One troubling aspect of this is that it appears Alaska had reason to believe something was wrong with this plane but basically ignored it. They were getting pressurization warnings on prior flights, but the only action they took was restricting the plane from flying ETOPS routes.
They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount of inconvenience.
I haven't trusted Alaska since the Flight 261 crash, where they failed to do basic maintenance for so long that the screw threads in the stabilizer system wore away and locked the plane in the "straight down" orientation. And fired and sued a mechanic who reported the problem. 100% fatalities.
Things like this are always alarming until you learn the base rate. Unfortunately, I cannot find a quick reference for this, but many many flights take off with some anomaly noted in the technical log book.
Yes, it's actually an FAA approved document for each aircraft type called the Mimimum Equipment List (MEL). It defines which non-critical equipment is permitted to be inoperative and not prevent dispatch of the aircraft.
Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.
And it's not like driving is especially safe. It's just that traffic deaths are so routine that they're not generally widely reported, while pretty much every major issue with an airplane gets national attention. In the US, traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 lost with all hands every couple days.
I can't link you an independent source just my word as an aircraft mechanic.
I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can never achieve.
I live in Alaska and Alaska Airlines (which isn't Alaskan - it's HQ is in Seattle) has a rather... notorious history with safety/maintenance issues. I fly Delta whenever possible when travelling to the lower 48.
Alaskan Airlines is notorious for taking maintenance shortcuts, this is likely not an inherent problem with the airframe but rather this operators SOP.
Alaskan Airline flight 261 is one example.
> The subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that inadequate maintenance led to excessive wear and eventual failure of a critical flight control system during flight.
Although I can sympathize with the story, this particular aircraft had been in their hands just a couple months. Its first commercial flight was just a couple weeks back. Maintenance isn't the issue here, clearly.
> Preliminary information about the accident remains scarce, though two people familiar with the aircraft tell The Air Current that the aircraft in question, N704AL, had presented spurious indications of pressurization issues during two instances on January 4. The first intermittent warning light appeared during taxi-in following a previous flight, which prompted the airline to remove the aircraft from extended range operations (ETOPS) per maintenance rules. The light appeared again later the same day in flight, the people said.
No idea about the accuracy of the site. And it seems like they have some script that prevents text highlighting for whatever reason (turn off Javascript).
It's too bad that asking "source?" comes across as hostile unless clarified to be otherwise. Maybe the internet should adopt something similar to the "/s" tag that signals that sentiment.
Following the two fatal crashes involving the MCAS system and the 737 Max … The FAA gave Boeing until Dec of 2022 to implement a fix. The fix was to reconfigure the 737 Max with 2 sensors (instead of one) and include an manual shutoff
Guess what happened? Boeing didn’t fix anything.. instead they cried to congress that the fix is too expensive and they cannot get it done.
So what happens is congress includes a provision in the omnibus spending bill to exempt Boeing from having to fix the MCAS system. So today in 2024 .. the 737 Max still only have one sensor although they did retrofit a manual shutoff
Pretty interesting after millions spent on investigation , congressional hearings, developing engineering a better MCAS system … quietly Boeing just bypasses everything.
Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)
That is pretty concerning. The way how Boeing can get its way simply by threatening to can the entire MAX program (which they'd never actually do) shows that there's a very deep level of integration between the US government and its biggest companies, especially one like Boeing that's often seen as kind of a minor point of national pride.
Not only that, but the article mentions that the 737 MAXs got an exemption on providing a modern crew alerting system. Of course, all of that is done so they could certify these aircraft as being basically the same as the first 737 from the 60s. Meanwhile, A320s have been flying with ECAMs (a centralized system for viewing the plane's status and alerts) since the 1980s.
Boeing doesn't have a real business plan until they have a plan to replace the 737. Boeing and Airbus have been going crazy over the past 30 years developing widebody airliners, some of which were solidly rejected by the market, but domestic flyers (most of them) are stuck with a 1967 design. It's a disaster when it comes to managing the social and environmental impacts of air travel.
radically changed my view of what is possible in a small airliner, because it has a squared-off cross section it feels much larger on the inside than a 737... And this is a previous generation plane, now there is
There's a crisis brewing at America's small airports in that they've really stopped building the sub-50 seat regional jets that serve smaller airports. (In the small city near me, almost every organization lists the local airport as a weakness in a SWOT analysis) Manufacturers know that airliners around 70 seats would be dramatically lower cost to operate than the status quo, enough that prices would drop and service quality would increase and filling the extra seats would be easy. Trouble is the unions won't let the airlines upgrade
Which in itself is ironic as the US government spends a large portion of it's current time accusing China of the same thing. As usual you should always expect projection when shade is being thrown.
Chinese system has a huge number of flaws but one thing it gets right is the government stands above corporations.
Corporate control over government is the path to dystopia, it's how the climate situation got out of control, why the drug epidemics keep coming back, why obesity is killing the country, etc. etc.
Occasionally people wake up and fight back for a moment but it's always fleeting because the deck is stacked against the people. The corporates have the money for the research and "lobbying" aka bribes to keep regulation at bay for decades usually.
Corporate greed is all consuming and thus regulation is meant to exist as it's counter-balance. When the corpos are the ones regulating themselves well... you can't be surprised when this is the result.
The best part is that Boeing had EICAS, the engine indicating and crew alerting system, in the early 80s with the introduction of the 757/767.
In the mid-90s, when they updated the 737 to the Next Generation, they opted to stay with the six-pack recall light system that every 737 pilot hates. Same in the Max. Too expensive to change and would likely require a new type rating.
The A320 was such a technological leap forward in commercial aviation. Boeing wasn’t able to match it until the introduction of the 777, almost a decade later.
The integration of government and these big businesses is one thing. The fact that it always seems to run in the direction of undermining citizen safety and protections, and weakening the country's capacity to actually hold these companies accountable to even national level interests is astonishing.
What purpose does this integration serve if not to allow the government leverage? These days you have the US government acting like its a 2nd-world power, just desperately trying to hang on to any businesses willing to grace the US with their presence, instead of a nation that holds the key to glibal economic power. Frankly it's pathetic.
This is completely wrong. Boeing did make the changes to include input from two AoA sensors, they did change the system to prevent recurrent horizontal stabilizer movements, they did include a manual shut-off.
What you are talking about has very little to do with MCAS. Congress required any new aircraft type certified after 2022 to include an Engine-Indicating and Crew Alerting System.
It was never even intended to apply to the 737-10, but because the certification took longer than expected, it became likely the -10 would fall under the regulation, which would cause pilots to have to be re-trained for the -10.
You are confusing two different issues. The article you reference is from December 2022. The MAX 8 had already returned to service two years prior, with the required fixes to the MCAS system, in 2020.
This law had to do with a deadline for certifying the MAX 7 without completely redesigning some of the systems.
I'm not a Boeing defender here -- these issues are incredibly concerning.
What are all the differences between these MAX <n> planes? Is this an intentional strategy by Boeing to confuse so that they can make all these loose arguments and skirt regulations?
Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless it is to add more limitations based on past (bad) performance and then only to document the reason the law exists, never to provide exemptions.
> Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless
No "unless". No law should target a specific company or individual by name, ever, whether to give them special exceptions or special permissions or special restrictions or anything else.
(They also shouldn't target specific companies by sufficiently-specific-description-it-only-applies-to-one-or-two-companies, either.)
Congress will be happy to replace “Boeing” with “American companies which manufacture all of commercial and military aircraft, satellites, and space vehicles and launchers”.
Washington State has been making Boeing-specific laws for decades, without having to mention them by name - the legislature just writes up a bill which sets such-and-such a lower tax rate for every aircraft manufacturer which employs at least so many workers, et voila! There happens to be only one.
You raise a good point, and there definitely exists a pile of related jurisprudence on the subject of "attainder"[0]. Afaik that only applies to negative consequences though.
It's almost comically evil at this point. Boeing actually argued that the victims didn't experience any suffering, because they died on impact.
So in your final screaming moments as you hurtle toward the ground, be comforted to know that the ultimate perpetrators of your death will say your terror never even happened.
You'd probably want to cite such a big claim ("Boeing didn't fix anything"), which is not supported by your link. Other online sources say Boeing did fix MCAS, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
> makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy
The US has not been a functioning democracy for a very long time, if it ever even was.
Don’t despair! Plenty of people have fulfilling and happy lives in non-democracies. But it’s important to be realistic about the chances of anything about the political system fundamentally changing.
There should be people on life sentences for manslaughter of 346 people that happened as a result of corporate greed and a company culture which made company profits the only important metric of success.
We're talking about what the MCAS used for input. The aircraft has two AoA sensors and three computers. MCAS used 1 and 1 because it was believed to be non-safety-critical system. Here is a direct quote from Wikipedia's MCAS article:
> Though there are two sensors on the MAX only one of them is used at a time to trigger MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. Any fault in this sensor, perhaps due to physical damage, creates a single point failure: the flight control system lacks any basis for rejecting its input as faulty information.
There is a whole subsection just about MCAS and AoA sensors.
Such an americentric take... as if Boeing only had to deal with FAA only. You completely forgot about other regulatory bodies. How was Boeing supposed to sway EU bodies, for example? Once you realize there's more of those, your conspiracy theory ends up in shambles.
I hate to turn this into a political comment, but your comment about it being depressing struck a nerve with me.
Many conservatives and people worried about the border have been feeling this depression pretty hard the last few years, if not 20+ years. Add in the crime problem with no cash bail, and honestly a few friends and I have felt something is really wrong for several years on a pretty deep sad level.
Interesting that something slighlt convoluted like a plane retrofit was what brought about it in you.
Feeling sad and depressed can be a medical condition rather than a reality issue. There are many numerically things (can't check everything) that are not much worse than 20 years ago (and some even better), but people seem more and more upset. It's like they just spend time online/on TV and WANT to find reasons to feel bad. Or that they expect that because things CAN be good they will be good tomorrow without any effort.
I guess that depends on what you believe a "functioning democracy" because yes we are are "functioning democracy", the fact that the outcome is not what you desire do not mean it is non-functional.
Keeping in mind that a democracy was never the goal, and being a democracy is actually the root of the problem. Looking to the federal government for solutions to all of these problems is the the problem itself.
People expecting the government to fix everything is the problem....
Maybe instead of acting "are we a functioning democracy", the better question is "how can we solve these problems with out government..."
Almost all of this can be laid specifically to the moment when Boeing passed over Alan Mullally for its next CEO in favor of a bean counter. Mullaly went to Ford and rescued that company. If Boeings board were serious about a true turnover here, they need to try and find Mullally And get him on the board right now. At this point the best outcome that I see is a BCA sale to Lockheed. That’s a high order, Elon tried to lure him to Tesla, but was unsuccessful.
It’s also worth noting that this is the ultimate outcome of the never rewrite anything mentality. Sooner or later technical debt catches up with you, they needed to launch a new, narrow body 15 years ago, but kept soldering on with the 737, which in turn is really a Boeing 707. While the 797 is the plane that launched the jet and unquestionably the greatest airliner of all time, it’s time is long long past.
You can recover from where boeing is at now. It’s not that much worse than airbus was at after their A320 flew into a forest and they hid the flight data recorders, or commercial disaster that was the A380, or the first 350 proposal but they have to want to change.
Comparing Boeing's woes to the A320 crash is to take a false middle ground. The A320 crash was the result of pilot risk taking for the purpose of showing off the plane. It didn't happen as the inevitable consequence of a company that prioritised profits over safety and had established management culture and government relationships to enable that.
Given Ford relentless push for more pickups and systematic reduction in all smaller cars. I would say Ford killed about few 1000x more people the Boeing ever has. And they have equally done a huge amount to prevent regulation, both in terms of safety and fuel economy. The US still doesn't even test how well cars do against pedestrian. The list goes on and on.
We hold Boeing to a much, much, much higher standard. And that is a good thing. So to give this guy credit when he has been involved with Ford, a company that has done an incredible amount to make the world more unsafe, we should maybe not just to conclusions about how much saver boing would be with him.
That said, safety at Boeing even from a business perspective would have been different, so his intensives there are very different.
If we actually ever want to really deal with traffic accidents, we need to approach it with the same systematic root-cause analysis and immediate action principles.
That is what they have stared doing in some of the leading countries and its amazing. Every accident leads to adjustment in the infrastructure, Identifikation of other locations with the same potential issues and updated road standards.
Unfortunately we are still far to lax, on actually regulating the cars themselves and far to forgiving on cars, car company and drivers. The arms raise of 'my car is bigger then your car' shouldn't be allowed. Cities shouldn't allow these horrible F-150 type cars into them at all. The list goes on.
It's chilling that both Alaska knew of pressurization issues in prior flights in this aircraft, and Boeing was already trying to get the FAA to look past known safety issues in the 737 MAX 7 certification. "Safety is our top priority"? Ha, absolutely not.
Yeah, that's fair. The tone of the website is sort of like other single-serving websites like "is California on fire", which displays yes even if a small part of California is on fire. http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/
I flew a United MAX 9 last night, I was sitting in the window seat of a visible (Not plugged) emergency exit door. Landed a little while after this incident was reported. About an hour and a half before landing at SFO the pilot announced a hurried “Flight attendants check in” with no follow up announcement to the passengers. It was probably because of the turbulence we had been experiencing a few minutes before, but I wonder if the cockpit was giving flight attendants a heads up in case any passengers got word.
I feel like this is pretty unlikely - as far as I know, they don't really pass news bulletins and such to pilots, if it's not something that they need to know. Besides, even if some passenger found out, what could they even do?
Boeing may think they fly above it all (get it?) but I can assure you despite my largely unwavering confidence in the air travel industry, I will not travel on a Boeing aircraft in the near future. I will see to it that I fly Airbus or not at all, which I'm perfectly fine with should it spare my life. This type of large-scale and continued negligence can only be defined as a company that thinks they're too big to fail. I would rather see the US's airplane manufacturing capabilities decrease than allow such heinous acts of negligence to continue. Shame on Boeing. You'd have thought that the previous 787 and MCAS problems would've straightened them up, but you'd of course be wrong. Let them bleed; dry if need be. This is no way to operate in such an important industry with deadly consequences.
How do you enforce that rule? It’s not always easy to pick your flight and aircraft like that (without a lot of money). I’ve got a flight with a national carrier and it’s on a 777; a tried and trusted aircraft and airline so that’s decent reassurance.
I think the big thing out of this is that 737s specifically are just outright scary to see on your flight. You should try to avoid any new (2014 onwards?) Boeing aircraft.
Very true. But there is probably something about the fact that traffic accidents are direct human error, usually, that make us more comfortable with the risk than the prospect of a systemic, corporate or technical error. Entirely irrational of course.
It's not a safety check bypass. Boeing wants to make pilots responsible for turning off the deicer within 5 min of ice disappearing to prevent the flawed engines breaking apart in flight.
Does it have the same manufacturing process? It wasn't anything specific to the plane's model, it was the fact that it was a manufacturing defect that caused the door to blow out.
A friend of mine works in Boeing as a data scientist. His team has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means. They spend their days creating processes, managing tickets, enforcing specific formats of tickets and stories and what not. Yet, none of the eight knew how to write product specs nor could be bothered with basic things like understanding how git works.
I have a hard time imagining how Boeing could survive in the long run with this level of bureaucracy.
Edit: Saw the summary of the book Flying Blind: "A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation". One has to ask: where did the cost cutting go? What's cutting throat? It looks to me that the management of Boeing is grossly incompetent.
> His team has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means.
Not disregarding your point, I think we all agree Boeing sounds like bureaucracy hell, but could it be that the 8 who are "managing projects" are in fact managing contractors or outsourced employees who are writing code?
I worked with a large multi-national fashion company, and they had an app development team that consisted of a product manager, scrum master, and senior technical advisor. You could look at them and say that 2/3 being non-technical was a problem, or you could look past that team to the several developers in India who weren't exposed to the rest of the company or clients/collaborators, and who actually got the work done.
I find this genuinely incomprehensible. I have never encountered a single person who was not technically proficient in the team’s tasks across the 10 years of my hodgepodge career in a variety of semi-independent small teams and currently a small business.
Small teams don’t have the margin for non technical folk. It often falls on people like me to become, temporarily, the admin or become the GIS department as such things are needed.
I feel like this is especially pervasive in the data and ML fields. Perhaps just to many formally cloistered academic PhDs are cashing in on the corporate rush to data and ML "everything", but have no actual ability to execute or even code.
I went to a large "AI" conference this year and was surprised to see some talks being given by the "VP of ML" at the company I work at. I'd never heard of him or the position before, and when I looked him up in our company directory he appeared to sit somewhere in Pharmacy data science. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
When I attended his first talk wearing our company swag he seemed visibly uncomfortable and...grumpy(?) after he noticed me. His talk was a very non-technical, superficial fly-over of how ML can be used to profile and predict customer spending habits on our company e-commerce domains. Nothing even to do with pharma! At another table session in the day he dropped that his PhD is from MIT. Our company is big -name brand in its field- but by no means does it attract "MIT level" talent; not in pay, problems, or prestige. But again, it's a massive company, so who know? Yet at this point I'm entertaining my own little conference conspiracy theory that this guy is just a corporate cutout.
The next day I ran into him at the conference lunch line and gave him a: "Hey, how's it going! I'm at {our company} too, over in {line-of-business}". He nodded, chuckled to himself, and without even looking up said "oh yeah, you here to call me on my bullshit"? I was so confused that this would be the first thing out of his mouth with no context between us, even as a seeming joke, that I didn't know what to say. He politely excused himself to run to another table session before I could figure out how to respond.
Since then I've tried to track his team and any work/product/output they might provide but for the life of me cannot find anything other than some Jira tickets that get pushed around. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
That would be a very efficient way of running things under a cost plus military contract. For a single contract win they're able to spend four times as much money on salaries and therefore earn four times as much profit.
I watched a documentary on Netflix recently that alleged that a lot of this change came from importing McDonnell Douglas management into Boeing after the acquisition. I wonder if the book concurs on that, I don't have time to read it right now.
If this is the case I wonder if it could be reversible.
B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck.
When they did the acquisition, they also got the management folks… who ran McD into the ground in the first place.
After seeng your comment, I just went ahead and watched the doc, and I frankly I find myself in a state of rage right now. From my limited understanding, I had this impression this was an engineering failure. And you know, when you have a complicated machine, sometimes shit happens.
But it wasn't that at all. Boeing knew clearly what the dangers of MCAS system were, they went to great lengths to completely hide the presence of the system from the world before delivery of the planes. Within days of the first crash, they knew it was MCAS, and kept trying to blame uneducated "foreign" pilots, kept trying to go on and tell the world again and again it was safe to fly, until that second crash happened. I understand greed, we all have that, but I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that your first concern after that crash and knowing there might be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy.
And what the hell FAA? 1) they didn't regulate properly before the plane was delivered, 2) After first crash they knew how dangerous the plane is, but didn't ground it (TAMARA report), 3) After second crash, you had the transportation secratary basically saying 737 Max was "innocent untill proven guilty" so let it fly before China forced its hand, 4) No criminal proescution in the end for those fanatic executives, just a cash fine.
Considering the consistent gross mismanagement of Boeing, who receive free bailouts just for being Boeing
Well, I was going to say that calling them “business oriented” is laughable, but I guess that running a business in to the ground then laughing all the way to the bail out bank is just standard operating procedure now around the world.
Readit News
They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount of inconvenience.
Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.
I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can never achieve.
Alaskan Airline flight 261 is one example.
> The subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that inadequate maintenance led to excessive wear and eventual failure of a critical flight control system during flight.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261
> Preliminary information about the accident remains scarce, though two people familiar with the aircraft tell The Air Current that the aircraft in question, N704AL, had presented spurious indications of pressurization issues during two instances on January 4. The first intermittent warning light appeared during taxi-in following a previous flight, which prompted the airline to remove the aircraft from extended range operations (ETOPS) per maintenance rules. The light appeared again later the same day in flight, the people said.
https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/alaska-737-max-9-t...
No idea about the accuracy of the site. And it seems like they have some script that prevents text highlighting for whatever reason (turn off Javascript).
[1] https://christinenegroni.com/irony-of-pilot-laying-blame-on-...
Dead Comment
Following the two fatal crashes involving the MCAS system and the 737 Max … The FAA gave Boeing until Dec of 2022 to implement a fix. The fix was to reconfigure the 737 Max with 2 sensors (instead of one) and include an manual shutoff
Guess what happened? Boeing didn’t fix anything.. instead they cried to congress that the fix is too expensive and they cannot get it done.
So what happens is congress includes a provision in the omnibus spending bill to exempt Boeing from having to fix the MCAS system. So today in 2024 .. the 737 Max still only have one sensor although they did retrofit a manual shutoff
https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2022/12/23/boeing-max-221223/
Pretty interesting after millions spent on investigation , congressional hearings, developing engineering a better MCAS system … quietly Boeing just bypasses everything.
Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)
Not only that, but the article mentions that the 737 MAXs got an exemption on providing a modern crew alerting system. Of course, all of that is done so they could certify these aircraft as being basically the same as the first 737 from the 60s. Meanwhile, A320s have been flying with ECAMs (a centralized system for viewing the plane's status and alerts) since the 1980s.
A ride in this plane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_family
radically changed my view of what is possible in a small airliner, because it has a squared-off cross section it feels much larger on the inside than a 737... And this is a previous generation plane, now there is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220
There's a crisis brewing at America's small airports in that they've really stopped building the sub-50 seat regional jets that serve smaller airports. (In the small city near me, almost every organization lists the local airport as a weakness in a SWOT analysis) Manufacturers know that airliners around 70 seats would be dramatically lower cost to operate than the status quo, enough that prices would drop and service quality would increase and filling the extra seats would be easy. Trouble is the unions won't let the airlines upgrade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_clause
At least in China when greed kills people there are consequences for executives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
Chinese system has a huge number of flaws but one thing it gets right is the government stands above corporations.
Corporate control over government is the path to dystopia, it's how the climate situation got out of control, why the drug epidemics keep coming back, why obesity is killing the country, etc. etc.
Occasionally people wake up and fight back for a moment but it's always fleeting because the deck is stacked against the people. The corporates have the money for the research and "lobbying" aka bribes to keep regulation at bay for decades usually.
Corporate greed is all consuming and thus regulation is meant to exist as it's counter-balance. When the corpos are the ones regulating themselves well... you can't be surprised when this is the result.
In the mid-90s, when they updated the 737 to the Next Generation, they opted to stay with the six-pack recall light system that every 737 pilot hates. Same in the Max. Too expensive to change and would likely require a new type rating.
The A320 was such a technological leap forward in commercial aviation. Boeing wasn’t able to match it until the introduction of the 777, almost a decade later.
What purpose does this integration serve if not to allow the government leverage? These days you have the US government acting like its a 2nd-world power, just desperately trying to hang on to any businesses willing to grace the US with their presence, instead of a nation that holds the key to glibal economic power. Frankly it's pathetic.
What you are talking about has very little to do with MCAS. Congress required any new aircraft type certified after 2022 to include an Engine-Indicating and Crew Alerting System.
It was never even intended to apply to the 737-10, but because the certification took longer than expected, it became likely the -10 would fall under the regulation, which would cause pilots to have to be re-trained for the -10.
All of this is only peripherally related to MCAS.
This law had to do with a deadline for certifying the MAX 7 without completely redesigning some of the systems.
I'm not a Boeing defender here -- these issues are incredibly concerning.
No "unless". No law should target a specific company or individual by name, ever, whether to give them special exceptions or special permissions or special restrictions or anything else.
(They also shouldn't target specific companies by sufficiently-specific-description-it-only-applies-to-one-or-two-companies, either.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder
So in your final screaming moments as you hurtle toward the ground, be comforted to know that the ultimate perpetrators of your death will say your terror never even happened.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-families-argue-over-pay-...
The US has not been a functioning democracy for a very long time, if it ever even was.
Don’t despair! Plenty of people have fulfilling and happy lives in non-democracies. But it’s important to be realistic about the chances of anything about the political system fundamentally changing.
By international standards, US ‘democracy’ doesn’t get rated that highly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde....
For starters, it's a two party system.
Sharp tongues would point out that this is double the amount of political parties you'd "find" in Russia or China ...
The word you are looking for is oligarchy.
I know that they have parted ways now, but Haley has managed to sit on both sides of negotiations between government and Boeing.
We're not. There was a coup attempt scant years ago, and there will absolutely be another in November.
> Though there are two sensors on the MAX only one of them is used at a time to trigger MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. Any fault in this sensor, perhaps due to physical damage, creates a single point failure: the flight control system lacks any basis for rejecting its input as faulty information.
There is a whole subsection just about MCAS and AoA sensors.
Obviously, obviously not.
Dead Comment
Many conservatives and people worried about the border have been feeling this depression pretty hard the last few years, if not 20+ years. Add in the crime problem with no cash bail, and honestly a few friends and I have felt something is really wrong for several years on a pretty deep sad level.
Interesting that something slighlt convoluted like a plane retrofit was what brought about it in you.
"All good boss. Let's certify this!"
Keeping in mind that a democracy was never the goal, and being a democracy is actually the root of the problem. Looking to the federal government for solutions to all of these problems is the the problem itself.
People expecting the government to fix everything is the problem....
Maybe instead of acting "are we a functioning democracy", the better question is "how can we solve these problems with out government..."
It’s also worth noting that this is the ultimate outcome of the never rewrite anything mentality. Sooner or later technical debt catches up with you, they needed to launch a new, narrow body 15 years ago, but kept soldering on with the 737, which in turn is really a Boeing 707. While the 797 is the plane that launched the jet and unquestionably the greatest airliner of all time, it’s time is long long past.
You can recover from where boeing is at now. It’s not that much worse than airbus was at after their A320 flew into a forest and they hid the flight data recorders, or commercial disaster that was the A380, or the first 350 proposal but they have to want to change.
This one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296Q
Doesn't read like "they" = Airbus hid the recorders.
We hold Boeing to a much, much, much higher standard. And that is a good thing. So to give this guy credit when he has been involved with Ford, a company that has done an incredible amount to make the world more unsafe, we should maybe not just to conclusions about how much saver boing would be with him.
That said, safety at Boeing even from a business perspective would have been different, so his intensives there are very different.
If we actually ever want to really deal with traffic accidents, we need to approach it with the same systematic root-cause analysis and immediate action principles.
That is what they have stared doing in some of the leading countries and its amazing. Every accident leads to adjustment in the infrastructure, Identifikation of other locations with the same potential issues and updated road standards.
Unfortunately we are still far to lax, on actually regulating the cars themselves and far to forgiving on cars, car company and drivers. The arms raise of 'my car is bigger then your car' shouldn't be allowed. Cities shouldn't allow these horrible F-150 type cars into them at all. The list goes on.
It's chilling that both Alaska knew of pressurization issues in prior flights in this aircraft, and Boeing was already trying to get the FAA to look past known safety issues in the 737 MAX 7 certification. "Safety is our top priority"? Ha, absolutely not.
Actually this isn’t a big deal, they’d taken it off of ETOPS trips and were following the mx requirements.
Intermittent pressurization aren’t that rare. In a brand new airplane I would expect all sorts of weird faults.
On the bottom of the page. Might wanna look into that
Panic and freak out?
I think the big thing out of this is that 737s specifically are just outright scary to see on your flight. You should try to avoid any new (2014 onwards?) Boeing aircraft.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358
We don't know that yet. The NTSB report will tell.
The management trying to weasel out of yet another regulation is entirely showing what’s going on here.
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* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...
I have a hard time imagining how Boeing could survive in the long run with this level of bureaucracy.
Edit: Saw the summary of the book Flying Blind: "A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation". One has to ask: where did the cost cutting go? What's cutting throat? It looks to me that the management of Boeing is grossly incompetent.
Not disregarding your point, I think we all agree Boeing sounds like bureaucracy hell, but could it be that the 8 who are "managing projects" are in fact managing contractors or outsourced employees who are writing code?
I worked with a large multi-national fashion company, and they had an app development team that consisted of a product manager, scrum master, and senior technical advisor. You could look at them and say that 2/3 being non-technical was a problem, or you could look past that team to the several developers in India who weren't exposed to the rest of the company or clients/collaborators, and who actually got the work done.
Small teams don’t have the margin for non technical folk. It often falls on people like me to become, temporarily, the admin or become the GIS department as such things are needed.
At many big corporations these "management" hires are just political. To fill in the certain quotas and tick the boxes.
Problems starts if they put their egos first. Then talented staff quit and projects go down the pan.
I went to a large "AI" conference this year and was surprised to see some talks being given by the "VP of ML" at the company I work at. I'd never heard of him or the position before, and when I looked him up in our company directory he appeared to sit somewhere in Pharmacy data science. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
When I attended his first talk wearing our company swag he seemed visibly uncomfortable and...grumpy(?) after he noticed me. His talk was a very non-technical, superficial fly-over of how ML can be used to profile and predict customer spending habits on our company e-commerce domains. Nothing even to do with pharma! At another table session in the day he dropped that his PhD is from MIT. Our company is big -name brand in its field- but by no means does it attract "MIT level" talent; not in pay, problems, or prestige. But again, it's a massive company, so who know? Yet at this point I'm entertaining my own little conference conspiracy theory that this guy is just a corporate cutout.
The next day I ran into him at the conference lunch line and gave him a: "Hey, how's it going! I'm at {our company} too, over in {line-of-business}". He nodded, chuckled to himself, and without even looking up said "oh yeah, you here to call me on my bullshit"? I was so confused that this would be the first thing out of his mouth with no context between us, even as a seeming joke, that I didn't know what to say. He politely excused himself to run to another table session before I could figure out how to respond.
Since then I've tried to track his team and any work/product/output they might provide but for the life of me cannot find anything other than some Jira tickets that get pushed around. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
Stock buy-backs, executive compensation, and lobbying. That's where the cost cutting goes.
If this is the case I wonder if it could be reversible.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
* https://archive.is/q5pQV
* https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
* https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/
B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck.
When they did the acquisition, they also got the management folks… who ran McD into the ground in the first place.
But it wasn't that at all. Boeing knew clearly what the dangers of MCAS system were, they went to great lengths to completely hide the presence of the system from the world before delivery of the planes. Within days of the first crash, they knew it was MCAS, and kept trying to blame uneducated "foreign" pilots, kept trying to go on and tell the world again and again it was safe to fly, until that second crash happened. I understand greed, we all have that, but I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that your first concern after that crash and knowing there might be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy.
And what the hell FAA? 1) they didn't regulate properly before the plane was delivered, 2) After first crash they knew how dangerous the plane is, but didn't ground it (TAMARA report), 3) After second crash, you had the transportation secratary basically saying 737 Max was "innocent untill proven guilty" so let it fly before China forced its hand, 4) No criminal proescution in the end for those fanatic executives, just a cash fine.
And today this happens.
Nowadays, to realistically restore competiveness in an industry, you'd have to coordinate a worldwide breakup of similarly-integrated competitors.
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Well, I was going to say that calling them “business oriented” is laughable, but I guess that running a business in to the ground then laughing all the way to the bail out bank is just standard operating procedure now around the world.
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