This is old news, this occurred in December and was covered extensively at the time. This article is covering some FAA follow-up as if it is a newly reported issue.
Hopefully the whole 737 MAX fiasco will lead to Boeing understanding that their current strategy is penny-wise but pound-foolish. At some point the extra money from cutting corners will be completely eclipsed by the monetary and reputational damage from all this chaos.
Until executive compensation is tied to long term performance this won't happen. They are free to institute policies that will cripple or kill a company and then jump ship and find greener pastures.
I think now that these are becoming hot news, we should get some context. I.e. is this a somewhat routine occurrence that gets found and addressed? It seems unlikely that anyone builds absolutely perfect airplanes, which is why we have so many checklists and inspections, in addition to designs that are tolerant of faults. My monkey brain would like to know what normal looks like, before it gets all spun up...
There's a comment from people that do not like sky diving along the lines of "why would I jump out of a perfectly good airplane?" The typical response from pilots or mechanics is "there's no such thing as a perfectly good airplane".
737 Max is going to end up being one of the safest planes to fly in.
Every inch of every plane combed over, every engineering decision re-examined, every system and sensor double-checked for redundancy and reliability, the pilots alert for any sign of problems.
They should have been doing that since the beginning and it doesn't deserve a medal the same way we don't deserve a medal to do the job we agreed to do.
But I'm not even that optimistic:
- What's the point of combing over the plane when the microscope is broken and nobody seems to care?
- How about stop putting lipstick on a pig and retire the whole 737 entirely? A large percentage of the MAX faults are due to Boeing doing everything to make a plane that the original design simply cannot accommodate. At what point somebody says: "No, enough!" ?
You're making the bold and naive assumption that a clean-sheet design would be bug free.
People here were saying the same thing a few weeks ago about the CVR with 2 hour storage. "It's the tech! Use cloud storage! Just buy more flash! Blah blah"
Well supposedly newer aircraft like the A350 and B787 have newer recorders with much more storage - that were later found to have software bugs in service writing garbage data. Imagine that.
So sometimes going with an old reliable design that is approved and rigorously tested for 25 years is the prudent decision when you have no requirement to upgrade.
With the current issues being manufacturing-related and not an engineering error, how would a new design help that? It's like saying let's scrap all the code because your ops team is incompetent and can't deploy VMs properly.
> How about stop putting lipstick on a pig and retire the whole 737 entirely?
What? The 737 NG family (along with the Airbus A320 series) have been the workhorse of short to medium haul air travel for decades now. Throwing out the 737 entirely is a nonsensical, knee-jerk reaction suffering from serious recency bias.
> A large percentage of the MAX faults are due to Boeing doing everything to make a plane that the original design simply cannot accommodate. At what point somebody says: "No, enough!" ?
And your solution to that is to throw out all the perfectly functional and flight-proven-over-decades aspects of the design and start completely fresh? If you're concerned about the process which produced the Max, what gives you any confidence that a fresh design wouldn't have 10x the issues that the Max does?
Clearly people care. They are literally checking every bolt for proper torque. When they found a few undertorque bolts it becomes a national news, it gets shared so much it ended up on Hacker News, and you cared enough to comment.
> It already has two crashes under its belt, compared to other models that never had any crashes (like the A380).
You can't come to any conclusions from simple math like that because it isn't corrected for flight hours and exposure. There are literally 10x more 737 Max's delivered so far than there are total A380s left flying, and they're constantly booked doing short to medium haul flights all day long rather than a single long-haul flight per day. And given that takeoff and landing are the riskiest phases of flight, it should also probably be corrected by flight cycles, not pure flight hours.
It's nowhere close to as simple as you make it out to be.
Maybe, but instead of redesigning and building a new jet suitable for the larger and more efficient engines allowing their competitor's A320 to be more efficient, they appear to have kludged them onto the old (and low-sitting) 737. To do this, they had to change their location on the wing, which made the aircraft more unstable, which lead to the MCAS system to mitigate this, and problems with MCAS and sensor redundancy led to the two fatal crashes. I have a hunch many of us have seen this sort of thing and consequences before.
This is nonsense, this is a repeat of correctness by construction vs correctness by test that we see in software. Since these planes are poorly constructed, due to failure in process controls, they must now rely on a correctness by test which is more expensive and less effective. I would argue that in such complex systems no amount of testing can ever make up for failures in controls.
Relying on the constant vigilance of pilots is a non-starter due to the limits of simply being human. Which is why risk is modeled using the Swiss cheese model. Pilots have off days and cannot be relied to catch everything, especially if the issue is previously unknown.
This isn’t the first 737 Max issue so why didn’t Boeing take the opportunity then to fix everything else wrong with the plane after the MCAS issues? Especially when they had the time during the pandemic to do so. How many new final issues should we expect? 3.. 4?
I’m not saying flying is going to be drastically more dangerous, just that it’s more dangerous than it could have been.
Aren't there some fundamental issues with the Max regarding its engine placement which necessitated the MCAS system that was responsible for the two fatal crashes? If that's true, I don't think the Max can be as safe as a plane that doesn't have these issues in the first place due to its design.
Our software is the safest software, because we’ve discovered a lot of bugs in it.
Historical note: ActiveX and Flash were never successfully made safe. They just stopped being a threat… by dying, a bit like the USSR never resolved communism, it just stopped doing it by dying.
TBF, the 737 had a bad rudder flaw in the 1990s that led to fatal crashes. After an overhaul it never came back, and the 737 went on to have a great record.
I find the phenomena of viral news interesting. I assume most people in the USA don't want to think about the engineering of planes. In Canada, as of this writing, car theft news has become viral, but car theft is not new or unusual.
My question is: do all social beings have attention surges? Are attention surges required to be social? Flocks of birds and schools of fish all react in unison to input from a few I suppose.
Is there anyone with an actuarial / risk management background in this community that could explain how this is going to impact industry insurance rates? e.g. is Boeing going to have astronomically high costs? Are airlines with 737 Max's going to also have to pay more? etc. etc.
Insurance rates are largely based on actual loss experience, maybe 737 MAX will cost a bit more in light of recent events, but 737 and other Boeing models have been flying for decades and are a very safe airplanes overall with a very well-known loss risk profile.
> 737 and other Boeing models have been flying for decades and are a very safe airplanes overall with a very well-known loss risk profile.
This is the catch, though. The 737 MAX is a 737 in name only. It's a bit of a ship of Theseus design, because Boeing management didn't want to take on the cost and time to build a new plane from the ground up. The company was under pressure from the A321neo and wanted something fast. Certifying a new aircraft also takes time and money. By altering a 737 Boeing was able to claim it was still a 737 and retain the type certificate and, important for the airlines buying it, not have to retrain pilots on a new type.
Like many other things in creaky corners of the commercial passenger airline industry, the foundation is from the 1960s. Solid and appropriate for the time, it's now aged and unsuitable for modern applications. Like building an extra story on a house with a foundation made for a single story, the compounded risks introduce so many unknowns as to make it impossible to calculate the real risks.
Insurance companies should look at the MAX again and consider whether or not it deserves to be classed in the same risk profile as the 737 type.
I’m not sure this is true. You can buy insurance on virtually any potential loss risk, like how celebrities can buy insurance for body parts: they obviously haven’t lost said parts, but that doesn’t mean the insurer charges $0.
Readit News
The second paragraph in the article literally contains "from an operator in December of last year"
I used to work for a company where my vice president could have gone to prison if I screwed up. It definitely focuses the mind.
And maybe stock owners shouldn’t hire non-engineers to run their aircraft firm.
Every inch of every plane combed over, every engineering decision re-examined, every system and sensor double-checked for redundancy and reliability, the pilots alert for any sign of problems.
They should have been doing that since the beginning and it doesn't deserve a medal the same way we don't deserve a medal to do the job we agreed to do.
But I'm not even that optimistic:
- What's the point of combing over the plane when the microscope is broken and nobody seems to care?
- How about stop putting lipstick on a pig and retire the whole 737 entirely? A large percentage of the MAX faults are due to Boeing doing everything to make a plane that the original design simply cannot accommodate. At what point somebody says: "No, enough!" ?
You're making the bold and naive assumption that a clean-sheet design would be bug free.
People here were saying the same thing a few weeks ago about the CVR with 2 hour storage. "It's the tech! Use cloud storage! Just buy more flash! Blah blah"
Well supposedly newer aircraft like the A350 and B787 have newer recorders with much more storage - that were later found to have software bugs in service writing garbage data. Imagine that.
So sometimes going with an old reliable design that is approved and rigorously tested for 25 years is the prudent decision when you have no requirement to upgrade.
With the current issues being manufacturing-related and not an engineering error, how would a new design help that? It's like saying let's scrap all the code because your ops team is incompetent and can't deploy VMs properly.
What? The 737 NG family (along with the Airbus A320 series) have been the workhorse of short to medium haul air travel for decades now. Throwing out the 737 entirely is a nonsensical, knee-jerk reaction suffering from serious recency bias.
> A large percentage of the MAX faults are due to Boeing doing everything to make a plane that the original design simply cannot accommodate. At what point somebody says: "No, enough!" ?
And your solution to that is to throw out all the perfectly functional and flight-proven-over-decades aspects of the design and start completely fresh? If you're concerned about the process which produced the Max, what gives you any confidence that a fresh design wouldn't have 10x the issues that the Max does?
Clearly people care. They are literally checking every bolt for proper torque. When they found a few undertorque bolts it becomes a national news, it gets shared so much it ended up on Hacker News, and you cared enough to comment.
It already has two crashes under its belt, compared to other models that never had any crashes (like the A380).
But I guess if we put the disclaimer "From today on!" then it might be accurate.
You can't come to any conclusions from simple math like that because it isn't corrected for flight hours and exposure. There are literally 10x more 737 Max's delivered so far than there are total A380s left flying, and they're constantly booked doing short to medium haul flights all day long rather than a single long-haul flight per day. And given that takeoff and landing are the riskiest phases of flight, it should also probably be corrected by flight cycles, not pure flight hours.
It's nowhere close to as simple as you make it out to be.
It exists specifically to bypass those new requirements.
All else being equal, it will never be as safe as something designed to meet modern standards.
Relying on the constant vigilance of pilots is a non-starter due to the limits of simply being human. Which is why risk is modeled using the Swiss cheese model. Pilots have off days and cannot be relied to catch everything, especially if the issue is previously unknown.
This isn’t the first 737 Max issue so why didn’t Boeing take the opportunity then to fix everything else wrong with the plane after the MCAS issues? Especially when they had the time during the pandemic to do so. How many new final issues should we expect? 3.. 4?
I’m not saying flying is going to be drastically more dangerous, just that it’s more dangerous than it could have been.
At this point design should be scrapped. No amount of review can fix a broken concept executed by an incompetent manufacturer.
Historical note: ActiveX and Flash were never successfully made safe. They just stopped being a threat… by dying, a bit like the USSR never resolved communism, it just stopped doing it by dying.
My question is: do all social beings have attention surges? Are attention surges required to be social? Flocks of birds and schools of fish all react in unison to input from a few I suppose.
This is the catch, though. The 737 MAX is a 737 in name only. It's a bit of a ship of Theseus design, because Boeing management didn't want to take on the cost and time to build a new plane from the ground up. The company was under pressure from the A321neo and wanted something fast. Certifying a new aircraft also takes time and money. By altering a 737 Boeing was able to claim it was still a 737 and retain the type certificate and, important for the airlines buying it, not have to retrain pilots on a new type.
Like many other things in creaky corners of the commercial passenger airline industry, the foundation is from the 1960s. Solid and appropriate for the time, it's now aged and unsuitable for modern applications. Like building an extra story on a house with a foundation made for a single story, the compounded risks introduce so many unknowns as to make it impossible to calculate the real risks.
Insurance companies should look at the MAX again and consider whether or not it deserves to be classed in the same risk profile as the 737 type.
If anything all this attention should reduce insurance costs, since the planes will now be even more reliable than before.
Insurance does not care about the appearance of risk, or bad press.