7 ms·

US pressured Dutch Safety Board to downplay tech faults in 2009 Boeing 737 crash

218 points by BurnGpuBurn 7y ago

rahuldottech 7y ago
Because do human lives even really matter anymore? Nah, screw 'em, hurrrr money!
mtgx 7y ago
Please tell me some top executives and officials are going to prison over this. This is beyond criminal negligence. This proves they've known for a long time these models can crash and then went and covered it up.
acqq 7y ago
> the New York Times reports based on its own research. The original NYT article, with only a few HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098270 "Boeing’s Responsibility in a Deadly Crash ‘Got Buried’"
- breakingcups 7y ago
  People probably assumed it was about 737 MAX crashes, not the older NG.
lowdose 7y ago
Anybody even surprised by corporatism?
_tkzm 7y ago
"US pressured..." yeah, no surprise there.
laydn 7y ago
From Chernobyl (TV series): "When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
- davidvaughan 7y ago
  From Carlyle's French Revolution: "No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, with the answer, No effects. Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further".
- arethuza 7y ago
  I guess there are people who really believe that reality is malleable and if you say something often enough it becomes "true", as O'Brien explains in 1984: "I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth."
  - clauderoux 7y ago
    We do not talk about reality anymore. This is so 20th century stuff... We talk about alternate facts...
- the_af 7y ago
  In an unsurprising twist, the Chernobyl TV series had enough distortions and "artistic licenses" for the sake of creating a compelling drama for audiences, that indeed it seemed "the truth offended them".
ecliptic_pole 7y ago
The fact remains that this crash was 99% pilot error. The A/T displaying "RETARD" for something like 60 seconds and the airspeed got down to something stupid like 80 knots (airspeed is prominently displayed in at least 3 places right in front of both pilot's faces) so it was pretty obvious that the auto approach was not correctly configured, but what did the pilots do? Nothing. They just sat there gormlessly for over a minute, oblivious to dozens of warning signs right in front of them. No pilot should rely on the radio altimeter so much that they literally fall out of the sky when it fails. Every single Boeing plane has two buttons called "autopilot disconnect" and "autothrottle disconnect", and when you press them, then you can fly the plane and it will do exactly what you tell it to do. I mean fly the plane, i.e. left hand on yoke, right hand on throttle, feet on pedals. If those systems fail, then yes, blame the manufacturer. But those systems basically never fail.
- tapland 7y ago
  When landing there is a lot going on. I don't know how airliners do it but at those airspeeds and especially when landing an audio readout of airspeed for every 10 knots dropped would be very useful.
  - ecliptic_pole 7y ago
    Boeing planes do have some features like that, one is called GPWS ("Ground Proximity Warning System") and it yells things like "Sink Rate, Pull Up"! and then it makes obnoxious "Whoop! Whoop!" noises. There's also the "stick shaker" which literally starts violently vibrating the stick (which is basically in between your legs so it's impossible not to notice) and also makes a lot of noise. But I don't believe any amount of aural warnings will help a pilot who has decided to leave the autopilot on below 1000 feet when it's perfectly obvious the plane isn't correctly configured at all.
    - _-___________-_ 7y ago
      Turkish does seem to have some kind of problem with the landing phase in general: * THY A333 at Port Harcourt on Dec 31st 2019, runway excursion, tyre damage * THY B738 at Odessa on Nov 21st 2019, runway excursion and nose gear collapse on landing * THY B738 at Lviv on Jan 6th 2019, runway excursion during backtrack * THY A321 at Bucharest on Jun 22nd 2017, overran runway on landing * THY B738 at Pristina on May 2nd 2016, runway excursion on landing * THY A319 at Sochi on Sep 28th 2016, ATC prevented controlled flight into terrain * THY B738 at Nice on Aug 27th 2016, went through extended centerline and descended below safe height * THY A321 at Tbilisi on May 5th 2016, hard landing * THY A343 at Antananarivo on Jan 9th 2016, touched down short of runway * THY A333 at Kathmandu on Mar 4th 2015, runway excursion and nose gear collapse * THY A320 at Istanbul on Apr 25th 2015, hard landing, go-around, engine problem, gear problem, gear collapse, runway excursion I could go on...
DCKing 7y ago
Worth noting in Dutch news that the safety board chairman confirms US pressure, but denies that they altered the report or that the report downplays the tech faults in the first place [0]. [0]: https://nos.nl/artikel/2319562-van-vollenhoven-vaker-druk-uitgeoefend-maar-we-bleven-altijd-onafhankelijk.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2319562-van-vollenhoven-vaker-druk-ui...
tda 7y ago
Relevant comment from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101953 "Even a fix now proposed for the Max has similarities with the past: After the crash near Amsterdam, the F.A.A. required airlines to install a software update for the NG that compared data from the plane’s two sensors, rather than relying on just one. The software change Boeing has developed for the Max also compares data from two sensors. Critically, in the case of the NG, Boeing had already developed the software fix well before the Turkish Airlines crash, including it on new planes starting in 2006 and offering it as an optional update on hundreds of other aircraft. But for some older jets, including the one that crashed near Amsterdam, the update wouldn’t work, and Boeing did not develop a compatible version until after the accident."
- ShamelessC 7y ago
  I don't know anything at all about aviation, but if redundancy of sensors is so crucial to these systems then why don't they have like 10 of them on there just in case? Are they particularly expensive? Do they need to be in certain locations on the plane to work properly? I'm obviously thinking about this from a software point of view where redundancy is cheap but I am curious if it's just greedy cost cutting or if there are legitimate reasons for this stuff.
  - Gwypaas 7y ago
    Well, it is more expensive to have more than one. New fly by wire aircraft usually have 3 separate systems (sensors, computers and so on) voting to know which part fails and continue on working, or if everything fails do it to a safe-state. The protections are gone but you can fly the plane with direct inputs. Compare this to the ancient 737 where instead of the airplane detecting errors the pilots are supposed to do it by cross checking two flight computers. Thus we see now after the crashes Boeing forced to implement cross checking in a system not designed for it because things reliant on a single sensor has ended up being classified as safety critical.
  - Anarch157a 7y ago
    Because that would add several million dollars to the airplane's price. An angle of attack sensor (the sensor MCAS relies on) for a small, twin-engine private jet can cost nearly $50,000. The ones in the MAX cost a lot more. Even if cost wasn't an issue, space and weight are. There are just so much stuff you can tackle on the fuselage or inside the engine cowling before it starts affecting the airplanes ability to fly.
LoSboccacc 7y ago
sure it was an hardware fault that started the event, but now blaming the whole thing on a system that has a warning system, duplicate readings to check faults and bypasses to work around the issue is deeply misguided and ignores simple facts about how safety is attained in aircrafts: trough redundancy and training. this is completely different from the mcas where the default configuration lacked redundancy, the pilot lacked training and the bypass procedure ineffective unless executed at low speed and high altitude before the dive would lock the trims
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- blub 7y ago
  Boeing's cost-cutting design and their culture of covering their own ass and blaming the pilot seem particularly relevant and relatable.
  - LoSboccacc 7y ago
    no, it's not relevant unless you can substantiate how the cost cutting was related to the crash and it'd be an hard case to make, since the faulty system were redundant and the warning themselves were redundant with lights, audibles and whatnot. the hardware did all it could to get the pilot to go around and reassess the situation.
_-___________-_ 7y ago
It's really easy to pile on and see every single 737 crash from the past as somehow related to the MAX crashes now. There are actually very few similarities between this crash and the MAX crashes. The failure was in one part of a highly redundant system with additional warning systems. The pilots failed to correctly react to the failure and failed to do basic airmanship like monitor their speed until it was too late. Whereas the MAX failures may well have required well-above-average piloting skills and instincts to successfully recover from, this one simply required basic competence and attention.
- blub 7y ago
  Why are you focusing on the technical dissimilarities instead of the poor design based on one sensor and "blame the pilot" similarities?
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    I don't believe the concept of "blame" has any place in air accident investigation. Pilots should be able to report their mistakes without fear of prosecution or internet mobs, and investigations should be able to highlight errors on the part of pilots where they exist without the same kind of fears. This is not an automatic system relying on a single sensor, as MCAS was. An airliner in flight is a complex system of which the two pilots are a very significant part. There were multiple failures here, and the technical failure was not particularly unusual. What was quite unusual was a failure of basic airmanship on the part of the pilots. A good investigation would (and did) look at how that situation came about so that training or human-machine interface can be improved to prevent it happening again. It's not about blaming, it's about understanding.
    - iknowalot 7y ago
      That sounds interesting, but I still blame Boeing, liability is about blame and Boeing has been bending over backwards to blame pilots for its own technical failures.
salawat 7y ago
Hmmm. The only thing I wonder is whether there may be a fundamental architectural issue with their approach to "Flight Computer in command". From my understanding, every 737 has two flight computers, but only one is in command at a time (I.e. generating commands to drive things like A/P, A/T). If other hardware in the plane is connection-wise split between the two computers, you will end up in situations where the two computers fundamentally disagree on what reality is. The only backup in that case is good airmanship to know that you are in an anomalous condition, diagnose whether you have a set of gauges that you can rely on, and finally, what to do about it. ATC could have been utilized to cross-check instruments. This is honestly non-trivial machine operation 101. Your sensors can be wrong. A resolution I might suggest moving forward is an MFD function that allows pilots to manually remap avionics data sources in flight. Structure it as a Source->Sink system. Then again, I'm reluctant to drop that type of burden on them as it sounds quite similar to the structure of certain other software of I'll-repute; however, it would provide a remediatory mechanism a Pilot could utilize in flight. Though it doesn't help at all if everything is hosed. That's what A/T A/P disconnect and stick and rudder skills are for though. Overall, it does strike me as possibly being same in type in terms of manufacturer philosophy playing a part; but in this case there was enough done wrong by the pilotsthat it doesn't necessarily seem like a worthwhile hill to die on to go after Boeing for it. Interesting there was explicit pressure against doing so though. That raises questions, but sufficient time has gone by that likely most documentation to be investigated is long gone.
dangjc 7y ago
It's bad to rely on national champions like Boeing. Like Blackberry and Nokia, their pride leads to their eventual fall, taking out thousands of jobs with them when an upstart from outside (Apple) surges ahead. Better to have multiple smaller active competitors.
bolle 7y ago
The Dutch Safety Board published the original technical report by Prof. Dekker [0]. [0]: https://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/en/page/16227/turkish-airlines-rapport-prof.-dekker https://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/en/page/16227/turkish-airlines...
throwawaymanbot 7y ago
I dont know how many levels of wrong this is, But the lasting edifice of this will be that the US is a corrupt Corporate fascist state whereby shoddy goods are sent out by CEOs who have a particular outlook on life and people are strong armed in to using them. Welcome to USSA.

218 points by BurnGpuBurn 7y ago

Because do human lives even really matter anymore? Nah, screw 'em, hurrrr money!

mtgx 7y ago

Please tell me some top executives and officials are going to prison over this. This is beyond criminal negligence. This proves they've known for a long time these models can crash and then went and covered it up.

acqq 7y ago

> the New York Times reports based on its own research. The original NYT article, with only a few HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098270 "Boeing’s Responsibility in a Deadly Crash ‘Got Buried’"

breakingcups 7y ago
People probably assumed it was about 737 MAX crashes, not the older NG.

lowdose 7y ago

Anybody even surprised by corporatism?

_tkzm 7y ago

"US pressured..." yeah, no surprise there.

laydn 7y ago

From Chernobyl (TV series): "When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."

davidvaughan 7y ago
From Carlyle's French Revolution: "No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, with the answer, No effects. Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further".
arethuza 7y ago
I guess there are people who really believe that reality is malleable and if you say something often enough it becomes "true", as O'Brien explains in 1984: "I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth."
- clauderoux 7y ago
  We do not talk about reality anymore. This is so 20th century stuff... We talk about alternate facts...
the_af 7y ago
In an unsurprising twist, the Chernobyl TV series had enough distortions and "artistic licenses" for the sake of creating a compelling drama for audiences, that indeed it seemed "the truth offended them".

ecliptic_pole 7y ago

The fact remains that this crash was 99% pilot error. The A/T displaying "RETARD" for something like 60 seconds and the airspeed got down to something stupid like 80 knots (airspeed is prominently displayed in at least 3 places right in front of both pilot's faces) so it was pretty obvious that the auto approach was not correctly configured, but what did the pilots do? Nothing. They just sat there gormlessly for over a minute, oblivious to dozens of warning signs right in front of them. No pilot should rely on the radio altimeter so much that they literally fall out of the sky when it fails. Every single Boeing plane has two buttons called "autopilot disconnect" and "autothrottle disconnect", and when you press them, then you can fly the plane and it will do exactly what you tell it to do. I mean fly the plane, i.e. left hand on yoke, right hand on throttle, feet on pedals. If those systems fail, then yes, blame the manufacturer. But those systems basically never fail.

tapland 7y ago
When landing there is a lot going on. I don't know how airliners do it but at those airspeeds and especially when landing an audio readout of airspeed for every 10 knots dropped would be very useful.
- ecliptic_pole 7y ago
  Boeing planes do have some features like that, one is called GPWS ("Ground Proximity Warning System") and it yells things like "Sink Rate, Pull Up"! and then it makes obnoxious "Whoop! Whoop!" noises. There's also the "stick shaker" which literally starts violently vibrating the stick (which is basically in between your legs so it's impossible not to notice) and also makes a lot of noise. But I don't believe any amount of aural warnings will help a pilot who has decided to leave the autopilot on below 1000 feet when it's perfectly obvious the plane isn't correctly configured at all.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    Turkish does seem to have some kind of problem with the landing phase in general: * THY A333 at Port Harcourt on Dec 31st 2019, runway excursion, tyre damage * THY B738 at Odessa on Nov 21st 2019, runway excursion and nose gear collapse on landing * THY B738 at Lviv on Jan 6th 2019, runway excursion during backtrack * THY A321 at Bucharest on Jun 22nd 2017, overran runway on landing * THY B738 at Pristina on May 2nd 2016, runway excursion on landing * THY A319 at Sochi on Sep 28th 2016, ATC prevented controlled flight into terrain * THY B738 at Nice on Aug 27th 2016, went through extended centerline and descended below safe height * THY A321 at Tbilisi on May 5th 2016, hard landing * THY A343 at Antananarivo on Jan 9th 2016, touched down short of runway * THY A333 at Kathmandu on Mar 4th 2015, runway excursion and nose gear collapse * THY A320 at Istanbul on Apr 25th 2015, hard landing, go-around, engine problem, gear problem, gear collapse, runway excursion I could go on...

DCKing 7y ago

Worth noting in Dutch news that the safety board chairman confirms US pressure, but denies that they altered the report or that the report downplays the tech faults in the first place [0]. [0]: https://nos.nl/artikel/2319562-van-vollenhoven-vaker-druk-uitgeoefend-maar-we-bleven-altijd-onafhankelijk.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2319562-van-vollenhoven-vaker-druk-ui...

tda 7y ago

Relevant comment from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101953 "Even a fix now proposed for the Max has similarities with the past: After the crash near Amsterdam, the F.A.A. required airlines to install a software update for the NG that compared data from the plane’s two sensors, rather than relying on just one. The software change Boeing has developed for the Max also compares data from two sensors. Critically, in the case of the NG, Boeing had already developed the software fix well before the Turkish Airlines crash, including it on new planes starting in 2006 and offering it as an optional update on hundreds of other aircraft. But for some older jets, including the one that crashed near Amsterdam, the update wouldn’t work, and Boeing did not develop a compatible version until after the accident."

ShamelessC 7y ago
I don't know anything at all about aviation, but if redundancy of sensors is so crucial to these systems then why don't they have like 10 of them on there just in case? Are they particularly expensive? Do they need to be in certain locations on the plane to work properly? I'm obviously thinking about this from a software point of view where redundancy is cheap but I am curious if it's just greedy cost cutting or if there are legitimate reasons for this stuff.
- Gwypaas 7y ago
  Well, it is more expensive to have more than one. New fly by wire aircraft usually have 3 separate systems (sensors, computers and so on) voting to know which part fails and continue on working, or if everything fails do it to a safe-state. The protections are gone but you can fly the plane with direct inputs. Compare this to the ancient 737 where instead of the airplane detecting errors the pilots are supposed to do it by cross checking two flight computers. Thus we see now after the crashes Boeing forced to implement cross checking in a system not designed for it because things reliant on a single sensor has ended up being classified as safety critical.
- Anarch157a 7y ago
  Because that would add several million dollars to the airplane's price. An angle of attack sensor (the sensor MCAS relies on) for a small, twin-engine private jet can cost nearly $50,000. The ones in the MAX cost a lot more. Even if cost wasn't an issue, space and weight are. There are just so much stuff you can tackle on the fuselage or inside the engine cowling before it starts affecting the airplanes ability to fly.

LoSboccacc 7y ago

sure it was an hardware fault that started the event, but now blaming the whole thing on a system that has a warning system, duplicate readings to check faults and bypasses to work around the issue is deeply misguided and ignores simple facts about how safety is attained in aircrafts: trough redundancy and training. this is completely different from the mcas where the default configuration lacked redundancy, the pilot lacked training and the bypass procedure ineffective unless executed at low speed and high altitude before the dive would lock the trims

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
blub 7y ago
Boeing's cost-cutting design and their culture of covering their own ass and blaming the pilot seem particularly relevant and relatable.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  no, it's not relevant unless you can substantiate how the cost cutting was related to the crash and it'd be an hard case to make, since the faulty system were redundant and the warning themselves were redundant with lights, audibles and whatnot. the hardware did all it could to get the pilot to go around and reassess the situation.

_-___________-_ 7y ago

It's really easy to pile on and see every single 737 crash from the past as somehow related to the MAX crashes now. There are actually very few similarities between this crash and the MAX crashes. The failure was in one part of a highly redundant system with additional warning systems. The pilots failed to correctly react to the failure and failed to do basic airmanship like monitor their speed until it was too late. Whereas the MAX failures may well have required well-above-average piloting skills and instincts to successfully recover from, this one simply required basic competence and attention.

blub 7y ago
Why are you focusing on the technical dissimilarities instead of the poor design based on one sensor and "blame the pilot" similarities?
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  I don't believe the concept of "blame" has any place in air accident investigation. Pilots should be able to report their mistakes without fear of prosecution or internet mobs, and investigations should be able to highlight errors on the part of pilots where they exist without the same kind of fears. This is not an automatic system relying on a single sensor, as MCAS was. An airliner in flight is a complex system of which the two pilots are a very significant part. There were multiple failures here, and the technical failure was not particularly unusual. What was quite unusual was a failure of basic airmanship on the part of the pilots. A good investigation would (and did) look at how that situation came about so that training or human-machine interface can be improved to prevent it happening again. It's not about blaming, it's about understanding.
  - iknowalot 7y ago
    That sounds interesting, but I still blame Boeing, liability is about blame and Boeing has been bending over backwards to blame pilots for its own technical failures.

salawat 7y ago

Hmmm. The only thing I wonder is whether there may be a fundamental architectural issue with their approach to "Flight Computer in command". From my understanding, every 737 has two flight computers, but only one is in command at a time (I.e. generating commands to drive things like A/P, A/T). If other hardware in the plane is connection-wise split between the two computers, you will end up in situations where the two computers fundamentally disagree on what reality is. The only backup in that case is good airmanship to know that you are in an anomalous condition, diagnose whether you have a set of gauges that you can rely on, and finally, what to do about it. ATC could have been utilized to cross-check instruments. This is honestly non-trivial machine operation 101. Your sensors can be wrong. A resolution I might suggest moving forward is an MFD function that allows pilots to manually remap avionics data sources in flight. Structure it as a Source->Sink system. Then again, I'm reluctant to drop that type of burden on them as it sounds quite similar to the structure of certain other software of I'll-repute; however, it would provide a remediatory mechanism a Pilot could utilize in flight. Though it doesn't help at all if everything is hosed. That's what A/T A/P disconnect and stick and rudder skills are for though. Overall, it does strike me as possibly being same in type in terms of manufacturer philosophy playing a part; but in this case there was enough done wrong by the pilotsthat it doesn't necessarily seem like a worthwhile hill to die on to go after Boeing for it. Interesting there was explicit pressure against doing so though. That raises questions, but sufficient time has gone by that likely most documentation to be investigated is long gone.

dangjc 7y ago

It's bad to rely on national champions like Boeing. Like Blackberry and Nokia, their pride leads to their eventual fall, taking out thousands of jobs with them when an upstart from outside (Apple) surges ahead. Better to have multiple smaller active competitors.

bolle 7y ago

The Dutch Safety Board published the original technical report by Prof. Dekker [0]. [0]: https://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/en/page/16227/turkish-airlines-rapport-prof.-dekker https://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/en/page/16227/turkish-airlines...

throwawaymanbot 7y ago

I dont know how many levels of wrong this is, But the lasting edifice of this will be that the US is a corrupt Corporate fascist state whereby shoddy goods are sent out by CEOs who have a particular outlook on life and people are strong armed in to using them. Welcome to USSA.