Model Airplanes

Boeing and ELG Carbon Fibre announced a partnership to recycle excess aerospace-grade composite material, which will be used by other companies to make products such as electronic accessories and automotive equipment.

The agreement covers excess carbon fiber from 11 Boeing airplane manufacturing sites and will reduce solid waste by more than 1 million pounds a year.

Related: What Some Airlines are Doing to Help Mitigate Waste

According to Boeing, carbon-fiber reinforced material is extremely strong and lightweight, making it attractive for a variety of uses, including in building the 787 Dreamliner and the all-new 777X airplane.

Boeing added it has been working for several years to create an economically viable carbon fiber reuse industry. The company improved its production methods to minimize excess and developed a model for collecting scrap material.

But technical barriers stood in the way of repurposing material that had already been “cured” or prepped for use in the airplane manufacturing process. U.K.-based ELG developed a proprietary method to recycle cured composites so they do not have to be thrown out.

“Recycling cured carbon fiber was not possible just a few years ago,” said Tia Benson Tolle, Boeing Materials Fabrication director for product strategy and future airplane development, in a statement. “We are excited to collaborate with ELG and leverage innovative recycling methods to work toward a vision where no composite scrap will be sent to landfills.”

To prove that the recycling method can be applied on a grand scale, Boeing and ELG conducted a pilot project where they recycled excess material

Article source: https://www.waste360.com/recycling/boeing-elg-carbon-fibre-find-new-life-airplane-material

Pilots should follow Boeing’s manual when confronted with this anomalous situation, the company initially wrote in its advisory last week.

But Mr. Soerjanto’s deputy, Haryo Satmiko, said in an interview last Wednesday that Boeing’s manual was “incomplete” when it came to advising pilots on how to handle a situation in which false data is fed into the automatic anti-stall system.

On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a follow-up directive confirming that the manual for the Max 8 needed to be updated to address this rare but dangerous sequence of events.

The Lion Air plane had experienced faulty data readings on earlier flights, according to Indonesian investigators. At three different airports, Lion Air maintenance crews tried to fix various problems concerning erroneous airspeed and other data, declaring the plane fit to fly.

But the problems continued. On the plane’s next-to-last flight, the crew received errant measurements of the plane’s angle of attack, a data point used to help understand how sharply a plane is ascending or descending, Indonesian investigators said.

Mr. Soerjanto said on Tuesday that the pilot of that flight reacted quickly to the data discrepancy and switched off the tail trim mechanism that might have caused the plane to nose-dive.

“The pilot thought about it and improvised, though it was not in the manual,” Mr. Soerjanto said. “And it worked.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/world/asia/boeing-737-indonesia-crash.html

Debate inside Boeing on what the 737 MAX manuals should say about the automated system and how much training would be required before pilots could safely slide behind the controls was more intense than usual, industry officials recall.

The decision to omit the new control system from manuals has put a Boeing design principle at the center of a probe into a fatal airliner crash for the first time in more than two decades. It has sparked public scrutiny of a typically behind-the-scenes process and threatens to tarnish Boeing’s reputation for safety and its tradition of prioritizing pilot authority over automation.

Former Boeing and current airline and government officials said there was a strong push to keep 737 MAX training to a minimum—a common goal for the introduction of new models. One former Boeing official recalls a colleague expressing concern about keeping their job if regulators rejected the company’s proposed guidelines. The program was eventually approved.

Boeing said it didn’t intentionally keep relevant information from aviators and had discussed the new system—known by its acronym, MCAS—with airlines at conferences in recent years. A spokesman disputed the characterization of the debate as unusually heated, saying, “Discussions were consistent with our regular process.”

“When Boeing developed its training and materials, it followed a process that was absolutely consistent with introducing previous new airplanes” and new models, the spokesman said. The goal, he said, is to ensure that pilots have all the information they need and that maintenance crews understand how to service the aircraft.

Boeing

Article source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-boeings-decision-to-omit-details-on-safety-system-in-lion-air-crash-from-manual-1544025884