FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s | Hacker News Reader

FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

cnbc.com

861 pointsephesee838 comments

One troubling aspect of this is that it appears Alaska had reason to believe something was wrong with this plane but basically ignored it. They were getting pressurization warnings on prior flights, but the only action they took was restricting the plane from flying ETOPS routes.

They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount of inconvenience.

I haven't trusted Alaska since the Flight 261 crash, where they failed to do basic maintenance for so long that the screw threads in the stabilizer system wore away and locked the plane in the "straight down" orientation. And fired and sued a mechanic who reported the problem. 100% fatalities.

That's more than two decades ago. People involved must have long left the company. They might even be working for other airlines.

Things like this are always alarming until you learn the base rate. Unfortunately, I cannot find a quick reference for this, but many many flights take off with some anomaly noted in the technical log book.

Yes, it's actually an FAA approved document for each aircraft type called the Mimimum Equipment List (MEL). It defines which non-critical equipment is permitted to be inoperative and not prevent dispatch of the aircraft.

Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.

And it's not like driving is especially safe. It's just that traffic deaths are so routine that they're not generally widely reported, while pretty much every major issue with an airplane gets national attention. In the US, traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 lost with all hands every couple days.

I can't link you an independent source just my word as an aircraft mechanic.

I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can never achieve.

I live in Alaska and Alaska Airlines (which isn't Alaskan - it's HQ is in Seattle) has a rather... notorious history with safety/maintenance issues. I fly Delta whenever possible when travelling to the lower 48.

There’s more than one of us up here that goes to hacker news!? Hello fellow northerner!

Alaskan Airlines is notorious for taking maintenance shortcuts, this is likely not an inherent problem with the airframe but rather this operators SOP.

Alaskan Airline flight 261 is one example.

> The subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that inadequate maintenance led to excessive wear and eventual failure of a critical flight control system during flight.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261

Although I can sympathize with the story, this particular aircraft had been in their hands just a couple months. Its first commercial flight was just a couple weeks back. Maintenance isn't the issue here, clearly.

Do you have any examples that aren't from a quarter century ago?

isn't alaska airlines rated one of the safest airline? What airline is safe these days?

Do you have a source for that? I'm not denying it, just curious to read more.

cursory search:

> Preliminary information about the accident remains scarce, though two people familiar with the aircraft tell The Air Current that the aircraft in question, N704AL, had presented spurious indications of pressurization issues during two instances on January 4. The first intermittent warning light appeared during taxi-in following a previous flight, which prompted the airline to remove the aircraft from extended range operations (ETOPS) per maintenance rules. The light appeared again later the same day in flight, the people said.

https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/alaska-737-max-9-t...

No idea about the accuracy of the site. And it seems like they have some script that prevents text highlighting for whatever reason (turn off Javascript).

It will come out in the NTSB report, if it's true. Though that will take quite a bit of time.

It's too bad that asking "source?" comes across as hostile unless clarified to be otherwise. Maybe the internet should adopt something similar to the "/s" tag that signals that sentiment.

Do we remember when the referenced article from here [1] hit the top of HackerNews soon after the Max crashes?

[1] https://christinenegroni.com/irony-of-pilot-laying-blame-on-...

Interesting timeline.

Following the two fatal crashes involving the MCAS system and the 737 Max … The FAA gave Boeing until Dec of 2022 to implement a fix. The fix was to reconfigure the 737 Max with 2 sensors (instead of one) and include an manual shutoff

Guess what happened? Boeing didn’t fix anything.. instead they cried to congress that the fix is too expensive and they cannot get it done.

So what happens is congress includes a provision in the omnibus spending bill to exempt Boeing from having to fix the MCAS system. So today in 2024 .. the 737 Max still only have one sensor although they did retrofit a manual shutoff

https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2022/12/23/boeing-max-221223/

Pretty interesting after millions spent on investigation , congressional hearings, developing engineering a better MCAS system … quietly Boeing just bypasses everything.

Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)

That is pretty concerning. The way how Boeing can get its way simply by threatening to can the entire MAX program (which they'd never actually do) shows that there's a very deep level of integration between the US government and its biggest companies, especially one like Boeing that's often seen as kind of a minor point of national pride.

Not only that, but the article mentions that the 737 MAXs got an exemption on providing a modern crew alerting system. Of course, all of that is done so they could certify these aircraft as being basically the same as the first 737 from the 60s. Meanwhile, A320s have been flying with ECAMs (a centralized system for viewing the plane's status and alerts) since the 1980s.

Boeing doesn't have a real business plan until they have a plan to replace the 737. Boeing and Airbus have been going crazy over the past 30 years developing widebody airliners, some of which were solidly rejected by the market, but domestic flyers (most of them) are stuck with a 1967 design. It's a disaster when it comes to managing the social and environmental impacts of air travel.

A ride in this plane

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_family

radically changed my view of what is possible in a small airliner, because it has a squared-off cross section it feels much larger on the inside than a 737... And this is a previous generation plane, now there is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220

There's a crisis brewing at America's small airports in that they've really stopped building the sub-50 seat regional jets that serve smaller airports. (In the small city near me, almost every organization lists the local airport as a weakness in a SWOT analysis) Manufacturers know that airliners around 70 seats would be dramatically lower cost to operate than the status quo, enough that prices would drop and service quality would increase and filling the extra seats would be easy. Trouble is the unions won't let the airlines upgrade

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

Which in itself is ironic as the US government spends a large portion of it's current time accusing China of the same thing. As usual you should always expect projection when shade is being thrown.

At least in China when greed kills people there are consequences for executives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...

Chinese system has a huge number of flaws but one thing it gets right is the government stands above corporations.

Corporate control over government is the path to dystopia, it's how the climate situation got out of control, why the drug epidemics keep coming back, why obesity is killing the country, etc. etc.

Occasionally people wake up and fight back for a moment but it's always fleeting because the deck is stacked against the people. The corporates have the money for the research and "lobbying" aka bribes to keep regulation at bay for decades usually.

Corporate greed is all consuming and thus regulation is meant to exist as it's counter-balance. When the corpos are the ones regulating themselves well... you can't be surprised when this is the result.

The best part is that Boeing had EICAS, the engine indicating and crew alerting system, in the early 80s with the introduction of the 757/767.

In the mid-90s, when they updated the 737 to the Next Generation, they opted to stay with the six-pack recall light system that every 737 pilot hates. Same in the Max. Too expensive to change and would likely require a new type rating.

The A320 was such a technological leap forward in commercial aviation. Boeing wasn’t able to match it until the introduction of the 777, almost a decade later.

The integration of government and these big businesses is one thing. The fact that it always seems to run in the direction of undermining citizen safety and protections, and weakening the country's capacity to actually hold these companies accountable to even national level interests is astonishing.

What purpose does this integration serve if not to allow the government leverage? These days you have the US government acting like its a 2nd-world power, just desperately trying to hang on to any businesses willing to grace the US with their presence, instead of a nation that holds the key to glibal economic power. Frankly it's pathetic.

This is completely wrong. Boeing did make the changes to include input from two AoA sensors, they did change the system to prevent recurrent horizontal stabilizer movements, they did include a manual shut-off.

What you are talking about has very little to do with MCAS. Congress required any new aircraft type certified after 2022 to include an Engine-Indicating and Crew Alerting System.

It was never even intended to apply to the 737-10, but because the certification took longer than expected, it became likely the -10 would fall under the regulation, which would cause pilots to have to be re-trained for the -10.

All of this is only peripherally related to MCAS.

You are confusing two different issues. The article you reference is from December 2022. The MAX 8 had already returned to service two years prior, with the required fixes to the MCAS system, in 2020.

This law had to do with a deadline for certifying the MAX 7 without completely redesigning some of the systems.

I'm not a Boeing defender here -- these issues are incredibly concerning.

What are all the differences between these MAX <n> planes? Is this an intentional strategy by Boeing to confuse so that they can make all these loose arguments and skirt regulations?

Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless it is to add more limitations based on past (bad) performance and then only to document the reason the law exists, never to provide exemptions.

> Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless

No "unless". No law should target a specific company or individual by name, ever, whether to give them special exceptions or special permissions or special restrictions or anything else.

(They also shouldn't target specific companies by sufficiently-specific-description-it-only-applies-to-one-or-two-companies, either.)

Congress will be happy to replace “Boeing” with “American companies which manufacture all of commercial and military aircraft, satellites, and space vehicles and launchers”.

Washington State has been making Boeing-specific laws for decades, without having to mention them by name - the legislature just writes up a bill which sets such-and-such a lower tax rate for every aircraft manufacturer which employs at least so many workers, et voila! There happens to be only one.

You raise a good point, and there definitely exists a pile of related jurisprudence on the subject of "attainder"[0]. Afaik that only applies to negative consequences though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder

Somewhere, the NFL is quickly checking its shoes...

It's almost comically evil at this point. Boeing actually argued that the victims didn't experience any suffering, because they died on impact.

So in your final screaming moments as you hurtle toward the ground, be comforted to know that the ultimate perpetrators of your death will say your terror never even happened.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-families-argue-over-pay-...

You'd probably want to cite such a big claim ("Boeing didn't fix anything"), which is not supported by your link. Other online sources say Boeing did fix MCAS, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

> makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy

The US has not been a functioning democracy for a very long time, if it ever even was.

Don’t despair! Plenty of people have fulfilling and happy lives in non-democracies. But it’s important to be realistic about the chances of anything about the political system fundamentally changing.

> Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)

By international standards, US ‘democracy’ doesn’t get rated that highly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde....

> By international standards, US ‘democracy’ doesn’t get rated that highly.

For starters, it's a two party system.

Sharp tongues would point out that this is double the amount of political parties you'd "find" in Russia or China ...

>(inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)

The word you are looking for is oligarchy.

Yeah, I heard Boeing even has it's own Presidential candidate...

A brief search of who Boeing donates to is a bit depressing.

I know that they have parted ways now, but Haley has managed to sit on both sides of negotiations between government and Boeing.

> Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)

We're not. There was a coup attempt scant years ago, and there will absolutely be another in November.

There should be people on life sentences for manslaughter of 346 people that happened as a result of corporate greed and a company culture which made company profits the only important metric of success.

That is not at all accurate. The MAX has two AoA sensors from day one.

We're talking about what the MCAS used for input. The aircraft has two AoA sensors and three computers. MCAS used 1 and 1 because it was believed to be non-safety-critical system. Here is a direct quote from Wikipedia's MCAS article:

> Though there are two sensors on the MAX only one of them is used at a time to trigger MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. Any fault in this sensor, perhaps due to physical damage, creates a single point failure: the flight control system lacks any basis for rejecting its input as faulty information.

There is a whole subsection just about MCAS and AoA sensors.

>makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy

Obviously, obviously not.

Single item spending bills ftw

Such an americentric take... as if Boeing only had to deal with FAA only. You completely forgot about other regulatory bodies. How was Boeing supposed to sway EU bodies, for example? Once you realize there's more of those, your conspiracy theory ends up in shambles.

I hate to turn this into a political comment, but your comment about it being depressing struck a nerve with me.

Many conservatives and people worried about the border have been feeling this depression pretty hard the last few years, if not 20+ years. Add in the crime problem with no cash bail, and honestly a few friends and I have felt something is really wrong for several years on a pretty deep sad level.

Interesting that something slighlt convoluted like a plane retrofit was what brought about it in you.

Feeling sad and depressed can be a medical condition rather than a reality issue. There are many numerically things (can't check everything) that are not much worse than 20 years ago (and some even better), but people seem more and more upset. It's like they just spend time online/on TV and WANT to find reasons to feel bad. Or that they expect that because things CAN be good they will be good tomorrow without any effort.

Fortunately, Boeings work on the 737 MAX was independently checked by non-US aviation authorities who aren't subject to US Congress provisions.

<Non-US aviation authority reads FAA papers>

"All good boss. Let's certify this!"

I guess that depends on what you believe a "functioning democracy" because yes we are are "functioning democracy", the fact that the outcome is not what you desire do not mean it is non-functional.

Keeping in mind that a democracy was never the goal, and being a democracy is actually the root of the problem. Looking to the federal government for solutions to all of these problems is the the problem itself.

People expecting the government to fix everything is the problem....

Maybe instead of acting "are we a functioning democracy", the better question is "how can we solve these problems with out government..."

Almost all of this can be laid specifically to the moment when Boeing passed over Alan Mullally for its next CEO in favor of a bean counter. Mullaly went to Ford and rescued that company. If Boeings board were serious about a true turnover here, they need to try and find Mullally And get him on the board right now. At this point the best outcome that I see is a BCA sale to Lockheed. That’s a high order, Elon tried to lure him to Tesla, but was unsuccessful.

It’s also worth noting that this is the ultimate outcome of the never rewrite anything mentality. Sooner or later technical debt catches up with you, they needed to launch a new, narrow body 15 years ago, but kept soldering on with the 737, which in turn is really a Boeing 707. While the 797 is the plane that launched the jet and unquestionably the greatest airliner of all time, it’s time is long long past.

You can recover from where boeing is at now. It’s not that much worse than airbus was at after their A320 flew into a forest and they hid the flight data recorders, or commercial disaster that was the A380, or the first 350 proposal but they have to want to change.

> It’s not that much worse than airbus was at after their A320 flew into a forest and they hid the flight data recorders,...

This one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296Q

Doesn't read like "they" = Airbus hid the recorders.

Comparing Boeing's woes to the A320 crash is to take a false middle ground. The A320 crash was the result of pilot risk taking for the purpose of showing off the plane. It didn't happen as the inevitable consequence of a company that prioritised profits over safety and had established management culture and government relationships to enable that.

Given Ford relentless push for more pickups and systematic reduction in all smaller cars. I would say Ford killed about few 1000x more people the Boeing ever has. And they have equally done a huge amount to prevent regulation, both in terms of safety and fuel economy. The US still doesn't even test how well cars do against pedestrian. The list goes on and on.

We hold Boeing to a much, much, much higher standard. And that is a good thing. So to give this guy credit when he has been involved with Ford, a company that has done an incredible amount to make the world more unsafe, we should maybe not just to conclusions about how much saver boing would be with him.

That said, safety at Boeing even from a business perspective would have been different, so his intensives there are very different.

If we actually ever want to really deal with traffic accidents, we need to approach it with the same systematic root-cause analysis and immediate action principles.

That is what they have stared doing in some of the leading countries and its amazing. Every accident leads to adjustment in the infrastructure, Identifikation of other locations with the same potential issues and updated road standards.

Unfortunately we are still far to lax, on actually regulating the cars themselves and far to forgiving on cars, car company and drivers. The arms raise of 'my car is bigger then your car' shouldn't be allowed. Cities shouldn't allow these horrible F-150 type cars into them at all. The list goes on.

Back in 2019, I made a lil microsite covering the 737 MAX groundings. Didn't think I'd have to update it again. https://www.isthe737maxstillgrounded.com/

It's chilling that both Alaska knew of pressurization issues in prior flights in this aircraft, and Boeing was already trying to get the FAA to look past known safety issues in the 737 MAX 7 certification. "Safety is our top priority"? Ha, absolutely not.

> It's chilling that both Alaska knew of pressurization issues in prior flights in this aircraft,

Actually this isn’t a big deal, they’d taken it off of ETOPS trips and were following the mx requirements.

Intermittent pressurization aren’t that rare. In a brand new airplane I would expect all sorts of weird faults.

FWIW my understanding is that only a subset (not sure how they determine which) of the 737 MAX 9s that are grounded.

Yeah, that's fair. The tone of the website is sort of like other single-serving websites like "is California on fire", which displays yes even if a small part of California is on fire. http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/

Warning: Undefined array key "PHPSESSID" in /home/public/www.isthe737maxstillgrounded.com/includes/cmsAnalytics.php on line 27

On the bottom of the page. Might wanna look into that

You've got a typo in there - it's spelled Ethiopian

I flew a United MAX 9 last night, I was sitting in the window seat of a visible (Not plugged) emergency exit door. Landed a little while after this incident was reported. About an hour and a half before landing at SFO the pilot announced a hurried “Flight attendants check in” with no follow up announcement to the passengers. It was probably because of the turbulence we had been experiencing a few minutes before, but I wonder if the cockpit was giving flight attendants a heads up in case any passengers got word.

I feel like this is pretty unlikely - as far as I know, they don't really pass news bulletins and such to pilots, if it's not something that they need to know. Besides, even if some passenger found out, what could they even do?

> even if some passenger found out, what could they even do?

Panic and freak out?

Intercom announcements like "flight attendants check-in" are a matter of routine.

Yeah, I imagine this could be a call to go to the bathroom or part of a security check-in.

Boeing may think they fly above it all (get it?) but I can assure you despite my largely unwavering confidence in the air travel industry, I will not travel on a Boeing aircraft in the near future. I will see to it that I fly Airbus or not at all, which I'm perfectly fine with should it spare my life. This type of large-scale and continued negligence can only be defined as a company that thinks they're too big to fail. I would rather see the US's airplane manufacturing capabilities decrease than allow such heinous acts of negligence to continue. Shame on Boeing. You'd have thought that the previous 787 and MCAS problems would've straightened them up, but you'd of course be wrong. Let them bleed; dry if need be. This is no way to operate in such an important industry with deadly consequences.

How do you enforce that rule? It’s not always easy to pick your flight and aircraft like that (without a lot of money). I’ve got a flight with a national carrier and it’s on a 777; a tried and trusted aircraft and airline so that’s decent reassurance.

I think the big thing out of this is that 737s specifically are just outright scary to see on your flight. You should try to avoid any new (2014 onwards?) Boeing aircraft.

Objectively, even a 737 MAX is probably safer than driving.

Very true. But there is probably something about the fact that traffic accidents are direct human error, usually, that make us more comfortable with the risk than the prospect of a systemic, corporate or technical error. Entirely irrational of course.

This is sort of ironic because they asked to bypass some safety checks on the 737 max 7 recently. Note this is a different model. EDIT: The bypass is about the deicer. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...

It's not a safety check bypass. Boeing wants to make pilots responsible for turning off the deicer within 5 min of ice disappearing to prevent the flawed engines breaking apart in flight.

How does one even know if ice has disappeared in the vicinity of the engines?

Hacker news discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358

Does it have the same manufacturing process? It wasn't anything specific to the plane's model, it was the fact that it was a manufacturing defect that caused the door to blow out.

> It wasn't anything specific to the plane's model, it was the fact that it was a manufacturing defect that caused the door to blow out.

We don't know that yet. The NTSB report will tell.

The problem here is the company and its management, not a specific plane.

The management trying to weasel out of yet another regulation is entirely showing what’s going on here.

Good book describing the cultural change from engineering-focus to business-focus of Boeing:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...

A friend of mine works in Boeing as a data scientist. His team has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means. They spend their days creating processes, managing tickets, enforcing specific formats of tickets and stories and what not. Yet, none of the eight knew how to write product specs nor could be bothered with basic things like understanding how git works.

I have a hard time imagining how Boeing could survive in the long run with this level of bureaucracy.

Edit: Saw the summary of the book Flying Blind: "A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation". One has to ask: where did the cost cutting go? What's cutting throat? It looks to me that the management of Boeing is grossly incompetent.

> His team has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means.

Not disregarding your point, I think we all agree Boeing sounds like bureaucracy hell, but could it be that the 8 who are "managing projects" are in fact managing contractors or outsourced employees who are writing code?

I worked with a large multi-national fashion company, and they had an app development team that consisted of a product manager, scrum master, and senior technical advisor. You could look at them and say that 2/3 being non-technical was a problem, or you could look past that team to the several developers in India who weren't exposed to the rest of the company or clients/collaborators, and who actually got the work done.

I find this genuinely incomprehensible. I have never encountered a single person who was not technically proficient in the team’s tasks across the 10 years of my hodgepodge career in a variety of semi-independent small teams and currently a small business.

Small teams don’t have the margin for non technical folk. It often falls on people like me to become, temporarily, the admin or become the GIS department as such things are needed.

Been there. It's half bad if the "managers" can swallow their ego and let developers lead while only just keeping an eye on any potential troubles.

At many big corporations these "management" hires are just political. To fill in the certain quotas and tick the boxes.

Problems starts if they put their egos first. Then talented staff quit and projects go down the pan.

I feel like this is especially pervasive in the data and ML fields. Perhaps just to many formally cloistered academic PhDs are cashing in on the corporate rush to data and ML "everything", but have no actual ability to execute or even code.

I went to a large "AI" conference this year and was surprised to see some talks being given by the "VP of ML" at the company I work at. I'd never heard of him or the position before, and when I looked him up in our company directory he appeared to sit somewhere in Pharmacy data science. But it's a massive company, so who knows?

When I attended his first talk wearing our company swag he seemed visibly uncomfortable and...grumpy(?) after he noticed me. His talk was a very non-technical, superficial fly-over of how ML can be used to profile and predict customer spending habits on our company e-commerce domains. Nothing even to do with pharma! At another table session in the day he dropped that his PhD is from MIT. Our company is big -name brand in its field- but by no means does it attract "MIT level" talent; not in pay, problems, or prestige. But again, it's a massive company, so who know? Yet at this point I'm entertaining my own little conference conspiracy theory that this guy is just a corporate cutout.

The next day I ran into him at the conference lunch line and gave him a: "Hey, how's it going! I'm at {our company} too, over in {line-of-business}". He nodded, chuckled to himself, and without even looking up said "oh yeah, you here to call me on my bullshit"? I was so confused that this would be the first thing out of his mouth with no context between us, even as a seeming joke, that I didn't know what to say. He politely excused himself to run to another table session before I could figure out how to respond.

Since then I've tried to track his team and any work/product/output they might provide but for the life of me cannot find anything other than some Jira tickets that get pushed around. But it's a massive company, so who knows?

> One has to ask: where did the cost cutting go?

Stock buy-backs, executive compensation, and lobbying. That's where the cost cutting goes.

That would be a very efficient way of running things under a cost plus military contract. For a single contract win they're able to spend four times as much money on salaries and therefore earn four times as much profit.

They have "people skills"

I watched a documentary on Netflix recently that alleged that a lot of this change came from importing McDonnell Douglas management into Boeing after the acquisition. I wonder if the book concurs on that, I don't have time to read it right now.

If this is the case I wonder if it could be reversible.

Yes: the running joke is/was that McD bought Boeing with Boeing's money.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

* https://archive.is/q5pQV

* https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...

* https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/

B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck.

When they did the acquisition, they also got the management folks… who ran McD into the ground in the first place.

After seeng your comment, I just went ahead and watched the doc, and I frankly I find myself in a state of rage right now. From my limited understanding, I had this impression this was an engineering failure. And you know, when you have a complicated machine, sometimes shit happens.

But it wasn't that at all. Boeing knew clearly what the dangers of MCAS system were, they went to great lengths to completely hide the presence of the system from the world before delivery of the planes. Within days of the first crash, they knew it was MCAS, and kept trying to blame uneducated "foreign" pilots, kept trying to go on and tell the world again and again it was safe to fly, until that second crash happened. I understand greed, we all have that, but I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that your first concern after that crash and knowing there might be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy.

And what the hell FAA? 1) they didn't regulate properly before the plane was delivered, 2) After first crash they knew how dangerous the plane is, but didn't ground it (TAMARA report), 3) After second crash, you had the transportation secratary basically saying 737 Max was "innocent untill proven guilty" so let it fly before China forced its hand, 4) No criminal proescution in the end for those fanatic executives, just a cash fine.

And today this happens.

Has there been any push to break up Boeing?

Boeings breaking up is how we got here.

The problem with breaking up Boeing is Airbus.

Nowadays, to realistically restore competiveness in an industry, you'd have to coordinate a worldwide breakup of similarly-integrated competitors.

How about nationalizing it?

The moment Boeing breakup discourse entering public discourse all of their lobbyists retinue will shout "Airbus, COMAC, Great Power Competition"

Boeing was reasonably broken up until merged with McDonnell Douglas.

The Netflix series Downfall is very good and focuses a lot on the root causes of these technical issues (i.e. business-focus of the company).

Considering the consistent gross mismanagement of Boeing, who receive free bailouts just for being Boeing

Well, I was going to say that calling them “business oriented” is laughable, but I guess that running a business in to the ground then laughing all the way to the bail out bank is just standard operating procedure now around the world.

Thanks, had credits that needed burning so picked up an Audible version of that.

Two days ago before we got on one of these planes I said to my partner “don’t worry, it’s the most scrutinized plane in history”.

When all of that scrutiny stops finding issues, I'll not worry about it. Sadly, every time they look, they find new issues.

Yeah it's really not. Age is the only thing that will do that.

The problem wasn’t finding problems, it was acknowledging them

Famous last words.

There is a reason they are the most scrutinized.

> don’t worry, it’s the most scrutinized plane in history

That's a bad thing, not a positive one that it needs so much scrutiny.

A bit off-topic, but I found it curious that Ryanair refuses to call their Max fleet "737 Max-8", instead they go for "737-8200" in both their safety cards and cabin briefings. I wonder if this is common and if other airlines do the same after the reputational damage from the crashes and groundings.

They call it that because their plane is in fact not a 737 Max 8.

Ryanair’s aircraft is a different variant, made only for them, the Max 200 which is the same size as a Max 8 but has the extra exits for up to 200 pax.

It is in fact a 737 Max 8. It’s a 737-8-200

That's called a different configuration.

It is still a MAX8. A rose, by any other name...

This reminds me of the old mattress store scam, where each mattress store has its own slightly different SKU of basically the same mattress purely to make it harder for the customer to compare prices between stores.

...so basically the same just named to sound remarkably different. One more exit and it is not at all the problematic MAX anymore! ;)

Surprised they still call it 737 then. :)

ryanair using misleading advertising? say it's not so!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair#Misleading_advertising

o'leary bought them as he got them cheap, exactly the same as ryanair's fleet in the 90s

At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft.

I would not be surprised though if Boeing's sales drop if the US government brings in tariffs or etc to try and force companies to buy their flying coffins.

> At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft.

Prior to new models released in the last ~10yrs-ish, Boeing made the safest planes in the sky (as measured by passenger miles). Many of those planes are still flying and still doing great.

For me the interesting question is what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes which is apparently resulting in worse safety performance.

787 program:

- designed to outsource most manufacturing to the lowest bidder, many program management problems, overruns and delays

- to bust unions new factory was created in South Carolina and this has very poor QC, there are rumors that a certain large middle eastern airline refuses to accept any planes assembled there

737 program:

- they decided that they are not going to do a clean sheet 737NG and use the existing platform to put on new engines and do other modernization. They did it the cheap way and tried to paper over problems in software to make sure that their biggest customers would not need to send their pilots through extra training. Killed hundreds already.

> what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes

My theory is that this is not limited to Boeing or even aircraft design, it's a much deeper and systemic problem affecting all kinds of fields. We've had a lot of industrial accidents lately.

When aircraft manufacturing was an emerging industry there were tons of undocumented safety margins and "slack" in the design and production pipeline.

Over time, the beancounters start optimizing stuff, so these undocumented safety margins are eroded in the name of efficiency/profit (and sometimes even documented safety margins too).

Furthermore, workers back in the day had a much better life when it comes to purchasing power (especially when it comes to property), and so could actually "give more fucks" about the job than they do now which is a compounding factor. You used to get a lot of implicit quality assurance back then which you don't get now.

We've now reached a stage where these undocumented safety margins have been eroded enough that it actually starts to cause issues, and the safeguards that are supposed to catch them aren't good enough, either due to 1) they've never been good enough but just weren't really needed before or 2) they too have been eroded in the same way for the same reason.

This also applies to software - software quality nowadays has gone down the drain for the same reasons, and even brands that were built on quality and polish (Apple) are now churning out shit (see the endless calls for another "Snow Leopard" bugfix-only macOS release).

I've heard that when they merged with McDonnell Douglas their new (McDonnell) management pushed out the good engineering culture and dropped their quality standards in a chase for more profit, leading to engineering experiencing the dead sea effect.

There is a book recommendation in the other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38894227

The McDonnell Douglas merger is also worth mentioning in this context.

Read this: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

One of the tenets of the article is that the breakdown of the once-impermeable wall between civilian and military divisions has resulted in disaster.

Some corporate history https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304277

After the unfortunate incident in Japan this week, the Boeing 787, a plane designed in the 2000s and flying since 2013, is now the only passenger airliner without a hull loss. So they are clearly capable of producing modern safe airliners post merger.

Back when their planes blew up on their own (TWA 800, Philippine 143, Thai Airways 114), and when the rudders liked to jam themselves to full-deflection (UA 525, USAir 427)?

Probably some upper-middle manager that needed to push something through to get a bonus.

Turns out when you care about R&D and not just profits you can build safe/reliable aircraft.

With how thin the airline industry is right now post covid though we knew stuff was going to start happening. FAA is short staffed, airline maintenance had a ton of people retire during covid, etc. Here is to hoping things will change before more people lose their lives.

The A380 is the best plane ever made in the entirety of human history. It’s a damn shame it’s not used more. I’m hoping new fuel efficient engines make it viable again because there simply is NOTHING like first class on an A380.

What makes it the best? I've flown on it, and it seems nice enough, though it isn't the most comfortable airliner I've flown on. It's certainly the biggest! But there are only what, 250 or so that were put into service? It's hard to have a strong opinion about a plane in such a small niche.

It will inevitably come back in some form in the long term as air traffic keeps increasing. It's much harder to build a new runway and a new terminal in busy airports (ask Heathrow) than to add a floor to a plane.

It's interesting how so many people sounded the death knell on the A380 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Production of new A380s even ceased around this time. Now it seems demand for that size of aircraft is only increasing (at least for specific hub and spoke models).

The control stick on the airbus is pretty bad, the fact that neither pilot knows what inputs the other is giving makes them far inferior to the system in boeing aircraft, even with warnings.

The whole point of this aircraft is to avoid modern safety regulations.

Exactly. This plane was created as a modernization of a several decades old design clearly just to be easily approved without major scrutiny by the FAA. There are many bad decisions made to create this plane that we don't even know yet.

Is there any detail anywhere on what exactly is being inspected? Just the bits of airframe around the where the panel that failed? Can a broader issue with how the airframes were manufactured be ruled out at this point?

The cynical part of me wonders if this isn't just a bit of PR to 'ground' the planes for 'inspections' without actually addressing some kind of root cause.

Inspection will involve this plane, every other plane around this door/panel, and current manufacturing. Records and maintenance logs will be inspected until they know what happened and why, and then check where it could occur on these planes and others.

It’s not a hole in the airframe. It’s a plugged emergency exit door that failed. I guess that’s what they check. The bolts there.

Boeing 737 Max is quite the case study in how to ruin a company via merger

Boeing made the 737 NG until 2019. It also allegedly had issues with the contractor Ducommun making the airframe, including "hammering alignment holes into place". But it wasn't nearly as problematic of a plane.

The Max is a desperate attempt to compete with the A320 neo ("new engine option"). It is the aviation efficiency gain equivalent of a die shrink, except these engines get bigger, and while Airbus had space to spare under the wing of the A320 ceo, the 737 NG did not. So they angled it, changing flight characteristics. Thus, MCAS, because the entire point of keeping the 737 - a 55 year old design - alive is pilots not having to do an entirely new type certificate. Because given availability (not a given, the only reason Ryanair went with Boeing) and staff type certificates not playing a role, Airbus is the clear winner on every metric.

> pilots not having to do an entirely new type certificate

And consequently, their intention seems to be to bend the rules about the validity of the existing certifications to the max (no pun intended). At what point can an agency rule that Boeing no longer follows the spirit of the pilot certification rules?

> So they angled it, changing flight characteristics. Thus, MCAS, because the entire point of keeping the 737 - a 55 year old design - alive is pilots not having to do an entirely new type certificate.

Holy hell, anyone who does computer modelling can tell you how insane this is. The model, or instrument, will never be able to cover the entire domain space of the real world conditions. You can’t do this an expect nothing to go wrong.

How to avoid the 737 Max? Fly only airlines that don’t have it. Luckily there are still a few around in Europe. Since the two fatal crashes I have avoided doing flights with 737s.

I have made the decision that unless I absolutely can’t avoid it I am avoiding Boeing for the near future entirely.

But a 737 max is full no go for me no matter what the situation is. I will do multiple stops before stepping foot on one.

Personally I fly exclusively JetBlue in the US and they use Airbus almost exclusively. They have a few of whatever that other brand is. No Boeing.

Please don’t read this as a defense of Boeing, especially the MAX series aircraft, but from a flyer-safety standpoint the statistics show most Boeing aircraft in operation today are extremely safe.

The post-200 series 737s, not including the MAX, have some of the largest accumulated flight miles and lowest incident rates of any aircraft ever. The 777 and 747-400 also have exceptional safety records. Even the aging 757 and 767 fleets have only slightly higher rates. The 787, though relatively newer and with plenty of documented early issues has had no passenger fatalities that I’m aware of.

Just some food for thought.

Embraer, the Brazilian-made aircraft. They're being replaced with Airbus A220s, which was called a Bombardier CSeries before Airbus bought Bombardier's airliner division.

I have booked a 10 hours flight to NYC with Americna Airlines and I think the craft is a 772-boeing 777. Should it be OK? I am scared now...

Just about every airline I’ve ever flown lets you see what kind of aircraft they’re using for the flight you book. It’s pretty easy to avoid flying on a 737 max if you want.

1. Go to Google Flights[1], pick your search options, click Explore

2. On search results[2], find the Departing flight you want

3. On the right-hand side of the flight summary, click the Down arrow ( \/ )

4. In the drop-down description, below each flight leg is the plane description and flight number.

5. Confirm all planes used for legs of both departing and returning flights.

First flight listed:

  Departure:
    SYR to CLT: American Economy  Airbus A320     AA 1739
    CLT to SFO: American Economy  Airbus A321neo  AA 1580

  *Select departure to see return flights*
  
  Return:
    SFO to DFW: American Economy  Airbus A321neo  AA 2504
    DFW to SYR: American Economy  Airbus A320     AA 421

Looking through different options, I can see a United flight that connects from SYR to EWR that uses a Boeing 737 MAX 9 Passenger (UA1513). So I'm not picking that flight.

You can also find plane information at time of purchase, at least from the airline's website. I highly recommend booking direct at the airline's website, as [in the US] by law you have a 24 hour window to cancel your reservation with no cancellation fee.

[1] https://google.com/flights [2] https://www.google.com/travel/flights/search?tfs=CBwQAhoeEgo...

It's usually accurate, but I've had planes changed on me a couple times. For example, there could be a delay that results in it being used for a different flight, and you end up with something else. Or if the plane you're supposed to fly has mechanical issues.

I don’t think that’s a legally binding guarantee, though. Last-minute changes for operational reasons do happen, and I don’t think you can expect compensation in that case.

Still, it definitely increases your chances of not flying on a MAX.

I'm bored while waiting for my flight to take off in KLIA2 airport that AirAsia uses as its base. Their whole fleet is A320s. If the A320sbwere to be grounded, this airline will be pretty much done for.

In the US, Delta seems to fly a lot of Airbus but unfortunately this is fast changing too based on their recent-ish large Boeing orders.

JetBlue has an all Airbus and Embraer 175 fleet. No matter what you book on B6 mainline, you're getting a comfortable airliner.

Virgin America had an all-Airbus fleet...until Alaska bought them and ditched the Airbus leases because 'Merica-Seattle-Boeing or something. (I'm sure they justified it as mechanical/maintenance efficiencies from operating a single type, but they made a bad mistake staying all-in on a failing company's product.)

Delta's famously agnostic - they fly whatever is net cheapest for them, even if it's an old airframe (that they own outright) that sucks fuel (rather than a more fuel-efficient plane that they lease). Boeings got cheap after the MAX problems. On the plus side, Delta is a very well run operation with competent maintenance.

And then there's Southwest. All Boeing, bad maintenance history. A culture that hates change and new technology.

At what point does Boeing just scrap the 9s? Completely, for good?

It’s all starting to feel like the galaxy note, where you pass a tipping point of no return with public perception.

Is the 9 really that different from the 8, other than being a few meters longer?

Why the 9? Both crashes were on 8s.

That isn't going to happen, they are too many out there and they have too much money invested. It would take FAA action (or European I suppose)

Because some guy at the factory forgot to lock the door? Isn't that a little melodramatic?

“One doesn’t just” forget things like that. It’s aviation we’re talking about, not toy cars. This absolutely must not happen, and there should be processes in place to make sure it doesn’t.

It doesn’t actually matter if it’s an engineering or a process problem, because both of those point to an organisational problem that needs to be rooted out at a company to which we basically entrust our lives.

Apparently the door was permanently plugged, as Alaska Airlines didn't order the airplane with that optional door in place. So... turns out it wasn't so permanent - and definitely an issue with Boeing rather than the airline.

"Whatever the reasons (market pressures, rushing processes, inadequate certifications, fear of being fired, or poor project management), Leveson’s insights are being ignored. For example, after the first fatal Boeing 737 Max flight, why was the entire fleet not grounded indefinitely? Or not grounded after an Indonesian safety committee report uncovered multiple failures? Or not grounded when an off-duty pilot helped avert a crash? What analysis procedures failed to prevent the second fatal Boeing 737 Max flight?"

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/

Boeing is in deep trouble. $16B underwater ($134B assets, $150B liabilities) [0]

Turns out focusing on profits over quality leads to neither.

[0] https://valustox.com/BA

The plane that had the issue was new, so I guess they want to make sure it wasn't an issue with other planes off the line maybe?

Sure is a good thing nobody was sitting in that seat.

Another good reason to keep that seat belt fastened even when the sign is off.

Is there any place to get the full list of tail numbers involved in the grounding? I just flew on an Alaska 737 Max 9 out of PDX a few days ago and am morbidly curious if my plane was one of the ones grounded.

Alaska grounded their whole fleet of Max 9s before the FAA ordered it for everyone else. So yes. It was grounded.

* https://www.planespotters.net/aircraft/production/boeing-737...

* https://www.airfleets.net/listing/b737ng-1-statasc.htm

* https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-airlines/

There don't see to be to be a lot of MAX 9s out there (relative to other MAX variants).

United says all aircraft 7535 and above. 7501-7533 have already received inspections.

Just check the production list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38891172

In all likelihood it is all of them, there aren't that many flying in the US..

I realize it might not be fair to ask right at this moment, but:

How come Boeing hasn't produced a clean-sheet-design replacement for the 737, despite its extreme age? I mean, since its design, the 747, 757 and 767 have come and gone, variants and all, no production continuing. Why the endless adaptations of this old thing:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Boeing_7...

1. The 737 is so ubiquitous that they didn't want to create something new. They wanted old 737 pilots to be almost automatically certified to fly their new aircraft, and they wanted all the 737-oriented equipment to keep working. So, instead of making a new design, they opted for the easier, cheaper and faster "lipstick on a pig" approach.

2. It was the quicker option. The A320neo was a real gut punch to Boeing, and the execs wanted their response out, fast. Reusing the existing design was a faster and cheaper approach for them.

1. Volume. They've sold so many 737s they're scared to upset the market. 747s

2. Target market. There are airlines like Southwest and Ryanair who use a lot of 737s and have optimised their routines around very specific aircraft, so want as little change as possible. In comparison the bigger aircraft are used more by the legacy carriers and flag carriers, who are more used to operating a mixed fleet and more willing to try something new.

>clean-sheet-design

Won't help if there are issues at each step. Design, manufacturing, certification, pilot training, "self-certification" etc. Even if they start from scratch - until they fix their corporate culture the outcomes will stay the same.

Because Southwest Airlines won’t let them.

Recent and related:

Alaska Airlines grounds Boeing 737 Max 9 planes after mid-air window blowout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38889774 - Jan 2024 (324 comments)

Alaska Airlines 737 Max makes emergency landing due to depressurization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38887840 - Jan 2024 (330 comments)

"FAA Statement on Temporary Grounding of Certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 Aircraft" - https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-temporary-groundi...

Juan Browne's YouTube channel posts about basically every aviation accident, and as usual he somehow already has a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9EvHpf8jZg

The chick's tiktok went viral immediately. And fast followers were already posting tiktoks with pictures of the actual plane, breakdowns of how door plugs are made, etc.

You just have to go where the content is. Reuters has been sending journalists across the world for over 100 years. You just have to dl tiktok.

If it's Boeing, I ain't going.

(out the door, midair)

They had a loose rudder bolt issue literally 8 days ago.

https://en.swissquote.ae/newsroom/research/morning-news/2023...

There was a comment on one of the other threads asking if FAA would be slow to react again. I'm glad they learned from the first incident on the same plane.

On the other hand we have the proof that an Airbus can hit another plane when landing and deliver everyone fine.

It's honestly astonishing how well the A350 held up for evacuation, which supposedly took 10 minutes. This is the first hull loss, and it actually improves the safety record.

I certainly know nothing about planes yet from the reading I've done on the 737 Max I'm a bit uneasy that these planes are still flying.

I usually subscribe to the mentality that something that had a significant issue that was fixed is overly scrutinized and thus becomes safe but in this case it seems like the decision-making involved in the making of this plane from the start was flawed, such that I'm not sure patches on patches are enough.

Someone who knows more about planes might say all the issues are unrelated but fundamentally in a system like this I think one thing is bound to affect another, and if not that, then the mentality that led to one issue is likely to have been present in the developing of other components of the system.

The FAA will never ban it because politically its untenable in the US, the only thing that could kill the Max off would be if another big regulator such as EASA refused to let the Max into their airspace.

>The FAA said the inspections will take between four and eight hours per plane.

Seems reasonable. I was wondering if a single event should really be enough to "ground" all similar planes, but seems like they just want to do a quick inspection.

A single explosive decompression event, comprising the spontaneous loss of an assembly the size of an entire exit door, two months off the factory floor?

I should certainly hope they’d take a gander at the others before I’d sit next to one.

Especially with the memory of the last time they chose to keep flying 737 MAXes instead of fixing the defect in the rest of the fleet, at the cost of 157 lives, not even 5 years ago.

It was a catastrophic failure of a two month old plane. I think grounding is warranted until the scope of the problem is understood.

It was only dumb luck that no one got killed because the adjacent seats were empty.

To give you some idea, a teenager seated across the aisle had his shirt completely torn off.

Of course it should. This is a manufacturing defect that could easily have sucked someone out the plane or dropped debris on someone’s head. Should it happen during cruise over water the consequences could be much worse.

> We can do it in two!

Boeing probably.

Would this door incident be specific to the 737 Max, or just general Boeing shoddiness?

I thought the main big difference about the Max was the engines, and the ensuing software fixes to aerodynamics. But would the doors be very different to other modern 737s?

Im wondering if focusing on the Max is a red herring and this is potentially indicative of issues with many more 737s. #armchair-aviation-geek

Why doesn't Boeing split into a commercial airplane producer and a pure defense contractor company. The former will then have to struggle like a real company while the defense contractor will still be above the law.

I'm sure I'm missing lots of logical steps which say that this is a bad idea, but I'd like to hear reasons on why.

I don't know anything about this topic, but it seems straightforward to me. Why would they split up a company that is protected into something that is not above the law?

It would hurt both the company and the US.

I've been following this story for a bit. I'm traveling to Mexico soon and the last leg is on a 737 MAX 9. I'm looking into contacting Aeromexico to see about changing flights to a different airplane.

Is that a good idea? I always feel like the best time to fly a plane or airliner is after they've had some incident that leads them to being under a microscope.

That is, all the MAX 9s have been grounded, and I'm guessing they'll all be thoroughly inspected for this issue before they fly again. So if your concern is that you'll hit a repeat of this same issue, that seems like the wrong concern.

I've been thinking the same thing.

Boeing is doubling down on its disgraceful behavior with shit like this: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...

Some of the comments in this thread are talking about government corruption and safety issues but I think we should put something into perspective. Not a single passenger has died on a commercial flight in the United States in the last five years, and even then, it was a single fatality in a freak occurrence. To me, that’s not government corruption but mind boggling success.

To put that into perspective, you have a significantly better chance of winning the lottery than dying on a United Airlines flight.

Thanks. I feel so much better now.

Now i wonder, where did that broken door land?

That's a matter of active speculation on the Portland subreddit, as you might imagine. As far as I know, no land owner has come forward with the missing window.

There's a lot of green space in and around Portland. There's good odds it may never be found, especially if it lands in some remote corner of Forest Park.

Somewhere in the suburbs south of Portland, possibly near Metzger.

Window and wall flew off mid flight?

Yeah, I'm not flying on a Boeing 737 Max 9 ever again.

This reminded me of this unrelated incident:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/17/philadelphi...

"EASA yet to follow FAA’s action against 737 Max 9" - https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/easa-yet-to-follow-faas-...

Most Airbus manufacturing happens in or near big cities like Toulouse, Hamburg, and Seville. These cities have plenty of engineering talent and plenty of colleges, universities, and other companies creating and nurturing this talent.

Meanwhile most Boeing manufacturing seems to be taking place in rural areas (or "flyover states" as you Americans put it). This is of course because of the local and state subsidies that Boeing is getting to create jobs. The question is if the lack of engineering talent in these rural areas is beginning to show its face.

Even in my tiny country (Denmark) there is significant decrease in quality of engineering talent outside the tier 1 cities.

That's a pretty awful take on engineering culture. I grew up in a city that is one of the most remote in the US and it creates a massive engineering pipeline. It started with civil engineering but moved into ICs, utility power, trains, on and on. Those companies helped build an engineering college which in turn trained engineers.. etc.

None of those companies have had issues getting talent. Not all good engineers want to live in mega urban areas and infact it was quite easy pulling talent away with the promise of a back yard and skiing fifteen minutes away if said talent had kids. Especially when the salary goes 2x as far.

The 737 is made at Boeing Renton and Boeing Everett, two factories in the Seattle area, Boeing's home town, that have been running since the 40s. Fuselages are made at the former Wichita plant, which also dates from the 40s.

737's problems do not stem from being made at a new plant.

Traditional engineering in the US pays pretty poorly, not enough to live comfortably in T1 cities. My civil, chemical, and mechanical engineering friends all live and work in “fly over” states for major multinationals.

Which rural areas are you thinking of? Toulouse and Seville are really not that big (they’re both around the size of Oklahoma City when considering their metro areas). Hamburg is quite a bit bigger.

The designs are unsound and the strategy for fixing is to persuade the regulators to look the other way. No way to blame that on the manufacturing teams.

This is going to put a dent in Boeing's request for an FAA waiver for the Max 7

How even does a "plug" door blow out like that? That's a seemingly very robust design where cabin pressure holds the door in place passively, in addition to the latches holding it in place.

It is not a plug door in this case. There was no door - this was a kind of blanker for a space where there could have been a door.

A bit like when you buy a car model that doesn’t have all the options installed, there’s a space for the button or switch for the option in the dashboard or whatever but it’s filled in with a fixed bit of plastic - it saves them from having to produce multiple different versions of dashboard, or in this case plane fuselages.

It's a plug, sort of. There are fingers that interlock, but if the plug is moved vertically the fingers do not align and the "plug" can be removed outwards. There are supposed to be bolts installed (or in case of an actual door, a latching mechanism) to prevent this vertical movement.

In /r/Aviation they were talking like it gets installed from the outside.

How does the cabin pressure hold it in place passively? Isn't the pressure on the inside higher than the pressure on the outside?

We really need another player in this space. There are these startups like Boom etc. Trying to do new things, we should do one that's just normal planes, made right.

I am so excited for the SV move fast and break things philosophy applied to commercial aircraft. Control software via javascript, make lots of it out of lithium for the ecological branding, don't bother with pilots. Going to be very exciting.

Reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861

Boeing is what happens when an engineering focused company gets taken over by MBAs. When it happens to a webtech company we call it enshitification. When it happens to a transportation company lives are actually at risk. Sadly Boeing is important enough to DC that they seem to be allowed to casually risk American lives.

Boeing is late stage MBA.

Intel is mid-stage MBA.

Google/Alphabet is early stage MBA.

MBAs can only pull this off when there is no competition and they are in bed with the regulators. You can very easily get Boeing back on track by splitting them into multiple competing businesses, but we all know this won't happen.

And risk a multiple of those lives as long as they are foreign, remember the MAX failed several times around the world before getting grounded.

There really needs to be a federally protected “no” from engineering to keep the MBAs from “optimizing” away things they don’t understand.

Good news, everyone: The United 737 Max 9 I’m supposed to board tomorrow has “already been checked out and returned to service.”

If it ain't Boeing it ain't blowing.

Who was the exec that led the Boeing 737 Max?

Investigative journalism report into Boeing by Al Jazeera in 2014:

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...

I don't know about this one, but a few years earlier they also reported on the 737 NG, and those claims did not hold up all too well. So I'd take this one with a large grain of salt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_Next_Generation#Str...

Everyone seems to be jumping to conclusions too quickly. It was a plug that failed that filled the spot where a door normally goes, not the actual airframe.

What's the back of the envelope on whether the 737 Max is more dangerous than driving?

1,300 aircraft have been built since the first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe 3 years (1000 days) of flying to date per aircraft on average, giving a very rough estimate of a few billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.

Who cares? The age-old comparison against cars is just to illustrate that flying, on average, is safer than driving, which most people intuitively don’t “feel” to be true (or at least they didn’t back in the days).

In this case we’re talking about a company that consistently makes mistakes and puts their passengers lives at risk due to negligence, whether “it’s still safer than driving” or not is completely irrelevant, because what they’re doing is not OK no matter how much safer it is than driving.

> maybe 3 years (1000 days) of flying to date per aircraft on average

It's probably a lot less. 950 out of those 1300 aircraft were delivered in the last three years, and the other 350 were grounded throughout most of 2019 and 2020.

You can’t compare like that.

If you drive into a tree and get maimed, it’s different to someone else driving you into a tree and maiming you.

When you’re welfare is in someone else’s hands, they need to better than you would.

> What's the back of the envelope on whether the 737 Max is more dangerous than driving?

Driving is an absurdly dangerous mode of transportation, so it’s probably not the best comparison.

Looks like I have to stop making jokes about Scarebus. Boeing quality has been in a steady decline since the McDonnell-Douglas merger.

Scarebus? You mean “Boeing 737 sMAX into the ground sometimes?”

Good. Finally the FAA got a spine with Boeing.

They did it for the DC10 and 787 (grounded for inspections). They didn’t need to do it before because Boeing was an actual engineering company

Especially since the two are so tightly intertwined.

How does Embraer compare to Boeing/Airbus? Why don't they take Boeing's position in the market?

Embraer was a smaller manufacturer, much smaller than Boeing. The had some success, but it was tough for them to compete with Boeing, especially because Boeing bullied them through regulators. They outmanoeuvred Boeing by letting Airbus buy them for 1 dollar. Now Embraer planes are rebranded as Airbus 200 series

See what happened when Bombardier tried to muscle into the "big plane" market.

The commercial pilots that I know really enjoy flying Embraer planes. I’ve always enjoyed being a passenger on them too.

Weird this happens right before Alaska Airlines is about to replace Hawaiian Airlines Airbus fleet

So who is ever going to want to sit next to a seat plug again?!

Clearly they need more exemptions.

Already working on it as of yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358

I bet they are lobbying for it right now

When price trumps quality, integrity becomes fallacy.

dups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893811

Thanks! We merged that thread hither since the current article seems to have a bit more background.

Management should rot in prison.

is this international, or just domestic flights?

im on a Mexico City to Vegas flight next week

The article(!) says it is only some planes, and then its only a few hours of inspection before flying them again.

My dude what is going on with these planss

Ways in which you can experience an unexpected cabin decompression to the next world...Or join the mile-high never-come-back club, on a Boeing 737 MAX...

1- Loose bolts: "Boeing Urges Airlines to Check for Loose Bolt in newer 737 MAX Aircraft" - https://www.european-views.com/2023/12/boeing-urges-airlines...

2- Leave the anti-icing system on for more than 5 min after non-icing conditions: "Boeing still hasn't fixed this problem on Max jets, so it's asking for an exemption to safety rules" - https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/boeing-still-ha...

3- Sit too close to a door not in use: "Alaska Airlines grounds 737 Max 9 planes after section blows out mid-air" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67899564

4 - Possible unscheduled decompression, from incorrectly drilled fastener holes in the aft pressure bulkhead, if being in the wrong plane, at the wrong time: "Boeing and a key supplier find a new manufacturing issue that affects the 737 Max airliner" - https://apnews.com/article/spirit-aerosystems-boeing-737-fus...

I think I am going to need a shared Google Sheet...

I am amazed at how fast we went from “if it’s not Boeing I’m not going” to this. I think Americans need to start considering their own financial industry as a strategic threat to their economy and industry.

This is what happens when bean counters run the show.

Two of those are manufacturing mistakes, and it seems likely the door one is as well. Not that that helps the passengers, but they're not systemic design flaws.

That anti-icing system is deranged, though. They effectively installed a timed detonator on the engines and want a safety exemption for it.

Wasn't there also the whole runaway trim issue leading to un-commanded climb and stall?

Supposedly fixed with software when the root cause was retrofitting engines too large for the airframe leading to pitch instability under high thrust.

Honestly a website for this wouldn’t be a bad idea. In future flights if I’m going to look if there is a 737 max I’m gonna change my flight .

I’d at first read the plane was without passengers and just being flown somewhere… and I thought, great.

Today I read that it was full of passengers, and the two people supposed to be in the two seats in the row the panel blew out happened to miss their flight.

If that’s true… what an interesting set of statistics coming together.

Amount of people that sleep through flights Amount of panels that blow out of passenger planes Chance to be seated next to said panel

I'm just going to leave you with this frightening quote: "They said there was a kid in that row who had his shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."

Shirt sucked off him. Mother was holding onto him. Oh hello, a thousand nightmares of my youth.

The seat is still there, firmly attached to the plane. In all likelihood a passenger in that seat, if they were wearing their seat belt (as they should have, it wasn't at cruising altitude, and you should wear your seat belt anyway when seated), would have been severely frightened and annoyed, but probably uninjured. Maybe some hearing loss.

We are seeing the "inverted Swiss cheese" model of disaster avoidance: you are only safe if several independent, random events go your way.

I’m sitting in Mexico City about to board a Boeing Max 737 (fortunately, I guess, an 8) back to the US.

If I am to be randomly thrust upon the afternoon sky against my will, please distribute all my HN karma to my extended family.

The two lost air frames from the MCAS issue were 8's I'm sorry to tell you. But its been two hours so hopefully you're in the air and/or landed safely already :)

The only remedy at this point is to hold executives financially and morally culpable.

Anyone opposed to seeing the entire C-suite and board of directors having their bonuses clawed back and sent to jail? I'm not.

Let the guillotine come out, I want to see heads roll.

Please don't post clichés of internet indignation to Hacker News. It leads to repetitive subthreads, as in this case. That's the opposite of the curious conversation we're trying for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Executives are personally liable for loss of life, regardless of the law it is morally contemptible to hide behind a corporation. Until people go to jail for manslaughter this will not change.

From FAA.gov:

> We're responsible for the safety of civil aviation.

https://www.faa.gov/about/mission/activities

Maybe the people responsible are the people who say they’re responsible?

Don’t just pierce the corporate veil, shred it.

It’s been used to escape responsibility and shirk transparency entirely too much, and if orgs can’t be trusted with it (as they evidently cannot) then they don’t deserve to have it.

"Criminally," is the word you are looking for.

Sounds like a great way to create an airplane company that no competent people will want to run. Might want to think through the game-theoretic consequences a bit further.

For example, instead of ranting and howling about prisons and guillotines, you could point to some successful examples of other companies or orgs that have operated in a similar fashion. That might provide more productive grounds for further discussion. Any good examples?

... Yeah, I thought so.

Made in America! And america can't understand why people go elsewhere...

Please, let's keep this at a higher level than Reddit :)

This feels like the attention that shark attacks get--way more than it deserves. Somehow as a society we've decided that the correct number of deaths from airplanes is zero, but we're fine with thousands of people dying from other causes that could be prevented.

What the...? Hey, the model of phone or computer you're using might be prone to lethally exploding, but hey, don't worry, you can keep using it because dying by computer/phone explosion would be a very rare thing indeed!

A door blows out, and you think no one should say "Wait a minute, let's check all the other doors before you use that model of plane..."?

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