6 ms·

Some points from personal experience from working at Boeing, family working at Boeing, and a close friend on the flight line for the 737-8; - not everything is

by _cerv 8y ago

Some points from personal experience from working at Boeing, family working at Boeing, and a close friend on the flight line for the 737-8; - not everything is back from the Lion Air incident, but internally there was strong confidence that a lack of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of MCAS contributed to the disaster - reproducing these failures has been extremely hard and has required a lot of cooperation with other airlines and agencies, and that has been difficult - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. - since Lion Air, Boeing has been in somewhat of a “panic mode” but confidence isn’t that the airframe and engine mechanics are at fault - Lion and Ethiopian Air are near the bottom when it comes to maintenance and follow up with Boeing - as of this morning, it sounded like there are more uncertainties with this incident given that the pilot indicated troubles after take off, but I’m find it hard to back up that claim in what’s already been published This isn’t about greed or the FAA being in the pocket of Boeing, it’s that there were already adjustments made to fix MCAS and the investigation from Ethiopia isn’t in yet.

Svip 8y ago
> - Lion and Ethiopian Air are near the bottom when it comes to maintenance and follow up with Boeing Another commenter mentioned that Ethiopian Airline is considered Category 1 by the FAA, and is a member of the Star Alliance. Surely that indicates a decent track record? I'm not saying it _is_ the plane, but as the EASA Emergency Airworthiness Directive points out, while a connection between the two incidents cannot be established, neither can one be ruled out. And for that reason, they are grounding the planes as a prudent temporary measure till we know more.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Quite. That doesn’t pass the sniff test. If it turns out this is Boeing’s fault, for the reasons suspected, and the FAA have staked their reputation on it - I fear for the future of airline safety.
  - askmike 8y ago
    It seems to be that the crash situations are way too complex to blame a single party. Since a chain of events (automatic systems, pilot actions) seems the be responsible for the crashes. I imagine that besides what is being done to make sure this doesn't happen again, a lot of time is being spent on making sure that whatever changes, the crashes cannot be blamed on them.
    - AsyncAwait 8y ago
      > It seems to be that the crash situations are way too complex to blame a single party. It seems to me like Boeing is very much intent on blaming a single party, ("3rd world pilots/airlines").
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        Of course they are. Any rational entity caught up in a situation like this will try to blame someone else. The cost of being liable for anything in today's society is very high so every party fights tooth and nail to make it 100% not their fault. This is especially amplified in a highly public case like this, the politicians will not rest until some entity has been punished, politicians are under a lot of pressure be seen "doing something". The incentive structure of modern society is simply not conducive to accepting responsibility for mistakes and is even less so when politics get involved. We already know that crash #1 was caused by poor maintenance and communication (pilots not sufficiently aware of the implications of a questionable AoA sensor) of the plane's condition to the pilots combined with changes to how the plane responds to certain pilot inputs and how MCAS works which resulted in a situation the pilots didn't properly handle (Boeing and the airline's failure to train pilots combined with some amount of human error). I will be very very surprised if the cause of the second crash is as simple as "yup, Boeing built a POS that fell out of the sky" or "yup, the pilots were idiots who flew into the ground". Thanks to decades of incremental improvement we don't really have "single source" accidents in commercial aviation anymore.
        AsyncAwait 8y ago
rimliu 8y ago
> - not everything is back from the Lion Air incident, > but internally there was strong confidence that a lack > of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of > MCAS contributed to the disaster > <…> > - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non > existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly > differently. Don't you think these two statements are at odds? If there is no difference in practice then why does unfamiliarity kill? "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice it is different".
- ggm 8y ago
  Is this Yogi Berra or was he mis-attributed?
walkingolof 8y ago
>Ethiopian Air are near the bottom This is ignorance, Ethiopian have been flying for 70 years and have an excellent safety record on par with most western airlines.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Could there be more non fatal incidents that only manufacturers and safety regulators are aware of ?
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    Aviation doesn't work that way. If a moving plane screws up in any way (too close to another plane, wrong taxiway, botched takeoff/landing, etc) it will be noticed. The US also has the widely used ASRS system for confidentially reporting safety issues/lapses of any kind for everybody's benefit, and most other countries have similar systems now, although I can't vouch for Ethiopia specifically. https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      I'm not sure we understood each other. I understand aviation is heavily monitored by the field, but maybe only a few (when fatal or grave) sample of incidents gets to the public eye. Unless walkingolof is also in the field and by 'track record' he meant even 'up to the slightest faults'.
      - tialaramex 8y ago
        All aviation accidents are reportable in most civilised countries, and the reports will be public. For an airliner (which these are) they'll invariably make the news. For little prop planes in GA nobody cares unless someone died. Take an example from Ireland, an island near me. A crew screwed up and typed the wrong temperature into the computer, which calculated take-off thrust based on higher density air than was reality. As a result they had inadequate acceleration and smashed a runway light with their wheels because they took off far too late. Nobody died, nobody even needed a band aid, but that's a reportable accident and made minor headlines... even though it happened in another country miles away. As your parent indicated, the US further has ASRS, so that not only accidents, but incidents short of an accident (situations in which something went wrong, but fortunately it did not cause an actual accident), are reported. These are anonymised to protect the reporter but you can see (anonymous) reports by aircraft type in a public system.
nolok 8y ago
> - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. Except for, you know, that computer system that throws people into the ground if a probe malfunction, and that the "just short of non existent" training doesn't seem to cover properly. I don't know how this part works, when a manufacturer says "this plane doesn't require full training but merely a small top up since it's the same as plane X before", I assume the FAA needs to validate this matches reality ?
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Not only validate it matches reality when the plane is introduced, but continuously validating it via crew reports. This feedback needs to be a closed loop. If a plane surprises an adequately trained crew, then it means someone missed something.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
"practice, these planes don’t fly differently." Until they crash and kill hundreds of people.
rnx100 8y ago
What are insider's views on the MAX being the new MD11 cargo, which had a similar software solution for stretching-induced aerodynamic instabilities? https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/619272-ethiopian-airliner-down-africa-48.html#post10416275 https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/619272-ethiopian-airline...
anoncoward111 8y ago
Spare me. The pilots themselves have stated that they were completely unprepared to fly the plane safely in any condition with 0 training or warning.
hnnmzh 8y ago
> - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. Have you read this complaint from an actual pilot? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19374386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19374386 Quoting the HN post: "My post flight evaluation is that we lacked the knowledge to operate the aircraft in all weather and aircraft states safely. The instrumentation is completely different - My scan was degraded, slow and labored having had no experience w/ the new ND (Navigation Display) and ADI (Attitude Director Indicator) presentations/format or functions (manipulation between the screens and systems pages were not provided in training materials. If they were, I had no recollection of that material). We were unable to navigate to systems pages and lacked the knowledge of what systems information was available to us in the different phases of flight. Our weather radar competency was inadequate to safely navigate significant weather on that dark and stormy night. These are just a few issues that were not addressed in our training."
- Pokepokalypse 8y ago
  To me - having had a 25 year career in customer-facing systems engineering and support, this just reeks of dismissing the first-hand account of UX. If the problem is lack of training, (or even "possibly maybe failing sensors") - and your failure mode includes "maybe killing 150+ paying customers in one shot" ... seems like a no-brainer, to me, to fucking ground the planes, and take immediate corrective action. And again: just my opinion, it just reeks of someone who spends their days in a "spreadsheet-facing" position, making the decision to not ground these planes, not take their users' (pilots) reports seriously, and continue to risk hundreds of customers' lives (and thousands of their own employees livelihoods) on a daily basis.
peteradio 8y ago
Why the fuck does the investigation need to be concluded __BEFORE__ they ground the goddamn planes??? That makes no sense it has horrible incentives.
- kayfox 8y ago
  Because its quite possible that grounding the planes would result in more fatalities. People may drive or get shuffled onto older, less safe aircraft.
  - wazoox 8y ago
    With such a small fleet in service, for such a short time, with 2 crashes already, I fail to see what a "less safe aircraft" could be among those currently flown nowadays.
shaki-dora 8y ago
> but internally there was strong confidence that a lack of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of MCAS contributed to the disaster > training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. These statements contradict.
b_tterc_p 8y ago
Saying these areas are near the bottom feels disingenuous. Boeing should make minimum safety requirements explicitly clear and not sell planes to areas that don’t comply. Not just ethically, but for business reputation.
mannykannot 8y ago
I understand the point that the aircraft itself is probably safe (up to the fact that we don't know what caused the latest crash), but there appears to be an inconsistency between these opinions (emphasis added:) - not everything is back from the Lion Air incident, but internally there was strong confidence that a lack of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of MCAS contributed to the disaster. - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. My best guess is that the latter refers only to the situation where things are working properly, and may also ignore the what-its-like-for-a-pilot issues raised in ASRS report 1555013, as mentioned by hnnmzh in another reply to this post. Plus, at the time of the Lion Air crash, no-one had said anything to pilots about these 'adjusted mechanics'.
fps_doug 8y ago
> - not everything is back from the Lion Air incident, but internally there was strong confidence that a lack of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of MCAS contributed to the disaster Sure, if there's a probability you were involved in developing a potentially flawed system that killed hundreds, the natural reaction is to not accept this and blame someone or something else. And it's not suprising that "internally there was a strong confidence" – nobody there wants to be the one saying "uh, I think we messed up here guys". Boeing is a total echo chamber at this point. It's interesting you mention the MCAS here since... > - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. If this were true, the adjustment shouldn't even matter, since the sole purpose of it is to make the plane behave exactly the same way as the old 737, so that the pilots don't have to go through lengthy training for the new plane. You were trying to patch up changes to the hardware by adding software, so the hardware would feel the same. You claim you have achieved exactly that. But at the same time, you blame pilots for not reacting properly to those changes you made to the new plane compared to the old one. What?

by _cerv 8y ago

Svip 8y ago

> - Lion and Ethiopian Air are near the bottom when it comes to maintenance and follow up with Boeing Another commenter mentioned that Ethiopian Airline is considered Category 1 by the FAA, and is a member of the Star Alliance. Surely that indicates a decent track record? I'm not saying it _is_ the plane, but as the EASA Emergency Airworthiness Directive points out, while a connection between the two incidents cannot be established, neither can one be ruled out. And for that reason, they are grounding the planes as a prudent temporary measure till we know more.

isostatic 8y ago
Quite. That doesn’t pass the sniff test. If it turns out this is Boeing’s fault, for the reasons suspected, and the FAA have staked their reputation on it - I fear for the future of airline safety.
- askmike 8y ago
  It seems to be that the crash situations are way too complex to blame a single party. Since a chain of events (automatic systems, pilot actions) seems the be responsible for the crashes. I imagine that besides what is being done to make sure this doesn't happen again, a lot of time is being spent on making sure that whatever changes, the crashes cannot be blamed on them.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > It seems to be that the crash situations are way too complex to blame a single party. It seems to me like Boeing is very much intent on blaming a single party, ("3rd world pilots/airlines").
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Of course they are. Any rational entity caught up in a situation like this will try to blame someone else. The cost of being liable for anything in today's society is very high so every party fights tooth and nail to make it 100% not their fault. This is especially amplified in a highly public case like this, the politicians will not rest until some entity has been punished, politicians are under a lot of pressure be seen "doing something". The incentive structure of modern society is simply not conducive to accepting responsibility for mistakes and is even less so when politics get involved. We already know that crash #1 was caused by poor maintenance and communication (pilots not sufficiently aware of the implications of a questionable AoA sensor) of the plane's condition to the pilots combined with changes to how the plane responds to certain pilot inputs and how MCAS works which resulted in a situation the pilots didn't properly handle (Boeing and the airline's failure to train pilots combined with some amount of human error). I will be very very surprised if the cause of the second crash is as simple as "yup, Boeing built a POS that fell out of the sky" or "yup, the pilots were idiots who flew into the ground". Thanks to decades of incremental improvement we don't really have "single source" accidents in commercial aviation anymore.
      - AsyncAwait 8y ago

rimliu 8y ago

> - not everything is back from the Lion Air incident, > but internally there was strong confidence that a lack > of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of > MCAS contributed to the disaster > <…> > - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non > existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly > differently. Don't you think these two statements are at odds? If there is no difference in practice then why does unfamiliarity kill? "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice it is different".

ggm 8y ago
Is this Yogi Berra or was he mis-attributed?

walkingolof 8y ago

>Ethiopian Air are near the bottom This is ignorance, Ethiopian have been flying for 70 years and have an excellent safety record on par with most western airlines.

agumonkey 8y ago
Could there be more non fatal incidents that only manufacturers and safety regulators are aware of ?
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Aviation doesn't work that way. If a moving plane screws up in any way (too close to another plane, wrong taxiway, botched takeoff/landing, etc) it will be noticed. The US also has the widely used ASRS system for confidentially reporting safety issues/lapses of any kind for everybody's benefit, and most other countries have similar systems now, although I can't vouch for Ethiopia specifically. https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I'm not sure we understood each other. I understand aviation is heavily monitored by the field, but maybe only a few (when fatal or grave) sample of incidents gets to the public eye. Unless walkingolof is also in the field and by 'track record' he meant even 'up to the slightest faults'.
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      All aviation accidents are reportable in most civilised countries, and the reports will be public. For an airliner (which these are) they'll invariably make the news. For little prop planes in GA nobody cares unless someone died. Take an example from Ireland, an island near me. A crew screwed up and typed the wrong temperature into the computer, which calculated take-off thrust based on higher density air than was reality. As a result they had inadequate acceleration and smashed a runway light with their wheels because they took off far too late. Nobody died, nobody even needed a band aid, but that's a reportable accident and made minor headlines... even though it happened in another country miles away. As your parent indicated, the US further has ASRS, so that not only accidents, but incidents short of an accident (situations in which something went wrong, but fortunately it did not cause an actual accident), are reported. These are anonymised to protect the reporter but you can see (anonymous) reports by aircraft type in a public system.

nolok 8y ago

> - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. Except for, you know, that computer system that throws people into the ground if a probe malfunction, and that the "just short of non existent" training doesn't seem to cover properly. I don't know how this part works, when a manufacturer says "this plane doesn't require full training but merely a small top up since it's the same as plane X before", I assume the FAA needs to validate this matches reality ?

rbanffy 8y ago
Not only validate it matches reality when the plane is introduced, but continuously validating it via crew reports. This feedback needs to be a closed loop. If a plane surprises an adequately trained crew, then it means someone missed something.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

"practice, these planes don’t fly differently." Until they crash and kill hundreds of people.

rnx100 8y ago

What are insider's views on the MAX being the new MD11 cargo, which had a similar software solution for stretching-induced aerodynamic instabilities? https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/619272-ethiopian-airliner-down-africa-48.html#post10416275 https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/619272-ethiopian-airline...

anoncoward111 8y ago

Spare me. The pilots themselves have stated that they were completely unprepared to fly the plane safely in any condition with 0 training or warning.

hnnmzh 8y ago

> - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. Have you read this complaint from an actual pilot? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19374386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19374386 Quoting the HN post: "My post flight evaluation is that we lacked the knowledge to operate the aircraft in all weather and aircraft states safely. The instrumentation is completely different - My scan was degraded, slow and labored having had no experience w/ the new ND (Navigation Display) and ADI (Attitude Director Indicator) presentations/format or functions (manipulation between the screens and systems pages were not provided in training materials. If they were, I had no recollection of that material). We were unable to navigate to systems pages and lacked the knowledge of what systems information was available to us in the different phases of flight. Our weather radar competency was inadequate to safely navigate significant weather on that dark and stormy night. These are just a few issues that were not addressed in our training."

Pokepokalypse 8y ago
To me - having had a 25 year career in customer-facing systems engineering and support, this just reeks of dismissing the first-hand account of UX. If the problem is lack of training, (or even "possibly maybe failing sensors") - and your failure mode includes "maybe killing 150+ paying customers in one shot" ... seems like a no-brainer, to me, to fucking ground the planes, and take immediate corrective action. And again: just my opinion, it just reeks of someone who spends their days in a "spreadsheet-facing" position, making the decision to not ground these planes, not take their users' (pilots) reports seriously, and continue to risk hundreds of customers' lives (and thousands of their own employees livelihoods) on a daily basis.

peteradio 8y ago

Why the fuck does the investigation need to be concluded __BEFORE__ they ground the goddamn planes??? That makes no sense it has horrible incentives.

kayfox 8y ago
Because its quite possible that grounding the planes would result in more fatalities. People may drive or get shuffled onto older, less safe aircraft.
- wazoox 8y ago
  With such a small fleet in service, for such a short time, with 2 crashes already, I fail to see what a "less safe aircraft" could be among those currently flown nowadays.

shaki-dora 8y ago

> but internally there was strong confidence that a lack of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of MCAS contributed to the disaster > training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. These statements contradict.

b_tterc_p 8y ago

Saying these areas are near the bottom feels disingenuous. Boeing should make minimum safety requirements explicitly clear and not sell planes to areas that don’t comply. Not just ethically, but for business reputation.

mannykannot 8y ago

I understand the point that the aircraft itself is probably safe (up to the fact that we don't know what caused the latest crash), but there appears to be an inconsistency between these opinions (emphasis added:) - not everything is back from the Lion Air incident, but internally there was strong confidence that a lack of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of MCAS contributed to the disaster. - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. My best guess is that the latter refers only to the situation where things are working properly, and may also ignore the what-its-like-for-a-pilot issues raised in ASRS report 1555013, as mentioned by hnnmzh in another reply to this post. Plus, at the time of the Lion Air crash, no-one had said anything to pilots about these 'adjusted mechanics'.

fps_doug 8y ago

> - not everything is back from the Lion Air incident, but internally there was strong confidence that a lack of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of MCAS contributed to the disaster Sure, if there's a probability you were involved in developing a potentially flawed system that killed hundreds, the natural reaction is to not accept this and blame someone or something else. And it's not suprising that "internally there was a strong confidence" – nobody there wants to be the one saying "uh, I think we messed up here guys". Boeing is a total echo chamber at this point. It's interesting you mention the MCAS here since... > - training for the 737-8 and -9 was just short of non existent because in practice, these planes don’t fly differently. If this were true, the adjustment shouldn't even matter, since the sole purpose of it is to make the plane behave exactly the same way as the old 737, so that the pilots don't have to go through lengthy training for the new plane. You were trying to patch up changes to the hardware by adding software, so the hardware would feel the same. You claim you have achieved exactly that. But at the same time, you blame pilots for not reacting properly to those changes you made to the new plane compared to the old one. What?