Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
cnn.com
cnn.com
It's not that there necessarily isn't a thru-line to these stories. And I read "Flying Blind" like everyone else and share the popular opinion of Boeing's modern engineering culture. But there's basically no content in these stories. There are experts somewhere that can put events like this into context, but they're not cited and the story isn't written around that kind of analysis, so we're left to supply it ourselves. Human nature suggests that the blanks we'll fill in will be a disaster movie, because that's "fun" to think about.
I guess I'm not saying it isn't worth reporting. Before the Boeing Narrative set in, these kinds of stories did get reported! But now they're tied into this long-running Boeing arc, and it's frustrating because there isn't enough in the story to know what's really going on.
Increasingly more than just a narrative
If you camped avherald watching for incidents, and you had an inciting incident like the door plug (indisputably a major story!) to start from, could you create the same narrative for Bombardier? I think you could.
I used to laugh at those pushing "mainstream media" wild stories (e.g. from a certain portion of Americans) but Journalism isn't what it used to be, and maybe it was never what it used to be.
I do think that focus on Boeing is somewhat warranted but it's a good question how do we get a real unbiased picture. Especially given that accidents are a low probability event and it's hard to determine what happens by chance, within reason, or is really reflecting something concerning that has to be addressed and how it should be addressed. Your average Journalist is lacking the training and tools to think about these things and they wouldn't even know who is the right expert and what is the right data to look at.
A very similar thing happened post Air France 447's crash into the Atlantic ocean. The reporting on it began to include any incident involving any airbus plane for quite a while until it was determined the crew was primarily at fault. There was a narrative building simply because of our tendency in media to have extreme recency bias.
It's ridiculous to consider the problems with Boeing started now:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Boeing_787_Dreamliner_g...
What the conversation was pointing out that coverage of such issues tends to shift with the closeness in time to something really bad. If your one of your planes crashes, anytime your planes has an issue for a whole the coverage is going to be amplified. The manufacturer is irrelevant…it’s the nature of media coverage and human biases
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/us/hawaiian-airlines-injuries...
https://avherald.com/h?article=515c54c7
https://avherald.com/h?article=5153c289
https://avherald.com/h?article=514dd2cc
https://avherald.com/h?article=51474192
https://avherald.com/h?article=50a9fa9f
https://avherald.com/h?article=512e34e3
Only three are "anywhere near", but you get the idea, that's just browsing the first page with the accident filter on.
I have heard a lot of passengers recount events from incident flights. I have seen vanishingly few where there was much overlap between what actually happened and what they believe happened.
So like Embraer, Airbus, Bombardier and probably others?
Boeing is 100% a product of the American system. All the acquisitions, mergers, lobbying and loss of engineering culture in favor of short-term profit seeking that got it to where it is today happened under capitalism. Nothing resembling Boeing ever existed on the USSR, its airplane manufacturers worked very differently, with different incentives and under different constraints.
Of course it's terrible for everyone but shareholders there isn't really any domestic competition.
The shareholders in a company have no reason to want the government to kill off the competition - they could just as easily invest in that competition. Shareholders care about the size of the whole market and corruption steals from them as much as it steals from anybody.
Is this you as well? Is this even allowed?
He didn't say that. YOU inserted the "Boeing planes" bit. He just said planes.
Exactly. But the takeaway here is that "notable" and "newsworthy" are slightly different ideas, and the latter is more subjective.
This is absolutely the effect of the "Boeing Narrative". If the media is faced with data like this[2] in the face of a frame that says "Aviation is extremely safe and getting safer every year", they'll likely skip over the outliers. If they need to sell articles into a market that knows "Boeing Planes are Unsafe", they're going to have a much harder time with that notability analysis.
And that's 100% on Boeing, not the media. At the end of the day if your business depends on people believing your products are good products[1], cutting corners on the reality undergirding that perception is a disaster. Boeing had almost a full century of goodwill they've now flushed.
[1] Which is true for almost every business where the consumer sees the competition. Maybe not if you manufacture gaskets or capacitors, but airplanes and laptops for sure.
[2] Editted to add: it also hands out an easy scapegoat. We really don't know if there was an instrument failure here or if it was pilot culpability. We just know what the pilot said. And we have to recognize that the pilot might have lied knowing that Boeing made an easier target.
No they're not. Flight control issues happen, turbulence happens, flight control issues that cause injuries are quite rare.
I’m reminded of another thread on this site a few months back. One commenter talked about an incident where their flight circled in a holding pattern unable to land for whatever reason. The pilot got on the PA and informed the passengers that they might have to divert as they about 30 minutes of fuel. Around half an hour later, the plane made a desperate run for a nearby airport.
As the story was told, all the flight attendants were white as ghosts. The plane’s engines ran out of gas and shut off, but to the commenter’s existential relief they managed to just make it to the runway.
Of course this is ridiculous. The pilot’s announcement was either grossly misunderstood or very poorly chosen. The plane had plenty of fuel, they had thirty minutes before they would be forced to divert, not thirty minutes total. No cockpit crew with functioning self-preservation instincts would patiently circle around a pattern while their plane inevitably runs out of gas. The engines didn’t run out of fuel; they were brought to idle or low for the descent just like every other landing.
If the plane had truly run out of fuel, the cabin crew would have had the passengers brace for landing. There would have been emergency crews with flashing lights all along parallel taxiways. The plane would have come to a halt on the runway and been unable to taxi. An NTSB report would have been filed. The news would have reported on it.
People replied pointing all of this out, but to my (probably faulty, after all, I’m an eyewitness) recollection they remained steadfast in their telling of events.
And very timely, 737 Gear just published a video discussing Tucker Carlson’s retelling of an incident where his plane crashed[1]. By Tucker’s telling, there was an explosion and the wing broke off mid-flight. The plane crashed into the sand. In reality, the plane’s landing gear collapsed during landing. The plane rolled off the runway.
In short, a passenger’s recall of stressful events is generally worse than useless.
The passenger could have misheard or be lying. Even if the pilot did say that, he may have just said that to save face, when it was pilot error all along. Hopefully the FDR data will be made public.
Can't but say the company brought it on themselves.
That being said that was a noteworthy incident regardless.
And I'm acknowledging that they may be "innocent" in this case (in the sense that these kinds of things are expected across all of commercial aviation). I'm not arguing that I know they're guilty and being completely incurious. But my default hypothesis with Boeing has shifted to guilty until proven innocent, and in the absence of conclusive evidence to assume guilt. That isn't actually incurious, since I'm willing to listen to evidence. But the argument that "things like this happen all the time" isn't actually evidence, that's just a rationalization.
And it is okay to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they've proved in the past that they don't deserve it. That's just healthy psychological defenses. You move them from the box where they get the benefit of the doubt, over to the box where they don't. To argue nobody should ever do that is to argue that everyone should constantly get manipulated and taken advantage of because this time Lucy isn't going to pull the ball away from Charlie Brown.
A) Stuff breaks on planes. All the time. They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies that unless there is a completely catastrophic failure, they are still perfectly safe to fly. An example: a starter is out in one of the engines, but there are four starters for an engine. Once the issue is known, if they can't fix it where they are currently at, they will do an empty flight (well, crew only) to the next maintenance hub and get it fixed. Before a plane even gets off the ground they have a checklist and do their best to determine if the plane is airworthy and safe to fly or not. If they feel the plane is unsafe, they can refuse to fly it. It is important to them to make sure the plane is safe to fly because:
B) They also don't want to die.
That last bit really hit hard for me for some reason, it's hilarious but at the same time eye opening. I think that I just never really thought of it in that way before. Maybe it's just me.
Without a deep understanding of the design of the plane they rely a lot on the metrics that the plane manufacturer display and on the manufacturers manuals to interpret them.
Do you have the ability to tell if a street is safe to cross?
Most of the time, yes.
Sometimes, you can't tell for sure, but you cross anyways.
Sometimes, you are dead wrong about your judgement. Shit happens. Nobody expects 100% certainty.
The problem here may be that Boeing may be falling to meet the expectation of 99.????% certainty, and regressing down to 99.????% certainty, due to a broken corporate culture.
Yes, it's literally part of the job of the pilots, by federal regulation. If the captain feels the flight isn't fit to fly, the captain can say it's a no go, period.
But Boeing reduced redundancies, presumably to cut costs. The 737 MAX planes that crashed only had one AoA sensor. Where else did they cut costs? Where else did they reduce redundancies? The public trust has been lost. Boeing needs to design a new plane from scratch, this time let engineers design the plane without interference from accountants.
It's just poor design. If software fails, then any plane should be designed to have a neutral center of gravity in order to give the crew the greatest amount of time to recover from the loss.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-lo...
It’s almost impossible for a completely fresh design to be safer on day one. There’s so many different ways to fuck up many of them are counterintuitive because nobody ever considers if someone could install this backwards until someone does. 20+ years of debugging written with people’s lives tests just about everything in a way engineers never really think about
Designers need to make radical changes before cockpit windows would need to be updated. That specific example may not seem like much but there’s a lot of safety critical engineering that goes into such things and yet design flaws where still uncovered.
The original 737-100 was 61,994 lbs empty and the 737-900ER was more than 50% heavier at 98,495 before they started calling them MAX. The 900ER was in many ways a radically different aircraft but got there through a long list of incremental changes leveraging the past.
That’s not to say new designs can’t be quite safe. The much newer A320 family are some of the safest aircraft flying with only 38 hull losses and 1505 fatalities, but do not mistake good design for inevitability.
With training, improved systems, and redundant sensors, MCAS should be safe. There are other planes that have similar systems. And there procedures for disabling bad sensors or misbehaving sensors.
I'm not sure if MCAS is necessary, there is some indication it is only there to mimic older 737 and plane would be safe without it and with training.
Side note: I know there isn't a 797 or A390 yet, that was the intent of the statement, a future unknown plane.
On the other hand, no 787 or A380 has ever had a crash or incident that resulted in a passenger fatality or hull loss. This LATAM flight is probably the most serious incident that has ever happened on a 787 in almost 10 years of service, with over 1100 aircraft active.
There have been nearly 10x as many 737s built as 787s and A380s combined. Given the date of first flight (1967 vs. 2009 and 2203, respectively) it is safe to say they have been flown for significantly more than 10x the total flight hours. Probably at least 20x but I’m pulling that number out of thin air.
The data is certainly promising but it’s probably a little too soon to be too confident in relative safety comparisons. For one, we don’t have nearly as much data on those newer airframes as they age.
Lack of QC is why I'll gladly choose any Airbus over any new Boeing.
IIRC, it had two, but each of the computers only used the sensor on its side; which was OK for the original (pre-MAX) design because of they way these sensors were originally used by it.
The fix, amongst other mitigations, was to have the MCAS software cross-check inputs from both AoA sensors.
And yes, I understand perfectly well that this invalidates the idea that the second sensor was "eliminated" to save cost - but if I remember correctly there was a paid option to have the MCAS consider both sensors. So there was a financial aspect to the decision. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
The optional feature was essentially networking the two ststems such that the data would be fed to the FCIC for warning light activation, so that pilot's could start running the right checklists.
It's an aviation channel for people who aren't into aviation. Lot's of clickbait + obvious optimization of titles and topics to appeal to the masses. The Mr Beast of pilots.
they both do the job well. i've not been mildly irked by clickbait-y thumbnails for ages! great for mental health.
The same phenomenon is unfolding in chess youtube world. The audience of laypeople (with minimal to zero chess knowledge) who are entertained by yelling and extreme over-excitement and butt-plug cheating scandals is 1000x as large as the audience of true chess nerds.
What's wrong with that?
The content itself is generally him explaining from a pilot's point of view situations that have happened, like crashes or ATC issues, or responses to clickbait misinformation from other places on social media. His responses tend to be reasonable and enjoyable and for people who "aren't into aviation," maybe his videos will make them more interested. He has never made it about himself, the guy got promoted to Captain and didn't (and hasn't?) even mentioned it. Even his avatar and banner have him at 3 bars. It seems to me that he genuinely cares about aviation and informing people who aren't familiar with it. I feel like he brings a lot of value.
If you're not into it's fine, but I think it's a bit unfortunate you feel the need to play gatekeeper.
I will hold off on passing judgment for now, even though I too share the popular opinion of Boeing's current (lack of) engineering culture.
And it's insane such a system would ever be authorized IMO. That sounds like a hack to fix a memory leak or similarly some bug they can't figure out
Radiation-induced bit flips and bad code.
It should sure as hell be common knowledge to the pilots of the plane. I would have expected something like this to be on a checklist somewhere though: "Step 74, check uptime in Flight Computer, pull breaker if too high"
Why would it be insane for a computer controller of what is essentially industrial machinery be designed to be reset at least once every other day? They "reboot" the engines damn near once a flight! Most pilots have experience and training on shutting down a plane for say overnight and then starting it from cold and dark the next day.
It's an odd idea to us software developers but the computer isn't the primary function of the plane, and doesn't need to serve customers 24/7. If the computer is 100% reliable only for 18 hours, and the plane cannot fly for longer than 12 hours in the first place, is that a problem?
> If the computer is 100% reliable only for 18 hours, and the plane cannot fly for longer than 12 hours in the first place, is that a problem?
The reset should happen on every flight, if forgetting it on the wrong flight could potentially lead to an incident.
Huh? Try 51. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33233827
https://gizmodo.com/turn-it-off-and-on-again-every-149-hours...
What is the value in posting a long, entirely speculative comment like this? It doesn't even appear that you have any credibility in this field. Even if you did, this comment would be useless.
I've got a pilots license and shoving the stick forward such that you pull negative Gs and passengers get stuck on the roof is not a normal reaction to the instuments going out.
It sounds more like one of the computer systems crashed or lost power causing a lack of control until a backup kicked in, and caused the fly by wire to pitch downwards briefly.
There are experts somewhere that can put events like this into context, but they're not cited and the story isn't written around that kind of analysis, so we're left to supply it ourselves. Human nature suggests that the blanks we'll fill in will be a disaster movie, because that's "fun" to think about.
That seems kinda patronizing, considering there's a first hand report describing the effect of the sudden drop:
“That’s when I opened my eyes and there was various individuals at the top of the plane. Just stuck to the roof and then they fell to the floor. And then I just realized I’m not in a movie, this is actually for real,” he told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
Are readers supposed to just ignore this, or the pilot's comment that the plane apparently rebooted and he lost all control of it?
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_...
Like obviously that is not the failure mode in this scenario… but it’s the same aircraft type. It’s totally believable imo that they just bumped into some other bug/timeout/overflow, especially on the 787 of all aircraft.
In fairness these types of reports can also “prime” people to favor certain explanations. It doesn’t mean it is a software bug, or related in any way to the previous ones. But as a software engineer… yeah that really does sound like some kind of overflow or hang, followed by a lockup, followed by a watchdog timeout and reboot. Good thing it’s not booting off spinning rust there. “Please wait while windows checks your file system for errors” is not what I’d want to see as I’m falling out of the sky :V
It obviously has to be something very edgy otherwise it would have been caught already. Uptime is a good theory imo. But that’s pure unfounded speculation.
On the other hand, not good news for Boeing given the other situation. Yes, it’s unrelated and a totally different aircraft type, and small bugs are routine in newer types. But people don’t have confidence in Boeing to engineer and manufacture well anymore - when people know deep down in their heart of hearts it’s another big Boeing bug you have a mindshare problem. It’s like smeltdown etc. Even if it affects everyone it certainly reminds them of intel the most.
We've long since offshored the development of any physical products that isn't considered ITAR/defense world.
At my previous workplace I wrote a documentation bot which helps people find documentation based on vague descriptions of what they are looking for (like when you know you saw something but you don't know where exactly or what the keyword is). Or by specifying what you want to accomplish.
Mind, the bot would not create answers to questions, it would just ingest existing documentation and point people to things that are relevant to their searches.
Hmmm, wonder what I've been hallucinating about for the last 30 years.
The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.
I agree that both of the airlines have incentives to cover it up, but it's strange this is being "reported" as verified.
John Oliver did a report on Boeing recently that is pretty damning.
Once Airbus knew what the problem was, they were able to detect and mitigate it with a software update. They didn’t fix the hardware.
The issue was not definitively traced to cosmic rays or another root cause.
Wikipedia is such a fascinating website
That is if the autopilot is producing a constant nose up control signal the auto-trim will move the elevator tabs towards nose up until the AP pitch signal is null.
It's to prevent fun excursions like this should the autopilot become disconnected without the pilots hands on the controls.
Maybe, but also the alternative is that pilots may be pressued not to report these things due to career or crony capitalist concerns like pressure from their employer or are told this crash is 'normal'. Airlines and Boeing are not "nice guys" and are historically toxic and vindictive companies against the working class.
So that leaves us whistleblowers of lower professional value than pilots. The same way Snowden was a lowly sysadmin contractor and not a high ranking NSA general or CISO or whatever. Or Reality Winner or Chelsea Manning had relatively low level positions.
At a certain point, in a corrupt system, we have to accept the quality of whistleblower is never going to be that gold standard we want. Maybe this is fake, but its worth taking on face value considering what we know about Boeing culture and the capitalism dynamics and government corruption they've helped create that keeps them away from proper regulation and disclosure.
Not to mention we still know next to nothing about Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which was a Boeing too. The narrative of "nothing to see here, its just a pilot suicide or freak swamp gas accident" is now a lot more questionable as we've seen Boeing quality decline lately.
"Hey this isnt good enough" is wrong thinking here. In a system of corruption and secrecy its rare to have "good enough" but instead we have to deal with the cards we're dealt by witnesses and whistleblowers.
They are having HUGE quality issues for the exact reason you would expect: finance bros took over the company and they now blow tons of money on stock buybacks and not unnecessary things like QA.
Businesses doing Big Things cannot just blow all of their money on stock buybacks and expect to do great things. It is all profits without prosperity. It used to be illegal for a reason.
It is not just hype. They have screwed the pooch.
Now what will happen with civilian avionics is another story, for me they lost my trust for good but I & my family choices are insignificant forces on the market.
Plus this isn’t exactly a huge industry, and I don’t recall airbus having these problems. Probably because “spend the normal amount of money on engineering” is about the easiest decision a company could ever make - the most obvious, no-shit-Sherlock board room decision possible for building the long-term value of a company.
IMO sometimes things are simple, and sometimes the rich and powerful are blinded by short-term greed.
Still, in the large commercial aircraft market, there are just two major players: the U.S.-based Boeing (BA) and the Airbus Group (EADSY), formerly known as the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS).
Protectionism bullshit by Boeing forced them to sell to Airbus, they only do business jets now.
> Embraer
Regional jets only. They saw what happened with Bombardier and they're highly unlikely to move upmarket in short haul jets.
> Mitsubishi
Cancelled their regional jet, so nothing.
> UAC
Severely hampered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting supply chain collapse and sanctions. The MC-21 and SSJ-100 were decent planes on paper, but cannot be manufactured because critical components are European or American (like the engines). The Tu-214 is back in production but it's a pretty obsolete plane by modern standards.
> Comac
By most accounts, roughly a decade behind equivalent Airbus planes in terms of efficiency, but realistically the only real alternative to Boeing/Airbus in the medium term.
Btw, people bragging about having lots of common sense are usually the ones that have the least of it.
Yeah it’s relative and the line between “large airliners” and “all passenger aircraft” is somewhat arbitrary, I agree. But I stand by the distinction. The market for large airliners is by far the most important market in aerospace, and it has two companies in it, and the one that’s been doing a decade of record cost cutting has way more safety issues than the company that didn’t. I’d love a higher sample size ofc, but as far as clarity goes that’s pretty damning.
Plus what are we fighting about? Whether it’s fair to describe Boeing as being in “not a huge industry”? I mean I’ll just give that one to you lol, I care little about the exact phrasing of that comment. Honestly if it bothers you just drop the whole paragraph!
Big industry or small, I have been informed by trustworthy journalists that this is not usual behavior for an aerospace company. Much less normal for an aerospace company that used to be prestigious for its engineering excellence…
So it seems fairly safe to say that something has gone seriously wrong with Boeing, rather than there just being a big focus on them. I always thought the safest time to fly would be shortly after an airline had a major safety incident, because that's exactly when they're going to be checking everything ten times over. And I'm sure this is exactly what Boeing is still doing, yet they still can't seem to keep their planes in the air and in one piece.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=wheel+falls+off+airplane&s...
https://aviation-safety.net/database/
https://avherald.com/ (has fulltext search)
This query returns some results about dropped wheels:
https://avherald.com/h?search_term=dropped+wheel&opt=7168&do...
Are we already into some boeing whitewashing cycle too?
As far as breaking out of a duopoly, I don't know the path for that, as the barrier to entry to building commercial planes is sky high, but I do think one more player would be a net benefit.
I'm sure China does. Right now they're the only bloc of sufficient size, economy, and most importantly motivation, to pull it off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
Do note that some systems in that aircraft are still manufactured by European and American companies or are jointly made.
Oh wow I had no idea. Can you compare hull losses / fatalities of the 787 to the A350?
The fuckups being directly attributable to inept leadership, bad policy, and a focus shift away from building planes does not help, especially since the same incompetent clowns are still in charge at Boeing. One of the first remedies should've been getting rid of the businesses school types that have crept in and making sure decision making is again done by engineers. Instead, they blamed the 737 MAX's issues on engineers in the corporate ladder, such as then CEO Dennis Muilenburg, replacing them with lesser-qualified people. Even though the plane was developed during his predecessor's term, who definitely wasn't an engineer and brought most of the relevant organizational issues about! Now you can blame him for not substantially reversing the course set by his predecessor, but the answer definitely isn't to have Boeing be run by yet another non-engineer.
Boeing's current leadership does not have the trust of the public or that of the engineers working under them. After all of this, they won't ever.
The bottom line is that I have places to go, and if my risk tolerance was zero, that would be a very difficult way to live my life.
I've temporarily lost trust in them until they get their shit together. Airplanes are only safe because manufacturing and maintainence has been done diligently over the past couple decades and with sufficient attention to prevention of known hazards. As soon as that diligence disappears, airplanes can become unsafe, very quickly. If an accident could have been prevented by diligence, I lose trust.
I've been flying but avoiding Boeing aircraft in the past few months, until we get to the bottom of this. Many of my friends are doing the same.
I've also had multiple pilots explicitly announce that "this is not a 737 Max" or something to that effect.
Their leadership are worse than "inept" or "incompetent". Actively evil psychopaths running the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boe...
Which isn't even to say that Israel and its armed forces are necessarily not behaving poorly in Gaza, rather that it's worth questioning whether we have enough evidence to conclude that they are behaving unusually poorly in Gaza, or if for a number of reasons other than an excess of sympathy for Gazans we are experiencing an unbelievably high level of scrutiny and criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza.
But if the plane did this by itself.. wow. The 787 is fly by wire. Worrying. And very bad timing for Boeing.
The linked wiki article literally says it ripped the plane apart
> The aircraft then encountered strong turbulence, causing it to break up in flight and crash into a forest.
It has, not only in this case but also here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLM_CityHopper_Flight_431
And there are many other examples.
I guess it depends by what you mean by "at altitude"? Most of these accidents did happen below 10.000 feet yes. And the mountain wave phenomenon in New Zealand in particular reaches pretty high. Some glider pilots use it to get up really high, so high some of them got frostbitten.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItPnp4pJ_bg There at 19k feet.
But yes at that altitude the phenomenon is probably not strong enough anymore to break up an airliner.
> The victims even included several survivors of the Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 402 crash. (Note: A plane that crashed the day prior, with only 8 out of 72 people on board surviving)
> Several booked passengers cancelled their tickets at the last moment to see a ninja demonstration. These passengers, Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, Ken Adam, Lewis Gilbert, and Freddie Young, were in Japan scouting locations for the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967).
Coincidences like this are of course bound to happen with large enough numbers of people traveling, but I still find this interesting.
Overview of 787 control system.[1]
[1] https://ioactive.com/reverse-engineers-perspective-on-the-bo...
For example, he could have slipped while climbing out of the seat and fell against the control column.
That wouldn't be the first time
"Flight attendant hit a seat switch that pushed pilot into controls during flight to New Zealand, industry officials say"
https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/cockpit-mishap-might-h...
Manual "reboot" fixed that one. But "have you tried turning it off and back on again" is not a good answer for an airliner...
At time ~02:27, a dip in the altitude can be seen in the flight data chart.
Something tells me that there's going to be a "come to Jesus" meeting soon in the C-suite's future that results in the deployment of a golden parachute.
Engineers love a good challenge. Let's compare tensile strength of gold to silk (the original parachute material): • Ultimate tensile strength of Gold is 220 MPa • degummed natural silk fibers, with a tensile strength of 614 MPa
So approximately just triple the gold thread versus silk thread. Expensive but doable. Gold may add to total weight (parachute + person) to keep floating causing velocity to increase versus silk. Attach warning label: IANA MECHENG.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/09/2020-22...
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/8548-reboot-...
To be fair, 248 days is quite a long time.
I'm dubious and betting on clear-air turbulence, but we'll know in a few days.
[0] https://simpleflying.com/air-france-boeing-777-serious-incid...
They should have communicated better, but we've seen this many times - in panic situations or under pressure, communication is hard.
https://bea.aero/fileadmin/user_upload/F-GSQJ_finalreport_EN...
No, that's precisely what's supposed to happen.
the control yokes got desynchronised from one another which isn't supposed to happen
Worst of all, Boeing doesn't warn in any way if that happens, because why would they?
There was no hardware failure. Air France simply trains their pilots to a very low standard compared to other airlines.
Considering that the feedback you get might be due to outside forces, having no clear indication that the yokes are desynchronised is an issue.
no clear indication that the yokes are desynchronised
The first is https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/354285. A fairly complete database of aviation incidents.
The second is https://avherald.com/h?article=51601631&opt=256, similar to Aviation Safety but has comments and is more like hackernews but for commercial aviation.
And yes, tail number was CC-BGG.
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2015/05/05/boeing-787-power-is...
Which was an issue where the 787's Generator Control Units went into failsafe mode after being powered on for 248 days...
When one door closes, an other door opens. Boeing.> About 50 people were injured in the incident, with one person in serious condition, emergency services said.
I don’t think there’s any control input that can cause that, this story doesn’t seem to make sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
So it's in principle possible.
But passengers are notoriously clueless, to the point that "there was a go around and I thought we were all going to die" is practically a meme in aviation circles. Wait a few days and see what comes to light once it's investigated.
We have a social problem of embracing speculation, misinformation and disinformation and movements that are little more than angry mobs, and of treating with contempt an adherence to facts and rationality. With ever more information out there, and ever more speculation, mis- and disinformation, we need to utilize the latter - the facts and rationality - more than ever. They are proven tools for distinguishing fact from all the fictions we humans have some urge to embrace.
I still think Boeing has legitimate liability and responsibility, and needs to fix their manufacturing and safety situations. Airplane manufacturing can't respond only when things get worse.
Since the merger, the FAA has grounded both of Boeing's new planes (The 787 Dreamliner and the 737 Max).
Boeing's safety record is objectively declining. They are shipping out airplanes with safety issues that are being found "in production". This is why their planes are being grounded (something that never happened to Boeing pre-merger).
Christ, Boeing planes used to just spontaneously explode back in the 90s, and the only reason more people weren't killed was that two of the three had the good fortune to happen on the ground.
The A320 neo has had zero fatalities. This is an objective measure that Boeing should be compared against.
AFAIK there have also been zero manufacturing defects at the scale of missing bolts on a door panel.
The FAA's job is to prevent that - to stop it before it happens. I don't at all object to them grounding planes.
it's just jet fuel and meat travelling in a tight tube together.
Maybe its time to rethink software safety and verification there of? Safety in software is a bit of a joke. Document the behavior, its safe! Yeah no.
I'm no professional, but if I had to guess - the plane got hit by a hard gust, and the gust triggered a short in some electronics that caused the screens to go blank. (So, the opposite direction of causality).
How is this relevant? There is turbulence and gravity, this isn't "empty" space.
> Losing instruments for a second doesn't cause a change in momentum
No, but modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable.
If the account is accurate sounds like quite literally everything had a blip for a second, which would have prevented computer-intervention when encountering severe turbulence, or worse, flight control surfaces became "stuck."
> No, but modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable.
Most aircraft outside of fighter jets are aerodynamically stable. Loss of powered flight would mean the airplane will glide (in nominal operation). Even the 737MAX7/9 aircraft are still stable (although that brings up defining exactly what we mean by aerodynamically stable... )
Sure, but there is significant overlap between being stable and throwing around passengers, unfortunately.
Dropping 500 feet is perfectly okay for the aircraft and it will largely continue to not simply fall out of the sky past that.
In the case of military aircraft, they quite literally can't glide or maintain stable flight without the flight computer actively managing the control surfaces.
A 787 is perfectly capable of flying in steady state should the computer glitch.
Small nitpick, commercial jets are designed to be aerodynamically stable. If controls froze briefly, the plane would continue to be stable, flying as it was when the controls froze. You'd need to add in the turbulence or some external force for it to be a problem. That said, the 787 is 100% dependent on electronic controls, so anything more than brief loss of controls would lead to a crash.
Which is what I said :). The computer controlled flight control surfaces aren't just keeping the aircraft aerodynamically stable, they're keeping it comfortable/safe which is what "stable" means in this context (since it's a passenger jet).
Dropping 500 feet is nothing for the aircraft. That's a different story for the passengers.
That is a hilariously complex first guess.