5 ms·

There have been plenty of design flaws in commercial jetliners and in most cases, reputation is recovered. But there hasn't been design flaw quite like this on

by pcurve 7y ago

There have been plenty of design flaws in commercial jetliners and in most cases, reputation is recovered. But there hasn't been design flaw quite like this one. but none quite like this one.

chx 7y ago
Especially one that the FAA tried to pooh pooh as long as it could. It was amazing to watch the goodwill and trust accumulated over decades crumble to nothing in a few hours as the European countries one by one banned the airline from their airspace but did not ground them. It was the EASA telling the FAA to do the right thing. They didn't and then finally the EASA did ground the plane. I really can't remember any other time when the EASA and the FAA disagreed especially this big. https://www.thejournal.ie/us-ireland-boeing-4538567-Mar2019/ https://www.thejournal.ie/us-ireland-boeing-4538567-Mar2019/
- FabHK 7y ago
  My perception is different. It was appropriate, I think, for the FAA not to ground the fleet after the first crash. It was also arguably appropriate for the FAA not to ground the fleet immediately after the second crash, but then after some time when it became apparent that the failure mode was sufficiently similar (as they did). However, what has emerged since then certainly damaged the reputation of the FAA. But it was not a matter of a few hours, it was a matter of careful investigation and evaluation over months.
  - markdown 7y ago
    > It was appropriate, I think, for the FAA not to ground the fleet after the first crash. Safety first. They ought to have grounded the plane immediately after the first crash and TBH it's my belief that they would have done so if it had been a US plane with US passengers. The fact that it happened to brown people on the other side of the world made it easy to ignore. Don't forget that the FAA had all the details of the plane showing that it had implemented the new MCAS system which in theory could have caused the crash.
    - briandear 7y ago
      The FAA doesn’t control the worldwide skies. Indonesia didn’t ground the plane, nor did Ethiopia. Europe also didn’t ground it after the first crash either. The FAA’s jurisdiction is the United States: other countries could have grounded the plane quickly but didn’t.
      - bdhess 7y ago
        As the United States is the country of origin, an airworthiness directive issued by the FAA is valid in all ICAO member states.
    - georgeplusplus 7y ago
      Your safety first rhetoric doesn’t hold up against any sort of practicality. Should the 777 have been grounded immediately when Asiana crashed? What about the 777 after Malaysia or its second which we still don’t know the cause of? the right thing was done after the second crash (and eventually by the FAA after it’s arm was twisted enough) but to say it should’ve been immediately grounded is missing the picture entirely.
      - akie 7y ago
        > and eventually by the FAA after it’s arm was twisted enough There's a big part of the problem.
      - markdown 7y ago
        > Your safety first rhetoric doesn’t hold up against any sort of practicality. Wow. I don't know how to respond to that. People who thought like you kept the planes in the air and the result was the completely preventable deaths of so many more. > Should the 777 have been grounded immediately when Asiana crashed? What about the 777 after Malaysia or its second which we still don’t know the cause of? Nope. Those aircraft have a very long history of safe flight, completely unlike a 737 MAX. The FAA isn't made up of laymen watching the news to find out about the planes. They knew before the first MAX took flight that it had been heavily modified to make bigger engines on an airframe that wasn't designed to support it. It knew about the MCAS hacks that were implemented to make sure the plane fought the pilots under certain circumstances. They knew that pilots hadn't been taught about MCAS. The moment the first plane went down and they got a look at the planes behaviour before it crashed, they would have suspected the cause. Yet they did nothing. They did the bidding of Boeing to ensure they'd have jobs when their stint with govt was over. It's the revolving door. Regulatory capture. Utter corruption leading to completely avoidable mass deaths.
  - jussij 7y ago
    Except there are reports some pilots had already raised concerns about the safety of the MAX, even before both of these crashes. If true, that would indicate these pilot reports were not given the full scrutiny that they deserved.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    Well, as you said yourself, the FAA itself calculated the chance of a MAX crash to be significant higher than other models. Sure, those things take time, but a more decisive action should have been taken sooner. It might not justify a full ground but at least it should have justified a very strongly worded Advisory Notice to pilots (not sure of the specific nomenclature for this document) also the AOA disagree light should have been made default ASAP. So no, FAA has a lot to blame here.
  - daddylonglegs 7y ago
    It's been reported that an FAA analysis after the first crash concluded that - without modification - MCAS was expected to cause an additional 15 crashes over the service life of the 737 MAX. It seems that when the second aircraft crashed Boeing was already working on a new version of MCAS, but they and the FAA decided to keep this quiet and keep the aircraft flying. I think that this decision accepted rather a lot of risk to life, compared to what I would expect from civil aviation. "Peter Defazio, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said an FAA analysis following the Lion Air accident but before the Ethiopian Airlines crash concluded there would be 15 fatal MAX accidents if there was no fix to MCAS. DeFazio asked Dickson why wasn’t airplane grounded then? He did not have an answer." https://leehamnews.com/2019/12/11/faa-no-max-certification-until-2020-analysis-forecast-15-more-crashes-if-mcas-not-fixed/ https://leehamnews.com/2019/12/11/faa-no-max-certification-u... (I think the first report was in the WSJ, but that's behind a paywall)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ulfw 7y ago
  It was the Chinese Authorities who moved first and the we-outsource-our-job-to-Boeing FAA last.
  - dmix 7y ago
    China has recently produced some competing planes and has more of an authoritarian hold on the industry. About 20% of the Max stock was across a few of Chinese airlines which wasn’t a huge number. The last one also happened in SEA and had some initial duelling finger pointing so it worked well as a PR gambit to be the first to block it. Especially in the middle of a trade war involving product quality issues and Boeing is the closest thing to a US state run aircraft manufacturer. It’s always been a beacon of American protectionism well before the recent administration. So basically there was a ton of political will potentially involved here.
nexuist 7y ago
Like a lot of tragedies, it's really hard to tell how much the side effects of something like this are attributed to the mistake itself and how much can be explained through modern communication networks (social media) amplifying everything. Is the Boeing mistake really that bad, or is it because this is the first such aviation design mistake to happen in our post-2010 everyone-is-online world? Remember that the tails on 737s used to just...fall off back in the '90s. For the record, I don't think the 737 MAX should have ever been cleared to fly with the current version of MCAS. But I can't help but believe that there had to be some boneheaded designs in the past that cost hundreds of lives that we just don't think about today. In any case, I hope Boeing has learned from this and revised its engineering processes to go back to its previous prestigious roots. I also hope against hope that we will finally see some executives go to prison for approving this.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Yes, it's really that bad. Not because of the flaw itself, but the culture that drove the flaw into the outside world. There have been plenty of others in the past that do not detract from the magnitude of this one.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  It’s hard to be statistically sure given the small number of existing examples, but taken on face value, no recent large airliner has anything like this level of deaths per flight.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Yes it is that bad. No it is not because of social media. Airline crashes have always been a huge deal. That's why airplanes are so safe
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  The 737NG problems in the 90s were rudders deflecting suddenly and irrecoverably, tails did not fall off. Two crashes and a number of incidents before the problem was identified. Boeing also tried to squash that investigation, they actually swiped the servo from the first crashed plane so it could not be properly analyzed. Then the 737NG went on to have the best safety record of any plane ever. So while the MAX problem is pretty bad, and social media vastly complicates the PR angle, there is precedent for recovering from this. Certainly with as many MAXs as have been built there is enormous incentive to get it fixed. It's not realistic to expect them to scrap the planes.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
Has software had its materials science moment? The pioneering DeHavilland Comet failed due to unexpected stress fractures. The aviation industry changed markedly because of it with years of testing preceding the introduction of any new material or process. Boeing took the lead, DeHavilland never recovered. My cynical view is that little will change in this era.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  More like MBAs moment maybe? This issue doesn't seem to have anything to do with the difficulties or shortcomings of computer science but product management.
  - OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
    I am no fan of MBAs but in this case I am talking about what I perceive as cultural difference between hardware and software engineering. I come from the experimental/hardware world and I believe there isn't the incremental patch and release mindset for deliverable items. The testing cycles for mission critical hardware is rather brutal. The MBA piece of it is why I'm cynical. "Ho-ho-hold on one second. This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it." --- C.J. Burke "Aliens"
    - fiter 7y ago
      I think this is a systems engineering problem that may have been due to siloed hardware and software engineering teams. The hardware engineers knew they were making something inherently unstable that the software would have to compensate for. The software engineers believed they had working AoA hardware.
    - joe_the_user 7y ago
      But that isn't the situation, it's really not. The context is airbus has an advanced and fuel-economic model that was eating Boeing market share. Boeing decided to produce one more version of the 737 model - it fit the category and as a fuel-efficinet "drop-in replacement", it was very competitive but was rather aerodynamically unstable. So Boeing added a software system to compensate but didn't tell anyone, didn't make it dependent on redundant sensors and basically produced a plane where, once the facts were all out, it became obvious it could never fly again - not because it could never be made safe but because making safe would involve admitting how flagrantly you initially skirted safety. No one flies on the "once this was utterly unsafe but now we've fixed it" plane if they really have fixed it. Everything about the plane was super advanced but cheap-as-could-be, including the software. But by that token, none of this seems the fault of "software culture", indeed, there's been no implication that the software was at fault in the crashes, just the total shitshow design package, which was indeed the fault of finance and management pushing this approach through.
mopsi 7y ago
> But there hasn't been design flaw quite like this one. The DC-10 cargo door issue is probably the closest thing. Took two accidents, 346 fatalities and a House of Representatives investigation to get the flawed design fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_door_problem_and_other_major_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_...
- lmm 7y ago
  Notably that was another case that was widely seen as the FAA treating an American company especially gently.
- philjohn 7y ago
  Also the DeHaviland Comet ... first passenger jetliner, but due to poorly understood metal fatigue science had several high-profile explosive disintegrations during flight and along with the lives of those on board, the hopes of the UK being a major aviation player looked bleak until Airbus.
briandear 7y ago
The A330 in the crash of AF 447 certainly had a design flaw like that. Due to that flaw, they entered a high altitude stall and crashed into the ocean.
- thombat 7y ago
  On AF447 all three of the airspeed probes iced up for 40 seconds, prompting the flight computers to disconnect autopilot and autothrottle and clearly announce to the crew that air data was unreliable and that the normal protection against stalling was suspended. The pilots immediately understood the problem, however for various reasons made a series of bad decisions which resulted in the crash. Tragically there was no need for the pilots to take any urgent action - by design the plane continued in stable flight when the air data was lost. On the 737MAX crashes the single angle of attack indicator being used as input to the MCAS malfunctioned and in response the system set about repeatedly forcing the plane into a dive with no clear indication of why this was happening. Compounding this was the utter lack of training on the MCAS system, which wasn't even mentioned in the pilot manual or IPad-based training that was also used by US airlines. There's a world of difference between these accidents.
elliekelly 7y ago
There’s also clearly a serious design flaw in FAA regulations and how the certification process works. Like most rules, I’m sure they meant well when it was implemented but as the regulations/process has iterated it’s created a perverse incentive where Boeing wasn’t optimizing for safety in order to pass the safety certification. Boeing bears a lot of responsibility but taking Boeing to task without taking a look at the system in which it operates seems short-sighted.

by pcurve 7y ago

There have been plenty of design flaws in commercial jetliners and in most cases, reputation is recovered. But there hasn't been design flaw quite like this one. but none quite like this one.

chx 7y ago

Especially one that the FAA tried to pooh pooh as long as it could. It was amazing to watch the goodwill and trust accumulated over decades crumble to nothing in a few hours as the European countries one by one banned the airline from their airspace but did not ground them. It was the EASA telling the FAA to do the right thing. They didn't and then finally the EASA did ground the plane. I really can't remember any other time when the EASA and the FAA disagreed especially this big. https://www.thejournal.ie/us-ireland-boeing-4538567-Mar2019/ https://www.thejournal.ie/us-ireland-boeing-4538567-Mar2019/

FabHK 7y ago
My perception is different. It was appropriate, I think, for the FAA not to ground the fleet after the first crash. It was also arguably appropriate for the FAA not to ground the fleet immediately after the second crash, but then after some time when it became apparent that the failure mode was sufficiently similar (as they did). However, what has emerged since then certainly damaged the reputation of the FAA. But it was not a matter of a few hours, it was a matter of careful investigation and evaluation over months.
- markdown 7y ago
  > It was appropriate, I think, for the FAA not to ground the fleet after the first crash. Safety first. They ought to have grounded the plane immediately after the first crash and TBH it's my belief that they would have done so if it had been a US plane with US passengers. The fact that it happened to brown people on the other side of the world made it easy to ignore. Don't forget that the FAA had all the details of the plane showing that it had implemented the new MCAS system which in theory could have caused the crash.
  - briandear 7y ago
    The FAA doesn’t control the worldwide skies. Indonesia didn’t ground the plane, nor did Ethiopia. Europe also didn’t ground it after the first crash either. The FAA’s jurisdiction is the United States: other countries could have grounded the plane quickly but didn’t.
    - bdhess 7y ago
      As the United States is the country of origin, an airworthiness directive issued by the FAA is valid in all ICAO member states.
  - georgeplusplus 7y ago
    Your safety first rhetoric doesn’t hold up against any sort of practicality. Should the 777 have been grounded immediately when Asiana crashed? What about the 777 after Malaysia or its second which we still don’t know the cause of? the right thing was done after the second crash (and eventually by the FAA after it’s arm was twisted enough) but to say it should’ve been immediately grounded is missing the picture entirely.
    - akie 7y ago
      > and eventually by the FAA after it’s arm was twisted enough There's a big part of the problem.
    - markdown 7y ago
      > Your safety first rhetoric doesn’t hold up against any sort of practicality. Wow. I don't know how to respond to that. People who thought like you kept the planes in the air and the result was the completely preventable deaths of so many more. > Should the 777 have been grounded immediately when Asiana crashed? What about the 777 after Malaysia or its second which we still don’t know the cause of? Nope. Those aircraft have a very long history of safe flight, completely unlike a 737 MAX. The FAA isn't made up of laymen watching the news to find out about the planes. They knew before the first MAX took flight that it had been heavily modified to make bigger engines on an airframe that wasn't designed to support it. It knew about the MCAS hacks that were implemented to make sure the plane fought the pilots under certain circumstances. They knew that pilots hadn't been taught about MCAS. The moment the first plane went down and they got a look at the planes behaviour before it crashed, they would have suspected the cause. Yet they did nothing. They did the bidding of Boeing to ensure they'd have jobs when their stint with govt was over. It's the revolving door. Regulatory capture. Utter corruption leading to completely avoidable mass deaths.
- jussij 7y ago
  Except there are reports some pilots had already raised concerns about the safety of the MAX, even before both of these crashes. If true, that would indicate these pilot reports were not given the full scrutiny that they deserved.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  Well, as you said yourself, the FAA itself calculated the chance of a MAX crash to be significant higher than other models. Sure, those things take time, but a more decisive action should have been taken sooner. It might not justify a full ground but at least it should have justified a very strongly worded Advisory Notice to pilots (not sure of the specific nomenclature for this document) also the AOA disagree light should have been made default ASAP. So no, FAA has a lot to blame here.
- daddylonglegs 7y ago
  It's been reported that an FAA analysis after the first crash concluded that - without modification - MCAS was expected to cause an additional 15 crashes over the service life of the 737 MAX. It seems that when the second aircraft crashed Boeing was already working on a new version of MCAS, but they and the FAA decided to keep this quiet and keep the aircraft flying. I think that this decision accepted rather a lot of risk to life, compared to what I would expect from civil aviation. "Peter Defazio, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said an FAA analysis following the Lion Air accident but before the Ethiopian Airlines crash concluded there would be 15 fatal MAX accidents if there was no fix to MCAS. DeFazio asked Dickson why wasn’t airplane grounded then? He did not have an answer." https://leehamnews.com/2019/12/11/faa-no-max-certification-until-2020-analysis-forecast-15-more-crashes-if-mcas-not-fixed/ https://leehamnews.com/2019/12/11/faa-no-max-certification-u... (I think the first report was in the WSJ, but that's behind a paywall)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ulfw 7y ago
It was the Chinese Authorities who moved first and the we-outsource-our-job-to-Boeing FAA last.
- dmix 7y ago
  China has recently produced some competing planes and has more of an authoritarian hold on the industry. About 20% of the Max stock was across a few of Chinese airlines which wasn’t a huge number. The last one also happened in SEA and had some initial duelling finger pointing so it worked well as a PR gambit to be the first to block it. Especially in the middle of a trade war involving product quality issues and Boeing is the closest thing to a US state run aircraft manufacturer. It’s always been a beacon of American protectionism well before the recent administration. So basically there was a ton of political will potentially involved here.

nexuist 7y ago

Like a lot of tragedies, it's really hard to tell how much the side effects of something like this are attributed to the mistake itself and how much can be explained through modern communication networks (social media) amplifying everything. Is the Boeing mistake really that bad, or is it because this is the first such aviation design mistake to happen in our post-2010 everyone-is-online world? Remember that the tails on 737s used to just...fall off back in the '90s. For the record, I don't think the 737 MAX should have ever been cleared to fly with the current version of MCAS. But I can't help but believe that there had to be some boneheaded designs in the past that cost hundreds of lives that we just don't think about today. In any case, I hope Boeing has learned from this and revised its engineering processes to go back to its previous prestigious roots. I also hope against hope that we will finally see some executives go to prison for approving this.

ncmncm 7y ago
Yes, it's really that bad. Not because of the flaw itself, but the culture that drove the flaw into the outside world. There have been plenty of others in the past that do not detract from the magnitude of this one.
rsynnott 7y ago
It’s hard to be statistically sure given the small number of existing examples, but taken on face value, no recent large airliner has anything like this level of deaths per flight.
bcrosby95 7y ago
Yes it is that bad. No it is not because of social media. Airline crashes have always been a huge deal. That's why airplanes are so safe
rootusrootus 7y ago
The 737NG problems in the 90s were rudders deflecting suddenly and irrecoverably, tails did not fall off. Two crashes and a number of incidents before the problem was identified. Boeing also tried to squash that investigation, they actually swiped the servo from the first crashed plane so it could not be properly analyzed. Then the 737NG went on to have the best safety record of any plane ever. So while the MAX problem is pretty bad, and social media vastly complicates the PR angle, there is precedent for recovering from this. Certainly with as many MAXs as have been built there is enormous incentive to get it fixed. It's not realistic to expect them to scrap the planes.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago

Has software had its materials science moment? The pioneering DeHavilland Comet failed due to unexpected stress fractures. The aviation industry changed markedly because of it with years of testing preceding the introduction of any new material or process. Boeing took the lead, DeHavilland never recovered. My cynical view is that little will change in this era.

mrtksn 7y ago
More like MBAs moment maybe? This issue doesn't seem to have anything to do with the difficulties or shortcomings of computer science but product management.
- OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
  I am no fan of MBAs but in this case I am talking about what I perceive as cultural difference between hardware and software engineering. I come from the experimental/hardware world and I believe there isn't the incremental patch and release mindset for deliverable items. The testing cycles for mission critical hardware is rather brutal. The MBA piece of it is why I'm cynical. "Ho-ho-hold on one second. This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it." --- C.J. Burke "Aliens"
  - fiter 7y ago
    I think this is a systems engineering problem that may have been due to siloed hardware and software engineering teams. The hardware engineers knew they were making something inherently unstable that the software would have to compensate for. The software engineers believed they had working AoA hardware.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    But that isn't the situation, it's really not. The context is airbus has an advanced and fuel-economic model that was eating Boeing market share. Boeing decided to produce one more version of the 737 model - it fit the category and as a fuel-efficinet "drop-in replacement", it was very competitive but was rather aerodynamically unstable. So Boeing added a software system to compensate but didn't tell anyone, didn't make it dependent on redundant sensors and basically produced a plane where, once the facts were all out, it became obvious it could never fly again - not because it could never be made safe but because making safe would involve admitting how flagrantly you initially skirted safety. No one flies on the "once this was utterly unsafe but now we've fixed it" plane if they really have fixed it. Everything about the plane was super advanced but cheap-as-could-be, including the software. But by that token, none of this seems the fault of "software culture", indeed, there's been no implication that the software was at fault in the crashes, just the total shitshow design package, which was indeed the fault of finance and management pushing this approach through.

mopsi 7y ago

> But there hasn't been design flaw quite like this one. The DC-10 cargo door issue is probably the closest thing. Took two accidents, 346 fatalities and a House of Representatives investigation to get the flawed design fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_door_problem_and_other_major_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_...

lmm 7y ago
Notably that was another case that was widely seen as the FAA treating an American company especially gently.
philjohn 7y ago
Also the DeHaviland Comet ... first passenger jetliner, but due to poorly understood metal fatigue science had several high-profile explosive disintegrations during flight and along with the lives of those on board, the hopes of the UK being a major aviation player looked bleak until Airbus.

briandear 7y ago

The A330 in the crash of AF 447 certainly had a design flaw like that. Due to that flaw, they entered a high altitude stall and crashed into the ocean.

thombat 7y ago
On AF447 all three of the airspeed probes iced up for 40 seconds, prompting the flight computers to disconnect autopilot and autothrottle and clearly announce to the crew that air data was unreliable and that the normal protection against stalling was suspended. The pilots immediately understood the problem, however for various reasons made a series of bad decisions which resulted in the crash. Tragically there was no need for the pilots to take any urgent action - by design the plane continued in stable flight when the air data was lost. On the 737MAX crashes the single angle of attack indicator being used as input to the MCAS malfunctioned and in response the system set about repeatedly forcing the plane into a dive with no clear indication of why this was happening. Compounding this was the utter lack of training on the MCAS system, which wasn't even mentioned in the pilot manual or IPad-based training that was also used by US airlines. There's a world of difference between these accidents.

elliekelly 7y ago

There’s also clearly a serious design flaw in FAA regulations and how the certification process works. Like most rules, I’m sure they meant well when it was implemented but as the regulations/process has iterated it’s created a perverse incentive where Boeing wasn’t optimizing for safety in order to pass the safety certification. Boeing bears a lot of responsibility but taking Boeing to task without taking a look at the system in which it operates seems short-sighted.