17 ms·
Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw
- jcroll 8y ago> The News found at least five complaints about the Boeing model in a federal database where pilots can voluntarily report about aviation incidents without fear of repercussions. Is this a lot?
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoYes. Recalls with autos happen more often with a lot less. Consider the amount of cars out there. It only takes a few to put one in play.
- V-eHGsd_ 8y agoASRS doesn't deal with reports about auto-safety. eg. search for ACN 1337942 here https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/search/dbol.html https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/search/dbol.html (i'm too dumb to figure out how to link to a specific nasa report), and there's a report about the captain's side AOA vane being busted and causing the captain's stick shaker to vibrate constantly. edit: here's another one: 1097906, talking about inconsistent airspeed readings between the captain and first officer and then on descent, the airspeed readings went super wonky and the plane pitched nose down.
- stefan_ 8y agoIf the US would treat car safety like airplane safety there would be no SUVs driving out there.
- k_sh 8y agoAirplane safety should be more strict than car safety, because the damage an airplane crash causes is a handful of orders of magnitude higher than a car accident...
- stefan_ 8y agoYet deaths in the latter vastly outpace adverse events in the former. What is the criteria by which public safety should operate? Is it biggest explosion?
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y agoOpportunity cost of safety improvements to vehicles. Airliners cost like $100 million each, so they can afford to perfect safety. You can’t get airliner-level safety in a vehicle that costs less than $50,000.
- Johnny555 8y agoMaybe not airliner level of safety, but based on the top causes of car accidents, they could probably be reduced by an order of magnitude with relatively inexpensive improvements: 1. better driver training 2. breathalyzer ignition interlocks 3. speed limiters (even more reduced speed at night/rain) 4. traffic light detection/automatic braking 5. enforced following distance (I'd add "sleep/impaired driver warnings", automatic emergency braking (including pedestrian detection) even though it doesn't quite relate to the top causes of accidents)) Here's the top ten: 1. Distracted Driving 2. Drunk Driving 3. Speeding 4. Reckless Driving 5. Rain 6. Running Red Lights 7. Night Driving 8. Design Defects/Maintenace 9. Tailgating 10. Wrong-Way Driving/ Improper Turns
- gravy 8y agoFar more cars (than planes), far more drivers (than pilots), far less rules for permission (than a driver's license). Kind of an unfair comparison here.
- alfalfasprout 8y agoThey mostly seem to agree with each other which is the scary part. Several of them reference a completely unexplained pitch up/down behavior during a climb. During landing an unplanned nosedive would be disastrous.
- mrpippy 8y agoMCAS can only activate when flaps are raised, it shouldn't cause any unexpected trim changes during landing. This is why the Lion Air flight had a normal takeoff/climb until they raised the flaps.
- CamperBob2 8y agoAren't the flaps up during landing?
- rrmm 8y agoFlaps are down during landing and take offs (to different extents).
- Gibbon1 8y agoFlaps are deployed to lower the stall speed of the aircraft by increasing the lift coefficient of the wing at the expense of higher drag.
- hannasanarion 8y agoI think you're confusing flaps with air brakes. Flaps are wing extensions that deploy downwards to increase lift and drag, air brakes are panels that deploy upwards to produce lots and lots of drag to slow the plane down after landing, like a parachute.
- CamperBob2 8y agoAh, that makes sense, thanks.
- tuna-piano 8y agoThere have been 865 total 737 reports in the ASRS database since 1/1/2018 (linked the results of my search in another comment in this thread). There doesn't appear to be a 737-MAX filter (groups all 737-800s and 737-900s together it seems), so it's tough to say. In addition, it seems like some pilots were motivated to submit reports on their MAX experiences due to the Lion Air incident.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y agoWe’d need the number of reports for other plane models to know if that’s a lot or a little or the norm. Can you compare?
- rconti 8y agoExactly my reaction. I'm appalled at Boeing's response, and I agree with the Europeans, other countries, and Senator Cruz and others that the planes should probably be grounded, at least very briefly. But the news reporting that an unknown-relative-to-other-planes percentage of complaints were filed by pilots, especially when those reports could theoretically be merely annoyed pilots responding to a perceived lack of training, or piling on after Lion Air, doesn't tell me a whole lot I didn't already know.
- rootusrootus 8y agoIf I am reading the article correctly, the complaints all came after JT610? It would have been more damning if they had been complaining about this for the last couple years.
- FigBug 8y agoThat's impossible, 737 MAX hasn't been in service for 2 years yet.
- rootusrootus 8y agoI meant in round numbers ;). It's been pretty close to two full years now, so I wrote "a couple years" instead of 22 months.
- therealmarv 8y agoUS media. Why do I need always a VPN from Europe? Beeing GDPR compliant is not rocket science. "Unfortunately, our site is unavailable to European Union visitors... blablabla". UPDATE: And this news website even detects if I use incognito mode: "To continue reading, please disable private/incognito mode, log in, or enroll as a member" omg
- _ph_ 8y agoI was able to access the text via reader mode in Firefox. (I am surfing from the EU)
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago> Why do I need always a VPN from Europe? Beeing GDPR compliant is not rocket science. "Unfortunately, our site is unavailable to European Union visitors... blablabla" If you think there's a compelling business case for enabling European access, you may wish to contact the publisher.
- cco 8y agoThe compelling business case is avoiding the burden of complying with GDPR regulations. At a minimum someone has to answer those requests for info and/or deletion, if Europe represents a small percentage of your traffic it might not be worth bothering with.
- codedokode 8y agoOr they might just not collect any data from EU users.
- therealmarv 8y agoha, best comment here so far. Interesting approach! :D
- vonmoltke 8y agoI know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but if you are running a web server you have to try to not collect data on people who hit it. My personal website )if it were up, oops) is not GDPR-compliant, and it is completely hosted on my own server using nothing but static HTML with a bit of Bootstrap JavaScript. I have no ads. I have no referral links. I have no analytics. I don't even have comments on the articles I post. If I were running this site as a business I would need to evaluate how much it would cost to bring, and keep, the site into compliance versus how much revenue I derive from European visitors. Don't give me the "it's simple if you aren't tracking people" line, either. It's not simple, and I'm not going to trust the health of a business to the interpretations of random Internet posters or the benevolence of regulars on the other side of an ocean.
- acqq 8y agoIn the wake of the previous Boeing 737 Max crash: "Boeing Co. withheld information about potential hazards associated with a new flight-control feature suspected of playing a role in last month's fatal Lion Air jet crash, according to safety experts involved in the investigation, as well as midlevel FAA officials and airline pilots." "Safety experts involved in and tracking the investigation said that at U.S. carriers, neither airline managers nor pilots had been told such a system had been added to the latest 737 variant — and therefore aviators typically weren't prepared to cope with the possible risks." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18438607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18438607
- doctorshady 8y agoYou can see the archive.is copy of it without jumping through hoops: http://archive.is/GsHVR http://archive.is/GsHVR
- neonate 8y agohttps://outline.com/fLAE8N https://outline.com/fLAE8N
- Someone1234 8y agoThis article is less compelling than the title would suggest. After the Lion Air crash the FAA released a Emergency Airworthiness Directive, these five comments are in response to that directive. That differentiates it from pilots that had a negative run-in with MCAS or other defects in the 737 Max 8 (which would be significant news). This article might inform you pilots are unhappy, but that fact has been widely circulated elsewhere since the Lion Air crash. The fact that five pilots submitted official comments doesn't add to what we knew. These comments for example wouldn't have helped inform the FAA's decisions, since the FAA told the pilots about the issues in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive that these comments are based upon.
- V-eHGsd_ 8y agoI assumed they were talking about nasa reports. You can find a few if you search for 737-800 and AOA on the asrs site.
- int_19h 8y agoThe comments seem to be recounting personal experiences of those pilots though, not their reactions to the initial disclosure.
- Someone1234 8y agoMany of them are recounting how they didn't receive enough training and only found out after the initial disclosure. Nobody said they weren't personal experiences, just that those experiences are about the FAA directive/training rather than with the aircraft itself/MCAS.
- mimixco 8y agoThe Dallas News report shows two separate complaints where the pilots knew of and discussed MCAS on the flight deck before take off and still had serious problems with it.
- kayfox 8y agoThey had serious problems with the autopilot, which also disables MCAS.
- tuna-piano 8y agoSome context: 1. There have been 865 737 related ASRS reports since 1/1/2018 2. I don't know how to quickly separate out 737-MAX reports from the non 737-MAX reports, as the ASRS database doesn't include 737-MAX as an airplane type! From scanning, I can say that there are more than five MAX related reports, though. [1] All 865 737 reports since 1/1/2018 CSV - http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=54668679794062195281 http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=546686797940621... DOC - http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=72649718879825392207 http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=726497188798253... [2] Airplane model filter with no MAX option: https://imgur.com/a/09rRtzX https://imgur.com/a/09rRtzX [3] ASRS database: https://titan-server.arc.nasa.gov/ASRSPublicQueryWizard/QueryWizard_Filter.aspx# https://titan-server.arc.nasa.gov/ASRSPublicQueryWizard/Quer... [4] Document linked in the article with plane models listed under 737-800 or 737-Next Generation Undifferentiated https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5766398-ASRS-Reports-for-737-max8.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5766398-ASRS-Reports...
- dpwm 8y agoregex? I just grepped "B737 max" and found 11 entries. "737.{0,20}max" (case insensitive) yields 20. [0] [0] CSV output: https://pastebin.com/87N023cx https://pastebin.com/87N023cx
- dajohnson89 8y agoSo 20 MAX-related issues out of ~850. How is that significant?
- siwatanejo 8y agowe're talking about a plane model that is only 2 years old?
- ams6110 8y agoYes and no. The basic 737 design dates to the 1950s. The first ones flew in the 1960s. The 737 Max is an augmented version of the original.
- mannykannot 8y agoThere are at least three inter-related issues here: 1) Was MCAS an issue in the Ethiopian Airlines crash? 2) Did Boeing err, prior to the Lion Air crash, in not informing pilots of the existence of MCAS, and the way it changes how a failure is experienced by the flight crew? 3) Does MCAS pose a risk that cannot be adequately addressed through appropriate awareness and training? IIRC, after the existence of MCAS was disclosed, the US pilots' unions were divided over this issue, with the union representing Southwest pilots castigating Boeing for its nondisclosure, while that representing United pilots did not consider it to be a big issue. Unfortunately, this article does not make it clear where pilots stand on issue 3, and the investigation of the Ethiopian Airlines crash might reveal additional issues. The forthcoming software upgrade for MCAS certainly implies that there were improvements to be made.
- ddoolin 8y agoI don't know the answer to 1 or 2, but regarding 3, if the issue in the reports via this article are the same issue, which it seems like they may be, then no I don't believe it poses a risk that can't be addressed through training. Through awareness these pilots and FOs filing reports seemed to know, at least through intuition if not outright knowledge of the new MCAS system, to disconnect the autopilot system when the nose goes down inappropriately. My question is, should the onus be on the pilots? Yes, they should know about it if they're going to be piloting an aircraft with it, but is this expected behavior? To me it seems more like a bug than expected behavior...why would you want to pitch downwards in a climb? I don't really understand defense of Boeing in any scenario. This seems like a mistake in any case, whether it's just lack of instruction or documentation in the relevant flight manuals, or an outright system failure.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago>why would you want to pitch downwards in a climb To avoid stalling?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- objektif 8y agoCan anyone at this point provide a legitimate argument for not grounding this model?
- woofcat 8y agoA best it's reactionary as we simply don't have enough data. The FAA said it will review once the crash investigation has been completed. Sometimes clustering occurs, such as Maylasian airlines being shot down and lost in an ocean and never found. We didn't ground the whole airline.
- Gibbon1 8y agoThat's my take, accidents at the edges of the safe flight envelope are concerning but don't imply the aircraft is unsafe in general. Two losses during ordinary weather, operations, and daytime is extremely concerning.
- cjbprime 8y agoIt sounds like you're going for a "innocent until proven guilty" approach to the Max's airworthiness, if I'm understanding your comment correctly. That seems opposite to the culture of air safety, where planes are certified airworthy because the data prove them to be so. I don't think the data prove airworthiness of the Max anymore.
- woofcat 8y agoHowever no data that originally certified it as airworthy has changed. All we have is two incidents, one of which we have no information about. For all we know it was a hijacking, or a drunk pilot. Absurd ideas, however in my mind without any evidence it is equally likely. They have the CVR and I'm sure very shortly we'll know for sure. If it turns out to be MCAS then we can ground the fleet, the extra day of delay doesn't seem like the highest risk factor.
- cjbprime 8y agoThat's not really true. MCAS can not be argued to meet https://www.risingup.com/fars/info/part25-672-FAR.shtml https://www.risingup.com/fars/info/part25-672-FAR.shtml, so it's not airworthy. The FAA's allowed them to continue flying anyway while they disclose the problem and workarounds, and deploy a fix which is now very delayed. That's a much more questionable decision now that another flight with similar characteristics has crashed.
- yeukhon 8y agoAre we grounding MAX yet? Seriously...
- tibbydudeza 8y agoSec of Defense is an ex-Boeing man.
- cjbprime 8y agoAnd on a less individual level, just the MAX order book alone is larger than the market cap of Apple. Boeing is the largest exporter in the US.
- chopin 8y agoBut how would it help to not grounding the plane in the US if it is grounded pretty much elsewhere? I am pretty sure orders will get canceled or at least postponed over this. And Boeing pretty sure cannot risk another incident.
- cjbprime 8y agoIt helps because it influences other authorities and buyers not to do anything drastic.
- CodeSheikh 8y agoPlease make a conscious choice when flying 737 Max on US domestic flights. It is your right to know the type of aircraft when you are booking your flight. Switching to a reasonably expensive alternative is worth more than any foreseeable trouble.
- tommoor 8y agoAt this point I wouldn't be booking on a Max for a while just in case they ground them all, if nothing else.
- cjbprime 8y ago> It is your right to know the type of aircraft when you are booking your flight. This is not actually any kind of right in the US. The airline can switch to using a MAX just before the flight boards without breaking any law or contract with you, and would not have to honor your request to travel on a non-MAX aircraft instead.
- ergocoder 8y agoThis is off topic. But I've been skeptical of the commercial aviation accident risk compared to cars. I'm not saying cars are safer. But using accident count per mileage seems a bit odd, especially when the most risky parts of flying are taking off and landing. A plane travelling 400 more miles doesn't incur much more risk. But a car travelling 400 more miles incur a much bigger risk (e.g. fatigue, car malfunctioning). So, of course, the stats for planes is going to look much better. I wonder if anyone has an insight into why we are using this metrics, and what is a better metrics?
- reneherse 8y agoPerhaps a better metric would be accidents per unit of time.
- ordinaryradical 8y agoOr accidents per departure and arrival. Since take-off and landing are the two most dangerous times, gauging accidents based on how many times one leaves and arrives could provide a more direct way of measuring how dangerous any one departure/arrival actually is?
- Udik 8y agoI'd say it's accidents per person/hour. And I've read somewhere that the figures used to be similar for cars and airplanes (though aircraft safety is constantly improving, cars probably less).
- joering2 8y agoIt looks like politics play big role with Boeing donating almost $1MM to Trump's presidential campaign. That's why those are not grounded in USA yet (until God forbids one will fall off the sky). What we are probably are going to find out within the next few months is that right after corporations corrupting politics, corrupted healthcare system, corrupted housing system, corrupted FDA, corrupted educational system, and so many others, we also have a serious issues with FAA. But what's new? "This is America and this is business!"
- sfilargi 8y agoFor a car analogy, imagine Tesla creates a new model that under certain conditions tends to over-steer left. To prevent any accidents because of that, they have added a system that turns the steering wheel clockwise. To disable the system it is not enough to try to prevent by force the steering wheel from turning, but you have to press a button that disables electric steering assistance. Notice they have never briefed you about this new system because they didn't want to retrain you. You happily drive along the highway at 70mph when the system malfunctions and incorrectly thinks the car is over-steering left, so the steering wheel starts rotating clockwise. The car swiftly moves to the lane in your right as you use all your strength to prevent it and manage to bring the car back in the lane. In the mean time all kind of lights and sounds go off on your cockpit. In 5 seconds, while you are trying to find out what to make out of all the lights flashing, the steering wheel starts turning the card right again. This time you are not so lucky and you crash into the truck on your right.
- lsh123 8y agoIncorrect analogy. Runaway trim is a common and known problem with a solution to pull the electric trim breaker. MCAS failure is very similar in appearance and have exactly the same solution.
- siwatanejo 8y agoCan you think of a better car analogy? I'm genuinely curious.
- n0reman101 8y agoS4CK MY F4CKING D1CK CORRUPT POS MOD
- aaron695 8y agoThis is NOT about MCAS (Is my understanding) So pick a narrative on why you want them grounded. If it was MCAS then this is irrelevant. We have Social Media wagging the dog atm.
- purplezooey 8y agoI think it would've been cool to have a database for anonymous complaints at most of my previous jobs.
- siwatanejo 8y agothat's a very interesting idea! let's build it :D
- est 8y agoreminds me of ratemyprofessor
- callalex 8y agoI assume you’ve heard of GlassDoor but don’t consider it sufficiently anonymous?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kenneth 8y agoThis is a great video that does a concise and understandable of the main theory for the issue that occured on the LionAir flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfQW0upkVus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfQW0upkVus It was very helpful for me to understand exactly what "runaway trim" meant. Essentially, it's a force (down or up) on the elevator on the horizontal stabilizer. The pilot still controls it from his yoke, but the more trim applied the more it pushes the result in a given direction. If the system applies trim consistently to push the nose down (to avoid what it thinks is an imminent staff), it will progressively more difficult for the pilot to counteract that and pitch up. Eventually, it's too much to handle. This situation should be easily detectable, from what I understand, due to large wheels moving visibly in the center console, and the pilots can counteract the trim in a known procedure.
- known 8y agoCar manufacturers RECALL defective cars; Why isn't Boeing doing that? And hope Boeing is NOT simulating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_control https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_control
- callalex 8y agoThis comment reallly comes off as a procedurally generated combination. Can you rephrase your point another way? I don’t think it’s even clear what point you are trying to make.
- anentropic 8y agothat's interesting, their other comment in this thread is also a bit wtf > In order to increase fuel efficiency on the 737 MAX, the engine fan diameter was increased; > "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Knuth
- nothrows 8y agoman fuck canada and the usa. how are we the only ones in the world to not care about safety. even if its a 0.5% chance 150+ people die, isn't that enough to warrant temporarily grounding a handful of planes. sigh common
- mobilemidget 8y agoIs it time to buy Boeing put options already?
- nocture 8y agowait until the mounting pressure makes FAA ground the plane, then buy shortly after
- mobilemidget 8y agohttps://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/12/investing/boeing-stock-update/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/12/investing/boeing-stock-up...
- tibbydudeza 8y agoLooks like another DC-10 PR disaster in the making.
- toweringgoat 8y ago>> Thank you for being a patron of the Dallas Morning News. Unfortunately, our site is unavailable to European Union visitors Please learn some basic geography. Norway (and Switzerland) are not in the EU.
- AnabeeKnox 8y agoGDPR applies to Norway, even if it's not in EU
- slezyr 8y agoWell, they give same message for Ukraine.
- newnewpdro 8y agoThis is insane. Between this and Tesla Autopilot I'm left speechless.
- tomerbd 8y agoMaybe it was scheduled for next sprint?
- infinity0 8y ago> Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action, What, except for the data of the two crashes happening? The person that wrote this statement is a fucking idiot.
- ringaroll 8y agoWell guess I'm not flying on 737 Max anymore. Unsafe plane with a terrible record. Should be banned.
- yason 8y agoThe thing that worries me most is that, based on mere amateur observations in the media, the number of incidents involving user interfaces, repeated changes to procedures, and software fixes to "unexpected" corner-cases seems to have been in the increase. To the uninitiated, it seems that problems in airline incidents used to revolve around mechanical failures, bad wiring, sensor malfunctions, toasted electronics causing smell of smoke and such. Plain and simple. Issue a fix in the design and apply to all planes of the same type, and you'll end up reducing the failure surface bit by bit. I might be totally wrong about this because I don't track actual data. But if I've spotted the trend right it's scary because the problems are shifting into our space, i.e. software engineering. And being a software engineer, I know we're pretty much fucked at that point. We've only ever managed to write reliable and trustworthy software when we've split it into very tiny pieces that we can verify and kept the number of pieces small. Maybe aviation computers used to be much simpler that they could be verified more throughoutly. Maybe airplanes used to have less features and they could keep the complexity sufficiently down and functionality orthogonal. Maybe there was enough human glue in between the systems so that there was a live sanity-check during flights and pilots could react properly if the computers didn't agree on something. But now I sense a new category of error conditions that are eerily similar to what we've had in non-critical software for decades where assumptions are laid on top of other assumptions, and when they fail the whole stack comes crashing down. Only this time there might be a whole plane coming down instead of getting a curious SIGSEGV on the screen with a blinking cursor. It might start as an innocent "couldn't access flight plan because of wifi went down" but such interdependencies between certified and uncertified systems grow exponentially and this will snowball into the unmanageable very soon.
- tomaskafka 8y agoIf you split a complex systems into a tiny pieces, you imo just shift a locus of problems from individual modules into their more and more complex network of interactions and emergent behaviors.
- yason 8y agoHence you keep the number of pieces small to avoid the exponential interactions. You only ever implement what is really needed instead of letting feature creep and excess convenience work their way into your plane. It's not like N times more of that sweet complexity is required to fly a plane today than what was needed in the 80's or 90's.
- known 8y agoIn order to increase fuel efficiency on the 737 MAX, the engine fan diameter was increased; "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Knuth
- rurban 8y agoMore context missing in this news. Southwest certainly was aware of the MCAS issues, they are the only airline having demanded a second AOA sensor to be installed and used, they also changed the UI to display the attack angle. So they lied. Even if it's safer to fly a SW max than AA. > A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines told The News that it hasn't received any reports of issues with MCAS from its pilots, "nor do any of our thousands of data points from the aircraft indicate any issues with MCAS."
- nothrows 8y agoHere are a few links to petitions you can sign to help out and ground boeing: https://groundboeing.com https://groundboeing.com https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/ground-boeing-737-max https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/ground-boeing-737-... https://www.change.org/p/your-government-ground-the-boeing-737-max https://www.change.org/p/your-government-ground-the-boeing-7...