Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard
reuters.com
reuters.com
The plane is a STEM engineer fixable issue. The corporate mess that pushed this across flying clearance is not.
I’ll aim to fly airbus until Boeing understands that difference and fixes the root cause.
I worked with Jinnah before and he is great at shielding the engineers from executive. If hiring great execs is not movement of corporate mindset I don't know what is.
Regulations which require engineers or their union representatives to sit on the corporate board of directors.
(Such as in the deplorable communist countries Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, France and Denmark.)
There's even precedence in the US for this approach: in the legal profession, only lawyers are permitted to own or to manage a law firm.
Because it mentioned unions is my guess.
This is the guaranteed outcome given this way of organizing commerce. Just as if you organized everyone into medieval guilds, we would replicate the behavior of medieval guilds.
I dunno man, the culture came from McDonnell-Douglass which was actually purchased by engineer-centric-at-the-time Boeing. How this culture spread in Boeing ought to be some kind of HBS case study, except they wouldn't notice that it should be taken as a cautionary tale.
The company that today uses the name Boeing looks, acts, and quacks a lot more like 1970s-1995 MD did, than 1970s-1995 Boeing did.
Trust takes a long time to build, and minutes to loose. Boeing knows that, that is how a pilot's license is issued and revoked as well. They gambled their Trust and lost, so now they are in a well-deserved decades-long Trust deficit.
Now hopefully they actually did get their shit together.
Instead, they doubled down and are now going to try to have to sell a product that many will refuse to ever fly on, myself included.
The tail’s controls inverted in freezing temperatures.
Anyone have any more info on this? It seems completely insane for flight control inputs to invert themselves, but only in certain temperatures. I'd love to see the incident report on that...
EDIT: Ah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAir_Flight_427
I'm so sorry that happened to your wife's father.
The accident report is here: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
Section 2.7.2 is interesting:
2.7.2 Unusual Attitude Training for Boeing 737 Pilots
At the time of the USAir flight 427 accident, no air carrier training programs were specifically aimed at training 737 pilots to recognize and address a rudder jam or reversal. The guidance available at that time from Boeing advised pilots, as a first consideration, to maintain or regain full control of the airplane. Specifically, the guidance advised pilots to counter unwanted roll tendencies from a malfunctioning rudder with the application of up to full aileron control inputs. However, the guidance did not advise pilots that, at some airspeeds, an uncommanded full rudder input could not be successfully opposed by full wheel (aileron and spoiler) inputs and that a reduction in the airplane’s angle-of-attack could improve the effectiveness of the roll controls relative to the effectiveness of the rudder. Boeing’s guidance for relieving a jammed rudder informed pilots only that they should use maximum force to overpower the jam and specifically warned pilots against turning off flight control switches “unless the faulty control was positively identified.” No additional guidance was provided about the effects of flight control switch selections on rudder jam conditions.
(Oh, by the way, I didn't mean to imply you were mistaken, or anything like that. I was just so shocked that a plane's controls could invert themselves in any conceivable circumstance. Currently digging through the accident report to try to figure out what happened.)
"the probable cause of the USAir flight 427 accident was a loss of control of the airplane resulting from the movement of the rudder surface to its blowdown limit. The rudder surface most likely deflected in a direction opposite to that commanded by the pilots as a result of a jam of the main rudder power control unit servo valve secondary slide to the servo valve housing offset from its neutral position and overtravel of the primary slide"
Unfortunately I don't know what most of these terms mean. It sounds like it might be saying "they moved the rudder to its limit, and then it jammed at the limit; so when they tried to command the rudder to go the other way, the rudder was pointed in the opposite direction of the control inputs." But I'm really not sure.
My recollection in researching this a decade ago was that the cold weather made the behavior of the rudder change (my term was invert, maybe that’s not accurate), and pilots were trying to pull up, but in fact putting the plane deeper into a nosedive. Some 25 seconds later they hit the ground at some 300-400 MPH and vaporized.
The only way to have saved the plane would have been to dump the hydraulics and/or switch to a manual fly by wire mode, neither of which were a logici thing to do in the 15 seconds they had to save the flight.
I’ve only flown for 20 hours in a Cessna so sorry if my terminology isn’t perfect!
The rudder controls yaw, not pitch. The rudder controls did invert: the pilot tries to turn slightly left, the plane turns right, so the pilot naturally tries turning harder left until the rudder is in the full right position, and they're in an uncoordinated turn. The wing on the inside of the turn starts to drop significantly or even stalls. The plane is then sideways and in a dive, and on top of that, the rudder is all the way over in the direction that makes the dive steeper. The planes quickly rolled over on their sides and went into steep dives.
My understanding is that a big break in the case came when a pilot figured out what was going on and successfully landed a plane with reversed rudder controls.
"Testing revealed that under certain circumstances, the Power Control Unit (PCU)'s dual servo valve could jam and deflect the rudder in the opposite direction of the pilots' input. Thermal shock testing revealed that the uncommanded rudder movement could be replicated by injecting a cold PCU with hot hydraulic fluid. Thermal shock resulted in the servo's secondary slide becoming jammed against the servo housing, and that when the secondary slide was jammed the primary slide could move to a position that resulted in rudder movement opposite of the pilot's commands"
Did the rudder actually move in opposition to the commands, or was it stuck at some limit value?
i.e. in that situation, if you command the rudder to go left, does it move even more in the wrong direction? Or is it simply frozen at whatever position it happened to get stuck in?
Thanks for the info!
In theory the problem was recoverable but the pilots had about 10 seconds to realize what was going on and react appropriately. Sounds familiar to the 737-MAX uncommanded trim issues.
> MCAS was devised to fulfill an airworthiness certification condition in 14 CFR 25.173 and 14 CFR 25.175. In high angle-of-attack (AoA) flight configuration, it is required that stick force/g (the stick force necessary to produce (hold) an incremental normal acceleration of 1g) and stick movement/g (ditto mutatis mutandis) must increase (or at least not decrease) with an increase in AoA (thanks to Clive Leyman for this formulation). I understand that in flight test, in which “wind-up turns” were conducted (a turn with increasing angle of bank; an increasing angle of bank means ceteris paribus increasing AoA), this condition was not fulfilled.
-- https://abnormaldistribution.org/index.php/2019/04/30/ieee-s...
And also to stop the plane dropping out of the sky!
@HPsquared “.. The plane is perfectly stable without MCAS ..”
NO, no, no it isn't .. doesn't matter how many different ways you re-arrange the word salad. MCAS is a software kludge to compensate for an unstable airframe
The implementation is certainly not "elegant". It's like this random batch job that triggers when some conditions are satisfied and does its own thing without regard for anything else, sure. Not integrated with the auto-pilot, does not display anything in the panel.
We have plenty of aircraft (even though most are military) which are aerodynamically unstable, and require fly-by-wire software to even be flyable. We don't think those are kludges. That's not too far from what Boeing has to do.
It could have been either a fancier fly-by-wire software in the Airbus philosophy that wouldn't let pilots exceed parameters(retrofitting it might have been a challenge, and possibly even more dangerous). Or it could be this non-elegant solution that behaves like an old-school stick pusher. Both could have worked.
The problem is that they did this while trusting a single sensor. And not informed anyone.
Airbus had a crash because their fly by wire averaged the input from both yokes vs doing what Boeing does which is to allow both to feel that the other is pushing on the yoke and the pilots where not trained to understand that.
An interesting question is going to be as to what happens elsewhere in the world; I'd be intrigued to see if Boeing ends up certifying the 737 MAX with MCAS as an optional feature with additional difference training required, as some things mentioned suggest that it's not implausible that this will happen.
You had corners cut to deliver a product that ended up killing people. There is no real room for doubt in that just from the material we have available.
So, what? What happens? What should happen? Everything go back to "normal"? Let the same people who ran things continue to profit off their wrongdoing? Accept that as long as you're one of only two rides in town that you have the security to deliver and recover from delivering a lethal product?
That's the issue. That's the reality we're taking out of this. It isn't even self-regulating anymore. There is no bankruptcy, no hammer, no reallocation of assets to those that can wield them more responsibly, no reset. Just a token gesture. The same Goliath just shrugs and moves on.
While I get that might be tenable or desirable to some, I'm not one of them. Realistic risk of falling flat on your face, being held to account, and not being able to just shrug it off and keep going keeps you honest.
Once you lose that, "What's a life here and there? Doesn't bother me. Can't make an onelette without cracking a few eggs."
The economy is not an omelette, and people are not eggs. Either we serve it, or it serves us. I know which side of that assertion I'm on.
Also, responsibility doesn't just like with Boeing; the FAA certified the 737 MAX, and the rules that allowed that to happen were written by lawmakers and bureaucrats over a period of decades. How do you hold all of them accountable? Many, if not most, of those people aren't even actively working any more.
> " collateral damage so cost of that outweighs the benefits"
Do we have a system a justice or do we not? You seem to suggest some people are above the law. Let's see, could that possibly lead to corruption and abuse of power?
I'm suggesting no such thing. I'm simply pointing out that "justice" is not as simple as you are making it sound.
And the obvious defense to that is that the FAA certified the plane. Then what?
And their obvious defense is that they were acting entirely in accordance with statutes passed by Congress and regulations approved by the statutory process for doing that.
Then what?
MAX exists as a response to competition. One may assume the previous design is no longer competitive. And no, the body count isn't being considered; fuel efficiency, capacity and leveraging existing training are among the considerations.
The issue with the Max was, that a software, which should improve the handling in extreme situations, kicked in in normal conditions and the pilots failed to handle this (runaway stabilizer procedure). And indeed, the software for the MCAS was really badly designed, which has been fixed now and by now every 737 pilot should be aware how the two crashes could have been prevented by the right crew reaction. Both of this should mean that these accidents won't happen again.
I specifically chose a return option from Japan last year because it was on a 787.
Perhaps no one in sufficient interests in Boeing read Irrational Exuberance [1] which covered in a decent amount of detail about downturns +/- 2 years of every decade, always the same root cause if different symptoms. Or perhaps they did but were 'maximising shareholder value' (with a 3 month window on the share price) and didn't care - "this time it's different" after all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_Exuberance_(book)
Anyone walking onto an aircraft today is thinking "I hope I don't get a virus" instead of "I hope my plane doesn't crash".
Recent example I've had to deal with:
Morgan Stanley's acquisition of E-Trade has completely wrecked their customer service experience. Live chat wait times are 2+ hours, getting a secure message response takes 5 days now.
Their web site is covered with COVID-19 disclaimers for all the trouble, with a minor blurb about "operational shift".
As they say; Never let a good crisis go to waste.
You could blame anything on 9/11... "Wifi is down, due to 9/11"
"No stock? Must be covid causing manufacturing issues." What? You don't know the sales figures at all and you're making wild assumptions
When the planes were grounded, Boeing kept producing them assuming the issue would be resolved quickly. As of January 2020, slightly before Covid, they had 400 planes built, but not delivered to customers (and so customers haven’t paid for them). Boeing was funding these aircraft with debt.
All of a sudden, demand for air travel drops off a cliff.
All those airlines now decide “I’m just not going to take delivery of those aircraft”. Which also means “I’m not going to pay for them”.
Had the timing gone in the other order, all of those aircraft would have been delivered, and paid for, and airlines would have been holding the bag. (and the covid crisis would have limited the damages airlines could claim, and thus demand from Boeing, if they could meet their reduced schedules with other aircraft).
Low oil prices have also not helped the situation. Airlines need fuel efficient aircraft less than ever right now.
> The airlines slowdown due to COVID likely gave them some
> serious breathing room while they got their shit together.
Also, being has little to do with the actual decisions on what and how to train pilots not employed by them, the airlines develop training programs that are approved by the FAA and operated with FAA oversight.
A lot (maybe most) airlines are struggling to survive with the impact of the pandemic on travel.
A lot of banks that have lent money to airlines have their security in part in the airplanes.
Some countries are pumping money into particular airlines to try to keep them from bankruptcy
As more and more airlines news to shed aircraft and employees the market is or will be flooded with used aircraft.
Possibly some can be considered converted for freight if the market stays strong there
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jeremyboga...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.seattletimes.com/business/b...
And now there are airlines failing left and right with their planes going on the second hand market, back to lessors or are gutted for parts. That's depressing the price of airplanes and spare parts. That can't be good for Boeing either. Would you buy a 15% more efficient car for twice as much?
Here are some variants > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Variants
And here are some operators > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_operators
Admittedly, there are times it gets changed at the last minute for whatever reason, but when you book you see what you're getting, and have for years.
Flightradar24 has the information: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/aa9750/#26332420
In general I think a prosumer-oriented flight search engine would do well. Something like ITA Matrix, before Google absorbed it into Google Flights.
They claim they solved the software problem, but they didn't solve the physics problems created by the engine position (which necessitated the software in the first place).
The engine position, in itself, isn't terribly unusual; the 757 and 767 both have engines in similar forward positions on the wings and have a similar pitch up moment due to the engines at high angles of attack. So do a number of Airbus models. Designing flight controls to deal with this issue is not new and has been well tested.
The particular issue with the 737 MAX was that Boeing wanted to change the engine position on an existing aircraft, without requiring a new type certification and pilot retraining. That meant that the flight controls had to not just properly account for the engine position, but to do so while keeping the same stick force curve vs. angle of attack as existing 737 models. That is what drove the MCAS software system that caused all the trouble. If the plane had been designed as a new type from the start, the engine position would not have been an issue; and the redesign is basically doing what a new type design would have done, as far as I can tell from the documents the FAA has published.
Because the engineers would not have positioned the engines there in the first place.
That would have been one possible approach, yes, but it would have involved other changes, the main one being longer landing gear and a higher ground clearance.
My point is that even having the engines in a similar position to the existing one would not have posed a problem if the plane had been a new type. Other planes in service have engines in a similar position. What caused the problem was having the engines in that position and having to match the stick force curve of the existing 737 in order to keep the same type rating.
Not only is that a single point of failure, it is more easily sabotaged or easily damaged.
Besides the fact the plane has engines too big for it and needed this MCAS system simply to retrofit and route around regulations and deal with that by constantly checking the AoA to trigger nose down adjustments, this is bad engineering/product design by management.
The software now takes two sensors into account in case of a failure of one but is still a problem potentially. Not sure if software can solve this.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-ma...
Presumably as part of the update, this optional feature has become standard?
I'd also like to see a list of all the airlines that chose not to spec the additional sensor in their initial order of the aircraft. It probably says a lot about their safety culture.
No rational person would think this system wouldn't kill people. The people responsible committed manslaughter.
In a way what you described is worse: a known bug that they decided not to fix.
I'm surprised that displaying the sensor value wouldn't be a standard feature.
It's probably far safer now than other models.
No other plane in the history of aviation has had this level of scrutiny.
[1] https://www.airlineratings.com/news/boeing-737-max-safe-fly-...
> “While the software upgrades and changes are enough to get the plane back in the air, the agency is still demanding the development of a so-called synthetic sensor (that will be ready in 20 to 24 months) to reach even higher safety levels.”
This seems clear that we're talking about a conditional airworthiness rather than absolute confidence, safest plane ever made, etc etc. Recall that you said "It's probably far safer now than other models". Why are you saying that given that the experts you quoted are using the paragraph above for this plane, when they don't have similar concerns and requirements for other models?
If other planes received this level of scrutiny, changes would similarly be demanded. The practice of re-badging old models is widespread.
I'm telling you that personally, I'd exclusively travel on just the Max for the rest of my days and wouldn't lose sleep.
That isn't a response to my actual position, or something I expected to happen.
Boeing is a company that needs to take the long view, and the only way to make that happen is to vote with your dollars.
If they can wave this away, then the necessary lessons haven’t been learned and the Jack Welch protege currently at the helm will be allowed to continue business as usual.
All 737 have an obsolescent fuselage design. It could not be certified given modern regulation and relies on being grandfathered for new production. The consequence is the fuselage can shatter on crash landings or runway overruns whereas more modern designs will hold together and protect passengers.
The relatively minor training, hardware and software revisions of 737 MAX do not make it safer than other models. Reading the FAA documents one learns there is little interest in pursuing more fundamental problems.
For instance, the trim wheel control force issue has been officially handwaved. This means your 737 pilot may need to be an athlete in the midst of dealing with failed systems and reading flight manuals. Modern designs have flight proven fly-by-wire systems and don't involve wrestling with crazy naval vessel-like mechanical wheels to control pitch.
[citation needed] It was never said that it was an unsafe design.
[google it]
I never claimed it was unsafe. I argued with the claim that, due to the additional scrutiny the 737 was now somehow 'far safer than other models.' It is not and no amount of additional scrutiny will change that.
It's the most scrutinized plane in aviation history, and has been vetted by multiple regulatory bodies and received thousands of test flights since fixes were made.
Honest question: if this isn't enough for you, what is? All other planes have been scrutinized far less. The bar for the Max to return was much much higher.
No, I do not disagree with any conclusion that the 737, including the MAX, is safe to operate. I disagree with the characterization that, as a result of recent scrutiny, the 737 is now 'far safer than other models.' It is not and no amount of additional scrutiny, and no signoffs by any number of pilots in any nation will change that.
> It's the most scrutinized plane in aviation history, and has been vetted by multiple regulatory bodies and received thousands of test flights since fixes were made.
I don't disagree with any of this.
> Honest question: if this isn't enough for you, what is? All other planes have been scrutinized far less.
It's plenty for me. I would happily fly on an 737 MAX. However, I do question whether some count of hours of scrutiny (or whatever you mean by 'far less') is a good proxy for safety. Things that operate safely tend not require so much scrutiny.
I don't understand this statement, it seems fundamentally wrong. Aviation is full of scrutiny. Aircraft maintenance checks happy every 500 flight hours. Engines get overhauled completely every 1,500 hours.
Maintenance and scrutiny ensure safety.
If the Max has received, at a guess, 200x the scrutiny of any other plane in history, then I'd wager it is the safest. And at this point, pilots will know the Max back to front and front to back in order to avoid issues. Do pilots have such deep knowledge of other planes which almost assuredly have latent bugs which rarely or never crop up due to exceedingly rare conditions?
Maintenance and overhauls don't address design issues. Exactly the opposite; the people that perform checks and maintenance are expressly not supposed to deviate from approved designs and published processes. Conflating these tasks with regulatory scrutiny shows a fundamental misunderstanding about this discussion.
And airliner engines are not 'completely overhauled' every 1,500 hours. Figures that low are related to small aircraft engines, usually piston engines.
Boeing delivered 387 Max 8 aircraft to their customers before they were grounded in 2019. Two were destroyed, killing everyone aboard. That's half a percent of the aircraft they delivered destroyed within two years. That's obviously much worse that most other aircraft, and far worse than any car currently for sale. You wouldn't buy a car that had a one in 200 chance of killing you and your family before the lease was up, would you?
But to continue down this path, let's compare the 737 Max to its predecessor, the 737NG. Out of the 7,065 737NGs delivered, 22 have been completely destroyed, for a rate of 0.3%. If we only look at fatal accidents, we find 12 (0.16%). If we limit this to accidents that were caused by some failing of the aircraft, even if it was made worse by pilot error, you end up with two fatal accidents (0.027%).
So in order to believe that the 737 Max is no more or less dangerous than the 737NG, you have to believe that the 387 delivered 737 Max aircraft were flown enough in 2 years to cover the massive difference in their fatal hull loss rate. I'm sure that the 737 Max was flown a lot, the reduction in fuel consumption means that airlines would want to use it as much as they could, but there is over an 18x difference between the rate of fatal accidents caused by those two aircraft; do you really think that the 737 Max flew 18x more on average than the 737NG has?
Oh, and Airbus has delivered 1,499 airplanes in their a320neo series. None have crashed so far.
Think about the fact that you're flying what is essentially a management designed plane. No reasonable engineer would chose to build this plane.
- bug fixes and general improvements
"If on ground, do not takeoff. End of procedure."
> As proposed in the NPRM [FAA's notice of proposed rulemaking], the corrective actions mandated by this AD [airworthiness directive] include a revision of the airplane's flight control laws (software). The new flight control laws now require inputs from both AOA [angle of attack] sensors in order to activate MCAS [Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System; the system causing the crashes]. They also compare the inputs from the two sensors, and if those inputs differ significantly (greater than 5.5 degrees for a specified period of time), will disable the Speed Trim System (STS), which includes MCAS, for the remainder of the flight and provide a corresponding indication of that deactivation on the flight deck. The new flight control laws now permit only one activation of MCAS per sensed high-AOA event, and limit the magnitude of any MCAS command to move the horizontal stabilizer such that the resulting position of the stabilizer will preserve the flight crew's ability to control the airplane's pitch by using only the control column. This means the pilot will have sufficient control authority without the need to make electric or manual stabilizer trim inputs. The new flight control laws also include FCC [flight control computer] integrity monitoring of each FCC's performance and cross-FCC monitoring, which detects and stops erroneous FCC-generated stabilizer trim commands (including MCAS).
> This AD further mandates changes to the airplane's AFM [airplane flight manual] to add and revise flight crew procedures to facilitate the crew's ability to recognize and respond to undesired horizontal stabilizer movement and the effects of a potential AOA sensor failure.
> This AD also mandates an AOA DISAGREE alert, which indicates certain AOA sensor failures or a significant calibration issue. The alert is implemented by revision of MDS software [MAX display system]; as a result, certain stickers (known as INOP [inoperative] markers) will be removed.
> Additionally, this AD mandates adequately separating certain airplane wiring, and conducting an AOA sensor system test and an operational readiness flight on each airplane before the airplane is reintroduced to service.
> Finally, this AD requires that operators that wish to dispatch airplanes with certain inoperative systems must first have incorporated specific provisions that are more restrictive into their existing FAA-approved MEL [minimum equipment list; defining what can be broken and you can still take-off].
Looks pretty convincing from my point of view.
Because they are journalists and have no idea how airplanes work or how engineering is done.
I'm sure there are better sources for details, and in the end FAA.
The Ethiopian Airlines sensor was speculated to have been hit by a bird on takeoff.
If one needed another reason not to fly Ryannair, here it is.
I think people will fly on the MAX (or 737-8 as it's going to be badged) after a year or two assuming there are no more accidents. Cheaper long haul flights is too tempting.
Though I don't think I'd like to be stuck in a Ryanair plane with the temperature notched all the way up so the passengers buy drinks for longer than 1/2hrs.
I've never noticed that, and it doesn't really make sense as it costs fuel to heat up the cabin. Are you making that up?
The best plan would be to avoid airlines that own the plane, but that will be impractical for most. Even then you might be re-routed onto another airline or third party plane.
You will never be able to get a refund for plane changes. Even airlines with no MAX aircraft of their own could operate your flight with a MAX if they use code share or wet lease.
So while you can make your risk small, you can never be sure, without accepting that you may need to turn back at the gate. But on the other hand I assume you'll be OK with flying it once it has flown for a number of million miles in a few years from now. After all, the airlines that operate non-MAX 737's for the equivalent flights will be flying older and older craft.
The length of developing a fully new aircraft is too long considering the competition, assuming you aren’t particularly passionate about safety.
If I were the EU regulator, I would have forced them to... It's a great way to screw over Boeing (American) and boost sales for Airbus (EU), while having the fairly legit rationale that you no longer have confidence in the US regulator due to a long series of blunders, and you are not happy for a major new plane design to use a decades old type rating (and is therefore missing now-mandatory safety stuff).
https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/06/news/companies/boeing-bomba...
Trade agreements are written to anticipate this sort of thing.
The even bigger problem is that our governments allow companies to get to these “too big to fail” states, and I myself am pretty tired of it. Every single time it is the consumer that pays, either literally or with their lives.
It can't be good for innovation or the consumer if a giant established player is getting preferential treatment.
An expectation of a product creates a product. And a product (can) create(s) demand with or without that expectation.
Of course that won't happen as aerospace is such a strategic industry.
Multiple aviation projects have almost bankrupt Bombardier in recent history, so I don't really see them getting back into it. And it's hard to see what BAE Systems would get out of entering the commercial aviation market.
Um let's be serious. Hard no on those.
Boeing planes are super safe from millions of flighthours and the learnings and failures from before. The older aircraft annealed into a state of safety and reliability from known-ness.
"fully redesigning," introduces a lot more risk.
Which you use to build off of.
It's why banks still run on mainframes despite trying (quite desperately) to get away from that.
You shouldn't be able to say "we followed all regulations" when people die and leave it at that. They should stop playing games and just design an aircraft.
That's EXACTLY what they didn't want to do.
Airbus was able to do the 320Neo without a redesign. They essentially slapped new engines on it and made tiny adjustments. Boom, fuel savings.
Boeing wanted to do the same. Their design didn't accommodate the bigger, more efficient engines they wanted. So they created a workaround.
Redesigning essentially means creating an entirely new aircraft, even if it looks similar. Requires a new type certification, which is a very lengthy process in itself. Requires pilot training for the new type rating. Possibly new simulators, and simulator time. Not all airlines even own simulators.
Airlines like Southwest use all 737s exactly because that makes pilots interchangeable(simplifies logistics and maintenance too, but mostly it's about pilots).
If I'm an airline and now you tell me my pilots need training, including expensive simulators, it's no longer the same aircraft(as in, not the same type rating). If it is not the same aircraft, that means I could choose any other aircraft. Such as these new Airbus models I've been hearing about...
See the problem? MCAS wasn't such a bad solution on paper, it's just that the implementation sucked. It should have required some minimal training (which is much better than a new type rating) but Boeing didn't even want that.
I'm not even clear what that fix boeing used to cover up this problem. The article didn't specify, that is a red flag.
The control mechanism caused the crashes, and control mechanisms can be fixed relatively easily.
The control mechanism existed to cover up a physical flaw then proceeded to be the cause of crashes itself.
If a control mechanism can easily be fixed... What was the exact fix? Literally tell me.
It makes the control curve slightly different, don't be so dramatic.
> If a control mechanism can easily be fixed... What was the exact fix? Literally tell me.
I'm not psychic, I can't tell you how they fixed it, but you can find a ton of people talking about how redundant sensors would have avoided the same issue. You could also have it be much more obvious when it's adjusting trim, because if the pilots were aware of what was happening they wouldn't have crashed either.
from your other comment> Saying the control mechanism crashed the plane and just fixing that is like saying you didn't put enough duct tape over the real problem.
Tape, and the equivalent of tape, is a valid solution to many problems if you have an expert analyze it.
I'm not being drastic, the plane has an unconventional control system built to hide a physical flaw that is never an actual physical property on planes designed from the ground up. The plane will literally stall:
https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/boeing-737-max-...
It's well known boeing used a hack to avoid costs of redesign.
>Tape, and the equivalent of tape, is a valid solution to many problems if you have an expert analyze it.
The experts who killed 300 people analyzed the mcas and also built it. No one will get on a plane covered in duck tape no matter how many experts analyzed it.
>I'm not psychic, I can't tell you how they fixed it,
Makes sense that you're not psychic. Likely you went to google at some point and tried to find out what that fix was and likely you found nothing. That's a red flag, a huge one.
Being psychic is the only possible way you'll know what the engineers did to duct tape the whole design. At the very least this is something any wise man should know about before getting onto that plane.
> The experts who killed 300 people analyzed the mcas and also built it.
It could be fair to avoid all planes coming from those experts. But if you don't trust them to fix a single flaw, why in god's name do you trust them to design an entirely new plane? This is not a reason to push for a redesign.
> No one will get on a plane covered in duck tape no matter how many experts analyzed it.
Ever heard of speed tape?
Most people will either get on the plane when it's fixed, or they will never get on the plane. They're not going to care about the exact details.
> Likely you went to google at some point and tried to find out what that fix was and likely you found nothing. That's a red flag, a huge one.
Sure. Red flag. But a flag is far from conclusive.
> At the very least this is something any wise man should know about before getting onto that plane.
I'm wise enough to not play armchair plane engineer when my life is on the line. If I don't trust the process, then I'll wait for a certain number of flight hours instead. I'm not going to depend on my own ability to analyze plane design.
The locations of the engine and a plane flown without mcas will also cause the plane to crash.
The technical debt transferred over to the control mechanism and now all the engineers and people who worked on and funded the plane are responsible for killing over 300 people. These are peoples lives at stake. Fix the technical debt. Saying the control mechanism crashed the plane and just fixing that is like saying you didn't put enough duct tape over the real problem.
Don't Cover it up.
Note that Boeing had this problem ever since the 737 Classic (the second generation 737) was introduced, hence the non-circular engine inlets they've had for decades. This cost them efficiency, at the benefit of maintaining commonality with all its advantages.
Note that last I heard Airbus was planning a clean-sheet redesign for the A320neo's successor, targeting an early 2030s introduction into service. If you allow me to speculate for a moment, Airbus is in an interesting position now having the A220 in its family: it could easily stretch the A220 to be comparable in capacity to the A320, leaving an A320 family replacement to focus on the A321 and the smaller midsize market.
The A321XLR is already a huge success.
A Ryanair spokesperson said "It's the first time we've ever been offered a discount in excess of 100%"
Makes sense for Ryan to start doing negative prices for their flights. Making profit on the bus fare into city and baggage fees.
The planes are just a cost for Boeing once they are built and they obviously need to them in the air to convince everyone that they are safe and ok to buy.
Where can I find info about the differences and improvements in terms of aerodynamics, structures, materials and systems?
For example,
Does the Max have a composite wing box?
What percentage of the Max is composite, compared to the NG?
Do the wings use the same airfoil section?
Have they been re-lofted, re-twisted?
Are there any changes to the high life devices?
Have there been any changes to the materials, gauge, design for the fuselage?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737#Boeing_Converted_Fr...
It's not like Boeing has a warehouse of 737-MAX's sitting around. They are ordered and delivered as they are finished.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein....
That all said, Boeing is liable for penalties due to late delivery of many (most?) aircraft.
Clearly the fact that fewer aircraft are flying increases the lifespan of those aircraft (assuming they aren't scrapped or inappropriately stored!). But that's often not the only concern the airlines have: some airlines pride themselves on having a fleet of relatively new aircraft, fuel is a significant cost and can be a significant incentive to replace aircraft with more efficient ones regardless of age (especially if you have competitors on the same routes with more efficient aircraft), time out of service due to maintenance (at some point having the aircraft out of service for a couple of months with a large bill due just isn't worth it versus replacement, and aircraft maintenance is mostly done on a time basis so the clock is still ticking).
Delaying aircraft replacement by a couple of years due to 737 MAX delays is almost certainly viable, but delaying replacement by 5+ years to instead order A320neos is harder, and delaying replacement by 10+ years if you want to push Boeing to replace the 737 is likely implausible.
They do have a bunch sitting around. So much they had to hire people to care for them.
I mean come on. Of course it won't. It didn't before the long recertification process started either.
What about every 10 or 100,000th flight though? They gonna do PR stunts for that long?
The bigger problem is that you have a company that decided that a single sensor driving a safety-critical system was sufficient, even though they have two (and even that is not enough, such systems should have three).
For a new system that was introduced and not explained to pilots, because that was the goal. It even made the "AOA disagree" warning _an optional feature_. Or, more specifically, it made the AOA indicator an optional feature, and the AOA disagree feature was tied to that. They knew about it, but didn't inform anyone. Including the FAA.
So now we trust that same company to make the plane safe. Why?
Everyday flights are as boring as possible on purpose, you do everything you can to keep the plane away from the limits.
Flight testing inverts that. You run everything to the limit, and beyond, to see if it is possible for systems to fail.
But the frequency of flights increases the probability of an unusual or unforeseen event occurring, or tested events occurring but in combination. Just like beta testing.
It's also how the Soviet regulators certified their aircraft, they required them to operate for a year or more on cargo and mail flights so that they were exposed to a wide range of environmental and operational scenarios.
> Everyday flights are as boring as possible on purpose
So were the commercial 737 Max flights, yet here we are.
Aerospace should be a cost-sink first, a financial growth engine second. Often, a cost-sink is actually both at the same time with the growth in industry around them that new, costly, realistically risky work creates. Whereas optimizing for the second metric at all costs tends to only benefit the undertaker, investigative agencies, and the lawyers.
http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/a310.htm
The airbus A310 had 1.35 accidents per million flights, and for some reason people still fly in it
The second is a 2020 model, equipped with state of the art safety features. However, its fatal accident rate is the same as the other model (though the absolute number is much smaller), and nearly every single such accident happened in the exact same way: the driver assist system, which cannot be turned off, has a nasty habit of overpowering the driver and steering into oncoming traffic. The NHTSA investigation reveals that this system was implemented hastily, using outsourced labor and cheap non-redundant components, so that the manufacturer could qualify for a tax credit. Specific concerns regarding the implementation were raised by engineers but overruled by management.
I'll take option A, thanks.