9 ms·

They had no choice. When no other major regulator would stand with their position, and the public didn't wish to fly on the Max 8, the position became untenable

They had no choice. When no other major regulator would stand with their position, and the public didn't wish to fly on the Max 8, the position became untenable. After the flight data recorders are recovered from the Ethiopian Airlines accident they could reevaluate if it turned out to be something else. But this seems like a rational safety first position given what we know today. Hopefully Boeing's April patch and mandatory additional training mitigates the issue well enough to resume normal flight operations.

walkingolof 8y ago
The fix may be as simple as a patch, but the customer confidence in the plan is damaged, maybe beyond repair. I know I will look twice next time going on a trip which plane I end up on, I'm not sure I will go with a 737 Max anytime soon.
- Kurtz79 8y ago
  I have no direct experience with aviation software, but if it's similar to other highly regulated environments, a SW "patch" is not "simple", possibly it means weeks/months of regression testing and validation, justification for it need, etc...
- corbet 8y ago
  Remember all the early A320 crashes? Do you worry about stepping onto an A320 now? Unless the problem turns out to be far deeper, I suspect that this, too, shall pass.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    Agreed. I don't think they're unsalvageable, but they're definitely unsafe in their current state, and trust will need to be rebuilt (a slow process). Boeing is to blame for most of this because of their design decisions, too.
  - mrtksn 8y ago
    It doesn't look like anything like the 737MAX crashes though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Airbus_A320_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... "an a320 crashes every two years" sounds quite different than "a brand new 737MAX crashes during take off every 6 months because of the faulty sensor thingy". Also a320 family of 8605 aircraft took the life of 1393 passengers in 30 years, 737MAX is at %30 of that in two years and 350 aircraft. 737MAX accidents look very brutal and specific. It doesn't look like "ironing out imperfections" but more like "this plane is broken, it falls off on take off" - regardless if that's the case, people see a pattern here.
    - syshax 8y ago
      Worth noting: 150 of the A320 count may be Germanwings Flight 9525 (unless you already accounted for this) - which was suicide by pilot. Not really fair to blame the plane in that case.
      - snowwrestler 8y ago
        It's not fair to blame the plane at all unless you're sure the crash was the plane's fault, but that isn't stopping most of the people in this thread from doing it.
        hannasanarion 8y ago
        Airplanes don't have the right to a trial of their peers with presumption of innocence. Two crashes within six months is very abnormal. Abnormalities are evidence of problems. Airline regulators are tasked with keeping people from dying, not with protecting manufacturers' feelings.
        snowwrestler 8y ago
        The Boeing 767 experienced three crashes between the months of September 2001 and April 2002. I think you can guess what caused the first two. You need more information than just a calendar and a model number to make determinations of flight safety.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  It's a revision of a model number. People will forget, if they remembered at all.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    But that's the thing, the 737 max isnt a revision of a model number. It has a very different airframe with different flight characteristics from other 737 models. Boeing used software to override and reinterpret pilot inputs so that the airplane behaves as if it were a 737, in order to cut costs on retraining. When that software fails, the pilots are suddenly flying a totally new airframe that would normally require additional certification with 0 experience.
    - thisacctforreal 8y ago
      The idea of there being a layer of software between the pilot's intentions and the aircraft's control input freaks me out.
      - crummy 8y ago
        Doesn't that describe fly by wire systems which describes most planes these days?
        hannasanarion 8y ago
        Most fly-by-wire systems implement the pilot's stated intention directly, though, is that not correct? This layer inbetween where the computer goes "actually what I think you REALLY meant to do is..." is novel in the 737 Max.
        cmurf 8y ago
        No. The intended behavior is a nose down nudge every 10s only when a) exceeding a certain angle of attack b) above a certain altitude and c) when flaps are retracted. It's second guessing only at a particular edge of the normal flight envelope to prevent it from departing that envelope. And all the various layers of protections in fly by wire airplanes do that - they second guess certain inputs to prevent edge cases. But in any case the input is going through software abstraction. Any apparent directness is part of that software behavior. I'll be interested what the software update due at the end of April entails exactly. I think every airplane should get the angle of attack sensors disagree indication, standard.
- idlewords 8y ago
  The 737 Max is probably the safest plane to fly right now. Pilots are not complacent people.
  - chimpburger 8y ago
    No. The 737 Max introduced a fundamental design weakness that was implemented for cost efficiency reasons only. The center of gravity is towards the rear, which makes the plane tend to tilt backwards, and requires an automatic system to compensate for that https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-evaluates-a-potential-design-flaw-on-boeings-737-max-after-lion-air-crash/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-e...
    - richjdsmith 8y ago
      This is the first time I have seen this. Really scary if that is what ended up being the cause. Won't bode well for Boeing.
      - rootusrootus 8y ago
        It's the first time you've heard it because there is a lot of BS floating around in the last few days, and it seems to be getting worse, not better.
        CamperBob2 8y ago
        So it's not true?
        FabHK 8y ago
        My understanding is that the issue is more one of the centre of thrust (of the engines), which is now further away from the centre of gravity, giving rise to a larger momentum.
        8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- gesman 8y ago
  99.9% of passengers cares more about the cost of ticket vs. airplane model
  - dev_north_east 8y ago
    Yeah I dunno about that. Sure they don't care about airplane model in general but this is fast becoming a known name and associated with crashing. In the past few days I've had my in-laws and my own grandma asking me to help check their planes for booked flights. You just need a bit more of the tabloids to run on it and this model plane is finished in the public's mind.
    - paublyrne 8y ago
      I think this is natural because it's a major news story right now.It seems likely that some upgrade will be made to the planes to address whatever issue they conclude they have, and once that's done and the planes are in the air again people will soon forget about it all.
  - dclowd9901 8y ago
    I must be very unique then. As someone who flies often and cares about making it there, I _have_ been booking recent flights to not take MAX aircraft, even at the inconvenience of multiple legs.
- ip26 8y ago
  If the root cause is straightforward, I would be inclined to expect once they figure it out it will never happen again, given all the attention.
mtgx 8y ago
Even Boeing itself started calling for the grounding of the Max 8: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/boeing-requests-faa-ground-the-737-as-the-president-pushes-an-emergency-order/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/boeing-requests-faa-ground... Something is terribly wrong when the regulator that's supposed to keep people safe is less willing to do that then the company that stands to lose the most from the bad image of a product.
- justin66 8y ago
  Boeing did it far too late to help themselves. Compare and contrast with Johnson & Johnson's handling of the 1982 Tylenol poison incidents. Tylenol immediately pulled the product off the shelves everywhere out of an abundance of caution and earned a lot of credit with the public. Boeing... yeah.
  - mikeyouse 8y ago
    Just in case anyone is under the presumption that J&J is a good company, that business school corporate responsibility case apparently didn't have a lasting impact on their culture. In recent years, there have been numerous cases of them covering up serious defects in their products while keeping them on sale: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/27/vaginal-mesh-implant-sold-despite-warnings-could-cause-pain-johnson-johnson https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/27/vaginal-mesh... https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/business/27hip.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/business/27hip.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-11/j-j-said-to-pay-2-2-billion-to-end-risperdal-sales-probe https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-11/j-j-said-...
    - delfinom 8y ago
      Honestly that's more of a sign of the times. People have gotten more greedy and immoral when running companies. Or just in general, have become complete cowards to admit they fucked up.
- blackflame7000 8y ago
  No Southwest and American airlines stand to lose the most. Nothing is worse for an airliner than a grounded jet. As an aside, do you know who actually owns most of the jets for an airliner? Banks like wells fargo and chase. They still expect leasing payments regardless if the plane is flying or not.
halfjoking 8y ago
I bet American and Southwest were receiving phone calls from customers cancelling their flights. Supposedly the profit margins for discount airlines are pretty slim, so if they can't fill all the seats what's the point? What's bad is that they had to wait for that to happen before they took action. It just makes it look like they'd choose profits over safety every time... as long as they can keep making profits.
- pintxo 8y ago
  Looks like SWA at least was very proactive already after the first crash. Supposedly their fleet of 737Max has been retrofitted with additional cockpit displays for (faulty) AoA values. And they have afaik also extended pilot training.
  - Zombieball 8y ago
    It’s a bit absurd that the mechanism to detect the failure is a paid upgrade!
paranoidrobot 8y ago
> the public didn't wish to fly on the Max 8 I certainly couldn't have been the only one to look at the airline I'm about to fly on and check that they didn't have any of the Max 8 variants in service.
- webkike 8y ago
  My father and I both did for our immediate flights.
smadurange 8y ago
Not sure if thats all to it. It seems rather curious that US grounding the aircraft (and Boeing advising to do so) right after about a day or so after black boxes being found. Also, Ethiopian authorities issued a statement about the pilots reporting flight control issues rather than any external factors. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have priliminary evidence that there's an issue with the aircraft.
dclowd9901 8y ago
April? I heard this morning it would be til the end of the year before the software was updated.

walkingolof 8y ago

The fix may be as simple as a patch, but the customer confidence in the plan is damaged, maybe beyond repair. I know I will look twice next time going on a trip which plane I end up on, I'm not sure I will go with a 737 Max anytime soon.

Kurtz79 8y ago
I have no direct experience with aviation software, but if it's similar to other highly regulated environments, a SW "patch" is not "simple", possibly it means weeks/months of regression testing and validation, justification for it need, etc...
corbet 8y ago
Remember all the early A320 crashes? Do you worry about stepping onto an A320 now? Unless the problem turns out to be far deeper, I suspect that this, too, shall pass.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Agreed. I don't think they're unsalvageable, but they're definitely unsafe in their current state, and trust will need to be rebuilt (a slow process). Boeing is to blame for most of this because of their design decisions, too.
- mrtksn 8y ago
  It doesn't look like anything like the 737MAX crashes though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Airbus_A320_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... "an a320 crashes every two years" sounds quite different than "a brand new 737MAX crashes during take off every 6 months because of the faulty sensor thingy". Also a320 family of 8605 aircraft took the life of 1393 passengers in 30 years, 737MAX is at %30 of that in two years and 350 aircraft. 737MAX accidents look very brutal and specific. It doesn't look like "ironing out imperfections" but more like "this plane is broken, it falls off on take off" - regardless if that's the case, people see a pattern here.
  - syshax 8y ago
    Worth noting: 150 of the A320 count may be Germanwings Flight 9525 (unless you already accounted for this) - which was suicide by pilot. Not really fair to blame the plane in that case.
    - snowwrestler 8y ago
      It's not fair to blame the plane at all unless you're sure the crash was the plane's fault, but that isn't stopping most of the people in this thread from doing it.
      - hannasanarion 8y ago
        Airplanes don't have the right to a trial of their peers with presumption of innocence. Two crashes within six months is very abnormal. Abnormalities are evidence of problems. Airline regulators are tasked with keeping people from dying, not with protecting manufacturers' feelings.
        snowwrestler 8y ago
        The Boeing 767 experienced three crashes between the months of September 2001 and April 2002. I think you can guess what caused the first two. You need more information than just a calendar and a model number to make determinations of flight safety.
lallysingh 8y ago
It's a revision of a model number. People will forget, if they remembered at all.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  But that's the thing, the 737 max isnt a revision of a model number. It has a very different airframe with different flight characteristics from other 737 models. Boeing used software to override and reinterpret pilot inputs so that the airplane behaves as if it were a 737, in order to cut costs on retraining. When that software fails, the pilots are suddenly flying a totally new airframe that would normally require additional certification with 0 experience.
  - thisacctforreal 8y ago
    The idea of there being a layer of software between the pilot's intentions and the aircraft's control input freaks me out.
    - crummy 8y ago
      Doesn't that describe fly by wire systems which describes most planes these days?
      - hannasanarion 8y ago
        Most fly-by-wire systems implement the pilot's stated intention directly, though, is that not correct? This layer inbetween where the computer goes "actually what I think you REALLY meant to do is..." is novel in the 737 Max.
        cmurf 8y ago
        No. The intended behavior is a nose down nudge every 10s only when a) exceeding a certain angle of attack b) above a certain altitude and c) when flaps are retracted. It's second guessing only at a particular edge of the normal flight envelope to prevent it from departing that envelope. And all the various layers of protections in fly by wire airplanes do that - they second guess certain inputs to prevent edge cases. But in any case the input is going through software abstraction. Any apparent directness is part of that software behavior. I'll be interested what the software update due at the end of April entails exactly. I think every airplane should get the angle of attack sensors disagree indication, standard.
idlewords 8y ago
The 737 Max is probably the safest plane to fly right now. Pilots are not complacent people.
- chimpburger 8y ago
  No. The 737 Max introduced a fundamental design weakness that was implemented for cost efficiency reasons only. The center of gravity is towards the rear, which makes the plane tend to tilt backwards, and requires an automatic system to compensate for that https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-evaluates-a-potential-design-flaw-on-boeings-737-max-after-lion-air-crash/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-e...
  - richjdsmith 8y ago
    This is the first time I have seen this. Really scary if that is what ended up being the cause. Won't bode well for Boeing.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      It's the first time you've heard it because there is a lot of BS floating around in the last few days, and it seems to be getting worse, not better.
      - CamperBob2 8y ago
        So it's not true?
        FabHK 8y ago
        My understanding is that the issue is more one of the centre of thrust (of the engines), which is now further away from the centre of gravity, giving rise to a larger momentum.
        8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gesman 8y ago
99.9% of passengers cares more about the cost of ticket vs. airplane model
- dev_north_east 8y ago
  Yeah I dunno about that. Sure they don't care about airplane model in general but this is fast becoming a known name and associated with crashing. In the past few days I've had my in-laws and my own grandma asking me to help check their planes for booked flights. You just need a bit more of the tabloids to run on it and this model plane is finished in the public's mind.
  - paublyrne 8y ago
    I think this is natural because it's a major news story right now.It seems likely that some upgrade will be made to the planes to address whatever issue they conclude they have, and once that's done and the planes are in the air again people will soon forget about it all.
- dclowd9901 8y ago
  I must be very unique then. As someone who flies often and cares about making it there, I _have_ been booking recent flights to not take MAX aircraft, even at the inconvenience of multiple legs.
ip26 8y ago
If the root cause is straightforward, I would be inclined to expect once they figure it out it will never happen again, given all the attention.

mtgx 8y ago

Even Boeing itself started calling for the grounding of the Max 8: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/boeing-requests-faa-ground-the-737-as-the-president-pushes-an-emergency-order/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/boeing-requests-faa-ground... Something is terribly wrong when the regulator that's supposed to keep people safe is less willing to do that then the company that stands to lose the most from the bad image of a product.

justin66 8y ago
Boeing did it far too late to help themselves. Compare and contrast with Johnson & Johnson's handling of the 1982 Tylenol poison incidents. Tylenol immediately pulled the product off the shelves everywhere out of an abundance of caution and earned a lot of credit with the public. Boeing... yeah.
- mikeyouse 8y ago
  Just in case anyone is under the presumption that J&J is a good company, that business school corporate responsibility case apparently didn't have a lasting impact on their culture. In recent years, there have been numerous cases of them covering up serious defects in their products while keeping them on sale: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/27/vaginal-mesh-implant-sold-despite-warnings-could-cause-pain-johnson-johnson https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/27/vaginal-mesh... https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/business/27hip.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/business/27hip.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-11/j-j-said-to-pay-2-2-billion-to-end-risperdal-sales-probe https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-11/j-j-said-...
  - delfinom 8y ago
    Honestly that's more of a sign of the times. People have gotten more greedy and immoral when running companies. Or just in general, have become complete cowards to admit they fucked up.
blackflame7000 8y ago
No Southwest and American airlines stand to lose the most. Nothing is worse for an airliner than a grounded jet. As an aside, do you know who actually owns most of the jets for an airliner? Banks like wells fargo and chase. They still expect leasing payments regardless if the plane is flying or not.

halfjoking 8y ago

I bet American and Southwest were receiving phone calls from customers cancelling their flights. Supposedly the profit margins for discount airlines are pretty slim, so if they can't fill all the seats what's the point? What's bad is that they had to wait for that to happen before they took action. It just makes it look like they'd choose profits over safety every time... as long as they can keep making profits.

pintxo 8y ago
Looks like SWA at least was very proactive already after the first crash. Supposedly their fleet of 737Max has been retrofitted with additional cockpit displays for (faulty) AoA values. And they have afaik also extended pilot training.
- Zombieball 8y ago
  It’s a bit absurd that the mechanism to detect the failure is a paid upgrade!

paranoidrobot 8y ago

> the public didn't wish to fly on the Max 8 I certainly couldn't have been the only one to look at the airline I'm about to fly on and check that they didn't have any of the Max 8 variants in service.

webkike 8y ago
My father and I both did for our immediate flights.

smadurange 8y ago

Not sure if thats all to it. It seems rather curious that US grounding the aircraft (and Boeing advising to do so) right after about a day or so after black boxes being found. Also, Ethiopian authorities issued a statement about the pilots reporting flight control issues rather than any external factors. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have priliminary evidence that there's an issue with the aircraft.

dclowd9901 8y ago

April? I heard this morning it would be til the end of the year before the software was updated.