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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.
Where are they burying the survivors?
it ain't exploding.
This is really bad for Boeing.
Who in their right mind would get on one of these after two accidents in six months?
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.
This 737 "Family Killer" Max 8 is, currently, simply not reliable enough for air travel. Sure, it might be a software update away from being reliable, but that software update needs a full testing cycle.
(sure, I guess that 1 crash per 100,000 flights might be five nines reliability, when you want six nines...)
I'm going out in a limb here but maybe they were acting on the information that another one had crashed.
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.
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
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.
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".
southwest has a few of these but mostly other 737 models .. i wonder if they quietly grounded their max 8 planes too
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two brand new Boeing crashes in a matter of weeks!
"If you get on a Boeing, you don't get where you are going."
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.
..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.
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...
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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!
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.
Dont they have triple redundant systems on all this shit??? Sounds like having this system engaged at low altitude is not the best use of plane flying code.
I'm going out in a limb here but maybe they were acting on the information
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