Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it more that the rest of the world is susceptible to political winds (US plane) and the FAA is just holding the course?

View on HN

A plane crashes and kills over 300 people, in two separate incidents, in an industry where even minor crashes are rare, and you think the grounding of the planes is "political"?

FAA is not in the business of operating based on unsupported assumptions. The investigation for the second crash is not complete and a root cause is not known.

> "The investigation for the second crash is not complete"

After two crashes in such a small amount of time, the investigation doesn't need to be complete. The planes should be grounded until proven safe, not flying until proven unsafe.

Bullshit. Anyone who deals with or tries to deal with the FAA will tell you they deal with all kinds of unsupported assumptions. For instance, medical certificates are denied all the time for people who admit to having taken an ADHD drug when they were a kid, even if they only took it once or didn’t want to take it. Why? “An abundance of caution,” which is a frequent cause for actions the FAA takes.

Isn't that an argument to ground the planes?

If a third 737 Max 8 were to crash before a root cause of this crash can be determined, would you then say it's a prudent move to ground them all? What about a fourth? Fifth?

Is your position that any grounding of the planes is unjustified until the full root cause is determined, or that "only" two crashes isn't enough to justify this action?

While I would always rather understand root cause -- and it's absolutely essential to get there eventually -- the world is full of imperfect information and assumptions are sometimes all you have.

This is pretty much what happened with the Comet. I think they gave in when four of them had exploded.

One inexplicable crash is not a case for grounding, no; otherwise the (incredibly safe) 777 would still be grounded because of MH 370.

Regarding the 737 MAX now, the prior Lion Air crash is reasonably well understood. It has exposed some fundamental weakness and questionable design choices, but the plane was still deemed safe to fly.

Thus, what we have is one unexplained crash. Why should it be grounded?

(Having said that, I'm avoiding the MAX as far as I can. But that's based already on the Lion Air crash. So, I argue that it should've been grounded after Lion Air became understood, or not at all.)

We have one unexplained crash where early reports about what happened /strongly/ match the circumstances that brought down the LionAir flight. We also have hundreds of public complaints from pilots across the United States of similar unexpected nose down behavior from 737 MAX airplanes.

Oh, I hadn't heard of those reports. It must be terrifying when your plane is actively trying to kill you.

I don't understand how they could build MCAS on the basis of one (!) AoA sensor.

It's one sensor per flight computer, and the diagnostic indicator to warn a pilot of disagreeing AoA sensors is a paywalled upgrade.

This is probably the root cause https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-e...

I would argue that the reasoning for not grounding them was political.

Somehow Americans always play the victim card. The airplane is maybe dangerous but nope, grounding it is a political move? I just wish to see the comment section of the plane was Chinese.

Your comment is bending over backwards to give FAA the benefit of doubt

Not how it looks from the rest of the world I'm afraid. More, US didn't want to ground plane built by US manufacturer...

... i mean, honestly all we're doing out here is sitting back with a bag of popcorn and channel flipping between the UK parliament on Brexit, and Trump on twitter. And they say there's nothing entertaining on TV any more...

The problems with the plane have been known for a while, so much so that there is a high priority control software patch in the pipeline. The design as it existed is inherently unsafe as it relies too heavy on the input of a single sensor without any sanity checking, redundancy, or correlation with other sensor data.

Also, the FAA makes precautionary changes before it knows everything, it has routinely issued emergency airworthiness directives before investigations have been complete.

No. The circumstances are so unusual that grounding it is not unexpected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com