6 ms·

"We'll do everything possible to earn and re-earn that trust and confidence" Empty promises. Will they fly 10 empty aircraft 24/7 for a year on realistic rout

• zaroth 8y ago
  It’s a colloquialism and means whatever is possible [and necessary]. When a company says they will do “everything possible,” the statement is not wrong because you can find anything they theoretically could have done but didn’t. English language is not set theory.
  • lultimouomo 8y ago
    It's more like whatever we think appropriate. Why don't they say so? Because it has a clear meaning, while everything possible suggests they will go out of their way, without actually promising it. I think it's only fair to call them out on these weasel words.
    • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Yet if they said "we will do what we feel is appropriate" then people would be bitching and moaning about them not doing "everything possible". There is no winning when making a statement to the public in a situation like this.
      • everybodyknows 8y ago
        Right. Most of the public can't handle hard truth, so the de facto job description of "spokespersons" is now to obfuscate with such skill that we all get as little hard truth as possible.
  • cptskippy 8y ago
    Let's be clear, when they say "everything possible" they actually mean "the absolute minimum necessary to appease". The reality is that "possible" is contextualized by business constraints of costs and profits, not the hypothetical money is no object "possible". The purposefully use ambiguous language with the intent to mislead most people into a pie-in-the-sky interpretation rather than one with constraints. The English language is highly contextual, ambiguous, and open to interpretation which is why there are subsets (lexicons? dialects?) of the language used by difference disciples with clearly defined terms to avoid these ambiguities.
• jsbaby608 8y ago
  They will rebrand and eventually everyone will forget about it.
  • lmm 8y ago
    To rebrand will be acknowledging that this is not a 737, at which points pilots will be required to recertify anyway and there is less need for the MCAS to mimic 737 flight characteristics.
    • NullPrefix 8y ago
      Rebrand to 737 BIG. Same type, different name
      • usrusr 8y ago
        737 FYAE (fifty years anniversary edition)
• CydeWeys 8y ago
  That they didn't add a third AoA sensor does not fill me with confidence that they've done all they can to fix this fatal issue that's already claimed over 300 lives. I'm skeptical that a software-only fix is good enough. Airbus planes, by contrast, have three AoA sensors. How can Boeing justify doing fewer given how critically important these sensors are for preventing crashes?
  • consp 8y ago
    > How can Boeing justify doing fewer given how critically important these sensors are for preventing crashes? Money, as adding a third would likely require recertification as has been mentioned in some articles about the sensors in the past few months.
    • CydeWeys 8y ago
      If the FAA had any balls they'd say that the 737 MAX is a new type anyway, thus allowing necessary safety improvements to be made.
      • CaptainZapp 8y ago
        Let's wait and see what other regulatory agencies have to say on the issue. I see a political thunderstorm brewing in the not very far future.
        • milesvp 8y ago
          Lol! The engine placement on the Maxx so fundamentally alters the physics of the plane, that it’s a totally different beast. Even if it flew the same in common flight scenarios (aka passed all it’s unit and integration tests) it will perform very differently in uncommon situations. It’s the uncommon situations that require pilots anyways, since so much otherwise is automated for safety. There will need to be retraining and hopefully recertification involved. Even then, I think the plane is fundamentally unsafe for passenger flight and cannot be fixed without massive redesign. As I now reread your comment, I’m no longer convinced you meant it in the contrary way I read it. I agree there’s a thuderstorm coming, and I hope all regulators involved can have the conviction to stand up to the pressures from both sides and rule based on the design merits of the plane (even if they are able to conclude differently from my armchair engineer opinion).
• mikro2nd 8y ago
  > They'll model the scenario and conclude that it is fixed. You're so right. From the article: Existing customers such as Westjet and Air Canada are being run through simulations of the changes to the 737 Max Not exactly a phrase to inspire confidence. The scenario as we're seeing it give me a strong sense of deja vu as I recall the DC-10 disasters of the 1970's - many people refused to fly that aircraft ever again and I don't believe the brand ever fully recovered.
  • linsomniac 8y ago
    I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned the DC-10, because the line from that song has been going through my head every time I read about this ("She's like a DC-10, guaranteed to go down"). I'm just wondering what the artists are going to do to immortalize the MAX...
• xenonite 8y ago
  It seems that Boeing now is in a series of quality issues that started with the 787 Dreamliner. This is the first plane that was developed after the merger with McDonnell Douglas and a major change in their engineering and production processes, see e.g. the Al Jazeera Investigation on https://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/boeing787/ https://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/boeing787/ (from 2014)
  • ceejayoz 8y ago
    See also https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamliner-production-problems.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline... > Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries. Workers have filed nearly a dozen whistle-blower claims and safety complaints with federal regulators, describing issues like defective manufacturing, debris left on planes and pressure to not report violations. Others have sued Boeing, saying they were retaliated against for flagging manufacturing mistakes. > While Boeing has nurtured generations of aerospace professionals in the Seattle area, there was no comparable work force in South Carolina. Instead, managers had to recruit from technical colleges in Tulsa, Okla., and Atlanta. Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.
• Nasrudith 8y ago
  Onecthing I have learned from institutional molestation scandals is never trust anyone who states their first goal with a problem is restoring trust. It is a sociopathic Freudian slip that they don't care about the actual problem, only that it is making it harder to manipulate people. I advise treating it as a shibboleth for people so callous they think trust is the most important thing as opposed to the problem which they deliberately avoid mentioning.
  • sokoloff 8y ago
    It's an admission that the public's trust in them has been damaged as a result of the two crashes and that they understand that they need to work to regain that trust, in addition to the technical measures they will be implementing to the airframes and design.
    • davidwitt415 8y ago
      That is a highly naive statement to make. Per the parent comment, look at Wells Fargo as another example. They've been caught massively stealing from their cusomters multiple times, yet each time they come back with the same boilerplate mea culpa. Sokoloff is absoutely right, these companies are mostly concerned with getting back to status quo; they care about customer 'trust' only as far as it negatively impacts their bottom line.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• atoav 8y ago
  It seems to be an issue of company culture. So the question is: What would it take for them to regain my trust? Maybe a decade of restructuring, including punishments of managers that are responsible for breaches of safety protocols. They took the risk. And if even in the worst case (people die) there is no consequence, they will loose trust even more. Heads have to roll! And then we can talk about the systemic issues with time pressures on the production line and managers getting all the wrong incentives.
• tzs 8y ago
  > Will they fly 10 empty aircraft 24/7 for a year on realistic routes to demonstrate that they've resolved the problem? That seems like a complete waste of time. If we were dealing with a situation where these planes randomly fell out of the sky and we had no data as to why they did so, so any proposed fixes were based on guesses as to what might have gone wrong, that might be a useful and even necessary way to see if they really found the problem. But that is not the case here. They have the flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders from both crashes. They have radar and transponder data on both flights. There is no guessing involved as to what went wrong. They can easily force the same thing to go wrong on test flights, either in simulators or in actual flying aircraft, and test any fix.
• ackfoo 8y ago
  I really don't understand why you would make this sort of comment without being aware of the facts. The Ethiopian pilots were about 50kts overspeed when they reactivated the electric trim and allowed the MCAS to trim the plane to a full AND (aircraft-nose-down) condition. If you fly the aircraft 50kts faster than it was designed to fly, disaster awaits. There's nothing Boeing can do to make its airplane safer for pilots who are not capable of flying manually. This has nothing to do with Boeing or its business model. This is hysteria created by an ignorant press to sell eyeballs. It's easier to sell eyeballs when you blame the big, bad corporation instead of the owners of the eyeballs. The Ethiopian pilots failed to fly the plane. Period. The interim report blamed Boeing, of course, because the state-owned Ethiopian Airlines also owns the flight school where the pilots were trained. That school graduates almost exclusively men. Why? Because social and economic conditions in Africa prohibit training women as pilots. This is a systemic problem, which is the same systemic problem that puts the sons of the rich and famous into the right seat of a passenger 737 Max with only 98 hours total flight time. It's the same systemic problem that dictates saving money on flight training by turning out pilots who are perfectly capable of setting and monitoring the flight director from takeoff to landing so long as nothing whatsoever goes wrong, but who are hopelessly incapable of flying the plane manually in the event of a failure. The ILS goes bad at SFO, the plane crashes. The pitot tubes ice up over the ITCZ, the plane crashes. The AOA sensor on one side goes bad, the plane crashes. All of these have a common element: pilots who are competent to monitor the automatic systems, but incapable of flying manually when they need to take over control. The solution is us: we are so badly squeezed by the disparity of wealth that we can't afford better pilot training and more simulator time dealing with system failures because it would increase ticket prices, and we can't handle that. Then, when 300 people get drilled into the ground at 25Gs, we go after the manufacturer because they didn't make their systems perfect. There is no such thing as a perfect system, and there is always going to be a failed component. By demanding that Boeing make its systems even more idiot-proof, we are simply entertaining the notion of incompetent pilots and laying the foundation for even more and worse disasters. The first change we need is for the media to understand that facts are important, invariant, and objective. And that you can't understand them easily without a technical background. Reporters who do not understand aircraft systems must be prohibited item from commenting upon them because doing so only leads to hype, hysteria, and misinformation. We live in a technical world now; there's no excuse for being a techno-pov.
• rtkwe 8y ago
  The problem is largely fixable. Interconnect the two AoA sensors so they can validate each other and add some logic to detect failures like we've seen where the AoA suddenly jumps to an extreme position and add an indicator or audio alert for that situation. Also modify the cutout to only disable the MCAS inputs so pilots can fix the MCAS trim adjustments using the electronic trim instead of having to use the manual wheels. Finally limit the total trim amount like they originally had in the FAA approval process. Those together should prevent more crashes. It doesn't fix the underlying problem that the MAX8 has fundamentally different handling properties during climbs that were papered over by a black box but they should prevent it from causing crashes with training.
  • salawat 8y ago
    You're assuming that MCAS has physically/logically discriminated inputs, and that the electric motor driver is capable of filtering which ones to acknowledge based on a switch that no one knew would need to exist at design time. Odds are, when looking at the avionics network traffic, signals from the trim switches and MCAS are indistinguishable. Running an extra wire to represent the input to the microcontroller would also be a hardware change, which likely means swapping out hardware boards, and running new cable/wire/etc, which will require new schemata, new boards to be sourced from the manufacturer, more paperwork and testing, more maintenance install/refurb procedures, so on and so forth. From my understanding, Boeing is desperately trying to squeak by with just a software change to avoid all that. Personally, I'd prefer they take the time to do it right and change the hardware. It's what should have been done in the first place.
    • rtkwe 8y ago
      I didn't mean run a switch to the motors but either to the MCAS itself or whatever does the mixing between the MCAS and the other trim adjustment sources. Is the MCAS system even a separate box or just a software routine running on the main flight computers taking the AoA data?
      • salawat 8y ago