At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft.
I would not be surprised though if Boeing's sales drop if the US government brings in tariffs or etc to try and force companies to buy their flying coffins.
The A380 is the best plane ever made in the entirety of human history. It’s a damn shame it’s not used more. I’m hoping new fuel efficient engines make it viable again because there simply is NOTHING like first class on an A380.
It's interesting how so many people sounded the death knell on the A380 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Production of new A380s even ceased around this time. Now it seems demand for that size of aircraft is only increasing (at least for specific hub and spoke models).
What makes it the best? I've flown on it, and it seems nice enough, though it isn't the most comfortable airliner I've flown on. It's certainly the biggest! But there are only what, 250 or so that were put into service? It's hard to have a strong opinion about a plane in such a small niche.
For me the A380 is the most comfortable. I'm slightly scared of flying, and turbulence making the entire plane jump around makes it that much worse. I'm only speculating, but I think it might be the sheer bulk of the A380 making it the smoothest rides I've ever been on.
It’s resistant to turbulence. It has the nicest cabins for business class and up. It has many entrances which is nice because then economy doesn’t need to walk past you in contempt. It also has more safety features than I can list which makes it very hard to crash even intentionally.
It will inevitably come back in some form in the long term as air traffic keeps increasing. It's much harder to build a new runway and a new terminal in busy airports (ask Heathrow) than to add a floor to a plane.
Turns out when you care about R&D and not just profits you can build safe/reliable aircraft.
With how thin the airline industry is right now post covid though we knew stuff was going to start happening. FAA is short staffed, airline maintenance had a ton of people retire during covid, etc. Here is to hoping things will change before more people lose their lives.
> At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft.
Prior to new models released in the last ~10yrs-ish, Boeing made the safest planes in the sky (as measured by passenger miles). Many of those planes are still flying and still doing great.
For me the interesting question is what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes which is apparently resulting in worse safety performance.
I've heard that when they merged with McDonnell Douglas their new (McDonnell) management pushed out the good engineering culture and dropped their quality standards in a chase for more profit, leading to engineering experiencing the dead sea effect.
No, this isn't a well-functioning capitalist system. Competition is a core principle of capitalism. What occurred in the aerospace industry represents a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Capitalism is literally defined by the ability to invest capital to accumulate more of it by way of profit. The logical end of this process is straightforwardly monopoly.
And if the world/environment/context of the business didn’t change then the monopolies might last, but because there is change there is room to innovate and outcompete the monopolies.
Capitalism is not only defined by the accumulation of capital, but also by competition. The interplay between market forces, competition, innovation, and regulation in capitalism works against the formation of monopolies.
The aerospace industry is not a good example of capitalism. What we have with Boeing is basically a government sanctioned monopoly. It’s basically a weak form of nationalization, without the stigma.
>Capitalism is not only defined by the accumulation of capital, but also by competition
That's wrong. In reality, the mere theoretical potential for competition has always been more than enough to call it capitalism from any perspective. The facts are that actual competition is not a requirement.
Capitalism is simple: The capital rules supreme. As opposed to the previous system of aristocracy, where it was the land owners. Nobody would seriously claim that aristocracy requires any kind of competition between the aristocrats. Even the very first capitalist big enterprises, such as East India Company were created as _monopolies_
Monopolies are broken by capitalism just as much as they're created by capitalism. The whole "end-stage capitalism" schtick is wrong because a free market will lead to the ossification and then breakdown of a monopolist. You just have to finish spring semester of Econ101 to find out how.
In it's origins it was about the capital ruling, as opposed to the aristocracy. So political power would be in the hands of people with capital, not the landed aristocracy. The means of production only entered the equation with the industrial revolution. And capitalism is older than that, albeit not much older
It’s always so funny to read this kind of answer when someone points out the evident flaws of capitalism!
“Hey, wait a minute, this is not how capitalism is supposed to work, so you can’t say it’s capitalism”.
Too bad that capitalism isn’t one monolithic thing and this is ABSOLUTELY how loosely regulated American capitalism works.
It’s a form of capitalism where human life is an optimization problem that sits on the way to profits.
Is there any kind of alternative that could be found, or have we reached the end of history, with our only two options being 2023 capitalism versus 1960s Soviet state capitalism?
I'm less concerned about mistakes as I am about systemic failures and bad incentives.
Boeing seems to have created a political and regulatory environment for itself where its better for it to design and build planes poorly, than it is for it to design and build planes well.
Consider the incentives of the people at the FAA. Their incentive is to never approve a design, because if they approve a faulty design, they get the heat, too. It's much safer to just not approve anything, or at least delay demanding ever more documentation.
Hence there's always going to be a tug of war between the FAA and the industry. The FAA never wants to approve anything, and industry goes out of business if the FAA doesn't approve it.
You'll see the same forces in action with the FDA.
BTW, as is abundantly clear from history, a fatal design mistake can and has destroyed several airframe companies. Boeing's finances were punished severely after the MAX crashes. Boeing does not win by making an unsafe design. When I worked at Boeing, I didn't know any engineer who was willing to sign his name to a faulty design. Yes, the engineer responsible for a piece of work gets his name on the drawings. It's career suicide for him if he signed off on a bad design.
Ah yes, the same capitalism that was around for the building of this industry that was incredibly safe up until it wasnt? Or was it safe because it was heavily regulated back then but the heavy regulations today we ignore because "capitalism"? You cant just throw these single word thought-terminators out there. When an actual cartoon is doing better than you it's time to recalibrate. "Think Mark! Think!"
Why do you think regulatory efforts have been undermined? Karl Marx showed us 150 years ago how a government under capitalism always tends toward domination by capitalists.
(I'm not talking about self-congratulatory conceits, like "raising the bar" and "fire fast", since the companies that first come to mind as saying those things tend to produce a large quantity of often poor quality, in very visible ways. Do we have concepts or terms lately for a place where most everyone does great work, and people who don't rise to that don't remain there?)
After the unfortunate incident in Japan this week, the Boeing 787, a plane designed in the 2000s and flying since 2013, is now the only passenger airliner without a hull loss. So they are clearly capable of producing modern safe airliners post merger.
Huh I never realized the 717 had no crashes either that’s even more impressive considering the era it was designed in tbh. The others on that list look like subtypes (ie the 747-8; there have been numerous 747 crashes).
To be fair, the 717 is a DC-9 subtype if we're being honest with ourselves. If the 717 counts as type without a hull loss, the 747-8 should count as well.
I don’t feel like hull loss without context is a meaningful metric of anything. At the end of the day they are airplanes flown by pilots. You could have a less safe design flown by highly competent pilots and never lose a plane, or an incredibly sophisticated, technically advanced aircraft where the pilot makes a decision resulting the destruction of the aircraft.
There was an engineer who got fired for worrying publicly about the fire safety of the carbon fiber hulls during the 787 leadup.
It turned out I worked in the same building he had, and I found his old office. Word is after he left they locked it up, like a crime scene. I think they were worried his whistleblowing would turn to leaks and I guess they thought his office would have some sort of evidence? It was an interior office so no big loss real estate wise, but that was a super weird chapter.
He was painted as an aluminum bigot but I always wondered.
I used to talk to a coworker about how Mitsubishi - which built the 787 wings (something Boeing has never done before) - had introduced a regional jet and would be coming after a Boeing’s lunch. He was not worried. I’m a little shocked he’s been right so far. In fact that particular division of MHI seems to be defunct as of last February, which is news to me, so I suppose he was right. Maybe the 787 experience was as unpleasant for them as it was for Boeing.
From the looks of it the composite fuselage of the A350 did its job splendidly, it held out against the fire long enough for everyone to evacuate, only flashing over after >20 minutes.
> It turned out I worked in the same building he had, and I found his old office. Word is after he left they locked it up, like a crime scene. I think they were worried his whistleblowing would turn to leaks and I guess they thought his office would have some sort of evidence? It was an interior office so no big loss real estate wise, but that was a super weird chapter.
If they were worried about a lawsuit from him they might want to preserve everything in case it was subpoenaed regardless of guilt or innocent - possibly especially if they thought his claims were wrong.
> Word is after he left they locked it up, like a crime scene. I think they were worried his whistleblowing would turn to leaks and I guess they thought his office would have some sort of evidence?
If Boeing did clear it out, they'd be open to charges of doing a coverup. The smart thing to do is lock it up as is.
- designed to outsource most manufacturing to the lowest bidder, many program management problems, overruns and delays
- to bust unions new factory was created in South Carolina and this has very poor QC, there are rumors that a certain large middle eastern airline refuses to accept any planes assembled there
737 program:
- they decided that they are not going to do a clean sheet 737NG and use the existing platform to put on new engines and do other modernization. They did it the cheap way and tried to paper over problems in software to make sure that their biggest customers would not need to send their pilots through extra training. Killed hundreds already.
It's safer to have a new airplane design behave like the old one. There have been many crashes due a pilot being stressed and automatically doing something that would have been right on a previous airplane he was familiar with, but which was wrong for the current airplane he is flying.
All jet airliners are aerodynamically unstable and use active controls to "paper over" that. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing that.
The MCAS problem was not due to its purpose. The problem was the software for it had too much authority, and did not shut off when the pilot countermanded it. A worse problem was the pilots did not follow emergency procedures for runaway trim.
For reference, the emergency procedures are:
1. restore normal trim with the electric trim switches (which overrides MCAS)
I don't think it's worth relitigating MCAS here but your analysis here is very generous to Boeing and harsh to the pilots who where unwitting test pilots in Boeing's mistake.
In the LA crash, the crew restored normal trim 25 times, and never thought to turn off the trim. Turning off the trim is a "memory item", meaning the pilots should not need to consult a checklist for it. The switch is right there on the center console within easy reach.
The FAA sent around an Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterating the two step process before the EA crash:
Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any
stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be
used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB
TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be
used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved
to CUTOUT."
They also ignored the overspeed warning horn because they were apparently operating at full throttle. This was a large contributory factor to being unable to move the trim by hand.
So, yeah, it is harsh to the crews. I've also talked with MAX pilots who were quite harsh towards them. I'm amazed that one would not be harsh towards a pilot who did not bother to read/understand/remember and EMERGENCY AIRWORTHINESS DIRECTIVE about how not to crash.
Would you get on an airplane knowing it had such a pilot? Not me.
I assign 50% responsibility to the pilots and 50% to Boeing.
The EA crew did not follow the 2 step procedure in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive given to all MAX crews before the EA crash.
Also, before the LA crash, the MCAS failure happened on the previous flight of the same aircraft, and the crew just turned off the stab trim, and continued the flight normally and landed safely. That crew was unaware of MCAS, but they followed standard runaway trim emergency procedure.
Pilots are already trained to stop runaway trim failures, and received an Emergency Airworthiness Directive explaining trivial procedure to counter MCAS failure.
Of course, the MCAS software was badly designed, and the single path failure, are squarely Boeing's fault.
Pilots must always be ready to deal with runaway stabilizer trim, on any aircraft type. It's a "memory item".
The whole shit happened because Boeing only used only one sensor for the system because then it wouldn't be seen as safety critical and wouldn't need to be mentioned extra in the manuals
This is a good tabloid take but I don't believe it's accurate. It wasn't pretending to be the same plane - it was pretending to be any aircraft with certifiable flight characteristics, particularly control forces on approach to the stall.
Indeed there is no requirement for aircraft with the same training / type certificate to handle identically. For example the whole CitationJet class from the Mustang to the CJ4.
Aerodynamic stability refers to the desire of an aircraft to return to straight and level flight without any control inputs.
Stability is also commonly understood as the opposite of maneuverability, as a more stable aircraft is less maneuverable.
Combat aircraft such as fighters are designed to be aerodynamically unstable so their maneuverability is unhindered. Likewise stunt planes and other aircraft whose job is to not fly straight and level.
Aircraft such as passenger and cargo airliners are designed to be aerodynamically stable because their job is to fly straight and level with good fuel economy and minimal piloting, they do not need swift and nimble maneuverability.
The safety of an aircraft has no relation to that aircraft's aerodynamic stability.
Airliners also have to work at low speed in thick air, and high speed in thin air. Swept wings, for example, perform poorly at lower speeds.
An airliner has to perform well at both, which is why wings are swept, yet have flaps and slats to modify their aerodynamic profile. Swept wings have other problems, like dutch roll.
Airliners also become uncontrollable above a certain speed, which was a contributing factor to the EA crash (the crew ignored the overspeed warning).
> there are rumors that a certain large middle eastern airline
Thank god there are airlines with standards. I'm certainly glad my Middle Eastern long haul option for a particular cross-continent journey does not have any faulty Boeing models.
> what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes
My theory is that this is not limited to Boeing or even aircraft design, it's a much deeper and systemic problem affecting all kinds of fields. We've had a lot of industrial accidents lately.
When aircraft manufacturing was an emerging industry there were tons of undocumented safety margins and "slack" in the design and production pipeline.
Over time, the beancounters start optimizing stuff, so these undocumented safety margins are eroded in the name of efficiency/profit (and sometimes even documented safety margins too).
Furthermore, workers back in the day had a much better life when it comes to purchasing power (especially when it comes to property), and so could actually "give more fucks" about the job than they do now which is a compounding factor. You used to get a lot of implicit quality assurance back then which you don't get now.
We've now reached a stage where these undocumented safety margins have been eroded enough that it actually starts to cause issues, and the safeguards that are supposed to catch them aren't good enough, either due to 1) they've never been good enough but just weren't really needed before or 2) they too have been eroded in the same way for the same reason.
This also applies to software - software quality nowadays has gone down the drain for the same reasons, and even brands that were built on quality and polish (Apple) are now churning out shit (see the endless calls for another "Snow Leopard" bugfix-only macOS release).
I pretty much agree with this. The aggressive push towards optimisation everywhere in life is causing strain at the margins. I think this has always happened though, including without capitalism – it's basically the definition of growing pains. It's a natural process to some extent, and I'm not sure that corrections ever really happen, we just find new areas, new things that don't have the same limitations and grow into those.
Seems more parsimonious to explain aggressive optimisation everywhere as contraction pains. Efficiency and optimization as the obsession of a society aiming to rescue itself from encroaching constraints within a historically successful but fading paradigm- the facade of which may long outlast its public interest utility, propped up for the convenient credibility it lends private, perhaps mercenary, interests
Back when their planes blew up on their own (TWA 800, Philippine 143, Thai Airways 114), and when the rudders liked to jam themselves to full-deflection (UA 525, USAir 427)?
The control stick on the airbus is pretty bad, the fact that neither pilot knows what inputs the other is giving makes them far inferior to the system in boeing aircraft, even with warnings.
>The FAA said the inspections will take between four and eight hours per plane.
Seems reasonable. I was wondering if a single event should really be enough to "ground" all similar planes, but seems like they just want to do a quick inspection.
Yeah especially given the public trust the FAA needs to rebuild after it came out how Boeing got the 737 certified in the first place. It’s an unmitigated shit show top to bottom.
You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that have no fatalities, but they also have very low production numbers to go with it.
> safest airliner ever built ... very low production numbers
If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?
I’ll take the one with 50 crashes any time. That’s 50 times something went catastrophically wrong and 50 times measures were taken to fix the underlying problems.
A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new problems.
I'm not sure if I agree or not, but my thinking were that it wouldn't reach great safety by upgrades until long after it became too expensive for Boeing and would instead be replaced with a new model.
The point is that commercial aviation is so extraordinarily safe, that mechanical failures that result in fatalities are too rare to determine if a model with 5 million flight hours is more or less safe than another model with 500 million flight hours.
Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.
I think this is the wrong take, for the following reasons:
- There is no reason to assume that the learnings from the 50 crashes weren't also applied to the newer model. In fact you'd expect that they all were.
- Faults in a new design are likely to be front-loaded, meaning most of the crashes would have happened earlier than later. Therefore the new model seems to be a much safer design if it flew 10% of the miles without even 10% of the crashes (actually 0%).
The point in the outer comment was that the 737NG has both many flight hours and ... if I skimmed Wikipedia correctly, only 1 mechanically-attributed fatality.
For reference, the most-produced passenger/cargo aircraft:
16K Douglas DC-3 (1935)
11K Boeing 737 family:
1K Original (1967)
2K Classic (1984)
7K NG (1998)
1K MAX (2016)
11K Airbus A320 family (1988)
Different sources give oddly different numbers (more than I would expect for ordered vs built vs delivered; I didn't investigate deeply), but nothing else is above 2K. Note that plenty of small or military planes beat these numbers.
If Boeing is necessary for national defence and no longer knows how to build aircraft, drastic action is needed by the US government on a very short timeframe to get their shit together. War is a thing.
In the meantime it's hard to disagree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that flying with airbus seems a better idea.
Of course it should. This is a manufacturing defect that could easily have sucked someone out the plane or dropped debris on someone’s head. Should it happen during cruise over water the consequences could be much worse.
A single explosive decompression event, comprising the spontaneous loss of an assembly the size of an entire exit door, two months off the factory floor?
I should certainly hope they’d take a gander at the others before I’d sit next to one.
Especially with the memory of the last time they chose to keep flying 737 MAXes instead of fixing the defect in the rest of the fleet, at the cost of 157 lives, not even 5 years ago.
Let's also consider just how much worse this situation could have been. The door panel blew out next to the one seat that happened to be unoccupied, and it happened at 16,000 ft instead of 26,000 ft.
And even so, sucked the shirt right off the boy in the middle seat! I shudder to imagine how things would have gone 20 minutes further in to the flight.
No it's not. Crews are trained for decompression events and they've happened at higher altitudes than 26,000 feet before with no airframe loss at all (for example, the Southwest 737-700 where a fan blade ruptured the window happened at 33,000 feet). It may likely have been a fatal incident but definitely not likely a crash.
I’d at first read the plane was without passengers and just being flown somewhere… and I thought, great.
Today I read that it was full of passengers, and the two people supposed to be in the two seats in the row the panel blew out happened to miss their flight.
If that’s true… what an interesting set of statistics coming together.
Amount of people that sleep through flights
Amount of panels that blow out of passenger planes
Chance to be seated next to said panel
I mean, of course it is better that the seats were not occupied, but there is no reason to treat it as if those people for sure would have died if they were on the plane.
It sounds like if they were on board and wearing seat belts they would have been fine. Possibly very shaken, but fine.
After the segment of fuselage fell to the earth, after the giant hole opened, after the kid's shirt was ripped away, passengers were standing up at their seats and in the aisle, and flight attendants had to plead with them to sit down and buckle up.
I'm just going to leave you with this frightening quote: "They said there was a kid in that row who had his shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."
Shirt sucked off him. Mother was holding onto him. Oh hello, a thousand nightmares of my youth.
The seat is still there, firmly attached to the plane. In all likelihood a passenger in that seat, if they were wearing their seat belt (as they should have, it wasn't at cruising altitude, and you should wear your seat belt anyway when seated), would have been severely frightened and annoyed, but probably uninjured. Maybe some hearing loss.
The seat is at the very least missing some fabric and cushioning. Winds that can do that to an airplane seat probably wouldn’t leave a human uninjured.
Agreed, I wouldn't be surprised to see some light injuries, but on the other hand that seat cover is velcro'd on at the top and comes right off for cleaning. Not much really holding it there.
Although I'm not an aerospace engineer, Airplane seats only have a a simple lap-belt, are rarely adjusted to the proper tightness, and are designed to accommodate all body sizes. I could certainly imagine a lap-belt not being adequate to keep a small child from getting sucked out of the seat.
I guess it all really started with everyone’s favorite CEO of GE, Jack Welch. It seems like he created the blueprint for the cost cutting/stack ranking/MBAs/profits over quality that we see today.
Probably they refer to Tesla, Full Self Driving feature but the small print explains that is not "full self driving" the name is just an aspiration, the advertisement statement are also false because are also aspirations etc.
AFAIK there is soem kind of investigation about the mode this feature was advertised and I expect that sooner or later the people that were tricked to pay for a FSD would demand their money back since the promises were not kept.
About their safety, the human must pay attention all the time so we can judge the safety of the software because the human intervenes when the situation is to unsafe and prevents the crashes, with the exception when the humans do not pay attention and the car kills/injures them.(any idea what happen with that software guy killed in a Tesla? did the family pursue the cause in justice or they got money to give up?)
Their practices spread everywhere, most corporations behave following Jack Welch's MBA teachings: cut costs (massive layoffs are Welch's bread and butter), return as much as possible to shareholders because they are the only important players in the corporate game (fuck society, fuck the workers).
I hate Welch and all of his acolytes with a passion.
The way you phrased it, I figured that "don't give a shit" was a Stonecipher catch phrase or something. Sort of like Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things".
Stonecipher was the "leadership" that came in from McD when they effectively took over Boeing, replacing their traditional care with literally anything for a buck.
He did say "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm" and he does seem to have been successful at making it into something other than a great engineering firm.
At the very least we should have a corporate death penalty. Force the company into bankruptcy, de-list it from the stock market, and turn it into a worker-owned co-op that can never be publicly traded or be sold to private equity.
Yes I feel this needs to hit the shareholders hard. But they'll just continue to cut costs to get the value back up and we'll be back here in a couple of years. It needs deep institutional changes and I can't see that happening.
Prison and even the death penalty should absolutely be considered for the bean-counting Boeing execs that deliberately drove safety into the ground for profit. The blood of innocents is on their hands, and yet they get to cheerfully cash in their stock options.
Airbus execs seem fine[1], so they'd have nothing to fear here.
Lol nothing to fear except the death penalty if employees you never heard of 5 reporting lines below you screw up badly enough?
Where do people come up with this stuff. If you want a mass exodus from airline management and sudden collapse of the entire industry that would be a fast way to do it.
I think GP meant that they might give more of a fuck (in the wrong direction) if sabotaging "just this one bolt" means this they can own a significant chunk of stock in the company they are part of.
According to a quick search Boeing has a market cap of ~150 billion and 150k employees, so if you manage to hide that it was you who installed the bolt wrong then assuming the company gets distributed roughly equally among employees then that's a quick 1 million payday. How certain are you that "hopelessly alienated" employees wouldn't sell out a few hundred anonymous passengers for a million bucks?
Worker-owned companies have a unbelievably shitty record in the aviation space.It's been tried.
The right thing to do at this point is to go the airbus route, make the government responsible for launch aid, and put engineers back in charge of the company.
Jack Welch is (in)famous for his management style and the impact that his style has had on American business.
I won't opine too much on it, but the most concise way to put it is an extreme concentration on producing shareholder value as quickly as possible at the expense of basically everything else.
The light only means that having it fastened is mandatory. There are many reasons to keep it on during the entire flight, the most common of which is turbulence.
In Europe that's what seems to be a standard announcement. "The captain has switched off the fasten seatbelt sign, but we recommend you keep your seatbelt fastened at all times when seated, in case of sudden turbulence."
Last year I flew domestic U.S. on several airlines and the preflight safety briefing on all of them included a line that passengers should always keep their seat belt buckled for safety whenever seated (or something to that effect).
Being a fat guy, I disregard that during flight other than takeoff, landing, and turbulence. I drive to work on most days, and the chance that I die that way is FAR, FAR higher than the few flights I take each year. I'll live with the odds. Yes, I wear my seat belt in my car, it's actually comfortable
To be fair, there are a lot of rose-colored sunglasses in the crowd of Boeing critics. The rudder problems with the original 737 weren't exactly McDonnell-Douglas's fault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
Is there any place to get the full list of tail numbers involved in the grounding? I just flew on an Alaska 737 Max 9 out of PDX a few days ago and am morbidly curious if my plane was one of the ones grounded.
I can only assume major hubs have already completed inspection, because a buddy of mine flew out of Seattle on a 737 Max9 this morning. Guess I assumed inspections took longer than half a day
Supposedly the flaw exists on a section where a “false door” exists for future alterations to the exit points. Perhaps not all of their planes were built with this feature. Nothing to inspect in that case.
Boeing is what happens when an engineering focused company gets taken over by MBAs. When it happens to a webtech company we call it enshitification. When it happens to a transportation company lives are actually at risk. Sadly Boeing is important enough to DC that they seem to be allowed to casually risk American lives.
Microsoft seems to be "coming back" by essentially becoming an umbrella company, much like how all food manufacturers consolidated and are basically a couple of mega umbrella companies
MBAs can only pull this off when there is no competition and they are in bed with the regulators. You can very easily get Boeing back on track by splitting them into multiple competing businesses, but we all know this won't happen.
They’re already broken up. They consider themselves to be a system integrator. They design the planes, hire contractors to build most of the parts, and then assemble the parts. The fact that this gives Boeing most of the risk and the contractors most of the profit doesn’t seem to bother them.
Vertical integration is not competition. A decision maker at any level within the vertical of power is facing internal competition from political rivals, but no results-based competition from his peers in other companies. So this promotes political shenanigans, and applies negative selection pressure on the actual product quality.
This is some kind of vertical dis–integration. They literally sold their factories and tools to their contractors because owning land and buildings and machinery was dragging down their metrics! (Specifically assets to earnings or something along those lines.)
But regardless of that, breaking up a large company because it has some problem doesn’t fix the problem. It just makes all the smaller companies you created easier to purchase. Just look at AT&T. NorTel bought every single one of the baby bells within a decade of their creation, resulting in just as much of a monopoly except now in a foreign corporation.
I wish we had an updated remake of Airplane! that uses this line. THere's so much room for good political satire but it seems like it's not being made.
I notice this a lot in everyday life, with things like getting a text while heading out the door, answering it, then forgetting there were other tasks and leaving sans keys and wallet
This phenomenon was really useful for sneaking booze into football games as undergrads.
Two airplane bottles in your pocket, belt loop, etc. - somewhere obvious but not too obvious - can absolutely blind a ticket taker to the 6-8 you have taped to the back of your calves.
It's hard to know how much time has to elapse before all the problems have been teased out though.
Anyone who thought the DC-10 was in the clear after its cargo door problems were fixed was in for a nasty surprise a few years later when an engine fell off of one at O'Hare, but if the industry had written it off after that incident they'd have missed out on 35 years of an otherwise reliable plane.
The thing I see missing is that it’s totally normal and even justified to not want to fly on one of these planes at this point. Regardless of whether there is some period of time on the order of years after which all the bugs will be worked out, in the meantime it makes absolutely no sense to take a gamble flying on one of these, but many, especially those within aviation, insist otherwise.
I watched a documentary on Netflix recently that alleged that a lot of this change came from importing McDonnell Douglas management into Boeing after the acquisition. I wonder if the book concurs on that, I don't have time to read it right now.
If this is the case I wonder if it could be reversible.
B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck.
When they did the acquisition, they also got the management folks… who ran McD into the ground in the first place.
In a broad sense high level management tends to take care of it's own in a bit of self interest so when they screw up and run a company into the ground chasing short term quarterly profits they'll also get taken care of.
This is exactly it. The skilled politicians are the reason why the company failed in the first place. They then take over the acquiring company from within like a virus and destroy that next. Rule of thumb: If a company is failing and you purchase it, fire everybody. Either the culture or the people are poison, and they will infect you.
Yes absolutely - keep the skilled folks below the VP level and perhaps some of the Directors. Generally garbage flows from the top down, and they've been putting up with it this entire time.
We just had a close call with this where I work. Bought a company, because they were failing and being crushed under their own weight. Somehow they convinced the management at my company that they knew the path forward and we've been in complete gridlock trying to get anything done for a couple years, eventually they hired outside management for the company we bought, set clear KPIs which they failed to deliver on (in some cases failing to even attempt to deliver on) and the got fired.
But god damn, when you buy a company that can no longer afford to support its own weight, don't let those fuckers convince you that they somehow know how to run your business too when they can't run theirs.
Phil Condit only had his job through the influence of his wife at the time. Unfortunately, he was busy diddling his executive assistant at the time of the merger, clearing a path for Harry Stonechiseler to be CEO.
I’ve heard variations on this story a few times, successful company swallows failing company and gets infected by failing-culture. Isn’t that what happened to Netscape?
There's a long list of companies that died by being acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent company.
By the time of the merger with Time Warner they were a joke among technical people. They were in the same category as Compuserve and Prodigy, but marketed specifically as an "easy" service for less technical users.
Netscape died because Microsoft bundled their browser with the operating system and made it free for commercial use, what essentially led to the huge antitrust case.
Only after that did browsers become utilities in the OS, with open source engines like Konqueror's KHTML (which later became WebKit, which later became Blink) and Netscape/Mozilla's Gecko
Microsoft was the overwhelming majority of all installations. So effectively, once Microsoft added it, it was a utility. I'm well aware of that history.
Not Collabora. Collabra was a groupware company Netscape acquired to shore up the E-mail portion of Communicator. It didn't work and ended up substantially delaying future development of the browser suite.
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. Pretty much everything they started after that point has failed because the focus has been on selling ads rather than building something normal people enjoy using.
On the other hand how much of the things Google has built/bought and grew today we enjoy could exist without the firehose of money that ads represented? I'm not sure Youtube happens without the ad money.
I'm mostly wondering if they could have kept it as open as they do to non revenue generating users or would they have had to do something like Vimeo where after a certain number of views they come asking for money or would have had to limit the quality/quantity of uploads from small creators due to the costs of storing and serving their videos with limited ad returns.
AdWords was doing just fine before DoubleClick. That's how they got the money to buy DoubleClick in the first place.
The problem was specifically DoubleClick management, who then got inserted in high levels within the Ads organization, forcing out the very technically & economically savvy people who were there before.
This is a recurring problem in large organizations. People who spend their time learning to be politically savvy will be...politically savvy, and be at an advantage when playing power politics that determines who is in charge. The effort needed to become politically savvy usually comes at the expense of domain/technical/economic knowledge required to actually get the job done. Eventually the organization becomes very good at playing political games and very bad at getting stuff done, until it collapses.
Yes, ad money built a lot of the web. I’m not saying it’s evil on a conceptual level, but rather that a lot of companies start failing when they switch from thinking about what their users would like which happen to be ad supported as opposed to building products which are designed around ad revenue first. It’s what gives you things like Google+ but also things like social media sites optimizing for outrage or other low-quality interactions which maximize ad sales revenue.
YouTube has obviously done well, but look at everything they’ve done since the ad sales mentality dominated their thinking. Stuff like Google+ happens when you are thinking “we need X to keep Facebook from cutting into our ad revenue, therefore our users will use X” rather than asking “what will our users like more than Facebook?”.
The other side is what we saw with things like Stadia, GCP, or G-Suite where executives used to the ad model have trouble with other business models. The problem there again isn’t that ads are evil but rather that you need to understand your users and what they want so you can think about the product the right way.
That doesn’t say anything about whether it’s a good example: even if it’s true, the real question would be whether they looked for the right things and especially who they kept at the management level – at the time, Google announced they were laying off a quarter of the employees due to redundancy, which tends to mean that groups like HR and accounting get hammered more than senior managers. This is especially important to get right when you consider that the most damaging people aren’t comic book villains but rather people who sound like they know what they’re talking about and are charismatic – exactly the sort of people who would make it through an interview process.
The Google interview process at that time was definitely not tuned for selecting the charismatic lol. I was there at the time and I can't recall anyone from DoubleClick management surviving, only engineers. It was a bloodbath.
That is correct. However MDD was manufacturing key military products (F-15, F-18) and it was doing bad financially, going bankrupt and jeopardizing the fighter plane production and maintenance was a "national security" problem that forced the Boeing acquisition of MDD.
Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." Perhaps they should have just been auctioned off and other investors given an opportunity to create new lines of business out of the incompetent mess they had become. Taking the mess and wholesale buying it into another company and then keeping the management that created the problem in the first place is astronomically dumb.
Also, all the money in the world doesn't mean you spend it on things that make money later. If you spend your manufacturing budget on strippers, you won't have anything to sell later.
Umm, no we didn’t. We spent less as a percentage of GDP. But total spending barely shrank by the late 90’s. We hadn’t even started to shift spending away from piloted jets by then either.
Nowadays the reduction of the increase of military spending is called 'budget cuts'. Not the actual budget reduction, just increasing the budget slower than in previous budget somehow is a 'cut'. That's the reality we live in now.
If you change the endpoints on that graph to 1985 and 2000, the drop in spending in the 1990’s is a lot clearer. 325 billion to 287 billion is a sizable decrease—about 11%—, especially in non-inflation-adjusted dollars. It only looks small compared to the post-9/11 increase in spending, and a larger share of that spending was operations rather than procurement.
Right, but he said “massively drew down”. 11% would not qualify. It was relatively brief during a period of normally low inflation, so even in real dollars, it was not a steep decline.
At this point you’re just making a semantic argument about the word “massive”. The impact of that 11% cut in spending was massive; between 1990 and 1998, manpower dropped from 2.18 million to 1.59 million and the total number of active ships in the Navy dropped from 570 to 344. The total budget didn’t drop by a similar proportion because there are a lot of expenses that are much less flexible; it’s not simply a matter of employing fewer personnel and buying less equipment.
Late 1989 was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in most of Eastern Europe and 1991 was the end of the Soviet Union itself. There’s a drop between 1990 and 1991, a slight increase in 1992 (replenishment after Desert Storm?) and then a gradual decline in nominal dollars throughout the 1990’s. Also remember that federal budgets were usually passed ahead of time; this was before the government normalized all the government shutdowns and other monkeyshines we have grown accustomed to today, so budget changes might be a year behind current events. Adjusting for inflation the drop in spending would be even more.
Spending does start to increase after 1998. I’m not exactly sure why, but a lot of things started happening in 1998 and 1999, ranging from Bin Laden’s attacks on American embassies, the Kosovo conflict, Saddam Hussein ejecting UN weapons inspectors from Iraq, the discovery of Chinese interference in the 1996 elections and China stealing nuclear secrets.
Also, at the end of the Cold War, there were a number of systems that were in the late stages of design and development that were either radically cut back or canceled outright. These included the F-22, B-2, and Seawolf class submarine, just to name a few big ticket items. This saved a lot of money and made sense at the time since these were all designed specifically for Cold War missions that no longer seemed relevant. But eventually the older hardware still needs to be replaced; instead of replacing the Los Angeles class submarines with the Seawolf class starting in the 90’s, you end up replacing them with the Virginia class starting in the 00’s.
Other cutbacks during the post-Cold War period included closing military bases (which was fraught with political difficulty; no congressman wants the base in his district to be closed!) and reducing the number of US forces permanently stationed in countries like Germany.
Dollars aren’t the only measure, either. One of Reagan’s goals was a 600 ship navy. It takes time to build ships so it wasn’t until 1987 that the US Navy reached a peak size of 594 ships. Currently the US Navy has 238 ships. Sometimes a higher defense budget means you’re building a larger military but sometimes it means health care has gotten more expensive or you need to buy more fuel and ammunition to support operations. This also explains the drop after Korea.
All the manufacturers of key pieces of military advanced weapons are on that list. Fighter jets are on the very top. When corporate America is now more about "business" than engineering, making a good plane is very expensive. It's just business :|
Boeing is in its position only because of a close relationship with government. They didn't get rich because of their brains. They will do anything for government to maintain the current benefits.
They did get rich because of their brains. But they then replaced those brains with accountants and since then it is a steady downward trajectory, which if it were any other company would likely result in controlled descent into terrain.
It may potentially harm the security of the nation's subject, but it does not harm the interests of the ruling elites - and that's the real "national security" in practice.
After seeng your comment, I just went ahead and watched the doc, and I frankly I find myself in a state of rage right now. From my limited understanding, I had this impression this was an engineering failure. And you know, when you have a complicated machine, sometimes shit happens.
But it wasn't that at all. Boeing knew clearly what the dangers of MCAS system were, they went to great lengths to completely hide the presence of the system from the world before delivery of the planes. Within days of the first crash, they knew it was MCAS, and kept trying to blame uneducated "foreign" pilots, kept trying to go on and tell the world again and again it was safe to fly, until that second crash happened. I understand greed, we all have that, but I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that your first concern after that crash and knowing there might be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy.
And what the hell FAA? 1) they didn't regulate properly before the plane was delivered, 2) After first crash they knew how dangerous the plane is, but didn't ground it (TAMARA report), 3) After second crash, you had the transportation secratary basically saying 737 Max was "innocent untill proven guilty" so let it fly before China forced its hand, 4) No criminal proescution in the end for those fanatic executives, just a cash fine.
You have to view all US regulatory goings-on wrt Boeing through the lens of Airbus-Boeing/EU-US trade rivalry (plus China's COMAC as a new entrant).
Boeing is the US's largest exporter (defense + civilian), and also the 65th largest US stock overall. Any US regulator action against Boeing would affect all that, plus US stock markets. You have to wonder how independent the FAA head can afford to be from Congressional interference, in the current setup. In the US, the FAA head is appointed (or, in recent admins, left vacant) by the Senate.
Back in the 2018/9 first 737MAX scandal [0], it was the Canadian, EU and Chinese regulators which were more aggressive about investigating and grounding, meanwhile the US FAA dragged its feet on taking action against Boeing while its donees like Congressman Sam Graves (R-MO 6) [1] continued to blame foreign pilot training, which was dishonest and adding insult to injury.
PS consider also in 2020, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA 27) secretly sold $50K Boeing stock ahead of his committee's damning 737MAX report; then avoided election scrutiny by simply blowing the deadline to report the stock sale... When he finally did disclose the sale, it was two weeks after the 2020 general election votes were cast, and three days after Garcia declared victory. He won by 333 votes. [2]
There's some scrutiny of Congressmen insider-trading biotech/pharma stocks esp. which their own committees (gasp) regulate, but really not a lot of scrutiny on aerospace. [3] Compare to George Santos, who wasn't implicated in a coverup that actually killed hundreds of people.
> I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that your first concern after that crash and knowing there might be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy.
The most garbage human being I know personally is a project manager at Boeing. Unfortunately the only way to get this person completely out of my life would be to move to a different neighborhood.
Even that's predictably shifted in the last few years. HN is perpetually turning into Reddit in the sense of being on a level with where Reddit was 3-5 years ago.
I believe that was the point. Aircraft economics barely sustains two airframers per market segment, and uncompetitive offerings aren't going to raise safety/QC bars in a regulated industry
(and whilst you've got the scope to leave the airframe design/sales op alone and [further] vertically disintegrate the supply chain instead, that might actually make it worse, with the Spirit/Boeing relationship plausibly having a causal relationship with this incident)
Is the argument here that it's more economically viable to run a plane building company whose planes accidentally falls out of the sky? Naively, it would seem to me to be a bad business decision to design aero planes that can't fly, but what do I know.
> it's more economically viable to run a plane building company whose planes accidentally falls out of the sky?
Business school may say if your product never fails perhaps you are overspending on it and some known small failure rate is acceptable to control costs to have better profits. Boeing leadership may have took that logic and applied it to airplanes.
Is that argument wrong? If it isn't, then you've successfully identified capitalism as the problem. I'm all for anti-capitalism, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect that to start with Boeing.
This is not a problem of "pointy haired MBA's", we can either fix this within the current regime by imposing heavy fines on this sort of reckless behavior, or we can tear down the current regime and replace it with communism/fascism/monarchy/whatever. In the system we are currently in, what happened at Boeing looks to be "correct", in the sense that it's what the system incentivizes.
It's a sticky product. There isn't an alternative from Boeing in this market segment that's viable in a modern fleet from what I understand, and airlines tend to be either Boeing or Airbus, so it would take a huge push to get an airline to migrate from one to the other – possibly multiple failed models and significant compensation to fund building up the maintenance infrastructure for the other manufacturer and pilot retraining.
It's functionally impossible for Airbus to take over all of Boeing's contracts. Airbus itself has an order backlog in the thousands.
They're not REALLY competing with Boeing.
which will never happen.
Airbus is a pan european political project asmuch as a competitor to boeing. (also, one which is hugely important for independence of european airtransport).
The consolidation in aerospace and defense was a much longer process than that. All of the companies with names like “McDonnell Douglas”, “Lockheed Martin”, or “Northrop Grumman” were formed by mergers. If you actually break apart Boeing’s merger history there were at least a half dozen WWII-era companies that slowly consolidated over half a century.
Part of this was because WWII subsidized an unsustainable and frankly absurd level of demand. For instance, Grumman almost exclusively built carrier-based fighters, and by the end of WWII they were producing planes so quickly that the Navy stopped doing periodic heavy maintenance of their aircraft in lieu of dumping them into the sea and replacing them with brand new planes. Obviously business for Grumman would never be quite that good ever again.
Considering the consistent gross mismanagement of Boeing, who receive free bailouts just for being Boeing
Well, I was going to say that calling them “business oriented” is laughable, but I guess that running a business in to the ground then laughing all the way to the bail out bank is just standard operating procedure now around the world.
A friend of mine works in Boeing as a data scientist. His team has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means. They spend their days creating processes, managing tickets, enforcing specific formats of tickets and stories and what not. Yet, none of the eight knew how to write product specs nor could be bothered with basic things like understanding how git works.
I have a hard time imagining how Boeing could survive in the long run with this level of bureaucracy.
Edit: Saw the summary of the book Flying Blind: "A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation". One has to ask: where did the cost cutting go? What's cutting throat? It looks to me that the management of Boeing is grossly incompetent.
And BTW, we have a market mechanism for this: bankruptcy. Preferably restructuring, not liquidating, though both are useful. Just leave the job and maybe one day the whole thing gets rewired.
I find this genuinely incomprehensible. I have never encountered a single person who was not technically proficient in the team’s tasks across the 10 years of my hodgepodge career in a variety of semi-independent small teams and currently a small business.
Small teams don’t have the margin for non technical folk. It often falls on people like me to become, temporarily, the admin or become the GIS department as such things are needed.
That would be a very efficient way of running things under a cost plus military contract. For a single contract win they're able to spend four times as much money on salaries and therefore earn four times as much profit.
I feel like this is especially pervasive in the data and ML fields. Perhaps just to many formally cloistered academic PhDs are cashing in on the corporate rush to data and ML "everything", but have no actual ability to execute or even code.
I went to a large "AI" conference this year and was surprised to see some talks being given by the "VP of ML" at the company I work at. I'd never heard of him or the position before, and when I looked him up in our company directory he appeared to sit somewhere in Pharmacy data science. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
When I attended his first talk wearing our company swag he seemed visibly uncomfortable and...grumpy(?) after he noticed me. His talk was a very non-technical, superficial fly-over of how ML can be used to profile and predict customer spending habits on our company e-commerce domains. Nothing even to do with pharma! At another table session in the day he dropped that his PhD is from MIT. Our company is big -name brand in its field- but by no means does it attract "MIT level" talent; not in pay, problems, or prestige. But again, it's a massive company, so who know? Yet at this point I'm entertaining my own little conference conspiracy theory that this guy is just a corporate cutout.
The next day I ran into him at the conference lunch line and gave him a: "Hey, how's it going! I'm at {our company} too, over in {line-of-business}". He nodded, chuckled to himself, and without even looking up said "oh yeah, you here to call me on my bullshit"? I was so confused that this would be the first thing out of his mouth with no context between us, even as a seeming joke, that I didn't know what to say. He politely excused himself to run to another table session before I could figure out how to respond.
Since then I've tried to track his team and any work/product/output they might provide but for the life of me cannot find anything other than some Jira tickets that get pushed around. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
This doesn't surprise me at all lol. Someone higher up maybe wanted an AI bullet point on the accomplishments/goals and just made it happen on paper-only.
> His team has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means.
Not disregarding your point, I think we all agree Boeing sounds like bureaucracy hell, but could it be that the 8 who are "managing projects" are in fact managing contractors or outsourced employees who are writing code?
I worked with a large multi-national fashion company, and they had an app development team that consisted of a product manager, scrum master, and senior technical advisor. You could look at them and say that 2/3 being non-technical was a problem, or you could look past that team to the several developers in India who weren't exposed to the rest of the company or clients/collaborators, and who actually got the work done.
Damn. I was hoping there was a charitable explanation! This is a pattern I've seen several times and while it's not ideal I don't think it's as bad as what you described.
Does it have the same manufacturing process? It wasn't anything specific to the plane's model, it was the fact that it was a manufacturing defect that caused the door to blow out.
It's not a safety check bypass. Boeing wants to make pilots responsible for turning off the deicer within 5 min of ice disappearing to prevent the flawed engines breaking apart in flight.
(This is not an argument for or against.) I was curious, so I checked. The death penalty is legal at the federal level and only 27 states. 23 states have abolished the death penalty. And many of the states where it is legal have effectively stopped executing people, so the majority of states do not execute people. It isn't much of a surprise which states still do, and there's only 11 states that do.
Juan Browne's YouTube channel posts about basically every aviation accident, and as usual he somehow already has a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9EvHpf8jZg
The chick's tiktok went viral immediately. And fast followers were already posting tiktoks with pictures of the actual plane, breakdowns of how door plugs are made, etc.
You just have to go where the content is. Reuters has been sending journalists across the world for over 100 years. You just have to dl tiktok.
Perhaps we shouldn’t consider this country a democracy when so much of our lives today are ungoverned by undemocratic institutions (corporations in this case). Can you feel the representation?
Based on n=1, I’m hesitant to speculate much and so I don’t have any opinion on whether there will be more. I always don’t see how scrapping the 9 makes sense even if he forgot to do all of them.
Low n is pretty unavoidable here, considering how few aircraft generally get made. Even for the world's leading manufacturers, deliveries are counted in units per month.
The point here is that the aviation industry is one of the most regulated and scrutinized industries in regards to safety, and yet despite all that, one manufacturer keeps making very dangerous slip-ups.
“One doesn’t just” forget things like that. It’s aviation we’re talking about, not toy cars. This absolutely must not happen, and there should be processes in place to make sure it doesn’t.
It doesn’t actually matter if it’s an engineering or a process problem, because both of those point to an organisational problem that needs to be rooted out at a company to which we basically entrust our lives.
There was the accident with Turkish Airlines Flight 981 caused by the cargo door not locking properly and it seems there was an attempt to blame the baggage handler who couldn't understand the English/Turkish language instructions, was not trained to do the check and it was someone's else job anyway.
Apparently the door was permanently plugged, as Alaska Airlines didn't order the airplane with that optional door in place. So... turns out it wasn't so permanent - and definitely an issue with Boeing rather than the airline.
That attempt to spin this would be far worse for the company: if “some guy” forgot a step, it would mean that Boeing’s process is horribly broken because the worker needed a better confirmation check for that step, and the independent safety checks which are supposed to happen either didn’t or were not setup correctly. It’s not like changing the toner in the office printer, this industry is all about multiple independent safety measures because the alternatives are horrific.
For machines which hundreds of lives depend on, the correct response to that excuse would be to shut the factory down and replace the management who faked the safety process. I doubt they’ll use it for that reason.
Ways in which you can experience an unexpected cabin decompression to the next world...Or join the mile-high never-come-back club,
on a Boeing 737 MAX...
4 - Possible unscheduled decompression, from incorrectly drilled fastener holes in the aft pressure bulkhead, if being in the wrong plane, at the wrong time: "Boeing and a key supplier find a new manufacturing issue that affects the 737 Max airliner" - https://apnews.com/article/spirit-aerosystems-boeing-737-fus...
I think I am going to need a shared Google Sheet...
Two of those are manufacturing mistakes, and it seems likely the door one is as well. Not that that helps the passengers, but they're not systemic design flaws.
That anti-icing system is deranged, though. They effectively installed a timed detonator on the engines and want a safety exemption for it.
Back in 2014[1] Al Jazeera (the international edition) had a pretty good in-depth report of issues with the manufacturing line for the 787.
There are known issues regarding quality assurance at Boeing for a decade now, they keep going down the drain. The MBAs from McDonnell-Douglas won, and properly tarnished Boeing's image...
Ah you’re right. They’re not design flaws, just manufacturing issues, so sign me up for the first flight when the max flies again…
People falling out the sky because the wing falls off because someone forgot to bolt it on aren’t going to care if it’s a design issue or a manufacturing issue. Boeing is doing both, so the blame lies with them either way.
I absolutely agree. I meant it as a comparison to issues like the infamous MCAS, which was wrong on purpose on all 737 Max 8s everywhere.
There isn't a change in outcome between the flaws, but I think the difference between a mistake and a known issue that was left in while the company tried to change regulations to allow it, all for a tiny cut to the BOM, is worth noting.
Question is, why were these things manufactured wrong. It's well possible that Boeing's engineering documents are poor or misleading, triggering human error during manufacturing.
This is of course pure speculation and it might equally well be some single manufacturer pressuring ("optimizing") their employees (or even machines) past the point of reliability.
Either way I'm not gonna fault anyone for refusing to fly on a 737 MAX. At some point you gotta make a call and shift your assumption from "isolated engineering/manufacturing mishap" to "corporate screwed the entire product top to bottom".
The statement pointing out that it’s a manufacturing error (I’m guessing) was not intended to be solution to the problem. It pointed out that those problems have less to do the certification of the design and more to do with a manufacturing defect. If the manufacturer created parts that were up to specifications, these things would have not been a problem. This is a very important distinction because a design flaw is a much bigger deal for this aircraft type than that poorly manufactured components.
Boing is still at fault, yes, but we should exercise restraint in becoming too reductionistic on complicated engineering problems.
When we reduce complicated problems down to inaccurate trivial ones by stripping out important details and nuance, we end up with a caricature of the original - one that easily devolves into a to strawman argument to serve someone’s point. This new representation masquerading as the original can carry the same weight as the one it was based off of.
This is spreadsheet brain thinking – likely the same MDD dorks used to justify cutting corners.
There's no nuance when people are dying. None whatsoever.
If someone can't agree to that sort of black-and-white thinking, probably they should be working in an industry where innocent lives aren't dependent upon sound decision-making.
> It pointed out that those problems have less to do the certification of the design and more to do with a manufacturing defect.
You might really enjoy a book called the The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. He covers your comment here in detail.
One of his key insights is that "human error" are far too often weasel words that prematurely end a conversation (or investigation) into root cause. He goes on to detail a whole tree of "human error" so we can speak about mistakes, lapses, and errors that humans make.
The meat of his point is that some types of human error are very hard to design out of your system, but _many_ types of human error can and should be expected by the designer (or engineer), and appropriately handled.
In this instance, if a human (or perhaps a few) can make a single error when affixing the door plug to the aircraft, like improperly torquing a bolt. And that simple error risks a catastrophic loss of the airframe, then you probably have a _design_ issue and not a "manufacturing issue caused by human error".
> Spirit [AeroSystems] is responsible for the entire fuselage, including the cockpit, in all Boeing jets, and the entire fuselage for the 737 MAX models, according to the Seattle Times.
Separating “manufacturing mistakes” only makes sense if someone else is responsible for manufacturing. As far as I know, Boeing is responsible for both the design and the manufacturing of these aircraft so the difference is purely informational, but in terms of criticizing Boeing mostly irrelevant.
Boeing decided to outsource to Spirit, Boeing is responsible to attest the quality of what Spirit is delivering for a Boeing product.
If Samsung/Apple would outsource their batteries to Megabattery Company LLC and those batteries started to randomly explode we would all be blaming Samsung/Apple for not doing proper QC. I hope we all hold Boeing to a much higher level of scrutiny than cellphone manufacturers.
A manufacturing mistake which makes it into service is a failure of QA and testing systems design. (At least above a certain threshold which varies depending on the industry etc. etc.)
Depends. You can’t do e.g. crystallographical analysis of metals inside an engine if the engine is already put together. You have to trust your vendor that they built the engine correctly and checked the materials themselves. Or at most send auditors to the vendor.
> You can’t do e.g. crystallographical analysis of metals inside an engine if the engine is already put together.
QA is not forced to only deal with assembled components. They can be embeded before the assembly process to QA the parts. For example they could peform crystallographical analysis on a subset of blades which are ready for assembly.
They can also take apart a certain percentage of randomly selected engines, perform crystallographical analysis on a subset of parts and then re-assemble the engines. Many options.
Titanium fan disks, for example are all required to be inspected not just when installed but also at regular engine maintenance intervals. The inspection requires essentially complete disassembly of the fan (so it is required during particular engine maintenance events) followed by the application of penetrating dye and inspection at a narrow granularity.
This kind of maintenance and inspection actually can be required and performed, it just costs more time and money. If we want to be all market capitalism about this we could require tests necessary to ensure safety and let engineers, business people, and executives make decisions that price in the cost of dangerous and risky designs that require constant and invasive inspection and maintenance.
The only real difference with today would be regulators having a spine and/or more than pro forma power to enforce their decisions.
The troubling thing to me here over and above these issues is if they (Boeing) think some of these things are ok to the point that they ask for an exemption, what else is there that would fail rigorous safety checks but has been deemed ok by management, and has not come to light yet? We may never know until it’s too late.
Isn’t the manufacturing process and quality assurance part of the design in “products” like these? It is in car manufacturing so i assume it should, I don’t believe is sort of an “artisan” production line.
So not only the design quality is flawed but also the manufacturing process is botched up.
That’s reassuring, I guess, because two kind of flaws cancel each other out
I am amazed at how fast we went from “if it’s not Boeing I’m not going” to this. I think Americans need to start considering their own financial industry as a strategic threat to their economy and industry.
This is what happens when bean counters run the show.
There was a comment on one of the other threads asking if FAA would be slow to react again. I'm glad they learned from the first incident on the same plane.
One troubling aspect of this is that it appears Alaska had reason to believe something was wrong with this plane but basically ignored it. They were getting pressurization warnings on prior flights, but the only action they took was restricting the plane from flying ETOPS routes.
They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount of inconvenience.
> Preliminary information about the accident remains scarce, though two people familiar with the aircraft tell The Air Current that the aircraft in question, N704AL, had presented spurious indications of pressurization issues during two instances on January 4. The first intermittent warning light appeared during taxi-in following a previous flight, which prompted the airline to remove the aircraft from extended range operations (ETOPS) per maintenance rules. The light appeared again later the same day in flight, the people said.
No idea about the accuracy of the site. And it seems like they have some script that prevents text highlighting for whatever reason (turn off Javascript).
Well, that's an interesting thing. During taxi-in, the cabin altitude should be the ground altitude; outflow valves open at touchdown.
Hard to understand how an an incipient failure could manifest then (e.g. from increased leakage).
Of course, there's warning lights for excessive cabin pressure, etc, too... which would point to a different theory of the problem than a structural manufacturing problem.
Jon Ostower is one of the best aviation reporters in the business and the Air Current is a site many professionals and executives in the industry trust.
It's too bad that asking "source?" comes across as hostile unless clarified to be otherwise. Maybe the internet should adopt something similar to the "/s" tag that signals that sentiment.
Asking for any sort of clarifying information inevitably leads to argumentation on Reddit. It’s like we’ve all learned to be so polite that the truth barely matters (I’m exaggerating of course).
Things like this are always alarming until you learn the base rate. Unfortunately, I cannot find a quick reference for this, but many many flights take off with some anomaly noted in the technical log book.
And it's not like driving is especially safe. It's just that traffic deaths are so routine that they're not generally widely reported, while pretty much every major issue with an airplane gets national attention. In the US, traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 lost with all hands every couple days.
Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I control my fate when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad conditions, etc.) but have little to no control once I board a plane.
That's certainly true in the sense that flying from NYC to LA is 750x safer than doing the same as a road trip, on a fatalities-per-km basis. But on a per-trip basis, boarding that flight will be about equally as safe as taking a 5 km trip by car to the hardware store, and above-average defensive driving can certainly boost that radius considerably, maybe to 50 km.
Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite.
On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
> In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html
So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops!
Of course one should consider that:
(a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?),
(b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference),
(c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either.
Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.
IMHO the comparison is to inform the decision point of whether to fly or drive somewhere, so the inputs should be limited accordingly: exclude drives that couldn't reasonably be flown.
Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more when driving unfamiliar roads, with additional fatigue of long durations, with additional distraction of kids, etc. Or perhaps routine drives are worse because one lets their guard down!
Statistics is a tricky thing. There are 43K traffic fatalities in the US per year and 53K deaths from colorectal cancer. Which means chances of dying from colorectal cancer is higher than dying in a traffic accident. Well, over a lifetime, but distribution over age can be different etc. In the same way 43K fatalities are not an even distribution over region, type of driving, destination, age etc.
Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good.
But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.
The report you seem to be citing is this one, which summarizes the data on General Aviation flights. Those are small private planes. Commercial air transport is not part of General Aviation.
Yep, I'm not actually claiming that driving is safer per se, but it's apples vs oranges. I'm also not sure about 24M hours, total commercial airlines hours (i.e. aircraft hours, not passengers') is around 14M/year in 2018 (link in my other comment), so we need to multiply by the average number of passengers. Which gives >1B hours/year for commercial airlines only.
If that door had hit horizontal stabilizer though we would have had a completely different statistics even with 1B hours. Fortunately it didn't happen, but with the current trend the idea that flying is always safer may become not so obvious, and "orders of magnitude" thing may disappear pretty fast.
This is roughly accurate for general aviation (people taking a Cessna out for a ride on a weekend, etc.) - it is about 10x deadlier than driving and the rates have been pretty stable for decades.
If you look at just airlines, they’re in turn 10x _safer_ than driving if I remember correctly. There’s this anecdote that after 9/11 people were afraid to fly and died on the highways in much higher numbers. There’s also the fact that there there was a very small number of passenger deaths involving airliners in the US in over a decade (meaning no major crashes). Compared to thousands and thousands of traffic deaths a year that should drive the point home, even when you have to adjust for base rates.
I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the situation with defensive driving. There's very little you can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.
Especially since, most of the time, they weren't intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt) was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed instantly or when he hit the ditch.
It is true that you control your fate more when driving. Once the door shuts on the plane you have little ability to do anything other than get yourself arrested.
Your car won't fall out of the sky in the event of a malfunction so I guess cars are safer "when something goes wrong"? Then again cars travel with less margin of error to other cars and objects than airplanes.
An airplane falling out the sky is something like the equivalent of the wheels falling off of a car traveling at speed. It's not that it can't happen, but it's hardly the only possible result of a malfunction.
There's also a giant speed difference plus the fact that a car will decelerate even if uncontrollably for basically any mechanical failure. Even at speed vehicle accidents are quite safe comparatively to a plane that has lost its ability to fly. A plane tends to have all or nothing incidents while vehicles have lots of accidents with a wide variety of severity.
Naturally that tends to push aviation towards avoidance of mechanical issues and on cars we are much more tolerant. I've seen people driving cars with their door duck taped on!
Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 was a Boeing 737-700 that experienced an uncontained engine failure[a] in the left CFM56-7B engine after departing from New York–LaGuardia Airport en route to Dallas Love Field on April 17, 2018. […] One passenger was partially ejected from the aircraft and sustained fatal injuries[…]
The numbers would go up quite a bit if it included private and military. The numbers you linked to seem to have a very tight definition of which flights were considered, as the Wikipedia list showcases several more in-flight deaths involving air carrier class airplanes than just two.
I don't understand how you arrived at the number 51. Did you just tally up all the incidents in that list that occurred after 2009?
That list includes a bunch of incidents that are not really relevant for assessing risk level when flying on a commercial airline:
- Someone committing suicide by getting sucked into a plane engine while the plane was on the ground.
- Someone sneaking onto a runway and getting struck by a plane that was landing.
- Another person stealing a plane and intentionally crashing it into the ground.
- The Kobe Bryant helicopter crash.
Looking through the list I would conclude the parent comment was correct. The only incidents with passenger fatalities on US airlines since 2009 were Southwest 1380 and PenAir 3296.
Airplanes are inherently much, much less reliable than cars and only reach reliability through however many millions or billions of dollars worth of redundant systems and maintenance intervals and however many man-hours. That means that when you get on an airplane, you are extremely reliant on those systems and processes having been followed.
We are seeing more and more that these systems and processes have been breaking down, from regulation to manufacturing to pilots to systems to maintenance.
It really is hard to compare, but for an airplane, a passenger has to have faith that literally hundreds of thousands of people and things have done their job correctly. When I drive my car, I am much less reliant on people, systems, and processes, as cars are just plain simple. Most leople barely change their oil or check tire pressure. I even once had a complete engine failure and was able to just roll to a stop from highway speeds. Furthermore, I am in control. If I am too tired, I don't drive. I can pay attention to other drivers. I am directly responsible for maintenance. Etc.
I think it's hard to compare airplanes to cars by numbers alone. There are subtleties that are not exposed by numbers.
For an airplane passenger, it is absolutely a risk. You rely on so much happening correctly, and you are not in control of any of it. As little bits in that chain of things that need to happen don't happen correctly, percentages of failure and death go way up, and fast.
And we haven't even discussed in-flight medical emergencies, as there are actually quite a few in-flight deaths every year that would likely not yield a death if the medical emergency happened on the ground.
> There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
Wikipedia says there has been 51, not counting private or military. And that list doesnt include American aircraft flying overseas, to which the MAX planes would add hundreds.
And that is why I think it is absolutely, mind bogglingly bonkers that Tesla is currently using "drive by wire" in a mass production car when this technology is not common in aviation at all. Only the huge airliners that benefit from extremely expensive maintenance schedules use full "fly by wire".
Drive by wire isn’t the problem. You already have tons of electronics in a 10 year old car, from the ECU to ABS. However, there are relevant important standards and certifications in aviation, and I’m not sure if vehicular certs are as strict.
Yes it will be when you loose all power while going 80mph on a motorway because rodents ate the wiring 10 years later.
"tons of electronics" in modern cars is not required for the most basic functionality such as steering and braking. Yes, you loose power steering and power breaking if it goes off, but you can still drive (unless maybe you've never driven without it and it surprises you during a high speed takeover manouver etc).
This "drive by wire" takes away the most essential security feature present in "all" cars up to now. A direct mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the wheels. Even manufacturers of small airplanes (like "executive" 8 seater jets) say "no way" to this tech unless it controls an auxiliary control surface.
Putting it in a production car that will get crashes, it will corrode (yes copper wiring and insulation corrodes too), it will get attacked by rodents and it might get driven in 50 years from now as a "classic" is sheer, unabridged, stupidity of the highest order.
No, not just cost. Take a cessna columbus. An 8 seater executive jet. They chose to put fly by wire only on flaps. Is it because of cost? I doubt it. Pilots like "fly by wire" and people would gladly pay a 100k more for it on a $27 million aircraft. Even back in 2009 when it was still available.
People die in cars due to medical emergency all the time. I even know someone who had a heart attack and it caused him to hit a utility pole and die. We just don’t have any way of tracking it, whereas the FAA keeps very detailed statistics.
You’re leaving out the biggest risk: other people. Most deaths, in planes or cars, are caused by human error. In a car you’re dependent on everyone going down the road (and there may be thousands in one trip) not drifting across the median. You’re dependent on the person coming the other way at an intersection to stop. Etc.
Traffic deaths have been climbing again after decades of decline, probably due to distracted driving. Driving is much more dangerous.
Because when trying to compare different things (car, train, plane, space ship, etc), they all travel at different speeds, by different methods, with different categories.
An example? Travel to the moon would be the safest thing ever, even if 50% of the ships exploded, because of how far it is. I bet travel to Mars would the safest thing ever, based upon miles, even if 99% of the ships exploded.
Things break based upon two things. One is maintenance per trip. And each trip has riskier parts, of which start and end are parts. Planes have issues taking off and landing, a lot more than cruising. Same for space ships. Even cars have issues at start and end of trip, if you're driving very long distances.
Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. There's still a chance of you getting ambulance on road accidents but you're plummeting to your death on major aircraft malfunction.
> Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash.
It isn't though. Airliners have suffered in-flight engine explosions and decompressions multiple times since 2001 without fatalities. The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. Modern airliners don't just fall out of the sky. They feature robust designs and highly competent crews.
Cars regularly crash fatally without mechanical failures at all. And that says nothing of the dire state of car maintenance among the general population.
> The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959.
While I agree with your point, if the scope is scheduled airline flights in the USA, AA flight 587 crashed on 2001-11-12; globally, Egypt Air 804 on 2016-05-19. There have also been a few close calls, such as Qantas 32 on 2010-11-04, and collisions can also occur, such as that between BAL flight 2937 and DHL slight 611 on 2002-07-01, and Gol Transportes Aéreos flight 1907 with a business jet on 2006-09-29. And, given the topic is things going catastrophically wrong at altitude, there is AF447 on 2009-06-01.
It feels like this should be true, but your chance to survive a serious in-flight mishap are actually really good. Like a 90%+ chance of survival.
How can that be? Very few serious in flight mishaps STAY in the news for more than one day, but proportionally MANY mishaps that lead to death stay in the news.
This incident has juice because it's a Boing 737 series aircraft.
It may be hard to believe what I wrote here, and it would be hard to verify if you just look at the general news. You'll need to look at specialized air transport reporting to see the baseline of major mishaps.
True, but it's not an apples-to-apple comparison. If you compare by miles, then flying wins by a lot. If you compare by hour, it's much closer (though I'm pretty sure flying still wins, yes).
Only commercial. If you add in General Aviation with some random poorly maintained Cessnas from the 70s piloted by some randoms in their 70s then it's a completely different picture.
I've heard that private aviation and private driving have comparable accident rate, which makes sense. Now I wonder how's the rate of both public transportation.
According to this chart https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... buses and trains have 0.02 to 0.04 deaths per 100,000,000 miles travelled. This compares to 0.01 deaths in the commercial aviation. So pretty much on par, but if you switched to deaths per hours of travel, which is IMHO better statistic, assuming that a average plane flights say 10 times faster than a bus/train (800km/h vs 80km/h which seems reasonable) then the commercial aviation is actually less safe, but not by a big margin either, within the same order of magnitude.
Because people generally spend much more time driving cars and being on the trains and buses than being on a plane. The intuitive reading of the statistics of accidents is 'how likely it would happen to me in my _lifetime_', and not based on how much you actually fly or drive. For such intuition one would need to compare the same amount of time spend in either mode of transport because they would represent the same amount of somebody's lifetime.
No, not at all. Given that people generally spend more time in cars than on planes, assuming that they spend the same time on each, as is tacit in treating per passenger hour risk as comparable to a lifetime risk, is flat out wrong. You'd need to know the expected total time or distance traveled by each mode.
By your logic death per miles travelled by different mode of transport statistics would be useless, too, precisely for the same reasons you are stating, that is needing to know how many miles you actually travelled using each mode of transport as it's not immediately obvious if average person gets more miles on a plane than in a car in his lifetime.
However, it's immediately obvious that an average person spends more time in car/bus/train than on a plane, and you are agreeing with it. So deaths per hours travelled is actually better as it gives you some immediately insight. If fly and car/bus were the same in deaths per hour you know straight away that car is less safe because you spend more time in a car.
>By your logic death per miles travelled by different mode of transport statistics would be useless, too, precisely for the same reasons you are stating, that is needing to know how many miles you actually travelled using each mode of transport
Yes, if you want to calculate a lifetime risk, you must know (or estimate) a lifetime usage.
>So deaths per hours travelled is actually better.
It really isn't. Does the average person spend as many times more time in cars as planes are faster than cars? If so, per mile risks would be comparable to lifetime risks. The average person probably spends more time in cars than that, though that still leaves per mile risk as closer to accurate (for the average person. Are you the average person?). But neither per mile nor per hour risk should be conflated with lifetime risk, and if you're not going to use personalized assumptions about usage, it's much better to just look at actual mortality data to avoid the issue entirely. For most comparisons though, risk/cost/pollution/whatever per passenger (or for goods, ton) mile is probably by far the more useful measure. If something needs to get from A to B and you need to know what that entails or what the best option is, those are the more directly relevant figures.
I'm not really sure which metric is better but one logic of using per hour is that I think vehicle breakdown occurs more likely the more hour they're active, not the more distance they travelled https://www.lytx.com/blog/measuring-engine-miles-to-hours-to... . Also chances of external condition like weather ruining your trips are also more likely with more time because forecasting can only go so far.
Not if you consider general aviation statistics and instead stick to the commercial planes only. And anyway these statistics are kinda massaged because they compare amount of miles travelled instead of comparing amount of time spend travelling.
While I think it’s good to keep things in perspective and recognize that statistically you’re more likely to die on the ride to the airport than on the plane itself, it needs to be said that these statistics shouldn’t lead to a complacent mindset especially because the redundancies in aviation can lead to such a mindset.
Slowly but surely we see more cutting corners in aviation, especially in the US.
This ranges from trying to evade certification for planes to crew hours, to more lax regulation on how air traffic is managed to increase movements at airports, to overworked and understaffed ATC.
I don’t think it has risen to levels that affect statistics in terms of death, but the statistics in terms of near catastrophic events has risen over the years.
Yes, it's actually an FAA approved document for each aircraft type called the Mimimum Equipment List (MEL). It defines which non-critical equipment is permitted to be inoperative and not prevent dispatch of the aircraft.
Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.
There's a joke about asking skydivers why they'd jump out of a perfectly good airplane and the punch line is that there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.
Every single plane has things that are broken, things that are inoperative, things that behave slightly out of tolerance. This is true for commercial aircraft the whole way down to single engine trainers. 172s are notorious for having fuel gauges that are basically only good for telling you how many fuel tanks you have and not anything related to quantity of fuel on the plane.
I can't link you an independent source just my word as an aircraft mechanic.
I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can never achieve.
We already have laws for when people are criminally negligent.
You want people incentivized to participate in safety culture, not motivated to frame others or destroy evidence to save their jobs.
People will always make mistakes and have poor judgment sometimes. That will never go away, and punishing people will not stop it. A robust safety culture expects this to happen, and builds in mechanisms to catch problems.
Of which as mentioned previously by Miraste/flight 261 regarding Alaska were not implemented clearly and cleanly given that the person who raised the alarm of ghr situation was fired and the situation continued onwards
Right now regarding boeing there are also boeing whistleblowers in new NGOs set up to police boeing malpractice... If only laws work and this weren't necessary, as boeing also has bribed faa staff to achieve their own objectives risking public safety
That doesnt seem to be the current IS state when it comes to certain companies. Some dont have a safety culture on company level but one of corruption and economically viable malpractice. Which means the negative effects you describe are already happening.
Once policing fails to stop their trend economic pressure is really the only thing that is left. Especially if policing failed due to said company being able to use economic power to influence the policymakers and the people tasked with enforcing those policies.
As long as people buy stuff from companies with a negative safety culture that have political pull, they dont have an incentive to change. I dont see an alternative to boycotting these dangerous malfunctioning actors.
edit: Or to get to your initial wording, this isnt about how to deal with people making errors or having poor judgement but people acting with intent for economic reasons.
I haven't trusted Alaska since the Flight 261 crash, where they failed to do basic maintenance for so long that the screw threads in the stabilizer system wore away and locked the plane in the "straight down" orientation. And fired and sued a mechanic who reported the problem. 100% fatalities.
That's not how organizations work. You can't just slowly take out the "bad" people and replace them with "good" people and expect that to fix anything. It's the wrong mental model.
Organizations are sticky. They get stuck in a rut, basically. The slow trickle of new people gets indoctrinated into the Company Way (or else selectively ejected), and the people that are able to leave often use it as a lesson of what not to do.
If you've ever read the details of that crash... I can think of no better example of where "corporate death penalty" should have kicked in. Instead Alaska has bought up multiple carriers and increased their footprint, all while continuing to engage in shenanigans.
I live in Alaska and Alaska Airlines (which isn't Alaskan - it's HQ is in Seattle) has a rather... notorious history with safety/maintenance issues. I fly Delta whenever possible when travelling to the lower 48.
Alaskan Airlines is notorious for taking maintenance shortcuts, this is likely not an inherent problem with the airframe but rather this operators SOP.
Alaskan Airline flight 261 is one example.
> The subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that inadequate maintenance led to excessive wear and eventual failure of a critical flight control system during flight.
Although I can sympathize with the story, this particular aircraft had been in their hands just a couple months. Its first commercial flight was just a couple weeks back. Maintenance isn't the issue here, clearly.
Fixing known problems as you learn of them is maintenance is it not? That's just as important as changing out the lubricants and checking that the working parts are working.
When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras. A pressurization fault on the ground where the plane is not pressurized almost certainly doesn't hint at problems with a permanently installed door plug.
Is there any detail anywhere on what exactly is being inspected? Just the bits of airframe around the where the panel that failed? Can a broader issue with how the airframes were manufactured be ruled out at this point?
The cynical part of me wonders if this isn't just a bit of PR to 'ground' the planes for 'inspections' without actually addressing some kind of root cause.
Inspection will involve this plane, every other plane around this door/panel, and current manufacturing. Records and maintenance logs will be inspected until they know what happened and why, and then check where it could occur on these planes and others.
I certainly know nothing about planes yet from the reading I've done on the 737 Max I'm a bit uneasy that these planes are still flying.
I usually subscribe to the mentality that something that had a significant issue that was fixed is overly scrutinized and thus becomes safe but in this case it seems like the decision-making involved in the making of this plane from the start was flawed, such that I'm not sure patches on patches are enough.
Someone who knows more about planes might say all the issues are unrelated but fundamentally in a system like this I think one thing is bound to affect another, and if not that, then the mentality that led to one issue is likely to have been present in the developing of other components of the system.
The FAA will never ban it because politically its untenable in the US, the only thing that could kill the Max off would be if another big regulator such as EASA refused to let the Max into their airspace.
How do you think we would judge someone using common sense to work out a problem in computing? Because saying the FAA is existentially deferential to Boeing is a "series of tubes" analog.
Another poster above described it but Boeing managed to lobby congress into passing a law that basically says they don’t have to add a sensor that the FAA required them to.
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[ 8.1 ms ] story [ 366 ms ] threadI would not be surprised though if Boeing's sales drop if the US government brings in tariffs or etc to try and force companies to buy their flying coffins.
Airbus may have mistimed the A380 versus industry trends - though this is certainly up to debate and is still up in the air.
The first A380 deliveries were back in 2007, so the also had to eat the impact of the 09 financial crisis.
No question about that.
[0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...
With how thin the airline industry is right now post covid though we knew stuff was going to start happening. FAA is short staffed, airline maintenance had a ton of people retire during covid, etc. Here is to hoping things will change before more people lose their lives.
Prior to new models released in the last ~10yrs-ish, Boeing made the safest planes in the sky (as measured by passenger miles). Many of those planes are still flying and still doing great.
For me the interesting question is what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes which is apparently resulting in worse safety performance.
Is any part of the capitalist system "well functioning" anymore?
Capitalism is literally defined by the ability to invest capital to accumulate more of it by way of profit. The logical end of this process is straightforwardly monopoly.
The aerospace industry is not a good example of capitalism. What we have with Boeing is basically a government sanctioned monopoly. It’s basically a weak form of nationalization, without the stigma.
That's wrong. In reality, the mere theoretical potential for competition has always been more than enough to call it capitalism from any perspective. The facts are that actual competition is not a requirement.
Source?
Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production, no? Maybe the definition changed in the US?
Boeing seems to have created a political and regulatory environment for itself where its better for it to design and build planes poorly, than it is for it to design and build planes well.
Hence there's always going to be a tug of war between the FAA and the industry. The FAA never wants to approve anything, and industry goes out of business if the FAA doesn't approve it.
You'll see the same forces in action with the FDA.
BTW, as is abundantly clear from history, a fatal design mistake can and has destroyed several airframe companies. Boeing's finances were punished severely after the MAX crashes. Boeing does not win by making an unsafe design. When I worked at Boeing, I didn't know any engineer who was willing to sign his name to a faulty design. Yes, the engineer responsible for a piece of work gets his name on the drawings. It's career suicide for him if he signed off on a bad design.
America looks like it's speed running the soviet union and south africa.
(I'm not talking about self-congratulatory conceits, like "raising the bar" and "fire fast", since the companies that first come to mind as saying those things tend to produce a large quantity of often poor quality, in very visible ways. Do we have concepts or terms lately for a place where most everyone does great work, and people who don't rise to that don't remain there?)
The McDonnell Douglas merger is also worth mentioning in this context.
It turned out I worked in the same building he had, and I found his old office. Word is after he left they locked it up, like a crime scene. I think they were worried his whistleblowing would turn to leaks and I guess they thought his office would have some sort of evidence? It was an interior office so no big loss real estate wise, but that was a super weird chapter.
He was painted as an aluminum bigot but I always wondered.
I used to talk to a coworker about how Mitsubishi - which built the 787 wings (something Boeing has never done before) - had introduced a regional jet and would be coming after a Boeing’s lunch. He was not worried. I’m a little shocked he’s been right so far. In fact that particular division of MHI seems to be defunct as of last February, which is news to me, so I suppose he was right. Maybe the 787 experience was as unpleasant for them as it was for Boeing.
That everyone survived the collision last week makes be feel better but still not great.
If they were worried about a lawsuit from him they might want to preserve everything in case it was subpoenaed regardless of guilt or innocent - possibly especially if they thought his claims were wrong.
If Boeing did clear it out, they'd be open to charges of doing a coverup. The smart thing to do is lock it up as is.
- designed to outsource most manufacturing to the lowest bidder, many program management problems, overruns and delays
- to bust unions new factory was created in South Carolina and this has very poor QC, there are rumors that a certain large middle eastern airline refuses to accept any planes assembled there
737 program:
- they decided that they are not going to do a clean sheet 737NG and use the existing platform to put on new engines and do other modernization. They did it the cheap way and tried to paper over problems in software to make sure that their biggest customers would not need to send their pilots through extra training. Killed hundreds already.
All jet airliners are aerodynamically unstable and use active controls to "paper over" that. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing that.
The MCAS problem was not due to its purpose. The problem was the software for it had too much authority, and did not shut off when the pilot countermanded it. A worse problem was the pilots did not follow emergency procedures for runaway trim.
For reference, the emergency procedures are:
1. restore normal trim with the electric trim switches (which overrides MCAS)
2. turn off the trim via a switch on the console
The FAA sent around an Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterating the two step process before the EA crash:
Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
They also ignored the overspeed warning horn because they were apparently operating at full throttle. This was a large contributory factor to being unable to move the trim by hand.
So, yeah, it is harsh to the crews. I've also talked with MAX pilots who were quite harsh towards them. I'm amazed that one would not be harsh towards a pilot who did not bother to read/understand/remember and EMERGENCY AIRWORTHINESS DIRECTIVE about how not to crash.
Would you get on an airplane knowing it had such a pilot? Not me.
I assign 50% responsibility to the pilots and 50% to Boeing.
Also, before the LA crash, the MCAS failure happened on the previous flight of the same aircraft, and the crew just turned off the stab trim, and continued the flight normally and landed safely. That crew was unaware of MCAS, but they followed standard runaway trim emergency procedure.
Of course, the MCAS software was badly designed, and the single path failure, are squarely Boeing's fault.
Pilots must always be ready to deal with runaway stabilizer trim, on any aircraft type. It's a "memory item".
Indeed there is no requirement for aircraft with the same training / type certificate to handle identically. For example the whole CitationJet class from the Mustang to the CJ4.
This is flatly wrong. The only aerodynamically unstable planes are experimental and some fighter jets.
No passenger plane can be certified if it can't be proven that it is aerodynamically stable.
EDIT: don't take my word, here is a short explanation by a 777 pilot: https://youtu.be/EuVlbVr_jrs?feature=shared&t=129
Stability is also commonly understood as the opposite of maneuverability, as a more stable aircraft is less maneuverable.
Combat aircraft such as fighters are designed to be aerodynamically unstable so their maneuverability is unhindered. Likewise stunt planes and other aircraft whose job is to not fly straight and level.
Aircraft such as passenger and cargo airliners are designed to be aerodynamically stable because their job is to fly straight and level with good fuel economy and minimal piloting, they do not need swift and nimble maneuverability.
The safety of an aircraft has no relation to that aircraft's aerodynamic stability.
An airliner has to perform well at both, which is why wings are swept, yet have flaps and slats to modify their aerodynamic profile. Swept wings have other problems, like dutch roll.
Airliners also become uncontrollable above a certain speed, which was a contributing factor to the EA crash (the crew ignored the overspeed warning).
Look up dutch roll, the active yaw damper that suppresses it, and the FAA requirement that all of them have a yaw damper installed.
Besides, the MAX is not unstable. All it was supposed to do was just nudge the nose down a bit to match the profile of the previous 737 jets.
>Besides, the MAX is not unstable.
You might want to address your seeming hypocrisy there.
Thank god there are airlines with standards. I'm certainly glad my Middle Eastern long haul option for a particular cross-continent journey does not have any faulty Boeing models.
One of the tenets of the article is that the breakdown of the once-impermeable wall between civilian and military divisions has resulted in disaster.
My theory is that this is not limited to Boeing or even aircraft design, it's a much deeper and systemic problem affecting all kinds of fields. We've had a lot of industrial accidents lately.
When aircraft manufacturing was an emerging industry there were tons of undocumented safety margins and "slack" in the design and production pipeline.
Over time, the beancounters start optimizing stuff, so these undocumented safety margins are eroded in the name of efficiency/profit (and sometimes even documented safety margins too).
Furthermore, workers back in the day had a much better life when it comes to purchasing power (especially when it comes to property), and so could actually "give more fucks" about the job than they do now which is a compounding factor. You used to get a lot of implicit quality assurance back then which you don't get now.
We've now reached a stage where these undocumented safety margins have been eroded enough that it actually starts to cause issues, and the safeguards that are supposed to catch them aren't good enough, either due to 1) they've never been good enough but just weren't really needed before or 2) they too have been eroded in the same way for the same reason.
This also applies to software - software quality nowadays has gone down the drain for the same reasons, and even brands that were built on quality and polish (Apple) are now churning out shit (see the endless calls for another "Snow Leopard" bugfix-only macOS release).
Seems reasonable. I was wondering if a single event should really be enough to "ground" all similar planes, but seems like they just want to do a quick inspection.
You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that have no fatalities, but they also have very low production numbers to go with it.
If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?
A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new problems.
They seem more keen on getting legislative change and regulation bypass or exemption.
Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.
- There is no reason to assume that the learnings from the 50 crashes weren't also applied to the newer model. In fact you'd expect that they all were. - Faults in a new design are likely to be front-loaded, meaning most of the crashes would have happened earlier than later. Therefore the new model seems to be a much safer design if it flew 10% of the miles without even 10% of the crashes (actually 0%).
For reference, the most-produced passenger/cargo aircraft:
Different sources give oddly different numbers (more than I would expect for ordered vs built vs delivered; I didn't investigate deeply), but nothing else is above 2K. Note that plenty of small or military planes beat these numbers.Look at this list[0]: the soviet IL-2 plane has produced more planes the the entire list of planes mentioned above over a period of 4 years!
That is just one type of plane, for one country during a very short period..
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircraft
If the problem is the whole model or ‘Boeing’, both of which seem possible, what then?
In the meantime it's hard to disagree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that flying with airbus seems a better idea.
Boeing probably.
I should certainly hope they’d take a gander at the others before I’d sit next to one.
Especially with the memory of the last time they chose to keep flying 737 MAXes instead of fixing the defect in the rest of the fleet, at the cost of 157 lives, not even 5 years ago.
There is a real story of another 737 of Aloha Airlines flight 243 where part of the fuselage blown away together with unlucky flight attendant at 24000 feet: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-to-pieces-the-ne...
To give you some idea, a teenager seated across the aisle had his shirt completely torn off.
Today I read that it was full of passengers, and the two people supposed to be in the two seats in the row the panel blew out happened to miss their flight.
If that’s true… what an interesting set of statistics coming together.
Amount of people that sleep through flights Amount of panels that blow out of passenger planes Chance to be seated next to said panel
It sounds like if they were on board and wearing seat belts they would have been fine. Possibly very shaken, but fine.
After the segment of fuselage fell to the earth, after the giant hole opened, after the kid's shirt was ripped away, passengers were standing up at their seats and in the aisle, and flight attendants had to plead with them to sit down and buckle up.
Shirt sucked off him. Mother was holding onto him. Oh hello, a thousand nightmares of my youth.
I guess it all really started with everyone’s favorite CEO of GE, Jack Welch. It seems like he created the blueprint for the cost cutting/stack ranking/MBAs/profits over quality that we see today.
I hate Welch and all of his acolytes with a passion.
They'd get their shit together so fast if they faced meaningful consequences to their fuckups.
If you had a death penalty for execs, most competent people would refuse the job, and you'd end up in a worse situation.
Airbus execs seem fine[1], so they'd have nothing to fear here.
[1]: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...
Where do people come up with this stuff. If you want a mass exodus from airline management and sudden collapse of the entire industry that would be a fast way to do it.
Sounds like a good way to encourage execs to prioritize safety systemically.
In either case, of course negligent decisions on part of the C-suite would be considered.
> sudden collapse of the entire industry that would be a fast way to do it.
Compensations would increase accordingly. The industry would be fine.
According to a quick search Boeing has a market cap of ~150 billion and 150k employees, so if you manage to hide that it was you who installed the bolt wrong then assuming the company gets distributed roughly equally among employees then that's a quick 1 million payday. How certain are you that "hopelessly alienated" employees wouldn't sell out a few hundred anonymous passengers for a million bucks?
The right thing to do at this point is to go the airbus route, make the government responsible for launch aid, and put engineers back in charge of the company.
I won't opine too much on it, but the most concise way to put it is an extreme concentration on producing shareholder value as quickly as possible at the expense of basically everything else.
Sure is a good thing nobody was sitting in that seat.
I just assumed all airlines did it.
* https://www.airfleets.net/listing/b737ng-1-statasc.htm
* https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-airlines/
?
There don't see to be to be a lot of MAX 9s out there (relative to other MAX variants).
Intel is mid-stage MBA.
Google/Alphabet is early stage MBA.
But regardless of that, breaking up a large company because it has some problem doesn’t fix the problem. It just makes all the smaller companies you created easier to purchase. Just look at AT&T. NorTel bought every single one of the baby bells within a decade of their creation, resulting in just as much of a monopoly except now in a foreign corporation.
To quote a cardiologist I worked with, ‘keep scanning, you can have ticks and lice’.
https://radiopaedia.org/articles/satisfaction-of-search-erro...
Two airplane bottles in your pocket, belt loop, etc. - somewhere obvious but not too obvious - can absolutely blind a ticket taker to the 6-8 you have taped to the back of your calves.
Anyone who thought the DC-10 was in the clear after its cargo door problems were fixed was in for a nasty surprise a few years later when an engine fell off of one at O'Hare, but if the industry had written it off after that incident they'd have missed out on 35 years of an otherwise reliable plane.
That's a bad thing, not a positive one that it needs so much scrutiny.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...
If this is the case I wonder if it could be reversible.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
* https://archive.is/q5pQV
* https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
* https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/
B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck.
When they did the acquisition, they also got the management folks… who ran McD into the ground in the first place.
At the very least, anyone in a management position.
But god damn, when you buy a company that can no longer afford to support its own weight, don't let those fuckers convince you that they somehow know how to run your business too when they can't run theirs.
There's a long list of companies that died by being acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent company.
Netscape died because Microsoft bundled their browser with the operating system and made it free for commercial use, what essentially led to the huge antitrust case.
Only after that did browsers become utilities in the OS, with open source engines like Konqueror's KHTML (which later became WebKit, which later became Blink) and Netscape/Mozilla's Gecko
The problem was specifically DoubleClick management, who then got inserted in high levels within the Ads organization, forcing out the very technically & economically savvy people who were there before.
This is a recurring problem in large organizations. People who spend their time learning to be politically savvy will be...politically savvy, and be at an advantage when playing power politics that determines who is in charge. The effort needed to become politically savvy usually comes at the expense of domain/technical/economic knowledge required to actually get the job done. Eventually the organization becomes very good at playing political games and very bad at getting stuff done, until it collapses.
YouTube has obviously done well, but look at everything they’ve done since the ad sales mentality dominated their thinking. Stuff like Google+ happens when you are thinking “we need X to keep Facebook from cutting into our ad revenue, therefore our users will use X” rather than asking “what will our users like more than Facebook?”.
The other side is what we saw with things like Stadia, GCP, or G-Suite where executives used to the ad model have trouble with other business models. The problem there again isn’t that ads are evil but rather that you need to understand your users and what they want so you can think about the product the right way.
Creating monopolies and reducing suppliers actually harms "national security." Our braindead managerial class in action.
We massively drew down defence spending at the end of the Cold War.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...
Incidentally, however, as a factor of gdp, it had gone down 50% since the Korean War before that too.
I think all this means is that military spending isn’t outpacing gdp growth (a good thing) rather than we’re actually cutting spending.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
But it is - obviously - on the rise right now.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...
Late 1989 was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in most of Eastern Europe and 1991 was the end of the Soviet Union itself. There’s a drop between 1990 and 1991, a slight increase in 1992 (replenishment after Desert Storm?) and then a gradual decline in nominal dollars throughout the 1990’s. Also remember that federal budgets were usually passed ahead of time; this was before the government normalized all the government shutdowns and other monkeyshines we have grown accustomed to today, so budget changes might be a year behind current events. Adjusting for inflation the drop in spending would be even more.
Spending does start to increase after 1998. I’m not exactly sure why, but a lot of things started happening in 1998 and 1999, ranging from Bin Laden’s attacks on American embassies, the Kosovo conflict, Saddam Hussein ejecting UN weapons inspectors from Iraq, the discovery of Chinese interference in the 1996 elections and China stealing nuclear secrets.
Also, at the end of the Cold War, there were a number of systems that were in the late stages of design and development that were either radically cut back or canceled outright. These included the F-22, B-2, and Seawolf class submarine, just to name a few big ticket items. This saved a lot of money and made sense at the time since these were all designed specifically for Cold War missions that no longer seemed relevant. But eventually the older hardware still needs to be replaced; instead of replacing the Los Angeles class submarines with the Seawolf class starting in the 90’s, you end up replacing them with the Virginia class starting in the 00’s.
Other cutbacks during the post-Cold War period included closing military bases (which was fraught with political difficulty; no congressman wants the base in his district to be closed!) and reducing the number of US forces permanently stationed in countries like Germany.
Dollars aren’t the only measure, either. One of Reagan’s goals was a 600 ship navy. It takes time to build ships so it wasn’t until 1987 that the US Navy reached a peak size of 594 ships. Currently the US Navy has 238 ships. Sometimes a higher defense budget means you’re building a larger military but sometimes it means health care has gotten more expensive or you need to buy more fuel and ammunition to support operations. This also explains the drop after Korea.
Now whether doing a full blown merger vs an asset deal would have been more advisable can be debated.
If it’s a national security issue, that’s the governments problem to fix, surely?
Are we seeing similar things right now? Will companies like OpenAI or Nvidia be forced to merge or buy other players in the space?
Nvidia already has to work around export restrictions. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/17/23921131/us-china-restri...
But it wasn't that at all. Boeing knew clearly what the dangers of MCAS system were, they went to great lengths to completely hide the presence of the system from the world before delivery of the planes. Within days of the first crash, they knew it was MCAS, and kept trying to blame uneducated "foreign" pilots, kept trying to go on and tell the world again and again it was safe to fly, until that second crash happened. I understand greed, we all have that, but I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that your first concern after that crash and knowing there might be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy.
And what the hell FAA? 1) they didn't regulate properly before the plane was delivered, 2) After first crash they knew how dangerous the plane is, but didn't ground it (TAMARA report), 3) After second crash, you had the transportation secratary basically saying 737 Max was "innocent untill proven guilty" so let it fly before China forced its hand, 4) No criminal proescution in the end for those fanatic executives, just a cash fine.
And today this happens.
Boeing is the US's largest exporter (defense + civilian), and also the 65th largest US stock overall. Any US regulator action against Boeing would affect all that, plus US stock markets. You have to wonder how independent the FAA head can afford to be from Congressional interference, in the current setup. In the US, the FAA head is appointed (or, in recent admins, left vacant) by the Senate.
Back in the 2018/9 first 737MAX scandal [0], it was the Canadian, EU and Chinese regulators which were more aggressive about investigating and grounding, meanwhile the US FAA dragged its feet on taking action against Boeing while its donees like Congressman Sam Graves (R-MO 6) [1] continued to blame foreign pilot training, which was dishonest and adding insult to injury.
PS consider also in 2020, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA 27) secretly sold $50K Boeing stock ahead of his committee's damning 737MAX report; then avoided election scrutiny by simply blowing the deadline to report the stock sale... When he finally did disclose the sale, it was two weeks after the 2020 general election votes were cast, and three days after Garcia declared victory. He won by 333 votes. [2]
There's some scrutiny of Congressmen insider-trading biotech/pharma stocks esp. which their own committees (gasp) regulate, but really not a lot of scrutiny on aerospace. [3] Compare to George Santos, who wasn't implicated in a coverup that actually killed hundreds of people.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings#2019
[1]: https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/sam-graves/s...
[2]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-rep-mike-garcia-secretly-s...
[3]: NYT 2022/09 : These 97 Members of Congress Reported Trades in Companies Influenced by Their Committees https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-grounded-by-mo...
The most garbage human being I know personally is a project manager at Boeing. Unfortunately the only way to get this person completely out of my life would be to move to a different neighborhood.
Nowadays, to realistically restore competiveness in an industry, you'd have to coordinate a worldwide breakup of similarly-integrated competitors.
(and whilst you've got the scope to leave the airframe design/sales op alone and [further] vertically disintegrate the supply chain instead, that might actually make it worse, with the Spirit/Boeing relationship plausibly having a causal relationship with this incident)
Business school may say if your product never fails perhaps you are overspending on it and some known small failure rate is acceptable to control costs to have better profits. Boeing leadership may have took that logic and applied it to airplanes.
This is not a problem of "pointy haired MBA's", we can either fix this within the current regime by imposing heavy fines on this sort of reckless behavior, or we can tear down the current regime and replace it with communism/fascism/monarchy/whatever. In the system we are currently in, what happened at Boeing looks to be "correct", in the sense that it's what the system incentivizes.
PS: I realize you're not the person responding previously.
Part of this was because WWII subsidized an unsustainable and frankly absurd level of demand. For instance, Grumman almost exclusively built carrier-based fighters, and by the end of WWII they were producing planes so quickly that the Navy stopped doing periodic heavy maintenance of their aircraft in lieu of dumping them into the sea and replacing them with brand new planes. Obviously business for Grumman would never be quite that good ever again.
Well, I was going to say that calling them “business oriented” is laughable, but I guess that running a business in to the ground then laughing all the way to the bail out bank is just standard operating procedure now around the world.
I have a hard time imagining how Boeing could survive in the long run with this level of bureaucracy.
Edit: Saw the summary of the book Flying Blind: "A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation". One has to ask: where did the cost cutting go? What's cutting throat? It looks to me that the management of Boeing is grossly incompetent.
At many big corporations these "management" hires are just political. To fill in the certain quotas and tick the boxes.
Problems starts if they put their egos first. Then talented staff quit and projects go down the pan.
Small teams don’t have the margin for non technical folk. It often falls on people like me to become, temporarily, the admin or become the GIS department as such things are needed.
Stock buy-backs, executive compensation, and lobbying. That's where the cost cutting goes.
I went to a large "AI" conference this year and was surprised to see some talks being given by the "VP of ML" at the company I work at. I'd never heard of him or the position before, and when I looked him up in our company directory he appeared to sit somewhere in Pharmacy data science. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
When I attended his first talk wearing our company swag he seemed visibly uncomfortable and...grumpy(?) after he noticed me. His talk was a very non-technical, superficial fly-over of how ML can be used to profile and predict customer spending habits on our company e-commerce domains. Nothing even to do with pharma! At another table session in the day he dropped that his PhD is from MIT. Our company is big -name brand in its field- but by no means does it attract "MIT level" talent; not in pay, problems, or prestige. But again, it's a massive company, so who know? Yet at this point I'm entertaining my own little conference conspiracy theory that this guy is just a corporate cutout.
The next day I ran into him at the conference lunch line and gave him a: "Hey, how's it going! I'm at {our company} too, over in {line-of-business}". He nodded, chuckled to himself, and without even looking up said "oh yeah, you here to call me on my bullshit"? I was so confused that this would be the first thing out of his mouth with no context between us, even as a seeming joke, that I didn't know what to say. He politely excused himself to run to another table session before I could figure out how to respond.
Since then I've tried to track his team and any work/product/output they might provide but for the life of me cannot find anything other than some Jira tickets that get pushed around. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
Not disregarding your point, I think we all agree Boeing sounds like bureaucracy hell, but could it be that the 8 who are "managing projects" are in fact managing contractors or outsourced employees who are writing code?
I worked with a large multi-national fashion company, and they had an app development team that consisted of a product manager, scrum master, and senior technical advisor. You could look at them and say that 2/3 being non-technical was a problem, or you could look past that team to the several developers in India who weren't exposed to the rest of the company or clients/collaborators, and who actually got the work done.
The management trying to weasel out of yet another regulation is entirely showing what’s going on here.
We don't know that yet. The NTSB report will tell.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Un...
You just have to go where the content is. Reuters has been sending journalists across the world for over 100 years. You just have to dl tiktok.
Facebook doesn't even occur to me anymore, and the only videos I see on Reddit are hosted on YouTube.
Genuinely asking. I'd take a calculator nerd over a tech bro almost any (business) day.
I'm confused by your original point.
No one picks a flight based on what plane takes them there. Its Departure/destination/time/price/connections.
It’s all starting to feel like the galaxy note, where you pass a tipping point of no return with public perception.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
The point here is that the aviation industry is one of the most regulated and scrutinized industries in regards to safety, and yet despite all that, one manufacturer keeps making very dangerous slip-ups.
It doesn’t actually matter if it’s an engineering or a process problem, because both of those point to an organisational problem that needs to be rooted out at a company to which we basically entrust our lives.
For machines which hundreds of lives depend on, the correct response to that excuse would be to shut the factory down and replace the management who faked the safety process. I doubt they’ll use it for that reason.
1- Loose bolts: "Boeing Urges Airlines to Check for Loose Bolt in newer 737 MAX Aircraft" - https://www.european-views.com/2023/12/boeing-urges-airlines...
2- Leave the anti-icing system on for more than 5 min after non-icing conditions: "Boeing still hasn't fixed this problem on Max jets, so it's asking for an exemption to safety rules" - https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/boeing-still-ha...
3- Sit too close to a door not in use: "Alaska Airlines grounds 737 Max 9 planes after section blows out mid-air" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67899564
4 - Possible unscheduled decompression, from incorrectly drilled fastener holes in the aft pressure bulkhead, if being in the wrong plane, at the wrong time: "Boeing and a key supplier find a new manufacturing issue that affects the 737 Max airliner" - https://apnews.com/article/spirit-aerosystems-boeing-737-fus...
I think I am going to need a shared Google Sheet...
That anti-icing system is deranged, though. They effectively installed a timed detonator on the engines and want a safety exemption for it.
There are known issues regarding quality assurance at Boeing for a decade now, they keep going down the drain. The MBAs from McDonnell-Douglas won, and properly tarnished Boeing's image...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...
People falling out the sky because the wing falls off because someone forgot to bolt it on aren’t going to care if it’s a design issue or a manufacturing issue. Boeing is doing both, so the blame lies with them either way.
There isn't a change in outcome between the flaws, but I think the difference between a mistake and a known issue that was left in while the company tried to change regulations to allow it, all for a tiny cut to the BOM, is worth noting.
This is of course pure speculation and it might equally well be some single manufacturer pressuring ("optimizing") their employees (or even machines) past the point of reliability.
Either way I'm not gonna fault anyone for refusing to fly on a 737 MAX. At some point you gotta make a call and shift your assumption from "isolated engineering/manufacturing mishap" to "corporate screwed the entire product top to bottom".
Boing is still at fault, yes, but we should exercise restraint in becoming too reductionistic on complicated engineering problems.
There's no nuance when people are dying. None whatsoever.
If someone can't agree to that sort of black-and-white thinking, probably they should be working in an industry where innocent lives aren't dependent upon sound decision-making.
You might really enjoy a book called the The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. He covers your comment here in detail.
One of his key insights is that "human error" are far too often weasel words that prematurely end a conversation (or investigation) into root cause. He goes on to detail a whole tree of "human error" so we can speak about mistakes, lapses, and errors that humans make.
The meat of his point is that some types of human error are very hard to design out of your system, but _many_ types of human error can and should be expected by the designer (or engineer), and appropriately handled.
In this instance, if a human (or perhaps a few) can make a single error when affixing the door plug to the aircraft, like improperly torquing a bolt. And that simple error risks a catastrophic loss of the airframe, then you probably have a _design_ issue and not a "manufacturing issue caused by human error".
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/boeing-737-max-loses-e...
So Boeing didn’t actually manufacture the plane. But they are still responsible for ensuring its manufactured correctly.
It's even in the article: "Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselages for the planes, referred CNBC to Boeing when asked about the incident"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems
[2] https://www.spiritaero.com/
Otherwise there’s too many shellgames you can play.
If Samsung/Apple would outsource their batteries to Megabattery Company LLC and those batteries started to randomly explode we would all be blaming Samsung/Apple for not doing proper QC. I hope we all hold Boeing to a much higher level of scrutiny than cellphone manufacturers.
Spirit was Boeing Wichita until 2005, and today Boeing represents 85% of sales.
QA is not forced to only deal with assembled components. They can be embeded before the assembly process to QA the parts. For example they could peform crystallographical analysis on a subset of blades which are ready for assembly.
They can also take apart a certain percentage of randomly selected engines, perform crystallographical analysis on a subset of parts and then re-assemble the engines. Many options.
This kind of maintenance and inspection actually can be required and performed, it just costs more time and money. If we want to be all market capitalism about this we could require tests necessary to ensure safety and let engineers, business people, and executives make decisions that price in the cost of dangerous and risky designs that require constant and invasive inspection and maintenance.
The only real difference with today would be regulators having a spine and/or more than pro forma power to enforce their decisions.
Boeing is no longer engineering focused. It’s a numbers business pumping out planes as fast and as cheap as they can get away with.
Hum, yes, instead Boeing seems to have systemic manufacturing flaws. Do we have a reason to believe those are contained into the Max line?
Supposedly fixed with software when the root cause was retrofitting engines too large for the airframe leading to pitch instability under high thrust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
Need a Wikipedia page tracking all of these Boeing issues tbh.
Wonder if that will happen again.
This is what happens when bean counters run the show.
They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount of inconvenience.
> Preliminary information about the accident remains scarce, though two people familiar with the aircraft tell The Air Current that the aircraft in question, N704AL, had presented spurious indications of pressurization issues during two instances on January 4. The first intermittent warning light appeared during taxi-in following a previous flight, which prompted the airline to remove the aircraft from extended range operations (ETOPS) per maintenance rules. The light appeared again later the same day in flight, the people said.
https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/alaska-737-max-9-t...
No idea about the accuracy of the site. And it seems like they have some script that prevents text highlighting for whatever reason (turn off Javascript).
Hard to understand how an an incipient failure could manifest then (e.g. from increased leakage).
Of course, there's warning lights for excessive cabin pressure, etc, too... which would point to a different theory of the problem than a structural manufacturing problem.
The illusion of control doesn't change your odds much.
Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite.
On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
> In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html
So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops!
Of course one should consider that:
(a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?),
(b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference),
(c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either.
Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.
Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more when driving unfamiliar roads, with additional fatigue of long durations, with additional distraction of kids, etc. Or perhaps routine drives are worse because one lets their guard down!
Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good.
But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.
https://www.aopa.org/-/media/files/aopa/home/training-and-sa...
The last passenger death in a US Commercial Air Carrier was in 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_in...
Even assuming your 24-million flight hour number, that would mean 1 death over 100-million flight hours from 2020-2023.
If that door had hit horizontal stabilizer though we would have had a completely different statistics even with 1B hours. Fortunately it didn't happen, but with the current trend the idea that flying is always safer may become not so obvious, and "orders of magnitude" thing may disappear pretty fast.
If you look at just airlines, they’re in turn 10x _safer_ than driving if I remember correctly. There’s this anecdote that after 9/11 people were afraid to fly and died on the highways in much higher numbers. There’s also the fact that there there was a very small number of passenger deaths involving airliners in the US in over a decade (meaning no major crashes). Compared to thousands and thousands of traffic deaths a year that should drive the point home, even when you have to adjust for base rates.
That’s part of WHY air travel is safer.
Naturally that tends to push aviation towards avoidance of mechanical issues and on cars we are much more tolerant. I've seen people driving cars with their door duck taped on!
Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 was a Boeing 737-700 that experienced an uncontained engine failure[a] in the left CFM56-7B engine after departing from New York–LaGuardia Airport en route to Dallas Love Field on April 17, 2018. […] One passenger was partially ejected from the aircraft and sustained fatal injuries[…]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_13...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_...
The numbers would go up quite a bit if it included private and military. The numbers you linked to seem to have a very tight definition of which flights were considered, as the Wikipedia list showcases several more in-flight deaths involving air carrier class airplanes than just two.
That list includes a bunch of incidents that are not really relevant for assessing risk level when flying on a commercial airline:
- Someone committing suicide by getting sucked into a plane engine while the plane was on the ground.
- Someone sneaking onto a runway and getting struck by a plane that was landing.
- Another person stealing a plane and intentionally crashing it into the ground.
- The Kobe Bryant helicopter crash.
Looking through the list I would conclude the parent comment was correct. The only incidents with passenger fatalities on US airlines since 2009 were Southwest 1380 and PenAir 3296.
We are seeing more and more that these systems and processes have been breaking down, from regulation to manufacturing to pilots to systems to maintenance.
It really is hard to compare, but for an airplane, a passenger has to have faith that literally hundreds of thousands of people and things have done their job correctly. When I drive my car, I am much less reliant on people, systems, and processes, as cars are just plain simple. Most leople barely change their oil or check tire pressure. I even once had a complete engine failure and was able to just roll to a stop from highway speeds. Furthermore, I am in control. If I am too tired, I don't drive. I can pay attention to other drivers. I am directly responsible for maintenance. Etc.
I think it's hard to compare airplanes to cars by numbers alone. There are subtleties that are not exposed by numbers.
For an airplane passenger, it is absolutely a risk. You rely on so much happening correctly, and you are not in control of any of it. As little bits in that chain of things that need to happen don't happen correctly, percentages of failure and death go way up, and fast.
And we haven't even discussed in-flight medical emergencies, as there are actually quite a few in-flight deaths every year that would likely not yield a death if the medical emergency happened on the ground.
> There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
Wikipedia says there has been 51, not counting private or military. And that list doesnt include American aircraft flying overseas, to which the MAX planes would add hundreds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_...
Yes it will be when you loose all power while going 80mph on a motorway because rodents ate the wiring 10 years later.
"tons of electronics" in modern cars is not required for the most basic functionality such as steering and braking. Yes, you loose power steering and power breaking if it goes off, but you can still drive (unless maybe you've never driven without it and it surprises you during a high speed takeover manouver etc).
This "drive by wire" takes away the most essential security feature present in "all" cars up to now. A direct mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the wheels. Even manufacturers of small airplanes (like "executive" 8 seater jets) say "no way" to this tech unless it controls an auxiliary control surface.
Putting it in a production car that will get crashes, it will corrode (yes copper wiring and insulation corrodes too), it will get attacked by rodents and it might get driven in 50 years from now as a "classic" is sheer, unabridged, stupidity of the highest order.
You’re leaving out the biggest risk: other people. Most deaths, in planes or cars, are caused by human error. In a car you’re dependent on everyone going down the road (and there may be thousands in one trip) not drifting across the median. You’re dependent on the person coming the other way at an intersection to stop. Etc.
Traffic deaths have been climbing again after decades of decline, probably due to distracted driving. Driving is much more dangerous.
A weird metric. I'd prefer travel time, not per mile.
Still far safer.
https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat...
But, I disagree with the article, I think the debate is hardly settled.
An example? Travel to the moon would be the safest thing ever, even if 50% of the ships exploded, because of how far it is. I bet travel to Mars would the safest thing ever, based upon miles, even if 99% of the ships exploded.
Things break based upon two things. One is maintenance per trip. And each trip has riskier parts, of which start and end are parts. Planes have issues taking off and landing, a lot more than cruising. Same for space ships. Even cars have issues at start and end of trip, if you're driving very long distances.
Airliner passenger deaths are 1 per several billion miles.
It isn't though. Airliners have suffered in-flight engine explosions and decompressions multiple times since 2001 without fatalities. The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. Modern airliners don't just fall out of the sky. They feature robust designs and highly competent crews.
Cars regularly crash fatally without mechanical failures at all. And that says nothing of the dire state of car maintenance among the general population.
While I agree with your point, if the scope is scheduled airline flights in the USA, AA flight 587 crashed on 2001-11-12; globally, Egypt Air 804 on 2016-05-19. There have also been a few close calls, such as Qantas 32 on 2010-11-04, and collisions can also occur, such as that between BAL flight 2937 and DHL slight 611 on 2002-07-01, and Gol Transportes Aéreos flight 1907 with a business jet on 2006-09-29. And, given the topic is things going catastrophically wrong at altitude, there is AF447 on 2009-06-01.
How can that be? Very few serious in flight mishaps STAY in the news for more than one day, but proportionally MANY mishaps that lead to death stay in the news.
This incident has juice because it's a Boing 737 series aircraft.
It may be hard to believe what I wrote here, and it would be hard to verify if you just look at the general news. You'll need to look at specialized air transport reporting to see the baseline of major mishaps.
Yes, if you want to calculate a lifetime risk, you must know (or estimate) a lifetime usage.
>So deaths per hours travelled is actually better.
It really isn't. Does the average person spend as many times more time in cars as planes are faster than cars? If so, per mile risks would be comparable to lifetime risks. The average person probably spends more time in cars than that, though that still leaves per mile risk as closer to accurate (for the average person. Are you the average person?). But neither per mile nor per hour risk should be conflated with lifetime risk, and if you're not going to use personalized assumptions about usage, it's much better to just look at actual mortality data to avoid the issue entirely. For most comparisons though, risk/cost/pollution/whatever per passenger (or for goods, ton) mile is probably by far the more useful measure. If something needs to get from A to B and you need to know what that entails or what the best option is, those are the more directly relevant figures.
Slowly but surely we see more cutting corners in aviation, especially in the US.
This ranges from trying to evade certification for planes to crew hours, to more lax regulation on how air traffic is managed to increase movements at airports, to overworked and understaffed ATC.
I don’t think it has risen to levels that affect statistics in terms of death, but the statistics in terms of near catastrophic events has risen over the years.
Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.
Every single plane has things that are broken, things that are inoperative, things that behave slightly out of tolerance. This is true for commercial aircraft the whole way down to single engine trainers. 172s are notorious for having fuel gauges that are basically only good for telling you how many fuel tanks you have and not anything related to quantity of fuel on the plane.
I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can never achieve.
You're far more likely to die in a private plane or in an executive jet. GA aircraft crash constantly.
You want people incentivized to participate in safety culture, not motivated to frame others or destroy evidence to save their jobs.
People will always make mistakes and have poor judgment sometimes. That will never go away, and punishing people will not stop it. A robust safety culture expects this to happen, and builds in mechanisms to catch problems.
Of which as mentioned previously by Miraste/flight 261 regarding Alaska were not implemented clearly and cleanly given that the person who raised the alarm of ghr situation was fired and the situation continued onwards
Right now regarding boeing there are also boeing whistleblowers in new NGOs set up to police boeing malpractice... If only laws work and this weren't necessary, as boeing also has bribed faa staff to achieve their own objectives risking public safety
Once policing fails to stop their trend economic pressure is really the only thing that is left. Especially if policing failed due to said company being able to use economic power to influence the policymakers and the people tasked with enforcing those policies.
As long as people buy stuff from companies with a negative safety culture that have political pull, they dont have an incentive to change. I dont see an alternative to boycotting these dangerous malfunctioning actors.
edit: Or to get to your initial wording, this isnt about how to deal with people making errors or having poor judgement but people acting with intent for economic reasons.
Organizations are sticky. They get stuck in a rut, basically. The slow trickle of new people gets indoctrinated into the Company Way (or else selectively ejected), and the people that are able to leave often use it as a lesson of what not to do.
In short, turnover isn't a magic bullet.
They are part of management now. ;)
Alaskan Airline flight 261 is one example.
> The subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that inadequate maintenance led to excessive wear and eventual failure of a critical flight control system during flight.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261
It is. Maintenance was aware of the pressurization warnings on this plane. They did nothing.
Planes are incredibly complex and have little problems like that all the time. It's not a safety issue.
This was a brand new aircraft, this is almost certainly a manufacturing defect of some kind.
[1] https://christinenegroni.com/irony-of-pilot-laying-blame-on-...
The cynical part of me wonders if this isn't just a bit of PR to 'ground' the planes for 'inspections' without actually addressing some kind of root cause.
I usually subscribe to the mentality that something that had a significant issue that was fixed is overly scrutinized and thus becomes safe but in this case it seems like the decision-making involved in the making of this plane from the start was flawed, such that I'm not sure patches on patches are enough.
Someone who knows more about planes might say all the issues are unrelated but fundamentally in a system like this I think one thing is bound to affect another, and if not that, then the mentality that led to one issue is likely to have been present in the developing of other components of the system.
What are you basing this on?
How do you think we would judge someone using common sense to work out a problem in computing? Because saying the FAA is existentially deferential to Boeing is a "series of tubes" analog.
There's literally no reason to ban the aircraft.