Alaska Airlines and the Boeing 737 MAX

2020 Alaska Airlines and the Boeing 737 MAX DECEMBER 15, 2020 ALASKA AIRLINES AND THE BOEING 737 MAX Contents Our Responsibility ......................................................................................................................................... 2 Summary ....................................................................................................................................................... 2 A short history of the Boeing 737 MAX ......................................................................................................... 2 FAA grounding for 20 months ....................................................................................................................... 3 Issues and steps to address them ................................................................................................................ 4 Key updates Boeing has made to MCAS .................................................................................................. 4 What we’re doing: Alaska’s systemic safety review of the MAX ................................................................... 4 Alaska has always included the “optional” visual indicators for pilots ....................................................... 4 Alaska’s independent reviews of Boeing’s software updates .................................................................... 5 Data-driven enhancements for Alaska pilots ............................................................................................. 5 Flight Operations preparations for return to service .................................................................................. 5 Maintenance & Engineering preparation for service ................................................................................. 6 Testing & readiness: Following the MAX from production to delivery to service ...................................... 6 Alaska’s safety culture and Safety Risk Management assessments ........................................................ 7 Alaska’s independent, data-based conclusion .............................................................................................. 8 1 ALASKA AIRLINES AND THE BOEING 737 MAX Our Responsibility At Alaska Airlines, operating safely is our most important responsibility. Our guests trust us to fly them to their destination safely, on time, for a reasonable fare, and they want to feel welcome and comfortable along the way. Being safe rises above all else. It’s a core value that we will not compromise. Each of us shares this responsibility to own safety. You see that in the people we hire, in our experience and in our professionalism. You see it in how we invest in training for our people, and in our equipment and aircraft. Each employee is empowered to stop our operation if something isn’t right. We call this “Ready, SAFE, Go” – you’ll see those words all around our operation. Before we do anything, we stop to check whether everyone and everything is ready, we make sure we’re being safe, and only then do we go. And if we’re not ready, or it’s not safe, we don’t go. We depend on each other and look out for each other, so our guests arrive safely and all of us can go home to our loved ones at the end of the day. That’s what matters most. It is in that spirit that we feel deep responsibility to review and ensure the safety of all our aircraft. In this paper, we share our review of the Boeing 737 MAX as it enters our fleet and we begin flying it. We know there have been many discussions, and many more to come, with employees and guests – and we hope these facts and assessments are of service for each person who is seeking to understand. Summary In October 2012, at the Alaska Airlines annual employee meeting in Seattle, more than 1,600 people packed our hangar to hear a surprise announcement that we had signed the largest airplane order in our history – 50 Boeing aircraft, including the 737 MAX that was under development. Worth about $5 billion at list prices, this order was a massive investment in our company and in our future. As of Dec. 15, 2020, Alaska has firm orders for 32 MAX aircraft, options for 37 more, and we will be leasing 13. We’re scheduled to take our first delivery in the next few months. We are looking forward to that milestone, confident in the safety of this aircraft based on the updates that have been made, as described below, and cognizant of the huge responsibility we bear to ensure safety whenever we fly an aircraft. Regardless of others’ decisions or actions, Alaska Airlines will not fly the MAX until our own assessments and internal reviews determine that we are ready and the aircraft is safe – safe for our crews, safe for our guests and safe for our loved ones. This paper outlines the work we are doing to examine the MAX: Our assessment of the aircraft and verification of the updates Boeing has performed, our own flight trials and training protocols, our engineering and safety reviews, our maintenance preparations and training, and the training and qualifications that make our 737 pilots ready to fly the MAX. A short history of the Boeing 737 MAX Boeing began developing the 737 MAX aircraft in 2011 as an evolution of the 737 Next Generation. Boeing produced nearly 7,000 of the Next Gen between 1993 and 2019, and Alaska flies 166 of them in our fleet today. The MAX was designed to compete with the Airbus 320neo – a more fuel-efficient iteration of a common Airbus jet, which Alaska also flies. 2 ALASKA AIRLINES AND THE BOEING 737 MAX People representing the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency monitored the 5½-year MAX project and certified the aircraft in spring of 2017. Boeing delivered the first MAX to Malindo Air (a Lion Air subsidiary) and it went into service in May 2017. As of Dec. 1, 2020, Boeing had delivered 387 MAX aircraft around the world and had orders for over 4,000 more. Compared to Boeing’s Next Gen aircraft that Alaska Airlines flies today, the MAX is designed to be a more efficient aircraft – it can fly about 500 miles farther and is projected to use about 14% less fuel, while carrying the same number of people as our current cabins configured for 178 seats with First Class, Premium Class and Main Cabin. Much of the MAX’s efficiency comes from new engines, the LEAP-1B made by CFM, a joint company between GE in the U.S. and Safran in France. Because these engines have a bigger fan diameter than the engines on previous models of the 737, they are mounted slightly higher and forward on the wing to maintain the required 17 inches of ground clearance. So that the MAX would feel and fly the same as a Next Gen 737 (given the different engine placement), to meet FAA certification requirements, Boeing enhanced an existing 737 system called the speed trim system with the new Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. With the forward mounted engines, the aircraft would have a tendency to pitch nose up during high-power, high-angle-of- attack events. MCAS was designed to add nose-down trim to in this situation. The idea was to allow pilots to transition between the 737 Next Gen and MAX models with minimal training. FAA grounding for 20 months Two fatal crashes in MAX aircraft in less than five months were significant tragedies felt around the world. In October 2018, 189 people died when Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in Indonesia. The investigation pointed to a mis-calibrated angle-of-attack sensor, providing an erroneous signal to the flight control computer, activating the MCAS and resulting in numerous nose-down trim activations. Both Boeing and the FAA released urgent bulletins to remind pilots of an existing emergency procedure to deal with this type of situation. Boeing also began to develop a software solution to prevent MCAS from overpowering pilots if they failed to isolate the system in case of corrupt angle-of-attack input. In March 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed and 157 people died. The preliminary accident investigation identified a failure of the angle-of-attack sensor providing a faulty input to the flight control computer, causing MCAS nose-down trim activations, eventually overcoming the pilots’ ability to control the aircraft. After the second crash, aviation regulators around the world, including the FAA in the U.S., grounded the fleet. Since that time, significant study, work, review cycles, and revisions to the aircraft have occurred to learn from and correct the failures that occurred in these two events and make the MAX a significantly safer aircraft. As a result of this work, in November 2020, the FAA released an airworthiness directive (AD) that allows the MAX to fly again. The AD outlines the steps each operating carrier must take to bring the plane back into service. The significant changes include reconfigured software for the flight control computers including added redundancy, revised flight manuals and crew procedures, pilot training and maintenance technician training. This AD validates that Boeing has met all the requirements the FAA and other regulators around the world identified to safely bring the aircraft back into service. 3 ALASKA AIRLINES AND THE BOEING 737 MAX Issues and steps to address them Preliminary crash investigations identified four issues with the MCAS system: It took input from only one angle-of-attack sensor, it would repeatedly engage to push the nose down, it would engage even if there was a sensor error at takeoff, and the force on the stabilizer could

Load more