7 ms·

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable. The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhe

• rco8786 3y ago
  Yea I have the same question. Objectively it appears that Boeing is having some really serious safety issues. Things that absolutely do not jive with what we’ve been taught our entire lives about how safe airline travel is. But I’m open to the idea that 5-10 “major” incidents a year is maybe within the normal range and we just don’t ever hear about them.
  • bbor 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • chung8123 3y ago
      I don't this this allegedly happened. What authorities are saying Boeing killed a whistleblower?
      • datadrivenangel 3y ago
        The whistleblower was found dead in their car of an 'apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound'. Seems extremely unlikely that they would decide to kill themselves after 32 years at Boeing and deciding to blow the whistle. "Barnett, who spent decades working for Boeing at its plants in Everett, Wash., and North Charleston, S.C., had repeatedly alleged that Boeing's manufacturing practices had declined — and that rather than improve them, he added, managers had pressured workers not to document potential defects and problems. "
        • BobaFloutist 3y ago
          I can see someone whistle-blowing in good faith, realizing they made a mistake and called out the company for something that it wasn't doing or something that wasn't actually a problem, and killing themselves. I can also see someone whistle-blowing in good faith, getting harassed by ex-coworkers/managers or the court of public opinion, and just getting overwhelmed by the negative attention and feeling bad for the betrayal and killing themselves. I can't really see a company faking the suicide of someone that already whistleblew and got national attention. That seems like a great way to exacerbate a problem that, if you leave it alone, probably won't be made worse by your leaving it alone. Like, what, a Boeing executive hired an assassin off the dark web with the click of a button to kill someone that already did the thing he was going to do? Executives can make some pretty poor decisions, so I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it would be a pretty wild mistake to make.
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        • chasd00 3y ago
          I can see a lifer, someone who've spent their whole life at a single company, reacting this way. Their identity is tied so closely to their employer that having to "blow the whistle" probably feels like a terrible betrayal against the company.
    • rco8786 3y ago
      > using parts from scrap bins This is a good micro-example. Scrap bins! Sounds horrible! But is it? Do you know? Or is it just common practice? Is it called a scrap bin in the media to drive a narrative, when really it's just a parts bin like any other? We don't know.
      • aunty_helen 3y ago
        Scrap bin would allude to using parts that are out of tolerance, time expired, or single use ie regardless of cycles or time on wing, the part is required to be replaced every disassembly. This can include parts that have been assembled only to be disassembled because an issue was found before it left the shop.
      • bbor 3y ago
        … I don’t know how to respond to this. This is basically epistemic relativism. Yes, we know that scrap bins are for scrap. I am 100% sure that there is never any reason to be pulling stuff from scrap bins ad-hoc in order to avoid having to reorder parts. As far as your point is “the whistleblowers could be lying, the video investigations could be staged/one-offs, and the ongoing massive increase in safety incidents could be unrelated to the publicly-bragged-about intentionally-done corner cutting”, that’s fair, the jury is still out. Figuratively, ofc, because they aren’t yet facing any real weighty investigations AFAIK, only small ones. But “maybe the you’re supposed to use parts from scrap bins”? No. Not for fucking airplanes EDIT: an analogy; is it ever okay to store passwords in plain text? Maybe, if by “plain text” you mean the text that’s encrypted by a normal auth system. But that’s just not how that word is used, and is giving an absurd benefit of the doubt to people who do not deserve it
      • virtualritz 3y ago
        I visited the Airbus facility in Hamburg, about 20 years ago. They showed us lots of "scrap bins" at the various production lines. And "scrap bins" is what they called those indeed. I particularly recall one with titanium (AFAIR) Hi-Lok bolts[1] that didn't pass the xray for defects. They told us those would be melted. They looked flawless and were all brand new, nicely anodized. We were allowed to grab a few each, as souveniers. These are not cheap (I think the guys said they cost around 10 EUR each, at the time, but I may misremember) and a plane uses a shitload of them. Now lets say you're out for whatever reason. That would halt your production line. If your safety culture is shitty, you may decide to just use those Hi-Loks that passed xray with 95% or whatever threshold suits you overcoming your shortage ... And the above sounds to me like that's what the whisteblower suggested happened at Boeing. [1] https://www.lisi-aerospace.com/en/product/hi-lok-and-hi-lite-fasteners/ https://www.lisi-aerospace.com/en/product/hi-lok-and-hi-lite...
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • Aetheridon 3y ago
    appears to be the newer manufactured aircraft (737 Max series and 787's) that are having these issues... the 777 has one of the best safety records for airliners out there for example
• readthenotes1 3y ago
  More plausible than hearsay from Boeing or LATAM
  • joecasson 3y ago
    Fair, but - for the sake of the argument - who's to say that Brian Jokat doesn't have a major short position on Boeing? I agree that both of the airlines have incentives to cover it up, but it's strange this is being "reported" as verified.
• kefirlife 3y ago
  Given the stories reported about the safety culture at Boeing I expect there are other quality issues. The instances where those quality issues are so apparent that customers experience them, like the door blowout, are unlikely to be unique. John Oliver did a report on Boeing recently that is pretty damning.
• rob74 3y ago
  Even with zero controls, and even if one or more of the various computers decided spontaneously to restart, I would expect the plane to continue flying the way it did before the incident rather than going into an (apparently) uncommanded descent? I mean, we had that with the 737 MAX, so I wouldn't rule it out, but it sounds suspiciously like the pilot messed up and is trying to blame the airplane. However I'm no specialist, so it's probably best to wait until further details emerge...
  • cm2187 3y ago
    Well, something of that sort happened with the A330 also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
  • kayodelycaon 3y ago
    Airbus had a problem like this on an A330 due to corrupted AOA data in the flight computers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
    • sammy2255 3y ago
      Cosmic rays*
      • kayodelycaon 3y ago
        The cause of the corrupted data is not known but it did happen multiple times in a short period and only on an A330s. Once Airbus knew what the problem was, they were able to detect and mitigate it with a software update. They didn’t fix the hardware.
      • throwaway3563 3y ago
        The most that the ATSB was able to determine was that the data corruption was basically akin to a C++ reinterpret_cast of "altitude" as "angle of attack", causing the 37,000ft or so altitude to sporadically be read as a 50 degree AoA. The issue was not definitively traced to cosmic rays or another root cause.
• zoeysmithe 3y ago
  " hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable." Maybe, but also the alternative is that pilots may be pressued not to report these things due to career or crony capitalist concerns like pressure from their employer or are told this crash is 'normal'. Airlines and Boeing are not "nice guys" and are historically toxic and vindictive companies against the working class. So that leaves us whistleblowers of lower professional value than pilots. The same way Snowden was a lowly sysadmin contractor and not a high ranking NSA general or CISO or whatever. Or Reality Winner or Chelsea Manning had relatively low level positions. At a certain point, in a corrupt system, we have to accept the quality of whistleblower is never going to be that gold standard we want. Maybe this is fake, but its worth taking on face value considering what we know about Boeing culture and the capitalism dynamics and government corruption they've helped create that keeps them away from proper regulation and disclosure. Not to mention we still know next to nothing about Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which was a Boeing too. The narrative of "nothing to see here, its just a pilot suicide or freak swamp gas accident" is now a lot more questionable as we've seen Boeing quality decline lately. "Hey this isnt good enough" is wrong thinking here. In a system of corruption and secrecy its rare to have "good enough" but instead we have to deal with the cards we're dealt by witnesses and whistleblowers.
  • psunavy03 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • 9659 3y ago
      Of the three, Manning and Winner, have been convicted (or pleaded) in a court of law, been sentenced to confinement, and served the time. As far as I am concerned, those two have paid in full what they owe our society. Leave them be.
    • bigbillheck 3y ago
      What would that reason be?
      • psunavy03 3y ago
• honkycat 3y ago
  Did you really not hear about one of their door plugs falling off mid air? Or how TWO of their passenger planes crashed into the ocean killing all passengers due to gross negligence in implementing their computer assisted control for their new plane? They are having HUGE quality issues for the exact reason you would expect: finance bros took over the company and they now blow tons of money on stock buybacks and not unnecessary things like QA. Businesses doing Big Things cannot just blow all of their money on stock buybacks and expect to do great things. It is all profits without prosperity. It used to be illegal for a reason. It is not just hype. They have screwed the pooch.
• cjbgkagh 3y ago
  Boeing being safe was the default, what we're seeing is the disillusion of this default. What's the alternative for the news; "plane lands successfully and without issue". As with any complex system things when things go wrong they go wrong in a myriad of ways with a great deal of uncertainty and randomness - which in and of itself makes them interesting. The erosion of the culture of safety at Boeing is a slow gradual process that has occured over several decades. Incidents that make it to the public are a lagging indicator, which suggests that there is much more to come. Culture is easy to destroy and very very hard to fix, like how cutting down a forest is much faster and easier than growing one. And a culture that has destroyed itself is very unlikely able to fix itself. So we could very well be witnessing a terminal decline. Boeing will make a ton of money providing drones for the US military so there is no real incentive to force leadership to do any course corrections - instead they will just have to act surprised each time a new Boeing issue pops up.
  • jajko 3y ago
    These issues are killing people in hundreds. You are right that national security is more important, but world is not binary. Current execs could easily say rot in jail while company keeps churning whatever hardware military wants, nothing mutually exclusive there. Now what will happen with civilian avionics is another story, for me they lost my trust for good but I & my family choices are insignificant forces on the market.
    • cjbgkagh 3y ago
      I'm not suggesting national security is more important, just that Boeing's leadership won't learn any lessons from this as they'll keep getting bailed out with sweet MIC contracts. I would probably feel much safer if we didn't have a MIC that is constantly trying to play a nuclear game of chicken with political adversaries. 'Russia will not use nukes because Russia has not used nukes' - what kind of effed up logic is that. I feel very unsafe being governed by morons. I can easily avoid flying but dodging nukes is much more difficult.
      • rightbyte 3y ago
• pxeboot 3y ago
  If you are curious just how common minor incidents are, https://avherald.com https://avherald.com does a good job of listing most of them.
• bbor 3y ago
  This isn’t a “hype cycle”, Boeing has very publicly abandoned their engineering culture in favor of stock buybacks ever since the McDonnell-Douglas merger. It’s not hidden at all, and we have countless whistleblower employees, undercover investigations, and the obvious fiscal facts (eg they planned to spend half as much on the MAX as they originally thought it would take). Plus this isn’t exactly a huge industry, and I don’t recall airbus having these problems. Probably because “spend the normal amount of money on engineering” is about the easiest decision a company could ever make - the most obvious, no-shit-Sherlock board room decision possible for building the long-term value of a company. IMO sometimes things are simple, and sometimes the rich and powerful are blinded by short-term greed.
  • mym1990 3y ago
    How do you suppose a half a trillion dollar market is not a "huge industry"? I am definitely aware of the cultural issues at Boeing, but boiling it down to "sometimes things are simple" is just a lot of ignorance on your part.
    • bbor 3y ago
      I just meant that there are only two companies in the industry at all - the industry being “commercial passenger flight”, or what they seem to call “airliners” (?): Still, in the large commercial aircraft market, there are just two major players: the U.S.-based Boeing (BA) and the Airbus Group (EADSY), formerly known as the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS). I totally understand your pushback against some kid on HN thinking he knows better than the Boeing board, but I stick by the simplicity comment. I know little about airplanes but I know a lot about engineering and common sense. My point is this: R&D is vital to the long term success of an aerospace company, and suddenly slashing R&D budgets while expecting a similar amount of output is an obvious cause of safety incidents.
      • nradov 3y ago
        That depends on how you define the market. Boeing and Airbus are the only two manufacturers of large civil airliners on the worldwide market. But there is a second tier including Bombardier, Embraer, Comac, Mitsubishi, and UAC which either manufacture smaller (regional) airliners or have more limited sales options.
• somenameforme 3y ago
  You can test this, to some degree, by using custom date ranges on most of any search engine. Just exclude from the past several days and search for whatever. So for instance, I assume most people know that amongst numerous other issues, a Boeing also had a wheel fall off and cause damage to vehicles and what no on the ground below. So I searched for 'wheel falls off airplane' [1] while excluding the past few months. And yeah, every time it happened, even on relatively small planes, it received lots of coverage. So it seems fairly safe to say that something has gone seriously wrong with Boeing, rather than there just being a big focus on them. I always thought the safest time to fly would be shortly after an airline had a major safety incident, because that's exactly when they're going to be checking everything ten times over. And I'm sure this is exactly what Boeing is still doing, yet they still can't seem to keep their planes in the air and in one piece. [1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=wheel+falls+off+airplane&source=web&tf=2000-01-01to2024-01-01 https://search.brave.com/search?q=wheel+falls+off+airplane&s...
  • metalliqaz 3y ago
    But for the planes that are in-service, any extra scrutiny in the wake of an incident would mostly fall on the airlines, not on Boeing.
  • chmod775 3y ago
    There's databases that are going to make that a bit more precise. https://aviation-safety.net/database/ https://aviation-safety.net/database/ https://avherald.com/ https://avherald.com/ (has fulltext search) This query returns some results about dropped wheels: https://avherald.com/h?search_term=dropped+wheel&opt=7168&dosearch=1&search.x=0&search.y=0 https://avherald.com/h?search_term=dropped+wheel&opt=7168&do...
• mym1990 3y ago
  I would lean towards an anti-Boeing hype cycle with some confluence of a series of unfortunate events. This is not to say that the QA issues aren't leading to something catastrophic, but on the whole I don't think people quite comprehend the number of flights that take off and land in a day, and how few fatalities and injuries result as of these trips relative to the passenger load.
  • jajko 3y ago
    Yet competition can and does better, much better re safety currently. Any issue of Airbus would get at least same press coverage, in US even more since media are usually not impartial. Are we already into some boeing whitewashing cycle too?
    • mym1990 3y ago
      A lot of safety related improvements(at least in the US) are also due to the FAA and generally the open process of anonymously reporting issues on flights. Each crash has also been meticulously investigated and vast improvements were put in place. The reality is that the most dangerous times on a flight are take off and landing, which is also where human judgement and process plays a large part. As far as breaking out of a duopoly, I don't know the path for that, as the barrier to entry to building commercial planes is sky high, but I do think one more player would be a net benefit.
      • chmod775 3y ago
        > As far as breaking out of a duopoly, I don't know the path for that I'm sure China does. Right now they're the only bloc of sufficient size, economy, and most importantly motivation, to pull it off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919 Do note that some systems in that aircraft are still manufactured by European and American companies or are jointly made.
    • drstewart 3y ago
      >Yet competition can and does better, much better re safety currently. Oh wow I had no idea. Can you compare hull losses / fatalities of the 787 to the A350?
• aniftythrifrty 3y ago
  Carry that skepticism forward when reading anti-Israel headlines.
  • bigbillheck 3y ago
    In the sense that there's evidence of a problem with planes right now, and the question is if that problem was already there, whereas there's evidence of IDF war crimes right now, and the question is if they've always been doing them?
    • BobaFloutist 3y ago
      I think they meant in the sense of bad things happen to airplanes often enough that you could find what looks like a pattern for any given manufacturer if you looked for it, and bad things happen in armed conflict often enough that you could find what looks like a pattern for any given side in an armed conflict if you looked for it. Which isn't even to say that Israel and its armed forces are necessarily not behaving poorly in Gaza, rather that it's worth questioning whether we have enough evidence to conclude that they are behaving unusually poorly in Gaza, or if for a number of reasons other than an excess of sympathy for Gazans we are experiencing an unbelievably high level of scrutiny and criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza.
      • whatshisface 3y ago
        Suppose there's a dragon that comes out of its cave and eats a villager every seven years. A knight passes through the village, sees the dragon carry off someone's wife, and calls the villagers to arms: only for calm reason to prevail, as the village elder points out that the incidence of dragon attacks in that locale has not, when adjusted for the expanding population, and increasingly frequent human-dragon contacts, and the inherent unreliability of wooden house door-plugs, risen above historically expected levels.
  • SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
    proisreal, antiisarael, skepticism is always useful.
• jerf 3y ago
  The problem with engineering defense in depth is that systems naturally evolve to "spend" that defense in depth. Constant, active vigilance is required to maintain a culture that honors and preserves defense in depth rather than exploiting it. It isn't that hard to believe that Boeing has failed to preserve that culture. A company like Boeing would be constantly fighting against multiple forces pushing them to exploit the defense in depth rather than maintain it. Some of them, like the Harvard MBA mindset, are very difficult for large companies to resist. Short term costs that result in long term benefits are a hard sell to almost anyone, but current American business culture is definitely not strong against that.