The FAA suffered a major loss of credibility in their handling of the first round of testing/accreditation of the MAX.
The FAA can't afford another stuff up this second time around and as such I suspect they will be checking every aspect of the plane in very fine detail.
I still don't trust the FAA at all. They've been sourcing out their own work to Boeing since the 787 Dreamliner [0]. That's seven years ago. I don't think this will make them change their practices. The 787 fiasco certainly didn't.
Personally I'd be happiest if the world just scrapped all the Max-es. Just scrap 'em, let Boeing go out of business, it's what they deserve now, they shouldn't exist anymore as a company. There are enough businesses that happily create planes without putting profit before people.
It's really too bad that there's no footage of either of the crashes, because if people could see what happened they would never fly one of those things again. That's why people don't fly zeppelins anymore. Not because of what people said or read, but because they saw. The Max deserves the same.
Do you want to fly in a plane which was created using the deaths of over 300 people to finalize the design?
I think overall we should consider this process a very positive thing, FAA and Boeing (and Airbus as well) are all going to learn a lot from this process which will make air travel safer in the future. It's unfortunate that it took two tragedies to get us here but if you look at the history of aviation improvements this isn't the first and it won't be the last time.
Asking because I legitimately don't know: was the FAA failure here more attributable to the agency, or the funding (and therefore manpower*expertise) available to it?
The FAA suffered a major loss of credibility in their handling of the first round of testing/accreditation of the MAX.
The FAA can't afford another stuff up this second time...
Because I'll just check with the next air transit regulatory body right?
That makes me doubt the severity of this issue slightly. Maybe the FAA is pointing out a relatively minor issue to rebuild trust, and Boeing isn't in the position to disagree, or even say it's minor, so they're acquiescing.
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if this was an issue somebody knew about but with the recent attention they're forced to disclose it before somebody else discovers it.
There are a myriad of issues that put the planes at risk, but I think that the fact that when the control system (MCAS) is engaged causes it to ignore feedback is the biggest issue of all.
"But with the MCAS activated, said Fehrm, those breakout switches wouldn’t work. MCAS assumes the yoke is already aggressively pulled back and won’t allow further pullback to counter its action, which is to hold the nose down.
Fehrm’s analysis is confirmed in the instructions Boeing sent to pilots last weekend. The bulletin sent to American Airlines pilots emphasizes that pulling back the control column will not stop the action.
Fehrm said that the Lion Air pilots would have trained on 737 simulators and would have learned over many years of experience that pulling back on the yoke stops any automatic tail maneuvers pushing the nose down." [0].
If you bought a new computer, how pissed off would you be if you lost data not because of a hard-drive failure, but because of a weird design decision of the 1 penny caps lock key? Imagine spending the time to setup a proper RAID system and losing everything because of a design decision in the keyboard.
I mean if the media keeps reporting about the small stuff that's wrong, it's going to make people go "well planes are complex and things happen" and almost ignore the seriousness of a design decision that ignores user input.
When the Boeing CEO had his press conference in April, he said "we've confirmed that the MCAS system as originally designed did meet our design and safety analysis criteria and our certification criteria."[1] I yelled at the screen "you know that means the criteria are flawed, right? If the procedures didn't catch this mistake, that means there are other mistakes that weren't caught!"
A flabbergasted reporter then asks him if he means to say that MCAS was designed to push the nose down 21 times. The CEO then blamed the pilots for not following procedures!
He repeatedly avoids avoiding admitting that any mistakes were made. He was so intent on avoiding blame that he gave me no confidence that Boeing could learn from its mistakes. The longer he talked, the less confidence I had in Boeing as a company.
Edit: unsure if this video is correct, but the MCAS system is classical "solution" to how in software a junior programmer would patch their software by adding more complexity to the code without realizing what that changes would further affect. It felt like they gave up on some solid solution and just decided to added a sensor who would overwrite pilot manuver.
A similar situation would be downgrading a size of tires on a new model of a car (to be competitve with other auto makers that lower the price) and simply adding software blockage that you cannot turn wheels as violent as you could before because on thin thread that would lead to a car tipover.
The whole video - if correct, paints a grim picture of profits above PAXes...
Admitting culpability more or less admits financial responsibility as well.
If Boeing would say "we're at fault", people would sue them (more than now) and have greater chance at winning those lawsuits, since Boeing already admitted to being at fault.
I can imagine Boeing, and the Boeing CEO, is trying very, very hard at walking a fine line of not admitting being at fault, but also saying that they are "taking responsibility"
(since they have 300 souls, public opinion, and lawmakers against them). They have to convince people (those that matter, ie those stopping operation and sales) that the MAX and Boeing are safe.
I wonder if they're just now finding new things by simply running the software in a simulator, what more will they find, and what does this say to their continued assurances as to the safety of this plane?
This plane appears to be a (sorta) flying dumpster fire rushed to market against Airbus with tragic consequences. One design flaw after another is MAX failure.
The industry is pretty homogeneous and somewhat of a revolving door between the few OEMs. What are the odds that the code on this plane is orders of magnitude worse (in terms of code quality) than every other similar bit of code in the sky?
Edit. I should have to say this but I'm not defending Boeing here. I'm saying it's not at al unforeseeable that the other planes, even ones by other manufacturers are just as bad. Clearly they thought nothing was abnormal about this one until it started falling out of the sky. I see this kind of like diesel-gate. If one of them is cheating they're probably all cheating.
Since this thread is already full of armchair airplane engineers opinions about the root cause, I'll add mine too: Never ever write new software under the condition that it must work EXACTLY as old software. It can't be done and you'll always miss something.
Case in point: Wine. They've been at it for years and the emulation layer is still far from perfect. It works 99% of the time which is good enough for games, but I wager not for airplane control systems.
I made a post about three months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578201) that my main fear with the 737 Max was that they rushed the plane into production and more mistakes were made than with just the MCAS system. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case. I doubt Boeing will ever convince me that enough "patches" have been made to make the plane safe to fly on.
I'd be pretty comfortable flying it after all this attention and review. It will probably be the best reviewed passenger plane software developed in America, if not the world once this is over.
Boeing deserves a 9-figure fine though, and its shareholders should lose massively to make sure this doesn't happen again.
I'm not convinced. The pressure on Boeing to fix this ASAP is immense. That is not a good environment for writing safety critical software. Especially if they are doing a "broader software redesign". I don't believe that software quality can be enforced from the outside.
> It will probably be the best reviewed passenger plane software developed in America, if not the world once this is over.
The problem is that this is not actually a software problem. It’s an airplane design problem, and Boeing is trying to convince you that it’s just the software.
Even if the software is perfect, this plane remains a flying coffin until it is redesigned from scratch.
I bet they will be able to test the known or anticipated issues. What about the unknowns that bad hardware design introduced? Thats why people are scared of.
The aerodynamic/stability effects of moving the engine position is a complicated topic, and I haven't seen a really good thorough explanation of it yet that really goes into the gritty details. There's so many rules of thumb and generalizations in the vast majority of peoples' understanding of aircraft stability and forces, even for pilots or engineers in the field.
What's the problem with the airframe? What's the problem with the larger engine nacelle causing a different pitching moment? I've yet to read either of those violate any portion of FAR 25. There is still an open question whether the MAX should have or will have a separate type certificate from other 737's, thereby requiring pilots of a type rating to fly the MAX, thereby requiring full disclosure and training on all differences.
Which pilots should have had anyway, even if it didn't require a new type rating.
This all points up the glaring conflicts of interest in the corporate business environment. Most of us think that Boeing is the business of building airplanes, but as a publicly traded company, its real business is making money for its shareholders, and aerospace is just a vehicle toward that end. The Boeing CEO's steadfast refusal to take responsibility for these two crashes are nothing more than CYA designed to limit or defer financial responsibility for >300 deaths and protect and privilege shareholder value above the safety and well-being of the flying public.
They'll do some rebranding and resume business as usual after the FAA approves their tweaks. Boeing will have lot of inventory ready to ship and there will no doubt also be some lucrative discounts for airlines currently staring very hard at competing offers from Airbus. Airlines will be flying these planes for decades.
An issue recovering from uncommanded stabilizer trim which is not MCAS-related?
I’m going to assume there’s a real issue they are trying to report on, but Gell-Mann effect is strong with this one and some key information is missing.
If only the FAA wasn't corrupt and did their job of testing, verifying and CERTIFYING the 787 and 737max in the first place rather than outsourcing it to the VERY MANUFACTURER Boeing.
I don't know where y'all went to school, but I was never able to self-grade my year-end exams.
Absolutely unthinkable banana republic behaviour and not a single head rolled (except for the about 350 poor dead souls who had to pay for this corruption with their life).
The 787 and 737max represent two different things.
The 787 is an advanced and innovative plane. It blazes the way in terms of seat-mile cost, comfort, fuel consimptoon, etc.
The 737max is a half-baked response to the re-engined a320 and also the somewhat smaller planes like the a220 and e195-2 that beat the 737 in cost per mile and noise as well as being more comfortable. (Think of the Japanese cars that were small on the outside and big on the inside compared to 1970s American cars)
The 737max tried to innovate as little as possible, and that is where it got into trouble.
I think Boeing still thinks that it can get the FAA to avoid a simulator training requirement but they won't and by trying they will delay the recertification at the expense of airlines, shareholders, etc.
Sadly nothing new. Remember when the Air Force outsourced their fraud and abuse investigation database to Lockheed Martin? Which Lockheed then lost together with the backups?
What you are looking at is the direct consequence of deregulation. Profit over people is the logic of deregulation. The people want regulation to protect the populace and vested interests for profit do not want that regulation.
Boeing has many areas of work, including autonomous drone taxis. You'd need to be a bit more specific. Even the venerable 747 is getting work with a new passenger version (Air Force 1) that includes up-rated engines.
“Addressing this condition will reduce pilot workload” is a funny way of saying they're going to stop planes crashing themselves!
We're all quite used to having problems described in the least threatening way but I'm thankful that I've never had to do so about something that could result in people dying.
As a web/game developer, one thing I never understood is the alleged complexity of these control systems. There is no image/voice recognition, no graphics engine, no rocket science. What are they even doing? Or is it all a big lie?
Lines of code, from the internet[1]:
Pacemaker: 100k
Boeing 787: 5M
Chevy Volt: 10M
Modern car: 100M
[+] [-] jussij|6 years ago|reply
The FAA can't afford another stuff up this second time around and as such I suspect they will be checking every aspect of the plane in very fine detail.
That could spell more trouble for Boeing.
[+] [-] BorRagnarok|6 years ago|reply
Personally I'd be happiest if the world just scrapped all the Max-es. Just scrap 'em, let Boeing go out of business, it's what they deserve now, they shouldn't exist anymore as a company. There are enough businesses that happily create planes without putting profit before people.
It's really too bad that there's no footage of either of the crashes, because if people could see what happened they would never fly one of those things again. That's why people don't fly zeppelins anymore. Not because of what people said or read, but because they saw. The Max deserves the same.
Do you want to fly in a plane which was created using the deaths of over 300 people to finalize the design?
[0] The Boeing 787: Broken Dreams, Al Jazeera Investigations, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os
[+] [-] brentm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laythea|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbrown|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbigelow76|6 years ago|reply
Because I'll just check with the next air transit regulatory body right?
[+] [-] dehrmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixothree|6 years ago|reply
But is that really what is going on here? Are they equipped to do so any longer?
[+] [-] hanniabu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjvehn|6 years ago|reply
"But with the MCAS activated, said Fehrm, those breakout switches wouldn’t work. MCAS assumes the yoke is already aggressively pulled back and won’t allow further pullback to counter its action, which is to hold the nose down.
Fehrm’s analysis is confirmed in the instructions Boeing sent to pilots last weekend. The bulletin sent to American Airlines pilots emphasizes that pulling back the control column will not stop the action.
Fehrm said that the Lion Air pilots would have trained on 737 simulators and would have learned over many years of experience that pulling back on the yoke stops any automatic tail maneuvers pushing the nose down." [0].
If you bought a new computer, how pissed off would you be if you lost data not because of a hard-drive failure, but because of a weird design decision of the 1 penny caps lock key? Imagine spending the time to setup a proper RAID system and losing everything because of a design decision in the keyboard.
I mean if the media keeps reporting about the small stuff that's wrong, it's going to make people go "well planes are complex and things happen" and almost ignore the seriousness of a design decision that ignores user input.
[0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-e...
[+] [-] kahirsch|6 years ago|reply
A flabbergasted reporter then asks him if he means to say that MCAS was designed to push the nose down 21 times. The CEO then blamed the pilots for not following procedures!
He repeatedly avoids avoiding admitting that any mistakes were made. He was so intent on avoiding blame that he gave me no confidence that Boeing could learn from its mistakes. The longer he talked, the less confidence I had in Boeing as a company.
I have no idea why this guy still has his job.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOQmQpKHVWA&t=9m30s
[+] [-] joering2|6 years ago|reply
Edit: unsure if this video is correct, but the MCAS system is classical "solution" to how in software a junior programmer would patch their software by adding more complexity to the code without realizing what that changes would further affect. It felt like they gave up on some solid solution and just decided to added a sensor who would overwrite pilot manuver.
A similar situation would be downgrading a size of tires on a new model of a car (to be competitve with other auto makers that lower the price) and simply adding software blockage that you cannot turn wheels as violent as you could before because on thin thread that would lead to a car tipover.
The whole video - if correct, paints a grim picture of profits above PAXes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2tuKiiznsY
[+] [-] retSava|6 years ago|reply
If Boeing would say "we're at fault", people would sue them (more than now) and have greater chance at winning those lawsuits, since Boeing already admitted to being at fault.
I can imagine Boeing, and the Boeing CEO, is trying very, very hard at walking a fine line of not admitting being at fault, but also saying that they are "taking responsibility" (since they have 300 souls, public opinion, and lawmakers against them). They have to convince people (those that matter, ie those stopping operation and sales) that the MAX and Boeing are safe.
[+] [-] dehrmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mevile|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|6 years ago|reply
Edit. I should have to say this but I'm not defending Boeing here. I'm saying it's not at al unforeseeable that the other planes, even ones by other manufacturers are just as bad. Clearly they thought nothing was abnormal about this one until it started falling out of the sky. I see this kind of like diesel-gate. If one of them is cheating they're probably all cheating.
[+] [-] bjourne|6 years ago|reply
Case in point: Wine. They've been at it for years and the emulation layer is still far from perfect. It works 99% of the time which is good enough for games, but I wager not for airplane control systems.
[+] [-] Xcelerate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbnj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rfugger|6 years ago|reply
Boeing deserves a 9-figure fine though, and its shareholders should lose massively to make sure this doesn't happen again.
[+] [-] mantap|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanakachen|6 years ago|reply
The problem is that this is not actually a software problem. It’s an airplane design problem, and Boeing is trying to convince you that it’s just the software.
Even if the software is perfect, this plane remains a flying coffin until it is redesigned from scratch.
The only real fix is not to fly on this plane.
[+] [-] objektif|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] teh_infallible|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afterburner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmurf|6 years ago|reply
Which pilots should have had anyway, even if it didn't require a new type rating.
[+] [-] spaceandshit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hwestiii|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GiorgioG|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaroth|6 years ago|reply
I’m going to assume there’s a real issue they are trying to report on, but Gell-Mann effect is strong with this one and some key information is missing.
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 333c|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dplgk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulfw|6 years ago|reply
I don't know where y'all went to school, but I was never able to self-grade my year-end exams.
Absolutely unthinkable banana republic behaviour and not a single head rolled (except for the about 350 poor dead souls who had to pay for this corruption with their life).
[+] [-] PaulHoule|6 years ago|reply
The 787 is an advanced and innovative plane. It blazes the way in terms of seat-mile cost, comfort, fuel consimptoon, etc.
The 737max is a half-baked response to the re-engined a320 and also the somewhat smaller planes like the a220 and e195-2 that beat the 737 in cost per mile and noise as well as being more comfortable. (Think of the Japanese cars that were small on the outside and big on the inside compared to 1970s American cars)
The 737max tried to innovate as little as possible, and that is where it got into trouble.
I think Boeing still thinks that it can get the FAA to avoid a simulator training requirement but they won't and by trying they will delay the recertification at the expense of airlines, shareholders, etc.
[+] [-] cf141q5325|6 years ago|reply
https://www.govexec.com/defense/2016/06/computer-crash-wipes...
[+] [-] kevin_b_er|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bumby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _jal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralph84|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777X
[+] [-] bdamm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehrdadn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominicr|6 years ago|reply
We're all quite used to having problems described in the least threatening way but I'm thankful that I've never had to do so about something that could result in people dying.
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pseingatl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dandare|6 years ago|reply
Lines of code, from the internet[1]: Pacemaker: 100k Boeing 787: 5M Chevy Volt: 10M Modern car: 100M
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/millions-lines-of-code/