Max: Boeing 'inappropriately coached' pilots in test after crashes
bbc.com
bbc.com
What is wrong with these people? If the plane can't be brought up to snuff without you fudging the test results then you can the thing. There is no other way.
Because if you don't can it what's going to happen? More crashes. The subsequent investigations will reveal that there is still a problem with the plane. Investigators will follow the trail back to the certification, and then you'll find yourselves in a whole heap of trouble.
Oh, and Boeing will go under. Where's your shareholder value then?
Of all the short-sighted, obtuse, shady, unethical, blithering idiocy we have all witnessed in various quarters in 2020 this ranks amongst the worst.
I honestly no longer care what the certification status of the 737 Max is. There is such a cloud of untrustworthiness around the plane, its systems and its certifications that there is no way I will ever risk flying on one.
Boeing have done some amazing things in the past. The 747, for example, was for its time an extraordinary aircraft and is still without doubt the most iconic passenger airliner even today. The Boeing museum near Seattle is incredible, and I highly recommend it. In more recent years it's clear that they've lost their way, but I hope that they are able to get back on track, and back to building more amazing aircraft. It's time to let the 737 Max die though.
When just recently I was explaining the Boeing situation to my children, my twelve year old mentioned that it sounds exactly like what happened at NASA. That's a twelve year old's conclusion, and I told her how insightful that was. So many people in the field are so blinded by their patriotism towards a company or organization that they are unable to identify the roots rotting out under their own feet.
There is a ubiquitous bias to assume that everyone else is stupid but we’re somehow especially intelligent or infallible ourselves, which as we’re seeing here as some fairly dire consequences at scale.
It's been over a decade since I've last said "that decision that somebody else made was stupid". I've since replaced it with "I would have done it differently, but I don't know what other constraints they were faced with at the time".
History is littered with failed products that were very well engineered. For any business to last there needs to be an effective partnership between commercial and product development areas of the company (or, if you prefer, MBAs and engineers, not that the distinction is so clean).
GP is merely pointing that out.
I’m astonished that the echo chamber between Boeing and the FAA is so oblivious to their customers that they’re plowing on ahead even prior to this latest scandal.
I’m not flying with any airline that can’t guarantee my flight won’t be on one of these. I doubt I’m alone.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-delta-...
How much would you wager on that?
There are clearly quite a few people who are determined to avoid flying on a 737 Max (or avoid Boeing altogether) and also seem to expect this to be a widespread view. While I can understand the former (though not hold it myself), there is no realistic prospect of the latter.
I can't verify the safety of airliners either, but so long as they are flown by an on-board crew of professional pilots, there will be a body of informed* people with a vested interest in keeping things safe.
* Though not always fully informed, which is, of course, a big part of the 737 Max debacle.
A lot of people won’t fly on these planes, but far from a majority I’m quite sure.
Those same people will also be aghast if something goes wrong in the future as “they” were supposed to have made sure the planes were safe.
People still want to believe in The Magical Them.
[0] https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/04/27/reader-ma...
Or you could just avoid all 737s.
You have to outweigh the cost of retraining all pilots for an alternative plane. This whole mess happened because that is something the airlines really want to avoid and Boeing was greedy enough to offer it.
I don’t see repeated crashes in the article.
Part of the wager in situations like this is that the state will, in a variety of ways, from contracts to bailouts to regulatory capture, keep the crony corporation afloat.
The involved shareholders will have already sold their shares by then, and be busy destroying some other company's long term existence for some short term valuation that they can dump and run.
And any criminal investigation will stop on the small people they coerced into doing the illegal deeds, because they of course left no evidence trail of those decisions.
I wonder if we can frame a system starting with this approach (correcting for aspects like some votes are on really minor issues, and some are really major issues).
This particular problem is heavy on game theory, which is a pretty well-developed field at this point. So I think there are grounds to believe we might be able to predict consequences with some accuracy.
And look how it turns out every time that principle is broken, albeit in userland and not the kernel: KDE 4, PulseAudio, Systemd.
I'm fully aware of the differences between a product (airplane) and software, but the 737 Max is born of the same principle being broken. The problem that was being fixed was fuel efficiency. So Boeing replaced the engines and associated structures with more efficient engines, which required different structures to hold them, which required MCAS, and now the whole thing is untested, as compare to the old setup with decades of proven reliability despite 1.6% more fuel consumption.
I'd also point out that arguments like this, while often well-intentioned, can also be abused, by people who don't like a particular new idea but can't articulate a defensible reason. It's easiest then to just fall back on conservatism.
The real answer is to invent new stuff and try not to be idiots about it. Use good design principles, don't cut corners, do the testing, roll out gradually when that's feasible, etc. For the Torvalds principle you mentioned "untested" new code, and Boeing definitely cut corners.
If you are adding complexity into a very complex system, in order to govern it, it is very likely that the change will make the system harder to control. So you must have a pretty good certainty that this will give you governance and not destroy it.
Can you come up with specific ways it might fail? I can definitely think of issues that would have to be addressed, but so far all the critical comments in this subthread could apply, unmodified, to thousands of unrelated ideas, rather than just this one.
> Can you come up with specific ways it might fail?
It's trivially exploitable by the executive team by just behaving in a sustainable way for a while, and then changing it suddenly when every other shareholder is locked-in.
The reason the comments apply to thousands of possible suggestions is that the problems appear on thousands of possible suggestions, and nobody wants to keep writing thousands of comments debunking each bad idea.
Again, it's an extra bonus to the unethical ones, because they are the only ones that can sell, and will take all the profits from the short lived stock pump.
Do you also have a home-made encryption algorithm you'd like to push?
Perhaps you could point me to an equivalent field for making society better, with a well-developed utopia that lots of people live in today.
Incidents listed on Wikipedia excl. hijacking/being shot down where >=20 people perish:
year airbus boeing
2000 2 3
2001 1 0
2002 0 4
2003 0 3
2004 0 1
2005 0 6
2006 2 2
2007 1 3
2008 1 2
2009 2 0
2010 2 2
2011 0 2
2012 0 1
2013 0 1
2014 1 1
2015 1 0
2016 1 1
2017 0 1
2018 0 2
2019 0 1
2020* 1 2
* To date.
> The whistleblower alleges Boeing officials were present for the testing and encouraged the test pilots to “remember, get right on that pickle switch” immediately prior to the exercise.
> “Pickle switch” refers to the stabilizer trim control switches
The implication is that the pilot reaction times were only fast enough to counter the original MCAS design if they were explicitly reminded how to react immediately before the exercise.
However, that to me points to the larger problem, that "Boeing officials," whoever that group may entail precisely, treat the 737 Max safety as a test that needs to be passed, instead of a safety problem, that would require best effort.
Of course, the real answer, “ask your boss Cesare Borgia and do whatever he says, or you will be fired for insubordination”, is conspicuously absent.
They were testing if the original assumption that went into the original design of MCAS was correct. The assumptions that pilots would be able to react to a failure correctly within 10 seconds.
Basically, Boeing was trying to cover their ass.
I think something is very wrong if safety of any system is dependent on reacting to any failure within 10 seconds, without any error whatsoever.
I know pilots and piloting is on the extraordinary end of the spectrum but, isn't this stretching it a bit too much?
Also, these airlines that bought the Max on the basis they wouldn't have to re-train the pilots are presumably having to foot the bill for this?
My understanding is that the design is aerodynamically flawed. The MCAS system was an ugly hack and even the new solution is just an improved MCAS.
However the 737-MAX is Boeing’s answer to Airbus’ competitive threat in the biggest commercial airplane segment. Not approving the plane would leave this segment to Airbus and would cripple Boeing’s commercial airplane business as a whole.
The US considers this business strategic given past history of government incentives. Europe and other countries also consider this business strategic and likewise have provided massive government incentives.
This calculus alone almost forces the FAA to approve the plane for flying.
Furthermore, the 737-MAX not flying could bankrupt Boeing. All those hundreds of planes that they manufactured would be scrap. All the existing planes flown would become lawsuits.
But Boeing is a big defense contractor with a revolving door with the Defense Department. There is no way the US would let one of its biggest defense contractors go bankrupt. The gravy train for that military industrial complex would end.
That isn’t going to happen. Look at Biden’s nominees. They are part of the revolving door between the military and defense contractors.
If we could peer through closed doors I bet we would see the US government pressuring other governments to approve the 737-MAX for flight. They also need to give approval for the plane to fly to their countries.
For all I know, the benefits of this effect, as a function of time and whatever other factors are relevant, may well be well-studied and amenable to modeling. Perhaps one possible source of data for such studies would be measurements of reaction times in training and proficiency-check simulator sessions, where no single issue is under scrutiny.
This will hamper peoples trust in both Boeing and the FAA for years. It doesn't take much for flyers to choose an alternate flight that isn't on a Boeing. And for overseas aviation authorities to not trust FAA airworthiness certificates.
Are you suggesting they can't?
I didn't say they would succeed, but that's not really the point. If people don't ask for this, no airline will implement it.
The airline industry has made customer segmentation an artform. They manage to charge hundreds of people different prices for the exact same service.
You don't think they can add a premium upgrade that lets you choose the aircraft type?
Get outta here.
Maybe that's what's wrong with the world. People aren't taught to ask for the things they want and just blindly accept the status quo.
Don't bother responding. The downvotes for my suggestion speaks for itself.
Sheople.
If you address the right people in the right way in writing, you may elicit a written response and (if you're extremely lucky) some form of compensation. It is very doubtful that many companies that can afford a 747 Max will change their operations unless political pressure is put on them due to an extreme imbalance of power.
If we lived in a world where the imbalance did not exist, things would be different. In some cases, we can see that in smaller airlines which tend to be more responsive to customer concerns and needs. But those companies are flying much smaller planes to start with.
People act like corporate death is similar to the death of a person. It’s not. The body parts just get shuffled around into other companies.
Do Boeing contribute funding to the FAA in a direct and discretionary way?
I can't comprehend how a federal body would aid a private company like this when the ramifications could be so severe (threat to life and to the FAA's public credibility).
Entrenched government agencies never appear to have concern about public credibility. Their security is guaranteed not by the public but by politicians, and these same politicians are the beneficiaries of donations by large corporations like Boeing. Further, large corporations employ lots of people who would be rather pissed off if they lost their job. So by punishing the large corporation, the agency would in effect be giving an incentive to its key stakeholder (politicians) an incentive to punish the agency (limiting authority, etc).
The world is a messed up place, where agencies tasked to do a very specific thing undermine that task out of self-preservation.
>being complicit in the cover up?
Guess what common sense says.
The 737 Max and A320neo are direct competitors. The A320neo was announced 6 months before the 737 Max in 2011, and both were certified for flight in March 2017. (Give or take - the A320neo has a few variants.)
Back when the 737 was first grounded, initial investigation found that Boeing and the FAA cooperated to rush the 737 into service to beat the A320neo [1,2].
The FAA has every incentive to make sure that American companies, especially large ones like Boeing, are treated favorably. Even outside of donations or smells of corruption, Boeing is a major employer and S&P500 member. If Boeing does well, our economic metrics (employment/stocks) do well, and the lawmakers who regulate the FAA are happy.
Those same incentives appeared in the FAA's refusal to ground the Max for days after the second crash. (First crash was 8/29/18; second was 3/10/19; grounded 3/13/19)[3]
I suspect we're seeing a replay of the original certification. As soon as the 737 Max is recertified, all those grounded planes can get back to making a profit, and Boeing can go back to making them.
Not how it should work, but the recertification effort seems consistent with how Boeing and the FAA acted in the initial certification. It's not right, but the same incentives still exist.
Just my $0.02.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...
[2] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/21/congress-faa-boein...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/13/702936894/ethiopian-pilot-had...
However, if the 737 Max is flown by a pilot from a 3rd world country, then, yes, you might die.
And this was the problem to begin with. The pilots in 3rd world countries were not even trained on the 737 Max. They just told them, that it flew the same way as the older 737 planes.
To everyone’s horror, they found out the hard way. While the plane was in flight.
Do I need to put a big Borat style Naaaat on the end to stop these down votes?