ‘potted’ version of all the things wrong with the air safety world and citing the Boeing 737Maxi grounding due to their predilection to go into uncontrollable nose-dives from a great height as his major example.

It seems the root cause of the problem is the design of the 737 from Day 1. It’s apparently a cut and shut version of the 727 but especially made to be low to the ground so you don’t need expensive stairs and things to load and unload. It shorter and fatter and so also should be able to take off and land in shorter space. It was also cheaper to make, which made it very popular. But, as with everything in life, it became a victim of its own success. Buyers wanted more: cheaper, faster, lower, fatter so it could carry more paying customers at a lesser cost, so Boeing put bigger and bigger engines on it until they were so big they interfered with design of the wings and the way the plane flew. The extra lift from the extra big engine surface could cause the plane to rise nose-up sharply and stall (and fall out of the sky). So those cunning engineers installed a system to detect the sharp rise angle and force the plan down, which was great until it failed and gave a false nose-up signal. So, you’re flying along all nice and level and then the system kicks in, determines that you are going up too steeply and auto corrects by forcing the plane into a steep nose-down. Now as nobody had told the pilots about the system they had no idea why their planes would suddenly nose-dive, and no way of correcting it. Hundred and hundreds of lives were lost in the first two catastrophic failures, which lead to the craft being grounded for a year and half.

Thanks Martin for your educational and entertaining talk. I may never fly again!

Report: Brian Black