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Comment by heymijo | Hacker News Reader

"In his letter, Jacobsen recommends that Boeing upgrade the MAX’s autothrottle logic to either disconnect or give the pilots a warning when the computer registers invalid data.

In the upgrade to the MAX that allowed it to return to service, the FAA did not require any such change but did add an explicit instruction that pilots in this kind of emergency should “disengage the autothrottle.”"

In the many articles about the MAX that have shown up on HN the underlying concern seems to be that this is still not a safe plane. This excerpt is scary.

Anyone with aviation experience want to weigh in?

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Of course it's not a safe plane, common sense says so. Would you trust a bunch of bureaucrats and corporate sellouts with your life, when engineers have been ringing alarm bells for years?

Not only will I never fly this plane again, but I'll do my best to avoid Boeing altogether. Given that I'm European, it should be fairly easy.

> I'll do my best to avoid Boeing altogether

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbus-probe/airbus-bribe...

This is about Airbus bribing to get more deals, which is abhorable but common practice in any multinational corporation even these days, be it soda, weapons or banking. Boeing is about utterly incompetent management killing 300+ civilians +-knowingly, and acting like little children. Still refusing to take blame, still refusing to actually fix the source of the issue. As a passenger, I and my family are in direct risk from this incompetence.

Yes, in almost duopoly in civilian flying, I will take Airbus anytime. And never, ever, fucking ever 737 Max.

What I was trying to say was: yes, you probably shouldn't fly the 737 Max in particular (and perhaps 787), no doubt about that. But to write off the entire company's fleet of airliners when they still obviously have planes that continue to maintain excellent history seems kind of extreme and unwarranted. Like presumably you think they somehow compromised on safety on their other models too, despite their safety records, to bring them into the market. Shouldn't that give you pause on Airbus too, given they've actually gone so far as to to bribe people to get their planes into the market?

I've more critical of Boeing than some folks here in the past, but if your goal is safety, you're just limiting your own options by rejecting planes with provably good safety records. (Or if you somehow think that's warranted, then there seem to be plenty of reasons to question Airbus's integrity too.) OTOH, if your goal is to just do this as some kind of economic retaliation (a "vote with your wallet" thing), in which case, never mind, I misunderstood your goal as being safety-related. Though you're not the person who wrote the initial comment, so I guess your reason could be different.

With the current leadership of Boeing I wouldn’t really trust anything they do or say.

This is a loss of confidence situation, not one based on deep fundamental analysis.

As much as all other Boeing airframes can be safe, I'm not confident at all with the way Boeing's management runs the company. What other cost-cutting measures have been implemented? How can they affect current airframes maintenance and reliability? It probably doesn't affect them much but it's been blunder after blunder from Boeing, from the 777 built at Charleston, the 737 MAX fiasco and the 787.

As an airline customer I'm completely dependent on trust that Boeing was doing things correctly, from a safety standpoint at least. I don't have that trust anymore and it'll take decades to earn it back.

You're also forgetting the fact that Boeing still maintain the current aircraft. What if they cut corners in some updated manufacturing design or material? What if a new update to an FMS introduces faulty design into how something or other works. Yes, you're totally right if planes rolled out of the factory and was never touched by Boeing again, but that's not necessarily how it works.

I mean, if they were going to do that, why would they start doing that now? By most accounts I've read, their culture supposedly changed with the McDonnell-Douglas acquisition in 1997. They could've and would've already started doing so long ago before all this mess burnt their reputation, and we would've seen its effects on other planes' track records, yet I don't think we've seen anything to indicate this. And it seems to me like they have far less of an incentive to start engaging in these shenanigans now.

textbook whataboutism

I think his point was Airbus also isn't safe, not Boeing is okay.

which is a textbook whataboutism

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/whataboutism

> A conversational tactic in which a person responds to an argument or attack by changing the subject to focus on someone else’s misconduct, implying that all criticism is invalid because no one is completely blameless

> Excusing your mistakes with whataboutism is not the same as defending your record.

This was emphatically not what I was doing.

> by changing the subject to focus on someone else’s misconduct

and how is highlighting airbus misconduct not a textbook example of this?

you even linked the explanation sentence, but did you read it?

If you read the entirety of what I wrote in all my comments here it should be fairly obvious how. You seem very keen to start a fight though, and I'm not sure I'm up for a match here, so I'll leave it at this.

Actually, pointing out similar actions in peers of the accused is a valid method to demonstrate that such actions are not misconduct. Or, if we still insist on calling these actions misconduct, then a double standard has been demonstrated.

That said, GGP post did not point out similar actions. Airbus did not risk passengers' lives. That is the issue here: public safety.

But ofc there s a double standard as long as Boeing kills and deflects and Airbus stays silent with no history.

Doesnt mean Boeing shouldnt restructure or disappear.

As the other commenter pointed out, whataboutism would imply defense of Boeing.

I think we disagree on what whataboutism means. I think we're just gonna have to agree to disagree, because we're having a meta argument at this point.

Given that I'm European, it should be fairly easy.

Why does this change anything? Every major European carrier flies Boeing aircraft. Some exclusively.

Airbus is much more common.

I've already decided that once it's safe to fly again, I'm going to fly Spirit exclusively. They're a US-based carrier with an all-Airbus fleet.

If you want to not be charged fees up the wazoo, JetBlue also has no Boeings.

While this is good to know, Spirit is also the worst airline I've ever had the misfortune of flying with.

Honestly, I'd rather deal with shitty customer service than plunge to my death.

Seems irrational given the probabilities. Do you stop driving non-Tesla cars? That should give you a bigger bump in expected mortality (obviously depending on your relative mileage)

> Seems irrational given the probabilities.

Two Boeing 737max out of a total close to 400 crashed in the span of around a year before being grounded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

The FAA predicted that the Boeing 737max would cause about 15 crashes during the next 30 years.

The right figure to look at is the number of fatalities per million miles traveled. Those 400 covered an awful lot of distance over that year (but also, not all of them were yet flying at the beginning of the year).

> The right figure to look at is the number of fatalities per million miles traveled.

The right figure to look at is how many plane crashes there are with other commercial flight planes of the same class due to design defects covered up like Boeig did, which is zero.

The comment I was addressing was "Do you stop driving non-Tesla cars? That should give you a bigger bump in expected mortality (obviously depending on your relative mileage)".

You seem to have mistakenly believe that I'm defending Boeing here. I'm not. The following two things can be simultaneously true: The 737 MAX is less safe than other aircraft, and the 737 MAX is still safer than driving.

Look at how many car crashes leading to fatalities there were over those two years and it's a lot more than the mere 2 with the 737 MAX. The point still stands; the only reasonable way to make comparisons here is not by absolute number, but per passenger distance traveled. Any other comparison isn't correctly normalizing the things being compared.

> The comment I was addressing was "Do you stop driving non-Tesla cars? I'm not.

That's your personal decision, and one you feel you meet to be vocal about on public forums.

Others feel the exact opposite, and flying Boeing is a risk not worth taking due to the company's track record.

Think about it for a second: your decision comes down to either fly with company A or company B, who have pretty identical offers, and company B flies planes with known safety problems. Not a hard decision.

> Not only will I never fly this plane again, but I'll do my best to avoid Boeing altogether.

Seems excessive. Most of Boeing plane families have been flying for decades. We're unlikely to discover new major failure modes in them at this point.

If anything, I'd wait before flying any recent Boeing designs.

It's a matter of principle

> the underlying concern seems to be that this is still not a safe plane

The takeaway here is that the FAA is dysfunctional, so any plane certified by them in recent years is potentially unsafe.

The FAA has to demonstrate how they fixed their process, then re-certify every plane tested under the old, broken, process.

One plane model being obviously defective is just a symptom.

The MAX had the MCAS installed to make it so that pilots could operate it under the type certificate of a 737. Otherwise, the plane would behave differently and would require retraining. What he's probably saying is there is nothing wrong with the plane's design without the MCAS. Financially, the 737 MAX wouldn't be a success that way.

>> What he's probably saying is there is nothing wrong with the plane's design without the MCAS.

That is a common IMHO misconception. Since the new version with "fixed" MCAS requires additional training, it does not follow that MCAS exists simply to avoid retraining and non certifying it the same. In that case, Boeing should have simply dropped MCAS and did the certification and training. Instead they opted for the near financial disaster and disruption to their supply chain AND failure to avoid additional training.

I suspect MCAS is covering for a very bad corner case in the flight dynamics.

> I suspect MCAS is covering for a very bad corner case in the flight dynamics.

yeah, much larger, stronger, and more forward positioned engines so the thrust leads to pitch up stalls in worst case scenarios.

> I suspect MCAS is covering for a very bad corner case in the flight dynamics.

I cannot judge the severity, but it covers for rule 14CFR §25.203(a) "Stall characteristics", see http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm#background

Your suspicion is correct.

FAA rules require on all planes that the control stick takes more and more pressure to pull back as the plane approaches stall.

The 737 MAX doesn't meet this requirement, apparently it gets easier to pull the stick back as it approaches stall due to engine nacelles. This is what MCAS fixes, as the plane approaches stall, it adjusts trim to provide that extra back-pressure on the stick.

No amount of additional pilot training will allow the plane to fly without MCAS, because this is a hard rule and it's not certifiable without it.

The idea this deficiency can be masked by software is perverse. These parts of the regulations need to be true without electrical power. They're supposed to be a function of aerodynamics.

This is only superseded in absurdity by the fact there are two switches to disable the stabilizer trim motors, thereby making the airplane no longer airworthy while in flight.

> These parts of the regulations need to be true without electrical power.

How would you make that happen in a fly-by-wire airplane? In fact, how would you implement it at all in a digital fly-by-wire system without software?

If you feel that using software to control an airplane is perverse, you might want to avoid flying.

The 737 is not fly by wire.

Airbus fly-by-wire have an alternate law mode where yoke input has matching control surface deflection, just like cable or hydraulic planes. I did not say no software anywhere ever. I said using it to mask aerodynamic deficiency is wrong.

These are transport category aircraft. Not fighter jets. Positive static and dynamic stability is required. All of this is reviewable. Is the software?

Thanks! That's the first I've heard what the actual problem was. Reducing pressure instead of increasing would make the controls inherently unstable.

It's only right at the edge a stall condition, under most normal situations the controls are stable.

It is important to note that the MCAS was implemented on the MAX because the larger engines, and larger possible thrust vector further away from the planes center of mass, make it much easier to flip the plane over.

The MAX is a bad aeronautical design that Boeing made more "controllable" through additional control system engineering. Problem is, the additional control system engineering was pretty bad.

> The MAX is a bad aeronautical design that Boeing made more "controllable" through additional control system engineering. Problem is, the additional control system engineering was pretty bad.

Yeah, it's really frustrating that the solution was already a band-aid, and they didn't even bother to do that properly so they covered up what was questionably fraud (the lazy way of not getting a new certification) with what was unquestionably fraud (lying about the MCAS system).

What's really sad though is it exposes just how defanged the FAA has become over the years, so now who the hell do we rely on to tell us what's safe for aviation?

Yeah the 737MAX should have been an entirely new airframe and not been a 737 at all.

757

The 757 is long dead. They stopped manufacturing it in 2004. The real answer was the 797, which Boeing scrapped in favor of the 737 MAX.

My point is that the 757 was the replacement for the 737, to accommodate high bypass engines. So we are a very long way down this road.

When it came out, the 757 was a significantly larger and more powerful plane than the 737. It was not a direct replacement, it was a new model in a class above what the 737 at that time was. Then, after the Boeing 757 was already in the skies, Boeing kept making the 737 bigger and started impinging on 757 territory, which had previously been separate.

Without the MCAS the plane would stall. Which would lead to much more accidents than without MCAS or with the broken MCAS as we have now.

I understand MCAS is only necessary when performing the most extreme, emergency maneuvers. Even then a good pilot would cope without it.

Not as I understand it. It was installed because of the Airbus accident in the South Atlantic. An extreme case, yes. But with the engines moved back, the plane has the natural tendency to stall. Which is very common.

It's common practice to change procedures instead of certification.

I flew an airplane that was getting ready to be retired after it's been in service for ~30 years and we had a lot of emergency procedures and memory items (items that pilots have to memorize) that were add over the years after various incidents.

The 737 MAX wasn't necessarily an unsafe airplane, it's pilots were not made aware of how everything worked, which led to the two crashes.

It was both an unsafe airplane and pilots were not made aware of how everything worked.

A human pilot properly informed in advance could paper over an act of sabotage by a flight control system, but that does not make the airplane safe.

A single sensor reporting bogus data was used by a system to automatically take dangerous action. Both are dangerous. But in particular the latter, because it permits an excessive reaction to what is supposed to be merely stall avoidance, not recovery. Even stall recovery does not require anywhere near the kind of nose down amount MCAS was permitted to induce. That behavior is sabotage. If a human pilot did the same thing, with the same available bogus information, it would be incompetency. And if it lead to death, it would be manslaughter.

Is it common for commercial airliners to nose-up when approaching stall conditions, thus making them easier to stall? (Or something else, that sounds similarly dire to a layman?)

I understand that aircraft are complex systems, and they need to be used by experts, and that those experts are aware of, and have to work to mitigate a lot of catastrophic failure scenarios. Is the unstable flight caused by the forward-mounted engines a particular example of a 'typical' quirk of a commercial airliner?

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