“Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard. It Wasn’t.”
This is retrospective ass-covering, to distract us from the fact that the the pilots were never informed as to the existence of MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) and therefore could not even know how to disable it. The presence of or lack thereof of a warning light being rendered specious. And MCAS read only the one AoA sensor, from the captains side.
So to summarize, the pilots don't know about MCAS, MCAS is still engaged even when the auto-pilot is disengaged. A single AoA sensor failed, triggering the MCAS into a nose-down mode, the pilots begin ignorant of this, repeatedly tried to regain level flight using the trim wheel. This they failed at.
“The warning light notifies pilots of a disagreement in the sensors that measure which direction the plane is pointed”
This wouldn't even work in the way described, in a two sensor system, the computer can't tell which sensor is giving false readings. That's why they hooked up MCAS to only the one sensor. And Boeing didn't tell the FFC or the pilots as they would of had to get the plane re-certified and the pilots retrained.
It's (almost?) wilful. If ever there was a suitable time for using a military acronym such as FUBAR, this is it.
In my own view, leadership should be held criminally responsible for the loss of lives. Of course it will never happen, but that's what ought to happen.
Hopefully they'll at least be responsible for liability in a lawsuit by the victims' families. They deserve being taken to the cleaners, well and proper.
At this point I feel like it's fair to call Boeing's actions malicious. You charge for safety features that cost you nothing to deploy? Yeah, that's malicious. They knew people could die, but they wanted more money, so they let people die. Now, the company needs to die. Buyers of aircrafts would be clever not to trust Boeing ever again, and buyers of tickets would be clever to avoid flights that use Boeing planes. If everybody acted cleverly, Boeing would die and other aircraft manufacturers would take note. I doubt everyone will act cleverly, but repeatedly informing people of their malicious actions could help facilitate it. Not flying on Boeing planes would help too, but unlike a traditional boycott you have an actual selfish incentive to do so (not dying). Just like a traditional boycott, your individual participation is statistically meaningless unless you're actually in a position to buy a large number of aircrafts. I honestly don't think I'll avoid flying on Boeing planes in the future, but I'm also probably more willing to gamble with my life than most people are; I never said I was clever.
Agree on malicious, especially given that the Max change was a big hack of an existing airframe. It needed all the extra safety features it could get; to charge through the nose for them was shocking and callous.
However, given the amount of Boeing planes out there, and the number of employees, the company dying would be harsh. What needs to happen is a fundamental shift of culture; this is why I think that leadership should be held responsible for what's happened, and that this (with leaders in jail, new ones would have to take their place) would help force the changes that need to happen for safety and engineering quality again to be the number one drivers - not just profits and bean counting.
It's an opportunity for them to fully reset the company. Fingers crossed, it will happen.
>However, given the amount of Boeing planes out there, and the number of employees, the company dying would be harsh.
346 dead from wilful incompetence, followed by utter bullshittery, half-truths, outright lies and finally, when it has to admit what it has been doing, a desperate insistance that executives could not possibly have known.
And all the while fighting against them being grounded.
That's another reason, given the evident issues with the total fuckwits currently in management, it should be broken up. If it isn't, then the US may end up without a major US aircraft manufacturer.
>However, given the amount of Boeing planes out there, and the number of employees, the company dying would be harsh.
It would be, but it needs to happen. And it wouldn't be as bad as people think.
The same thing happened when GM was on the verge of going under 10+ years ago. Why does everyone somehow think a giant manufacturer going out of business somehow means that thousands of employees will suddenly be destitute and unable to find another job? Do people really think that enormous manufacturing facilities are somehow going to go unused forevermore?
No, what happens is the company's competitors swoop and and buy up all the assets for cheap, and put them to work, because now there's suddenly not enough manufacturing capacity to meet global demand, but there's all these assets and a highly-skilled workforce suddenly available to be put to use.
For the same reason bailing out Chrysler and GM was wrong, Boeing should not be allowed to survive. The company can be broken up and all its assets sold to (hopefully foreign) competitors, who can then build better planes with them.
> You charge for safety features that cost you nothing to deploy?
If you read the article, that's not what happened.
The warning message was meant to be supplied by default. Boeing though it was supplied by default. The airlines thought they were receiving it.
But they later discovered they had a bug which disabled the warning message unless another feature (an optional luxury feature) was enabled.
This situation is still bad. Boeing should have done something back when they discovered this bug: released a software update, given everyone the optional feature for free, or at the very least notified the pilots.
I get the distinction you're making, but I still feel like the actions taken by Boeing resulted in charging for a safety feature. I also never bought into Hanlon's razor; I don't accept anything Boeing claims as being true just because they claim it. I don't accept that upper management didn't know, I don't accept that they intended to add this feature in the next software update before they were forced to talk to the FAA about the first crash, and I don't accept that they didn't know about this "bug" until after the plane shipped. Like, really, they didn't test all of the indicators on an airplane before shipping it? Really? If that isn't malice, it's an unbelievable amount of incompetence. I find it more likely that the airlines conspired with Boeing to act like this was a bug rather than admit that the didn't pay for a safety feature, so Boeing gets to act like they intended to ship the software-only safety feature all along. Maybe I'm crazy, the crazy rarely know it.
> This situation is still bad. Boeing should have done something back when they discovered this bug: released a software update, given everyone the optional feature for free, or at the very least notified the pilots.
Do you feel like the failure to do this qualifies as malicious behavior?
> I still feel like the actions taken by Boeing resulted in charging for a safety feature
I still feel like a distinction needs to be made. According to this article, at no point before the grounding were airlines aware that they needed to pay extra to get this safety feature. Infact, they thought they already had it.
Boeing got no benefit, it was clearly a mistake.
Maybe you could argue the coverup was malicious behaviour, but such coverups can also result from incompetence.
The reason I think a distinction is necessary, is I think incompetence is much more dangerous than maliciousness.
A Malicious company evaluated each corner it cuts. It decides "Can I get away with this particular thing" and it will only cut the corners it thinks it can gets away with, leaving the more dangerous corners un-cut. A Malicious company will have notes on each corner they cut, or at least people who remember, so we can go in later and re-evaluate everything.
On the other-hand, an Incompetent company has no idea where it went wrong. It made random mistakes without realising. The mistakes could be anywhere along the risk-spectrum. They aren't documented. Nobody knows where they are. The only way to be sure you caught all these mistakes it to completely re-examine the whole design.
In the case of disagreement the only sensible option is to disable the MCAS and alert the pilots. Simply ignoring the secondary sensor is not a valid solution.
This is true. Which means per FAA certification standards MCAS should have been a "hazardous failure" system. Which means it should have had at least two levels of redundancy. Which means it should have never been certified with no redundancy at all for a failed sensor.
The handling characteristics change, but from what I understand it just tends to pull up. Any pilot should be able to deal with that as long as the artificial horizon is working and they are paying attention.
Plus, even if their attention does wander there are other safety systems (like stall alerts) that will kick in to help them.
It's not like the MCAS disengagement makes the plane uncontrollable.
I don't think the quoted text refers to the computer being able to resolve conflicts in the sensor readings. The computer cant resolve conflicting signals from two sensors, but can certainly detect if the signals are conflicting, and if there was an indicator to warn about such cases, can turn it on giving pilots indication of such conflict.
This is retrospective ass-covering, to distract us from the fact that the the pilots were never informed as to the existence of MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) and therefore could not even know how to disable it. The presence of or lack thereof of a warning light being rendered specious. And MCAS read only the one AoA sensor, from the captains side.
So to summarize, the pilots don't know about MCAS, MCAS is still engaged even when the auto-pilot is disengaged. A single AoA sensor failed, triggering the MCAS into a nose-down mode, the pilots begin ignorant of this, repeatedly tried to regain level flight using the trim wheel. This they failed at.
“The warning light notifies pilots of a disagreement in the sensors that measure which direction the plane is pointed”
This wouldn't even work in the way described, in a two sensor system, the computer can't tell which sensor is giving false readings. That's why they hooked up MCAS to only the one sensor. And Boeing didn't tell the FFC or the pilots as they would of had to get the plane re-certified and the pilots retrained.