[HN Gopher] FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s
___________________________________________________________________
FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s
Author : ephesee
Score : 536 points
Date : 2024-01-06 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| jamghee wrote:
| >The FAA said the inspections will take between four and eight
| hours per plane.
|
| Seems reasonable. I was wondering if a single event should really
| be enough to "ground" all similar planes, but seems like they
| just want to do a quick inspection.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It was a catastrophic failure of a two month old plane. I think
| grounding is warranted until the scope of the problem is
| understood.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah especially given the public trust the FAA needs to
| rebuild after it came out how Boeing got the 737 certified in
| the first place. It's an unmitigated shit show top to bottom.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 737
|
| You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for
| decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the
| 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the
| safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that
| have no fatalities, but they also have very low production
| numbers to go with it.
| panarky wrote:
| _> safest airliner ever built ... very low production
| numbers_
|
| If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes,
| and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50
| crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?
| dahdum wrote:
| I'll take the one with 50 crashes any time. That's 50
| times something went catastrophically wrong and 50 times
| measures were taken to fix the underlying problems.
|
| A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new
| problems.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Until 1980-1990 I would completely agree but with the
| more recent history of basically everything I am not so
| sure anymore.
| lostlogin wrote:
| What has been done by Boeing that makes you feel that
| they have fixed everything up and that safety is their
| top priority?
|
| They seem more keen on getting legislative change and
| regulation bypass or exemption.
| o11c wrote:
| The point in the outer comment was that the 737NG has
| _both_ many flight hours and ... if I skimmed Wikipedia
| correctly, only 1 mechanically-attributed fatality.
|
| For reference, the most-produced passenger/cargo
| aircraft: 16K Douglas DC-3 (1935)
| 11K Boeing 737 family: 1K Original (1967)
| 2K Classic (1984) 7K NG (1998) 1K MAX
| (2016) 11K Airbus A320 family (1988)
|
| Different sources give oddly different numbers (more than
| I would expect for ordered vs built vs delivered; I
| didn't investigate deeply), but nothing else is above 2K.
| Note that plenty of small or military planes beat these
| numbers.
| kazen44 wrote:
| its actually kind of crazy how much military planes where
| produces during world war 2.
|
| Look at this list[0]: the soviet IL-2 plane has produced
| more planes the the entire list of planes mentioned above
| over a period of 4 years!
|
| That is just one type of plane, for one country during a
| very short period..
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-
| produced_aircraft
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I think grounding is warranted until the scope of the
| problem is understood.
|
| If the problem is the whole model or 'Boeing', both of which
| seem possible, what then?
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| If Boeing is necessary for national defence and no longer
| knows how to build aircraft, drastic action is needed by
| the US government on a very short timeframe to get their
| shit together. War is a thing.
|
| In the meantime it's hard to disagree with the sentiment
| elsewhere in this thread that flying with airbus seems a
| better idea.
| jahewson wrote:
| Of course it should. This is a manufacturing defect that could
| easily have sucked someone out the plane or dropped debris on
| someone's head. Should it happen during cruise over water the
| consequences could be much worse.
| lokar wrote:
| It seems to have ripped the shirt off the person in the
| middle seat.
| Rapzid wrote:
| > We can do it in two!
|
| Boeing probably.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| And if we can't, is there some way we can blame the pilots?
| Maintenance crew? Anyone but business leadership?
| alwa wrote:
| A single explosive decompression event, comprising the
| spontaneous loss of an assembly the size of an entire exit
| door, two months off the factory floor?
|
| I should certainly hope they'd take a gander at the others
| before I'd sit next to one.
|
| Especially with the memory of the last time they chose to keep
| flying 737 MAXes instead of fixing the defect in the rest of
| the fleet, at the cost of 157 lives, not even 5 years ago.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Let's also consider just how much worse this situation
| _could_ have been. The door panel blew out next to the one
| seat that happened to be unoccupied, and it happened at
| 16,000 ft instead of 26,000 ft.
| alwa wrote:
| And even so, sucked the shirt right off the boy in the
| middle seat! I shudder to imagine how things would have
| gone 20 minutes further in to the flight.
| ponector wrote:
| Not a big difference if everyone was with fastened seat
| belt.
|
| There is a real story of another 737 of Aloha Airlines
| flight 243 where part of the fuselage blown away together
| with unlucky flight attendant at 24000 feet:
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-to-pieces-the-
| ne...
| smcin wrote:
| Aloha Airlines Flight 243 (Apr 28, 1988)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| It was only dumb luck that no one got killed because the
| adjacent seats were empty.
|
| To give you some idea, a teenager seated across the aisle had
| his shirt completely torn off.
| stretchwithme wrote:
| His mother held on to him to keep him from getting suck out
| too.
| pella wrote:
| dups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893811
| el-dude-arino wrote:
| Fuck Jack Welch and fuck his devil spawn, the likes of Boeing
| CEO's Dave Calhoun and James McNerney, and sycophant Dennis
| Muilenburg. They belong in prison for the people that died flying
| on their planes. CEOs should be able to be held criminally
| liable.
| belter wrote:
| It's a shame you can't short their shares during the weekend...
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Already priced in
| makestuff wrote:
| Yeah and their practices have spread into big tech too.
| childishnemo wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| makestuff wrote:
| Amazon was the one that came to mind with prime air/drone
| delivery https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/amazon-hires-
| former-boei...
|
| I guess it all really started with everyone's favorite CEO
| of GE, Jack Welch. It seems like he created the blueprint
| for the cost cutting/stack ranking/MBAs/profits over
| quality that we see today.
| simion314 wrote:
| Probably they refer to Tesla, Full Self Driving feature but
| the small print explains that is not "full self driving"
| the name is just an aspiration, the advertisement statement
| are also false because are also aspirations etc. AFAIK
| there is soem kind of investigation about the mode this
| feature was advertised and I expect that sooner or later
| the people that were tricked to pay for a FSD would demand
| their money back since the promises were not kept. About
| their safety, the human must pay attention all the time so
| we can judge the safety of the software because the human
| intervenes when the situation is to unsafe and prevents the
| crashes, with the exception when the humans do not pay
| attention and the car kills/injures them.(any idea what
| happen with that software guy killed in a Tesla? did the
| family pursue the cause in justice or they got money to
| give up?)
| piva00 wrote:
| Their practices spread _everywhere_ , most corporations
| behave following Jack Welch's MBA teachings: cut costs
| (massive layoffs are Welch's bread and butter), return as
| much as possible to shareholders because they are the only
| important players in the corporate game (fuck society, fuck
| the workers).
|
| I hate Welch and all of his acolytes with a passion.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Don't forget that f-er Harry Stonecipher, a man who gave "don't
| give a shit" a bad name.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The way you phrased it, I figured that "don't give a shit"
| was a Stonecipher catch phrase or something. Sort of like
| Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things".
| pinewurst wrote:
| Stonecipher was the "leadership" that came in from McD when
| they effectively took over Boeing, replacing their
| traditional care with literally anything for a buck.
| kenny11 wrote:
| He did say "When people say I changed the culture of
| Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a
| business rather than a great engineering firm" and he does
| seem to have been successful at making it into something
| other than a great engineering firm.
| selimnairb wrote:
| At the very least we should have a corporate death penalty.
| Force the company into bankruptcy, de-list it from the stock
| market, and turn it into a worker-owned co-op that can never be
| publicly traded or be sold to private equity.
| lttlrck wrote:
| Yes I feel this needs to hit the shareholders hard. But
| they'll just continue to cut costs to get the value back up
| and we'll be back here in a couple of years. It needs deep
| institutional changes and I can't see that happening.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Even if we had it politicians would rush to protect Boeing.
| It's too critical a partner for many large national defense
| projects.
| lokar wrote:
| They should break the civil aviation business off into a
| new company.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| If it's important enough to national defense, let's
| nationalize it. Or at least move the parts we absolutely
| need to the DoD.
| xvector wrote:
| A death penalty for grossly negligent execs is also
| necessary.
|
| They'd get their shit together so fast if they faced
| meaningful consequences to their fuckups.
| lokar wrote:
| They should at least revoke financial liability protection
| for the members of the board.
| chris_va wrote:
| I am not going to defend execs/board members, but that
| seems ill advised.
|
| If you had a death penalty for execs, most competent people
| would refuse the job, and you'd end up in a worse
| situation.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| Where are the competent people taking the job now?
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Airbus? The death penalty would apply to them too,
| presumably.
| bsimpson wrote:
| If a corporation can be "punished" to become a co-op, what
| incentive does that give the employees?
| selimnairb wrote:
| Most workers are already hopelessly alienated and don't
| give an eff...
| WJW wrote:
| I think GP meant that they might give more of a fuck (in
| the wrong direction) if sabotaging "just this one bolt"
| means this they can own a significant chunk of stock in
| the company they are part of.
|
| According to a quick search Boeing has a market cap of
| ~150 billion and 150k employees, so if you manage to hide
| that it was you who installed the bolt wrong then
| assuming the company gets distributed roughly equally
| among employees then that's a quick 1 million payday. How
| certain are you that "hopelessly alienated" employees
| wouldn't sell out a few hundred anonymous passengers for
| a million bucks?
| stretchwithme wrote:
| How is Jack Welch implicated?
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| The plane that had the issue was new, so I guess they want to
| make sure it wasn't an issue with other planes off the line
| maybe?
|
| Sure is a good thing nobody was sitting in that seat.
| brewdad wrote:
| Another good reason to keep that seat belt fastened even when
| the sign is off.
| hnarn wrote:
| The light only means that having it fastened is mandatory.
| There are many reasons to keep it on during the entire
| flight, the most common of which is turbulence.
| Symbiote wrote:
| In Europe that's what seems to be a standard announcement.
| "The captain has switched off the fasten seatbelt sign, but
| we recommend you keep your seatbelt fastened at all times
| when seated, in case of sudden turbulence."
| hamstercat wrote:
| It's the same with canadian and asian airlines. Is it not
| the case in the US?
|
| I just assumed all airlines did it.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Last year I flew domestic U.S. on several airlines and
| the preflight safety briefing on all of them included a
| line that passengers should always keep their seat belt
| buckled for safety whenever seated (or something to that
| effect).
| asylteltine wrote:
| Good. Finally the FAA got a spine with Boeing.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Especially since the two are so tightly intertwined.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| They did it for the DC10 and 787 (grounded for inspections).
| They didn't need to do it before because Boeing was an actual
| engineering company
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| To be fair, there are a lot of rose-colored sunglasses in the
| crowd of Boeing critics. The rudder problems with the
| original 737 weren't exactly McDonnell-Douglas's fault:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
| throwup238 wrote:
| Is there any place to get the full list of tail numbers involved
| in the grounding? I just flew on an Alaska 737 Max 9 out of PDX a
| few days ago and am morbidly curious if my plane was one of the
| ones grounded.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| In all likelihood it is all of them, there aren't that many
| flying in the US..
| snitty wrote:
| Alaska grounded their whole fleet of Max 9s before the FAA
| ordered it for everyone else. So yes. It was grounded.
| throwup238 wrote:
| When did they ground it? I'm looking at the tail number on
| FlightAware and it's on a scheduled flight to SEA since 9am.
| obmelvin wrote:
| It seems like they grounded all of their 737 Max 9 fleet
| immediately after the incident. But apparently they have
| begun inspections and returned some of the fleet to service
| -
| https://twitter.com/jonostrower/status/1743668287106678866
| and
| https://twitter.com/AlaskaAir/status/1743677307644944797
| jaktet wrote:
| I can only assume major hubs have already completed
| inspection, because a buddy of mine flew out of Seattle on
| a 737 Max9 this morning. Guess I assumed inspections took
| longer than half a day
| brewdad wrote:
| Supposedly the flaw exists on a section where a "false
| door" exists for future alterations to the exit points.
| Perhaps not all of their planes were built with this
| feature. Nothing to inspect in that case.
| asmor wrote:
| The number of emergency exits required depends on how
| many seats you cram on a plane. A Ryanair Max 9 would
| need that extra exit for compliance.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Do we really know the root cause this quickly?
| p1mrx wrote:
| *Slaps door of 737 MAX* this bad boy can fit so much air
| in it.
| throw0101d wrote:
| *
| https://www.planespotters.net/aircraft/production/boeing-737...
|
| * https://www.airfleets.net/listing/b737ng-1-statasc.htm
|
| * https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-airlines/
|
| ?
|
| There don't see to be to be a lot of MAX 9s out there (relative
| to other MAX variants).
| belter wrote:
| Just check the production list:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38891172
| robbiet480 wrote:
| United says all aircraft 7535 and above. 7501-7533 have already
| received inspections.
| aplummer wrote:
| Two days ago before we got on one of these planes I said to my
| partner "don't worry, it's the most scrutinized plane in
| history".
| physhster wrote:
| Famous last words.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It's like sneaking a bomb on board for safety purposes. "I
| mean, what are the odds that there are TWO bombs on this
| plane?"
| whycome wrote:
| I wish we had an updated remake of Airplane! that uses this
| line. THere's so much room for good political satire but it
| seems like it's not being made.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I believe the above is actually a paraphrase of Jim
| Jefferies's bit about the difference between Australian
| and American airport security actually.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| The sketch in question:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyqBZBC3RbY
| lostlogin wrote:
| 'Satisfaction of search' is very much a thing. In my field
| (I'm a radiographer), finding an abnormally is a classic
| reason to miss another one nearby.
|
| To quote a cardiologist I worked with, 'keep scanning, you
| can have ticks and lice'.
|
| https://radiopaedia.org/articles/satisfaction-of-search-
| erro...
| eternityforest wrote:
| I notice this a lot in everyday life, with things like
| getting a text while heading out the door, answering it,
| then forgetting there were other tasks and leaving sans
| keys and wallet
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Guessing you're quoting Laurie Anderson.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Yeah it's really not. Age is the only thing that will do that.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| It's hard to know how much time has to elapse before all the
| problems have been teased out though.
|
| Anyone who thought the DC-10 was in the clear after its cargo
| door problems were fixed was in for a nasty surprise a few
| years later when an engine fell off of one at O'Hare, but if
| the industry had written it off after _that_ incident they 'd
| have missed out on 35 years of an otherwise reliable plane.
| dylan604 wrote:
| When all of that scrutiny stops finding issues, I'll not worry
| about it. Sadly, every time they look, they find new issues.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| The problem wasn't finding problems, it was acknowledging them
| topspin wrote:
| There is a reason they are the most scrutinized.
| throw0101d wrote:
| Good book describing the cultural change from engineering-focus
| to business-focus of Boeing:
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind
|
| * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I watched a documentary on Netflix recently that alleged that a
| lot of this change came from importing McDonnell Douglas
| management into Boeing after the acquisition. I wonder if the
| book concurs on that, I don't have time to read it right now.
|
| If this is the case I wonder if it could be reversible.
| throw0101d wrote:
| Yes: the running joke is/was that McD bought Boeing with
| Boeing's money.
|
| * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-
| boeing...
|
| * https://archive.is/q5pQV
|
| * https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-
| merg...
|
| * https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/
|
| B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons.
| What would have been a better idea would have been, instead
| of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go
| bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck.
|
| When they did the acquisition, they also got the management
| folks... who ran McD into the ground in the first place.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| You don't have to keep the management from the company
| you've bought.
| rtkwe wrote:
| In a broad sense high level management tends to take care
| of it's own in a bit of self interest so when they screw
| up and run a company into the ground chasing short term
| quarterly profits they'll also get taken care of.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Well clearly the McD people were more skilled
| politicians.
| pstuart wrote:
| This can't be emphasized enough. Businesses (and most
| organizations) are not meritocracies.
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| This is exactly it. The skilled politicians are the
| reason why the company failed in the first place. They
| then take over the acquiring company from within like a
| virus and destroy that next. Rule of thumb: If a company
| is failing and you purchase it, fire everybody. Either
| the culture or the people are poison, and they will
| infect you.
| jcadam wrote:
| > fire everybody
|
| At the very least, anyone in a management position.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| We just had a close call with this where I work. Bought a
| company, because they were failing and being crushed
| under their own weight. Somehow they convinced the
| management at my company that they knew the path forward
| and we've been in complete gridlock trying to get
| anything done for a couple years, eventually they hired
| outside management for the company we bought, set clear
| KPIs which they failed to deliver on (in some cases
| failing to even attempt to deliver on) and the got fired.
|
| But god damn, when you buy a company that can no longer
| afford to support its own weight, don't let those fuckers
| convince you that they somehow know how to run your
| business too when they can't run theirs.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Phil Condit only had his job through the influence of his
| wife at the time. Unfortunately, he was busy diddling his
| executive assistant at the time of the merger, clearing a
| path for Harry Stonechiseler to be CEO.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I've heard variations on this story a few times, successful
| company swallows failing company and gets infected by
| failing-culture. Isn't that what happened to Netscape?
| bsimpson wrote:
| Who poisoned Netscape?
| wvenable wrote:
| AOL
| bsimpson wrote:
| Didn't AOL buy Netscape?
|
| There's a long list of companies that died by being
| acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the
| opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent
| company.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| AOL was borgified by Time Warner management post
| acquisition the same way Boeing was by MD.
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| You make it sound like AOL was cool before the Time-
| Warner merger and people didn't joke about e.g. the free
| trial CD's
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They were a successful online service before the
| internet. Yes. They were just as cool as Compuserve and
| Prodigy.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Netscape died because browser became a utility in the OS.
| purerandomness wrote:
| It's not that simple.
|
| Netscape died because Microsoft bundled their browser
| with the operating system and made it free for commercial
| use, what essentially led to the huge antitrust case.
|
| Only after that did browsers become utilities in the OS,
| with open source engines like Konqueror's KHTML (which
| later became WebKit, which later became Blink) and
| Netscape/Mozilla's Gecko
| classichasclass wrote:
| Collabra, per jwz. See "groupware bad" (not direct
| linking in case he still has the referer block up).
| thinkerswell wrote:
| Is Collabora not a good product?
| classichasclass wrote:
| Not Collabora. Collabra was a groupware company Netscape
| acquired to shore up the E-mail portion of Communicator.
| It didn't work and ended up substantially delaying future
| development of the browser suite.
| acdha wrote:
| Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. Pretty much everything
| they started after that point has failed because the
| focus has been on selling ads rather than building
| something normal people enjoy using.
| rtkwe wrote:
| On the other hand how much of the things Google has
| built/bought and grew today we enjoy could exist without
| the firehose of money that ads represented? I'm not sure
| Youtube happens without the ad money.
| owisd wrote:
| Google had enough 3rd party ad revenue before they bought
| DoubleClick (2008) to buy YouTube (2006).
| nostrademons wrote:
| AdWords was doing just fine before DoubleClick. That's
| how they got the money to buy DoubleClick in the first
| place.
|
| The problem was specifically DoubleClick _management_ ,
| who then got inserted in high levels within the Ads
| organization, forcing out the very technically &
| economically savvy people who were there before.
|
| This is a recurring problem in large organizations.
| People who spend their time learning to be politically
| savvy will be...politically savvy, and be at an advantage
| when playing power politics that determines who is in
| charge. The effort needed to become politically savvy
| usually comes at the expense of domain/technical/economic
| knowledge required to actually get the job done.
| Eventually the organization becomes very good at playing
| political games and very bad at getting stuff done, until
| it collapses.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, ad money built a lot of the web. I'm not saying it's
| evil on a conceptual level, but rather that a lot of
| companies start failing when they switch from thinking
| about what their users would like which happen to be ad
| supported as opposed to building products which are
| designed around ad revenue first. It's what gives you
| things like Google+ but also things like social media
| sites optimizing for outrage or other low-quality
| interactions which maximize ad sales revenue.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Not a good example. Google reinterviewed every
| DoubleClick employee and fired half of them.
| acdha wrote:
| That doesn't say anything about whether it's a good
| example: even if it's true, the real question would be
| whether they looked for the right things and especially
| who they kept at the management level - at the time,
| Google announced they were laying off a quarter of the
| employees due to redundancy, which tends to mean that
| groups like HR and accounting get hammered more than
| senior managers. This is especially important to get
| right when you consider that the most damaging people
| aren't comic book villains but rather people who sound
| like they know what they're talking about and are
| charismatic - exactly the sort of people who would make
| it through an interview process.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security'
| reasons.
|
| Creating monopolies and reducing suppliers actually harms
| "national security." Our braindead managerial class in
| action.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| That is correct. However MDD was manufacturing key
| military products (F-15, F-18) and it was doing bad
| financially, going bankrupt and jeopardizing the fighter
| plane production and maintenance was a "national
| security" problem that forced the Boeing acquisition of
| MDD.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go
| bankrupt." Perhaps they should have just been auctioned
| off and other investors given an opportunity to create
| new lines of business out of the incompetent mess they
| had become. Taking the mess and wholesale buying it into
| another company and then keeping the management that
| created the problem in the first place is astronomically
| dumb.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go
| bankrupt."_
|
| We massively drew down defence spending at the end of the
| Cold War.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Also, all the money in the world doesn't mean you spend
| it on things that make money later. If you spend your
| manufacturing budget on strippers, you won't have
| anything to sell later.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Umm, no we didn't. We spent less as a percentage of GDP.
| But total spending barely shrank by the late 90's. We
| hadn't even started to shift spending away from piloted
| jets by then either.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-
| states/mili...
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I almost couldn't believe this statement so I looked it
| up. Sure enough you're correct. As a factor of GDP, it
| dropped by about half.
|
| Incidentally, however, as a factor of gdp, it had gone
| down 50% since the Korean War before that too.
|
| I think all this means is that military spending isn't
| outpacing gdp growth (a good thing) rather than we're
| actually cutting spending.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Actually, spending was cut in an absolute sense as well,
| especially if you factor in inflation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_Unit
| ed_...
|
| But it is - obviously - on the rise right now.
| philwelch wrote:
| Even in dollar terms it actually did go down.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-
| states/mili...
|
| Late 1989 was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of
| communism in most of Eastern Europe and 1991 was the end
| of the Soviet Union itself. There's a drop between 1990
| and 1991, a slight increase in 1992 (replenishment after
| Desert Storm?) and then a gradual decline in nominal
| dollars throughout the 1990's. Also remember that federal
| budgets were usually passed ahead of time; this was
| before the government normalized all the government
| shutdowns and other monkeyshines we have grown accustomed
| to today, so budget changes might be a year behind
| current events. Adjusting for inflation the drop in
| spending would be even more.
|
| Spending does start to increase after 1998. I'm not
| exactly sure why, but a lot of things started happening
| in 1998 and 1999, ranging from Bin Laden's attacks on
| American embassies, the Kosovo conflict, Saddam Hussein
| ejecting UN weapons inspectors from Iraq, the discovery
| of Chinese interference in the 1996 elections and China
| stealing nuclear secrets.
|
| Also, at the end of the Cold War, there were a number of
| systems that were in the late stages of design and
| development that were either radically cut back or
| canceled outright. These included the F-22, B-2, and
| Seawolf class submarine, just to name a few big ticket
| items. This saved a lot of money and made sense at the
| time since these were all designed specifically for Cold
| War missions that no longer seemed relevant. But
| eventually the older hardware still needs to be replaced;
| instead of replacing the Los Angeles class submarines
| with the Seawolf class starting in the 90's, you end up
| replacing them with the Virginia class starting in the
| 00's.
|
| Other cutbacks during the post-Cold War period included
| closing military bases (which was fraught with political
| difficulty; no congressman wants the base in his district
| to be closed!) and reducing the number of US forces
| permanently stationed in countries like Germany.
|
| Dollars aren't the only measure, either. One of Reagan's
| goals was a 600 ship navy. It takes time to build ships
| so it wasn't until 1987 that the US Navy reached a peak
| size of 594 ships. Currently the US Navy has 238 ships.
| Sometimes a higher defense budget means you're building a
| larger military but sometimes it means health care has
| gotten more expensive or you need to buy more fuel and
| ammunition to support operations. This also explains the
| drop after Korea.
| mihaaly wrote:
| What is even weirder to me is how could you be key
| manufacturer, go bankrupt, cause forcing a merger, then
| being promoted to Boeing to 'carry on!' ...
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| That is the definition of "failing upwards". It's the
| fashion of the past 50 years in business.
| times_trw wrote:
| Well now we can add all the planes Boeing manufactures to
| the list of things which the inevitable bankruptcy will
| jeopardise.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| All the manufacturers of key pieces of military advanced
| weapons are on that list. Fighter jets are on the very
| top. When corporate America is now more about "business"
| than engineering, making a good plane is very expensive.
| It's just business :|
| lostlogin wrote:
| How was MDD going bankrupt Boeings problem?
|
| If it's a national security issue, that's the governments
| problem to fix, surely?
| coliveira wrote:
| Boeing is in its position only because of a close
| relationship with government. They didn't get rich
| because of their brains. They will do anything for
| government to maintain the current benefits.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They did get rich because of their brains. But they then
| replaced those brains with accountants and since then it
| is a steady downward trajectory, which if it were any
| other company would likely result in controlled descent
| into terrain.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| They both acted in the same area. In case an important
| company is going under, you can merge it into a similar
| company to keep it running.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's when the government goes, "buys" the design for
| some price it decides, and distributes for other
| companies to manufacture.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Yeah, but that won't help my buddies at MDM that have
| been buying me lunch and beers on the golf course
| tempname2 wrote:
| Aka privatize profits, socialize losses.
| einpoklum wrote:
| It may potentially harm the security of the nation's
| subject, but it does not harm the interests of the ruling
| elites - and that's the real "national security" in
| practice.
| whycome wrote:
| > B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security'
| reasons.
|
| Are we seeing similar things right now? Will companies like
| OpenAI or Nvidia be forced to merge or buy other players in
| the space?
|
| Nvidia already has to work around export restrictions.
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/17/23921131/us-china-
| restri...
| shihab wrote:
| After seeng your comment, I just went ahead and watched the
| doc, and I frankly I find myself in a state of rage right
| now. From my limited understanding, I had this impression
| this was an engineering failure. And you know, when you have
| a complicated machine, sometimes shit happens.
|
| But it wasn't that at all. Boeing knew clearly what the
| dangers of MCAS system were, they went to great lengths to
| completely hide the presence of the system from the world
| before delivery of the planes. Within days of the first
| crash, they knew it was MCAS, and kept trying to blame
| uneducated "foreign" pilots, kept trying to go on and tell
| the world again and again it was safe to fly, until that
| second crash happened. I understand greed, we all have that,
| but I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so
| toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that
| your first concern after that crash and knowing there might
| be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy.
|
| And what the hell FAA? 1) they didn't regulate properly
| before the plane was delivered, 2) After first crash they
| knew how dangerous the plane is, but didn't ground it (TAMARA
| report), 3) After second crash, you had the transportation
| secratary basically saying 737 Max was "innocent untill
| proven guilty" so let it fly before China forced its hand, 4)
| No criminal proescution in the end for those fanatic
| executives, just a cash fine.
|
| And today this happens.
| smcin wrote:
| You have to view all US regulatory goings-on wrt Boeing
| through the lens of Airbus-Boeing/EU-US trade rivalry (plus
| China's COMAC as a new entrant).
|
| Boeing is the US's largest exporter (defense + civilian),
| and also the 65th largest US stock overall. Any US
| regulator action against Boeing would affect all that, plus
| US stock markets. You have to wonder how independent the
| FAA head can afford to be from Congressional interference,
| in the current setup. In the US, the FAA head is appointed
| (or, in recent admins, left vacant) by the Senate.
|
| Back in the 2018/9 first 737MAX scandal [0], it was the
| Canadian, EU and Chinese regulators which were more
| aggressive about investigating and grounding, meanwhile the
| US FAA dragged its feet on taking action against Boeing
| while its donees like Congressman Sam Graves (R-MO 6) [1]
| continued to blame foreign pilot training, which was
| dishonest and adding insult to injury.
|
| PS consider also in 2020, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA 27)
| secretly sold $50K Boeing stock ahead of his committee's
| damning 737MAX report; then avoided election scrutiny by
| simply blowing the deadline to report the stock sale...
| When he finally did disclose the sale, it was two weeks
| after the 2020 general election votes were cast, and three
| days after Garcia declared victory. He won by 333 votes.
| [2]
|
| There's some scrutiny of Congressmen insider-trading
| biotech/pharma stocks which their committees regulate, but
| really not a lot of scrutiny on aerospace. [3] Compare to
| George Santos, who wasn't implicated in anything that
| actually killed people.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_grounding
| s#2019
|
| [1]: https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/sam-
| graves/s...
|
| [2]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-rep-mike-garcia-
| secretly-s...
|
| [3]: NYT 2022/09 : These 97 Members of Congress Reported
| Trades in Companies Influenced by Their Committees https://
| www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Has there been any push to break up Boeing?
| brewdad wrote:
| Boeings breaking up is how we got here.
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| I know we're not supposed to be funny on this website. But
| that just broke me up.
| davidw wrote:
| Humor is fine here, it just has to be actually funny - no
| tired memes or chains of replies or that sort of thing.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The problem with breaking up Boeing is Airbus.
|
| Nowadays, to realistically restore competiveness in an
| industry, you'd have to coordinate a worldwide breakup of
| similarly-integrated competitors.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| If the broken-up bits are uncompetitive with a monolith,
| that's an argument _against_ pursuing a break-up.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Well, there's product-price-uncompetitive and then
| externality-inclusive-uncompetitive.
| notahacker wrote:
| I believe that was the point. Aircraft economics barely
| sustains two airframers per market segment, and
| uncompetitive offerings aren't going to raise safety/QC
| bars in a regulated industry
|
| (and whilst you've got the scope to leave the airframe
| design/sales op alone and [further] vertically
| disintegrate the supply chain instead, that might
| actually make it worse, with the Spirit/Boeing
| relationship plausibly having a causal relationship with
| this incident)
| delusional wrote:
| Is the argument here that it's more economically viable to
| run a plane building company whose planes accidentally
| falls out of the sky? Naively, it would seem to me to be a
| bad business decision to design aero planes that can't fly,
| but what do I know.
| czl wrote:
| > it's more economically viable to run a plane building
| company whose planes accidentally falls out of the sky?
|
| Business school may say if your product never fails
| perhaps you are overspending on it and some known small
| failure rate is acceptable to control costs to have
| better profits. Boeing leadership may have took that
| logic and applied it to airplanes.
| delusional wrote:
| Is that argument wrong? If it isn't, then you've
| successfully identified capitalism as the problem. I'm
| all for anti-capitalism, but I don't think it's
| reasonable to expect that to start with Boeing.
|
| This is not a problem of "pointy haired MBA's", we can
| either fix this within the current regime by imposing
| heavy fines on this sort of reckless behavior, or we can
| tear down the current regime and replace it with
| communism/fascism/monarchy/whatever. In the system we are
| currently in, what happened at Boeing looks to be
| "correct", in the sense that it's what the system
| incentivizes.
| rustymonday wrote:
| It is wrong because people will not want to fly on this
| plane, and carriers will be less likely to buy this
| model. This hurts Boeing's bottom line.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| It's functionally impossible for Airbus to take over all of
| Boeing's contracts. Airbus itself has an order backlog in
| the thousands. They're not REALLY competing with Boeing.
| kazen44 wrote:
| which will never happen. Airbus is a pan european political
| project asmuch as a competitor to boeing. (also, one which
| is hugely important for independence of european
| airtransport).
| eunos wrote:
| The moment Boeing breakup discourse entering public discourse
| all of their lobbyists retinue will shout "Airbus, COMAC,
| Great Power Competition"
| fullshark wrote:
| How about nationalizing it?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Nationalize a critical piece of our infrastructure? Perish
| the thought!
| numpad0 wrote:
| Boeing was reasonably broken up until merged with McDonnell
| Douglas.
| philwelch wrote:
| The consolidation in aerospace and defense was a much
| longer process than that. All of the companies with names
| like "McDonnell Douglas", "Lockheed Martin", or "Northrop
| Grumman" were formed by mergers. If you actually break
| apart Boeing's merger history there were at least a half
| dozen WWII-era companies that slowly consolidated over half
| a century.
|
| Part of this was because WWII subsidized an unsustainable
| and frankly absurd level of demand. For instance, Grumman
| almost exclusively built carrier-based fighters, and by the
| end of WWII they were producing planes so quickly that the
| Navy stopped doing periodic heavy maintenance of their
| aircraft in lieu of dumping them into the sea and replacing
| them with brand new planes. Obviously business for Grumman
| would never be quite that good ever again.
| wredue wrote:
| Considering the consistent gross mismanagement of Boeing, who
| receive free bailouts just for being Boeing
|
| Well, I was going to say that calling them "business oriented"
| is laughable, but I guess that running a business in to the
| ground then laughing all the way to the bail out bank is just
| standard operating procedure now around the world.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| A friend of mine works in Boeing as a data scientist. His team
| has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and
| models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means.
| They spend their days creating processes, managing tickets,
| enforcing specific formats of tickets and stories and what not.
| Yet, none of the eight knew how to write product specs nor
| could be bothered with basic things like understanding how git
| works.
|
| I have a hard time imagining how Boeing could survive in the
| long run with this level of bureaucracy.
|
| Edit: Saw the summary of the book Flying Blind: "A fast-paced
| look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting,
| toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to
| one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation". One has to ask:
| where did the cost cutting go? What's cutting throat? It looks
| to me that the management of Boeing is grossly incompetent.
| varispeed wrote:
| Been there. It's half bad if the "managers" can swallow their
| ego and let developers lead while only just keeping an eye on
| any potential troubles.
|
| At many big corporations these "management" hires are just
| political. To fill in the certain quotas and tick the boxes.
|
| Problems starts if they put their egos first. Then talented
| staff quit and projects go down the pan.
| H8crilA wrote:
| And BTW, we have a market mechanism for this: bankruptcy.
| Preferably restructuring, not liquidating, though both are
| useful. Just leave the job and maybe one day the whole
| thing gets rewired.
| ImaCake wrote:
| I find this genuinely incomprehensible. I have never
| encountered a single person who was not technically
| proficient in the team's tasks across the 10 years of my
| hodgepodge career in a variety of semi-independent small
| teams and currently a small business.
|
| Small teams don't have the margin for non technical folk. It
| often falls on people like me to become, temporarily, the
| admin or become the GIS department as such things are needed.
| Symmetry wrote:
| That would be a very efficient way of running things under a
| cost plus military contract. For a single contract win
| they're able to spend four times as much money on salaries
| and therefore earn four times as much profit.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| This is sort of ironic because they asked to bypass some safety
| checks on the 737 max 7 recently. Note this is a different model.
| EDIT: The bypass is about the deicer.
| https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
| blindriver wrote:
| Does it have the same manufacturing process? It wasn't anything
| specific to the plane's model, it was the fact that it was a
| manufacturing defect that caused the door to blow out.
| aaomidi wrote:
| The problem here is the company and its management, not a
| specific plane.
|
| The management trying to weasel out of yet another regulation
| is entirely showing what's going on here.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| _> It wasn 't anything specific to the plane's model, it was
| the fact that it was a manufacturing defect that caused the
| door to blow out._
|
| We don't know that yet. The NTSB report will tell.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Hacker news discussion
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358
| mission_failed wrote:
| It's not a safety check bypass. Boeing wants to make pilots
| responsible for turning off the deicer within 5 min of ice
| disappearing to prevent the flawed engines breaking apart in
| flight.
| belter wrote:
| "FAA Statement on Temporary Grounding of Certain Boeing 737 MAX 9
| Aircraft" - https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-temporary-
| groundi...
| travisgriggs wrote:
| At what point does Boeing just scrap the 9s? Completely, for
| good?
|
| It's all starting to feel like the galaxy note, where you pass a
| tipping point of no return with public perception.
| tiahura wrote:
| Because some guy at the factory forgot to lock the door? Isn't
| that a little melodramatic?
| hypothesis wrote:
| What makes you think that this was the _only_ door he forgot
| to lock? There is clearly a pattern here with Boeing QA,
| doors, bolts, etc
| tiahura wrote:
| Based on n=1, I'm hesitant to speculate much and so I don't
| have any opinion on whether there will be more. I always
| don't see how scrapping the 9 makes sense even if he forgot
| to do all of them.
| malfist wrote:
| When will you be happy to extrapolate? When the next
| incident has bodies? Or will that be another n=1 event?
| lostlogin wrote:
| The whole scenario has 'the front fell off', dark comedy
| vibes. Wish the guy was still alive.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
| tavavex wrote:
| Low n is pretty unavoidable here, considering how few
| aircraft generally get made. Even for the world's leading
| manufacturers, deliveries are counted in units per month.
|
| The point here is that the aviation industry is one of
| the most regulated and scrutinized industries in regards
| to safety, and yet despite all that, one manufacturer
| keeps making very dangerous slip-ups.
| jgilias wrote:
| "One doesn't just" forget things like that. It's aviation
| we're talking about, not toy cars. This absolutely must not
| happen, and there should be processes in place to make sure
| it doesn't.
|
| It doesn't actually matter if it's an engineering or a
| process problem, because both of those point to an
| organisational problem that needs to be rooted out at a
| company to which we basically entrust our lives.
| mmanfrin wrote:
| The 346 people who died in 2018/2019 because of the 737 Max's
| incompetent safety standards and engineering beg to differ.
| jcadam wrote:
| Apparently the door was permanently plugged, as Alaska
| Airlines didn't order the airplane with that optional door in
| place. So... turns out it wasn't so permanent - and
| definitely an issue with Boeing rather than the airline.
| acdha wrote:
| That attempt to spin this would be far worse for the company:
| if "some guy" forgot a step, it would mean that Boeing's
| process is horribly broken because the worker needed a better
| confirmation check for that step, and the independent safety
| checks which are supposed to happen either didn't or were not
| setup correctly. It's not like changing the toner in the
| office printer, this industry is all about multiple
| independent safety measures because the alternatives are
| horrific.
|
| For machines which hundreds of lives depend on, the correct
| response to that excuse would be to shut the factory down and
| replace the management who faked the safety process. I doubt
| they'll use it for that reason.
| panarky wrote:
| Is the 9 really that different from the 8, other than being a
| few meters longer?
| charles_f wrote:
| Why the 9? Both crashes were on 8s.
| belter wrote:
| Ways in which you can experience an unexpected cabin
| decompression to the next world...Or join the mile-high never-
| come-back club, on a Boeing 737 MAX...
|
| 1- Loose bolts: "Boeing Urges Airlines to Check for Loose Bolt in
| newer 737 MAX Aircraft" - https://www.european-
| views.com/2023/12/boeing-urges-airlines...
|
| 2- Leave the anti-icing system on for more than 5 min after non-
| icing conditions: "Boeing still hasn't fixed this problem on Max
| jets, so it's asking for an exemption to safety rules" -
| https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/boeing-still-ha...
|
| 3- Sit too close to a door not in use: "Alaska Airlines grounds
| 737 Max 9 planes after section blows out mid-air" -
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67899564
|
| 4 - Possible unscheduled decompression, from incorrectly drilled
| fastener holes in the aft pressure bulkhead, if being in the
| wrong plane, at the wrong time: "Boeing and a key supplier find a
| new manufacturing issue that affects the 737 Max airliner" -
| https://apnews.com/article/spirit-aerosystems-boeing-737-fus...
|
| I think I am going to need a shared Google Sheet...
| Miraste wrote:
| Two of those are manufacturing mistakes, and it seems likely
| the door one is as well. Not that that helps the passengers,
| but they're not systemic design flaws.
|
| That anti-icing system is deranged, though. They effectively
| installed a timed detonator on the engines and want a safety
| exemption for it.
| belter wrote:
| A manufacturing mistake is, in all likelihood, another type
| of systemic fault. Why would you think only one aircraft
| would suffer from it?
| piva00 wrote:
| Back in 2014[1] Al Jazeera (the international edition) had
| a pretty good in-depth report of issues with the
| manufacturing line for the 787.
|
| There are known issues regarding quality assurance at
| Boeing for a decade now, they keep going down the drain.
| The MBAs from McDonnell-Douglas won, and properly tarnished
| Boeing's image...
|
| [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7
| /20/t...
| olig15 wrote:
| Ah you're right. They're not design flaws, just manufacturing
| issues, so sign me up for the first flight when the max flies
| again...
|
| People falling out the sky because the wing falls off because
| someone forgot to bolt it on aren't going to care if it's a
| design issue or a manufacturing issue. Boeing is doing both,
| so the blame lies with them either way.
| Miraste wrote:
| I absolutely agree. I meant it as a comparison to issues
| like the infamous MCAS, which was wrong on purpose on all
| 737 Max 8s everywhere.
|
| There isn't a change in outcome between the flaws, but I
| think the difference between a mistake and a known issue
| that was left in while the company tried to change
| regulations to allow it, all for a tiny cut to the BOM, is
| worth noting.
| eqvinox wrote:
| Question is, why were these things manufactured wrong.
| It's well possible that Boeing's engineering documents
| are poor or misleading, triggering human error during
| manufacturing.
|
| This is of course pure speculation and it might equally
| well be some single manufacturer pressuring
| ("optimizing") their employees (or even machines) past
| the point of reliability.
|
| Either way I'm not gonna fault anyone for refusing to fly
| on a 737 MAX. At some point you gotta make a call and
| shift your assumption from "isolated
| engineering/manufacturing mishap" to "corporate screwed
| the entire product top to bottom".
| samtho wrote:
| The statement pointing out that it's a manufacturing error
| (I'm guessing) was not intended to be solution to the
| problem. It pointed out that those problems have less to do
| the certification of the design and more to do with a
| manufacturing defect. If the manufacturer created parts
| that were up to specifications, these things would have not
| been a problem. This is a very important distinction
| because a design flaw is a much bigger deal for this
| aircraft type than that poorly manufactured components.
|
| Boing is still at fault, yes, but we should exercise
| restraint in becoming too reductionistic on complicated
| engineering problems.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Why _exactly_ should we "exercise restraint in becoming
| too reductionistic on complicated engineering problems"?
| samtho wrote:
| When we reduce complicated problems down to inaccurate
| trivial ones by stripping out important details and
| nuance, we end up with a caricature of the original - one
| that easily devolves into a to strawman argument to serve
| someone's point. This new representation masquerading as
| the original can carry the same weight as the one it was
| based off of.
| 23B1 wrote:
| This is spreadsheet brain thinking - likely the same MDD
| dorks used to justify cutting corners.
|
| There's no nuance when people are dying. None whatsoever.
|
| If someone can't agree to that sort of black-and-white
| thinking, probably they should be working in an industry
| where innocent lives aren't dependent upon sound
| decision-making.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| > Spirit [AeroSystems] is responsible for the entire
| fuselage, including the cockpit, in all Boeing jets, and
| the entire fuselage for the 737 MAX models, according to
| the Seattle Times.
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/boeing-737-max-
| loses-e...
|
| So Boeing didn't actually manufacture the plane. But they
| are still responsible for ensuring its manufactured
| correctly.
| hnarn wrote:
| Separating "manufacturing mistakes" only makes sense if
| someone else is responsible for manufacturing. As far as I
| know, Boeing is responsible for both the design and the
| manufacturing of these aircraft so the difference is purely
| informational, but in terms of criticizing Boeing mostly
| irrelevant.
| Brybry wrote:
| Spirit AeroSystems makes the fuselage for the 737 Max.
| [1][2]
|
| It's even in the article: "Spirit AeroSystems, which makes
| the fuselages for the planes, referred CNBC to Boeing when
| asked about the incident"
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems
|
| [2] https://www.spiritaero.com/
| bombcar wrote:
| At some point it has to be simple liability for the final
| seller, ignoring _all_ subcontractors.
|
| Otherwise there's too many shellgames you can play.
| piva00 wrote:
| Boeing decided to outsource to Spirit, Boeing is
| responsible to attest the quality of what Spirit is
| delivering for a Boeing product.
|
| If Samsung/Apple would outsource their batteries to
| Megabattery Company LLC and those batteries started to
| randomly explode we would all be blaming Samsung/Apple
| for not doing proper QC. I hope we all hold Boeing to a
| _much_ higher level of scrutiny than cellphone
| manufacturers.
| peterhunt wrote:
| For all intents and purposes, Spirit is part of Boeing.
|
| Spirit was Boeing Wichita until 2005, and today Boeing
| represents 85% of sales.
| mastax wrote:
| A manufacturing mistake which makes it into service is a
| failure of QA and testing systems design. (At least above a
| certain threshold which varies depending on the industry etc.
| etc.)
| derefr wrote:
| Depends. You can't do e.g. crystallographical analysis of
| metals inside an engine if the engine is already put
| together. You have to trust your vendor that they built the
| engine correctly and checked the materials themselves. Or
| at most send auditors to the vendor.
| krisoft wrote:
| > You can't do e.g. crystallographical analysis of metals
| inside an engine if the engine is already put together.
|
| QA is not forced to only deal with assembled components.
| They can be embeded before the assembly process to QA the
| parts. For example they could peform crystallographical
| analysis on a subset of blades which are ready for
| assembly.
|
| They can also take apart a certain percentage of randomly
| selected engines, perform crystallographical analysis on
| a subset of parts and then re-assemble the engines. Many
| options.
| plorg wrote:
| Titanium fan disks, for example are all required to be
| inspected not just when installed but also at regular
| engine maintenance intervals. The inspection requires
| essentially complete disassembly of the fan (so it is
| required during particular engine maintenance events)
| followed by the application of penetrating dye and
| inspection at a narrow granularity.
|
| This kind of maintenance and inspection actually can be
| required and performed, it just costs more time and
| money. If we want to be all market capitalism about this
| we could require tests necessary to ensure safety and let
| engineers, business people, and executives make decisions
| that price in the cost of dangerous and risky designs
| that require constant and invasive inspection and
| maintenance.
|
| The only real difference with today would be regulators
| having a spine and/or more than pro forma power to
| enforce their decisions.
| natch wrote:
| The troubling thing to me here over and above these issues is
| if they (Boeing) think some of these things are ok to the
| point that they ask for an exemption, what else is there that
| would fail rigorous safety checks but has been deemed ok by
| management, and has not come to light yet? We may never know
| until it's too late.
| maronato wrote:
| This looks like manufacture cost cutting - an issue no amount
| of good design/engineering can fix.
|
| Boeing is no longer engineering focused. It's a numbers
| business pumping out planes as fast and as cheap as they can
| get away with.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > but they're not systemic design flaws.
|
| Hum, yes, instead Boeing seems to have systemic manufacturing
| flaws. Do we have a reason to believe those are contained
| into the Max line?
| neuralRiot wrote:
| Isn't the manufacturing process and quality assurance part
| of the design in "products" like these? It is in car
| manufacturing so i assume it should, I don't believe is
| sort of an "artisan" production line.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The procedures are part of the design certification. And
| while some vary from one design to another, many of them
| do not.
| hwillis wrote:
| design for manufacturing is a part of engineering
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| So not only the design quality is flawed but also the
| manufacturing process is botched up. That's reassuring, I
| guess, because two kind of flaws cancel each other out
| Miraste wrote:
| Sure they do. At this rate the planes will stop working
| well enough to take off, eliminating accidents forever.
| aeternum wrote:
| Wasn't there also the whole runaway trim issue leading to un-
| commanded climb and stall?
|
| Supposedly fixed with software when the root cause was
| retrofitting engines too large for the airframe leading to
| pitch instability under high thrust.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| MCAS.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au.
| ..
|
| Need a Wikipedia page tracking all of these Boeing issues
| tbh.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Honestly a website for this wouldn't be a bad idea. In future
| flights if I'm going to look if there is a 737 max I'm gonna
| change my flight .
| bruceb wrote:
| after the crashes a few years ago Southwest allowed
| passengers to switch to other planes at no charge:
| https://www.newsweek.com/southwest-waiving-fare-
| differences-...
|
| Wonder if that will happen again.
| jcadam wrote:
| Yep, prefer designs from the Old Boeing (pre-merger). The 737
| MAX doesn't count because it is not really a 737...
| omginternets wrote:
| I am amazed at how fast we went from "if it's not Boeing I'm
| not going" to this. I think Americans need to start considering
| their own financial industry as a strategic threat to their
| economy and industry.
|
| This is what happens when bean counters run the show.
| charles_f wrote:
| There was a comment on one of the other threads asking if FAA
| would be slow to react again. I'm glad they learned from the
| first incident _on the same plane_.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| If it's Boeing, I ain't going.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| One troubling aspect of this is that it appears Alaska had reason
| to believe something was wrong with this plane but basically
| ignored it. They were getting pressurization warnings on prior
| flights, but the only action they took was restricting the plane
| from flying ETOPS routes.
|
| They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of
| screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without
| a fair amount of inconvenience.
| Xorlev wrote:
| Do you have a source for that? I'm not denying it, just curious
| to read more.
| sidlls wrote:
| It will come out in the NTSB report, if it's true. Though
| that will take quite a bit of time.
| whycome wrote:
| cursory search:
|
| > Preliminary information about the accident remains scarce,
| though two people familiar with the aircraft tell The Air
| Current that the aircraft in question, N704AL, had presented
| spurious indications of pressurization issues during two
| instances on January 4. The first intermittent warning light
| appeared during taxi-in following a previous flight, which
| prompted the airline to remove the aircraft from extended
| range operations (ETOPS) per maintenance rules. The light
| appeared again later the same day in flight, the people said.
|
| https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/alaska-737-max-9-t.
| ..
|
| No idea about the accuracy of the site. And it seems like
| they have some script that prevents text highlighting for
| whatever reason (turn off Javascript).
| mlyle wrote:
| Well, that's an interesting thing. During taxi-in, the
| cabin altitude should be the ground altitude; outflow
| valves open at touchdown.
|
| Hard to understand how an an incipient failure could
| manifest then (e.g. from increased leakage).
|
| Of course, there's warning lights for _excessive_ cabin
| pressure, etc, too... which would point to a different
| theory of the problem than a structural manufacturing
| problem.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Is "sensor just no longer responding" a failure mode
| which could trigger the alarm?
| theYipster wrote:
| Jon Ostower is one of the best aviation reporters in the
| business and the Air Current is a site many professionals
| and executives in the industry trust.
| pbae wrote:
| It's too bad that asking "source?" comes across as hostile
| unless clarified to be otherwise. Maybe the internet should
| adopt something similar to the "/s" tag that signals that
| sentiment.
| csours wrote:
| Things like this are always alarming until you learn the base
| rate. Unfortunately, I cannot find a quick reference for this,
| but many many flights take off with some anomaly noted in the
| technical log book.
| thfuran wrote:
| And it's not like driving is especially safe. It's just that
| traffic deaths are so routine that they're not generally
| widely reported, while pretty much every major issue with an
| airplane gets national attention. In the US, traffic deaths
| amount to the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 lost with all
| hands every couple days.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Whether it's true or not, I feel like I control my fate
| when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take
| precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad conditions,
| etc.) but have little to no control once I board a plane.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| When someone runs a red light at speed and t-bones you on
| your left you're dead no matter how defensively you
| drive.
|
| The illusion of control doesn't change your odds much.
| mertd wrote:
| I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the
| situation with defensive driving. There's very little you
| can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Especially since, most of the time, they weren't
| intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far
| too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of
| 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt)
| was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see
| the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a
| construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers
| to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed
| instantly or when he hit the ditch.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| It is true that you control your fate more when driving.
| Once the door shuts on the plane you have little ability
| to do anything other than get yourself arrested.
|
| That's part of WHY air travel is safer.
| shriek wrote:
| Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong
| in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher
| (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. There's still
| a chance of you getting ambulance on road accidents but
| you're plummeting to your death on major aircraft
| malfunction.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, it's actually an FAA approved document for each aircraft
| type called the Mimimum Equipment List (MEL). It defines
| which non-critical equipment is permitted to be inoperative
| and not prevent dispatch of the aircraft.
|
| Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft
| had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There
| are many systems that have redundant backups or are not
| essential for safe flight.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| I can't link you an independent source just my word as an
| aircraft mechanic.
|
| I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm
| concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the
| spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can
| never achieve.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Given the number of parts on one, it would be impossible
| for them all to be working perfectly at once.
| Miraste wrote:
| I haven't trusted Alaska since the Flight 261 crash, where they
| failed to do basic maintenance for so long that the screw
| threads in the stabilizer system wore away and locked the plane
| in the "straight down" orientation. And fired and sued a
| mechanic who reported the problem. 100% fatalities.
| mertd wrote:
| That's more than two decades ago. People involved must have
| long left the company. They might even be working for other
| airlines.
| schiffern wrote:
| That's not how organizations work. You can't just slowly
| take out the "bad" people and replace them with "good"
| people and expect that to fix anything. It's the wrong
| mental model.
|
| Organizations are sticky. They get stuck in a rut,
| basically. The slow trickle of new people gets
| indoctrinated into the Company Way (or else selectively
| ejected), and the people that are able to leave often use
| it as a lesson of what _not_ to do.
|
| In short, turnover isn't a magic bullet.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| > They might even be working for other airlines.
|
| They are part of management now. ;)
| jcadam wrote:
| I live in Alaska and Alaska Airlines (which isn't Alaskan -
| it's HQ is in Seattle) has a rather... notorious history with
| safety/maintenance issues. I fly Delta whenever possible when
| travelling to the lower 48.
| xfitm3 wrote:
| Alaskan Airlines is notorious for taking maintenance shortcuts,
| this is likely not an inherent problem with the airframe but
| rather this operators SOP.
|
| Alaskan Airline flight 261 is one example.
|
| > The subsequent investigation by the National Transportation
| Safety Board (NTSB) determined that inadequate maintenance led
| to excessive wear and eventual failure of a critical flight
| control system during flight.
|
| Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261
| yokem55 wrote:
| Is there any detail anywhere on what exactly is being inspected?
| Just the bits of airframe around the where the panel that failed?
| Can a broader issue with how the airframes were manufactured be
| ruled out at this point?
|
| The cynical part of me wonders if this isn't just a bit of PR to
| 'ground' the planes for 'inspections' without actually addressing
| some kind of root cause.
| noncoml wrote:
| It's not a hole in the airframe. It's a plugged emergency exit
| door that failed. I guess that's what they check. The bolts
| there.
| bombcar wrote:
| Inspection will involve this plane, every other plane around
| this door/panel, and current manufacturing. Records and
| maintenance logs will be inspected until they know what
| happened and why, and then check where it could occur on these
| planes and others.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| I certainly know nothing about planes yet from the reading I've
| done on the 737 Max I'm a bit uneasy that these planes are still
| flying.
|
| I usually subscribe to the mentality that something that had a
| significant issue that was fixed is overly scrutinized and thus
| becomes safe but in this case it seems like the decision-making
| involved in the making of this plane from the start was flawed,
| such that I'm not sure patches on patches are enough.
|
| Someone who knows more about planes might say all the issues are
| unrelated but fundamentally in a system like this I think one
| thing is bound to affect another, and if not that, then the
| mentality that led to one issue is likely to have been present in
| the developing of other components of the system.
| intunderflow wrote:
| The FAA will never ban it because politically its untenable in
| the US, the only thing that could kill the Max off would be if
| another big regulator such as EASA refused to let the Max into
| their airspace.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| And EASA, which is also politically controlled, will not do
| it because the US government pressure.
| kazen44 wrote:
| it works the same way the other way around no? airbus
| planes are still flying in the US even though they are
| currently eating boeing's lunch.
| whycome wrote:
| Or some combined major crashes on US soil?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Need a pilot strike until it's banned
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| They could refuse to certify any new MAX planes.
| Grandfathering only existing planes if they are thoroughly
| and independently inspected.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _FAA will never ban it because politically its untenable in
| the US_
|
| What are you basing this on?
| bluelu wrote:
| Common sense
| notherhacker wrote:
| Boeing is basically an extension of .gov
| cratermoon wrote:
| This is going to put a dent in Boeing's request for an FAA waiver
| for the Max 7
| davidhunter wrote:
| Investigative journalism report into Boeing by Al Jazeera in
| 2014:
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...
| asmor wrote:
| I don't know about this one, but a few years earlier they also
| reported on the 737 NG, and those claims did not hold up all
| too well. So I'd take this one with a large grain of salt.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_Next_Generation#Str...
| klysm wrote:
| Boeing 737 Max is quite the case study in how to ruin a company
| via merger
| asmor wrote:
| Boeing made the 737 NG until 2019. It also allegedly had issues
| with the contractor Ducommun making the airframe, including
| "hammering alignment holes into place". But it wasn't nearly as
| problematic of a plane.
|
| The Max is a desperate attempt to compete with the A320 neo
| ("new engine option"). It is the aviation efficiency gain
| equivalent of a die shrink, except these engines get bigger,
| and while Airbus had space to spare under the wing of the A320
| ceo, the 737 NG did not. So they angled it, changing flight
| characteristics. Thus, MCAS, because the entire point of
| keeping the 737 - a 55 year old design - alive is pilots not
| having to do an entirely new type certificate. Because given
| availability (not a given, the only reason Ryanair went with
| Boeing) and staff type certificates not playing a role, Airbus
| is the clear winner on every metric.
| codeflo wrote:
| > pilots not having to do an entirely new type certificate
|
| And consequently, their intention seems to be to bend the
| rules about the validity of the existing certifications to
| the max (no pun intended). At what point can an agency rule
| that Boeing no longer follows the spirit of the pilot
| certification rules?
| asmor wrote:
| MCAS absolutely should have triggered a recertification.
| It's essentially meant to make the Max feel like the NG by
| _slightly_ pulling down to compensate for the angled
| engines. And we all know how that ended when the plane 's
| angle of attack sensor failed, the backup wasn't being
| checked, and the pilots didn't know their plane suddenly
| had an extra system pulling on the trim. Even with the
| autopilot off. This is normal and expected on Airbus craft
| and later Boeing planes like the Dreamliner, but not the
| 737.
|
| Oh, and the indicator for your AOA sensors disagreeing?
| Used to be a physical part of the cockpit, and was moved to
| an optional addon in the Max. But Boeing then forgot to put
| the indicator in the glass cockpit. Presumably because
| their development aircraft all had the option.
|
| None of the accident airlines had the option.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Brazil has decided that since the first day.
|
| And honestly, it didn't create any huge roadblocks for
| Boeing.
| Zigurd wrote:
| How even does a "plug" door blow out like that? That's a
| seemingly very robust design where cabin pressure holds the door
| in place passively, in addition to the latches holding it in
| place.
| alibarber wrote:
| It is not a plug door in this case. There was no door - this
| was a kind of blanker for a space where there could have been a
| door.
|
| A bit like when you buy a car model that doesn't have all the
| options installed, there's a space for the button or switch for
| the option in the dashboard or whatever but it's filled in with
| a fixed bit of plastic - it saves them from having to produce
| multiple different versions of dashboard, or in this case plane
| fuselages.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Are you sure of that? I've read that it is the same or very
| similar to an emergency exit, except that the interior is
| covered by an interior panel. It would be uncovered and
| equipped as an emergency exit in cases where very tight
| seating would bring the number of passengers above a
| threshold requiring more emergency exits. And down the rabbit
| hole I go wondering if this non-equipped exit is new for 737
| MAX planes because they can have more rows of seats.
| alibarber wrote:
| I'm fairly sure of it based on the reports but of course we
| need to wait for the actual investigation.
|
| I think it is indeed new for these Max planes and the
| airline purchased this one in this configuration that would
| not require it (fewer seats), and adding a functioning exit
| in (including life rafts and slides) would simply cost a
| lot more (and weigh more) than just blanking it out with a
| piece of metal. Not to mention extra maintenance and
| testing of said exit.
|
| The airline may have the desire to buy a model with fewer
| seats because it's cheaper and weighs less, but might also
| have a requirement for fewer cabin crew members too.
| mastax wrote:
| In /r/Aviation they were talking like it gets installed from
| the outside.
| shrimpx wrote:
| How does the cabin pressure hold it in place passively? Isn't
| the pressure on the inside higher than the pressure on the
| outside?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's a plug, sort of. There are fingers that interlock, but if
| the plug is moved vertically the fingers do not align and the
| "plug" can be removed outwards. There are supposed to be bolts
| installed (or in case of an actual door, a latching mechanism)
| to prevent this vertical movement.
| seydor wrote:
| Now i wonder, where did that broken door land?
| cratermoon wrote:
| Somewhere in the suburbs south of Portland, possibly near
| Metzger.
| bombcar wrote:
| NTSB will find it, they're surprisingly thorough.
| cellis wrote:
| How would triangulation of that small of an item be done?
| throw_away_584 wrote:
| They drop another door from the same place, this time
| with an airtag taped to it
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They'll know from flight data recorder the exact time the
| decompression occurred. They'll know where and at what
| altitude the airplane was in the sky at that time and in
| which direction and speed it was moving. It's nearly a
| high school physics problem at that point to calculate
| where the door landed.
| ugiox wrote:
| How to avoid the 737 Max? Fly only airlines that don't have it.
| Luckily there are still a few around in Europe. Since the two
| fatal crashes I have avoided doing flights with 737s.
| Me1000 wrote:
| Just about every airline I've ever flown lets you see what kind
| of aircraft they're using for the flight you book. It's pretty
| easy to avoid flying on a 737 max if you want.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 1. Go to Google Flights[1], pick your search options, click
| Explore
|
| 2. On search results[2], find the Departing flight you want
|
| 3. On the right-hand side of the flight summary, click the
| Down arrow ( _\ /_ )
|
| 4. In the drop-down description, below each flight leg is the
| plane description and flight number.
|
| 5. Confirm all planes used for legs of both departing and
| returning flights.
|
| First flight listed: Departure: SYR
| to CLT: American Economy Airbus A320 AA 1739 CLT
| to SFO: American Economy Airbus A321neo AA 1580
| *Select departure to see return flights* Return:
| SFO to DFW: American Economy Airbus A321neo AA 2504
| DFW to SYR: American Economy Airbus A320 AA 421
|
| Looking through different options, I can see a United flight
| that connects from SYR to EWR that uses a Boeing 737 MAX 9
| Passenger (UA1513). So I'm not picking that flight.
|
| You can also find plane information at time of purchase, at
| least from the airline's website. I highly recommend booking
| direct at the airline's website, as [in the US] by law you
| have a 24 hour window to cancel your reservation with no
| cancellation fee.
|
| [1] https://google.com/flights [2] https://www.google.com/tra
| vel/flights/search?tfs=CBwQAhoeEgo...
| lxgr wrote:
| I don't think that's a legally binding guarantee, though.
| Last-minute changes for operational reasons do happen, and I
| don't think you can expect compensation in that case.
|
| Still, it definitely increases your chances of not flying on
| a MAX.
| bthrn wrote:
| It's usually accurate, but I've had planes changed on me a
| couple times. For example, there could be a delay that
| results in it being used for a different flight, and you end
| up with something else. Or if the plane you're supposed to
| fly has mechanical issues.
| abawany wrote:
| In the US, Delta seems to fly a lot of Airbus but unfortunately
| this is fast changing too based on their recent-ish large
| Boeing orders.
| spr93 wrote:
| JetBlue has an all Airbus and Embraer 175 fleet. No matter
| what you book on B6 mainline, you're getting a comfortable
| airliner.
|
| Virgin America had an all-Airbus fleet...until Alaska bought
| them and ditched the Airbus leases because 'Merica-Seattle-
| Boeing or something. (I'm sure they justified it as
| mechanical/maintenance efficiencies from operating a single
| type, but they made a bad mistake staying all-in on a failing
| company's product.)
|
| Delta's famously agnostic - they fly whatever is net cheapest
| for them, even if it's an old airframe (that they own
| outright) that sucks fuel (rather than a more fuel-efficient
| plane that they lease). Boeings got cheap after the MAX
| problems. On the plus side, Delta is a very well run
| operation with competent maintenance.
|
| And then there's Southwest. All Boeing, bad maintenance
| history. A culture that hates change and new technology.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I have made the decision that unless I absolutely can't avoid
| it I am avoiding Boeing for the near future entirely.
|
| But a 737 max is full no go for me no matter what the situation
| is. I will do multiple stops before stepping foot on one.
|
| Personally I fly exclusively JetBlue in the US and they use
| Airbus almost exclusively. They have a few of whatever that
| other brand is. No Boeing.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Embraer, the Brazilian-made aircraft. They're being replaced
| with Airbus A220s, which was called a Bombardier CSeries
| before Airbus bought Bombardier's airliner division.
| zekrioca wrote:
| (Embraer) which Boeing tried buying but the deal was
| reverted due to the failure of the 737-max..
| riffraff wrote:
| Wait, what? How did that caused the deal to fall apart?
|
| (I was actually under the impression this acquisition had
| happened until a few minutes ago)
| binoct wrote:
| Please don't read this as a defense of Boeing, especially the
| MAX series aircraft, but from a flyer-safety standpoint the
| statistics show most Boeing aircraft in operation today are
| extremely safe.
|
| The post-200 series 737s, not including the MAX, have some of
| the largest accumulated flight miles and lowest incident
| rates of any aircraft ever. The 777 and 747-400 also have
| exceptional safety records. Even the aging 757 and 767 fleets
| have only slightly higher rates. The 787, though relatively
| newer and with plenty of documented early issues has had no
| passenger fatalities that I'm aware of.
|
| Just some food for thought.
| nerdjon wrote:
| That is valid and that's why I am not quite No Boeing.
|
| But it's a last choice for me, if the choice exists and I
| am willing to put up with some inconveniences.
|
| Especially given that this seems to be a manufacturing
| problem and not a problem with the series itself, does have
| me worried about other planes even on those other lines if
| it is a fundamental issue with Boeing in recent years.
| tavavex wrote:
| I assume that a lot of people here want to avoid the 737s
| not necessarily because they're scared for their lives, but
| as a way to show disapproval to Boeing. Like, I won't avoid
| flying a 737 Max if it's the only option for flying, but I
| generally prefer to pick a different manufacturer if it's
| available. On a large scale, many people avoiding a
| specific aircraft model puts pressure on airlines to not
| start or continue ordering said model.
| 101008 wrote:
| I have booked a 10 hours flight to NYC with Americna Airlines
| and I think the craft is a 772-boeing 777. Should it be OK? I
| am scared now...
| extractionmech wrote:
| The ancients reached for divination methods when reason
| failed them. You on the other hand can write a quick python
| script with a random number source in it.
| Ayesh wrote:
| I'm bored while waiting for my flight to take off in KLIA2
| airport that AirAsia uses as its base. Their whole fleet is
| A320s. If the A320sbwere to be grounded, this airline will be
| pretty much done for.
| agubelu wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but I found it curious that Ryanair refuses to
| call their Max fleet "737 Max-8", instead they go for "737-8200"
| in both their safety cards and cabin briefings. I wonder if this
| is common and if other airlines do the same after the
| reputational damage from the crashes and groundings.
| blibble wrote:
| ryanair using misleading advertising? say it's not so!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair#Misleading_advertising
|
| o'leary bought them as he got them cheap, exactly the same as
| ryanair's fleet in the 90s
| throwaheyy wrote:
| They call it that because their plane is in fact not a 737 Max
| 8.
|
| Ryanair's aircraft is a different variant, made only for them,
| the Max 200 which is the same size as a Max 8 but has the extra
| exits for up to 200 pax.
| salawat wrote:
| That's called a different configuration.
|
| It is still a MAX8. A rose, by any other name...
| throwaheyy wrote:
| Sure but if you read what I'm replying to, they are not
| "lying" to call it a 737-8-200. That is what it is.
| switch007 wrote:
| It is in fact a 737 Max 8. It's a 737-8-200
| mihaaly wrote:
| ...so basically the same just named to sound remarkably
| different. One more exit and it is not at all the problematic
| MAX anymore! ;)
|
| Surprised they still call it 737 then. :)
| philwelch wrote:
| This reminds me of the old mattress store scam, where each
| mattress store has its own slightly different SKU of
| basically the same mattress purely to make it harder for the
| customer to compare prices between stores.
| jessriedel wrote:
| What's the back of the envelope on whether the 737 Max is more
| dangerous than driving?
|
| 1,300 aircraft have been built since the first started flying in
| 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those
| have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day
| per aircraft, and maybe 3 years (1000 days) of flying to date per
| aircraft on average, giving a very rough estimate of a few
| billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in
| comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for
| cars.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > maybe 3 years (1000 days) of flying to date per aircraft on
| average
|
| It's probably a lot less. 950 out of those 1300 aircraft were
| delivered in the last three years, and the other 350 were
| grounded throughout most of 2019 and 2020.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Cool, thanks. So probably a factor of ~2 fewer miles, or
| twice the accident rate.
| jacquesm wrote:
| divide by the # of passengers...
| alexwennerberg wrote:
| > What's the back of the envelope on whether the 737 Max is
| more dangerous than driving?
|
| Driving is an absurdly dangerous mode of transportation, so
| it's probably not the best comparison.
| hnarn wrote:
| Who cares? The age-old comparison against cars is just to
| illustrate that flying, on average, is safer than driving,
| which most people intuitively don't "feel" to be true (or at
| least they didn't back in the days).
|
| In this case we're talking about a company that consistently
| makes mistakes and puts their passengers lives at risk due to
| negligence, whether "it's still safer than driving" or not is
| completely irrelevant, because what they're doing is not OK no
| matter how much safer it is than driving.
| lostlogin wrote:
| You can't compare like that.
|
| If you drive into a tree and get maimed, it's different to
| someone else driving you into a tree and maiming you.
|
| When you're welfare is in someone else's hands, they need to
| better than you would.
| Instantix wrote:
| On the other hand we have the proof that an Airbus can hit
| another plane when landing and deliver everyone fine.
| asmor wrote:
| It's honestly astonishing how well the A350 held up for
| evacuation, which supposedly took 10 minutes. This is the first
| hull loss, and it actually improves the safety record.
| ygvamjq2ol wrote:
| I flew a United MAX 9 last night, I was sitting in the window
| seat of a visible (Not plugged) emergency exit door. Landed a
| little while after this incident was reported. About an hour and
| a half before landing at SFO the pilot announced a hurried
| "Flight attendants check in" with no follow up announcement to
| the passengers. It was probably because of the turbulence we had
| been experiencing a few minutes before, but I wonder if the
| cockpit was giving flight attendants a heads up in case any
| passengers got word.
| tavavex wrote:
| I feel like this is pretty unlikely - as far as I know, they
| don't really pass news bulletins and such to pilots, if it's
| not something that they need to know. Besides, even if some
| passenger found out, what could they even do?
| thangalin wrote:
| "Whatever the reasons (market pressures, rushing processes,
| inadequate certifications, fear of being fired, or poor project
| management), Leveson's insights are being ignored. For example,
| after the first fatal Boeing 737 Max flight, why was the entire
| fleet not grounded indefinitely? Or not grounded after an
| Indonesian safety committee report uncovered multiple failures?
| Or not grounded when an off-duty pilot helped avert a crash? What
| analysis procedures failed to prevent the second fatal Boeing 737
| Max flight?"
|
| https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
| JoshTko wrote:
| Who was the exec that led the Boeing 737 Max?
| jcadam wrote:
| Looks like I have to stop making jokes about Scarebus. Boeing
| quality has been in a steady decline since the McDonnell-Douglas
| merger.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Scarebus? You mean "Boeing 737 sMAX into the ground sometimes?"
| einpoklum wrote:
| I realize it might not be fair to ask right at this moment, but:
|
| How come Boeing hasn't produced a clean-sheet-design replacement
| for the 737, despite its extreme age? I mean, since its design,
| the 747, 757 and 767 have come and gone, variants and all, no
| production continuing. Why the endless adaptations of this old
| thing:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Boeing_7...
|
| ?
| coredog64 wrote:
| Because Southwest Airlines won't let them.
| Havoc wrote:
| >clean-sheet-design
|
| Won't help if there are issues at each step. Design,
| manufacturing, certification, pilot training, "self-
| certification" etc. Even if they start from scratch - until
| they fix their corporate culture the outcomes will stay the
| same.
| Macha wrote:
| 1. Volume. They've sold so many 737s they're scared to upset
| the market. 747s
|
| 2. Target market. There are airlines like Southwest and Ryanair
| who use a lot of 737s and have optimised their routines around
| very specific aircraft, so want as little change as possible.
| In comparison the bigger aircraft are used more by the legacy
| carriers and flag carriers, who are more used to operating a
| mixed fleet and more willing to try something new.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| How does Embraer compare to Boeing/Airbus? Why don't they take
| Boeing's position in the market?
| ycombinete wrote:
| The commercial pilots that I know really enjoy flying Embraer
| planes. I've always enjoyed being a passenger on them too.
| hasperdi wrote:
| Embraer was a smaller manufacturer, much smaller than Boeing.
| The had some success, but it was tough for them to compete with
| Boeing, especially because Boeing bullied them through
| regulators. They outmanoeuvred Boeing by letting Airbus buy
| them for 1 dollar. Now Embraer planes are rebranded as Airbus
| 200 series
| Macha wrote:
| That was Bombardier, not Embraer.
|
| It's also not clear at all that that was a win for
| Bombardier, other than giving a free win to Airbus to spite
| Boeing. Given up the project that they were relying on for
| the future direction of the company for a nominal sum?
|
| Airbus made out like bandits, and the government of Quebec
| cut their losses, but Bombardier almost certainly lost as
| badly as Boeing in the C-Series/A200 outcome.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| This is a good opportunity for BOOM aerospace too
| Macha wrote:
| See what happened when Bombardier tried to muscle into the "big
| plane" market.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Window and wall flew off mid flight?
|
| Yeah, I'm not flying on a Boeing 737 Max 9 ever again.
| sharkweek wrote:
| I'm sitting in Mexico City about to board a Boeing Max 737
| (fortunately, I guess, an 8) back to the US.
|
| If I am to be randomly thrust upon the afternoon sky against my
| will, please distribute all my HN karma to my extended family.
| jimmar wrote:
| This feels like the attention that shark attacks get--way more
| than it deserves. Somehow as a society we've decided that the
| correct number of deaths from airplanes is zero, but we're fine
| with thousands of people dying from other causes that could be
| prevented.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| We really need another player in this space. There are these
| startups like Boom etc. Trying to do new things, we should do one
| that's just normal planes, made right.
| ycombinete wrote:
| Reminds me of this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I am so excited for the SV move fast and break things
| philosophy applied to commercial aircraft. Control software via
| javascript, make lots of it out of lithium for the ecological
| branding, don't bother with pilots. Going to be very exciting.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I'm actually saying the opposite.
|
| I'm saying instead of that (boom, etc) we should just make
| another commercial airplane company that makes regular
| planes, safely, in a normal way.
|
| You and I are agreeing...
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Yeah, I'm poking fun at the modern US engineering model.
|
| Actually fixing the problem is much harder. It probably
| goes something like aggressively fire everyone at Boeing
| who looks vaguely associated with management and
| reconstitute it as a division of some company that seems to
| know how to build things that work.
| mnbion wrote:
| Most Airbus manufacturing happens in or near big cities like
| Toulouse, Hamburg, and Seville. These cities have plenty of
| engineering talent and plenty of colleges, universities, and
| other companies creating and nurturing this talent.
|
| Meanwhile most Boeing manufacturing seems to be taking place in
| rural areas (or "flyover states" as you Americans put it). This
| is of course because of the local and state subsidies that Boeing
| is getting to create jobs. The question is if the lack of
| engineering talent in these rural areas is beginning to show its
| face.
|
| Even in my tiny country (Denmark) there is significant decrease
| in quality of engineering talent outside the tier 1 cities.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| The 737 is made at Boeing Renton and Boeing Everett, two
| factories in the Seattle area, Boeing's home town, that have
| been running since the 40s. Fuselages are made at the former
| Wichita plant, which also dates from the 40s.
|
| 737's problems do not stem from being made at a _new_ plant.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| The designs are unsound and the strategy for fixing is to
| persuade the regulators to look the other way. No way to blame
| that on the manufacturing teams.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Which rural areas are you thinking of? Toulouse and Seville are
| really not that big (they're both around the size of Oklahoma
| City when considering their metro areas). Hamburg is quite a
| bit bigger.
| liquidgecka wrote:
| That's a pretty awful take on engineering culture. I grew up in
| a city that is one of the most remote in the US and it creates
| a massive engineering pipeline. It started with civil
| engineering but moved into ICs, utility power, trains, on and
| on. Those companies helped build an engineering college which
| in turn trained engineers.. etc.
|
| None of those companies have had issues getting talent. Not all
| good engineers want to live in mega urban areas and infact it
| was quite easy pulling talent away with the promise of a back
| yard and skiing fifteen minutes away if said talent had kids.
| Especially when the salary goes 2x as far.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| Traditional engineering in the US pays pretty poorly, not
| enough to live comfortably in T1 cities. My civil, chemical,
| and mechanical engineering friends all live and work in "fly
| over" states for major multinationals.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| The whole point of this aircraft is to avoid modern safety
| regulations.
| coliveira wrote:
| Exactly. This plane was created as a modernization of a several
| decades old design clearly just to be easily approved without
| major scrutiny by the FAA. There are many bad decisions made to
| create this plane that we don't even know yet.
| gregatragenet3 wrote:
| If it ain't Boeing it ain't blowing.
| FredPret wrote:
| Boeing is in deep trouble. $16B underwater ($134B assets, $150B
| liabilities) [0]
|
| Turns out focusing on profits over quality leads to neither.
|
| [0] https://valustox.com/BA
| roody15 wrote:
| Interesting timeline.
|
| Following the two fatal crashes involving the MCAS system and the
| 737 Max ... The FAA gave Boeing until Dec of 2022 to implement a
| fix. The fix was to reconfigure the 737 Max with 2 sensors
| (instead of one) and include an manual shutoff
|
| Guess what happened? Boeing didn't fix anything.. instead they
| cried to congress that the fix is too expensive and they cannot
| get it done.
|
| So what happens is congress includes a provision in the omnibus
| spending bill to exempt Boeing from having to fix the MCAS
| system. So today in 2024 .. the 737 Max still only have one
| sensor although they did retrofit a manual shutoff
|
| https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2022/12/23/boeing-max-221223/
|
| Pretty interesting after millions spent on investigation ,
| congressional hearings, developing engineering a better MCAS
| system ... quietly Boeing just bypasses everything.
|
| Honestly it's super depressing and makes me question if we are
| even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy
| perhaps?)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be
| automatically rejected, unless it is to add more limitations
| based on past (bad) performance and then only to document the
| reason the law exists, never to provide exemptions.
| bmulcahy wrote:
| Somewhere, the NFL is quickly checking its shoes...
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Congress will be happy to replace "Boeing" with "American
| companies which manufacture all of commercial and military
| aircraft, satellites, and space vehicles and launchers".
| tavavex wrote:
| That is pretty concerning. The way how Boeing can get its way
| simply by threatening to can the entire MAX program (which
| they'd never actually do) shows that there's a very deep level
| of integration between the US government and its biggest
| companies, especially one like Boeing that's often seen as kind
| of a minor point of national pride.
|
| Not only that, but the article mentions that the 737 MAXs got
| an exemption on providing a modern crew alerting system. Of
| course, all of that is done so they could certify these
| aircraft as being basically the same as the first 737 from the
| 60s. Meanwhile, A320s have been flying with ECAMs (a
| centralized system for viewing the plane's status and alerts)
| since the 1980s.
| belter wrote:
| Yeah, I heard Boeing even has it's own Presidential
| candidate...
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Fortunately, Boeings work on the 737 MAX was independently
| checked by non-US aviation authorities who aren't subject to US
| Congress provisions.
| Havoc wrote:
| They had a loose rudder bolt issue literally 8 days ago.
|
| https://en.swissquote.ae/newsroom/research/morning-news/2023...
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Back in 2019, I made a lil microsite covering the 737 MAX
| groundings. Didn't think I'd have to update it again.
| https://www.isthe737maxstillgrounded.com/
|
| It's chilling that both Alaska knew of pressurization issues in
| prior flights in this aircraft, and Boeing was already trying to
| get the FAA to look past known safety issues in the 737 MAX 7
| certification. "Safety is our top priority"? Ha, absolutely not.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| FWIW my understanding is that only a subset (not sure how they
| determine which) of the 737 MAX 9s that are grounded.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. The tone of the website is sort of like
| other single-serving websites like "is California on fire",
| which displays yes even if a small part of California is on
| fire. http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Would this door incident be specific to the 737 _Max_ , or just
| general Boeing shoddiness?
|
| I thought the main big difference about the Max was the engines,
| and the ensuing software fixes to aerodynamics. But would the
| doors be very different to other modern 737s?
|
| Im wondering if focusing on the _Max_ is a red herring and this
| is potentially indicative of issues with many more 737s.
| #armchair-aviation-geek
| uptheroots wrote:
| My dude what is going on with these planss
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