Chinese Carriers, Ethiopian Airlines Halt Use of Boeing 737 MAX 8 Aircraft After Crash (reuters.com) 182
China's aviation regulator today grounded nearly 100 Boeing Co 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by its airlines, more than a quarter of the global fleet of the jets, after a deadly crash of one of the planes in Ethiopia. From a report: However, a U.S. official said it was unclear what information the Chinese regulator was acting on because the investigation of Sunday's crash, the second involving the latest version of the narrowbody jet, was in the early stages. Speaking on condition of anonymity as the topic is sensitive, the U.S. official said there were no plans to follow suit, as the jet had a stellar safety record in the United States and there was a lack of information on what caused the Ethiopian crash.
unclear what information the Chinese regulator was (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going out in a limb here but maybe they were acting on the information that another one had crashed.
Boeing need to sort this out very fast (Score:2, Interesting)
Normally, I'm pretty happy to fly on any well maintained airplane, but a second crash within 5 months, where the early indications are that the plane crashed itself despite the best efforts of the pilots to prevent that, would make me cautious of flying on a 737 MAX 8.
How does that quote go: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."
Unless Boeing get this sorted out very fast then folks will reinterpret "MAX 8" to be the maximum amount of time in minutes that
lack of information (Score:5, Insightful)
when last I checked, a "lack of information" is a great reason to avoid something dangerous. Actually, it might be the one and only and best reason to avoid anything dangerous -- from bicycles to bungee jumping. Get informed first. And if you thought you were informed, and suddenly you discover that you aren't informed because you can't explain something that happened, well then, avoid again until you become informed again.
In other words, let someone else run the tests. That's exactly what test-pilots are for.
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No kidding. Saying that it's had a stellar record in the US is somewhat less meaningful when it has only been in commercial use for less than 2 years.
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when last I checked, a "lack of information" is a great reason to avoid something dangerous. Actually, it might be the one and only and best reason to avoid anything dangerous -- from bicycles to bungee jumping. Get informed first. And if you thought you were informed, and suddenly you discover that you aren't informed because you can't explain something that happened, well then, avoid again until you become informed again.
In other words, let someone else run the tests. That's exactly what test-pilots are for.
That's my thought as well. 2 high profile crashes of a new airframe within a few months, one of which was directly caused by an undocumented and therefore untrained for "safety feature" and the other with no immediately identifiable external (ie not integral to the aircraft itself) causes (bad weather, explosion, etc), the immediate reaction would be to suspend flights with aircraft of that type. There are at most about 50 737 MAX 8s in operation with US carriers (I could only find total MAXs delivered,
Re:lack of information (Score:5, Interesting)
There aren't really that many Max 8s flying, and they haven't been doing so for very long, so a couple of crashes seems like a bad sign, particularly since they were very similar (immediately after takeoff). The Max also has a lot of new technology and new aerodynamic design, so it's not just a minor upgrade over previous 737s, which do have a long safety record.
The 737 Max is unstable at higher angles of attack so Boeing added a bit of software to correct if the angle of attack starts to get dangerous. From the Lion Air crash it sounds like there might be problems with the sensors, causing that system to improperly engage and actually put the plane into a dangerous dive.
Ethiopian Airlines got burned by the 787 battery fire issues too.
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Automobiles get in about 1 fatal accident per 10,000 vehicles per year.
The 737 MAX is at about 1 per 100 per year, since the average age of the fleet at about 20/month being produced is about half a year.
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Not even going to do the math, but you're comparing a time unit (per year) to a non-time unit. (total vehicles that exist)
What you need to do is normalize it by converting the number of vehicles to hours driven. Then your units are both based on time, and you can make a reasonable comparison.
The way it is now, you're including grandma's 1 trip to the store per week as if she was driving full time like a taxi, or a commercial airplane.
Boeing shares down 12.9% ; FDR & CVR found (Score:5, Informative)
The ground search (well, digging into the ground) has located both FDR (Flight Data Recorder) and CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) for the crashed aircraft, which should help greatly in determining what the problem was/ is.
Best explanation of MCAS issue (Score:5, Informative)
smoke from eyewitness (Score:1)
Today's nyt quotes an eyewitness as saying the plane was trailing smoke and making strange noises before it went down. It was carrying lots of UN people. It might have nothing to do with the MCAS system and everything to do with the political system.
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Air crash witnesses often state that they saw smoke, flames or heard strange noises where it later turns out that there was no evidence for it. The reason for this is unknown, but investigators know to take such testimony with a big pinch of salt.
I think people are just trained to expect smoke or fire when a plane is in an uncontrolled descent, just like they assume they all sound like a Stuka diving with it's air siren blaring.
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These are people right under an air corridor near an airport. They do know what airplanes sound like.
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Right but multiple people nearby are giving detailed descriptions of the way the plane was making a really loud shuddering sound, trailing smoke and luggage, and then the nose tipped down and it crashed.
Apparently because of the sounds, every nearby villager and cow was aware of the situation and watched the crash.
I'd take it wish a pinch of salt, but I wouldn't credit internet assumptions that the cause must be the same as something else that happened 1 time.
Grounding is Safest (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad Sensor (Score:5, Interesting)
There are several things that should happen:
1. Interim corrective action. Disable stall protection on all 737 Max aircraft.
2. Quality control investigation into the angle of attack sensor reliability.
3. Implement diagnostic algorithms into the control strategy to detect failed angle of attack sensors automatically. A failed sensor should disable the stall protection feature automatically, and alert the pilot.
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Not only those, they need to change how this feature works. The system is simply too dangerous as-is.
I'm shocked that this idiotic "feature" wasn't disabled on all 737 Max 8s after the first crash. This is a system that will override the pilot's inputs to use the elevator to pitch the aircraft downward at any time, it's normally on. There's no indication to let the pilot know that this system is doing this. If one sensor glitches out it will cause a crash rather quickly unless the pilot knows how to recogni
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It is bad programming and unfortunately, having automatic aircraft control systems use a single sensor when many are available seems to be the norm. For example in the Air France 447 crash, the stall warning system only used the notoriously troublesome pitot tube sensors and didn't look to GPS inputs for a second opinion. Neither did the pilots...
But I still don't think it's a good idea to let a computer silently take control of an airplane from the pilot, even without a sensor as a single point of failure.
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Because the GPS inputs only show ground speed and are completely useless for determining airspeed. Given a sufficiently strong headwind an airplane can have only little ground speed and seemingly park in the sky, but with an airspeed high enough to keep flying.
How exactly are you suggesting to measure airspeed other than with a differential pressure system?
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The GPS could be used to sanity-check changes in airspeed - if there's a massive change in the airspeed reported from the pitot tubes and the plane is flying somewhere close to level, there should be a large change in ground speed as well. If there's none, then that's a red flag that the pitot tubes are acting up. GPS can also be used for reliable altitude readings, which the pitot tubes could also report incorrectly if they malfunction.
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Like I said, airspeed and groundspeed are completely unrelated. A gust of wind can massively change airspeed, but barely change groundspeed. You cannot sanity check apples by comparing them to oranges.
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Two things:
First, as Dunkelfalke said, doing delta comparisons between ground and air speed as an indicator is not reliable at all, due to winds etc.
Second, GPS isn't very reliable during storm conditions, like what AF447 flew through, so would thus not be trustworthy.
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Regardless of the number of sensors on the plane, the number one / primary instrument should be what is seen out the front window. I would not fly a plane that had an automatic system that I could not override, and I consider it a crime to even sell tickets for such a beast.
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I would not fly a plane that had an automatic system that I could not override, and I consider it a crime to even sell tickets for such a beast.
So, no Airbus for you, right? Unless the aircraft is in direct law, it's *always* under some type of automated control.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes/ [wikipedia.org]
m
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Not just no airbus, the "primary instrument is what is seen from the front window" would mean no airplane that can be flown under the IFR. That means piddly general aviation stuff only, but these normally aren't allowed to carry paying passengers. Real pilots are trained to trust the instruments first, not what they see or what they think they see.
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To compound the issue, the Captain was extremely sleep deprived, and the two flight officers(who were in the seats at the time of the crash) had been out doing drugs and drinking alcohol the night before, so they were all mentally impaired.
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Regardless of the number of sensors on the plane, the number one / primary instrument should be what is seen out the front window.
Remember a year or 2 back when Airbus was talking about using digital windscreens in the cockpit?
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When it fails, the stall protection algorithm thinks the plane is stuck in a nose up orientation, and tries to force the nose down... into the ground.
Incidentally what is noted from this incident so far is that the rate of ascent during the latest accident was irregular. I don't mean rate of descent either before someone tries to be funny about all crashes having an irregular ascent.
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They also should have experience on how to handle the situation. Last time it was the radar altimeter that caused unexpected crashes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And this lies at the heart of why, until flight-control systems give up the 'thick stacks of bloated code model' and go back to using simpler designs that are easier to understand (massively-parallel analog circuits will eventually see their day, IMHO), I shall continue to Fly Chevy.
The problem is they NEED MCAS (Score:2)
From what I read, because they used the 737 frame but moved the engines, stalling is easier, so they NEED something like the MCAS. Just turning it off is not an option. I am a software engineer, so when I read that in order to cover for an aeronautics engineering flaw of the aircraft they turned to software, I shuddered...
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The problem is Boeing trying to shoehorn modern engines on a 50 year old airframe specifically built to have the shortest possible landing gear so the aircraft could be used in unsophisticated airports.
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The fuselage itself is over 60 years old since it came from the 707. There is also a flashlight in the 737 cockpit that was probably already used in the b-29.
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If I recall, the previous crash has been linked to a bad angle of attack sensor. [flyingmag.com] This sensor is only used by a new stall protection feature [seattletimes.com] in the 737 Max. When it fails, the stall protection algorithm thinks the plane is stuck in a nose up orientation, and tries to force the nose down... into the ground.
There are several things that should happen:
1. Interim corrective action. Disable stall protection on all 737 Max aircraft.
My first thought as well, but apparently the engine nacelles have been moved further along the wing and higher so that the risk of stalls have increased. That's why the MCAS (anti-stall) system was introduced in the 737 MAX. If this can't be corrected to the satisfaction of the CAA and others, the type may have to be withdrawn, at least until it's re-engineered.
Pull the stick back? Nope! (Score:3, Insightful)
www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/world/asia/lion-air-plane-crash-pilots.html
to summarise: we added a few lines of code that the pilots don't know about to make the plane do something the pilots have no idea the plane might decide to try and do: ie, depending on input from one little sensor, the computer might try and shove the nose into the ground.
And the "you couldn't make this bit up" bit in the article:: on previous planes without this new software, if you felt the nose was being shoved into the ground for some unknown reason, you could (wait for it, wait for it) "pull back on the stick", and that would do what pulling back on the stick has done in aeroplanes like forever, i.e. bring the nose up (in this case, by disabling any mad sensors/sensor readings).
(If I were the one conscious person on a plane, having to fly it, that is the single thing I would know to try to do.)
But not any more - with this new feature, *that method of escape has been removed*.
- We're going to crash!
- Pull back on the stick!
- Computer says no!
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And good. So far a computer has caused 1 maybe 2 crashes. Pilots on the other hand yanking sticks back in error / terror have caused hundreds of crashes in history.
Several industries including airlines, cars, and the process industry have made major strides in safety precisely by realising that for easily describable scenarios a computer should have the power to say no.
The question isn't why wasn't the pilot given control, the question is only why did the computer fail.
What if the nuclear rules applied here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Over 150 people just died, which is 3 Chernobyls. This means that aviation is a dead-end technology that cannot possibly be made safe at reasonable levels of cost. Germany takes the lead, mothballing all civilian aircraft now in use. From now on, Germans will use their rail network to carry domestic traffic. For international travel, Germany will build a new fleet of ships, wind powered and made of sustainable tree derived materials.
The US will take a more measured approach. No new planes will be ordered, but airlines will continue to operate with existing craft until they age out, whereupon they will be replaced by buses. The UK will do the same, but will order one more aircraft from China, specially designed with 12 engines and parachutes for each passenger, to cost GBP 10 billion and be delivered in 2025.
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Although I agree the feer of nuclear is often irrational, at least you have the choice of not flying. Even if you chose not to use nuclear electricity (say, you get only your own off grid solar panels), you will still be affected by a nuclear plant meltdown.
Now, of course an airplane can fall on you while you are on the ground, but this is highly unlikely.
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Soon self driving will need the same kind of system or it will never work either.
Probably not the same problem as Lion Air (Score:2)
Latest news from Reuters suggests that plane suffered some kind of a problem that caused it to emit smoke while in the air:
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
Could be anything from engine trouble to a bad case of Mohammedianism.
Why do those sensors malfunction so often? (Score:2)
And why don't they run a backup system like GPS sensor, or cheap run-of the mill barometric and accelerometer sensors, and at least run sanity checks against these? This way, the aircraft could at least know that MAYBE something is s bit 'off' with the main sensors, and maybe light a 'soft warning" lamp?
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Without any accident investigation (and they are usually though) an analysys two crashes in six months are just a coincidence.
Your speculations are worthless.
Re:Aircraft with four 9s reliability is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Except we do have information. One has gone through accident investigation that hasn't been published yet, but has been completed and was serious enough that 2 advisories have been issued. It would appear as though there actually is a problem in these aircraft. Both crashed during takeoff. Both had problems with vertical ascension. One had a specific advisory on instruments used during ascending.
You're right it'll remain somewhat speculative until both incidents have gone through a complete review, but there are already indications pointing to systemic issues rather than just pure coincidence.
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To be fair: All crash landings* involve problems with vertical ascension, and takeoff is by far the riskiest portion of the flight. The lack of altitude results in little time to recover from any issue. Thus, it is unsurprising to see two accidents on takeoff in a row, often with completely different causes.
* - It is possible to crash a plane on the ground. However, those crashes aren't usually described as crash landings. It's also possible to land a plane and go off the end or side of a runway, etc.
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To be fair: All crash landings* involve problems with vertical ascension
If you're going to be pedantic crash landings involve problems with vertical descension ;-)
Thus, it is unsurprising to see two accidents on takeoff in a row, often with completely different causes.
The problem was more specific than just "during takeoff". Both aircraft showed similar irregularities with their rate of ascent during takeoff. You are of course still right and this is still speculation, but these issues seem to have a lot in common.
Re:Aircraft with four 9s reliability is bad (Score:5, Funny)
No. A crashing plane is having no trouble descending.
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> involve problems with vertical ascension
I'd be concerned if the plane I was in was climbing vertically.
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I'm concerned with your grasp of the English language.
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Are you unaware that there can be ambiguity in language?
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I'm not sure how the pitch control system would cause the luggage to be falling out the back and it swerved over the cow pastures.
It doesn't seem to explain the smoke it was trailing, either.
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For the record, Trump was aggressively championing a Boeing aircraft over Lockheed Martin one, and against all of the competition from European aircraft for Finland's fighter tender. This debunks your hypothesis completely.
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China is forgetting that Boeing is based in a blue state
Boeing is shifting jobs out of Seattle to cheaper and more business friendly places like South Carolina [wikipedia.org].
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The last ten years we had like 4 or 5 airplane crashes.
Now we have 2 in a row just during a 5 month period, same type of _new_ airplane. Most likely not a coincident but a systematic fault in the plane.
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2 events is never enough information for you to say something math-challenged like "Most likely not a coincident."
That's just world class stupidity right there.
I say "stupidity" and not "ignorance" because I know darn well you've had basic statistics explained to you before.
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Basic statistics does not apply to tow incidents ... moron.
However it applies if you have about 20 common planes used by mayour airlines and no real crashes since a decade and suddenly 2 of the same type crash during identical circumstances.
Hint: except for USA that plane type is world wide grounded.
Re:Aircraft with four 9s reliability is bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course it may be a coincidence. But it is an extremely low probability coincidence.
Let's be clear. The 737-NG and A320 family both have total fatal hull loss rates of less than 1 in 10,000 aircraft years in operation. This is generous and includes all accidents: terrorists, captain suicide, mechanical issue, and pilot error.
The DC-10 - recognized as having a fatal design flaw with its cargo door and widely recognized as a "dangerous" airliner at the time - took 1,600 aircraft flight years before suffering two fatal accidents.
The 737 MAX 8 has had 2 hull losses in less than 300 flight years of operation. That is nearly 70 times higher than the 737-NG and A320 family.
The likelihood of the 737 MAX having the same ultimate failure probability as the 737NG and A320 and having two fatal hull loss accidents in only 300 flight years is something on the order of 1 in a 1000.
Even if the ET302 flight is boiled down to "pilot error" (like the Lion Air flight), that is just an excuse. If the ET302 had the same failure mode as the Lion Air flight, then the fact that you have two separate incidents with a loss of control (shortly after takeoff, meaning less room for root cause analysis, checklists, etc) is a design flaw. Full stop. Whether or not a pilot could recover is not relevant; an airframe should not be constantly testing pilots with unexpected loss of control.
It is still "safe" to fly a 737 MAX 8 relative to most other daily activities. You probably won't die if you fly on one. That said, relative to aviation standards and safety records that we have achieved in the past 50 years, the 737 MAX 8 - today, at least - appears like a veritable statistical death trap.
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Even if the ET302 flight is boiled down to "pilot error" (like the Lion Air flight), that is just an excuse. If the ET302 had the same failure mode as the Lion Air flight, then the fact that you have two separate incidents with a loss of control (shortly after takeoff, meaning less room for root cause analysis, checklists, etc) is a design flaw. Full stop. Whether or not a pilot could recover is not relevant; an airframe should not be constantly testing pilots with unexpected loss of control.
It is still "safe" to fly a 737 MAX 8 relative to most other daily activities. You probably won't die if you fly on one. That said, relative to aviation standards and safety records that we have achieved in the past 50 years, the 737 MAX 8 - today, at least - appears like a veritable statistical death trap.
It's not even really fair to call the Lion Air crash pilot error when the main culprit was an unpublished "safety feature". Sure, the crew didn't go through the checklist that would have disengaged it like the crew the previous night, but as you say takeoff is a bad time for troubleshooting. Of course, with crashes where everyone dies they almost always make pilot error at least a contributing factor if not the primary one. Gotta protect those aircraft makers from liability.
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Regardless of whether this is pilot error or not, if pilots consistently mess it up, then it's a problem with the system or the training.
It's not all that different from claiming it's driver error when a car's brakes fail. Technically the drivers can switch to the handbrake and come to a safe stop. However, in practice a large number of people would crash.
And if we had a situation where suddenly many more cars of a particular model were running red lights and hitting the backs of other cars, it might be a g
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Regardless of whether this is pilot error or not, if pilots consistently mess it up, then it's a problem with the system or the training.
It's not all that different from claiming it's driver error when a car's brakes fail. Technically the drivers can switch to the handbrake and come to a safe stop. However, in practice a large number of people would crash.
And if we had a situation where suddenly many more cars of a particular model were running red lights and hitting the backs of other cars, it might be a good idea to stop using it until the cause has been determined.
To apply your analogy to the Lion Air crash, it's as if the car manufacturer didn't tell people there were breaks at all. You can't train pilots on a system no one was aware existed.
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OTOH, some parking brakes are so badly designed that depending on them for an emergency would probably result in a crash.
My trucks parking brake is foot operated and seems to be rather on, locking up the rear wheels or off. Be really hard to feather it.
This is an American designed plane, so wouldn't be surprised if similar design decisions were made like not considering a parking brake might be needed for emergencies.
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It's even worse than that. The "pilot error" appears to be faulty angle of attack sensors that cause the unpublished safety system (added to address an aerodynamic design deficiency) to freak out and dive the plane. The pilot error in question is not turning the thing off fast enough.
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Not running a checklist IS BLATANT PILOT ERROR AND GROSSLY IRRESPONSIBLE;.
Maybe if you would have checked your facts, you would have known that in the incident referenced, the air crew was overwhelmed as the MCAS failure happened shortly after take-off; i.e. at a low altitude. The issue pushed the nose down.
It is very similar to the Hudson splash; the first officer did not have sufficient time to complete the ditch checklist as it has been written to be completed at a higher altitude.
Wanna put Jeff Skiles in jail?
Re:Aircraft with four 9s reliability is bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Computers should never have the last say in flying an airliner.
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Actually they should since pilot errors are by far the most common reason for crashes.
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Self flying works only in a very specific set of circumstances. Even the military drones are mostly RC aircraft.
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Applies to cars too, and other machinery.
But people usually say this AFTER some crap already happened. Like you did just now.
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You say that out of emotion rather than logical thought. There's a couple of industries that have made absolutely incredible advances in safety over the past 50 years, the airline industry, the car industry, and the process industry. A large part of all of those industries efforts include the realisation that the human is usually the weakest link in the system and successive safety improvements have been made precisely by giving a computer the final say.
Be it forward crash avoidance applying the brake regar
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When witnesses report that luggage was trailing the plane before it crashed, along with smoke, you'd be well advised not to presume any sort of connection to past crashes.
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We must accuse China here (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, you can be sure of that.
We should continue to blame China for everything wrong on this planet, that will for sure Make America Great Again.
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But those things are all pretty much true...
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His name is "hacking bear." Are you sure that Russians posting on American websites are not also friends of China? It doesn't seem unreasonable on its face.
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Same plane
Both practically brand new
Both fall rapidly out the sky minutes after takeoff
For an industry as cautious as aviation I'd say that's a hell of a red flag for anyone operating these things.
Re:Aircraft with four 9s reliability is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so fast there AC..
The speculation is that this is a human factors problem too, where some automated system is messing with the pitch controls in weird ways when presented with sensor failures. Where you can mitigate this problem with pilot training (Hey, when this happens, turn of the stall prevention system) there may also be a pilot manual omission issue too. If that's true, the pilots are properly trained per the documentation provided, so the base cause is really the pilot manual omits some important information, so they didn't have a chance to get trained.
So, I'd not be so fast to blame the pilots, or their training. It could be that it's not their fault.
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1. Sensor out of range( value defies reason. e.g. temperature of absolute zero)
2. Sensor stuck in range (the value doesn't change despite all other conditions changing.)
If either of those diagnostics fails, the control strategy is forced to a safe condition. Seeing as this is a new and uness
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The problem here is how the system is designed to work and how pilots fly airplanes.
The Stall prevention system is designed to make it harder to stall the aircraft by increasing the back pressure the pilot feels as they approach the stall. So as the angle of attack increases, so does the back pressure required to maintain the pitch angle. This actually makes perfect sense as part of of the flying skill is the feel of the aircraft, the forces on your butt, the forces your hands feel all play a roll.
The
Re:Aircraft with four 9s reliability is bad (Score:4, Interesting)
My point was that this was NOT in the fine manuals, so reading them wouldn't help... It was added in August of last year, which was AFTER the crash in Indonesia.
So I'm not blaming the pilots at all, I'm saying they didn't receive the necessary information for the safe operation of the aircraft with the new system installed, likely never experienced the problem in the simulator during their training. It may be that the aircraft was airworthy and controllable, but if you don't know what to do, haven't been trained to do it, It's hard to blame the pilots for not being able to deal with the problem.
I'm also pointing towards the maintenance staff's training and the aircraft's maintenance procedure documentation. This new feature wasn't well documented there either and the Indonesian aircraft experienced multiple issues with this system, which in hindsight where likely indicators of a failing sensor, but the maintenance crews never fixed the problem, their diagnosis procedures didn't find the pending fault, so they put the aircraft back into service..
So, RTFM wouldn't have produced a different result. The information just wasn't in there.
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This is looking more and more like poor pilot training.
When a bomb explodes in the cargo compartment, training doesn't help much. These are human pilots, not cartoon X-Men.
Re: Aircraft with four 9s reliability is bad (Score:1)
It was only introduced two years ago. Enough with the Donald Trump style propaganda. Letâ(TM)s see more evidence before bigging it up.
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1 crash per 100,000 flights
Well then, it should be safe for the next 200,000 flights. Better make your reservations quickly before the odds run out. [fallacyfiles.org]
I'll fly one (Score:2)
Who in their right mind would get on one of these after two accidents in six months?
I would. Seriously, two accidents compared to how many tens of thousands of trips and passenger miles? I take bigger risks every day on my morning commute to work and I'm FAR more likely to die in my car on any given trip even adjusting to make the trips statistically comparable.
Sure, the individual chance of the plane deciding to give up on takeoff despite the best efforts of well trained pilots is very low. But it's clearly not low enough.
I'm rather confident the appropriate regulators will conduct an appropriate investigation and figure the problem out. In the mean time the actual risk is remarkably low and not worthy of panicking over. We don't know the details
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I'm rather confident the appropriate regulators will conduct an appropriate investigation and figure the problem out.
Like they figured out the problem with UA 811? One of the victims parents by themselves had to figure out the real problem because NTSB was too interested in protecting Boeing. NTSB only capitulated and forced to change the report to reflect reality after all plausible deniability was totally exhausted and exposed by one of the victims parents.
The only thing I'm confident in is the need to hold all feet to fire and not assume anyone will do their jobs properly.
In the mean time the actual risk is remarkably low and not worthy of panicking over. We don't know the details about what caused the Ethiopian crash so it's highly premature to declare this aircraft to be dangerous.
Love word games people play in face of absenc
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This is really bad for Boeing.
Well, in the short term, sure. But the issue here just doesn't seem to be a huge problem to me.
Speculation here is that the new stall prevention system on the aircraft is likely the issue. This new system does some unexpected things when there is a sensor failure and if the pilots don't know about the system and how to override it, they can lose control of the aircraft's pitch. Boeing's issue was in not providing proper documentation of this system for the pilots until late last year, AFTER the Indonesi
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This 737 "Family Killer" Max 8 is, currently, simply not reliable enough for air travel.
It is simply far too soon to draw this conclusion, Anonymous Coward. For all we know, the incident in Ethiopia was related to terrorists, or something in a passenger's baggage. We just don't know.
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"Who in their right mind would get on one of these after two accidents in six months?"
I would and I'd sleep like a baby as I do on any flight. I'm a career crew chief, engine mech and avionics troop. (Cross-training was fun.)
If you want to do something dangerous, drive to work. Aircraft accidents make the news because people adore freaking out over delicious drama while ignoring the endless list of what's reasonably likely to kill them.
Re:Could be muslim terrorists (Score:5, Informative)
Ethiopia is predominantly Christian.
Re: (Score:2)
And actually jewish ... but most "black jews" got relocated to Israel a decade ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Could be muslim terrorists (Score:5, Informative)
Could be muslim terrorists. Both crashed from heavily predominant Muslim countries.
Time for a Goodwin's Law 2.0: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of somebody blaming Islamic terrorists or Muslims in general approaches 1."
Re: (Score:2)
Time for a Goodwin's Law 2.0: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of somebody blaming Islamic terrorists or Muslims in general approaches 1."
Airline safety is improving to the point where it will eventually be even odds whether Hanlon's razor prevails as a default guess in a commercial airliner disaster.
Re:Let us not forget (Score:5, Informative)
Regardless how good or bad this particular model may be, one has to remember that neither of the companies involved in the recent crashes is a paradigm to follow when it comes to aircraft maintenance.
Ethiopian's MRO is FAA and EASA certified for B757, B767, B777; FAA only for 737, 787, Q400 and MD11, and EASA only for 73NG, and is Boeing and Bombardier accredited. It is also Africa's largest airline. It has a good reputation.
Re: (Score:2)
Where are they burying the survivors?
This was not a United flight.
Re: (Score:2)
Ironically [reuters.com]
The Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed killing 157 people was making a strange rattling noise and trailed smoke and debris as it swerved above a field of panicked cows before hitting earth, according to witnesses.
Doesn't sound like a software problem to me. At least not any I've ever run across.
The real question is, how did they know the cows were panicked?
Re: (Score:2)
If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going.
This was a fucking bomb. Eyewitness reports are that it was trailing smoke and raining luggage before crashing.
Have fun riding your magic pixies to your destination.
Re:If it ain't Boeing, (Score:5, Insightful)
Two early crashes in a new plane with somewhat similar circumstances is mighty suspicious and certainly warrants waiting for solid details from the investigation.