Boeing 737 Research Paper

Boeing’s 737 Ruder Malfunction

Boeing is one of the major leading companies in aircraft design, and their 737 has become the world’s most used commercial aircraft since its introduction to the world. The 737 first made its appearance to the world on January 17th, 1967 (“Historical Snapshot,” 2015). The 737 had some of the best safety ratings for 3 decades after its release with a record of 1.21 crashers per million flights for the old models and .51 crashers per million flights for the new models which is below the industry average of 1.83 crashes per million fights for all passenger jet types (Acohido, 1996).

The 737 rudders were designed differently from all the rest of the Boeing planes. The 737 has a large single panel rudder, which differed

Two major accidents occurred in the 1990’s that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) believes were caused by this opposite movement of the rudder on the 737. On March 3,1992, United Airlines flight 585 crashed while on approach to Colorado Springs from a loss of control of the rudder and wind conditions. On September 8th, 1994, US Airways flight 427 crashed while maneuvering to approach Pittsburgh airport form a loss of rudder control and a wake caused by the Delta 727 flight 69 seconds in front of the 737 (Brady, 2015). The NTSB posted in their official reports that both accidents were caused by movement of the rudder in the opposite direction due to a jam in the main rudder power control unit servo (“Aircraft Accident Report,” 2001). Being that there were no flight data recorders on these flights, the NTSB had to make a generalization from what occurred in both of these events and from the previous reports of rudder problem. This cause Boeing to react by saying that it was not a design flaw but pilot errors and other environment conditions such as the wind at Colorado Springs. Now it is known that a combination of the poor conditions plus the design flaw of having only one power unit were the causes of the