Hacker News Reader

Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

It has been fascinating to watch layer after layer peel back around all of this.

Bad design decisions forced from chasing the bottom dollar, optional, critical safety features with the warning indicator and now these switches.

> Boeing declined to detail the specific functionality of the two switches

That's also interesting- I assume they are in CYA mode and wouldn't discuss anything that could be sensitive to the current investigations in any point. I wonder how hard the Seattle Times had to work to get manuals for the MAX.

I hope the loss of life is vindicated in the end.

I hope there are lessons learned from this but I fear our culture of quarterly profits and lack of real punishment for companies and their directors will result in nothing drastic happening.

View on HN

One of the lessons learned is that the FAA is no longer a credible institution.

Gotta love deregulation. How many institutions are left? Any? CFPB, EPA, HUD, Interior are all run by people that don’t believe in their missions. It’s all about undermining from inside. Who protects the public when private rights of collective action are forbidden by arbitration agreements and the government has been captured by private interests?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is doing just fine in their function.

True, but I also doubt we'll see new nuclear facilities in the US any time soon.

Some of these applications have been withdrawn, but there are in fact some in flight.

https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/new-reactor-ma...

> In flight

Hopefully, their planes don't need MCAS ;)

I don't know - a lot of those nuclear plant applications seem to stall ;)

[Citation needed]

EPA has been a joke for at least two, I want to say three, administrations now. Now they're just a joke that doesn't impede business quite so much.

Explain. What about it has made it a joke?

Its head, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal lawyer. That tells you all you need to know.

Bit separately, I know people in DC who work in this field and they say the same thing.

> Gotta love deregulation.

I dunno, I see it as the opposite: regulation (apparently) made it impossible to just train pilots on this one new feature, instead requiring a full recertification of both the airframe and the pilots, which is incredibly expensive and unnecessary relative to what was actually required to save lives.

So one way of looking at is is: regulation caused perverse incentives that ultimately got people killed.

That’s such a roundabout way of thinking that I’m not sure whether you believe it yourself.

You’re basically saying that because shitty people don’t want to follow safety regulations we shouldn’t have them.

You should always consider incentives when thinking about regulations. Especially roundabout, second and third order consequences. Those are the ones that get you.

Having safety in mind doesn't make something unambiguously good, fit for purpose, or free of net-negative consequences. The specific content of rule determines that.

A different way to look at this is: does this particular perverse incentive justify reduced regulation so that it can’t happen anymore.

Even if your assessment is valid, you’d likely be throwing away the baby with the bath water if you’d cut regulation to avoid it.

I would think it would justify additional regulations to allow for something like "upgrades" to existing certifications instead of the binary (full recertification|pretend plane is identical) standard we appear to have today that resulted in the 737 Max tragedy.

Is that less regulation? More regulation? I don't know, and I doubt it matters if it's "less" or "more" since the goal is fewer dead people, not passing an ideological Turing test.

> Is that less regulation? More regulation?

You are suggesting stronger regulation of some aircraft ('upgrades', as you rightly say), without weakening regulation for any other aircraft. So it's certainly 'more regulation'.

> I doubt it matters if it's "less" or "more" since the goal is fewer dead people, not passing an ideological Turing test.

It's a political question, so there's at least some question of ideology. Full-bore libertarians would doubtless find some way to oppose your suggestion.

You said regulation caused perverse incentives that ultimately got people killed. It would be more fair to say that a loophole in the regulations, caused the perverse incentive.

Gotta love deregulation.

Remind me, when's the last time we had a major fatality incident in the US domestic passenger airline business?

And how does that compare with the prevailing state of affairs before "deregulation?"

Difficulty: answer with numbers, please, rather than insults, downvotes, or political attacks.

Colgan Air 2407 was in 2009. Comair 5191 was 2006. Both, like most airplane crashes, were substantially pilot error. (Both of these were primarily pilot error.)

Weather forecasting has gotten much better in the years since deregulation. We’ve also been operating a mostly-jet fleet, which has larger inherent performance margins than the turboprops (and, worse, pistons) before them. And we have decades of experience about how pilots kill airplanes to inform operations and regulations.

It’s not clear that airfare deregulation either hurt nor helped airline safety in the US. US-flag air carrier ops are extraordinarily safe and I believe the FAA makes a positive contribution to that outcome.

> Remind me, when's the last time we had a major fatality incident in the US domestic passenger airline business?

Doesn't really matter much. Incidents in aviation that can happen on continent X could usually have happened on any continent.

A good counterexample: in the Lion Air case, at least one planeload of passengers came within a hair's-breadth of disaster prior to the fatal crash. The pilots figured out what to do in time, in part because a third pilot was available to RTFM while the other two flew the airplane. However, that crew not only didn't take any action to remove the aircraft from service, they apparently didn't even bother to leave a Post-It note on the dashboard.

The regulations we have in place here in the US -- to say nothing of our airlines' own policies -- would have kept that aircraft grounded until the problem was diagnosed and addressed.

He didn't RTFM actually. They performed Crew Resource Management, and he was able to focus his attention on controls the other two pilots didn't have time to manage. Hence noticing the trim wheels running amok.

Good point, I was just echoing some of the earliest news accounts there. Those stories came out before it became apparent that the flight manuals didn't actually have much useful information on the subject.

Agreed. Hopefully there is a big shake up and lots of people are sent home without pay. Nothing else could salvage it.

Boeing declined to detail the specific functionality of the two switches

It seems like that's really the crux of the problem. They made changes that they didn't feel it was necessary to tell their customers about. Just another step along the "I know you bought this product from us, but it's still our product at the end of the day" timeline that we're stuck on.

Further, I'll bet that it transpires that no one entity inside Boeing is really to blame for this mess. The engineers in charge of the AOA indicator subsystem didn't know that someone else in the company was going to drive a safety-critical component from it. And that engineering group may not have realized that the AOA data they were getting came from only one of the two sensors. My guess is that Boeing not only hid this information from their customers, they hid it from themselves.

The problem will have to be addressed at the top, but I don't agree with those who say that blaming, firing, or jailing the CEO is going to be helpful. The culture that allowed this to happen will have grown organically over time.

When a culture becomes this defective, the top people need to end their careers in disgrace. This provides the necessary context, clearance and incentives for others to pick up the pieces and make substantial reforms.

Actually what it provides is the necessary context for fear-based decisionmaking, misallocation of resources, metastatic bureaucracy, R&D stagnation, and ultimately departure of talent.

There is a reason why the aviation industry focuses on fixing the problem rather than the blame. A witch hunt makes everybody feel better in the short term but provides no guarantee of actual forward progress.

The problem here is corporate greed and willfully blind governance. It’s not a technical issue.

I think their safety system analysis made the connection MCAS is potentially hazardous as previously reported by the Seattle Times

Reply on news.ycombinator.com