7 ms·

Ralph Nader: Greedy Boeing’s Avoidable Design and Software Time Bombs

70 points by walkingolof 8y ago

PaulHoule 8y ago
As for a flyer's bill of rights it would be nice to have more widebody flights or at least something small but comfortable like the Embraer 195. What's been lost in this discussion is that the 737 is based on the 1958-era 707 in it's major configuration -- with its circular fuselage it is not built with compatibility with the human body in mind so of course you are going to feel like flying is hell after a transcontinental trip on what was originally intended as a regional jet. Even if you survive the flight on a 737 you are going feel like you're dead. Since the 737 and A330 represent the vast bulk of planes built, anyone concerned about the environmental impacts of air travel (e.g. climate change, noise) would want to see the 737 get a clean sheet design like the 787.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I’ve never noticed a difference in comfort between different airplanes. What matters is the seat, and they’re pretty much all the same (and, when different, this does not depend on the type of plane they’re in). Why would I care about fuselage cross section?
  - rayiner 8y ago
    The narrow body gives you less room to work with. Delta Economy seats are 17.2” in the 737, 17.9” in the 767, and 18.5” in the 777.
    - Alupis 8y ago
      This is entirely up to Delta though (or any airline). Delta could have easily decided to fill Economy seats on their 737's with 18.5" wide seats... and then had a 2-and-2 configuration instead of 3-and-2 or 3-and-3. Same is true for the 777, they could go with smaller seats and pack in more seats per row. Likely, the 777 is used for longer flights and they decided a more comfortable seat for an 8-16 hour flight is worth a few less passengers. Or, the 777 might be overweight if filled with too many passengers, so larger seats are justified. At the end of the day, it's the economics of making these flights - airlines run on notoriously thin margins, and flying a passenger jet is very expensive.
    - Johnny555 8y ago
      United has a few configurations for 777 economy seating - a 3-3-3 configuration with 18.3" of width and a 3-4-3 with 17.1" of width. I've flown the 3-4-3 one and will never fly it again, it is super cramped, and even the few inches of extra leg room in economy plus can't make up for the narrow seats. So being a wide/narrow body jet doesn't really relate to seat width, it's all based on how many seats the carrier can cram in. https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Airlines_Boeing_777-200_6.php https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air... https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Airlines_Boeing_777-200_9.php https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air...
    - mikeash 8y ago
      That makes no sense. Seat width is fuselage width divided by number of seats, minus room for the aisle(s). Wider seats means fewer seats. The airlines make that trade off based on what they think people will tolerate.
- Fomite 8y ago
  A320.
- jdavis703 8y ago
  If airlines could fill up the seats I’m sure they’d fly more wide bodies. Unfortunately people want direct flights between all kinds of small metro areas. As such even routes like SF to DC only get widebodies at peak travel times like Thanksgiving and July 4th (at least those are the only times I’m able to book the United 777s for demostic flights).
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Direct flights and flights more often. There’s more than enough DC-SF traffic to fill a couple of 777s a day, but people would rather have six 737s or A320s with a wider variety of departure times to choose from.
    - asdfadsfgfdda 8y ago
      I would also rather board the plane in 20 minutes instead of 50+ minutes for a widebody, not to mention deplaning and waiting for checked bags.
    - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
      I personally wouldn't. I need an early and a late flight. The driver for all the departure times is, again, efficiency and money. If you had 777 flights from DC to SF and SF to DC at 6:00AM and 6:00PM, I'd be content, and I think you would satisfy most needs if everyone could fit on those flights. But then you have a 777 idle for 16 hours a day. If, instead, you had CRJ200s (that can't handle the morning and evening rush) running all day as fast as you can turn them around, they're never idle. I guess the final point is that people vote with their wallets and fly on the airline with the cheaper CRJ200 tickets...but I wish it wasn't that way.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        You need an early flight and a late flight. Bob needs flights in the middle of the day. Jane prefers mid afternoon. Any given individual only needs one flight at one time, but passengers as a whole want options.
      - 8y ago
- Alupis 8y ago
  Unfortunately, what you want is completely incompatible with the price you're willing to pay for an airline ticket... and likely the amount of time you wish to spend traveling (hub-and-spoke model takes a lot longer than direct flights, due to layovers, boarding and deplaning, etc, and offers fewer departure/arrival times). Also, a modern 737 can be very comfortable - it depends on the interior layout and choices the Airline (not Boeing) made when leasing the aircraft. Airlines are responsible for the interiors...
- erentz 8y ago
  > it would be nice to have more widebody flights You'll be a fan of the new midmarket airplane Boeing is planning at the moment then. It's really hard to think of an ideal time that Boeing could reasonably have done a clean sheet 737. They're constrained in how many programs they can run at a time. After the 777, we had the huge 787 program which pushed boundaries a lot. Then we run into this situation now where a clean sheet 737 was not going to sell and airlines didn't want to wait and retrain their pilots, so they would've switched to the A320 making a replacement 737 untenable at this time. It seems Boeing would've needed to somehow go back in time and do a clean sheet 737 around the same time as the 757/767 program. Which would've been amazing if they'd done it, but the 737 was still a perfectly viable aircraft back then so how could they justify it.
- FTA 8y ago
  I usually have less severe jetlag on the 737 MAX 9s compared to the Airbus fleet. I think it's the level at which they pressurize the cabins. In any case, like others have said, it really depends on the airline and seating configuration therein. Also regarding the climate change, as I understand it, the MAX 9 changes were designed to _increase_ fuel efficiency.
erentz 8y ago
> Most notoriously, the airlines, after the hijacks to Cuba in the late Sixties and early Seventies, made sure that Congress and the FAA did not require hardened cockpit doors and stronger latches on all aircraft, costing a modest $3000 per plane. Then the 9/11 massacre happened, a grisly consequence of non-regulation, pushed by right wing corporatist advocacy centers. This is a curious and very sad bit of history I was unaware of.
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  Well, those very same strengthened doors actually also caused around 150 deaths. https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/26/europe/france-germanwings-plane-crash-main/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/26/europe/france-germanwings...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- detaro 8y ago
  Wasn't part of it that before 9/11 a hijacker using the plane as a weapon or wanting to kill everyone wasn't the expected, and thus the assumed "best" route was to comply (as not to provoke the hijacker to start killing hostages to increase the pressure), go wherever they want and hope law enforcement will sort it out? E.g. the cited Cuba hijackers didn't very often kill people. Some of them might have given up when unable to get to flight crew, but others might have used more force to get what they wanted.
  - erentz 8y ago
    That's always been my understanding of it. Hijackings were common in Europe for example and that's how it almost always went down. (Not too familiar with the history of hijackings in USA, but sounds the same.) Then we saw the change right on 9/11 when passengers on UA93 learned their hijackers intended fate and fought back.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I’m going to put a big fat Citation Needed on that one. I don’t see how it would have helped in the 1970s. The hijackers take over the rest of the plane and say they’re going to execute one passenger every hour unless the pilots take them to Cuba. Are we expecting the pilots to say, nope, we’re safe, execute whoever you want? 9/11 was a game changer becasue it was a completely new kind of hijacking where the hijackers have no demands and everybody dies quickly if the hijacking goes according to plan. Reinforced doors are useful there, becasue threats to the passengers don’t hold weight when you know they’ll all die anyway if you open the door. That was very much not the case in the 70s.
ajross 8y ago
Boeing's design process was a shady mess for sure, but safety goes all the way down and up the stack. Every failure mode should have some level of redundancy and double checking. So, yeah, a manufacturer tried to game the certification process to save a few bucks (and months) on a new aircraft design. That's a failure. But it's not an unforseen one! The safety value for manufacturer shenannigans is supposed to have been the certification process itself. And I gotta say the worst failings here are with the FAA. At any point someone could have looked at the process and seen: 1. They changed the engine 2. They had to move it because it was too close to the ground, but they couldn't stretch the landing gear and keep the type certification. 3. So they moved the engines forward and up 4. But now the aircraft was less stable, and they couldn't change the tail design and keep the type certification. 5. So they did software-managed stability augmentation instead 6. But (that's right) they couldn't change the autopilot and keep the type certification. 7. So they did it with the trim, which had never operated under autonomous control before. I'm sure I have a few of those details wrong, but the point is that any bureaucrat familiar with the aircraft could have seen that this was a ridiculous house of cards they were playing with the type certificate. I mean, one change with one workaround, sure. But a cascade like this is just obviously a perversion of the process. Yet no one said something. Or if they did they were overruled. The way the built-in incentives work, it's not feasible to rely on 100% forthright and honorable manufacturers. So we have a regulatory body to catch those failures for us, and it failed.
- patagonia 8y ago
  As a passenger, if these were the trade-offs Boeing made, my stomach just dropped. I don’t consider myself naive as to which trade offs corporations might consider fair game to increase profits, but if,,, changing engine placement in spite of impact to stability and such.... can anyone else talk to this. I’m actually bothered by this. This sounds like dangerous engineering.
  - asynchronous13 8y ago
    Everything in engineering is a trade off. The changes that were made were not inherently dangerous, but the certification process on those changes fell apart for a variety of reasons. If the certification process had been followed correctly, these planes would be flying safely. The FAA is underfunded. A pro-business administration applied pressure to help Boeing certify more rapidly. Due to time and money pressures, many things that should have been performed by the FAA safety inspectors were actually performed by Boeing engineers. The safety assessment was performed on incorrect numbers! (Boeing estimated some parameters and performed safety assessment. Then those parameters were updated after flight testing, but the safety assessment was not re-performed with the updated numbers! That's a huge problem in the process.)
vermontdevil 8y ago
Boeing’s culture needs to change. They have a history of shady behavior. The espionage against Lockheed Space that lead to the ULA formation The rudder denials with 737 before this current crisis. The 767 lease debacle. I’m sure I’ve forgotten more. They keep getting away with it and it needs to stop.
- lemoncucumber 8y ago
  There was the 787 lithium ion battery fires too
- mhandley 8y ago
  The Boeing 737 bear straps fiasco is pretty sobering reading too: https://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/political-social-justice/boeing-parts-scandal.html https://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/political-social-justic... https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/12/20101214104637901849.html https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/12/...
yingw787 8y ago
Does the FAA require civilian commercial airliners to have some sort of catch-all (e.g. positive stability if you kill all power and lower a ram-air turbine and assuming your flaps aren't jammed)? I don't know if that would have saved lives on those flights, because it was high enough to crash and low enough to not turn around to the airport or get to safety, but I would think a gliding plane and some base assumptions about the inherent flight characteristics of their plane would give the pilots a few precious seconds to think (like the miracle on the Hudson). Physics-based problems should have physics-based solutions. If the engine placement and weight distribution caused an inherent problem with the stability of the aircraft, a rule like that might have given Boeing pause, no?
- ams6110 8y ago
  Yes, in particular the 737 is a cables and levers and pullys design. It can fly totally manually. If the pilots had realized they had a trim problem, and switched off the electric trim, and trimmed manually (literally turning a crank in the cockpit) they would not have crashed.
Johnny555 8y ago
Should the airlines share some of the blame for not paying for the $80K disagree light for the two sensors on their $100M plane? If I don't pay for the $3K automated emergency braking upgrade for my car, is it Honda's fault if I rear-end someone and die? It doesn't cost them $3K for what's mostly software and a couple hundred dollars of sensors, should they have bundled that obvious safety feature into the price of the car and not made it an optional upgrade?
- torpfactory 8y ago
  I personally don’t think safety equipment should be optional when they are relatively inexpensive for the manufacturer to implement. Boeing were clearly viewing this as an opportunity to get a bit more money out of a customer as pure profit margin.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    That's part of the problem with the debate about this though: that's a never ending slope. What constitutes relatively inexpensive for the 1,000s of parts in an aircraft? There's a cost to human lives. We can quibble about what it is, but there's clearly a point where it is unreasonable and worse for society as a whole to make planes safer but more expensive. They got it wrong here. But it's non-trivial to figure out without hindsight.
    - torpfactory 8y ago
      I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where they decided whether the feature should be standard equipment or an option.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        I guess that's the cynical engineer in me too. Boeing is getting a lot of flack, but you know the airlines and FAA were in that proverbial room too. And I doubt American et al. were clamoring for more extensive mandatory retraining.
llamataboot 8y ago
'm a bleeding-heart socialist, actually an anarchist, far to the left of Ralph Nader and I /still/ find his rhetorical style obnoxious and not useful. We can have a discussion about how de-regulations and profit motives may have contributed to this disaster, we have even throw in ideas about regulations and corporate responsibility, but we have to recognize that software at this scale and or these purposes is hard, and there's no reason why the govt may be better at it than Boeing, and the discussion about what the risk/reward ratio should be for society as a whole is super complicated and we don't nec have a way to have it. TLDR: I'm an anarcho-socialist programmer. Boeing may or may not be evil and de-regulation and the profit motive probably eff things up in the current socio-economic sphere, but Ralph Nader doesn't lend much to the conversation here.
colechristensen 8y ago
The NTSB does and has done a fantastic job keeping flight safe, they are the sorts of people we should be looking to for what went wrong and how to fix it. Not politicians, Ralph Nader, or armchair engineers on forums. Flying is complex and exposing the correct instrumentation, controls, and training to pilots is a hard problem. There will be mistakes and the important thing is to learn from them. The industry and regulators are very good at this.
liber8 8y ago
Nader may be right about some of this, but just claiming that evil "reckless" Boeing executives caused this is pretty silly. Boeing execs are probably the least reckless execs in any field, because even tiny failure rates can have massive consequences. What's scariest about this is that it highlights the fact that many pilots are just regular schmoes. Average intelligence, adequate training. That's fine 99.9% of the time, when equipment failure isn't catastrophic. But it's crazy how many, when they're actually faced with catastrophic failure, forget how to fly the damn plane. The runaway trim problem has been happening for 50 years. This isn't new, or unique to the MAX (same thing can happen on the small jets I fly). Anytime something like this (or any other autopilot failure) happens, every pilot is trained to disengage the system and fly the goddamn plane. Apparently the pilots on these flights didn't know how to do that. It's tragic. For some more reading on the other end of the spectrum, see: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/march/20/congressman-concerned-about-foreign-pilot-training https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/march/20/c... (this is probably equally as bombastic as Nader's article, but offers some good perspective from that side) edit: Apparently Nader's niece died in one the crashes, which would certainly explain his outrage: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/22/ralph-naders-niece-died-in-one-of-the-boeing-crashes-now-hes-calling-for-the-737-max-8-to-be-grounded.html https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/22/ralph-naders-niece-die...
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  I wouldn't believe anything Nader says. He has an agenda, and crafts his narratives to fit it. Nader's article title makes his bias and agenda clear.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Didn’t the pilots in the lion air crash shut off autopilot though? The issue was that they were unable to diagnose it as a problem that required disengaging the trim system.
- asynchronous13 8y ago
  > But it's crazy how many, when they're actually faced with catastrophic failure, forget how to fly the damn plane. Your comment makes me sad. Especially since there will be many other people who come to a similar conclusion without adequate information. The runaway trim problem and the new MCAS problem are superficially similar, but the symptoms are distinctly different. The runaway trim manifests itself with a continuous deflection of the trim. Pilots are trained to recognize this symptom and compensate. The new MCAS also affects the trim, but it is engaged in repeated nose-down commands. It has fundamentally different symptoms compared to the older and more widely known runaway condition. There is no absolute reference on the position of the stabilizer. It is a wheel that turns, so a pilot must watch that wheel continuously to know if it keeps turning or if it turns periodically. The controls column has force feedback. The pilot was pulling back with ~50 lbs of force to fight the angle of the trim. Imagine holding a 50 lb dog while simultaneously trying to review emergency procedures to find the source of the problem. The pilot was flying the damn plane, and the symptoms of this problem were different.
cliveb 8y ago
From applied control theory I intuitively knew that a cascade of issues resulting in a system instability had overwhelmed the pilots. I now see this arrogance of data science based software engineering being inserted into business, industry and social systems. As an abstract example Facebook's attempt to stabilize the politics on its platform through algorithms. More concretely in the hydro dam control systems in the Pacific Northwest. Specifically in this damned Boeing 737 Max control system. Control systems need rigorous testing through simulation not accidents.

70 points by walkingolof 8y ago

As for a flyer's bill of rights it would be nice to have more widebody flights or at least something small but comfortable like the Embraer 195. What's been lost in this discussion is that the 737 is based on the 1958-era 707 in it's major configuration -- with its circular fuselage it is not built with compatibility with the human body in mind so of course you are going to feel like flying is hell after a transcontinental trip on what was originally intended as a regional jet. Even if you survive the flight on a 737 you are going feel like you're dead. Since the 737 and A330 represent the vast bulk of planes built, anyone concerned about the environmental impacts of air travel (e.g. climate change, noise) would want to see the 737 get a clean sheet design like the 787.

mikeash 8y ago
I’ve never noticed a difference in comfort between different airplanes. What matters is the seat, and they’re pretty much all the same (and, when different, this does not depend on the type of plane they’re in). Why would I care about fuselage cross section?
- rayiner 8y ago
  The narrow body gives you less room to work with. Delta Economy seats are 17.2” in the 737, 17.9” in the 767, and 18.5” in the 777.
  - Alupis 8y ago
    This is entirely up to Delta though (or any airline). Delta could have easily decided to fill Economy seats on their 737's with 18.5" wide seats... and then had a 2-and-2 configuration instead of 3-and-2 or 3-and-3. Same is true for the 777, they could go with smaller seats and pack in more seats per row. Likely, the 777 is used for longer flights and they decided a more comfortable seat for an 8-16 hour flight is worth a few less passengers. Or, the 777 might be overweight if filled with too many passengers, so larger seats are justified. At the end of the day, it's the economics of making these flights - airlines run on notoriously thin margins, and flying a passenger jet is very expensive.
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    United has a few configurations for 777 economy seating - a 3-3-3 configuration with 18.3" of width and a 3-4-3 with 17.1" of width. I've flown the 3-4-3 one and will never fly it again, it is super cramped, and even the few inches of extra leg room in economy plus can't make up for the narrow seats. So being a wide/narrow body jet doesn't really relate to seat width, it's all based on how many seats the carrier can cram in. https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Airlines_Boeing_777-200_6.php https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air... https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Airlines_Boeing_777-200_9.php https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Air...
  - mikeash 8y ago
    That makes no sense. Seat width is fuselage width divided by number of seats, minus room for the aisle(s). Wider seats means fewer seats. The airlines make that trade off based on what they think people will tolerate.
Fomite 8y ago
A320.
jdavis703 8y ago
If airlines could fill up the seats I’m sure they’d fly more wide bodies. Unfortunately people want direct flights between all kinds of small metro areas. As such even routes like SF to DC only get widebodies at peak travel times like Thanksgiving and July 4th (at least those are the only times I’m able to book the United 777s for demostic flights).
- mikeash 8y ago
  Direct flights and flights more often. There’s more than enough DC-SF traffic to fill a couple of 777s a day, but people would rather have six 737s or A320s with a wider variety of departure times to choose from.
  - asdfadsfgfdda 8y ago
    I would also rather board the plane in 20 minutes instead of 50+ minutes for a widebody, not to mention deplaning and waiting for checked bags.
  - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    I personally wouldn't. I need an early and a late flight. The driver for all the departure times is, again, efficiency and money. If you had 777 flights from DC to SF and SF to DC at 6:00AM and 6:00PM, I'd be content, and I think you would satisfy most needs if everyone could fit on those flights. But then you have a 777 idle for 16 hours a day. If, instead, you had CRJ200s (that can't handle the morning and evening rush) running all day as fast as you can turn them around, they're never idle. I guess the final point is that people vote with their wallets and fly on the airline with the cheaper CRJ200 tickets...but I wish it wasn't that way.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      You need an early flight and a late flight. Bob needs flights in the middle of the day. Jane prefers mid afternoon. Any given individual only needs one flight at one time, but passengers as a whole want options.
    - 8y ago
Alupis 8y ago
Unfortunately, what you want is completely incompatible with the price you're willing to pay for an airline ticket... and likely the amount of time you wish to spend traveling (hub-and-spoke model takes a lot longer than direct flights, due to layovers, boarding and deplaning, etc, and offers fewer departure/arrival times). Also, a modern 737 can be very comfortable - it depends on the interior layout and choices the Airline (not Boeing) made when leasing the aircraft. Airlines are responsible for the interiors...
erentz 8y ago
> it would be nice to have more widebody flights You'll be a fan of the new midmarket airplane Boeing is planning at the moment then. It's really hard to think of an ideal time that Boeing could reasonably have done a clean sheet 737. They're constrained in how many programs they can run at a time. After the 777, we had the huge 787 program which pushed boundaries a lot. Then we run into this situation now where a clean sheet 737 was not going to sell and airlines didn't want to wait and retrain their pilots, so they would've switched to the A320 making a replacement 737 untenable at this time. It seems Boeing would've needed to somehow go back in time and do a clean sheet 737 around the same time as the 757/767 program. Which would've been amazing if they'd done it, but the 737 was still a perfectly viable aircraft back then so how could they justify it.
FTA 8y ago
I usually have less severe jetlag on the 737 MAX 9s compared to the Airbus fleet. I think it's the level at which they pressurize the cabins. In any case, like others have said, it really depends on the airline and seating configuration therein. Also regarding the climate change, as I understand it, the MAX 9 changes were designed to _increase_ fuel efficiency.

erentz 8y ago

> Most notoriously, the airlines, after the hijacks to Cuba in the late Sixties and early Seventies, made sure that Congress and the FAA did not require hardened cockpit doors and stronger latches on all aircraft, costing a modest $3000 per plane. Then the 9/11 massacre happened, a grisly consequence of non-regulation, pushed by right wing corporatist advocacy centers. This is a curious and very sad bit of history I was unaware of.

iforgotpassword 8y ago
Well, those very same strengthened doors actually also caused around 150 deaths. https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/26/europe/france-germanwings-plane-crash-main/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/26/europe/france-germanwings...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
detaro 8y ago
Wasn't part of it that before 9/11 a hijacker using the plane as a weapon or wanting to kill everyone wasn't the expected, and thus the assumed "best" route was to comply (as not to provoke the hijacker to start killing hostages to increase the pressure), go wherever they want and hope law enforcement will sort it out? E.g. the cited Cuba hijackers didn't very often kill people. Some of them might have given up when unable to get to flight crew, but others might have used more force to get what they wanted.
- erentz 8y ago
  That's always been my understanding of it. Hijackings were common in Europe for example and that's how it almost always went down. (Not too familiar with the history of hijackings in USA, but sounds the same.) Then we saw the change right on 9/11 when passengers on UA93 learned their hijackers intended fate and fought back.
mikeash 8y ago
I’m going to put a big fat Citation Needed on that one. I don’t see how it would have helped in the 1970s. The hijackers take over the rest of the plane and say they’re going to execute one passenger every hour unless the pilots take them to Cuba. Are we expecting the pilots to say, nope, we’re safe, execute whoever you want? 9/11 was a game changer becasue it was a completely new kind of hijacking where the hijackers have no demands and everybody dies quickly if the hijacking goes according to plan. Reinforced doors are useful there, becasue threats to the passengers don’t hold weight when you know they’ll all die anyway if you open the door. That was very much not the case in the 70s.

ajross 8y ago

Boeing's design process was a shady mess for sure, but safety goes all the way down and up the stack. Every failure mode should have some level of redundancy and double checking. So, yeah, a manufacturer tried to game the certification process to save a few bucks (and months) on a new aircraft design. That's a failure. But it's not an unforseen one! The safety value for manufacturer shenannigans is supposed to have been the certification process itself. And I gotta say the worst failings here are with the FAA. At any point someone could have looked at the process and seen: 1. They changed the engine 2. They had to move it because it was too close to the ground, but they couldn't stretch the landing gear and keep the type certification. 3. So they moved the engines forward and up 4. But now the aircraft was less stable, and they couldn't change the tail design and keep the type certification. 5. So they did software-managed stability augmentation instead 6. But (that's right) they couldn't change the autopilot and keep the type certification. 7. So they did it with the trim, which had never operated under autonomous control before. I'm sure I have a few of those details wrong, but the point is that any bureaucrat familiar with the aircraft could have seen that this was a ridiculous house of cards they were playing with the type certificate. I mean, one change with one workaround, sure. But a cascade like this is just obviously a perversion of the process. Yet no one said something. Or if they did they were overruled. The way the built-in incentives work, it's not feasible to rely on 100% forthright and honorable manufacturers. So we have a regulatory body to catch those failures for us, and it failed.

patagonia 8y ago
As a passenger, if these were the trade-offs Boeing made, my stomach just dropped. I don’t consider myself naive as to which trade offs corporations might consider fair game to increase profits, but if,,, changing engine placement in spite of impact to stability and such.... can anyone else talk to this. I’m actually bothered by this. This sounds like dangerous engineering.
- asynchronous13 8y ago
  Everything in engineering is a trade off. The changes that were made were not inherently dangerous, but the certification process on those changes fell apart for a variety of reasons. If the certification process had been followed correctly, these planes would be flying safely. The FAA is underfunded. A pro-business administration applied pressure to help Boeing certify more rapidly. Due to time and money pressures, many things that should have been performed by the FAA safety inspectors were actually performed by Boeing engineers. The safety assessment was performed on incorrect numbers! (Boeing estimated some parameters and performed safety assessment. Then those parameters were updated after flight testing, but the safety assessment was not re-performed with the updated numbers! That's a huge problem in the process.)

vermontdevil 8y ago

Boeing’s culture needs to change. They have a history of shady behavior. The espionage against Lockheed Space that lead to the ULA formation The rudder denials with 737 before this current crisis. The 767 lease debacle. I’m sure I’ve forgotten more. They keep getting away with it and it needs to stop.

lemoncucumber 8y ago
There was the 787 lithium ion battery fires too
mhandley 8y ago
The Boeing 737 bear straps fiasco is pretty sobering reading too: https://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/political-social-justice/boeing-parts-scandal.html https://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/political-social-justic... https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/12/20101214104637901849.html https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/12/...

yingw787 8y ago

Does the FAA require civilian commercial airliners to have some sort of catch-all (e.g. positive stability if you kill all power and lower a ram-air turbine and assuming your flaps aren't jammed)? I don't know if that would have saved lives on those flights, because it was high enough to crash and low enough to not turn around to the airport or get to safety, but I would think a gliding plane and some base assumptions about the inherent flight characteristics of their plane would give the pilots a few precious seconds to think (like the miracle on the Hudson). Physics-based problems should have physics-based solutions. If the engine placement and weight distribution caused an inherent problem with the stability of the aircraft, a rule like that might have given Boeing pause, no?

ams6110 8y ago
Yes, in particular the 737 is a cables and levers and pullys design. It can fly totally manually. If the pilots had realized they had a trim problem, and switched off the electric trim, and trimmed manually (literally turning a crank in the cockpit) they would not have crashed.

Johnny555 8y ago

Should the airlines share some of the blame for not paying for the $80K disagree light for the two sensors on their $100M plane? If I don't pay for the $3K automated emergency braking upgrade for my car, is it Honda's fault if I rear-end someone and die? It doesn't cost them $3K for what's mostly software and a couple hundred dollars of sensors, should they have bundled that obvious safety feature into the price of the car and not made it an optional upgrade?

torpfactory 8y ago
I personally don’t think safety equipment should be optional when they are relatively inexpensive for the manufacturer to implement. Boeing were clearly viewing this as an opportunity to get a bit more money out of a customer as pure profit margin.
- ethbro 8y ago
  That's part of the problem with the debate about this though: that's a never ending slope. What constitutes relatively inexpensive for the 1,000s of parts in an aircraft? There's a cost to human lives. We can quibble about what it is, but there's clearly a point where it is unreasonable and worse for society as a whole to make planes safer but more expensive. They got it wrong here. But it's non-trivial to figure out without hindsight.
  - torpfactory 8y ago
    I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where they decided whether the feature should be standard equipment or an option.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      I guess that's the cynical engineer in me too. Boeing is getting a lot of flack, but you know the airlines and FAA were in that proverbial room too. And I doubt American et al. were clamoring for more extensive mandatory retraining.

llamataboot 8y ago

'm a bleeding-heart socialist, actually an anarchist, far to the left of Ralph Nader and I /still/ find his rhetorical style obnoxious and not useful. We can have a discussion about how de-regulations and profit motives may have contributed to this disaster, we have even throw in ideas about regulations and corporate responsibility, but we have to recognize that software at this scale and or these purposes is hard, and there's no reason why the govt may be better at it than Boeing, and the discussion about what the risk/reward ratio should be for society as a whole is super complicated and we don't nec have a way to have it. TLDR: I'm an anarcho-socialist programmer. Boeing may or may not be evil and de-regulation and the profit motive probably eff things up in the current socio-economic sphere, but Ralph Nader doesn't lend much to the conversation here.

colechristensen 8y ago

The NTSB does and has done a fantastic job keeping flight safe, they are the sorts of people we should be looking to for what went wrong and how to fix it. Not politicians, Ralph Nader, or armchair engineers on forums. Flying is complex and exposing the correct instrumentation, controls, and training to pilots is a hard problem. There will be mistakes and the important thing is to learn from them. The industry and regulators are very good at this.

liber8 8y ago

Nader may be right about some of this, but just claiming that evil "reckless" Boeing executives caused this is pretty silly. Boeing execs are probably the least reckless execs in any field, because even tiny failure rates can have massive consequences. What's scariest about this is that it highlights the fact that many pilots are just regular schmoes. Average intelligence, adequate training. That's fine 99.9% of the time, when equipment failure isn't catastrophic. But it's crazy how many, when they're actually faced with catastrophic failure, forget how to fly the damn plane. The runaway trim problem has been happening for 50 years. This isn't new, or unique to the MAX (same thing can happen on the small jets I fly). Anytime something like this (or any other autopilot failure) happens, every pilot is trained to disengage the system and fly the goddamn plane. Apparently the pilots on these flights didn't know how to do that. It's tragic. For some more reading on the other end of the spectrum, see: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/march/20/congressman-concerned-about-foreign-pilot-training https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/march/20/c... (this is probably equally as bombastic as Nader's article, but offers some good perspective from that side) edit: Apparently Nader's niece died in one the crashes, which would certainly explain his outrage: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/22/ralph-naders-niece-died-in-one-of-the-boeing-crashes-now-hes-calling-for-the-737-max-8-to-be-grounded.html https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/22/ralph-naders-niece-die...

skookumchuck 8y ago
I wouldn't believe anything Nader says. He has an agenda, and crafts his narratives to fit it. Nader's article title makes his bias and agenda clear.
ummonk 8y ago
Didn’t the pilots in the lion air crash shut off autopilot though? The issue was that they were unable to diagnose it as a problem that required disengaging the trim system.
asynchronous13 8y ago
> But it's crazy how many, when they're actually faced with catastrophic failure, forget how to fly the damn plane. Your comment makes me sad. Especially since there will be many other people who come to a similar conclusion without adequate information. The runaway trim problem and the new MCAS problem are superficially similar, but the symptoms are distinctly different. The runaway trim manifests itself with a continuous deflection of the trim. Pilots are trained to recognize this symptom and compensate. The new MCAS also affects the trim, but it is engaged in repeated nose-down commands. It has fundamentally different symptoms compared to the older and more widely known runaway condition. There is no absolute reference on the position of the stabilizer. It is a wheel that turns, so a pilot must watch that wheel continuously to know if it keeps turning or if it turns periodically. The controls column has force feedback. The pilot was pulling back with ~50 lbs of force to fight the angle of the trim. Imagine holding a 50 lb dog while simultaneously trying to review emergency procedures to find the source of the problem. The pilot was flying the damn plane, and the symptoms of this problem were different.

cliveb 8y ago

From applied control theory I intuitively knew that a cascade of issues resulting in a system instability had overwhelmed the pilots. I now see this arrogance of data science based software engineering being inserted into business, industry and social systems. As an abstract example Facebook's attempt to stabilize the politics on its platform through algorithms. More concretely in the hydro dam control systems in the Pacific Northwest. Specifically in this damned Boeing 737 Max control system. Control systems need rigorous testing through simulation not accidents.