Boeing 737 Max
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Friday, August 21, 2026 17:40
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Quote:The FAA could certify the 737 Max as ... cargo planes that aren't allowed to carry more than the pilots. To protect the two pilots, the planes could be modified to have ejector seats like on the B-1 or B-2 bombers. That's one way the problem could be solved about how to get people to take Boeing's word for fixing the plane.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Saw a story that Boeing had completed their software upgrade a few days ago.
Wonder how many people will take their word for it.
And how can their CEO remain in that position, after this disaster?
www.wired.com/story/utc-aces5-ejection-seat-b2-bomber
www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/05/18/air-force-b-1-lan
cer-blew-escape-hatch-in-emergency-landing-but-its-seat-did-not-eject
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change
At first, MCAS — Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System — wasn’t a very risky piece of software. The system would trigger only in rare conditions, nudging down the nose of the plane to make the Max handle more smoothly during high-speed moves. And it relied on data from multiple sensors measuring the plane’s acceleration and its angle to the wind, helping to ensure that the software didn’t activate erroneously.
To ensure it didn’t misfire, engineers initially designed MCAS to trigger when the plane exceeded at least two separate thresholds, according to three people who worked on the 737 Max. One involved the plane’s angle to the wind, and the other involved so-called G-force, or the force on the plane that typically comes from accelerating. The Max would need to hit an exceedingly high G-force that passenger planes would probably never experience.
Then Boeing engineers revised the system, expanding its role to avoid stalls in all types of situations. They allowed the software to operate throughout much more of the flight. They enabled it to aggressively push down the nose of the plane. And they used only data about the plane’s angle, removing some of the safeguards.
The current and former employees, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigations, said that after the first crash, they were stunned to discover the revised MCAS relied on a single sensor.
“That’s nuts,” said an engineer who helped design MCAS.
“I’m shocked,” said a safety analyst who scrutinized it.
“To me, it seems like somebody didn’t understand what they were doing,” said an engineer who assessed the system’s sensors.
Regulators didn’t conduct a formal safety assessment of the new version of MCAS. William Schubbe, a senior F.A.A. official, said, “The way the system was presented to the F.A.A., the Boeing Corporation said this thing is so transparent to the pilot that there’s no need to demonstrate any kind of failing.”
Boeing declined to say whether it had conducted a new safety analysis of the revised MCAS.
More at www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/boeing-737-max-crash.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Boeing Co learned that a cockpit warning light on its 737 MAX jetliner was defective in 2017 but decided to defer fixing it until 2020. Either save lives now or save money until 2020.
The defective warning light alerts pilots when two sensors that measure the angle between the airflow and the wing disagree. Faulty “angle of attack” data is suspected of playing a role in two deadly crashes involving Boeing’s best-selling 737 MAX in Indonesia in October 2018 and in Ethiopia in March 2019.
Boeing decided in November 2017 to defer a software update to correct the so-called AOA Disagree alert defect until 2020, three years after discovering the flaw, U.S. Congressmen Peter DeFazio and Rick Larsen said in a press release on Friday. Boeing only accelerated this schedule after the Lion Air accident in Indonesia, they added.
Boeing has said it discovered the problem in 2017, soon after it began delivering its top-selling 737 MAX aircraft to customers. But it did not inform the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about the defect until after the Lion Air crash more than one year later, the lawmakers said.
www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737/boeing-delayed-fix-of-defective-
737-max-warning-light-for-three-years-u-s-lawmakers-idUSKCN1T8284
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How Boeing’s Bean-Counters Courted the 737 MAX Disaster. The company fell into tight-fisted hands — with fatal consequences.
www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-bean-counters-courted-the-737-max-dis
aster
The decision to launch the MAX was taken by James McNerney, the company’s first boss without a background in aviation, with a résumé that included Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, General Electric and 3M. At GE McNerney was schooled under the hard-nosed bottom-line philosophy of Jack Welch.
When McNerney retired as chairman from Boeing at the age of 66 in 2016 he left with $35.8 million, part of it from selling stock but he still retained $238 million in stock and was awarded a pension of $3.2 million for 15 years. (Boeing production line workers had an annual bonus equivalent to nine days of pay.)
The days when a single generation of brilliant Boeing engineers doubled the speed at which airliners flew and created the world’s leading airplane company were long gone. It’s true that the costs of making that giant leap meant that Boeing was never a stellar stock market performer, and it took enormous risks. Launching the 747 jumbo nearly bankrupted the company. And Boeing executives were modestly rewarded compared to today’s corporate norms.
It was not a culture that McNerney thought admirable. He told financial analysts that running a company on the basis of “every 25 years a big moonshot, produce a 707 or a 787, that’s the wrong way to pursue this business. The more-for-less world will not let you produce moonshots.”
But the 737 MAX demonstrates that—regardless of whether you believe in moonshots - the engineering ethic at Boeing has yielded too much power to the profit motive. Saying that the 737 is suboptimal is too technically polite. It doesn’t describe the seriousness of the continual compromises made to avoid launching a new model. Boeing knew that the MAX could never match the quality of an all-new airplane.
Boeing had never taken that route with any airplane before; it was not part of the company’s tradition to knowingly settle for second-best.
As a result, the bitter irony is that no airplane has made more money for Boeing than the 737, and in the company’s 100-year history no airplane has so jeopardized the company’s reputation.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:What is this?
Originally posted by second:
How Boeing’s Bean-Counters Courted the 737 MAX Disaster. The company fell into tight-fisted hands — with fatal consequences.
www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-bean-counters-courted-the-737-max-dis
aster
The decision to launch the MAX was taken by James McNerney, the company’s first boss without a background in aviation, with a résumé that included Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, General Electric and 3M. At GE McNerney was schooled under the hard-nosed bottom-line philosophy of Jack Welch.
When McNerney retired as chairman from Boeing at the age of 66 in 2016 he left with $35.8 million, part of it from selling stock but he still retained $238 million in stock and was awarded a pension of $3.2 million for 15 years. (Boeing production line workers had an annual bonus equivalent to nine days of pay.)
The days when a single generation of brilliant Boeing engineers doubled the speed at which airliners flew and created the world’s leading airplane company were long gone. It’s true that the costs of making that giant leap meant that Boeing was never a stellar stock market performer, and it took enormous risks. Launching the 747 jumbo nearly bankrupted the company. And Boeing executives were modestly rewarded compared to today’s corporate norms.
It was not a culture that McNerney thought admirable. He told financial analysts that running a company on the basis of “every 25 years a big moonshot, produce a 707 or a 787, that’s the wrong way to pursue this business. The more-for-less world will not let you produce moonshots.”
But the 737 MAX demonstrates that—regardless of whether you believe in moonshots - the engineering ethic at Boeing has yielded too much power to the profit motive. Saying that the 737 is suboptimal is too technically polite. It doesn’t describe the seriousness of the continual compromises made to avoid launching a new model. Boeing knew that the MAX could never match the quality of an all-new airplane.
Boeing had never taken that route with any airplane before; it was not part of the company’s tradition to knowingly settle for second-best.
As a result, the bitter irony is that no airplane has made more money for Boeing than the 737, and in the company’s 100-year history no airplane has so jeopardized the company’s reputation.
This seems like the best post I've seen from you in a very long time, or forever.
Are you ill? Do you have fever, or cough due to cold?
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The pilot who orchestrated the dramatic plane landing in the Hudson River 10 years ago told a congressional panel Wednesday that he can see how crews would have struggled during the recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes after he spent time in a simulator running recreations of the doomed flights.
"I recently experienced all these warnings in a 737 MAX flight simulator during recreations of the accident flights. Even knowing what was going to happen, I could see how crews could have run out of time before they could have solved the problems," Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger told the House Transportation Committee during a hearing on the embattled plane model.
Sullenberger, whose "Miracle on the Hudson" landing in 2009 saved the lives of all 155 people on board, told the panel that it's important planes don't have "inadvertent traps" for pilots.
www.cnn.com/2019/06/19/politics/chesley-sullenberger-boeing-737-max-sc
enario/index.html
"We should all want pilots to experience these challenging situations for the first time in a simulator, not in flight with passengers and crew on board," Sullenberger told lawmakers.
"Some (U.S.) crews would have recognized it in time to recover, but some would not have," Carey testified. Sullenberger agreed, saying it's unlikely that more experienced pilots would have had different outcomes, adding, "we shouldn't have to expect pilots to compensate for flawed designs."
"These two recent crashes happened in foreign countries," said Sullenberger. "But if we do not address all the important issues and factors, they can and will happen here."
www.npr.org/2019/06/19/734248714/pilots-criticize-boeing-saying-737-ma
x-should-never-have-been-approved
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Are you ill?
Originally posted by second:
The pilot who orchestrated the dramatic plane landing in the Hudson River 10 years ago told a congressional panel Wednesday that he can see how crews would have struggled during the recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes after he spent time in a simulator running recreations of the doomed flights.
"I recently experienced all these warnings in a 737 MAX flight simulator during recreations of the accident flights. Even knowing what was going to happen, I could see how crews could have run out of time before they could have solved the problems," Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger told the House Transportation Committee during a hearing on the embattled plane model.
Sullenberger, whose "Miracle on the Hudson" landing in 2009 saved the lives of all 155 people on board, told the panel that it's important planes don't have "inadvertent traps" for pilots.
www.cnn.com/2019/06/19/politics/chesley-sullenberger-boeing-737-max-sc
enario/index.html
"We should all want pilots to experience these challenging situations for the first time in a simulator, not in flight with passengers and crew on board," Sullenberger told lawmakers.
"Some (U.S.) crews would have recognized it in time to recover, but some would not have," Carey testified. Sullenberger agreed, saying it's unlikely that more experienced pilots would have had different outcomes, adding, "we shouldn't have to expect pilots to compensate for flawed designs."
"These two recent crashes happened in foreign countries," said Sullenberger. "But if we do not address all the important issues and factors, they can and will happen here."
www.npr.org/2019/06/19/734248714/pilots-criticize-boeing-saying-737-ma
x-should-never-have-been-approved
This seems to be the only thread in which you make pertinent and sensible posts.
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Fix for the 737 Max needs its own software fix
The software fix Boeing was earlier working on was supposed to prevent the anti-stall system from kicking in on data from a single sensor, recalibrate how powerfully it worked, and limit the number of times it could trigger. But tests of the software fix showed that in some cases, substantial upper body strength would be required to fully comply with the recommended emergency checklist. One of the final steps to stabilize the plane requires manually turning a wheel control, but the action of the anti-stall system could potentially make it too difficult to turn in rare cases.
That could mean more time is needed to stabilize the plane than is available — in the two crashes that have occurred the malfunction occurred minutes into the flight at fairly low altitudes, when pilots have just seconds to make critical decisions and act.
Boeing said the newest software fix it’s working on “will reduce pilot workload.” If the software can’t address the issue, it might have to change computer chips in all the 737 Max planes it’s delivered.
https://qz.com/1653879/faa-says-boeing-max-needs-additional-software-f
ix/
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The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has presented Boeing with five major requirements that need to be addressed before the 737 MAX returns to service.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/europe-sets-out-demands-for
-boeing-before-max-can-fly-again
1) Reduce the difficulty manually turning the trim wheel
2) Address the unreliability of Angle of Attack sensors
3) Address the training situation
4) Investigate software issues with a lagging microprocessor
5) The biggest and newest to join the list of problems involves the autopilot system in the aircraft, which reportedly fails to disconnect in some emergency scenarios.
Investigations have concluded that pilots who encounter a stall scenario relating to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) or similar flight control emergencies have difficulty disconnecting the autopilot.
Bloomberg notes the autopilot doesn’t completely disconnect. This could mean the system is designed in a way to work with MCAS so closely it still believes it has greater authority than the pilots.
Having to redesign, or modify, the existing autopilot system would take enormous amounts of time and resources.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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American Airlines said on Sunday it is extending for a fourth time cancellations of about 115 daily flights through November 2 due to the ongoing grounding of the Boeing Co 737 MAX jets.
Southwest Airlines, the world’s largest MAX operator, has removed the aircraft from its scheduling through Oct. 1, and United Airlines Holdings until Nov. 3.
American Airlines cut its annual profit forecast in April, blaming an estimated $350 million hit from the MAX groundings.
American’s chief executive, Doug Parker, has been among the most vocal supporters of the MAX aircraft, saying on June 12 that it was “highly likely” flights would resume by mid-August.
www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airplane-american/american-airline
s-extends-boeing-737-max-cancellations-for-fourth-time-idUSKCN1U90CI
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Boeing 737 MAX Grounding Could Stretch Into 2020 per Wall Street Journal
Boeing Co. 737 MAX planes are unlikely to be ready to carry passengers again until 2020 because of the time it will take to fix flight-control software and complete other steps, an increasing number of government and industry officials say, even as the company strives to get its jet back into service this year. . . .
In late June, Boeing and the FAA disclosed still another flight-control problem on the MAX, involving failure of a microprocessor that meant test pilots couldn’t counteract a potential misfire of MCAS as quickly as required.
Since the 737 MAX and its earlier version, called the 737 NG, share the same flight-control computer, fixes related to the microprocessor also apply to NG models, thousands of which remain in service around the world.
More at www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-737-max-grounding-could-stretch-into-2020-
11563112801?mod=e2tw
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Not only are those other interesting stories and updates not as crucially pivotal as this one, but they also serve to underscore this one, more and more.
Originally posted by second:
How Boeing’s Bean-Counters Courted the 737 MAX Disaster. The company fell into tight-fisted hands — with fatal consequences.
www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-bean-counters-courted-the-737-max-dis
aster
The decision to launch the MAX was taken by James McNerney, the company’s first boss without a background in aviation, with a résumé that included Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, General Electric and 3M. At GE McNerney was schooled under the hard-nosed bottom-line philosophy of Jack Welch.
When McNerney retired as chairman from Boeing at the age of 66 in 2016 he left with $35.8 million, part of it from selling stock but he still retained $238 million in stock and was awarded a pension of $3.2 million for 15 years. (Boeing production line workers had an annual bonus equivalent to nine days of pay.)
The days when a single generation of brilliant Boeing engineers doubled the speed at which airliners flew and created the world’s leading airplane company were long gone. It’s true that the costs of making that giant leap meant that Boeing was never a stellar stock market performer, and it took enormous risks. Launching the 747 jumbo nearly bankrupted the company. And Boeing executives were modestly rewarded compared to today’s corporate norms.
It was not a culture that McNerney thought admirable. He told financial analysts that running a company on the basis of “every 25 years a big moonshot, produce a 707 or a 787, that’s the wrong way to pursue this business. The more-for-less world will not let you produce moonshots.”
But the 737 MAX demonstrates that—regardless of whether you believe in moonshots - the engineering ethic at Boeing has yielded too much power to the profit motive. Saying that the 737 is suboptimal is too technically polite. It doesn’t describe the seriousness of the continual compromises made to avoid launching a new model. Boeing knew that the MAX could never match the quality of an all-new airplane.
Boeing had never taken that route with any airplane before; it was not part of the company’s tradition to knowingly settle for second-best.
As a result, the bitter irony is that no airplane has made more money for Boeing than the 737, and in the company’s 100-year history no airplane has so jeopardized the company’s reputation.
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Quote:Only hundreds of 737 MAX are grounded, but if the FAA decided to ground thousands of 737 NG, it could drive Boeing out of business. Since the 737 MAX and its earlier version, the 737 NG, share the same flight-control computer, fixes related to the microprocessor also apply to NG models, thousands of which remain in service around the world.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Not only are those other interesting stories and updates not as crucially pivotal as this one, but they also serve to underscore this one, more and more.
More at www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-737-max-grounding-could-stretch-into-2020-
11563112801?mod=e2tw
As of 31 May 2019, a total of 7,097 737NG aircraft have been ordered, of which 7,031 have been delivered.
As of March 2019, a total of 393 737 MAX have been built.
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Boeing CEO says its 737 Max just needs a quick software fix. Aviation experts disagree.
David Strauss from Barclays asked Boeing's CEO, “You talked about a software fix for this latest issue that the FAA identified. Are you for sure it’s a software fix at this point and not also potentially a hardware fix?”
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg repeated the company’s party line. It was confident that what was needed was a software update, rather than any change of hardware, he told Strauss.
In FAA simulator tests last month, test pilots experienced a “catastrophic failure,” in which they were unable to regain control of the plane. Under the same circumstances, an actual aircraft might have been lost mid-flight. The plane’s microprocessor speed was said to be a contributing factor, with the plane’s new control software potentially triggering an automatic nosedive.
Sources told Reuters it was still unclear whether a software upgrade could fix the problem or whether the plane would need a more complex, hardware-based solution.
The software relies on systems known for their propensity to fail (angle-of-attack indicators) and did not appear to include even rudimentary provisions to cross-check the outputs of the angle-of-attack sensor against other sensors, or even the other angle-of-attack sensor. None of the above should have passed muster. None of the above should have passed the ‘OK’ pencil of the most junior engineering staff.
More at https://qz.com/1674857/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Rudder Cable Failure – an internal battle at the F.A.A.
www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/business/boeing-737-max-faa.html
F.A.A. engineers found they had little power when they raised concerns.
Early on, engineers at the F.A.A. discovered a problem with one of the most important new features of the Max: its engines. The Max featured more fuel-efficient engines, with a larger fan and a high-pressure turbine. But the bigger, more complex engines could do more damage if they broke apart midair.
The F.A.A. engineers were particularly concerned about engine pieces hitting the cables that control the rudder, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal agency documents. A rudder cable severed after takeoff would bring down the jet.
The F.A.A. engineers suggested a couple solutions, three of the people said. The company could add a second set of cables or install a computerized system for controlling the rudder.
Boeing did not want to make a change, according to internal F.A.A. documents reviewed by The Times. A redesign could have caused delays.
Most of the F.A.A. engineers working on the issue insisted the change was necessary for safety reasons, according to internal agency emails and documents. But their managers sided with Boeing.
F.A.A. managers conceded that the Max “does not meet” agency guidelines “for protecting flight controls,” according to an agency document. But the requested changes would interfere with Boeing’s timeline. The managers wrote that it would be “impractical at this late point in the program,” for the company to resolve the issue.
Engineers at the F.A.A. were demoralized. “During meetings regarding this issue the cost to Boeing to upgrade the design was discussed,” the engineer wrote.
An F.A.A. panel found managers siding with Boeing had created “an environment of mistrust that hampers the ability of the agency to work effectively.” The panel cautioned against allowing Boeing to handle this kind of approval, saying “the company has a vested interest in minimizing costs and schedule impact.”
But by then the panel’s findings were moot. Managers at the agency had already given Boeing the right to approve the rudder cables, and they were installed on the Max.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Southwest Airlines, which operates an all-Boeing 737 fleet, said last week it plans to take its new Max planes out of its schedule until early January.
Ryanair executives expected 58 of the planes for the summer of 2020, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary warned on Monday. “It may well move to 20, it could move to 10, and it could well move to zero if Boeing don’t get their s--- together pretty quickly with the regulator,” O’Leary said.
www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/ryanair-rails-against-boeing-for-aircraft-dela
ys-from-737-max-grounding.html
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Newly stringent FAA tests spur a fundamental hardware redesign of Boeing’s 737 MAX flight controls
www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/newly-stringent-faa-tes
ts-spur-a-fundamental-software-redesign-of-737-max-flight-controls/
In sessions in a Boeing flight simulator in Seattle, two FAA engineering test pilots, typically ex-military test pilots, and a pilot from the FAA’s Flight Standards Aircraft Evaluation Group (AEG), typically an ex-airline pilot, set up a session to test 33 different scenarios that might be sparked by a rare, random microprocessor fault in the jet’s flight-control computer.
This was standard testing that’s typically done in certifying an airplane, but this time it was deliberately set up to produce specific effects similar to what happened on the Lion Air and Ethiopian flights.
The fault occurs when bits inside the microprocessor are randomly flipped from 0 to 1 or vice versa. This is a known phenomenon that can happen due to cosmic rays striking the circuitry. Electronics inside aircraft are particularly vulnerable to such radiation because they fly at high altitudes and high geographic latitudes where the rays are more intense. . . .
The FAA pilots took a further step. They flew the same fault scenario again, this time deliberately allowing the fault to run for some time before responding. This time, one of the three pilots didn’t manage to recover and lost the aircraft. . . .
Prior to that, Boeing had classified this failure mode as a “major fault,” a category that can be mitigated by flight-crew action. The one pilot’s failure to recover immediately changed the classification to “catastrophic,” and FAA regulations require that no single fault can be permitted to lead to a catastrophic outcome. That meant Boeing must fix it and eliminate the possibility. . . .
“There are active means of protecting against bit flips,” said retired Boeing electronics manager Schaeffer. “We always built it into our own software.”
One standard way to fix such a problem is to have a second independent microprocessor inside the same flight-control computer check the output of the first. If the second processor output disagrees with that of the first processor for some specific automated flight control, then no automated action is initiated and the pilot must fly manually.
“Now it takes two processors to fail to get the bad result,” the person familiar with the tests said. “You are no longer in the realm of a single point failure.” . . .
David Hinds, a retired Boeing flight controls and autopilot expert, said that clearly “something got missed” in the original MAX certification of MCAS and now this microprocessor fault.
“I’d like to think you’d catch this on first pass,” said Hinds. “They should have looked harder at some of this.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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They should revoke that last CEO's retirement package, or force him to remain invested in Boeing stock, during it's decline.
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Quote:The first flight of the 737 was April 9, 1967. The good news is that after 52 years of flogging a tired old design, the next iteration of a Boeing plane the same size as the 737 won't be based upon the ancient and decrepit 737. Instead, it will be a brand-new design with absolutely nothing carried over from the 737, except it has got two wings and one tail.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
They should revoke that last CEO's retirement package, or force him to remain invested in Boeing stock, during it's decline.
Boeing Yellowstone Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Yellowstone_Project
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Four-Second Catastrophe: How Boeing Doomed the 737 MAX
www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-four-second-catastrophe-how-boei
ng-doomed-the-737-max/ar-AAFTIuc
Four minutes into the flight, the pilots finally touched on the source of their problems, simultaneously calling out “Left alpha vane!” Erroneous signals from that malfunctioning sensor tricked the onboard computers into believing the jetliner’s nose was angled too high, causing MCAS to push it down again and again. But it was too late. Flight 302 nose-dived, hitting the ground.
In designing the flight controls for the 737 MAX, Boeing assumed that pilots trained on existing safety procedures should be able to sift through the jumble of contradictory warnings and take the proper action 100% of the time within four seconds.
Boeing bet nearly everything on those four ticks of the clock. The company’s belief in its engineering, and its reliance on pilots to be flawless cogs, enabled Boeing to speed the latest iteration of its most important airliner to market.
FAA rules typically assume the human will intervene reliably every time, but that is an unrealistic assumption for human performance.
In 1996, an FAA study of a subset of experienced propeller-plane pilots found that only one out of 26 reacted to a stabilizer emergency within four seconds.
A 2008 study for the FAA, one of the most recent, found commercial pilots in simulator tests sometimes became confused when confronted with unfamiliar failures and reiterated that certification standards were unrealistic.
In meetings with Boeing officials at an FAA office in the Seattle area around 2013, the plane maker described the system as simply a few lines of software code, according to Richard Reed, a former FAA engineer who participated in those discussions. Boeing outlined how a single sensor that measured the angle of the plane's nose would trigger MCAS, Mr. Reed recalled, but argued a failure wasn't likely and the system would kick in only in extreme conditions.
“Let’s quit messing around about the chances of this happening being rare,” Mr. Reed remembered saying. “If it can happen, it’s going to happen.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A panel of international air-safety experts is set to condemn the U.S. approval process for Boeing’s 737 MAX jets, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The task force is finishing its report into how the flawed jets were allowed to fly in the first place, and it’s expected to call out the Federal Aviation Administration for what it reportedly describes as a lack of clarity and transparency in the way it allowed Boeing to assess the safety of certain flight-control features.
It will reportedly conclude that essential design changes didn’t get enough attention from the FAA. The report will also say the agency didn’t share enough data with foreign authorities during its original approval of the MAX two years ago, and relied on mistaken assumptions about how pilots would react to flight-control emergencies.
The report will be released in the next few weeks and will be the first official outside review of MAX certification since the fleet was grounded around the world following two crashes.
www.thedailybeast.com/boeing-737-max-international-panel-of-experts-wi
ll-condemn-faa-jet-approval-says-report
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Didn't that all happen under St Obama's tenure?
The insane never-Trumpers will be driven even more insane in the wash/ rinse/ spin/ repeat/ cycle they mistake for reality.
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Quote:The Republican controlled Congress cut the budget to the FAA. The result? Plane crashes. Republicans cut the IRS budget. The result? $500 billion per year increase in tax cheating.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Didn't that all happen under St Obama's tenure?
“Unfortunately, we no longer have a stable, predictable funding stream, and this uncertainty has caused serious problems in the system,” Rinaldi testified. “We have experienced 24 short-term extensions of authorization, a partial shutdown of the FAA, a complete government shutdown and numerous threats of government shutdowns.”
www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/white-house-endorses-
plan-to-remove-30000-faa-workers-from-federal-payroll/2017/03/16/ce4a4e3c-099c-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Didn't that all happen under St Obama's tenure?
Quote:Didn't St Obama sign that budget? Doesn't the buck stop with the President?
Originally posted by SLOPPY:
The Republican controlled Congress cut the budget to the FAA. The result? Plane crashes. Republicans cut the IRS budget.
The insane never-Trumpers will be driven even more insane in the wash/ rinse/ spin/ repeat/ cycle they mistake for reality.
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Quote:First point: "The buck stops here" is President Harry S Truman's motto. Truman nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians. Killing all those innocents did NOT bring WWII to a close, no matter what you been told by fools and ignoramuses, and it certainly did start an arms race that cost Truman's country more than $10 trillion and may destroy the world. Obviously, the buck does not stop with the President, for if it did, Truman deserves punishment.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Didn't St Obama sign that budget? Doesn't the buck stop with the President?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States
Second point: Congress writes the budget; not the President. I have heard a thousand times the President blamed for what Congress did. If the President does NOT sign the budget, it is equivalent to the President nuking the Federal Government. See Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Truman for how destructive that is.
Third point: From years of experience, I know you will never stop misunderstanding how government works and who is responsible for what, 1kiki. Not understanding is one of your defining characteristics, along with your feeling that you know what you don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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If nukes weren't made in WWII, they eventually would have been made, which would have led to an inevitable arms race.
It's the main idea behind the theory that even if we're not alone in the universe, there's almost zero chance we'll ever be visited by anybody because the likelihood that any sentient race would develop space travel sophisticated enough to explore other planets before annihilating themselves is almost nil.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:First point: "The buck stops here" is President Harry S Truman's motto. Truman nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians. Killing all those innocents did NOT bring WWII to a close, no matter what you been told by fools and ignoramuses, and it certainly did start an arms race that cost Truman's country more than $10 trillion and may destroy the world. Obviously, the buck does not stop with the President, for if it did, Truman deserves punishment.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Didn't St Obama sign that budget? Doesn't the buck stop with the President?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States
Second point: Congress writes the budget; not the President. I have heard a thousand times the President blamed for what Congress did. If the President does NOT sign the budget, it is equivalent to the President nuking the Federal Government. See Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Truman for how destructive that is.
Third point: From years of experience, I know you will never stop misunderstanding how government works and who is responsible for what, 1kiki. Not understanding is one of your defining characteristics, along with your feeling that you know what you don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Why don't you stop blaming Trump for everything then.
Seems you do a lot of picking and choosing what rules you follow and when you follow them.
And you're the poster child for Dunning Kruger Syndrome. Not the good one either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Trump came to Boeing's defense after the first and second crashes. He suggested rebranding that model so that passengers would forget what happened. It was only after every country in the world had banned the 737 MAX that Trump stopped pressuring the FAA to keep the 737 MAX flying.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Why don't you stop blaming Trump for everything then.
Seems you do a lot of picking and choosing what rules you follow and when you follow them.
And you're the poster child for Dunning Kruger Syndrome. Not the good one either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
How Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created The 737 MAX Disaster
Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”
Sorscher, a physicist who’d worked at Boeing more than two decades and had led negotiations there for the engineers’ union, had become obsessed with management culture. He said he didn’t previously imagine Boeing’s brave new managerial caste creating a problem as dumb and glaringly obvious as MCAS (or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, as a handful of software wizards had dubbed it).
In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.
It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators: AIG famously told investors it was hard for management to contemplate “a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions” that would, a few months later, lose the firm well over $100 billion—but hey, the risk management algorithms had been wrong. A couple of years later, a single JP Morgan trader lost $6 billion because someone had programmed one of the cells in the bank’s risk management spreadsheet to divide two numbers by their sum instead of their average. Boeing was not, of course, a hedge fund: It was way better, a stock that had more than doubled since the Trump inauguration, outperforming the Dow in the 22 months before Lion Air 610 plunged into the Java Sea.
And so there was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November 2018, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made — and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.
Here, a generation after Boeing’s initial lurch into financialization, was the entirely predictable outcome of the byzantine process by which investment capital becomes completely abstracted from basic protocols of production and oversight: a flight-correction system that was essentially jerry-built to crash a plane. “If you’re looking for an example of late stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it,” said longtime aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia, “it’s a pretty good one.”
“As an investment professional, allow me to inform Congress as to how Boeing has viewed this whole crisis.” Paul Njoroge laid out the sequence of 737 MAX orders, ten-figure stock buybacks, and dividend hikes.
“Could that be the reason Boeing did
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lol... oh.
You want to go back to the thread title now, huh?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Trump came to Boeing's defense after the first and second crashes. He suggested rebranding that model so that passengers would forget what happened. It was only after every country in the world had banned the 737 MAX that Trump stopped pressuring the FAA to keep the 737 MAX flying. 6ixStringJack, you voted for that jackass Trump.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol... oh.
You want to go back to the thread title now, huh?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I don't fly.
I don't care.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Didn't St Obama sign that budget? Doesn't the buck stop with the President?
Quote:So? What does that have to do with your idiocies about Trump being responsible for everything bad and St Obama responsible for nothing? What does that have to do with your huge and morally corrupt double standards?
Originally posted by SLOPPY:
First point: "The buck stops here" is President Harry S Truman's motto. Truman nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Quote:Not only is that claim dishonest, it's severely factually wrong. The OMB (executive branch - in case you don't know it that's the presidential branch) creates the budget and proposes it to Congress. "The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 requires the President to submit the budget to Congress for each fiscal year". Then the CBO studies it and each house may or may not pass a version which may or may not be amended. "There is no obligation for either or both houses of Congress to pass a budget resolution. There may not be a resolution every year; if none is established, the previous year's resolution remains in force. For example, the Senate has not passed a budget resolution for FY2011, FY2012, or FY2013".
Originally posted by SLOPPY:
Second point: Congress writes the budget; not the President.
Quote:
Originally posted by SLOPPY:
I have heard a thousand times the President blamed for what Congress did. If the President does NOT sign the budget, it is equivalent to the President nuking the Federal Government. See Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Truman for how destructive that is.
And then the president may veto the budget - as did Clinton ("Further information on the vetoed appropriations bills in 1995: United States federal government shutdown of 1995 and 1996") and St Obama (December 30, 2009: Vetoed H.J.Res. 64, a joint resolution making further continuing appropriations for fiscal year 2010, and for other purposes. Override attempt failed in House, 143–245, 1 present (260 needed).").
And guess what? The government wasn't annihilated in a governmental nuclear holocaust.
Quote:Jeeze - I don't know SLOPPY.
Originally posted by SLOPPY:
Third point: From years of experience, I know you will never stop misunderstanding how government works and who is responsible for what, 1kiki. Not understanding is one of your defining characteristics, along with your feeling that you know what you don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Isn't it you who posted claims that are entirely wrong?
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
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Anyway - to get back to St Obama somehow not being responsible for the budgets he signed - yanno, especially the ones that underfunded the FAA that led to the manufacturer-driven approval procedure for the 737 Max -
Care to try again, SLOPPY?
The question - how is St Obama not responsible for the budgets he signed?
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
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Federal investigators say the FAA’s Boeing 737 Max inspectors were insufficiently trained
The FAA’s Office of Audit and Evaluation in February said it found that 16 of 22 safety inspectors did not complete formal training while 11 of the 16 lacked flight-instructor certificates.
The FAA told a Senate panel in April 2019 that all Boeing 737 Max inspectors who worked on the Flight Standardization Board that sets pilot training and procedures were qualified, but the Special Counsel’s office said its findings contradicted that.
www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/federal-investigators-faas-boeing-737-max-insp
ectors-were-underqualified.html
The FAA and its European counterpart, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), were also called out for being aware of an unusual method for controlling the Max's nose angle, which may have been an issue in the recent disasters concerning the aircraft, a document shows.
Although the EASA said that the additional procedures and training would "clearly explain" to pilots the need to manipulate a rarely-used manual wheel, these were not listed in the flight manual, according to a copy from American Airlines seen by the Reuters news agency.
The EASA and FAA ultimately determined that the set-up was safe enough for the plane to be certified, however.
In the EASA document, the regulator said simulations showed the electric thumb switches could not keep the 737 MAX properly positioned under certain conditions, including those of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, according to the Indonesian preliminary report and a source with knowledge of the Ethiopian air traffic control recordings.
The flight conditions were similar to those described in the EASA document, a source at Lion Air told Reuters. The source said that training materials before the crash did not say the wheel could be required under those conditions but that Boeing advised the airline about it after the crash.
Boeing declined to comment on the EASA document or its advice to Lion Air, citing the ongoing investigation into the crash.
www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/investigator-inspectors-werent-qualified-73
7-max-work-190925041840797.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Boeing is expected to fix the 737 Max version of MCAS by making it work more like the one designed earlier for the KC-46.
https://qz.com/1718506/boeings-737-max-mcas-has-better-designed-milita
ry-forerunner/
Accident investigators looking into the 737 Max crashes have implicated a key system known as MCAS. Now it appears that a version of the system Boeing created years earlier for a military fuel tanker had a better design.
That’s according to a Wall Street Journal report published today on the system’s history and the push to build safeguards into it for the tanker, known as the KC-46A Pegasus. It’s a plane based off Boeing’s 767 passenger jet. Those safeguards were not incorporated into the version installed on the 737 Max. On both planes, the system is intended to combat the natural tendency of the airplane to pitch upwards.
Notably, pilots of the KC-46 are able to override the MCAS — or Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System — simply by pulling on the controls, the Journal reports. It quotes an Air Force procurement chief as saying, “We have better sensor data. But most importantly, when the pilot grabs the stick, the pilot is completely in control.”
On the 737 Max, by contrast, the MCAS remained active even if the pilots pulled on the controls. The system would repeatedly push the plane’s nose down.
The Journal also notes that the KC-46’s MCAS relies on two sensors measuring the plane nose angle and compares the readings from each, as Air Force Magazine reported in March. The 737 Max version relies on just one.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Boeing rejected 737 MAX safety upgrades before fatal crashes, whistleblower says
www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-whistleblowers-c
omplaint-says-737-max-safety-upgrades-were-rejected-over-cost/
A Boeing engineer submitted a scathing internal ethics complaint alleging that management had blocked significant safety improvements during the jet’s development.
The ethics charge, filed by 33-year-old engineer Curtis Ewbank, whose job involved studying past crashes and using that information to make new planes safer, describes how around 2014 his group presented to managers and senior executives a proposal to add various safety upgrades to the MAX.
A version of the proposed system, called synthetic airspeed, was already installed on the 787 Dreamliner, but not on the MAX.
The complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by The Seattle Times, suggests that one of the proposed systems could have potentially prevented the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people. Three of Ewbank’s former colleagues interviewed for this story concurred.
The details revealed in the ethics complaint raise new questions about the culture at Boeing and whether the long-held imperative that safety must be the overarching priority was compromised on the MAX.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:This might be redundant. Who is really under the impression Boeing did not sell out their reputation with that last CEO, McNerney?
Originally posted by second:
Boeing rejected 737 MAX safety upgrades before fatal crashes, whistleblower says
www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-whistleblowers-c
omplaint-says-737-max-safety-upgrades-were-rejected-over-cost/
A Boeing engineer submitted a scathing internal ethics complaint alleging that management had blocked significant safety improvements during the jet’s development.
The ethics charge, filed by 33-year-old engineer Curtis Ewbank, whose job involved studying past crashes and using that information to make new planes safer, describes how around 2014 his group presented to managers and senior executives a proposal to add various safety upgrades to the MAX.
A version of the proposed system, called synthetic airspeed, was already installed on the 787 Dreamliner, but not on the MAX.
The complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by The Seattle Times, suggests that one of the proposed systems could have potentially prevented the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people. Three of Ewbank’s former colleagues interviewed for this story concurred.
The details revealed in the ethics complaint raise new questions about the culture at Boeing and whether the long-held imperative that safety must be the overarching priority was compromised on the MAX.
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Quote:Boeing had promised the airlines that the MAX would be so minimally different from the prior 737 model that no additional pilot certification or flight simulator training would be necessary. In particular, Boeing promised to pay Southwest Airlines “$1 million per tail” if the FAA were to require expensive simulator training. Do the math: Southwest will buy 1,000 planes and get a rebate of $1 billion if Boeing adds the safety feature that would have prevented the crashes. What do you think management will do, if they are more concerned about their paycheck than your safety? Logic says no new safety features will be installed unless management is absolutely, positively, 100 percent sure that the safety feature will prevent a crash. Such certainty will never exist.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
This might be redundant. Who is really under the impression Boeing did not sell out their reputation with that last CEO, McNerney?
The MAX program leaders had always mandated that, if it’s not required for function or certification, it’s not going on the airplane.
www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-whistleblowers-c
omplaint-says-737-max-safety-upgrades-were-rejected-over-cost/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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FAA failed to properly review 737 MAX jet's anti-stall system
“The JATR team found that the MCAS was not evaluated as a complete and integrated function in the certification documents that were submitted to the FAA,” the 69-page series of findings and recommendations said.
“The lack of a unified top-down development and evaluation of the system function and its safety analyses, combined with the extensive and fragmented documentation, made it difficult to assess whether compliance was fully demonstrated.”
The report also questioned FAA’s limited staffing to oversee certification tasks it designated to Boeing and said there were an “inadequate number of FAA specialists” involved in the certification of the 737 MAX.
There were signs that Boeing employees conducting FAA work faced “undue pressure. ..which may be attributed to conflicting priorities and an environment that does not support FAA requirements,” it said.
www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-boeing-airplane-faa/faa-failed-to-prope
rly-review-737-max-jets-anti-stall-system-jatr-findings-idUSKBN1WQ0H8
--------
A review of the 737 Max approval found the FAA signed off on a plane it didn’t fully understand
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) delegated far too much of the certification process of the 737 Max plane to its manufacturer, Boeing, and didn’t comprehensively understand a new flight system on it that was later linked to two deadly crashes, the international panel that has been reviewing the plane’s approval process has found.
https://qz.com/1726157/
--------
Will JATR Report On Boeing 737 MAX Further Delay Relaunch?
If regulators lack confidence in Boeing’s ability to submit complete and reliable documentation of their testing, then they are bound to want to take a closer look at any new information they receive now. Even if that information is complete, to the best of Boeing’s ability, the collective of regulators are unlikely to uniformly agree to a rapid re-approval.
www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/10/11/will-jatr-report-on-boein
g-737-max-further-delay-launch/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/air-canada-scrubs-737-max-202557292.
html
Air Canada scrubs 737 Max from schedule until Feb. 14 amid lingering uncertainty
[The Canadian Press]
The Canadian PressOctober 16, 2019
Air Canada scrubs 737 Max from schedule until Feb. 14 amid lingering uncertainty
Air Canada will keep the Boeing 737 Max off its flying schedule until Feb. 14, citing "regulatory uncertainty" nearly a year after authorities across the globe banned the plane from the skies following two fatal crashes in five months.
The country's biggest airline had earlier scrubbed the 24 jetliners from schedules until Jan. 8. For now, major U.S. carriers hope to welcome the Max back into the fleet in early to mid-January.
The Boeing Co. has said it expects federal authorities to greenlight software changes to the aircraft, but regulators say they don’t have a set timeline.
Air Canada's chief commercial officer said the extension until Valentine's Day will give Air Canada "scheduling predictability" as it rolls out its new reservation system.
"We are taking this prudent step as a result of the ongoing regulatory uncertainty about the timing of the aircraft returning to service," Lucie Guillemette said in a release Wednesday.
The airline said it will lease two more wide-body aircraft at least through March Break to help compensate for the absence of the Max planes, which make up about 20 per cent of Air Canada's narrow-body fleet and would typically carry about 11,000 passengers per day.
WestJet announced in September it was removing the 737 Max from its schedule until Jan. 5.
Sunwing Airlines Inc. said in August that its four Maxes will be absent from the rotation until mid-May, with some 3,000 flights having been affected over the summer alone.
Last month, Air Canada's chief financial officer said he expected that Transport Canada may not approve the plane for takeoff until early next year.
Michael Rousseau noted his airline doesn't fly other 737 models, giving it an unenviably "unique" position relative to North American competitors as Air Canada's Max pilots sit relatively idle while those at rival carriers find more productive deployment in the cockpit of other 737 jets.
Air Canada faced a tougher third quarter because of the grounding, forecasting a two per cent decline in capacity from a year ago.
About 26 Max 8s were initially slated for delivery between the March grounding and mid-2020, but have been partly pushed back. The Airbus A320s they were set to replace are less fuel-efficient, piling on more costs.
Air Canada, like WestJet, has also had to lease aircraft and cancel some routes to compensate for the Max 8's absence.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 16, 2019.
Companies in this story: (TSX:AC, TSX:WJA)
Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press
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Southwest had $1 million per 737 MAX rebate clause on training
www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-airplane-southwest/southwest-had-1-m
illion-per-737-max-rebate-clause-on-training-idUSKBN1X92D4
Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg said on Wednesday Southwest Airlines Inc had a $1 million per plane rebate clause in a contact with Boeing Co if the FAA required simulator training unique to only the 737 MAX planes.
Representative Peter DeFazio, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the rebate would have covered 280 planes ordered by Southwest.
The article does not say it, but the 737 MAX simulator should have, but did not, train pilots on how to handle the idiosyncratic malfunction that crashed the plane twice. If the simulator had included such training, Boeing would have been powerfully motivated to re-engineer 737 MAX so that it could not malfunction in the first place.
Wrong signals to the horizontal stabilizer jack-screw crashed two 737 MAXs
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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One photo shows why Boeing had to shut down production of its grounded 737 Max
www.businessinsider.com/photos-show-boeing-737-max-sitting-untouched-s
nowy-kansas-carpark-2019-12
Photographs show the fuselages of almost 100 Boeing 737 Max planes sitting unused at a Kansas factory.
The image was taken by Reuters at the headquarters of Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kansas. Spirit is one of the hundreds of companies in the Boeing supply chain that help produce the finished product.
The photo shows Boeing's snarled production line, which was getting ever more clogged as the company built planes that could not be delivered to customers.
On Monday, Boeing acknowledged its strategy of building planes that couldn't immediately fly was no longer sustainable, and it said it would freeze the production line in the new year. It is not clear when it will be restarted.
Spirit AeroSystems has the capacity to produce about 50 fuselages a month for the Max, and it employs about 13,000 people in Wichita. It is the city's biggest employer. The company earns 80% of its revenue from Boeing, according to data provided to Business Insider by Bloomberg.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Wrong signals to the horizontal stabilizer jack-screw crashed two 737 MAXs
That is one terrifying video, second. Flight is scary enough without having to think it could be down to a giant nut and a giant bolt.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
One photo shows why Boeing had to shut down production of its grounded 737 Max
www.businessinsider.com/photos-show-boeing-737-max-sitting-untouched-s
nowy-kansas-carpark-2019-12
Photographs show the fuselages of almost 100 Boeing 737 Max planes sitting unused at a Kansas factory.
The image was taken by Reuters at the headquarters of Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kansas. Spirit is one of the hundreds of companies in the Boeing supply chain that help produce the finished product.
The photo shows Boeing's snarled production line, which was getting ever more clogged as the company built planes that could not be delivered to customers.
On Monday, Boeing acknowledged its strategy of building planes that couldn't immediately fly was no longer sustainable, and it said it would freeze the production line in the new year. It is not clear when it will be restarted.
Spirit AeroSystems has the capacity to produce about 50 fuselages a month for the Max, and it employs about 13,000 people in Wichita. It is the city's biggest employer. The company earns 80% of its revenue from Boeing, according to data provided to Business Insider by Bloomberg.
Gov bail out? I hope not.
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Quote:Do you remember when Serenity crashed in the movie? If Boeing built Firefly class spaceships, Serenity would have never flown again because of Boeing's light weight construction methods, about as tough as an aluminum beer can.
Originally posted by captaincrunch:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Wrong signals to the horizontal stabilizer jack-screw crashed two 737 MAXs
That is one terrifying video, second. Flight is scary enough without having to think it could be down to a giant nut and a giant bolt.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Boeing has fired Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg, following a year of intense scrutiny and industrial setbacks set off by twin fatal crashes of its 737 MAX jetliner.
Chairman David Calhoun will take over as CEO and president.
A Boeing official said the board deliberated over the weekend and they made the decision to fire Muilenburg in a phone call on Sunday. Too bad the GOP's Senators won't deliberate over the phone, then fire Trump. It really is that easy, despite that your average Trump lover thinks it can only be a complicated and slow process. The Constitution does not say it is. Mike Pence is ready to replace Trump, as David Calhoun is ready to replace Muilenburg.
The company’s shares rose nearly 4% in early trading.
The company said this month it would stop production of the jets in January.
www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737-max-ceo/boeing-fires-ceo-muilenb
urg-as-737-max-crisis-deepens-idUSKBN1YR1FL
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Well, I'm sure the board didn't object when CEO pulled in one profitable year after another, but somebody had to be scapegoated! It won't save the company tho: They're trying to pull up from a nosedive 500 ft above ground.
This is a little bit like blaming Trump for decades of USA policy failures.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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Boeing Starliner sent to orbit and rendezvous with Space Station - IT'S SOLE PURPOSE FOR BEING BUILT IN THE FIRST PLACE - is sent to WRONG ORBIT, so that the Mission to connect with Space Station is a catastrophic failure (good thing nobody's lives were on the line!) and the Mission was Aborted.
Boeing Sales Team calls this a "glitch" - ho hum.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/20/boeings-starliner-flies-into-wrong-orb
it-jeopardizing-trip-to-the-international-space-station.html
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"Boeing's light weight construction methods" are probably important when you're dealing with gravity. The trick is to make an aircraft both light and strong.
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"NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that the spacecraft “believed it was in an orbital insertion burn,” saying Starliner “burned more fuel than anticipated to maintain precise control.”"
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/20/boeings-starliner-flies-into-wrong-orb
it-jeopardizing-trip-to-the-international-space-station.html
Yanno, it wasn't the 737's CONSTRUCTION that was the problem, or the Starliner's. It was the brains of both that failed.
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All of these assinine Libtard Boeing Executives should be thrown in prison. These Libtards are disgusting pigs.
Cut and paste didn't work well here, maybe somebody else can try.
I know there are other sources of this story, but I haven't tracked them down.
Boeing VP Executive has wedding with all of his Ultra-Libtard pals (they were all in the Obamination Admin), and they start fights, including the ugly Libtard women, and the Best Man gets arrested by cops.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/17/pro-trump-womens-group-say-the
y-were-attacked-at-dc-hotel-by-well-connected-dem-wedding-party-865632
Unfortunately, due to the harassment from Trump haters from an adjacent ball room, and lack of hotel security involvement, an event occurred when myself and others were escorting WFAF women out of the venue. I’m ok, but the future of this country is not!
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2:48 PM - Dec 16, 2019
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Unfortunately, due to the harassment from Trump haters from an adjacent ball room, and lack of hotel security involvement, an event occurred when myself and others were escorting WFAF women out of the venue. I’m ok, but the future of this country is not!
1,149
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Ann Vandersteel SteelTruth™? @annvandersteel
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This picture is from the wedding where the deranged TDS afflicted guests emerged harassing MAGA women, assaulted a former Navy Seal, FBI agent and US Federal Air Marshall @JGilliam_SEAL The man in the red tie drinking a beer was arrested. @realDonaldTrump @fbi @SecretService
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The grunts usually know what's going on ...
Quote:MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/plane-was-designed-clowns-shocking-b
"This Plane Was Designed By Clowns, Who Are Supervised By Monkeys [FAA]" - Shocking Boeing Emails Reveal Contempt For Management, FAA
...According to more than 100 pages of internal company communications (which were apparently withheld from the FAA during the certification process for the jet) Boeing employees could be heard mocking federal rules, openly discussing their deception of regulators, and joking about the MAX's potential flaws.
The most shocking messages were sent by Boeing pilots and other employees who can be seen discussing software issues and problems with the flight simulator software for the MAX, which is particularly disturbing since it was issues with the plane's MCAS software that were found to have contributed to two avoidable crashes and the brutal deaths of 346 people
In one message, one Boeing employee openly admits to deceiving the FAA on behalf of the company.
"I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year," one of the employees said in messages from 2018, apparently in reference to interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration.
In another, a group of Boeing test pilots agreed that they wouldn't want their families flying with pilots trained on the new Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight simulator.
"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t," one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. "No," the colleague responded.
As the New York Times explains, the release of these communications, both emails and instant messages, is "the latest embarrassing episode for Boeing in a crisis that has cost the company billions of dollars and wreaked havoc on the aviation industry across the globe."
It should go without saying that these messages "threaten to complicate Boeing's relationship with the FAA" at a time when it's still unclear when the MAX might be cleared to fly again.
Yet, as we mentioned above, this is only the latest and perhaps most jarring of a string of revelations citing internal documents and communications. Forget "regulatory capture" - a term that's often used to criticize the revolving-door nature of Wall Street compliance officials and the regulatory agencies supposed to keep their firms in line - this is regulatory irrelevance.
oeing-emails-reveal-contempt-management-faa
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
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Quote:I can tell you that some in the airline or aircraft industry have trouble sleeping at night, knowing how many lives are in danger. And some do not have ny trouble sleeping at night - they just tell their family members and significant others to not fly certain planes. I expect these in your article have no problem sleeping at night, knowing these hundreds of people died as a result of their deceptions.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The grunts usually know what's going on ...Quote:MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/plane-was-designed-clowns-shocking-b
"This Plane Was Designed By Clowns, Who Are Supervised By Monkeys [FAA]" - Shocking Boeing Emails Reveal Contempt For Management, FAA
...According to more than 100 pages of internal company communications (which were apparently withheld from the FAA during the certification process for the jet) Boeing employees could be heard mocking federal rules, openly discussing their deception of regulators, and joking about the MAX's potential flaws.
The most shocking messages were sent by Boeing pilots and other employees who can be seen discussing software issues and problems with the flight simulator software for the MAX, which is particularly disturbing since it was issues with the plane's MCAS software that were found to have contributed to two avoidable crashes and the brutal deaths of 346 people
In one message, one Boeing employee openly admits to deceiving the FAA on behalf of the company.
"I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year," one of the employees said in messages from 2018, apparently in reference to interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration.
In another, a group of Boeing test pilots agreed that they wouldn't want their families flying with pilots trained on the new Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight simulator.
"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t," one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. "No," the colleague responded.
As the New York Times explains, the release of these communications, both emails and instant messages, is "the latest embarrassing episode for Boeing in a crisis that has cost the company billions of dollars and wreaked havoc on the aviation industry across the globe."
It should go without saying that these messages "threaten to complicate Boeing's relationship with the FAA" at a time when it's still unclear when the MAX might be cleared to fly again.
Yet, as we mentioned above, this is only the latest and perhaps most jarring of a string of revelations citing internal documents and communications. Forget "regulatory capture" - a term that's often used to criticize the revolving-door nature of Wall Street compliance officials and the regulatory agencies supposed to keep their firms in line - this is regulatory irrelevance.
oeing-emails-reveal-contempt-management-faa
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Now Execs are leaving before they get sent to prison.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/boeing-new-ceo-1.5425407?cmp=rss
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Quote:There are hundreds of engineers who knew what was wrong with the 737 MAX, but none of them went to the FAA to stop Boeing. It is just the way Americans are -- born with a backbone, but fear of being fired causes them to lose it, becoming cowards.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Now Execs are leaving before they get sent to prison.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62996&mid=10769
35#1076935
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How Boeing’s Responsibility in a Deadly Crash ‘Got Buried’
Jan. 20, 2020, 6:00 a.m. ET
After a Boeing 737 NG crashed near Amsterdam more than a decade ago, the Dutch investigators focused blame on the pilots for failing to react properly when an automated system malfunctioned and caused the plane to plummet into a field, killing nine people.
Some of the parallels between that accident and the more recent ones are particularly noteworthy. Boeing’s design decisions on both the 737 Max and the plane involved in the 2009 crash — the 737 NG, or Next Generation — allowed a powerful computer command to be triggered by a single faulty sensor, even though each plane was equipped with two sensors. In the two 737 Max accidents, a sensor measuring the plane’s angle to the wind prompted a flight control computer to push its nose down after takeoff; on the 737 NG accident, an altitude sensor caused a different computer to cut the plane’s speed just before landing.
Dutch investigators determined that the cause of the malfunction was a sensor on the plane’s exterior measuring altitude. The sensor had mistakenly indicated that the plane was just moments from touchdown, prompting the computer to idle the engines at about 450 feet. Immediately, one of the pilots pushed the thrust lever forward to gain speed, but when he let go, the computer again commanded it to idle.
The captain intervened, disabling the autothrottle and setting the thrust levers to their maximum. Nine seconds had elapsed since the stall warning. By then, it was too late.
Decisions by Boeing, including risky design choices and faulty safety assessments, contributed to the 737 NG accident. But the Dutch Safety Board either excluded or played down criticisms of the manufacturer in its final report after pushback from a team of Americans that included Boeing and federal safety officials, documents and interviews show.
. . . the Dutch board deleted or amended findings in its own accident report about issues with the plane when the American team weighed in. The board also inserted statements, some nearly verbatim and without attribution, written by the Americans, who said that certain pilot errors had not been “properly emphasized.”
The muted criticism of Boeing after the 2009 accident fits within a broader pattern, brought to light since the Max tragedies, of the company benefiting from a light-touch approach by safety officials.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/business/boeing-737-accidents.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Coronavirus means airlines don’t need those grounded Boeing 737 Maxes after all
Airlines are finding themselves with too many airplanes, relative to consumer demand.
No airline would have chosen what happened with the Max, of course, both in terms of the tragedies themselves and the extremely expensive grounding that has followed. But given the reduction in consumer demand, some carriers may see the situation as a silver lining—albeit a slim one. “If you’re United, it’s not such a bad thing that the Maxes haven’t yet been delivered,” says Kaplan. “It’s kind of a blessing in disguise not to be paying for those additional five, 10, 20, 30 airplanes, depending on the airline.” In addition to its 14 grounded Maxes, United had more than 100 on order.
And though airlines don’t need as many airplanes today, the situation may be totally different in just a few short months. Either way, for the first time in a while, Boeing isn’t the greatest problem plaguing the industry.
https://qz.com/1813657/coronavirus-reduces-the-impact-of-grounded-boei
ng-737-maxes/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I believe today is the 1st anniversary of the 2nd crash.
Full report supposed to come out Tuesday.
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How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer
Everyone in the aviation community wants an airplane that flies as simply and as naturally as possible. That means that conditions should not change markedly, there should be no significant roll, no significant pitch change, no nothing when the pilot is adding power, lowering the flaps, or extending the landing gear.
The airframe, the hardware, should get it right the first time and not need a lot of added bells and whistles to fly predictably. This has been an aviation canon from the day the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk.
Apparently the 737 Max pitched up a bit too much for comfort on power application as well as at already-high angles of attack. It violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably violated the certification criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. But 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.
Boeing’s solution to its hardware problem was software.
MCAS is certainly much less expensive than extensively modifying the airframe to accommodate the larger engines. Such an airframe modification would have meant things like longer landing gear (which might not then fit in the fuselage when retracted), more wing dihedral (upward bend), and so forth. All of those hardware changes would be horribly expensive.
What’s worse, those changes could be extensive enough to require not only that the FAA recertify the 737 but that Boeing build an entirely new aircraft. Now we’re talking real money, both for the manufacturer as well as the manufacturer’s customers.
That’s because the major selling point of the 737 Max is that it is just a 737, and any pilot who has flown other 737s can fly a 737 Max without expensive training, without recertification, without another type of rating. Airlines—Southwest is a prominent example—tend to go for one “standard” airplane. They want to have one airplane that all their pilots can fly because that makes both pilots and airplanes fungible, maximizing flexibility and minimizing costs.
It all comes down to money, and in this case, MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction. The necessity to insist that the 737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in systems, from any other 737 was the key to the 737 Max’s fleet fungibility. That’s probably also the reason why the documentation about the MCAS system was kept on the down-low.
Put in a change with too much visibility, particularly a change to the aircraft’s operating handbook or to pilot training, and someone—probably a pilot—would have piped up and said, “Hey. This doesn’t look like a 737 anymore.” And then the money would flow the wrong way.
More at https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-di
saster-looks-to-a-software-developer
The final paragraph in the story: It is likely that MCAS, originally added in the spirit of increasing safety, has now killed more people than it could have ever saved. It doesn’t need to be “fixed” with more complexity, more software. It needs to be removed altogether.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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American Airlines quietly announced that it would return the Max to its schedule next month.
European regulators have already declared the Max is safe to fly. What's curious is that Boeing hasn't yet made the software change that European regulators insisted was necessary. This is one software update that simply cannot go wrong. It has to be perfect and enjoy the absolute confidence of those who use it. Therefore I was a little disturbed to read: "Southwest, American pilots say new Boeing 737 Max manual may lead to errors in emergencies."
The pilots are concerned that the Federal Aviation Authority's manual for handling the new software in the event of an emergency is inadequate. They say there are simply too many steps to remember. This, they insist, has been proved in simulator flights.
An intriguing element is whether American and other airlines will tell customers they're flying in a Max at all. At the end of last year, they began referring to it as the 737-8. Which is quite bizarre, given that there's already a 737-800, a bastion of flying for many years. Could it be, then, that one of the ways airlines will try and reassure passengers is to only tell them it was a Max after they've landed?
More at https://www.zdnet.com/article/american-airlines-is-quietly-bringing-ba
ck-the-737-max-heres-why-thats-disturbing/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Federal Aviation Administration cleared Boeing’s 737 MAX for flight Wednesday, ending the 20-month grounding of the jet in the United States.
The nation’s air safety agency announced the move early Wednesday, saying it was done after a comprehensive and methodical 20-month review process.
https://www.king5.com/article/tech/science/aerospace/boeing/faa-will-l
ift-us-grounding-of-737-max-on-wednesday-according-to-sources/281-c37fe280-9e68-42e9-b693-91f658652a7c
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How many got fired at Boeing?
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Quote:None. How many got fired at the FAA? None, again, but Boeing and the FAA are colluding together to make the redesign of the 737 MAX look far better than it actually is. How? By reminding, just before the test in the simulator, what the test pilots must do during an emergency in order to make the redesign look good. In a real life emergency, there won't be somebody reminding the pilot what to do during an emergency. That is why a simulator test of the redesign must NOT have somebody coaching the pilot.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
How many got fired at Boeing?
Boeing officials "inappropriately coached" test pilots during recertification efforts after two fatal 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people, according to a lengthy congressional report released on Friday.
Reuters reports:
The report from the Senate Commerce Committee Republican staff said testing this year of a key safety system known as MCAS tied to both fatal crashes was contrary to proper protocol.
The report citing a whistleblower who alleged Boeing officials encouraged test pilots to “remember, get right on that pickle switch” prior to the exercise that resulted in pilot reaction in approximately four seconds, while another pilot in a separate test reacted in approximately 16 seconds.
The account was corroborated during an FAA staff interview, the committee added.
Numerous reports have found Boeing failed to adequately consider how pilots respond to cockpit emergencies in its development of the 737 MAX.
More at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737-max/boeing-inappropriate
ly-coached-pilots-in-737-max-testing-u-s-senate-report-idUSKBN28S314
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Wicker Releases Committee’s FAA Investigation Report of Boeing 737 MAX
December 18, 2020
U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today released the Committee’s investigation report on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This investigation began in April of 2019, weeks after the second of two tragic crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, when Committee staff began receiving information from whistleblowers disclosing numerous concerns related to aviation safety.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2020/12/wicker-releases-committee-s-fa
a-investigation-report
Click here to read the Committee’s report, which includes a one-page executive summary and a six-page overview.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/FFDA35FA-0442-465D-AC63
-5634D9D3CEF6
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A lot of deaths a lot of PR disasters
Sad to see a good manufacturing and aviation company go this way
Hopefully they will get their shit together
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'What the Truth Is': FAA Safety Engineer Slams Oversight of Boeing's 737 MAX
The Seattle Times reports:
Haunted by the two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 MAX jets and his agency's role in approving the plane, veteran Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety engineer Joe Jacobsen is stepping forward publicly to give the victims' families "a firsthand account of what the truth is." In a detailed letter sent last month to a family that lost their daughter in the second MAX crash in Ethiopia two years ago this week, and in interviews with The Seattle Times, Jacobsen gave the first personal account by an insider of the federal safety agency's response to the MAX crashes...
He believes additional system upgrades are needed beyond Boeing's fix for the MAX that was blessed by the FAA and other regulators.
And Jacobsen argues that the plane would be safer if Boeing simply removed altogether the new software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that went wrong in the two crashes that killed 346 people. Jacobsen also calls for the replacement of some of the people at "the highest levels of FAA management," whom he blames for creating a culture too concerned with fulfilling the demands of industry. In his letter and interview, Jacobsen also described in more depth than previously reported how an autothrottle system issue may have contributed to the crash in Ethiopia in March 2019.
Boeing and the FAA said in separate statements they believe the MAX is fixed and safe, and that regulators worldwide have validated this conclusion...
A week after the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, 2018, Jacobsen received an email from a colleague asking if there was an issue paper on MCAS. "This was the first day that I heard about MCAS," he wrote. "We had no issue papers, and if we had, I would have been the engineer responsible for providing technical content and comment on such an issue paper." When he did get a look at the system, Jacobsen said he was "shocked to discover that the airplane was purposely designed and certified to use just one AOA (Angle of Attack) input for a flight critical function."
If given the chance during the original certification, he's certain that he and "6 to 8 of our most experienced engineers in the Seattle office" would have identified that as a serious design flaw because there's "a long history of AOA sensor failures."
Instead, Boeing minimized MCAS and kept the details of its assessment to itself...
The article also argues that Boeing itself didn't grasp the danger of its system. "Michael Teal, 737 MAX chief engineer, testified to Congress that he first learned only after the Lion Air crash that MCAS relied on a single sensor.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-safety-engi
neer-goes-public-to-slam-the-agencys-oversight-of-boeings-737-max/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The autothrottle problem
The instructions Boeing and the FAA gave pilots immediately after the first crash — instructions the Ethiopian pilots tried to follow — have been heavily criticized.
Boeing’s procedure failed to emphasize that pilots need to bring the nose of the jet back up electrically before hitting the cutoff switches to stop MCAS acting.
Jacobsen’s letter adds something new about the inadequacy of those instructions: There was no mention of an issue with the autothrottle — the automated system controlling the thrust of the engines — that added to the jet’s excessive speed and made it impossible to manually bring the jet’s nose up.
According to the interim investigation report released a year ago, the faulty Angle of Attack sensor on Flight ET302, even before it triggered MCAS to push the plane’s nose down, interfered with other sensor readings of altitude and airspeed.
Registering the plane as still below 800 feet above the ground even after it passed that threshold, the jet’s computer had the autothrottle maintain full takeoff thrust for 16 seconds after it should have reduced the power for the climb phase.
More significantly, seconds later the pilots set the jet’s speed target at 238 knots, but the autothrottle didn’t follow through.
Again because of the faulty sensor on the left, the flight computer detected the discrepancy between the left and right airspeed values and flagged the data as invalid. Unable to validate the aircraft’s speed, the computer stopped sending thrust instructions to the autothrottle.
As a result, the engines remained at maximum thrust for the rest of the fatal flight.
The plane eventually exceeded the 737’s maximum design speed of 340 knots. This so increased the forces on the jet’s tail that the pilots couldn’t budge it manually.
Some pilots faulted the Ethiopian crew for allowing the plane to gather so much speed.
Jacobsen recalls how he was angered listening to Rep. Sam Graves, R-Missouri, say during a May 2019 House hearing that U.S.-trained pilots would have been able to handle the emergency.
The Ethiopian crew indeed should have throttled back the engines manually. But apparently they were confused by the cacophony of alerts going off. Those alerts did not include any autothrottle warning to indicate it had stopped responding to their speed setting.
Boeing has said that for this kind of emergency it relies on pilots to execute a standard checklist from memory that includes an instruction to disengage the autothrottle.
The FAA, in a statement, said this checklist tells pilots “to turn off all automatic systems, including autopilot and auto-throttle.”
The ET302 pilots, however, jumped immediately to the step in the checklist that Boeing emphasized in its bulletin after the Lion Air crash: hitting the cutoff switches to stop MCAS from pushing the jet’s nose down. In their rush to do that, they didn’t first bring the nose back up with the electrical switches and didn’t disengage the autothrottle.
And Jacobsen points out that the FAA’s emergency directive after the Lion Air crash lists the procedure pilots should follow — but omits the instruction on the autothrottle and fails to mention that it could malfunction.
“I think it was just a miss,” said Jacobsen. “I don’t think anyone recognized the Angle of Attack malfunction would also mess with the autothrottle.”
In an interview, Capt. John Cox, a veteran pilot and founder of Washington, D.C.-based aviation safety consultancy Safety Operating Systems, called this autothrottle behavior on ET 302 a “hard-to-detect failure.”
“To fail this way and not tell the crew, that bothers me. Humans are not good at picking up omissions,” Cox said. “It’s a significant miss.”
Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the celebrated pilot from the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” emergency, agreed that Boeing and the FAA provided pilots inadequate information after the Lion Air crash, including a lack of warning about the autothrottle issue.
The ET302 crew “did take affirmativ
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A "simple flaw" caused by a language difference led to a "serious incident" for a flight from Birmingham last year.
All female passengers whose title was "Miss" were classified as children - not adults - on the Tui flight after a software upgrade, a report said.
That meant that their average weight used for take-off calculations was lower than it should have been.
The difference could have had an impact on take-off thrust, but the report said flight operation was not compromised.
Take-off prep documents told the pilot that his Boeing 737 jet was 1,244kg lighter than it actually was after using 35kg as the average weight of the females involved rather than 69kg.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56690529
That "load sheet" is used to determine how much weight is safe, how the plane is balanced, and other important information for a safe flight within safety regulations.
The AAIB report on the incident said the reservation system that produces the load sheet had been upgraded in the downtime caused by the coronavirus lockdown last year, when the airline suspended flights "for several months".
Safety officials said the problem was that the software had been programmed in a foreign country where "Miss" is used to refer to children, and "Ms" to adult women.
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https://ca.news.yahoo.com/exclusive-boeing-faces-hurdle-737-014153906.
html
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Boeing 737 MAX chief technical pilot indicted for fraud
In January, Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion in fines and compensation after reaching a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Justice Department over the MAX crashes, which cost Boeing more than $20 billion.
The January agreement faulted Boeing's conduct and said it was holding the largest U.S. planemaker "accountable for its employees’ criminal misconduct."
In January, Boeing admitted in court documents that through two former employees it deceived the FAA about the MCAS.
Prosecutors noted that a key FAA document lacked any reference to the MCAS, and as a result airplane manuals and pilot-training materials for U.S.-based airlines also lacked any reference.
One November 2016 message from Forkner said he was working at "jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by FAA."
If the FAA required pilot simulator training for MAX pilots, Boeing would have been required to pay Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) nearly $400 million to offset the simulator-based pilot training requirements, a 2020 U.S. House of Representatives report said.
In 2019, the FAA required simulator training before pilots could resume flying the MAX.
Forkner is charged with two counts of fraud involving aircraft parts in interstate commerce and four counts of wire fraud. He is expected to make his initial court appearance Friday in Fort Worth, Texas.
If convicted, he potentially faces decades in prison.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ex-boeing-737-max-c
hief-technical-pilot-indicted-fraud-us-justice-dept-2021-10-14/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created The 737 MAX Disaster
Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”
Sorscher, a physicist who’d worked at Boeing more than two decades and had led negotiations there for the engineers’ union, had become obsessed with management culture. He said he didn’t previously imagine Boeing’s brave new managerial caste creating a problem as dumb and glaringly obvious as MCAS (or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, as a handful of software wizards had dubbed it).
In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.
It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators: AIG famously told investors it was hard for management to contemplate “a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions” that would, a few months later, lose the firm well over $100 billion—but hey, the risk management algorithms had been wrong. A couple of years later, a single JP Morgan trader lost $6 billion because someone had programmed one of the cells in the bank’s risk management spreadsheet to divide two numbers by their sum instead of their average. Boeing was not, of course, a hedge fund: It was way better, a stock that had more than doubled since the Trump inauguration, outperforming the Dow in the 22 months before Lion Air 610 plunged into the Java Sea.
And so there was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.
Here, a generation after Boeing’s initial lurch into financialization, was the entirely predictable outcome of the byzantine process by which investment capital becomes completely abstracted from basic protocols of production and oversight: a flight-correction system that was essentially jerry-built to crash a plane. “If you’re looking for an example of late stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it,” said longtime aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia, “it’s a pretty good one.”
“As an investment professional, allow me to inform Congress as to how Boeing has viewed this whole crisis.” Paul Njoroge laid out the sequence of 737 MAX orders, ten-figure stock buybacks, and dividend hikes.
“Could that be the reason Boeing did not feel obliged to ground the MAX even after the second crash of the Boeing 737 MAX?” he asked. “Back to my very essential question, why wasn’t the MAX 8 grounded in November after the first crash in the Java Sea? One hundred and eighty-nine lives were lost, and executives at Boeing cared more about its stock price than preventing such a tragedy from occurring again,” and so had begun “a pattern of behavior blaming innocent pilots.”
More at https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-in
donesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, wh
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Netflix documentary 'Downfall: The Case Against Boeing' is a deadly tale of greed
Boeing reached a settlement with the DOJ that did not deliver anything close to accountability.
This investigation did lead to the passage of the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act, which DeFazio described as necessary to “make sure what happened with the Boeing 737 MAX is never repeated.”
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/netflix-documentary-downfa
ll-case-against-boeing-deadly-tale-greed-n1289973
https://www.netflix.com/title/81272421
https://yts.mx/movies/downfall-the-case-against-boeing-2022
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Which is more modernized the "dot or feather" ?
https://files.catbox.moe/u7adzs.mp4
Boeing engineers still blame cheap Indian Hindu software from the H-1B visa Street Shitters?
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Quote:It was a hardware problem. And then Americans didn't fix the problem because they would be forced to admit the 737 MAX needs special training for the pilots, in which case Boeing would have to pay, according to contract, a million dollars per plane sold to Southwest Airlines. That is literally thousands of planes and billions of dollars.
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Boeing engineers still blame cheap Indian Hindu software from the H-1B visa Street Shitters?
To convince Southwest Airlines Co to buy the Boeing 737 MAX, the plane maker reassured the airline that pilots would not need expensive simulator training and backed up the promise with a $1 million per plane rebate if training was needed.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-airplane-southwest/u-s-lawma
kers-question-boeings-1-mln-rebate-clause-for-southwest-737-max-orders-idUSKBN1X92D4
Here's stuff Boeing didn't do until after two crashes:
So Boeing made some changes to the MAX and the MCAS system. The MCAS system now has a maximum limit of one nose-down input during a single event of high angle of attack. The limit doesn’t reset if the pilots activate the electric trim switches. Further, an AOA sensor monitor was added to make sure MCAS doesn’t use AOA input if sensors disagree with each other by more than 5.5 degrees. The Flight Control Computer itself also no longer relies on a single sensor. Another important change is with the AOA DISAGREE alert. Previously, this alert was part of an optional AOA Gauge offered by Boeing. Now the AOA DISAGREE alert is always enabled, regardless of whether the airline has the option or not. All these changes are in the FAA summary.
In addition to the above changes, Boeing also improved training procedures and added safeguards to the Flight Control Computer to detect and stop erronous stabilizer commands. It also added a requirement for operators to test AOA sensors after repairs have been made.
In essence, the changes Boeing made are honestly what should have been done in the first place. Modern aviation is known for its redundancy. MCAS should have never relied on a single sensor, and the system should have never been allowed to continuously enter nose-down inputs.
https://jalopnik.com/heres-everything-boeing-did-to-fix-the-737-max-af
ter-tw-1845716820
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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(March 16, 2022, 9:39 PM EDT) — The Boeing Co.'s former chief technical pilot will stand trial Friday in a Texas district court for allegedly misleading safety regulators and airlines about the 737 MAX, in the first U. S. criminal trial over Boeing’s 737 MAX.
The families of 737 MAX crash victims have said the U.S. Justice Department violated their rights when it struck a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing. As part of the deferred prosecution deal, Boeing test pilot Mark Forkner is the only person to be criminally charged in the two disastrous 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.
https://www.law360.com/consumerprotection/articles/1472445/breaking-do
wn-the-doj-s-1st-737-max-criminal-fraud-trial
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Families of victims of the two 737 MAX crashes filed a court motion on Thursday
Say DOJ ‘lied and violated their rights through a secret process’ with Boeing
Accuse prosecutors of allowing Boeing to make a patsy of test pilot
Test pilot Mark Forkner is the only one to be criminally charged in the scandal
The 737 MAX jets had two deadly crashes within months, killing 346 people
The families of 737 MAX crash victims have said the U.S. Justice Department violated their rights when it struck a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing in January.
Relatives filed a motion on Thursday arguing the United States government ‘lied and violated their rights through a secret process’ by allowing Boeing to escape criminal charges.
As part of the deferred prosecution deal, Boeing test pilot Mark Forkner is the only person to be criminally charged in the two disastrous 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.
Families of two victims have asked a U.S. judge to declare that the order violated victims´ families rights to rescind Boeing’s immunity from criminal prosecution that was part of the $2.5 billion agreement.
The families of 737 MAX crash victims have said the U.S. Justice Department violated their rights when it struck a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing in January.
‘Boeing and the Government deliberately excluded those who were most concerned with the negotiations: the families of the victims,’ said attorney Paul G. Cassell, a former federal judge who is currently a professor of law at the University of Utah and considered one of the nation’s leading experts on crime victims’ rights.
‘If the Government is going to craft a DPA for a serious felony crime, including one that gives a corporation like Boeing immunity, it cannot do so secretly. In concealing its negotiations from Boeing’s victims, the Government plainly violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act – a broad bill of rights protecting victims of federal crimes.’
The motion was brought by the families of Mick Ryan and Jared Babu Mwazo, who both perished in the Ethiopian Flight 302 crash.
The victims’ families are seeking an order for the government to confer with them and provide evidence related to Boeing’s crimes and require Boeing to appear for a public arraignment where the victims can be heard.
They also ask the court to exercise its supervisory powers over the DPA which may include rescinding the immunity provision.
‘If the U.S. Justice Department had advised us of our right to confer with it about the crimes associated with the crash, we would have urged the Department to hold Boeing accountable to the full extent of U.S. criminal law,’ said Mick Ryan’s widow Naoise Connolly Ryan in a statement to DailyMail.com.
‘We would have pointed out that the Boeing employees whose conduct form the basis of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement were acting in furtherance of Boeing’s program goals, set at the highest levels of the company,’ she added.
‘Boeing should be fully prosecuted. The agreement reached under the Trump administration is merely a slap on the wrist that wrongly holds no executive accountable.’
Forkner, Boeing’s former chief technical pilot, was charged with fraud for deceiving federal regulators evaluating the company’s 737 MAX jet.
Boeing test pilot Mark Forkner is the only person to be criminally charged
His attorneys said this week that a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) official called him a ‘scapegoat’ for two fatal crashes.
Lawyers for Mark Forkner said the FAA official with personal knowledge of the 737-MAX contacted the government and said Forkner ‘is a ‘scapegoat’ and should ‘not be charged.’ The court filing on Monday did not disclose the official’s name.
Boeing did not respond to a request for comment. The FAA did not immediately comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Northern Texas, where the case is being heard, declined to comment.
The filing also included parts of a PowerPoint from an unnamed FAA employee that defense lawyers said
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Jeez. What weasels.
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Quote:In the movie Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022), starting at 1 hour 17 minutes into the movie, it was revealed that the FAA did a Quantitative Risk Assessment of the 737 MAX after the first crash, the Lion Air crash. What was the conclusion?
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Jeez. What weasels.
The FAA calculated that there was a probability of 15 more crashes of this plane over the next 30 years. That would make the MAX the most dangerous modern plane ever built.
Boeing comes back with the response that it averages only 1 crash every 2 years, so will the FAA please, please, pretty please not tell the airlines? If Boeing has 2 years to fix the software, nobody would ever need to know how dangerous the MAX had been before it was fixed. The weird part is that the FAA agreed with this screwy reasoning. It turns out that the next crash happened sooner than 2 years after the first.
Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11893274/
On November 18, 2020, the FAA ended the 20-month grounding, the longest ever of a U.S. airliner. If the crashes had been evenly space every 24 months, as Boeing hoped, then Boeing could have gotten the planes fixed without airlines realizing how dangerous the MAX had been before the fix was completed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Boeing 737 Crashes In China With 132 People Onboard
https://www.baystreet.ca/articles/stockstowatch/75684/Boeing-737-Crash
es-In-China-With-132-People-Onboard
China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 crash: Flight MU5735 crash - Boeing 737 model accident timeline
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-60821189
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Quote:The crash was a Boeing 737-800, not a 737 MAX.
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Boeing 737 Crashes In China With 132 People Onboard
https://www.baystreet.ca/articles/stockstowatch/75684/Boeing-737-Crash
es-In-China-With-132-People-Onboard
China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 crash: Flight MU5735 crash - Boeing 737 model accident timeline
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-60821189
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1505863117343014916
The industry keeps track of "hull-losses", which sounds so much better than crashes/explosions/fires/midair collisions/being hit by antiaircraft missiles/suicidal-pilot-kills-self-and-passengers/whatevers for the 737.
Hull-losses: 225
4796 fatalities
https://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Boeing-737-series/index
This latest "hull-loss" is already in database:
https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20220321-0
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:That's weird. Flight does rapid descent, brief recovery, and final rapid descent in the same location and same altitude as the same Flight Number the day before. But the prior day the pilots were able to recover. Unclear if it was the same bird (hull number).
Originally posted by second:Quote:The crash was a Boeing 737-800, not a 737 MAX.
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Boeing 737 Crashes In China With 132 People Onboard
https://www.baystreet.ca/articles/stockstowatch/75684/Boeing-737-Crash
es-In-China-With-132-People-Onboard
China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 crash: Flight MU5735 crash - Boeing 737 model accident timeline
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-60821189
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1505863117343014916
The industry keeps track of "hull-losses", which sounds so much better than crashes/explosions/fires/midair collisions/being hit by antiaircraft missiles/suicidal-pilot-kills-self-and-passengers/whatevers for the 737.
Hull-losses: 225
4796 fatalities
https://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Boeing-737-series/index
This latest "hull-loss" is already in database:
https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20220321-0
Impacted in a mountain range. Loss of altitude started 1 hour 5 minutes into flight.
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Boeing pilot who tested 737 MAX jets is found not guilty of 'deceiving safety regulators and giving incomplete information' about flight-control system that caused two deadly crashes
A federal district court jury in Fort Worth deliberated less than two hours before finding Mark Forkner, 49, not guilty on four counts of wire fraud.
Prosecutors accused Forkner of misleading Federal Aviation Administration regulators about the amount of training pilots would need to fly the Max
The FAA required only brief computer-based training for pilots instead of more extensive practice in simulators that could have cost Boeing up to $1million per plane sold.
Defense lawyers said Boeing engineers did not tell Forkner about changes to the flight software, known by its acronym, MCAS
The lawyers said Forkner was a scapegoat for Boeing and FAA officials who sought to avoid blame after the Max crashes, which killed 346 people
Justice Department spokesman Joshua Stueve said the department stands by its investigation and prosecution of the case
More at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10645881/U-S-jury-finds-forme
r-Boeing-737-MAX-pilot-not-guilty-fraud-case.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why was the trial in Fort Worth?
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Quote:Because the defendant lives in Keller, TX, a suburb of Fort Worth, according to Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Since he was charged with "wire-fraud", I presume he sent those emails that got him into trouble from his home in Keller.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Why was the trial in Fort Worth?
He could have dodged the whole legal issue and avoided a trial if only he had sent his written answers to his bosses at Boeing and they would later forward his misrepresentations, also known as lies, to the people that chief pilot Mark Forkner was misleading or lying to. Pilot Forkner could then blame his bosses and his bosses could blame Forkner and the prosecutors would have nobody to prosecute because typical juries can't understand who is lying, either the bosses or Forkner. Then the innocent-until-proven-guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt defense gambit gets everyone declared innocent.
With stupid juries, that gambit works every single time when the defense attorneys are good enough to sell nonsense to dumb juries. Prosecutors know that crappy closing statement succeeds with the kind of dummies that show up for jury duty. But in this particular case, the prosecutors hoped that since the chief pilot sent the emails directly to the people he was trying to bamboozle, the jury wouldn't get confused about who to blame, but jury still did, anyway.
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/aviation/article259574139.
html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Oh Boeing, Boeing, Boeing ....what ARE you doing???
Quote:
FAA grounds more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s after section of Alaska Airlines plane blows out
The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday ordered a temporary grounding of dozens of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft for inspections, a day after a piece of the aircraft blew out in the middle of an Alaska Airlines flight....
The section of the fuselage missing appeared to correspond to an exit not used by Alaska Airlines, or other carriers that don't have high-density seating configurations, and was plugged....
The incident was described as "an explosive decompression at the window exit," according to Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA...
The Boeing 737 Max 9 is a larger version of Boeing's best-selling jetliner, the 737 Max 8. ... The Boeing 737 Max 9 has an emergency exit door cut behind the wings for use in dense seating cabin configurations, like those used by budget airlines, according to Flightradar24.
"The doors are not activated on Alaska Airlines aircraft and are permanently 'plugged,'" Flightradar24 said.
Boeing didn't comment beyond its statement when asked about the sealed emergency exit door. Spirit AeroSystems , which makes the fuselages for the 737 Max, confirmed to CNBC that it installed the plugged door on the aircraft...
Late last year, Boeing urged airlines to inspect aircraft for a "possible" loose bolt in the rudder control system, the latest in a series of manufacturing flaws on Boeing jets
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/06/boeing-737-max-9-grounding-after-alask
a-airlines-door-blows-midflight.html
Quote:
The new Boeing 737 Max 9 involved in the incident was delivered to Alaska Airlines in late October and certified in early November, according to FAA data. It had been in service for just eight weeks.
The Max is Boeing’s newest version of the 737 and went into service in May 2017.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/7/boeing-18
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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The USA has started losing an ability, this is more than just 'Boeing'
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Well, I looked up Spirit Aerosystems. And unless I do a deep dive, which I don't have time for, I couldn't learn much from their website except that they have "facilities" in the USA, Malaysia, and Morocco.
And I would bet dollars to donuts that corporate HQ is in America but fabrication is someplace cheap and far away, where it's impossible to QA properly. And I would say that's typical of many American companies, even high tech ones. Our lab principally bought GC and GC MSs from Agilent (formerly Hewitt Packard) and we could tell which ones were made in China and which were made in America bc the serial numbers either began with a "C" or a "U". And every single GC MS (costing about $130,000 each) that came from China had a SIGNIFICANT flaw. Two were shipped with defective flow controllers (We spent a few weeks troubleshooting that) and one arrived so dirty it took three weeks to bake it out.
Quality control ain't what it used to be!
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:You handle that by inspecting the product while the subcontractor makes it. If you wait until the product is in its final form before inspecting, you will never get better than whatever the lackadaisical subcontractor feels is good enough, even if it is no good at all.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quality control ain't what it used to be!
What’s Gone Wrong at Boeing
By James Surowiecki | January 15, 2024, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/boeing-737-max-corpo
rate-culture/677120/
Behind the 737 Max’s persistent problems is the erosion of a valuable corporate culture. That will be harder to fix than a loose bolt.
When, last week, a panel called a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane in mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the plane’s fuselage, air travelers everywhere no doubt felt a shudder of horror—even though the aircraft was able to turn around and land safely. But in a sense, the startling thing was how unstartling the news was. In the six years since the Max—an updated version of the long-running 737, Boeing’s most popular plane—made its debut, the aircraft has been plagued by quality problems. The most dramatic of these resulted in two catastrophic crashes, in 2018 and in 2019, which together killed 346 people.
Those crashes, caused by a faulty flight-control system, led to the Max being grounded for almost two years. Even after it returned to service, additional issues cropped up. Last April, deliveries of the Max 8 version of the plane were delayed because of problems with one of Boeing’s key suppliers’ installation of brackets joining the rear of the fuselage to the plane’s tail fin. A few months later, Boeing said it had identified a new concern, over improperly drilled holes on a bulkhead. Then, in December, the Federal Aviation Administration said an overseas airline had found that a bolt on the plane’s rudder-control system was missing a nut—a seemingly elementary fault that now chimes with the door-plug incident, which has led to the grounding of Max 9s: Both Alaska Airlines and United Airlines said that they subsequently discovered loose bolts in some of their aircraft.
Boeing was once among the most respected American companies. It helped NASA put a man on the moon. It built the 747, the most famous passenger airplane of all time. The firm’s reputation for safety and excellence was such that people used to say, “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going”—and actually mean it. So what went wrong?
The answer that pretty much everyone arrived at after those two fatal crashes was the same: Boeing’s culture had changed. And here, the conventional wisdom is correct. For most of its history, Boeing had what you might call an engineering-centric culture, with power in the company resting in the hands of engineering and design. But in 1997, Boeing bought another aircraft manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, in what turned out to be a kind of reverse acquisition—executives from McDonnell Douglas ended up dominating and remaking Boeing. They turned it from a company that was relentlessly focused on product to one more focused on profit.
This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
Corporate culture can be a notoriously squishy topic—too readily subject to broad generalizations. And, of course, all big companies are interested in making money and boosting their stock price. But even if corporate cultures are hard to characterize accurately, they’re still real. As the management theorist Edgar Schein defined it, the essence of corporate culture is “the learned, shared, tacit assumptions on which people base their daily behavior.” In the old Boeing, the people who dictated those assumptions were the engineers. In the post-merger Boeing, the people who did so were more likely to be accountan
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quality control ain't what it used to be!
SECOND: You handle that by inspecting the product while the subcontractor makes it. If you wait until the product is in its final form before inspecting, you will never get better than whatever the lackadaisical subcontractor feels is good enough, even if it is no good at all.
No kidding! But the problem is, when you're assembling a plane in Indonesia, from parts made in a bunch of small sub-sub contractors in India, Vietnam, Philippines, and Bangladesh ... you gonna send 400 inspectors to all those facilities?
Just looking at cars, Ford Mustang example. Last we looked ... Engines made in Spain. Transmissions made in Mexico. Who knows where the wiring harnesses and instrument panels was made. Parts sent to China and Bangladesh for chroming. Heat treatment of valve springs?
Given GLOBAL supply chain ... same part could be made in three different countries, for example... quality control has gone to shit.
And everything that was written about corporate culture? So true!
And it could be said of any large technical-centric business, from software operating systems, applications, servers, and cyber security; to the military industrial complex which designs, builds, and maintains weapons for profit, not for war. Could add big pharma, tool-makers, and food suppliers to that list.
It's not so important if your towels are thin and your jeans have uneven hems, but there are areas where you should insist on good quality, and some areas where it's literally a matter of life and death.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:From a much longer article I saw this morning:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
No kidding! But the problem is, when you're assembling a plane in Indonesia, from parts made in a bunch of small sub-sub contractors in India, Vietnam, Philippines, and Bangladesh ... you gonna send 400 inspectors to all those facilities?
China Manufacturing and Its Potential Costs
Bill Haskell | January 16, 2024 7:00 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2024/01/china-manufacturing-and-its-potentia
l-costs
Nick Dewhurst of Boothroyd Dewhurst has some data on what it may cost you to move manufacturing of a product overseas. In the pie chart above, part costs represent 72% of a product, overhead is 24%, and labor only 4%.
It’s rare to see an OEM in the U.S. today questioning the presumed logic of lower-cost manufacturing in China. They say . . . “Can’t beat those labor rates. My competitors are all doing it, and I have to stay competitive.”
AB: Labor is not the big cost it is made out to be. The percentage of it in a product has been steadily decreasing over the years. Labor is not the enemy. Doing stupid things is by far the enemy. This article touches on one of them . . . sourcing.
The fervor to go to China is a bit similar to those in the stock market shortly before the dot-com bubble burst.
A few voices have risen above the cacophony, however, pointing out that perhaps this lemming-like exodus to China has not been fully examined from a cost perspective. Business analysts such as Boston Consulting Group and Aberdeen Group are uncovering both the risks of outsourcing and the limited view most U.S. manufacturers have about what it costs them to produce their products.
AB: I was with Ingersoll Engineers a smaller consulting firm. Not an engineer, just a supply chain person who handled many different products.
Nicholas P. Dewhurst, executive VP for Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc. (BDI), and David Meeker, a consultant with Neoteric Product Development, published a study recently (“Improved Product Design Practices Would Make U.S. Manufacturing More Cost Effective – A Case to Consider Before Outsourcing to China”) examining some of the hidden costs of outsourcing that U.S. manufacturers may not be taking into account.
Boothroyd Dewhurst develops and implements design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) software. Dewhurst, an experienced project engineer, spends most of his time working with U.S. companies to make DFMA part of their product development process. He says:
“I ran into several clients who wanted to eliminate domestic manufacturing entirely in favor of outsourcing to China. But when I asked them about the real cost of producing, shipping, and distributing the products, they didn’t have an answer. It was clear they hadn’t done the math or thought it through.”
Dewhurst also saw that companies were not taking the time to understand the potential for cost savings during the design of their products.
“OEMs are drawn to China by the lure of reduced manufacturing costs via extremely low labor rates. But it is a given that most of the cost of a product is fixed during design, so the best time to find cost reductions is during the design stage, not during manufacturing. Yet most products are moved offshore without any such considerations.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Why Europe’s mixed economy produces safer planes than America
By Harold Meyerson | January 18, 2024
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-01-18-airbus-advan
tage/
In the wake of the midair blowout of a door on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 earlier this month, the lead that Airbus has taken over Boeing in the manufacture and sales of the world’s commercial aircraft has, not surprisingly, grown. It’s actually been growing for some time: Last year, Airbus delivered 735 new planes to airlines and leasing companies, The New York Times reported, while Boeing delivered just 528. Airbus had an order backlog of 8,600 new planes, against Boeing’s 5,626. This month’s blowout reinforced the public’s—and consequently, the airlines’—doubts about Boeing’s commitment to safety, which soared after two disastrous crashes of its 737s in 2018 and 2019.
“What used to be a duopoly” in the manufacture of commercial aircraft, Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory told the Times, “has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing.”
The long descent of Boeing has now become the subject of widespread analysis in the mainstream media. A story last Saturday in The Wall Street Journal began with an account of one Boeing engineer’s white paper in 2001 that warned against the company’s new commitment to outsourcing production of key parts of the aircraft it assembled. But continuing to produce the parts in-house, with the work done by Boeing’s very experienced and unionized workforce, cut no mustard with Wall Street and the company’s new-model CEOs, who no longer came to their posts from careers in production, but rather from the financial side of the industry. In 2005, the company sold its Wichita plant to a private equity firm that slashed costs before unloading the plant to Spirit AeroSystems, which has become notorious for its deficient quality inspection practices.
But this fish stunk from the head. Boeing continually objected to what it said were Spirit’s high costs and inability to meet deadlines. As the workers on the shop floor and their union repeatedly noted, this led to rushed production and deficient oversight. Workers—members of the International Association of Machinists—had “great quality and safety concerns,” one union representative wrote to union leaders, but their concerns were routinely ignored by senior management, the Journal reported.
So how are work practices at Airbus different from those at Boeing? I’m not arguing that Airbus provides a panacea for 21st-century production; a chunk of their own production, for instance, is outsourced as well. But consider, for starters, who actually owns the two companies. Airbus’s four largest shareholders, in order, are the government of France, the government of Germany, the Capital Research and Management Company, and the government of Spain. Boeing’s four largest shareholders, in order, are The Vanguard Group, Vanguard Group subfiler, Newport Trust Company, and State Street Corporation (a bank and asset manager). In other words, Airbus’s largest shareholders are mainly politically accountable governments that must pay heed to such public concerns as air safety; Boeing’s are entirely investors in business for profits.
Moreover, as the merger of German, French, and Spanish companies, Airbus production is centered in nations where workers historically and currently have more power than their U.S. counterparts. Forty-six thousand of Airbus’s roughly 130,000 employees work in the company’s German factories, where workers, by law, routinely discuss production and safety issues with managers in works councils. In the U.S., the Machinists are a union in which workers do have voice and power by American standards, but lack mechanisms like works councils through which management must take at least some heed of their concerns.
In sum, Airbus’s clear leadership over Boeing in matters of flight safety stem in good measure from their differences in ownership and worker power—that is, from the European model of mitigating laissez-faire capitalism
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Boeing, not Spirit, mis-installed piece that blew off Alaska MAX 9 jet, industry source says
By Dominic Gates | Jan. 24, 2024 at 6:04 am
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-not-spir
it-mis-installed-piece-that-blew-off-alaska-max-9-jet/
It was clear soon after the incident that the plug must have been mis-installed.
When the cabin is pressurized, six small stop fittings on either side of the plug press against corresponding stop pads on the door frame.
The only way for the plug to have blown out is if it moved up, so that the twelve stop fittings were no longer aligned with the twelve stop pads — which is how the plug is opened for maintenance.
Four key bolts that prevent such upward movement in flight could not have been in place.
The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, “were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.” the whistleblower stated. “Our own records reflect this.”
NTSB investigators already publicly raised the possibility that the bolts had not been installed.
The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton.
The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector.
It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished.
Boeing’s 737 production system is described as “a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.”
If that account of what happened is indeed fully documented in Boeing’s system it should be readily verified by the investigation.
The Seattle Times offered Boeing the opportunity to dispute the details in this story. Citing the ongoing investigation, Boeing declined to comment. Likewise, so did Spirit, the FAA, the Machinists union and the NTSB.
The anonymous whistleblower posted his account online, in the comments appended to an article about the door plug incident on the Leeham.net aviation website.
https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspe
ction-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962
At the end of his second online post, the whistleblower asks “So, where are the bolts?” then offers a guess:
“Probably sitting forgotten and unlabeled … on a work-in-progress bench. Unless someone already tossed them in the scrap bin to tidy up.”
https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspe
ction-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509963
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Alaska Airlines resumes flying Boeing 737 Max 9 plane after door plug blowout
By Meredith Deliso | January 26, 2024, 6:45 PM
The service return comes two days after the Federal Aviation Administration released final instructions to airlines to begin conducting inspections of their 737 Max 9 planes.
Alaska confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that it planned to return some of its 737 MAX-9 aircraft back to the skies on Friday following a thorough inspection.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/alaska-airlines-resumes-flying-boeing-737-ma
x-9/story?id=106723983
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The fall of Boeing has been decades in the making
Jan 31, 2024, 10:05am EST
https://www.vox.com/money/24052245/boeing-corporate-culture-737-airpla
ne-safety-door-plug
Consumers have little choice when it comes to plane manufacturers: It’s pretty much Boeing or Airbus. There are currently over 10,000 Boeing commercial planes in service, and over 13,600 Airbuses.
Until the deadly Max crashes, the FAA allowed Boeing, like other aircraft manufacturers, to “self-certify” that their planes met air safety rules because the FAA doesn’t have the staff to do all the certifications itself. After the agency grounded some Max planes for a flaw in the de-icing system, Boeing asked for an exemption because engine disintegration would be “extremely improbable.”
Weak enforcement of regulation means that Boeing isn’t held accountable to the degree that it should. “The mantra in Washington for years has been ‘starve the beast, big government bad,’” says Aboulafia. “Sometimes you kind of need that [big government], whether it’s monitoring drinking water or keeping the air travel system safe.”
Boeing’s biggest defect? Corporate culture.
Experts say that the root of Boeing’s present troubles is a longstanding culture issue. Over the years, the company’s top decision-makers went from detail-oriented engineers to slick suits with MBAs.
“You’ve got a management team that doesn’t seem terribly concerned with their core business in building aircraft,” says Aboulafia.
There’s one name that keeps popping up when people talk about Boeing’s cultural downslide: Jack Welch, the legendary — and infamous — executive who helmed the conglomerate General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Welch was known for ushering in a sea change of “lean” management that ruthlessly made cuts in both manufacturing processes and the workforce, all in the service of pumping up stock prices. His leadership style included firing the worst-performing 10 percent of GE staff every year; he reportedly laid off over 250,000 people during his tenure. He inspired an entire generation of business leaders, and this Welchian GE philosophy was eventually brought over to Boeing.
In Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, journalist Peter Robison describes an environment where safety concerns were concealed or downplayed, in part to be faster and cheaper than Airbus, the former underdog that overtook Boeing as the biggest commercial aircraft manufacturer in the world in 2019.
While lean management was the name of the game for Boeing’s rank-and-file, in the past decade the company’s executives spent over $43 billion buying back their own stocks and paying out nearly $22 billion in profits to shareholders. By buying back shares and removing them from the public market, the individual value of a share automatically rises even though nothing about the company’s operations has changed.
Those billions represent cash that could have been reinvested in developing the next line of Boeing planes or hiring more quality inspectors. Former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who led the company during the deadly Max crashes, reportedly received an exit package of $62 million.
Boeing’s strategy to continually shrink costs doesn’t appear to have paid off. The company hasn’t turned an annual profit in the past five years. Airbus is selling more planes, and recent headlines about Boeing are putting a halo over Airbus’s comparative reputation. In January alone, Boeing lost $35 billion in market value as its stock price fell. https://www.google.com/search?q=total+stockmarket+value+of+boeing
In the aftermath of the fatal Max crashes, the grounding of the planes cost Boeing about $20 billion. It paid another $200 million in a legal settlement in which its shareholders claimed it had made misleading statements about the Max planes. It lost billions more from canceled orders. “The big criticism is that they’re solely focused on finance, but they’re not even good at that,” says Aboulafia.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pa
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Suicide Mission
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
By Maureen Tkacik | March 28, 2024
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-
mission-boeing/
Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
-----
A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the “bullying environment” in which defects had systematically “stopped being documented” by inspectors. They weren’t fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”
-----
In early 2017 John Barnett happened upon a printout of a list of 49 “Quality Managers to Fire.” The name John Barnett was number one. He decided to go on a medical leave of absence, which turned into early retirement on March 1. He called a labor lawyer he knew from a colleague’s case, and together they began the seemingly unending process of filing an aviation whistleblower complaint detailing his seven years at the Charleston plant. It made him sick to think that the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period during which he’d watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch the stock price nearly triple once more during the two years after he left the company.
Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island
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Why are Boeing whistleblowers suffering sudden unexplained deaths?
Is Sudden Whistleblower Death Syndrome a thing?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/2nd-boeing-whistleblower-fou
nd-dead-heres-a-timeline-of-the-companys-mounting-problems/ar-AA1o3bvZ
Joshua Dean died 1 May 2024. Following a 2-week sudden critical mystery infection. Age 45.
https://nypost.com/2024/05/02/us-news/second-boeing-whistleblower-dies
-suddenly-from-severe-infection/
John Barnett died in March - in the middle of his sworn deposition. What should we call that? How about "suicide" anyone?
https://www.newsweek.com/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblower-predicted-d
eath-scandal-1879548
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Department of Justice says Boeing may be criminally liable in 737 Max crashes
May 14, 2024
Boeing has violated a 2021 agreement that shielded it from criminal prosecution after two 737 Max disasters left 346 people dead overseas, the Department of Justice told a federal judge in a court filing Tuesday.
Boeing acknowledged receiving notice of DOJ's decision and said it is planning to respond.
“We can confirm that we received a communication today from the Justice Department, stating that the Department has made a determination that we have not met our obligations under our 2021 deferred prosecution agreement, and requesting the company's response," Boeing told USA TODAY in a statement. “We believe that we have honored the terms of that agreement and look forward to the opportunity to respond to the Department on this issue.”
Government officials plan to meet May 31 with victims of the crash and directed Boeing to reply to the filing by June 13. The department will inform the court by July 7 how it plans to proceed, which could lead to criminal charges against the company.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-says-boeing-brea
ched-2021-deferred-prosecution-737-max-agreement-2024-05-14/
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/14/justice-department-says-boeing-breache
d-2021-agreement-that-shielded-it-from-criminal-charges-over-737-max-crashes.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How ordinary failure could have a seismic effect on industrial giant Boeing
By John Downer | July 16, 2024
John Downer is Associate Professor in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Bristol, and the author of "Rational Accidents."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240718-how-ordinary-failure-could
-have-a-seismic-effect-on-an-industrial-giant
Earlier this year, a Boeing aircraft's door plug fell out in flight – all because crucial bolts were missing. The incident shows why simple failures like this are often a sign of larger problems, says John Downer.
For a flight to be imperiled by a simple and preventable manufacturing or maintenance error is an anomaly with potentially far-reaching implications.
On 6 January, as Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 (a Boeing 737 Max 9) was climbing out of Portland, Oregon, a large section of the aircraft's structure, a fuselage door-plug, broke free in flight. With the plug gone, the cabin violently decompressed with a clamorous boom and gale that ripped headrests from their moorings. The mother of a teenage boy seated just in front of the rupture clung to him as his shirt was torn from his body and sucked into the void.
Nobody died in the harrowing incident, somewhat miraculously, but it was a very close call. If the seats directly next to the failed fuselage section had not been empty, or the seatbelt light had not been lit, the event could probably have been deadly.
Dangerous failures in modern jetliners are extremely uncommon events in general, but even in this context, the plug blowout looks unusual and concerning. Preliminary reports strongly indicate that its proximate cause was shockingly mundane: it seems that Boeing simply failed to secure the plug correctly. The errant door-plug was missing four crucial bolts when it was discovered in a residential neighborhood, and subsequent inspections have reportedly revealed improperly bolted plugs on other aircraft fuselages.
If the missing bolt theory is confirmed when the safety investigation concludes, then it will be the sheer ordinariness of the failure that sets it apart. When jetliners fail for mechanical reasons, those reasons tend to be much more complicated and interesting (at least from an engineering perspective) than missing bolts. For a flight to be imperiled by such a prosaic and eminently avoidable manufacturing or maintenance error is an anomaly with ominous implications.
To understand what I mean here, it helps to put the incident into context, and for that it helps to step back and think briefly about the inherent difficulties of making jetliners as reliable as we have come to expect.
Much More at https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240718-how-ordinary-failure-could
-have-a-seismic-effect-on-an-industrial-giant
Download the free book "Rational Accidents" from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Rational+Accidents
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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