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Boeing scrambles to contain fallout from deadly crash
- RickJWagner 8y agoThis is an interesting one. NYT and CNN are running prominent doomsday stories in big headlines. Fox News has been nearly silent on this one. My inner conspiracy theorist tells me this isn't a fluke. Left-leaning sources are pouncing on Boeing, while right-side Fox is staying mum. Is it my imagination? I can't think up a reason why.
- gamblor956 8y agoFox News' webpage looks like a tabloid...but there were 2 videos about the crash and Boeing's safety concerns on the front page when I checked a minute ago. Notably, the most liberal news site, NBC News, has a story about the Boeing MAX being safe at the top of its home page. So I think it's your imagination.
- RickJWagner 8y agoI agree, NBC is pretty much on the left. If they're calling the plane safe, my conspiracy theory must be bunk. Thanks.
- titanomachy 8y agoYou may be the most reasonable conspiracy theorist I've ever met.
- mehrdadn 8y agoIs NBC that far left? I felt like MSNBC was further...
- liability 8y agoI agree. So what does MSNBC say about it? Personally I doubt a strong correlation will be found, other than the American/foreign media dichotomy.
- tyingq 8y agoI see it on foxbusiness.com, but nothing on foxnews.com's front page until I scroll maybe 4 pages down. This is on a mobile...maybe their desktop site has a sidebar? It is front/top on NYT.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- popz41 8y agoI see multiple headlines on Fox News about this crash. I think you're over thinking this.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- liability 8y agoBoeing and the FAA no doubt believe they are protecting shareholders by not grounding the fleet, but they're risking their reputation. If it turns out that Boeing is at fault, will the American media/industrial complex be able to keep a lid on it? I doubt it.
- pcurve 8y agoI cannot seriously believe they are rolling the dice for the second time.
- wahern 8y agoDumber things have happened. Boeing executives and FAA administrators may feel sincerely committed to their decision to approve MCAS without retraining and that they're doing everybody a service by keeping cool heads.
- voodooranger 8y agoI haven’t seen any evidence that the two Max crashes are related. The first one was the result of Lion Air flying a plane that was not airworthy because its AOA sensor was known to be faulty. There is no information about the cause of the second crash as of yet. You’re making a claim about the purported alignment of Boeing, the FAA, and the “American media/industrial complex” (whatever that is) but I’m not aware that there is such a thing. What do you know that the rest of us don’t?
- ethbro 8y agoI'd be curious to hear from anyone who's a pilot (I know there are a few of them here). What are the interactions between an automated system and the pilot? Specifically, can a plane quickly switch from flyable to out of control? There's a huge number of unknowns here, but I thought most pilot assistance systems were designed to be disengaged if needed.
- AaronM 8y ago
- anonymouslambda 8y agoSingapore just grounded all their 737 Max flights. Aeromexico and GOL grounded their 737 Max planes today. Soon we’ll (U.S.) be the only country left flying these.
- sohkamyung 8y agoNews article about the grounding of flights in Singapore [1] [1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/singapore-to-ground-all-boeing-737-max-8-planes-after-ethiopian-airlines-crash https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/singapore-t...
- analog31 8y agoToday was the first time I ever checked the type of plane on a flight.
- patrickxb 8y agoMe too. Seems like https://seatguru.com https://seatguru.com is the best site for figuring out the type of plane for a flight.
- briandear 8y agoAir Canada is still flying the Max 8.
- netheril96 8y agoThis should quiet anyone down who claims that China grounded 737 MAX for primarily political reasons.
- mafm 8y agoAustralia also grounded those aircraft today: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/australia-grounds-boeing-s-737-max-in-wake-of-fatal-crashes-20190312-p513hi.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/australia-grounds-...
- zaarn 8y agoGermany grounded them too, now.
- gojomo 8y agoWhat an awful metaphor – "contain fallout" – for the NYT to use in its current online headline. ("Boeing Scrambles to Contain Fallout From Deadly Ethiopia Crash") It makes it sound like there's some toxic debris Boeing is still racing to clean-up, when in fact the story is just about financial/reputational after-effects. (NYT's original print headline for this story, "Crisis for Boeing As Safety Worry Grounds New Jet", at least avoided the problematic toxic-debris implication – though it somewhat implied the jet was grounded everywhere, or by Boeing, when it's just been grounded by some jurisdictions and carriers.)
- freddie_mercury 8y ago> It makes it sound like there's some toxic debris Boeing is still racing to clean-up, when it fact the story is just about financial/reputational after-effects. It doesn't make it sound like that at all. I don't think anyone except maybe you reads it that way. "Fallout" well-understood to mean "effects" or "results".
- wantoncl 8y agoOr, just spitballing here, "fall(ing) out of the sky" perhaps.
- slyfocks 8y agoI read it that way as well—-words do have secondary and tertiary connotations, and any competent journalist knows how to use composition and careful word choice to more effectively convey a particular narrative.
- freddie_mercury 8y agoHere are some other recent NY Times headlines that use the word fallout Trauma May Have Fallout Over Generations Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far As Trump Struggles With Helsinki’s Fallout, Congress Faces a New Charge: Complicity Inside Uber’s $100,000 Payment to a Hacker, and the Fallout Nissan and Renault Wrestle With the Fallout From Carlos Ghosn’s Arrest Fallout is widely used to mean "affect-effects" with no secondary or tertiary connotations. I mean....you really thought there was some kind of nuclear disaster in Helsinki after reading that headline?
- droithomme 8y agoIt does look possible that the anti-stalling software new to these planes has a bug.
- ethbro 8y agoI hesitate to even say something, in deference to the much more knowledgeable folks working this at the NTSB and sister agencies right now. But I'd be surprised if it were that simple, especially given the airtime of all planes flown. Airtime which I'd assume passed largely without incident, as by now some news agency should have drug up any similar close calls. If we're doing wild speculation, I'd bet on something like the Tesla battery punctures (where it turned out high-energy impacts from pointed road debris were more common than expected). E.g. a maintenance issue, coupled with a specific configuration, coupled with pilot behavior Or, it could just be a poorly maintained plane and a freak accident. But that's what root cause analysis and black box recordings are designed to ascertain.
- drunkflanker 8y agoAs mechanical engineering students at my college, we analyze failures of engineering ethics in the past to better inform our decisions in the future. We analyze a number of situations, always the culpability of the engineer is placed first and foremost to us. Whether legal culpability falls on the engineer, we are taught that the moral culpability falls on us as the arbiters of safety. I can already see that the 737 Max failures will be taught 10 years from now in the ethics classes I currently take.
- speedplane 8y ago> As mechanical engineering students at my college, ... always the culpability of the engineer is placed first and foremost to us In college we learned about the engineering & product decisions that led to the challenger disaster. There's a famous line that is rumored to have been said at one of the last design meetings before the disaster: "lets take off our engineering hats and put on your management hats". Personally, I doubt this sentence was uttered, but even the rumor conveys the point.
- dingo_bat 8y agoLooks like that outsourced software didn't meet the requirements after all.
- Axsuul 8y agoOn people eschewing their 737 MAX flights, I would argue it's probably even safer to be on a 737 MAX these next few days since every airline and their pilots will be on edge with that particular model.
- BinaryIdiot 8y agoIf it's a routine maintenance issue then yes but if they're trying to find a design defect then you may not be safer at all. I don't blame people for avoiding them for the time being.
- nostromo 8y agoThe speed at which things went wrong is what concerns me. There's a very short window of time for the pilots to diagnose the issue and correct things. https://youtu.be/4h8GTXK3e2g?t=220 https://youtu.be/4h8GTXK3e2g?t=220 With the Lion Air flight there was only about 20 seconds from the plane nose diving to impact -- and for a significant fraction of those 20 seconds their fate was sealed. https://geeksprinkles.com/search-for-cause-of-deadly-737-lion-air-crash-begins/ https://geeksprinkles.com/search-for-cause-of-deadly-737-lio...
- speedplane 8y ago> I would argue it's probably even safer to be on a 737 MAX these next few days since every airline and their pilots will be on edge with that particular model You're assuming that being "on edge" is sufficient to prevent a systemic design flaw. Without a proper investigation, it's not clear that is true at all.
- xbmcuser 8y agoNo the Indonesian plane that crashed first the pilot had similar problems on a previous flight with the plane before the crash so he was aware of something being wrong but he still crashed. So pilot being aware of it won't make it safer.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nostromo 8y agoSeems like anti-stall software shouldn't be killing more people than actual stalls. When was the last major airline downed by a pilot error stall anyway?
- ralph84 8y agoThe pilots of both Air France 447 and Colgan Air 3407 managed to stall perfectly serviceable aircraft in 2009, killing 277 combined.
- nostromo 8y agoExactly my point -- we've just seen 346 people killed by (presumably) an anti-stall system -- when it's been a decade since we've had the problem this system is meant to prevent.
- pmart123 8y agoYeah, it is tough to assess without knowing the likeliness of a stall, and the likeliness a stall causes a crash. Otherwise, we run into the problem of having such a small sample size.
- ralph84 8y agoIf the 737 MAX anti-stall system has a flaw of course it should be fixed. That's hardly an argument against anti-stall systems in general. The accidents prevented by anti-stall systems don't make the news.
- dvdkhlng 8y agoIn german we even have a word for this: Verschlimmbessern [1] Making something worse in an attempt to make it better. As an engineer I'm often concerned about committing such a fallacy. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern
- pmart123 8y agoAnecdotally, I was speaking to a friend who has a pilot's license, and his thought was that a well-trained pilot should know how to adjust due to the failure, but the system seemed counter-intuitive. I think it does at the very least beg the question of whether this feature has already caused more problems than it would have likely prevented. Would commercial pilots have to report when a plane stalls/would the airline keep track of such data?
- jimmy_ruska 8y agoSome statistically significant percentage of xbox 360s are starting to red light for customers running a certain model number. Microsoft assures customers that there's no need to panic as this particular model has been reliable for a long time, and it could just be a statistical anomaly. Microsoft is currently investigating the issue but consumers are weary about paying full price for a product that might break. Substitute xbox 360 with PLANE, substitute microsoft with BOEING, substitute "weary about paying full price" with "dying in a horrible fiery death". I'm not sure why this is contentious. Be on the safe side and wait for the investigation to complete in case there's some kind of unexpected single point of failure caused by mechanical defects.
- speedplane 8y ago> xbox 360s are starting to red light ... substitute "weary about paying full price" with "dying in a horrible fiery death" ... wait for the investigation to complete Paying full price and dying a fiery death don't exactly seem like comparable substitutions.
- jimmy_ruska 8y agoPlanes don't just fall out of the sky. Having 2 major crashed on the same model could indicate mechanical defects. When microsoft faced an issue with statistically increased failure rates they initially played the plausible deniability game ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems#Response_to_rate_of_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems#Re... ). In fact this is the only response you will ever get from a public company with short term looking stockholders. I definitely wouldn't buy that xbox for $300 if I heard similar news reports, but I sure as hell wouldn't buy that $300 plane ticket and bet my life on boeing's words.
- speedplane 8y ago> I definitely wouldn't buy that xbox for $300 if I heard similar news reports, but I sure as hell wouldn't buy that $300 plane ticket and bet my life on boeing's words. I suppose we agree, but just to a different extent. I could conceivably buy an Xbox knowing that it might crash at some point. But I wouldn't buy an airline ticket knowing it might crash at some point.