> After emerging from icy conditions into drier air they have to make sure they turn off the engine anti-ice system, which heats the inner barrel of the engine pod so that ice doesn’t build up.
> If they fail to do so, the system can quickly overheat the carbon composite material and damage the structural integrity of the engine pod.
> The problem is there’s no alert or indication to the crew that the system needs to be turned off. They just have to remember to do it.
> If they forget, or are distracted by other tasks, the overheating can begin to damage the structure after just five minutes.
This is all you need to know to pass judgement on Boeing Management. Whatever happened to Boeing's "Engineering Excellence" ?
More details are in the book "Flying Blind" [2]. It shows how Boeing's culture of Engineering Excellence was gradually replaced with MD's rotten parasitic culture through the process that is better described as "reverse acquisition". Formally Boeing acquired MD, but in reality MD took over Boeing.
An uncle worked for McDonnell Douglas, then Boeing, on military planes (C-17). The tales of the culture of utter corruption on the military contractor side he told were chilling.
Boeing management's attitude reminds me of this passage from the novel "The Sea-Wolf by Jack London".
“Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course over-estimated since it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds or rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. He was worth nothing to the world. The supply is too large. To himself only was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was, being dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself. He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-water, and he does not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone. He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss. Don’t you see? And what have you to say?”
In the erstwhile third-world countries the moniker "Boeing" was synonymous with all Aeroplanes and a symbol of American Technological Might. Every kid knew of "The Jumbo Jet" and families would make weekend picnic trips to the Airport to see one up close and if allowed, enter the cabin for a tour. You were "somebody" if you had traveled in a Airplane and bazillion times more-so if it was on a "Jumbo Jet".
It seems Boeing is now set on destroying all reputation and goodwill earned over decades and by extension making American Technology and Management a laughing stock in the World.
I've heard Boeing folks suggest that the 1997 acquisition of McDonell-Douglas (who was having serious financial difficulties at the time) ironically resulted in the latter's MBA-heavy management taking over Boeing leadership. The result has been a less profitable company with a now poor and getting worse safety record:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
So is the FAA going to ground these planes now or do what they did the last time? At least no one died yet this time around.
For those who still do not understand what unchained captialism looks like. This is a taste of it. The phrase "the market will correct itself" may be true eventually but ignores the hundreds of people that have die before that happens.
I don't think airline manufacturers are a great example of unchained capitalism. They're a god-awful example actually, being heavily chained to nations and in many cases directly supported, protected, and owned by them. There's a reason high-level diplomats are involved in many aircraft sales and you'll see the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia or wherever announce preliminary sales numbers before even the manufacturer does. Airline manufacturers are essentially immune to free-market forces, because their respective governments would never let them fail. Not to mention that - unlike aviation - many other industries don't even have their own dedicated government agencies to regulate them.
Also the airline industry as a whole also has a stellar safety record, Boeing's issues notwithstanding.
That's not to say that your core thesis is necessarily wrong, but airline manufacturers aren't a great vehicle to argue that point.
They are a perfect example of end stage capitalism when en entire industry has concentrated into the 1-2 winner/ and their weight of jobs on elections and the competition of nations and money on corruption outweighs everything.
Like Volkswagen Dieselgate
Like Samsung Exploding Phones
Like CPU Branch Prediction Idiocy
> Like [..] CPU Branch Prediction Idiocy
Can you elaborate on that or point me to some sources as I thought branch prediction was a good thing for speed (until now)
See the CPU slowdowns and related security issues that resulted from branch prediction, basically CPUs would optimistically assume access and so could be tricked into executing what you wanted...which there was no OS or security level control that could be used to fix that.
They had to patch "micro code" to turn off the branch prediction in order to fix the security issues, which if they hadn't had that basically a ton of institutions would have been SOL (think banks unable to patch security holes in their computer systems - bodes poorly if you also realize banks aren't usually able to patch their systems overnight).
While the summary in this reply is at best misleading if not simply wrong, the linked Wikipedia article is good. I recommend just reading that article and disregarding the comment.
Also yes, branch prediction is "a good thing" without which processors wouldn't be able to reach the performance they have today. Starving the whole instructing pipeline at every branch for dozens of cycles is not great.
Even the processor on the BCM2835 used in the first raspberry PI had branch prediction, and for good reason.
As for assuming access and tricking into execution of what you wanted, branching forms the foundation for many if not all OS level security features, in the form of boolean flags, bits behind protected memory (protected by more branching), etc. If the result of a compare causes code to execute that should not (for security reasons), then you have caused execution of what you wanted, which can lead to exposure of e.g. operating system secrets. And with such access it then becomes (sometimes) possible to executing more of what you wanted.
I.e. trusted code could be used to cause insecure results.
Oversimplification, sure, but the truth (exposure of register results due to fault of the hardware) is overly technical and under-emphasizes the severity of the issue, so it is somewhat intentionally misleading...
No way that they are going to ground them now.
Last time they were delaying the grounding as much as possible even after the second fatal crash.
They grounded it only after a lot of other countries already did it.
you're using one of the most regulated and government lobbied industries as an example of "unchained capitalism" ? Boeing would have went bankrupt years ago if it wasn't for their sweetheart government contracts and favors given due to lobbying
What would it need so the US government takes over the company and puts the engineers in charge? Hadn't NASA been run like that at least until some point in the 80s or so? I don't know about those contexts at all, would just like to wrap my head around what was and is possible or not in the US.
I just don’t think that would happen. The government seems impotent to do anything that is for the greater good if there are corporate interests (not capitalist but corporate, i.e. this Q bonuses > long term business value).
I also remember reading about the damage from that acquisition. I wonder if it would have eventually occurred anyway as that level of short-sighted thinking is so pervasive in industry now.
I hope one day engineering students will study the MAX 7 and learn from the Boeing culture that has killed at least 346 people so far. So many issues (and related cover-ups) stem from the massive compromises made so Boeing could quickly launch a flawed modified plane instead of a new design because Airbus scared their management.
This needs to be in *management* ethics. It was the *management* that ignored warnings. The "compromises" were demanded by *management*.
Boeing is not an engineering culture, it is an MBA culture. This is the result.
It is clear, by deadly example, that Boeing *management* is not capable of running a company that produces a safe plane. It is, after all, difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
All the engineering ethics in the world does nothing against the greed of Boeing's management.
"All the engineering ethics in the world does nothing against the greed of Boeing's management. "
Sure managers are guilty.
But managers did not write the code. "Engineers" did.
As long as there are engineers writing that code (also see VW and #Dieselgate) there will be managers who do this. Engineers need to take a stand and don't do everything. Like professionals. "He made me do it" is not an excuse for hundreds of dead people.
I generally agree that one has an ethical duty to be accountable for the output of one’s work, but I also worked with a fellow at a previous job who stuck around long after I’d pulled the chute because his daughter had a medical issue and he couldn’t risk losing insurance. It’s not always that cut and dry, and until we’ve got UBI, universal health care, and a reasonable immigration system, the blame is and must remain on the managers first and foremost.
Yes, and then the other engineer is responsible for the dead people, not you. But if your job is more important than other peoples lifes, I guess, yes, you do as you have been told.
As long as writing code is not an actual engineering profession with the associated authority and liability -- no, you're wrong. The code was not written by (certified) engineers, it was written by programmers. And programmers do not have the authority to refuse their manager's orders.
I've seen fiduciary duty to shareholders in publicly traded companies and how it force managers to chase unsustainable immediate gains repeated as cliche, template, criticisms in this types of topics. Privately owned companies of course aren't much different OTOH, so personally it feels to me that incentive design that rewards ethical corporate behaviors is an open question passed from the modern era to the post-modern world(or is that one label behind this one? I'm totally out of my depth).
I will remark that, excluding cases where some idiot is offering several times what the company is worth, it is rare that the fiduciary duty issue would force the management of a company to choose unsustainable immediate gains.
The value of a company's equity is based on the net present value of future returns. That means that while short term earnings are important, so are earnings in the moderately distant future. (depending on risk free interest rates)
If a company like Boeing were properly managed, they'd give suitable priority to engineering excellence, at least to the point of not having critical failures like these, because that's core to their ability to compete with Airbus/etc in the future.
The real issue you're concerned about is that it is very difficult to align the interests of corporate managers with the interests of the company. It is relatively easy to align senior management with short term stock prices, but it is difficult for the public to figure out that the gains they see (less engineering cost, faster turnaround time, etc) come at the expense of the longer term viability of the company, so the former gets priced into the short term stock price (and so executive compensation) and the latter does not.
Agreed. I only mention engineering students as my only experience with ethics classes are in that domain. However it's still a good example for engineers, particularly how the design failures resulted in deaths, the role of whistleblowers and how disastrous self-certification can be.
I would be utterly shocked if any MBA program in the world had a mandatory ethics component, for all that an unethical MBA is in a position to kill many more people than an unethical engineer.
The same MBA-ization of Boeing has been happening in other companies as well, including in the IT sector. Seriously, how can we allow non-engineers to lead aerospace or tech companies at all?
Same, and I wonder if it'll share a chapter with Tesla's prematurely shipped autonomous features, related deaths, and the dishonest messaging surrounding it.
Considering the MCAS[0] failures were largely software defects in an autonomous system, seems plausible to me...
In the case of Tesla they make the argument that the safety features have saved far more than they have injured/killed. Inexplicably, there is no federal agency that actually checks these things.
In this case I don't see how you could make the same argument, clearly the new planes were not safer than the old ones or they wouldn't have been grounded.
Based on my experience with Tesla’s autonomous driving software, there is no planet on which that’s true. It is quite literally worse than anyone I can imagine driving unless they’re high, drunk, texting, and doing 30+mph over the speed limit. I’ve come across an unfortunate number of drunk drivers in my time on this earth driving and I can say I’ve never once seen or heard of a drunk slamming on their brakes at 70mph because of a tree shadow across the road. I’ve personally experienced and seen someone else’s Tesla do it on multiple occasions.
I can anticipate and avoid a drunk driver in many situations. I’d never expect that behavior out of any human driver.
I had a Tesla with FSD which I never used again after it pulled out in front of another car on the motorway. Only me grabbing control and pulling us back into lane prevented us being rear-ended. My inferior human reactions were enough for that. Even the regular autopilot lane-keeping was useless on anything except nice neat roads with painted lanes, and it did several frightening phantom emergency stops, luckily all at low speed.
That said, my current MG4 is just as bad with emergency lane-keeping, but with the added entertainment of it being on by default and needing to be disabled on every trip. Level 5 self-driving won't happen for decades.
The good news is that you did what you were supposed to do. The bad news is that it would have been your responsibility if you hadn't: "FSD" doesn't detract from your responsibility to be in control of your vehicle, it merely enables your mind to wander away from the task.
I'm glad you're safe, and honestly you were set up to fail (hence the GP's point). Thank you for taking the responsible choice and not putting yourself in the same dangerous situation again.
Don't know of legalities, but we have two different scenarios. First, I car in front stopped, driver is responsible for breaking, FSD may or may not help, driver is responsible. Second, car was going straight and decides to randomly change lane, speed up/down. Driver may be able to take mitigating steps, but car is responsible. Second case is more akin to car accelerating when break is pressed.
And yet one sees people talking the fearure up all day on the internet, as if it's safer than human drivers. When I see such comments, I seriously question if they've ever driven a car and came across a Tesla in "self-driving" mode.
Just to add to the conversation a bit more:
Humans give away their intentions in more ways than turn signals, as a human you subconsciously know what the other is trying to do, just by watching. It's difficult to explain, and you gotta have driven a car to understand.
These self-driving vehicles aren't even close to mimicking that aspect. Leading us, humans on the road, a bit more clueless on what's going on.
Fair, but humans sometimes hit the accelerator rather than the break if they have to do an emergency stop, which is an error that you would not expect a self driving car to make.
I haven't driven a Tesla, although I've been in an uber where the guy used FSD and it didn't do anything crazy. I don't think anecdotes on the internet are going to settle this, an independent body needs to work with insurers etc. to track statistics to determine which driver assistance features are helping and which are hurting.
> I’d never expect that behavior out of any human driver.
People will slam on the brakes when they see an animal run out on the road. It's generally considered better driving practice to not do that, as you risk rear end collisions, but that behaviour from humans does exist.
What are you talking about, Tesla doesn't ship any autonomous features. Driver assist features do not make a car autonomous. Tesla has always plainly said you must monitor the car at all times autopilot is engaged, the exact same way that turning on cruise control in any other car doesn't make the car autonomous even though the car is managing the speed.
Quite right old chap! Surely no reasonable consumer would interpret terms like "Autopilot" or "Full Self Driving" to mean that the car autonomously drives itself!
> What are you talking about, Tesla doesn't ship any autonomous features. Driver assist features do not make a car autonomous. Tesla has always plainly said you must monitor the car at all times autopilot is engaged, the exact same way that turning on cruise control in any other car doesn't make the car autonomous even though the car is managing the speed.
What are you talking about?
What Tesla markets and sells falls into SAE Autonomous Ground Vehicle classifications, just not level 5.
Nothing I wrote spoke to anything Tesla sells being L5 (or any particular level at all).
Edit: On the topic of MCAS, it strikes me as a system akin to around an SAE L2/L3, overriding pilot inputs to prevent a perceived crash/stall risk. This AIUI is well within the autonomy space Teslas operate...
Its not Airbus. The Chinese Comac C919 and Sukhoi SJ100 are the two main aircraft placing enormous pressure on Boeing internationally. FAA approval is a slam-dunk for them in foreign markets as it renews confidence in the brand and allows them to compete against newcomers that are arguably just as good or better than the max series of widebodies and come in at a fraction of the cost.
Boeing management --and their flat-out inability to out-innovate the competition at cost-- are the real reason behind the push to certify at all cost.
My understanding is that they have developed an import substitution plan for the jet and are resolved to keep producing it. [1] For instance, they are substituting the original SaM-146 engines with fully domestically produced PD-8 engines and I understand they are already, or close to testing the first prototype with the new engines (they already tested an earlier prototype with other import substitutions but which still had the old engines). [2]
> or close to testing the first prototype with the new engines
Considering that Russian engineering culture is even worse than that of Boeing (and probably massively so) it’s unlikely that they can ever be competitive if that’s the main issue
Which begs the question, why didn't they use those engines initially? The answer is probably in their efficiency, because Russian engines are not known for that.
That's simply untrue. The Sukhoi SJ100 is a different type of plane (<100 passenger capacity), comparable to an Embraer E190. Neither it nor the Comac C919 are "widebodies".
The C919 is a decent plane, but by most accounts a decade behind in tech and efficiency. And for short-haul operations, efficiency is the most important thing.
The only real competitor to Boeing today is Airbus. Comac can be one 10-20 years down the line.
FAA approval is a slam-dunk for them in foreign markets
FAA approval is only a slam-dunk because it is recognized internationally as a steward of quality and reliability. By asking the FAA to start certifying sub-par planes, Boeing will not only destroy their own brand but will bring the FAA down with them.
Normally when I read a comment like the above on an internet forum, it's blowing some issue way out of proportion. In this case, I think it's a fair comment.
Today I learned that my refrigerator has a more complex anti-icing control that the engine inlet on the 737 Max (by virtue of having a $10 snap switch in the circuit).
It wasn't clear to me if Boeing was asking for a exception such as "allow the planes to fly, but beat the pilots about turning the 'melt engine' feature off until we can design and build out a fix for this" or a "let's never fix it and pretend it won't happen".
The first almost is reasonable, the second is kinda batshit.
> 737 MAX 7 — the still-uncertified smallest member of its newest jet family
The first would be reasonable if there were hundreds of such planes already flying and grounding them would result in huge disruptions. But this plane is not yet certified. How can you go to the FAA with a half-baked product and tell them that you'll get it right eventually? Considering the whole MAX history?
> How can you go to the FAA with a half-baked product and tell them that you'll get it right eventually
That's the beauty of it, Boeing until recently certified themselves, with minimal FAA oversight. It's precisely because of the MCAS fiasco that there is actual scrutiny from the FAA, and much more importantly, from the actually competent people at EASA that will actually check things instead of trusting Boeing's bullshit. Note that this is actually unprecedented, normally air authorities trust each other, but FAA dropped the ball so bad with Boeing that EASA had to step in and insert itself into the process and stop automatically assuming the FAA did it's job.
The long term effects are potentially pretty bad for the US (and it's aerospace industry generally), if the FAA is no longer trusted then that's a loss of prestige and a business cost because anyone wanting to sell abroad can expect local regulators to get involved, FAA and EASA have had a bilateral agreement for a while to basically cover a "you do yours and we'll do ours" approach.
The FAA is free to apply different standards to planes already in operation than to planes not yet built. To a certain extent, that's the only sane way to make forward progress on the standards (the other two choices involve airlines continuously retrofitting their fleets or the standards never changing).
>Boeing would have until mid-2026 to design, test and certify a permanent fix for the engine anti-ice system defect that would then be retrofitted to all MAXs.
"Minimum equipment list" - notably, that's used to allow a certified plane to fly with some temporary reductions in operable equipment, rather than to allow a design to proceed through certification with known defects.
I'd suggest because this is a new plane model, they simply don't let it fly, so there is no need to "beat the pilots about turning the 'melt engine' feature off until we can design and build out a fix for this".
Airplanes are not the latest video game: we try to avoid a bunch of downloadable software patches required for a brand-new airplane (just as I think should be the case for video games, too).
Also... continuing to have a 737 rating for decades, all in the interest of saving pilot retraining hours and making it cheaper for airlines to purchase these new aircraft, is partially why we're in this problem in the first place. Boeing needs to suck it up and truly claim a new airplane is, well, new, and requires new training.
As I understand it, the real problem isn't that the pilot is expected to turn off the deicing heater after X minutes, but that the pilot will then have to remember to turn it back on when needed later.
Seems like a valid technical solution but a human-factors nightmare. Boeing needs to read the room.
The problem is, if they drill it in their heads too much, pilots will err on the side of caution and could ice the engine. The system is there for a reason.
Yeah I'm surprised they are still cowboying around after the max scandal. Do they really need to put more lives at risk before the message becomes clear that safety trumps profit?
Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing's former CEO, left the company with $80.7 million in pay and benefits, after being fired over two aircraft crashes that killed 346 people in total. His compensation dwarfs the $50 million set aside for families of the crash victims.
What's not clear from the article is how likely this failure mode actually is to occur, even if the pilots happen to forget to disable the anti-ice.
The fact that this issue is present in the existing 737 Max variants, and none appear to have actually experienced a structural failure, suggests the probability is low.
It is easy for a bunch of keyboard warriors here on HN to insist that only zero risk is acceptable. In the real world, everything is a continuum and without knowing quantifiably where on the risk continuum this issue is, any discussion is meaningless.
> The fact that this issue is present in the existing 737 Max variants, and none appear to have actually experienced a structural failure, suggests the probability is low.
The fact that the space shuttle flew 60 times without SRB o-rings being a problem suggests that the probability of their failure was also low.
Repeating catastrophic design flaws though? I'd think the even the most inhumane manufacturers would face too much liability to allow the second one to happen.
> "it cannot be shown that the EAI [Engine Anti-Ice] system meets the probability requirements applicable to this regulation."
In my understanding, Boeing is asking for to be excluded from the risk assessment entirely. They know there is a possibility that the structure could be weakened enough to fail during normal flight.
> "the nacelle inlet structural temperatures during EAI operation may cause the inner barrel to lose sufficient strength such that capability to carry limit and ultimate loads may not be maintained."
> "analysis and engineering flight testing showed there is a potential for structural damage."
Their entire justification for why the risk is acceptable is that no one has had parts fly off yet and surely pilots will follow the flight rules to turn off the deicer:
> "737 MAX has been in service since 2017 and has accumulated over 6.5 million flight hours. In that time, there have been no reported cases of parts departing aircraft (PDA) due to overheating of the engine nacelle inlet structure".
> "Operators [Pilots] must adhere to the mandatory AD [Airworthiness Directive], mitigating the potentially unsafe condition."
Oh, and they petition relief from some of the human factors requirements as well. Which indicates they don't want to be judged based on the probability that pilots will not turn off the EAI.
This is also a trivially true statement and meaningless for real-world decision-making.
In a large enough dataset and given enough time, a meteor will eventually hit a plane in-flight and destroy it. Should regulation require the airplanes carry anti-meteor armor?
Your qualitative judgement that these conditions described occur all the time actually suggests it's not a big deal, because the currently-flying Max 8 and Max 9 variants have the same issue, and none have experienced a structural failure.
The scenario here is that, if the pilots forget to turn off anti-ice, the nacelle will eventually overheat, weaken, and possibly fail. But clearly that is not guaranteed to happen, or happen immediately. What I'm saying is that actual decision-making here depends on what the statistics of this possible failure actually are, given that the pilots forget to turn off the anti-ice.
Your analogy doesn't make sense because there is no feasible way to protect a plane from a meteor hit (if it ever happens). So it's either take your chances or don't fly at all. The failure mode we are discussing absolutely can be prevented, it's just a matter of some extra cost.
To me, variant 7 is different than 8 and 9, and 7 should not be given special treatment because of its similarity to the others. Any discussion is meaningless?
The 737 MAX has been in service since 2017 and has accumulated over 6.5 million flight hours. In that time, there have been no reported cases of parts departing aircraft due to overheating of the engine nacelle inlet structure,” the filing states.
That's your rationale?
Have we forgotten when NASA management discounted concerns about O-rings in part because one hadn't catastrophically failed yet? (Until Challenger)
Given Boeing's recent horrendous safety record with knowlingly allowing unsafe systems to fly, and the failures of such resulting in catastrophic crashes, the FAA would be out of their mind to consider the proposal.
Much as I like the idea of punishing Boeing, this doesn't make any sense in terms of personal safety. Airliner crashes are so unlikely to kill you that, in terms of your own personal safety, it just isn't worth worrying about.
No, what I said was correct. It simply isn't the case that avoiding Boeing airliners appreciably improves your personal safety.
Airliner crashes always make the news, so many casual observers overestimate their frequency by orders of magnitude. The statistics remain clear as day: airliner crashes are incredibly rare. They're incomparably rarer than road traffic accidents, for instance. Most years, no US airlines have any fatal crashes.
I recommend this YouTube video as a general overview of aviation safety. It's about the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash, but also covers airliner safety and big-picture aviation safety.
Edit for context (thanks /u/janice1999) there are 11,182 Airbus A320s and ~8400 Boeing 737 NG / Max so even pro rated Boeings recent planes are worse and the A320 has been out a few years longer too.
We'd probably also want to see separate stats for issues that occur shortly before landing or after takeoff -- stuff that may be more likely to come up with every flight regardless of duration.
Airbus’s human factor engineering was so bad that it led experienced pilots to fly a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean. They were repeatedly warned about this, and still have not fully fixed it.
Airbus’s flight controls worked sufficiently well that the pilots could still keep the plane in the air and then land it successfully despite the massive damage to the plane.
They acted on it. Wikipedia writes: "On 12 August 2009, Airbus issued three mandatory service bulletins, requiring that all A330 and A340 aircraft be fitted with two Goodrich 0851HL pitot tubes and one Thales model C16195BA pitot (or, alternatively, three of the Goodrich pitot tubes); Thales model C16195AA pitot tubes were no longer to be used."
Yes, they were.
They got stuck with ice and they disagreed in the air speed sent.
Because of this the autopilot was disabled and the flight controls were switched in alternate law 2.
The pilot that was flying failed to realise that this meant that his inputs had a much bigger effect compared to normal flight and he panicked and he also failed to relinquish control to the much more experienced pilot (on that model) multiple times.
How are the pitot tubes not the root cause?
When I was getting ready to graduate college with a degree in mechanical engineering (circa 2009), I must have applied to Boeing 50+ times. I was a huge fan of the company. Every application was flatly rejected, no explanation given.
I moved on, and I'm glad I did. Boeing sucks. I feel like I dodged a bullet.
Funny thing is, they're the biggest (well aside from Bombardier that were forced into a fire sale and are a shadow of themselves now) loser of the whole story. Airbus got a brand new and very good design for practically free because Boeing were stupid and short-sighted.
Well, they can't be that bad if the FAA will to listen to them. I can recall another transportation company who is able to have legislation passed for their soul benefit.
What does that mean? Like you sent in a new application every other day?
Why would you re-apply after getting rejected? Don't you need to get more experience on your resume?
Job rejections virtually never get explanations. Even if you've interviewed in person, it's extremely unlikely. That's just how it is. Nothing specific to Boeing.
Oh, thanks. I've never seen that before for new college grads -- usually these big companies have a centralized hiring and interviewing and placement process for grads since that's so much more efficient.
Especially grad students tend to already have some work or research experience under their belt - meaning they don't necessary have to go through the meat grinder of "new grad" job listings.
It's truly insane to put a human in the loop for something like this... its like saying don't forget to turn the oven off after 5 minutes or it might explode (ovens go through extensive compliance testing to make sure they don't cause fires even in adverse conditions).
I do think it's important to recognize they are working on a fix for the issue, which is called out in the article.
I also think it's important to recognize no one commenting in the article has seen the analysis, knows what is meant by "structural damage" or what went into Boeing saying a failure resulting from it is "extremely improbable". Could be it's a solid analysis, the structural damage they mention is no where approaching a concern, and they think it's extremely improbable for good reason. Or not, I just don't think we know.
That being said, it is hard for me to look at this as something other than another example of poor company culture. You have a component that can be damaged when exposed to temperatures above a certain limit, for a certain length of time, connected to a heater that can heat it above that limit for longer than that time... And no systems to stop this?
This strikes me as being due to someone without an engineering degree saying "We've always used this heating system, there's no need to go through an in depth new analysis or testing regime to validate it's use, that would cost lots of money!".
Yeah. Welchian management is garbage from a product perspective - that's just about the most obvious thing in the universe - but the real crap of this is, over the lifetime of the business, it's also garbage from a finance perspective. Go ahead and take a tour of the companies that went whole-hog on Welchian initiatives. Assuming you can find one that still exists, show me one that's unequivocally making money today.
Welchian management is just another spin on the old "restaurant fire" mafia scheme: bank up debt on assets before selling the plumbing and torching the place. Like the mob, it makes a handful of cash for some random top guy, and absolutely wrecks everything else, forever.
It's hard to not take stories like this personally, having spent time inside the Boeing mothership. The power of this organization to destroy value rivals that of a small-ish military occupation; the ability of Boeing to do anything meaningful in an engineering context is pretty obviously at an end[1]. It's a testament to past cleverness - and to the knowledge and dedication of line workers, maintenance, and aircrew - that any legacy Boeing product ever works, at all, ever. And that's why we're now fixing deficiencies like this in goddamn flight checklists. Because it's all that's left.
[1] Whatever innovation leaks from the company today is wholly from acquisitions, and those always have all cash choked from their lifeless corpses within five or ten years. Even DoD procurement has put a big red flag on the Boeing RFPs that come in, although that's also related to their increasing inability to estimate costs better than RANDINT.
Boeing was one of the most innovative companies and took major risks to move the state of air travel forward (747 etc.) and that basically came to a standstill after the spreadsheet and finance people took over.
> took major risks to move the state of air travel forward (747 etc.)
That's a very bad example. Boeing failed with the 2707 supersonic transporter because federal funding was cut, and assuming that they'll be left behind by the obvious future of supersonic passenger transportation with the Concorde and the Tu-144, decided to make a plane filling other niches that were going to be left. Like cargo, which wasn't going to need the speed, but needed capacity. The 747 was a dual use cargo and passenger design.
I still do my best to avoid flying on the MAX 8. V low confidence in Boeing after that debacle. They introduced MCAS to compensate for the fact that they didn't want to spend on redesigning an aerodynamically stable plane that could accommodate the new, larger engines.
When MCAS led to crashes, they dialled it back, increasing the power of the pilot relative to the computer. That's not a solve. In either case, the aircraft has an additional point of failure that properly designed aeroplanes do not have.
The 788 is great but the 787 MAX, not so much.
Needless to say this new story does not inspire further confidence.
I feel like if you made a plane that has killed anyone recently through your fault, your company should enter a period of “time out” where you get zero exemptions from anything.
> Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air
I bet they do and the FAA should rightly tell them to fuck off if they're not willing to go through the formal procedure to get their proven-dangerous planes back into commercial aviation.
It's quite funny how we still teach THERAC-25 to students about how deadly engineering issues can get yet Boeing seems to be a much better and modern candidate to teach about bad engineering/management practices affecting safety (MCAS).
Toyota kept going on and on about how their software code wasn’t faulty, but analysts showed that it was so incredibly riddled with bugs that unintended acceleration was not only “in there”, but was hiding under a layer of literally(!) thousands of other critical bugs.
Did Toyota change their safety culture as a result?
Can you please provide some links? As far as I know there are no credible references. Also, my whole family drives Toyotas for at least 40+ years, so I both have a real interest to know if that occurs, and I also have some anecdotal evidence it doesn't occur.
1. There’s an identified mechanism by which the software could accelerate without the pedal depressed.
2. In my car, if I step gently on both pedals, they both take effect. (Which is reasonable: starting uphill is a thing.). If I step harder on both pedals, the car chimes at me and the motor output is reduced automatically.
In every car, the brake is much, much stronger than the accelerator, and easily overpowered by braking. Every one of these cases was simply a person who accidentally stepped on the gas, thinking it was the brake. If you ever feel like this is happening to you, pick your foot up and try again.
You can manually filter out airlines that have substantial 737 fleets. (Wikipedia usually has good information on the makeup of each airline's fleets.)
The Babylonians had similar ideas. Code of Hammurabi, Law 229: If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
How is lawfully prosecuting a private company that makes profits off of a vehicle is the same thing as killing someone? Would you agree with literally any punishment against Boeing for cheaping out on their design?
Boeing really wants to cut corners, and it's gonna take a really long time to fully bite them in the ass, because of their effective monopoly on US produced jets.
There is some shitty engineering there for sure, but I still fly any 737 (MAX or not) so long as relevant authorities find it safe enough. It's usually not possible to switch airlines/planes anyway. If the trip is by MAX or not at all, the trip happens. Not really an argument of any kind, but these posts always get littered with people who are quick to say they won't fly plane X again etc. Just one vote the other way.
What the actual f*ck is wrong with Boeing's management? After the MAX fiasco that left several hundreds dead, I would have expected the new management to be more cautious about safety issues. As a consumer, I feel the need to vote with my wallet and feet. I feel it is time to boycott flying on Boeing's unsafe planes. Unfortunately, due to consolidation and lack of competition there are very few choices left for us.
Map Boeing facility locations, political district boundaries, and bribes (exchanges of cash for the explicit purpose of achieving a specific political outcome), and it looks a lot less amazing. Boeing is structured to be immune to any sort of oversight, consequence, or inconvenience. This may have harmed their reputation, but they've reshaped the world so that their reputation doesn't matter.
Boeing should sack all their management and promote engineers to any needed management positions. This idea after the last set of issues is ridiculous and it'll be the same non-technical people who think it's magical thinking that keeps aircraft in the sky.
this unfortunately requires management to fire themselves, which seems unlikely to happen. I guess maybe the government could step in somehow, or at some point.
Boeing cannot make things that fly no more. So now as a lawyer run entity will try to redefine the concept of flying to, riffing on Douglas Adams line on, constantly falling and mostly missing hitting the ground.
Not sure if you are joking or not. But since its not funny I assume not.
Switching from one airplane to another isn't like switching from a Honda to a Toyota car. It requires lots of training and thus cost.
Southwest as the prim example has many 100s of pilots trained on a 737, they have a huge maintenance network that is trained for the 737. They don't fly any Airbus at all, thus they have 0 experience in their whole operation.
Switching would a monumental task. It was reported that Southwest took a serious look at A220 program, but has since doubled down on 737 for the next couple decades.
Many airlines have switched to higher amounts of Airbus and Airbus has made inroads into the US market. But partly now Airbus has so many orders for 737 Max sized planes that if you order one, your gone have to wait for a long time. So, maybe you still rather get that 737MAX instead.
For a while the market was more like 50/50, now we are trending towards a 40/60 market, or potentially even more. And that doesn't take into account that Boeing lowering prices quite to get some of these contracts.
not all boeings are bad, in fact, most are fantastically reliable, except for the newer versions with incredibly cheap design, that places extraordinary demands on pilots and their knowledge. There is a welchian management culture that is cutting costs to the bone.
This, along with the door blowout in the middle of an Alaska airlines flight and MCAS give me reason to believe the MAX was an ill-conceived project from the very beginning.
Shareholders need to suck it up, and Boeing needs to start with a clean sheet of paper and design airplanes the same way their parents did. Enough coasting on re-engines.
Let’s fly fast and break engines and airplanes. Boeing management need to be behind bars for making such a ridiculous request. Uhhh. We didn’t have time to make a safe airplane. Can we have an exemption? This is egregious and wrong.
The real issue here is regarding decision fatigue & resource management. It’s just another thing that a pilot may have to deal with which could distract from making important decisions in a potentially dangerous situation.
I have mixed feelings about unions overall. But, pilots' unions seem to be an important "check and balance" to maintain safety in a capitalist aviation world.
Pilots are not machines, and can't be expected to have a 0% error rate.
As a former aviator who is likewise union-agnostic, ALPA is absolutely the exception. The pilot in command has absolute authority under the Federal Aviation Regulations to take whatever actions are needed for safety of flight. He or she absolutely needs to have a union standing behind them in order to be able to tell non-aviator managers to pound sand when they want to compromise flight safety in the name of saving a buck or two.
Otherwise stand by for:
- "You don't really NEED that much fuel reserve, it's expensive."
- "You can fly with one of those redundant components failed, stop whining."
- "You don't NEED those inconvenient crew rest requirements. Stop whining, pound some coffee, and fly tired."
- "We don't NEED to do all this expensive maintenance."
- "We don't NEED all these expensive boomer pilots with 10,000 hours of experience and combat time over Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan. Fire them, hire the rookie from the regionals, and pay them $50,000 a year. Pilots are just bus drivers anyway."
I'm open to evidence of their regulations being substantially driven by airline unions, but I've never heard of this.
edit I think I just found exactly that. From page 23 of this 2014 MSc thesis [0]
> Airline labor unions have fought to increase on the job safety for their members through litigation, supporting regulations, and member education. Labor unions were instrumentals in pushing for the adoption of safety measures such as TCAS and the anti-fatigue rest rules of FAR117.
>We don't NEED all these expensive boomer pilots with 10,000 hours of experience and combat time over Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan.
Genuinely curious: what aspect of flying an F18 in a hostile environment with a goal of destroying things while trying to stay alive is useful for flying a 400-passenger airliner? You might say "well, the trying-to-stay-alive portion is relevant", but that involves things like high-g turns which airliners are not so good at, and ultimately ejecting is the final option, also not so good with 400 passengers on board. "It's a jet engine!" Ok? So? Does that mean I can't drive an EV if I qualified on gasoline? Does that mean I am qualified to drive an 18 wheeler because I've previously driven a Ferrari? (No, it does not).
It seems to me that F18 flight hours contributing towards Boeing 787 pilot certification is a jobs program for military pilots. Not saying that's not a good idea: we need (for now) a strong human air force.
Military pilots would have superior manual flying skills and proven ability to stay calm and make the right decisions under highly stressful conditions.
Unlikely that they will panic and become completely incompetent when something goes wrong.
"In the case of Air France 447, it appears that Bonin, in his panic, completely forgot one of the most basic tenets of flight training: when at risk of a stall, never pull back on the controls. Instead, he held back the controls, in a kind of panicked death-grip, all the way down to the ocean. Ironically, if he had simply taken his hands away, the plane would have regained speed and started flying again."
Lots of really good replies to my question. "Staying calm" has been a shared thread. I looked up the pilot in the Quantas A380 near disaster, and it says of of the Captain de Crespigny's time in the RAAF:
"He went on to join the RAAF at age 17 in 1975. During his first training flight the instructor did not stop him from putting the plane into a downward spiral, after which he left de Crespigny to stop the plane from plummeting to the ground alone. The incident left him terrified but heightened his awareness of the dangers of complacency and human error in flight."
This team of pilots was able to bring back the largest passenger plane in the world back to a safe landing even after an engine effectively exploded and punctured the wing, fuel tanks, and fly-by-wire electronics.
So I am thinking that the next time I am on a plane, I hope the pilot has military training.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the arrogance and ignorance in this post just screams off the page. You claim you're "genuinely curious," then go spew a ridiculously uninformed rant about how it "seems to you" that Hornet pilots need a "jobs program." Based, I assume, on your thousands of hours of both military and civilian experience, thousands of instrument approaches, and puissant understanding of how to operate multi-million-dollar aircraft? Donny, you're out of your element.
To correct your analogy, a career professional Formula One, IndyCar, or NASCAR driver would absolutely have a MUCH greater chance at adapting to driving an 18-wheeler than your average Joe, because they understand things like friction, turning and braking performances of different vehicles, and the visual, tactile, and auditory signs that a vehicle is or isn't being pushed to its limits. Sure, they would have to learn the finer points of driving such a massive vehicle, but they're starting off with advanced driving knowledge most don't have.
The average military jet pilot can perform the routine tasks of an airline pilot, and also handle inflight emergencies, by the time that they're a twentysomething flight student who hasn't even earned their wings yet. I know because I once was one.
They spend the rest of their career layering skills on top of that concerning how to fly in combat and employ their weapons system tactically AFTER they've already proven they can fly from point A to point B and handle inflight emergencies. What airline pilots do for a living is bare-minimum table stakes for what tactical aviators do. The appeal of the airlines isn't a more challenging job; it's not having to deploy away from your family and do dangerous things anymore combined with a union paycheck.
it's not about WHERE they flew, it's about the fact they have _experience_ flying large, heavy, mechanical machines filled with fuel, in the air! These days, there are extremely limited possibilities to get experience flying planes because of drone usage. The military barely needs pilots anymore, what with all the drone usage.
If you enjoy your weekends and are equally grateful kids don't work 12 hour days, and someone didn't die at work today, perhaps you could get off the fence.
"this union is absolutely required for preventing death" and "i'm on the fence about unions" are two wild takes to see together.
Why the triangle shirtwaist factory fire isn't enough to encourage people to like unions, I'll never know:
> Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked[1][8] – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft[9] – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows.
Wow “no nacelles have overheated or fallen off the max”. Really? Not even when a different single point of failure hidden “feature” flew a bunch into the ground killing all on board?
I always wondered if you can buy a plane ticket where it shows the manufacturer/type of airplane that will be used for the flight. Anybody has some insight?
> He said the pilot procedure the FAA approved as an interim solution — urging pilots to make sure to turn off the system when icing conditions dissipate to avoid overheating that within five minutes could seriously damage the structure of the nacelle — is inadequate given the serious potential danger.
This is insane
What are the chances that even a very well trained and experienced major US airline crew would forget to turn of the engine anti-ice within 5 minutes of non-icing conditions? Greater than zero for sure.
During the last MAX fiasco, I said to someone that if there is a button you have to push every five minutes for the plane not to explode, then failing to do so would be “pilot error”, instead of a gross design failure. It turns out this is not a joke…
There was a great paper[1] I read about the human components in complex technical systems which argues that one of the roles of the human is to take the blame when the entire system fails. This does real valuable work for the companies involved and helps them avoid needing to answer the most uncomfortable questions.
[1] Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction by Madeline Clare Elish
Well I am talking about all crashes, not just car-pedestrian crashes. For example Teslas crash in to other cars and then the company blames the human driver.
The flip side to this is that every system involving software seems to inevitably devolve into a situation where the human is expected to no longer be responsible.
Oh, you floored it while the car was pointed at the wall? It has cameras, why didn't the car disable the go pedal?
This is happening more and more with cars, and it seems inevitable that it will happen in other spaces as well, as software is expected to protect us from ourselves.
This is literally a joke on the excellent board game “Space Alert” - someone has to wiggle a mouse every so often or everything on your Sitting Duck Class Explorer turns off.
>The device sounds a warning after 25 seconds of inactivity by an engineer. If the engineer fails to respond to the warning tone within 15 seconds, the system applies the brakes and stops the train.
That's still prompt -> response. This is a discussion about mandatory responses to no prompt at all.
Although on reflection, that undersells the level of stupidity being proposed here. The pilots need to not only respond to no prompt, but be actively monitoring a condition changing state so that they can then perform the unprompted action.
So, in all seriousness... by what algorithm are the pilots performing this assessment that is not something a computer can perform? How on Earth is it not cheaper and faster to add that to the system than petition a government agency for an exemption? What are all the computers on a plane even for other than monitoring state changes and performing actions in response? Even high-assurance, safety-critical coding should be able to outpace a Federal bureaucracy on something like this comfortably.
That's only the next best option in the very short term. Boeing will suffer significant damage if there's another Max fiasco - more than they did from the first one. Probably much more.
If your company can't build safe planes, the real "next best option" is to fix your company.
It's usually not possible to fix a company that is broken, simply because of Gall's Law. ("A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.") Large companies are complex systems; they develop their own set of internal incentives, communications architectures, org politics, membership tests, etc. Over time, these incentives inevitably adapt themselves toward maintaining the organization rather than delivering the product or service that is the reason why the organization exists. At that point, everyone who actually wants to deliver the product leaves, leaving an organization consisting solely of people whose full-time job is maintaining their position in the organization.
Ask yourself: would you take a position at Boeing trying to "fix the company"?
The only way out of this is to poach the few remaining employees that still have technical knowledge, setup a new company that refuses to employ everyone with a vested interest in Boeing, and take their market. This is hard for aerospace because of the sheer complexity of the product and the baseline quality levels needed to deliver a safe experience.
I did, and it was one of the worst periods of my career. And I went in knowing it was going to be challenging, I wasn’t naive, it was just worse than I expected.
I would genuinely try to fix it, based on descriptions by my mentors who were Boeing engineers.
I believe the board and executives would genuinely want me to fix it.
But it may nevertheless be impossible due to organizational mechanics, entrenched bureaucracy, short-sighted shareholders, etc.
I was just pointing out that it’s ridiculous to pretend nobody would want the job because it’s likely to fail when there’s only upside, for both yourself and the company. A literal win-win.
Implying there’s something negative in my comment because it’s easy to be cheaply cynical (and the cheap cynicism in the comment I originally replied to) is what’s actually wrong with the world — and why things are so bad.
Who gives up on something that only has upsides without even trying?
Your line "Sure — if I fail, I’ll just use that position as a stepping stone to my next executive role" indicated a certain cynicism in your own post, so I was reflecting that in my response.
So here's the more detailed sincere response, based on experience working in a similar large, similarly dysfunctional technology company (and also knowing people who spent several years at Boeing specifically):
It is usually not possible for a chief executive to fix a company. The reason is simply sheer complexity. A company of 100,000 people has potentially 100,000! (factorial) different working relationships within it. In practice it's less because not everyone communicates with everybody else, but even a small department of 100 people has more different relationships than anyone can possibly keep track of. No one executive is going to know every single employee, every team, every project. And without them having those personal relationships, they don't have enough trust to convince people to alter their behavior.
If the company is in trouble in the first place, that means that the way they do business is no longer adapted to the marketplace. So you need to get the company to make changes. But if you root cause each individual problem, you find that the company is fractally fucked up. The employee is usually acting according to the incentives available to them; if they did things differently, they would fail to get the cooperation needed to accomplish their goals (at best) or lose their job (at worse). And that's the key part: in a big company, achieving any goal, regardless of how small, requires the cooperation of many different people. In a normal functioning company things mostly work because these habits of cooperation grew up in good times, working culture & processes adapted themselves to the activities that actually made the company money, and so when people just do their jobs good things basically result. But as the company grows and ages, it ossifies. Over time they want to do things like introduce a new jetliner, but find that the right combination of people with the right skillsets to do things like make engine nacelles that don't explode no longer exist.
This is why advice for turnaround CEOs is "get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on the bus". And they frequently hire outsiders, or folks from much earlier in the company's history. Their first task is to stabilize finances.
Their next task is to identify the parts of the company that are still functional, then double down on them (often made harder because these folks were often laid off as part of stabilizing finances). Their next task is to sell off or lay off all the folks that are embedded in organizations that are no longer serving the company's purposes. Remember that there are > 100K employees, and you're building a product of exceptional engineering complexity, and that nobody knows everything the company is doing. It's pretty hard to have enough visibility into the company's product, engineering, supplier relationships, employee base, finances, etc. to do this correctly.
Fixing the company sounds good, but you have to remember that the people who would be fixing it are the people who got it to this point in the first place.
I think it's very likely that nobody currently at Boeing has the ability and willingness to make the kinds of changes they would need to make in order to become a functional company again, because Boeing has spent over two decades systematically purging senior engineers from management and leadership in order to become another crappy company full of empty suits with MBAs, who don't understand the product they're making, and don't care if they're literally killing people and the company is rotting out from under them as long as they can monetize the rot to make their quarterly numbers.
What damage can they actually suffer though? Boeing is a strategic asset of the US government, they would never allow any harm to come to it. Some heads would roll for sure, maybe even the government would step in and assume direct control of certain parts of the company, but it's not like it would go out of business, or like companies would cancel all of their orders and buy Airbuses instead - they could, but again, the US government would never allow that to happen, either through direct monetary action or promises and guarantees that whatever the worry is won't ever happen again.
Loss of market share. As in, customers actively looking at the type of aircraft when they book a ticket. Airplanes becoming reluctant to ordering Boeing.
At this time, every $1 you invest in making it known what Boeing does since 15 years, results in $2 or $3 of loss of market share for Boeing. Absolutely the time to buy ads to promote articles about Boeing.
I would actually trust Comac more than Boeing, as Comac has something to prove, whereas Boeing has been proven to crash planes and bribe the FAA.
In 2013 they received frames (the circular structures that make the fuselage) which instead of being machined, has been created manually. Voids were all in the wrong place because the workers had taken the blueprints symmetrically.
Did they ditch the frames? Of course not? They remade the cuts so that it fits upside down! And soldered the I-beam parts that had been cut! Result: The circular frames, which are a critical structural component, have twice as many gaps and holes and soldered sections than the designed piece.
And the dinner party system with FAA, introduced by Mac Donnell’s practices when it was bought over, has to stop. They should not be friends in real life.
I agree, but you underestimate the cost of software in "safety critical" applications.
I've heard stories of cases where development orgs were given the option of changing a line of code or re designing the hardware. They of course redesigned the hardware.
And in large ships, the Bridge Navigational Watch Alarm System or BNWAS.
Over night most normal operations cease, so it's quiet on the bridge. But an officer is on duty to keep watch, because the ship is still moving, often relatively fast, and it needs a human to obey pre-existing route plan decisions, observe changing conditions, stay alert to other vessels and so on. However, the bridge (on a modern large ship) is warm and dark and at night tired humans in warm dark rooms will sleep.
So BNWAS will (if operating correctly) periodically need to be "nudged" to show that the officer on watch is awake and somewhat paying attention. If they do nothing for a while the BNWAS will alert them and if they ignore that it will eventually alarm critical crew, often the Master ("Captain") of the ship or other senior officers who are asleep in their cabins.
Now of course nobody wants to leave a nice dream to discover that instead of your teenage girlfriend agreeing to go on that picnic you never got to that sound is their boss, very angrily demanding to know what the fuck you're doing curled up by the radar console. So unfortunately sometimes after a serious incident (e.g. cargo ship has "decided" to wait right next to a small island a few miles from the usual route from 4am until midday, and then when it gets to a dock it seems very smashed up at the bottom as though it was grounded and had to wait until higher tides lifted it clear...) we find the BNWAS has been disabled crudely (it's not as though ship's crew tend to be IT experts)...
But this is a completely different scenario. The BNWAS is not something which causes a disaster if you forget to react, it's an alarm to prevent such disasters which would otherwise be commonplace.
depends whether you consider trains rudimentary sentients or not. If the train fails to follow procedure to alert the gut bacteria/engineer every so many minutes, the train runs a higher risk of running into something because the engineer is asleep or incapacitated.
Ok, I don't know much about trains, but it seems like if they can build this kind of system then they could also build a system that only allows trains to go as fast as track "speed limits".
This is too ensure that the driver is still there and hopefully watching. If they do not react then it means they are not fully abled. So the train stops.
This is very good.
The correct analogy would have been: if the driver did not press the button then the train accelerates until they do. Not good.
I can come up with several methods to solve this problem at the hardware level.
Slap a temperature sensor on/in/near the heater
Monitor current through the heater for temperature coefficient response
Capacitive sensing of ice on the heater
A timer that shuts off the heater after some time and a buzzer to alert the crew
You could even have a thermal fuse with a manual time-limited override
Honestly there's so many easy ways to prevent thermal runaway that creating a situation where THE ENGINE FALLS OFF is inexcusably negligent.
My space heater has no less than three independent, redundant safeties. As does my clothes iron, my coffee pot, my slow cooker. It really is not that complicated.
Remember that Boeing was too stupid to put an odd number of pitot tubes on their planes, so the computer could have determined which airspeed indication was crazy. They put TWO.
If you think about it, civilian standards must be way higher than military ones; you're talking about millions of people per year who can't bail out of a crashing plane.
The breakdown came from trying to crush their engineering organization for costing too much/being unionized — and particularly firing the mid-career engineers, who would by now be the missing senior/principal engineers.
MCAS is a reflection of their systems integration engineers not being the caliber and experience they need: it was obviously a defective design.
Not to mention that it was a fraud to begin with, trying to skirt pilot-training rules by having (monumentally incompetent) software tweak the controls of a perverted airframe design to make it imitate previous 737s.
If they had done what they needed to do and designed a new plane from scratch, those people wouldn't be dead.
OR if they'd simply acknowledged the changed characteristics of the plane, struck deals with purchasers to subsidize training expenses, and let pilots fly it themselves... those people wouldn't be dead.
Boeing's recent behavior, as reported by this article, warrants further disgust and ought to be featured in the mainstream news.
If they had designed a new plane from scratch, those people wouldn't have died because the new airframe wouldn't have been flying yet. Check back again in 2030.
Just like the optimal amount of fraud is nonzero (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...), the optimal number of dead children is too. A child doesn't have a meaningfully greater chance of dying on an airplane than an adult, so what this question is really asking (while crudely attempting to tug on the heartstrings) is whether we're willing to tolerate people dying in order to keep planes flying. The answer is obviously yes. We don't cancel all flights globally when a plane crashes and everyone dies, because we suddenly can't tolerate the risk anymore.
So humans are supposed to be able to do it (within five minutes) with the sensor data already available to them, but it's not easy to make a sensor do it automatically?
Maybe this is overly optimistic, but I'm confident they could figure out something if they wanted to.
And one or more of those is probably going to be the long-term fix. However any change like this also needs FAA testing and certification, and enough design and review to be sure the changes don't introduce other new problems, all of which will take some time.
Someone in the article comments said a pilot might be dipping into and out of icing conditions throughout a flight. You'd need to remember each time and if you forget once you'll lose both engines.
The latest Tesla features manual window wipers and if you don't use them right the car explodes.
I wonder how the families of the 346 victims must feel reading years later such a headline like "Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air"
Probably pretty worked up, which is why the headline was phrased that way. If they said something like "Boeing seeks safety exemption for MAX 7 anti-ice system", it would communicate more information about the contents, but readers would be less likely to get mad and thus less likely to click.
Maybe? I like to think that the people affected are paying more attention than others, and aren't stupid. They'd know that "Boeing seeks safety exemption for MAX 7 anti-ice system" means "Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules".
If I had read your headline I would have expected they were asking for an exemption so that the system could be used, not so that the plane could fly at all.
Boeing's argument is that it's not likely to happen, as it hasn't happened in the 6.5 million flight hours with other MAX models for which this procedure is approved.
Which don’t have this problem because the material used for the engine pod is metal and not fiber like with the uncertified models. This fiber is breaking up after five minutes of heating
Boeing's main argument seems to be that, even if the pilot forgets, the overall risk isn't worth the remediation:
In its petition to the FAA, Boeing argues the breakup of the engine nacelle is “extremely improbable” and that an exemption will not reduce safety.
“The 737 MAX has been in service since 2017 and has accumulated over 6.5 million flight hours. In that time, there have been no reported cases of parts departing aircraft due to overheating of the engine nacelle inlet structure,” the filing states.
> no reported cases of parts departing aircraft due to...
Wow, that's a great phrase. "No reported cases" is a serious weasel-phrase, and "parts departing aircraft" is much easier to take than "things falling off planes."
No, it's not because it doesn't define who it would be reported to. So it could be not reported to FAA, or Boing, or a person responsible for this specific design or anybody really, perfectly shedding any responsibility whatsoever.
Boeing got taken over by McDonnell Douglas business types, and engineering excellence is no longer the main thing there. This seems like how the situation would naturally play out.
(I hear from the rumor mill, something similar is happening at Google).
you should probably not read the rest of an aviation manual then. You ought to see what happens if you leave an air valve in a certain position too long.
Yeah, all kettles in the UK which start in price from about £8 have a bimetallic strip based device to disconnect the power if the thing tries overheating because it's got no water in or such like. You'd think something like that would not be so hard or expensive to do.
To be fair on both your point and the parent comment, it is both a difficult problem, and one that engineers at Boeing are capable of solving (and likely already solved). The issue here isn't an engineering one, it's a management one.
Looking it up the heating system uses bleed air from the engine so probably isn't as easy to control. On the other hand it just has to stop the thing getting hot enough to damage carbon composite which probably isn't anything extreme temperature wise. If you limited it to say 80C it would probably be ok to stop ice and also not fry the composite.
It's obvious enough. They have a total-air-temp displayed on the FMC and a TAT above 10°C OR not in visible moisture OR SAT* below -40°C is a good enough proxy for "not in icing conditions".
The problem isn't knowing whether or not you're in possible icing conditions if you think to ask the question, but rather reliably remembering to evaluate it every single time you enter and exit possible icing conditions.
* SAT - static air temp (air temp before the ram rise).
That's not obvious. Something with critical damage potential shouldn't be hidden in a reading in an obscure display page where a value has to be evaluated by several rules.
It should be a caution light or something at least.
I'm not advocating that Boeing is proposing a sensible path here; I think they're not.
But ATPs don't have any trouble evaluating "am I in potential icing conditions?" as they've been doing it for one to many thousands of hours previously.
I understand. It's just that most accidents have not just one cause but a whole chain of them. Something small happens that causes the pilots to be distracted trying to fix it, meanwhile ignoring the elephant in the room or forgetting a 'routine check'. The flight deck isn't always a relaxed place and this is when these things can get out of hand so easily.
This kind of mistake has been made so often and lives have been paid that I find it crazy that it's still being proposed.
based on the article, it doesn't sound like this has anything specifically to do with temperature - the issue is more about whether there is moisture in the air.
If it were just a temperature thing, you'd think it could be automated, but I don't think that's really the main thing they're dealing with here.
In theory this means switching the system off when you exit the clouds.
This is usually pretty noticeable, but maybe less so at night, since you might be breaking out into a pocket or a clear layer between other layers, without visibly seeing much of anything outside.
I would hesitate to comment on the feasibility of this beyond what the interviewed persons have said, precisely because they're not clarifying (to the readers in any case) what the actual thresholds here are. And the interviewees don't seem convinced that this is a reasonable/safe requirement.
In the MCAS case the 'optional' component was an AoA display available to the pilots. Due to a misunderstanding about the design intent, planes without this option also did not display an AOA DISAGREE alert if the sensors disagreed. (I agree that such a simple situational awareness aid based on data the plane already has being a paid option is pretty absurd)
However all MAXes did/do have two AoA sensors, and prior to the fixes, regardless of the AoA display option, MCAS only considered one of them.
In the MCAS, the ‘AoA disagree’ sign allowed more freight to be carried. The pricing segmentation is based on freight, the intent was not segmentation over security levels.
Even if it leaded to lowering security so much that 4 planes crashed in just a few months.
The AOA DISAGREE was never intended to be optional, that was a bug due to miscommunication between Boeing and the avionics manufacturer, if the congressional report is to be believed.
Only the persistent numeric AoA indicator was optional. And none of this had anything to do with freight, there's no difference in capabilities between the aircraft, it's purely about pilot situational awareness.
But to pick on this point, from a systems perspective, isn't a single thermostat still a single point of failure? So to address the issue, they'd need to add multiple (2?) thermostats, each linked to a different bus etc.? Asking out of curiosity on how these systems work...
Makes sense and thanks. Sounds like the kind of capability that gets very expensive to include late in the game. Which speaks to a problem with contemporary culture at Boeing, which was to get rid of the test and QA roles that would typically catch these issues early enough to incorporate the solution (3+ thermostats) back into the design before it got too expensive to do so. Microsoft, btw, is guilty of the same test & QA culture dilapidation, which results in the crap Windows we get nowadays.
I have to disagree with all of the comments in this thread saying this is “insane”.
The FAA approved a mitigation for an issue in MAX 8 and 9 planes. The MAX 7 has the same issue, so Boeing is asking for the same mitigation to be approved.
If the FAA thinks it’s acceptable for the 8 and 9, I don’t see why asking for the same for the 7 is bad.
On the other hand, if the FAA doesn’t think this is acceptable for the 7, then I don’t see why it would be acceptable for the 8 and 9.
Either it’s an acceptable mitigation and all 3 should play by the same rules, or it’s not and all MAXes should be grounded (FWIW, the mitigation seems ridiculous to me and I’m leaning towards the latter).
I think it's because the 8 & 9 variants were approved prior to the discovery of the nacelle issue. So the difference is approving a mitigation for an unknown issue in the case of the 8 & 9 vs. approving an exemption for a known issue with the 7 & 10. To me, that is a pretty big difference.
Yes, it sounds to me like that’s the issue too, but I disagree with it.
Either the mitigation is acceptable to make the plane safe to fly, or it’s not. “Well this one already existed before we knew about the issue, whereas this one is new” doesn’t actually change the risk calculus nor the effectiveness of the mitigation.
That's not how the FAA views it. There's no such thing as "safe to fly" or "not safe to fly." There are simply probabilities of accidents in different conditions. What constitutes an acceptable probability of accident is a judgment call.
The FAA has many, many safety rules, but which ones apply to a particular situation depend on a number of factors. For example, if you're flying by yourself in a small airplane, you don't even need a pilot's license! (solo student)
In the world of aircraft certification, on one end you have experimental aircraft that untrained people designed and built and may be extremely dangerous. The FAA is relatively hands-off on this as long as you put EXPERIMENTAL in big letters on the side and don't charge anyone for a ride. When you start to get into heavier, faster planes, like people who buy MiGs, there are rules about where they can operate that are intended to protect the public on the ground, but not the pilots/passengers. On the other hand, a new Boeing commercial jet is subject to intense scrutiny in almost every aspect. Obviously you see an enormous difference in accident rates between commercial airliners and experimental homebuilts.
One other dimension of this is grandfathering. Once a design is set, can be very expensive to change it. You might like the 737 to have better redundancy in its hydraulic system, and if Boeing ever designs a replacement for it, they will have to put that in. However, if every regulation the FAA made applied to existing designs, either the FAA would have to keep the new regulations to an absolute minimum, which would harm safety going forward, or Boeing would have to redesign their planes every year, or maybe even send all of the old planes to the scrapyard!
This is not economically feasible, so the FAA only grounds aircraft for very serious safety issues. Parts are allowed to have tolerances in service that they aren't allowed to coming off the production line. Similarly, old design aircraft are allowed to have features that a new design aircraft wouldn't.
What this allows the FAA to do though is to improve safety incrementally as new designs are created. Since it's so much cheaper to put in a new feature in a new design, it's economically feasible to provide safety for progressively more unlikely failure scenarios for these aircraft. Gradually, the old aircraft are retired, and safety gets progressively better.
The 737MAX notwithstanding (and you could make a strong argument that Boeing abused the grandfathering rules with that aircraft), the progressive and dramatic improvements in airline safety over the past 100 years is a testament to the wisdom of this approach.
> There's no such thing as "safe to fly" or "not safe to fly."
Except the type certificate issued by the FAA for a given aircraft is by definition the FAA saying that the type meets all applicable standards and is safe to fly. So is the granting of exceptions to any applicable requirements.
The FAA doesn’t say “eh maybe, it’s a judgement call” to an aircraft manufacturer when telling them whether or not the plane can board passengers. They may include various factors, probabilities, and judgement calls in their own determination of if the type gets certified or not, but ultimately there _is_ a determination made: either it can fly in a given context, or it cannot.
If the argument is “we learn and get better over time, and just because we approved something yesterday doesn’t mean we approve it today”, I fully agree with that, but within reason. And while I don’t agree with this mitigation being an acceptable exception, I also don’t think it’s “insane” or incredulous for Boeing to ask for it, given that the FAA already approved the same thing previously.
Even whether an aircraft should be issued a type certificate is a judgment call. The regulations are not perfectly precise, and there is always going going be a certain amount of back and forth on interpretation and waivers and alternate means of compliance etc.
Even given that a type certificate has been issued, whether or not it is legal to fly depends on the circumstances of the flight. Just as an example, under part 91 (private flying), complying with manufacturer's service bulletins is optional, but under part 135 (charter) or part 121 (airline), it's generally mandatory.
Therefore, is the FAA saying it's safe to fly a plane that doesn't hasn't completed its manufacturer service bulletins? No. They're saying the acceptable level of risk under part 91 is higher.
Should there be an expiration date on grandfathering of airliner type certificates? Should manufacturers be required to update designs for new production airliners after, let's say, 30 years? The original Boeing 737 entered service in 1968 so even working at a slow pace with minimal resources they could have redesigned and recertified it multiple times in that period.
Personally I think so. Type certifications should expire after some reasonable time, and require a full re-certification under current rules and with current design review practices. I think this would also have other benefits, by discouraging improvements to e.g. fuel economy or pilot procedures slightly less, since the cost of re-certification is inevitable rather than something that can be avoided.
Grandfathering aircraft that exist indefinitely makes sense to me, but I don't see why designs should be grandfathered indefinitely for new builds, when we have learned a lot and increased our expectations significantly in the intervening years.
For that matter there are still plenty of DC-3s in active service, and those are all over 80 years old at this point. Not nearly as big a deal as it might sound - the biggest wear item on a commercial plane is actually cabin pressurization due to the long term fatigue characteristics of aluminum. DC=3s aren't pressurized.
I'm asking about changing policies for newly manufactured airliners, not specific airplanes that have already been built. No one has used a DC-3 for FAA Part 121 scheduled airline service in decades.
There are a number in regular commercial use (including passenger flights) in Canada which is a very similar regulatory regime. There are multiple US operators of the Basler turboprop conversion.
Excellent post overall, but I'd point out that almost all of the imported warbirds are in fact flying as experimentals, since obviously they are not FAA certified.
Yes, they both have an experimental airworthiness certificate, but when the FAA issues an experimental certificate, it comes with operating limitations (technically part of the airworthiness cert). The operating limitations you get depend on the specifics of the aircraft.
The more dangerous the plane is to people on the ground, the more severe the limitations. For example for the really dangerous ones, they'll give you a limitation of "Flight over a densely populated area or in a congested airway is prohibited."
When you discover a potential safety issue on an already certified type, you do have a process to declare it and have to provide a justification or solution for it. Even if it was overlooked during certification, you can’t just ignore it.
It doesn't change the risk (benefit) side of the cost/benefit equation, but it does change the cost side.
To illustrate why this matters, imagine a more extreme situation, where it was somehow discovered that a similar flaw existed in all Boeing and Airbus jets. If a single new jet were being developed that had a similar risk, it could be enough to prevent certification, but we wouldn't stop all air travel because of it - the cost would be too high.
Grounding just MAX jets obviously wouldn't have that degree of impact, but the cost to airlines and to passengers would still be significant.
The 8s and 9s have the exact same issue and the FAA already approved the exact mitigation in those aircraft. Having different fixes for the same issue is more deviance, not less.
This is exactly how normalization of deviance leads to death.
The MAX8 does not have a fix, it has a complicated checklist of workarounds for dynamic behaviors that should be automated.
Then the next level of failure you're inducing is that ' 8 = 7 '.
The combined systems of the MAX8 are not and do not equal the combined systems of the MAX7. You have re-asses the mitigation on every airframe that differs or you end up with a field of people splattered everywhere. If Boeing actually does the reassessment as they should, it will be about as intensive as actually removing the issue and reducing the workload of the pilot in the first place.
That's why a lot of people are pissy about this, as Boeing is trying to say they did it once and that work transfers to a new system perfectly. Didn't work so well with the other MAX8's that splattered themselves.
Pretty sure two wrongs don't make a right.
The unsafe planes should definitely be grounded but that would be expensive.
Just because we screwed up before, and exempted planes, doesn't mean we should knowingly continue to ignore danger.
There’s no “two wrongs” here, per the FAA. There was one wrong (the issue) and then that issue is mitigated by a procedure (the issue is righted, at least partially).
Even if you disagree with this mitigation, every time a new MAX 8 rolls off the production line and enters service, the problem grows larger. Why is this okay, but not with the same for a MAX 7?
Again: either the mitigation is effective enough for MAX variants, or it’s not. I see no reason the two variants should be treated differently here.
>Again: either the mitigation is effective enough for MAX variants, or it’s not
No it is not. Here, you are doing just the normalization of deviance I'm talking about.
An airplane is parts, and an airplane is a system. Just because you use part X in system 1 doesn't mean a mitigation strategy for part X works the same in system 2. For example system 2 (or the MAX 7 in this case) could also have an addition dysfunction in cold weather that by itself is low risk, but when coupled with this procedure now represent a significantly higher risk of loss of aircraft event.
This is the the kind of problem that shows up in new/changed systems when accepting risk from previous systems at their previously measured outcomes.
It makes you wonder if the aviation experts posting here, many of whom could not find their own ass without JavaScript automation, could understand a world where you have complex machinery (such as an airplane) controlled only by a trained operator (such as a pilot). It's for the same reason they don't allow just anyone to drive forklifts.
It defies how we made it through the first hundred years of commercial aviation with pilots having to deal with more complex tasks than an "up/down" switch.
It has more to do with the introduction of Crew Resource Management than anything else, many airlines still fly 30 year old aircraft without fancy automation. Recall AF447 where the over-reliance on automation caused a tragedy when it failed and of course the MCAS debacle where the automation was directly implicated. There is room for a more nuanced answer here.
Given the general hostility on HN towards ATC, General Aviation, county airports and old planes you can safely presume all those future planes will be using autopilots only. Because we sure as hell won’t have any new humans qualified to operate the machinery.
Just imagine that automated future. MCAS everywhere! We should start the debate now which language all that automation should be written.
Are you using "aviation expert" sarcastically? Because the Allied Pilots Association is reportedly concerned about this and I think it's fair to say there are some aviation experts in that group.
so you're saying, everyone complaining here about "remembering to check the condition every 5 minutes" needs to complain about THIS ALREADY HAPPENING ON FLYING PLANES??
From another comment, it seems (not surprisingly) the MAX 8 and 9 have metal housings, and is different from the 7, which has fiber housings. Maybe the reason they need this exemption in the first place, is cheaping out on the housing.
The FAA also didn’t think smoke alarms were important. Or radar systems. Or collision avoidance. I can go on and on… they didn’t care until at least 300 people die at once. The FAA doesn’t care about critical understaffing of towers and won’t until a fucking mid air collision happens again.
Ha, it is probably best if you don't fly at all since there are already many things in aviation that work just like this.
The most obvious example is the button to enable the anti-ice systems. If you don't push that button upon encountering icing conditions then you die. Of course you don't really die in either of these cases. At least not right away. Lots of other things have to go badly first.
This is why aviation relies on checklists. There are myriad things that must be turned on and off in each phase of flight, and checklists ensure that pilots don't forget.
How about "it's an acceptable mitigation, but we want Boeing to suffer so we'll delay their new planes while letting the existing ones fly?" That seems to be the tact the FAA is taking and I think it's reasonable to take actions that deliberately punish Boeing and Boeing alone.
That being said, I'm also on the "this mitigation is ridiculous" camp. They can't even have a humidity sensor that turns the de-icer on and off?
Youre being disingenuous if thats how you interpreted my comment. Of course there are changes, and as someone who does significant research on plane variants, I know that more than most.
But it doesn’t take a genius to see that in this particular case, there is no evidence (at least none provided in the article, nor none that I’m aware of) that the 7 is different from the 8 or 9 in regards to how the engine icing system works (or doesn’t, in this case).
Just because 7 is similar to 8 and 9 doesn't mean it has to get the same treatment. This isn't algebra or logic. By induction, having allowed it for 8 means that the FAA has to allow it for all plans from here on out? 1, 2, infinity.
Boeing should fix their shit. Not melting the nacelle is a simple feedback loop. Humans shouldn't be running that loop.
> Just because 7 is similar to 8 and 9 doesn't mean it has to get the same treatment.
Why not? As you appear to agree, it's the same problem for all of them, and the problem is a simple one that should never have reached this point in the first place. So all of them should be held to the same standard. If that means not certifying the 7, it should also mean revoking the certification of the 8 and 9 until the issue is fixed.
> Boeing should fix their shit.
Indeed. And since the same shit is on Max 8 and 9, they should fix those too now that the shit has been discovered, and be held to the same standard for all. I don't understand why you aren't arguing for that.
> allowed it for 8 means that the FAA has to allow it for all plans from here on out? 1, 2, infinity.
If the plane’s issue is the exact same issue and the mitigation is the same mitigation that’s already been approved by the FAA as effective, yes, and this is currently how things work. See the MEL. If mitigation X is approved for situation Y, then it is approved for all situations of Y (within the same context). You don’t have to go to the FAA to get a new approval to take off every time Y happens, you just do X and you’re approved.
> the mitigation is the same mitigation that’s already been approved by the FAA as effective
That's basically the argument Boeing is making. However, there is a counter argument that the FAA could make (though I don't know if they are): in order to limit the risk exposure now that this issue has been discovered, the same mitigation should not be allowed on any new variants not already in service, even though it is allowed for the ones already in service, because taking variants out of service is a much bigger deal than not allowing new ones into service.
I could see this being an argument, basically saying “we’re okay with the size of the problem now but don’t want to make the problem bigger by allowing more planes to fly with this issue”.
But if that was the argument, then that would also mean that we shouldn’t allow any newly built 8s and 9s to enter service, and I don’t see that happening.
> if that was the argument, then that would also mean that we shouldn’t allow any newly built 8s and 9s to enter service, and I don’t see that happening
Yes, that's a fair point, although doing that would require some sort of modification of the existing certification of 8s and 9s, and I'm not sure how that would work. If those certifications were simply revoked, all 8s and 9s already in service would be grounded until the issue was fixed. But if they are simply left alone, new 8s and 9s can come into service since those variants are certified. An Airworthiness Directive, which is what is currently issued by the FAA for 8s and 9s, by itself doesn't prevent new units from coming into service.
I would be ok with that if such a position included a mandatory rolling retrofit of the existing fleet the next time they come out of service for one of the big every-few-years inspections.
"McDonald-Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money." Such a travesty that a once great engineering company is now a bean-counting corner-cutting garbage culture. They just never learn.
Is the “McDonald-Douglas” misspelling a joke or a mistake? Curious if this is an existing joke that I haven’t seen until now, because it kind of works.
"Boeing Military Airplane Company; Hughes Satellite Systems; Hughes Helicopters minus the civilian helicopter line (which was divested as MD Helicopters); Piasecki Helicopter, subsequently known as Boeing Vertol and then Boeing Helicopters; the St. Louis–based McDonnell division of the former McDonnell Douglas Company; and the former North American Aviation division of Rockwell International."
making it not just too big to fail, but too important to US and allies' defense to fail. I guess defense could be split from commercial aviation which could be reduced to producing parts to keep fleets in operation until Airbus can replace all planes over 30 or 40 years. Some of McD-D's commercial planes have a second life as military, though, e.g. the P-8 Poseidon based on the 737-800.
I took a couple of cross-USA flights recently, some on 737-800 and some on 737 MAX 8 and noted that the 800's cruising speed is faster (cf. United's Hemispheres magazine). I suppose the carbon footprint of the MAX is lower, but whatever happened to flying at mach 0.9 ?
Someone made a website showing which airlines have the most delays, so airlines just added an hour of padding to every scheduled flight, and then fly slower / burn less fuel when there aren't delays. We do the same thing with commuter trains. Someone was mad that they were late to work one day during a snowstorm or something. Now trains with a top speed of 80mph take 80 minutes to go 40 miles. But are on time 99% of the time! Look at all the time saved from not being late to work!
Personally, I'd rather be 4 hours late to work once a year and save 1 hour commuting every day. But the masses have spoken and decided the opposite. I work from home, so not my problem, I guess.
Japan is better than the US, but I've definitely been standing around in Shinjuku station waiting an extra long time for a train, freezing my butt off, while the signs scroll "because of heavy snow in Gunma prefecture, trains are running with 15-30 minute delays." Weather is weather.
My favorite US-ism is when Andrew Cuomo (the governor of New York at the time) shut down the NYC subway because of a forecast of 24" of snow. The reason the subway was built was because of the transport disruptions caused by a big snowstorm in 1910. To close it for a snowstorm was the ultimate irony. The snowstorm didn't materialize and he looked like an idiot. The MTA then developed an actual service plan to keep the subway open during snow, and it hasn't been a problem since. (Well, not for me. For people that live on non-underground lines, they are probably annoyed. I think the pre-Cuomo policy was "play it by ear and hope for the best". That was rarely ideal but probably let a few people get home from work before trains started getting stuck. Now nobody gets stuck, but they also get stranded when the snowstorm ends up not being bad.)
Has NYC even had a comparably large snowstorm since then?
The reason Cuomo pre-emptively shut down the subway was because a few years prior there had been a serious snowstorm that did severely disrupt subway service. He was trying to avoid a repeat of the same scenario. It turned out that the weather forecast was wrong, but if we actually did get 2 feet of snow and the subway was up and running the next day, with nobody stranded in tunnels or on bridges, he would have looked like a genius.
Cuomo did a lot of stupid stuff (e.g. spending millions on pointlessly renaming bridges and setting up illegal highway signs), but that particular move was not one of them.
> The MTA predicts that over 12 inches of snow or blizzard conditions could cause “significant service suspensions” or a full system shutdown. However, before that, there are several contingency plans in place for winter weather and extreme snowfall.
> Has NYC even had a comparably large snowstorm since then?
14 inches in 2021.
> To this day, the MTA says that over 12" of snow would still result in system disruption and service suspension
I think the MTA's "underground only" service plan is fine: https://new.mta.info/map/9471. This popped up right after the big shutdown. I don't see why 12" of snow would have to go to a full shutdown, unless MTA employees can't get to work. (I don't know how likely that is.)
Maybe we'll find out tomorrow! (I'm personally placing my bets on "100% rain".)
(Edit to add: apparently we got 27 inches of snow on 1/23/2016 and all underground subway service ran. I have absolutely no memory of this. I might have been in Vermont skiing.)
New York's snow woes really surprise me. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and really only ever heard about snow days on TV. We would get 3 feet of snow and still have to be at school the next morning. Every winter, I dreamed of the "phone tree" being executed. I learned the weather patterns that would result in a lot of snow. I looked at the weather page in the newspaper every day, and glued myself to the TV after school if it was looking good for snow. A few times a year, I would get really excited. It was looking like a big one. I'd stay up late and look at the snow piling up on our deck. Higher than I'd ever seen! The next morning I'd wake up and turn on the local news and watch the list of school cancellations, as my parents got ready to go to work. Never mine. Not once. I think my parents would usually drive me to school, though, which was nice.
So I guess I'm just surprised how in New York we just shut down the city upon the forecast of a couple feet of snow. Maybe it's necessary at scale. Or maybe we're just wimps.
> Cuomo did a lot of stupid stuff (e.g. spending millions on pointlessly renaming bridges)
I guess the issue is that the yards where the trains are stabled are all above ground. If you can't get the crews to them, inspect, and operate them safely, you can't get them in the tunnels. Subway trains are all also 3rd or 4th rail powered, so I can see how lots of (effectively) standing water makes people nervous.
The mitigation I suppose would be to get them underground in advance, and when/if the snow hits you just run with what you've got.
In NYC we actually have a bunch of yard capacity that is completely underground, and then a bunch of other yards that are covered (like condos built on top). Typically the snow service plans involves stacking as many trainsets as possible on the express tracks, while service runs on the local tracks. There are a ton of extra express tracks on the network (because the IND had what appears to be unlimited money when building their system), so capacity doesn't suffer a ton.
Honestly, in the 12 years I've lived in NYC, there have really only been 2 or 3 nasty snowstorms. Generally things ran OK except the one time Cuomo freaked out. (Hurricane Sandy was pretty nasty, of course. Rain and storm surge are much worse than snow here.)
I mean, yes, of course, weather is weather. Nobody expects perfection in the face of force majeure. US railways, however, seem to specialize in delivering the minimum possible experience that doesn't result in open riots.
Less about carbon footprint and more about fuel costs, IIRC; passengers are generally more cost-sensitive than time-sensitive, so if a plane can only hit mach 0.8 (or even worse) but has better fuel economy at the relevant speeds, that's better for the airline.
Airlines found out that people, in aggregate, care more about ticket prices than about speed. Flying a bit slower allows planes to be more fuel efficient, and thus allows them to offer lower ticket prices.
I wouldn't be horribly surprised by a Boeing breakup, honestly. Even BDS might splinter down into smaller units.
The real question in a Boeing breakup, IMHO, would be what happens with BGS, because the org as a whole does an insane amount of hide-the-salami with repair/return/rebuild.
All large corporations become sort of bean-counting corner-cutting company after maybe a couple of decades. It is the game of modern Capitalism. They not only learned but learned well and early.
A lot of armchair commenters need to realize that commercial planes accept commands; it's up to the pilot to prevent putting the the airplane into an unsafe state. This is actually an important safety feature in itself... being able to override all systems to prevent a catastrophe has happened many times in flight history. For instance, if you need to dodge an incoming collision, you could care less if you might exceed the g-load-rating of the airframe. You might crack something, but it might safe quite a few lives; vs a guaranteed death if you stay on the collision course and can't turn fast enough.
Your experience with technology is consumer safety systems. These are designed so safety systems can't be overriden: the tech is protecting you from yourself.
If you think this is "bad", you really ought to watch the startup sequence of a large commercial airliner. There are lots of things depend on the crew to do the right thing and it literally happens thousands of times a day, every single day, with an accident record that is far better than consumer safety systems.
I feel like you didn't read the article, since your comment doesn't address anything from the article itself.
In this particular case, the engine anti-ice system needs to be turned off within 5 minutes of icing conditions going away. The pilots union has said they are concerned about this. There needs to be a better system than that.
> The problem is there’s no alert or indication to the crew that the system needs to be turned off. They just have to remember to do it.
>A lot of armchair commenters need to realize that commercial planes accept commands; it's up to the pilot to prevent putting the the airplane into an unsafe state.
Looks like one more armchair commenter has yet to learn about the Airbus flight law system; it's not possible to put the aircraft into an unsafe state in Normal Law.
I have no issues with there being manual overrides. I have issues with Boeing cheaping out on design and then whining to ignore safety rules so they don't have to fix their bad design.
> If they fail to do so, the system can quickly overheat the carbon composite material and damage the structural integrity of the engine pod.
> The problem is there’s no alert or indication to the crew that the system needs to be turned off. They just have to remember to do it.
> If they forget, or are distracted by other tasks, the overheating can begin to damage the structure after just five minutes.
This is all you need to know to pass judgement on Boeing Management. Whatever happened to Boeing's "Engineering Excellence" ?