This shouldn't be Trump announcing the ban. Either FAA or Secretary of Transportation should be announcing the grounding of flights. Its just odd to me that Trump would be involved...
I mean, he has a phone-line, and his Secretary of Transportation is in charge of the FAA. So its just odd that he'd personally involve himself in this issue. There's a myriad of ways for Trump to get this done with better optics.
Even if Trump were to give a phone call along the lines of 'Ground the Plane or else I'll write an executive order' , the optics of the situation would be so much better if Chao (Secretary of Transportation) or Dan Elwell (FAA Acting Administrator) were to give the announcement instead.
> if Trump were to give a phone call along the lines of 'Ground the Plane or else I'll write an executive order' , the optics of the situation would be so much better
If the President is requiring it then the proper mechanism to do that is an order.
You're suggesting a side-channel phone call and a threat so that he's still deciding but it's recorded as someone else's decision for PR purposes, and you think that's better? That's a terrible idea.
> You're suggesting a side-channel phone call and a threat so that he's still deciding but it's recorded as someone else's decision for PR purposes, and you think that's better? That's a terrible idea.
I disagree with GP, but this is basically how firings are handled at high levels.
It's very rare for a POTUS or a corporate CEO to actually fire a direct report. Instead, they say "you have X days to resign before I fire you" via a side channel, and most of the time the report opts for the resignation.
(funny thing is, at the first company I worked for, the CEO did this to the VP of Engineering... and the VP assumed he was bluffing, waited out the whole 30-day period he was given without resigning, and then got walked out of the building one morning in front of everyone who was there that early... and the guy who was in charge of walking him out was one of the people who was promoted to replace him)
> his Secretary of Transportation is in charge of the FAA
I actually don't believe this is true - I can look up citations in a bit, but the FAA is an independent body whose directors are appointed by the president.
> but the FAA is an independent body whose directors are appointed by the president.
The Federal Aviation Agency was an independent agency, but the Federal Aviation Administration, which it became, is a subordinate agency within the Department of Transportation. It has an Administrator, but it does not have directors, commissioners, or some other multimember voting governing body.
Remember that Trump knows a lot about planes. Unlike most people here he owns a big plane made by Boeing. As well as being a narcissist this is something he can feel he can understand, it's his topic, he pays the bills to get his own plane serviced.
more to the point, who told the FAA bods not to pull the plane? Was this the President too?
Because of how this has been handled by the Trump I think Boeing now have a 'Samsung Note 7' on their hands, i.e. a product that isn't going to be re-released as it is poorly engineered and can't be fixed by just changing a supplier or two. It was a hack with another hack to keep the hack okay. There will be a who knew what and when scandal. This won't be like the Dreamliner teething issues due to two lost planes. People can forgive teething issues but a scandal is a different beast.
> In August 1989, a Trump Shuttle flight arriving in Boston incurred a nose gear failure upon landing due to maintenance errors by Eastern personnel prior to the acquisition. Trump personally flew on the next Trump Shuttle flight to Boston in order to manage the media reaction to the incident.[3]
Owning a plane does not equate to understanding anything about them, easily proved by his completely stupid tweets about the complexity of modern aircraft being a bad thing.
An EO is the legal mechanism to command an agency to take an action. Agencies shouldn’t be taking instructions from random tweets, TV appearances and speeches as it’s hard to interpret the exact meaning. Further if some random bureaucrat were to act on a random Tweet and then be sued they’d be unable to say “I was just following orders.”
> An EO is the legal mechanism to command an agency to take an action. Agencies shouldn’t be taking instructions from random tweets, TV appearances and speeches as it’s hard to interpret the exact meaning.
Yes, but it'd not be unusual for the agency's director to check in with the president on a course of action or vice versa, verbally or via memorandum, without the president formally invoking his presidential authority via executive order.
To put the whole thing in perspective, the number of EOs issued annually by recent presidents Bush and Obama was very modest, averaging 36.4 and 34.6 respectively.
> It sounds like he had to go to an Executive Order to get the FAA to comply.
The words he used was "emergency order" and "we", not "executive order" and "I". CNBC is reporting it (not quoting any official source which says that, and citing only the President's "emergency order" public statement) as an "executive order", but other news sources are not, and Boeing is saying that they recommended the grounding to the FAA.
My initial impression is that this is an FAA action based on Boeing's recommendation that the White House wanted to take the press attention for.
> My initial impression is that this is an FAA action based on Boeing's recommendation that the White House wanted to take the press attention for.
That would make me feel better if this were true. It seems to match my expectations for who is in charge of various decisions, as well as the politics that Trump likes to play. So it makes sense at least.
To me another plausible explanation is that the reason the FAA _wasn't_ grounding them was because Trump said not to.
> Early Tuesday, Dennis A. Muilenburg, the chief executive of Boeing, spoke to President Trump on the phone and made the case that the 737 Max planes should not be grounded in the United States, according to two people briefed on the conversation.
Maybe Boeing changed it's mind in between yesterday and today?Or that reporting was inaccurate?
Or, that's exactly what happened, but then today either Trump or Boeing or both of them realized this wasn't gonna fly (no pun intended), and that they had to be grounded, they talked to each other again, Trump decided he wanted to make an announcement about it because he likes being on TV about whatever he's thinking about at the moment. (I'm not sure an "emergency order", which Trump said it was, is even a thing?)
I mean, really, who the fuck knows. This administration doesn't tend to make a lot of sense, and it's kind of kremlinology trying to guess why they do what they do.
The President is analogous to the Chairman/CEO of [most of] the executive branch. That role can tell them what to do and what do focus on, but mostly doesn't. He told them what to do, now the FAA has to do it. The Secretary of Transportation could likely have unilaterally issued an order without needing it to tell the FAA what to do, or waiting for the President.
But either way, this is symbolic and shows the stance of the government to the world and internally. The highest office in the US is grounding the planes like the rest of the world is, the administrative nuances are irrelevant. Boeing and the airlines would be the ones to challenge it, way to go for PR.
Of course the President can just tell the FAA what to do. I understand that.
The question is how the public should have been informed by the event. Dan Elwell, the acting director of the FAA, is both a military and commercial pilot. If he made the announcement, it would have carried far more weight than Trump (who likely doesn't know much about airplanes).
The President of the United States made the announcement. Thats what is being written in the history books. It carries weight regardless of who is in office.
In a tiny little footnote on wikipedia it will mention how disturbed citizens of California got the Secretary of Transportation or the FAA to reissue the same order because "orange man bad". You might be led to think I'm being "unsubstantive" but this is how the EO for gold confiscation is recorded (but the Secretary of the Treasury merely reissued it after a court challenge), as well as the EO for Japanese interment camps are recorded.
That would have only carried weight for those who know who Dan Elwell is. He carries no weight with me other than apparently being "acting director of the FAA". The president, even if he's disliked by many, carries much more weight for the average person.
The public don't need to know who Dan Elwell is, they need to know that the decision to take a very disruptive emergency safety precaution has been taken by the relevant safety body after evaluating the currently-known relevant information. (The people who actually execute the grounding of the Max know who he is anyway)
I don't actually think Trump is doing anything wrong in trying to take responsibility for the action, and suspect the decision was reached through appropriate channels rather than by him reading something by a pilot on Twitter, but having a president known for more being capricious than his understanding of aviation safety as the figurehead behind the decision does make it look less like a reasoned decision to the average person, especially if they have strong anti-Trump priors.
There is no question that the acting director of the FAA would be more knowledgeable about airplanes than Trump. While technical individuals are needed during the investigation, I don't believe that this decision warrants a full-on root cause analysis prior to making the decision to ground the planes. The FAA's Primary Mission is to ensure the safety of civil aviation, and from a safety stance, if the acting director is incorrect, and another plane was to go down, hundreds of people would likely be killed.
I predicted two days ago that this would turn into a shit storm of hysteria, justified or not. The President exerting his authority is similar in that sometimes these events turn too emotional and fearful. He made the right call for that sake.
That seems to be a closer fit to the kind of industry ties he has had then either Pai or DeVos. Pai's industry ties was as a lawyer for Verizon, whereas Wheeler's were as head of first the cable trade association and later the wireless trade association, and having been involved in several telecom companies. That seems a much closer match to Elwell, who was VP of a major aerospace trade association and a pilot and an airline executive.
Obama's last FAA director wasn't even a pilot. He had a degree in political science. At least Elwell has actually flown airplanes -- including 16 years flying airliners for American. He also has combat aviation experience. Elwell is far more competent than Michael Heurta. Huerta's background was in politics, working for New York City and Later the Port of San Francisco. No flight experience, no airline experience, no general aviation experience.
People criticized Trump for putting a non-scientist at the head of the Department of Energy, however, where is the criticism of Obama for putting a non-pilot as the head of the FAA? When Trump does something wrong, sure, criticize him, but Elwell is an experienced, relevant choice to head the FAA -- especially compared to Huerta. Reducing Elwell to "Lobbyist" is silly, if one actually looks at his background.
Fortunately there are laws against him being a "CEO". The "spoils system" he has sought to restore permitting him to fire those who disagree with him politically and place those he favors in their place are blocked by a series of progressively increasing laws culminating in the 1978 Ethics in Government Act which limits his ability to engage in CEO-like acts of political influence over the civil service.
His ability to directly influence, and damage, the executive branch's operation in service to the people to what he wants is thus limited.
> Fortunately there are laws against him being a "CEO"
Do you know what the Presidency is? It's the head of the executive branch. By definition, Chief Executive of the United States. The law specifically are for the President being CEO -- that's exactly what being president is. The one who signs bills, runs the organizations who enforce the laws, and runs the military that defends the country. The president is 100% in charge of the Executive Branch and all of its agencies -- that's exactly what the job is! He could fire every head of every non-independent executive agency tomorrow and it would be 100% constitutional.
That is...unclear, at best. The only account of the decision making I've seen in any news source that comes from anyone involved (e.g., excluding CNBCs unsourced claim of an "executive order") is Boeing's claim that they recommended the action "in an abundance of caution" to the FAA which acted on it. (EDIT: Actually, the FAA has just tweeted that they made the decision, based on evolving evidence from the investigations, so that's another narrative.)
Of course, the White House can assume the privilege of announcing any decision from anywhere in the executive branch, and the President announcing it as an "emergency order" that "we" are issuing is factually correct where "we" refers to the Executive Branch.
A country isn’t a company, nor is the executive branch. Agencies operate somewhat independently, precisely to prevent the appearance (and reality) of political interference. In practice, this means the president does not have the power to make agency decisions. For some agencies, he might get to fire the director. But even then, he would have to fire everyone down the line to the individual or group making the decision.
Violating that tradition is rather stupid for a President. Not only are FAA decisions now tainted, he is putting himself square at the center of blame for anything negative happening from now on. It’s even worse considering there aren’t really any symmetrical opportunities to shine with a job well done in aviation safety comparable to a crash.
> A country isn’t a company, nor is the executive branch.
It is an analogy, which is why I used the word analogous, and it still fits.
The power of the Executive Branch is vested in the President of the United States, who also acts as head of state and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. There isn't any framework to have a rebuttal to that, this is as succinct as it gets.
SOME agencies are independent of this structure. They are called independent agencies.
Other agencies are not.
The President's primary role in this capacity is to steer the executive branch, and this is done using rather mundane executive orders which are usually merely plans, again ANALOGOUS to a companies quarterly or annual goals. A CEO lays out the mission and the organization follows that.
The job title is a 3-part job. Head of executive branch, head of state, and commander-in-chief of armed forces. The celebrity status and reliance on The President's every move and stance on everything is merely happenstance, but a byproduct of the constitutional government becoming involved in every aspect of American society, having subsequently created all these "not-companies" with millions of employees, and perpetual armed conflicts around the world.
So finally, head of the executive branch, for agencies not independent of this structure, the President is ANALOGOUS to the Chairman/CEO and has ultimate say in steering them. There is no tradition that was violated.
Anyway, on the topic at hand, the FAA followed the order and indications from the President and issued their own.
I mean, that’s basically a failed state, right there. The whole thing is absurd. I actually initially thought it was a joke when I heard Trump had announced it.
Maybe he was letting FAA to do their job to avoid the appearance of interfering, but the external pressure was getting too high and FAA was dragging their feet so he stepped in to overrule. Interesting to see who's the original appointter of the FAA commissioners.
First of all, there is a backlog of higher priority nominees. It wouldn't be good to distract congress from those.
Second of all, the constant harassment of this administration must be having a huge impact. A person has to be slightly crazy to accept a nomination. They and their family will be facing physical danger, legal danger, and more. Lots of competent people are thus unavailable as choices. The constant harassment has had a real negative effect on the quality of our government.
I think you have cause and effect reversed there. The candidates aren’t low quality because they face difficulty. The administration’s candidates face difficulty because they’re low quality.
Even if you are right about them being low quality (a disputed political opinion) it should be obvious that no 100% sane person would put their family at risk by taking one of these jobs. Good people are thus eliminated from consideration. Those who feel that the choices would be low quality are thus forcing the choices to be lower quality.
Put yourself in their shoes. You have a normal family and could earn millions of dollars per years in a nice comfortable corporate executive position. How insane do you have to be in order to take something like $150,000 while living in the expensive DC area and being unable to simply go out to eat in public? What normal parent would subject their kids to the abuse?
Scaring away qualified people does not improve the government. You don't do that unless seeing Trump do badly is so important to you that you are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of the country itself.
I can see how it might have, in isolation, but the trickle of qualified people dried up well before that. Nobody wants to work for a fucking moron unless they’re corrupt and think they can turn it to their advantage, or they’re a true believer.
This is by far the most interesting aspect of this story. I expected that the US would ground these planes soon. There was too much pressure to follow the rest of the world. But having the order come from the President rather than the FAA is highly unusual. Seems like something very strange must be going on behind the scenes. Maybe the FAA is reluctant and he’s forcing their hand, or maybe he’s trying to take credit for their decision.
IT wasn't inevitable. There's nothing that's found to be unsafe about the aircraft. If anything it shows that airlines in other countries don't train their pilots properly. MCAS can be disabled by an easily visible switch directly in the cockpit and you can override it with manual trim control as well. The Lion aircraft that crashed before was having MCAS problems _FOUR_ flights repeatedly before the one that crashed. Third world aircraft maintenance combined with poor pilot training and non-idiot proof software made these disasters happen. It's not something that would happen in the US or any other first world country.
I’m sure you’re willing to hop on a flight with one of these planes, but I’m not and I doubt the majority of people who’ve heard about it are. Canada saw the same sort of flight pattern dip in the new crash that happened to the old one. It’s only that the FAA administrator is a lobbyist of the air manufacturing industry that they didn’t follow suit.
Boeing said no training was required to save on money. If that was the point of this 737 revision, it stands to believe that the airlines would believe them.
American pilots made complaints about MCAS as well.
> [It is] unconscionable that a manufacturer, the FAA, and the airlines would have pilots flying an airplane without adequately training, or even providing available resources and sufficient documentation to understand the highly complex systems that differentiate this aircraft from prior models
> The Flight Manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient
But we hear your "third world" and "idiot" dog whistles loud and clear.
> Third world aircraft maintenance combined with poor pilot training and non-idiot proof software made these disasters happen. It's not something that would happen in the US or any other first world country.
We're nowhere near having gathered enough facts to put forward claims like that.
I find it scary that Trump had to issue an Executive Order to get this to happen. It tells me that the FAA no longer cares about safety, but is more interested in corporate interests over the lives of 180+ people at any given time.
I have little faith that he "had" to issue anything. It falls in line with his pattern of dick swinging. "Look, I saved you guys! Your favorite president saved you!"
In due time we'll hear how he told FAA he'd handle the optics.
Is there anything he can do to get any positive approval? I am not american but from outside point of view it seems like in every thread or news comments section it seems like even if Trump saved 50 babies from a burning house people will still find a reason to blame him and search for a bad motive.
Getting off Twitter would probably boost his approval by a couple points.
People can and will disagree with policies regardless of who or what is in office. But the way he conducts himself and the people he surrounds himself with really push people the opposite way, though at the same time it's distracting from some of his less agreeable policies.
There's a proverb, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me". If Trump ran into a burning house - something entirely out of character - I'd probably lean towards "guess he's chucking the Mueller report in there".
A big part of his image, both admitted and admired, is essentially being an asshole. This is unusual, to say the least, and it can't be surprising that the reactions to this president reflect that.
This seems to be a distinction without a difference given how American politics works. You don’t need net positive approval to get elected, as evidenced by Trump’s current position as President. For this reason, it makes more sense in this context to say Trump does have positive approval from 4 in 10 Americans and the claim that “the world / media / etc” are wholly biased against him no matter what doesn’t hold water.
What do you think about that tim apple interaction? If you see proof that the president lies, to doners, and media, does that sow any hint that he is not honest? Credit is easy to lose.
Trump is a documented pathological liar, far beyond anything US politics has seen in multiple generations of Presidents. It isn't the "truth massaging" that Americans expect all politicians to engage in---it's pathological lying about trivial issues as well as large.
He has burned trust at so many points in his life---before his election and during his Presidency---that if there was a report he saved 50 babies from a burning house, the very reasonable first instinct of many non-eye-witnesses would be to question the source of the report and verify there was a housefire at all.
Not for Democrats. They hate him for winning. There is nothing whatsoever he (or anyone) can do to make them like him.
He was being criticized for not grounding the plane, and then criticized for grounding it. (He had nothing to do with either decision.)
Liberals are overrepresented online. So if your only contact with Americans is online it's understandable what you are seeing. The real world is rather different though.
Since this was Trump who issued the grounding order, can we finally dismiss all the previous HN comments of people saying the FAA and Trump are in cahoots to keep 737 Max 8's flying in the US to prop up Boeing.
-- Edit --
Apparently not. Now all the comments are blaming the FAA and saying it is fishy it took an executive order.
Why wouldn't it be plausible that Trump and the FAA were inclined to do whatever Boeing wanted, but eventually every other country grounding the planes made that position untenable so Trump was forced to change his mind?
To me, this is the most likely scenario. Boeing assures Trump the planes are safe and they'll take care of it, time passes and the US stands alone, people freak, Trump realizes this and then steps in front of the cameras to look like the "protector".
What's silly to me is how Boeing doesn't realize that another crash IN THE US would be disastrous, much, much worse than the position they find themselves in now.
It's possible that US maintenance procedures and pilot training make it very unlikely that a crash would happen here, even though depending on perfect maintenance and defensive piloting shouldn't be necessary for an airworthy plane.
I think it's the lack of information that's scaring people. We don't know why the Ethiopian flight went down, it's just really suspicious that 2 brand new airplanes crashed catastrophically so soon after delivery.
I think it's a good move until we know the full picture though. Better to err on the side of caution when lives could be at stake.
Everyone seems to be zeroed in on MCAS. Completely unknown at this time whether that system was related to the Ethopian crash. What the two crashes do have in common other than the aircraft model is a third world carrier, dubious pilot qualifications, and heavy reliance on automation. But it's somehow not OK to talk about that.
If these planes are being crashed multiple times per year, even if by less experienced operators, then Boeing is still at fault for designing an unsafe airplane. Other planes do not have these issues.
Ethiopian Captain had over 8000 hours, and the airline is a Category(right word?) 1 Airline, able to fly into and out of the U.S. directly. They actually have a stellar safety record.
Just because it's Africa doesn't mean the operators were lacking.
They had no choice. When no other major regulator would stand with their position, and the public didn't wish to fly on the Max 8, the position became untenable.
After the flight data recorders are recovered from the Ethiopian Airlines accident they could reevaluate if it turned out to be something else. But this seems like a rational safety first position given what we know today.
Hopefully Boeing's April patch and mandatory additional training mitigates the issue well enough to resume normal flight operations.
Remember all the early A320 crashes? Do you worry about stepping onto an A320 now? Unless the problem turns out to be far deeper, I suspect that this, too, shall pass.
Agreed. I don't think they're unsalvageable, but they're definitely unsafe in their current state, and trust will need to be rebuilt (a slow process). Boeing is to blame for most of this because of their design decisions, too.
"an a320 crashes every two years" sounds quite different than "a brand new 737MAX crashes during take off every 6 months because of the faulty sensor thingy".
Also a320 family of 8605 aircraft took the life of 1393 passengers in 30 years, 737MAX is at %30 of that in two years and 350 aircraft.
737MAX accidents look very brutal and specific. It doesn't look like "ironing out imperfections" but more like "this plane is broken, it falls off on take off" - regardless if that's the case, people see a pattern here.
It's not fair to blame the plane at all unless you're sure the crash was the plane's fault, but that isn't stopping most of the people in this thread from doing it.
Airplanes don't have the right to a trial of their peers with presumption of innocence.
Two crashes within six months is very abnormal. Abnormalities are evidence of problems. Airline regulators are tasked with keeping people from dying, not with protecting manufacturers' feelings.
Yes but my point is that people don’t avoid the 767. Look upthread please, this whole sub thread is about whether these incidents will cause consumers to avoid 737 Max planes in the future.
My (apparently very controversial) opinion is that we don’t know enough to predict that now, because we don’t know what caused the Ethiopian Air crash yet.
People never avoided the 767 because it was clear all along that the crashes had noting to do with the plane.
People are avoiding the 737 MAX because given the current information it definitely could be a problem with the plane, in fact the information we already have from the first crash makes it look like it's very likely to be a problem with the plane.
> People are avoiding the 737 MAX because given the current information
Again: the topic here is predicting long-term damage to consumer confidence. I understand what is happening right now.
The entire 787 fleet was grounded not more than a few years ago due to battery issue. How many people actively avoid 787s today? Long-term consumer trust depends not just the root cause of an accident, but also the perception of how it was addressed. As the GP correctly points out, the 767 (and all other planes, and security screening procedures) were redesigned to protect against the type of attack that succeeded on September 11.
Those three crashes had one thing in common: terrorism.
These two crashes have one thing in common: brand new planes.
Unless you know of an islamist terror organization that has a grudge against Ethiopian desert wilderness, I don't think terrorism is a more likely common cause than the brand new airframe.
> It's not fair to blame the plane at all unless you're sure the crash was the plane's fault
I'd say "unless you have some indication that it was the plane's fault". Otherwise, agreed: 2 crashes per se tell you nothing about the safety of the plane; it could've been a terrorist attack or a suicidal pilot or a missile.
It's two crashes under similar circumstances, with no indication of such an external event, that justify suspecting the plane.
> It's not fair to blame the plane at all unless you're sure the crash was the plane's fault
Since we aren't talking about assigning criminal penalties to the plane (for one, because its fairly well destroyed, and for another because it wasn't the kind of thing subject to such penalties in the first place), the criminal standard of proof ("beyond a reasonable doubt" -- which still falls short of actually being sure) is inapplicable. In fact, given the minimal consequences of blaming the plane in the discussion in this thread, its probably fair to do so if there is any reasonable basis for belief that that the crash was the plane's fault. Its certainly to do so if the preponderance of the evidence as yet reviewed by the person doing the blaming suggests that, even if it is a fairly weak conclusion that a very small amount of additional evidence could reverse.
I don't object to this line of reasoning, I object to the idea that this line of reasoning by itself, as known today, is sufficient to predict that the reputation of the 737 Max is permanently damaged in the eyes of consumers. That's the context of this subthread, starting here:
It was almost 1 a year for the first 5 years, but that is still less than 25% of the current Max-8 rate.
Edit: Max-8 had first flight in 2016 is in service since early 2017, so the crash rate over that period is roughly identical with the rate for the first 5 years of the A320. We just have a set of two closer together recently. Not enough data to form a statistical basis of course.
This should be normalized to tue number of flights (if the problems are related to starting/landing) or to flight hours (general problems that might appear mid air)
Time is not a very usefull thing here, as number of active aircraft and flights will be very variable.
>"an a320 crashes every two years" sounds quite different than "a brand new 737MAX crashes during take off every 6 months because of the faulty sensor thingy".
If you cherry-pick the time interval, you can say that basically all planes crash once every hour.
But that's the thing, the 737 max isnt a revision of a model number. It has a very different airframe with different flight characteristics from other 737 models.
Boeing used software to override and reinterpret pilot inputs so that the airplane behaves as if it were a 737, in order to cut costs on retraining. When that software fails, the pilots are suddenly flying a totally new airframe that would normally require additional certification with 0 experience.
No. The intended behavior is a nose down nudge every 10s only when a) exceeding a certain angle of attack b) above a certain altitude and c) when flaps are retracted. It's second guessing only at a particular edge of the normal flight envelope to prevent it from departing that envelope.
And all the various layers of protections in fly by wire airplanes do that - they second guess certain inputs to prevent edge cases. But in any case the input is going through software abstraction. Any apparent directness is part of that software behavior.
I'll be interested what the software update due at the end of April entails exactly. I think every airplane should get the angle of attack sensors disagree indication, standard.
that's exactly what airbus does... there are a set of "laws" that govern flight at different stages of flight "normal, ground, flight, flare, alternate 1, alternate 2, direct, and mechanical" quite complex systems, that.
And this is what contributed to the crash of AF 447.
That said, I prefer either the older boeings, with minimal computer interference when hand flying or the Airbus approach. Because Airbus at least appear to know what they are doing.
An intrinsically dangerous plane that needs either much more careful piloting (hard to sell...) or software assistance (bad idea) should freak you out even more.
Sure. But my point is that the name is easy to forget. It's not a top level brand like 737 or 787. It's a variant. People will write the information off as essentially trivia, because it's just one variant out of "how many?"
Sorry to go on a tangent, but if they were going the redesign the airframe anyway, why didn't just make the plane aerodynamically stable with the bigger engines (make landing gears longer?), instead of lifting the engines and using software to compensate?
Long term public opinion impact would likely be much smaller if the FAA had lead the grounding, not lagged behind: "some sub-variant of a model iteration on hold for investigation" would have been merely a footnote only those directly affected would remember a day later. But this slow-motion wave of country after country changing their minds with ever increasing drama "what will the FAA do!", this is quality news-tainment. I know that hn readership is not representative (the intersection of aviation geekery, software engineering and high stakes UX: golden), but it's quite a bit of a headline elsewhere as well.
No. The 737 Max introduced a fundamental design weakness that was implemented for cost efficiency reasons only. The center of gravity is towards the rear, which makes the plane tend to tilt backwards, and requires an automatic system to compensate for that https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-e...
My understanding is that the issue is more one of the centre of thrust (of the engines), which is now further away from the centre of gravity, giving rise to a larger momentum.
It confirms what I've read about this issue so far. But this article is from the previous crash. If this was already known, why hasn't it been fixed? Why haven't pilots received additional training to deal with this?
There are a ton of planes with a better flight/crash ratio.
380 A340 where build since 1991 almost exactly as much as the number of 737 Max built (376). Not one fatal accident in almost 20 years for the A340 versus 2 fatal accident in 2 years for the 737.
My point is that all 737 Max pilots flying today are briefing on the issue and hyper-vigilant, while the Airbus pilots doze in their cockpits in peace.
The problem is that the issue may cause the plane to be unflyable even by a pilot aware of the issue.
The earliest reports said that pilots could avoid this runaway trim issue by knowing to disable the electric trim. Now it sounds like doing that may also eliminate all ability for pilots to trim the aircraft.
Inability to trim make airplanes extremely difficult to fly, the control (yolk) pressures required can quickly become too high to maintain control. Pilots would have to hold something like 1 lb of continuous backpressure for every 6 knots out of trim for the entire flight.
> The problem is that the issue may cause the plane to be unflyable even by a pilot aware of the issue.
That’s partly true, but it’s not the whole story. MCAS and its use to make the MAX 8-9 fly “more like the 737” is part of a longer trend of manufacturers coddling pilots instead of expecting them to behave as competent professionals and treating them as such. They’re effectively opting for a more familiar normal aviating experience, with the tradeoff being longer emergency/exigency checklists and so much more to manage/remember/process when the system malfunctions. With the end-result being that even more experience is required to safely and reliably pilot modern aircraft.
Side note: Disabling trim should only be done as part of a problem remedy, not as part of normal flight.
(Disclaimer: I’m not a pilot. I’ve read for many hours on these issues.)
The point is that all legally licensed 737-type-rated pilots are currently legal to fly the 737 MAX line, no questions asked, no training needed. (As far as I know.) The plane should be moved to a new type certificate and all its attendant requirements, seems to me.
I can’t legally be the PIC (pilot in command) in a Citation 525 (“CitationJet” or CJ) despite it being nearly identical to the 550 (Citation II or Bravo) I can, in most ways that I can tell matters. I have copilot time in both and PIC in the 550 (and related models). The newer plane is even easier to fly, frankly, and has some nice safety features for engine failures. I have to get the training and certification (and recertification every two years) to legally be PIC in the newer Citation, though.
My limited understanding is that the aerodynamics and flight characteristics of the 737 MAX are quite different than the older 737-800 - let alone the even older second (or even first) generation 737s. The memory items may be different. That alone should have mandated a new type certificate in my non-regulatory expert perspective.
Flight characteristics are reported to be the same in the normal flight envelope except at high angles of attack where the new engine nacelle actually produces lift which translates into a further pitch up - but I have no idea how aggressive this is. But it's enough that this is why MCAS exists.
I'm certainly concerned whether MCAS is both working as intended, and also failing safe. But my more immediate concern is like yours: when MCAS is effectively disabled in the normal course of troubleshooting runway trim by setting stab trim to cutoff, now you have a plane that has different stall behavior than you're type rated for! Flip those switches, now you need a different type rating! Of course pilots can learn different stall behaviors and avoidance for a new type, we don't need abstraction to do that for us when we know about it and have trained for it. Stall avoidance is fundamental make+model knowledge, but it can be non-obvious and making it obvious and deliberate is what the type rating is about.
So yeah we might actually end up in the very curious case where either Boeing, or FAA or NTSB are all: this is going to require a type rating afterall. The very thing the airlines in particular want to avoid.
It seems to me the in-cockpit "aoa disagree" option needs to become standard by AD. MCAS only takes input from one of the two alpha vanes, so if it gets bogus data it has no backup source. Meanwhile the pilots have no indication the two vanes disagree unless they (apparently) bought that indication feature. Which I think is pretty fucked up if that turns out to be true and relevant as to either cause or solution in all of this.
The solution here is going to be to have MCAS automatically disengage when the two sensors disagree, which will change the stall behavior automatically. Airbus has the same problem, and so will any manufacturer that introduces computer augmented flight characteristics in their aircraft. If a component of the computerized flight control system fails, the flight characteristics of the aircraft will change. In fact, Airbus has had a similar crash: in that instance, a pilot was pulling full back on the stick thinking that the aircraft was unstallable, but one of the sensors (airspeed, maybe? can't remember) was disabled (by icing, if I remember) and the aircraft had changed to a different flight control law that didn't have the anti-stall function. Splash.
I don't think the AF crash was a case of that pilot "thinking it was unstallable" so much as not thinking, in the mental state he was in at that point. Even if the plane were "unstallable", pulling full back on the stick like that would not have been the right course.
Yeah I dunno about that. Sure they don't care about airplane model in general but this is fast becoming a known name and associated with crashing. In the past few days I've had my in-laws and my own grandma asking me to help check their planes for booked flights. You just need a bit more of the tabloids to run on it and this model plane is finished in the public's mind.
I think this is natural because it's a major news story right now.It seems likely that some upgrade will be made to the planes to address whatever issue they conclude they have, and once that's done and the planes are in the air again people will soon forget about it all.
I must be very unique then. As someone who flies often and cares about making it there, I _have_ been booking recent flights to not take MAX aircraft, even at the inconvenience of multiple legs.
I have no direct experience with aviation software, but if it's similar to other highly regulated environments, a SW "patch" is not "simple", possibly it means weeks/months of regression testing and validation, justification for it need, etc...
Something is terribly wrong when the regulator that's supposed to keep people safe is less willing to do that then the company that stands to lose the most from the bad image of a product.
Compare and contrast with Johnson & Johnson's handling of the 1982 Tylenol poison incidents. Tylenol immediately pulled the product off the shelves everywhere out of an abundance of caution and earned a lot of credit with the public. Boeing... yeah.
Just in case anyone is under the presumption that J&J is a good company, that business school corporate responsibility case apparently didn't have a lasting impact on their culture. In recent years, there have been numerous cases of them covering up serious defects in their products while keeping them on sale:
Honestly that's more of a sign of the times. People have gotten more greedy and immoral when running companies. Or just in general, have become complete cowards to admit they fucked up.
No Southwest and American airlines stand to lose the most. Nothing is worse for an airliner than a grounded jet.
As an aside, do you know who actually owns most of the jets for an airliner? Banks like wells fargo and chase. They still expect leasing payments regardless if the plane is flying or not.
Of course they're crude, however the fact remains that with very few hours in the air, 2 737-maxs have crashed in similar circumstances, both under 6 months old. If this doesn't raise concerns, what does.
> Nothing is worse for an airliner than a grounded jet.
Those airlines clearly think the probability of this is pretty low or they would have make the call to ground those planes on their own, but a jet that smashes itself into the earth and disintegrates because of a faulty sensor is probably even worse than a grounded jet.
Not quite because the Airline can turn around and sue Boeing so there is some recourse. Furthermore, people aren't blaming Ethiopian airlines they're blaming Boeing, so the reputation damage to the airline would likely be minimal. The reason why they can't easily sue Boeing over the grounded airplanes is that they don't own them, the banks do.
Traders operate on all kinds of time scales, and most trading is done based on algorithms that account for the fundamentals more than of-the-day news. It's likely that holding SW is good for the long term as people make more money and continue to fly more.
My company sent me on gig to a petroleum pipeline once. Gig was a result of an accident where a couple of people were burned alive in their homes when the pipeline exploded. Maintenance guy I met said one the engineers went down to the accident site to supervise. That night came back to the office, sat down and threw up on his desk.
I bet American and Southwest were receiving phone calls from customers cancelling their flights.
Supposedly the profit margins for discount airlines are pretty slim, so if they can't fill all the seats what's the point? What's bad is that they had to wait for that to happen before they took action. It just makes it look like they'd choose profits over safety every time... as long as they can keep making profits.
Looks like SWA at least was very proactive already after the first crash. Supposedly their fleet of 737Max has been retrofitted with additional cockpit displays for (faulty) AoA values. And they have afaik also extended pilot training.
I certainly couldn't have been the only one to look at the airline I'm about to fly on and check that they didn't have any of the Max 8 variants in service.
Not sure if thats all to it. It seems rather curious that US grounding the aircraft (and Boeing advising to do so) right after about a day or so after black boxes being found. Also, Ethiopian authorities issued a statement about the pilots reporting flight control issues rather than any external factors. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have priliminary evidence that there's an issue with the aircraft.
I wonder if this will create a "land rush" situation in the aircraft leasing market.
Maybe not given that only 130 737-Max aircraft have been delivered to airlines.
Does anyone here know how aircraft leasing works in scenario like this? e.g. grounding of an aircraft model for an unknown duration, do airlines have the option so "switch out" currently leased aircraft?
Boeing 737 Max 8 has a different software system. That software is now a focus of investigators.
The Max 8 is outfitted with bigger, more fuel-efficient engines than earlier 737s, and the weight and positioning of those engines shifted the plane's center of gravity forward, increased the potential for the nose to pitch up after take-off. To counteract this risk, Boeing developed software known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.
Max 8s come equipped with a sensor that reads the plane's angle relative to the wind flow, prompting MCAS to automatically trigger the plane's nose to angle downward if it gets a specific reading.
However, problems could arise if the MCAS system gets erroneous sensor readings. The system automatically pushes the plane's nose down, potentially surprising pilots who are unfamiliar with the system and overriding their commands.This is what investigators believe happened to Lion Air Flight 610 before it crashed in October
>The Max 8 is outfitted with bigger, more fuel-efficient engines than earlier 737s, and the weight and positioning of those engines shifted the plane's center of gravity forward, increased the potential for the nose to pitch up after take-off.
Umm, a little confused here, if the center of gravity shifted forward, why will the pitch up tendency increase?
The Center of thrust is offset down and somewhat in front of the CG, this means high thrust imparts a pitch up moment. Small, but present.
The bigger problem is the nacelles shape though, they create body lift at high AoA; imagine a vacuum bubble trying to suck the wing/nacelle backwards forming in the airstream, "pulling" them back.
Combine both of these characteristics, and you have an airframe demonstrating near stall positive pitch instability. I.e. you get a moment that if left uncountered will reinforce itself until the plane ends up stalling; behavior completely unprecedented in the airframe.
So in order to "counter" this behavior an automated system was introduced which supposedly restored the pilot relative flight characteristics in line with the old airframe's specs.
I'm probably oversimplifying, but it's the closest I can get to a visualization that makes some sense.
The pitch up tendency is only increased at high angles of attack, at which point the engine nacelles themselves add extra lift, possibly inducing a stall when you're already near one.
>Umm, a little confused here, if the center of gravity shifted forward, why will the pitch up tendency increase?
Because the center of thrust is also moved forward, and its effect is much greater than that offset by the center of mass. The 737 airframe was never designed to handle such powerful engines.
It's also a vastly longer aircraft than originally designed: the -100/-200 are 29m/30.53m long. The MAX 8 is 39.47m long. (And the MAX 10 will be 43.8m.)
"If the Center of Thrust does not act through the Center of Gravity there will be a moment causing the aircraft to pitch, yaw or roll about the axes of the aircraft and the moment(s) must be counter balanced by design (including provision for trimming when the thrust is varied)."
Boeing chose to counteract that newly induced pitch moment with software, so that they could sell the MAX 8 to airlines as not requiring any new training or type ratings. And now nearly 400 people are dead because of a marketing decision.
If you move an engine forwards (or backwards) you are moving it along its thrust vector. Therefore the moment resulting from the distance between the thrust vector and the center of mass is unchanged.
I think it is actually that shifting the gravity forward makes the flight control surfaces more effective because they are now further away from the CG, but that's just from years of developing flight sims for the Navy, and no real knowledge ;)
It also could be with the engines moved forward from the wings a bit, their thrust tends to rotate the air frame "up".
You are right. Airframes are designed to be nose heavy. The wings tends to fly up, whereas the elevators tend to fly down. In a dead stick condition, the airplane is designed to fly with a pitch down attitude so you don't lose airspeed and have enough airflow over the wings to continue generate enough lift to glide. If the CG shifts forwards, it is actually a good thing.
It's not the center of gravity that causes pitch-up - it's additional lift by engine nacelles at higher angles of attack; this lift increases the AoA further due to the position of the engines relative to the wing. This feedback loop leads to a stall when the angle gets high enough
Probably not completely true. An airfoil stalls when the critical angle of attack is exceeded. For most airfoils, this sits at around 17°. For all commercial aircrafts (I think 727 onwards) there is a mechanism called stick pusher that will not allow an airfoil to go over critical AoA. I am not sure if this has been overridden somwhere in the 737 Max 8 though.
Are you saying 17deg from horizontal? Let's ignore wind and other influences. A normal plane can not climb more steeply than 17deg?
I'm not implying you're wrong, just very surprised to see this low a number. I would have guessed much closer to something like 45deg, maybe even more.
The Angle of Attack is defined as the angle between relative wind and chord of an airfoil. So if your engine has enough juice to climb at 45° (and many aerobatic aircrafts do), your relative wind is coming at 45° from ground, but almost at 0° with respect to the chord. So your wing is still flying.
I was describing the physical "bug" Boeing was solving in software: MCAS is a stick-pusher because it forces down the nose - which led to the Lion air crash because of a faulty AoA sensor made MCAS avoid an imaginary stall, forcing the nose down into a powered flight into terrain.
Claims intermittent fluctuations in AoA can activate the MCAS. So no need for the AoA indicator to be faulty then, means the risk of false MCAS intervention is higher than previously believed.
Regarding your point of bigger engines, I understood it differently.
The bigger engines provide a lot of thrust and with the new position of the engines, it’s a lot easier for the plane to stall. So the plane was outfitted with a sensor and software that reads the angle of attack and it corrects it in case the plane reaches the factor of safety angle.
If the sensor malfunctions, the software would get wrong readings and try to correct something that doesn’t need correction. It moves the plane nose down. Pilots correct. Process repeats. Hence the elevation fluctuations seen in Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines.
Additionally, there is an optional feature to add a cockpit warning if the two sensors disagree, which could have helped the pilots diagnose the issue in the case of the Lion Air crash. The Lion Air plane did not have this option; not sure about the Ethiopian plane.
Awesome! Saves me time from clicking on the link and finding a paywall, or even hunting for the pertinent information :).
[edit: should've at least given credit though].
> The Max 8 is outfitted with bigger, more fuel-efficient engines than earlier 737s, and the weight and positioning of those engines shifted the plane's center of gravity forward, increased the potential for the nose to pitch up after take-off. To counteract this risk, Boeing developed software known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.
reminds a typical enterprise software project - deep serious issues stemming from screwed up basic architecture are hastily patched up by software patches. Sounds like it was a money saving architectural decision as development of more deep modifications to the airframe to allow for those engines to be positioned safely would definitely cost more than a software patch. And after the Lion crash the Boeing is doing patches for the patch ...
We've banned this account for plagiarizing from another source. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe this won't happen again—and also that you'll follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html in the future.
Don't understand the need for banning. I forgot to copy the link of news article.. Anybody can easily see that it is an official or news language and not a comment from me. It is copied from the below bigger article
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This is the correct move. Airline crashes are so rare that two crashes of a new model within 6 months of each other must be cause for grounding flights.
The fact that Boeing cut as many corners as they did to bypass mandatory training just adds more smoke to the fire. When the dust settles on this episode I won't be surprised to learn that Boeing (and FAA regulators) is found completely at fault for engineering shortcuts to save costs on re-training.
Boeing is the single largest exporter in the US. The idea that we are going to seriously punish them is laughable from a political standpoint, regardless of what the regulators have to say.
Then the interesting question is whether airlines would punish them by forcing better terms or even lawsuits, and would shareholders likewise punish them by selling the stock.
Isn't the alternative an abandonment of the 737 max 8 series from international carriers? The US currently has the largest aviation market but it's growing globally. Airbus has the 320neo and 220 which are direct/close competitors.
Remember the 737 has been slowly growing each generation: the A220-100 doesn't compete with the 737 MAX at all (it's smaller than the 737 MAX 7, and the MAX 7 has only 61 orders, out of over 5000 total orders). It provides a possible replacement for the A318 and 737-600 (but also neither of those sold well either!); it's biggest competition is probably the E195-E2.
The A220-300 competes with the A319neo and 737 MAX 7 (and the A319neo isn't selling any better than than the MAX 7).
I don't think really an abandonment is on the cards: too many fleets are too heavily bought into the 737 family, and the cost of migrating away is real. By way of comparison, the A320(ceo) hardly had the best of starts to its life either with the Air France Flight 296 crash (which while different, still wasn't exactly good press!).
I'm fairly sure knowingly selling defective airplanes involves some liability and breach of contract issues even without criminal charges. No need for the FAA to punish Boeing, but I expect them to feel the weight of public opinion.
> This is the correct move. Airline crashes are so rare that two crashes of a new model within 6 months of each other must be cause for grounding flights.
I agree. It seemed like the FAA was taking a position best described as "innocent until proven guilty." I think that's great for the US criminal justice system. I think a better approach for air travel safety is "abundance of caution." I have no direct experience in this field but it seems to me that the plane should be grounded out of an abundance of caution until we know more.
Edit: FWIW I used the phrase "abundance of caution" before I read it in the article.
Great point. Criminal Justice is about erring on the side of caution of imprisoning people wrongfully. Its why there's a difference between arrest and imprisonment.
Question: is it realistic to expect cops to know exactly what law someone is breaking before they decide to arrest them? Like I get that in an ideal world this would be the case, but humans only have so much memory. Is it unreasonable if a cop arrests someone because it seems the person is doing something that warrants it, but then later fails to find an actual crime they can charge them with? i.e. Would we be better in world where cops only arrested those whom they could immediately charge with a crime?
I don’t think the parent comment is about arresting. But holding someone without bail until a trial has concluded where by it is deemed that the person is a possible risk to society by being released until trial. (I think)
In practice, cops in a position to arrest people on their beat are generally arresting a series of people for the same thing over and over again, and eventually learn the details of what will satisfy a charge.
Mileage will vary based on geography and beat though.
And... I'd admit we saw some charging documents we immediately dismissed from new officers, roughly like 'this guy seemed shady and was near a crime.' We'd lay into them for that though, they'd eventually seem to figure it out.
You'd have to ask a lawyer if this would fall under probably cause - i.e. a police officer is allowed to arrest someone if they have a "reasonable" suspicion that a crime was committed, and then the prosecutors decide whether to bring charges. It's not clear to me how a court would view an officer being mistaken about the law in specific ways.
This depends upon where you are doesn't it? In the UK the grounds for arrest are "reasonable suspicion" in the US isn't it "probable cause"? I think that "reasonable suspicion" is similar to 10% certainty and "probable cause" 25% (c/f with "beyond reasonable doubt" which should be 95% certainty)...
I am not a lawyer. If anyone is in doubt I suggest speaking to a lawyer!
"Probable cause" is defined using the word "reasonable" in lots of sources. The root of any UK/US difference is more likely related to drift in precedent over the last couple of centuries than to any precise difference in the meaning of words.
Effectively yes, you can do that as a cop in most justice systems if you can dress up the "seems shifty" in a bit more concrete terms.
But if there is nothing to back it up, the guy will be realeased very soon, and if you do it repeatedly, you'll eventually get problems (and rather quickly and seriously if you lied and it can be proven).
A little bizarre to see "them" followed by "he"...
I guess the question here is what about him makes him seem shifty to you. One would at least hope his skin color would not be factoring into that and that your judgment would have been the same for anybody else exhibiting the same behavior.
Cops arrest people for all sorts of reasons. They don't have to have proof of a crime; suspicion is enough. They don't immediately have to charge them with anything, and they can first question you. If they decide not to charge you, they can keep you in custody for a couple of hours at most.
Then again, in Guantanamo Bay there are people held in custody for many years now without any charges, so these rules can be bent pretty far in the right circumstances.
Planes aren't criminals or even citizens, though. But to translate this to the 737 Max situation, when something seems to be wrong it seems entirely reasonable to ground planes in order to investigate the situation. But there should be a limit to that grounding, and a permanent ban requires some actual proof.
Of course keep arresting people for no good reason, people lose their trust in them.
Well nobody is proposing a free pass here. Of course they'll all need to be fixed, and ASAP. I'm just saying, it's no more a death trap than your average Honda Civic so it's probably okay to let them stay up in the air, depending on what the confounding external factors end up being.
Cars kill people primarily due to human error in judgment or lack of attention. Mechanical or software failures causing fatalities are the overwhelming minority of cases.
Remember how big of a deal the Toyota accelerator pedal recall was?
There was never any evidence that a software glitch caused sudden unintended acceleration in Toyotas. The problems were caused by defective floor mats and driver error.
I have a family trip booked next month on Southwest, who has many 737 Max 8. I'm relieved that they won't be able to use it now. I'm still expecting my flight to happen, Southwest and Boeing will have to figure out how to get the plane.
Southwest was actually grounding these flights yesterday (Tuesday) before the FAA decision. Source: flight was cancelled along with multiple other 737 MAX flights out of SJC yesterday.
I think we should be careful to look wholistically at this. Will grounding the plane cause more people to drive? Driving is so much more dangerous than flying even if there’s a MAX crash every 6 months (doubtful). How many more people will take connecting flights — the danger is in the take off and landing after all. I don’t have the answers, I’m suggesting this isn’t a straightforward decision. Humans have an amazing ability to overweight incredibly unlikely outcomes with severe consequences.
Some napkin math. 150,000 flights, each with 172 seats (based on the American Airlines 7M8 configuration, which is admittedly tight). That's 25.8 million journeys. Two accidents, let's that's ~350 deaths. Your chance of dying on any given journey is therefore 0.00135% (four nines to live).
You've got a 0.0167% chance of dying [1] for every 10,000 miles driven. Let's assume that each 7M8 journey averages 2500mi (generous, a transcontinental average). A linear projection tells me that's a 0.004175% of dying in an equivalent car ride.
You're still 3X safer on a 7M8 than you are in your car.
Now, by no means should this be taken to say the planes shouldn't be fixed or that Boeing should "get away with it." However, grounding all these planes and pushing people into a less safe form of transit may actually end up causing more harm than allowing the planes to fly with a fixed, short schedule to resolving the problem.
Maybe! Looks like there've been 350 deliveries so far [1]. Are that many planes available on short notice to replace them? Airlines generally operate with 80% load factors, it'd be hard to just re-shuffle everyone.
The grounding and reaction may also shake people's faith in air travel in general, causing them to drive more even if planes were available. Bruce Schneier has a good write-up on this effect post 9/11 too. Humans are terrible at dealing with this kind of thing.
The reality is you're much more at risk in your Uber ride to the airport than you are aboard the 7M8.
I think in practice more of the flights will be replaced by other flights or not travelling than driving 2500 miles.
Commercial flying is safer on average than driving, but that's because of, not despite the extreme approach to safety concerns. (General aviation is actually substantially more dangerous than driving)
Maintenance deferral is not an option (unless they're electively carrying out maintenance checks well ahead of OEM-specified intervals) and type-rated crews landing in unfamiliar territory happens on a daily basis and certainly isn't a risk factor comparable with a [possibly] flawed aircraft. If the delay's long enough to actually see parked aircraft brought into service, it'll largely be the same crews flying older 737s anyway.
Mostly people will just cancel their holidays or agree a teleconference because getting flights on that route at short notice is too difficult.
> type-rated crews landing in unfamiliar territory happens on a daily basis and certainly isn't a risk factor comparable with a [possibly] flawed aircraft.
Flying in/out of unfamiliar territory is a known risk. Whether the 737 MAX series is higher risk or not is an unknown risk because of insufficient sample sizes.
Hopefully some statistician will start tabulating P values so we can see if the confidence intervals overlap or not. Treat this situation like a new "better" drug for X where 2 users died in quick succession. Is there enough evidence to take it off the market or not? AFAIK, nobody has (yet).
>If the delay's long enough to actually see parked aircraft brought into service, it'll largely be the same crews flying older 737s anyway.
Sorta. On a Canadian airline, Westjet, the MAX is flying routes that are too far for the regular 737s without a fuel-stop (by my estimates). I'm booked for such a flight in 2 months. I'll get to learn what happens. I would have been happy to fly the MAX8 based on the current lack of evidence for grounding.
Have you examined the actual outcome of grounding this model of plane?
I would think at least some people are driving instead. US airlines run at a pretty high utilization, grounding dozens of planes isn't going to be easily absorbed into other flights.
Grounding a newly release airliner is not new. It's only news because of the two crashes and 300 victims. I'm pretty sure these airlines are careful and still have some of the older 737/A320 that these MAX were supposed to replace.
Issues with new airliners and engines -specially engines- are not rare at all. So this sort of grounding is not rare: see 787 first grounding (battery issues), current partial grounding (Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 issues), or Pratt & Whitney ongoing issues with the A320NEO engine (PW1000G issues).
You can imagine the sort of clusterfuck when PW needs to produce 60 engines a month for Airbus, only manages to build 20 in its factory... but need to send these 20 engines to replace already delivered engines because they are defective. The situation has improved a lot lately, but 2017/2018 were tough...
Only the A350 introduction has so far been relatively event free. Probably because the Trent-XWB is a derived from the Trent 1000, so the 787 took care of the teething...
> Only the A350 introduction has so far been relatively event free.
I am biased on this since I have spent a couple of years working on the development of A350XWB systems (and only marginally contributed to other programs) but I always had the feeling that, after the trauma of the A380 (rampant production issues, lengthy delays and management mishaps/stock fraud), the focus for A350XWB was put on accountability at all levels.
This might not be sustainable for a large corporation but retrospectively, that seemed to have had the desired effect at least for this particular aircraft program.
Why will grounding the plane cause more people to drive? It does not have large enough share of existing planes to cause significant rise in prices to make people choose driving. Especially considering that it is used for long distance flights, which are more likely be replaced by train instead of car.
Of course, the other thing to consider is how many more people will drive due to a loss of trust in the FAA and airlines over the failure to ground the plane once it's percieved as unsafe.
"I could drive or fly...oh, no, but what if they try to put me on a 737 Max? I better drive."
No, most people don't pay that much attention, honestly. "Drive or fly? Hm... that plane did just fall out of the sky right, planes freak me out, let's just drive." This is an excerpt of a conversation I've had with friends after the MH crashes. I had to explain to them planes generally don't get shot out of the sky or just disappear and that in spite of this all, flying remains safer than driving.
People pay attention to things like this. My kid is flying to Denver in a few weeks and was looking to see what plane type it was. An acquaintance is heading west for work and the first question was ‘Max 8’?
> "Driving is so much more dangerous than flying even if there’s a MAX crash every 6 months (doubtful)."
I'm not sure that's correct. Let say there's 350 MAX aircraft in service, flying 5 flights per day on average. In 6 months, thats about 320,000 flights. So a 1 in 320,000 chance of a fatal crash. Let's say the average route length is 1000 miles. That's 1 crash per 320 million miles flown, or 3.125 crashes per billion miles flown.
If we assume an average of 150 passengers per flight, then it's 468 deaths per billion miles for the MAX, compared to only 0.02 deaths per billion miles across all aircraft. [1]
In the US, there are 12.5 deaths per billion miles driven, including pedestrian and cyclist deaths from motor vehicle collisions.[1]
If it crashed once every 6 months, the MAX would be around 37X more dangerous than driving, and 2340X more dangerous than an average commercial flight in the United States.
150,000 flights, 172 seats per is 25.8 million passenger seat-journeys. Given the type, I think it's fair to say they're at least 1200mi long (why fly a 7M8 on a sub-2 hour flight, when you can just throw a regional jet at it). The whole point of the MAX family is that it can fly further than a normal variant. This is 30.96 billion passenger seat-miles. There were ~350 deaths. This is 0.000000011 deaths per passenger seat-mile, or 11 per billion. This is in line with but still less than driving (12.5 per your data source).
I imagine 1200 miles is short for an average 7M8 flight though, which could make it substantially safer. With 2500 mile averages you get back to that 3X number I cited. It's still no more a death trap than your average Honda Civic (10% safer by your metrics, more by mine).
To your point, it is of course riskier than a different aircraft.
My whole thesis was to ask what effect this will have across the entire population and how will humans react, irrationally, to this news.
On the flip side, if the plane is intended for long flights, do you think people are just going to drive 1200+ miles and incur the gas, the additional time, a hotel stay or a few?
Some trips may be made using older aircraft. Some trips may not be made at all. But I think assuming a 1:1 correlation with driving is a bit silly.
A very good point, although, my fear wasn't that people would replace 1:1 7M8 flights with a roadtrip across the country, but that grounding an entire plane type would cause people to replace short flights with long drives. I suppose planes falling out of the sky may do that too :)
There are arguments against measuring crash rates by “number per vehicle miles traveled” and instead by “number per vehicle hours traveled.” VMT is a product of speed and time, and thus a fatalities-per-VMT metric will nearly always show the faster routes to be safer.
But compare spending 20 minutes traveling 10 miles on a local street, vs 10 minutes traveling 10 miles on a freeway. Both are considered equally safe using a fatalities-per-VMT model. But in the former, you’ve stayed safe for a longer portion of your life. (See http://pedshed.net/?p=1050)
Using that metric would make that Boeing far less safe compared with driving.
As a traveler, I care about the trip, not the time nor the distance. If I take this trip, what's my probability of dying if I fly it versus drive it.
Airplane travel have fixed segments (takeoff and landing, ascent, descent) and variable segments (the coasting phase that varies by distance traveled). Car travel is only the variable segment. Hard to compare apples to oranges.
> measuring crash rates by “number per vehicle miles traveled” and instead by “number per vehicle hours traveled.”
there's another issue, which is plane risk is uneven during their journey, so a type that does half the flights but twice the distance on average will end up almost 1.5 times as safe all other things being equal.
a way to normalize that would have to use "number per flights" but then you'd get trains, with their multi-stop journeys, skewing the numbers the other way.
That argument seems flawed to the point of absurdity. Two extreme examples showcase this:
1) a teleporter with the exact same risk as driving 20min on local streets or 10min on the highway would be the worst thing ever invented. In reality, 100% of people would choose it unless they were intentionally wanting to spend time driving
2) A 100% safe ridable snail would be the ideal form of transit, given that you'd spend your whole life safely trying to get somewhere.
Also, more broadly, you have some degree of control over dying in a car. Like the odds of dying on the road while driving a modern safe car, legally and carefully, would be lower still again. Airplanes we cede all out control over safety to the airline / pilot and manufacturer.
This would be true if you were on the car alone. Unfortunately we all share the road, so it only takes the most dangerous person on the road to ruin your safety.
Even so, just by following road rules, driving sober and having a well-maintained car, you likely go to the bottom decile in car-related risks. That much is definitely under your own control.
I see what you’re saying, but there are intangibles that are hard to factor in. For example, a big reason that air travel is so big an industry is precisely because it is so safe. But that image could get tarnished very easily, at which point you would see a sudden and large drop in paying customers (think 9/11). Consequently, grounding the planes until everyone can be certain of the cause and the remedy is in the best interest of the entire industry (although not great for Boeing in the short term).
> Let's assume that each 7M8 journey averages 2500mi
Let's then also assume that people are not commontly drive transcontinental distances.
Your calacluations are interesting but all over the place. E.g.:
> How many more people will take connecting flights — the
> danger is in the take off and landing after all
So in this case distance does not matter. How does car safety compare to airplanes in terms of number of trips?
Anyway, the biggest problem is assuming that all grounded flights will be replaced by driving. Either the flight will use different aircraft or the trip is cancelled in majority of the cases.
The holistic view is rather that the only reason we have such safe aircrafts so you can get such nice numbers is because there's very well crafted procedures for handling crashes.
Reacting strongly when those procedures seems to have missed something is important not because of the crash itself but because the process is important. Could the same oversights lead to additional fatalities is the question, the robustness of the boeing is a minor point.
Flying is only as safe as it is thanks to regulations written in blood. I don't think flying today versus driving today is the right comparison to make, rather flying today versus flying in a decade. If we allow leniency on the basis of alternatives to flying being more dangerous now, improvement of flight safety may be squandered so that the safety of future transport as a whole is reduced.
I also think these regulatory bodies have to make grand gestures, at times, to reassure the bags of blood and bones that get on planes in a way that statistics do not.
It's sad that Boeing tried to cut so many corners, but absolutely baffling that the FAA went along with it. They squandered an enormous amount of trust by doing this. I wonder what the long term effects of that loss of trust will be.
And even if they fix the problem and pilots get more training, it's still likely to hurt 737 Max sales; it seems likely they cut those corners because having the Max count as "just another 737" that didn't require extra training, was a major advantage to airlines. When airlines need to retrain their pilots anyway, they might choose different planes in the future. And they may be less likely to trust Boeing and the FAA when they claim a new plane model won't require extra training.
Then again, I don't know the airline industry. Maybe it just blows over with no long term effects.
I'll happily blame anything on this evil administration, including this, but the corporatism which led to these deaths predates the American fascist assumption of power.
Grounding aircraft for unexplained mechanical failures is the norm.
Following that, the problem is not finding who is at fault but how to prevent it from happening again. The first step to getting the aircraft ungrounded is often to update the flight manual and decrease inspection time so it can be flown safely with reduced capabilities. The root cause is fixed later.
Aviation regulatory bodies are normally not into finger pointing. Traditionally, the customer pays for everything, even if it is not their fault. The reasoning is that it is one less incentive for the manufacturer to hide defects. No doubt that legal battles will ensue but care is taken to keep lawyers out of the technical process.
All of this news has prompted me to see where Boeing stock is at. Beyond the expected decline in price, I was more interested to find out how parabolic BA's price rise has been in the last 5 years.
Side note: I tried finding a site that would let me link out to a chart showing the full price history of BA. It's surprisingly difficult to find.
Make sure you use a log Y-axis when looking at historical data. Steady compound gains (even just from inflation) will make any chart look like a 'hockey stick' otherwise. You're almost always more interested in relative price movement, not absolute.
Gains from 2016 have been good, but that likely reflects the clear success of the Boeing over Airbus's new aircraft.
I'm aware of the nature of compounding returns and inflation. Compare BA to other companies that have been publicly listed for a long time. KO, CAT, MMM, IBM, and so on. BA has had a markedly-parabolic rise over the last 4 years.
Basically they bet right on where the future of commercial aviation is going: more direct flights rather than hub-and-spoke connections, smaller jets that the airlines can fill completely, fuel efficiency is critical, and the air travel industry as a whole would recover after a pretty miserable first decade of the millenia. Their main competitor, Airbus, bet wrong, investing heavily in the A380 which hasn't found much of a market. That's been reflected in their profits lately: 787 and 777 sales have been quite robust, while A330/A350/A380 orders have been anemic.
BA went up a lot in last couple years because there weren't any competition left and the demand for air travel has skyrocketed. They got 5000+ backorder for 737Max alone for regional. Then Airbus bowed out of the long distance market, leaving it to Boeing's 787.
The current fiasco certainly will put a damper to their stock，but there's simply no other choice for new planes. They will bounce back.
(Guessing upon all available information) It seems that something is wrong when the auto-pilot is turned on... And this seems to happen a few minutes after the take off...
Official rulings aren't in yet, so this is all wild speculation, but the dominant hypothesis appears to be that these new planes are equipped with MCAS ("Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System") software that is supposed to account for inherent aerodynamic instability in the design by making it much harder for the pilot to accidentally crash the plane.
Without going into too much detail: there are many tradeoffs in airframe design, but one of them is fuel efficiency vs. inherent stability. Some airframe designs eke out a bit more miles-per-gallon at the cost of having ranges of motion where if the pilot gets the plane into that state, the feedback loops on motion become positive and the plane is likely to tip over, stall out, spin, etc. Boeing's Max-8 design makes this tradeoff, and the MCAS system is supposed to help compensate for this design by forcing the pilot to nose the plane down (to improve airflow over the wings and generate more lift) if the plane is pitched too high.
Problem might be that MCAS can malfunction and think the plane is pitching up when it's not, and if the pilot can't figure out how to disable it, they get very confusing signals--- they're pulling back on the stick to get the plane to climb, but MCAS is pushing the stick forward to avoid an expected stall that a malfunctioning sensor is telling it will happen. End result: pilot and the computer fight each other while the very important business of "keeping the plane in the air" isn't done and the plane crashes.
It sounds to me not just a software issue but a systems issue where software, hardware and architecture play a role. What used to be a sensor to measure the angle of attack became suddenly key input, single source in a short term control loop for the most vital axis. What could go wrong...
Taking into account the other sensor data is an obvious choice. A better understanding the quality of the sensor data in real field operation may also be required. Clearer stabilization problem indication, quicker manual disengage of auto pilot (several reports of nose down events) and MCAS are others. Decreasing the allowed tail trim for MCAS is another.
Then that leaves: Another one or two sensors. Independent review of the engine control laws (report of unexpected low thrust when climbing).
There is a lot to be done. The plane was rolled out too early and fixing the cut corners for real could take a while.
If the plane is indeed unstable, and a pilot turns MCAS off due to a malfunction, can it be flown by a pilot who is not specifically trained in the manual management of the 737-MAX’s instability?
I hope there's more to that upgrade story. I mean, micro-transactions are popular in video games but an optional feature that gives you +1 life in real life is almost unthinkable to put behind an additional paywall.
Southwest has more 737max than anyone else. However they have outfitted it with an optional avionics package that includes a HUD, an additional AoA sensor and indicator in the HUD and PFD, and an "AoA disagree" indicator light. (https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/southwest-airlines...)
They also train their pilots using a 737max specific curriculum.
Hah, so I was right, in a way. They took the good without the bad. Except now these planes still grounded, so if they could have predicted this, perhaps they would have been smart not to buy them.
They were probably well into the process of purchasing the aircraft when they realized the extent of this issue, and might already have made financial arrangements that made them hesitate to back out. If this is a short grounding that is resolved by substantially the same measures as Southwest has already instituted, they'll look pretty smart. I wonder if airlines can buy insurance against losses due to problems with newly-purchased aircraft?
That actually makes me feel simultaneously a lot better and worse that some party, especially Southwest, who in my personal travels has been my favorite airline, has been proactive with this.
But also kind of like "if a customer had some suspicions about some avionics weirdness or training, why aren't you as a responsible vendor understanding or addressing it holistically?"
That’s fascinating. It does seem to add a little credence that there may be a training problem with these planes, perhaps that Boeing facilitated this training “shortcut” when they shouldn’t have, and that the US / Euro carriers didn’t have the crashes because they go above and beyond with training anyway. All speculation at this point but I’m really interested to see where this ends up after the investigations are complete.
Why was a safety critical system (which was really only needed to place a bandied on retrofitting bigger motors on an older frame design) being sold as an "optional package". You need at least 3 redundant sensors in any safety critical system. This is just basic rocket science. Boeing and the FAA are negligent and should not be trusted.
This could be true in avionics where availability and safety are more or less the same. In other applications where there is a fail safe mode like nuclear (stop fission) or land transportation (hit the brakes), you do not need that. The statement « any » is too strong.
It's an AoA sensor. Planes flew without AoA sensors for 100 years; it's a useful sensor but not a critical sensor. Pilots and autopilots are perfectly capable of flying planes without it. If two AoA sensors disagree, you just stop making decisions based on the AoA sensor and fly the plane without it.
The crux of the problem is that the NG/MAX isn't certified to fly with malfunctioning alpha vanes. On the NG and MAX the effort required to move the control column varies based on the angle-of-attack (a.k.a. elevator feel system). On the MAX the airspeed calculation is influenced by the AoA and MCAS is triggered by data from a single alpha vane with no sanity checking.
Functioning alpha vanes are critical on the MAX and NG.
With one sensor you have no choice but to simply trust the reading and hope for the best.
With two sensors you can compare, and if they disagree beyond some epsilon of tolerance you can fail safe by deactivating the system.
With three sensors, you can compare them, and if one is out of bounds vs the other two, you can fail operational by continuing to operate the system while also alerting the operator to the needed maintenance.
Even think about distributed systems like databases. You absolutely should not call 2 db servers that are configured in a cluster as "redundant" You introduce things like split brain and broken quorum voting (not even possible without a third node) in the event a network connection is severed between them.
You can use 2 dbs if you apply the STONITH principle (Shoot The Other Node In The Head). Typically, when one node decides to be master, it can switch off with certainty the other one. Routinely used in HA (Highly Available) industrial applications.
In fact, Southwest had very little choice purchasing new planes: their entire fleet are 737s (of various versions) so that they can lower personnel training & maintaining costs, which is part of the reason their prices are typically lower. So if they were to expand their fleet while still trying to minimize the cost they had basically no choice but to keep buying new 737s.
I don't blame Southwest though, after all the FAA and Boeing gave the green light for these jets. It would be interesting to see where Southwest is going if 737 Max is discontinued after this.
Note there are two sides to both coins: Southwest won't have such a good negotiating position with Boeing when it comes to ordering new aircraft, as they're much less likely to go to Airbus and buy A320 family aircraft (and even if Airbus offered a good deal, the logistical costs of moving to a more varied fleet add costs on top of that, and Boeing only needs to compete with the sum of the two).
It wasn’t inevitable; if it happened solely because Trump made them do it (edit: the article now seems to contradict this, but did not when I wrote the comment) it’s truly a red-letter day for rationality and evidence-based reasoning.
The conversation around this subject has degraded to irrational hysteria, but really: do you think Trump knows anything about airline safety? Is this really how we want the system to work?
Today it’s an airplane model, but tomorrow it’s banning travel from Africa because of an emerging disease, or capitulating to anti-vaxxers because of a news story.
Yeah, the article seems to be changing with new information.
If Boeing requested it, it’s obviously a different thing, but it wasn’t clear at the time I wrote the comment, and the original comment was phrased conditionally anyway.
What makes you think that Trump isn't an armchair airline safety savant? He's spent enough time flying around that his lifetime risk is proportionally higher than that of the general population.
I mean.. the guy did own and operate an airline at one point. So it's a little silly to say he knows nothing about it, no matter how much you don't like the guy.
I mean, he also claimed that newer airplanes are less safe than older airplanes. Which seems pretty absurd given that crashes have been trending down for sometime.
> I mean.. the guy did own and operate an airline at one point. So it's a little silly to say he knows nothing about it
Given the way that worked out, his having owned and operated an airline is certainly evidence that he had money, but not evidence that he knows much about even the business side, much less any other aspect other than the "being a passenger" side, of aviation.
Trump certainly wouldn't have been the only person to end up owning an airline that was more the money than the brains behind the operation...
Based on transcripts of him talking to airline industry executives[1] in the past, I'd say he actually knows less than nothing: i.e. he doesn't know what he doesn't know, much like the pointy haired guy who's too insistent he wants you to get the robots that write the computer programs to make a blockchain for cybersecurity to read your explanation of the bug.
Right move finally. Like I said in the post about Canada, at this point it's even better for Boeing. No one in the US wants to fly in this plane so it's better for Boeing if it's grounded.
Does anyone have any idea WHY the US was the holdout here? I'm not well-versed, but my understanding is that aviation safety is generally very good, and that the US is not an outlier on the bad side. While grounding a plane at this point is premature from the stance of conclusion, it seems reasonable from the standpoint of excessive caution that seems to be the norm for the industry.
I can conjecture about Boeing being a big US manufacturer, etc, but is there any evidence at all for why the US held out on this one? My initial reaction was that there must be a good reason for the holdout, given our safety record, but on reading more about it, I've not seen one. (Again, relative to the stance of excessive caution).
4. The issue was pilot operation of the aircraft. Apparently it was possible to disable the old 737 autopilot with stick input despite that not being the method prescribed by the procedures. MAX didn't involve simulator training, so a less disciplined crew in MAX might not correctly disable autopilot in an emergency despite the procedures for doing so still being correct.
This is incorrect. The MCAS doesn't even get triggered when autopilot is on. And surely when a system malfunctions, the issue is not entirely pilot operation.
Terminology issue in the parent: I believe the correct statement would be that in the non-MAX 737, extreme stick movement would countermand auto-trim. In the MAX, this is not the case (at least when MCAS is the bit making adjustments). It was an "undocumented feature" that (less experienced?) pilots were relying on.
Regulators come and go. The person holding the reigns at even given point in time is potentially not as good or unbiased as the predecessors.
From what I've read so far, there's absolutely no clear indication at this point it was solely pilot error, and common sense dictates you ground the planes before more crashes happen.
I don't know, but I wonder whether they were expecting to have preliminary findings within a few days that would clarify the choice. I gather that it's a more disruptive move for the US than for many of the countries that grounded the plane sooner because the US fleet may be larger.
Is the count not also significant? I don't know enough about the industry to know.
I mentioned it because when I first heard that there were so many other regulatory bodies grounding the fleet, I was surprised about the FAA. When it was pointed out that many of those regulatory bodies represent countries having a handful of these planes to begin with, I was still surprised, but it made a little more sense that the FAA might have more to lose if the decision proved rash.
For the sake of argument: their historical reputation allowed them to make determinations of safety independent of political considerations that other aviation authorities must make.
While it certainly sounds like there is a flaw in how the system handles erroneous sensor data, or that the interface promotes incorrect actions, the independent groundings of 737 MAX 8 planes probably are not independent in sense of each authority coming to its own determination based on their professional opinions alone. It would be politically foolish to be the lone holdout in your region.
There is a real cost to grounding these aircraft, and I'd imagine that if they are grounded without specific questions that need to be answered or problems that can be fixed, it becomes even more difficult to un-ground them later.
I believe that the FAA has a strong tradition of acting on evidence, not presumption. It's the flight certification equivalent of "innocent until proven guilty" (although they usually operate at a much lower level of proof than a court of law.)
I don't usually make libertarian-style arguments, but until there's evidence pointing to a specific safety of flight issue from the latest crash there's no justification for the government effectively "taking" airplane owners property by preventing its use.
At the moment there is specific evidence, I have no doubt the FAA will act swiftly.
If an airplane crashes because it's hit by a missile, or because there's a bomb aboard, or because a suicidal pilot flies it into a mountain, that is no reason to ground it.
Thus, more evidence is required to ground an airplane (that has, after all, gone through the certification process), than two crashes.
I agree with the assessment that the MAX has a problem; I'm saying "oh, two crashes" by itself is not sufficient evidence for that conclusion.
As someone pointed out in this thread, there were three B767 hull losses between September and November 2001, but two of those were caused by 9/11 terrorists and don't tell you much about the airworthiness of the aircraft.
FWIW, IMHO it's not pedantry, it's precisely the core of the discussion. The 737 MAX was deemed airworthy during certification, and deemed airworthy after Lion Air, and a further crash by itself does not change that. It is only the details and circumstances of the second crash that can provide evidence to challenge the conclusion of airworthiness. Just reflexively saying "crash, ground it all" is mistaken.
The point I'm trying to make all along is that it is precisely "those details and circumstances of the second crash" (that have emerged over the last few days) that make it so worrisome and warrant a grounding. It is not the fact of a second crash by itself.
The fundamental question is this: should the plane have been grounded immediately after the second crash? Many here seem to think that yes, obviously. I think that no, one unexplained crash of a certified plane does not warrant grounding. Once details and circumstances emerge that are indicative of some fundamental design flaw, or multiple unexplained crashes (as with the comet), of course ground it.
Is that a substantive disagreement, or "pedantry"?
When the second crash occurred, that was then TWO unexplained 100% fatal crashes within 5 months, with extremely similar circumstances and evidence pointing to the same root cause. Basically, the first crash with lion air had them on red alert for this model of plane. The second crash was nearly identical and was all they needed to ground them instantly.
On 24 March 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525, using an Airbus A320, flying from Barcelona to Düsseldorf crashed near Digne in the Southern French Alps, killing all 150 on board. They didn't know it was a suicide pilot until after they investigated. Yet, A320s kept flying in the meantime.
On 29 March 2015, Air Canada Flight 624, using an Airbus A320, flying from Toronto to Halifax carrying 138 people crash landed short of the runway. The aircraft was badly damaged and 23 people were injured.
On 14 April 2015, Asiana Airlines Flight 162, an Airbus A320 with 82 people on board, lost height on final approach to Hiroshima Airport in Mihara, Japan, struck an antenna, and skidded onto the runway on its tail, spinning 180 degrees before coming to a stop. Its main landing gear collapsed and the aircraft suffered damage to its left wing and left engine. 27 of the 82 people on board were injured.
Three incidents, on respectable, high-safety airlines within 3 weeks of each other all with the Airbus A320. Yet, those planes weren't grounded, not even for five minutes. Three serious incidents within 3 weeks of each other is "empirical evidence" that the A320 is unsafe.
But we have a crash from Ethiopian Air, on a plane where the first officer had only 200 hours of total flight experience. And another crash months ago on Lion Air (a ridiculously unsafe airline) and that's "empirical evidence" that the airplane is bad?
Lion Air should be grounded. Ethiopia shouldn't be flying planes with student pilots in the right seat. There may be issues with the 8 Max, however, it's a fact that inexperienced pilots, bad maintenance, inferior safety processes and negligence will exacerbate any potential flaws in the aircraft. The fact is that in the case of Lion Air, if it were Southwest Airlines operating those flights in Indonesia, flight 610 never would have crashed. Lion Air had days of reported issues before the crash and they ignored them. Look at Lion Air's incidents and accidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air#Incidents_and_acciden... It seems that can't even taxi a 737 safety, let alone be trusted to fly one. And right now we're complaining about the FAA? We should be complaining about airlines that are being allowed to operate with this slipshod respect for safety.
The US, Canada and Europe hasn't had any 8 Max incidents -- the incidents happened in organizations that were operating in ways that would never be allowed in US, Canada, or Europe. That fact seems to be getting ignored in favor of complaining about the FAA or Boeing. The US flies a lot more 8 Maxes than Ethiopia or Lion Air, yet not a single crash. Is that just coincidence or does the US/Canada/Europe just do a better job?
Asiana Airlines Flight 162 was an Airbus A320-232, manufactured in 2007
Air Canada Flight 624 was an Airbus A320-211 manufactured in 1991
Germanwings Flight 9525 was an Airbus A320-211 manufactured in 1990.
The Asiana and Air Canada incidents were similar, but the aircraft were of different models, one was 7 year old and the other was 24 year old. The German Wings and the Air Canada aircraft were similar models, but both planes were 23-24 year old, and the incidents were completely different.
Compare that to the 737 MAX 8. Two fatal crashes, during the same stage of flight, with identical models, of similar age. 2 out of 350 planes crashed, where the fleet is barely one year old on average.
> effectively "taking" airplane owners property by preventing its use.
...its use for transporting OTHER people/stuff in air over OTHER people's property (and lives). I'd be surprised if the FAA licenses didn't have clauses that basically allowed explicitly this.
Regardless, I don't find your arguments persuasive. The FAA didn't wait for "evidence" before banning cellphones, e-readers, etc on flights; they've grounded planes before investigations were complete before...which was why I asked my initial question: What was different this time.
I agree that the definition of "evidence" they use isn't obvious, and I'm not at all familiar with where the rules for cabin electronics come from.
I'm not saying they can't do it, they obviously can (and just did.) All I'm saying is that there has to be some evidence that the crash is for a reason that implies other aircraft are affected. And obviously the standard for transport category aircraft is higher than for smaller airplanes. But it can't just be "we gotta be sure", because then you can't let anything fly at any time.
Imagine if every time someone had an accident in the same model car you own, the DOT prohibited that model car on the roads "out of an abundance of caution" until it was proven that it was not a design fault in the car. While there arguably would be an improvement in safety, it would also be incredibly disruptive.
What standard of risk would you apply? Because you have to draw the line somewhere.
Separate question - and your arguments are all logical. My question was "given the standard of risk that HAS been applied, why was this time different?"
The safety record of car travel in the US is dramatically different than the safety record in air travel.
"Regular FAA oversight of an ODA is accomplished by a team of FAA engineers and inspectors to ensure the ODA holder functions properly and that any approvals or certificates issued meet FAA safety standards."
I don't know about the specific concerns in that video, just replying to the insinuation that Boeing has some strange deal that exempts their planes from oversight by the FAA. They don't.
While there might be issues of regulatory capture (ie too much influence of the regulatee (<- not a word, but it should be...) on the regulator)), my personal opinion is that there were two consistent courses of action:
1. Ground the MAX after the reasons for the Lion Air crash had became clear, as it's not airworthy.
2. Do not ground the MAX, as it's sufficiently airworthy.
This new crash had not provided enough information initially to conclude otherwise.
However, the FAA is sort of arguing that there is now enough new information from the second crash to support the decision to ground it.
This is the answer. The FAA considered the Max 8 after the Lion Air crash and determined that it was safe to fly, even taking into account the cause of the Lion Air crash.
If that was determination was done correctly, then there is no reason to ground every plane of that model, just because another one crashes shortly thereafter.
The FAA obviously is inclined to believe that they did that determination correctly. Of course, they could be wrong.
It will be very interesting to see how the Ethiopian investigation turns out. If the cause was the same as Lion Air, then the FAA will come under tremendous pressure to reconsider what constitutes "safe to fly".
(IMO the industry in general will come under hard questioning about the role of software in compensating for aerodynamic issues. Yeah the military does it, but we have different standards for airlines.)
But if it turns out that some other factor caused the crash, unrelated to the Lion Air cause, then the FAA will come off looking insensitive but ultimately justified in their determination.
> In a statement, Boeing said it recommended to the Federal Aviation Administration that the 737 Max be grounded "out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safety."
A company is recommending to their regulator that the regulator take action against them. That is a pretty solid indicator that the lawyers have a rough idea of potential liability and are now trying to mitigate damages.
> Early Tuesday, Dennis A. Muilenburg, the chief executive of Boeing, spoke to President Trump on the phone and made the case that the 737 Max planes should not be grounded in the United States, according to two people briefed on the conversation.
I was merely commenting on the rationale and strategy behind their decision as someone who has been in a similar position. Though in my case only bank accounts, not lives, were at risk.
And for the record, I made the same call. It's not easy but I'm certainly not judging Boeing for weighing their options and moving forward with a strategy that gives the company the best chance at recovering from this mess.
Why “against?” Surely Boeing is on the same team as everyone in wanting prevent any further loss of life. If they believe there is a safety issue I’m sure they would encourage the FAA to take action so airlines were obliged to.
When Boeing sells or leases the planes to the airlines there is almost certainly a clause in the agreement that represents & the warrants the plane is suitable for it's intended use: flying. An FAA declaration grounding the planes quite clearly means the planes aren't suitable to fly and Boeing will be on the hook to compensate the airlines for the costs associated with the groundings. We're talking millions of dollars a day.
They also have thousands of outstanding orders for this model plane that are, at best significantly delayed and perhaps in jeopardy.
On Mar 13th 2019 the FAA announced shortly after the President had signed the executive order, that they were probibiting Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to operate in US airspace and stated: "On March 13, 2019, the investigation of the ET302 crash developed new information from the wreckage concerning the aircraft’s configuration just after takeoff that, taken together with newly refined data from satellite-based tracking of the aircraft’s flight path, indicates some similarities between the ET302 and JT610 accidents that warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents that needs to be better understood and addressed. Accordingly, the Acting Administrator is ordering all Boeing 737 MAX airplanes to be grounded pending further investigation.”
I have to admit that after reading the tweet and thinking about the gravity of what happened, of the horrible end the innocent passengers went through, I choked up... It's just unimaginable.
I hope they find out the cause & make sure it never happens again.
Good lord, this has been such a disaster for the FAA’s image. Slower than everyone else to ground the plane and they project the appearance of being susceptible to political winds. Not a good look.
A plane crashes and kills over 300 people, in two separate incidents, in an industry where even minor crashes are rare, and you think the grounding of the planes is "political"?
FAA is not in the business of operating based on unsupported assumptions. The investigation for the second crash is not complete and a root cause is not known.
> "The investigation for the second crash is not complete"
After two crashes in such a small amount of time, the investigation doesn't need to be complete. The planes should be grounded until proven safe, not flying until proven unsafe.
Bullshit. Anyone who deals with or tries to deal with the FAA will tell you they deal with all kinds of unsupported assumptions. For instance, medical certificates are denied all the time for people who admit to having taken an ADHD drug when they were a kid, even if they only took it once or didn’t want to take it. Why? “An abundance of caution,” which is a frequent cause for actions the FAA takes.
If a third 737 Max 8 were to crash before a root cause of this crash can be determined, would you then say it's a prudent move to ground them all? What about a fourth? Fifth?
Is your position that any grounding of the planes is unjustified until the full root cause is determined, or that "only" two crashes isn't enough to justify this action?
While I would always rather understand root cause -- and it's absolutely essential to get there eventually -- the world is full of imperfect information and assumptions are sometimes all you have.
One inexplicable crash is not a case for grounding, no; otherwise the (incredibly safe) 777 would still be grounded because of MH 370.
Regarding the 737 MAX now, the prior Lion Air crash is reasonably well understood. It has exposed some fundamental weakness and questionable design choices, but the plane was still deemed safe to fly.
Thus, what we have is one unexplained crash. Why should it be grounded?
(Having said that, I'm avoiding the MAX as far as I can. But that's based already on the Lion Air crash. So, I argue that it should've been grounded after Lion Air became understood, or not at all.)
We have one unexplained crash where early reports about what happened /strongly/ match the circumstances that brought down the LionAir flight. We also have hundreds of public complaints from pilots across the United States of similar unexpected nose down behavior from 737 MAX airplanes.
Except your timeline is wrong: China was the first to issue a ban, followed by Indonesia. Australia and various European as well as non-European countries followed suit, and eventually the European Aviation Safety Agency.
Not how it looks from the rest of the world I'm afraid. More, US didn't want to ground plane built by US manufacturer...
... i mean, honestly all we're doing out here is sitting back with a bag of popcorn and channel flipping between the UK parliament on Brexit, and Trump on twitter. And they say there's nothing entertaining on TV any more...
The problems with the plane have been known for a while, so much so that there is a high priority control software patch in the pipeline. The design as it existed is inherently unsafe as it relies too heavy on the input of a single sensor without any sanity checking, redundancy, or correlation with other sensor data.
Also, the FAA makes precautionary changes before it knows everything, it has routinely issued emergency airworthiness directives before investigations have been complete.
Somehow Americans always play the victim card. The airplane is maybe dangerous but nope, grounding it is a political move? I just wish to see the comment section of the plane was Chinese.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 566 ms ] threadIn the UK the equivalent CAA is half-jokingly called "Campaign Against Aviation" for its merciless regulation.
The FAA seems to have veered in the opposite direction, inviting manufacturer staff to lead certification processes etc
Even if Trump were to give a phone call along the lines of 'Ground the Plane or else I'll write an executive order' , the optics of the situation would be so much better if Chao (Secretary of Transportation) or Dan Elwell (FAA Acting Administrator) were to give the announcement instead.
Personally involving himself unnecessarily is Trump's MO. "Only I can fix it." was one of the themes of his 2016 RNC speech.
If the President is requiring it then the proper mechanism to do that is an order.
You're suggesting a side-channel phone call and a threat so that he's still deciding but it's recorded as someone else's decision for PR purposes, and you think that's better? That's a terrible idea.
I disagree with GP, but this is basically how firings are handled at high levels.
It's very rare for a POTUS or a corporate CEO to actually fire a direct report. Instead, they say "you have X days to resign before I fire you" via a side channel, and most of the time the report opts for the resignation.
(funny thing is, at the first company I worked for, the CEO did this to the VP of Engineering... and the VP assumed he was bluffing, waited out the whole 30-day period he was given without resigning, and then got walked out of the building one morning in front of everyone who was there that early... and the guy who was in charge of walking him out was one of the people who was promoted to replace him)
I actually don't believe this is true - I can look up citations in a bit, but the FAA is an independent body whose directors are appointed by the president.
The Federal Aviation Agency was an independent agency, but the Federal Aviation Administration, which it became, is a subordinate agency within the Department of Transportation. It has an Administrator, but it does not have directors, commissioners, or some other multimember voting governing body.
more to the point, who told the FAA bods not to pull the plane? Was this the President too?
Because of how this has been handled by the Trump I think Boeing now have a 'Samsung Note 7' on their hands, i.e. a product that isn't going to be re-released as it is poorly engineered and can't be fixed by just changing a supplier or two. It was a hack with another hack to keep the hack okay. There will be a who knew what and when scandal. This won't be like the Dreamliner teething issues due to two lost planes. People can forgive teething issues but a scandal is a different beast.
> In August 1989, a Trump Shuttle flight arriving in Boston incurred a nose gear failure upon landing due to maintenance errors by Eastern personnel prior to the acquisition. Trump personally flew on the next Trump Shuttle flight to Boston in order to manage the media reaction to the incident.[3]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/13/boeing-shares-fall-after-rep...
Yes, but it'd not be unusual for the agency's director to check in with the president on a course of action or vice versa, verbally or via memorandum, without the president formally invoking his presidential authority via executive order.
To put the whole thing in perspective, the number of EOs issued annually by recent presidents Bush and Obama was very modest, averaging 36.4 and 34.6 respectively.
The words he used was "emergency order" and "we", not "executive order" and "I". CNBC is reporting it (not quoting any official source which says that, and citing only the President's "emergency order" public statement) as an "executive order", but other news sources are not, and Boeing is saying that they recommended the grounding to the FAA.
My initial impression is that this is an FAA action based on Boeing's recommendation that the White House wanted to take the press attention for.
That would make me feel better if this were true. It seems to match my expectations for who is in charge of various decisions, as well as the politics that Trump likes to play. So it makes sense at least.
> Early Tuesday, Dennis A. Muilenburg, the chief executive of Boeing, spoke to President Trump on the phone and made the case that the 737 Max planes should not be grounded in the United States, according to two people briefed on the conversation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/business/boeing-737-groun...
Maybe Boeing changed it's mind in between yesterday and today?Or that reporting was inaccurate?
Or, that's exactly what happened, but then today either Trump or Boeing or both of them realized this wasn't gonna fly (no pun intended), and that they had to be grounded, they talked to each other again, Trump decided he wanted to make an announcement about it because he likes being on TV about whatever he's thinking about at the moment. (I'm not sure an "emergency order", which Trump said it was, is even a thing?)
I mean, really, who the fuck knows. This administration doesn't tend to make a lot of sense, and it's kind of kremlinology trying to guess why they do what they do.
Well, the link to the order has that in its title (but is also a dead link right now):
[page with link] https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=93206
[target of link] https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/media/Emergency_Order.pdf%2...
[EDIT: Oh, they f-ed up the URL in the link with a trailing space, and didn't verify it before posting: https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/media/Emergency_Order.pdf ; It is indeed an "Emergency Order of Prohibition", and an FAA emergency order is an actual distinct legal thing under 49 USC Sec. 46105(c) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/46105 ]
But either way, this is symbolic and shows the stance of the government to the world and internally. The highest office in the US is grounding the planes like the rest of the world is, the administrative nuances are irrelevant. Boeing and the airlines would be the ones to challenge it, way to go for PR.
The question is how the public should have been informed by the event. Dan Elwell, the acting director of the FAA, is both a military and commercial pilot. If he made the announcement, it would have carried far more weight than Trump (who likely doesn't know much about airplanes).
In a tiny little footnote on wikipedia it will mention how disturbed citizens of California got the Secretary of Transportation or the FAA to reissue the same order because "orange man bad". You might be led to think I'm being "unsubstantive" but this is how the EO for gold confiscation is recorded (but the Secretary of the Treasury merely reissued it after a court challenge), as well as the EO for Japanese interment camps are recorded.
I don't actually think Trump is doing anything wrong in trying to take responsibility for the action, and suspect the decision was reached through appropriate channels rather than by him reading something by a pilot on Twitter, but having a president known for more being capricious than his understanding of aviation safety as the figurehead behind the decision does make it look less like a reasoned decision to the average person, especially if they have strong anti-Trump priors.
Trump owned an airline with a fleet of 17 Boeings. He also used 2 large Boeings as private jets.
Very likely he knows a thing or 2 about airplanes.
I predicted two days ago that this would turn into a shit storm of hysteria, justified or not. The President exerting his authority is similar in that sometimes these events turn too emotional and fearful. He made the right call for that sake.
Surprisingly, I am not a botanist.
Also important: he's a lobbiest for the airline industry.
It made the news when he was confirmed because of his ties to the industry. He is the Ajit Pai or Betsy DeVos of the FAA.
Why not the Tom Wheeler of the FAA?
That seems to be a closer fit to the kind of industry ties he has had then either Pai or DeVos. Pai's industry ties was as a lawyer for Verizon, whereas Wheeler's were as head of first the cable trade association and later the wireless trade association, and having been involved in several telecom companies. That seems a much closer match to Elwell, who was VP of a major aerospace trade association and a pilot and an airline executive.
People criticized Trump for putting a non-scientist at the head of the Department of Energy, however, where is the criticism of Obama for putting a non-pilot as the head of the FAA? When Trump does something wrong, sure, criticize him, but Elwell is an experienced, relevant choice to head the FAA -- especially compared to Huerta. Reducing Elwell to "Lobbyist" is silly, if one actually looks at his background.
It also shows the US has no legitimacy, Trump a corrupt head of state and the FAA is a Boeing lackey.
His ability to directly influence, and damage, the executive branch's operation in service to the people to what he wants is thus limited.
Do you know what the Presidency is? It's the head of the executive branch. By definition, Chief Executive of the United States. The law specifically are for the President being CEO -- that's exactly what being president is. The one who signs bills, runs the organizations who enforce the laws, and runs the military that defends the country. The president is 100% in charge of the Executive Branch and all of its agencies -- that's exactly what the job is! He could fire every head of every non-independent executive agency tomorrow and it would be 100% constitutional.
What a behemoth this Trump guy is.
Doesn't need an intelligence department, doesn't need an aviation department. He's just exposing government waste - left, right and center.
That is...unclear, at best. The only account of the decision making I've seen in any news source that comes from anyone involved (e.g., excluding CNBCs unsourced claim of an "executive order") is Boeing's claim that they recommended the action "in an abundance of caution" to the FAA which acted on it. (EDIT: Actually, the FAA has just tweeted that they made the decision, based on evolving evidence from the investigations, so that's another narrative.)
Of course, the White House can assume the privilege of announcing any decision from anywhere in the executive branch, and the President announcing it as an "emergency order" that "we" are issuing is factually correct where "we" refers to the Executive Branch.
Well, it does seem to spend a lot of time on Twitter. Perhaps he saw something convincing there.
Violating that tradition is rather stupid for a President. Not only are FAA decisions now tainted, he is putting himself square at the center of blame for anything negative happening from now on. It’s even worse considering there aren’t really any symmetrical opportunities to shine with a job well done in aviation safety comparable to a crash.
It is an analogy, which is why I used the word analogous, and it still fits.
The power of the Executive Branch is vested in the President of the United States, who also acts as head of state and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. There isn't any framework to have a rebuttal to that, this is as succinct as it gets.
SOME agencies are independent of this structure. They are called independent agencies.
Other agencies are not.
The President's primary role in this capacity is to steer the executive branch, and this is done using rather mundane executive orders which are usually merely plans, again ANALOGOUS to a companies quarterly or annual goals. A CEO lays out the mission and the organization follows that.
The job title is a 3-part job. Head of executive branch, head of state, and commander-in-chief of armed forces. The celebrity status and reliance on The President's every move and stance on everything is merely happenstance, but a byproduct of the constitutional government becoming involved in every aspect of American society, having subsequently created all these "not-companies" with millions of employees, and perpetual armed conflicts around the world.
So finally, head of the executive branch, for agencies not independent of this structure, the President is ANALOGOUS to the Chairman/CEO and has ultimate say in steering them. There is no tradition that was violated.
Anyway, on the topic at hand, the FAA followed the order and indications from the President and issued their own.
Unfortunately Trump didn't start this trend but I really hope whoever is next stops it.
I disagree. Bureaucracy is a good thing. This smacks of a President that looks a) desperate for attention and b) incapable of delegating.
FAA has an acting administrator: Dan Elwell. He was appointed by Trump to be Deputy Administrator.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-hasnt-trump-nomi...
First of all, there is a backlog of higher priority nominees. It wouldn't be good to distract congress from those.
Second of all, the constant harassment of this administration must be having a huge impact. A person has to be slightly crazy to accept a nomination. They and their family will be facing physical danger, legal danger, and more. Lots of competent people are thus unavailable as choices. The constant harassment has had a real negative effect on the quality of our government.
Put yourself in their shoes. You have a normal family and could earn millions of dollars per years in a nice comfortable corporate executive position. How insane do you have to be in order to take something like $150,000 while living in the expensive DC area and being unable to simply go out to eat in public? What normal parent would subject their kids to the abuse?
Scaring away qualified people does not improve the government. You don't do that unless seeing Trump do badly is so important to you that you are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of the country itself.
Actual qualified people like Mattis and Tillerson faced little trouble. Even Gorsuch, who was the embodiment of a stolen seat, did just fine.
What's scaring away qualified people is the proud ignorance and naked corruption of the administration.
And it's the same when we're considering nominations in general. What happened to Kavanaugh could happen to any nominee, no matter the branch.
https://twitter.com/FAANews/status/1105908677612056578
He initially tried to nominate his own pilot for the job (the same who screwed so much that FAA had Trump's plane grounded).
> [It is] unconscionable that a manufacturer, the FAA, and the airlines would have pilots flying an airplane without adequately training, or even providing available resources and sufficient documentation to understand the highly complex systems that differentiate this aircraft from prior models
> The Flight Manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient
But we hear your "third world" and "idiot" dog whistles loud and clear.
We're nowhere near having gathered enough facts to put forward claims like that.
As long as humans are involved, human error is involved too, especially with a new system. This could happen anywhere.
In due time we'll hear how he told FAA he'd handle the optics.
People can and will disagree with policies regardless of who or what is in office. But the way he conducts himself and the people he surrounds himself with really push people the opposite way, though at the same time it's distracting from some of his less agreeable policies.
See also: stopped clock being right twice a day.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
Your own source shows him with a current negative 11.5% net approval.
If you mean positive gross approval, well, as long as he approves of himself he has that.
Trump is a documented pathological liar, far beyond anything US politics has seen in multiple generations of Presidents. It isn't the "truth massaging" that Americans expect all politicians to engage in---it's pathological lying about trivial issues as well as large.
He has burned trust at so many points in his life---before his election and during his Presidency---that if there was a report he saved 50 babies from a burning house, the very reasonable first instinct of many non-eye-witnesses would be to question the source of the report and verify there was a housefire at all.
He was being criticized for not grounding the plane, and then criticized for grounding it. (He had nothing to do with either decision.)
Liberals are overrepresented online. So if your only contact with Americans is online it's understandable what you are seeing. The real world is rather different though.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/13/18263719/b...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/03/13/...
-- Edit -- Apparently not. Now all the comments are blaming the FAA and saying it is fishy it took an executive order.
What's silly to me is how Boeing doesn't realize that another crash IN THE US would be disastrous, much, much worse than the position they find themselves in now.
I think it's a good move until we know the full picture though. Better to err on the side of caution when lives could be at stake.
Just because it's Africa doesn't mean the operators were lacking.
After the flight data recorders are recovered from the Ethiopian Airlines accident they could reevaluate if it turned out to be something else. But this seems like a rational safety first position given what we know today.
Hopefully Boeing's April patch and mandatory additional training mitigates the issue well enough to resume normal flight operations.
I know I will look twice next time going on a trip which plane I end up on, I'm not sure I will go with a 737 Max anytime soon.
"an a320 crashes every two years" sounds quite different than "a brand new 737MAX crashes during take off every 6 months because of the faulty sensor thingy".
Also a320 family of 8605 aircraft took the life of 1393 passengers in 30 years, 737MAX is at %30 of that in two years and 350 aircraft.
737MAX accidents look very brutal and specific. It doesn't look like "ironing out imperfections" but more like "this plane is broken, it falls off on take off" - regardless if that's the case, people see a pattern here.
Not really fair to blame the plane in that case.
Two crashes within six months is very abnormal. Abnormalities are evidence of problems. Airline regulators are tasked with keeping people from dying, not with protecting manufacturers' feelings.
You need more information than just a calendar and a model number to make determinations of flight safety.
You do realize they redesigned the plane after 9/11 to prevent that from happening again, right?
My (apparently very controversial) opinion is that we don’t know enough to predict that now, because we don’t know what caused the Ethiopian Air crash yet.
People are avoiding the 737 MAX because given the current information it definitely could be a problem with the plane, in fact the information we already have from the first crash makes it look like it's very likely to be a problem with the plane.
You option is not controversial, it's just wrong.
Again: the topic here is predicting long-term damage to consumer confidence. I understand what is happening right now.
The entire 787 fleet was grounded not more than a few years ago due to battery issue. How many people actively avoid 787s today? Long-term consumer trust depends not just the root cause of an accident, but also the perception of how it was addressed. As the GP correctly points out, the 767 (and all other planes, and security screening procedures) were redesigned to protect against the type of attack that succeeded on September 11.
These two crashes have one thing in common: brand new planes.
Unless you know of an islamist terror organization that has a grudge against Ethiopian desert wilderness, I don't think terrorism is a more likely common cause than the brand new airframe.
I'd say "unless you have some indication that it was the plane's fault". Otherwise, agreed: 2 crashes per se tell you nothing about the safety of the plane; it could've been a terrorist attack or a suicidal pilot or a missile.
It's two crashes under similar circumstances, with no indication of such an external event, that justify suspecting the plane.
Since we aren't talking about assigning criminal penalties to the plane (for one, because its fairly well destroyed, and for another because it wasn't the kind of thing subject to such penalties in the first place), the criminal standard of proof ("beyond a reasonable doubt" -- which still falls short of actually being sure) is inapplicable. In fact, given the minimal consequences of blaming the plane in the discussion in this thread, its probably fair to do so if there is any reasonable basis for belief that that the crash was the plane's fault. Its certainly to do so if the preponderance of the evidence as yet reviewed by the person doing the blaming suggests that, even if it is a fairly weak conclusion that a very small amount of additional evidence could reverse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19382699
Edit: Max-8 had first flight in 2016 is in service since early 2017, so the crash rate over that period is roughly identical with the rate for the first 5 years of the A320. We just have a set of two closer together recently. Not enough data to form a statistical basis of course.
Time is not a very usefull thing here, as number of active aircraft and flights will be very variable.
If you cherry-pick the time interval, you can say that basically all planes crash once every hour.
Boeing used software to override and reinterpret pilot inputs so that the airplane behaves as if it were a 737, in order to cut costs on retraining. When that software fails, the pilots are suddenly flying a totally new airframe that would normally require additional certification with 0 experience.
This layer inbetween where the computer goes "actually what I think you REALLY meant to do is..." is novel in the 737 Max.
And all the various layers of protections in fly by wire airplanes do that - they second guess certain inputs to prevent edge cases. But in any case the input is going through software abstraction. Any apparent directness is part of that software behavior.
I'll be interested what the software update due at the end of April entails exactly. I think every airplane should get the angle of attack sensors disagree indication, standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes
That said, I prefer either the older boeings, with minimal computer interference when hand flying or the Airbus approach. Because Airbus at least appear to know what they are doing.
This Boeing-Airbus chimera isn't really working.
Lift from the nacelles is the issue.
There are a ton of planes with a better flight/crash ratio.
380 A340 where build since 1991 almost exactly as much as the number of 737 Max built (376). Not one fatal accident in almost 20 years for the A340 versus 2 fatal accident in 2 years for the 737.
The earliest reports said that pilots could avoid this runaway trim issue by knowing to disable the electric trim. Now it sounds like doing that may also eliminate all ability for pilots to trim the aircraft.
Inability to trim make airplanes extremely difficult to fly, the control (yolk) pressures required can quickly become too high to maintain control. Pilots would have to hold something like 1 lb of continuous backpressure for every 6 knots out of trim for the entire flight.
That’s partly true, but it’s not the whole story. MCAS and its use to make the MAX 8-9 fly “more like the 737” is part of a longer trend of manufacturers coddling pilots instead of expecting them to behave as competent professionals and treating them as such. They’re effectively opting for a more familiar normal aviating experience, with the tradeoff being longer emergency/exigency checklists and so much more to manage/remember/process when the system malfunctions. With the end-result being that even more experience is required to safely and reliably pilot modern aircraft.
Side note: Disabling trim should only be done as part of a problem remedy, not as part of normal flight.
(Disclaimer: I’m not a pilot. I’ve read for many hours on these issues.)
I can’t legally be the PIC (pilot in command) in a Citation 525 (“CitationJet” or CJ) despite it being nearly identical to the 550 (Citation II or Bravo) I can, in most ways that I can tell matters. I have copilot time in both and PIC in the 550 (and related models). The newer plane is even easier to fly, frankly, and has some nice safety features for engine failures. I have to get the training and certification (and recertification every two years) to legally be PIC in the newer Citation, though.
My limited understanding is that the aerodynamics and flight characteristics of the 737 MAX are quite different than the older 737-800 - let alone the even older second (or even first) generation 737s. The memory items may be different. That alone should have mandated a new type certificate in my non-regulatory expert perspective.
I'm certainly concerned whether MCAS is both working as intended, and also failing safe. But my more immediate concern is like yours: when MCAS is effectively disabled in the normal course of troubleshooting runway trim by setting stab trim to cutoff, now you have a plane that has different stall behavior than you're type rated for! Flip those switches, now you need a different type rating! Of course pilots can learn different stall behaviors and avoidance for a new type, we don't need abstraction to do that for us when we know about it and have trained for it. Stall avoidance is fundamental make+model knowledge, but it can be non-obvious and making it obvious and deliberate is what the type rating is about.
So yeah we might actually end up in the very curious case where either Boeing, or FAA or NTSB are all: this is going to require a type rating afterall. The very thing the airlines in particular want to avoid.
It seems to me the in-cockpit "aoa disagree" option needs to become standard by AD. MCAS only takes input from one of the two alpha vanes, so if it gets bogus data it has no backup source. Meanwhile the pilots have no indication the two vanes disagree unless they (apparently) bought that indication feature. Which I think is pretty fucked up if that turns out to be true and relevant as to either cause or solution in all of this.
Eh, I googled it for you people. It was air france 447: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/boeing-requests-faa-ground...
Something is terribly wrong when the regulator that's supposed to keep people safe is less willing to do that then the company that stands to lose the most from the bad image of a product.
Compare and contrast with Johnson & Johnson's handling of the 1982 Tylenol poison incidents. Tylenol immediately pulled the product off the shelves everywhere out of an abundance of caution and earned a lot of credit with the public. Boeing... yeah.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/27/vaginal-mesh...
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/business/27hip.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-11/j-j-said-...
As an aside, do you know who actually owns most of the jets for an airliner? Banks like wells fargo and chase. They still expect leasing payments regardless if the plane is flying or not.
Flydubai is the biggest loser - over 20% of their fleet grounded.
Airlines typically fly many sizes and shapes of planes. And usually more of the smaller planes.
But You can’t just drop in a Dash8 q400 twin turboprop for your grounded MAX.
And the MAX could fly further than the 737; so it opened new routes that the 737 could not do.
Those airlines clearly think the probability of this is pretty low or they would have make the call to ground those planes on their own, but a jet that smashes itself into the earth and disintegrates because of a faulty sensor is probably even worse than a grounded jet.
But the reason why I'm not a day trader is that I have no idea why they rebounded so quickly haha
Personally I never want to be that guy.
I'd say a spotty record is probably worse...
Gotta get ahead of that PR curve!
Supposedly the profit margins for discount airlines are pretty slim, so if they can't fill all the seats what's the point? What's bad is that they had to wait for that to happen before they took action. It just makes it look like they'd choose profits over safety every time... as long as they can keep making profits.
I certainly couldn't have been the only one to look at the airline I'm about to fly on and check that they didn't have any of the Max 8 variants in service.
Maybe not given that only 130 737-Max aircraft have been delivered to airlines.
Does anyone here know how aircraft leasing works in scenario like this? e.g. grounding of an aircraft model for an unknown duration, do airlines have the option so "switch out" currently leased aircraft?
Max 8s come equipped with a sensor that reads the plane's angle relative to the wind flow, prompting MCAS to automatically trigger the plane's nose to angle downward if it gets a specific reading.
However, problems could arise if the MCAS system gets erroneous sensor readings. The system automatically pushes the plane's nose down, potentially surprising pilots who are unfamiliar with the system and overriding their commands.This is what investigators believe happened to Lion Air Flight 610 before it crashed in October
more details https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-boeing-737-800...
Umm, a little confused here, if the center of gravity shifted forward, why will the pitch up tendency increase?
The Center of thrust is offset down and somewhat in front of the CG, this means high thrust imparts a pitch up moment. Small, but present.
The bigger problem is the nacelles shape though, they create body lift at high AoA; imagine a vacuum bubble trying to suck the wing/nacelle backwards forming in the airstream, "pulling" them back.
Combine both of these characteristics, and you have an airframe demonstrating near stall positive pitch instability. I.e. you get a moment that if left uncountered will reinforce itself until the plane ends up stalling; behavior completely unprecedented in the airframe.
So in order to "counter" this behavior an automated system was introduced which supposedly restored the pilot relative flight characteristics in line with the old airframe's specs.
I'm probably oversimplifying, but it's the closest I can get to a visualization that makes some sense.
Because the center of thrust is also moved forward, and its effect is much greater than that offset by the center of mass. The 737 airframe was never designed to handle such powerful engines.
Sure it would. Here's a better explanation than I care to make: https://www.quora.com/Where-should-the-center-of-mass-lift-a...
"If the Center of Thrust does not act through the Center of Gravity there will be a moment causing the aircraft to pitch, yaw or roll about the axes of the aircraft and the moment(s) must be counter balanced by design (including provision for trimming when the thrust is varied)."
Boeing chose to counteract that newly induced pitch moment with software, so that they could sell the MAX 8 to airlines as not requiring any new training or type ratings. And now nearly 400 people are dead because of a marketing decision.
Source: Physics 101
It also could be with the engines moved forward from the wings a bit, their thrust tends to rotate the air frame "up".
Source: I am a pilot.
Please explain.
I'm not implying you're wrong, just very surprised to see this low a number. I would have guessed much closer to something like 45deg, maybe even more.
Let me know if that makes sense.
Claims intermittent fluctuations in AoA can activate the MCAS. So no need for the AoA indicator to be faulty then, means the risk of false MCAS intervention is higher than previously believed.
The bigger engines provide a lot of thrust and with the new position of the engines, it’s a lot easier for the plane to stall. So the plane was outfitted with a sensor and software that reads the angle of attack and it corrects it in case the plane reaches the factor of safety angle.
If the sensor malfunctions, the software would get wrong readings and try to correct something that doesn’t need correction. It moves the plane nose down. Pilots correct. Process repeats. Hence the elevation fluctuations seen in Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines.
Just the one sensor?
reminds a typical enterprise software project - deep serious issues stemming from screwed up basic architecture are hastily patched up by software patches. Sounds like it was a money saving architectural decision as development of more deep modifications to the airframe to allow for those engines to be positioned safely would definitely cost more than a software patch. And after the Lion crash the Boeing is doing patches for the patch ...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-boeing-737-800...
The fact that Boeing cut as many corners as they did to bypass mandatory training just adds more smoke to the fire. When the dust settles on this episode I won't be surprised to learn that Boeing (and FAA regulators) is found completely at fault for engineering shortcuts to save costs on re-training.
And promptly given a pass by the FAA/regulators.
The A220-300 competes with the A319neo and 737 MAX 7 (and the A319neo isn't selling any better than than the MAX 7).
I don't think really an abandonment is on the cards: too many fleets are too heavily bought into the 737 family, and the cost of migrating away is real. By way of comparison, the A320(ceo) hardly had the best of starts to its life either with the Air France Flight 296 crash (which while different, still wasn't exactly good press!).
I agree. It seemed like the FAA was taking a position best described as "innocent until proven guilty." I think that's great for the US criminal justice system. I think a better approach for air travel safety is "abundance of caution." I have no direct experience in this field but it seems to me that the plane should be grounded out of an abundance of caution until we know more.
Edit: FWIW I used the phrase "abundance of caution" before I read it in the article.
Mileage will vary based on geography and beat though.
And... I'd admit we saw some charging documents we immediately dismissed from new officers, roughly like 'this guy seemed shady and was near a crime.' We'd lay into them for that though, they'd eventually seem to figure it out.
I am not a lawyer. If anyone is in doubt I suggest speaking to a lawyer!
But if there is nothing to back it up, the guy will be realeased very soon, and if you do it repeatedly, you'll eventually get problems (and rather quickly and seriously if you lied and it can be proven).
I guess the question here is what about him makes him seem shifty to you. One would at least hope his skin color would not be factoring into that and that your judgment would have been the same for anybody else exhibiting the same behavior.
Then again, in Guantanamo Bay there are people held in custody for many years now without any charges, so these rules can be bent pretty far in the right circumstances.
Planes aren't criminals or even citizens, though. But to translate this to the 737 Max situation, when something seems to be wrong it seems entirely reasonable to ground planes in order to investigate the situation. But there should be a limit to that grounding, and a permanent ban requires some actual proof.
Of course keep arresting people for no good reason, people lose their trust in them.
Remember how big of a deal the Toyota accelerator pedal recall was?
The way this particular glitch plays out sounds suspiciously like software, or a software-like function of the MCAS unit.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15125313/its-all-your...
I'm not sure Boeing's software, even if not at fault, will be entirely flawless.
http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_s...
Some napkin math. 150,000 flights, each with 172 seats (based on the American Airlines 7M8 configuration, which is admittedly tight). That's 25.8 million journeys. Two accidents, let's that's ~350 deaths. Your chance of dying on any given journey is therefore 0.00135% (four nines to live).
You've got a 0.0167% chance of dying [1] for every 10,000 miles driven. Let's assume that each 7M8 journey averages 2500mi (generous, a transcontinental average). A linear projection tells me that's a 0.004175% of dying in an equivalent car ride.
You're still 3X safer on a 7M8 than you are in your car.
Now, by no means should this be taken to say the planes shouldn't be fixed or that Boeing should "get away with it." However, grounding all these planes and pushing people into a less safe form of transit may actually end up causing more harm than allowing the planes to fly with a fixed, short schedule to resolving the problem.
[1] https://www.seeker.com/how-common-are-skydiving-accidents-17...
The grounding and reaction may also shake people's faith in air travel in general, causing them to drive more even if planes were available. Bruce Schneier has a good write-up on this effect post 9/11 too. Humans are terrible at dealing with this kind of thing.
The reality is you're much more at risk in your Uber ride to the airport than you are aboard the 7M8.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Orders_and_deli...
Commercial flying is safer on average than driving, but that's because of, not despite the extreme approach to safety concerns. (General aviation is actually substantially more dangerous than driving)
If there are, they'll have to wipe the dust off of them, and send type-rated crews into territories they're not familiar with day-to-day.
That, or defer maintenance of the existing fleet.
I'm unconvinced that this is the safe resolution, but that's what will happen.
At least the US and Canada allowed planes in-flight to land, instead of making them turnaround and come back anyway via non-revenue ferry flights.
Mostly people will just cancel their holidays or agree a teleconference because getting flights on that route at short notice is too difficult.
Flying in/out of unfamiliar territory is a known risk. Whether the 737 MAX series is higher risk or not is an unknown risk because of insufficient sample sizes.
Hopefully some statistician will start tabulating P values so we can see if the confidence intervals overlap or not. Treat this situation like a new "better" drug for X where 2 users died in quick succession. Is there enough evidence to take it off the market or not? AFAIK, nobody has (yet).
>If the delay's long enough to actually see parked aircraft brought into service, it'll largely be the same crews flying older 737s anyway.
Sorta. On a Canadian airline, Westjet, the MAX is flying routes that are too far for the regular 737s without a fuel-stop (by my estimates). I'm booked for such a flight in 2 months. I'll get to learn what happens. I would have been happy to fly the MAX8 based on the current lack of evidence for grounding.
I would think at least some people are driving instead. US airlines run at a pretty high utilization, grounding dozens of planes isn't going to be easily absorbed into other flights.
Issues with new airliners and engines -specially engines- are not rare at all. So this sort of grounding is not rare: see 787 first grounding (battery issues), current partial grounding (Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 issues), or Pratt & Whitney ongoing issues with the A320NEO engine (PW1000G issues).
You can imagine the sort of clusterfuck when PW needs to produce 60 engines a month for Airbus, only manages to build 20 in its factory... but need to send these 20 engines to replace already delivered engines because they are defective. The situation has improved a lot lately, but 2017/2018 were tough...
Only the A350 introduction has so far been relatively event free. Probably because the Trent-XWB is a derived from the Trent 1000, so the 787 took care of the teething...
I am biased on this since I have spent a couple of years working on the development of A350XWB systems (and only marginally contributed to other programs) but I always had the feeling that, after the trauma of the A380 (rampant production issues, lengthy delays and management mishaps/stock fraud), the focus for A350XWB was put on accountability at all levels.
This might not be sustainable for a large corporation but retrospectively, that seemed to have had the desired effect at least for this particular aircraft program.
OR the planes doing the short-haul flights will now have to make these longer-haul flights, increasing the short-haul flight costs.
"I could drive or fly...oh, no, but what if they try to put me on a 737 Max? I better drive."
“The ones that fall out of the sky have been grounded, so that’s great”
I'm not sure that's correct. Let say there's 350 MAX aircraft in service, flying 5 flights per day on average. In 6 months, thats about 320,000 flights. So a 1 in 320,000 chance of a fatal crash. Let's say the average route length is 1000 miles. That's 1 crash per 320 million miles flown, or 3.125 crashes per billion miles flown.
If we assume an average of 150 passengers per flight, then it's 468 deaths per billion miles for the MAX, compared to only 0.02 deaths per billion miles across all aircraft. [1]
In the US, there are 12.5 deaths per billion miles driven, including pedestrian and cyclist deaths from motor vehicle collisions.[1]
If it crashed once every 6 months, the MAX would be around 37X more dangerous than driving, and 2340X more dangerous than an average commercial flight in the United States.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
I imagine 1200 miles is short for an average 7M8 flight though, which could make it substantially safer. With 2500 mile averages you get back to that 3X number I cited. It's still no more a death trap than your average Honda Civic (10% safer by your metrics, more by mine).
To your point, it is of course riskier than a different aircraft.
My whole thesis was to ask what effect this will have across the entire population and how will humans react, irrationally, to this news.
Some trips may be made using older aircraft. Some trips may not be made at all. But I think assuming a 1:1 correlation with driving is a bit silly.
But compare spending 20 minutes traveling 10 miles on a local street, vs 10 minutes traveling 10 miles on a freeway. Both are considered equally safe using a fatalities-per-VMT model. But in the former, you’ve stayed safe for a longer portion of your life. (See http://pedshed.net/?p=1050)
Using that metric would make that Boeing far less safe compared with driving.
Airplane travel have fixed segments (takeoff and landing, ascent, descent) and variable segments (the coasting phase that varies by distance traveled). Car travel is only the variable segment. Hard to compare apples to oranges.
there's another issue, which is plane risk is uneven during their journey, so a type that does half the flights but twice the distance on average will end up almost 1.5 times as safe all other things being equal.
this source claim 45% crashes happening on takeoff and landing which are a minimal percentage of travel if you measure risk by mile or hour: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/cox/2013/08/2...
a way to normalize that would have to use "number per flights" but then you'd get trains, with their multi-stop journeys, skewing the numbers the other way.
1) a teleporter with the exact same risk as driving 20min on local streets or 10min on the highway would be the worst thing ever invented. In reality, 100% of people would choose it unless they were intentionally wanting to spend time driving
2) A 100% safe ridable snail would be the ideal form of transit, given that you'd spend your whole life safely trying to get somewhere.
That is, the plane isn't inherently 100x safer if you just fly it empty.
Let's then also assume that people are not commontly drive transcontinental distances. Your calacluations are interesting but all over the place. E.g.:
> How many more people will take connecting flights — the > danger is in the take off and landing after all
So in this case distance does not matter. How does car safety compare to airplanes in terms of number of trips?
Anyway, the biggest problem is assuming that all grounded flights will be replaced by driving. Either the flight will use different aircraft or the trip is cancelled in majority of the cases.
Reacting strongly when those procedures seems to have missed something is important not because of the crash itself but because the process is important. Could the same oversights lead to additional fatalities is the question, the robustness of the boeing is a minor point.
Flying is only as safe as it is thanks to regulations written in blood. I don't think flying today versus driving today is the right comparison to make, rather flying today versus flying in a decade. If we allow leniency on the basis of alternatives to flying being more dangerous now, improvement of flight safety may be squandered so that the safety of future transport as a whole is reduced.
I also think these regulatory bodies have to make grand gestures, at times, to reassure the bags of blood and bones that get on planes in a way that statistics do not.
And even if they fix the problem and pilots get more training, it's still likely to hurt 737 Max sales; it seems likely they cut those corners because having the Max count as "just another 737" that didn't require extra training, was a major advantage to airlines. When airlines need to retrain their pilots anyway, they might choose different planes in the future. And they may be less likely to trust Boeing and the FAA when they claim a new plane model won't require extra training.
Then again, I don't know the airline industry. Maybe it just blows over with no long term effects.
Following that, the problem is not finding who is at fault but how to prevent it from happening again. The first step to getting the aircraft ungrounded is often to update the flight manual and decrease inspection time so it can be flown safely with reduced capabilities. The root cause is fixed later.
Aviation regulatory bodies are normally not into finger pointing. Traditionally, the customer pays for everything, even if it is not their fault. The reasoning is that it is one less incentive for the manufacturer to hide defects. No doubt that legal battles will ensue but care is taken to keep lawyers out of the technical process.
Side note: I tried finding a site that would let me link out to a chart showing the full price history of BA. It's surprisingly difficult to find.
Make sure you use a log Y-axis when looking at historical data. Steady compound gains (even just from inflation) will make any chart look like a 'hockey stick' otherwise. You're almost always more interested in relative price movement, not absolute.
Gains from 2016 have been good, but that likely reflects the clear success of the Boeing over Airbus's new aircraft.
The current fiasco certainly will put a damper to their stock，but there's simply no other choice for new planes. They will bounce back.
Disclosure: I shorted/put BA yesterday morning
What? They have the A330neo and A350, the only wide-bodies they don't really compete with are the 747-8 and 777-9X.
Without going into too much detail: there are many tradeoffs in airframe design, but one of them is fuel efficiency vs. inherent stability. Some airframe designs eke out a bit more miles-per-gallon at the cost of having ranges of motion where if the pilot gets the plane into that state, the feedback loops on motion become positive and the plane is likely to tip over, stall out, spin, etc. Boeing's Max-8 design makes this tradeoff, and the MCAS system is supposed to help compensate for this design by forcing the pilot to nose the plane down (to improve airflow over the wings and generate more lift) if the plane is pitched too high.
Problem might be that MCAS can malfunction and think the plane is pitching up when it's not, and if the pilot can't figure out how to disable it, they get very confusing signals--- they're pulling back on the stick to get the plane to climb, but MCAS is pushing the stick forward to avoid an expected stall that a malfunctioning sensor is telling it will happen. End result: pilot and the computer fight each other while the very important business of "keeping the plane in the air" isn't done and the plane crashes.
Taking into account the other sensor data is an obvious choice. A better understanding the quality of the sensor data in real field operation may also be required. Clearer stabilization problem indication, quicker manual disengage of auto pilot (several reports of nose down events) and MCAS are others. Decreasing the allowed tail trim for MCAS is another.
Then that leaves: Another one or two sensors. Independent review of the engine control laws (report of unexpected low thrust when climbing).
There is a lot to be done. The plane was rolled out too early and fixing the cut corners for real could take a while.
Edit: I was dead wrong. They had more 737 Max 8's than any other airline in the US.
Nothing concrete about the latest crash, could be 100% software related.
They also train their pilots using a 737max specific curriculum.
But also kind of like "if a customer had some suspicions about some avionics weirdness or training, why aren't you as a responsible vendor understanding or addressing it holistically?"
Huh? Says who?
That allows the system to have at least one failure and still operate.
With just two sensors any fault is an unidentifiable failure - how does the system know which is correct when there are just two votes?
It may be there's a third input from some other sensort, but then technically we're back to at least 3 sensors voting on the issue.
Functioning alpha vanes are critical on the MAX and NG.
With two sensors you can compare, and if they disagree beyond some epsilon of tolerance you can fail safe by deactivating the system.
With three sensors, you can compare them, and if one is out of bounds vs the other two, you can fail operational by continuing to operate the system while also alerting the operator to the needed maintenance.
I don't blame Southwest though, after all the FAA and Boeing gave the green light for these jets. It would be interesting to see where Southwest is going if 737 Max is discontinued after this.
The conversation around this subject has degraded to irrational hysteria, but really: do you think Trump knows anything about airline safety? Is this really how we want the system to work?
Today it’s an airplane model, but tomorrow it’s banning travel from Africa because of an emerging disease, or capitulating to anti-vaxxers because of a news story.
Given his recent tweeting, he sure seems to think he does.
If Boeing requested it, it’s obviously a different thing, but it wasn’t clear at the time I wrote the comment, and the original comment was phrased conditionally anyway.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/828609/trump-claims-old-simpl...
Given the way that worked out, his having owned and operated an airline is certainly evidence that he had money, but not evidence that he knows much about even the business side, much less any other aspect other than the "being a passenger" side, of aviation.
Based on transcripts of him talking to airline industry executives[1] in the past, I'd say he actually knows less than nothing: i.e. he doesn't know what he doesn't know, much like the pointy haired guy who's too insistent he wants you to get the robots that write the computer programs to make a blockchain for cybersecurity to read your explanation of the bug.
[1]https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...
I can conjecture about Boeing being a big US manufacturer, etc, but is there any evidence at all for why the US held out on this one? My initial reaction was that there must be a good reason for the holdout, given our safety record, but on reading more about it, I've not seen one. (Again, relative to the stance of excessive caution).
1. Ineptitude 2. Corruption/Greed 3. US planes don't have the same issues that is suspected to be the root cause of other crashes.
From what I've read so far, there's absolutely no clear indication at this point it was solely pilot error, and common sense dictates you ground the planes before more crashes happen.
5 times as many people died on Aeroflot than any other airline during the Soviet Era.
I mentioned it because when I first heard that there were so many other regulatory bodies grounding the fleet, I was surprised about the FAA. When it was pointed out that many of those regulatory bodies represent countries having a handful of these planes to begin with, I was still surprised, but it made a little more sense that the FAA might have more to lose if the decision proved rash.
Not a trivial number for either fleet, but I imagine it won't significantly impact their business either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_fleet
While it certainly sounds like there is a flaw in how the system handles erroneous sensor data, or that the interface promotes incorrect actions, the independent groundings of 737 MAX 8 planes probably are not independent in sense of each authority coming to its own determination based on their professional opinions alone. It would be politically foolish to be the lone holdout in your region.
There is a real cost to grounding these aircraft, and I'd imagine that if they are grounded without specific questions that need to be answered or problems that can be fixed, it becomes even more difficult to un-ground them later.
I don't usually make libertarian-style arguments, but until there's evidence pointing to a specific safety of flight issue from the latest crash there's no justification for the government effectively "taking" airplane owners property by preventing its use.
At the moment there is specific evidence, I have no doubt the FAA will act swiftly.
Thus, more evidence is required to ground an airplane (that has, after all, gone through the certification process), than two crashes.
As someone pointed out in this thread, there were three B767 hull losses between September and November 2001, but two of those were caused by 9/11 terrorists and don't tell you much about the airworthiness of the aircraft.
The fundamental question is this: should the plane have been grounded immediately after the second crash? Many here seem to think that yes, obviously. I think that no, one unexplained crash of a certified plane does not warrant grounding. Once details and circumstances emerge that are indicative of some fundamental design flaw, or multiple unexplained crashes (as with the comet), of course ground it.
Is that a substantive disagreement, or "pedantry"?
On 24 March 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525, using an Airbus A320, flying from Barcelona to Düsseldorf crashed near Digne in the Southern French Alps, killing all 150 on board. They didn't know it was a suicide pilot until after they investigated. Yet, A320s kept flying in the meantime.
On 29 March 2015, Air Canada Flight 624, using an Airbus A320, flying from Toronto to Halifax carrying 138 people crash landed short of the runway. The aircraft was badly damaged and 23 people were injured.
On 14 April 2015, Asiana Airlines Flight 162, an Airbus A320 with 82 people on board, lost height on final approach to Hiroshima Airport in Mihara, Japan, struck an antenna, and skidded onto the runway on its tail, spinning 180 degrees before coming to a stop. Its main landing gear collapsed and the aircraft suffered damage to its left wing and left engine. 27 of the 82 people on board were injured.
Three incidents, on respectable, high-safety airlines within 3 weeks of each other all with the Airbus A320. Yet, those planes weren't grounded, not even for five minutes. Three serious incidents within 3 weeks of each other is "empirical evidence" that the A320 is unsafe.
But we have a crash from Ethiopian Air, on a plane where the first officer had only 200 hours of total flight experience. And another crash months ago on Lion Air (a ridiculously unsafe airline) and that's "empirical evidence" that the airplane is bad?
Read About Lion Air's "safety" culture: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/world/asia/lion-air-crash...
Lion Air should be grounded. Ethiopia shouldn't be flying planes with student pilots in the right seat. There may be issues with the 8 Max, however, it's a fact that inexperienced pilots, bad maintenance, inferior safety processes and negligence will exacerbate any potential flaws in the aircraft. The fact is that in the case of Lion Air, if it were Southwest Airlines operating those flights in Indonesia, flight 610 never would have crashed. Lion Air had days of reported issues before the crash and they ignored them. Look at Lion Air's incidents and accidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air#Incidents_and_acciden... It seems that can't even taxi a 737 safety, let alone be trusted to fly one. And right now we're complaining about the FAA? We should be complaining about airlines that are being allowed to operate with this slipshod respect for safety.
The US, Canada and Europe hasn't had any 8 Max incidents -- the incidents happened in organizations that were operating in ways that would never be allowed in US, Canada, or Europe. That fact seems to be getting ignored in favor of complaining about the FAA or Boeing. The US flies a lot more 8 Maxes than Ethiopia or Lion Air, yet not a single crash. Is that just coincidence or does the US/Canada/Europe just do a better job?
Asiana Airlines Flight 162 was an Airbus A320-232, manufactured in 2007
Air Canada Flight 624 was an Airbus A320-211 manufactured in 1991
Germanwings Flight 9525 was an Airbus A320-211 manufactured in 1990.
The Asiana and Air Canada incidents were similar, but the aircraft were of different models, one was 7 year old and the other was 24 year old. The German Wings and the Air Canada aircraft were similar models, but both planes were 23-24 year old, and the incidents were completely different.
Compare that to the 737 MAX 8. Two fatal crashes, during the same stage of flight, with identical models, of similar age. 2 out of 350 planes crashed, where the fleet is barely one year old on average.
...its use for transporting OTHER people/stuff in air over OTHER people's property (and lives). I'd be surprised if the FAA licenses didn't have clauses that basically allowed explicitly this.
Regardless, I don't find your arguments persuasive. The FAA didn't wait for "evidence" before banning cellphones, e-readers, etc on flights; they've grounded planes before investigations were complete before...which was why I asked my initial question: What was different this time.
I'm not saying they can't do it, they obviously can (and just did.) All I'm saying is that there has to be some evidence that the crash is for a reason that implies other aircraft are affected. And obviously the standard for transport category aircraft is higher than for smaller airplanes. But it can't just be "we gotta be sure", because then you can't let anything fly at any time.
Imagine if every time someone had an accident in the same model car you own, the DOT prohibited that model car on the roads "out of an abundance of caution" until it was proven that it was not a design fault in the car. While there arguably would be an improvement in safety, it would also be incredibly disruptive.
What standard of risk would you apply? Because you have to draw the line somewhere.
Separate question - and your arguments are all logical. My question was "given the standard of risk that HAS been applied, why was this time different?"
The safety record of car travel in the US is dramatically different than the safety record in air travel.
This of course is insane when you are talking about a for profit business.
[1] https://youtu.be/vWxxtzBTxGU 20min in.
FAA Delegated Organizations
Page: https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_...
"Regular FAA oversight of an ODA is accomplished by a team of FAA engineers and inspectors to ensure the ODA holder functions properly and that any approvals or certificates issued meet FAA safety standards."
List of delegated organizations: https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_...
Spoiler: there's a lot more than Boeing on there.
I don't know about the specific concerns in that video, just replying to the insinuation that Boeing has some strange deal that exempts their planes from oversight by the FAA. They don't.
1. Ground the MAX after the reasons for the Lion Air crash had became clear, as it's not airworthy.
2. Do not ground the MAX, as it's sufficiently airworthy.
This new crash had not provided enough information initially to conclude otherwise.
However, the FAA is sort of arguing that there is now enough new information from the second crash to support the decision to ground it.
If that was determination was done correctly, then there is no reason to ground every plane of that model, just because another one crashes shortly thereafter.
The FAA obviously is inclined to believe that they did that determination correctly. Of course, they could be wrong.
It will be very interesting to see how the Ethiopian investigation turns out. If the cause was the same as Lion Air, then the FAA will come under tremendous pressure to reconsider what constitutes "safe to fly".
(IMO the industry in general will come under hard questioning about the role of software in compensating for aerodynamic issues. Yeah the military does it, but we have different standards for airlines.)
But if it turns out that some other factor caused the crash, unrelated to the Lion Air cause, then the FAA will come off looking insensitive but ultimately justified in their determination.
This is more revealing than they’d like, I think.
A company is recommending to their regulator that the regulator take action against them. That is a pretty solid indicator that the lawyers have a rough idea of potential liability and are now trying to mitigate damages.
> Early Tuesday, Dennis A. Muilenburg, the chief executive of Boeing, spoke to President Trump on the phone and made the case that the 737 Max planes should not be grounded in the United States, according to two people briefed on the conversation.
And for the record, I made the same call. It's not easy but I'm certainly not judging Boeing for weighing their options and moving forward with a strategy that gives the company the best chance at recovering from this mess.
They also have thousands of outstanding orders for this model plane that are, at best significantly delayed and perhaps in jeopardy.
https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/media/Emergency_Order.pdf
[ sound of stampeding lawyers intensifies ]
I hope they find out the cause & make sure it never happens again.
After two crashes in such a small amount of time, the investigation doesn't need to be complete. The planes should be grounded until proven safe, not flying until proven unsafe.
Is your position that any grounding of the planes is unjustified until the full root cause is determined, or that "only" two crashes isn't enough to justify this action?
While I would always rather understand root cause -- and it's absolutely essential to get there eventually -- the world is full of imperfect information and assumptions are sometimes all you have.
Regarding the 737 MAX now, the prior Lion Air crash is reasonably well understood. It has exposed some fundamental weakness and questionable design choices, but the plane was still deemed safe to fly.
Thus, what we have is one unexplained crash. Why should it be grounded?
(Having said that, I'm avoiding the MAX as far as I can. But that's based already on the Lion Air crash. So, I argue that it should've been grounded after Lion Air became understood, or not at all.)
I don't understand how they could build MCAS on the basis of one (!) AoA sensor.
China grounds it after Europe.
US grounds it after consulting with Boeing.
Europe was anti US. China was reactionary. And US was protecting their own.
The major people to be hurt are airlines and travelers.
... i mean, honestly all we're doing out here is sitting back with a bag of popcorn and channel flipping between the UK parliament on Brexit, and Trump on twitter. And they say there's nothing entertaining on TV any more...
Also, the FAA makes precautionary changes before it knows everything, it has routinely issued emergency airworthiness directives before investigations have been complete.