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I'm disappointed that the FAA hasn't done this. The FAA seems to be adopting Gollum's "I'm not listening" stance. There is historical precedent for the FAA susp

I'm disappointed that the FAA hasn't done this. The FAA seems to be adopting Gollum's "I'm not listening" stance. There is historical precedent for the FAA suspending a type certificate. This happened after a DC-10 crash in 1979.[1] The facts are that the Indonesia crash just 5 months ago killed 189 people; this latest Ethiopia crash just killed 157 people. That's way too many dead people for a plane that has only been shipping since 2017, with less than 350 aircraft in service. Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe the Ethiopian carrier has a bad rep for pushing pilots beyond prudent flying limits. But maybe there's something wrong with the plane! The first crash was IMO almost 100% on Boeing. They significantly changed the operating behavior of the aircraft and didn't prominently publicize that. I hope there won't be a third crash anytime soon. Right now if I were Boeing I'd be 100% in emergency design review mode. How would you like to be an engineer at Boeing right now? 346 people are dead. Is it something you did or failed to do? Did you fuck up what was a relatively minor re-design of a plane that started flying 52 years ago? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191

drstewart 8y ago
Do you think the Airbus 330 should be grounded? It has 11 hull losses with 1447 built. That's a rate of 2.67 per 350 built by the way -- higher than the MAX
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  That's a rate of 2.67 per 350 built by the way -- higher than the MAX How many of those hull loses resulted in fatalities? How many of the hull loses were due to pilot error (e.g. AF 447)? How many flights have those A330s flown? So far Boeing's lost two MAX8s that were quite new with many signs pointing to a design flaw rather than pilot error. That's a worse record than the A330.
  - yoda222 8y ago
    > How many of the hull loses were due to pilot error (e.g. AF 447)? He is counting 11 hull losses, which is the correct number of hull loss ( http://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Airbus-A330/losses http://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Airbus-A330/losses ), but he didn't bother to look for anything more than that. Out of these 11 losses, four were due to ground attack by armed groups (Two in Sri Lanka in 2001, two in Libya in 2014. These are the one marked "C1" in the page) Pretty sure that these should not count when assessing the security of a airplane (at least a civilian airplane)
    - jmgao 8y ago
      And looking through the rest, two of them were "chemical leakage/fire in the cargo bay" and one of them was obvious pilot error ("fell off the runway").
      - tialaramex 8y ago
        "pilot error" isn't good enough. Good design and engineering can mitigate human failings, bad can exacerbate them. The only accident investigation I've ever read (I read a lot of these) that actually had no broader recommendations for safety, was one where two fishermen used enough heroin to render themselves incapable of operating their boat safely and they drowned. The investors concluded that yup, taking so much heroin that you can't operate the boat is a bad idea, don't do that. Heroin is, of course, already a class A drug and you're not supposed to use it at all while operating a boat. No new recommendations. Back in software, it's theoretically possible to do PKCS #1 v1.5 decryption safely but you're going to keep seeing Bleichenbacher Oracles until we stop using it in online protocols, because doing it correctly is hard. So we should just stop doing it altogether.
- cjbprime 8y ago
  Oh, come on, this is a terrible argument. Those A330 hull losses are over more than 25 years. The Max went into production in 2017. The correct metric to use here is hull losses per hour of flight. I can see some total number of flights data, but not total hours. The Max has probably made fewer than 100k flights total, the A330 has made at least 7 million flights. Therefore, multiply the two Max hull losses by 70 to get your first ballpark guess at a comparable number. It is as if the Max was an A330 with 140 hull losses instead of 11.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    It may be even worse than that, because the A330 is a long-range plane. I’ve been on an 11 hour A330 flight. Many 737 flights are only a couple of hours. Of course, given the small numbers of 737 MAXes, this may be s statistical fluke. But grounding it til the investigation is complete doesn’t seem crazy to me.
    - khuey 8y ago
      Takeoff and landings are the most dangerous part of the flight though, so comparing based on number of flights may in fact be the salient metric.
- vultour 8y ago
  Out of the 11 hull losses, only 3 resulted in fatalities, one of those was a test flight, one was the famous Air France crash, and one was probably due to the pilot being surprised by somatogravic illusion during go around. All of this in the past 25 years. The 737 MAX crashed twice in the past six months, I supposed based on this track record we should just close Boeing down altogether?
cjbprime 8y ago
I agree with you. The FAA obviously knows that there are issues with MCAS, since it's been working with Boeing on finalizing a software update that fixes some of them for months. Grounding the fleet at least until that software update can be deployed seems prudent the moment there's objective reasoning to suspect MCAS was at play in this crash too. (And I think we might already be there.)

drstewart 8y ago

Do you think the Airbus 330 should be grounded? It has 11 hull losses with 1447 built. That's a rate of 2.67 per 350 built by the way -- higher than the MAX

inferiorhuman 8y ago
That's a rate of 2.67 per 350 built by the way -- higher than the MAX How many of those hull loses resulted in fatalities? How many of the hull loses were due to pilot error (e.g. AF 447)? How many flights have those A330s flown? So far Boeing's lost two MAX8s that were quite new with many signs pointing to a design flaw rather than pilot error. That's a worse record than the A330.
- yoda222 8y ago
  > How many of the hull loses were due to pilot error (e.g. AF 447)? He is counting 11 hull losses, which is the correct number of hull loss ( http://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Airbus-A330/losses http://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Airbus-A330/losses ), but he didn't bother to look for anything more than that. Out of these 11 losses, four were due to ground attack by armed groups (Two in Sri Lanka in 2001, two in Libya in 2014. These are the one marked "C1" in the page) Pretty sure that these should not count when assessing the security of a airplane (at least a civilian airplane)
  - jmgao 8y ago
    And looking through the rest, two of them were "chemical leakage/fire in the cargo bay" and one of them was obvious pilot error ("fell off the runway").
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      "pilot error" isn't good enough. Good design and engineering can mitigate human failings, bad can exacerbate them. The only accident investigation I've ever read (I read a lot of these) that actually had no broader recommendations for safety, was one where two fishermen used enough heroin to render themselves incapable of operating their boat safely and they drowned. The investors concluded that yup, taking so much heroin that you can't operate the boat is a bad idea, don't do that. Heroin is, of course, already a class A drug and you're not supposed to use it at all while operating a boat. No new recommendations. Back in software, it's theoretically possible to do PKCS #1 v1.5 decryption safely but you're going to keep seeing Bleichenbacher Oracles until we stop using it in online protocols, because doing it correctly is hard. So we should just stop doing it altogether.
cjbprime 8y ago
Oh, come on, this is a terrible argument. Those A330 hull losses are over more than 25 years. The Max went into production in 2017. The correct metric to use here is hull losses per hour of flight. I can see some total number of flights data, but not total hours. The Max has probably made fewer than 100k flights total, the A330 has made at least 7 million flights. Therefore, multiply the two Max hull losses by 70 to get your first ballpark guess at a comparable number. It is as if the Max was an A330 with 140 hull losses instead of 11.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  It may be even worse than that, because the A330 is a long-range plane. I’ve been on an 11 hour A330 flight. Many 737 flights are only a couple of hours. Of course, given the small numbers of 737 MAXes, this may be s statistical fluke. But grounding it til the investigation is complete doesn’t seem crazy to me.
  - khuey 8y ago
    Takeoff and landings are the most dangerous part of the flight though, so comparing based on number of flights may in fact be the salient metric.
vultour 8y ago
Out of the 11 hull losses, only 3 resulted in fatalities, one of those was a test flight, one was the famous Air France crash, and one was probably due to the pilot being surprised by somatogravic illusion during go around. All of this in the past 25 years. The 737 MAX crashed twice in the past six months, I supposed based on this track record we should just close Boeing down altogether?

cjbprime 8y ago

I agree with you. The FAA obviously knows that there are issues with MCAS, since it's been working with Boeing on finalizing a software update that fixes some of them for months. Grounding the fleet at least until that software update can be deployed seems prudent the moment there's objective reasoning to suspect MCAS was at play in this crash too. (And I think we might already be there.)