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Chinese Carriers, Ethiopian Airlines Halt Use of Boeing 737 MAX 8 Aircraft After Crash (reuters.com)
China's aviation regulator today grounded nearly 100 Boeing Co 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by its airlines, more than a quarter of the global fleet of the jets, after a deadly crash of one of the planes in Ethiopia. From a report: However, a U.S. official said it was unclear what information the Chinese regulator was acting on because the investigation of Sunday's crash, the second involving the latest version of the narrowbody jet, was in the early stages. Speaking on condition of anonymity as the topic is sensitive, the U.S. official said there were no plans to follow suit, as the jet had a stellar safety record in the United States and there was a lack of information on what caused the Ethiopian crash.
I'm going out in a limb here but maybe they were acting on the information that another one had crashed.
Without any accident investigation (and they are usually though) an analysys two crashes in six months are just a coincidence.
Your speculations are worthless.
I wonder if it crashed for the same reason this plane did:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/13/lion-air-crash-boeing-withheld-information-on737-max-planes-wsj-says.html
Could be muslim terrorists. Both crashed from heavily predominant Muslim countries.
Normally, I'm pretty happy to fly on any well maintained airplane, but a second crash within 5 months, where the early indications are that the plane crashed itself despite the best efforts of the pilots to prevent that, would make me cautious of flying on a 737 MAX 8.
How does that quote go: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."
Unless Boeing get this sorted out very fast then folks will reinterpret "MAX 8" to be the maximum amount of time in minutes that the plane will stay in the air ...
when last I checked, a "lack of information" is a great reason to avoid something dangerous. Actually, it might be the one and only and best reason to avoid anything dangerous -- from bicycles to bungee jumping. Get informed first. And if you thought you were informed, and suddenly you discover that you aren't informed because you can't explain something that happened, well then, avoid again until you become informed again.
In other words, let someone else run the tests. That's exactly what test-pilots are for.
Except we do have information. One has gone through accident investigation that hasn't been published yet, but has been completed and was serious enough that 2 advisories have been issued. It would appear as though there actually is a problem in these aircraft. Both crashed during takeoff. Both had problems with vertical ascension. One had a specific advisory on instruments used during ascending.
You're right it'll remain somewhat speculative until both incidents have gone through a complete review, but there are already indications pointing to systemic issues rather than just pure coincidence.
The ground search (well, digging into the ground) has located both FDR (Flight Data Recorder) and CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) for the crashed aircraft, which should help greatly in determining what the problem was/ is.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
YouTube: Mentour Pilot
The last ten years we had like 4 or 5 airplane crashes.
Now we have 2 in a row just during a 5 month period, same type of _new_ airplane. Most likely not a coincident but a systematic fault in the plane.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It was only introduced two years ago. Enough with the Donald Trump style propaganda. Letâ(TM)s see more evidence before bigging it up.
To be fair: All crash landings* involve problems with vertical ascension, and takeoff is by far the riskiest portion of the flight. The lack of altitude results in little time to recover from any issue. Thus, it is unsurprising to see two accidents on takeoff in a row, often with completely different causes.
* - It is possible to crash a plane on the ground. However, those crashes aren't usually described as crash landings. It's also possible to land a plane and go off the end or side of a runway, etc.
Of course it may be a coincidence. But it is an extremely low probability coincidence.
Let's be clear. The 737-NG and A320 family both have total fatal hull loss rates of less than 1 in 10,000 aircraft years in operation. This is generous and includes all accidents: terrorists, captain suicide, mechanical issue, and pilot error.
The DC-10 - recognized as having a fatal design flaw with its cargo door and widely recognized as a "dangerous" airliner at the time - took 1,600 aircraft flight years before suffering two fatal accidents.
The 737 MAX 8 has had 2 hull losses in less than 300 flight years of operation. That is nearly 70 times higher than the 737-NG and A320 family.
The likelihood of the 737 MAX having the same ultimate failure probability as the 737NG and A320 and having two fatal hull loss accidents in only 300 flight years is something on the order of 1 in a 1000.
Even if the ET302 flight is boiled down to "pilot error" (like the Lion Air flight), that is just an excuse. If the ET302 had the same failure mode as the Lion Air flight, then the fact that you have two separate incidents with a loss of control (shortly after takeoff, meaning less room for root cause analysis, checklists, etc) is a design flaw. Full stop. Whether or not a pilot could recover is not relevant; an airframe should not be constantly testing pilots with unexpected loss of control.
It is still "safe" to fly a 737 MAX 8 relative to most other daily activities. You probably won't die if you fly on one. That said, relative to aviation standards and safety records that we have achieved in the past 50 years, the 737 MAX 8 - today, at least - appears like a veritable statistical death trap.
1 crash per 100,000 flights
Well then, it should be safe for the next 200,000 flights. Better make your reservations quickly before the odds run out.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is looking more and more like poor pilot training. Can not blame China for stopping their carriers from flying them. They have some of the worst training going.
Today's nyt quotes an eyewitness as saying the plane was trailing smoke and making strange noises before it went down. It was carrying lots of UN people. It might have nothing to do with the MCAS system and everything to do with the political system.
Even if the ET302 flight is boiled down to "pilot error" (like the Lion Air flight), that is just an excuse. If the ET302 had the same failure mode as the Lion Air flight, then the fact that you have two separate incidents with a loss of control (shortly after takeoff, meaning less room for root cause analysis, checklists, etc) is a design flaw. Full stop. Whether or not a pilot could recover is not relevant; an airframe should not be constantly testing pilots with unexpected loss of control.
It is still "safe" to fly a 737 MAX 8 relative to most other daily activities. You probably won't die if you fly on one. That said, relative to aviation standards and safety records that we have achieved in the past 50 years, the 737 MAX 8 - today, at least - appears like a veritable statistical death trap.
It's not even really fair to call the Lion Air crash pilot error when the main culprit was an unpublished "safety feature". Sure, the crew didn't go through the checklist that would have disengaged it like the crew the previous night, but as you say takeoff is a bad time for troubleshooting. Of course, with crashes where everyone dies they almost always make pilot error at least a contributing factor if not the primary one. Gotta protect those aircraft makers from liability.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The Chinese response is the most appropriate, especially since they are not blinded by the fear of damaging profit margins for Boeing. The fact that at least 2 incidents with "unknown" cause involve the same aircraft means its continued use while the cause is unknown is a risk. China recognizes it as an avoidable risk, which it is in reality.
Who in their right mind would get on one of these after two accidents in six months?
I would. Seriously, two accidents compared to how many tens of thousands of trips and passenger miles? I take bigger risks every day on my morning commute to work and I'm FAR more likely to die in my car on any given trip even adjusting to make the trips statistically comparable.
Sure, the individual chance of the plane deciding to give up on takeoff despite the best efforts of well trained pilots is very low. But it's clearly not low enough.
I'm rather confident the appropriate regulators will conduct an appropriate investigation and figure the problem out. In the mean time the actual risk is remarkably low and not worthy of panicking over. We don't know the details about what caused the Ethiopian crash so it's highly premature to declare this aircraft to be dangerous.
If I recall, the previous crash has been linked to a bad angle of attack sensor. This sensor is only used by a new stall protection feature in the 737 Max. When it fails, the stall protection algorithm thinks the plane is stuck in a nose up orientation, and tries to force the nose down... into the ground.
There are several things that should happen:
1. Interim corrective action. Disable stall protection on all 737 Max aircraft.
2. Quality control investigation into the angle of attack sensor reliability.
3. Implement diagnostic algorithms into the control strategy to detect failed angle of attack sensors automatically. A failed sensor should disable the stall protection feature automatically, and alert the pilot.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If it was a new Chinese plane the US would ground all of them until we knew the reason. Yes, we do not know the reason so it is sensible to ground them until we do know rather than let people keep dying.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
At least get it right: "If it's a Boeing, I ain't going."
Computers should never have the last say in flying an airliner.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
southwest has a few of these but mostly other 737 models .. i wonder if they quietly grounded their max 8 planes too
This is really bad for Boeing.
Well, in the short term, sure. But the issue here just doesn't seem to be a huge problem to me.
Speculation here is that the new stall prevention system on the aircraft is likely the issue. This new system does some unexpected things when there is a sensor failure and if the pilots don't know about the system and how to override it, they can lose control of the aircraft's pitch. Boeing's issue was in not providing proper documentation of this system for the pilots until late last year, AFTER the Indonesian crash. In the Indonesian incident there where indications of the problem in the aircraft's maintenance logs. Where the system was doing strange things, the pilots where complaining about it but maintenance wasn't actually fixing the problem. So there may be a maintenance training and fault tree documentation issue too.
What this is likely to end up being is a pilot and maintenance manual training issue and possibly a design change based on human factors. If this speculation is true, Boeing may be financially liable for the two accidents, but the aircraft is indeed safe to operate, once the pilots and maintenance crews are properly trained.
IF the speculation is right, Boeing isn't in grave danger. The 737 MAX may find a different name and come without the new system, but Boeing's insurers will pay out, Boeing will pay higher rates in the future, but not much else will change.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Same plane
Both practically brand new
Both fall rapidly out the sky minutes after takeoff
For an industry as cautious as aviation I'd say that's a hell of a red flag for anyone operating these things.
Regardless of whether this is pilot error or not, if pilots consistently mess it up, then it's a problem with the system or the training.
It's not all that different from claiming it's driver error when a car's brakes fail. Technically the drivers can switch to the handbrake and come to a safe stop. However, in practice a large number of people would crash.
And if we had a situation where suddenly many more cars of a particular model were running red lights and hitting the backs of other cars, it might be a good idea to stop using it until the cause has been determined.
It's even worse than that. The "pilot error" appears to be faulty angle of attack sensors that cause the unpublished safety system (added to address an aerodynamic design deficiency) to freak out and dive the plane. The pilot error in question is not turning the thing off fast enough.
Not so fast there AC..
The speculation is that this is a human factors problem too, where some automated system is messing with the pitch controls in weird ways when presented with sensor failures. Where you can mitigate this problem with pilot training (Hey, when this happens, turn of the stall prevention system) there may also be a pilot manual omission issue too. If that's true, the pilots are properly trained per the documentation provided, so the base cause is really the pilot manual omits some important information, so they didn't have a chance to get trained.
So, I'd not be so fast to blame the pilots, or their training. It could be that it's not their fault.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Regardless of whether this is pilot error or not, if pilots consistently mess it up, then it's a problem with the system or the training.
It's not all that different from claiming it's driver error when a car's brakes fail. Technically the drivers can switch to the handbrake and come to a safe stop. However, in practice a large number of people would crash.
And if we had a situation where suddenly many more cars of a particular model were running red lights and hitting the backs of other cars, it might be a good idea to stop using it until the cause has been determined.
To apply your analogy to the Lion Air crash, it's as if the car manufacturer didn't tell people there were breaks at all. You can't train pilots on a system no one was aware existed.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Actually they should since pilot errors are by far the most common reason for crashes.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Regardless how good or bad this particular model may be, one has to remember that neither of the companies involved in the recent crashes is a paradigm to follow when it comes to aircraft maintenance.
it's fun to mess with planes' GPS and other sensors from above and build capability to take them down remotely with no trace, but when you take down the same type of newly introduced plane with so few months inbetween... oops! And now they'll scramble to blame it on the airlines to save all that sweet revenue coming in to the U.S. economy.
The question really becomes, how much power do you give the computer, before you decide that you're not really letting the pilot fly anyway and just remove them?
Have you dolts even SEEN the inside of a cockpit? There are LOTS of things that the pilots have to do. Not running a checklist IS BLATANT PILOT ERROR AND GROSSLY IRRESPONSIBLE;. Both of you idiot trolls. AND YOU ARE TROLLS have issued a ridiculous shitpile about the takeoff not allowing time to react. OF COURSE YOU IDIOTS. THAT"S WHY YOU HAVE PRE FLIGHT CHECKLISTS. Not sorry about the caps because people redefining just how incredibly stupid people can be is quite shocking. No credible human being will casually dismiss a crew's failure to perform checklists. It's what keeps passengers alive. Not doing checklists results in a number of ways that very bad things WILL happen.
Calling failure to perform checklists pilot error is very gentle language. Failure to perform checklists resulting in death is manslaughter through grossly endangering irresponsibility. Anyone not recognizing this has immediately and irrefutably identified himself as a completely unqualified moron.
Learn to spell.
www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/world/asia/lion-air-plane-crash-pilots.html
to summarise: we added a few lines of code that the pilots don't know about to make the plane do something the pilots have no idea the plane might decide to try and do: ie, depending on input from one little sensor, the computer might try and shove the nose into the ground.
And the "you couldn't make this bit up" bit in the article:: on previous planes without this new software, if you felt the nose was being shoved into the ground for some unknown reason, you could (wait for it, wait for it) "pull back on the stick", and that would do what pulling back on the stick has done in aeroplanes like forever, i.e. bring the nose up (in this case, by disabling any mad sensors/sensor readings).
(If I were the one conscious person on a plane, having to fly it, that is the single thing I would know to try to do.)
But not any more - with this new feature, *that method of escape has been removed*.
- We're going to crash!
- Pull back on the stick!
- Computer says no!
It looks like a simple rationale for hurting a US company which provides more leverage for China (it thinks) during various negotiations.
China is forgetting that Boeing is based in a blue state that probably hasn't gone Republican since Walter Mondale, and the current Administration therefore couldn't give a damn about them.
As soon as the tech is available it would only be prudent to remove the pilots altogether.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Not running a checklist IS BLATANT PILOT ERROR AND GROSSLY IRRESPONSIBLE;.
Maybe if you would have checked your facts, you would have known that in the incident referenced, the air crew was overwhelmed as the MCAS failure happened shortly after take-off; i.e. at a low altitude. The issue pushed the nose down.
It is very similar to the Hudson splash; the first officer did not have sufficient time to complete the ditch checklist as it has been written to be completed at a higher altitude.
Wanna put Jeff Skiles in jail?
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Arguably the tech has been available for some time now.
Self flying works only in a very specific set of circumstances. Even the military drones are mostly RC aircraft.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
To be fair: All crash landings* involve problems with vertical ascension
If you're going to be pedantic crash landings involve problems with vertical descension ;-)
Thus, it is unsurprising to see two accidents on takeoff in a row, often with completely different causes.
The problem was more specific than just "during takeoff". Both aircraft showed similar irregularities with their rate of ascent during takeoff. You are of course still right and this is still speculation, but these issues seem to have a lot in common.
> involve problems with vertical ascension
I'd be concerned if the plane I was in was climbing vertically.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You're a famous climate denialist faggot propaganda operative that lies when you have no knowledge.
Not true. There's a fantastic cockpit video of a pilot rendered unconscious through high-G, where the onboard computer determines a crash will happen and maneuvers out of the situation (upwards). Yes, it's not an airline, but it's a good example of a time where reverting to full-automatic saved at least one life.
Oh arse
This 737 "Family Killer" Max 8 is, currently, simply not reliable enough for air travel.
It is simply far too soon to draw this conclusion, Anonymous Coward. For all we know, the incident in Ethiopia was related to terrorists, or something in a passenger's baggage. We just don't know.
In aviation industry, two crashes in 5 months without a clear cause is good enough reason to ground these planes. Would FAA act the same way if Airbus had these problems? Probably not- there are lives at stake her folks. The best way to handle this particular situation would be to simply refuse to fly in these planes if you are a passenger. Perhaps steward/stewardess are smarter or have less to lose.
No. A crashing plane is having no trouble descending.
Right, you can be sure of that.
We should continue to blame China for everything wrong on this planet, that will for sure Make America Great Again.
Given how successful braking, stability, and steering take-over functions have been in at making cars safer, it makes perfect sense to apply them to even more modes of transport.
The whole goal is to de-complicate the operating process -- we don't manually adjust choke and spark advance, we can't individually control wheels that are braking, etc... we provide simple controls and hand off the rest to automation.
The problem here seems to be one of inadequate testing and backup sensors/systems.
I've seen automated pedestrian braking happen -- lives are saved and injuries prevented every day by computers that are paying close attention when the human operator can't or isn't.
We need more of this, not less.
Over 150 people just died, which is 3 Chernobyls. This means that aviation is a dead-end technology that cannot possibly be made safe at reasonable levels of cost. Germany takes the lead, mothballing all civilian aircraft now in use. From now on, Germans will use their rail network to carry domestic traffic. For international travel, Germany will build a new fleet of ships, wind powered and made of sustainable tree derived materials.
The US will take a more measured approach. No new planes will be ordered, but airlines will continue to operate with existing craft until they age out, whereupon they will be replaced by buses. The UK will do the same, but will order one more aircraft from China, specially designed with 12 engines and parachutes for each passenger, to cost GBP 10 billion and be delivered in 2025.
Where are they burying the survivors?
This was not a United flight.
Two brand new Boeing crashes in a matter of weeks!
"If you get on a Boeing, you don't get where you are going."
Sometimes you have to go beyond training to find and disable the offending device, and quickly! But it would be nice if they had a simple circuit breaker to kill everything but the engines. The Master Switch, perhaps, if it doesn't cut off fuel flow. Unlike the truly scary Airbus, the 737 doesn't need a computer to fly.
You gotta look at the places where these accidents happened. It's pretty difficult to train a goat herder how to operate an airplane, beyond pushing the buttons on the autopilot. They don't know how to fly.
Latest news from Reuters suggests that plane suffered some kind of a problem that caused it to emit smoke while in the air:
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
Could be anything from engine trouble to a bad case of Mohammedianism.
Creating an aircraft with a dangerous new unexpected behavior, different from all other aircraft pilots are familiar with, then blaming the pilot for not RTFM is asinine.
Yes being a pilot is complicated and requires lots of training. No that doesn't mean you can add more edge cases to their already complicated jobs and just stick it in the manual.
This was a complete fuck-up by Boeing.
..It is possible for the stabilizer to reach the nose down limit unless the system inputs are counteracted completely by pilot trim inputs and both STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT.
Additionally, pilots are reminded that an erroneous AOA can cause some or all of the following indications and effects:
- Continuous or intermittent stick shaker on the affected side only.
- Minimum speed bar (red and black) on the affected side only.
- Increasing nose down control forces.
- Inability to engage autopilot.
- Automatic disengagement of autopilot.
- IAS DISAGREE alert.
- ALT DISAGREE alert.
- AOA DISAGREE alert (if the AOA indicator option is installed)
- FEEL DIFF PRESS light.
The pilot should be the last line of defense against a failed sensor. I don't have a background in this particular sensor, but most controls algorithms I've worked with have some basic level of sensor diagnostics:
1. Sensor out of range( value defies reason. e.g. temperature of absolute zero)
2. Sensor stuck in range (the value doesn't change despite all other conditions changing.)
If either of those diagnostics fails, the control strategy is forced to a safe condition. Seeing as this is a new and unessential feature for the 737, the strategy should have been turned off. Pilot training is minimal in that scenario.
Where things get complex are sensor failures where the reading is simply inaccurate. The classic example is a gain or offset from the expected value. Those conditions are much harder to detect, but it is possible. These are the conditions a pilot needs to look out for.
I could imagine an aircraft with a sensor gain or offset being forced into level flight while attempting to climb. However, being forced into a dive instead of a climb is a very gross sensor error. That leads me to believe the sensor failed in either scenario 1 or 2. A simple diagnostic should catch it.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
My point was that this was NOT in the fine manuals, so reading them wouldn't help... It was added in August of last year, which was AFTER the crash in Indonesia.
So I'm not blaming the pilots at all, I'm saying they didn't receive the necessary information for the safe operation of the aircraft with the new system installed, likely never experienced the problem in the simulator during their training. It may be that the aircraft was airworthy and controllable, but if you don't know what to do, haven't been trained to do it, It's hard to blame the pilots for not being able to deal with the problem.
I'm also pointing towards the maintenance staff's training and the aircraft's maintenance procedure documentation. This new feature wasn't well documented there either and the Indonesian aircraft experienced multiple issues with this system, which in hindsight where likely indicators of a failing sensor, but the maintenance crews never fixed the problem, their diagnosis procedures didn't find the pending fault, so they put the aircraft back into service..
So, RTFM wouldn't have produced a different result. The information just wasn't in there.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going.
This was a fucking bomb. Eyewitness reports are that it was trailing smoke and raining luggage before crashing.
Have fun riding your magic pixies to your destination.
This is looking more and more like poor pilot training.
When a bomb explodes in the cargo compartment, training doesn't help much. These are human pilots, not cartoon X-Men.
I'm not sure how the pitch control system would cause the luggage to be falling out the back and it swerved over the cow pastures.
It doesn't seem to explain the smoke it was trailing, either.
2 events is never enough information for you to say something math-challenged like "Most likely not a coincident."
That's just world class stupidity right there.
I say "stupidity" and not "ignorance" because I know darn well you've had basic statistics explained to you before.
When witnesses report that luggage was trailing the plane before it crashed, along with smoke, you'd be well advised not to presume any sort of connection to past crashes.
The problem here is how the system is designed to work and how pilots fly airplanes.
The Stall prevention system is designed to make it harder to stall the aircraft by increasing the back pressure the pilot feels as they approach the stall. So as the angle of attack increases, so does the back pressure required to maintain the pitch angle. This actually makes perfect sense as part of of the flying skill is the feel of the aircraft, the forces on your butt, the forces your hands feel all play a roll.
The problem with this system is that it messes with the pitch trim. Pilots are trained to trim the aircraft for the pitch, power and attitude settings so the yoke pressure is nearly zero. The stall avoidance system effectively messes with this trim setting and if a pilot isn't aware of what the system is doing, it's easy to get into a situation where the aircraft is badly out of trim (or at least feels that way) should the system be reacting to an error from a sensor. Where it's *possible* to fly out of trim aircraft (within acceptable pitch trim range which is based on your speed, weight and power) it is a mentally and physically demanding. Then add to the fray the confusion about why the aircraft isn't flying as it should and you are going though the fault isolation check lists, it's easy to see how a pilot might be overwhelmed. Further, it's likely that in this case the fault isolation check list didn't actually include this system failure, so the two guys up front where on their own, trying to figure out something they had no information about.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Ironically
The Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed killing 157 people was making a strange rattling noise and trailed smoke and debris as it swerved above a field of panicked cows before hitting earth, according to witnesses.
Doesn't sound like a software problem to me. At least not any I've ever run across.
The real question is, how did they know the cows were panicked?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
How come some relatively simple sensors malfunction so often in aircraft? Especially AoA or pitot sensors?
And why don't they run a backup system like GPS sensor, or cheap run-of the mill barometric and accelerometer sensors, and at least run sanity checks against these? This way, the aircraft could at least know that MAYBE something is s bit 'off' with the main sensors, and maybe light a 'soft warning" lamp?
From what I read, because they used the 737 frame but moved the engines, stalling is easier, so they NEED something like the MCAS. Just turning it off is not an option. I am a software engineer, so when I read that in order to cover for an aeronautics engineering flaw of the aircraft they turned to software, I shuddered...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Two early crashes in a new plane with somewhat similar circumstances is mighty suspicious and certainly warrants waiting for solid details from the investigation.
gotten their air safety tip from the dear-leader-for-life's trade negotiators. Things not going well for the China side of trade talks with Trump? Recent Boeing crash? Turn the trade screws on a big American exporter named Boeing!
No, I'm not asserting this as fact or even conspiracy (I despise foil hats of all shapes and sizes), but what I do wish people would think about before jumping to conclusions, and what I ONLY with to assert here with this post, is that there could always be any number of alternate explanations for the actions of any particular government at any moment in history. Translation: We need to wait for more info before knowing anything about why anything related to this crash happens.
It could simply be an honest concern about safety by the Chinese who are acting on an abundance of caution and who lack any direct insight into the investigation. I'm very skeptical about totalitarian governments, particularly ones who are so abusive to their own people, but I'm willing to consider this possibility.
What is certainly of interest are three items:
1. Witnesses have reported strange sounds, and smoke, and stuff falling from the plane before the crash. Those witnesses are agricultural people who live and work under the flight path and are therefore not experts in aviation but they are certainly familiar with what they usually observe. Caution is needed here however because amateur observers seeinga large out-of-the-ordinary even often get sequences of what they observed, and directions of motion jumbled.
2. Boeing made recent changes to the 737 avionics to assist pilots in avoiding stalls, but apparently not all airlines have pilots who were properly updated/trained/notified of the changes - which may be the cause of the previous 737Max-8 crash.
3. Third world airlines sometimes get nice shiny new planes and then place pilots into them who would never get at the controls of a first world airliner. In the US a pilot would need 1500 hours before getting into the right seat in this plane, but the Ethiopian right-seater for the plane in this incident had only 200 hours.
as a person who has worked on avionics, I have the reverse position.
Boeing systems have always allowed the pilot to override the system, with the presumption being that a human operator of the system is more likely to have the complete situational awareness, and might be in unusual situation that requires unanticipated responses. There's also the generally unspoken idea that with human lives on the line there is an element of human morality at play.
Airbus systems have traditionally favored the judgement of the automated system over that of the human operator. I do not like this on multiple levels: It can make things more difficult in an emergency if the flight crew is not extremely well-trained (capt Sulley was an extreme outlier), and I an concerned that it can encourage complacency in the air crews, which can produce total incompetence when competence matters most (see: Air France 447).
Even though humans have their flaws, I prefer a system that ultimately favors human judgement - particularly given that the pilots on the US-based airlines I am likely to fly with tend to be experienced pilots (usually ex-military aviators), and I am aware that as good as the guys creating the avionics are, they and the systems they created are not necessarily better than the flyboys (which is the implication of favoring the systems over the guys with their butts in the cockpits).
I meant to add that both builders make excellent aircraft these days, so we are really just discussing corner-of-the-envelope cases.
The situations where any of these differences matter are remarkably rare and nobody should be trembling in fear before boarding either a Boeing or an AirBus.
I love aviation, and it's still far safer than a trip in a car, but the same people who swear they'll "never fly on a Boeing" or "never fly on an AirBus" will hop into any car with no concern for its maintenance, and little concern for the training and condition of the driver, and then go bounding down the road with little concern for the conditions of all the other vehicles and vehicle operators all around them.
You are looking for all sorts of technical fixes to what you have heard is a technical problem, when a simpler fix is right in front of everybody (assuming this was the issue) and has already been implemented by the US carriers:
Tell the pilots about the new feature of the avionics that is intended to help them avoid a stall in certain take off scenarios, and...
Tell the pilots where the switch is that shuts the system off (it's right by the pilot's leg) and makes the 7373Max-8 behave like it has the older avionics.
Wow.
That's really hard, and the costs are astonomical!
OTOH, some parking brakes are so badly designed that depending on them for an emergency would probably result in a crash.
My trucks parking brake is foot operated and seems to be rather on, locking up the rear wheels or off. Be really hard to feather it.
This is an American designed plane, so wouldn't be surprised if similar design decisions were made like not considering a parking brake might be needed for emergencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm concerned with your grasp of the English language.
Presumably the farmer knows how cows behave, and what it looks like when they panic?
"Who in their right mind would get on one of these after two accidents in six months?"
I would and I'd sleep like a baby as I do on any flight. I'm a career crew chief, engine mech and avionics troop. (Cross-training was fun.)
If you want to do something dangerous, drive to work. Aircraft accidents make the news because people adore freaking out over delicious drama while ignoring the endless list of what's reasonably likely to kill them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You know what this accident reminds me of? It reminds me of people NOT taking into true understanding the concept of human RISK. You build something new. You throw in some new special features that are designed to make your life so much easier. But in reality, it is a controlled experiment in shifting control from the human factor into the machine factor. Instead of relying on basic human instinct, basic controls, basic concepts that pilot's have been likely doing for decades, you insert {feature here} that "outweighs the risk", for long term gain, of some sort. I call complete bull shit on that, because it is a complete failure of every single safety system that is designed in the aircraft. Why isn't there a safety system built in for pilot's that may not know what the hell they are doing wrong? What does shifting into manual mode and using manual controls do in an environment where every single possible configuration that may exist can be overridden by computerized systems? It essentially places no control of the plane to the pilot. With planes getting more and more complex as decades go by, this can either be used to further minimize pilot involvement/power in these machines, or, ultimately, just like the car industry is going, it will be likely used to argue that pilot's are no longer necessary in flying planes (I am talking many years from now). It's all by design, folks. Whatever reason comes out, it will likely be manipulated and used to test these murky waters of liability and ownership of disasters, not to mention keep the corporate stock prices in line for a next buy in.
> Computers should never have the last say in flying an airliner.
Applies to cars too, and other machinery.
But people usually say this AFTER some crap already happened. Like you did just now.
Commercial Aircraft pilots ARE trained for that.
In the case of these 4 pilots, none of them had more than 8000 hrs. In most America-based, even some of the European, Airlines , that would be a junior FO, MAYBE a captain on RJs, or smaller, but NOT a captain on a 737.
You say that out of emotion rather than logical thought. There's a couple of industries that have made absolutely incredible advances in safety over the past 50 years, the airline industry, the car industry, and the process industry. A large part of all of those industries efforts include the realisation that the human is usually the weakest link in the system and successive safety improvements have been made precisely by giving a computer the final say.
Be it forward crash avoidance applying the brake regardless of what the driver thinks, industrial safety systems slamming shut safety valves regardless of the operator overpressuring the vessel, or in this case, a very definable scenario of aerodynamic stalling.
The question isn't should a computer have more control. The answer there is still yes, there have been 1 (now possibly 2) cases where a computer has crashed a plane due to not knowing the stall condition. There have been thousands where a pilot has done the same thing.
The question is only: why did the computer fail.
Are you unaware that there can be ambiguity in language?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I'm going out in a limb here but maybe they were acting on the information
Try https://users.wfu.edu/palmitar...
You won't regret it.
Which has nothing to do with my point. From after the crash to today, Boeing fucked up. Putting it in the manual is not a valid solution.
How you assign blame before the Lion Air crash is up to you. I'm talking after.
Basic statistics does not apply to tow incidents ... moron.
However it applies if you have about 20 common planes used by mayour airlines and no real crashes since a decade and suddenly 2 of the same type crash during identical circumstances.
Hint: except for USA that plane type is world wide grounded.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There is no time to consult manuals, when a plane is in a vertical dive, due to stall. Reaction time must be spontaneous. It may be that some change has been made to the pitot tube, which therefore gives a wrong airspeed indication, leading to stall. This is yet to be determined, however my question would be what are the redundacy systems to validate airspeed? Both Lion Air and Ethiopian airways crashes show major similarities, with no time for response and recovery, as still at quite a low height.
I'd wait too for some real evidence instead of conjecture. What we do know is there haven't been any Accidents in the USA. Canada and Europe. Lion Air and its ancestor airlines have had several fatal over the past 15 years and Africa has the most lax and unregulated aviation industry on the planet. I lived in several African Countries over 25 years. The pilots I spoke to is that many pilots are jumping out of much older 737 models with different avionics and coming into the MAX with very little updated training.