The real reason Boeing's new plane crashed twice

Roxxsmom

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neandermagnon

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The fact that whisleblowers have requested to remain anonymous* is the most worrying thing because it suggests that there's an endemic problem with the management, i.e. putting pressure on workers to cut corners and/or to meet productivity targets at any cost with no regard to the quality of their work, and if workers complain they're at risk of being fired. It's a very negative working environment that in the aviation industry can lead to and has led to fatal accidents.

*re the article posted by roxxsmom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261 - in particular read the paragraphs about John Liotine who tried to alert the FAA about the shoddy routine maintenance which led to the crash but was pushed out of the profession as a result. He got a large libel payout in the end.

Honestly I thought that was a thing of the past. Very disappointed in Boeing.
 
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Roxxsmom

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Honestly I thought that was a thing of the past. Very disappointed in Boeing.

It's pretty alarming, actually.

Capitalism isn't working too well right now. I think it might be because it's been years since we've had the political will to regulate and supervise it properly. Our governments are increasingly working for corporations like Boeing, not for us.
 

lizmonster

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Honestly I thought that was a thing of the past. Very disappointed in Boeing.

TBF I never worked at a company that listened to someone warning of serious issues and said "Oh, thank you, we hadn't realized!" Every one of them knew what was happening. At some point past the idealistic start-up phase, every company ends up trying to balance draconian corner-cutting with keeping enough customers happy to stay in business.

I don't know that it's capitalism, per se. It's this myth that corporations exist to maximize shareholder value, and that they must do so as quickly as possible. If society saw the purpose of corporations as contributing to the greater good (which would include their own longer-term capitalistic needs), they'd have a different motivation for balancing investment with payout.
 

cbenoi1

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I wonder why they couldn't increase the ground clearance instead of mounting the engine higher. Seems like that would have been easier and safer.

Certification costs and delays.

Modifying the engines is one thing.

Changing the airframe - because higher ground clearance means the gears will be bigger and need major changes to the airframe to be stowed during flight - is one heck of another and very costly.

-cb
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I wonder why they couldn't increase the ground clearance instead of mounting the engine higher. Seems like that would have been easier and safer.

I thought the author addressed that, said the landing gear would have to be made longer and wouldn’t necessarily fit in the fuselage, or something like that.

Changing that design would not, I think, be easier than what they did, although it would probably have been safer. But Boeing seems to have wanted to claim this new plane was just another 737, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, and so apparently resisted redesigning any part of it except for those new gigantic monster engines.

The metaphor of the computerized dog in the cockpit biting the pilot until he gives up and everyone dies was weird, but chilling. Those planes sound like a total horrorshow.
 
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Xelebes

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Certification costs and delays.

Modifying the engines is one thing.

Changing the airframe - because higher ground clearance means the gears will be bigger and need major changes to the airframe to be stowed during flight - is one heck of another and very costly.

-cb

Also training costs. Higher gear definitely changes the handling of landing and take-off, especially how liberal one can turn their aircraft as they enter and as they exit these procedures.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Does anyone know why Boeing tried to retrofit the old 737 with huge, heavy, hot new engines prone to making the plane stall (which necessitated adding special software to correct for stalling which is prone to shutting out pilots and just taking over and which is implicated in the disastrous crashes) rather than simply designing a new plane from the ground up?
 

Auteur

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Also training costs. Higher gear definitely changes the handling of landing and take-off, especially how liberal one can turn their aircraft as they enter and as they exit these procedures.

The Airbus 320 is virtually the same length and width. The main difference is how high the fuselage sits. So if the pilots of the Airbus can handle it, those of the 737 Max should be able to, also, given all other factors being the same, which they may not be.
 

cbenoi1

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Does anyone know why Boeing tried to retrofit the old 737 with huge, heavy, hot new engines prone to making the plane stall (which necessitated adding special software to correct for stalling which is prone to shutting out pilots and just taking over and which is implicated in the disastrous crashes) rather than simply designing a new plane from the ground up?

It takes 10+ years to design a new airplane from the ground up, and billions in the making. It takes much less time and money to retrofit an existing airplane with new stuff.

-cb
 

cbenoi1

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Also training costs. Higher gear definitely changes the handling of landing and take-off, especially how liberal one can turn their aircraft as they enter and as they exit these procedures.

The new gear size means wires and tubing have to be re-routed, the electronics bay redesigned from scratch, fuel tanks reshaped, and maybe the wings lengthened and widened a bit to take on the extra weight. Soon enough the changes become a certification nightmare and by the time you get them all ironed out your competitor has gone through one or two iterations of its own model.

-cb
 

veinglory

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Also airlines would not bu a new plane because training all their pilots on it would cost too much. The mods were just within the amount that would trigger training requirement. Which is why they just had to do some ground lessone before flying it--lessons that never mentioned how to detect and response to an anti-stall malfunction.
 

Roxxsmom

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The Airbus 320 is virtually the same length and width. The main difference is how high the fuselage sits. So if the pilots of the Airbus can handle it, those of the 737 Max should be able to, also, given all other factors being the same, which they may not be.

The big difference is that the larger engines on the new 737 design had to be placed higher and a bit forward from where the smaller engines sat (tucked under the wings) on earlier models of 737. This changed the angle of thrust so the nose wants to go up more sharply. This wouldn't be an issue with the airbus, because the larger engine can still sit comfortably under its wings (because it is higher). The software that forces the nose down attempted to correct for this.

The interface between engineering and design are where many products fail to deliver. When that product is an airplane, well, the consequences are severe.
 

Prophetsnake

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That video is more than a little off the mark. Almost every western jet airliner has a powerful trim system. They need it for a variety of reasons, and in the 737 max, the MCAS system utilises this trim system to accomplish its task. The important thing is that the trim system itself can malfunction regardless of the presence of MCAS; they can run away. That's effectively what happened to both of these airplanes.
A trim runaway is a rare event, and there are several layers of protection guarding against them. First, they are wired so that multiple failures need to occur before there is a failure. Next, there is a semi-automatic brake that will jam it solid in the event that it does runaway. The brake is activated by the pilot pushing or pulling the stick in the direction opposite of the trim. He'd do that as naturally as the driver of a car might press on the brake if the car began to accelerate uncommanded. This second feature, the brake, is bypassed in the 737MAX if the MCAS is triggered. It has to be as the system is assuming that the pilot might be the cause of the problem. So if the MCAS fails, it's going to cause a runaway trim.
HEre's the thing - none of this matters. There are two switches in all Boeing jet airliners that will instantly disable the trim system. And there is a manual wheel right next to that that enables manual control of the trim. If the trim acts up in any way, the drill is to immediately kill the trim with those two switches and trim manually. Neither one of those crews did that in good time. The Ethiopian crew did eventually switch the switches off. If memory serves, it was the very green FO that did so, in fact, but then someone switched them back on again.
In short, a trim runaway is apt to happen in any jet airliner, and in any Boeing especially, the drill is exactly the same - you disable the power trim and trim manually. You don't hesitate, you simply do it, for obvious reasons.
In short, both crews failed to fly the airplane. The fault lies with Boeing, their respective airlines, and a culture that relies too heavily on automatics on the flight deck and dilutes the practice of good airmanship. This is especially true in third world countries, where traditions are relatively young and the depth of experience across an airline is small, but it's also true of a lot of low cost airlines with a relatively young pilot body.
 
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frimble3

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Sounds about right. A lack of training for guys who don't have the experience to realize how much training they need.
 

Words.Worth

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[FONT=&quot]Boeing aerospace engineers are nuts (or they plagiarised at UNI). You can't move jet engines up or down or let or right without effecting the aerodynamic force acting on the airplane (trust and drag). So fix hardware design errors with software was the solution. Software engineers are nuts too for designing a bad software MCAS that doesn’t provide a feedback to pilots among other flaws. And to top it all, train pilots on iPads to save cash and F.A.A. gave Boeing more authority to certify it's own airplane safety.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]This is a prime example of a completely capitalistic system that chooses accumulating profits over saving people lives.[/FONT]
 

Prophetsnake

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Boeing aerospace engineers are nuts (or they plagiarised at UNI). You can't move jet engines up or down or let or right without effecting the aerodynamic force acting on the airplane (trust and drag). So fix hardware design errors with software was the solution. Software engineers are nuts too for designing a bad software MCAS that doesn’t provide a feedback to pilots among other flaws. And to top it all, train pilots on iPads to save cash and F.A.A. gave Boeing more authority to certify it's own airplane safety.

This is a prime example of a completely capitalistic system that chooses accumulating profits over saving people lives.

Well, in fact you can move engines around. It's been done before, and often. It's not really an issue in and of itself. The addition of MCAS isn't really an issue either - though there were some things Boeing could have done to ensure that the system was more secure. It's complicated, and most of what has appeared in the press is nonsense.
 

cbenoi1

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Well, in fact you can move engines around. It's been done before, and often. It's not really an issue in and of itself.

This time moving the engines around caused a cascade of flaws that eventually killed people. Yes, it's a big issue.

-cb
 
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Auteur

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The real reason the 737 Max crashed? Gravity.

Okay, that was in bad taste. :tongue
 

Roxxsmom

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Well, in fact you can move engines around. It's been done before, and often. It's not really an issue in and of itself. The addition of MCAS isn't really an issue either - though there were some things Boeing could have done to ensure that the system was more secure. It's complicated, and most of what has appeared in the press is nonsense.

Yes, but it requires changes in the rest of the design that Boeing didn't implement. Why didn't they implement them? From what I've read, it's because they were A. Trying to get the plane on the market as fast as possible (to be competitive with the new Airbus design), and B. They wanted to be able to sell it as being basically the same as earlier 737 models still in service. This was because of various rules requiring pilot retraining and pilots not being cleared to fly more than one plane model at a time when working for an airline (so having the plane considered a completely different design would create challenges for airlines that wanted to shuffle pilots between the 737 Max and earlier 737 models).

In addition, they didn't have enough redundancy with their systems, they oversold the new design as being flyable with minimal retraining from the old 737 design, they didn't recommend adequate training, and they evidently made it hard for pilots to spontaneously figure out how to override the automated system when it malfunctioned.

Not saying the airlines don't share some culpability if they didn't insist on their pilots going for whatever training was recommended, but I think a lot of this is on Boeing. They didn't recommend adequate training in the first place.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-crash-problems-human-error-mcas-faa

There was also that matter with the "optional" cockpit warning light Boeing said they thought was standard.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/...a-737-max-warning-light-was-standard-it-wasnt

There were ample complaints about the 737 Max before these tragedies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2...ecord-about-problems-with-the-737-max/584791/
 
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