7 ms·

What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

53 points by xmmrm 7y ago

chmaynard 7y ago
A friend of mine wrote: "I don't know whether you recognized the name of the author. He is a well-known aviation writer and journalist, and the son of Wolfgang Langeweische, author of the book Stick and Rudder. Stick and Rudder has been the bible for pilots of how planes fly since its publication in the 1940s."
vbisbest 7y ago
Why do we allow pay wall articles on this site?
VBprogrammer 7y ago
> before reverting to a perfectly capable parallel system of manual trim I don't have time to read the article in detail at the moment but suffice to say that this is subject to considerable debate.
- Filligree 7y ago
  Suffice also to say that, under heavy aerodynamic load, manual trim requires enough physical force to be the next thing to impossible.
  - me_me_me 7y ago
    Correct me if I am wrong, the pilot also need to be is specific position to have maximum leverage - ergo its not pilots its the plane that is the issue (or in that case Boeing's management).
g4d 7y ago
That's a 14,000 word report with no concluding statement...
pytester 7y ago
This reads like yet another PR attempt by Boeing execs to shift the blame for the deaths away from their chronic mismanagement to pilot error.
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  Yep, just wanted to write more a les sthe same thing. Sounds like another smear the pilots job paid for by Boeing in order to deflect blame from their abyssimal performance.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  I would actually still place this failure directly at Boeing's feet. Games like the ones Boeing was trying to play (overhauling an entire aircraft without having to change type rating and retrain pilots) directly lead to situations like this. Yes, the FAA / NTSB should have been more effective, but regulatory capture like this is common. It's ultimately Boeing's job to manage the risk: losing 2 airframes in a matter of months because pilots weren't trained on the aircraft as a result of Boeing's mismanagement has done catastrophic damage to their reputation that will take decades to repair. They will now be under a microscope for everything they do, which means they can't use a lot of the less risky cost-cutting they were likely doing before. The net result of Boeing's machinations to keep the 737-Max at the same type rating led directly to a situation where pilots were not sufficiently trained in the functionality of the aircraft. So I have zero sympathy for the view that Boeing is not entirely responsible for this situation.
  - pytester 7y ago
    Yes, I'm surprised that more shareholders and more of Congress haven't been calling both for Dennis Muilenburg's head and the end to self certification.
    - sseveran 7y ago
      It might make everyone feel better if he was fired, but little else. He became CEO one month before the first fuselage was completed and six months before the first flight, having been in charge of the defense unit. Perhaps a better but less satisfying target would be Ray Conner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner) who was head of commercial aviation from 2012 to 2016, or perhaps Jim Albaugh, his predecessor. Crucial engineering decisions would have been made during these years.
ecmascript 7y ago
Wow, such a long article in what probably could be condensed into 1 a4 sized page if you really are just about answering the question posed. Who actually reads articles like this? I am genuinely curious. Comes off as information overload to me and it's hard to know what to believe.
- matthewtoast 7y ago
  I do. William Langewiesche is probably the best writer on aviation - if you want really deep and detailed analysis.
  - qaq 7y ago
    That reads as extremely biased analysis (to put it lightly).
  - ecmascript 7y ago
    Cool, you must honestly be one of a few. I could never bear myself to read such a long article even if the topic was of interest. I can listen to or view content that are hours long but in text format it's kind of overwhelming to me. Mainly because I cannot do anything else than read while I am reading which makes reading such a piece a very time-consuming task. I'd rather do something else than read such an article but it's probably for the best that there are people like you who like it as well.
    - lenocinor 7y ago
      I understand your point, but I read articles like this (and especially ones by Langewiesche) because there are topics that, for me, I learn better about it this way. I'm exactly opposite of you -- I generally can't bear to watch videos or listen to podcasts about these kinds of nonfiction topics because they feel way too long to me, whereas I can read an article faster and skip the parts easily that I don't feel are good.
  - cmurf 7y ago
    I don't consider it analysis. It is a discussion. He writes that Air France 447 was "an exercise in poor airmanship", full stop. That is completely inconsistent with the final report on AF 447, where literally everyone but the passengers got part of the blame for it. It blamed Air France, it blamed Airbus, it blamed the simulators, it blamed the pilots. His central thesis in this article might be: Boeing became the world’s pre-eminent commercial airplane manufacturer in part because it developed a coherent design philosophy that relied on pilots’ airmanship as the last line of defense. And that's come up before in various discussions like Langewiesche's. And here I'll underscore this article is a discussion, it's not an analysis. He does bring in myriad relevant factors like airline's being cheap, foolhardy, downright wreckless at times, literally expecting pilots to paper over their decisions. I think that is a real problem all airlines have to contend with, but the safest airlines have mostly solved it, and the least safe airlines still struggle with it and it's mostly about systemic corruption, not pilot incompetency. It's just that if you don't have particularly skilled and experienced pilots all of the time, you're playing roulette - you don't have your last line of defense all of the time. Eventually, things aren't going to work out well. And on that part of the discussion, I agree with him.
miketery 7y ago
"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." - Dr Joseph Goebbels. My god, the PR on behalf of Boeing by The NY Times is embarrassing. The accidents were the result of various actions which increased the risk and decreased safety. All beginning with moving the engines forward and up which changed the flight envelope, requiring more complex systems. Followed by not informing pilots of said new systems, and additionally selling as an add on (for profit reasons) indicators which would have informed pilots whether this system was activated. Imagine your cruise control automatically was turning on in your car, but you had no idea, and hitting the brake pedal did nothing. This is what those pilots were experiencing. Planes aren’t hard to fly if you follow basic principles, take appropriate safety measures, and know the physics. Responsibility for these deaths rests with Boeing.
- zaroth 7y ago
  I like the brake pedal analogy. It's not perfect, but it makes the point well. To add insult to injury, when the driver flipped a cut-out switch to disable the cruise control, the brakes were useless, the manual brake adjustment lever failed, and the only documented procedure to fix them at that point (for that model plane, err, car) was to turn cruise control back on.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    As someone who's driven a lot of vehicles in various states of mechanical failure I don't. Once you stop treating a vehicle as a magical black box where everything affects everything the analogy falls apart. Vehicles have predictable failure mode and systems that are integrated with each other in known and fairly standardized ways. Short of catastrophic mechanical failure (i. e the front fell off) someone with sufficient experience to recognize what is going on should be able to disable systems until some level of basic control is restored. Your brakes have nothing to do with cruise control other than having a little switch on them (usually two switches) to tell cruise control to turn off when you press them. I feel like airline pilots should in theory have that level of understanding of the systems in their aircraft since they are trained professionals and the stakes are very high so they need to be able to handle failures gracefully. And before anyone puts words in my mouth I'm not saying Boeing isn't the most at fault party in all of this.
zelienople 7y ago
Finally, one lone voice cuts through the hysteria and garbage and speaks the unpopular truth. The good old boy culture of training men inadequately so that they can, at best, monitor an aircraft's systems, and then pretending that they are pilots is what killed those people. You don't like it, but it's the truth.
- salawat 7y ago
  No... Not really. I mean, I agree with you to a point. There is a delight taken by manufacturers being able to ostensibly cut training costs. But in this case, the fact was the plane itself was unsoundly engineered. Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator. The pilot cannot be the primary carrier of blame when the equipment in the best hands available had only a 66% chance of having the pilot recover AFTER being made aware of what to expect. Boeing is definitely the right one on whom to shoulder the blame here. EDIT: Okay, On further consideration, I do see where you're coming from with the article's focus on "airmanship". My primary contention, however, remains. You can put a dangerous plane in the hands of a good airman, and you still have an airman flying a dangerous plane. That is the issue most seem to be bothered by. Even if the "modern pilot" doesn't have that visceral connection to their planes, that's no excuse for a manufacturer to produce one that requires extreme levels of airmanship to divine the existence of a system they couldn't admit the existence, severity, or implementation of to regulators for fear of not meeting deadlines. Again, I agree with you to a point, and believe you did make a good point. Just wanted to make it clear that I don't think it should detract from Boeing's clear malfeasance here.
  - zelienople 7y ago
    You wrote "Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator". This is utter nonsense that you either made up or obtained from some unreliable source. It is categorically false. The third pilot in the jump seat "rescued" the Lion Air accident aircraft on the previous flight by simply telling the pilots to disengage the stabilizer trim. This "rescued" aircraft continued 600 miles safely to Jakarta. You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist. In the words of the Air France 447 pilot just before he died from his own gross incompetence, “[Expletive], we’re dead.” And in this, I am referring to the human species.
sambull 7y ago
Trying to get everything under the sun grandfathered in from the old air-frame (from safety requirements and type rating) is what brought it down. Oh and being in bed with the people who could have slowed them down and said hold up here....
chmaynard 7y ago
The author has done a great deal of thoughtful investigative work and that's always a good thing. However, in his attempt to reach conclusions and assign blame he has diluted the effectiveness of the article. I'm very interested in this topic, so I skimmed through it (a very long read) and get a sense of whether it's worth further study. I decided to move on.
- swasheck 7y ago
  Exactly. It reads like an attempt to validate a foregone conclusion using components of thorough investigation. The author threw in a few gratuitous statements about how "maybe MCAS wasn't the best idea" so that the they couldn't really be accused of blindly supporting Boeing. It sounds like Lion Air were victims of not knowing the systems in place. Ethiopian Air didn't seem to have the altitude to figure things out in a timely manner. This isn't to say that there's not corruption and other things going sideways in these investigations, but to lay blame squarely on the countries and the airlines is really disingenuous.
qaq 7y ago
How much does it cost to have an "article" like this posted on NYT?
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
"Even more pernicious was the F.A.A.’s longstanding delegation of regulatory authority to Boeing employees — a worry that is perennially available to chew on if you like and may indeed be related to the configuration of the troublesome system as it was installed. Nonetheless, in Seattle, at the level where such small choices are made, corruption, like cynicism, is rare." This is really embarassing to read, due to the intense naivete to have these two sentences side by side.
jmull 7y ago
I read the whole article. It is long. The TLDR is something like: the 373 max crashes are the result of a lack of “airmanship” by pilots of the airlines of developing countries, a quality the author acknowledges he can’t define. But he feels the pilots make many “really dumb” errors and are incompetent. And the airlines that employ and often train them are crappy. Meanwhile, Boeing is mostly blameless. Sure, there were “bewildering” design decisions but those didn’t have much to do with it. The article suggests Boeing’s mistake may have been that, unlike Airbus, it failed to appreciate how idiotic pilots have become. Ok, I failed to make my TLDR short. This article doesn’t go over very well with me. The problem with blaming the problem on an unmeasureable quality (“airmanship”) is that it leaves no room for a rational solution. He suggests the max should be ungrounded, but how can you do that without improving airmanship, and how can you do that if you can’t meaningfully quantify it? While it does a great job of presenting many facts across several threads, it reads like the author wants to minimize Boeing’s responsibility and interprets all the facts through that lens.
cdumler 7y ago
Can someone validate my thinking here, please? I’ve been watching this saga for a while and there is something that doesn’t seem to be said that really bothers me about this whole situation: the failure mode is negative, not neutral. Here is what I mean. An aircraft has a flight envelop that defines its flight characteristics. Not only does it define in how fast or slow or high it can operate, but how that operation changes if something changes in performance. For instance, engines under the wing and on the tail cause differences as power is gained or lost. Under the wing, an increase in power will push the nose up, and a loss in power will cause the nose to drop. This is the opposite of tail mounted engines. The whole point of training a pilot is make it instinctive to expect what the plane will do when things go wrong, ie. if you are in a tail engine plane and loose suddenly power, expect that you are moving closer to a stall. The plane will both be raising the nose and losing speed. Again, vice versa for wing mounted engine. There is also another important point. If the pilot kills/loses the engine, is a neutral failure: the flight envelope does not change. The engine is no longer providing thrust so the plane orients merely to a new position in its flight envelope. But, failure in the flight system for the Max does something totally different. The whole point of the MCAS flight computer is make the plane appear as though it has a different flight envelope. The computer automagically adjusts the flight services, notably by moving the trim. What really bothers me about the idea of using software to alter the flight characteristics is that any failure results in the plane not only falling back on a fight envelope that isn’t what the pilot trained on, but also to a point in the flight envelope that the pilot didn’t even choose (ie. trim being in some arbitrary position). Worse than that, an MCAS failure is negative. The very point of the computer system is “out guess” and compensate for the pilot’s expectations of his or her trained flight envelop; thus, if the computer believes it is operating correctly but is not, it is actively making an arbitrary flight envelope that could be constantly changing. The pilot must deduce the MCAS software is at fault while the MCAS software is deducing the pilot is at fault. Everything I have ever seen is that the whole point of airplane design and pilot training is to reduce flight problems to known solutions as to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. The very design of MCAS is failure must put the pilot into an unknown position and likely be actively combating the pilot’s understand of the situation. If this logic is correct, I cannot fathom how any of this is acceptable.
- 7y ago
maxthrow22 7y ago
>>Immediately after liftoff, the captain’s airspeed indication failed, airspeed-disagreement and altitude-disagreement warnings appeared on his flight display and his stick shaker began to rattle the controls in warning of an imminent stall. This simple fact has simply been ignored by the broder community on hackernews who are not pilots. The airspeed indicator is tied into the AoA sensor. The moment the AoA fails the pilots recieve an airspeed disagreement warning that must be fixed using the unreliable airspeed checklist. If your analysis of what happend on either of the accident flight ignores this critical fact you are wrong. Welcome to the Danning-Krueger effect in action
- cmurf 7y ago
  What in the unreliable airspeed checklist would have saved the flight? Once mistrim happens, there is no possible way to get either of the two flights in question, to either 4 degrees pitch up and 75% N1, let alone 10 degrees pitch up and 80% N1. Any power reduction will cause a pitch down and make the problem worse. All your advise would do is kill them faster. Mistrim must be avoided at low altitude, and in these two cases MCAS induced mistrim faster than it could be identified and avoided. It takes significant altitude to recover from it, assuming you even know the procedure, which hasn't been in the 737 FOM for decades. Neither flight had sufficient altitude for that procedure. If all of this were just about training and checklists, these airplanes wouldn't be grounded around the world. I also find it hilarious you misspell your insult.
mobilefriendly 7y ago
Why was this flagged? It is a detailed New York Times article by a respected aviation journalist. Its opinionated reporting but I was looking forward to the Hacker News discussion.
- lenocinor 7y ago
  I agree. I'm guessing that, at least for many folks, they didn't know the context, and assumed that the more positive statements are the result of naivete or ignorance.
hackerNoose 7y ago
I think it was the first article I've read on the issue that actually explained all the factors in a clear way. As it's a complicated issue it needed to be long. Even though the pilots evidently were incompetent, I do think he's too light on his criticism against Boeing. The failure mode on this system was too drastic, and unnecessarily persistent. Combined with the fact that all that was needed was one faulty sensor this was obviously shoddy engineering.

53 points by xmmrm 7y ago

A friend of mine wrote: "I don't know whether you recognized the name of the author. He is a well-known aviation writer and journalist, and the son of Wolfgang Langeweische, author of the book Stick and Rudder. Stick and Rudder has been the bible for pilots of how planes fly since its publication in the 1940s."

vbisbest 7y ago

Why do we allow pay wall articles on this site?

VBprogrammer 7y ago

> before reverting to a perfectly capable parallel system of manual trim I don't have time to read the article in detail at the moment but suffice to say that this is subject to considerable debate.

Filligree 7y ago
Suffice also to say that, under heavy aerodynamic load, manual trim requires enough physical force to be the next thing to impossible.
- me_me_me 7y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, the pilot also need to be is specific position to have maximum leverage - ergo its not pilots its the plane that is the issue (or in that case Boeing's management).

g4d 7y ago

That's a 14,000 word report with no concluding statement...

pytester 7y ago

This reads like yet another PR attempt by Boeing execs to shift the blame for the deaths away from their chronic mismanagement to pilot error.

CaptainZapp 7y ago
Yep, just wanted to write more a les sthe same thing. Sounds like another smear the pilots job paid for by Boeing in order to deflect blame from their abyssimal performance.
wayoutthere 7y ago
I would actually still place this failure directly at Boeing's feet. Games like the ones Boeing was trying to play (overhauling an entire aircraft without having to change type rating and retrain pilots) directly lead to situations like this. Yes, the FAA / NTSB should have been more effective, but regulatory capture like this is common. It's ultimately Boeing's job to manage the risk: losing 2 airframes in a matter of months because pilots weren't trained on the aircraft as a result of Boeing's mismanagement has done catastrophic damage to their reputation that will take decades to repair. They will now be under a microscope for everything they do, which means they can't use a lot of the less risky cost-cutting they were likely doing before. The net result of Boeing's machinations to keep the 737-Max at the same type rating led directly to a situation where pilots were not sufficiently trained in the functionality of the aircraft. So I have zero sympathy for the view that Boeing is not entirely responsible for this situation.
- pytester 7y ago
  Yes, I'm surprised that more shareholders and more of Congress haven't been calling both for Dennis Muilenburg's head and the end to self certification.
  - sseveran 7y ago
    It might make everyone feel better if he was fired, but little else. He became CEO one month before the first fuselage was completed and six months before the first flight, having been in charge of the defense unit. Perhaps a better but less satisfying target would be Ray Conner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Conner) who was head of commercial aviation from 2012 to 2016, or perhaps Jim Albaugh, his predecessor. Crucial engineering decisions would have been made during these years.

ecmascript 7y ago

Wow, such a long article in what probably could be condensed into 1 a4 sized page if you really are just about answering the question posed. Who actually reads articles like this? I am genuinely curious. Comes off as information overload to me and it's hard to know what to believe.

matthewtoast 7y ago
I do. William Langewiesche is probably the best writer on aviation - if you want really deep and detailed analysis.
- qaq 7y ago
  That reads as extremely biased analysis (to put it lightly).
- ecmascript 7y ago
  Cool, you must honestly be one of a few. I could never bear myself to read such a long article even if the topic was of interest. I can listen to or view content that are hours long but in text format it's kind of overwhelming to me. Mainly because I cannot do anything else than read while I am reading which makes reading such a piece a very time-consuming task. I'd rather do something else than read such an article but it's probably for the best that there are people like you who like it as well.
  - lenocinor 7y ago
    I understand your point, but I read articles like this (and especially ones by Langewiesche) because there are topics that, for me, I learn better about it this way. I'm exactly opposite of you -- I generally can't bear to watch videos or listen to podcasts about these kinds of nonfiction topics because they feel way too long to me, whereas I can read an article faster and skip the parts easily that I don't feel are good.
- cmurf 7y ago
  I don't consider it analysis. It is a discussion. He writes that Air France 447 was "an exercise in poor airmanship", full stop. That is completely inconsistent with the final report on AF 447, where literally everyone but the passengers got part of the blame for it. It blamed Air France, it blamed Airbus, it blamed the simulators, it blamed the pilots. His central thesis in this article might be: Boeing became the world’s pre-eminent commercial airplane manufacturer in part because it developed a coherent design philosophy that relied on pilots’ airmanship as the last line of defense. And that's come up before in various discussions like Langewiesche's. And here I'll underscore this article is a discussion, it's not an analysis. He does bring in myriad relevant factors like airline's being cheap, foolhardy, downright wreckless at times, literally expecting pilots to paper over their decisions. I think that is a real problem all airlines have to contend with, but the safest airlines have mostly solved it, and the least safe airlines still struggle with it and it's mostly about systemic corruption, not pilot incompetency. It's just that if you don't have particularly skilled and experienced pilots all of the time, you're playing roulette - you don't have your last line of defense all of the time. Eventually, things aren't going to work out well. And on that part of the discussion, I agree with him.

miketery 7y ago

"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." - Dr Joseph Goebbels. My god, the PR on behalf of Boeing by The NY Times is embarrassing. The accidents were the result of various actions which increased the risk and decreased safety. All beginning with moving the engines forward and up which changed the flight envelope, requiring more complex systems. Followed by not informing pilots of said new systems, and additionally selling as an add on (for profit reasons) indicators which would have informed pilots whether this system was activated. Imagine your cruise control automatically was turning on in your car, but you had no idea, and hitting the brake pedal did nothing. This is what those pilots were experiencing. Planes aren’t hard to fly if you follow basic principles, take appropriate safety measures, and know the physics. Responsibility for these deaths rests with Boeing.

zaroth 7y ago
I like the brake pedal analogy. It's not perfect, but it makes the point well. To add insult to injury, when the driver flipped a cut-out switch to disable the cruise control, the brakes were useless, the manual brake adjustment lever failed, and the only documented procedure to fix them at that point (for that model plane, err, car) was to turn cruise control back on.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  As someone who's driven a lot of vehicles in various states of mechanical failure I don't. Once you stop treating a vehicle as a magical black box where everything affects everything the analogy falls apart. Vehicles have predictable failure mode and systems that are integrated with each other in known and fairly standardized ways. Short of catastrophic mechanical failure (i. e the front fell off) someone with sufficient experience to recognize what is going on should be able to disable systems until some level of basic control is restored. Your brakes have nothing to do with cruise control other than having a little switch on them (usually two switches) to tell cruise control to turn off when you press them. I feel like airline pilots should in theory have that level of understanding of the systems in their aircraft since they are trained professionals and the stakes are very high so they need to be able to handle failures gracefully. And before anyone puts words in my mouth I'm not saying Boeing isn't the most at fault party in all of this.

zelienople 7y ago

Finally, one lone voice cuts through the hysteria and garbage and speaks the unpopular truth. The good old boy culture of training men inadequately so that they can, at best, monitor an aircraft's systems, and then pretending that they are pilots is what killed those people. You don't like it, but it's the truth.

salawat 7y ago
No... Not really. I mean, I agree with you to a point. There is a delight taken by manufacturers being able to ostensibly cut training costs. But in this case, the fact was the plane itself was unsoundly engineered. Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator. The pilot cannot be the primary carrier of blame when the equipment in the best hands available had only a 66% chance of having the pilot recover AFTER being made aware of what to expect. Boeing is definitely the right one on whom to shoulder the blame here. EDIT: Okay, On further consideration, I do see where you're coming from with the article's focus on "airmanship". My primary contention, however, remains. You can put a dangerous plane in the hands of a good airman, and you still have an airman flying a dangerous plane. That is the issue most seem to be bothered by. Even if the "modern pilot" doesn't have that visceral connection to their planes, that's no excuse for a manufacturer to produce one that requires extreme levels of airmanship to divine the existence of a system they couldn't admit the existence, severity, or implementation of to regulators for fear of not meeting deadlines. Again, I agree with you to a point, and believe you did make a good point. Just wanted to make it clear that I don't think it should detract from Boeing's clear malfeasance here.
- zelienople 7y ago
  You wrote "Even highly skilled pilots have failed to rescue the plane in a simulator". This is utter nonsense that you either made up or obtained from some unreliable source. It is categorically false. The third pilot in the jump seat "rescued" the Lion Air accident aircraft on the previous flight by simply telling the pilots to disengage the stabilizer trim. This "rescued" aircraft continued 600 miles safely to Jakarta. You know nothing and yet you have opinions, and this is now universally accepted. You are therefore easily manipulated by those who would blame Boeing instead of the gross and egregious negligence of the pilots, those who trained them, the airline owners and executives, and the market conditions that forced Boeing to make decisions in good faith that incorrectly assumed a level of pilot competency that did not exist. In the words of the Air France 447 pilot just before he died from his own gross incompetence, “[Expletive], we’re dead.” And in this, I am referring to the human species.

sambull 7y ago

Trying to get everything under the sun grandfathered in from the old air-frame (from safety requirements and type rating) is what brought it down. Oh and being in bed with the people who could have slowed them down and said hold up here....

chmaynard 7y ago

The author has done a great deal of thoughtful investigative work and that's always a good thing. However, in his attempt to reach conclusions and assign blame he has diluted the effectiveness of the article. I'm very interested in this topic, so I skimmed through it (a very long read) and get a sense of whether it's worth further study. I decided to move on.

swasheck 7y ago
Exactly. It reads like an attempt to validate a foregone conclusion using components of thorough investigation. The author threw in a few gratuitous statements about how "maybe MCAS wasn't the best idea" so that the they couldn't really be accused of blindly supporting Boeing. It sounds like Lion Air were victims of not knowing the systems in place. Ethiopian Air didn't seem to have the altitude to figure things out in a timely manner. This isn't to say that there's not corruption and other things going sideways in these investigations, but to lay blame squarely on the countries and the airlines is really disingenuous.

qaq 7y ago

How much does it cost to have an "article" like this posted on NYT?

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

"Even more pernicious was the F.A.A.’s longstanding delegation of regulatory authority to Boeing employees — a worry that is perennially available to chew on if you like and may indeed be related to the configuration of the troublesome system as it was installed. Nonetheless, in Seattle, at the level where such small choices are made, corruption, like cynicism, is rare." This is really embarassing to read, due to the intense naivete to have these two sentences side by side.

jmull 7y ago

I read the whole article. It is long. The TLDR is something like: the 373 max crashes are the result of a lack of “airmanship” by pilots of the airlines of developing countries, a quality the author acknowledges he can’t define. But he feels the pilots make many “really dumb” errors and are incompetent. And the airlines that employ and often train them are crappy. Meanwhile, Boeing is mostly blameless. Sure, there were “bewildering” design decisions but those didn’t have much to do with it. The article suggests Boeing’s mistake may have been that, unlike Airbus, it failed to appreciate how idiotic pilots have become. Ok, I failed to make my TLDR short. This article doesn’t go over very well with me. The problem with blaming the problem on an unmeasureable quality (“airmanship”) is that it leaves no room for a rational solution. He suggests the max should be ungrounded, but how can you do that without improving airmanship, and how can you do that if you can’t meaningfully quantify it? While it does a great job of presenting many facts across several threads, it reads like the author wants to minimize Boeing’s responsibility and interprets all the facts through that lens.

cdumler 7y ago

Can someone validate my thinking here, please? I’ve been watching this saga for a while and there is something that doesn’t seem to be said that really bothers me about this whole situation: the failure mode is negative, not neutral. Here is what I mean. An aircraft has a flight envelop that defines its flight characteristics. Not only does it define in how fast or slow or high it can operate, but how that operation changes if something changes in performance. For instance, engines under the wing and on the tail cause differences as power is gained or lost. Under the wing, an increase in power will push the nose up, and a loss in power will cause the nose to drop. This is the opposite of tail mounted engines. The whole point of training a pilot is make it instinctive to expect what the plane will do when things go wrong, ie. if you are in a tail engine plane and loose suddenly power, expect that you are moving closer to a stall. The plane will both be raising the nose and losing speed. Again, vice versa for wing mounted engine. There is also another important point. If the pilot kills/loses the engine, is a neutral failure: the flight envelope does not change. The engine is no longer providing thrust so the plane orients merely to a new position in its flight envelope. But, failure in the flight system for the Max does something totally different. The whole point of the MCAS flight computer is make the plane appear as though it has a different flight envelope. The computer automagically adjusts the flight services, notably by moving the trim. What really bothers me about the idea of using software to alter the flight characteristics is that any failure results in the plane not only falling back on a fight envelope that isn’t what the pilot trained on, but also to a point in the flight envelope that the pilot didn’t even choose (ie. trim being in some arbitrary position). Worse than that, an MCAS failure is negative. The very point of the computer system is “out guess” and compensate for the pilot’s expectations of his or her trained flight envelop; thus, if the computer believes it is operating correctly but is not, it is actively making an arbitrary flight envelope that could be constantly changing. The pilot must deduce the MCAS software is at fault while the MCAS software is deducing the pilot is at fault. Everything I have ever seen is that the whole point of airplane design and pilot training is to reduce flight problems to known solutions as to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. The very design of MCAS is failure must put the pilot into an unknown position and likely be actively combating the pilot’s understand of the situation. If this logic is correct, I cannot fathom how any of this is acceptable.

7y ago

maxthrow22 7y ago

>>Immediately after liftoff, the captain’s airspeed indication failed, airspeed-disagreement and altitude-disagreement warnings appeared on his flight display and his stick shaker began to rattle the controls in warning of an imminent stall. This simple fact has simply been ignored by the broder community on hackernews who are not pilots. The airspeed indicator is tied into the AoA sensor. The moment the AoA fails the pilots recieve an airspeed disagreement warning that must be fixed using the unreliable airspeed checklist. If your analysis of what happend on either of the accident flight ignores this critical fact you are wrong. Welcome to the Danning-Krueger effect in action

cmurf 7y ago
What in the unreliable airspeed checklist would have saved the flight? Once mistrim happens, there is no possible way to get either of the two flights in question, to either 4 degrees pitch up and 75% N1, let alone 10 degrees pitch up and 80% N1. Any power reduction will cause a pitch down and make the problem worse. All your advise would do is kill them faster. Mistrim must be avoided at low altitude, and in these two cases MCAS induced mistrim faster than it could be identified and avoided. It takes significant altitude to recover from it, assuming you even know the procedure, which hasn't been in the 737 FOM for decades. Neither flight had sufficient altitude for that procedure. If all of this were just about training and checklists, these airplanes wouldn't be grounded around the world. I also find it hilarious you misspell your insult.

mobilefriendly 7y ago

Why was this flagged? It is a detailed New York Times article by a respected aviation journalist. Its opinionated reporting but I was looking forward to the Hacker News discussion.

lenocinor 7y ago
I agree. I'm guessing that, at least for many folks, they didn't know the context, and assumed that the more positive statements are the result of naivete or ignorance.

hackerNoose 7y ago

I think it was the first article I've read on the issue that actually explained all the factors in a clear way. As it's a complicated issue it needed to be long. Even though the pilots evidently were incompetent, I do think he's too light on his criticism against Boeing. The failure mode on this system was too drastic, and unnecessarily persistent. Combined with the fact that all that was needed was one faulty sensor this was obviously shoddy engineering.