My recollection is that the Indian involvement in the software for the Max was a make work program to gratuitously add Indian content so as to be able to sell in India. The US engineers complained they spent so much time debugging the software that they might as well have written it from scratch.
Added:
During the .com bubble I talked to a gold & precious metals dealer in Palo Alto. He said people were flying back and forth to India loaded with the maximum allowable amount of gold.
So no wonder Boeing was looking for sales in India by any means necessary.
Ruskie birds:
Two the most fascinating paragraphs in this report:
After a few seconds, at 08:58:56 (time converted from CVR waveform),
HL8088 made an emergency declaration (Mayday x 3) for a bird strike
during a go-around.
Flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) were
installed in HL8088. However, both recordings stopped at 08:58:50 on
December 29, 2024. The airplane impacted with the embankment at
09:02:57, meaning the last 00:04:07 recordings were missing.
Engine dumps oil vapor/smoke into the cabin in response to fan blade out (FBO) event:
I watched the Mentour Pilot episode on this. When an engine fan is damaged by blade loss and becomes unbalanced from a bird strike, there ie a new system installed only on certain models, which reduces the vibration and prevents further damage. Unfortunately, it ejects the engine oil into the engine upstream from the fire box, where it burns. The destination of the resultant toxic vapor depends on which engine is affected, since the left engine supplies A/C to the cockpit, while the right supplies the cabin. Mentour is shocked by the official non-demand for immediate action to mitigate this problem (so am I).
Mentour’s episode is yet another (in a seemingly endless series) revelation as to the potentially deadly, and often unforeseeable, cascades of causation when it comes to (mal)function of complex devices and systems like modern airliners. I shudder to think of military fighters. It seems clear that flying a commercial airliner is today has become super human endeavor; AI has become essential to achieve an acceptable level of safety. Humans can’t think fast enough. Flying an airliner is not at all the same undertaking as the actual flying I did - joyfully, with the seat of my pants - in single and twin engine piston airplanes, in the era before “glass cockpits” replaced the “steam gauges”.
Here is a different kind of problem for Boeing – and for Airbus too. As the saying goes, Sanctions turn Customers into Competitors.
Russian Superjet makes milestone test flight (VIDEO) — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union
"… Russia’s aviation industry has faced increasing pressure to replace Western-made components due to sanctions imposed after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. In response, the SJ-100 program was developed to eliminate foreign reliance, replacing around 40 imported systems with Russian alternatives …
… This project has been implemented within an extremely tight timeframe by global aviation standards. After 2022, we essentially had to reassemble the Superjet from scratch. …
Only 3 years! It is amazing what a business can do if the Directors invest in production instead of playing financial games by buying back their own stock. If Russia can do it this quickly, so can China. And in a few years time Airbus & Boeing will face severe price competition trying to sell their older designs against newer Chinese & Russian planes.