To be cynical, it probably worked out well for Garuda since their finances aren't strong. And with 5,000+ Max still in the backlog this is 1% of orders, so not much of a hit for Boeing. About $5 billion at list price, probably much less in reality.
What would really impress would be if they now ordered 49 COMAC C919 narrowbodies from China. That would send a signal that airlines are fed up with the A-B duopoly and that they're not prepared to take recycled designs any longer.
"...that they're not prepared to take recycled designs any longer".
I believe that the use of recycled designs is one of the major guarantees for aircraft safety! There is nothing wrong with a gradual development process, where only small modifications are done from one revision to the next. This is a bit like continuous integration principles in software development. Building on former experience as much as possible is an important factor of quality assurance (and also efficient in many other aspects).
I understand your point, though: small modifications can sum up to a point, where they do not blend smoothly in the base design anymore - as is the case with the larger engines of the 737 8 max. At some point, designers have to refactor big.
What went (criminally) wrong with the 737 8 max, in my eyes, is the attempt to treat a large redesign as a small modification, to save (certification) time and money. It went horribly wrong, causing loss of lives and trust in the company.
And obviously Boeing is not able to understand the consequences of the loss of trust. Last week I thought, the worst thing that Boeing could do now, was to offer quick fixes (like hot patches for the software), as this would proof their incapacity to embrace the scale of the problem. But this is exactly what happened.
Indeed, I too was shocked to see them come up with a patch solution vs recognizing that perhaps the plane design and the oversized engine are the areas that need attention. Sorry Boeing, some things don’t blow over. I think the public took note and the damage is already done. The best thing they can do now is own up to their mistakes. I have a feeling it will take all the lawsuits combined to make any impact though.
I think it's easy to predict that Garuda is just trying to create some leverage to negotiate a discount with Boeing, and they will just re-affirm their order quietly in a few weeks or months. I expect more airlines doing the same. Boeing marketing and sales is probably working overtime to make sure most of this stays out of the news.
The reason might rather be that it doesn't make sense to purchase an aircraft passengers are reluctant to fly with. No matter how well the problems of the 737 8 MAX are resolved, its reputation is tainted. Every further accident of that type will be blamed to Boeing.
It reminds me a lot of the DC-10 in the 1970s.
Boeing will probably have to rename the 737 8 MAX and marketing it as a brand new type.
I'll believe it when I see it. Much more likely they will just fix the plane as they have already communicated they will do, airlines will continue buying it, and people will happily board the airplanes.
I'm pretty sure the percentage of travelers who check the type of aircraft an airline uses before booking is counted in some small fraction of a percent. I surely never did, and never heard anyone mention they did.
Also, Boeing is not going to fool any airline by simply re-branding the plane, so if airlines pressure them now to get discounts on their 737 MAX 8 orders, that obviously also applies to the rebranded plane.
That'd be an interesting move, and perhaps a plausible one since the maintenance/training/spares providers all being based in China isn't such a big deal for an Indonesian company
(though the issue here appears to have been Boeing didn't recycle enough of the previous generation 737...)
The Airbus A320neo production lines are booked through 2025. Airlines and leasing companies can't really cancel their 737 Max orders and buy A320neos instead. Maybe Airbus can get more orders for other models if buyers decide to go with Airbus instead of Boeing for larger planes, but that can also be an expensive switch to make if their pilots are certified for the Boeing but not the Airbus models. There are plenty of factors at play here.
It's true that both Airbus and Boeing have a huge backlog of orders for aircraft at the moment, with a lot of growth in air travel in Asia.
However, the airline industry is cyclical and the current boom might be particularly big because of very low interest rates. Many aircraft are bought and leased through third party companies and everything is heavily financialised (these days, what isn't?). Additionally there are manufacturers (including a Chinese company) trying to break into the short haul market. If there is a large bust there will be a lot of orders cancelled and these cancellations may hit Boeing harder than it's competitors.
A bad knock on internal and external confidence in both Boeing and the FAA could have lasting repercussions, Boeing might find it harder and slower to develop new aircraft if they and the FAA have to rebuild institutional capability and then convince the world that they have done so. The recent investigation by the Seattle Times makes for grim reading: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...
Seems neither the FAA nor Boeing can be trusted. How can anyone without expert knowledge have the final say so in technical certification? It sounds like FAA just chose to cut corners and passed the problem down to the company. Do family members of victims have a solid case for lawsuits here? I hope they do because this process has to change if the people are to trust in those who are supposed to be looking out for safety.
Well, Airbus has also had its share of issues with bad pitot tube data combined with automation leading to catastrophic accidents. [0] From the evidence so far it seems Boeing made a similar mistake. It's not the first and unlikely to be the last.
When you actually look at the linked article it wasn't so much an equipment problem, but really a crew issue. Something often conveniently hushed over in those recent discussions.
While there was equipment failure this was not the main cause of the crash. The very same article you link to list the following as the cause of the accident :
the crew made inappropriate control inputs that destabilized the flight path;
the crew failed to follow appropriate procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information;
the crew were late in identifying and correcting the deviation from the flight path;
the crew lacked understanding of the approach to stall;
the crew failed to recognize the aircraft had stalled and consequently did not make inputs that would have made it possible to recover from the stall.
There's one mentioning of the pitot tube in this list. And certainly not as the main cause:
temporary inconsistency between the measured speeds, likely as a result of the obstruction of the pitot tubes by ice crystals, causing autopilot disconnection and reconfiguration to alternate law;
I interpret this that the plane worked exactly as it should. Essentially it was really the crew that fucked up.
It's not really comparable with what happened (probably) on those 737MAX8 planes that crashed.
There's no question the crew made serious mistakes that led to the stall and subsequent crash in the AF 447 case. Yet you could argue Airbus and AF did not sufficiently highlight this case to ensure adequate training to ensure a proper response. Something similar may emerge from the 737Max cases.
It's hard to trust just a "software update" with your life. I don't believe what Boeing is allegedly trying to do to fix the MCAS problems is sufficient. If they don't read 3 angle of attack sensors, how is this 'software update' going to solve anything.
And all they have is 2 sensors (only 1 of which is read now)
If they have 2 AoA's and they disagree, they can indicate that with the light AoA disagree, disable MCAS and display on the CDU that MCAS is disabled. So the pilot knows what's happening and take corrective action.
>So the pilot knows what's happening and take corrective action
Except that now we have a plane that behaves differently compared to the plane the pilot actually is trained for (the whole reason to implement MCAS in the first place). So now the plane comes down because it stalls where it should not according to the training of the pilot. Gee, makes me confident to fly...
Apologies, I keep trying to quash this one but it keeps reappearing. The reason MCAS is needed is because the engine nacelle generates lift at high angles of attack. This meant that there was a lack of positive control required to increase angle of attack.
I understand this as if you need to pull with 10KG of force to get a 10 degree angle of attack, then you need to pull with at least 20kg to get to a 20 degree angle of attack. I'm not going to claim that's 100% accurate but I believe it's close enough.
This is a generic requirement of part 25. So had the 737 Max been a clean sheet design it would have been a requirement. It's not just a compatibility layer to make it behave the same as old aircraft. It's a fix to make it meet the requirements of certification.
Training only came into it at the point that Boeing declined to add it to the difference training, charitably, because they felt the system was covered by existing procedures or, less charitably, because they wanted to downplay any differences to make the aircraft more appealing.
Absolutely. I feel that the motives which led to the situation are quite important though in the greater scheme of things.
To phrase it another way, without MCAS the 737 Max didn't meant the requirements of certification and so wouldn't have gone into production. The alternative wasn't to train pilots into how to handle the new stall characteristics.
Of course, the region of flight that MCAS was intended to activate in is also a bit of an edge case. Without MCAS we may have seen an aircraft flown into a stall, most likely around a critical phase of flight (landing or a go-around), but that would have involved a pilot ignoring numerous warnings (stick shaker activation, 'stall stall' oral alerts etc) and you'd be better categorised as pilot error than directly related to the handling characteristics.
Unfortunately, due to a terrible system design, MCAS appears to be activating in regions of flight outside of the design intent and with greater authority than it should ever have been given.
I guess that, for systems that are not considered critical for safety, disabling them if they are failing in a way that creates additional problems is the better option. This calculus depends on how useful they are when working, how much trouble they cause when failing, and how likely they are to fail in that way. In some cases, I imagine the option to disable comes with the requirement to land as soon as safely possible, or to not fly again until fixed.
This is precisely the issue, as far as I know, but I have had this tangential question tugging at me: The 737 already has an Elevator Feel and Centering Unit which "provides simulated aerodynamic forces using airspeed (from the elevator pitot system) and stabilizer position" [1]. I wonder why, if the issue is stick forces, this would not be the place to make a change. The answer is probably in the details of the system, but I also wonder if the reasoning was in part that, by changing the trim, the MCAS system is simultaneously and proactively reducing the possibility of a stall.
I've asked myself the same question. And the only plausible answer I can come up with is that the engineers working on the 737 Max view it the same way I view a lot of legacy code. They barely understand how it works; are kind of surprised that it does work; and have no inclination to try to change it.
The entire concept is nuts. You can't fix a primary control characteristic with a slow trim system driven by a screw jack. If Boeing wants to fix their wonky flight characteristic with software then great, but they actually have to do that.
I think to understand the thought process that lead to this system being implemented you have to understand, or at least see, the layers of fixes and kludges the 737 flight control system has had added over the years.
I came across this last night, it made my head hurt:
computers are the whole reason why air travel is literally orders of magnitude safer than car travel. airbus is fly by wire, it can't work without computers. boeing at this point is most likely, too - i don't know about them other than i read here.
For sure. But the pilots exist for a reason. It sounds like we are making it impossible for them to do their job properly when their intervention is needed.
They used to - you needed an extra person and a bigger cockpit. Computers handle things like the pressurisation of the cabin, power systems, etc. that all used to be managed and controlled by the flight engineer. They used to have a huge panel covered with gauges and controls.
Generally for a lot of those tasks the computer is better at it than people...
At the end of the day, this is more to do with bad system design, certification problems and lack of documentation and training about a critical system than computer control.
Amusingly the 737 is about as close to that philosophy as you'll be likely to fly on these days. It doesn't require a yaw damper as (to Boeing's own surprise) it is positively stable in yaw. It's flight controls are directly connected to the elevators and there is a big manual trim wheel in the middle of the cockpit.
43 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 70.5 ms ] threadWhat would really impress would be if they now ordered 49 COMAC C919 narrowbodies from China. That would send a signal that airlines are fed up with the A-B duopoly and that they're not prepared to take recycled designs any longer.
I believe that the use of recycled designs is one of the major guarantees for aircraft safety! There is nothing wrong with a gradual development process, where only small modifications are done from one revision to the next. This is a bit like continuous integration principles in software development. Building on former experience as much as possible is an important factor of quality assurance (and also efficient in many other aspects).
I understand your point, though: small modifications can sum up to a point, where they do not blend smoothly in the base design anymore - as is the case with the larger engines of the 737 8 max. At some point, designers have to refactor big.
What went (criminally) wrong with the 737 8 max, in my eyes, is the attempt to treat a large redesign as a small modification, to save (certification) time and money. It went horribly wrong, causing loss of lives and trust in the company.
And obviously Boeing is not able to understand the consequences of the loss of trust. Last week I thought, the worst thing that Boeing could do now, was to offer quick fixes (like hot patches for the software), as this would proof their incapacity to embrace the scale of the problem. But this is exactly what happened.
The reason might rather be that it doesn't make sense to purchase an aircraft passengers are reluctant to fly with. No matter how well the problems of the 737 8 MAX are resolved, its reputation is tainted. Every further accident of that type will be blamed to Boeing.
It reminds me a lot of the DC-10 in the 1970s.
Boeing will probably have to rename the 737 8 MAX and marketing it as a brand new type.
I'm pretty sure the percentage of travelers who check the type of aircraft an airline uses before booking is counted in some small fraction of a percent. I surely never did, and never heard anyone mention they did.
Also, Boeing is not going to fool any airline by simply re-branding the plane, so if airlines pressure them now to get discounts on their 737 MAX 8 orders, that obviously also applies to the rebranded plane.
(though the issue here appears to have been Boeing didn't recycle enough of the previous generation 737...)
However, the airline industry is cyclical and the current boom might be particularly big because of very low interest rates. Many aircraft are bought and leased through third party companies and everything is heavily financialised (these days, what isn't?). Additionally there are manufacturers (including a Chinese company) trying to break into the short haul market. If there is a large bust there will be a lot of orders cancelled and these cancellations may hit Boeing harder than it's competitors.
A bad knock on internal and external confidence in both Boeing and the FAA could have lasting repercussions, Boeing might find it harder and slower to develop new aircraft if they and the FAA have to rebuild institutional capability and then convince the world that they have done so. The recent investigation by the Seattle Times makes for grim reading: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...
The FAA approved this. So who can trust the FAA after this? They can expect more oversight from other national approval agencies.
Make the FAA irrelevant.
With so many eyes on them at the moment, next couple of decades should be pretty good in terms of following the rules.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
While there was equipment failure this was not the main cause of the crash. The very same article you link to list the following as the cause of the accident :
There's one mentioning of the pitot tube in this list. And certainly not as the main cause: I interpret this that the plane worked exactly as it should. Essentially it was really the crew that fucked up.It's not really comparable with what happened (probably) on those 737MAX8 planes that crashed.
Except that now we have a plane that behaves differently compared to the plane the pilot actually is trained for (the whole reason to implement MCAS in the first place). So now the plane comes down because it stalls where it should not according to the training of the pilot. Gee, makes me confident to fly...
I understand this as if you need to pull with 10KG of force to get a 10 degree angle of attack, then you need to pull with at least 20kg to get to a 20 degree angle of attack. I'm not going to claim that's 100% accurate but I believe it's close enough.
This is a generic requirement of part 25. So had the 737 Max been a clean sheet design it would have been a requirement. It's not just a compatibility layer to make it behave the same as old aircraft. It's a fix to make it meet the requirements of certification.
Training only came into it at the point that Boeing declined to add it to the difference training, charitably, because they felt the system was covered by existing procedures or, less charitably, because they wanted to downplay any differences to make the aircraft more appealing.
But that still means that if you disengage MCAS, you have a plane that flies out of certification specs (and by extension, out of the training), then?
To phrase it another way, without MCAS the 737 Max didn't meant the requirements of certification and so wouldn't have gone into production. The alternative wasn't to train pilots into how to handle the new stall characteristics.
Of course, the region of flight that MCAS was intended to activate in is also a bit of an edge case. Without MCAS we may have seen an aircraft flown into a stall, most likely around a critical phase of flight (landing or a go-around), but that would have involved a pilot ignoring numerous warnings (stick shaker activation, 'stall stall' oral alerts etc) and you'd be better categorised as pilot error than directly related to the handling characteristics.
Unfortunately, due to a terrible system design, MCAS appears to be activating in regions of flight outside of the design intent and with greater authority than it should ever have been given.
[1] https://www.737ng.co.uk/B_NG-Flight_Controls.pdf page 8.
MCAS will be fixed and done right. But what other systems the same mindset have enchanced.
I came across this last night, it made my head hurt:
https://www.satcom.guru/2018/11/stabilizer-trim.html?m=1
How realistic is that? Where theoretically a single switch is flipped and your plane flies like they used to.
Generally for a lot of those tasks the computer is better at it than people...
At the end of the day, this is more to do with bad system design, certification problems and lack of documentation and training about a critical system than computer control.