US Secretary of State stuck in Davos after Boeing 737 breakdown | Hacker News Reader

US Secretary of State stuck in Davos after Boeing 737 breakdown

bloomberg.com

36 pointsren_engineer14 comments

This is not a 737 Max 9, it's an older 737 - technically a Boeing C40, which is a military variant derived from the older 737NG line. These have historically been extremely reliable.

Aircraft frequently have to be grounded for maintenance. This is normal operations in aviation, and is nothing to be concerned with. You either keep spare aircraft around to swap out in a fleet, or accept that sometimes you're not flying.

After flying from Davos to Zurich on helicopters and boarding the modified Boeing Co. 737, Blinken and his party were informed that the aircraft had been deemed unsafe to fly. An oxygen leak detected previously could not be remedied.

"Maintenance" is a bit of a euphemism.

Uh no, that's exactly the proper term.

> Uh no, that's exactly the proper term.

I thought that maintenance meant to regularly change your engine oil in order for the engine to not become clogged. But hey, English is not my mother tongue. /s

There's an oxygen storage system that serves the cockpit for emergencies (pax masks are served by chemical oxygen generators, not tanks). If the cockpit system has a leak, it's possible that the crew would not be able to be supplied oxygen in a depressurization or smoke in cockpit scenario, so there's a preflight check that all is working. If the plane failed this check, that's consistent with it being discovered after pax are boarded.

It's quite similar to fixing a leak and recharging the AC on your car. If you'd call that maintenance, you should call this maintenance.

One of the primary reasons that aviation is so safe is experiences like this. Aircraft fails a preflight check for something and is AOG until fixed. ("Aircraft On Ground", aka "broken".) There's an entire industry around serving maintenance needs and special handling for AOG situations.

I imagine all the media attention is due to the door plug fiasco with everyone piling onto any news about Boeing aircraft (even if it's not really even worth talking about).

It's a shame that the MAX tarnished the 737's history of reliability.

Kind of Boeing’s own fault about that though, isn’t it? Presumably they attached MAX to the existing 737 line for several reasons, one of which probably was its history of reliability being a good selling point.

A shame for who? Boeing had the option of not destroying their reputation and chose to do so in exchange for a few good quarters.

It's a shame Boeing killed 346 people. IT's obvious that Boeing is a bad actor.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/22/business/boeing-737-max-crime...

> It's a shame Boeing killed 346 people. IT's obvious that Boeing is a bad actor.

If I recall correctly, Boeing also tried to pin the blame of their broken by design plane crashing on human error, when pilots were powerless.

Bad actor indeed.

Boeing did a lot wrong on the MCAS system.

The pilots were, however, not entirely powerless (and Boeing relied too heavily on this fact in their design, I suspect). The 737 memory items include the memory items for a stabilizer trim runaway (which an MCAS malfunction presents as). Every pilot with a 737 type rating had to memorize and recite those memory items.

The Ethiopian 302 crew came incredibly close to saving their aircraft by virtue of correctly executing that checklist, leaving themselves with an airplane that was heavily out of trim but probably recoverable. They flew in this configuration for 2m33s (what the final report calls "Phase 4"). In the course of stabilizing and recovering the airplane, they (knowingly) reversed the checklist actions they used to save the plane initially (entering Phase 5), in conjunction with commanding aircraft-nose-up (ANU) trim manually, then for unknowable reasons (perhaps simple human overload), left the stab trim powered up and stopped commanding ANU trim, at which point the underlying MCAS fault drove the airplane to the crash. It was possible to save the flight and the crew struggled valiantly and almost achieved that save.

The pilots were placed in a very difficult situation, but they were not powerless. It's a terrible look for Boeing to point that out, especially in the manner and tone they did.

* - https://bea.aero/fileadmin/user_upload/ET_302__B737-8MAX_ACC...

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/K6w3K

Sounds like a feature to me.

https://archive.is/www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-1...

Newest version of the headline doesn't say he's stuck in Davos, although apparently the previous one did. Gotta love the lazy journalist/editor that conjured up that headline although the 2nd paragraph starts with "After flying from Davos to Zurich on helicopters".

"Davos, Zurich, same thing!". Guess the nationality of the headline author?

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