Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7
reuters.com
reuters.com
Anybody else get the exact opposite of a warm fuzzy feeling about the specific wording choice used by Boeing there?
In other words, they don't understand what they did wrong, but people more powerful than them are forcing them to change. "We are being coerced into expending unnecessary resources."
They think it is an engineering problem that can be solved by engineers and not a management problem that must be solved with a change of culture, namely a change to managements inability to take responsibility for the current state of Boeing.
When this inevitably fails because the core problem (culture) is not acknowledged or addressed, the engineers will be blamed, and management will continue to avoid responsibility.
The people most at fault for the state of Beoing will probably cash out with enough money to get spoon-fed caviar for the rest of their life while their progeny will never have to work a day in their life.
Of course not. Wouldn't it just open them up to legal liability and additional lawsuits if they admitted wrong doing? It seems like saying "we have updated our plan and will now focus on an engineered solution" is exactly the kind of language I would expect from a large corporation that has made such visible failures as to be very vulnerable to lawsuits. I am not even sure they might have current pending lawsuits against them right now which could be made worse if they admit wrongdoing.
That's not even a paraphrase of what they said.
They said:
> we are confident that the proposed time-limited exemption for that system follows established FAA processes
When we know that:
1) The established FAA processes resulted in a variation of this aircraft that crashed.
2) The established FAA processes resulted in a variation of this aircraft that had part of the hull pop out mid-flight.
3) The established FAA processes resulted in Boeing doing their own certification of their own aircraft.
We know also know:
4) They asked for a safety exemption for the new variation of this aircraft under the 'The established FAA processes'.
slow clap...
If we're talking about investor and consumer confidence and bland corporate HR talk, they could have phrased this in any number of other ways (like saying literally what you said) that didn't draw attention to the fact that they continue to de-prioritize safety.
What they actually said does the opposite of the intended effect of 'we're focusing on safety' and instead says (to me at least) 'we continue to think we can ignore the FAA safety rules for our aircraft until a senate committee makes a fuss about it'.
Well, time to do so I think. Good call.
https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
Ah, happy to see Patty Murray is already on it, but wish she was doing more
- https://www.murray.senate.gov/murray-statement-on-seattle-ti...
Emphasis mine.
Boeing literally said they won’t seek an exemption and will instead engineer a solution.
“we are confident”
It they don’t think it’s necessary that means they don’t think it’s important or needs to be executed well.
Reading between the lines external pressure seems to be their justification. As “we are confident” but they aren’t going to do X.
Boeing’s statement doesn’t say that.
I have a feeling they'd be much more concerned about not messing up and protecting their reputation if they weren't the only domestic player in town.
Cancelled orders should have the necessary affect on stock price to scare leadership in the right direction.
Your dissent from techno-neo-feudalism has been duly noted, and added to your Equifax file.
They continue to have massive layoffs and lean into outsourcing over preserving knowledge workers and draining those that know the hopes and why's of correct processes.
The irony is the 707 replaced then De Havilland Comet 4, which is much like the 737 MAX today. The difference being Boeing is a strategic defense contractor that is "too big to fail". There are enormous pressures on the FAA to let Boeing slide with a stern warning again.
It isn't. Or at least the max isn't. It's a big change from the original 737, a change that makes the type IMHO unairworthy beyond repair.
But that is not even the biggest issue, its the fact that boeing thinks they should withold essential information (such as the existence of an MCAS) from the pilots, who ultimaltely bear the responsibility of the safety of hundreds of passagers. Even now, in the light of what happened, apparently boeing still hasn't changed policy.
I mean, airlines obtain new types all the time and pilots get trained to fly them. If it were so onerous, selling new aircraft would be practically impossible. (Yes, I know many Airbus share a type classification.)
It feels like there's an historical truth that's now no longer the case, especially when you consider all the associated compromises and, now, the resulting safety & engineering concerns.
[disclaimer: former chief dispatcher for a large regional US airline]
This means that if you have a hardware issue, you can't swap the plane without also swapping the flight crew.
Don't overvalue the airship in the equation. (And I've done this job. I know what levers we can pull and how often it comes up.) Show me your data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet#Square_wind...
It’s interesting that FAA avoided naked corruption case with pushing this through, but they were unable to simply reject exemption either. Somehow, external pressure was required to avoid worst case.
Um, no. Absolutely not “ie plastic”. Composite material in the case of aircraft means it’s made of two or more materials. In the case of modern aircraft, it often is carbon fiber, but can also mean fiberglass and Kevlar (aka aramid fibers).
Sometimes it feels like the decision process at Boeing is:
- How big of a problem $this can be?
- Disaster like
- Go for it.
Maybe someone with aviation industry knowledge can reply, but my guess is adding a trivial timed shutoff would have triggered an elaborate FAA approval and certification process. That’s probably where the savings were.
Source to backup the claim of the scale of worldwide airline fuel usage: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655057/fuel-consumption-...
Source to give you an idea of how much US airlines pay for fuel: https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/us-airlines-january-2023-fuel-c...
But, like someone else said this here, I would love someone with knowledge about this to chime in.
This is all a sad, ugly mess. A glimmer of hope does give me a warm fuzzy feeling actually.
At least they do not handle the people involved, the media or anybody who raise there is a problem … there is still some hope in non-chinese system.
> "I'm expecting a gold watch from Boeing at the end of my presidency, because I know that I'm on the list of top salesmen at Boeing," Obama deadpanned in 2013.
https://www.wprl.org/npr-news/2024-01-19/cozy-relationship-b...
This is pathetic. Boeing could end up losing out to the COMAC C919, which, although years late, is finally flying a few routes.
Maybe that's a good thing. It will be a lesson to the US to not prop up a shitty monopolies for decades just because it's currently the only local option and losing dominance in the short term is oh-so-scary to techocrats who want to orchestrate everything.
They should have encouraged and enabled the domestic development of competitors to Boeing - as a long term play - instead of repeatedly propping them up in the short term, just to keep the status quo going.
It shows how little confidence, or interest, the US gov and US business community as a whole have in America's ability to compete on merit alone. With lots of juice by Boeing to manipulate an easily manipulated system that has become overly comfortable manufacturing these pseudo private businesses, without true accountability to either the market or gov.
Although I don't blame any up and coming US manufacturer that looks at Boeing's cushy arrangement with the gov and the regulatory system bending over for them alone and hard passing attempting to compete.
The auto industry has nothing on Boeing.
As someone with very limited knowledge in aircraft development, I'm genuinely curious about what more modern designs would bring to the table compared to the modern 737s, which I assume are heavily updated versions of the original 1960s design?
On a 737 those engines cannot be placed in an ideal position, because that would mean they'd clip into the ground.
The engines are being put above and I think in front of (might be wrong there) where they should be for maximal flight stability.
The original 737 was self-correcting - meaning that if for example the aircraft stalled, the resulting forces would cause the nose to dip down, pulling the plane out of the stall automatically.
The newer versions no longer have that inherent self-correcting ability - and instead use computer software to take over controls and pull the nose down, in case of a stall.
A new airplane design could be made to accommodate much larger, modern engines, while also having the stability and inherent self-correcting ability of the original 737.
But that would require changes to the overall shape and form of the plane - which will require complete recertification. By sticking to the old design, they avoid that.
so the crashes were because the new software was confusing to the pilots and did something unintuitive? and now they want to do another change to how the airplane behaves (interacts with) the pilot?
I believe the updated software now uses both sensors and only acts if both sensors agree (which is actually standard for such systems and should have been done right from the start) - and can be disabled by the pilots, who are now aware of it's function.
But please don't trust my word... I'm no aviation export by a long stretch.
For a more qualified take on this, done by an actual pilot and pilot trainer, I recommend checking out "Mentour Pilot" on Youtube. He's got a number of videos on the 737 Max and the reported problems at Boeing.
Both pilots pulling up on their yokes couldn't override the system?
In this case no, because the way the MCAS system operated was to actuate the stabilizer trim which changes the angle of the entire huge tail plane (the horizontal part of the tail). For the most part the yoke controls the elevator (a smaller flap on the trailing edge of the tail plane), so the pitch control authority available in the yoke movement is not enough to override the adjustment to the tail plane trim MCAS was making.
Once MCAS moved the trim far enough, you couldn't raise the nose with the yoke alone. To correct it, pilots needed to deactivate the trim adjustment motor ("stab trim cut-out" you might have heard about) and manually re-trim the tail plane by folding out a literal crank and spinning a wheel by their legs in the cockpit[1]. The concept of doing this was not new with the MAX (similar procedures around trim system malfunctions existed), but what was new was that MCAS existed in the first place, that it could repeatedly activate if the erroneous inputs were still present, and that it could move the trim quite far before pilots realized what was happening. As I understand it that is pretty different than a traditional runaway trim malfunction for which they'd had training for. I believe that looks more like a stuck switch making a constant movement of the trim until you hit the cut-out. If you cut it back in, either it immediately starts moving again and you know you have a problem or it doesn't and leaves you wondering.
[1](https://www.trbimg.com/img-5d0ba28b/turbine/ct-biz-wp-boeing...)
All the pilots will need to get a type-rating on the new plane type as well, before they are allowed to fly it.
It's not just Boeing's greed. Pretty much the entire industry has been happy to look the other way and enable their nonsense for years, since it meant they wouldn't need to invest extra in training their pilots.
The 737 Max is like double the size of the original 737 - roughly twice the passenger seats, more than twice the weight, roughly 1.5 times the length... How much larger can a plane get, while still keeping the same certification?
Also it's entirely normal for a variant of a vehicle to have significant physical dimension differences. They're considered variants because their [chassis, airframes, hulls, etc] follow the same design and assembly, and because they handle in a similar way; they don't need to basically the same vehicle in a different coat of paint.
I guess a somewhat decent comparison is...Apple makes a type of computer (the MacBook Pro) and releases different variants (and within that, versions) of it. A fully specced out 2023 16-inch MacBook Pro and its entry-level 13-inch variant are both fundamentally the same type of computer even though the former is significantly bigger and beefier. Now, if Apple tried to shove a whole RTX 4090 graphics card into a MacBook Pro's characteristic svelte and relatively vent-less chassis we would say "no, that's stupid. Make a different type of computer if you want to do that". But that doesn't and shouldn't mean that a 16-inch laptop is a different type of laptop from a 13-inch one.
(As an aside, your numbers are a bit off, probably because you're comparing the wrong things. The "original 737" is two planes/variants, not one, and the "737 MAX" is similarly four planes not one)
One of the ways that low-cost regional airlines save money is by standardizing on a single aircraft. For Southwest, that's the 737. Every single pilot, inspector and mechanic in their entire organization only needs to be certified on a single airplane, they only need to have one parts supplier, only one set of tools, etc. - it's enormous cost savings.
Your problem there is . . well, jeez, look around. You're treating completely different products like they're the same thing. Not exactly a new problem, either, but it sure is interesting how it's compounded since the great "financialization" experiment in American capitalism circa 1974, and with a whopper of a sequel post-2008. I am out of my sandbox here, but if I was a betting man, I would put the root cause of this nonsense in this bucket, i.e., lowering apparent risk (by making things look similar) so as to meet requirements of issuing larger financial instruments (bonds, etc).
After the first crashed MAX's FDR data release, I was wondering if there were something massing with the pilots but I wasn't sure. Then the 2nd crash happened and the FDR data looked almost exactly the same, I was almost certain there was some undisclosed mechanism causing nose diving. But as we all knew, Boeing denied such thing until later.
You can see that in the whole Boeing had been SUPER CONFIDENT for sure, and thus I now have no confidence in it at all.
Isn't that the cause of many problems?
I can't imagine much of the original design would be left in the aircraft except for the overall shape of it. I'm guessing (remember now, basically zero aircraft development knowledge) that most tech has been updated to modern equivalents. Engines, controls, computers, ...?
So what would be changed in a complete overhaul of the aircraft?
That's the problem. It was designed for 60s-style boarding via air-stairs on the ground (rather than modern jetways from the terminal) so it's too low down. This requires doing funky things to fit modern, large, energy-efficient engines, starting with those weird flat-bottom cowlings and ending in moving the engines back and changing their angle, which changes the flight characteristics of the plane so much it needed MCAS to compensate.
> So what would be changed in a complete overhaul of the aircraft
The certification, meaning pilots would need re-training since it's no longer the same plane.
The MCAS thing clearly changed the plane so much it should have required re-training anyway, which is why the whole thing is so dumb.
Note that boarding a plane in the middle of the tarmac via bus+stairs is still quite common at many major European airports. Using jet bridges exclusively requires the planes to all be parked in one long line beside a building, which can never be as space-efficient as a 2D-grid parking lot.
Interesting.
Designing a completely new plane (which was considered for quite some time) would have taken far too long and Airbus would gave eaten Boeing's lunch in this important segment.
So, Boeing McGivered a solution and updated a 60s airframe for modern use.
To not having to recertify the plane they came up with a software hack, which they initially didn't even document and which far exceeded the capability of its original design.
This[0] is a fantastic read which will leave you with a "how the fuck could they ever do that"? feeling and makes you wonder why nobody went to jail for that
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-lo...
It seems like the flight charismatics have changed so much that pilot recertification should have been required anyway.
I have worked on eLearning courses for aerospace in the early-mid 00s but have forgotten mostb of what I learned in that domain back then. It was also mostly mechanic/diagnostic interfaces (ECU, etc)
Lots of cases in light aviation where some crashed plane is rebuilt basically from scratch but it's cheaper from regulatory perspective to say it's the same plane, just repaired, ie reuse the tail number.
How would we know unless they do it? Before iphone was launched someone could have made the same point about Nokia's smartphones. They were heavily updated designs of their massively popular Symbian phones. We simply didn't know what was possible until someone put in the work and innovated and came up with an entirely new design.
We know it because the Airbus 320NEO which is based on a late 80s design, does not have all the cons the 737 has, and was the reason Boeing scrambled to make the 737Max.
For my question the phone-equivalent would be someone asking today in 2024 what is the difference between a Nokia of 2006 and an iPhone of 2024, when only knowing that you can make calls with both of them.
I genuinely didn't know that the modern 737s are so much of a hack to get around regulations and save cost on R&D, and thought they were just good aircraft that were worth iterating on.
I'm sure a few PalmOS owners wondered why they don't make the scroll bars fingerable and add a cell phone ;)
But points to Apple for figuring out you don't need a stylus to write either and you can scroll from anywhere. And for, you know, building a device. I thought of a primitive form of it but it never occured to me to do it.
I've had quite a few non phone PalmOS devices though. I think I'm still keeping a non functional Sony Clie [1] in my nostalgia stash. And maybe a Zire Z22, but I may have thrown that away.
Just because they have attempted to foist a polite fiction that it is a 737 variant doesn't mean that it actually is. It's a new single-aisle transport with several serious problems.
In name only, and by dint of software cludges to prime the vividness of our ability to imagine that pilots needn't be separately type-rated.
...but we all know that if it weren't for MCAS (and by extension, if it weren't for Boeing's special seat at the FAA table), this wouldn't pass muster.
(but yes, I think you and I are saying the same thing.)
Again, the whole reason the "software cludges" were implemented in the first place is precisely because it's more or less the same "hardware". The entire problem is that the 737 MAX family is in fact made up of 737s when they should have been redesigned from scratch. It's baffling to me how one could come to the conclusion that they aren't 737s.
For reference in 2022 they shipped 661 aircraft and 735 in 2023.
I’m assuming they are increasing manufacturing capacity but that doesn’t change the fact that their backlog extends into the next decade.
So Airbus is bugger but its not like Boeing is going bust or something.
I hope never to fly on another Boeing 737, because of all the accidents and safety drama that has been happening & is ongoing. It's become vogue to hate Boeing as a result, but I still prefer the 787 over any other plane.
I am guessing that entirely different teams were responsible for what's been happening with each model, but I'm surprised that Boeing's culture has led to two quite different results with these two types of planes. Can anyone explain that?
Then you really shouldn't watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os
TLDW: Critical Dreamliner fuselage parts didn't fit together because workers at the subcontractor (Ducommun) traced a template with magic marker onto the material and cut and drilled the part by hand. Officially, the parts were manufactured by high precision CNC machinery with extremely small tolerances. At Boeing, if drill holes didn't match up in parts A and B, workers were told to just put the parts together and re-drill the hole in part B through the hole in part A, or hammer the parts into place. Internal Boeing investigators who found out and documented the issues were threatened to be sued if they spoke up. They were later fired, after the US government allegedly leaked their identities to Boeing.
Here, a Boeing employee speaks about the work culture in the manufacturing plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os&t=1466s
- Boeing had a pretty strong engineering driven culture for a long time
- In the 90s, McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money and McDD management took over, which was a mostly Jack Welch inspired bunch of value extraction types
- Engineering culture started decaying, drastic cost cutting, outsourcing and value extraction started taking place, with Boeing spending up to 80% of free cash on stock buybacks instead of investments
- Dreamliner program started in the early 2000s, 737 MAX several years later
I think it boils down to the erosion of the company not having progressed as far when the Dreamliner was being designed
For the 737 Max, they were very late and had to react to Airbus much better neo offering, and didn't have the time and/or money and/or capabilities to develop a new airplane, so a lot of in the end deadly compromises had to be made to somehow bypass training and security certification as much as possible using the old airframe at low cost.
I’ve read a lot of complaints across many airlines about economy being very cramped as airlines chose to pack people in like sardines
Though business class generally gets good reviews
I quote the article: She noted the exemption Boeing had sought "involves an anti-ice system that can overheat and cause the engine nacelle to break apart and fall off. This could generate fuselage-penetrating debris, which could endanger passengers in window seats behind the wing."
While that doesn't make Boeing any less responsible for engineering proper solutions instead of a compliance hack, there's a difference between the solution for a throwaway consumer device and one for a multi-million dollar airplane that has to operate in conditions with harsh vibration and wide operating temperature ranges, has to be serviceable for decades, and cannot fail in ways that render the plane inoperable.
What a bunch of hysterical hand-wringing.
They just needed to a program a timer on the heater circuit and/or add sensors; the engines are already incredibly instrumented so this wouldn't be hard to do.
"Cannot fail in ways that render the plane inoperable" is precisely why there should not be a system that if forgotten about by the pilots past ~10 minutes causes the destruction of the engine nacelle and thus both probable destruction of the engines and penetration of the body of the aircraft by parts of said engine when it ingests parts of the nacelle.
You don't understand how serious that is. The nacelle of a jet engine is designed to contain a blade-off event where one or more blades - each of which has a massive amount of kinetic energy - completely break off from the turbine rotor at takeoff power levels.
The level of corporate apologism in your comment is breathtaking.
A simple thermal fuse to prevent catastrophic failure of a toaster is an example of a solution that works for a toaster. It's cheap. If the toaster handle gets stuck, the fuse heats up, trips, and the toaster is inoperable but there is no fire. The customer can replace the toaster or the thermal fuse.
That solution doesn't work for a plane, because if the fuse trips mid flight and the anti icing system doesn't work until the plane lands and maintenance replaces the thermal fuse, the plane is screwed if it encounters icing conditions during the same flight.
A timer doesn't work in this case, since from what I recall keeping the anti-icing system on is okay as long as the plane is in icing conditions. It can only overheat if the anti-icing is kept on outside of icing conditions for a few minutes.
Realistically, the system should work the same way it works on other planes; if it's forgotten, then it could waste energy but shouldn't cause the engine to fail. It's only because the engine inlet is made of composite materials instead of metal that this is a problem, but this is a problem of Boeing's own making.
Feel the thrill of life threatening bugs!
It's like when you go to the doctor and say "My knee hurts the day after I play basket ball" - you know what he's going to tell you - stop playing basketball. Sometimes you can be safe by just... not doing a particular thing.
Given that the 737 Max 8 and 9 are currrently flying with this defect and no damage has been reported, let alone failures, the actual likelihood of catastrophic failure is clearly low.
Boeing got an exemption for the existing MAX-8 and MAX-9 planes with the same issue, and are allowed to continue shipping new planes of those with the issue. This isn't really that big of a deal IMO, planes fly with stuff broken all the time, it's why they have minimum equipment lists. Planes are enormously complex with thousands of systems onboard, it would be kind of surprising if everything worked all of the time.
To not allow shipping MAX 7s with the same issue would be a bit odd, if it's serious enough the planes should either be grounded across the board, or at least not shipping new MAX 8s and MAX 9s.
Safety exemptions are there for a reason and this doesn't sound like a fitting example.
It's because planes with this same issue are currently flying and it's an easily managed issue (i.e. don't use it when certain conditions happen).
Boeing was hoping to add another model to the list of planes currently grandfathered in, but decided not to do that and instead fix it, and then back-port the fix to the currently flying planes.
Anyone can quite how boring due with this. Just not to use it?
Interestingly, Airbus's orders are filled up to 2030. I suppose if an airline wants something sooner, they'll either get Boeing or they're not going [to get one].
Michael says a lot of things that get him news coverage of Ryanair. He does have a track recording of going against the zeitgeist to profit e.g. he bought a lot of planes after 9/11 knowing that air traffic would bounce back while planes were cheap to purchase.
That said; he's also urged Boeing to take the safety issues more seriously as well: https://news.sky.com/story/boeing-safety-ryanair-rues-minor-...
So I wouldn't see this as an endorsement that Boeing are 100% okay and this is all media spin. There are issues at Boeing and they need to be addressed -- according to the industries big supporters of Boeing.
However, the MAX 8 and MAX 9 had already been certified and delivered before this AD was published, while the MAX 7 had delays in certification.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/08/10/2023-17...
Don't fret, the American government is doing all it can to ensure Boeing's investors' MONEY is worth more than a few hundred people who are already dead. Boeing pinky promises it will never, ever happen again. And if it does, it's pilot error.