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Comment by jcroll | Hacker News Reader

> The News found at least five complaints about the Boeing model in a federal database where pilots can voluntarily report about aviation incidents without fear of repercussions.

Is this a lot?

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They mostly seem to agree with each other which is the scary part. Several of them reference a completely unexplained pitch up/down behavior during a climb. During landing an unplanned nosedive would be disastrous.

MCAS can only activate when flaps are raised, it shouldn't cause any unexpected trim changes during landing. This is why the Lion Air flight had a normal takeoff/climb until they raised the flaps.

Aren't the flaps up during landing?

Flaps are down during landing and take offs (to different extents).

Flaps are deployed to lower the stall speed of the aircraft by increasing the lift coefficient of the wing at the expense of higher drag.

I think you're confusing flaps with air brakes. Flaps are wing extensions that deploy downwards to increase lift and drag, air brakes are panels that deploy upwards to produce lots and lots of drag to slow the plane down after landing, like a parachute.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks.

There have been 865 total 737 reports in the ASRS database since 1/1/2018 (linked the results of my search in another comment in this thread). There doesn't appear to be a 737-MAX filter (groups all 737-800s and 737-900s together it seems), so it's tough to say.

In addition, it seems like some pilots were motivated to submit reports on their MAX experiences due to the Lion Air incident.

We’d need the number of reports for other plane models to know if that’s a lot or a little or the norm. Can you compare?

Exactly my reaction.

I'm appalled at Boeing's response, and I agree with the Europeans, other countries, and Senator Cruz and others that the planes should probably be grounded, at least very briefly.

But the news reporting that an unknown-relative-to-other-planes percentage of complaints were filed by pilots, especially when those reports could theoretically be merely annoyed pilots responding to a perceived lack of training, or piling on after Lion Air, doesn't tell me a whole lot I didn't already know.

Yes. Recalls with autos happen more often with a lot less. Consider the amount of cars out there. It only takes a few to put one in play.

ASRS doesn't deal with reports about auto-safety.

eg. search for ACN 1337942 here https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/search/dbol.html (i'm too dumb to figure out how to link to a specific nasa report), and there's a report about the captain's side AOA vane being busted and causing the captain's stick shaker to vibrate constantly.

edit: here's another one: 1097906, talking about inconsistent airspeed readings between the captain and first officer and then on descent, the airspeed readings went super wonky and the plane pitched nose down.

If the US would treat car safety like airplane safety there would be no SUVs driving out there.

Airplane safety should be more strict than car safety, because the damage an airplane crash causes is a handful of orders of magnitude higher than a car accident...

Yet deaths in the latter vastly outpace adverse events in the former. What is the criteria by which public safety should operate? Is it biggest explosion?

Opportunity cost of safety improvements to vehicles. Airliners cost like $100 million each, so they can afford to perfect safety. You can’t get airliner-level safety in a vehicle that costs less than $50,000.

Maybe not airliner level of safety, but based on the top causes of car accidents, they could probably be reduced by an order of magnitude with relatively inexpensive improvements:

  1. better driver training
  2. breathalyzer ignition interlocks
  3. speed limiters (even more reduced speed at night/rain)
  4. traffic light detection/automatic braking
  5. enforced following distance

(I'd add "sleep/impaired driver warnings", automatic emergency braking (including pedestrian detection) even though it doesn't quite relate to the top causes of accidents))

Here's the top ten:

  1. Distracted Driving
  2. Drunk Driving 
  3. Speeding
  4. Reckless Driving
  5. Rain
  6. Running Red Lights
  7. Night Driving
  8. Design Defects/Maintenace
  9. Tailgating
 10. Wrong-Way Driving/ Improper Turns

Far more cars (than planes), far more drivers (than pilots), far less rules for permission (than a driver's license). Kind of an unfair comparison here.

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