If you watch The Aviation Herald, this kind of reporting feels a little like trying to write news stories off VAERS data. Crazy shit is happening more or less all the time in planes; the idea isn't that nothing ever goes wrong, but that layered controls prevent injuries or hull losses.
It's not that there necessarily isn't a thru-line to these stories. And I read "Flying Blind" like everyone else and share the popular opinion of Boeing's modern engineering culture. But there's basically no content in these stories. There are experts somewhere that can put events like this into context, but they're not cited and the story isn't written around that kind of analysis, so we're left to supply it ourselves. Human nature suggests that the blanks we'll fill in will be a disaster movie, because that's "fun" to think about.
50 injuries on a commercial flight is very unusual. The story is about half description of the incident and half background info on Boeing's ongoing woes. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect an engineering explainer on a breaking news story.
There are experts somewhere that can put events like this into context, but they're not cited and the story isn't written around that kind of analysis, so we're left to supply it ourselves. Human nature suggests that the blanks we'll fill in will be a disaster movie, because that's "fun" to think about.
That seems kinda patronizing, considering there's a first hand report describing the effect of the sudden drop:
“That’s when I opened my eyes and there was various individuals at the top of the plane. Just stuck to the roof and then they fell to the floor. And then I just realized I’m not in a movie, this is actually for real,” he told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
Are readers supposed to just ignore this, or the pilot's comment that the plane apparently rebooted and he lost all control of it?
Like obviously that is not the failure mode in this scenario… but it’s the same aircraft type. It’s totally believable imo that they just bumped into some other bug/timeout/overflow, especially on the 787 of all aircraft.
In fairness these types of reports can also “prime” people to favor certain explanations. It doesn’t mean it is a software bug, or related in any way to the previous ones. But as a software engineer… yeah that really does sound like some kind of overflow or hang, followed by a lockup, followed by a watchdog timeout and reboot. Good thing it’s not booting off spinning rust there. “Please wait while windows checks your file system for errors” is not what I’d want to see as I’m falling out of the sky :V
It obviously has to be something very edgy otherwise it would have been caught already. Uptime is a good theory imo. But that’s pure unfounded speculation.
On the other hand, not good news for Boeing given the other situation. Yes, it’s unrelated and a totally different aircraft type, and small bugs are routine in newer types. But people don’t have confidence in Boeing to engineer and manufacture well anymore - when people know deep down in their heart of hearts it’s another big Boeing bug you have a mindshare problem. It’s like smeltdown etc. Even if it affects everyone it certainly reminds them of intel the most.
74gear[1] on YouTube is a 747 Captain. It's a great aviation channel in general if anyone is interested in that stuff. He had mentioned two things that really illustrated to me your point a while back:
A) Stuff breaks on planes. All the time. They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies that unless there is a completely catastrophic failure, they are still perfectly safe to fly. An example: a starter is out in one of the engines, but there are four starters for an engine. Once the issue is known, if they can't fix it where they are currently at, they will do an empty flight (well, crew only) to the next maintenance hub and get it fixed. Before a plane even gets off the ground they have a checklist and do their best to determine if the plane is airworthy and safe to fly or not. If they feel the plane is unsafe, they can refuse to fly it. It is important to them to make sure the plane is safe to fly because:
B) They also don't want to die.
That last bit really hit hard for me for some reason, it's hilarious but at the same time eye opening. I think that I just never really thought of it in that way before. Maybe it's just me.
> They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies
But Boeing reduced redundancies, presumably to cut costs. The 737 MAX planes that crashed only had one AoA sensor. Where else did they cut costs? Where else did they reduce redundancies? The public trust has been lost. Boeing needs to design a new plane from scratch, this time let engineers design the plane without interference from accountants.
The 737 MAX, like all 737s, always had two AoA sensors. The problem was that Boeing engineers wrote software for the 737 MAX which could make critical flight control inputs based on the data from one sensor only. And didn't really tell pilots about it.
The fix, amongst other mitigations, was to have the MCAS software cross-check inputs from both AoA sensors.
The airplane could have a dozen AoA sensors, but if the software is ignoring 11 of them then there is only one actual AoA sensor for purpose of discussion. Even if the sensors are used for other aspects, such as pilot instrumentation.
And yes, I understand perfectly well that this invalidates the idea that the second sensor was "eliminated" to save cost - but if I remember correctly there was a paid option to have the MCAS consider both sensors. So there was a financial aspect to the decision. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Close! AoA disagree hazard light was an optional feature. In the original implementation, the Flight computer in command, either the one on the pilot's side, or the one on the copilot's side (alternated on power up), were fed input from only the AoA sensor they shared a physical link with.
The optional feature was essentially networking the two ststems such that the data would be fed to the FCIC for warning light activation, so that pilot's could start running the right checklists.
Can't do that: the pilot can't be allowed to control, or even know about MCAS, because that would affect Boeing's ability to claim the plane is "just another" 737 and that the pilots don't need retraining. Giving the pilot the ability to control MCAS means the pilots all need retraining.
That's certainly the regulatory logic, but I feel like the entire idea of hiding critical systems from the pilots may have been a bad idea from the beginning. Regulators should never have even entertained the idea of using active compensation systems to maintain the type class.
They already received training on MCAS once they got 737 MAXes, albeit a short superficial one (1 hour of lecture&1 hour of simulator training iirc). Hence "cannot be allowed to know" does not apply anymore.
Yeah, and that's wrong. It should apply. Pilots should not be allowed to know, because that means this is a different plane than the one they were rated for. And so, since the plane can't be flown safely without proper training, the planes should not get the same type rating as the old 737, and either 1) they should just be demolished, or 2) they should be considered an entirely different plane, with all the training requirements that entails. The regulators completely failed here, and by allowing this are showing they're corrupt.
This is VERY bad engineering practice, you throw away knowns for unknowns. A blue sky design isn't a fix. Especially if your corporate culture has the wrong leadership. First year engineers take engineering economics for a reason. Money is always an object.
Is there never a case where it is cheaper + better to start over? I think sometimes there is. The design of 737 MAX was flawed from the get-go. They made the engines bigger because bigger engines run hotter and burn less fuel. Ordinarily this would require the fuselage to be raised as well, so that the bigger engine can fit under the wing. Instead they changed the position of the engine. Instead of being hung under the wing, as in earlier models, the engines have been moved forward and upward, potentially leading to an aerodynamic stall under certain circumstances. Instead of going back to the drawing board and getting the airframe hardware right, Boeing relied on something called the ‘Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,’ or MCAS. [1]
It's just poor design. If software fails, then any plane should be designed to have a neutral center of gravity in order to give the crew the greatest amount of time to recover from the loss.
It’s almost impossible for a completely fresh design to be safer on day one. There’s so many different ways to fuck up many of them are counterintuitive because nobody ever considers if someone could install this backwards until someone does. 20+ years of debugging written with people’s lives tests just about everything in a way engineers never really think about
The flaw was fixed with MCAS. The problem that caused the two crashes was that pilots weren't trained on the new system because Boeing wanted to act like it was the same plane. The pilots didn't know what was going on or how to disable MCAS when it started misbehaving because of bad sensor.
With training, improved systems, and redundant sensors, MCAS should be safe. There are other planes that have similar systems. And there procedures for disabling bad sensors or misbehaving sensors.
I'm not sure if MCAS is necessary, there is some indication it is only there to mimic older 737 and plane would be safe without it and with training.
You can definitely treat it as a design flaw and fix it without impacting most systems.
Designers need to make radical changes before cockpit windows would need to be updated. That specific example may not seem like much but there’s a lot of safety critical engineering that goes into such things and yet design flaws where still uncovered.
Sure you can bring over the "good parts" of the old plane, but if this design flaw is fixed then it is essentially a new plane. They will no longer be able to pretend it is the same as the old 737s (and that's what got them into trouble).
When you say “parts” it’s really complex systems. The 737 family of aircraft has gone through many revisions over 50+ years at this point.
The original 737-100 was 61,994 lbs empty and the 737-900ER was more than 50% heavier at 98,495 before they started calling them MAX. The 900ER was in many ways a radically different aircraft but got there through a long list of incremental changes leveraging the past.
That’s not to say new designs can’t be quite safe. The much newer A320 family are some of the safest aircraft flying with only 38 hull losses and 1505 fatalities, but do not mistake good design for inevitability.
All-new aircraft designs are only certified to fly after many years of rigorous analysis and testing. It was Boeing's desire to avoid the full expensive certification process, by claiming that the MAX was just a minor update to an existing design, which led to two catastrophic crashes in the space of a few months.
On the other hand, no 787 or A380 has ever had a crash or incident that resulted in a passenger fatality or hull loss. This LATAM flight is probably the most serious incident that has ever happened on a 787 in almost 10 years of service, with over 1100 aircraft active.
> On the other hand, no 787 or A380 has ever had a crash or incident that resulted in a passenger fatality or hull loss.
There have been nearly 10x as many 737s built as 787s and A380s combined. Given the date of first flight (1967 vs. 2009 and 2203, respectively) it is safe to say they have been flown for significantly more than 10x the total flight hours. Probably at least 20x but I’m pulling that number out of thin air.
The data is certainly promising but it’s probably a little too soon to be too confident in relative safety comparisons. For one, we don’t have nearly as much data on those newer airframes as they age.
There are two recent accidents that show how much new airplane designs (and better safety measures) have improved survivability of accidents: Emirates Flight 521 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirates_Flight_521), a Boeing 777 that crashed in Dubai in 2016, where all 300 people on board survived (although un unfortunate firefighter lost his life); and the A350 that collided with another airplane while landing at Tokio Haneda airport in January this year - if you look at the burnt out airplane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Haneda_Airport_runway_col...), it's hard to believe that all 379 people on board made it out alive...
The problem is quality control of production and new features. It doesn't matter how old most of the design is, if someone messes up in the production line, or if new features are not adequately tested like in case of MCAS.
Lack of QC is why I'll gladly choose any Airbus over any new Boeing.
> The 737 MAX planes that crashed only had one AoA sensor.
IIRC, it had two, but each of the computers only used the sensor on its side; which was OK for the original (pre-MAX) design because of they way these sensors were originally used by it.
Yes but do the flight crew have the ability to tell if a plane is safe to fly?
Without a deep understanding of the design of the plane they rely a lot on the metrics that the plane manufacturer display and on the manufacturers manuals to interpret them.
> Yes but do the flight crew have the ability to tell if a plane is safe to fly?
Yes, it's literally part of the job of the pilots, by federal regulation. If the captain feels the flight isn't fit to fly, the captain can say it's a no go, period.
> Yes but do the flight crew have the ability to tell if a plane is safe to fly?
Do you have the ability to tell if a street is safe to cross?
Most of the time, yes.
Sometimes, you can't tell for sure, but you cross anyways.
Sometimes, you are dead wrong about your judgement. Shit happens. Nobody expects 100% certainty.
The problem here may be that Boeing may be falling to meet the expectation of 99.????% certainty, and regressing down to 99.????% certainty, due to a broken corporate culture.
>It's a great aviation channel in general if anyone is interested in that stuff.
It's an aviation channel for people who aren't into aviation. Lot's of clickbait + obvious optimization of titles and topics to appeal to the masses. The Mr Beast of pilots.
Mentour Pilot is for people interested in aviation. He does breakdowns/analyses of plane incidents—not just crashes. He's also a certified trainer on at least one type.
It's funny, I was also thinking about Mentour Pilot, both because of the whole discussion here, and because of the post upthread talking about clickbait. I love Mentour Pilot once I get into one of the videos, but looking at all the attention-grabbing (and clickbaity!) stills on his video list makes me have to force myself to remember that it's fine once the video starts.
Mentour's recent videos have become much more fake salesy ultra-high energy. I actually had to unsubscribe.
The same phenomenon is unfolding in chess youtube world. The audience of laypeople (with minimal to zero chess knowledge) who are entertained by yelling and extreme over-excitement and butt-plug cheating scandals is 1000x as large as the audience of true chess nerds.
Hmm. I think that's interesting. I don't agree with you, but let's take your statement as fact.
What's wrong with that?
The content itself is generally him explaining from a pilot's point of view situations that have happened, like crashes or ATC issues, or responses to clickbait misinformation from other places on social media. His responses tend to be reasonable and enjoyable and for people who "aren't into aviation," maybe his videos will make them more interested. He has never made it about himself, the guy got promoted to Captain and didn't (and hasn't?) even mentioned it. Even his avatar and banner have him at 3 bars. It seems to me that he genuinely cares about aviation and informing people who aren't familiar with it. I feel like he brings a lot of value.
If you're not into it's fine, but I think it's a bit unfortunate you feel the need to play gatekeeper.
The last part doesn't always work the way you'd like it to - most aviation disasters these days have very definite things the pilots could have done to save themselves and everyone, which they failed to do.
Yep, and a regulator who thinks that the answer is millions of dollars in spending to build a system and hire admins. Understanding of self preservation could replace the same things with better training and empowerment of pilots to override unsafe decisions.
Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald.
I guess I'm not saying it isn't worth reporting. Before the Boeing Narrative set in, these kinds of stories did get reported! But now they're tied into this long-running Boeing arc, and it's frustrating because there isn't enough in the story to know what's really going on.
Multiple whistleblowers have been raising concerns about Boeing safety and build quality issues for several years, so for you to say "so what, there have been issues on Boeing planes for several years" actually reinforces the "Boeing narrative". If there are multiple people on the inside raising alarm bells, there probably is some substance there. Finally the problems are getting big enough that they can't just be swept under the rug anymore.
I don't understand why people seem to be disregarding highly related facts and are ignoring the fundamental nature of how or why the facts are related. Correlation does not imply causation, but when the facts are of the same substance, additional concern is warranted.
It's hard to criticize a power structure your point of view depends on, so you get weird apologists for industry in general that pop up in conversations like these.
The funniest thing is that Boeing is barely industry, with all the two-way regulatory ties and of course the monopoly, it's like a nationalized company that just happens to be nominally owned by investors. The only ideology that Boeing makes look bad is the Soviet system! :-)
Yes, that's right. The free market has no horses in this race, it's a comparison of the relative corruption of different governments and societies. Our military-industrial complex, of which Boeing is an important member, is one of the most corrupt institutions in the world.
>The only ideology that Boeing makes look bad is the Soviet system!
Boeing is 100% a product of the American system. All the acquisitions, mergers, lobbying and loss of engineering culture in favor of short-term profit seeking that got it to where it is today happened under capitalism. Nothing resembling Boeing ever existed on the USSR, its airplane manufacturers worked very differently, with different incentives and under different constraints.
Seems sort of like the opposite—a lot of the regulation is done by people installed by lobbying, sort of like a privately owned and operated part of government.
Of course it's terrible for everyone but shareholders there isn't really any domestic competition.
It's great for the entrenched leadership, but bad for the shareholders who would benefit more from a variety of investment opportunities in a diversified and growing market. I don't think all of these problems are good for the airline industry.
The shareholders in a company have no reason to want the government to kill off the competition - they could just as easily invest in that competition. Shareholders care about the size of the whole market and corruption steals from them as much as it steals from anybody.
Worse, we’re only given a passenger’s recollection of what a pilot said. Which is of basically zero value.
I’m reminded of another thread on this site a few months back. One commenter talked about an incident where their flight circled in a holding pattern unable to land for whatever reason. The pilot got on the PA and informed the passengers that they might have to divert as they about 30 minutes of fuel. Around half an hour later, the plane made a desperate run for a nearby airport.
As the story was told, all the flight attendants were white as ghosts. The plane’s engines ran out of gas and shut off, but to the commenter’s existential relief they managed to just make it to the runway.
Of course this is ridiculous. The pilot’s announcement was either grossly misunderstood or very poorly chosen. The plane had plenty of fuel, they had thirty minutes before they would be forced to divert, not thirty minutes total. No cockpit crew with functioning self-preservation instincts would patiently circle around a pattern while their plane inevitably runs out of gas. The engines didn’t run out of fuel; they were brought to idle or low for the descent just like every other landing.
If the plane had truly run out of fuel, the cabin crew would have had the passengers brace for landing. There would have been emergency crews with flashing lights all along parallel taxiways. The plane would have come to a halt on the runway and been unable to taxi. An NTSB report would have been filed. The news would have reported on it.
People replied pointing all of this out, but to my (probably faulty, after all, I’m an eyewitness) recollection they remained steadfast in their telling of events.
And very timely, 737 Gear just published a video discussing Tucker Carlson’s retelling of an incident where his plane crashed[1]. By Tucker’s telling, there was an explosion and the wing broke off mid-flight. The plane crashed into the sand. In reality, the plane’s landing gear collapsed during landing. The plane rolled off the runway.
In short, a passenger’s recall of stressful events is generally worse than useless.
If you want to be a contrarian after a whistleblower is dead and 50 people were injured, maybe you should have some real data, stats or information instead of just saying "it happens all the time".
> Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald.
Exactly. But the takeaway here is that "notable" and "newsworthy" are slightly different ideas, and the latter is more subjective.
This is absolutely the effect of the "Boeing Narrative". If the media is faced with data like this[2] in the face of a frame that says "Aviation is extremely safe and getting safer every year", they'll likely skip over the outliers. If they need to sell articles into a market that knows "Boeing Planes are Unsafe", they're going to have a much harder time with that notability analysis.
And that's 100% on Boeing, not the media. At the end of the day if your business depends on people believing your products are good products[1], cutting corners on the reality undergirding that perception is a disaster. Boeing had almost a full century of goodwill they've now flushed.
[1] Which is true for almost every business where the consumer sees the competition. Maybe not if you manufacture gaskets or capacitors, but airplanes and laptops for sure.
[2] Editted to add: it also hands out an easy scapegoat. We really don't know if there was an instrument failure here or if it was pilot culpability. We just know what the pilot said. And we have to recognize that the pilot might have lied knowing that Boeing made an easier target.
Do you know that or do you just feel it? If you know it, how do you know? Is that knowledge reflected in the reporting?
If you camped avherald watching for incidents, and you had an inciting incident like the door plug (indisputably a major story!) to start from, could you create the same narrative for Bombardier? I think you could.
Does it matter? At this stage it's just ridiculous that there's no more uproar towards Boeing or even direct intervention into it. Maybe because it's one of the 2 disfuntional members of the duopoly at the foundation of global air transit with massive geopolitical consequences if major changes are suggested.
Definitely both. You never really want to stop understanding, but understanding in public interest cases serves to inform advocacy, and any story can cross the evidence threshold where advocacy becomes the primary concern. I think we're there with Boeing.
Does it sell more ads? Does it get more eyeballs? Do people click on the story? Does the writer get promoted? A bonus? Is this a conspiracy against Boeing? Is the owner of the newspaper short Boeing and long Airbus? (those last four questions are /s the first two maybe less so.)
I used to laugh at those pushing "mainstream media" wild stories (e.g. from a certain portion of Americans) but Journalism isn't what it used to be, and maybe it was never what it used to be.
I do think that focus on Boeing is somewhat warranted but it's a good question how do we get a real unbiased picture. Especially given that accidents are a low probability event and it's hard to determine what happens by chance, within reason, or is really reflecting something concerning that has to be addressed and how it should be addressed. Your average Journalist is lacking the training and tools to think about these things and they wouldn't even know who is the right expert and what is the right data to look at.
Whether time proves that out - and whether 'more than a narrative' (meaning..safety culture) is actually related to this incident matter and are independent of it emerging as a narrative.
A very similar thing happened post Air France 447's crash into the Atlantic ocean. The reporting on it began to include any incident involving any airbus plane for quite a while until it was determined the crew was primarily at fault. There was a narrative building simply because of our tendency in media to have extreme recency bias.
Airbus has had any number of incidents (here's one: https://safetyfirst.airbus.com/landing-with-nosewheels-at-90... ) - and for awhile their approach to autopilots was widely argued back and forth (Airbus wouldn't let you put the plane outside of the envelope, basically), and there's some disagreement on how competing sticks should be handled.
Right…there are always going to be concerns, no manufacturer is perfect…some are bad, some good, soon change with time, some don’t.
What the conversation was pointing out that coverage of such issues tends to shift with the closeness in time to something really bad. If your one of your planes crashes, anytime your planes has an issue for a whole the coverage is going to be amplified. The manufacturer is irrelevant…it’s the nature of media coverage and human biases
Not a control issue but there was a Hawaiian flight that had 36 injuries from turbulence. Edit to add: it would be unsurprising if turbulence was the cause here and the passenger quoted had their facts wrong.
An airplane doesn't suddenly drop out of the sky because its controls stops responding. So I agree that on the face of it it's either turbulence or some sort of aggressive manoeuvre, either initiated by the pilots accidentally or somehow initiated by the airplanes control systems, not simply "stopped responding to controls".
“Flight control issues” is a passenger’s retelling of what they remember a pilot saying.
I have heard a lot of passengers recount events from incident flights. I have seen vanishingly few where there was much overlap between what actually happened and what they believe happened.
Especially given that the Bayesian numbers are that most incidents (especially long haul) will happen on Boeing frames purely because Boeing is everywhere.
Perfectly good diesel engines and the carbon dioxide they saved with these cars. Madness, pure madness. Should have just ignored the scandal to protect the local car industry..
It feels irresponsible to me to report some random thing a layperson passenger said without verifying the information.
The passenger could have misheard or be lying. Even if the pilot did say that, he may have just said that to save face, when it was pilot error all along. Hopefully the FDR data will be made public.
I think it's worth reporting on because this particular issue is known to everyone... you need to cycle the power on the planes every 3 days or else the reset themselves. it's crazy that a modern plane needs to have that happen but it does. the most likely situation is that the plane didn't get shutdown and happened to occur at a level flying situation and the pilots probably freaked out and overflew the plane which got it into upset territory. the plane was trimmed and would have been fine if the pilots(likely) didn't do what they did.
>Unless you're a pilot I'm not sure why anyone would expect that to be common knowledge.
It should sure as hell be common knowledge to the pilots of the plane. I would have expected something like this to be on a checklist somewhere though: "Step 74, check uptime in Flight Computer, pull breaker if too high"
Why would it be insane for a computer controller of what is essentially industrial machinery be designed to be reset at least once every other day? They "reboot" the engines damn near once a flight! Most pilots have experience and training on shutting down a plane for say overnight and then starting it from cold and dark the next day.
It's an odd idea to us software developers but the computer isn't the primary function of the plane, and doesn't need to serve customers 24/7. If the computer is 100% reliable only for 18 hours, and the plane cannot fly for longer than 12 hours in the first place, is that a problem?
> If the computer is 100% reliable only for 18 hours, and the plane cannot fly for longer than 12 hours in the first place, is that a problem?
It is a problem if it requires a human to remember to do the procedure, especially if it is not done on every flight. Putting it on the checklist, but making it optional per situation, is asking for someone to make a mistake.
The reset should happen on every flight, if forgetting it on the wrong flight could potentially lead to an incident.
>pilots probably freaked out and overflew the plane
I've got a pilots license and shoving the stick forward such that you pull negative Gs and passengers get stuck on the roof is not a normal reaction to the instuments going out.
It sounds more like one of the computer systems crashed or lost power causing a lack of control until a backup kicked in, and caused the fly by wire to pitch downwards briefly.
What is the value in posting a long, entirely speculative comment like this? It doesn't even appear that you have any credibility in this field. Even if you did, this comment would be useless.
Yeah after the MCAS incident showing a kind of malice and the door blowout showing incompetency, I'm perfectly happy to start treating Boeing as guilty until proven innocent on these incidents. They haven't really been behaving in a way that they're worthy of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Until they start to show that they're changing their behavior (which they clearly didn't do after the MCAS incident) then they really deserve the gut reactions to their own bad headlines. The public doesn't have to try to search for perfect judicial fairness once they've burned our trust, that's a standard that only makes sense to apply to the actual courts.
I'm fine if you want to distrust or dislike or sanction Boeing. But that's not a good epistemology; it's not bringing you closer to understanding what's happening. It's also deeply incurious (as a rhetorical strategy, not as a belief system).
I think the people who are plugged into avherald.com and trying to prove how much they know about aviation are in a worse state, because they're missing the fact that through MCAS and the plug blowout that Boeing's culture really can't be trusted right now. You're very concerned about the fact that you've been studying dendrology and correcting people about the species and nature of the trees when the forest is just on fire. And I can connect this back to problems with our entire management class, which you can't reach when you're just looking at the technical details and frequency of aviation accidents. There's a way to be incurious about the overall sociological and political environment by overly focusing on detailed technical knowledge.
And I'm acknowledging that they may be "innocent" in this case (in the sense that these kinds of things are expected across all of commercial aviation). I'm not arguing that I know they're guilty and being completely incurious. But my default hypothesis with Boeing has shifted to guilty until proven innocent, and in the absence of conclusive evidence to assume guilt. That isn't actually incurious, since I'm willing to listen to evidence. But the argument that "things like this happen all the time" isn't actually evidence, that's just a rationalization.
And it is okay to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they've proved in the past that they don't deserve it. That's just healthy psychological defenses. You move them from the box where they get the benefit of the doubt, over to the box where they don't. To argue nobody should ever do that is to argue that everyone should constantly get manipulated and taken advantage of because this time Lucy isn't going to pull the ball away from Charlie Brown.
The WSJ just ran a story suggesting that an FA accidentally hit a seat switch that pushed a pilot into the flight controls, which is what caused this incident --- a cause incompatible with most of the comments on this thread.
Real time operating systems are expensive to develop for and require laborious system validation. That's why we decided to use a custom version of Android Jelly Bean running on the latest MediaTek quad core processors featuring Arm Mali gpus. Sensor communications are handled wirelessly with BlueTooth. Be sure to turn off all electronic devices before the flight. :)
All development was offshored to a lowest bidder. Thanks to this, all our critical flight control software is now developed by a single intern aided by Copilot (sic!) We are now looking for a way to optimize the intern away.
Yea I laugh at everyone try to shove AI into hardware and software design of physical products as if there's a market of engineers out there and not just hobbyists keeping things alive in the states.
We've long since offshored the development of any physical products that isn't considered ITAR/defense world.
I think there is a great opportunity to use AI in design and development, as long as it is used correctly. Which is as tools to help engineers.
At my previous workplace I wrote a documentation bot which helps people find documentation based on vague descriptions of what they are looking for (like when you know you saw something but you don't know where exactly or what the keyword is). Or by specifying what you want to accomplish.
Mind, the bot would not create answers to questions, it would just ingest existing documentation and point people to things that are relevant to their searches.
You joke, but relying on bluetooth could be reasonable as a redundant system, wires can break too. Probably more as a failure detection mechanism though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not suggesting national security is more important, just that Boeing's leadership won't learn any lessons from this as they'll keep getting bailed out with sweet MIC contracts. I would probably feel much safer if we didn't have a MIC that is constantly trying to play a nuclear game of chicken with political adversaries. 'Russia will not use nukes because Russia has not used nukes' - what kind of effed up logic is that. I feel very unsafe being governed by morons. I can easily avoid flying but dodging nukes is much more difficult.
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...
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?)
An autopilot disconnect (caused by a failure of the flight control computer) in an out of trim condition can cause it. I'm not sure how a 787s trim system is built but on our, much older, plane with a mechanical trim system there's a motor that will slowly move the trim tabs to bring the autopilot inputs to 0.
That is if the autopilot is producing a constant nose up control signal the auto-trim will move the elevator tabs towards nose up until the AP pitch signal is null.
It's to prevent fun excursions like this should the autopilot become disconnected without the pilots hands on the controls.
From reports of passengers in the rear of the plane suffering the most injuries, it sounds like a descent followed by an abrupt pitch up (elevators push tail down).
Thanks for the link, it made me move to the article about "Mayday Mayday Mayday" callsign, then listen to a recording of one and read about a ship that hit a bridge in Florida. They rebuild the bridge.
The most that the ATSB was able to determine was that the data corruption was basically akin to a C++ reinterpret_cast of "altitude" as "angle of attack", causing the 37,000ft or so altitude to sporadically be read as a 50 degree AoA.
The issue was not definitively traced to cosmic rays or another root cause.
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.
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.
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
The whistleblower was found dead in their car of an 'apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound'.
Seems extremely unlikely that they would decide to kill themselves after 32 years at Boeing and deciding to blow the whistle.
"Barnett, who spent decades working for Boeing at its plants in Everett, Wash., and North Charleston, S.C., had repeatedly alleged that Boeing's manufacturing practices had declined — and that rather than improve them, he added, managers had pressured workers not to document potential defects and problems. "
I can see someone whistle-blowing in good faith, realizing they made a mistake and called out the company for something that it wasn't doing or something that wasn't actually a problem, and killing themselves.
I can also see someone whistle-blowing in good faith, getting harassed by ex-coworkers/managers or the court of public opinion, and just getting overwhelmed by the negative attention and feeling bad for the betrayal and killing themselves.
I can't really see a company faking the suicide of someone that already whistleblew and got national attention. That seems like a great way to exacerbate a problem that, if you leave it alone, probably won't be made worse by your leaving it alone. Like, what, a Boeing executive hired an assassin off the dark web with the click of a button to kill someone that already did the thing he was going to do? Executives can make some pretty poor decisions, so I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it would be a pretty wild mistake to make.
I can see a lifer, someone who've spent their whole life at a single company, reacting this way. Their identity is tied so closely to their employer that having to "blow the whistle" probably feels like a terrible betrayal against the company.
This is a good micro-example. Scrap bins! Sounds horrible! But is it? Do you know? Or is it just common practice? Is it called a scrap bin in the media to drive a narrative, when really it's just a parts bin like any other?
… I don’t know how to respond to this. This is basically epistemic relativism. Yes, we know that scrap bins are for scrap. I am 100% sure that there is never any reason to be pulling stuff from scrap bins ad-hoc in order to avoid having to reorder parts.
As far as your point is “the whistleblowers could be lying, the video investigations could be staged/one-offs, and the ongoing massive increase in safety incidents could be unrelated to the publicly-bragged-about intentionally-done corner cutting”, that’s fair, the jury is still out. Figuratively, ofc, because they aren’t yet facing any real weighty investigations AFAIK, only small ones.
But “maybe the you’re supposed to use parts from scrap bins”? No. Not for fucking airplanes
EDIT: an analogy; is it ever okay to store passwords in plain text? Maybe, if by “plain text” you mean the text that’s encrypted by a normal auth system. But that’s just not how that word is used, and is giving an absurd benefit of the doubt to people who do not deserve it
I visited the Airbus facility in Hamburg, about 20 years ago. They showed us lots of "scrap bins" at the various production lines. And "scrap bins" is what they called those indeed.
I particularly recall one with titanium (AFAIR) Hi-Lok bolts[1] that didn't pass the xray for defects. They told us those would be melted.
They looked flawless and were all brand new, nicely anodized. We were allowed to grab a few each, as souveniers. These are not cheap (I think the guys said they cost around 10 EUR each, at the time, but I may misremember) and a plane uses a shitload of them.
Now lets say you're out for whatever reason. That would halt your production line. If your safety culture is shitty, you may decide to just use those Hi-Loks that passed xray with 95% or whatever threshold suits you overcoming your shortage ...
And the above sounds to me like that's what the whisteblower suggested happened at Boeing.
Scrap bin would allude to using parts that are out of tolerance, time expired, or single use ie regardless of cycles or time on wing, the part is required to be replaced every disassembly.
This can include parts that have been assembled only to be disassembled because an issue was found before it left the shop.
Scrap bins are where you throw parts that fail quality control. If you have no part at all and your management doesn’t allow you to halt production you might install a failed part and pray.
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.
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.
I just meant that there are only two companies in the industry at all - the industry being “commercial passenger flight”, or what they seem to call “airliners” (?):
Still, in the large commercial aircraft market, there are just two major players: the U.S.-based Boeing (BA) and the Airbus Group (EADSY), formerly known as the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS).
I totally understand your pushback against some kid on HN thinking he knows better than the Boeing board, but I stick by the simplicity comment. I know little about airplanes but I know a lot about engineering and common sense. My point is this: R&D is vital to the long term success of an aerospace company, and suddenly slashing R&D budgets while expecting a similar amount of output is an obvious cause of safety incidents.
That depends on how you define the market. Boeing and Airbus are the only two manufacturers of large civil airliners on the worldwide market. But there is a second tier including Bombardier, Embraer, Comac, Mitsubishi, and UAC which either manufacture smaller (regional) airliners or have more limited sales options.
Protectionism bullshit by Boeing forced them to sell to Airbus, they only do business jets now.
> Embraer
Regional jets only. They saw what happened with Bombardier and they're highly unlikely to move upmarket in short haul jets.
> Mitsubishi
Cancelled their regional jet, so nothing.
> UAC
Severely hampered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting supply chain collapse and sanctions. The MC-21 and SSJ-100 were decent planes on paper, but cannot be manufactured because critical components are European or American (like the engines). The Tu-214 is back in production but it's a pretty obsolete plane by modern standards.
> Comac
By most accounts, roughly a decade behind equivalent Airbus planes in terms of efficiency, but realistically the only real alternative to Boeing/Airbus in the medium term.
I don't think defining the size of a market based on how many companies are in it is a very useful metric. If you kept reading your investopedia snippet, you would see that "The airplane manufacturing market is part of the overall airline industry". So saying that "there are only two companies in the industry" is incredibly disingenuous, there are thousands of companies involved in commercial passenger flight.
Btw, people bragging about having lots of common sense are usually the ones that have the least of it.
Ok cmon be nice it’s hacker news we all hate Boeing here - that’s why we’re Hackers :)
Yeah it’s relative and the line between “large airliners” and “all passenger aircraft” is somewhat arbitrary, I agree. But I stand by the distinction. The market for large airliners is by far the most important market in aerospace, and it has two companies in it, and the one that’s been doing a decade of record cost cutting has way more safety issues than the company that didn’t. I’d love a higher sample size ofc, but as far as clarity goes that’s pretty damning.
Plus what are we fighting about? Whether it’s fair to describe Boeing as being in “not a huge industry”? I mean I’ll just give that one to you lol, I care little about the exact phrasing of that comment. Honestly if it bothers you just drop the whole paragraph!
Big industry or small, I have been informed by trustworthy journalists that this is not usual behavior for an aerospace company. Much less normal for an aerospace company that used to be prestigious for its engineering excellence…
My point is more that: the engines are built by a different company, the tickets are sold by different companies, the airports are run by different companies. I am not making a distinction between large aircraft and medium aircraft, I am saying that Boeing is cog in a much larger wheel, and market dynamics dictate much more than meets the eye. As I mentioned, I am not on Boeing's side and the cost cutting is obviously having impacts. We are arguing about the idea that you think it is a simple fix and common sense fix, and I promise you it isn't. But if I am wrong, I guess I hope to see you in the boardroom soon!
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.
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.
Totally agree, but the truth is that it is hard to say that the public has lost trust in Boeing when more people than ever are in the air. The peanut gallery is on to something, and Boeing is losing orders, but it doesn't seem to be enough to actually change anything.
> it is hard to say that the public has lost trust in Boeing
I've temporarily lost trust in them until they get their shit together. Airplanes are only safe because manufacturing and maintainence has been done diligently over the past couple decades and with sufficient attention to prevention of known hazards. As soon as that diligence disappears, airplanes can become unsafe, very quickly. If an accident could have been prevented by diligence, I lose trust.
I've been flying but avoiding Boeing aircraft in the past few months, until we get to the bottom of this. Many of my friends are doing the same.
I've also had multiple pilots explicitly announce that "this is not a 737 Max" or something to that effect.
"Lost trust" is a complicated matter. I think I have list a great deal of trust in Boeing, and try to avoid 737 max and 787 planes when I fly, but if flights with those planesc are the only reasonable choices, I'll still go. The probability of injury or death is still fantastically low. Maybe my views on that will change over time. We'll see.
The bottom line is that I have places to go, and if my risk tolerance was zero, that would be a very difficult way to live my life.
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?
A lot of safety related improvements(at least in the US) are also due to the FAA and generally the open process of anonymously reporting issues on flights. Each crash has also been meticulously investigated and vast improvements were put in place. The reality is that the most dangerous times on a flight are take off and landing, which is also where human judgement and process plays a large part.
As far as breaking out of a duopoly, I don't know the path for that, as the barrier to entry to building commercial planes is sky high, but I do think one more player would be a net benefit.
It's not a fair comparison since the A350 is newer, has less planes in operation and less flight cycles. It does have 1 hull loss with 0 fatalities due to human error either in the ATC or another plane that resulted in a crash - nothing to do with the A350 or its crew in any way outside of its and their good management of the crash (the plane composite materials delayed the fire long enough for the crew to be able to perform a perfect evacuation and save everyone).
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.
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.
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?
I think they meant in the sense of bad things happen to airplanes often enough that you could find what looks like a pattern for any given manufacturer if you looked for it, and bad things happen in armed conflict often enough that you could find what looks like a pattern for any given side in an armed conflict if you looked for it.
Which isn't even to say that Israel and its armed forces are necessarily not behaving poorly in Gaza, rather that it's worth questioning whether we have enough evidence to conclude that they are behaving unusually poorly in Gaza, or if for a number of reasons other than an excess of sympathy for Gazans we are experiencing an unbelievably high level of scrutiny and criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza.
Suppose there's a dragon that comes out of its cave and eats a villager every seven years. A knight passes through the village, sees the dragon carry off someone's wife, and calls the villagers to arms: only for calm reason to prevail, as the village elder points out that the incidence of dragon attacks in that locale has not, when adjusted for the expanding population, and increasingly frequent human-dragon contacts, and the inherent unreliability of wooden house door-plugs, risen above historically expected levels.
" 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.
Pilots are unionized partially so that they have the ability to push back on unsafe practices without retaliation from management. Federal law designates the Pilot in Command as having sole authority for the safe operation of their aircraft, and the union side of things keeps management from being able to retaliate against a pilot for exercising that authority in ways management might find inconvenient.
This sounds more worrying now. When I heard it originally it sounded like a mountain wave. Those are extremely powerful natural downdrafts (or up!) and common in South New Zealand.. They've crashed flights before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911 though that was at mount Fuji in Japan.
But if the plane did this by itself.. wow. The 787 is fly by wire. Worrying. And very bad timing for Boeing.
> The victims even included several survivors of the Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 402 crash. (Note: A plane that crashed the day prior, with only 8 out of 72 people on board surviving)
> Several booked passengers cancelled their tickets at the last moment to see a ninja demonstration. These passengers, Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, Ken Adam, Lewis Gilbert, and Freddie Young, were in Japan scouting locations for the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967).
Coincidences like this are of course bound to happen with large enough numbers of people traveling, but I still find this interesting.
Not sure how I acquired the "common" knowledge that a plane has never crashed before due to turbulence alone, but this looks like an example of such a case!
I think maybe you've misunderstood what the common knowledge said. Turbulence hasn't ripped an airplane apart at altitude, so yea turbulence alone hasn't caused a crash. But anything near terrain is plenty risky (mountain waves, low-level wind shear). If the turbulence makes you drop a couple of hundred feet that's no big deal at 35,000 feet and no matter how bumpy it gets, the wings aren't going to break off. But if you're near the ground (or a mountain), well....
I guess it depends by what you mean by "at altitude"? Most of these accidents did happen below 10.000 feet yes. And the mountain wave phenomenon in New Zealand in particular reaches pretty high. Some glider pilots use it to get up really high, so high some of them got frostbitten.
The good news is that very strong downdrafts, in absolute terms, simply can't happen close to the ground, because the air in question needs somewhere to go.
If the FBW system is getting spurious inputs, that's a Very Bad Thing. But I'm skeptical about CNN reporting from some rando non-aviator being accurate as to what exactly is going on. This is like asking some random person what their doctor or lawyer told them, and expecting them to get it all right.
Or maybe the pilot made a mistake and is trying to save face by blaming the instruments. I suggest waiting for the investigation to figure out what went wrong.
For example, he could have slipped while climbing out of the seat and fell against the control column.
Title is misleading, and should be changed to match the original headline. Pilot has not reported that information directly; this is hearsay from a passenger.
Reminds me of the time my brand new F-250 "crashed" and rebooted. Lost all functionality for almost a minute, completely dropped dead on the road. It rebooted and continued on. Happened one time in five years and ~50k miles.
Heh, yeah. Had a Subaru Forrester decide that something was wrong with the throttle or cruise control or something, and the appropriate response was to ignore the accelerator and just leave the engine at idle. On the freeway. In the middle of a road trip.
Manual "reboot" fixed that one. But "have you tried turning it off and back on again" is not a good answer for an airliner...
I had a Chrysler Pacifica go into limp mode several times due to issues in a CAN bus connector sending bad ECM data. It was very intermittent so service couldn't do anything. Eventually someone in an owner's forum figured it out so I was able to swap out the $5 connector.
That Tesla didn't "completely drop[] dead on the road" like the post you're replying to stated - it just had the non-driving controls go dark for a couple of minutes. Still terrible, and the Nissan Leaf also does it occasionally, though for less time.
Not the same thing, He said the f-250 lost all functionality, including power. The video you posted is just the Tesla screen rebooting, while keeping all driving functionality.
Something tells me that there's going to be a "come to Jesus" meeting soon in the C-suite's future that results in the deployment of a golden parachute.
Engineers probably told to make a golden parachute for the execs.
Engineers love a good challenge. Let's compare tensile strength of gold to silk (the original parachute material): • Ultimate tensile strength of Gold is 220 MPa • degummed natural silk fibers, with a tensile strength of 614 MPa
So approximately just triple the gold thread versus silk thread. Expensive but doable. Gold may add to total weight (parachute + person) to keep floating causing velocity to increase versus silk. Attach warning label: IANA MECHENG.
There will be a scapegoat, and then big bonuses for everyone else for eliminating the bad seed, at the expense of the workers who won't get raises to pay for it all.
On Dec 2nd 2016 the FAA had issued their airworthiness directive AD 2016–24–09 summarizing: "We are adopting a new airworthiness directive (AD) for all The Boeing Company Model 787–8 and 787–9 airplanes. This AD requires repetitive cycling of either the airplane electrical power or the power to the three flight control modules (FCMs). This AD was prompted by a report indicating that all three FCMs might simultaneously reset if continuously powered on for 22 days. We are issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."
I remember being on a 787 not long after they were introduced and after boarding, we had a 20 minute delay because of an equipment problem that required "rebooting the plane" (the pilot's words). They did a full power shutoff, the cabin lights went off for a few minutes (and the cabin quickly warmed up because the A/C was off and the electronic window shades turned clear), then about 20 minutes later the pilot said everything was good and we were ready for departure. The rest of the flight was uneventful.
The first versions of the Dreamliner had some kind of software bug that ended up generating a requirement of a hard reboot every X hours until it could be fixed. I don’t know if I would have the guts to board the plane after seeing that!
Given that all we have is hearsay, and we've seen many incidents like this in the past that were caused by "clear air turbulence" ... I'm going to default to assuming it was not a mechanical defect in the plane until we know otherwise. It is by far the most likely answer.
In the Air France flight 11 [0] situation the pilots thought they were having instrument and control issues, they had to go around, and there was much panic in the cockpit. It turned out the entire thing was pilot induced and the aircraft was fine. Because of Boeing's massive failures on the minds of everyone it'll be interesting to see if this was truly an instrumentation failure or something else.
If you read the final incident report[1] from BEA, you'll see that there was a hardware failure - the control yokes got desynchronised from one another which isn't supposed to happen, and the pilots were therefore unaware of conflicting inputs. Worst of all, Boeing doesn't warn in any way if that happens, because why would they? Airbuses (which don't have synchronised sticks) have "dual input" warnings audio and visual warnings.
They should have communicated better, but we've seen this many times - in panic situations or under pressure, communication is hard.
Ah, since I see the peanut gallery needs some education.
the control yokes got desynchronised from one another which isn't supposed to happen
No, that's precisely what's supposed to happen. Seriously. On an Airbus with sidesticks opposing inputs get you a dual input warning and have a button to lock out the other set of controls, and the computers just average the inputs. On a Boeing with yokes (e.g. the 777 in question) the way you overcome opposing inputs is simply to pull harder. Past a certain point (I want to say about 50 lb of force), the torque tube linking the controls "breaks" and the controls are desynchronized. If memory serves that means each pilot gets control of the elevator on one side.
Worst of all, Boeing doesn't warn in any way if that happens, because why would they?
This is also wildly inaccurate. The yokes are mechanically connected up until you apply enough force to break the connection. The feedback you get as a result serves as a warning. Airbus uses the aural and visual warnings because their sidesticks aren't backfed and you'd otherwise have no idea what the other pilot is doing.
There was no hardware failure. Air France simply trains their pilots to a very low standard compared to other airlines.
Don't think I like the news article structure where the reporter spends half the article listing everything bad that happened recently, that isn't actually a cause of the event, but is just there to make you feel bad about who they've decided to make the article about.
Anyone have the tail number for the airplane involved? Is it CC-BGG? Wondering if there's any way to tell if this is one of the 787s built in South Carolina or in Washington state.
Boeing news … meanwhile doors or flying off planes, planes are dropping mid flight … and the whistleblower is dead. What a strange time. I’m afraid of airplanes (made by Boeing) now.
For those who haven't read the article: this was a severe failure, the plan dropped altitude suddenly, the pilot had no control, and people in the flight were literally tossed around.
> About 50 people were injured in the incident, with one person in serious condition, emergency services said.
But passengers are notoriously clueless, to the point that "there was a go around and I thought we were all going to die" is practically a meme in aviation circles. Wait a few days and see what comes to light once it's investigated.
Oh wow I was expecting some really bad turbulence. Saw the WSJ video of the passenger who mentioned that the pilot told him “he lost his instruments”, how does this even happen aren’t they supposed to have redundancy.
The Boeing story is starting to sound a bit like the crime-in-cities story. We always can find some examples somewhere due to sheer volume of Boeing planes and people in cities. However, both are very safe.
We have a social problem of embracing speculation, misinformation and disinformation and movements that are little more than angry mobs, and of treating with contempt an adherence to facts and rationality. With ever more information out there, and ever more speculation, mis- and disinformation, we need to utilize the latter - the facts and rationality - more than ever. They are proven tools for distinguishing fact from all the fictions we humans have some urge to embrace.
I still think Boeing has legitimate liability and responsibility, and needs to fix their manufacturing and safety situations. Airplane manufacturing can't respond only when things get worse.
Not really. No airplane was ever grounded by the FAA since the 1970s, when they grounded the McDonnell Douglas DC-10.
Since the merger, the FAA has grounded both of Boeing's new planes (The 787 Dreamliner and the 737 Max).
Boeing's safety record is objectively declining. They are shipping out airplanes with safety issues that are being found "in production". This is why their planes are being grounded (something that never happened to Boeing pre-merger).
Number of groundings depends on the subjective judgement of FAA employees. It's not useful as an objective measure.
Christ, Boeing planes used to just spontaneously explode back in the 90s, and the only reason more people weren't killed was that two of the three had the good fortune to happen on the ground.
Modern airplanes should be compared to what is possible in modern times with modern safety standards. If you want an objective measure then compare the Boeing Max planes to their Airbus equivalent: the A320neo.
The A320 neo has had zero fatalities. This is an objective measure that Boeing should be compared against.
AFAIK there have also been zero manufacturing defects at the scale of missing bolts on a door panel.
I'm skeptical of this account - Newton's First Law says that an object in motion stays in motion. Losing instruments for a second doesn't cause a change in momentum - that would have needed to be a stall, a change in trim, or an external weather event such as a downdraft. A stall would have been accompanied by a stall recovery procedure involving attitude + thrust changes, and nobody seems to be reporting that in the article.
I'm no professional, but if I had to guess - the plane got hit by a hard gust, and the gust triggered a short in some electronics that caused the screens to go blank. (So, the opposite direction of causality).
>Newton's First Law says that an object in motion stays in motion.
How is this relevant? There is turbulence and gravity, this isn't "empty" space.
> Losing instruments for a second doesn't cause a change in momentum
No, but modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable.
If the account is accurate sounds like quite literally everything had a blip for a second, which would have prevented computer-intervention when encountering severe turbulence, or worse, flight control surfaces became "stuck."
modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable
Small nitpick, commercial jets are designed to be aerodynamically stable. If controls froze briefly, the plane would continue to be stable, flying as it was when the controls froze. You'd need to add in the turbulence or some external force for it to be a problem. That said, the 787 is 100% dependent on electronic controls, so anything more than brief loss of controls would lead to a crash.
>You'd need to add in the turbulence or some external force for it to be a problem.
Which is what I said :). The computer controlled flight control surfaces aren't just keeping the aircraft aerodynamically stable, they're keeping it comfortable/safe which is what "stable" means in this context (since it's a passenger jet).
Dropping 500 feet is nothing for the aircraft. That's a different story for the passengers.
Yes, I wanted to draw the distinction between other types of aircraft, like some military jets, which compromise stability (either for performance or stealth), and need the computer controlled surfaces to fly straight. I take stable to mean, not unexpectedly changing speed and direction, not just smooth.
> No, but modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable.
Most aircraft outside of fighter jets are aerodynamically stable. Loss of powered flight would mean the airplane will glide (in nominal operation). Even the 737MAX7/9 aircraft are still stable (although that brings up defining exactly what we mean by aerodynamically stable... )
That's not what aerodynamically stables means. Anything external that would cause a 787 to drop 500 feet is probably going to do that with or without the flight computers working.
In the case of military aircraft, they quite literally can't glide or maintain stable flight without the flight computer actively managing the control surfaces.
A 787 is perfectly capable of flying in steady state should the computer glitch.
If passengers were touching the ceiling, it would have required either a very powerful downdraft or control surface inputs leading to greater-than gravity acceleration downwards. Very interested to hear the investigation into this.
Murphy's law, "anything that can go wrong (eventually) will go wrong". Gusts triggering a short that blocks out fly-by-wire would be even more worrying than poor coding. You know landings generally have lots of gusts and would be a terrible time to locked out.
It's not that there necessarily isn't a thru-line to these stories. And I read "Flying Blind" like everyone else and share the popular opinion of Boeing's modern engineering culture. But there's basically no content in these stories. There are experts somewhere that can put events like this into context, but they're not cited and the story isn't written around that kind of analysis, so we're left to supply it ourselves. Human nature suggests that the blanks we'll fill in will be a disaster movie, because that's "fun" to think about.
https://avherald.com/h?article=5138ccfe&opt=0