What a deceitful headline, the upper management knows about the flaws, they've been in spin control since 2012. There have been whistleblowers, and no corrective action was taken.
There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media on this, and it was damning and that was done a decade ago. No one has been held to account for the systematic failures that were largely introduced as a result of upper management and propagated due to failures in process with the FAA. I'd like to see a corruption probe, and mandatory cool-off periods for regulators seeking to jump from regulation to working in the industry.
> There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media
As the name might suggest, Al Jazeera isn't a US media company. And despite being Qatari state owned, has mostly retained its editorial independence. It reminds me of what the BBC used to represent.
Boeing's board has just three people with degrees in engineering. They are outnumbered by accountants. Only two worked as engineers (the other is a pilot/Air Force) and only one of the two working engineers is from aviation.
The Netflix documentary Downfall talked a little about it as well. It's absolutely cost cutting measures and horrendous engineering and QA across all of Boeing.
Sabotaged QA you mean. When you're getting hounded about polishing that apple because management wants crap out the door, that's a powerful message that not even some of the most insanely dedicated QA groups can fully defang.
Absolutely agree.. And I don't think they needed to look very far to find flaws in that plane.. I probably shouldn't have been certified to start with. It's maybe not as bad as the MAX, but it ain't great either. Apparently they've made changes to the lightning strike protection systems in the wings, to decrease costs. And it's for the worse. Like removing insulation for lightning diffusers going straight through the fuel tanks. And let's not talk about the li-ion batteries..
> The agency now has more power to choose which Boeing employees represent the FAA’s interests, and there are new protections for them from undue pressure by company managers.
This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
I wonder if after it's all said and done, whether the splitting up of parts manufacturing will really have saved that much money. I also wonder how much of this is caused by pushing materials as far as they can go to get to the fuel/efficiency targets they want to hit.
1) it is absolutely a problem, but...
2) to fix it, you'd have to pay federal FAA employeees as much as equally-skilled members of the private sector at Boeing, and that hasn't happened in a long time. My understanding is this system started because the FAA's best technical people kept leaving for Boeing and other private-sector employers.
Build it into the cost of certification. You absolutely want the brightest people working their hardest to uncover potentially fatal issues so they can be fixed before people die.
Maybe it's time to finally pay market rate for government employees?
The underpayment is a consistent factor that keeps cropping up wherever you search for the reason why a government project or entire structure failed or went over time/budget.
>> even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
Yeah but after I read this:
>The FAA delegated an increasing number of tasks to a group of Boeing employees authorized to work on the agency’s behalf.
I first imagined a typical corporate group which might have turnover and I thought: What if the FAA delegated to individual people, so if Boeing fired someone for raising too much concern the role would fall back to the FAA? But yeah, its still a conflict of interest no matter how you do it.
> This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
This is what happens in the US when your company is in a regulated industry and has been found to be so far from best practices that the regulatory body shows up one day, says "We need x number of offices" and then takes over managing your firm until they are satisfied enough Corrective Action have been performed and enough Preventive Actions are in place to right the ship.
Solution: don't get into a regulated industry, and if you must, keep your house in order.
It does seem strange but, even including the 737 MAX disaster, air travel is safer today than it ever was. Since the 1960s, miles traveled increased tenfold while deaths (in absolute numbers) dropped by 90 %, for a combined 100-fold increase in safety.
If engineering standards had dropped 5 years ago, that would not really be reflected in the current numbers yet.
A commonly heard thesis is that this track record of safety has been used as an excuse for reducing engineering standards. I don't think the historical track record of safety can be used to disprove that thesis.
No thanks to the MBAs flying people into the ground to pay for their yachts.
Consider the record of the 737 MAX alone and up to the point where it was grounded worldwide. I bet that's not a great ratio of fight hours to lives lost compared to Boeing pre-merger.
you’re spot on with how safe commercial air travel is today. it’s actually insane when you think about it.
but the reason its so safe is because there are so many redundancies built into so many different layers of the system.
once rot starts to happen, it’ll take the better part of several years or a decade for a wave of elevated fatalities to manifest themselves in these stats.
The overlooked point is that the MCAS system had been in place and functioning for 10,000 hours +, with hundreds of pilots, and none of them even noticed MCAS existed.
If not for a brain dead design decision to not check for bad AOA data, we probably still would never have heard of MCAS.
Even if ground crews reliably checked and fixed AOAs, we probably would never have heard of it.
But ultimately MCAS was a symptom of a failure of process, with people whose entire job was to check and veto designs failing to veto designs, apparently for fear of management pressure. To be clear, the failure was in management. It sucks that people had to die to get us to notice ordinary management failure.
The Lion Air jet had the same MCAS failure on its previous flight. If you dig through ASRS you'll find other reports of uncommanded pitch down events on the MAX. Just because MCAS hadn't yet crashed a plane doesn't mean that nobody noticed its presence.
I think it's more of the airliner version of the X-29. Yes, it can be made to fly, but only when controlled against normal aeronautic tendencies. In other words, unless you have compensating (automated) controls, the things would not fly as a conventional aircraft and would soon lose control and lift.
As far as I'm aware, it would glide as well as any other 737 if both engines were cut. It merely had a slightly lower maximum nose-up because of the increased engine thrust or something like that.
I would like a system where the airline had to declare the type of aircraft used on the flight at the time of booking. If at the time of departure the aircraft model actually use for the flight is different then the passenger must on request be repaid the entire value of the ticket.
This means that there is no (financial) pressure on the passenger to fly on an aircraft they do not trust.
Currently the live-or-die risk devolves to the passenger and they have no direct say in the choice of aircraft: after ticket purchase they are left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
This system might force airlines to think much much harder when making their aircraft purchasing decisions.
Just because the aircraft is certified will no longer amount to adequate commercial due diligence.
An airline which wants to protect its revenue will now need to deep-dive into the manufacturers quality procedures themselves.
Otherwise their customers can vote with their feet, at no financial cost, any time prior to departure.
You can already vote as a customer as to which fleet you want to fly on. It may not be practical but it is possible.
For example, jetBlue only flies Airbus and Embraer. Spirit and Frontier exclusively fly Airbus. Lufthansa's commercial fleet is mostly Airbus and the Boeing aircraft it does operate have good track records.
If you're flying commercial, I don't think laws are going to get made for you against the interests of airlines and aircraft manufacturers. And before you think market pressures will work, they know you'll keep flying.
I’ve flown three times since the 800 has been green lighted. I have very intentionally picked Airbus flights. I’ll never get on one of those Boeing jets.
Good thinking. Airbus planes are impervious to software glitches[1] and sensor failures[2] that result in catastrophic loss of control of the aircraft.
Better bring a gas mask[3] though. And bring one for the flight crew too in case they become incapacitated.
AF 447 was first and foremost a problem between the controls and the seat. The sensor problem you're referring to did not render the plane incapable of flying, but it did remove one level of idiot proofing. As a result one of the pilots pulled the stick back and didn't relent even as the plane stalled. If you did that in a Boeing plane (or any plane) with functioning sensors you'd have the same end result.
Airplane safety is a function of fatalities over capacity, flight hours and model service life. As such, planes that have been in production longer usually tend to become "more safe" (which is a self-fulfilling thing - notoriously unsafe planes eventually won't be sold anymore). See [1] for a short overview.
As such, the 737NG - which had fatalities - is unlikely to be a contender, considering the much older A340 has had none.
Most flight booking portals I know do tell you which equipment a flight is using.
And yes, I strongly prefer airlines that do not use "modern" Boeing planes at all (which arguably might be a lot easier here in Europe). If it's Boeing, I'm not going.
How much of this is to be expected anyway? I.e. in any sufficiently complicated system, you can never find all the flaws. Is there a particular reason to believe the 787 in particular has a disproportionate number of flaws given what it is?
The reasons I've heard is that after merging McDonald-Douglass, Boeing developed a culture of cost-cutting and gutting engineering, and it's only gotten worse over time.
From what I've read, following the merger Boeing was no longer run out of Seattle but Chicago. How can you effectively manage a manufacturing facility from halfway across the country?
What we are seeing is regulatory capture by McDonald-Douglass top level executives and board of the FAA. Standard operating procedure for the capitalists. Everything is permissible as long as it increases their and the shareholders' profiteering.
Readit News
There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media on this, and it was damning and that was done a decade ago. No one has been held to account for the systematic failures that were largely introduced as a result of upper management and propagated due to failures in process with the FAA. I'd like to see a corruption probe, and mandatory cool-off periods for regulators seeking to jump from regulation to working in the industry.
As the name might suggest, Al Jazeera isn't a US media company. And despite being Qatari state owned, has mostly retained its editorial independence. It reminds me of what the BBC used to represent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera
https://www.boeing.com/company/general-info/corporate-govern...
This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
I wonder if after it's all said and done, whether the splitting up of parts manufacturing will really have saved that much money. I also wonder how much of this is caused by pushing materials as far as they can go to get to the fuel/efficiency targets they want to hit.
The underpayment is a consistent factor that keeps cropping up wherever you search for the reason why a government project or entire structure failed or went over time/budget.
Yeah but after I read this:
>The FAA delegated an increasing number of tasks to a group of Boeing employees authorized to work on the agency’s behalf.
I first imagined a typical corporate group which might have turnover and I thought: What if the FAA delegated to individual people, so if Boeing fired someone for raising too much concern the role would fall back to the FAA? But yeah, its still a conflict of interest no matter how you do it.
This is what happens in the US when your company is in a regulated industry and has been found to be so far from best practices that the regulatory body shows up one day, says "We need x number of offices" and then takes over managing your firm until they are satisfied enough Corrective Action have been performed and enough Preventive Actions are in place to right the ship.
Solution: don't get into a regulated industry, and if you must, keep your house in order.
Consider the record of the 737 MAX alone and up to the point where it was grounded worldwide. I bet that's not a great ratio of fight hours to lives lost compared to Boeing pre-merger.
but the reason its so safe is because there are so many redundancies built into so many different layers of the system.
once rot starts to happen, it’ll take the better part of several years or a decade for a wave of elevated fatalities to manifest themselves in these stats.
If not for a brain dead design decision to not check for bad AOA data, we probably still would never have heard of MCAS.
But ultimately MCAS was a symptom of a failure of process, with people whose entire job was to check and veto designs failing to veto designs, apparently for fear of management pressure. To be clear, the failure was in management. It sucks that people had to die to get us to notice ordinary management failure.
The Lion Air jet had the same MCAS failure on its previous flight. If you dig through ASRS you'll find other reports of uncommanded pitch down events on the MAX. Just because MCAS hadn't yet crashed a plane doesn't mean that nobody noticed its presence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GEB-7Gw-_0
This means that there is no (financial) pressure on the passenger to fly on an aircraft they do not trust.
Currently the live-or-die risk devolves to the passenger and they have no direct say in the choice of aircraft: after ticket purchase they are left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
This system might force airlines to think much much harder when making their aircraft purchasing decisions.
Just because the aircraft is certified will no longer amount to adequate commercial due diligence.
An airline which wants to protect its revenue will now need to deep-dive into the manufacturers quality procedures themselves.
Otherwise their customers can vote with their feet, at no financial cost, any time prior to departure.
[1] http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
For example, jetBlue only flies Airbus and Embraer. Spirit and Frontier exclusively fly Airbus. Lufthansa's commercial fleet is mostly Airbus and the Boeing aircraft it does operate have good track records.
"How To Avoid Flying The Dreaded Boeing 737-MAX"
https://www.godsavethepoints.com/how-to-avoid-flying-the-dre...
Better bring a gas mask[3] though. And bring one for the flight crew too in case they become incapacitated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
[3] https://viewfromthewing.com/is-airbus-doing-enough-to-stop-t...
I've no problem getting in a Boeing airplane. The 737NG, in particular, has one of the best (if not THE best) safety records in history.
As such, the 737NG - which had fatalities - is unlikely to be a contender, considering the much older A340 has had none.
[1] https://turbli.com/blog/the-safest-planes-to-fly-in-by-accid...
And yes, I strongly prefer airlines that do not use "modern" Boeing planes at all (which arguably might be a lot easier here in Europe). If it's Boeing, I'm not going.
What we are seeing is regulatory capture by McDonald-Douglass top level executives and board of the FAA. Standard operating procedure for the capitalists. Everything is permissible as long as it increases their and the shareholders' profiteering.