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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 aut

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.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  But who defines "inexpensive"? Is a $1000 feature inexpensive on a $30,000 car? Is an $80K feature inexpensive on an $100M airplane? That's $4M across a fleet of 50 jets (Ethiopean's 737 order size) - so it's not exactly insignificant. Japanese authorities required the feature, while the FAA and others did not. Should all of the onus be on the manufacturer? There's definitely an argument to be made that Boeing didn't reveal the full nature of MCAS to the FAA, but if that weren't true, is it Boeing's fault that they didn't bundle the feature, or is it the FAA's fault? And why did the Japanese require it, did they have information that the FAA did not have?
  - torpfactory 8y ago
    I guess I meant from the manufacturer's perspective. I doubt it costs Boeing 80k to implement, though that was apparently the list price for the feature. This comment also really belongs within the context of the safety expectations of your industry. For planes, there is a high safety expectation. For a hardware feature that costs Boeing maybe $1k (wild ass guess here) to implement, I would expect them NOT to view that as an opportunity to squeeze someone for more profit. They would obviously have to increase the selling price somewhat. From a purely business case I can see why Boeing did what they did but I'm just philosophically opposed to profit being the only goal. Even if it was the only goal, this case pretty clearly shows that it wasn't 'worth it' for Boeing to skimp on safety features with what, 20B wiped off their valuation.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    > That's $4M across a fleet of 50 jets On a total order of $5000 million. The problem with this is as that $4m sounds like a lot of money to pretty much everyone on the planet but if you are buying 50 medium size commercial jets it's literally a rounding error.
asdfadsfgfdda 8y ago
Adding another caution light is a bad solution. In some incidents, pilots had 100+ error messages to decipher (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32). The real solution would be to inhibit trim if the AoA vanes disagreed. This is typically the policy for stick shakers and stick pushers. My guess is they justified this policy because: -the trim wheel is obviously moving, so a pilot will recognize this as a runaway trim (and perform correct memory items to disable trim) -the system will only activate when flaps are retracted. So when the plane starts doing something wrong (nose down), the pilot will undo the last thing they changed (flaps), which prevents further nose down trim
michelpp 8y ago
That's not equivalent. All 737 MAXs have the failed design. Instead it's like all cars like yours have their stock automated emergency braking system malfunction, didn't illuminate the "check engine" light (that's was the extra 100 bucks), and preventing the brakes from working at all despite you slamming furiously on the pedal. My guess is you'd be a lot angrier about that if you lived.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  Isn't it more like the brakes failed to operate and since I didn't pay for the "brake system inoperative" light, I have to figure it out on my own and turn off the primary braking system and apply the emergency brake? If I have enough experience to know (or happen to have another driver with me that knows) what to do when I press the brake pedal and nothing happens, it's recoverable, otherwise I'm going to keep stomping on the brakes and fighting it without knowing that all I have to do is flip the switch to disable the broken braking system. So it's not that I had no way to know how to get out of the situation, I didn't have the specific training to recognize it, and if I'd just paid the extra $100 for the light, it would have been much more obvious.
Theodores 8y ago
I would go with Toyota and unintended acceleration rather than Honda. Honda are doing pretty good - only car company in America meeting emission standards (except Tesla). The tactile response friction device in the electronic accelerator pedal was the point of failure. I doubt people buying the car even knew the accelerator was some electronic gadget rather than connected by a cable to the engine as per grand-dad's Toyota. Nobody was given special training on how to react should the electronic accelerator go wrong. Now, if you are a driving instructor you can specify a second set of pedals. They might be in the other seat but you can specify them and have someone sat there to use them. Anyway, that is as far as the auto analogy goes, tenuously...
- Johnny555 8y ago
  I used Honda as an example of my car because my car is a Honda, and note that my example didn't posit any malfunction, just an extra-cost safety feature (though I think it's standard on most of their cars now)
  - mjcohen 8y ago
    It is. We just got a 2019 Honda Civic, and the safety stuff which used to be extra is now standard.

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.
Johnny555 8y ago
But who defines "inexpensive"? Is a $1000 feature inexpensive on a $30,000 car? Is an $80K feature inexpensive on an $100M airplane? That's $4M across a fleet of 50 jets (Ethiopean's 737 order size) - so it's not exactly insignificant. Japanese authorities required the feature, while the FAA and others did not. Should all of the onus be on the manufacturer? There's definitely an argument to be made that Boeing didn't reveal the full nature of MCAS to the FAA, but if that weren't true, is it Boeing's fault that they didn't bundle the feature, or is it the FAA's fault? And why did the Japanese require it, did they have information that the FAA did not have?
- torpfactory 8y ago
  I guess I meant from the manufacturer's perspective. I doubt it costs Boeing 80k to implement, though that was apparently the list price for the feature. This comment also really belongs within the context of the safety expectations of your industry. For planes, there is a high safety expectation. For a hardware feature that costs Boeing maybe $1k (wild ass guess here) to implement, I would expect them NOT to view that as an opportunity to squeeze someone for more profit. They would obviously have to increase the selling price somewhat. From a purely business case I can see why Boeing did what they did but I'm just philosophically opposed to profit being the only goal. Even if it was the only goal, this case pretty clearly shows that it wasn't 'worth it' for Boeing to skimp on safety features with what, 20B wiped off their valuation.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  > That's $4M across a fleet of 50 jets On a total order of $5000 million. The problem with this is as that $4m sounds like a lot of money to pretty much everyone on the planet but if you are buying 50 medium size commercial jets it's literally a rounding error.

asdfadsfgfdda 8y ago

Adding another caution light is a bad solution. In some incidents, pilots had 100+ error messages to decipher (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32). The real solution would be to inhibit trim if the AoA vanes disagreed. This is typically the policy for stick shakers and stick pushers. My guess is they justified this policy because: -the trim wheel is obviously moving, so a pilot will recognize this as a runaway trim (and perform correct memory items to disable trim) -the system will only activate when flaps are retracted. So when the plane starts doing something wrong (nose down), the pilot will undo the last thing they changed (flaps), which prevents further nose down trim

michelpp 8y ago

That's not equivalent. All 737 MAXs have the failed design. Instead it's like all cars like yours have their stock automated emergency braking system malfunction, didn't illuminate the "check engine" light (that's was the extra 100 bucks), and preventing the brakes from working at all despite you slamming furiously on the pedal. My guess is you'd be a lot angrier about that if you lived.

Johnny555 8y ago
Isn't it more like the brakes failed to operate and since I didn't pay for the "brake system inoperative" light, I have to figure it out on my own and turn off the primary braking system and apply the emergency brake? If I have enough experience to know (or happen to have another driver with me that knows) what to do when I press the brake pedal and nothing happens, it's recoverable, otherwise I'm going to keep stomping on the brakes and fighting it without knowing that all I have to do is flip the switch to disable the broken braking system. So it's not that I had no way to know how to get out of the situation, I didn't have the specific training to recognize it, and if I'd just paid the extra $100 for the light, it would have been much more obvious.

Theodores 8y ago

I would go with Toyota and unintended acceleration rather than Honda. Honda are doing pretty good - only car company in America meeting emission standards (except Tesla). The tactile response friction device in the electronic accelerator pedal was the point of failure. I doubt people buying the car even knew the accelerator was some electronic gadget rather than connected by a cable to the engine as per grand-dad's Toyota. Nobody was given special training on how to react should the electronic accelerator go wrong. Now, if you are a driving instructor you can specify a second set of pedals. They might be in the other seat but you can specify them and have someone sat there to use them. Anyway, that is as far as the auto analogy goes, tenuously...

Johnny555 8y ago
I used Honda as an example of my car because my car is a Honda, and note that my example didn't posit any malfunction, just an extra-cost safety feature (though I think it's standard on most of their cars now)
- mjcohen 8y ago
  It is. We just got a 2019 Honda Civic, and the safety stuff which used to be extra is now standard.