Boeing Wanted To Wait Three Years To Fix Safety Alert on 737 Max (latimes.com) 188
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Boeing Co. planned to wait three years to fix a non-working safety alert on its 737 Max aircraft and sped up the process only after the first of two deadly crashes involving the planes. The company acknowledged that it originally planned to fix a cockpit warning light in 2020 after two key U.S. lawmakers disclosed the company's timetable Friday...
The feature, called an angle of attack or AoA alert, warns pilots when sensors measuring the up-or-down pitch of the plane's nose relative to oncoming air might be wrong. The sensors malfunctioned during a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October and an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa in March, causing anti-stall software to push the planes' noses down. Pilots were unable to regain control, and both planes crashed, killing everyone aboard -- 346 people in all. It is not clear whether either crash could have been prevented if the cockpit alert had been working... Boeing and the head of the FAA both say the alert is not critical for safety. Boeing says all its planes, including the Max, give pilots all the flight information -- including speed, altitude and engine performance -- that they need to fly safely.
The pilots' union at American Airlines expressed unhappiness about the matter, however, and said Boeing's assurance about the cockpit alert was a factor in the union standing behind Boeing after the first Max crash, in October. Jason Goldberg, an American Airlines pilot and union spokesman, said Boeing told pilots that the alert could pinpoint a faulty sensor even on the ground, before takeoff. "That is one of the things that made us confident initially to make the statement that we were happy to continue to fly the aircraft," he said. "It turned out later that that wasn't true."
The feature, called an angle of attack or AoA alert, warns pilots when sensors measuring the up-or-down pitch of the plane's nose relative to oncoming air might be wrong. The sensors malfunctioned during a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October and an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa in March, causing anti-stall software to push the planes' noses down. Pilots were unable to regain control, and both planes crashed, killing everyone aboard -- 346 people in all. It is not clear whether either crash could have been prevented if the cockpit alert had been working... Boeing and the head of the FAA both say the alert is not critical for safety. Boeing says all its planes, including the Max, give pilots all the flight information -- including speed, altitude and engine performance -- that they need to fly safely.
The pilots' union at American Airlines expressed unhappiness about the matter, however, and said Boeing's assurance about the cockpit alert was a factor in the union standing behind Boeing after the first Max crash, in October. Jason Goldberg, an American Airlines pilot and union spokesman, said Boeing told pilots that the alert could pinpoint a faulty sensor even on the ground, before takeoff. "That is one of the things that made us confident initially to make the statement that we were happy to continue to fly the aircraft," he said. "It turned out later that that wasn't true."
The people who certified the design are murderers (Score:5, Insightful)
They killed 346 people. When will charges be brought?
make them wait 3 years in jail pretrial. (Score:5, Insightful)
make them wait 3 years in jail pretrial with no bail
Re: make them wait 3 years in jail pretrial. (Score:2)
Re: make them wait 3 years in jail pretrial. (Score:1)
Any Southern US prison.
Gitmo was worse than any Turkish or Syrian prison.
America is the best at everything.
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:5, Interesting)
If corporations are people, then Boeing should get the death penalty.
Re: The people who certified the design are murder (Score:5, Insightful)
People need to be directly responsible for the 'systems' they set loose upon us, creations, be it a pizza delivery robot or a massive, faceless company.
Re: The people who certified the design are murde (Score:2)
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Re: The people who certified the design are murde (Score:2)
The heart of your system.
Yours, too.
(Asshole.)
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There's plenty of evidence the Forefathers did not intend corporations to have the same rights as individuals, at least not at the Federal level. The people-esque view was slipped in over time.
Otherwise, we get large-scale legalized bribery, among other problems.
I do agree that corporate personhood simplifies many aspects of the law because it means we don't have to reinvent a paral
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"Off with their heads!" (Score:4, Insightful)
If corporations are people, then Boeing should get the death penalty.
Really? Please find me a single example of a company that makes transportation related products (cars, planes, trains, boats, roads, bridges, rails, etc) that does not have a body count due to their products.
Maybe you shouldn't be so quick to execute people and/or companies without thinking through what you are doing. Consequences are one thing but you've pretty much lost the plot if you think terminating Boeing as an organization will solve any real world problems relating to this fiasco. Yes it seems to have been some stupid decisions, probably with a profit motive kicker. If we killed companies every time that happened we would have no cars, no trains, no aircraft and no boats.
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If corporations are people, then Boeing should get the death penalty.
Really? Please find me a single example of a company that makes transportation related products (cars, planes, trains, boats, roads, bridges, rails, etc) that does not have a body count due to their products.
Maybe if we "killed" a few of those companies in the past, Boeing's management would have taken the hint and fixed this problem instead of pushing it out.
All have body counts (Score:2)
Segways
Lots of accidents on Segways [nbcbayarea.com] including at least one known death.
I could name bicycles, skateboards, etc.. but most problems with those aren't design related. They're user error.
All have fatalities associated with them, some due to product failures. Transportation is inherently dangerous.
Re: The people who certified the design are murde (Score:1)
It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:5, Insightful)
They are to big to be punished. Even if they find intent (so far it just looks like criminally negligent homicide), i.e. some people knew this would cause crashes, then some low-level engineer will be sent to jail and that was it.
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:5, Insightful)
They are to big to be punished.
More like too strategic to be punished.
Boeing is a corporate jewel for the US. And the US military is very close to Boeing.
And if folks are not buying Boeing, they will be buying Airbus . . . which is EU . . . can't have that.
Re: The people who certified the design are murder (Score:5, Informative)
some low-level engineer will be sent to jail and that was it.
Him?? He's already in jail; he thought 'whistleblower protection' was a thing and now they've got him for child porn.
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I missed that. Got a reference?
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He's probably referring to this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/w... [google.com]
Don't seem related to the 737 Max though.
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:5, Interesting)
Japan has corporate responsibility laws to handle this. The company can be ordered to shut down for a period of time, doing no more than the minimum amount of maintenance necessary to keep facilities from falling into disrepair.
There was some financial company that was ordered to shut down for a month last year. All the staff had to be paid during that time.
Alternatively a massive fine works. % of global turnover scales nicely.
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:4, Interesting)
Japan has corporate responsibility laws to handle this. The company can be ordered to shut down for a period of time, doing no more than the minimum amount of maintenance necessary to keep facilities from falling into disrepair.
There was some financial company that was ordered to shut down for a month last year. All the staff had to be paid during that time.
Alternatively a massive fine works. % of global turnover scales nicely.
Even if the US had corporate responsibility laws, it would most definitely carve out exceptions for Boeing and other similar companies for "national security" reasons, since Boeing is a huge defense contractor. They are too embedded to ever receive any meaningful consequences.
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Even if the US had corporate responsibility laws, it would most definitely carve out exceptions for Boeing and other similar companies for "national security" reasons, since Boeing is a huge defense contractor. They are too embedded to ever receive any meaningful consequences.
Yeah, so break them up.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in 1890. It's tailor made to deal with situations like this. Boeing civilian needs to be ripped out of Boeing military. I'd go so far as to say Boeing military aircraft should be independent of Boeing all other military contracting. It should be at least three companies, and if the non-aircraft military contracting side is still "too big to punish", break it in half too. Any company too big to be effectively punished is too big to exist, peri
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:5, Interesting)
It's amazing that people are going bat shit over the MAX issues when Boeing has done this before...
Americans Airlines Flight 585. USair Flight 427. Copa Airlines Flight 291. China Southern Fkight 3943. SilkAir Flight 185.
Hundreds dead, and for more than a decade Boeing refused to accept they had an uncommanded rudder deflection problem due to an issue with the PCU. Finally they were forced to after the FAA and NTSB amassed enough independent evidence.
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The press release was wrong. It was sensor(singular) not plural. It tuns out this sensor is used on other planes and is reliable - very. However the wiring and interface may be defective - covered up for now - we don't know.
All this is just wrong on multiple levels - be very glad I am not on the jury. Even the terrorists are unhappy - Boeings management has made them redundant by designing a plane that takes more dives than an Italian soccer player.
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It's amazing that people are going bat shit over the MAX issues when Boeing has done this before...
Americans Airlines Flight 585. USair Flight 427. Copa Airlines Flight 291. China Southern Fkight 3943. SilkAir Flight 185.
Hundreds dead, and for more than a decade Boeing refused to accept they had an uncommanded rudder deflection problem due to an issue with the PCU. Finally they were forced to after the FAA and NTSB amassed enough independent evidence.
Let's shut down all of the companies that have caused deaths due to negligence!
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/1... [nytimes.com]
https://www.theglobeandmail.co... [theglobeandmail.com]
https://www.straitstimes.com/a... [straitstimes.com]
Wait, why is everyone walking everywhere now?
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Well, if I wanted to bring up everything about them, my post would have been longer than Tolstoy's book.
Our problem is that we let so-called "important" people get away with murder. We let corruption permeate the entire system, perhaps out of our own greed for some of that bacon the politicians all promise us. No corporate charter should protect the decision makers from the consequences. Our reaction to these things is weak and ineffective, and so it will happen again and again.
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:5, Insightful)
They killed 346 people. When will charges be brought?
I agree! I mean remember in 2008 when we threw all those banking CEOs in jail for causing th...oh wait. Nevermind.
I almost forgot. We don't actually punish corporations for bad behavior anymore.
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a problem with the 2008 crash, you know who are guilty of that?
The SEC who didn't care about the mortgage bonds market The rating agencies who blindly set AAA ratings on any mortgage bond product. The investment banks who created those mortgage bond products, so dumb to think bundling bad mortgages diversifies them enough to be a good investment. The investment banks buying up mortgages without checking the credit history or collateral. The mortgage banks that sold the bad mortgages to investment banks. The mortgage banks the gave mortgages to people without checking credit history or collateral and didn't care because the investment bank will just buy it. The mortgage broker knowing full well the situation of the home owners who bought houses and pushed them to lie on the mortgage application. The real estate agent showing expensive houses to home owners and explaining they can get a mortgage from those mortgage brokers. The home owners that lied on their mortage application about their income situation.
10s of millions of people should have go to jail for the frauds they committed, yes even those home owners who committed fraud of several hundred thousand dollars each.
Blaming stupid people for being stupid is hardly a worthwhile effort. Homeowners were approved by banks for loans banks knew they couldn't afford. It hardly had anything to do with fraud on applications. You didn't even need to lie to get approved for far more than you could afford. And let's say your idea came to fruition. You think taxpayers still armed with financial common sense are going to feel better about an 80% tax rate to pay for all those "criminals" behind bars who were too stupid to math right?
Make stupidity a crime, and you'll quickly see how expensive that solution is.
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That part wasn't what led to the financial crisis of 2008 ... it was banks and trading houses who packaged up junk debt, called it a AAA rated investment vehicle, and sold off their bad mortgages to other people when they were essentially high risk.
The companies who lied and called this AAA rated and sold it to everyone else essentially committed fraud by repackag
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I think people getting approved for loans they really couldn't afford was a baked-in part of this.
We had a mortgage lender at the time as a client, and these guys were both growing exponentially and shady as hell. Right before the bubble burst, they hired some Spanish speaking sales people to sell even worse mortgages to even more poorly qualified candidates. I remember asking one of the employees about this, and they kind of bragged at how easy it was to get qualified for $3-400k, and their thinking was
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I feel like there should almost be some kind of mandatory education that goes into taking out a mortgage. It's pretty easy, especially in a hot housing market, to borrow more than is sane even if it fits the underwriting models. It's like going to an auction and not understanding how much you're gonna spend.
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yeah, corporations don't get punished [npr.org] for bad behavior anymore.
Bullshit.
Thousands of low-level workers were laid off when they were caught. THOSE people were punished in the worst way for just doing the job they were told to do.
The executives were handed millions to "retire". And a billion dollar fine for a company that makes 5 billion a quarter isn't a punishment. It's a fucking slap on the wrist. When illegal, immoral, or unethical actions are still worth it every fucking time, don't expect me to believe we're really doing a damn thing to curb that activity, or t
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No kidding, these people are evil and greedy
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They killed 346 people. When will charges be brought?
I can't speak for other countries, but in the USA, likely never. Did any Americans die in the crashes? If not, then that makes it even less likely. Those weren't American companies flying the planes either. Plus, technically speaking, Boeing was aware of the problem and tried to fix it. The fact that the fix may have led to the crashes is interesting, but unless there is hard proof that Boeing knew crashes were likely, they aren't technically at fault for trying to fix something and finding out late
Re:The people who certified the design are murdere (Score:4, Informative)
They killed 346 people. When will charges be brought?
Plus, technically speaking, Boeing was aware of the problem and tried to fix it. The fact that the fix may have led to the crashes is interesting, but unless there is hard proof that Boeing knew crashes were likely, they aren't technically at fault for trying to fix something and finding out later the fix was bad.
Except they knew their fix was bad, and their response was "eh, we'll fix it later". It wasn't until a second plane fell out of the sky and their planes started getting grounded that Boeing decided to put a rush on the fix.
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The people who first certified it didn't do anything. Its the higher ups at Boeing who penny pinched only having a single sensor and whoever headed the software side of things that didn't think telling the pilots about changes to the code.
Be careful about judging others lest you be judged (Score:2)
They killed 346 people. When will charges be brought?
Sigh... It's amazing how ready people are to condemn others without thinking through the consequences. Let's assume for argument that this was an honest error by an engineering team and there is no paper trail of fraud or other serious malfeasance. Do you REALLY want to set the precedent of throwing engineers in jail for failures in their product designs? Seriously? Because you're going to have an extremely hard time convincing people to be engineers if that is the case. I'm not going to sign off on an
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They decided to use a single sensor to save money. That is not an honest error. It was gamble at the roulette table. At the very best it's 346 counts of negligent homicide. The engineer doesn't have to go to jail, unless he committed fraud and lied about system reliability to the poor saps upstairs. Find the guy who signed it off, or put pressure on the engineer. That probably happened up in the front office.
It is absolutely disgraceful that there will be no punishment for this.
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No, cluestick, when designs are getting oversight by the government, it is a failing of oversight when this happens.
Blaming the engineers is a false accusation, and you should go to prison for making it.
The simple answer is to restore the level of oversight that existed for decades, and when somebody starts blathering about "deregulation," punch them in the nose.
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Bringing charges against people may feel like justice, but it goes counter to a good safety culture. A good safety culture in a company requires open communication, and a frank discussion of deficiencies and problems so they can be identified and corrected. Creating a culture of recrimination with immediate reprisal for errors only leads to the situation in the Russian segment of the International Space Station where a contractor tried to cover a mistaken drill hole rather than reporting the incident.
Charg
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Can anybody show me where I am accusing the engineers?
Neither you nor anyone else said this.
It's just corporate apologists like sjbe and wired-parrot trying to deflect the blame.
Boeing is a Slashdot regular (Score:2, Funny)
c6gunner said the plane was perfect and only pilot error could bring one down, so naturally they thought there was no rush for extra safety features.
Re:Boeing is a Slashdot regular (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Probably they used experts of his caliber...
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Not really. He said that while the aircraft was crap, a decent pilot would have not crashed the machine.
Which is the truth.
And before you go on accusing me being a Boeing shill, the 737 is an obsolete pile of shit and I am happy that most European airlines got rid of it.
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By not fighting the aircraft for 20 times and applying the stab trim runaway checklist.
The deadheading pilot did precisely that.
No longer an engineering-run company (Score:5, Insightful)
Repair of the AoA sensor? (Score:2)
Can we talk about the fact that in one case the AoA sensor was repaired and re-certified according to Boeing's documentation?
Either there was some fraud in the maintenance, or Boeing's procedure to re-certify needs to be investigated.
Re: No longer an engineering-run company (Score:5, Informative)
And if that were true, you would have a point. It is not. Neither autopilot nor autothrottle has any lasting effect here. You need to specifically switch off the MCAS. That the handbook does not tell you about. That was not included in pilot training. That has a far stronger trim-effect than it should have. A trim that on ascent you can not manually override, because that takes too much strength.
Cultural arrogance does not make you right. It just makes you look stupid.
Re: No longer an engineering-run company (Score:4, Insightful)
And the only way to switch it off is to switch off the electrical trim system altogether (in previous generation of the 737 pilots could either switch off the electrical trim system completely, or only the autotrim), leaving manually turning the trim wheels the only option (as opposed to using the trim switches on the yokes). Which indeed requires super-human strength in the situations where it is needed.
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And if that were true, you would have a point. It is not.
No, he's right.
That the handbook does not tell you about. That was not included in pilot training.
Yes, you're also right, but you're not contradicting him.
Cultural arrogance does not make you right. It just makes you look stupid.
His cultural arrogance only makes him look like an asshole, it doesn't make him wrong. There are significant cultural differences in pilot behavior, training, emergency response, and trust of the aircraft. These are politely referred to by the catchall "differences in training," but the differences are real.
Re: No longer an engineering-run company (Score:5, Insightful)
It doensn't help your incoherent babbling that you don't even know what "third world" is and that Russia is by definition "second world country".
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For Russia to be 2nd World they have to be part of the Soviet empire, which might not exist anymore.
Sorry Ivan, you've been 3rd world for decades.
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wrong. you've been lied to.
It's happened in the US, but it happened when they were at altitude, and had room to recover. Not on takeoff. In the ethiopian crash they followed procedure and disabled the power to the trim like they were supposed to, which disabled the MCAS but they were fucked anyways. They had too high velocity, and couldn't manually adjust the trim. They couldn't ease up on the stick and drop the nose, which might have reduced the force and allowed them to adjust it manually because the
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Challenge: how many mistakes can an anonymous idiot pack into a single sentence?
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Challenge: how many mistakes can an anonymous idiot pack into a single sentence?
Mistakes or malicious misinformation?
Clark's Law: sufficiently advanced idiocy is indistinguishable from malice.
(J. Porter Clark, writing the corollary to Hanlon's Razor based on Arthur C. Clarke's law.)
(Yes the name is unfortunately confusing.)
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How much is Boeing paying you for this?
Re: No longer an engineering-run company (Score:5, Informative)
The pilots of both mishap crews failed to compete the memory item of punching off autopilot
Neither crash involved autopilot. Autopilot is a feature the pilot specifically engages. MCAS, the actual culprit, is an always-on system that was undocumented. It is unclear if the pilots in the two crashes even knew it was a computer issue, since there is no notification to the pilot that it is MCAS which is pitching the nose down. Pilots would normally assume it is a pitch-trim issue and there is a lot of evidence they tried to use various pitch trim systems to regain control.
In fact, contrary to your assertion, MCAS is supposed to actually disable itself when autopilot is engaged. So it's clear that the pilots did not have autopilot engaged and were trying to manually regain control of the aircraft.
There are some good facts (and yes, the reason I bolded that was to contrast with the inflammatory fiction you posted) on the aviation stackexchange [stackexchange.com] that make good reading.
What also makes good reading is the fact that the United Airlines (yes, a "western") pilots union, who at first came out in support of Boeing, have subsequently strenuously reversed course and have now strongly criticized Boeing as facts emerged about how poor the disclosure and training really was.
Re: No longer an engineering-run company (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, even if they did have the better setup, the fact that the MCAS system was completely undocumented and reacted with overpowering force, would the light of helped? Everything I've read thus far(a few articles, not a whole lot) nothing has said the MCAS would be disabled on a duel system if the AOA didn't agree since the MCAS system relied on a single sensor even if two were present. Boeing stated that the light would tell the pilots to turn off the MCAS system.
That could be quite difficult to achieve since they were never told the system existed in the first place.
Criminal Corporate Doublespeak.
If I'm incorrect in my assumptions here, please link to a correction.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/boeing-sold-safety-feature-that-could-have-prevented-737-max-crashes-as-an-option/
Re: No longer an engineering-run company (Score:5, Informative)
The for-pay feature was an AoA indicator that would show the AoA relative to the nose. The AoA disagree warning existed on previous 737s (NGs), and many operators and many in Boeing assumed it existed on the MAX. It was only after LionAir lost one that Boeing realized that they didn't have the feature any more. Perhaps it was removed when the optional AoA indicator was implemented.
The light would probably have helped Lion Air diagnose the problem before dispatch on the second and fateful flight. It might also have given the Ethiopian crew earlier warning of what was happening.
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Western pilots fly for airlines who purchased the optional AoA display feature.
The airlines that crashed didn't buy the optional extra, so they didn't get any warnings that there was a sensor failure. The failure warning wasn't supposed to be optional.
Re: No longer an engineering-run company (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact of the matter is, while we all want a pilot like Sullenberger or Liu Chuanjian up front, aircraft have to be flyable by even the worst pilots. The Lion Air MCAS problem should have been resolved when the first flight crew to encounter it turned around and landed at their point of departure. Instead, probably due to commercial pressures, they continued their flight with manual trim and the stickshaker going continuously until touchdown. The next crew fought for a bit, then one of the two people up front did the worst thing possible, repeatedly: tap the trim button just enough to reset the MCAS for another cycle of nose-down trim. The Ethiopian crew apparently knew what the problem was, but disabled electric trim before neutralizing loads. Then they found themselves unable to mechanically trim the aircraft and unaware of the procedure to unload the plane.
One of Boeing's responses, especially to Congress, has been to blame the pilots. Yes, the pilots didn't perform outstandingly in these cases. And maybe they were "Children of the Magenta". Yet the core problem is one of bad design, a bandaid on a jury-rigged solution to keep a 50-year-old design in the air so that airlines following the Southwest model don't have to train their crew on two different types.
Compare to "Children of the Magenta" cases like the Colgan flight outside of Buffalo, where the pilot reacted to the stick shaker by pulling back, even overriding the stick pusher (training to the FAA test emphasized minimizing loss of altitude in a stall), or the recent Superjet crash, which at this point looks like a pilot was unfamiliar with flying the aircraft in a degraded FBW state ("Direct Law") and, on approach in a perfectly flyable airplane with plenty of fuel, promptly ignored seven predictive windshear alerts ("Windshear. Go Around" -- the record shows that he did not go around), and killed a lot of people. In those two cases, the part of the automation that actually flies the plane dropped out, putting control in the hands of the pilot and, at some point, providing strong instructions one what the pilot should be doing. In both cases, the flight crew proved so unable to fly the plane that they even ignored the sage advice of the machine that was trying not to get them killed.
Yes, racism plays a role here, especially as to how Boeing's spun the issue. Asia and Africa are huge growth areas for aviation, and that's where Boeing is selling a lot of planes, especially ones like the MAX that are designed to cram a lot of passengers into a small space and carry them at a fraction of the cost. But the Chinese were right to ground the plane immediately regardless of GP's explanation. "Children of the Magenta" refers to a training culture more than a national or ethnic one.
Start looking (Score:2)
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Airbus screwed up massively with the A380 that was extremely expensive to develop and now almost nobody wants it. Too large. They did not, so far, screw up on safety, and now they probably will not for a long, long time.
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You mean much like the 747, which nobody wants and is going out of production. See, four engine jumbos aren't the most efficient way to move passengers any more.
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The A380 has forced Airbus to develop a lot of engineering solutions that came in handy for the A350, so that was not completely in vain.
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The A380 has forced Airbus to develop a lot of engineering solutions that came in handy for the A350, so that was not completely in vain.
No argument.
Volkswagen of the Sky (Score:3)
The CEO should resign. It's a pattern of delay and denial, not just one incident.
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You are far to generous. The CEO is paid to direct the company. With a pattern of gross safety violations as bad as this one, he is responsible for a mass-killing. That should put him at the very least behind bars for the rest of his life. That is what "responsibility" means. If he cannot do the job, then he should not have taken it.
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This confirms the bias inside Boeing.
The company is rotten to the core.
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The problem is not Boeing. The problem is that we have a specific certification system designed to find critical flaws. And now, it's fairly clear that the system missed one.
The system needs to be fixed. Boeing is a part of the system. So is FAA and other aviation authority bodies.
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The certification system in use currently misses loads of things - have people already forgotten the battery fires on the 787 and that aircrafts subsequent grounding at the start of this decade?
Every aircraft has Air Worthiness Directives issued, every single one. The certification system cannot catch everything, such a system would result in a process that was so long and so expensive that commercial airlines wouldn't be viable.
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Battery fires didn't bring a single plane down in a catastrophic way. The main reason they got blown as far out of proportion as they did was because civil aviation is remarkably safe.
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To be fair, Muilenburg has no way of keeping that kind of watch over the Boeing commercial division. Back in the days when Boeing corporate offices were located in Seattle, the executives could keep a close eye on operations. And pull the plug pretty quickly when some engineering or manufacturing managers proved to be fuck-ups. But when they moved to Chicago, the locals adopted that old Chinese saying: "The emperor is far away and the mountains are high."
Perhaps a better solution would be to split Boeing i
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All discovered potential safety problems on production products should end up on his desk to be reviewed and debated by his staff, and a paper-trail created of the decisions and related reasoning. If they are not doing that, then he's running the shop wrong.
If underlings ignored that process, then he'd at least have a paper trail that they ignored it. It would have covered his ass also.
Takes several screw-ups to cause catastrophes (Score:4, Insightful)
And in this case, also a culture of business far over safety. It seems the fatal combination of greed, incompetence and arrogance was strong at work here.
If what they did does not constitute at the very least criminally negligent homicide on a mass-scale, then I do not know what does.
A good example of what is wrong with the US (Score:3)
We constantly let these people get away with this. None of them will face jail time for murdering all those people. They knew it was a problem and instead of doing the right, ethical thing they decided to let it go unreported. When they start putting them in jail for killing people, for covering their asses will be the turning point for this country. We are not there yet.
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In a capitalist system, every life has a price, and a full recall is not done when paying off the victims is cheaper.
It's Fight Club 101:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Your life would still be exceptionally worthless even under socialism
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You can't have a pure anything. Not democracy, not socialism, not capitalism. But at this point, we can't even agree on what we want the government to do...
Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) is in Seattle (Score:2)
But look what is going on in Seattle in the documentary "Seattle is Dying": https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw [youtu.be]
I have no more questions.
Re: MBA strikes again (Score:2)
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. I dont think this would happen @ Airbus
It probably would, that's the nature of capitalism.
Re:I'll avoid Boeing jets after this (Score:5, Informative)
You could say that Airbus actually caused this whole fracas, in a round about way
Boeing was studying a brand new single aisle design, with an eye to delivering it in the mid 2020s - but Airbus pulled the trigger on the A320NEO, which was based on a significantly younger airframe, and Boeing was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
They had to react - airlines were signing up for the NEO at a rate of knots, but the final straw was when Americans Airlines (an airline that analysts had said was steadfastly a Boeing customer for ever more after the bad blood from the Flight 587 crash, where American wanted Airbus to take full public blame and Airbus refused) signed up...
Boeing simply could not launch their new design - it wouldn't have been significantly better than the NEO, but it would have been significantly more expensive and much later. Airbus would have taken the market anyway.
So Boeing looked to do what many thought was impossible - cobble together a NEO competitor out of the 737, hence the MAX. And hence the problems with the MAX. The best chance for matching economy was larger engines, but lengthening the undercarriage to support them meant major changes to the airframe, which meant a risk of losing the grandfathering under the old 737 certification (which dates back to the early 70s) and also a lot of cost, so it meant moving the engines forward and compensating for handling differences in software.
So here we are.
Re:I'll avoid Boeing jets after this (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the most interesting interpretation of the old meme of "six degrees of separation to blame the Jews."
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It was deliberately meant to be contrived, but then again people are actually blaming Airbus for the MAX issues on aviation forums in this exact manner...
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Care to share a link or three?
I am not doubting you, just being curious.
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They were all over Airliners.net a few months back before I quit the site - just hit up their forums :)
It's stupid, but the Airbus vs Boeing rivalry on that site is astounding - people with utterly no say in either companies doings or successes are following them with the fervour akin to sports teams.
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Is that really surprising? AMD vs Intel and AMD vs Nvidia wars are pretty much the same thing here in Slashdot.
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But Slashdot users have a vested interest in Intel/AMD and NVidia/ATI because we were the ones buying their products, suffering their failures and enjoying their successes - can't say that about Airbus and Boeing, theres a tiny group of people who fit in the same audience...
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Well, we blamed chickens when we slapped a tariff on cheap import trucks. There's no telling what goes on in the addled little pea brains in Washington DC.
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The 737 Max certainly beat the Neo in terms of carnage.
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The 737 Max certainly beat the Neo in terms of carnage.
Boeing astroturfers are still slithering around the social media sites apparently.
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Americans Airlines (an airline that analysts had said was steadfastly a Boeing customer for ever more after the bad blood from the Flight 587 crash, where American wanted Airbus to take full public blame and Airbus refused)
From Wikipedia
the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which instead attributed the disaster to the first officer's overuse of rudder controls in response to wake turbulence, or jet wash, from a Japan Airlines (JAL) Boeing 747-400 that took off minutes before it. According to the NTSB, the aggressive use of the rudder controls by the co-pilot caused the vertical stabilizer to snap off the plane, along with the plane's two engines separating from intense forces before impact.
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Th rudder failed well in excess of its ultimate load as designed for and certified for (in other words, the rudder wasn't at fault) - the NTSB blamed the copilot and their training received from American, as well as lack of restrictors on rudder deflection, but American wanted Airbus to take the full blame publicly and Airbus refused. American didn't buy another Airbus jet for over a decade.
Re:I'll avoid Boeing jets after this (Score:5, Informative)
. I dont think this would happen @ Airbus
It probably would, that's the nature of capitalism.
Yep. How quickly folks forget, like the top poster in my quote. Airbus has had other truly horrible "it's a feature NOT a bug" issues that have led to crashes and made many of us wonder just what they were thinking to do things that way. Look up the crash about a decade ago of Air France flight 447 and if you can, try to find the article about what the cockpit voice recorded told in Scientific American. Airbus design decisions played a big role in that crash, especially how the co-pilot and pilot could both move what I guess they call the joystick independently of each other and the plane would take the average. Boeing planes at the time didn't work that way and still may not for all I know. Only one stick gets control. This decision to allow both sticks to give inputs was a large factor of the crash, with the co-pilot left in charge basically making irrational decisions and the plane happily accepting them because it was flying in alternate law mode. The other co-pilot didn't realize what the co-pilot in charge (the captain had left the flight deck on break and put the junior co-pilot in charge) was doing with his controls, which was that he was putting the plane into a stall due to a training failure that failed to adequately cover the unusual situation the plane was in. There are other crashes caused by other Airbus design issues. About 20 years ago an Aeroflot plane crashed and the sensational version is that a pilot let his kid fly and the kid crashed the plane. That's not exactly what happened, but a strange Airbus "feature" seemed to be unknown to the pilots and when the pilot's kid very briefly took controls (yes, that really happened) the kid accidentally caused the plane's ailerons to switch to manual control. The only indicator that this happened was a silent light on the panel. The plane crashed because the pilots failed to understand that this had happened and did not take the correct action to recover from it. I'm not anti-Boeing or anti-Airbus, but Airbus has had its issues too.
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Airbus design decisions played a big role in that crash, especially how the co-pilot and pilot could both move what I guess they call the joystick independently of each other and the plane would take the average. Boeing planes at the time didn't work that way and still may not for all I know. Only one stick gets control. This decision to allow both sticks to give inputs was a large factor of the crash, with the co-pilot left in charge basically making irrational decisions and the plane happily accepting them because it was flying in alternate law mode. The other co-pilot didn't realize what the co-pilot in charge (the captain had left the flight deck on break and put the junior co-pilot in charge) was doing with his controls, which was that he was putting the plane into a stall due to a training failure that failed to adequately cover the unusual situation the plane was in.
That type of issue isn't limited to Airbus, or independent controls that average out inputs. Linked controls like with Boeing aircraft lead to issues all the time in crash scenarios. It usually involves a loss of spatial awareness or the failure of one crew member to correctly identify the problem/solution and a failure of cockpit communication: the pilots can end up fighting each other over the stick and cancel out each other's input. Even if the pilot making the correct input finally gets control, it's
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I never thought I would say this but Boeings negligence is criminal and I will avoid flying on Boeing planes from now on.
I dont think this would happen @ Airbus
An update on the old saying:
"If it's a Boeing, I ain't going"?
Or, a new one:
"If it's a MAX, don't count me as PAX"?
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I never thought I would say this but Boeings negligence is criminal and I will avoid flying on Boeing planes from now on.
I dont think this would happen @ Airbus
I see you got trollmodded by the creepy Boeing astroturfer gang, just like me. Disgusting criminal corporate culture, disgusting camp followers. Starts at the top and rots all the way down. From now on, I will always check for "anything but Boeing" when I book a flight.
ABB for the win, if you hope to live to a ripe old age.