Boeing 737 Max’s Rudder Controls Briefly Failed

US federal investigators said Thursday they confirmed pilots’ account of a brief failure of rudder controls on a Boeing 737 Max after it landed at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey last month. 

 

United Airlines pilots said pedals that control rudder movement on the plane were stuck as they tried to keep the plane in the center of the runway during the February 06 landing.

 

The pilots were able to use a small nose-gear steering wheel to veer from the runway to a high-speed turnoff. The rudder pedals began working again as the pilots taxied to the gate with 155 passengers and six crew members on the flight from Nassau, Bahamas, according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board. 

 

Boeing said this is the only rudder-response issue reported on a Max, although two similar incidents happened in 2019 with an earlier model of the 737 called NG or next generation, which has the same rudder-pedal system. 

 

The NTSB said preliminary information from the plane’s flight data recorder, one of the so-called black boxes, confirmed the captain’s description of the event. UA were able to recreate the same problem on the 2-year-old plane during a test flight at the Newark airport three days later, and reported the problem to the NTSB. 

 

Mechanics couldn’t find an obvious cause for the malfunction during an inspection, but they replaced parts of the rudder control system, and the plane operated normally during a second test flight, the government investigative agency confirmed. 

 

They had subjected one of the removed parts to cold for one hour in a laboratory and it failed to produce the torque needed for the rudder pedals to work. They plan further testing of the part. FYI, pedals in the cockpit control the rudder, which is attached to the vertical part of the tail and can be used to point the nose of the plane left or right. 

 

All the parties, including parts supplier Collins Aerospace and the Federal Aviation Administration are taking part in the ongoing investigation.

 

In the meantime, three passengers who were on board Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, Kyle Rinker, Amanda Strickland, and Kevin Kwok are asking for $1 billion in punitive damages from the carrier and Boeing, according to a press release from the aviation law firm Jonathan W Johnson LLC. This was the incident on the Boeing 737 Max 9 which lost its door plug in midair on January 05.

 

The lawsuit was filed last month in Multnomah County in the US state of Oregon. It follows a class-action lawsuit filed in January on behalf of fourteen passengers.