7 ms·

Reading through the chronology in section 1.1, it feels like a movie where the aircraft is a malevolent entity that's trying to kill them. So if I were in the

Reading through the chronology in section 1.1, it feels like a movie where the aircraft is a malevolent entity that's trying to kill them. So if I were in the cockpit I'm sure it would've been some mix of fear and anger. My life's not in danger though, so I'm only left with the anger, on their behalf, knowing some greedy bunch of assholes were effectively that malevolent entity, whose will was expressed via the aircraft. EDIT: You guys can fucking blow me. Moderators ban my account please.

ummonk 8y ago
Why is that getting downvoted? What the heck.
- aaron695 8y ago
  > knowing some greedy bunch of assholes were effectively that malevolent entity, whose will was expressed via the aircraft. If this it true then link? When was this confirmed? Who are the assholes? Else this is just Reddit spam that contributes less than nothing.
  - geofft 8y ago
    The "greedy bunch of assholes" are the Boeing execs who optimized for profit over the lives of those pilots and their passengers. (I thought that was pretty clear from the comment, fwiw.) I think it's been pretty thoroughly established at this point that an underlying design constraint in the MCAS was that it was easier for Boeing to get a 737-with-modifications approved than a new airplane, despite the engines being configured rather differently from existing 737s, and the MCAS was a computerized hack to avoid instability caused by the design of the newer engines (specifically, the newer engines would risk pitching up and stalling if you flew a 737 MAX like a normal 737, so they added the MCAS to counteract that, and the problem in both crashes was the MCAS unnecessarily activated and pitched the plane down when the plane was actually flying fine). Certainly lots of other things went wrong too, but had they instead just built a new plane design, the problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place. (I can find links about this if you're curious but it seems to be the consensus interpretation of what happened.)
    - cjbprime 8y ago
      Agree on the consensus. There's a piece of additional flavor, which is that as I understand it Boeing proposed building a new type of plane as an a320neo competitor, and the airlines announced that they'd only buy it if it's a 737 subtype to avoid having to retrain their pilots. It's not just "Boeing doesn't want to pay for certifications", but also -- and perhaps primarily -- "Airlines don't want to pay for training". So while Boeing's ultimately responsible for building unsafe aircraft, I could imagine people being angrier at the airlines than Boeing.
      - VBprogrammer 8y ago
        Just to add an extra element to what you've already said. It's quite likely that the pilots themselves would have been reluctant to accept another entry level narrow body jet. In the current climate it's often the pilots themselves who are paying for the type rating, at least the first one they acquire.
        geofft 8y ago
        That's fair, but also, salaries for pilots are not great, and Boeing's former CEO got a salary of $865K/year + $1.3M/year bonus + stock and now that he's retired gets a pension of $730K/year. I'm sort of curious what exactly it would have cost Boeing to say, "This is not a 737, but we will pay to retrain any 737-trained pilot who's interested." (Which still would have given them a negotiating advantage over Airbus!)
        refurb 8y ago
        Reading the r/aviation subreddit apparently airline pilot salaries have really improved over the last 5 years.
        tyingq 8y ago
        It's very cyclical. For reasons unknown to me, pilot unions have always negotiated a seniority-based pay scale. Where seniority is only how many years you been at the airline. How much total experience you have doesn't matter just how many years you've been with the airline. So if you stay with the airline for a long time you move up from first officer to Captain and then as years of seniority add up you start making a lot more. The trouble is the pilots can't threaten to change jobs because if you move from one airline to another your seniority goes back to zero. Also if an airline declares bankruptcy, all the union contracts are null and void. The airline then has a ton of leverage because the pilots are all out of work. The pay scale that comes out of bankruptcy is typically very low. Similar if one airline acquires another airline. The pilots at the acquired airline typically get screwed in the pay scale and seniority calculation. Also jobs like flying cargo planes or piloting for a commuter airline pay very low wages. It's mostly just the big airlines that pay well.
  - hacker_9 8y ago
    You are disgusting
    - zaroth 8y ago
      Please don’t pile on.
  - toss1 8y ago
    They would be the set of assholes who: 1) decided to move the engines forward making the aircraft dynamically unstable, but improve performance and potential sales 2) decided to counter the instability with a software system (MCAS) based on a single sensor, with zero redundancy or fail-safe mode, AND make a second sensor an optional extra cost for the airlines, AND bury the whole thing in a poor UI, in short: cheaping out on a band-aid fix to a critical problem of their own creation, to maximize profits 3) decided to evade normal requirements to make the airframe a new classification, so that airlines wouldn't need to spend money on retaining and separately qualifying pilots for the different airframe, again to reduce apparent costs of the new airplane and increase sales 4) minimized the training on the MCAS system and require no new training when they made changes to the system. AND make the MCAS system automatically re-engage, based on the single sensor to reduce customer costs 5) ensured that this cascade of bad decisions got implemented through the FAA and rolled out globally. The effect of all of this was to overlook and minimize critical flaws in a complex human flight system, and do so in order to maximize sales and profits over safety. They killed 346 people already, and nevermind the economic knock-on effects. No, I'm not going to hunt back and provide a link to every bit of analysis I read gathering the above facts. It is all recent, non-obscure, and very google-able. Yes, bad engineering and management decision that kill people will tend to get folks a bit riled up. This is a good thing. While this forum should indeed emphasize facts and intellectual argument, this is not a peer-reviewed journal, it is a forum for humans to discuss issues, and we should also keep here the human perspective on engineering.
    - cjbprime 8y ago
      > AND make a second sensor an optional extra cost for the airlines This would be extremely egregious, but it's not what happened. Every MAX has two AoA vanes. Every MAX only hooks up the MCAS to one vane. The optional feature was just an "AOA disagree" light and display, which wasn't even hooked up to an error alarm. It's a red herring for these crashes, in my opinion. The pilots aren't going to hunt around the cockpit during an emergency and notice a disagree light and be able to conclude anything meaningful about what's happening to the plane and how to stop it.
      - 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- na85 8y ago
  On HN you can say the same things you say anywhere else but GP didn't couch his rant in fancy synonyms and misused Latin phrases like a priori.
  - crysin 8y ago
    I really like this comment because I agree and was trying to write a comment that said this but not in a toxic way. People act like Hacker News is some bastion of discourse that is raised above the rest of the internet but it's not. Most of the comments I read are people stroking their ego's and enjoying the echo chamber.
    - MisterTea 8y ago
      http://n-gate.com http://n-gate.com Enjoy! :-)
      - toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
        Mother of god, that’s equal parts funny and just plain accurate. Dell wonders if maybe their hiring process can be improved. Hackernews debates whether this is a cynical attempt to mine talent from previously-overlooked seams or a genuine attempt to treat human resources as human beings. Some Hackernews consider labeling such personnel so their specific status is on display at all times, an idea that nobody got from Nazi concentration camps. Hole in one. Sometimes the best thing to do is just log off and remember that some people would argue about the correct oil used to boil them alive.
        MisterTea 8y ago
        Wow both of us downvoted. Looks like no one likes a mirror being held up mixed with humor.
    - dang 8y ago
      Your expectations may be too high. Collective behavior on the internet converges to toxicity. All we can do is mitigate it at the margins and try to slow down the decay. Your help would be appreciated.
- dang 8y ago
  It got extremely heavily upvoted. Unfortunately, though, that wasn't for good reasons in terms of the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This subthread is clearly about gratifying rage, not intellectual curiosity. That makes it off topic for Hacker News. Yes, the rage is understandable and there are reasons for it. Nevertheless what's going on in this vortex of the discussion is not in keeping with the values of the site. To a weird extent actually.
peteradio 8y ago
Lol top comment. Seriously who sees this and is like NO I must downvote. Its a great comment, imagine a plane all of the sudden just fighting to crash you into the ground, what a horror show.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thatoneuser 8y ago
I swear I've encountered propaganda bots/shills on HN lately. Maybe it's just my imagination or maybe there are just people out there who wanna argue in favor of megacorps, but I've been getting downvoted and argued with lately for saying pretty obvious things lately. Anyway, I'm on your side. Two planes falling from the sky killing hundreds I mean that's a non negligible percentage of 9/11 casualties. Maybe we don't know exactly the cause (tho it seems we do) but at any rate I'd wager a large sum of money that this is boeings fault.
- 1000units 8y ago
  Try saying something bad about Google.
throwaway713 8y ago
I've been on HN for years, and lately some of the downvotes have really been blowing my mind. See this post I made a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18937864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18937864. Someone actually downvoted and argued against me that their dog's life is more valuable than "a stranger's". I have no doubt it's the same people downvoting your comment. I can't tell if these people are just really good trolls, or they truly don't value human life (including loss of life in an airplane crash).
- darkpuma 8y ago
  I think you probaby struck a raw nerve with that dog issue in particular. Some people have family and dogs, but other people have no family (or not the one they want) and use dogs as surrogates. Pointing out the difference between family and dogs can provoke an intense emotional reaction, not rooted in their feelings towards dogs but rather rooted in the phantom pain they feel where their family should be. So what seems to be an irrational emotional outburst in defense of dogs is in fact their sense of familiar longing or loss. Viewed this way, maybe you can see some common ground. (I'm sure somebody might want to tell me about how they have a family and a dog, and love both. That's great, but I'm quite sure losing a child would be a greater blow to you than losing a dog. The point here is that somebody who already feels pain from missing family might try to ameliorate that pain with dog ownership.)
  - objektif 8y ago
    Anyone who equates human life and dog needs to be evaluated immediately. I am not kidding, it means they have lost touch with the society.
- matz1 8y ago
  This value are relative to the individual, not everyone value human life and dog life the same way. That's just reality.
- internetzzzzzz 8y ago
  Quit gettin' mad at video games.
late2part 8y ago
I generally support your first paragraph and the first sentence of your second. But your final sentence is illogical and immature. If you want @dang and mods to ban you; just erase your account. If what you mean to say is "if what I am saying is wrong, then ban me for saying it," you should say that. Regardless you've created a little drama for your biologically degrading snowflake, and it's unlikely they'll want to make you a martyr, but does your second sentence really add much value except to air your protestations?
- icebraining 8y ago
  > just erase your account. There's actually no way of doing that on HN.
  - late2part 8y ago
    How does HN comply w/ GDPR?
    - xoa 8y ago
      Why would it? Y Combinator is out of Mountain View, not in the EU. I doubt HN would offer special deletion privileges for any other polity in the world either unless they felt like it, everyone gets the same terms of US law and HN ToS.

ummonk 8y ago

Why is that getting downvoted? What the heck.

aaron695 8y ago
> knowing some greedy bunch of assholes were effectively that malevolent entity, whose will was expressed via the aircraft. If this it true then link? When was this confirmed? Who are the assholes? Else this is just Reddit spam that contributes less than nothing.
- geofft 8y ago
  The "greedy bunch of assholes" are the Boeing execs who optimized for profit over the lives of those pilots and their passengers. (I thought that was pretty clear from the comment, fwiw.) I think it's been pretty thoroughly established at this point that an underlying design constraint in the MCAS was that it was easier for Boeing to get a 737-with-modifications approved than a new airplane, despite the engines being configured rather differently from existing 737s, and the MCAS was a computerized hack to avoid instability caused by the design of the newer engines (specifically, the newer engines would risk pitching up and stalling if you flew a 737 MAX like a normal 737, so they added the MCAS to counteract that, and the problem in both crashes was the MCAS unnecessarily activated and pitched the plane down when the plane was actually flying fine). Certainly lots of other things went wrong too, but had they instead just built a new plane design, the problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place. (I can find links about this if you're curious but it seems to be the consensus interpretation of what happened.)
  - cjbprime 8y ago
    Agree on the consensus. There's a piece of additional flavor, which is that as I understand it Boeing proposed building a new type of plane as an a320neo competitor, and the airlines announced that they'd only buy it if it's a 737 subtype to avoid having to retrain their pilots. It's not just "Boeing doesn't want to pay for certifications", but also -- and perhaps primarily -- "Airlines don't want to pay for training". So while Boeing's ultimately responsible for building unsafe aircraft, I could imagine people being angrier at the airlines than Boeing.
    - VBprogrammer 8y ago
      Just to add an extra element to what you've already said. It's quite likely that the pilots themselves would have been reluctant to accept another entry level narrow body jet. In the current climate it's often the pilots themselves who are paying for the type rating, at least the first one they acquire.
      - geofft 8y ago
        That's fair, but also, salaries for pilots are not great, and Boeing's former CEO got a salary of $865K/year + $1.3M/year bonus + stock and now that he's retired gets a pension of $730K/year. I'm sort of curious what exactly it would have cost Boeing to say, "This is not a 737, but we will pay to retrain any 737-trained pilot who's interested." (Which still would have given them a negotiating advantage over Airbus!)
        refurb 8y ago
        Reading the r/aviation subreddit apparently airline pilot salaries have really improved over the last 5 years.
        tyingq 8y ago
        It's very cyclical. For reasons unknown to me, pilot unions have always negotiated a seniority-based pay scale. Where seniority is only how many years you been at the airline. How much total experience you have doesn't matter just how many years you've been with the airline. So if you stay with the airline for a long time you move up from first officer to Captain and then as years of seniority add up you start making a lot more. The trouble is the pilots can't threaten to change jobs because if you move from one airline to another your seniority goes back to zero. Also if an airline declares bankruptcy, all the union contracts are null and void. The airline then has a ton of leverage because the pilots are all out of work. The pay scale that comes out of bankruptcy is typically very low. Similar if one airline acquires another airline. The pilots at the acquired airline typically get screwed in the pay scale and seniority calculation. Also jobs like flying cargo planes or piloting for a commuter airline pay very low wages. It's mostly just the big airlines that pay well.
- hacker_9 8y ago
  You are disgusting
  - zaroth 8y ago
    Please don’t pile on.
- toss1 8y ago
  They would be the set of assholes who: 1) decided to move the engines forward making the aircraft dynamically unstable, but improve performance and potential sales 2) decided to counter the instability with a software system (MCAS) based on a single sensor, with zero redundancy or fail-safe mode, AND make a second sensor an optional extra cost for the airlines, AND bury the whole thing in a poor UI, in short: cheaping out on a band-aid fix to a critical problem of their own creation, to maximize profits 3) decided to evade normal requirements to make the airframe a new classification, so that airlines wouldn't need to spend money on retaining and separately qualifying pilots for the different airframe, again to reduce apparent costs of the new airplane and increase sales 4) minimized the training on the MCAS system and require no new training when they made changes to the system. AND make the MCAS system automatically re-engage, based on the single sensor to reduce customer costs 5) ensured that this cascade of bad decisions got implemented through the FAA and rolled out globally. The effect of all of this was to overlook and minimize critical flaws in a complex human flight system, and do so in order to maximize sales and profits over safety. They killed 346 people already, and nevermind the economic knock-on effects. No, I'm not going to hunt back and provide a link to every bit of analysis I read gathering the above facts. It is all recent, non-obscure, and very google-able. Yes, bad engineering and management decision that kill people will tend to get folks a bit riled up. This is a good thing. While this forum should indeed emphasize facts and intellectual argument, this is not a peer-reviewed journal, it is a forum for humans to discuss issues, and we should also keep here the human perspective on engineering.
  - cjbprime 8y ago
    > AND make a second sensor an optional extra cost for the airlines This would be extremely egregious, but it's not what happened. Every MAX has two AoA vanes. Every MAX only hooks up the MCAS to one vane. The optional feature was just an "AOA disagree" light and display, which wasn't even hooked up to an error alarm. It's a red herring for these crashes, in my opinion. The pilots aren't going to hunt around the cockpit during an emergency and notice a disagree light and be able to conclude anything meaningful about what's happening to the plane and how to stop it.
    - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
na85 8y ago
On HN you can say the same things you say anywhere else but GP didn't couch his rant in fancy synonyms and misused Latin phrases like a priori.
- crysin 8y ago
  I really like this comment because I agree and was trying to write a comment that said this but not in a toxic way. People act like Hacker News is some bastion of discourse that is raised above the rest of the internet but it's not. Most of the comments I read are people stroking their ego's and enjoying the echo chamber.
  - MisterTea 8y ago
    http://n-gate.com http://n-gate.com Enjoy! :-)
    - toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
      Mother of god, that’s equal parts funny and just plain accurate. Dell wonders if maybe their hiring process can be improved. Hackernews debates whether this is a cynical attempt to mine talent from previously-overlooked seams or a genuine attempt to treat human resources as human beings. Some Hackernews consider labeling such personnel so their specific status is on display at all times, an idea that nobody got from Nazi concentration camps. Hole in one. Sometimes the best thing to do is just log off and remember that some people would argue about the correct oil used to boil them alive.
      - MisterTea 8y ago
        Wow both of us downvoted. Looks like no one likes a mirror being held up mixed with humor.
  - dang 8y ago
    Your expectations may be too high. Collective behavior on the internet converges to toxicity. All we can do is mitigate it at the margins and try to slow down the decay. Your help would be appreciated.
dang 8y ago
It got extremely heavily upvoted. Unfortunately, though, that wasn't for good reasons in terms of the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This subthread is clearly about gratifying rage, not intellectual curiosity. That makes it off topic for Hacker News. Yes, the rage is understandable and there are reasons for it. Nevertheless what's going on in this vortex of the discussion is not in keeping with the values of the site. To a weird extent actually.

peteradio 8y ago

Lol top comment. Seriously who sees this and is like NO I must downvote. Its a great comment, imagine a plane all of the sudden just fighting to crash you into the ground, what a horror show.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thatoneuser 8y ago

I swear I've encountered propaganda bots/shills on HN lately. Maybe it's just my imagination or maybe there are just people out there who wanna argue in favor of megacorps, but I've been getting downvoted and argued with lately for saying pretty obvious things lately. Anyway, I'm on your side. Two planes falling from the sky killing hundreds I mean that's a non negligible percentage of 9/11 casualties. Maybe we don't know exactly the cause (tho it seems we do) but at any rate I'd wager a large sum of money that this is boeings fault.

1000units 8y ago
Try saying something bad about Google.

throwaway713 8y ago

I've been on HN for years, and lately some of the downvotes have really been blowing my mind. See this post I made a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18937864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18937864. Someone actually downvoted and argued against me that their dog's life is more valuable than "a stranger's". I have no doubt it's the same people downvoting your comment. I can't tell if these people are just really good trolls, or they truly don't value human life (including loss of life in an airplane crash).

darkpuma 8y ago
I think you probaby struck a raw nerve with that dog issue in particular. Some people have family and dogs, but other people have no family (or not the one they want) and use dogs as surrogates. Pointing out the difference between family and dogs can provoke an intense emotional reaction, not rooted in their feelings towards dogs but rather rooted in the phantom pain they feel where their family should be. So what seems to be an irrational emotional outburst in defense of dogs is in fact their sense of familiar longing or loss. Viewed this way, maybe you can see some common ground. (I'm sure somebody might want to tell me about how they have a family and a dog, and love both. That's great, but I'm quite sure losing a child would be a greater blow to you than losing a dog. The point here is that somebody who already feels pain from missing family might try to ameliorate that pain with dog ownership.)
- objektif 8y ago
  Anyone who equates human life and dog needs to be evaluated immediately. I am not kidding, it means they have lost touch with the society.
matz1 8y ago
This value are relative to the individual, not everyone value human life and dog life the same way. That's just reality.
internetzzzzzz 8y ago
Quit gettin' mad at video games.

late2part 8y ago

I generally support your first paragraph and the first sentence of your second. But your final sentence is illogical and immature. If you want @dang and mods to ban you; just erase your account. If what you mean to say is "if what I am saying is wrong, then ban me for saying it," you should say that. Regardless you've created a little drama for your biologically degrading snowflake, and it's unlikely they'll want to make you a martyr, but does your second sentence really add much value except to air your protestations?

icebraining 8y ago
> just erase your account. There's actually no way of doing that on HN.
- late2part 8y ago
  How does HN comply w/ GDPR?
  - xoa 8y ago
    Why would it? Y Combinator is out of Mountain View, not in the EU. I doubt HN would offer special deletion privileges for any other polity in the world either unless they felt like it, everyone gets the same terms of US law and HN ToS.