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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to get a little meta here.

After the crash, reading the online comments about it (and the things said about Lion Air and the pilots) was pretty interesting given how things have turned out. It is also interesting how much play the initial discussion received relative to the follow up stories about the safety bulletin and now criticism from within the industry.

And when we finally do get an article on the safety issue, the top comment is focused on the pilot's supposed issues instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18409041

Or trying to continue to blame Lion Air:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18408540

I guess what I am saying is; there seems to be a deep unwillingness to criticize Boeing. This isn't recent or specific to this accident, Boeing is a very challenging topic to discuss without people getting tribal. Why is that?

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I think there's plenty of will to criticize Boeing itself on this board - just mention things like ULA, or weapons manufacturing (erm, Boeing Defense). Just in this case, the default position is to look for a fault in the airline with a known bad record - passenger planes, be it Boeing or Airbus, and 737 in particular, are incredibly well-tested and used without incidents all around the world. If it was Airbus A320 that crashed, I think people would still first ask if the issue really wasn't caused by Lion mishandling maintenance.

> I guess what I am saying is; there seems to be a deep unwillingness to criticize Boeing. This isn't recent or specific to this accident, Boeing is a very challenging topic to discuss without people getting tribal. Why is that?

Boeing is a large employer in the United States, people will get defensive when it threatens their livelihood. That said, as evidenced by the internal AA email Boeing fucked up. Rational or not I'm not planning on setting foot on a MAX anytime soon (and was fully prepared to get a refund if Southwest were to sub a MAX on my last flight).

But... you've also got the Indonesian aviation industry to contend with. Indonesian air travel is notoriously unsafe and in fact all Indonesian airlines were banned from EU airspace for a while. Lion Air, as well, stands out as being less safe than the Indonesian average.

Here's an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-alq0iuujOE

Watch the second landing. I'm not a pilot but I'm pretty sure that the pilot not flying is NOT supposed to adjust the control surfaces in an unannounced manner. Likewise I'm pretty sure you're supposed to arm the speed brakes BEFORE you touch down. Shit like that is why people pile onto Lion Air (and Indonesian airlines).

I think non-engineering issues were a focus in the Lion Air crash because of how poor Lion Air’s safety history has been, which included the egregious decision the allow its plane to continue flying despite sensor errors in its previous flights.

> egregious decision the allow its plane to continue flying despite sensor errors in its previous flights.

They fixed the previous issue[0]. Why is flying a fixed aircraft after following Boeing's own procedures to fix it a "egregious decision?"

[0] https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/indonesia-plane-...

There may be some semantics here. They "resolved" the issue, which I think can involve merely documenting that it is known.

How can it be fixed when the plane crashed?

> They fixed the previous issue[0]. Why is flying a fixed aircraft after following Boeing's own procedures to fix it a "egregious decision?"

The New York Times accused Lion Air of falsifying maintenance records.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/world/asia/indonesia-plan...

> Pilots and former safety regulators said that Lion Air flight and maintenance crews regularly filled out two log books, one real and one fake, to hide malfeasance.

The story you posted is from Oct. 29. Since then, it has been reported that the airspeed indicator was malfunctioning in its final 4 flights:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/world/asia/lion-air-crash...

We are speaking about a brand new plane delivered in August that crashed after two months. Even if you really wanted to blame lion air, do you think is acceptable for a new plane to self destruct after two months for a bug? I think is not acceptable and I will never fly a 737 max. These airplanes should all be grounded now until a fix is in place.

Good point. Aviation in Indonesia operates in a particularly challenging environment (many islands, short hops, inclement weather, problematic infrastructure, institutional culture with massive corruption and shortcuts, pervasive poverty). Given that background, I think commercial aviation there is amazingly successful and safe, by and large.

On the other hand, Lion Air does have a bad reputation even in Indonesia, and I suspect not without reason. So some speculation in that regard was to be expected. What's a shame is that some commentators pinned it on Lion Air without waiting for the full picture to emerge, and it seems Boeing screwed up, here.

But I don't think Boeing specifically is sacrosanct here; the discussion would have been much the same if it had been an Airbus.

FWIW, I've suggested to my Indonesian friend (who's just been to the funeral of one of the victims) to avoid both Lion Air and Boeing 737-8, -9 MAX for now.

I know little about aviation nor this incident, but the pilot never once radioed panpan let alone mayday despite having the time to do so.

This is very unusual.

For anyone interested the best sources of knowledgeable commentary is ppprune and avherald. Every other site is armchair speculation.

I have a feeling you don’t understand what angle of attack is, or how quickly you die when the sensors + autopilot conspire against you on this metric.

Sensors fail all the time, everything can be turned off. There's a half dozen ways to determine AoA and apparently the previous flight did exactly that, turn off the faulty sensor.

Aviate, Navigate, Communicate in that order

If you can't Aviate you don't do the other 2

It's a little unusual, but not extremely. There's both the instruction to "aviate, navigate, communicate" -- in that order -- and the fact that when you are "task-saturated" you often straight up fail to hear people talking to you.

If you believed your airplane was at imminent risk of a stall, it would be deeply negligent to spend mental cycles talking to ATC instead of fixing it. ATC exists to sequence traffic; they can't fly your plane for you.

The pilot negotiated turning around and returning to the airport with ATC, which takes more effort than a distress call.

The previous flight which suffered the same problems called in a PanPan before resolving the faulty sensor issue.

Reports are also saying that this fault was noted on the last 4 flights.

> but the pilot never once radioed panpan let alone mayday despite having the time to do so.

Probably because he was too busy trying to keep the plane flying. Also, apparently Boieng hadn't notified the airlines and their pilots about this most recent "feature" that could see the airplane "pushing it down unexpectedly and so strongly that flight crews can’t pull it back up", which certainly must have added to the pilots' confusion in this case.

> That warning came as a surprise to many pilots who fly the latest models for U.S carriers. Safety experts involved in and tracking the investigation said that at U.S. carriers, neither airline managers nor pilots had been told such a system had been added to the latest 737 variant—and therefore aviators typically weren’t prepared to cope with the possible risks.

AvHerald and Pprune have more industry input than most sites but aren't neutral by any stretch.

As with any story, don't slavishly follow one source.

AvHerald and Pprune have more industry input than most sites but aren't neutral by any stretch.

As with any story, don't slavishly follow one source. In fact with aircraft accidents my general advice is to ignore all 'coverage' for a year.

FWIW, they did radio their intent to return to the departure airport (CGK, AFAIK). They might not have formally declared an urgency or emergency, but you don't abort a flight just for fun.

Boeing is a company with a 100 year history and an impeccable safety record. Lion air is a budget airline of budget airlines that skimps on maintenance and was once banned by the EU from operating. Just look at their incident list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air#Incidents_and_acciden...

Accident after accident.

That is not to excuse anything Boeing has done, but it's easy to see why most had that reaction.

I don't know about "impeccable," but Lion reportedly kept this particular aircraft in service after previous flights experienced serious difficulties with the same subsystem. That takes a lot of the potential blame away from the manufacturer in my book.

So LionAir is definitely at some fault here. But it doesn't in general lessen Boeing's fault at to in my eyes. This could have happened on the first flight where the sensor had issue. I have no idea how common it is to have a sensor fail on a few months old plane but Boeing is damn lucky that the accident didn't happen on the first flight with sensor issue so they can't at least point to LionAir negligence. Imagine this happening on a first rate airlines and what the reaction would have been.

The manufacturer gives airlines training, SOP's, manuals, etc. All the failures that occurred on previous flights were fixed according to the requirements set forth by Boeing.

This happens every single day on thousands of aircraft worldwide. Problems show up, the engineers fix them, and the aircraft are returned to service.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting should happen... if you want Boeing to sign-off every pitot-tube cleaning or AoA sensor replacement, most planes would be grounded waiting for Boeing to show up.

Boeing as a company does have an excellent safety record but it has had its safety issues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

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