Boeing Pilot’s 2016 Worry on ‘Egregious’ Max Roils Jet’s Future | Hacker News Reader

Boeing Pilot’s 2016 Worry on ‘Egregious’ Max Roils Jet’s Future

bloomberg.com

64 pointshourislate47 comments

I wouldn't be that surprised if the 737 Max never flies again.

So the DoJ has a criminal investigation ongoing. That's one thing.

But the airlines and the families of the victims of the two fatal crashes have standing to sue Boeing over this. This will take a long time to play out. The problem for Boeing here is that these civil suits will have an extensive discovery phase.

All they really need is an exchange like this and to follow the trail. Did a manager bury it? How high did these concerns go? Who was aware of this and signed off on having this system rely on a single sensor?

We're now at the point where single exchange that can be construed as a cover up will kill this plane.

It's absolutely shocking to me that Boeing has played so fast and loose with their reputation in a desperate attempt to compete with the A320neo.

So after all of this, how are we still at the stage this is "jeopardizing" the job of the CEO? Like he should be done. If the ever-ballooning CEO pay packets are justified by the shareholder value they create, doesn't the reverse apply? The CEO is responsible even if he was completely unaware of it because he failed to be aware of it, because he failed to create the culture and management structure that allowed this to happen.

I think it will fly again. I won't be surprised if it takes years and some modifications to the systems before then. It may in fact turn the 737 Max into an overall loss for Boeing due to lower sales and contractual fees owed to the airlines for the planes that have already been sold and re-certifying pilots to fly it

But fixing the 737 is going to be strictly less money than developing a new model for Boeing. The right call here is to fix the issues both in software and possibly with the addition of more redundancies in the sensors. They were definitely bloodied by this but the plane itself is salvageable.

What happens if a 737 MAX crashes? Boeing was confident in their planes when they were falling from the skies, how much more confident are they going to be when they re-introduce it into service? They(Boeing and FAA) weren't even looking into it, they were %100 sure that the plane is fine. How the public is suppsed to know that this time is different?

Okay, they may change the name but if a crash happens the media will roll the ball to point out that this is re-named 737 MAX. Is this still cheaper than developing a new plane?

> They(Boeing and FAA) weren't even looking into it, they were %100 sure that the plane is fine.

Weren’t they looking into it after the first crash already? They had issued the emergency directive with instructions for how to shut down the MCAS system, which turned out to not help in the case of the second crash, but there was already a fix to the software in development after the first crash since the issues with the system were reported at the time.

> but the plane itself is salvageable.

You're probably right. From an engineering perspective.

Would you fly in a 737MAX post-fix? We have an engineering mindset here on HN and so I would expect many of us to answer "Yes". But ask this same question to the general public? How is Boeing going to repair the damage to both it's brand and this plane's reputation, and convince the general public to fly on this model?

I wouldn't. That's because I DO have an engineering mindset. A bad platform with tons of hacks to make it work and a severe bug/wrong design hack that has been 'fixed' doesn't imply there isn't more of those we're just not aware of.

I probably would. I'm the kind who looks at the probabilities. I imagine by the time they've fixed this the plane will be pretty safe.

Just ripping out the MCAS and telling the pilots to push the nose down manually at high angles of attack would probably do it for me.

It's possible Boeing would simply rename and rebrand the model, betting that many fliers wouldn't follow the change.

There seemed to be some evidence that they might take that approach based on a 737-MAX delivery to Ryanair earlier this year:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/15/boeing-737-...

the insurers would probably play a significant role here - if insurance rates jump then the plane's profitability and thus airlines' usage of it may be affected.

One one hand this is probably the most scrutinised plane of this generation, on the other hand its the wrong sort of attention... If they can convince people that the scrutiny is an asset, then maybe it will still be viable.

More scrutiny doesn't help the fact that it's a shitty iteration on a decades out-of-date design, though. A modern airplane that's received less scrutiny is nevertheless still likely to be safer.

I don't see how this is unsalvagable, unless there's some other issue with the planes that hasn't leaked yet.

Maybe stuff a third AoA sensor somewhere and add sensor voting. At least read both sensors and complain. But, most importantly, clearly indicate when MCAS is activating and allow the pilots to disable it without disabling electric trim, and train the pilots.

The problem is not to fix MCAS. The problem is are there more questionable design decisions? I personally will try to avoid the plane.

If they're lucky, their legal, HR, and PR teams will manage to contain this before it rises too high in the management chain, throw a few mid to high level managers and engineers to the angry mob, and move on. That's how it's worked in the past.

So this Forkner guy was the chief test pilot for the 737.

He sends emails saying the MCAS is out of control. He also is the one that tells the FAA MCAS should not be included in flight materials, and he later emails them to remind them to remove it when they include it anyway.

His attorney says he's a nice guy and was under pressure from others.

Great. Indict him, bring him in, and have him testify under oath who these others are and what exactly they ordered him to do.

As to the claim Boeing couldn't turn over the letters they found before the second crash to the FAA because the FAA itself was being "criminally investigated", first what difference does that make given the FAA is still the oversight agency, and second given that that investigation didn't start until after the second crash and therefore wasn't even a thing at the time they discovered the emails.

I don't think it said he was driving to have it removed. I think he reminded the FAA that it was not included even though it seemed substantial. In other words suggesting they should review that decision.

> In a Jan. 17, 2017 email, Forkner reminded an FAA official to delete information about MCAS from materials written for pilots transitioning to the 737 Max from an older model of the jet. In the email, Forkner said “recall we decided we weren’t going to cover” MCAS in the 737 Max’s flight crew manuals because the system only operated “way outside the normal operating envelope.”

So the chief test pilot for the MAX project complained about this system making the plane uncontrollable and this was all swept under the rug?

People need to be put in prison over this. This is negligent homicide.

I suppose we dont know what the reaction was do we? Afterall, if Boeing took his complaints seriously and redesigned aspects of the plane, that would be one thing. If he was complaining about the version that subsequently crashed, that would be another.

The pilot mentioned was a technical pilot, not a test pilot.

So he was a pilot with additional duties of writing and verifying checklists and manuals, and vendor and client meetings. He would also do acceptance testing, like the MCAS sim test. There could be several of these.

A test pilot is a whole level (world actually) beyond that, with an extra $1-2 million in training (hence almost always ex-military) and assigned to major aircraft development programs. Usually only 1 or 2 are assigned to a development program.

The whole FAA needs to be shitcanned is what needs to happen.

Their job is to test these planes. It's not like there's 100s of models coming out every year. The 737 is America's best selling and most used plane - bar none.

And that one hasn't been tested by the FAA? They just believed Boeing and stamped their approval on it?

Well...

> Their job is to test these planes.

No the FAA certifies airplanes, which is largely a paperwork exercise. They do not have airline designers and test pilots sitting around.

They don't need to have test pilots "sit around". They fly planes. Like a test pilot does.

You can apply to be one here: https://www.avjobs.com/careers/index.asp?Job_Title=FAA+Fligh...

He's joking over IM. He was, among other things, an instructor for the C17 in the USAF.

TFA doesn't seem to go far enough. Does anyone know the particulars of the simulator experiences that inspired these comments? Was the simulator that inspired those comments an accurate reflection of the real plane? Was it the same simulator that was used by airline pilots? If not, which was more accurate? Can the programmers of the simulator be made available to investigators?

If the point is just to stir the pot a bit more, that's fine I guess. Keep up the pressure; everyone at Boeing and FAA who took part in pushing this through owe a lot of suffering to the families of their victims. I'm just not sure that someone who interacted with a computer simulation is going to be the best-informed Congressional witness. That is, if the goal is really to find out exactly what happened.

The simulators themselves are generally quite thorough, wherever feasible they run the same software as the plane on simulated instrument input (which can also be broken for simulation purposes).

Newer planes are more and more often fly-by-wire with shakers and motors to provide the "feel" of the controls. This only makes the simulators more realistic. Note that the engineer wasn't jumping to the conclusion that there was a simulator bug, and trusted that the simulation represented the real handling (as was borne out in reality).

Here is a 747 simulator on eBay to give you an idea of what's in the box:

https://www.ebay.com/i/293183009463

In theory simulators are very accurate. In reality they might be. I'd expect the simulator for an existing airframe with decades of service (like your 747-400) to be more accurate than that for a new airframe. The primary purpose of simulators is training, not testing. While both the airframe and its simulator are under development, substantial inaccuracies wouldn't surprise me. TFA quotes this dude's attorney thus: "The simulator was not reading right and had to be fixed to fly like the real plane." Is that true? Is that ass-covering? How are we going to find out from this dude's testimony? Other evidence must be examined.

TFA says this pilot had a hard time with the simulator. We also know that these planes crash very often. We can't just put those two propositions together to prove that the simulator predicted these planes would often crash in this particular way.

Pilot here...

This NYTimes article is a recommended read. The author discusses the role of pilots who lack good airmanship (pilot training outside the US relies much more on rote memorization versus learning to fly small planes and/or in the military).

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...

Boeing certainly messed up with the MCAS system design, but a perhaps bigger error was to over-estimate pilot skills and intuition. A good "stick and rudder" pilot would have cut out the automation promptly and likely recovered from the situation.

For example, one of the factors in the crashes was airspeed. The pilots left the throttle at takeoff power, and accelerated to such a high speed that it was not possible to counteract the nose down moment. Also, had they noted the airspeed, they would have immediately known that they were not at risk of stalling, and that they were dealing with an instrumentation/automation failure (in which case you cut out the automation and hand fly the plane).

This does not absolve Boeing. MCAS violated their "pilot first" design pattern. It should have simply activated the stick shaker and an audio alert (and redundant sensor inputs should have been in place to minimize false positives). That said, the way pilots are trained in countries where light aviation is not a thing is an issue to be dealt with.

Hang on a minute.

From the article,

'Mark Forkner, the chief technical pilot for the 737 Max...'

then later, 'Forkner told Gustavsson that MCAS was “running rampant in the sim on me,” referring to simulator tests of the aircraft. “Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious.”'

So Boeing's chief technical pilot admits he sucks at flying????

then later,'Forkner is now a pilot at Southwest Airlines Co., the carrier said in a statement.'

Am I missing something? Is this a joke?

Yeah, you missed something. What he showed there was called "humility" and it's something you will more often see with people who are actually extremely confident in their skills. It was just a way of qualifying his statement to reflect that the operation of the simulator, which is variable, affects the outcome.

Of course he is an excellent pilot.

I suck at coding but I'm way above average. I've seen what people do. So I suck but most developers I've worked with suck a lot worse.

you sort of want someone who sucks at flying but has their wings. if you test with only ace pilots, you're likely to overestimate the skills of the average user. indeed, Boeing had assumed pilots would be quick-thinking enough to breeze through a checklist and compensate for MCAS in seconds, which wasn't the case even for seasoned pilots.

also, I imagine the job of a technical pilot is more to assess the behavior of the hardware through a series of tests, rather than regular flying. like how QA testers of a CAD software might not be CAD wizards, but know the product inside and out.

When MCAS was running rampant for Forkner, was it during a simulation of a failure of the angle of attack sensor that MCAS relied on? If so, then they basically predicted the failure that people are saying likely caused the crashes. If not, then perhaps there is another scenario where MCAS runs amok. Either way it's incredible.

He's joking. Self deprecating.

Americans don't understand how lucky they are, to live in a system where less than a thousand civilian deaths is enough to so severely damage one of the country's most powerful corporations, with very close ties to the military.

It is a global business and the FAA is not the only body passing judgement over the airworthiness and inclusion in a fleet portfolio.

Boeing is a 100 year old company in the business of building airplanes that transports hundreds of millions of passengers annually. Rushing to introduce this plane was absolutely unacceptable. It took Boeing decades to build its stellar reputation, but after something like this, their reputation is ruined in a matter of days.

Boeing stopped being Boeing when they bought McDonald Douglas and inherited a bunch of Jack Welch trained managers. They took the company from an engineering company to a commodity company where what they were selling didn't matter, it's all just widgets in the end. One of their first actions was to gut the various engineering departments.

As an American, I feel fortunate that a company can sign off on its own plane, kill hundreds of people, and continue to advocate for the plane to return to service with only a software update. /s

I’m not sure what’s the point of your comment. As an American I’m also lucky that my country isn’t facing the issues innocent people in Syria, Iraq, etc face being caught in a civil war. I’m lucky we have vaccines, clean water, contracts, courts, cops, etc etc.

None of that excuses Boeing’s gross negligence and lack of accountability.

I’ve dumped them from my portfolio although I still - unfortunately - have exposure since they’re in the SP500.

At some point, I’m hoping heads roll at Boeing.

There should be an S&P500-N fund where you can select up to N specific companies you want to exclude, and they give you a dynamic ticker which tracks that sub-set.

I wonder if it’s technically feasible without absurd transaction costs, to either explicitly or effectively net out specific company exposure from an S&P500 basket.

Even just a calculator which could tell you, for every share of SPY of you want to not have Boeing exposure you need to short-sell X shares of Boeing.

Not a finance expert, but I don't think the transaction costs would factor would they? You would own "units" in the fund, rather than the underlying security itself. The makeup of the unit however, would be dynamic

A fully realized s&p 500 ex-FOO fund for every company (or every combination of two or three companies) would probably not have sufficient demand to make it efficient.

You would need to have some sort of clever accounting to make it work, although, while retail commissions are at zero, and fractional shares may become available, assembling your own index fund may be possible with only a significant time cost.

Maybe they could implement it with S&P 500 and tqking a short position to cancel out ownership of stock XYZ. This way they don't have the demand problem you alluded to. Then they can charge customers an additional fee for this customization, which would cover the cost of the short. I imagine some would pay this additional customization fee since it's a small price to feel morally consistent.

> ...I’m hoping heads roll at Boeing.

None of the heads rolling will count unless they are from the very top. Make no mistake, there was a willful and calculated structuring of incentives and punitive pressure that originated from the top that had a decisive hand in establishing the culture that enabled all the combinations of poor decisions to pass through, like many air vehicle accidents. If only middle management heads roll, this will simply eventually repeat, with even more deniability accruing to the top as they vaccinate themselves from lessons learned out of this.

It is long past time that Henry II of England-style management ("Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?") by euphemism-laden punitive measures be scrutinized for their actual effects as structured cultural edifices, and not the legalistic interpretation of words designed for maximum deniability while indirectly pressuring for ridding the corporate body of turbulent priests.

Go to where the real power sits, and change why and how it is wielded to make lasting cultural change. Into this group I also lump in major shareholders who share in the accountability of crafting and maintaining a culture.

The CEO's been removed from his (previously simultaneous) chairman role, though he remains as CEO:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-ceo/boeing-board-s...

That's a possible sign of spine, though a rather weak one.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. The 737 MAX was yanked by aviation authorities worldwide, not just in the US. The US didn't even do it first.

Are you saying you want to go back to 1940s-era standards of aviation safety, where planes regularly crash out of the sky killing all aboard, and we should just accept it even though we know we can do much better?

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