That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
Yeah you will. Good luck selectively avoiding the most popular international route plane. Historically, people have been very quick to forget mishaps with particular airframes and revert to flying the most convenient/economical routes.
And by the time it's flying again, it will be hands down the safest plane that's being operated because every minute detail of it will have been checked with far more scrutiny than any other newly launched platform.
If the airframe is truly unsafe, then it'll never fly again. But everyone knows it will. Because it isn't.
The only thing that'll happen is the max 8 will probably require a new type rating which will hurt airline economy a bit. Other than that, you'll be flying in it a year from now and have forgotten all about this.
The force MCAS is correcting is a lightening of control forces near a stall. This is not allowed per FARs, so they added MCAS to force some extra force.
It will fly just fine with the computers turned off.
I think it's fairly unlikely that there's some other massively dangerous failure mode of the 737MAX, because the fleet has flown enough hours, and the only crashes have been the result of the MCAS. When that's fixed, it's quite possible that there are other gremlins that cause crashes, but they probably will be much less severe/likely than the MCAS problem.
Crucially, in order for this concept to work, the two sides are supposed to be totally independent -- the computers are different, the displays are different, and the sensors are different. However, at any one time, only one FCC is active, in that it is actually controlling the plane. Comparing the two sides AoA now violates this assumption and so many of the other engineering and certification assumptions may be violated since now the two FCCs are sharing AoA inputs.
Furthermore, my understanding is that now that everything is being looked at more closely, the FAA is having a change of heart about the idea of having one FCC active at a time being acceptable. If there is a hardware fault in the FCC, it has a lot of authority to cause problems, possibly faster than the crew can resolve them. My understanding is that now the FAA wants the FCCs to cross-check each other. Making this happen will require a lot of engineering and testing, and I think that this is the big reason for the delay. The MCAS fix itself was flight tested way back in April and May of last year.
All of that said, I don't believe an FCC fault has ever been implicated in an accident, so this IMO doesn't really present a safety issue big enough to be relevant to say, my decision of whether to fly on a 737MAX, but it looks like the FAA is deeming it not adequate for certification.
Airbus of course uses a different philosophy and uses multiple FCCs that continuously compare their output and vote.
No they're still rolling off the line for the military Poseidon and Wedgetail programs
They referred to the cable business as "Comcast Cable" for a while before rebranding it to Xfinity. The public rebranding was definitely intentional, but it wasn't the only reason behind it.
... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the city fiber to the home buildout that is going on in our neighborhood... ;-)
My view is that the indication is how a company treats you when you leave versus when you arrive and, at least this once, Comcast did well on both.
Aside from that my 300Mbps service frequently tops out at 30Mbps, seemingly whenever I want to download something large. The upstream bandwidth they offer is also abysmal.
Without that people tend to keep using the old name for a long time. People still call the Willis tower the sears tower and that change happened 11 years ago.
Edit: It says in the article
> The assembly line in Renton, Washington, has stopped building Boeing's bestselling plane, the company confirmed late Monday. Boeing announced plans to temporarily halt production for an undetermined period in December, but it had not previously announced a precise day for the shutdown.
Boeing made a lot of executives super rich with buybacks and equity compensation, this led directly to the shoddy engineering choices.
But this would require boards and executives who didn't want to just grant themselves huge amounts of equity while buying back stock. So far not many boards are standing up for this.
This news story is about Boeing, so yes I'm going to talk about Boeing here.
Do you work in defense or aerospace? You seem to be taking this personally for some reason.
First, if you think Airbus is any better, you should think again.
Second, what do you mean by "all modern Boeing planes"? If you just mean "planes designed after the merger with McDonnell Douglas", that's just the 787 and the 737 Max. The latter is grounded and the former only flies select long haul routes. For the average US business traveler they're a non-issue.
I guess people in general rely on the government agencies to do this decision for us..
Neither had I, until I took a Tupolev jet between Moscow and India. I then decided I would never fly another aircraft that wasn't certified to fly in American and European airspaces. The reason for this was that I had trust in the FAA's and European aviation authory's standards and integrity. That trust has been greatly eroded (particularly with the FAA) for me.
Having money/status to travel doesn't == intelligence, unfortunately.
Even the best airframe will go down if poorly maintained or their pilots aren't experienced and properly rotated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_...
It seems to have continued on for several years, though ultimate its poor safety record seems to have been a factor in its discontinuation.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/boeing-doesnt-expect-regulat...
Self admittedly, I don't fly as frequently as I used to, but do they still put the model of plane you're flying on anywhere on the ticket?
How can someone go about making sure you're not flying on this specific model?
The major users from North American airlines are Southwest (34 planes), Air Canada (24), American (24), United (14), and Aeromexico (6), so it's not super common here at least.
If I can see the plane type in the list of available flights, and the difference is $15 on a $250 ticket I would choose the non Max flight, all else being equal.
Blackwater -> Xe -> Academi
737 Max -> ?
Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.
The problem with the 737 MAX is that Boeing tried to make a plane with a completely different airframe and added a bunch of software to try to make it fly exactly like second generation 737s so that pilots didn't need to retrain. But the abstraction was leaky and it turns out that when you have a different airframe, you have to retrain your pilots.
That said, Boeing did some janky stuff to get this nonsense certified by the FAA and the whole design probably needs to be recertified, which will take years.
Anyhow, the point is that scrutinizing a bad architecture doesn't make it any better. Scrutinizing a chicken won't make it an eagle.
With that in mind, yeah, Windows ME sounds like a pretty great analogy.
You've got it backwards. The problem was that they used the same airframe with larger engines that had to be mounted differently due to ground clearance issues.
The MCAS has an issue with redundant AOA sensors; that specifically needs to be fixed. The MCAS caused problems on other flights, but the pilots knew to disable it by flipping the circuit breaker. The pilots on the crashed planes did not know to disable it. That is a training issue.
Fix the redundant AOA and provide training to disable the MCAS, and it will be fine.
Interesting maybe could have been fixed with software. I am thinking of Reactor Characteristics Augmentation System, or RCAS.
Also, Chernobyl exploded because they pressed the halt button at a very bad time. This also sounds like something that can be fixed in software.
There are many exactly same reactors as was in Chernobyl fixed and running still:
> Most of the flaws in the design of RBMK-1000 reactors were corrected after the Chernobyl accident and a dozen reactors have since been operating without any serious incidents for over twenty years.
Even Chernobyl itself had 3 remaining reactors working for many years after the disaster, last decommissioned in 2000.
[1] An IMHO stupidly obfuscated way of saying that the cooling water around the reactor was an unpressurized pool that would boil if it got hot. Low-density bubbles of steam absorb fewer neutrons than liquid water, so when it boils the core gets hotter, not cooler.
> Most of the flaws in the design of RBMK-1000 reactors were corrected after the Chernobyl accident and a dozen reactors have since been operating without any serious incidents for over twenty years. [99]
Including 3 remaining reactors of Chernobyl Power Plant itself.
Ten plants of same design are still operational today.
All the rest—dodgy sensors, crappy software kludge, no pilot retraining—is hacks laid on top of that initial flaw just to pretend it isn’t there. A lot of us here build complex systems for a living; if that isn’t a “smell”, what is?
(Aerodynamically unstable design is a thing, btw, e.g. Typhoon. But that’s Military, which can afford fly-by-wire software that works.)
A stable design might’ve lifted the airframe further from the ground to give those huge engines the clearance they need under the wing, keeping them to the COG and thus ensuring the plane continues to fly naturally level as per its original design. (Any air geeks want to check me on that?)
But obviously that would’ve cost more, and now Boeing’s run by short-term profit chasers, not adult engineers, the attitude is “What can we get away with?”, not “What do we need to build?” That alone’s reason not to trust their bloody product any more. Not least cos what else might they be tempted to cut corners on?
I mean, a shitty iPhone will screw up your day; a shitty Boeing will screw up the rest of your life.
This is why Corporate Manslaughter laws should include hanging the Board by its heels.
The MCAS might have been okay if the behavior matched initial expectations.
On the other hand I'm just a bystander in all this.
Mind you, my physics ed stopped after high school (though even that much is enough to do a double-take at MAX). This looks like a much better explanation:
https://www.quora.com/Where-should-the-center-of-mass-lift-a...
Not that any plane flies perfectly level at all speeds, which is why they need trim in the first place. But presumably there’s a “sweet spot” which the original 737 was designed to nail in normal flight, which subsequent revisions have moved further and further away from.
At some point you really need an adult in the room to stand up and declare “no more”. But by accounts McDonnell-Douglas already showed all the grown-ups the door. That’s the nice thing about responsibility: just disseminate it enough, and no-one’s to blame.