[joecasson]

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable.

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.

[somenameforme]

You can test this, to some degree, by using custom date ranges on most of any search engine. Just exclude from the past several days and search for whatever. So for instance, I assume most people know that amongst numerous other issues, a Boeing also had a wheel fall off and cause damage to vehicles and what no on the ground below. So I searched for 'wheel falls off airplane' [1] while excluding the past few months. And yeah, every time it happened, even on relatively small planes, it received lots of coverage.

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...

[chmod775]

There's databases that are going to make that a bit more precise.

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...

[metalliqaz]

But for the planes that are in-service, any extra scrutiny in the wake of an incident would mostly fall on the airlines, not on Boeing.

[cjbgkagh]

Boeing being safe was the default, what we're seeing is the disillusion of this default. What's the alternative for the news; "plane lands successfully and without issue". As with any complex system things when things go wrong they go wrong in a myriad of ways with a great deal of uncertainty and randomness - which in and of itself makes them interesting. The erosion of the culture of safety at Boeing is a slow gradual process that has occured over several decades. Incidents that make it to the public are a lagging indicator, which suggests that there is much more to come. Culture is easy to destroy and very very hard to fix, like how cutting down a forest is much faster and easier than growing one. And a culture that has destroyed itself is very unlikely able to fix itself. So we could very well be witnessing a terminal decline. Boeing will make a ton of money providing drones for the US military so there is no real incentive to force leadership to do any course corrections - instead they will just have to act surprised each time a new Boeing issue pops up.

[jajko]

These issues are killing people in hundreds. You are right that national security is more important, but world is not binary. Current execs could easily say rot in jail while company keeps churning whatever hardware military wants, nothing mutually exclusive there.

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.

[rob74]

Even with zero controls, and even if one or more of the various computers decided spontaneously to restart, I would expect the plane to continue flying the way it did before the incident rather than going into an (apparently) uncommanded descent? I mean, we had that with the 737 MAX, so I wouldn't rule it out, but it sounds suspiciously like the pilot messed up and is trying to blame the airplane. However I'm no specialist, so it's probably best to wait until further details emerge...

[thombat]

But what control input could a pilot make that abruptly produces significant negative gees for just a couple of seconds? Other than the bland references to "technical issue" it sounds like clear air turbulence. (Although one possible mistake could be that the weather radar did warn of it and the pilot didn't react?)

[kayodelycaon]

Airbus had a problem like this on an A330 due to corrupted AOA data in the flight computers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

[cm2187]

Well, something of that sort happened with the A330 also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

[jerf]

The problem with engineering defense in depth is that systems naturally evolve to "spend" that defense in depth. Constant, active vigilance is required to maintain a culture that honors and preserves defense in depth rather than exploiting it. It isn't that hard to believe that Boeing has failed to preserve that culture. A company like Boeing would be constantly fighting against multiple forces pushing them to exploit the defense in depth rather than maintain it. Some of them, like the Harvard MBA mindset, are very difficult for large companies to resist. Short term costs that result in long term benefits are a hard sell to almost anyone, but current American business culture is definitely not strong against that.

[rco8786]

Yea I have the same question. Objectively it appears that Boeing is having some really serious safety issues. Things that absolutely do not jive with what we’ve been taught our entire lives about how safe airline travel is. But I’m open to the idea that 5-10 “major” incidents a year is maybe within the normal range and we just don’t ever hear about them.

[Aetheridon]

appears to be the newer manufactured aircraft (737 Max series and 787's) that are having these issues... the 777 has one of the best safety records for airliners out there for example

[pxeboot]

If you are curious just how common minor incidents are, https://avherald.com does a good job of listing most of them.

[bbor]

This isn’t a “hype cycle”, Boeing has very publicly abandoned their engineering culture in favor of stock buybacks ever since the McDonnell-Douglas merger. It’s not hidden at all, and we have countless whistleblower employees, undercover investigations, and the obvious fiscal facts (eg they planned to spend half as much on the MAX as they originally thought it would take).

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.

[mym1990]

How do you suppose a half a trillion dollar market is not a "huge industry"? I am definitely aware of the cultural issues at Boeing, but boiling it down to "sometimes things are simple" is just a lot of ignorance on your part.

[mym1990]

I would lean towards an anti-Boeing hype cycle with some confluence of a series of unfortunate events. This is not to say that the QA issues aren't leading to something catastrophic, but on the whole I don't think people quite comprehend the number of flights that take off and land in a day, and how few fatalities and injuries result as of these trips relative to the passenger load.

[chmod775]

The problem isn't that "accidents happen", the problem is that airplane safety culture isn't meeting people's expectations anymore. Two planes crashing for the exact same preventable reason mere months apart just does not compute. A single crash would've been quickly forgotten. But two crashes and a long chain of incidents all while the planes were allowed to stay in the air is going to change people's perceptions.

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.

[jajko]

Yet competition can and does better, much better re safety currently. Any issue of Airbus would get at least same press coverage, in US even more since media are usually not impartial.

Are we already into some boeing whitewashing cycle too?

[honkycat]

Did you really not hear about one of their door plugs falling off mid air? Or how TWO of their passenger planes crashed into the ocean killing all passengers due to gross negligence in implementing their computer assisted control for their new plane?

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.

[kefirlife]

Given the stories reported about the safety culture at Boeing I expect there are other quality issues. The instances where those quality issues are so apparent that customers experience them, like the door blowout, are unlikely to be unique.

John Oliver did a report on Boeing recently that is pretty damning.

[readthenotes1]

More plausible than hearsay from Boeing or LATAM

[joecasson]

Fair, but - for the sake of the argument - who's to say that Brian Jokat doesn't have a major short position on Boeing?

I agree that both of the airlines have incentives to cover it up, but it's strange this is being "reported" as verified.

[aniftythrifrty]

Carry that skepticism forward when reading anti-Israel headlines.

[bigbillheck]

In the sense that there's evidence of a problem with planes right now, and the question is if that problem was already there, whereas there's evidence of IDF war crimes right now, and the question is if they've always been doing them?

[SomeoneFromCA]

proisreal, antiisarael, skepticism is always useful.

[zoeysmithe]

" hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable."

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.