Boeing's Woes Continue as 50 Injured on Australia-New Zealand Flight (aljazeera.com) 112
Dozens of people have been injured by what officials described as a "strong movement" on a Chilean flight from Australia to New Zealand. From a report: In a statement on Monday, Chilean LATAM Airlines blamed the injuries on "a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement." It is just the latest in a series of safety-related incidents to feature a Boeing plane. Passengers were met by paramedics when the LATAM Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner touched down in Auckland. It was not immediately clear what caused the incident.
About 50 people were treated at the scene, mostly for mild injuries. Twelve were taken to hospital, an ambulance spokesperson said, with one believed to be in serious condition. It is been a turbulent week for Boeing, with the US plane maker suffering a series of safety-related issues. Further reading: Justice Department Opens Criminal Investigation Into Boeing's Window Blowout Incident.
About 50 people were treated at the scene, mostly for mild injuries. Twelve were taken to hospital, an ambulance spokesperson said, with one believed to be in serious condition. It is been a turbulent week for Boeing, with the US plane maker suffering a series of safety-related issues. Further reading: Justice Department Opens Criminal Investigation Into Boeing's Window Blowout Incident.
Even with Boeing it's a coin toss (Score:5, Insightful)
Even with the plane being a Boeing, it's a coin toss at this point whether the plane was defective, or the maintenance was. I don't see the point of crying "look, Boeing did it again!" when there's a good chance someone screwed up long after they handed over control of the aircraft.
Re:Even with Boeing it's a coin toss (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even with Boeing it's a coin toss (Score:5, Informative)
Jokat said there was no turbulence after the incident and once the plane landed the pilot came to the back of the plane in “shock”. “I asked ‘what happened?’ and he said ‘my gauges just blanked out, I lost all of my ability to fly the plane’.”
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The Guardian now has a report on this [theguardian.com] with somewhat more detail than the stuff.co.nz report, this is looking pretty ugly for Boeing.
Quoting,
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It's possible as the 787 does have electrically actuated control surfaces, but a quick scan of the list doesn't reveal any that would cause the very sudden movement that the aircraft experienced.
Aircraft can change angle, and for big ones like the 787 it's a relatively slow change even with the control surfaces at maximum. It would be more like being on a roller coaster than being thrown violently against the ceiling. Generally speaking there is no control that can make an aircraft lurch downwards like that
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Yeah, it doesn't seem to add up.
If they just lost instrumentation for a few seconds, the plane should have just kept flying as it did before, where the passengers probably wouldn't even notice.
If the lost instrumentation caused the autopilot to move some control surface to the max improperly for a few seconds, I'd expect the resulting movement to not be *that* violent -- these planes are not really nimble, though if it lasted more than a few seconds the accumulated tilt could certainly cause people to fall.
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Yeah, it pretty much depends on the age of the plane as well. Alaska's door plug blow out was on a pretty new plane, with hardly any maintenance needed to be done by the airline.
If this is also a new plane, then it's probably a boeing issue.
If this plane is a few years old, that means a bunch of maintenance have been done by the airlines, and there is a decent chance it is the airline's fault. Just like the wheel which fell off a boeing plane during take off a few days ago - that plane was a bunch of years
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Another que
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Even with the plane being a Boeing, it's a coin toss at this point whether the plane was defective, or the maintenance was. I don't see the point of crying "look, Boeing did it again!" when there's a good chance someone screwed up long after they handed over control of the aircraft.
Reports have it as an instrument malfunction, the glass cockpit went blank.
If true, that definitely indicates a manufacturer issue, rather than a maintenance issue (al a that United 777 that lost the wheel) or a pilot/control issue (al a that United plane that went of the runway in Houston). Its definitely not an expected type of failure.
The plane was 8.3 years old, which is not that old for a widebody, but no spring chicken either.
Regardless the causes, the pilots resolved it and got the plane bac
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Enjoy (every company except Boeing)!
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If only I still had mod points. The only way this gets resolved is if the C suite does time for several hundred counts of reckless endangerment of human life.
The assembly line has been reconfigured over the years to emphasize costs over safety. It was a deliberate decision by the management team that produced the DC-10. the 787 and 737 should probably all be grounded and Boeing forced into bankruptcy. (I say that as someone who would take a moderate financial hit from owning stock in B)
So they don't know what caused it - yet (Score:5, Interesting)
If it was not for the words "technical event" this would sound like wind shear. It is also unclear how long LATAM has been using this particular aircraft and whether this could be a maintenance problem, of course if it's a software glitch (can't see it myself) then Boeing have yet another problem and it could be a show-stopper.
Re:So they don't know what caused it - yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: So they don't know what caused it - yet (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah, the manufacturer that's been fucking up their basic paperwork left and right should be in charge of maintenance, what a simple solution, how come nobody else thought of it?
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You could maybe make a case for that with small airlines, but LATAM is described as "the largest airline holding company in Latin America" so they should be perfectly capable of looking after their own safety. I've worked for a large airline and keeping their aeroplanes healthy was far too important to be left to the sticky hands of a manufacturer, they took full responsibility for their own aircraft. Mind you, most of their aircraft were from Airbus.
But what about the Bolts (Score:2)
Low aicraft weight with less maintenance required (Score:2)
Boeing improved that process recently: You get missing bolts right off the assembly line. Less maintenance required for keeping the weight of the aircraft low.
Re: So they don't know what caused it - yet (Score:4, Informative)
It's not unclear. News reports say the registration number is CC-BGG and https://www.airfleets.es/fiche... [airfleets.es] says LATAM (formerly LAN, product of the merger of Chilean LAN with Brazilian TAM) has owned the plane since 2015. They bought it brand new from Boeing.
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The pilot(s) claiming that instrument failure was the issue will likely result in 1 or both of them being grounded.
THis was a major down draft at an airport KNOWN for these and yet, they did not order belts on. The mistake was the pilots.
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You might be thinking of Wellington airport, which is.
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2) Auckland is WELL known for Shear. Look at Jeppesen charts to see.
3) the craft DROPPED. It did not dive. There is a HUGE difference in a drop vs a dive. For this aircraft to put ppl on the ceiling would have required a steep dive, which everybody said did not happen. Instead the craft simply dropped. There is no commercial aircraft that is capable of dropping 50' quickly without the craft being in a dive.
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Everyone is playing armchair quarterback at this point. The plane is instrumented out the ass and both the data recorder and cockpit voice recorder will be analyzed to give a better picture of what truely happened.
If the displays cut out or the electrical power sagged or they hit a microburst, all of that information will have been captured for analysis. There are enough redundant systems on the plane that one single failure should not leave the pilot without options.
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Re:So they don't know what caused it - yet (Score:4, Informative)
2) 50' is not a large drop and doesn't require a steep dive when flying at altitude to put people on the Ceiling, Just ask those onboard QF72 back in the mid 2000's, that was only a max of 8.4 degree sudden downward pitch.
3) For passenger no there is NOT a huge difference, a sudden attitude change exactly fits what passengers have described, as in like hitting a speed bump and both would appear similar for a passengers view point.
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For future reference, using all caps to try to make your point makes you look a bit shouty and mental.
Re: So they don't know what caused it - yet (Score:2)
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THis was a major down draft at an airport KNOWN for these and yet, they did not order belts on. The mistake was the pilots.
You have made the same comment multiple times for this story. What point are you trying to make? It's worth adding something like "as I said above" or something to subsequent comments, otherwise it looks like you are trying to hide something.
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Lost Instrumentation?! (Score:3)
Jokat said the pilot came to the back of the plane once the plane landed.
"I asked him 'what happened?' and he said to me 'I lost my instrumentation briefly and then it just came back all of a sudden'.
From https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/nat... [rnz.co.nz]
Where's there's smoke there's fire, fellas. Boeing needs to be looked at. The ghost of Douglas needs to be exorcised. They gave us the DC10. Their culture is why Boeing is how it is right now.
Keep the ghost of McDonnell, though -- they were the space side of McDonnel-Douglas, and gave us not just the spacecraft, but the F-15 as well.
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The McDonnel Douglas theory is funny. The DC/MD10 had a fatal crash rate considerably lower than the contemporary 747 and pretty much identical to the contemporary 737. The MD80/90 had a crash rate essentially the same as the 757 and 767.
Yet Boeing (of that era at least) is "legendary engineering" and McDonnel Douglas is "hurr durr, MBAs".
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More importantly, I know some of the engineers from MD. They would not fly the 11. Said it had a lot of well known issues. I was surprised.
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The DC10 was pretty unsafe by modern standards. But its crash record, over millions of flights, is a bit over half that of the original 747. The original 747 was also pretty unsafe by modern standards.
The point isn't that we should be building DC10s. It's that the lengend of Boeing is just a legend. I wouldn't be surprised if it's responsible for some of their current problems. Boeing buying MD was Boeing disposing of their last domestic competition. Combine that with idiocy like "Boeing or I'm not going" s
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As a 10-14 y.o, in the 70s, I thought that was cool beans.
Still, design engineers spoke about it and said that a lot of issues. The MD11 is what caused AA to leave MD which then lead to the collapse of MD's commercial, which Clinton's admin then pushed for Boeing to buy them, which anybody in commercial, Defense, and Space av KNOWS the results there.
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Well, there was a reason Douglas merged with McDonnell and then looked to merge again with Boeing. They got lucky during wartime and then were basically irrelevant in the commercial sector. Slowly, but surely, they've only brought down the companies they've merged with instead of improving overall in any way. Douglas was shit, then brought down McDonnell, and now the combination is bringing down Boeing.
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The DC-10 cargo door issue was a known design flaw before the first one blew out. Convair told them the design was bad. After the first deadly crash MD and the FAA knew the plane had a door design and a latching problem [youtube.com]. The FAA still failed to force MD to fix it.
It took another deadly crash before MD fixed it.
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And engines fell off 747s.
Re:Lost Instrumentation?! (Score:5, Informative)
I say this every time something Boeing comes up recently but Airbus is 25% state owned and controlled between France, Germany and Spain. I don't think its deniable that will have some degree of effect on how that company conducts business.
Everyone knows the issue with the merger was the leadership went from engineers to MBA's and those who don't even operate out of Seatle anymore, utterly detached. How many more stories will we hear about that aren't the CEO and pretty much everyone below him in the company has to be axed but unless anyone here is a major shareholder then we the public who ride on these things every day have pretty much zero control over that happening.
I think we as the public in the case of a company like Boeing (it has no US competitors, nor will it ever probably and it also is a vital military and government contractor. ) we should get some say in how it operates. I don't think it has to be fully nationalized but it should have some state ownership or be in a special class of corporation.
I mean congrats, you built a company literally too big to fail. That means it can't be a pure profit venture anymore either, quality and sustainability have to take focus.
don't let them have the power of self certificatio (Score:2)
don't let them have the power of self certification and then things will get safer.
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I agree but I will have to check but I believe I had read that the self-certification process has been in place for a long time before these current Boeing woes.
That doesn't make self-certification good, it should be done away with across the board for any contractor that needs it but to me the issue speaks more to the underlying cultural rot at the company. Yes a better inspector system catches these problems but it doesn't answer or fix why these problems suddenly start increasing to begin with nor does
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Allow self-certification, but require an FAA investigation, including private interviews, every time someone responsible for any certification leaves their position. Make "fix this or I quit" mean something.
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That's only a part of the problem, but, yes, it *is* part of the problem. There's also probably a lot of regulatory capture, though I haven't looked into this particular case.
It's a part of the standard way that technical corporations fail. First the engineers build the thing, then entrepreneurs grow it beyond reasonable limits, and then the beancounters cut "excess" in the name of efficiency...but they can't tell the difference between inefficiency and safety margin.
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The CEO and chariman of Boeing during the MAX crashes, and for some time previously, was Dennis Muilenburg. He's an aerospace engineer who also has a masters in aeronautics and astronautics. He started at Boeing as an intern in the 80s.
You should be highly suspicious of things "everyone knows."
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Sure but one man does not a company culture make, especially 16 years post merger and McNerny a non-enngineer made the 737 airframe decision.
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Smells like a lot of special pleading. Perhaps Boeing's complacence lies somewhere else? Like not having any competition?
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Was anything i said not true?
Do tell me how we encourage competition in the commercial airliner business in the US while at the same time keeping that competition from devolving into a different race to the bottom that ends up as less regulatory than just trying to correct the problems at Boeing directly?
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Airliner manufacturing appears to be a pretty natural oligopoly. You have to regulate it. It doesn't hurt to drop the nationalistic BS too. Boeing is an aircraft manufacturer. They aren't legendary, they don't have some kind of natural superiority over anybody else, no matter who's running them, and they never did. Engineers are just as susceptible to perverse incentives as anyone else, as amply demonstrated by the man who said the 737 Max "is as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies" while kno
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You touched on exactly the answer I am driving at: incentives.
Engineers can fall victim to perverse incentives but they tend to operate around different ones than MBA's and that's also where the regulatory state.
And yes Boeing is not "magical" but they are a natural monopoly at this point, no one else has the infrastructure, support network and breadth of knowledge to get into the commercial aviation market.
Also when an engineer becomes CEO they are no longer "an engineer", they're a CEO so they *cannot* sp
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Bull. I've heard enough engineers say "well yeah, it's wrong, but if I don't do it I'll get fired, and I have a family to feed." People like to argue based on reputations, engineer versus MBA, whatever. It doesn't work. If you want something like safe airplanes you need to create systems that don't depend on such things.
MCAS was a simple engineering failure. A perfectly reasonable ancillary system had scope creep until it turned into a critical system, but nobody reclassified it. That issue exposed corrupti
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"well yeah, it's wrong, but if I don't do it I'll get fired, and I have a family to feed."
What part of that statement suggests that guy has the authority to make the call in the first place? The person making that statement makes my point!
MCAS was a simple engineering failure. A perfectly reasonable ancillary system had scope creep until it turned into a critical system, but nobody reclassified it.
Just the contrary MCAS was actually an engineering success to a problem that was created for business reasons: modifying an existing airframe probably past it's limits for cost saving reasons. The whole reason to keep the airframe was to save cost for customers on re-training pilots. That is not an engineering decisions, that's engineers trying to make the
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Some history.
Boeing was known for safety and mediocre stock performance. McDonnell Douglas was known for excellent stock performance and planes that occasionally lost engines (specifically the DC10)
This caused the high flying stock of McDonnell Douglas to crater as the company was being forced into bankruptcy.
The US government was concerned about losing some military planes that McDonnell Douglas was producing and encouraged Boeing to acquire McDonnell Douglas.
Post acquisition, the former McDonnell Douglas
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I say this every time something Boeing comes up recently but Airbus is 25% state owned and controlled between France, Germany and Spain. I don't think its deniable that will have some degree of effect on how that company conducts business.
State ownership doesn't mean that the state controls anything. Most of these investments will be done via sovereign wealth funds, which means it's managed independently from the political machine. Also consider that you're not just dealing with several different national governments, but governmental entities on different levels. Particularly with Germany the individual states will have their own sovereign wealth funds (in particular to fund pensions, so it gets ring-fenced), I believe Bavaria holds a stake in BMW, but it's still very much a privately run corporation, Aktiengesellschaft or AG in German which is their word for a publicly listed company (I believe it means share company or stock company). If a government owns part of a company, they get to vote as shareholders but not dictate terms. I think you're right however but not for the reason you think. Airbus has very much become a "too big to fail" company and this means the governments of Europe are on the hook if it ever does, so the myriad of European governments (including the UK) are very, very, very much interested in making sure that doesn't happen which puts Airbus under a mountain of bureaucratic oversight so large it's become the third highest peak in Europe.
Everyone knows the issue with the merger was the leadership went from engineers to MBA's and those who don't even operate out of Seatle anymore, utterly detached. How many more stories will we hear about that aren't the CEO and pretty much everyone below him in the company has to be axed but unless anyone here is a major shareholder then we the public who ride on these things every day have pretty much zero control over that happening.
I think we as the public in the case of a company like Boeing (it has no US competitors, nor will it ever probably and it also is a vital military and government contractor. ) we should get some say in how it operates. I don't think it has to be fully nationalized but it should have some state ownership or be in a special class of corporation.
I mean congrats, you built a company literally too big to fail. That means it can't be a pure profit venture anymore either, quality and sustainability have to take focus.
I don't think the US govt. needs to take a stake in Boeing to force it on the path to fixing it's problems, but a huge amount of oversight is needed for any company that is considered too important to the economy, military or general stability of a nation that it cannot be permitted to fail. In fact given the amount of partisan politicisation the US has suffered from in recent years, having direct means of governmental control would be a bad thing, especially as the US can't seem to ring-fence anything prop
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In regards to Airbus I did look this up and the stakes those countries have is via holding companies but they are controlling shares, so those countries combined have a 25% vote share in regards to Airbus. Not SWF (as much as I love SWF's and think the US should have a large one, this is not that)
I am ok with the correct amount of oversight but at a certain the point if you have devote so, so, so much oversight to a single company just to make sure they stay in compliance you have a real problem at that co
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This pilot clustered this and wants to blame others.
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The incident occurred close to destination near an airport with a very capable weather radar and warning system. Up/down drafts dropping planes out of the sky are virtually unheard of today.
You're too quick to blame a pilot. Losing instruments does indeed not immediately cause your plane to do anything, but what the pilot actually said was "I lost all of my ability to fly the plane".
While it's too early to blame Boeing (or indeed anyone) we have ample evidence that technical faults in fly-by-wire control mo
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According to reports the craft did NOT go into a dive, but remained horizontal. That is why it can not be anything BUT a downdraft.
And I used to work at Jeppensen. AUK has plenty of issues with shears.
Technical event (Score:2)
In the absence of specific details in the initial report, the term "technical event" suggests that the cause of the incident was internal to the aircraft rather than external factors such as weather conditions or human factors. Future updates from the investigation will hopefully provide more insight into the exact nature of the technical issue.
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Oh, I guess I can't delete posts. My bad.
How can you have a UID that low and not know that /. doesn't allow users to delete their own posts? Do you by any chance work for Boeing?
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how much did you pay for that 4-digit slashdot ID ?
About as much as you paid for your 8-digit slashdot ID.
Dreamliner? (Score:2)
Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner was introduced in 2013. I don't know the age of the actual plane under investigation, but it could be a decade. There have been other reports of passenger injuries in the cabin in the past few years. Sometimes it's specifically due to turbulence. Since I don't know what "technical problem" means in this context, I'll pass on drawing my own inferences.
I don't know the specific plane involved in any of those other incidents. I could be something akin to confirmation bias - I notice thi
Should we error on the side of causion? (Score:2)
Either they're intentionally overlooking QA, or they're intentionally hiring unqualified people, or some combination. It's simply not possible to be a qualified engineer, and have this many serious problems show up after the fact. It also shows that government oversight and / or regulator
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I once had a boss who walked into my office and said that she thought waiting for the end of the month for financial statements was stupid, and that she wanted to have "real time" financial statements. A short socratic inquiry revealed that she wanted financial reports reflecting data up to the last *minute*. "So," I asked her, "what are you going to do if that data shows we lost money over the last five minutes? March down to sales and snatch the brithday cake out of Janet's mouth?"
The question you've p
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To put this another way, I want to s
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Nah, adding a weak argument to a strong argument doesn't improve the strong argument.
Looking for meaning where there is none, or none can be discerned yet, is waste of time. At the very least opportunity cost applies here. Focus on things that make a difference, not things you can do that are just doing anything.
It's usually clear air turbulence (Score:1)
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The injuries are why this made it into the media.
The comment from the pilot about displays blanking is what made people sit up and pay more attention.
Turbulence happens, but when there are significant injuries involved and a comment like that from the pilot, it becomes newsworthy.
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It's usually clear air turbulence that causes this, not the plane. Bad reporting if you ask me.
No.
Even the pilot was left in “shock,” Jokat said, saying he told him, “My gauges just blanked out, I lost all of my ability to fly the plane.”
That is not clear air turbulence, and even if it was, it shouldn't have caused the aviation equivalent of a BSOD. It may well not be Boeing's fault (although at this point, that is the default assumption as they have lost all credibility), but it sure wasn't clear air turbulence.
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Amazing how bad media and postings are (Score:2, Informative)
In the incident on Monday, passengers arriving in Aukland told local media that the plane quickly lost altitude, flinging those unsecured towards the ceiling. A passenger told radio network RNZ that “people flew through the air because they weren’t wearing their seatbelts”.
This was purely about a strong downdraft in an area KNOWN for such, in which the pilots did not do their jobs and put on the seatbelt signs.
/. has this on here and is pointing fingers at Boeing shows that /. has joined in with unintelligent.
The fact that
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Except for:
> the pilot came to the back of the plane once the plane landed.
> "I asked him 'what happened?' and he said to me 'I lost my instrumentation briefly and then it just came back all of a sudden'.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/nat... [rnz.co.nz]
We'll see. I agree the media frenzy around every Boeing issue is unhealthy.
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They forgot to reboot the plane [seattletimes.com] before taking off?
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The pilot's guages blanked out.
Even the pilot was left in “shock,” Jokat said, saying he told him, “My gauges just blanked out, I lost all of my ability to fly the plane.”
That isn't turbulence. Only thunderstorm levels of turbulence can cause that. You are either trolling or prejudging. It may well not have been Boeing's fault, but it sure wasn't a "downdraft".
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The Guardian is now reporting that the cause has probably been found [theguardian.com], they are quoting a (paywalled) report from the Wall Street Journal [wsj.com].
Quoting,
Boeing is done for (Score:2)
This clearly was not their fault in any way. Airplanes can get hit by such winds, no matter what brand. But now they get blamed for anything and everything that happens with their planes. Shows that public trust is gone.
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With 350 people dead due to gross negligence and intentional lying by omission to pilots and regulators? Yes. The CEO would be a good start.
And now, a dead whistleblower (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
Suicide, riiiiight. Also, I have a bridge to sell.
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Of course it's suicide. He was a Boeing employee, he has just learned the ways of his company and applied it to his personal life.
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I wonder if he committed suicide by shooting himself in the top of his head 5 times like Vince Foster... (who knows what Wikipedia says about his death now)
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I wonder if he committed suicide by shooting himself in the top of his head 5 times like Vince Foster... (who knows what Wikipedia says about his death now)
Wikipedia says five investigations, including Kenneth Starr's circus, support suicide by gunshot through the mouth and out the back of the head.
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everyone naturally keeps their seatbelt fastened during flight
Hah! [dressps.com]
On second thought, I'm sure it was the phone that did it.
MCAS (Score:1)
American engineering and workers (Score:3)
I wonder if this will become noticed by more people. "Buy American" is exactly the same as it always was. It actually was always crap quality, the difference is, the rest of the world keeps getting better and American's just keep getting better pay.