Citing a serious flight test incident, FAA slows Boeing 777X certification
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Crikey. MCAS all over again. Something at Boeing is very, very out of control.
This is of course much more expensive than picking up any contractor, who might be brilliant at programming, but lacks the domain knowledge that only grows over time, but it is a good way of having more eyes spotting potential spec issues.
And you make damn sure that if either of you has questions or see something funny, you figure it out before you ship.
I am a software engineer now, but my major was mechanical engineering, I can barely remember any of my coursework, but I understand how physics work in general, and a small bonus on how to disect a system. Nobody can know everything in today's world and that's why common engineering/sense training is so important IMO.
Where are those managers?
You'd hope you could communicate or document or something like that but exceptions are endless.
This misunderstanding arises out of necessity to compensate for the lack of understanding of the value of nontechnical roles.
It's heartbreaking for BAs, POs, PMs, and every other flavor of functionary when they realize that, after some* years of experience, the programmers understand the business just as well as they do. And the programmers have countless other invaluable skills that the functionary could never understand if he studied for a hundred years.
*This length of time is variable. Depending on the business domain, it could be anywhere between 1 and 10 years.
I don't push back on the premise that there are some incredibly dumb non-engineers. But of all the people I've had to work with, engineers were among the best and the worst. The latter has to do with their dysfunctional level of focus and utter lack of creativity - not just in an artistic way, but also in terms of general imagination.
Here's a very common scenario:
- non-engineer: let's improve this by 10%.
- engineer: that will cost 40%.
- non-engineer: I get that. But our current 90% is not competitive.
- engineer: but it doesn't make sense to invest 40% to get 10%.
That's what separates great engineers from the high-IQ/low-EQ ones: they have taste, imagination, and common sense. Incidentally, the latter group tends to have less self-awareness than the former, and tends to think they are the only non-idiots in the world.
Why heartbreaking? That should make it easier for everybody to do their job, and to do it better.
Shouldn’t be. Very few engineers want to move to BA/PM/PO or management track.
Engineers who understand those roles exist and should be given the reins. Call them whatever but an engineer with domain knowledge is what you need for just about everything.
We’ve had quite a bit of success moving to a product model for internal services. One thing I’ve observed though is that teams lacking strong PM/PO support tend to start looking inward to develop their roadmap rather than outward.
This ends up building little silos in which they are doing something and it’s generally executed well but when you explore their plans it can be hard to see how it connects to the larger view.
So are the computers that have to actually implement the solution. So that seems like at least as much a blessing as a curse.
It takes time and investment for other engineers to get to know you and feel comfortable explaining their thought process, including parts of the design they are afraid need extra testing.
You can't outsource the essential give and take of a correctly functioning cross-domain team.
I have yet to meet one of those unicorns.
He would have to leave the company every so often because of company rules (or labor law?) about how long the company could employee a contractor. Eventually he'd get hired back in, as a contractor.
I hear you, but I suspect aperocky was criticizing that exact approach.
I.e it felt like sarcasm.
Do you disagree with either part of my reasoning?
I just feel like the sentence structure doesn't make sense if they were suggesting that opinion. I'm not basing it on whether I think someone might actually have that sort of opinion. But if you don't want to elaborate on your thoughts then that's fine, have a nice day.
MCAS interfaces with quite a few other systems on the airplane.
The 737MAX should have gone through a new type certification, but didn't to allow for less pilot retraining.
FAA failed to properly serve the public.
New type cert finds flaws and saves lives.
Think of the engines as a big horizontal stabilizer but it's at the front, in front of the center of gravity. Normally it doesn't do much anything since the angle of attack is zero. But if you increase pitch, it will increase nose-up momentum.
For some reasons it's not common to put the engines further back. DC-9 style, on the sides of the rear fuselage might work. Or maybe over the wing and slightly to the rear, like Hondajet.
Specifically with regard to the flight characteristics, MCAS is a band-aid on a problem created by cost-minimization -- the desire to avoid a hardware redesign (to properly accommodate the larger engines) and/or a re-certification.
My point just was, a complete redesign of the 737 still would have to deal with the same aerodynamic issues as the 737 MAX, as they are rather fundamental to this kind of jets. But indeed, it would have been easier to deal with it with a new design.
It is less mentioned, that shortly after the MAX crashes, Airbus mandated that in some planes the last rows were kept empty until some software updates were deployed. So they seem to have discovered some boundary conditions they were not happy with and decided to be rather safe till they augmented the software.
... without triggering re-evaluation of the seriousness/consequences of failure. That meant that failures of MCAS were considered unproblematic, which meant that lower levels of redundancy were deemed acceptable.
Quite a process/management failure.
No, it would have more ground clearance, so it wouldn't need flat bottomed cowlings nor MCAS.
And the effect is fundamental to large engines. The effect which required MCAS would also happen if the machine had larger ground clearance and would be mounted more under the wings. Actually the way the engines are mounted on the MAX moves them closer to the longitudinal axis of the airplane and thus reduces and thrust-related tendency to pitch up.
https://leehamnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/737NG-vs-M...
https://aerocorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Aegean-Air...
But, MCAS was only ever using a single angle of attack sensor as its source of truth, so if there was a fault in that single sensor, MCAS could activate at normal attitudes.
But the real problem was that Boeing hadn’t documented MCAS, to avoid the requirement for pilots to obtain type certification for the MAX (so any existing 737 pilot could to fly it without additional training - and it wasn’t just Southwest objecting to this training), and to avoid a full FAA certification process for the MAX.
So on an MCAS activation, even if they had had an AoA alert, pilots would not know how to instinctively deal with it. (I don’t doubt an AOA disagree alert would give invaluable information allowing the pilots to rule out most failures, which when only a few thousand feet high would maybe have saved both planes.)
On the previous day to the Lion 610 crash, the incident aircraft suffered an MCAS activation and fortunately a pilot in the jump seat realised what was happening and what was needed to deactivate it.
It seems being sat behind the trim wheels (so he could see they were moving) and not wrestling to keep the plane in the sky at the same time was needed for that to happen. It must have been terrifying.
They don't need to redesign the wings to accommodate the newer, larger engines.
The real issue was the reliance on one sensor coupled with too much authority give to MCAS and inadequate failure analysis.
And pilots who did not read, remember, or follow the 2 step recovery process in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive sent to all MAX pilots.
The Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive says:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
For those who are skeptical of mainstream media fake news on the topic, here's the official final report on the Lion Air crash:
2018 - 035 - PK-LQP Final Report http://knkt.dephub.go.id/knkt/ntsc_aviation/baru/2018%20-%20...
I also recommend the recent Aviation Disasters episode on it. While shallow, because it has to fit in 40 minutes, I was shocked that it was surprisingly accurate. Kudos to the Smithsonian channel. I wouldn't be surprised if AD waited until that report was released before doing the episode, so it would be using verifiable facts.
One out of 313 active AD's [1], 12 with no effective dates that seems to signify a different class of AD's because their issue dates are all over the map. I'm okay with 313 patches that I apply and the computer executes it from then onwards. Above a certain limit of number of AD's that should be memorized by pilots at all times, instead of entered into maintenance tracking systems for example, I'd like to hear from pilots why safety-wise that doesn't trigger a type re-certification.
I know that is expensive and time-consuming, but I certainly don't expect for example, my most senior ops team members to recall off the top of their heads more than a handful of critical procedures to execute on-the-spot without referring to the runbooks. Why does it appear that AD's are expecting pilots to apply a seemingly unbounded number of these "patches" like computers without re-training?
[1] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/airworthiness_direc...
It's a whole two steps:
1. trim back to normal with the electric trim switches
2. turn off the trim system
Not only that, this is what they're supposed to know anyway. Recovering from stab trim runaway is supposed to be a memory item, meaning memorized.
If you were a MAX pilot, wouldn't you pay attention to this?
Can they just not do that?
I don’t think it’s anything to do with size, there are larger planes than the 777X that are perfectly safe (and of course, the 737 is pretty small as far as airliners go).
There is no level playing field here, if pilots were required to be retrained for new planes even if they are the same class it'd increase costs in general but it would, at least, level the field to avoid these shortcuts for certification.
Being hyper efficient has its costs, this is one of them, an airline can't stop flying some of their pilots because they are on the razor edge to keep their margins. It is in the design of a competitive market, we might have to take a second look on what's the net-positive of having that much "efficiency" forced by the lack of incentives in other areas such as safety.
First, Boeing doesn't prioritize safety anymore. Profit is the driving factor in their decision making. You can read about the issues they have assembling the 787 in South Carolina. It is so bad some airlines are refusing to take delivery unless the plane is validated by the assembly line in Washington.
Second, the FAA was caught being complacent with the 737 Max. It will take some time to fix that, but it is clear they don't want to make the same mistake. Also, the EASA is no longer just rubber stamping approvals following the FAA. Both agencies are combining to improve safety, which is highlighting the management problems at Boeing.
This to me speaks volumes about our regulatory environment. Once upon a time the US regulations were so thorough that other countries would just Me-Too certification if the US had certified something. That's no longer the case and the EU has rightly started to question everything.
The US is in rapid decline on all fronts as half our country stands in the way of anyone trying to fix the problems while ignoring our rapid erosion or blaming it on immigrants and leftists.
There is almost an obsession to find out if your BMW was manufactured in South Africa or Germany, the latter being desirable, on BMW enthusiast forums despite of being made with exacting specifications and factory processes.
I speculate that focus on safety and quality of work are easier at the unionized plants.
While the South Carolina plant was probably set up in a place with far less history, far less integration with engineering, far less historical knowledge and far less engineering talent in the area.
And quite likely a much smaller overall labor pool willing to move there.
I do believe being unionised impacts a lot the work environment psychological safety, allowing employees of the plant to halt production if they don't think work is being performed up to their standards, in NC there is no such provision and the employees themselves are caught on video stating "I wouldn't fly on a plane made here".
I was simply point out what to me seem clearly the most reasonable explanation. If tomorrow there was a union in the SC plant and no longer one in Washington I at least would still pick the Washington built plan every time.
And again, its a totally different question if union in SC would help. They might well improve quality, I still would much rather fly the Washington plane even if they had unions.
To not acknowledge the outsized effects of power dynamics in human hierarchies limits your analysis' scope IMHO. In some of my more dysfunctional clients, I've had to assiduously work to gain the trust of junior engineers to speak candidly to me so I could get the information I need to build my deliverables.
I didn't present a complete analysis of the problem. And even if you do take into account 'power dynamics' to jump from that to 'therefore union' would not be correct. Company culture on how errors get handled is likely more important.
A Union worker might be safer from being fired, but that doesn't mean is actually listen to when he speaks up. A company with a strong union culture of workers vs might be separable exactly that.
To me this feel like point to the issue that you like. I'm simply saying that the the better explanation is that one place is the historic home of the company the other is a cheap manufacturing location.
Consider if SpaceX started producing rocket and rocket engine in South Carolina. Would you not consider it likely that the quality there would be worse then in Hawthorne? SpaceX employs are not unionized.
Now on the other hand, what if you had the workers in Hawthorne be non unionized and those in South Carolina be unionized. Would you expect the quality of the rockets/engines from South Carolina to be higher?
I certainty wouldn't bet on that. I much rather have non-unionized workers at a historic company head quarters where the whole engineering sits in a region with likely a 10x higher density of engineering talent and a 10x higher approval as a relocation destination then a far away manufacturing center selected for cheap land and labor.
The same goes for Boeing as well. If you told me I had to make 10000 flights in plane built by the unionized workers from South Carolina and the now no longer unionized workers in Washington. I would still pick the Washington plane every single time.
This is totally outside of if it would be a good idea for the South Catalina workers to unitized and if that might have a improved effect on quality. I think that reasonable argument, but to me its a far smaller factor.
No profit means no airplanes.
Boeing is a huge company and I saw just a small slice of it at my time there. So with that caveat, in my opinion the root cause of Boeing's problems are mismanagement. Mismanagement flows down from the top of the organization and impacts everything they do.
Here's just one example, off the top of my head: There is no "psychological safety" in the workplace. I wasn't aware of this term at the time, but it's crystal-clear with the benefit of hindsight and a decade more working experience. There is no good way to fix irrational or ineffective processes; or at least, I've never seen it happen. What I did see, several times, is course changes and "new approaches" that result in whole departments (dozens of engineers) getting pink slips. So as a result there was inherent mistrust of change, because "we're going to stop doing X and start doing Y" meant "everyone currently doing X needs to scramble to find a new project before the hammer drops". It is impossible to build a culture of continuous improvement and engineering excellence in such an environment.
Again, this is just one example. There's probably hundreds, thousands, more. It's mismanagement all the way down.
Without it, people will not stick their necks out or call out problems. They won't tell you the truth or that they are having a hard time.
As someone new to the management sphere, but coming from an engineering background, it was the absolute first thing I've gone out of my way to establish.
The pattern recognition that has kicked in for me watching managers in many clients is the ones that can effectively lead because they've established this psychological safety within their teams and can stand up to pressure from above, are the ones that have also established a narrative upwards the management chain that they're practically nearly FIRE'd, and could essentially leave at any time without much adverse impact.
Empty nesters, on the home stretch towards retirement, working just because the missus wants a few more years at trade/career/profession/etc., whatever form the story takes, it immediately defangs any implicit threats of "do this with your team or else you're fired" that seem ever-present in higher hierarchy levels of many organizations. In fact, these leaders engender such strongly-cohesive teams, sometimes the implied threat goes the other way up the management chain: "if that manager leaves under a cloud, some/many/most/all of the most effective team members will follow them wherever they go at the same time".
What's not clear is why this is happening. To be clear, nearly all possible outcomes point at either a broken management, and/or engineering culture at Boeing, but all have different flavors. What points at it being a broken management culture (predominantly... this certainly doesn't rule out engineering problems) is this particular section:
> Citing a “lack of data” and the absence of a Preliminary Safety Assessment for the FAA to review, the agency’s letter declares that Boeing hasn’t even met its own process requirements.
> Boeing’s CCS “review dates have continuously slid over a year,” the letter notes.
This section indicates that someone told regulatory to start a TIA process with FAA despite having not completed a review of a vendor supplied critical component (ie, follow their own plan). This indicates that multiple areas within the company which should have been involved (engineering, quality, and regulatory, as well as areas of the company concerned primarily with internal development, and out-sourced systems) were likely all overruled. These are all areas of the company that are supposed to be setup to stop bullshit other areas getting through. All of them have slightly misaligned interests relative to each other that generally tends to keep stuff in check.
Quality is usually very very concerned with at the very least, following your own plan ('meeting its own process requirements'). No one at regulatory would have looked at these gaps (like not at least papering over missing their own process requirements), and thought that formally engaging would be a good idea.
As someone working in medical devices, this definitely smells like something that management rammed through. This doesn't absolve any of other parties/groups of responsibility though. It just means that you have a problem beyond just your documented process, or technical capabilities/competence.
Unfortunately this hits at the development of a culture of complacency.
I think using the word issues here is diluting the facts. A more accurate wording would use disasters or catastrophes.
After 2 planes down, hundreds of deaths and a massive international backlash and shitstorm, Boeing tries to get a business-as-usual, rubber-stamp, paper-over-the-cracks, fastrack approval, and rightly gets shot down.
> Is this just the FAA getting tough because of all the scrutiny?
Hopefully this is just the FAA doing its job from now on.
Business as usual being propped up as news because the topic gets attention recently.
You test to find issues. You expect a certain sort and number of issues to come up in testing. Sometimes an issue comes up outside of expectations so you reset your expectations and test more.
The FAA has been doing its job and flying is incredibly safe. There were lapses, those things are being addressed.
>Boeing tries to get a business-as-usual, rubber-stamp, paper-over-the-cracks, fastrack approval
This is way over the top. It's a fun narrative because building up an enemy is a good passtime and it gets reader attention.
When you don't know anything about a topic, be hesitant to share your theories about how everybody is doing it wrong.
In the real world people who aren't experts have opinions, and those opinions matter. If the narrative that is everywhere is wrong feel free to correct it, that's a useful undertaking IMO. If you think everyone who knows less than you (in your opinion) should just be a silent spectator to your expertise, I guess we have different views on a how a healthy society behaves.
Most airports came before the A380, you'd change one/two gates at most.
Doesn't beat the top deck of a 747 in business for the cool factor, but I've never woken up after an overnight flight feeling so refreshed before.
Book the shower right before landing and step off the plane feeling nice and fresh. It’s always easy to spot the F pax from the unwashed masses.
Hope it's around for many years.
8 hours of noisy bus ride? Weird, I never found the A380 like that and it's not as if I was up front or anything. Engine noice was minimal, fairly comfortable. Maybe just lucky.
Having said that, I recall a distinct difference between airliners. Qantas A380 wasn't as nice in comparison to the Emirates.
Boeing better estimated the widebody market than Airbus, but they lately have a problem with implementation.
They need to put an executive in every one of the test flights until it is fully certified. I assure you it will be the safest plane you will ever fly.
Even that wouldn't engender change. I could see change if it was selected from member of the board of directors, CEO, CFO, or COO, and random lower-level executive. And all their immediate families.
That we would even be discussing this is odd to me. I remember watching various old-timey 1940-1950's era American movies that depicted turn-of-the-century titans of industry proudly and aggressively using what their factories' products, and if it involved putting their lives on the line, so much the better to get more attention, validation, and sales. Don't know whether that happened at all in real life, but it made an impression upon me that the zeitgeist thought it entirely appropriate to depict in popular media.
Just as it makes an impression upon me that so few leaders of industry today will make it a point to truly randomly pick out their product and use it with gusto and pride. If they are caught on video doing any similar act, it is a thoroughly massaged "reality show" production carefully "handled" by PR, marketing and sales teams.
Hard to believe they wouldn't invest and ensure that their software is perfect after the MAX incidents, but here we are.
This project will just keep costing them money, continue eroding trust and probably more fatalities along the way...
This appears to be the heart of the problem, how come it's the FAA holding you up on this and not your own engineering department?
A solid foundation in design and engineering would require that if an event like this happened you'd rip down the whole structure until you got to the problem, from where you could confidently move forward knowing you know your systems.
Now finally that FAA doesn't want to repeat the MAX mistake, I believe Boeing.