If you’re in the business of selling passenger aircraft, design flaws that might cause your planes to crash ought to be non-existent. That’s why the discovery of a second critical safety risk on Boeing Co.’s 737 Max is so alarming. Tests by the US Federal Aviation Administration found that flight computers could cause the plane to dive in a way that pilots struggled to correct in simulator tests, people familiar with the finding told Alan Levin and Julie Johnsson of Bloomberg News on Wednesday. The problem wasn’t connected to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, that’s been linked to 737 Max crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, but could produce similar effects, one of the people said.
Lightning shouldn’t strike in the same place twice. Developing new aircraft is a decade-scale project, with certification by aviation regulators alone typically taking five years. By the time a plane is ready to be delivered to customers, it should have passed through such a stringent battery of tests that only once-in-a-lifetime events can cause problems.
