I can't stop thinking whether similar "compromises" had been made when redesigning the airframe. It's engineering after all. The engineers could be pressed by the management to make certain changes for the sake of profit.
But management also relies on customers to tell them which compromise is vital to selling a product. And in a market with such huge price-pressure as aeronautics, I can easily see how this is going to override engineer's concerns.
Of course they didn't; the damage to the airline's reputation would be terrible. The customers didn't make this choice; they were deceived by Boeing, who sold them on the idea that they didn't need any significant new training for this disaster of an aircraft. The customers didn't design this thing, they just bought it after listening to Boeing's promises.
They certainly voted with their wallets for a plane that doesn't require additional training. But they sure as hell did not vote with their wallets for a plane that does that on expense of crashing. And, to reiterate my point, I think that managers who pushed for trade-offs between different objectives did not push for this particular trade-off either.
Well, that's the law of unintended consequences. Customers wanted so not pay for retraining, Boeing wanted to get to the market faster and not wait for re-certification, managers wanted a physical problem fixed in software - and in the end the envelope got pushed too far.
I am sure the company operating the Titanic didn't exactly strive to have a shipwreck either.
This is true, but it is a statement about causality and the thread was about responsibility. Those are two different things. The fact that your actions lead to a certain outcome does not automatically mean that you're morally responsible for this outcome (that's the fallacy that leads to victim blaming, among other things).
It is always engineer's responsibility to clearly explain the trade-offs to the managers. Only a manager who's making the decision with accurate information can be responsible for it.
most modern fighter jets would drop out of the sky like a rock without software
they'll eventually get this right - they just need to step back and recognise that the MAX is a completely new type of aircraft and stop taking shortcuts on certification and training
what saves them is that Airbus is at production capacity on the neo
While it's true that fighter jets have been aerodynamically unstable for decades, they're not built for transportation and have ejection seats.
The main reason they are unstable is to increase agility. Is this necessary or even wanted in passenger aviation? I don't know but I'd guess not. Probably safety, comfort and fuel economy are far more important and can (should?) be achieved with a stable airframe.
fighter jets are the more extreme and established example, it also applies to most modern airliners which have software systems in place to prevent human controls from exceeding the aircraft flight envelope
fuel efficiency in these modern aircraft has been gained with swept back wings, larger intake engines etc. which with direct control and no software would be almost impossible to keep flying
discarding all of these systems because of a problem with one would set airline safety and efficiency back decades
Swept back wings and larger intake/bypass engines does not make the airframe inherently unstable.
The fly-by-wire system has multiple redundancies and layered protection, including direct law (at least for Airbus). Fly by wire is, like you say, of course a great innovation for improved control and safety, but it's nice when the plane continues flying even during a failure, however unlikely.
I guess in the case of MCAS the software was activity working against the pilots so maybe it's more of a problem with the design of this particular system and training.
I wouldn't hold fighter jets up as an example of safety. They spend more time broken then they do operational. Require a an entire team of engineers for each airframe, and the number of pilot deaths/flight time is pretty atrocious. But since it's 1-2 pilot deaths rather than >100 passengers we put up with it.
A well designed aircraft should not have a single point of failure, including the software.
Fly-by-wire does not necessarily imply that there is software interfering. You can have a very linear system that just translates yoke input into control surface deflection, but uses software and cables instead of hydraulic lines.
It actually says as much in the article linked by grand parent, but I also remember reading about it a few years ago in china daily or globaltimes (probably the latter), so it has been brought up in the Chinese press as well. Anecdotally as well: I was living in Beijing during the entire time period and noticed the dust storms going away and then coming back.
Fun story: Beijing kids are all required to plant trees on school organized trips (which they must also pay to plant). So they go to places in the hinterland that are designated for tree planting, and plant their trees. After each school group leaves, the trees are promptly dug out so they can be planted by the next group of kids.
I remember reading a Caixin article that says the plant they use in the north to fight desertification actually causes massive allergy to the population that are traditionally pretty healthy.
It looked like a surprise for some posters here, yeah, they seem to didn’t know that the same has been happening in the West since as early as the late 1700s-early 1800s and I’d say it’s still happening. The West is not being criticized as much as it should today for repeating the same mistake it has been doing again and again for almost two centuries now.
Later edit: This forest which got knocked out during a recent wind-storm in the Italian Dolomites [1] looks like being an "artificial" one, at least judging by how the remaining trees all look the same and are almost geometrically positioned. The article does indeed say that the forest was "centuries-old" but I think that only better underlines what I was saying, that the West has been repeating the same and same mistake (i.e. "dumb", non-thought out reforestation) for centuries now. It's too bad that with the recent climate-related changes our tampering with the ecosystem is really shown for what it is: a really, really dumb and non-thought out action.
The Irish Times article is highly critical of the West doing the same today. What's the difference between that and the Yale 360 article linked further above?
Edit: In response to your edit.
Are you sure that isn't native woodland? I would expect the higher reaches of a mountain to be pine trees. The article mentions Stradivarius, violins are made of spruce amongst other woods.
Plus those forests are obviously somewhat sustainable, the Chinese plantings are dying within a few years.
Hard to tell 100% without being present on site but that's my guess, yeah. I've very rarely seen "natural" forests being completely wiped out like this as a result of strong winds, the worst that can happen is some older trees being knocked down here and there, but, as I said, I've not yet seen "natural" forests being completely knocked down as a result of one wind-storm.
I also suspect those were planted forests because you cannot use that wood as raw material for Venice's Arsenal for centuries past without planting something in return. I suspect the planting continued even after the Arsenal itself and wood-shipping in general were no longer a thing.
I doubt theres a forest in Europe that hasn't been touched by man.
Venice would have been very selective about the wood it would have cut for ships etc, you can't just cut any old wood. It needs to be knot free, be straight, or have just the right curvature. They weren't clear felling vast swathes, then replanting. I'm not even sure the was conscious planting at all.
The UN has a definition for "Intact Forest Landscapes". Little of those are left in Europe, the majority in Russia and Scandinavia. Western/Central Europe has only tiny slivers of any.
Artificial forests are bound to be less resilient than wild ones.
The lack of biodiversity is a major concern, since we often take shortcuts by planting cuttings, which are genetic clones, or by using an initial pool that isn't sufficiently diverse.
An artificial forest is better than no forest, off course, but wild, ancient forests are more precious, since they are living DNA libraries.
There is some but its extremely rare. In Germany you for example have the Hambacher Forst, where parts are as old as 700 years. Its scale is however lacking
I've often wondered if those programs would eventually lead to widespread allergies developing among the population due to the rapid increase in a single kind of pollen, like Japanese hay fever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay_fever_in_Japan
And a very relevant one, in this case: trim runaway with pilots not understanding it's a runaway. The visiting pilot does recognise the situation and restores expected flight dynamics. What went wrong, why did not two pilots realise something that is traditionally a known case and well understood? Because it didn't look like a traditional case.
An irrelevant one in this case. This report needs to find out the technical/training/... reason, not why the other pilot needed a ride. I'm sure they'd have included it if they wanted to recommend having three pilots on every flight.
