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This whole plane sounds like any ugly hack. They slapped very different engines on an existing airframe. Then, when it inevitability exhibited undesirable behav

This whole plane sounds like any ugly hack. They slapped very different engines on an existing airframe. Then, when it inevitability exhibited undesirable behaviour, they tried to paper over the cracks. Then they hid this information from their customers, regulatory agencies and the pilots. It makes me wonder if there are other issues with the Max that the public doesn't know about yet. I hope a thorough review of Boeing's internal communications is already underway. If there is proof that these decisions were made for financial gain, they should face criminal charges. IMO, whether it was greed or just general incompetence, Boeing has demonstrated that they are not responsible enough to self-certify their aircraft.

Causality1 7y ago
Indeed. The article makes it sound like a foul-up late in the design process, but this plane was corrupt from the very beginning when Boeing set out to dodge the requirement for re-certifying the airframe.
- K0balt 7y ago
  To be fair, it's not like this isn't standard industry practice. Airframe evolve and change, with incremental changes typically only affecting limited areas of impact. OTOH seeking a non aerodynamic solution to a significant stability degrading airframe modification was IMHO a bridge too far. If the pitch stability (not the pitch feel) problems couldn't be dealt with aerodymancally without busting type certification, than perhaps the whole concept was just too much of a stretch for the venerable old 737. It surprises me, though, that this couldn't have been engineered out with enhancements to the horizontal stabilizer, such as tip fences or a span increase to offset the lift from the engine nacelles. If it could have, but software was cheaper, then that's even a darker indictment of Boeing's engineering incompetence.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    If you make the plane wider you run into issues finding room for it at the gates.
  - heisenbit 7y ago
    Re-engineering the rudder may also have helped avoiding employing pitch control (with it's inherent delay and hard to undo actions). But that would have made it obvious that this is a different plane...
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  The FAA needs to grow a pair and declare this type certification and all other certifications older than ~30 years EOLed. That doesn't mean you can't continue operating those planes, it just means you can't retrofit some changes onto a deeply legacy model and still call it the same type.
  - basicplus2 7y ago
    I think its not about retrofitting and more about retrofitting (engines in this case) in the wrong place.
  - quink 7y ago
    Say what now? It sounds like you want the FAA to revoke the A320 type certificate?
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Yes. The A320neo should be the last new design allowed under the same certification. They'll be forced to re-certify whatever they do next anyway, so they won't have to try to shoehorn things into the older design like Boeing did with the 737.
      - quink 7y ago
        But Airbus shoehorned the same thing - a CFM LEAP - into an older design, just like Boeing did. It's not the case that they won't have to try, they already did it years ago.
Brakenshire 7y ago
> This whole plane sounds like any ugly hack. They slapped very different engines on an existing airframe. Then, when it inevitability exhibited undesirable behaviour, they tried to paper over the cracks. Then they hid this information from their customers, regulatory agencies and the pilots. Don’t forget, the system they used to paper over the cracks had a single point of failure.
- brucemoose 7y ago
  *One of the systems that we are aware of
djsumdog 7y ago
The sad thing is that we'll probably see this plane fly again by the end of the year, because the millions of dollars in retrofits will still be cheaper than having to scrap all existing planes. We have no idea what other potentially lethal corners have been cut. What if they go back into service, after several months of retrofitting all of them at Boeing maintenance hangers, and then the following year there are two more deadly crashes from some other overlooked hack. Really, these planes need to be scrapped. The engines, equipment, seats, etc can all be stripped and used in other planes, but the air frames will need to be recycled and this line of planes should end here. Even if it doesn't (probably won't), I highly doubt we'll see another generation of 737s. They did survive the rudder problems way back from the... 80s? or 90s? .. So their reputation might recover, but they still can't make the types of planes airlines want and keep that name/certification.
- sk5t 7y ago
  In what world is scrapping the airframes due to a (serious) software fault the best and most sensible solution? Do you believe there could be undiagnosed problems with the wings, fuselage, tail, hydraulics, electrics, fueling system, gear, etc.?
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    In what world is scrapping the airframes due to a (serious) software fault the best and most sensible solution? A world in which the faulty software was required to fix faulty hardware.
    - na85 7y ago
      The hardware isn't faulty. The problem is the way Boeing tried to achieve a zero training delta so pilots wouldn't have to get a second type rating.
      - nopzor 7y ago
        the airplane did not have stable flight characteristics because of its physical design. that’s a hardware problem. MCAS only exists because of that hardware problem. the fact that boeing also did not train or tell pilots about MCAS, in order to make the airplane more financially appealing by retaining the 737 type rating, is a separate (also bad) issue.
gdavisson 7y ago
"Other issues" is what worries me most about this as well. We now know that MCAS is safety-critical, so it's going to be reviewed, but what else got missed/minimized during the design and review process? The fact that Boeing is still trying to minimize the danger of MCAS does not fill me with confidence in their willingness to raise and fix other problems. They don't seem to have learned from this, which means it's likely to happen again.
lutorm 7y ago
I think this is false thinking. The 737 is by now a very well tested airframe. Yes, you change some things and there are unexpected results, but the core is sound. Starting over on a completely new design, everything has to be debugged from scratch. This reasoning reminds me of the tendency to argue "this code needs to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch" among software engineers. It's easy to see the flaws, but not so easy to all the things that have been fixed. See https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- lugg 7y ago
  Please, no. This is not the same thing at all. This is like taking your MySQL app and running it against MongoDB with a bunch of hacks to translate the SQL into mongo calls. And then claiming you did all this so you could "avoid a rewrite". Some architectural decisions are far reaching and leaky. This is not the ideal but it often is the ideal trade off. The alternative is decoupling to the nth degree resulting in a hunk of junk impossible to change that won't get off the ground.
  - jngreenlee 7y ago
    I dont think its corelous (is that a word?). It's not really a lift and shift to new platform. However the analogy to "rewrite all this" politics is good I think. Often you could walk into a building and say "all this needs to go" but truely the costs of doing so and starting from scratch are hidden in code and engineering design that's survived a trial period. No matter how nice and neat everything might look, that's only because it doesn't yet account for 10,000 other edge cases you're not able to simultaneously consider...a system as complex as a commercial plane is still going to care about these.
  - eastern 7y ago
    Exactly. Changing the position of the engines means it's no longer the same 'tried and tested airframe'.
- heisenbit 7y ago
  Engines were mounted to make a stable configuration inherently unstable in not so uncommon circumstances. The pitch was used to control the the most critical axis of the plane - something done normally with the rudder. This gave an automated system the authority to override the pilot with a wide margin. The behavior of the plane differs wildly from the old 737 as soon as the surprising narrow corridor of normal flight situation is exceeded.
BurningFrog 7y ago
It's an ugly hack because the design tries to stay within what The Regulator considers the same airplane type. This in turn is because getting a new airplane type to market would cost some (I assume, facts are welcome!) unholy amount of money and time to get approved. If you consider that decision "greed" or "a rational response to perverse regulatory incentives" is I suppose a personality test as good as any :)
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I think this sort of excuse is always superficially applicable and therefore meaningless. There is no malfeasance that can't be described as "a rational response to perverse regulatory incentives", but "rational" falsely implies a singular possibility chosen objectively. It's incorrect to defend a specific failure as being compelled, because one hasn't explained why this failure and not the near-infinite number of other possible ones.
- salawat 7y ago
  Those regulatory incentives are there for a reason. They are written in blood for the most part. It's one thing to scoff and believe "Oh, it's nothing! You're just holding us all back!"... ...Right up until a plane load of freight or people plunges out of the sky. Free market economics optimizes for one thing, and one thing only as a first,order optimization. That's why we regulate. To ensure that all those nuisance secondary facets are accounted by everyone equally to ensure that market forces natural race to the bottom doesn't compromise the central tenet of air safety; that everyone and everything that goes up, comes back down, safely, controlled, and alive. The business part, if you think about it, is secondary to the capability to make and safely deploy a new plane. A nice bonus. Sacrificing the quality of the final product for the sake of looking better on the balance sheets us a cardinal sin. Plain and simple. Based on testimony from inside, that sin seems to be SOP at Boeing for the better part of the last decade.

Causality1 7y ago

Indeed. The article makes it sound like a foul-up late in the design process, but this plane was corrupt from the very beginning when Boeing set out to dodge the requirement for re-certifying the airframe.

K0balt 7y ago
To be fair, it's not like this isn't standard industry practice. Airframe evolve and change, with incremental changes typically only affecting limited areas of impact. OTOH seeking a non aerodynamic solution to a significant stability degrading airframe modification was IMHO a bridge too far. If the pitch stability (not the pitch feel) problems couldn't be dealt with aerodymancally without busting type certification, than perhaps the whole concept was just too much of a stretch for the venerable old 737. It surprises me, though, that this couldn't have been engineered out with enhancements to the horizontal stabilizer, such as tip fences or a span increase to offset the lift from the engine nacelles. If it could have, but software was cheaper, then that's even a darker indictment of Boeing's engineering incompetence.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  If you make the plane wider you run into issues finding room for it at the gates.
- heisenbit 7y ago
  Re-engineering the rudder may also have helped avoiding employing pitch control (with it's inherent delay and hard to undo actions). But that would have made it obvious that this is a different plane...
CydeWeys 7y ago
The FAA needs to grow a pair and declare this type certification and all other certifications older than ~30 years EOLed. That doesn't mean you can't continue operating those planes, it just means you can't retrofit some changes onto a deeply legacy model and still call it the same type.
- basicplus2 7y ago
  I think its not about retrofitting and more about retrofitting (engines in this case) in the wrong place.
- quink 7y ago
  Say what now? It sounds like you want the FAA to revoke the A320 type certificate?
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Yes. The A320neo should be the last new design allowed under the same certification. They'll be forced to re-certify whatever they do next anyway, so they won't have to try to shoehorn things into the older design like Boeing did with the 737.
    - quink 7y ago
      But Airbus shoehorned the same thing - a CFM LEAP - into an older design, just like Boeing did. It's not the case that they won't have to try, they already did it years ago.

Brakenshire 7y ago

> This whole plane sounds like any ugly hack. They slapped very different engines on an existing airframe. Then, when it inevitability exhibited undesirable behaviour, they tried to paper over the cracks. Then they hid this information from their customers, regulatory agencies and the pilots. Don’t forget, the system they used to paper over the cracks had a single point of failure.

brucemoose 7y ago
*One of the systems that we are aware of

djsumdog 7y ago

The sad thing is that we'll probably see this plane fly again by the end of the year, because the millions of dollars in retrofits will still be cheaper than having to scrap all existing planes. We have no idea what other potentially lethal corners have been cut. What if they go back into service, after several months of retrofitting all of them at Boeing maintenance hangers, and then the following year there are two more deadly crashes from some other overlooked hack. Really, these planes need to be scrapped. The engines, equipment, seats, etc can all be stripped and used in other planes, but the air frames will need to be recycled and this line of planes should end here. Even if it doesn't (probably won't), I highly doubt we'll see another generation of 737s. They did survive the rudder problems way back from the... 80s? or 90s? .. So their reputation might recover, but they still can't make the types of planes airlines want and keep that name/certification.

sk5t 7y ago
In what world is scrapping the airframes due to a (serious) software fault the best and most sensible solution? Do you believe there could be undiagnosed problems with the wings, fuselage, tail, hydraulics, electrics, fueling system, gear, etc.?
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  In what world is scrapping the airframes due to a (serious) software fault the best and most sensible solution? A world in which the faulty software was required to fix faulty hardware.
  - na85 7y ago
    The hardware isn't faulty. The problem is the way Boeing tried to achieve a zero training delta so pilots wouldn't have to get a second type rating.
    - nopzor 7y ago
      the airplane did not have stable flight characteristics because of its physical design. that’s a hardware problem. MCAS only exists because of that hardware problem. the fact that boeing also did not train or tell pilots about MCAS, in order to make the airplane more financially appealing by retaining the 737 type rating, is a separate (also bad) issue.

gdavisson 7y ago

"Other issues" is what worries me most about this as well. We now know that MCAS is safety-critical, so it's going to be reviewed, but what else got missed/minimized during the design and review process? The fact that Boeing is still trying to minimize the danger of MCAS does not fill me with confidence in their willingness to raise and fix other problems. They don't seem to have learned from this, which means it's likely to happen again.

lutorm 7y ago

I think this is false thinking. The 737 is by now a very well tested airframe. Yes, you change some things and there are unexpected results, but the core is sound. Starting over on a completely new design, everything has to be debugged from scratch. This reasoning reminds me of the tendency to argue "this code needs to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch" among software engineers. It's easy to see the flaws, but not so easy to all the things that have been fixed. See https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

lugg 7y ago
Please, no. This is not the same thing at all. This is like taking your MySQL app and running it against MongoDB with a bunch of hacks to translate the SQL into mongo calls. And then claiming you did all this so you could "avoid a rewrite". Some architectural decisions are far reaching and leaky. This is not the ideal but it often is the ideal trade off. The alternative is decoupling to the nth degree resulting in a hunk of junk impossible to change that won't get off the ground.
- jngreenlee 7y ago
  I dont think its corelous (is that a word?). It's not really a lift and shift to new platform. However the analogy to "rewrite all this" politics is good I think. Often you could walk into a building and say "all this needs to go" but truely the costs of doing so and starting from scratch are hidden in code and engineering design that's survived a trial period. No matter how nice and neat everything might look, that's only because it doesn't yet account for 10,000 other edge cases you're not able to simultaneously consider...a system as complex as a commercial plane is still going to care about these.
- eastern 7y ago
  Exactly. Changing the position of the engines means it's no longer the same 'tried and tested airframe'.
heisenbit 7y ago
Engines were mounted to make a stable configuration inherently unstable in not so uncommon circumstances. The pitch was used to control the the most critical axis of the plane - something done normally with the rudder. This gave an automated system the authority to override the pilot with a wide margin. The behavior of the plane differs wildly from the old 737 as soon as the surprising narrow corridor of normal flight situation is exceeded.

BurningFrog 7y ago

It's an ugly hack because the design tries to stay within what The Regulator considers the same airplane type. This in turn is because getting a new airplane type to market would cost some (I assume, facts are welcome!) unholy amount of money and time to get approved. If you consider that decision "greed" or "a rational response to perverse regulatory incentives" is I suppose a personality test as good as any :)

perl4ever 7y ago
I think this sort of excuse is always superficially applicable and therefore meaningless. There is no malfeasance that can't be described as "a rational response to perverse regulatory incentives", but "rational" falsely implies a singular possibility chosen objectively. It's incorrect to defend a specific failure as being compelled, because one hasn't explained why this failure and not the near-infinite number of other possible ones.
salawat 7y ago
Those regulatory incentives are there for a reason. They are written in blood for the most part. It's one thing to scoff and believe "Oh, it's nothing! You're just holding us all back!"... ...Right up until a plane load of freight or people plunges out of the sky. Free market economics optimizes for one thing, and one thing only as a first,order optimization. That's why we regulate. To ensure that all those nuisance secondary facets are accounted by everyone equally to ensure that market forces natural race to the bottom doesn't compromise the central tenet of air safety; that everyone and everything that goes up, comes back down, safely, controlled, and alive. The business part, if you think about it, is secondary to the capability to make and safely deploy a new plane. A nice bonus. Sacrificing the quality of the final product for the sake of looking better on the balance sheets us a cardinal sin. Plain and simple. Based on testimony from inside, that sin seems to be SOP at Boeing for the better part of the last decade.