10 ms·

Boeing Was ‘Go, Go, Go’ to Beat Airbus with the 737 Max

123 points by cmurf 8y ago

jumelles 8y ago
This seems to be getting worse and worse for Boeing, and they definitely aren't acting like they understand the gravity of the situation. I guess Boeing has been coasting along based on its position and reputation for a few decades and this is the result.
- dudus 8y ago
  They understand, they are just downplaying.
- ackfoo 8y ago
  That's not really accurate. Boeing is under continuous attack by hatchet jobs like this that insinuate they cut corners and are solely responsible for these accidents. First, we don't have final reports from the investigators yet, so it's awfully early to point the finger. Second, every major aviation accident is multi-factorial. It's never just one failure that causes it. If it does turn out to be the faulty AOA indicator causing the electric trim to go nose-down, there are still a number of other obvious contributing factors in addition to the faulty sensor. The public is demanding low airfare prices because they are getting squeezed by the increasing disparity of wealth worldwide. Wages are not rising as fast as prices, and as the cost of doing business with China slowly rises due to the trade war, prices start to creep up and the squeeze increases. Airlines respond by flying pilots with lower time and lesser training, paying them less, and working them harder. Pilots spend less time in the simulator working on abnormal conditions, and while they are undoubtedly great at monitoring normal flights and navigating controlled airspace, they have less experience hand-flying approaches and dealing with rare equipment failures and emergencies. Every pilot should have adequate simulator time to be competent with every emergency procedure for which there is a checklist, but that is not the reality. The three seconds allotted by the FAA to diagnose critical systems failures is simply not enough if you can't find and execute the correct checklist in that time period. In the old days, every single pilot from a Cessna 152 on up knew exactly what a badly trimmed airplane felt like and how to fix it instantly. When you felt that extra force on the controls, you would instinctively rotate the trim wheel in the direction of the force that you were needing to apply. Same for electric trim systems: if the force doesn't ease the way it should, you have a runaway and you need to interrupt power to the electric trim system. But that is hand-flying, stick-and-rudder-type stuff. If you're not getting the hand-flying time and the simulated failure time, you just don't develop that instinct. It's not entirely Boeing's fault that an aircrew can't recognize and counter a runaway electric trim, no matter what the details in the flight manual. It's only reasonable to assume that basic level of competency.
  - sgwae 8y ago
    Has the same issue happened for airbus with half a thousand dead, and any of their planes grounded world wide?
    - selectodude 8y ago
      The A330 had some weird pitch down incidences due to a faulty ADIRS, and obviously AF447 due to faulty pitot tubes and the completely idiotic issue where the control sticks aren't synced and the inputs are averaged out before being sent to the plane. There were some considerations given to grounding the fleet, whether or not Airbus wanted to admit it at the time. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-plane-denial-sb/airbus-denies-planning-to-ground-a330-340-fleet-idUSTRE5597AC20090610 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-plane-denial-sb/ai...
      - cjbprime 8y ago
        A330 has fewer total fatalities over its 27 years of service (339 deaths) than the MAX does in a year and a half (346 deaths).
      - raverbashing 8y ago
        The pitch down incidents I believe were caused by a non compliant part replacement (I don't remember which company it was though)
    - sidlls 8y ago
      There are several pilots who've had this very issue happen to them and they managed to diagnose and address the problem without flying the plane into the ground. These incidents are almost always the result of a combination of errors ranging from negligent engineering and documentation to mechanical defects to human (pilot) error. We simply don't know all the facts in these two crashes. The publicly available information to me indicates negligent documentation (pilot manuals should have been updated to reflect the new mode and how to treat the issue similarly to runaway trim), negligent sales practice (the AoA disagree feature shouldn't be an option), and poor reactions by the pilots involved. But that's purely speculation at this point: there could very well be some other causes instead of or in addition to these.
rsynnott 8y ago
> When upgrading the cockpit with a digital display, he said, his team wanted to redesign the layout of information to give pilots more data that were easier to read. But that might have required new pilot training. So instead, they simply recreated the decades-old gauges on the screen. This was a particularly weird detail, I thought.
- cletus 8y ago
  That's about common type ratings. With the same cockpit, a pilot qualified to fly the 737 is qualified to fly anything in that common type rating. If the 737 MAX is similar enough to be in that common type rating, no specific training or certification is required. That's something Boeing wanted. Probably because the airlines wanted it.
  - berti 8y ago
    Well Boeing wanted it just as much. If you need to retrain all your pilots anyway, Airbus becomes much more competitive.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  That seems very sane? It's a more fuel-efficient 737; carriers and pilots want and need redesigned cockpit and instruments as much as I need the latest take of the Gmail design team on how a mail app should look and function.
  - mortenjorck 8y ago
    The process and rationale for redesigning a web app to drive engagement is not really comparable to that of redesigning an aircraft instrument panel to promote safety.
  - Traster 8y ago
    I think this is a bad take - the reason why Gmail's redesign is bad is because the motivation is bad. They want more lock-in, more engagement etc. Stuff unrelated to being a good mail app. The reason the 737 redesign was good was because they actually could lay things out better and make things easier to use and safer. The reason not to redesign was bad - wanting an easy sell, and so the choice of not to redesign was bad, since you're not producing the best produce. Whether or not to redesign isn't the thing that sunk the 737 Max, but it is another manifestation of the same motivation that caused the problems.
Invictus0 8y ago
I can't really see any decision point where an engineer might have stood up and said "this plane isn't safe," like Allan McDonald did with the Challenger. The article tries to hang blame on the decision not to upgrade the cockpit info displays, but there was nothing wrong with the old display systems. It's still not clear if the plane is actually aerodynamically flawed or if the MCAS was simply programmed poorly. Even the business decision was fine; from the perspective of a non-technical executive, "add newer engines but change as little else as possible" seems like a pretty reasonable directive and not likely to cause safety issues. Engineers could have complained about the pace of work but I think it was made clear to them that they were fighting for their jobs: Boeing has had numerous 10,000+ workers layoffs in the past. With everything we know now, I can't see any criminal charges being filed in relation with this disaster.
- frostburg 8y ago
  Not having three AoA sensors seems either insane or criminally negligent.
  - ozmaverick72 8y ago
    I'm with you on that. It also seems completely against the Boeing ethos of when the auto pilot is off you should be hand flying the plane and your control inputs dictate the movement of the flight surfaces. That has been a perceived difference in philosophy between Boeing and Airbus. MCAS sounds like a hastly thrown together work around and a disaster waiting to happen.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    Yep, there’s going to be a lot of hand wringing, finger pointing and hot air expended over the next few years and this is basically it. Boeing had two options: (1) 3 sensors plus majority voter. (2) A mandatory AoA disagree indication plus some training on how to react to it. They chose option (3): Neither. Frankly when I heard there were just two sensors and no disagree indication, my first thought was well that’s just as good as one sensor and hoping for the best, isn’t it? The “challenger moment” would have been after the meeting they decided on this.
rootusrootus 8y ago
Boeing is still going to clean Airbus' clock with the 737MAX. This isn't the first time they've had something like this happen, soon enough people will forget and this plane will most likely go on to become yet another wildly successful 737 variant, safest in the world. Maybe they will downplay the MAX name, though, and market it simply as 737-7, 737-8, and 737-9 going forward.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Yes, like McDonnell-Douglas renaming the later revisions of the DC-10 as the MD-11. The MD-11 even included "a partly computer-driven horizontal stabilizer. Updates to the software package made the airplane's handling characteristics in manual flight similar to those of the DC-10" [1] Sounds like Boeing might have dusted off an old MD idea. I think you're probably right, they will improve the systems, improve the training, probably pay some sort of settlement, and as long as no smoking-gun evidence of deliberate malfeasance is found (ala Volkswagen Dieselgate), they will survive. Heck, Volkswagen survived, anyway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_MD-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_MD-11
  - renaudg 8y ago
    VW Dieselgate didn't directly kill 400 people, though.
- dnhz 8y ago
  Why? Both competitors have put new engines on old frames. Boeing has the MAX; Airbus has the A320neo. As far I can tell, the two planes are comparable. Also, there's already a 737-700, 737-800, 737-900.
  - dboreham 8y ago
    A320 wing is quite a bit higher than the 737.
    - dreamcompiler 8y ago
billfruit 8y ago
Not a good year this for Boeing, there has been major crashes of the 707 and 767 in the last 2 months, apart from the 737 Max loss.(Though 707 crash was due to lt landing in wrong airport by mistake, where the runway was not long enough, so it crashed into a wall).
acroback 8y ago
I see the same age my Startup all the time. It is go go go all the time. Except, it is not a plane.
ukenyatta 8y ago
Boeing is in trouble, the world is no longer revolving around the US and outside of the United States it’s very clear that Boeing is to blame.
ern 8y ago
Something else that's worrying is this comment from a technician: His internal assembly designs for the Max, he said, still include omissions today, like not specifying which tools to use to install a certain wire, a situation that could lead to a faulty connection. Normally such blueprints include intricate instructions. I hope that all these failures are investigated and addressed before the plane is allowed to fly again.
smtih 8y ago
Ll
smtih 8y ago
Something is rotten in the state of Washington
dstola 8y ago
I wonder if Boeing and their engineers instinctively knew it was their fault after the first crash, or at least had a feeling/intuition, and how many hoops they had to jump through to cover it up only for it to come up again
Yetanfou 8y ago
It is interesting and a bit disconcerting to see how a question like this one for some quickly turns into the the same type of partisan quibble as an Android-vs-Apple or Emacs-vs-vi or Linux-vs-Windows question would. If there were ways to map answers onto a globe I expect the 'pro-Boeing' answers to mostly come from the north-American continent and the 'pro-Airbus' mostly from the Eurasian and south-American continent with more diverse answers from the other continents.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  The planes crashed, there is nothing partisan about that.
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    That is what makes it disconcerting to see the same clan-like attitude arise in this discussion. It is one thing to 'defend your team' when talking about mobile user interfaces, freedom of choice of where to get your applications from or the relative virtues of different software development models. In this case two crashes seem to be partly caused by design problems and as such it seems to be an inappropriate response to try to 'defend the team'.

123 points by cmurf 8y ago

This seems to be getting worse and worse for Boeing, and they definitely aren't acting like they understand the gravity of the situation. I guess Boeing has been coasting along based on its position and reputation for a few decades and this is the result.

dudus 8y ago
They understand, they are just downplaying.
ackfoo 8y ago
That's not really accurate. Boeing is under continuous attack by hatchet jobs like this that insinuate they cut corners and are solely responsible for these accidents. First, we don't have final reports from the investigators yet, so it's awfully early to point the finger. Second, every major aviation accident is multi-factorial. It's never just one failure that causes it. If it does turn out to be the faulty AOA indicator causing the electric trim to go nose-down, there are still a number of other obvious contributing factors in addition to the faulty sensor. The public is demanding low airfare prices because they are getting squeezed by the increasing disparity of wealth worldwide. Wages are not rising as fast as prices, and as the cost of doing business with China slowly rises due to the trade war, prices start to creep up and the squeeze increases. Airlines respond by flying pilots with lower time and lesser training, paying them less, and working them harder. Pilots spend less time in the simulator working on abnormal conditions, and while they are undoubtedly great at monitoring normal flights and navigating controlled airspace, they have less experience hand-flying approaches and dealing with rare equipment failures and emergencies. Every pilot should have adequate simulator time to be competent with every emergency procedure for which there is a checklist, but that is not the reality. The three seconds allotted by the FAA to diagnose critical systems failures is simply not enough if you can't find and execute the correct checklist in that time period. In the old days, every single pilot from a Cessna 152 on up knew exactly what a badly trimmed airplane felt like and how to fix it instantly. When you felt that extra force on the controls, you would instinctively rotate the trim wheel in the direction of the force that you were needing to apply. Same for electric trim systems: if the force doesn't ease the way it should, you have a runaway and you need to interrupt power to the electric trim system. But that is hand-flying, stick-and-rudder-type stuff. If you're not getting the hand-flying time and the simulated failure time, you just don't develop that instinct. It's not entirely Boeing's fault that an aircrew can't recognize and counter a runaway electric trim, no matter what the details in the flight manual. It's only reasonable to assume that basic level of competency.
- sgwae 8y ago
  Has the same issue happened for airbus with half a thousand dead, and any of their planes grounded world wide?
  - selectodude 8y ago
    The A330 had some weird pitch down incidences due to a faulty ADIRS, and obviously AF447 due to faulty pitot tubes and the completely idiotic issue where the control sticks aren't synced and the inputs are averaged out before being sent to the plane. There were some considerations given to grounding the fleet, whether or not Airbus wanted to admit it at the time. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-plane-denial-sb/airbus-denies-planning-to-ground-a330-340-fleet-idUSTRE5597AC20090610 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-plane-denial-sb/ai...
    - cjbprime 8y ago
      A330 has fewer total fatalities over its 27 years of service (339 deaths) than the MAX does in a year and a half (346 deaths).
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      The pitch down incidents I believe were caused by a non compliant part replacement (I don't remember which company it was though)
  - sidlls 8y ago
    There are several pilots who've had this very issue happen to them and they managed to diagnose and address the problem without flying the plane into the ground. These incidents are almost always the result of a combination of errors ranging from negligent engineering and documentation to mechanical defects to human (pilot) error. We simply don't know all the facts in these two crashes. The publicly available information to me indicates negligent documentation (pilot manuals should have been updated to reflect the new mode and how to treat the issue similarly to runaway trim), negligent sales practice (the AoA disagree feature shouldn't be an option), and poor reactions by the pilots involved. But that's purely speculation at this point: there could very well be some other causes instead of or in addition to these.

rsynnott 8y ago

> When upgrading the cockpit with a digital display, he said, his team wanted to redesign the layout of information to give pilots more data that were easier to read. But that might have required new pilot training. So instead, they simply recreated the decades-old gauges on the screen. This was a particularly weird detail, I thought.

cletus 8y ago
That's about common type ratings. With the same cockpit, a pilot qualified to fly the 737 is qualified to fly anything in that common type rating. If the 737 MAX is similar enough to be in that common type rating, no specific training or certification is required. That's something Boeing wanted. Probably because the airlines wanted it.
- berti 8y ago
  Well Boeing wanted it just as much. If you need to retrain all your pilots anyway, Airbus becomes much more competitive.
stefan_ 8y ago
That seems very sane? It's a more fuel-efficient 737; carriers and pilots want and need redesigned cockpit and instruments as much as I need the latest take of the Gmail design team on how a mail app should look and function.
- mortenjorck 8y ago
  The process and rationale for redesigning a web app to drive engagement is not really comparable to that of redesigning an aircraft instrument panel to promote safety.
- Traster 8y ago
  I think this is a bad take - the reason why Gmail's redesign is bad is because the motivation is bad. They want more lock-in, more engagement etc. Stuff unrelated to being a good mail app. The reason the 737 redesign was good was because they actually could lay things out better and make things easier to use and safer. The reason not to redesign was bad - wanting an easy sell, and so the choice of not to redesign was bad, since you're not producing the best produce. Whether or not to redesign isn't the thing that sunk the 737 Max, but it is another manifestation of the same motivation that caused the problems.

Invictus0 8y ago

I can't really see any decision point where an engineer might have stood up and said "this plane isn't safe," like Allan McDonald did with the Challenger. The article tries to hang blame on the decision not to upgrade the cockpit info displays, but there was nothing wrong with the old display systems. It's still not clear if the plane is actually aerodynamically flawed or if the MCAS was simply programmed poorly. Even the business decision was fine; from the perspective of a non-technical executive, "add newer engines but change as little else as possible" seems like a pretty reasonable directive and not likely to cause safety issues. Engineers could have complained about the pace of work but I think it was made clear to them that they were fighting for their jobs: Boeing has had numerous 10,000+ workers layoffs in the past. With everything we know now, I can't see any criminal charges being filed in relation with this disaster.

frostburg 8y ago
Not having three AoA sensors seems either insane or criminally negligent.
- ozmaverick72 8y ago
  I'm with you on that. It also seems completely against the Boeing ethos of when the auto pilot is off you should be hand flying the plane and your control inputs dictate the movement of the flight surfaces. That has been a perceived difference in philosophy between Boeing and Airbus. MCAS sounds like a hastly thrown together work around and a disaster waiting to happen.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- arcticbull 8y ago
  Yep, there’s going to be a lot of hand wringing, finger pointing and hot air expended over the next few years and this is basically it. Boeing had two options: (1) 3 sensors plus majority voter. (2) A mandatory AoA disagree indication plus some training on how to react to it. They chose option (3): Neither. Frankly when I heard there were just two sensors and no disagree indication, my first thought was well that’s just as good as one sensor and hoping for the best, isn’t it? The “challenger moment” would have been after the meeting they decided on this.

rootusrootus 8y ago

Boeing is still going to clean Airbus' clock with the 737MAX. This isn't the first time they've had something like this happen, soon enough people will forget and this plane will most likely go on to become yet another wildly successful 737 variant, safest in the world. Maybe they will downplay the MAX name, though, and market it simply as 737-7, 737-8, and 737-9 going forward.

ams6110 8y ago
Yes, like McDonnell-Douglas renaming the later revisions of the DC-10 as the MD-11. The MD-11 even included "a partly computer-driven horizontal stabilizer. Updates to the software package made the airplane's handling characteristics in manual flight similar to those of the DC-10" [1] Sounds like Boeing might have dusted off an old MD idea. I think you're probably right, they will improve the systems, improve the training, probably pay some sort of settlement, and as long as no smoking-gun evidence of deliberate malfeasance is found (ala Volkswagen Dieselgate), they will survive. Heck, Volkswagen survived, anyway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_MD-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_MD-11
- renaudg 8y ago
  VW Dieselgate didn't directly kill 400 people, though.
dnhz 8y ago
Why? Both competitors have put new engines on old frames. Boeing has the MAX; Airbus has the A320neo. As far I can tell, the two planes are comparable. Also, there's already a 737-700, 737-800, 737-900.
- dboreham 8y ago
  A320 wing is quite a bit higher than the 737.
  - dreamcompiler 8y ago

billfruit 8y ago

Not a good year this for Boeing, there has been major crashes of the 707 and 767 in the last 2 months, apart from the 737 Max loss.(Though 707 crash was due to lt landing in wrong airport by mistake, where the runway was not long enough, so it crashed into a wall).

acroback 8y ago

I see the same age my Startup all the time. It is go go go all the time. Except, it is not a plane.

ukenyatta 8y ago

Boeing is in trouble, the world is no longer revolving around the US and outside of the United States it’s very clear that Boeing is to blame.

ern 8y ago

Something else that's worrying is this comment from a technician: His internal assembly designs for the Max, he said, still include omissions today, like not specifying which tools to use to install a certain wire, a situation that could lead to a faulty connection. Normally such blueprints include intricate instructions. I hope that all these failures are investigated and addressed before the plane is allowed to fly again.

smtih 8y ago

Something is rotten in the state of Washington

dstola 8y ago

I wonder if Boeing and their engineers instinctively knew it was their fault after the first crash, or at least had a feeling/intuition, and how many hoops they had to jump through to cover it up only for it to come up again

Yetanfou 8y ago

It is interesting and a bit disconcerting to see how a question like this one for some quickly turns into the the same type of partisan quibble as an Android-vs-Apple or Emacs-vs-vi or Linux-vs-Windows question would. If there were ways to map answers onto a globe I expect the 'pro-Boeing' answers to mostly come from the north-American continent and the 'pro-Airbus' mostly from the Eurasian and south-American continent with more diverse answers from the other continents.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
The planes crashed, there is nothing partisan about that.
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  That is what makes it disconcerting to see the same clan-like attitude arise in this discussion. It is one thing to 'defend your team' when talking about mobile user interfaces, freedom of choice of where to get your applications from or the relative virtues of different software development models. In this case two crashes seem to be partly caused by design problems and as such it seems to be an inappropriate response to try to 'defend the team'.