> Boeing said late on Monday "while we are confident that the proposed time-limited exemption for that system follows established FAA processes to ensure safe operation, we will instead incorporate an engineering solution that will be completed during the certification process."
Anybody else get the exact opposite of a warm fuzzy feeling about the specific wording choice used by Boeing there?
I agree with the way you read it entirely. They did not acknowledge and admit wrong doing. They disavowed responsibility and said "we are complying with public pressure against our will".
In other words, they don't understand what they did wrong, but people more powerful than them are forcing them to change. "We are being coerced into expending unnecessary resources."
They think it is an engineering problem that can be solved by engineers and not a management problem that must be solved with a change of culture, namely a change to managements inability to take responsibility for the current state of Boeing.
When this inevitably fails because the core problem (culture) is not acknowledged or addressed, the engineers will be blamed, and management will continue to avoid responsibility.
The people most at fault for the state of Beoing will probably cash out with enough money to get spoon-fed caviar for the rest of their life while their progeny will never have to work a day in their life.
Of course not. Wouldn't it just open them up to legal liability and additional lawsuits if they admitted wrong doing? It seems like saying "we have updated our plan and will now focus on an engineered solution" is exactly the kind of language I would expect from a large corporation that has made such visible failures as to be very vulnerable to lawsuits. I am not even sure they might have current pending lawsuits against them right now which could be made worse if they admit wrongdoing.
...mm... but they didnt say "we have updated our plan and will now focus on an engineered solution".
That's not even a paraphrase of what they said.
They said:
> we are confident that the proposed time-limited exemption for that system follows established FAA processes
When we know that:
1) The established FAA processes resulted in a variation of this aircraft that crashed.
2) The established FAA processes resulted in a variation of this aircraft that had part of the hull pop out mid-flight.
3) The established FAA processes resulted in Boeing doing their own certification of their own aircraft.
We know also know:
4) They asked for a safety exemption for the new variation of this aircraft under the 'The established FAA processes'.
slow clap...
If we're talking about investor and consumer confidence and bland corporate HR talk, they could have phrased this in any number of other ways (like saying literally what you said) that didn't draw attention to the fact that they continue to de-prioritize safety.
What they actually said does the opposite of the intended effect of 'we're focusing on safety' and instead says (to me at least) 'we continue to think we can ignore the FAA safety rules for our aircraft until a senate committee makes a fuss about it'.
> while we are confident that the proposed time-limited exemption for that system follows established FAA processes to ensure safe operation, we will instead incorporate an engineering solution that will be completed during the certification process.
Emphasis mine.
Boeing literally said they won’t seek an exemption and will instead engineer a solution.
If you read the full sentence Boeing says they don’t believe existing regulations require an engineered solution but Boeing is pursuing one anyway. Since Boeing doesn’t believe this is required by regulations it suggests to me Boeing believes it is necessary for safe operation. If anything this reads to me like Boeing saying the regulations are too permissive. In other words Boeing isn’t trying to cheat this time.
> The people most at fault for the state of Beoing will probably cash out with enough money to get spoon-fed caviar for the rest of their life while their progeny will never have to work a day in their life.
Your dissent from techno-neo-feudalism has been duly noted, and added to your Equifax file.
Because they're more concerned with bolstering b stock trades and executive payouts than actually delivering a good product.
They continue to have massive layoffs and lean into outsourcing over preserving knowledge workers and draining those that know the hopes and why's of correct processes.
Im not a stocktrader, but can one set an alarm watching large-scale investors devest? Even if it's just by not renewing investments and instead buying airbus?
There is never enough money, that is why they are rich whilst you just have satisfied with caviars… especially for those who think they are good and right engineering solution and the money is theirs. You should be grateful instead … /sarcastic
They will try to MacGyver some shit together last minute.
The irony is the 707 replaced then De Havilland Comet 4, which is much like the 737 MAX today. The difference being Boeing is a strategic defense contractor that is "too big to fail". There are enormous pressures on the FAA to let Boeing slide with a stern warning again.
The DeHavilland Comet was the first practical civil jet airliner ever produced. It literally invented the systems that were onboard. The 737 is a 60 year old design with a stellar safety record up to this point. It's not comparable at all. The only reason those planes fell apart is rotten management.
> The 737 is a 60 year old design with a stellar safety record
It isn't. Or at least the max isn't. It's a big change from the original 737, a change that makes the type IMHO unairworthy beyond repair.
But that is not even the biggest issue, its the fact that boeing thinks they should withold essential information (such as the existence of an MCAS) from the pilots, who ultimaltely bear the responsibility of the safety of hundreds of passagers. Even now, in the light of what happened, apparently boeing still hasn't changed policy.
It was pressure from airlines to not have to retrain pilots, because that costs them money and whatnot. And in almost all cases when it comes to Boeing, the 737, and further issues, these airlines are also involved.
At this stage of the game, I seriously have to ask: is retaining the type rating actually a money-saver for the carriers?
I mean, airlines obtain new types all the time and pilots get trained to fly them. If it were so onerous, selling new aircraft would be practically impossible. (Yes, I know many Airbus share a type classification.)
It feels like there's an historical truth that's now no longer the case, especially when you consider all the associated compromises and, now, the resulting safety & engineering concerns.
Yes. Generally speaking, you want your pilots as proficient as possible on a single type. They will need many hundreds of hours on the new type before they are considered seasoned. A lot of disasters in the last 30 years have been amplified by pilots with low hours on the type they were flying. It takes a lot of training to memorize checklists, switches, levers, time to get muscle memory for various emergency situations. It’s a lot of time in the simulators. Lots of airlines also fly only one type, so they are majorly impacted by needing training for their entire pilot crew. It’s their own fault for choosing that but still. Combine this with the fact that airlines are razor thin margins and always seem a couple bad quarters away from bankruptcy and you get what we have today.
That's what everyone says, but I don't think the numbers are there. And, to be frank, most of the accidents you infer, are with non-US pilots, who's culture & training just doesn't match up with what the States has (hey, we invented the airplane).
[disclaimer: former chief dispatcher for a large regional US airline]
The problem isn't in retraining a pilot to fly the new plane. The problem is that this pilot is now no longer interchangeable with legacy 737 pilots, and cannot fly a legacy 737.
This means that if you have a hardware issue, you can't swap the plane without also swapping the flight crew.
There is a thing called equipment change. We use it all the time. At airline scale a captain (and crew) is worth an airplane. (And, come to think about it, it's a 1:1 relationship, so that follows Noether's Lemma, I think).
Don't overvalue the airship in the equation. (And I've done this job. I know what levers we can pull and how often it comes up.) Show me your data.
You're off your rocker. Comet's square windows were fundamentally unsound. 737 NG contains Ducommun garbage structural components deemed "airworthy", going back between 1996 and 2004. 737 Classic != NG != MAX. No amount of MCAS or engineering exceptions will make it so, or make it safe.
> Despite findings of the Cohen Inquiry, a number of myths have evolved around the cause of the Comet 1's accidents. Most commonly quoted are the 'square' passenger windows. While the report noted that stress around fuselage cut-outs, emergency exits and windows was found to be much higher than expected due to DeHavilland's assumptions and testing methods[122] the passenger windows shape has been commonly misunderstood and cited as a cause of the fuselage failure. In fact the mention of 'windows' in the Cohen report's conclusion, refers specifically to the origin point of failure in the ADF Antenna cut-out 'windows', located above the cockpit, not passenger windows.[123] The shape of the passenger windows were not indicated in any failure mode detailed in the accident report and were not viewed as a contributing factor. A number of other pressurised airliners of the period including the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, Douglas DC-7, and DC-8 had larger more 'square' windows than the Comet 1 and experienced no such failures.[124] In fact, the Comet 1's window general shape resembles a slightly larger Boeing 737 window mounted horizontally. They are rectangular not square, have rounded corners and are within 5% of the radius of the Boeing 737 windows and virtually identical to modern airliners.[124] Paul Withey, Professor of Casting at the University of Birmingham School of Metallurgy states in a video presentation delivered in 2019, analysing all available data that: "The fact that DeHavilland put oval windows into later marks, is not because of any 'squareness' of the windows that caused failure."[125] "DeHavilland went to oval windows on the subsequent Marks because it was easier to Redux them in (use adhesive) – nothing to do with the stress concentration and it's purely to remove rivets." (from the structure)[126]
The Comet 4 didn't _have_ those, tho (its windows were round, precisely because of the incorrect perception that the Comet 1's window shape was problematic).
It’s interesting that FAA avoided naked corruption case with pushing this through, but they were unable to simply reject exemption either. Somehow, external pressure was required to avoid worst case.
Yep, MCAS was an “engineering solution”. Hopefully this time they’ll at least document their “engineering solution” for the people who have to fly the damn thing.
What I don't understand is why the 737-Max 7 is having problems with the anti-icing system for the engines. What "improvements" did they make to the engines that turned it into a problem?
Cowlings are now composite (ie plastic) instead of aluminum. They are limited to 5 minutes of use in dry air to prevent the cowling from melting, flying apart, or getting into the engine and causing it to fly apart.
> Cowlings are now composite (ie plastic) instead of aluminum.
Um, no. Absolutely not “ie plastic”. Composite material in the case of aircraft means it’s made of two or more materials. In the case of modern aircraft, it often is carbon fiber, but can also mean fiberglass and Kevlar (aka aramid fibers).
A larger part is the epoxy, e.g., plastic. It being a composite would actually make it worse than just plastic under cyclic heating, because the epoxy and carbon fiber have different coefficients of thermal expansion.
Very likely no money was saved by Boeing, composites are almost always more expensive.
Maybe someone with aviation industry knowledge can reply, but my guess is adding a trivial timed shutoff would have triggered an elaborate FAA approval and certification process. That’s probably where the savings were.
The “savings” is entirely due to weight. More weight requires more fuel. The single biggest cost by a large margin in the life of a commercial airline jet is fuel. Increase fuel efficiency by even 1% and you save the airline industry billions.
I was thinking about weight, but the cowlings are pretty small compared to other parts of the plane where composite materials are used. So i'm not sure a single digit saving in pounds of fuel per hour or flight was a good tradeoff considering the risks associated with the alternative they went with.
But, like someone else said this here, I would love someone with knowledge about this to chime in.
Sure. It’s not a cause for total forgiveness and trust but it is the first step in the right direction in a long time. There’s plenty of reasons to criticize Boeing. This is the first news in a long time that isn’t.
The DOJ acted as Boeing's PR firm in the Jamaica 737 NG crash of N977AN. Obama's DOJ made intentional false statements to media that the NTSB supposedly concluded that faulty bear straps and other structural components weren't a factor when the NTSB hadn't reached any conclusions. It came out later..
> "I'm expecting a gold watch from Boeing at the end of my presidency, because I know that I'm on the list of top salesmen at Boeing," Obama deadpanned in 2013.
The trouble is, Boeing hasn't built a new single-aisle transport since the 757, which first flew in 1982. There was supposed to be a 797 by now, but it keeps slipping into the far future. So they're still cranking out 737 variants, a 1960s design.
This is pathetic. Boeing could end up losing out to the COMAC C919, which, although years late, is finally flying a few routes.
> This is pathetic. Boeing could end up losing out to the COMAC C919
Maybe that's a good thing. It will be a lesson to the US to not prop up a shitty monopolies for decades just because it's currently the only local option and losing dominance in the short term is oh-so-scary to techocrats who want to orchestrate everything.
They should have encouraged and enabled the domestic development of competitors to Boeing - as a long term play - instead of repeatedly propping them up in the short term, just to keep the status quo going.
It shows how little confidence, or interest, the US gov and US business community as a whole have in America's ability to compete on merit alone. With lots of juice by Boeing to manipulate an easily manipulated system that has become overly comfortable manufacturing these pseudo private businesses, without true accountability to either the market or gov.
Although I don't blame any up and coming US manufacturer that looks at Boeing's cushy arrangement with the gov and the regulatory system bending over for them alone and hard passing attempting to compete.
Boeing strategies for domestic upstarts range from interesting to terrifying... Mostly burying them in decades of IP litigation until they are bankrupt.
As someone with very limited knowledge in aircraft development, I'm genuinely curious about what more modern designs would bring to the table compared to the modern 737s, which I assume are heavily updated versions of the original 1960s design?
Engines got a lot larger over time, more fuel efficient, more reliable, etc.
On a 737 those engines cannot be placed in an ideal position, because that would mean they'd clip into the ground.
The engines are being put above and I think in front of (might be wrong there) where they should be for maximal flight stability.
The original 737 was self-correcting - meaning that if for example the aircraft stalled, the resulting forces would cause the nose to dip down, pulling the plane out of the stall automatically.
The newer versions no longer have that inherent self-correcting ability - and instead use computer software to take over controls and pull the nose down, in case of a stall.
A new airplane design could be made to accommodate much larger, modern engines, while also having the stability and inherent self-correcting ability of the original 737.
But that would require changes to the overall shape and form of the plane - which will require complete recertification. By sticking to the old design, they avoid that.
so the crashes were because the new software was confusing to the pilots and did something unintuitive? and now they want to do another change to how the airplane behaves (interacts with) the pilot?
Afaik, the crashes were caused by the software mistakenly believing the plane was in a stall due to a single faulty sensor and pulling down the nose - while the pilots had absolutely no clue what was going on (because they never were told the software could do this), and had no way to disable/counteract the software.
I believe the updated software now uses both sensors and only acts if both sensors agree (which is actually standard for such systems and should have been done right from the start) - and can be disabled by the pilots, who are now aware of it's function.
But please don't trust my word... I'm no aviation export by a long stretch.
For a more qualified take on this, done by an actual pilot and pilot trainer, I recommend checking out "Mentour Pilot" on Youtube. He's got a number of videos on the 737 Max and the reported problems at Boeing.
Another armchair pilot here, also recommending Mentour Pilot's channel, but hopefully I can summarize it well enough.
In this case no, because the way the MCAS system operated was to actuate the stabilizer trim which changes the angle of the entire huge tail plane (the horizontal part of the tail). For the most part the yoke controls the elevator (a smaller flap on the trailing edge of the tail plane), so the pitch control authority available in the yoke movement is not enough to override the adjustment to the tail plane trim MCAS was making.
Once MCAS moved the trim far enough, you couldn't raise the nose with the yoke alone. To correct it, pilots needed to deactivate the trim adjustment motor ("stab trim cut-out" you might have heard about) and manually re-trim the tail plane by folding out a literal crank and spinning a wheel by their legs in the cockpit[1]. The concept of doing this was not new with the MAX (similar procedures around trim system malfunctions existed), but what was new was that MCAS existed in the first place, that it could repeatedly activate if the erroneous inputs were still present, and that it could move the trim quite far before pilots realized what was happening. As I understand it that is pretty different than a traditional runaway trim malfunction for which they'd had training for. I believe that looks more like a stuck switch making a constant movement of the trim until you hit the cut-out. If you cut it back in, either it immediately starts moving again and you know you have a problem or it doesn't and leaves you wondering.
MCAS uses trim rather than elevator? That seems insane, though I suppose trim has more authority than elevator...but yeah...in the time it takes for the pilot to notice the trim has moved itself to some insane level, they've been nose down for so long that they couldn't possibly recover.
How hard is it to do a complete recertification. Given that these planes cost over $100 million each it seems like that probably wouldn't be a huge cost compared to the revenue that a new model of plane would generate.
And this is why focusing exclusively on Boeing in the 737 MAX controversy is, IMO, quite short-sighted.
It's not just Boeing's greed. Pretty much the entire industry has been happy to look the other way and enable their nonsense for years, since it meant they wouldn't need to invest extra in training their pilots.
Maybe the discussion should be about how much changes regulation should allow being done to a plane, before it must become a new type.
The 737 Max is like double the size of the original 737 - roughly twice the passenger seats, more than twice the weight, roughly 1.5 times the length... How much larger can a plane get, while still keeping the same certification?
Mmmm, I think there's some confusion here. The 737 MAX has its own certification, as has every generation of the 737 (Original, Classic, Next Generation and now MAX). However, if a pilot already has another certification of the same type then they are only required to take a differences course to operate other variants (which comes out to a few simulator sessions and a couple of check rides), as opposed to earning an initial type rating from scratch (which can require over a month of instruction).
Also it's entirely normal for a variant of a vehicle to have significant physical dimension differences. They're considered variants because their [chassis, airframes, hulls, etc] follow the same design and assembly, and because they handle in a similar way; they don't need to basically the same vehicle in a different coat of paint.
I guess a somewhat decent comparison is...Apple makes a type of computer (the MacBook Pro) and releases different variants (and within that, versions) of it. A fully specced out 2023 16-inch MacBook Pro and its entry-level 13-inch variant are both fundamentally the same type of computer even though the former is significantly bigger and beefier. Now, if Apple tried to shove a whole RTX 4090 graphics card into a MacBook Pro's characteristic svelte and relatively vent-less chassis we would say "no, that's stupid. Make a different type of computer if you want to do that". But that doesn't and shouldn't mean that a 16-inch laptop is a different type of laptop from a 13-inch one.
(As an aside, your numbers are a bit off, probably because you're comparing the wrong things. The "original 737" is two planes/variants, not one, and the "737 MAX" is similarly four planes not one)
Exactly, and that means that airlines like Southwest wouldn't even consider it.
One of the ways that low-cost regional airlines save money is by standardizing on a single aircraft. For Southwest, that's the 737. Every single pilot, inspector and mechanic in their entire organization only needs to be certified on a single airplane, they only need to have one parts supplier, only one set of tools, etc. - it's enormous cost savings.
The original 737 was the smallest aircraft in Boeing's passenger jet family, behind the four-engine 707 (which was already becoming obsolete at the time and was eventually replaced by the 747) and the three-engine 727. I mean, this was the original 737 model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737#/media/File:Boeing_... - Lufthansa used it as a "CityJet", which is its regional brand! That's why the 737 sits so low to the ground, so it can be loaded and unloaded with simple equipment (or even without equipment) at small regional airports. And that proved a major issue when more efficient turbofan engines with ever higher bypass ratios (-> bigger diameters) came about, so they had to use various tricks to acommodate these engines, and the latest trick (MCAS) then backfired tragically. Besides that, the things Boeing can do to update the 737 are limited, or else the FAA might come along and say "this is not your grandfather's 737 anymore, it needs a new type certificate!".
False Equivalence is one of a big sawhorses I bring out for why things suck so much more now, in aerospace and defense generally. For the past 10-15 years, we've had mechanisms for quantitatively ballparking equivalence in pools of supportable assemblies and spared parts - but generally, no one wants to touch that. The purchasers of enterprise solutions (CAD, PDM, etc) want equivalence to be ultimately a financial decision, not a question solved by materials, interfaces, fluid dynamics, frickin' electricity, etc.
Your problem there is . . well, jeez, look around. You're treating completely different products like they're the same thing. Not exactly a new problem, either, but it sure is interesting how it's compounded since the great "financialization" experiment in American capitalism circa 1974, and with a whopper of a sequel post-2008. I am out of my sandbox here, but if I was a betting man, I would put the root cause of this nonsense in this bucket, i.e., lowering apparent risk (by making things look similar) so as to meet requirements of issuing larger financial instruments (bonds, etc).
Solely being old isn't the problem. The early variants of 737s were solid. It became a problem with later versions with bigger engines etc: you can probably get away with some minor CHANGES without overhaul the design as long as it's still within the threshold of the original design, but those MAX variants crossed the line. Thus MACS was introduced. MACS, to some extent, was a feasible workaround if Boeing did not cut the corners by outsourcing the implementation and chose to only have one critical attack angle sensor. But if things only stop there, those two disasters could still have been avoided if the pilots were aware of the existence of MACS. But again, Boeing decided there was no need for the pilots to know it at all.
After the first crashed MAX's FDR data release, I was wondering if there were something massing with the pilots but I wasn't sure. Then the 2nd crash happened and the FDR data looked almost exactly the same, I was almost certain there was some undisclosed mechanism causing nose diving. But as we all knew, Boeing denied such thing until later.
You can see that in the whole Boeing had been SUPER CONFIDENT for sure, and thus I now have no confidence in it at all.
A few things come to mind from more modern aircraft like the 787/A350:
Fly by wire (flight envelope protection), electronically actuated control surfaces (less hydraulics / reduced complexity), bleedless engines (greater efficiency), greater use of composites (less weight), modern wing design using computational modeling/optimization (possibly more efficient), and essentially as large of a turbofan fan as you would like
I can't imagine much of the original design would be left in the aircraft except for the overall shape of it. I'm guessing (remember now, basically zero aircraft development knowledge) that most tech has been updated to modern equivalents. Engines, controls, computers, ...?
So what would be changed in a complete overhaul of the aircraft?
That's the problem. It was designed for 60s-style boarding via air-stairs on the ground (rather than modern jetways from the terminal) so it's too low down. This requires doing funky things to fit modern, large, energy-efficient engines, starting with those weird flat-bottom cowlings and ending in moving the engines back and changing their angle, which changes the flight characteristics of the plane so much it needed MCAS to compensate.
> So what would be changed in a complete overhaul of the aircraft
The certification, meaning pilots would need re-training since it's no longer the same plane.
The MCAS thing clearly changed the plane so much it should have required re-training anyway, which is why the whole thing is so dumb.
> It was designed for 60s-style boarding via air-stairs on the ground (rather than modern jetways from the terminal)
Note that boarding a plane in the middle of the tarmac via bus+stairs is still quite common at many major European airports. Using jet bridges exclusively requires the planes to all be parked in one long line beside a building, which can never be as space-efficient as a 2D-grid parking lot.
Isn't that mostly through mobile stairs though? Airstairs are specifically the foldable stairs built into the plane, which enforce a stricter limit on the height that the door can be from the ground. I'm sure Ryanair uses them to save on ground handling fees, but if you were designing a plane from scratch these days you wouldn't include them.
The air stairs thing is a _bit_ of a red herring. 737s are arguably designed to be ideal for them, whereas A320s do support them, but they're a bit taller and sometimes steeper than you'd like. But the taller A320 can and does operate with air stairs.
Huh, I see. So keeping it around for so long was mostly for avoiding expensive R&D and pilot re-training, and not so much for the 737 being the perfect platform to keep iterating on.
A major factor was that Airbus launched the A320 NEO and die hard, lifelong Boeing customers showed interest and even ordered the Airbus offering.
Designing a completely new plane (which was considered for quite some time) would have taken far too long and Airbus would gave eaten Boeing's lunch in this important segment.
So, Boeing McGivered a solution and updated a 60s airframe for modern use.
To not having to recertify the plane they came up with a software hack, which they initially didn't even document and which far exceeded the capability of its original design.
This[0] is a fantastic read which will leave you with a "how the fuck could they ever do that"? feeling and makes you wonder why nobody went to jail for that
I'm somewhat curious as to what efforts to design a smaller, better fit engine closer to the original form/size with better fuel economy was tried. Combined with newer materials.
It seems like the flight charismatics have changed so much that pilot recertification should have been required anyway.
I have worked on eLearning courses for aerospace in the early-mid 00s but have forgotten mostb of what I learned in that domain back then. It was also mostly mechanic/diagnostic interfaces (ECU, etc)
Lots of cases in light aviation where some crashed plane is rebuilt basically from scratch but it's cheaper from regulatory perspective to say it's the same plane, just repaired, ie reuse the tail number.
It sounds to me like Boeing has been making incremental changes to the 737 over the years. Clearly now it's NOT the same plane. But was there a clear point in time where they crossed the line and it really should never have been certified as the same aircraft anymore?
How would we know unless they do it? Before iphone was launched someone could have made the same point about Nokia's smartphones. They were heavily updated designs of their massively popular Symbian phones. We simply didn't know what was possible until someone put in the work and innovated and came up with an entirely new design.
We know it because the Airbus 320NEO which is based on a late 80s design, does not have all the cons the 737 has, and was the reason Boeing scrambled to make the 737Max.
> Before iphone was launched someone could have made the same point about Nokia's smartphones.
For my question the phone-equivalent would be someone asking today in 2024 what is the difference between a Nokia of 2006 and an iPhone of 2024, when only knowing that you can make calls with both of them.
I genuinely didn't know that the modern 737s are so much of a hack to get around regulations and save cost on R&D, and thought they were just good aircraft that were worth iterating on.
I'm sure a few PalmOS owners wondered why they don't make the scroll bars fingerable and add a cell phone ;)
But points to Apple for figuring out you don't need a stylus to write either and you can scroll from anywhere. And for, you know, building a device. I thought of a primitive form of it but it never occured to me to do it.
A PalmOS cell phone - the Treo - was featured in the original iPhone keynote. I had two, the first (600) was OK. The second (650) was abject garbage - it would crash just sitting waiting for calls.
I know about the Treo, but I never got one. If i remember the first reviews correctly, it was a cell phone bolted onto palmos but totally separate somehow. It didn't 'smell good'.
I've had quite a few non phone PalmOS devices though. I think I'm still keeping a non functional Sony Clie [1] in my nostalgia stash. And maybe a Zire Z22, but I may have thrown that away.
It was quite well integrated all told from the 600 onwards, though I never tried the first version. The phone and SMS appeared as apps and worked in a very similar manner to what one would expect having used an iPhone.
Ohh I remember now. They thought it would be a good idea to take space with a physical keyboard instead of making it more touchable. That's why I never got one. I liked grafitti.
I don't really see that happening unless they make the C919 much more efficient. There's probably a market for Comac where Boeing and Airbus aren't allowed to sell due to sanctions or whatnot, but that's a separate issue.
Sure they have - they very family under discussion.
Just because they have attempted to foist a polite fiction that it is a 737 variant doesn't mean that it actually is. It's a new single-aisle transport with several serious problems.
In name only, and by dint of software cludges to prime the vividness of our ability to imagine that pilots needn't be separately type-rated.
...but we all know that if it weren't for MCAS (and by extension, if it weren't for Boeing's special seat at the FAA table), this wouldn't pass muster.
(but yes, I think you and I are saying the same thing.)
"In name only" is an interesting way to say "literally re-engined 737s with minor tweaks to the airframe, in line with an incremental development".
Again, the whole reason the "software cludges" were implemented in the first place is precisely because it's more or less the same "hardware". The entire problem is that the 737 MAX family is in fact made up of 737s when they should have been redesigned from scratch. It's baffling to me how one could come to the conclusion that they aren't 737s.
I love flying on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It is the most comfortable plane I've flown on in terms of how the air quality feels, and it has had 0 hull losses & 0 fatalities; almost as good a safety record as you could hope for as a passenger. I think there are many who agree with me about Dreamliners being the most comfortable planes to fly on.
I hope never to fly on another Boeing 737, because of all the accidents and safety drama that has been happening & is ongoing. It's become vogue to hate Boeing as a result, but I still prefer the 787 over any other plane.
I am guessing that entirely different teams were responsible for what's been happening with each model, but I'm surprised that Boeing's culture has led to two quite different results with these two types of planes. Can anyone explain that?
TLDW: Critical Dreamliner fuselage parts didn't fit together because workers at the subcontractor (Ducommun) traced a template with magic marker onto the material and cut and drilled the part by hand. Officially, the parts were manufactured by high precision CNC machinery with extremely small tolerances. At Boeing, if drill holes didn't match up in parts A and B, workers were told to just put the parts together and re-drill the hole in part B through the hole in part A, or hammer the parts into place. Internal Boeing investigators who found out and documented the issues were threatened to be sued if they spoke up. They were later fired, after the US government allegedly leaked their identities to Boeing.
Currently reading "Flying Blind", which was recommended on another recent Boeing thread. Not done yet, but I think it boils down to
- Boeing had a pretty strong engineering driven culture for a long time
- In the 90s, McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money and McDD management took over, which was a mostly Jack Welch inspired bunch of value extraction types
- Engineering culture started decaying, drastic cost cutting, outsourcing and value extraction started taking place, with Boeing spending up to 80% of free cash on stock buybacks instead of investments
- Dreamliner program started in the early 2000s, 737 MAX several years later
I think it boils down to the erosion of the company not having progressed as far when the Dreamliner was being designed
Also, maybe to add to that, the Dreamliner was a new design, of which apparently even considering some setbacks along the way Boeing was still capable of at that point in time.
For the 737 Max, they were very late and had to react to Airbus much better neo offering, and didn't have the time and/or money and/or capabilities to develop a new airplane, so a lot of in the end deadly compromises had to be made to somehow bypass training and security certification as much as possible using the old airframe at low cost.
You should try a flight on an A350 with seats over the wing or as forward as you can get them. It is so much quieter than the 787. So far it is the quietest plane I've flown on.
Boeing 787 was a NEW design from scratch. 737 MAX serials were just CHANGES OVER CHANGES over a once mature design. Boeing claimed those CHANGES as UPGRADES. Picking only one of those, it can probably be called an UPGRADE. But putting all together, I can only see whole bunches of UNVERIFIED CHANGES to original design.
I honestly don’t even know anymore if I’m living in a cracked / badly modded version of the sims, how can one wake up in the morning and seek for a safety exemption regarding
I quote the article: She noted the exemption Boeing had sought "involves an anti-ice system that can overheat and cause the engine nacelle to break apart and fall off. This could generate fuselage-penetrating debris, which could endanger passengers in window seats behind the wing."
A $20 toaster has overheat detection technology. Presumably other planes are doing this already. I am not understanding how there is a novel engineering problem to solve that could not be incorporated into the release.
The worst thing that can happen with a toaster is that it catches on fire, while a plane can crash and kill hundreds of people.
While that doesn't make Boeing any less responsible for engineering proper solutions instead of a compliance hack, there's a difference between the solution for a throwaway consumer device and one for a multi-million dollar airplane that has to operate in conditions with harsh vibration and wide operating temperature ranges, has to be serviceable for decades, and cannot fail in ways that render the plane inoperable.
Yeah, because an electrical appliance catching on fire is never deadly?
What a bunch of hysterical hand-wringing.
They just needed to a program a timer on the heater circuit and/or add sensors; the engines are already incredibly instrumented so this wouldn't be hard to do.
"Cannot fail in ways that render the plane inoperable" is precisely why there should not be a system that if forgotten about by the pilots past ~10 minutes causes the destruction of the engine nacelle and thus both probable destruction of the engines and penetration of the body of the aircraft by parts of said engine when it ingests parts of the nacelle.
You don't understand how serious that is. The nacelle of a jet engine is designed to contain a blade-off event where one or more blades - each of which has a massive amount of kinetic energy - completely break off from the turbine rotor at takeoff power levels.
The level of corporate apologism in your comment is breathtaking.
My comment talks about how the solution space for a toaster and a plane are completely different.
A simple thermal fuse to prevent catastrophic failure of a toaster is an example of a solution that works for a toaster. It's cheap. If the toaster handle gets stuck, the fuse heats up, trips, and the toaster is inoperable but there is no fire. The customer can replace the toaster or the thermal fuse.
That solution doesn't work for a plane, because if the fuse trips mid flight and the anti icing system doesn't work until the plane lands and maintenance replaces the thermal fuse, the plane is screwed if it encounters icing conditions during the same flight.
A timer doesn't work in this case, since from what I recall keeping the anti-icing system on is okay as long as the plane is in icing conditions. It can only overheat if the anti-icing is kept on outside of icing conditions for a few minutes.
Realistically, the system should work the same way it works on other planes; if it's forgotten, then it could waste energy but shouldn't cause the engine to fail. It's only because the engine inlet is made of composite materials instead of metal that this is a problem, but this is a problem of Boeing's own making.
From what I read elsewhere the problem is not entirely an engineering issue, but the fact that this creates new procedures to be followed by pilots, and relying on the pilots memory for these rare, but statistically significant occurrences is yet another risk on top of a plane that's already caveat-rich
I know the broader context is that Boeing has some fundamentally broken culture with regards to safety. Setting that aside I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a system were you can say "Hey, we have this problem, it has this impact, it occurs in the following situations. We'll fix it, but in the meantime we want an exemption to keep flying and we'll restrict the use to the following situations where the issue cannot occur." As long as that process is rigorous, it's not actually a problem. The broader problem is Boeing can't be trusted.
It's like when you go to the doctor and say "My knee hurts the day after I play basket ball" - you know what he's going to tell you - stop playing basketball. Sometimes you can be safe by just... not doing a particular thing.
The pilots must've been absolutely pissed discovering that the stick wasn't following their commands, and Boeing gaslighting by denying MCAS existed.
That there even exists a condition where the stick/steering can ignore direct commands given is insane to me.
Not necessarily disagreeing with your assessment but I guess all these things are about statistical probabilities. If the chance of this happening is small enough and the possible "worst case" outcome is tolerable, it gets a tick.
And the statistical requirements for failure causing injury or fatality to the passengers are on the order of 1 in 10 million to 1 in 1 billion. Forgetting to turn off a small switch within five minutes of exiting icing conditions will almost certainly happen more often than that.
The question is how often this failure will occur when the pilots fail to turn off the switch.
Given that the 737 Max 8 and 9 are currrently flying with this defect and no damage has been reported, let alone failures, the actual likelihood of catastrophic failure is clearly low.
Risk is hypothetical and Boeing will have had to submit various documents to the FAA describing the possible outcomes and the likelihood of those happening. Risk can also be managed by pilots doing manual checks.
Boeing got an exemption for the existing MAX-8 and MAX-9 planes with the same issue, and are allowed to continue shipping new planes of those with the issue. This isn't really that big of a deal IMO, planes fly with stuff broken all the time, it's why they have minimum equipment lists. Planes are enormously complex with thousands of systems onboard, it would be kind of surprising if everything worked all of the time.
To not allow shipping MAX 7s with the same issue would be a bit odd, if it's serious enough the planes should either be grounded across the board, or at least not shipping new MAX 8s and MAX 9s.
While the probability for this flaw to manifest is probably on the order of magnitude of that of being hit by lightning while being eaten by a shark, I'm with you.
Safety exemptions are there for a reason and this doesn't sound like a fitting example.
As some comments mentioned that the culture in Boeing has been broken for a long time. How to fix it? I heard about a solution: set up a policy that every executive and board member must take their "safe" airplane once a week.
> how can one wake up in the morning and seek for a safety exemption regarding
It's because planes with this same issue are currently flying and it's an easily managed issue (i.e. don't use it when certain conditions happen).
Boeing was hoping to add another model to the list of planes currently grandfathered in, but decided not to do that and instead fix it, and then back-port the fix to the currently flying planes.
There were over 20 serious issues affecting 737 NG and MAX models post MAX crashes, but they received exactly zero media coverage. Former 737 Boeing manufacturing manager Ed Pierson raised the alarm vigorously but no one listened.
Interestingly, Airbus's orders are filled up to 2030. I suppose if an airline wants something sooner, they'll either get Boeing or they're not going [to get one].
O'Leary hasn't been the CEO of Ryanair for some time though he is a leader and can represent the company, this is a tad pedantic but worth pointing out. It's been Eddie Wilson since.
Michael says a lot of things that get him news coverage of Ryanair. He does have a track recording of going against the zeitgeist to profit e.g. he bought a lot of planes after 9/11 knowing that air traffic would bounce back while planes were cheap to purchase.
So I wouldn't see this as an endorsement that Boeing are 100% okay and this is all media spin. There are issues at Boeing and they need to be addressed -- according to the industries big supporters of Boeing.
I don't understand. Is Boeing using a different anti-ice system on the engines for the MAX 7 compared to the other MAX variants? They use the same engines, no? Why would the MAX 7 need a safety exemption for a system that should be identical across the 4 variants?
The MAX 8 and 9 have the same issue[0], and have a temporary exemption with guidance to the pilots on when not to use the deicing. I think the idea is that this is an issue that can be managed, and the cost of grounding hundreds of planes for such an issue is substantially higher than the cost of delaying deliveries for a plane with no existing fleet. That different cost also leads to a different tradeoff for the two cases.
I hear what you're saying, but "because we have so many of these planes out there" isn't a rationale that gives me a lot of confidence for justifying a waiver. In the grand scheme of things I'd rather see them stop building shitty planes.
Here, just juggle these old sticks of dynamite weeping nitroglycerin carefully and nothing bad will happen. And if it does, it's the operator's fault.
Don't fret, the American government is doing all it can to ensure Boeing's investors' MONEY is worth more than a few hundred people who are already dead. Boeing pinky promises it will never, ever happen again. And if it does, it's pilot error.
But that gets in the way of making the little line on the graph go up every quarter which means top execs don't get as big of bonuses so shitty planes it is!
Certified variants are currently flying under an Airworthiness Directive. The requested exemption would have allowed the MAX 7 and MAX 10 to be certified despite the EIA flaw, with Boeing having until 2026 to design and certify a permanent fix (not sure about the deadline for actual implementation of said fix).
Anybody else get the exact opposite of a warm fuzzy feeling about the specific wording choice used by Boeing there?