This article reminds me of ones I have read about the British class system and how it has been blamed for failures in being technically innovative despite being the nation which produced Alan Turing.
I think it might be profound yet sort of obvious - hierarchical organizations reflect the failings of their heads as their control causes the organizations to reflect their /actual/ values, the ones not on banal mission statements but how they act.
The same already happened with Detroit car companies and how they have often been a joke even domestically.
The real question is how to reform or replace Wall Street Investment "management" as they lead down hill by being too short-termist and bean counter.
They seem somewhat aware of it themselves in some ways with market caps often being higher in tech companies with "executive" shares given disproportionate control value to founders.
I've come to the conclusion that the problem with large, MBA-managed companies is that they are centrally-planned dictatorships. I think the founders typically make an effort to have the leaves make decisions, but after the founders are gone then decision-making centralizes. Beyond a certain size, central-planning is inefficient, as we've seen with Communist countries. And from my outside perspective, MBA programs teach people that central-planning is what produces "shareholder returns". Add in some hubris on the part of the CEO and the fact that control is the easiest way to get people to do what you the central-planning agency wants, and you get the large corporation.
Leadership is vision and empowering the leaves, but that takes knowing yourself (to get the vision) and courage (to let the leaves have control). It's easier to act like a boss and give yourself the title of "leader". The only difference between a boss and a dictator is that that a boss controls by economic power and a dictator controls by physical power.
(Of course, most companies and management are somewhere in-between the poles)
Salon.com uncritically regurgitating someone else's ridiculous article for clicks may be the greatest indictment of 21st-century capitalism.
From the original article: "So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max."
No, it was not dynamically unstable. It just had sufficiently different performance compared with the original that it would require a new type rating without the MCAS system.
And since you all demand low ticket prices to make you feel like you are not being exploited by stagnant low wages and unpaid internships and whatnot, market forces required the airlines and Boeing to find a solution that would not require excessive retraining.
But I guess that's what you might think if you're a GA pilot whose greatest source of relevant experience is that you once flew a 757 full-motion simulator.
By all means, keep jetting around the world belching out greenhouse gasses and demanding that Boeing comply with the deflationary forces that you have come to accept as your birthright. I'm sure a quick technical fix will ensure that an incompetent pilot never has to hand-fly an aircraft ever again. Good plan.
This article seems to focus on things from a perspective of things from a small plane pilot. So a little wider perspective might be helpful.
A 737 first off is not a Cessna like the author mentions flying. You do not get to use direct inputs easily nor do you want to have to fight stab trim because the force on the stabilizer control surfaces is muuuch higher than those on a slower flying plane. Because of this, when the 737 came out there were designs for trim systems that can help. These systems work by adjusting the trim settings for pitch using motors (like the author mentioned). However sometimes these systems would give erroneous inputs to the trim. The system might be causing incorrect trim up or down depending on the failure. This is officially known as stabilizer trim runaway. The procedure for this has been well established as a memory item meaning all pilots of 737s must be able to correct this without referencing a checklist since it is so dangerous. And it is HARD to correct because of the aerodynamic forces on the stabilizer. You can find videos of training for it. Now they introduced MCAS. A system designed to adjust trim automatically to compensate for the shift in the moments acting on the plane due to powerplant placement, etc. This adjusts the trim as well to prevent to high of angle of attack that would allow these different moments to introduce a stall situation. So what procedure should you use if it starts giving incorrect inputs? That's right, the stab trim runaway procedures, which again should be a memory item all pilots of these 737s should know and be ready and able to execute. The differences between systems that cause it just means you are taking different systems out of the control loop. This is also why I believe the FAA said it was fine to forego full airframe certification requirements. The procedures for handling the plane just didn't change drastically enough.
Yes there was negligence on Boeing's part, but I also think it's worrying that the reports seemed to indicate that the correct procedures for runaway stab trim were not followed which could have saved lives (e.g. turning MCAS back on while dealing with runaway stab trim). Also something to note is the plane in Ethiopian airways' crash was flying with "unusually high thrust settings". Remember the aerodynamic forces that make runaway stab trim a bitch to deal with? Well those forces get stronger with more speed. People are quick to point the finger at Boeing and surely they ARE at fault in some ways, but what's worrying to me is that there are pilots that are being trained that cannot perform the proper procedures that have been known since way before MCAS. Whats more is that the motors for trim from MCAS is limited to move at a rate of 2.5 degrees over 10 seconds with a pause of 5 seconds before the next adjustment. This is definitely slow enough to give pilots time to catch the runaway trim, cutout the stab trim and regain control. Anyway I am just surprised that the engineer, working for Boeing, couldn't be arsed to also give this info which allows an alternative perspective. It is bad that stab trim runaway is happening more with this system and Boeing acknowledged it and pushed patches. It is worse imo that pilots are forgetting or just not being trained on how to recognize and correct for stab trim.
Edit: Any details or numbers about the systems I got wrong please post a comment so I can correct it.
I think it's not just that question and this is what I dislike about the whole discussion. It's all about Boeing and no one is also asking "if proper procedure was performed for runaway stab trim (again, a generalized memory item) would the plane have crashed? And it does seem the sentiment is to hell with anyone suggesting pilots and airlines involved share part of the blame despite evidence.
I could also ask, would the plane have crashed if it WASNT a max and another stab trim system failed?
It's both. We need to look at everything otherwise we will end up solving only 1 part of the issue.
Edit: To address something you mentioned about root cause (in aviation it's almost never a single root cause and I will give an example that shows such cases here). Let's look at another situation: Assume P&W designs an engine model a plane uses. The plane they are used in has in-air engine fire procedures that must be performed in order to mitigate disaster regardless of the engine model used. Now imagine the new engine design causes more engine fires. If pilots don't manage the problem appropriately when it occurs, what is the root cause? The poor engine design? Improper training from the pilot? In my opinion it's, again, both. Poor training coupled with higher chance of system issues.
The pilots and the airlines didn't design, build, and release a semi-autonomous system which isn't resilient to erroneous data, despite the failure case for that problem being catastrophic.
If an Automotive OEM released a vehicle with an adaptive cruise control system that refused to disable itself except by the human driver intervening through power cycling the vehicle, while driving, it's difficult to put much warranted blame on the driver. The OEM sold a potentially catastrophically faulty system, irrespective of that the fault can sometimes be managed into a fail-safe condition by the driver.
The reason people put the blame on Boeing is because the system implementation didn't fail, the design did.
It doesn't refuse to disable. People are mixing this up with overriding control inputs. It is still possible to take MCAS out if the control loop using stab trim cutout. However when left active it does override pilot inputs. Think of it as the alpha authority that exists on airbuses. However if you follow proper stab trim runaway procedures you cutout stab trim taking MCAS out which restores pilot authority. Again this procedure should be second nature to 737 pilots of any submodel.
In your example, if there were adaptive cruise control, I would turn off cruise control by hitting the button. Same options are present here. However it does mean that braking or acceleration would be overriden until that happens. But the real analogy is if all drivers had to be trained that you turn off cruise control in runaway. If you don't do that, well then you will crash and it's from system failure AND improper general procedure
The example analog I chose is actually a thing, and hitting the button does nothing.
The problem is in the design. Despite the fact that it's possible to defeat the failure in some instances (assuming it hopefully doesn't manifest itself too close to the disaster envelope to start with), the failure case 1) never should have happened and 2) shouldn't require unintuitive remediation.
It's bad design and bad functional-safety analysis. Neither of which fall to the fleet operator or system operator.
Yes I agree. And I'm pleading that everyone also recognise the other aspects of these.incidents such as improper basic procedure. It's all of the above.
Edit: And remember at the end of the day, these airlines and pilots agreed to fly the plane. Even in the wake of the LionAir incident. At the end of the day, the pilots choose to fly and can say no if they aren't comfortable. And if the answer to this is that there is pressure from airlines to keep flying? We just found another major issue and danger in aviation
Edit2: should clarify actually that I agree it's a bad design. Not about the procedures being "unintuitive". If the pilots think the corrective procedures are unintuitive they shouldn't fly any 737 since stab trim systems exist on all 737s and require the same corrective procedure in runaway stab trim.
Are you a pilot? If so what are your qualifications?
Have you read the ET302 preliminary report? In particular have you read page 25, section 2 "Initial findings" last bullet which I quote:
The crew performed runaway stabilizer checklist and put the stab trim cutout switch to cutout position and confirmed that the manual trim operation was not working.
How can you read that, and say multiple times in this thread "improper procedure"? On what basis?
You have no idea how much mental discipline it's taking me, as a pilot, to refrain from ad hominem attack. Your arguments are that bad, they are that willfully contrary to the available facts.
I get it. I understand everyone's frustration. In similar fashion I understand how unlikely it is a crew would have the mental capacity to deal with stick shakers, GPWS callouts, and still fix the problem and that is the tragedy here. However the report said they followed proper procedure but look at the data. 95% N1, turning auto trim on and off a few times, the last time causing the huge -2G bump. There also is not enough data to us yet to determine they did regain control of the plane before enabling electric trim again. I don't think in the case of runaway trim you are supposed to keep switching the cutoff and leave your plane above Vmo. Something doesn't add up according to the data imo.
This is such a bullshit response. You don't answer any of my questions. You proceed to armchair pilot. You use terms you cannot completely understand from a big picture yet claim to come at this from a big picture perspective. That's so out of order.
Do you know a power reduction causes a nose down moment and actually makes the problem worse?
What does "turning auto trim on and off" mean? Are you referring to the you're toggle it the stab trim switches flipped between normal and cutoff? If the latter you are wrong, zero evidence that happened a few times.
There was no -2 G vertical acceleration.
What you are doing is in my view a mental disturbance. You are using terms as if you know what you're talking about. You don't. You are a bullshitter.
Okay. Calm down for 1. Also the prelim data is there to review. The graph shows clearly there's a large plunge and there absolutely was a negative g report in the prelim showing that at the final few moments the trim settings from the FCC gave another correction. As for the cutoff, the report annotations tell you when they toggled the cutout switch. I went back and yeah actually you're right it was only once to cutoff and back to normal sorry for that mistake. However the overspeed is still supported from the data and yes the data shows vertical g forces and at the end there was a lurch of -2 Gs before total loss. It's on page 27.
As for less speed causing more nose down moment, yeah but at the same time they weren't in a descent for that portion either, nor were they nose down (this from page 26). The data shows they were oscillating though climbing slightly while they were overspeeding. In this case it could have helped to reduce the forces at play. I think it was more that they were just busy and left thrust settings where they were from takeoff.
Everyone hears you, most have taken your words into comsideration but I think the part you're missing is the fact that it was impossible for pilot and airline themselves to remediate problems because knowledge of the system wasn't there until it was too late, and even when information began trickling out from Boeing, it's been so slow, and so insubstantive, as to be worthless, likely because of concerns with legal exposure on Boeing's part.
The pilot's absolutely agreed to fly the plane. As far as they knew, it flew like a 737, and they knew everything they needed to know.
Boeing revealed as little as they did about MCAS to spare pilot's the "gory details" because the plane was allegedly "just another 737".
Information does not perfectly diffuse, and doesn't diffuse at all without effort. Half the outcry over this probably isn't from pilot's or aerodynamicist's at Boeing at all, but from people passionate and informed enough to get the word of the colossal fuck up out in as many ways as possible to the people who need to know it most.
I've been in these threads on Hacker News since the Lion Air incident, and held my tongue at many times. Cautioning more and more that new information will drive the development, but in all likelihood, given the facts we have access to, the problems will have occurred in X, Y, Z spots, all of which have origins within Boeing and the FAA as organizations.
The FAA delegated responsibility for vetting to Boeing. Boeing CHOSE to accept that mantle of trust, then discarded the integrity part as soon as the bottom line was threatened by a competitor.
Airlines fly planes. They don't make them. That was Boeing's job, and they cashed in on the better part of a century of goodwill, and torched the entire pile by delivering a complete failure in terms of their own responsibility to the public.
We get it. You think the pilots and airlines should shoulder the blame too. Understood. Many though, myself included, understand that the world runs on incomplete information transfer between designers and operators, and given that, an enormous responsibility is put on designers of industrial scale systems to take extra care to make sure that "unintuitive designs" are very clearly documented and made known to their operators who will have lives and property on the line.
Buying the planes from Boeing came with an implicit trust on the part of airlines that anything different to look out for would be clearly communicated. That didn't happen. They relied on Boeing doing that part. Boeing failed. The fact that armchair aeronautics engineers got to the root cause in such a short time, with so little information beyond the FDR means that it is not unreasonable for the professional engineers at Boeing whose raison d'être is to design safe planes to have caught it.
I don't think anyone here has such a severe grudge against Boeing's existence to just go after them for merely existing. Many, or at least I, am just awestruck at the magnitude of collective failure that occurred.
The data all points to them. Of everyone involved, they alone had both the means and onus to prevent what happened.
But it didn't. So here we are. Something needs to be done, we have very specific rules about how to do it, but nevertheless, something has to changed.
We owe at least that to the lost that their unwitting and tragic sacrifice shall not have been in vain.
The families that have been broken; the sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandparents who will never arrive at their destination demand it. Our integrity, "Our" being those of the will, hubris, and capability to take the lives and fates of others in the embrace of our works, demands it.
Somewhere, at some point, complacency, and cultural degradation happened for whatever reason.
It must be exposed. The historical annals decorated once more in blood, that we never lose sight of the cost of any shirking of our re...
In the case of ET302, you are ignoring mistrim at high airspeed being essentially impossible to retrim manually (by handcrank). If they followed the runaway trim procedure exactly, and did not re-enable autotrim, they would have died, they were mistrimmed, decending, and with increasing airspeed. How do you propose they get out of that without enabling autotrim, in order to have the electric trim motor help them retrim?
In the case of LNI610, you are assuming MCAS upset and approach to mistrim looks anything like runaway trim. There's quite a lot of evidence that it doesn't look like that, but is rather insidious.
It's probably being downvoted because it's a long and rambling way of yet again blaming the pilots for not following procedures when the official investigations have proven that this was absolutely not the case.
Being "well-written and detailed" doesn't make it correct.
Yeah I clarified in the reply that I don't think it's one or the other but all of the above. I'm trying to supplement the author's write-up, not override it. I hat that it's become a case of a single fault. It's not. It usually never is. And people are arguing only one side or the other. In every incident we need to look at the whole picture.
This was not a mistake, and it's wrong to characterize it as correct procedure not followed.
a. Strictly speaking, MCAS cannot be turned off. Autotrim can be turned off.
b. It's more clear than not, from at least the preliminary report on ET302, that the forces from MCAS induced mistrim at Vno were too high to manually retrim at the altitude they were at. The mistrim recovery maneuver requires releasing back pressure on the yoke to reduce the mistrim force in order for manual retrim to be possible. The transcript fairly clearly (not conclusively) suggests manual trim wheel would not budge. They were already at Vno at a low altitude, and it is reasonable they chose to reenable autotrim in order to gain leverage from the electric motor to overpower the wedged jackscrew.
At 05:43:11 (page 26 of the ET302 preliminary report) you can see two small trim events which are pilot yoke trim toggle switch electric motor assisted trim events; followed ~4 seconds later by an MCAS induced nose down trim that was a complete obscenity.
It was so extreme that the vertical acceleration sensor reports negative values. Only by being strapped in did they not hit the ceiling. That's how aggressive this last nose down MCAS initiation was, and within seconds later they were at 40 degrees nose down. For any automated system to have moved the stabilizer trim this much at Vno is a deeply flawed system. If a human pilot did the same thing in the same situation it would be considered attempted homicide, there is no possible alternative outcome but death for everyone.
You can correctly say: too bad they did not have our extreme mistrust of this MCAS system, too bad they did not realize at the time the extent of the betrayal they were facing. It is more clear than not that they still didn't know the details of how this system worked, that's why they didn't immediately return trim stab to shutoff after their two nose up trims.
It's flat out wrong to say the pilots did not follow proper procedure. They did follow it in the ET302 case. It didn't work. They almost certainly had to reenable stab trim, because the manual trim was stuck due to mistrim forces.
If the massive success of air travel in the US, which Boeing is a part of, is a product of 21st-century capitalism, THEN SIGN ME UP FOR MORE OF THAT!
This article seems a bit myopic.
The massive success was in the 20th century, the 21st has been a massive annoyance because of the loss of rights and privacy.
The interesting thing to me is that Boeing seems to have completely failed to restrain management pressure to perform economically and went right past the acceptable performance boundary (dynamic safety model).
Even an allegedly high reliability organization was not able to escape bean counting in the end. It would seem that capitalism's typical obsession with profit can't be reconciled with reliability on the long term.
Corporations and capitalism are different things. Capitalism is composed of a constant churn of organizations which are all failing at different rates. The point is that the system as a whole is not reliant upon the continual success of any of them. In a planned economy, the entire system depends on a single institution remaining competent indefinitely.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 69.2 ms ] threadI think it might be profound yet sort of obvious - hierarchical organizations reflect the failings of their heads as their control causes the organizations to reflect their /actual/ values, the ones not on banal mission statements but how they act.
The same already happened with Detroit car companies and how they have often been a joke even domestically.
The real question is how to reform or replace Wall Street Investment "management" as they lead down hill by being too short-termist and bean counter.
They seem somewhat aware of it themselves in some ways with market caps often being higher in tech companies with "executive" shares given disproportionate control value to founders.
Leadership is vision and empowering the leaves, but that takes knowing yourself (to get the vision) and courage (to let the leaves have control). It's easier to act like a boss and give yourself the title of "leader". The only difference between a boss and a dictator is that that a boss controls by economic power and a dictator controls by physical power.
(Of course, most companies and management are somewhere in-between the poles)
From the original article: "So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max."
No, it was not dynamically unstable. It just had sufficiently different performance compared with the original that it would require a new type rating without the MCAS system.
And since you all demand low ticket prices to make you feel like you are not being exploited by stagnant low wages and unpaid internships and whatnot, market forces required the airlines and Boeing to find a solution that would not require excessive retraining.
But I guess that's what you might think if you're a GA pilot whose greatest source of relevant experience is that you once flew a 757 full-motion simulator.
By all means, keep jetting around the world belching out greenhouse gasses and demanding that Boeing comply with the deflationary forces that you have come to accept as your birthright. I'm sure a quick technical fix will ensure that an incompetent pilot never has to hand-fly an aircraft ever again. Good plan.
A 737 first off is not a Cessna like the author mentions flying. You do not get to use direct inputs easily nor do you want to have to fight stab trim because the force on the stabilizer control surfaces is muuuch higher than those on a slower flying plane. Because of this, when the 737 came out there were designs for trim systems that can help. These systems work by adjusting the trim settings for pitch using motors (like the author mentioned). However sometimes these systems would give erroneous inputs to the trim. The system might be causing incorrect trim up or down depending on the failure. This is officially known as stabilizer trim runaway. The procedure for this has been well established as a memory item meaning all pilots of 737s must be able to correct this without referencing a checklist since it is so dangerous. And it is HARD to correct because of the aerodynamic forces on the stabilizer. You can find videos of training for it. Now they introduced MCAS. A system designed to adjust trim automatically to compensate for the shift in the moments acting on the plane due to powerplant placement, etc. This adjusts the trim as well to prevent to high of angle of attack that would allow these different moments to introduce a stall situation. So what procedure should you use if it starts giving incorrect inputs? That's right, the stab trim runaway procedures, which again should be a memory item all pilots of these 737s should know and be ready and able to execute. The differences between systems that cause it just means you are taking different systems out of the control loop. This is also why I believe the FAA said it was fine to forego full airframe certification requirements. The procedures for handling the plane just didn't change drastically enough.
Yes there was negligence on Boeing's part, but I also think it's worrying that the reports seemed to indicate that the correct procedures for runaway stab trim were not followed which could have saved lives (e.g. turning MCAS back on while dealing with runaway stab trim). Also something to note is the plane in Ethiopian airways' crash was flying with "unusually high thrust settings". Remember the aerodynamic forces that make runaway stab trim a bitch to deal with? Well those forces get stronger with more speed. People are quick to point the finger at Boeing and surely they ARE at fault in some ways, but what's worrying to me is that there are pilots that are being trained that cannot perform the proper procedures that have been known since way before MCAS. Whats more is that the motors for trim from MCAS is limited to move at a rate of 2.5 degrees over 10 seconds with a pause of 5 seconds before the next adjustment. This is definitely slow enough to give pilots time to catch the runaway trim, cutout the stab trim and regain control. Anyway I am just surprised that the engineer, working for Boeing, couldn't be arsed to also give this info which allows an alternative perspective. It is bad that stab trim runaway is happening more with this system and Boeing acknowledged it and pushed patches. It is worse imo that pilots are forgetting or just not being trained on how to recognize and correct for stab trim.
Edit: Any details or numbers about the systems I got wrong please post a comment so I can correct it.
I don't think so, but I'm open to being proved wrong. In that case the root cause of the two crashes is Boeing trying to save money.
I could also ask, would the plane have crashed if it WASNT a max and another stab trim system failed?
It's both. We need to look at everything otherwise we will end up solving only 1 part of the issue.
Edit: To address something you mentioned about root cause (in aviation it's almost never a single root cause and I will give an example that shows such cases here). Let's look at another situation: Assume P&W designs an engine model a plane uses. The plane they are used in has in-air engine fire procedures that must be performed in order to mitigate disaster regardless of the engine model used. Now imagine the new engine design causes more engine fires. If pilots don't manage the problem appropriately when it occurs, what is the root cause? The poor engine design? Improper training from the pilot? In my opinion it's, again, both. Poor training coupled with higher chance of system issues.
If an Automotive OEM released a vehicle with an adaptive cruise control system that refused to disable itself except by the human driver intervening through power cycling the vehicle, while driving, it's difficult to put much warranted blame on the driver. The OEM sold a potentially catastrophically faulty system, irrespective of that the fault can sometimes be managed into a fail-safe condition by the driver.
The reason people put the blame on Boeing is because the system implementation didn't fail, the design did.
In your example, if there were adaptive cruise control, I would turn off cruise control by hitting the button. Same options are present here. However it does mean that braking or acceleration would be overriden until that happens. But the real analogy is if all drivers had to be trained that you turn off cruise control in runaway. If you don't do that, well then you will crash and it's from system failure AND improper general procedure
The problem is in the design. Despite the fact that it's possible to defeat the failure in some instances (assuming it hopefully doesn't manifest itself too close to the disaster envelope to start with), the failure case 1) never should have happened and 2) shouldn't require unintuitive remediation.
It's bad design and bad functional-safety analysis. Neither of which fall to the fleet operator or system operator.
Edit: And remember at the end of the day, these airlines and pilots agreed to fly the plane. Even in the wake of the LionAir incident. At the end of the day, the pilots choose to fly and can say no if they aren't comfortable. And if the answer to this is that there is pressure from airlines to keep flying? We just found another major issue and danger in aviation
Edit2: should clarify actually that I agree it's a bad design. Not about the procedures being "unintuitive". If the pilots think the corrective procedures are unintuitive they shouldn't fly any 737 since stab trim systems exist on all 737s and require the same corrective procedure in runaway stab trim.
Have you read the ET302 preliminary report? In particular have you read page 25, section 2 "Initial findings" last bullet which I quote:
The crew performed runaway stabilizer checklist and put the stab trim cutout switch to cutout position and confirmed that the manual trim operation was not working.
How can you read that, and say multiple times in this thread "improper procedure"? On what basis?
You have no idea how much mental discipline it's taking me, as a pilot, to refrain from ad hominem attack. Your arguments are that bad, they are that willfully contrary to the available facts.
Do you know a power reduction causes a nose down moment and actually makes the problem worse?
What does "turning auto trim on and off" mean? Are you referring to the you're toggle it the stab trim switches flipped between normal and cutoff? If the latter you are wrong, zero evidence that happened a few times.
There was no -2 G vertical acceleration.
What you are doing is in my view a mental disturbance. You are using terms as if you know what you're talking about. You don't. You are a bullshitter.
Please stop.
As for less speed causing more nose down moment, yeah but at the same time they weren't in a descent for that portion either, nor were they nose down (this from page 26). The data shows they were oscillating though climbing slightly while they were overspeeding. In this case it could have helped to reduce the forces at play. I think it was more that they were just busy and left thrust settings where they were from takeoff.
The pilot's absolutely agreed to fly the plane. As far as they knew, it flew like a 737, and they knew everything they needed to know.
Boeing revealed as little as they did about MCAS to spare pilot's the "gory details" because the plane was allegedly "just another 737".
Information does not perfectly diffuse, and doesn't diffuse at all without effort. Half the outcry over this probably isn't from pilot's or aerodynamicist's at Boeing at all, but from people passionate and informed enough to get the word of the colossal fuck up out in as many ways as possible to the people who need to know it most.
I've been in these threads on Hacker News since the Lion Air incident, and held my tongue at many times. Cautioning more and more that new information will drive the development, but in all likelihood, given the facts we have access to, the problems will have occurred in X, Y, Z spots, all of which have origins within Boeing and the FAA as organizations.
The FAA delegated responsibility for vetting to Boeing. Boeing CHOSE to accept that mantle of trust, then discarded the integrity part as soon as the bottom line was threatened by a competitor.
Airlines fly planes. They don't make them. That was Boeing's job, and they cashed in on the better part of a century of goodwill, and torched the entire pile by delivering a complete failure in terms of their own responsibility to the public.
We get it. You think the pilots and airlines should shoulder the blame too. Understood. Many though, myself included, understand that the world runs on incomplete information transfer between designers and operators, and given that, an enormous responsibility is put on designers of industrial scale systems to take extra care to make sure that "unintuitive designs" are very clearly documented and made known to their operators who will have lives and property on the line.
Buying the planes from Boeing came with an implicit trust on the part of airlines that anything different to look out for would be clearly communicated. That didn't happen. They relied on Boeing doing that part. Boeing failed. The fact that armchair aeronautics engineers got to the root cause in such a short time, with so little information beyond the FDR means that it is not unreasonable for the professional engineers at Boeing whose raison d'être is to design safe planes to have caught it.
I don't think anyone here has such a severe grudge against Boeing's existence to just go after them for merely existing. Many, or at least I, am just awestruck at the magnitude of collective failure that occurred.
The data all points to them. Of everyone involved, they alone had both the means and onus to prevent what happened.
But it didn't. So here we are. Something needs to be done, we have very specific rules about how to do it, but nevertheless, something has to changed.
We owe at least that to the lost that their unwitting and tragic sacrifice shall not have been in vain.
The families that have been broken; the sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandparents who will never arrive at their destination demand it. Our integrity, "Our" being those of the will, hubris, and capability to take the lives and fates of others in the embrace of our works, demands it.
Somewhere, at some point, complacency, and cultural degradation happened for whatever reason.
It must be exposed. The historical annals decorated once more in blood, that we never lose sight of the cost of any shirking of our re...
In the case of LNI610, you are assuming MCAS upset and approach to mistrim looks anything like runaway trim. There's quite a lot of evidence that it doesn't look like that, but is rather insidious.
Why downvote this? Because it's interrupting a hate-fest on "21st-century capitalism"?
IMO the Salon article itself is pretty worthless; most of the substance comes from the IEEE article that has been already been well-discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694207
Being "well-written and detailed" doesn't make it correct.
(I didn't vote either way, FWIW).
This was not a mistake, and it's wrong to characterize it as correct procedure not followed.
a. Strictly speaking, MCAS cannot be turned off. Autotrim can be turned off.
b. It's more clear than not, from at least the preliminary report on ET302, that the forces from MCAS induced mistrim at Vno were too high to manually retrim at the altitude they were at. The mistrim recovery maneuver requires releasing back pressure on the yoke to reduce the mistrim force in order for manual retrim to be possible. The transcript fairly clearly (not conclusively) suggests manual trim wheel would not budge. They were already at Vno at a low altitude, and it is reasonable they chose to reenable autotrim in order to gain leverage from the electric motor to overpower the wedged jackscrew.
At 05:43:11 (page 26 of the ET302 preliminary report) you can see two small trim events which are pilot yoke trim toggle switch electric motor assisted trim events; followed ~4 seconds later by an MCAS induced nose down trim that was a complete obscenity.
It was so extreme that the vertical acceleration sensor reports negative values. Only by being strapped in did they not hit the ceiling. That's how aggressive this last nose down MCAS initiation was, and within seconds later they were at 40 degrees nose down. For any automated system to have moved the stabilizer trim this much at Vno is a deeply flawed system. If a human pilot did the same thing in the same situation it would be considered attempted homicide, there is no possible alternative outcome but death for everyone.
You can correctly say: too bad they did not have our extreme mistrust of this MCAS system, too bad they did not realize at the time the extent of the betrayal they were facing. It is more clear than not that they still didn't know the details of how this system worked, that's why they didn't immediately return trim stab to shutoff after their two nose up trims.
It's flat out wrong to say the pilots did not follow proper procedure. They did follow it in the ET302 case. It didn't work. They almost certainly had to reenable stab trim, because the manual trim was stuck due to mistrim forces.
The interesting thing to me is that Boeing seems to have completely failed to restrain management pressure to perform economically and went right past the acceptable performance boundary (dynamic safety model).
Even an allegedly high reliability organization was not able to escape bean counting in the end. It would seem that capitalism's typical obsession with profit can't be reconciled with reliability on the long term.