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Comment by anoncoward111 | Hacker News Reader

FAA, US Govt, and Boeing will continue to dig their heads deeper into the sand because Boeing is basically an arm of US policy at this point and the US Govt at this time will never admit to or show any weakness

5 months ago when the Lion Air crash happened, an HN commenter ridiculed me for saying Boeing made a crappy design choice to automate what pilots already did manually, without telling the pilots. The HN commenter basically said "we here at Boeing are working hard, how dare you"

well, now more people are dying. do we dismiss them as collateral damage from the "third world", or do we own up to the problem created by a poor design choice?

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It’s maybe even worse: 737 Max designers should have maybe changed the design of the plane to make it more stable instead of “we’ll fix it in the software” (that will surely eventually unproportionally badly fail) approach. If I understood correctly the “management decision” was to keep the body effectively unchanged but fitting the engines with the different effects on the stability, then relying on software, instead of changing the plane geometry.

Currently, 335 people are dead in the Boeing 737 Max accidents, flying commercially only since May 22, 2017. Not even two full years.

If that's true, that sounds like a thorough nightmare. Nothing gets me more heated than when an 85% perfect design with decades of real world use is replaced with something that is demonstrably broken + more expensive, simply because of corporate groupthink gone wrong

Thank you for this insight, I will research more deeply

The goal to replace the engines was saving fuel. However it seems that the effects of that replacement should have not be fixed with the software trick, but with the airplane geometry redesign.

It maybe has some similarity to the VW emission scandal: “fixing” with the software what should not be fixed with it.

Agree, but what I meant by more expensive was the new plane costs more than if they just kept making the old design through 2019.

Fuel savings and etc is always nice to strive for, but now human lives and insurance companies and airline companies are paying the price for the geometrical/software fault created by Boeing's corporate structure

If this continues, it's going to be the Concorde all over again really-- a better performing but a tad more unsafe plane

> what I meant by more expensive was the new plane costs more than if they just kept making the old design through 2019

It's the opposite that happened here: the more consistent redesign was avoided and the software trick employed (and even kept hidden initially, according to some reports) to compensate for the change that was introduced. The new planes are anyway bought, it's Boeing who tried to pass their badly fixed old planes as "improved but the same." Had they not done that, it's Airbus who would have (rightly so, based on my impression of these two accidents) sold more of their new efficient planes instead.

The bigger engines are more economically, that's the reason why airlines want it in the first place. But they had to move them forward to fit under the plane which brings the plane out of balance. The alternative would have been changing the height of the plane, which probably also results in other problems.

> The alternative would have been changing the height of the plane, which probably also results in other problems.

There were more alternatives but all negate the selling point “it’s the ‘same’ plane so you don’t have to pay to retrain pilots, just buy, fly and use less fuel.”

Marketing driven solution, with a bit of lie.

Remember that selling point whenever somebody claims that the “pilots didn’t follow the proper procedure” involving even initially undocumented new behavior and the new software dependency on the single point of failure sensor.

> will never admit to or show any weakness

I still don't understand why? Why is it even a weakness if they admit there might be a problem?

Boeing is if not largest, one of the largest aircraft manufacturers and they have a good record. So, why having two accidents can be bad for them? I can't see any negative impact if they admit that there might be a problem. It would be even way safer for them to ask airlines to ground 737 temporarily during the investigation.

This comment could be re-written to be just as useful but much less combative.

I agree that I've written it to be combative, but we aren't talking about rust vs python, we're talking about several hundred people dead so far. Still, I definitely understand where you are coming from and I wish I had the ability to filter my emotions more

Understood. However, combative language strongly degrades the constructiveness of discussion, so avoiding it is most important for issues (e.g., life and death) where constructive discussion is most needed.

The claim that Boeing is an arm of US policy is pure bull. Just look at what the US putting sanctions back onto Iran is costing Boeing in lost sales.

Nobody is dismissing the deaths, they're simply waiting for more information considering that the plane hadn't had any major issues until now (engine troubles on a Norwegian Air flight that resulted in a landing in Iran are not believed to have anything to do with the plane itself). If other airlines and pilots really felt that the plane was unsafe, they can always ground the plane themselves.

> hadn't had any major issues until now

The Lion Air crash was a pretty major issue, surely! Major enough that Boeing is supposedly working on a patch, which was supposed to have been delivered already (but hasn't been).

While we wait for more information on the Ethiopian case, the superficial similarities look worrying enough that "better safe than sorry" sounds like a more justifiable response than merely "let's wait and see".

I mean, it's not really completely made up. Just look at what happened with the CSeries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...

I retract my statement that Boeing is an arm of US government. President Cheetoh the aeronautics expert is going to break them up and we are all going to fly cessnas now

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1105468569...

In a German forum, I heard the rumor that it has more to do that the new Engines don't fit under the wing so they are moved forward. And this brings the plane out of balance it is corrected via software but might not work, if the sensors have problems. So the pilot would have to not only deactivate the autocorrection but then correct manually the whole flight to prevent stalling. Changing back the software to the old behavior might be even more dangerous.

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