5 ms·

> 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

> 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.
- Phrodo_00 8y ago
  It's not just Boeing, though (not that this exculpate them in any way), but cheap airlines insist in flying 737, but also have demand for more efficiency. This plane was trying to satisfy that impossible "I want the exact same plane but better" demand, so that the other greedy bunch of assholes that are airline execs wouldn't have to spend in training mechanics and pilots because the plane they're flying has another name now.
  - acqq 8y ago
    No. The redirection of demand would just give some more clients to Airbus and reduce the speed of the growth of the total number of planes flying. Nobody should accept this attempt to excuse Boeing of its responsibility and even less the possible variant of it "we are all guilty we will buy the cheapest flight."
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      It seems a bit unlikely to me that an airline like South West, that only flies 737s, would sooner buy Airbus planes than non-737 Boeing planes. I mean, stranger things have certainly happened, but it doesn't seem like the kind of existential threat that would force the hand of Boeing executives in such a way that takes blame away from them.
      - thatoneuser 8y ago
        Even if there was an existential threat to Boeing the people making the decisions should have decided "we can't do this safely". They were never forced. Maybe they wouldn't get their million $ bonus - well tough titties. Plenty of people didn't get a 7 digit bonus this year.
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

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.
Phrodo_00 8y ago
It's not just Boeing, though (not that this exculpate them in any way), but cheap airlines insist in flying 737, but also have demand for more efficiency. This plane was trying to satisfy that impossible "I want the exact same plane but better" demand, so that the other greedy bunch of assholes that are airline execs wouldn't have to spend in training mechanics and pilots because the plane they're flying has another name now.
- acqq 8y ago
  No. The redirection of demand would just give some more clients to Airbus and reduce the speed of the growth of the total number of planes flying. Nobody should accept this attempt to excuse Boeing of its responsibility and even less the possible variant of it "we are all guilty we will buy the cheapest flight."
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    It seems a bit unlikely to me that an airline like South West, that only flies 737s, would sooner buy Airbus planes than non-737 Boeing planes. I mean, stranger things have certainly happened, but it doesn't seem like the kind of existential threat that would force the hand of Boeing executives in such a way that takes blame away from them.
    - thatoneuser 8y ago
      Even if there was an existential threat to Boeing the people making the decisions should have decided "we can't do this safely". They were never forced. Maybe they wouldn't get their million $ bonus - well tough titties. Plenty of people didn't get a 7 digit bonus this year.

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