Air Industry Trends Safer, But 'Flukish' Second Crash Led Boeing to Mishandled Media Storm, WSJ Argues (msn.com) 78
There's actually "a global trend toward increased air safety," notes a Wall Street Journal columnist.
And even in the case of the two fatal Boeing crashes five years ago, he stresses that they were "were two different crashes," with the second happening only "after Boeing and the FAA issued emergency directives instructing pilots how to compensate for Boeing's poorly designed flight control software.
"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash. To boot, they committed an additional error by overspeeding the aircraft in defiance of aural, visual and stick-shaker warnings against doing so. It got almost no coverage, but on the same day the Ethiopian government issued its final findings on the accident in late 2022, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in what it called an "unusual step," issued its own "comment" rebuking the Ethiopian report for "inaccurate" statements, for ignoring the crew's role, for ignoring how readily the accident should have been avoided.
So the Wall Street Journal columnist challenges whether profit incentives played any role in Boeing's troubles: In reality, the global industry was reorganized largely along competitive profit-and-loss lines after the 1970s, and yet this coincided with enormous increases in safety, notwithstanding the sausage factory elements occasionally on display (witness the little-reported parking of hundreds of Airbus planes over a faulty new engine).
The point here isn't blame but to note that 100,000 repetitions likely wouldn't reproduce the flukish second MAX crash and everything that followed from it. Rather than surfacing Boeing's deeply hidden problems, it seems the second crash gave birth to them. The subsequent 20-month grounding and production shutdown, combined with Covid, cost Boeing thousands of skilled workers. The pressure of its duopoly competition with Airbus plus customers clamoring for their backordered planes made management unwisely desperate to restart production. January's nonfatal door-plug blowout of an Alaska Airlines 737 appears to have been a one-off when Boeing workers failed to reinstall the plug properly after removing it to fix faulty fuselage rivets. Not a one-off, apparently, are faulty rivets as Boeing has strained to hire new staff and resume production of half-finished planes.
Boeing will sort out its troubles eventually by applying the oldest of manufacturing insights: Training, repetition, standardization and careful documentation are the way to error-free complex manufacturing.
As he sees it, "The second MAX crash caught Boeing up in a disorienting global media and political storm that it didn't know how to handle and, indeed, has handled fairly badly."
And even in the case of the two fatal Boeing crashes five years ago, he stresses that they were "were two different crashes," with the second happening only "after Boeing and the FAA issued emergency directives instructing pilots how to compensate for Boeing's poorly designed flight control software.
"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash. To boot, they committed an additional error by overspeeding the aircraft in defiance of aural, visual and stick-shaker warnings against doing so. It got almost no coverage, but on the same day the Ethiopian government issued its final findings on the accident in late 2022, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in what it called an "unusual step," issued its own "comment" rebuking the Ethiopian report for "inaccurate" statements, for ignoring the crew's role, for ignoring how readily the accident should have been avoided.
So the Wall Street Journal columnist challenges whether profit incentives played any role in Boeing's troubles: In reality, the global industry was reorganized largely along competitive profit-and-loss lines after the 1970s, and yet this coincided with enormous increases in safety, notwithstanding the sausage factory elements occasionally on display (witness the little-reported parking of hundreds of Airbus planes over a faulty new engine).
The point here isn't blame but to note that 100,000 repetitions likely wouldn't reproduce the flukish second MAX crash and everything that followed from it. Rather than surfacing Boeing's deeply hidden problems, it seems the second crash gave birth to them. The subsequent 20-month grounding and production shutdown, combined with Covid, cost Boeing thousands of skilled workers. The pressure of its duopoly competition with Airbus plus customers clamoring for their backordered planes made management unwisely desperate to restart production. January's nonfatal door-plug blowout of an Alaska Airlines 737 appears to have been a one-off when Boeing workers failed to reinstall the plug properly after removing it to fix faulty fuselage rivets. Not a one-off, apparently, are faulty rivets as Boeing has strained to hire new staff and resume production of half-finished planes.
Boeing will sort out its troubles eventually by applying the oldest of manufacturing insights: Training, repetition, standardization and careful documentation are the way to error-free complex manufacturing.
As he sees it, "The second MAX crash caught Boeing up in a disorienting global media and political storm that it didn't know how to handle and, indeed, has handled fairly badly."
Wall Street Journal ignoring the facts yet again (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Wall Street Journal ignoring the facts yet aga (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an updated version of events from your same source:
https://www.seattletimes.com/b... [seattletimes.com]
This is the first I've heard of this...
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Here's an updated version of events from your same source:
https://www.seattletimes.com/b... [seattletimes.com]
This is the first I've heard of this...
I'm curious: what is the "this" you're referring to?
Re: Wall Street Journal ignoring the facts yet ag (Score:4, Insightful)
That pilot error was ultimately the cause, even though MCAS was a major contributor. The previous reporting on this blamed the entire thing on MCAS and said the pilots were doing exactly as they were supposed to do. It turns out this is false, though evidently some people refuse to believe it. I quoted the most relevant bits earlier and somebody modded my post "overrated" because I guess both the NTSB and its French equivalent agreeing in this matter is too difficult for some ideologue to accept. Or they're a conspiracy tard. Or both.
Re: Wall Street Journal ignoring the facts yet ag (Score:5, Insightful)
That pilot error was ultimately the cause, even though MCAS was a major contributor.
Accidents don't have a single "ultimate" cause. It's called the Swiss cheese model [wikipedia.org]. There are lots of layers of safeguards meant to prevent accidents from happening. Accidents happen when every one of the layers manages to fail (the holes in the slices of cheese line up in just the wrong way). If any one of them had worked, the accident wouldn't have happened. If Boeing hadn't cut corners to avoid having to retrain pilots, if they'd designed the MCAS to use multiple sensors, if the one sensor it relied on hadn't failed, if the pilots had responded differently... Each of those was a slice of cheese that could have prevented the accident. It happened because all of them failed.
A corollary is that for every accident, there are a lot of "almost accidents" that get through several layers of safeguards but not all of them. When an accident happens, it isn't a fluke. With tens of thousands of flights every day, it's inevitable that things will sometimes fail. If you have enough safeguards and the safeguards are reliable enough, accidents will be very rare. Boeing built an unreliable system with too many potential failure points and too few safeguards.
The same applies to the door plug. It was not a one-off as the article says. It happened because Boeing had insufficient safeguards in place to prevent errors from happening and to catch them when they did happen. They had too few layers of cheese, and each layer had too many holes in it.
Re: Wall Street Journal ignoring the facts yet ag (Score:2)
Accidents don't have a single "ultimate" cause. It's called the Swiss cheese model. There are lots of layers of safeguards meant to prevent accidents from happening. Accidents happen when every one of the layers manages to fail (the holes in the slices of cheese line up in just the wrong way).
Sure, in cases where the pilot error mainly results from simple confusion. Though now and then you have pilots doing things they're really not supposed to be doing. E.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
So there are cases where you can say "the pilot really should have known better than to do that". Others may disagree, but I think flying by IFR when the instruments very clearly indicated not to should count as one of those times.
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At some point, claiming pilot error just doesn't cut it. It's like saying all you had to do was recite the Lord's Prayer backwards while hopping on one foot, rubbing your belly clockwise with your left hand and signing the preamble to the Constitution with your right hand. Do not under any circumstances press the button marked emergency.
They were being simultaneously warned that they were going too slow, going too fast, and they must not descend. The pilot correctly decided too fast and don't descend were t
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Ah, thank you.
I'm having difficulty following the ever-changing details of the story. It's interesting how one can lay blame depending on one's perspective. My view and opinion is: Boeing put in a secret tricky defective thing that made the plane's handling counterintuitive. It's been a few years but I remember many seasoned pilots being tested in the same scenario in flight simulators and they were not able to recover the aircraft, unless they had a lot of specific training, and fully understood the crazy
History of safety engineering (Score:2)
It's long been understood that if a plane sets a trap for a pilot, the solution is to eliminate the trap and not to say "pilot error".
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Re: Wall Street Journal ignoring the facts yet aga (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that stands out is the low flight time experience of the first officer: 207 hours in Boeing 737 and 361 hours total. I read aviation magazines a lot when I was young, and recall discussion that 200 hours was an especially vulnerable experience level for general aviation. That does not excuse the aircraft, but it seems likely that it was a factor.
I noticed that also. I have a private pilots license so know a little about flying. To fly a 737 Max one would need VFR, IFR, Muli-engine and Jet Ratings. And then your talking about just pure time flying and getting used to it. Based on the guy's hours, it meant that this guy got all those ratings and started flying a Hi Tech 737 jet with just around 150 hours of flight time. And flying jet aircraft is far different that flying a prop plane. It requires you to be more "ahead" of the airplane and how it is going to react. So I think that the co-pilot should have had MUCH more flight and experience before he ever got into the right hand seat of a 737.
150 hours = pencil-whipped qualifications.. (Score:2)
150 hours is nothing let alone sufficient time to competently perform all those ratings. That tells me the pilot cannot have been competent and somehow got rated anyway. Bribery or other corruption would be a reasonable explanation.
The US has its 1500 hour rule which is quite reasonable. Overseas rules are far more casual and the undeveloped world cannot be expected to care about safety.
Though the 1500 hour rule is blamed for the US pilot shortage the shortage is of course due to airlines not paying people
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Only the USA has the 1500 hour rule, as an answer to the Colgan Air crash. Except those 1500 hours of towing banner ads on a Cessna 152 don't really transfer to flying airliners and pilots elsewhere, like in Europe, do just fine with flying airliners right from the beginning.
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I believe in the US, airline transport pilots are required to have 1500 hours time ( along with other requirements) which gives them t
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One thing that stands out is the low flight time experience of the first officer: 207 hours in Boeing 737 and 361 hours total. I read aviation magazines a lot when I was young, and recall discussion that 200 hours was an especially vulnerable experience level for general aviation. That does not excuse the aircraft, but it seems likely that it was a factor.
WTF? In Overwatch if you have 200 hours on a single hero you are still considered a noob.
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Economic efficiency is TRUTH and that's better than facts.
We honor the heroes who gave their lives and their passengers' lives, to test the cost cutting measures valiantly proposed by Boeing in these troubled times! There is no need to devalue their heroism with your so-called "facts" and "analysis", you ghoul.
What kind of drivel is this? (Score:5, Interesting)
What has this "journalist" been drinking? It has widely been established that the "simple remedy" suggested by Boeing did not work in reality. You had to turn off the electronic trim control and then use a small manual crank that required a stupid amount of strength at flight speeds. Yes, it was even worse because they were still at the take-off full throttle when they realized and started cranking, but it's doubtful they'd have much better luck otherwise. The plane was a deathtrap despite the warnings by many engineers, all because of profit incentives. It's exactly the opposite of what the columnist asserts according to TFS. I obviously did not RTFA.
Re:What kind of drivel is this? (Score:5, Interesting)
What has this "journalist" been drinking? It has widely been established that the "simple remedy" suggested by Boeing did not work in reality. You had to turn off the electronic trim control and then use a small manual crank that required a stupid amount of strength at flight speeds. Yes, it was even worse because they were still at the take-off full throttle when they realized and started cranking, but it's doubtful they'd have much better luck otherwise. The plane was a deathtrap despite the warnings by many engineers, all because of profit incentives. It's exactly the opposite of what the columnist asserts according to TFS. I obviously did not RTFA.
Boeing's root problem is the ascendancy of bean counting MBAs causing hard-to-value things like safety being undervalued.
The WSJ journalist is fighting this narrative because the WSJ's core demographic is bean counting MBAs.
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The journalist's account is pretty questionable, but this "too many accountants" theory is dangerous.
Good engineering practice involves the design and implementation of procedures and systems that depend as little as possible on human performance. That's what Murphy's Law is about. That means airplane systems that don't depend on pilots reliably performing emergency maneuvers. It *also* means manufacturing, design and quality control procedures that don't depend on the headcount in the accounting department
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I wouldn't frame is as "too many accountants" as much as "putting bad accountants in charge".
The primary mission of Boeing should be to make safe airplanes, the role of accountants should be to enable the engineers to do so while keeping the company profitable.
Instead the accountants treated safety as just another margin to optimize, among other things, that means fewer, more junior, engineers doing review. It doesn't matter what the best practises are, without resources errors will accumulate.
Same thing wi
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This is what's dangerous. Fetishizing engineers is not a good thing. They're just as motivated by money as accountants and MBAs are. The CEO of Boeing during the MAX accidents WAS an engineer.
McDonnell Douglas, the exemplar of profit over safety, made planes with as good or better safety records as contemporary (so-called legendary) Boeing planes. Both of them made planes with much poorer safety records than those made today.
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This is what's dangerous. Fetishizing engineers is not a good thing. They're just as motivated by money as accountants and MBAs are. The CEO of Boeing during the MAX accidents WAS an engineer.
Having an engineer title doesn't mean you're prioritizing the engineering in your management role.
It's about the organizational philosophy, modern Boeing overemphasized profit to the extent that safety suffered.
McDonnell Douglas, the exemplar of profit over safety, made planes with as good or better safety records as contemporary (so-called legendary) Boeing planes. Both of them made planes with much poorer safety records than those made today.
I'd be shocked if older planes were safer, technology and experience should make modern planes far safer than those in the past. The question is if modern Boeing is achieving a realistic modern safety record, and they certainly aren't.
As for McDonnell Douglas vs old Boeing, when you're dealing with i
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Modern Boeing planes, excepting the MAX, have similar same safety records to other planes. The MAX has a poor safety record because it's a new plane with a small number of flights combined with a terrible engineering screwup.
Engineering is based on numbers, not legends and stories. Fixing engineering problems relies on numbers and procedures, not more stories, wishful thinking, and slavish devotion to favoured narratives that aren't supported by the evidence.
Re:What kind of drivel is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The journalist seems to be suckling at the corporate teat.
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Short bio: formal education in the field of journalism, 30 years of experience, professional awards, member of the editorial board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. He is very wrong in this case, though.
Or you can recognise immediately... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and do the corrective action straight away. It only took a few seconds delay for the situation to develop beyond what the simple remedy covered.
What I conclude happened - the stuck sensor caused a sudden stick shaker and stall warning, masking the sound of the trim actuating. The airplane felt out of trim, so the pilot applied trim manually, setting the badly programmed system up to push the plane way out of trim.
MCAS was programmed to only apply a little downward trim, but that reset if the pilot applied manual trim. So MCAS trimmed 3 down, pilot applies a bit of up trim, then pauses to see if he has done enough. MCAS puts in another 3 (really fast), the pilot trims up again, maybe 1. MCAS puts in another 3, etc. Soon you are way out of trim.
So all of this leads to a delay in identifying a trim system failure, and so a delay in applying the cut out switches, while the plane speed gets out of hand (Note, you are hoping they'll pull the throttles back while they are still hearing a stall warning!). Pilots overworked until the situation is beyond their training, and then you are relying their skills as test pilots.
So I read TFA... (Score:5, Informative)
And I'm confused about what the author is trying to say. The article half starts making a number of points, fails to explain any of them fully, and in a few places offers almost "click-bait" style insights, which it they then fail to substantiate.
Even the overall point that the air industry trends safer, which is probably true, is not well made.
So at the end I'm left with the author's half-started points on a number of lines saying "It wasn't all Boeing's fault" and the "press jumped to conclusions too quickly" with nothing that really substantiates either of those claims (even if they are likely true).
Boeing could have got away with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the second crash hadn't happened, Boeing could have got away with it. If the Ethiopian pilots had the good luck not to have been at a high throttle level when MCAS triggered, or had recognized it as a trim system failure abnormally quickly, Boeing could have created and pushed out a software update a few months later and saved their shareholders a heap of money.
This would have allowed them to continue on as they had before, which is preferable in this journalist's eyes.
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If the second crash hadn't happened, Boeing could have got away with it. If the Ethiopian pilots had the good luck not to have been at a high throttle level when MCAS triggered, or had recognized it as a trim system failure abnormally quickly, Boeing could have created and pushed out a software update a few months later and saved their shareholders a heap of money.
This would have allowed them to continue on as they had before, which is preferable in this journalist's eyes.
As it happened, Boeing pretty much has gotten away with it and we're likely going to require a 3rd fatal incident before anything will be done, I just hope it doesn't happen in a far off place so Boeing can try to blame the pilots again.
The thing about both crashes is that the pilots didn't know about MCAS, so it's unreasonable to assume they could compensate for it's malfunction. It's only after the fatal crashes that Boeing had to inform people. Ironically, the purpose of MCAS was to avoid Boeing havin
Safer (Score:5, Insightful)
...However, the part about airline flights trending to be safer with time is accurate. The crash rate is something like one in thirty million.
Re:Safer (Score:4, Interesting)
This is standard: first thing to do after a crash is always to blame the pilots.
Only in the media. Only in public. Back in private the industry is largely at the forefront of *not* blaming user error where the user is put in a bad position due to the equipment they are using. Which is why so much of our knowledge about Human Machine Interfaces and best practices thereof comes from the airline industry.
Or at least they were.
That said I've experienced the opposite. I've seen OSHA investigate a fatal accident which was very obviously the result of an absolute fucking moron getting a Darwin award, and yet the company in question blaming various systems and processes (which were unrelated to the incident) specifically to put on a good face in public and *not* try and blame the victim in the media.
It's increasingly difficult to relate public statements to internal company / industry actions these days. It's all about looks, whether you want to not blame victims, or whether you want to not look bad to your shareholders.
My understanding (Score:2)
Was that when MCAS sent the nose down, that was what resulted in overspeeding that put so much pressure on the stabilator that prevented a recovery. Though that came from a Netflix documentary. And it seems it's wrong:
After takeoff, Flight ET302 was in the air for just 6 minutes before slamming into the earth. The BEA narrative lays out how the pilotsâ(TM) lack of control began during the first 2 minutes of the flight, before MCAS activated.
Upon liftoff, a key sensor on the left side of the fuselage failed. It measured the jetâ(TM)s angle of attack â" the angle between the wing and the oncoming air, a data point that the flight computer uses to calculate speed and altitude.
The false angle of attack reading immediately initiated a âoestick shakerâ warning, a loud, heavy vibration of the control column, falsely alerting the pilots that the plane was flying too slowly and was about to stall.
It also prompted messages on the primary flight displays indicating to the pilots their speed and altitude readings were now unreliable.
Pilots are supposed to memorize the response to an âoeAirspeed Unreliableâ message: Disengage the automatic systems that control flight position and speed, and fly manually.
The captain did not. The cockpit voice recording contains no exchange between the pilots recognizing the airspeed as an issue.
The BEA noted that âoecommunication between the captain and the First Officer [was] very limited and insufficient. ⦠The situational awareness, problem-solving and decision-making were therefore deeply impacted.â
The autopilot, fooled by the faulty sensor into believing the plane was moving too slowly, commanded the planeâ(TM)s nose down to gather speed.
Meanwhile the autothrottle was stuck at full takeoff thrust. Soon the jet was moving much too fast, beyond its maximum design speed.
That a single faulty sensor led the flight computer to such a drastic misunderstanding of the airplaneâ(TM)s situation even before MCAS activated is âoea design issue,â said Guzzetti.
But still, he said, itâ(TM)s crucial that pilots monitor their airspeed, and this crew missed multiple clues that they were moving too fast, not too slow.
At this point, the captain pulled the nose back up, but didnâ(TM)t reduce the engine thrust to moderate the speed. When MCAS kicked in, this would prove fatal.
The first officer, who should have been helping the captain figure out what was going on, had only 361 hours of total flying experience. He appeared âoeoverwhelmed by the events on board from the moment the stick shaker triggered,â the BEA said.
The NTSB and BEA criticize the Ethiopian report for removing key parts of the cockpit voice recorder transcript that would have made clear âoethe difficulties encountered by the first officerâ in reacting to the emergency.
https://www.seattletimes.com/b... [seattletimes.com]
Interesting that Airbus had a similar grounding incident about a safety issue and the media never really said anything about it when it happened.
Boeing is bad... (Score:5, Informative)
Boeing has a light that indicated when the TCAS system engaged, they CHARGE money for this light, so most airlines did not buy that option. You can you instantly see where profits outweighed saftey risks. The FAA could have stopped this as well, and failed, as usual. The engine placement on these planes cause the nose to point down more often, and this system kicks in to auto correct. Without the light, the pilot has to KNOW what's going on as the plane auto corrects. With a light, they'd see the plane was auto correcting. It was corportae greed on Boeing's side for providing such a saftely feature as an option, the FAA should have never allowed it, and airline industry trying to weasel every cent they can that caused both accidents. Strangely, Trump did ground these planes against the wishes of the FAA (like him or not, that was a good move by Trump).
The rest of this article is just drivel, and I would like ot see if this author doesn't invest in Boeing or something, because it's horribly written.
Re:Boeing is bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounded odd to me too, but rather than issue a knee-jerk response like this, I looked into it. It seems the Ethiopian Airlines crash was indeed the result of pilot error that began before MCAS had even engaged. Bad sensor, yes, though due to a bird strike rather than manufacturer defect. Either way, the pilots had been warned that the readings were inconsistent and the instrumentation was not to not be trusted. Rather than using VFR it seems they decided to accelerate and nose down based on a stick shaker warning. MCAS kicked in and they disconnected it, but by this time they were already in an irrecoverable nosedive. Irrecoverable due to the stabilator experiencing so much pressure due to high speed that they could no longer pull up -- a situation they should never have allowed themselves to get into at all. It seems multiple investigative bodies from multiple countries were in agreement with this, except for the Ethiopian government, and for whatever reason the media ignored all of that and only took their version of events.
Nevertheless, apparently Boeing accepted full responsibility anyways even though they had already known better by this point. Yes, they produced a faulty product, but no, that's not what caused this accident. My guess is they just weren't interested in fighting that battle, probably because the court of public opinion always does some of the most weird ass shit, e.g. https://news.yahoo.com/cnn-set... [yahoo.com]
None of this is new either, apparently this got out to the media quite a while ago, but it was more back-page news rather than being on every cable network and every newspaper headline like the original story. This is fairly typical of the media, they like to make a lot of noise about scandals but they don't like to make any noise about the fact that they love to rush to judgement and very often get it horribly wrong.
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The error before MCAS activated was that the autopilot nosed the plane down due to relying on a single malfunctioning sensor, and they were simultaneously warned that the plane was flying too fast and that the plane was flying too slow. The apparent existence of two opposing warning conditions should have disengaged any automatic actions of any kind as the system was clearly hopelessly confused.
Re:Boeing is bad... (Score:5, Informative)
This article fails to mention so much, and blames the pilot(s), which is so seriously wrong and pro-boeing it makes me wanna puke. Boeing has a light that indicated when the TCAS system engaged, they CHARGE money for this light, so most airlines did not buy that option. You can you instantly see where profits outweighed saftey risks. The FAA could have stopped this as well, and failed, as usual.
According to final report from Lion air crash it was even worse. There are two different things related to AoA. First one is indicator and which is a small dial-like indicator in top right part of primary flight display and simply shows current angle of attack. It is a paid add-on and most airlines don’t want it not because of pretty negligible cost, but because it is not very useful and clutters PFD. So this part was not a safety issue. The second thing is AoA disagree warning which tells pilots that bad shit is going on because two AoA sensors are out of whack. If this worked on Lion Air, the maintenance would probably catch the actual problem before the fatal flight. This warning should be always active, however Boeing fucked up the software and it the warning would never work unless AoA indicator was displaying. And that was the big safety issue.
Social media is making the world crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
Murder rates have been reducing over the decades. Yet most people thing the world is more dangerous.
Life expectancy (though fluctuating recently) has been increasing too. For example, before the year 2000, not a single US president lived past age 92. Now four have (Reagan, Ford, Jimmy Carter, GWH Bush).
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Murder rates have been reducing over the decades. Yet most people thing the world is more dangerous.
Life expectancy (though fluctuating recently) has been increasing too. For example, before the year 2000, not a single US president lived past age 92. Now four have (Reagan, Ford, Jimmy Carter, GWH Bush).
I wouldn't blame social media... People will complain and whine but still get on that cheap Ryanair flight without thinking about aviation safety because someone else has done the hard thinking for them.
The premise of the article is right, despite their reasoning being "bass-akwards" as the Americans say. Modern commercial aviation is insanely safe, but it's insanely safe despite the 737-MAX, not because of it. Airlines, pilots, regulators and dozens of other organisations the world over maintain a cultu
Should Never have been tested (Score:2)
I wrote a rant, but then deleted it.
This system should never have made it out of testing. The end. In fact, it should probably never even have made it into the test cycle into the first place.
Shoot this guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Reputation easy to break, very hard to fix (Score:5, Insightful)
Detroit never recovered from its reputation of making unreliable cars in the 70's and 80's, and now sells few sedans. Special tariffs protect them from more SUV competition. Ford busted their butt to improve sedan quality since the 90's, eventually equaling Japan's, but equal wasn't good enough, they'd have to exceed Japan's quality for several years to counter all the bad memories of jalopies Found On Road Dead (FORD).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I drove an F150 recently. It drove like a boat and was crappy in many ways. Half the dash controls were defective.
I drove an old Toyota Tacoma recently. It was pleasant to drive and had remained reliable for many years.
I don't think current day Ford has caught up with latter day Japan on vehicle quality. At least not from my very recent experience of 2 vehicles.
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I was mostly talking about sedans. Ford realized they had to improve the quality of their sedans or get their butts kicked out of the market.
There is less pressure on SUV's to have quality for some reason. I have theories, but I judge them too weak to give here.
Re: Reputation easy to break, very hard to fix (Score:2)
As far as I understand, there are some protective tariffs on trucks, which lead to higher margins. It's called the "chicken tax", because it was originally introduced in retaliation against European tariffs on chickens.
cognitive load (Score:4, Insightful)
this kind of white washing is pretty dumb to put on slashdot. A lot of programmers on this site, meaning a lot of people who know that when you increase cognitive load you get crashes of all kinds... what is this crap?
Of course it's dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot is often an ongoing insult to readers and the editors choose to make it so. For whatever reason fecalizing a once influential site has become their mission, executed as lazily as practical. It's as if they resent the power and glory which once resided here.
Why would a WSJ article have anything intelligent to offer regarding aviation? Of course it was shit. It was obviously shit. It got posted anyway and this is far from the last time.
Self serving corporate BS .. (Score:4, Interesting)
What about Boeing forging FAA safety tests and knowingly installing defective parts?
Boeing Charged with 737 Max Fraud Conspiracy and Agrees to Pay over $2.5 Billion [reuters.com]
FAA seeks $3.9 million fine from Boeing for defective parts on 737 NG planes [justice.gov]
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Not just installing defective parts, but retaliating against the employee who reported it. Everything points to a decomposed culture, not a one-off or routinely fixable thing.
Yay! Lets blame the pilots .... (Score:5, Interesting)
"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash.
The point is not so much that the second crash was avoidable, the real point is that the first crash was entirely avoidable. If Boeing had connected two AoA sensors to the MCAS system so it could figure out when one of the AoA sensors broke down and issue a warning or react in some other way (Airbus uses triple redundancy) those pilots wouldn't have had to master yet another 'simple remedy' for something that greedy and incompetent executives at Boeing screwed up. On top of that the AoA Disagree message was 'unintentionally disabled' and the AoA DISAGREE display on the pilots displays that the (defective) MCAS software relied on was a 'paid optional extra' which quite a lot of airlines did not pick up on because including one was considered a no brainer. They can blame the pilots as much as they want. After all, the pilots are not here to defend themselves so they are easy targets and I suppose blaming them is good business strategy, but in the end it was still Boeing management that made the conscious choice have the MCAS built with a single point of failure by an inexperienced contractor purely out of geed. In an industry where redundancy in everything is a basic requirement, quality is king and you stand and fall with your safety reputation, all of Boeings fuckups in this sorry story are basically unforgivable.
Re:Yay! Lets blame the pilots .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Boeing made a plane with a surprising failure mode and did tell nobody. That is at the very least criminally negligent manslaughter on mass-scale. Then they told people something, but not the whole story and did not fix the surprising failure mode. I think that needs an upgrade to plain manslaughter. Again, on mass-scale.
Re: Yay! Lets blame the pilots .... (Score:3, Informative)
It was entirely avoidable because Boeing never should have put MCAS on the plane in the first place. The max wouldn't have been dangerous to fly without it, it would just handle differently than the earlier 373s. Which would mean a bit of pilot training.
Re: Yay! Lets blame the pilots .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Yay! Lets blame the pilots .... (Score:5, Insightful)
The 737MAX should have gone through a new type certification which would then require pilot retraining for new aircraft type. Still hasn't happened yet the planes are still flying. The unwritten story is how Boeing was captured by their customer Southwest. Boeing made the plane fit into prior 737 pilot training, to save Southwest training costs.
It is basically a story of hubris, apathy and greed. All of this happened because Boeing had three options to solve the 737 MAX engine problem. The first and best one was to just watch what Airbus was doing with their line of similar aircraft and replace the 737 in a timely fashion with a newer more modern design. This excellent solution was deemed too hurtful to profits in the estimation of Boeing corporate leadership, plus, it would have demanded a degree of competence and initiative on their part that was just ... too much work. Second possible option, was to somehow lengthen the landing gear on the 737 to allow it to handle the bigger engines seamlessly. I'm not sure what the technical hurdles were there it would have required either redesigning the fuselage structure or use some kind of telescoping landing gear that fit into the existing smaller gear wells. However, even if this was a solvable problem it was likely judged unacceptable profit wise by Boeing corporate leadership. This is also an inferior option to just not falling asleep at the wheel, biting the bullet and designing a new more modern aircraft in a timely manner. The third and final option was to just stick the new engines on the 737 as is, change the handling characteristics, which was not popular with customers, but then eliminate that pesky handling problem with an MCAS system. This was not necessarily a bad idea (mind you, rewiring the 737 MAX to be completely fly-by-wire would have been far, far better but ... profits). Unfortunately Boeing corporate leadership chose to have the MCAS designed and coded up by the lowest bidder and with total disregard for that contractor's experience and competence. You see, normally you don't pick the lowest bidder, you choose the lowest competent bidder that submits an economically realistic bid because anything else tends to end badly for you and your company. However, since 'Profit, profit über alles ...' seems to be Boeing's motto these days, the choice fell on option No. 3 and they went with the lowest bidder with no regard to anything but the number on the bid. I would be tempted to suspect that Boeing corporate leadership are a bunch of Ferengi genetically modified to look like humans in order to blend in on this backwater planet but Ferengi, for all their greed, are at least capable of thinking more than one step ahead.
Re: (Score:2)
"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash.
The point is not so much that the second crash was avoidable, the real point is that the first crash was entirely avoidable. If Boeing had connected two AoA sensors to the MCAS system so it could figure out when one of the AoA sensors broke down and issue a warning or react in some other way (Airbus uses triple redundancy) those pilots wouldn't have had to master yet another 'simple remedy' for something that greedy and incompetent executives at Boeing screwed up. On top of that the AoA Disagree message was 'unintentionally disabled' and the AoA DISAGREE display on the pilots displays that the (defective) MCAS software relied on was a 'paid optional extra' which quite a lot of airlines did not pick up on because including one was considered a no brainer. They can blame the pilots as much as they want. After all, the pilots are not here to defend themselves so they are easy targets and I suppose blaming them is good business strategy, but in the end it was still Boeing management that made the conscious choice have the MCAS built with a single point of failure by an inexperienced contractor purely out of geed. In an industry where redundancy in everything is a basic requirement, quality is king and you stand and fall with your safety reputation, all of Boeings fuckups in this sorry story are basically unforgivable.
I read about the "paid optional extra" somewhere in the past but I can't find it anywhere now
When Boeing was good (Score:3)
A single point of failure would have been unthinkable.
The black box I worked on was only important enough to turn on a yellow light if it failed, and it ran the same algorithms in parallel on two processors with inputs inverted and logic DeMorganized, and it had a backup, and IIRC it could listen to more than one bus for air data.
Re: (Score:2)
What part are you having trouble with?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I hope you understand "parallel" and "bus".
Re: (Score:2)
You can't blame MCAS on Boeing executives. It was an engineering error. A non-critical system ported over from the 767 tanker version got revised into a critical system without being reclassified as such. That's why it wasn't triple redundant.
You do not want the safety of the airplane you're flying on, or the bridge you're driving over, to be dependent on who's sitting in which corner office.
EditorDavid being lazy as usual.. (Score:5, Informative)
How about posting aviation articles by and for professionals instead of this tripe?
The author cups Boeing nut hard enough to leave bruises:
"Boeing will sort out its troubles eventually by applying the oldest of manufacturing insights: Training, repetition, standardization and careful documentation are the way to error-free complex manufacturing."
Re: (Score:2)
Every one of which currently appears to be beyond Boeing's reach.
This reads like propaganda (Score:3, Informative)
This guy is probably stupid _and_ in Boeing's pocket.
who is the editor at WSJ? a muppet? (Score:2)
safety trends up, so let's give them (boeing in this case) a pass for poor decisions, poor design, knowing it (737 max) is unsafe and still deploying, telling customers you don't need to re-train pilots, providing a piss poor solution to identified problem that has killed hundreds... having multiple people come and publicaly say the leadership is failing in safety and design... multiple further design problems come to light... poor mntc and QA controls leading to a door falling off a plane mid flight, multi
Re: (Score:3)
Single AoA sensor probably biggest screwup (Score:2)
I don't think computer augmented flight controls are unusual, but taking input from only one AOA sensor makes no sense to me.
This plane is designed by monkeys... (Score:2)
.. who are supervised by clowns ... whose reputation is now being restored by this Wall Street Journalist
Boing doesn't care about safety (Score:2)
Wait till you realize Boeing doesn't care about safety, the only thing they care about is the next share holding meeting.
Everyone is bailing as soon as they can.
If you own Boeing stocks in 6 months (Score:2)
If you own Boeing stocks in 6 months you'll be held legally responsible for every single air crash.
did Boeing management pay for this puff piece? (Score:2)
This conveniently ignores a plethora of other indicators that Boeing's famous safety culture went out the window as its old management was replaced by the McDonnell Douglas management team.
Old Boeing probably would not have attempted to put the 787 into production with a new type of battery that sometimes bursts into flames... and then when they did it, refuse freely-offered help from the team most-experienced with that new tech (Musk's Tesla folks) and instead implement the hack of putting the battery into
The canary (Score:1)
Cost cutting kills customers. 'Nuff Said. (Score:2)
About Safety and Risk (Score:2)
I've developed aircraft sensors and cockpit instrumentation, and taken them through testing to FAA certification. From start to finish, one of our guiding lights was to have a painless (but far from effortless!) path to FAA certification. Our internal processes, especially concerning documentation, testing and analysis, were absolutely central to that goal. Our internal joke was we were "a testing and certification company that happened to make aircraft instrumentation". Our CEO actually liked this moniker,