The point is Boeing doesn’t even make this aircraft anymore. It’s like doomsday apple because the iPhone X has a battery defect. as sad as it is, the loss of life doesn’t actually change the value of the company because flying is dangerous and will always. I mean for God sakes Beings that can traverse solar systems also crash and nobody really doubts that only their existence
Why does 'not even make this aircraft' matter even 1%? How is that relevant?
People are ACTIVELY flying these aircrafts by the thousands each day. It's these people, these human beings, that are to be saved from a potential crash. Not Boeing, not the manufacturer.
Context from own memory: reportedly, -900ER and MAX 9 shares the same plug-type-plug-door / the dummy filler panel that blew off; the part is not a MAX-specific design.
Correct. However, even were there a difference, these are primarily assembly issues. All 737 fuselages are built by Spirit in Wichita with final assembly in Renton. If 757s were still rolling off the line I’d want the FAA to check those too.
These are not primarily assembly issues. The newest -900ER is ~5 years old which means all -900ERs have been through a heavy check where the bolts would've been inspected.
I think planes can still fly with the rudder loose? If the bolt falls out and it loses control, wind will push it into the neutral position and then flying will still be possible with other control surfaces? But I guess if the pilots don't know and it happens suddenly at a critical moment or if the bolt causes the rudder to get jammed, then that would be really bad. But I assume it falling out would result in the rudder loosely returning to neutral...
The rudder is necessary for directional control specifically turns, and for flying straight in a crosswind.
I've heard of a few cases where applying more/less power on the right/left engines can sort of crudely achieve the same thing, and you might get lucky and get on the groud without crashing, but loss of the rudder would be a serious emergency indeed.
> The rudder is necessary for directional control specifically turns,
Only if you add a secondary constraint of coordinated turns, which are important for passenger comfort and efficiency, but not directly a safety concern. (You still need directional stability, but that's provided by the fixed portion of the vertical tail, not the rudder.)
> and for flying straight in a crosswind.
Only if you add a secondary constraint of alignment between body angle and flight path. This constraint is totally absent in normal flight -- it only comes up during takeoff and landing, where it's useful to have the plane lined up with the runway to avoid side-loading the landing gear. In the case of a known rudder failure, you'd head to an alternate where there's not much crosswind, to avoid this issue; but you wouldn't expect many issues getting there.
The third case where the rudder is actually critical is when combined with other failures, especially asymmetric engine failures. There are parts of the flight envelope where a single engine failure combined with a rudder failure would not be expected to be survivable.
In fact, the rudder does not do what new pilots think it does (it is NOT like a boat rudder at all, really, because the plane banks) that instructors will often make you practice flying without using the pedals at all.
Planes can fly with the rudder inoperable, although with some restrictions -- you wouldn't want to do a serious crosswind landing, and you wouldn't want to stack it up with other failures, especially asymmetric engine failures.
However, that doesn't mean that planes can fly with the rudder /loose/. A significant risk in higher-speed airplane designs is that of aerodynamic flutter, where aerodynamic forces excite a vibration mode in the airframe, or a subset of it. You can find some impressive video of e.g. bending modes in sailplane wings being excited, with increasing magnitude bending until the wings are destroyed (or the excitation is reduced dramatically, or shifted to a different frequency). While aeroelastic modes get a lot of attention in flutter analysis, loose control surfaces can be much, much worse, because movement of the surface within the lash provided by the loose connections is effectively undamped.
How did the airline know not to sit anybody in the seat right next to the door plug (who would have gotten sucked out and fallen to their death)? Like was it really just good luck nobody sat there?
I'm so surprised people aren't more terrified to fly. So many different things can go wrong. I know what the statistics say about driving versus flying but I feel like over time with all of these Boeing issues that statistic is slightly changing for the worse?
> According to the latest estimates, there are approximately 100,000 flights per day. This number includes all types of flights, including passenger, cargo, and military aircraft. Passenger flights alone account for over 90,000 flights per day, transporting millions of passengers to destinations all around the world.
I guess 365 days a year, 100k flights a day, 1 incident is really statistically low but... it's still terrifying to put yourself in a metal tube in the sky where the risk is non-zero you die!
Door plugged seats maybe don't have a window or something that makes that row less desirable, so it gets filled last.
As to the flight terror, we're mainly scared of it for two reasons:
1. Disasters seem personally unavoidable - you can choose to drive better, etc, so any car accidents you see you can comfortably think you would have avoided. But once you're in the metal tube, you have no control over the results.
2. When it happens, it's rare and big news everywhere for weeks.
There is also the primal fear of falling down (I often have dreams of falling down and get jolted awake).
Another major issue is the awareness and helplessness. In a car accident everything happens so fast, you only have time to go 'On Sh..'. Sometimes not even that. Some people get T-Boned and die without knowing what happened.
But in case of an airliner, usually you know well ahead of time something is wrong. Engines are visibly on fire, there is fire in the cabin, it is flying side ways, it is lurching all over the place, it is spinning out of control.. etc. You have time to panic , scream, curse and cry.
The door plugs are regular windows with a little different bezel and they put a seat row right there. I think there was a young passenger on the Alaska flight: his shirt got sucked off and his mom was helping hold him in his seat.
1. Of course you have some control, like in driving. You can put on the seat belt, and not remove it until landing. When driving you have no control over other actors. In plane you have two professional pilots.
2. Traffic accidents with injuries happen daily, but very few of them are reported. That doesn't make ground transportation less risky.
> Like was it really just good luck nobody sat there?
Another point of good fortune was the altitude. Since the aircraft was still climbing, everyone was sitting down and wearing seatbelts.
At cruising altitude, people would have taken off the seat belts, started moving around the cabin and got sucked out due to extreme pressure differential.
>I'm so surprised people aren't more terrified to fly.
this fear has turned the flight industry into the safest and most responsible institution. They make mistakes, but they honestly investigate them and learn how to correct them.
It’s terrifying to put yourself in a metal box at high speed in a road where the risk is way higher than in any other mean of transport
Yes, but a linear growing industry could hide a exponential growing error Foothill in a delivering industry quite a while, before it could not, especially if it accepted that quality control was defacto outsourced to them..
I m interested, is there a tendency to fly passenger planes as cargo planes first over the last ten years?
"We at Boeing apologize for the door accident. Let us reassure you with a rational explanation: Basically it went all weird, due to nails being a bad size or maybe shape. It went wonky or something. Because the metal bits were wrong and/ or small or possibly the wrong type/ kind. "
How much of this is related to boomer nerds being booted or retiring. Has our skill and knowledge in Aviation has atrophied? I know Financial Engineers are menace to the society because of their pre-mature optimization of bottom line.
Did Boeing lose any skill or knowledge due to moving out large swath of their factory floor to South Carolina from Washington.
which book or website has this kind of information?
I’m guessing it’s because of the phrase “boomer nerds”.
But, the generational aspect really is relevant. I think probably a lot more nerds in later generations who were interested in aerospace engineering got sucked into software for a variety of reasons. During the boomer specialization period aerospace was more appealing as a career.
Lesson learnt, removed 'baby' for the sake of brevity. Did not realize it has become such a pejorative (thought it was only in niche circle things). As a late Xer, I think I do not have my finger on cultural pulse.
I said the same to my fiancée. We have gold status on Westjet (Canada’s second largest carrier and it has a hub airport close by) and I just put in the cancellation on my westjet credit card and will use up the rest of my credit. They use predominantly 737-800s and 787s in their fleet. AirCanada, their direct competitor, has a significantly larger airbus fleet. I’ll start using them from here on out just to decrease my odds of flying on a 737MAX
The probability of encountering something like this is so astronomically low, you'd be better off buying a newer, safer car because you're more likely to be killed driving to the airport to get on a 737 MAX.
It's perfectly rational to decrease the probability of getting involved in such a scenario even if the probability is very low. It all depends on the (subjective) cost of this incremental improvement to OP. In addition there is the benefit of being able to send a signal, and the associated utility is likely non-zero to OP as well.
> The probability of encountering something like this is so astronomically low, you'd be better off buying a newer, safer car because you're more likely to be killed driving to the airport to get on a 737 MAX.
You are statistically more likely to survive by sitting in the last row of the plane. That has a much larger effect than plane model.
I see people saying they won't fly on Boeing planes, but I see very few people saying that they are rebooking all of their tickets to fly the last row.
If you are willing to take such actions around the model of plane you fly, do you take similarly drastic actions around other more statistically dangerous risks? Do you wear a helmet in your car? Do you book the last row whenever you fly? Do you take transit instead of driving a car? Do you avoid traveling to countries with elevated traffic risks?
I get the idea of minimizing risks, but picking the model of plane you fly on has such a small marginal effect.
Your brain is not a rational machine, and its irrational fears will bring you much more suffering, on average, than an actual accident you could have prevented because of how rare the accidents are.
Therefore it's very rational to take great care about your irrational fears and feelings.
>>Confused, Bonin exclaimed, "I don't have control of the airplane any more now", and two seconds later, "I don't have control of the airplane at all!"[43] Robert responded to this by saying, "controls to the left", and took over control of the aircraft.[84][45] He pushed his side-stick forward to lower the nose and recover from the stall; however, Bonin was still pulling his side-stick back. The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.<<
Airbus made some design decisions that, in hindsight, weren't great but the side sticks aren't one of them. The captain should have locked out the other controls but didn't. As Air France proved a couple years ago, even force feedback in the controls won't fix the problem of two pilots providing separate inputs and not communicating.
There is a huge difference between a failure due to a bad design detail (can be checked for and corrected typically) and an okay design with bad manufacturing (the problem could be literally everywhere).
In the worst case you might even have to disassemble and reassemble the whole plane to really make sure you are not sitting on a ticking timebomb. And this might not be straightforward given the amount of glue involved in modern airplanes.
Would you rather fly A) in the play where ten screws were misdesigned and later fixed or B) in the plane where the design was okay, but a unknown number of screws are missing, loose or wrong although there was a check?
The per-trip risk of fatal accidents on commercial planes is approximately the same as for cars. Cars kill more people because we drive more often than we fly.
The per-mile metric always seemed disingenuous to me. The most dangerous parts of flying are takeoff and landing, which only happen once per flight.
Yeah, I've always been a suspicious of how extreme the difference is presented but actually working out the honest comparison seems like too much work.
You get similar from the "self driving" car people where they say "we are safer per mile than human drivers", but "self driving" systems have a wide array of rules limiting the use of the system in a wide number of conditions, specifically those conditions where most crashes happen. Then there are things like them reporting accident as being the result of the human driver if the system disconnected moments prior to a crash (my opinion here is that if a crash happens within 30 seconds of the driver being informed the self driving system is going to disengage it's the system's fault).
60 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadAnd that’s United only. They were manufactured for over 10 years.
People are ACTIVELY flying these aircrafts by the thousands each day. It's these people, these human beings, that are to be saved from a potential crash. Not Boeing, not the manufacturer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_Next_Generation
Reuters says there are 411 737-900ER planes that have plugs instead of exits: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/details-b...
I've heard of a few cases where applying more/less power on the right/left engines can sort of crudely achieve the same thing, and you might get lucky and get on the groud without crashing, but loss of the rudder would be a serious emergency indeed.
Only if you add a secondary constraint of coordinated turns, which are important for passenger comfort and efficiency, but not directly a safety concern. (You still need directional stability, but that's provided by the fixed portion of the vertical tail, not the rudder.)
> and for flying straight in a crosswind.
Only if you add a secondary constraint of alignment between body angle and flight path. This constraint is totally absent in normal flight -- it only comes up during takeoff and landing, where it's useful to have the plane lined up with the runway to avoid side-loading the landing gear. In the case of a known rudder failure, you'd head to an alternate where there's not much crosswind, to avoid this issue; but you wouldn't expect many issues getting there.
The third case where the rudder is actually critical is when combined with other failures, especially asymmetric engine failures. There are parts of the flight envelope where a single engine failure combined with a rudder failure would not be expected to be survivable.
However, that doesn't mean that planes can fly with the rudder /loose/. A significant risk in higher-speed airplane designs is that of aerodynamic flutter, where aerodynamic forces excite a vibration mode in the airframe, or a subset of it. You can find some impressive video of e.g. bending modes in sailplane wings being excited, with increasing magnitude bending until the wings are destroyed (or the excitation is reduced dramatically, or shifted to a different frequency). While aeroelastic modes get a lot of attention in flutter analysis, loose control surfaces can be much, much worse, because movement of the surface within the lash provided by the loose connections is effectively undamped.
I'm so surprised people aren't more terrified to fly. So many different things can go wrong. I know what the statistics say about driving versus flying but I feel like over time with all of these Boeing issues that statistic is slightly changing for the worse?
> According to the latest estimates, there are approximately 100,000 flights per day. This number includes all types of flights, including passenger, cargo, and military aircraft. Passenger flights alone account for over 90,000 flights per day, transporting millions of passengers to destinations all around the world.
I guess 365 days a year, 100k flights a day, 1 incident is really statistically low but... it's still terrifying to put yourself in a metal tube in the sky where the risk is non-zero you die!
As to the flight terror, we're mainly scared of it for two reasons:
1. Disasters seem personally unavoidable - you can choose to drive better, etc, so any car accidents you see you can comfortably think you would have avoided. But once you're in the metal tube, you have no control over the results.
2. When it happens, it's rare and big news everywhere for weeks.
Another major issue is the awareness and helplessness. In a car accident everything happens so fast, you only have time to go 'On Sh..'. Sometimes not even that. Some people get T-Boned and die without knowing what happened.
But in case of an airliner, usually you know well ahead of time something is wrong. Engines are visibly on fire, there is fire in the cabin, it is flying side ways, it is lurching all over the place, it is spinning out of control.. etc. You have time to panic , scream, curse and cry.
Personally this is what terrifies me.
https://imgur.com/a/Dsdt8VE
2. Traffic accidents with injuries happen daily, but very few of them are reported. That doesn't make ground transportation less risky.
Another point of good fortune was the altitude. Since the aircraft was still climbing, everyone was sitting down and wearing seatbelts.
At cruising altitude, people would have taken off the seat belts, started moving around the cabin and got sucked out due to extreme pressure differential.
All in all this was the most favourable outcome.
Nightmare fuel
this fear has turned the flight industry into the safest and most responsible institution. They make mistakes, but they honestly investigate them and learn how to correct them.
It’s terrifying to put yourself in a metal box at high speed in a road where the risk is way higher than in any other mean of transport
I m interested, is there a tendency to fly passenger planes as cargo planes first over the last ten years?
Do you drive or ride in cars, busses, trains?
There are many other daily risks other than transportation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
Did Boeing lose any skill or knowledge due to moving out large swath of their factory floor to South Carolina from Washington.
which book or website has this kind of information?
I don't know if it is true, and I hope someone can address the substance of the argument.
But, the generational aspect really is relevant. I think probably a lot more nerds in later generations who were interested in aerospace engineering got sucked into software for a variety of reasons. During the boomer specialization period aerospace was more appealing as a career.
The probability of encountering something like this is so astronomically low, you'd be better off buying a newer, safer car because you're more likely to be killed driving to the airport to get on a 737 MAX.
It's perfectly rational to decrease the probability of getting involved in such a scenario even if the probability is very low. It all depends on the (subjective) cost of this incremental improvement to OP. In addition there is the benefit of being able to send a signal, and the associated utility is likely non-zero to OP as well.
> The probability of encountering something like this is so astronomically low, you'd be better off buying a newer, safer car because you're more likely to be killed driving to the airport to get on a 737 MAX.
What if OP already has the newest, safest car?
I see people saying they won't fly on Boeing planes, but I see very few people saying that they are rebooking all of their tickets to fly the last row.
If you are willing to take such actions around the model of plane you fly, do you take similarly drastic actions around other more statistically dangerous risks? Do you wear a helmet in your car? Do you book the last row whenever you fly? Do you take transit instead of driving a car? Do you avoid traveling to countries with elevated traffic risks?
I get the idea of minimizing risks, but picking the model of plane you fly on has such a small marginal effect.
Therefore it's very rational to take great care about your irrational fears and feelings.
I'm thinking of this one primarily:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
>>Confused, Bonin exclaimed, "I don't have control of the airplane any more now", and two seconds later, "I don't have control of the airplane at all!"[43] Robert responded to this by saying, "controls to the left", and took over control of the aircraft.[84][45] He pushed his side-stick forward to lower the nose and recover from the stall; however, Bonin was still pulling his side-stick back. The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.<<
In the worst case you might even have to disassemble and reassemble the whole plane to really make sure you are not sitting on a ticking timebomb. And this might not be straightforward given the amount of glue involved in modern airplanes.
- I'm not sure which is worse
The per-mile metric always seemed disingenuous to me. The most dangerous parts of flying are takeoff and landing, which only happen once per flight.
You get similar from the "self driving" car people where they say "we are safer per mile than human drivers", but "self driving" systems have a wide array of rules limiting the use of the system in a wide number of conditions, specifically those conditions where most crashes happen. Then there are things like them reporting accident as being the result of the human driver if the system disconnected moments prior to a crash (my opinion here is that if a crash happens within 30 seconds of the driver being informed the self driving system is going to disengage it's the system's fault).