Boeing 737 Max 8 | Page 6 | GTAMotorcycle.com

Boeing 737 Max 8

Blackfin said:
It's actually pretty astounding how many people this must have gone through before being rolled out to customers. I can only imagine the size of the departments at Boeing dealing with SQA, risk-management, engineering review, readiness reviews, compliance etc etc etc. It's not believable that no one in this chain of groups raised a red flag of concern re lack of redundancy and poor documentation/training (etc etc ad nauseum); the CEO is a figurehead compared to the myriad decision makers below him entrusted to do **** right.

This is probably going to result in indictments of engineers and managers and even developers deep into Boeing, not unlike engineers being arrested in the wake of VW's diesel affair. With hundreds of dead people Boeing's fuckup is unimaginably worse than that; heads will roll.

It's just really, really hard to understand how a company that has been doing aircraft for the better part of a century and big liners since the 1940s or 1950s could have screwed this up so badly. Although I happen to think that engineers these days are simply not as good as they were when Boeing drew up the 747 on paper drafting boards, there's a lot of "safety nets" (reviews, SQA, qualification, compliance etc) that had giant holes in them; apparently managers aren't as good as the "good old days" either.
Click to expand...

Going back to the tobacco industry where they engineered smokes to be more addictive it doesn't surprise me that systems were rigged at Boeing where many people were involved, whether they knew it or not.

As far as punishment to Boeing staff goes, a lot depends on how much they contribute to Trump's election campaign. How much did Exxon have to pay to clean up after the Valdez?
 
I think it will be different this time. The issue of who knew what and when in the tobacco industry was litigated in slow motion 20-30 years ago and corporate malfeasance was seen differently in those days. Information was scarce (the Challenger and even Exxon Valdez preceded the all-seeing, never-forgetting World Wide Web as we now know it...)

This has a different flavor -- two spectacularly bad crashes of new airliners killing hundreds of people in the blink of an eye -- and happened in an era where good corporate citizenry is demanded. Volkswagen/Audis execs -- Martin Winterkorn, Joerg Kerner, Oliver Schmidt, Wolfgang Hatz to name a few, and engineer James Liang are all facing serious penalties in the courts (some are already serving time and facing hundreds of thousands in fines); this for lying about diesel engine emissions.

I suspect, in the fullness of time, if the evidence suggests engineers acted unethically and/or with negligence and without due care for safety and if management were found to have encouraged this, pressured would-be whistleblowers to clam-up etc, that there will be numerous criminal indictments all over the place, from the C-suites right down to the engineers conspiring to foist this past regulators and onto the public as "safe."
 
And it continues. Now that it is being evaluated as something that kills people, they realize that it is relying on a single processor. If that processor crashes, it's quite possible the plane does too. Boeing continues the completely delusional and embarasingly false talking point of "we are entirely committed to safety". The FAA is proud of itself for identifying this safety related issue on a plane that it certified and allowed to fly for years. Smh.

New flaw discovered on Boeing 737 Max, sources say
 
GreyGhost said:
And it continues. Now that it is being evaluated as something that kills people, they realize that it is relying on a single processor. If that processor crashes, it's quite possible the plane does too. Boeing continues the completely delusional and embarasingly false talking point of "we are entirely committed to safety". The FAA is proud of itself for identifying this safety related issue on a plane that it certified and allowed to fly for years. Smh.

New flaw discovered on Boeing 737 Max, sources say
Click to expand...

I don't know how what percent of the flying public are like me, stuck on the concept of the pilot flying the plane and the plane capable of flying with a competent pilot at the controls. In reality the pilot manages systems and the systems are being challenged by extremes placed on them by humans chasing max profit.

In my model aircraft days there was a saying that if you put a big enough engine on it you could get a brick to fly. Are we there yet?

Is it time for Boeing to say "We've proved our point, making a brick fly. Now we're going to build the right thing from scratch."

Are there too many "Ifs" in the solutions?

If we program this and if we adjust that and if this doesn't happen and if part A works and if situation B doesn't come up. Too many "Ifs" for me.

I like one "If". If the pilot is trained the plane is safe.
 
nobbie48 said:
I don't know how what percent of the flying public are like me, stuck on the concept of the pilot flying the plane and the plane capable of flying with a competent pilot at the controls. In reality the pilot manages systems and the systems are being challenged by extremes placed on them by humans chasing max profit.

In my model aircraft days there was a saying that if you put a big enough engine on it you could get a brick to fly. Are we there yet?

Is it time for Boeing to say "We've proved our point, making a brick fly. Now we're going to build the right thing from scratch."

Are there too many "Ifs" in the solutions?

If we program this and if we adjust that and if this doesn't happen and if part A works and if situation B doesn't come up. Too many "Ifs" for me.

I like one "If". If the pilot is trained the plane is safe.
Click to expand...

Problem with modern plane design is that by simply modifying a few things instead of redesigning, aircraft manufacturers can compete faster and cheaper. I heard modern planes still have switches that have now been redundant for decades. Removing them would require FAA recert or something along those lines. eg the no smoking sign. Still a switch on the plane, purely used as a muscle memory tool in the checklist to know if you completed another task (forgot what specifically).

737 MAX installed engines that are bigger, which resulted in a need to place them further forward and higher on the wing. This caused the pitch up problem which required the MCAS system from what I understand. A seemingly forced engine placement on a wing that was too low in the first place to accommodate it - requiring an alternative solution which plays with the Center of Gravity and pitching moment in a way that the wing was not designed for. Don't think they actually changed the airfoil, just added those winglets on the end - please correct me if I'm wrong.

Seems designing a new plane from scratch is too costly and the margins in the airline industry are thinning every year with the rise of budget airlines and people getting tired of paying so much for a ticket anywhere.


This reminds me of a hilarious video that compares Russian vs American fighter jets. I get a good laugh every time - having a hard time finding the video though. Basically the Russian flight officer talks about how American pilots walk hand in hand down the runway every morning to pick up rocks so the planes don't get damaged. Cuts immediately to a Sukhoi landing on its belly with no landing gear with virtually no damage. Overly fragile/technical vs analog and stable. Computers are helpful tools, but if they break then its not good on a plane that relies on them to stay in the air.
 
Oh one more reason for redesign as opposed to new plane - the type rating system for pilots is very expensive.

Making a 737 variant means pilots originally needed to just do a course on an iPad to learn the new plane software updates/changes. Some airlines now want expensive sim training due to the accidents, which I agree with.

Building a new plane means dozens if not hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars per pilot to fully learn a new aircraft. No airline wants to spend a few million dollars training pilots on a new plane when they can give them an app on their iPad and just learn a variant of an older plane in a matter of hours instead of weeks/months. This is time the pilots could have spent flying existing planes and earning the company revenue.
 
MaksTO said:
Oh one more reason for redesign as opposed to new plane - the type rating system for pilots is very expensive.

Making a 737 variant means pilots originally needed to just do a course on an iPad to learn the new plane software updates/changes. Some airlines now want expensive sim training due to the accidents, which I agree with.

Building a new plane means dozens if not hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars per pilot to fully learn a new aircraft. No airline wants to spend a few million dollars training pilots on a new plane when they can give them an app on their iPad and just learn a variant of an older plane in a matter of hours instead of weeks/months. This is time the pilots could have spent flying existing planes and earning the company revenue.
Click to expand...
I've also learned the bigger problem with these "types" is that a pilot can only be qualified for one type at a time. Making a new type means an airline needs to create a new pool of pilots. That is why southwest only has 737's, so every pilot is qualified to fly every plane.
 
GreyGhost said:
I've also learned the bigger problem with these "types" is that a pilot can only be qualified for one type at a time. Making a new type means an airline needs to create a new pool of pilots. That is why southwest only has 737's, so every pilot is qualified to fly every plane.
Click to expand...
Didn't know you can only have one type rating. That really sucks.
 
MaksTO said:
Didn't know you can only have one type rating. That really sucks.
Click to expand...
It makes sense for a commercial pilot. You want your muscle memory to be on point. If you fly multiple types, it is quite possible that you mix up the memorized lists ot switch locations.
 
Boeing got caught sleeping when Airbus introduced the A320 neo
20% fuel savings over the 737

Boeing did not have the time to design and certify a new type model
would have taken a decade to get that done and lost hundreds to thousands of sales to Airbus

so they cobbled up larger, more efficient engines onto the 737 design from the 60's
during testing they discovered the nose up stall tendencies

so they came up with the MCAS gadgetry
then conned the FAA into agreeing that it was safe and pilots needed no extra training
 
nobbie48 said:
They rushed the plane into production and now they're rushing the fixes?
Click to expand...
The faster they can get it approved and back in to the air, the less time regulators have to find more turds. Every problem found is potentially an exponential delay as that allows even more time to find additional problems (and incentive/justification for regulators to spend time and money on this as obviously the original certification was flawed).
 
Honestly, even though I’m sure 99% of the new 737’s are fine. A 1% failure rate in the airline industry (or even 1/1000 1/10000) is just not acceptable today. Especially with all the automation. If things were still more controlled by the pilot with less computer aid, you can probably save a plane easier in the event of catastrophic failure. Albeit all this is very well thought through on planes now - this specific debacle shows that companies are getting lazy in design and choosing profit over safety. iPad training? I get it cuts costs, but cmon. I wouldn’t even agree to that if I were a pilot. Get me in a simulator and run me through everything top to bottom.

I flew on a TU-154 in Russia a long time ago before it was discontinued. That thing was just a jagged heap of metal by modern standards. We were struck by lightning on our descent into Moscow and all the power went out in the cabin, I **** a brick - but she got down easy... the pilots were just damn good at their job. (This was totally irrelevant, but an example maybe where not having a bunch of electronics helped the situation).
 
daught said:
Instead of getting the necessary clearance by moving the engineer forward, they should just make the engines oval.
Click to expand...
If they get much larger they are going to have to flip them back onto the top of the wings where they were in the old days. I've seen radials and turboprops mounted high, but never a turbofan. I wonder if there is a technical block or just packaging. More power=dive would not be an ideal handling characteristic though. The props let you move the centre of effort much closer to the wing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom