FAA pushes back on Boeing exemption for 787 safety flaw
flightglobal.com
flightglobal.com
We are talking about a known bug that could lead to deaths.
This isn't some critical military aircraft or a cargo plane that without which food and goods can't be transported. The only "harm" will be to shareholders.
People are more important than profits.
If the RR engine is failing prematurely then there's also an argument the be made for switching to the GE engine because the maintenance costs are going to be passed on to the passengers in the form of higher prices.
They switched to php now?
However, thanks to how the industry is regulated, Boeing don't take chances if there is a risk to passenger safety. In this case, the likelihood of a single engine shutdown due to this elusive bug + the failure of the automatic restart system + the failure of the manual restart procedures, _combined with the fact that all commercial aircraft needs to be able to operate with only one of the engines_, makes Boeing ask for the exemption.
The FAA, on their part, is 100% right in demanding that Boeing show their work and is unlikely to grant such an exemption unless the risk is calculated to be negligible.
e.g. volcanic ash is also an environmental trigger. But it is likely to certain to cause engine failure. No amount of ash is acceptable, but there is a density at which engine failure will happen quickly, and it's going to affect all engines at pretty much the same time. So in this extreme case, certain probability of engine failure in the triggering conditions means you have no redundancy with additional engines.
Whereas the problem sounds more variable and complex. Probably is low, therefore additional engines does provide redundancy just not as much redundancy as being in non-triggering conditions. Decent chance there's enough time to find another altitude to avoid additional failures.
How is it that they can't pass those on to GE? You'd have to figure that if you've got your own SLA, you'd want an SLA on upstream providers.
That's not very reassuring to me. The article is light on details, but this bug is apparently triggered "during a step climb to a higher altitude in ice crystal icing conditions." The fact that the plane can operate one one engine doesn't do much good if both engines fail due to the same bug because they're experiencing the same conditions at the same time.
looks like the bug is know but they plan to deploy a fix to the airliner after it enters production, for reason unknown to me (likely having to restart some certifications?)
"The root cause of this event is the fact that ICI [ice crystal icing] accommodation logic, as it’s currently certified, is suspended with the application of climb power"
That's not absolutely true. People lives have a value, around $10M for US transport. It means that if the cost of potentially saving one human life is more than $10M, it isn't worth it, as in, there are more important things to do with that money, including improving safety in other areas.
Now profits are important too. Companies need money. That's how they pay their employees, do R&D, stuff like that. If they don't make money, employees will get fired, and they won't be able to develop new, better and potentially safer planes. For airlines, they may be forced to make tickets more expensive or lower their standards to compensate for the costs of planes that don't fly. Talking about shareholders, you may be a shareholder too if your savings include Boeing stocks. Less profits has an avalanche of undesirable effects. Some of them affect the 1% but the majority of it make things slightly worse for the 99%.
You could make it a reasonable binary if you define unsafe as "has known bugs that could lead to deaths", which is what the top comment was doing. Not sure if any already-in-use planes satisfy that criterion though.
I wouldn't include that since it wouldn't be useful. In any case it clearly wasn't included in whatever definition the top commenter intended.
But when the bug is known to be hit only is astronomically slim scenarios, they don’t rework the entire stack to eliminate it because, well perhaps it is more likely to cause more harm than good?
"unaccepted by users" is circular in this particular discussion, because it started with trying to tease out whether a rare* safety* risk was "acceptable."
* All these debatable words tell me GuB-42's comment is taking the right approach.
That money cannot be spent elsewhere to save lives by Boeing in an area that is regulated by the FAA at the FAA's instruction.
So, yes, $10 million could be spent on education to prevent people making the argument that $10 million could be better spent on letting people be killed, thereby saving countless lives. But that's not what the question is here, and to pretend that it is represents a deeply bogus rhetorical move.
We are not arguing that money spent on wars are wasted and that same money should be better spent on lowering heart disease, we are talking purely about increasing profit.
In order to save more lives that can be saved more cheaply, yes.
These are lives you’re talking about here, kids, kids that happen to be currently sharing the same planet as you. Human beings are not figures on a balance sheet, and I lament anyone’s soul that would dispute me on that point. The pillars of this community sit on billions and get hospitals named after them, but some brown kids in a cave are a theoretical exercise to think about economics? They have memories. Families. Hopes. Should we debate your worth? What’s the figure where you are no longer considered worthwhile?
If I can’t meet you on something as fundamental as every life is worth saving, we simply aren’t having the same conversation, and I’ll be honest, your side gives me pause. And I see it far too often among people here who simply consider themselves pragmatic. Many throughout history have convinced themselves of their pragmatism, and we have all paid for it for centuries.
What unfortunate times to live in where the scions of high tech debate the value of individual lives in a far flung part of the world. This thread should disgust.
The issue is really not as simple as you describe. Of course every life is worth saving, especially the lives of children. However, given a finite set of resources, would you rather save more or fewer children? The amount of money that goes into a long shot at saving a child with terminal cancer in the US would provide clean water and mosquito nets for many children in sub-Saharan Africa.
Am I saying that we should enforce this reallocation of resources? No. But I am saying that it is complicated.
But people love a spectacle. And heroics. So we just have to figure out how to make mosquito netting seem spectacularly heroic...
Why weren't you asking the Thai military to divert its resources to mosquito netting programs last week?
No the truth is more grim, we will save people until it costs more than we are willing to spend. Over time that threshold has increased with our wealth - but it remains in place as it must. Most people don't consciously think about it and it's upsetting to many.
Advocates of effective altruism argue that the best of us do this, and that if we all did this, it wouldn't take all of our time.
For people who deal with this professionally the quota is defined monetarily. For the average person its an unconscious decision. But in all cases the amount of resources allocated to helping is not defined directly by the demand.
I'm not sure how to determine what "effective altruism" is arguing, but prominent EA advocates like Will MacAskill and Peter Singer are absolutely concerned with increasing the amount of money allocated to helping people. The conclusion of Singer's most famous argument is that we have a moral imperative to donate most of our money to saving the most lives. Even personally, both live modestly and donate most of their income.
Till it’s your life.
According to Wikipedia people value one micromort of their own life at around $50 (inferred by how much they want to pay for safety features). So if I am average, I would probably value my life at around $50M, so yeah, you are right, though maybe not in the way you intended.
Still, it is difficult to make sense of comparisons between our own perception of the value of life and how much we actually value it based on our actions. The expenses on safety when chances of death are low is only one aspect.
Also, the page on Microlife is great. Wish it was longer!
I think you misread. It's 2.6 and 6.2 (in millions of USD)
You might also find that it's not so weird in that this valuation is not general but specific to road improvements.
It could be explained by the relative prevalance of road fatalities, which would skew the relative political importance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Note that traffic fatalities per 100k of population are 2.9 for the UK and 10.6 for the US.
Not that I'm qualified to answer whether or not that's the case here, but it's arguably something the FAA would need to consider.
If unlimited safety improvements are required without regard to cost, it could drive the cost of the aircraft so high that airlines can't afford to upgrade, so they keep their older fleet in service for longer. Which works for a while, but airframes do age and need to be retired.
Boeing has an issue in their planes that the A350 doesn't have. So if the price of 787's goes up because it needs to go from unsafe to safe, then airlines can buy A350s instead.
In this case, the problem is with the engine, not with the plane, and the alternative engine is already approved and in service.
Mostly people don't do safety comparisons of different planes when booking trips overseas and, TBH, pushing that sort of investigation off on consumers creates huge inefficiencies in our economy. It's simply better for the government to hold all options to a certain safety level then try and rely on market forces to balance it out.
Wow, I'd have a variety of responses to this remarkable post.
Obviously, safety regulations should allow for the profitable production of planes and they clearly do, the rest should be up to the plane manufacturer. Now, profits as such aren't what creates jobs as such. Rather it's the productive use of capital - a patent troll making a mint creates zero jobs for example. Now, if a particular form of investment doesn't create jobs one place, it should be able to create them elsewhere. Guaranteeing profits in one sector has many pernicious effects, often including a lack of job growth rather than the reverse.
Just as much, the profit/safety equation is more complex than "more profits, more safety spending" (to say the least). For example, if safety regulations can always be ignored for profits, plane manufacturers will build less safe planes over time.
Finally, a management which responds to not being able to produce a new, unsafe design by making their present line of planes unsafe by "lowering standard" should be looking at jail time.
Would you fly on an airplane that had a reputation for crashing? Me neither. Crashing airplanes is very, very bad for profits.
Would you bet your life that reputation alone was enough to keep an airliner from crashing? We know right now airlines shave every possible extra cost to achieve the lowest prices because passengers are very price sensitive.
Even more, right now a lot of people don't know they're flying on any number of regional airlines, some of which may have terrible reputations when they fly "United express" [1]. Consider that one of those airlines beating a passenger to get them off the plane didn't change the situation.
Of course, now we have safety standards rather than just reputation preventing crashes, which seems like the appropriate thing.
Please review the history of the DeHavilland Comet and the Lockheed Electra for what happened when an airliner acquired a reputation for being unsafe.
Back in the 2000s, a manager uttered the words "torture flights" in a private corporate meeting. Within days his words were leaked to the populist press by rivals within the bureaucracy.
Boeing higher-ups dealt with the ensuing firestorm by disposing of the truth-teller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_v._Jeppesen_Dataplan,_....
But I wanted to add that your post very much reminds me of something Jean-Baptiste Zorg [1] from The Fifth Element would say [2].
I think people's take on that depends on (a) whose lives, (b) how much profit, and (c) to whom they may or may not be more important.
Taken as an overriding principle, then we wouldn't have airplanes at all. Or cars. Or food. Or pretty much anything.
(See https://www.popsci.com/why-air-travel-became-so-incredibly-s...)
All of that said, the modern generation of engines are so complex to hit their efficency windows, it's majorly impacting airlines. The A320-NEO engines by Pratt & Whitney have huge problems that have significantly impacted airlines and carriers, while GE is struggling with this problem.
All of these are engineering problems, with a complex trade-off between efficiency (fuel), safety and cost.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rolls-royce-hldg-trent100...
Basically, the compressor is not lasting near as long as expected, and, since it's a safety-critical part, airplanes are spending a lot of time on the ground awaiting expensive inspections and repairs that weren't in anyone's maintenance schedule.
>The experience with General Electric Engines, which had experienced perhaps two shut downs on the Boeing 767s in over 20 years, had given the airline a sense of security so that the shut down of one engine did not cause any pressure, the probability of the failure of the second engine was rated minimal.
>Rolls Royce on the other hand had taught the airline however, that this was not true. From RR bulletins it is clear that the shut down of one engine dramatically increases the likelihood of the other engine failing. This forces us to revise our approach to ETOPS.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/one-s...
The equivalent product for the A320NEO/737 Max is called the Leap 1A/1B. It's doing better than many of the new generation of jet engines, but it also has a flaw that requires a certain part to be replaced on all ~500 or so in-service engines.
For example Rolls Royce does "power by the hour" where the airline is essentially paying rent on the engine while it is in use. That means Rolls takes care of the maintenance etc (all rolled into the per hour price). There are far fewer Rolls locations that can do that work. Then suddenly a lot of maintenance work needs to be done, and planes have to wait.
For those interested in aviation, I recommend following leehamnews[1]. The industry is very similar to what is faced in the software industry but over far larger timescales. eg airframe manufacturers have constant streams of improvements, but have to work out if and how to charge for them, how to do deal with existing aircraft of the same model without them ("backwards compatibility"), and the constant spending money to make money. You even see second system effects (arguably the birth of the 787 was just that financially, manufacturing and technically).
You can tell some of my customers are in aircraft engine manufacturing.
The whole point of JIT is to take control of the dynamic effects so it's a bit ironic.
I don't envy whoever is responsible for shipping these on time.
This seems kinda weird though to authorize for a commercial passenger craft? I'm curious, why would they authorize such a thing?
> Boeing said on 4 March that GE’s fix for the shutdown problem is included in a broad software update called “B200”, and it’s not scheduled for delivery until December 2019. But GE has told FlightGlobal and the FAA that the B200 software update will be ready by the first quarter of 2019.
Edit: I gave you an upvote since this is an area that people should try to learn more about.
IIRC, SQLite is flight certified...which means that they have to show that every machine code branch is tested by their test suite [1]. This stuff is not developed with the same lax processes as "move fast and break things" web apps.
[1] From some Youtube talk by one of the lead SQLite developers.
Article is a month old, response was due to FAA already but I can't find it anywhere.
Here's a direct link to the "Record of Discussion": https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=FAA-2...
Unfortunately it doesn't really add any new information.
For those that are interested, here is the FAA's entry in the Federal Register from Boeing's Petition for Exemption: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/03/23/2018-05...
The documents related to that Petition for Exemption can be found on Regulations.gov by searching for Docket ID FAA-2018-0186 https://www.regulations.gov/searchResults?rpp=25&po=0&s=FAA-...
They can ask for engineering data, but that can fudged. Asking them to bet the company on it is a much surer bet, imho.