Boeing 737 Max mid-air emergencies revealed | Hacker News Reader

Boeing 737 Max mid-air emergencies revealed

abc.net.au

50 pointsdlcmh15 comments

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Control surface write-ups are *huge.* The 737MAX design is broken as designed ... and then poorly built.

I actively won't fly one and I've never said that about any other aircraft.

(me => FAA licensed aircraft dispatcher / ex-dept chief)

assume you werent around when dc-10s were still active then ?

I did not know the DC-10 had bit of dodgy record and oh hey, it's McDonnell Douglas. Again! What a coinky dink

I read the book "Destination disaster" years ago and its pretty chilling how callous the company was to get the plane out the door.

The article makes vague references to scary sounding incidents such as:

> In one incident in December 2021, a United Airlines pilot declared a mayday after the system controlling the pitch and altitude of the plane started malfunctioning.

And yet, after searching multiple online databases looking for more info, I can't find any evidence of this ever having happened. One exception is this incident from December 2021 in the NASA database which references a non-MAX 737-800:

> B737-800 Captain reported stabilizer trim became inoperative and elected to divert and make a precautionary landing.

Surely the authors of this hit piece would not have confused the MAX with a completely different aircraft?

Its possible given even Boeing started to refer to the MAX as 737-8 due to the MAX branding being tarnished:

https://boeing.mediaroom.com/news-releases-statements?item=1...

Not necessarily. For example the “737 Next Generstion 800” is just known as the “737-800”. In some contexts it is further abbreviated to eg. “738”. For brevity the full name is not always used in all places.

I flew on a 737-Max after an 8 hour flight delay very recently and I thought they were joking when they announced what the plane was. I quickly looked up the stats on my phone (is this thing safe to actually fly?). It made the trip back more anxious than it had to be.

Is one declared emergency per 100,000 flights (6 emergencies declared in 580,000 revenue flights, according to the article) more or less than is usual/expected?

edit: I was able to find one very rough statistic "about 10,000,000 passenger flights per year" are managed by FAA, and "150 emergency events" are reported in a typical year. That's 1.5 emergencies per 100,000 flights, or fairly in line with what the post-MCAS-redesign 737 MAXs are running

I'd want to look how many were from jets vs passenger prop plane engine outs, which seem more common to happen than jet engine failures (but passenger prop plane flights themselves are so much less common it might not matter).

The 10,000,000 number was scheduled passenger flights only (there are another 4,500,000 FAA-serviced flights), but it's possible that the 150 emergencies included non-airliner passenger flights (like semiprivate charters). I don't know.

I'm still waiting to ever see any disaster or problem or issue with any other plane manufacturer show up here or in other media sources. Other manufacturers have problems just as often. Yet the reporting is completely, horrendously, skewed to the point where every single Boeing issue is blasted as publicly as possible, whereas you never, ever, hear of any problems with any other planes, which paints a completely inaccurate picture of the landscape.

Other manufacturers, apart from Airbus, those include Embrear and Bombardier (at the time) didn't have that issue of brand new planes crashing into to ground, killing 100s of people due to shoddily implemented and hardly documented software.

Other manufacturers didn't have to halt production of their flagship model due to shoddy manufacturing and quality control.[0]

It seems that this company ultimately values the lifes of passengers flying their planes lower than the financial shenanigans they so much like to put in place.[1]

It seems that Boeing is quite rightfully getting all the opprobrium it deserves.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=boeing+787+quality+issues&t=fpas&i...

[1] https://wolfstreet.com/2020/03/11/boeing-crashes-as-43-billi...

When the second one crashed seat of the pants Bayesian probability said to me something was very very wrong with that design. In at least the burden of proof flips around from prove it's unsafe to prove it's not.

To me it's a classic case of what happens when you let MBA brains make all the decisions.

> Other manufacturers have problems just as often.

No.

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