"Instead of relying on a single sensor indicating the angle of the plane’s nose, MCAS will rely on data from both of the plane’s sensors"
Why wouldn't you design it that way from the beginning? This isn't Boeing's first plane.
Why wouldn't you design it that way from the beginning? This isn't Boeing's first plane.
Outstanding Max order backlog is $600 billion at list price. That is what matters.
> Outstanding Max order backlog is $600 billion at list price. That is what matters.
So at 600 billion in orders they got greedy and didn't want to spend 1M extra per plane to make it safe.
But I guess Ethiopian/Indonesian cries for some sort of compensation/justice would have to go very viral in western media to force a corporation like Boeing into anything (since it is also a clear admission its purely their fault, which it seems to be).
With lots of of passengers on both flights being from lots of different countries, what they're getting instead is lots and lots and lots of individual lawsuits all being filed in different jurisdictions.
Which is, I'm guessing, likely to be more damaging to them in the long run.
MH370 was a multi-national class-action lawsuit filed in SC that was only dismissed because the circumstances of the disappearance were not clear and nothing to do with it being multi-national
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3512628-16319045179....
With the Lion Air crash the settlements the Indonesian government had passengers sign included waiving any right to sue Boeing in the USA
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/world/asia/lion-air-crash...
The fault being with Boeing in this case seems a lot more clear-cut
There is a tendency to fixate on the bug that caused a crash to the extent that you introduce new more new bugs than you had before.
Exactly this. It can't be both required for safe flight and disabled at a moments notice during the most dangerous portion of a flight (takeoff).
These things are essentially just wind vanes that read the direction that the air is moving past them.
Short of the plane flying obliquely into a tornado, I can't think of any atmospheric effect that could lead to a disagreement.
You'd need an atmospheric effect that causes a significant difference in wind direction between two points that are maybe 3 m apart and the difference that atmospheric effect is trying to cause would have to be noticeable when superimposed on the wind vector due to the plane's velocity.
It’s obvious that the code was executed during the regular flight conditions which means it has to be applied even then.
The motors simply push the plane nose up too much compared to the previous models, threating the plane to enter the stall. Once in the stall the plane is just not controllable. MCAS was there to hide that.
And now that the problem is known to the world either will Boeing provide the proper solution, no matter the cost, or there will be a third crash and that will be too much. Boring still tries to present all that as “business as usual.” It’s wrong.
Nobody said there was anything abnormal about the two flights that crashed. It really doesn't matter since the root problem is the plane doing things without telling anyone and then doing it wrongly. Without MCAS these accidents would not have happened.
Without MCAS, wouldn't there be accidents caused by the nonlinear pitch though?
What is your source? This is not what I have been reading. What I have been reading is that the MAX has a bigger engine and this engine has been positioned forward on the wing in order to preserve ground clearance. As a result of this unusual engine position, the MAX has a tendency to pitch up during acceleration. Nowhere did I read that this doesn't happen during normal flights.
Yes, but not what you may be thinking. The AoA is the angle of the wing vs relative wind (the angle the wing is attacking the air). You can have high relative pitch (attitude) to the horizon but a low AoA, such as during climb. That same attitude is a full stall at slower speeds/power.
The wing doesn't care where the nose points. All it cares about is its relative angle to the wind. Once it diverges past a critical angle the wing stalls.
What appears to have happened with these MCAS issues is that the MCAS senses that the AoA is too high when it's completely normal and safe, so it auto-trims down.
The nose can be pointed up with a low angle of attack (e.g. a climb during cruise) and conversely the aircraft can be pitched down with a high angle of attack (e.g. descent approach with flaps extended)
This is true for climb and cruise, but not necessarily true for a bank.
Plenty of normal flights fly manually for a significant portion of the climb-out after takeoff, which is exactly the portion of the flight when MCAS issues happened for the Lion Air and Ethiopian Air flights.
Also, you will have higher AoA in a bank, which can be encountered in manual flight on normal flights.
MCAS compensates this by trimming elevators. Without MCAS, it is up to the pilot to handle the unstable system.
Not sure this is right. General aviation pilots often think of wing stalls as a consequence of low speed (their planes don't have AoA indicators!) but they can happen at any airspeed: they simply happen whenever the critical AoA is reached.
I think the idea is that the extra lift generated by the nacelles due to the engine position causes the plane to reach high AoA at e.g. full engine power, not just when flying slowly.
I think it's also the case that the plane does not actually become aerodynamically unstable, it just starts to handle differently (yoke pressure-wise) in a way that fails airworthiness requirements.
So it would only cause a stall if the pilots continued to pull back on the yoke into the stall while it's not fighting them as much as they're expecting it to.
I am not saying that Boeing did not try to cut corners (I just do not know), but the current media circus painting Boeing as a bunch of [idiot engineers | greedy execs | lazy testers] is likely far from reality or at least a major oversimplification. Boeing planes (including 737 max) are still very safe (compare to cars). Mistakes should be calmly assessed and fixed and making a public circus of this simply pushes engineers to avoid everything but uber-conservative, uber-safe solutions, which has major costs in itself. My 2c.
Instead they wasted time and resources to smear the airline and the pilots.
And that's inexcusable.
At least until the cause is known.
Edit : Some clarification
When MCAS was established to be a likely factor in the first crash, Boeing issued an emergency airworthiness directive to all operators of the 737 Max, alerting pilots to the possibility of undesired nose down trim, and reminding them that the runaway trim procedure would disable it.
When it comes to mass transport, safety should definitely have higher priority than pushing some potentially new cool tech ASAP (which is debatable, making plane unstable ain't cool by any measure)
No simulator time required, no sire!