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Boeing 737 Max Jets Grounded By FAA Emergency Order (nbcnews.com)
President Trump announced an emergency order from the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday grounding Boeing 737 Max jets in the wake of an Ethiopian Airlines crash Sunday and a Lion Air accident in October that together killed 346 people. The emergency order comes two days after the FAA said the Boeing 737 Max planes are still airworthy. NBC News reports: Trump's announcement came as the FAA faced mounting pressure from aviation advocates and others to ban flights of the planes pending the completion of investigations into the deadly accidents. Sunday's crash killed 157 people and the one in Indonesia in October left 189 dead. "We're going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 Max 8 and the 737 Max 9 and planes associated with that line," Trump announced, referring to "new information and physical evidence that we've received" in addition to some complaints.
The FAA said it decided to ground the jets after it found that the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that crashed had a flight pattern very similar to the Lion Air flight. "It became clear that the track of the Ethiopian flight behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight," said Steven Gottlieb, deputy director of accident investigations for the FAA. United States airports and airlines reacted to the order Wednesday, acknowledging that it will lead to canceled flights. American has roughly 85 flights a day on the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 jets. United Airlines has about 40 such flights. Southwest Airlines has the most, about 150 flights per day on these types of jets out of the airline's total of about 4,100 flights daily.
The FAA said it decided to ground the jets after it found that the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that crashed had a flight pattern very similar to the Lion Air flight. "It became clear that the track of the Ethiopian flight behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight," said Steven Gottlieb, deputy director of accident investigations for the FAA. United States airports and airlines reacted to the order Wednesday, acknowledging that it will lead to canceled flights. American has roughly 85 flights a day on the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 jets. United Airlines has about 40 such flights. Southwest Airlines has the most, about 150 flights per day on these types of jets out of the airline's total of about 4,100 flights daily.
second post
So the plans that couldn't fly anyway because no other country would accept them are now grounded by 'Emergency'
slowest emergency ever...
Claims it was collusion with the Russians and Trump was paid in Aeroflot stock.
Are these models those new ones with the carbon-fiber wings that I was so sure were rushed to market too fast and might just shatter if they banked or climbed too hard in cold weather?
It's a critical safety system, required to obtain flight certification because of the larger, more powerful engines.
Without it, on full throttle, the aircraft doesn't have enough authority to bring the nose down once it goes up too high.
That's why only the MAX variants have this system, because they have larger engines.
It has nothing to do with auto-pilot, except the system is disabled when auto-pilot is engaged.
What you are basically saying is that Machine Learning adaptive controllers crashed the airlines?
Or maybe they had too much Blockchain on board, weighing them down?
Iâ(TM)ve already heard âoeremote control takeoverâ cutting the fly by wire pilot off from his own plane.
It wasn't just these 2 incidents, there have been several close calls reported. What's sad is that you don't read about this before you form an opinion about it.
You are fact free
The plane was nosing down before they engaged the autopilot.
Turning off autoleveling isn't simple, can't be done in a crisis, and the pilots were not trained for it.
Dumb shit
While you can compensate for a poor design in software, the best way is to not make the poor design in the first place.
There is a 'neutral' point for the engines to be located such that a large amount of thrust causes the body to remain mostly neutral.
It's a critical safety system, required to obtain flight certification because of the larger, more powerful engines.
Without it, on full throttle, the aircraft doesn't have enough authority to bring the nose down once it goes up too high.
I don't suppose you have any citations for any of that? If it's actually true it's certainly significant, but I've seen zero evidence of that anywhere. All the documentation talks about it being designed to assist pilots avoid a stall under very specific conditions; absolutely nothing anywhere says that its safety critical, or that the aircraft cannot be controlled at some point prior to stall.
I posted this 5 months ago: Reasons Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg should be replaced.
Does that mean planes also stop down pitches? bc if you go down too quickly there's not enough space to pull back up?
It's mostly Comac propaganda. It's a critical safety system, as all safety systems are critical, but there's plenty of authority, but the trim forces are pretty high. The causal factor appear to be children of the magenta taking of with known faults in safety systems.
Slashdot told me there was nothing wrong with the planes.
Now today they are not safe? WTF?
Rick B.
Though, I wonder why this issue didn't affect the A320neo Family of airliners, which use the LEAP-1A and PW1100G engines with much bigger front fans than the CFM56 and V2500 engines of the regular A320 Family of airliners.
And it's only been in service since May 22, 2017.
Considering the extreme safety of air traffic in general that's one freakishly unsafe plane.
It makes me glad I'm not the engineer/developer responsible for building that subsystem.
I stole this Sig
A clean-sheet design would absolutely have better positioning of the engines. Unfortunately, the 737 platform comes from an era of much smaller engines, so there just isn't enough under-wing clearance to fit modern turbines in the original locations (even versions with engine updates from 10-20 years ago have odd bulges around the nacelle where parts had to be relocated to fit).
https://safeblog.org/2016/01/14/automation-dependency-children-of-the-magenta/
Side-note to Tesla:
Self-driving car or Driver-piloted car, there is nothing in-between.
The MCAS system was implemented because the 737-MAX engines are placed more forward of the wing which will tend to induce a nose up pitching moment particularly at high angles of attack near stall. This would've probably been a certification issue.
Now the 737 MAX had the engines placed so far forward to enable enough ground clearance. The original 50-year old 737 had low bypass engines which much smaller and could be placed directly under the wings. The newer models already ran into ground clearance issues, and this was initially solved by putting the engine systems to the side of the engine creating a distinct ovoid nacelle shape. With the new GE Leap engines, this fix was no longer sufficient due to larger engine diameter, hence the repositioning forward.
Newer aircraft like the airbus a300 series and the airbus a220 (bombardier cseries) never had this issue because they were designed to accomodate large diameter newer generation engines. The basic design of the 737 has always suffered from this flaw and really Boeing should have invested in a new aircraft design rather than try to re-engine an aircraft that was never designed for it. This was like fitting a V-12 engine into a model T.
Sad to see the once-proud remnant of American industrial might, Boeing, brought low like this. I thought Airbus lost it on Air France 447 when the pilot pulled his sidestick all the way back and kept it there until the plane crashed. On a Boeing, the dual control sticks would have revealed this and lives would have been saved. But now, we have this:
"One high-ranking Boeing official said the company had decided against disclosing more details to cockpit crews due to concerns about inundating average pilots with too much information â" and significantly more technical data â" than they needed or could digest."
So they:
1) Design an aircraft that has an inherent tendency to pitch up
2) Implement an a system to persistently add control inputs during critical phases of flight
3) Do NOT disclose system description to pilots in FCOM
How about fundamental rules:
Understanding what automation systems do.
Control the automated systems according to strong pilot skills.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Apparently not, since there is a checklist for disabling it. The problem in the crashed flights is that it happened at a time when the pilots are fairly busy anyway and they didn't realize what was happening.
I'm not a pilot but I wonder if the better approach wouldn't have been to just recommend turning it off before they even take off.
According to Boeing, it's just meant to make the plane handle more like the non-MAX version of the 737.
The A320 series had the ground clearance necessary to accomodate the new engines without needing to reposition them, hence no stability issues due to the engine placement that might have required an equivalent MCAS system.
The MCAS system was implemented because the 737-MAX engines are placed more forward of the wing which will tend to induce a nose up pitching moment particularly at high angles of attack near stall. This would've probably been a certification issue.
It would have been a certification issue because it changes the handling characteristics of the aircraft, not because it's inherently unsafe. The MCAS is meant to automatically counter the changes so that the aircrew can fly the aircraft the same way they would a legacy 737. It has to do with Boeing being able to sell the aircraft without excessive certification requirements for pilots, rather than anything to do with safety.
This was like fitting a V-12 engine into a model T.
That's a horrible comparison. The fact that the engines are more powerful has nothing to do with anything. The placement and shape of the engine cowlings is the issue.
This was like fitting a V-12 engine into a model T.
How dare you speak badly of such things!
Probably because the 737 platform was designed in the 60s while the A320 platform was designed in the 80s.
None of that has anything to do with why the single-sensor SDS is causing these planes to fly themselves into the ground though.
If it's Boeing, you ain't going.
Smarter constructors, better design, less marketing (lies), more engineering (actual work).
He just had to do it. I'm a dictator Donnie made the completely authoritarian decision to ground them.
And had he not done so, he would be a corporate stooge endangering innocent life.
He can be two things.
I've long wondered why Boeing doesn't make a clean sheet replacement for the 737. For a plane sold in such vast numbers, the case for a clean redesign is much easier to make. My understanding is that currently they're looking to a 757 replacement/A321 competitor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_New_Midsize_Airplane) as their next clean design, with a 737 replacement possibly after that.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The 737 incorporates dual AOA vanes, therefore it is not "single instrument".
https://www.seattletimes.com/b...
Dual systems are standard on aircraft which detect AOA (not all do). It should be obvious to anyone but you that a dual system is redundant, but that the redundancy cannot be automated. If one sensor is giving bad data there's no way of automatically detecting which one is right and which one is wrong. Therefore the computer has to either make a best-guess, or it has to default to a single channel. This, again, is the same on all aircraft which have AOA sensors.
Of course none of that has anything to do with either the fact that the aircraft was allowed to fly with a known AOA problem, or the fact that the pilots didn't seem to have any idea how to disengage electrical actuation of the trim system.
Please stop making up nonsense.
Boeing considered raising the landing gear, but considered it too costly as it meant changes to the centre wing box and associated structure, so they bodged it with an engine higher on the wing and software to compensate for the negative handling characteristics. And then they didnt tell anyone who actually flew the aircraft...
They didn't see a problem with going down too quickly...
Because it would cost too much - the MAX series was Boeing *reacting* to Airbuses launch of the A320NEO family. Boeing had had a study ongoing for years about launching a clean sheet 737 replacement, and were going down that road for introducing in the mid 2020s, but then Airbus launched the NEO and airlines started their fleet renewal processes as a result.
Boeing was caught so off guard that, when a customer no one thought would ever buy Airbus again (due to bad blood after a crash - AA wanted Airbus to take all the blame, Airbus said nope, your pilots were to blame, AA didn't place another order with Airbus as a result) placed an order for the NEO and split it by also placing an order with Boeing, they ordered "130 Airbus A320NEO aircraft AND 130 Boeing aircraft (whatever Boeing comes up with as a 737 replacement)"...
Make no mistake, the MAX is a reaction - otherwise they would have lost a lot more of the market than they already did by the procrastination they did over the A320NEO launch.
Profit.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Also you spent all day yesterday saying the plane had "no problems" - you fucking liar lol.
It's inherently unsafe to have a single-instrument stall detection system. It didn't start out that way in design, at some point they changed to that. You know nothing about this. Single pitot instrument failure = critical failure.
You are a moron. You tried to say it was all pilot error, lol. Fucking idiot.
Redundancy is regularly automated in IT systems. dual power supply, dual mirror hard drive, dual network switch, dual path network link. Those are all redundancy with automated failover and failback. There are many many ways to automatically detect when a device is not working correct and ignore it's data.
This was literally explained to him yesterday, c6gummer lied and made something up and ran away from the conversation. The same plane is having the same type of critical all-hands-killed problem twice in months, and in addition pilots have been complaining in the dozens to hundreds about similar events that resulted in close-calls.
C6gummer is a liar in everything he does, he has zero integrity. He tried to say it was all in the pilot's heads. He should date Kendall and repopulate the inbred Republican party with their stubbornly-illiterate inviable offspring.
In future airplanes will have a pilot and a dog. The dog is there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch the controls. The pilot is there to feed the dog.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
There are checklists for disabling all systems, it's an aircraft. FAA regulations require that. That doesn't make it not a critical system.
"According to Boeing, it's just meant to make the plane handle more like the non-MAX version of the 737." This is bullshit, no idea where you got that marketing line.
That's great; I'm sure the airspace industry as a whole would love to have your input on how to automatically figure out which AOA vane is giving bad data. As of now I'm unaware of any aircraft which actually does so. Certainly none of the aircraft I've worked on do.
Also if you could please explain to me how you plan to do so, I'd love to hear it.
AA wanted Airbus to take all the blame, Airbus said nope, your pilots were to blame
Shouldn't the NTSB be deciding who is to blame?
The NTSB came to its own conclusions regarding its investigation (they blamed both, but primarily the airlines training), but AA wanted Airbus to pay all the compensation and costs of the crash, as well as publicly assuming responsibility, so as to preserve AAs reputation.
You spent all day yesterday saying the plane had "no problems" - you're nothing but a fucking liar lol.
It's inherently unsafe to have a single-instrument stall detection system. It didn't start out that way in design, at some point they changed to that. You know nothing about this. Single pitot instrument failure = critical failure.
You are a moron. You tried to say it was all pilot error, lol. Fucking idiot kill yourself, leave us out of your stupid self-important delusions of knowing anything about this, you do not.
In addition to more thrust, the engines are more-forward located. Additional thrust causes the plane to climb at a high angle, lessening lift until a stall is probable. The software causes the nose to point down prevent a stall. Down right in to the ground it seems.
"rather than anything to do with safety."
I think we have two rather fine counter examples to your claim.
Also because "computer overruling pilot to avoid stall" has been part of the A320's design (and all subsequent airbus jets) since the very beginning.
" Since the Airbus A320, Airbus flight-envelope control systems always retain ultimate flight control when flying under normal law, and will not permit the pilots to violate aircraft performance limits unless they choose to fly under alternate law" --[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-by-wire]
The FAA was forced to take Boeing's dick out of its mouth and wipe its chin.
Dude, anyone with an understanding of basic electronics and motors can see how the AoA sensor can be checked inflight. I just looked at the schematic on https://www.satcom.guru/2018/12/angle-of-attack-failure-modes.html
I am sure their engineer thought about how it could be done, but it was too costly to implement. For computer electronics, it's basically a 5x to 10x increase in cost to implement error detection logic so I imagine it's the same here. It's the same reason why you don't see these kind of designs in desktop computers system, but worth having on server systems.
You know that Boeing is going to push out new software to try to address the issue right? It's for sure not as good as if it was originally designed in silicon, but the software solution will come pretty close.
From this.
Dude, anyone with an understanding of basic electronics and motors can see how the AoA sensor can be checked inflight.
That's great! Please explain.
I am sure their engineer thought about how it could be done, but it was too costly to implement.
If it were just Boeing, I might buy that argument, but you're suggesting that every aircraft manufacturer in the world decided to skimp on it just to save a few bucks ... which seems a lot less likely.
You know that Boeing is going to push out new software to try to address the issue right? It's for sure not as good as if it was originally designed in silicon, but the software solution will come pretty close.
The software update is reportedly for the MCAS, not for the AOA system. Not sure why you think that's relevant.
I think you're wrong.
Holding the stick back is fine most of the time on an Airbus. But, since the plane had just switched into alternate law, it no longer was okay to do that. I think there is a good possibility the junior FO didn't understand that, either because he didn't really know it was in alternate law, or didn't understand what changed in alternate law.
There is a 'neutral' point for the engines to be located such that a large amount of thrust causes the body to remain mostly neutral.
Yup, and that's how the other versions are configured. These new MAX configs have physically larger engines, so - to prevent have to redesign the whole aircraft to deal with them - the engines are positioned a little bit further forward, and a centre of the engine a little bit higher off the ground (ie closer to the wing). The centre of thrust is consequently moved forward and up in relation to the centre of gravity. The result is the craft will nose-up under full throttle.
The other problem is that companies were assured pilots would not need training in the new system, however a critical difference between this system and normal auto-pilot systems is that this system does not turn off when pilots attempt an overide.
Seriously, what the *bleep* does this kind of corporate malfeasance have to do with Millennials? You do know this kind of crap existed before Millennials, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Well, we know very well that Boeing boss called Trump and asked to delay the inevitable.
And we know Trump complied.
And that's all.
The problem in the crashed flights is that it happened at a time when the pilots are fairly busy anyway and they didn't realize what was happening.
Not really. The first time it happened for Lion Air was as they approached 2,000 feet and went flaps up. Not a particularly busy time, but it did catch them off guard and they lost about 400 feet altitude. They, for whatever reason, then decided to drop the flaps again ... which fixed the issue since MCAS doesn't operate with flaps down. They continued to climb to about 5,000 feet at which point they went flaps up again.
From that point on they were struggling with it for something like 8 minutes, but maintaining altitude the entire time. It's mind boggling that they didn't think to either drop the flaps again, or to go to their runaway trim checklist. They continued to fight it until shortly before the end, at which point the black box makes it look like they just gave up and plumeted out of the sky.
tl;dr: "busy" had nothing to do with it.
I'm not a pilot but I wonder if the better approach wouldn't have been to just recommend turning it off before they even take off.
Not really, unless there's a lot more wrong with the system than we currently know. It does actually make the aircraft easier to fly without needing conversion training, and it does help prevent stalls. Pilots just need to follow their checklist if it acts up.
According to Boeing, it's just meant to make the plane handle more like the non-MAX version of the 737.
Yep, that's the gist of it.
Load the sin and/or cos coil(s) against the air pressure. It would require additional driver circuitry on the input side, but then you can do all sorts of checks like is it stuck? How much is it stuck by? heck you can use it as crude airspeed monitor also.
they are updating the software to compensate for a hardware issue. Happens all the time in computer systems. see intel microcodes.
I would argue that either the pilot can recognize whether the plane is about to stall and ignore the AOA sensor entirely, in which case both sensors are non-essential, or the pilot can't, in which case the pilot also can't reliably determine which sensor is wrong. More importantly, if the pilot can, then the avionics systems should be able to do so as well. And if not, then that single backup is only useful when the sensor fails outright (e.g. no output, wiring fault, etc.).
And in this case, because the plane makes critical decisions that impact the airworthiness of the aircraft in response to that data and apparently cannot determine which AOA sensor is lying, having only two AOA sensors just means that the risk of the entire system failing because of incorrect data is twice as high as if it had only one AOA sensor. Assuming it is practical to fly the plane with both stall warnings and MCAS disabled, then everyone would arguably be better off if the aircraft had only a single AOA sensor, statistically speaking. If that were the case, we'd have probably had only one crash in the first two years, instead of two (not that such numbers would be good, mind you, just less appalling).
IMO, having too little redundancy can actually be worse than not having any at all. It seems likely that this aircraft, as designed, cannot be made safe unless Boeing adds either a second pair of independent AOA sensors or a couple of Pitot tubes as backups for resolving disagreements. Two sensors clearly isn't enough, given their apparent propensity for failure at low altitudes.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
China is a dog-eating cabalist ethno-state chock full of lying faggots
Is this the /. we love so much?
Or has it turned into a gathering place for racists?
No people under the jurisdiction of the FAA have died in those two crashes. Incase you are unaware, the FAA is an American agency, and only has control over US skies, and US bound flights.
The FAA pays attention to world wide flight data and bases some decisions on what it sees there. The Lion and Ethiopian crashes we're under the jurisdiction of the counties in which they originated from and crashed.
Similarly, China has its own agency too, and that agency grounded the planes well in advance of when the FAA did.
You're proposing turning an AOA sensor into an AOA + pressure sensor. Extra complexity just adds more failure modes. What happens if the pressure sensing side of your AOA vane fails? How exactly are you detecting pressure in the first place, and how will it react to things like moisture, dust, or ice? How will you determine whether a pressure change is due to a change in airspeed, or a stuck vane?
Assuming you overcome all of those issues, what happens if the failure is electrical rather than mechanical? What happens if the vane is installed incorrectly and therefore misaligned? What happens if the vane is bent, and otherwise functioning perfectly but giving a slightly different reading due to an offset angle?
You're certainly arrogant enough to think you can in 5 seconds come up with a solution which nobody in the aerospace industry has ever come up with, but arrogance and competence are not the same thing.
https://users.wfu.edu/palmitar... Remember Ford Pinto. the defective car that ended up killing passengers? Boeing 737 Max Series is in the same league. Both the Boeing 737 Max Series and Ford Pinto have design defects and yet the manufacturers, Ford Motor Company and Boeing, never warned their customers of the defects. And when accidents happened and people being killed, the manufacturers put up a wall of denial , blaming the drivers / pilots for being the culprits, instead. And both companies, Ford Motors and Boeing, are American Companies , and both companies got the backing of the government of the United States of America . Both Ford Pinto and Boeing 737 Max Series were certified by the US government as being SAFE. And when news of the accidents spread, both companies got the backing of the US government in DENYING THEIR OWN FAULTS ! In other words, how can anyone put any more trust in the government of the United States of America ??
Do you guys know who the director of the Federal Aviation Authority is right now? Nobody does, because Trump has never gotten around to appointing one. To be fair, he's been very busy with the golf co-championship and everything, and it probably just slipped his mind.
Nothing matters any more.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You're kinda right but you're missing the purpose of dual sensors. If you want true redundancy you would obviously want 3 or more sensors. When you install 2 sensors, you're not looking for one to be a backup for the other; rather you're looking for them to check each other. If they disagree then you know that the system as a whole is no longer trustworthy, and you can throw signals at the aircrew to let them know not to depend on the readings.
Now, as that relates to MCAS, Boeing had two options in the case of sensor disagreement:
1. Go with the best-case sensor reading, in which case you will likely not react to an actual stall condition.
2. Go with the worst case reading, in which case you may react to a condition which isn't actually a stall.
3. Ignore them completely, in which case the MCAS system becomes inoperative and can't prevent a stall.
They decided to go with the worst case reading because, generally speaking, stalls are bad. You want to prevent them as much as possible. Going nose down when you don't need to is also bad, but not nearly AS bad unless you happen to be close to the ground .... and they tried to make sure that wouldn't happen by disabling the system when the flaps are down. Even if you are at a relatively low altitude with the flaps up for some reason, a stall is typically worse than going nose down because a stall requires significant altitude to recover from.
It was a rational design choice. Where they probably erred the most was in not telling pilots about it. I'm not sure that it would have made a difference to that Lion Air crew even if they had been told, but they still should have been informed.
You're certainly not more qualified to make a wild guess on a /. about aircraft engineering than the AC. The only thing that is different between you two is that having spent all day yesterday to troll how the plane was "safe", you have no credibility on the topic whatsoever.
Fuck off, shill.
It's also worth noting that, at least if the folks on PPRuNe are correct, and assuming I'm understanding correctly, even though the aircraft itself has two AOA sensors, the MCAS system only uses one of them, which is to say that if they disagree, it has no idea.
Worse, from what I've read, this aircraft in its default configuration lacks the extra AoA gauges to independently show the output of the two AoA sensors to tell you that the MCAS system is getting crap data, instead providing only an AoA Disagree light. And apparently, a few don't even have that (WTF?).
It sounds to me like there are multiple aspects of the way the MCAS system was designed that are seriously flawed, any one of which should have resulted in it not being certified to fly. But the most serious of those, assuming I understand correctly, is that this system effectively has no redundancy at all, yet is in a position to seriously wreck the airworthiness of the aircraft.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Are you an Old Economy Steve who's engaging in a case of "a noun, a verb, and millenials?"
https://i.pinimg.com/originals...
Power supplies are different. If one works, that's enough. For sensors, dual isn't good enough. You need a third one as a tie-breaker if the others disagree.
But it was pilot error, right?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, you moron, this is way beyond your basic understanding level and actually needs real engineers to understand it. Shut up and take your delusions elsewhere.
Since we all love car analogies...
https://fsinfo.noone.org/dev/n...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Stalker troll is a male feminist incel. That's why he is so butthurt all the time.
Unless it has access to an extra set of control surfaces that aren't accessible to the pilots, how does MCAS get this authority?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
He's the idiot.
Meanwhile, at least a hundred people die in car accidents every day just in the U.S. Every day, day after day after day after day....
The point no one seems to be addressing is the chaotic mismanagement of the grounding. The planes continued to fly for several days. If there was a REAL emergency, then they should have been grounded as soon as the second crash removed any doubt. Instead, we went from a state in which there was no emergency to a state in which there was an emergency, but nothing changed in the real world at that time.
Yes, I am saying that Trump's mind is nothing. As in nothing to see there.
I was actually surprised to see that much of the Slashdot discussion was actually substantive, though I expected more mention of fly-by-wire planes. From that perspective it's still a software issue, but I'm not yet certain that Boeing has really gotten to the bottom of it.
There was a related discussion in the discussion of the related survey... Now I'm hung up on the ultimate "safe" airplane with controls like an elevator. Just push the button and take a nap...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
CFM LEAP, not GE.
The MCAS prevents the plane from getting into an uncorrectable condition by bringing the nose down BEFORE it gets to the point where the condition can't be corrected. It doesn't wait until the nose-high condition happens and then try to correct it.
IMO, having too little redundancy can actually be worse than not having any at all.
It depends on the failure mode: if the failure mode is to give no readings then the twofold redundancy is better. If the failure mode is to five false readings then the twofold redundancy is worse.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
after all what do these youngsters know?
They elevate idealism and we can't have them disrupting the old order until they are old.
Both show that you should not give a single person so much power.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually these multifunction probes (Pitot, AOA and TAT) are exactly what Airbus uses on the A380 and the A350 at the very least. The A350 has three multifunctional probes and one each of single function probes.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The USA used to be the world leader in airplane safety. Now, under the Trump administration, the FAA was the last to ground the 737 Max planes. (The USA still has an excellent record on airplane safety overall.) Is it just a coincidence that Boeing's CEO also golfs with Trump in Mar-a-Lago?
More accurately, Dick Donnie saw FOX reporting other countries grounding the planes. At first, he thinks that would be bad for American business and after that nice CEO from Boeing gave him a ringy-dingy to pump his ego. However, aides were also watching and realized the danger that Dick Donnie would be in were one of those planes go down in America while the the FAA hadn't grounded the planes. He'd be blamed. It was unconscionable that he could be blamed, after all he is a genius. So he mouths off in a statement to the press including the bit about planes becoming too complicated for pilots...not for him, of course, he is a genius.
Meanwhile, over at the FAA and the Dept. of Transportation where Madame Chao, Mitch McConnell's wife, had been supporting the previous policy of "those crazy foreigners and their grounding OUR American planes", they get wind of Dick's pronouncement and immediately issue their own press release that claimed with consultation with Canada, they had heroically decided to ground the planes. Dick's ego is preserved, all is well.
With hindsight, it might have been better for Boeing to modernise the Boeing 757 instead of stretching the role of the Boeing 737 so much: https://www.businessinsider.co...
What's really sad is how people pass judgement while at the same time having no fucking clue about what they are talking about.
While you can compensate for a poor design in software, the best way is to not make the poor design in the first place.
This isn't a poor design. It is just a design. Control is part of most finely tuned complex and efficient machines. Discounting anything for daring to need an instrumented control loop is just ignorance of the world around you.
The inexcusable point is that Boeing's shoddy work killed over 300 people.
MCAS controls the trim of the whole horizontal stabiliser (fixed stab and movable elevator move as one) whereas the pilot controls
only the elevator part. This method of trim gives full control authority at all trim settings, as opposed to an elevator trim that uses some of the elevators travel to do the trimming, limiting the maximum control throw. Every time the pilots pulled back, the system added more down trim, then they ran out of elevator throw.
Then the big lawn dart.
If by "chaotic mismanagement of the grounding" you mean, "waited until there was evidence to make a decision affecting safety" then sure. Exactly 0 incident occurred between the time of the crash in Africa and the grounding of the aircraft in the USA. Seems they acted rationally to wait for evidence before grounding aircraft out of media fear...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
You sound like the engineeriest engineer ever!
These tragedies require understanding. Passengers and crew fears need assurances. The costs enormous but safety a cornerstone of the gigantic airline industry. The convenience and low cost very good for economic activity. Near term will be yet another head wind into a shaky economy.
No, only if after reading the data and them finding a common fault would he be a corporate stooge.
It seems completely lost on the torch wielding villagers, we have a process that got you all the jet safety...the data will be the only useful product of all this bleating by the unwashed masses.
You know what they did with the DC-10 after they fixed it? Made it fly cargo only... the public was spooked.. ... as if they know how that transonic scotch got in their hands over the ocean at 38 thousand feet.
Nice v6. A V12 is longer and wouldn't fit unless you modify the frame. (Which is exactly what they didn't want to do with the plane - because then it isn't a 737 any more.)
Having 3 multifunction probes and 1 standalone AOA vane is not an example of true redundancy with only 2 sensors ....
so they bodged it
You mean made a design decision?
And then they didnt tell anyone who actually flew the aircraft...
Less hyperbole please. Not only are the changes to the design known by pilots, they are known by the frigging public.
While my delay has more to do with the fact that I don't have the money for one, the crashes still are an important factor in my decision.
Best post so far.
Could have used links to reports on how they just said the opposite for those who didn't just see and remember from a few days ago.
Good thing no emergencies requiring quick responses have happened...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's a critical safety system, required to obtain flight certification because of the larger, more powerful engines.
Without it, on full throttle, the aircraft doesn't have enough authority to bring the nose down once it goes up too high.
That's why only the MAX variants have this system, because they have larger engines.
Not quite.
The CFM International LEAP engines were too big to fit underwing like the current engines on the Classic and Next Generation (NG) airframes, so what Boeing did was put the engines forward of the wing and higher so that the thrust was now going directly under the wing which can cause the pitch to increase. Airliners keep their engines on underwing nacelles precisely to avoid that problem but the 737 MAX couldn't because it was too low to the ground. The anti-stall system is designed to compensate for this by automatically changing the elevators to reduce the Angle of Attack. The problem is the system is wrongly interpreting the actual Angle of Attack so it's erroneously pushing the nose of the plane towards the ground.
Rather than raise the 737 off the ground which was the logical option, Boeing tries to correct an inherent physical design flaw with software, software that has malfunctioned to cause a fatal incident twice in the last six months. Considering that air travel has become insanely safe, up to and including exploding engines and batteries with no fatalities on new models, two extremely fatal accidents in less than six months is a serious flaw.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Gerald Eastman has been exposing them for years:
https://www.thelastboeinginspe...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That's not the whole story.
737 was originally designed for unsophisticated airfields, hence Boeing placed the engines low and used a very short landing gear so aircraft mechanics wouldn't need a platform to work on the engines. That decision came back to bite them in the arse two decades later when Boeing tried to fit the CFM56 under the 737 wing. They had to modify the engine and still couldn't fit the larger fan model that fit a 707 just fine.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The new code for the 737 MAX was written by Indians and relies on one single sensor for a number of critical tasks.
It is absolutely absurb.
That is not entirely true. If FAA certifies an airplane as airworthy, itâ(TM)s recognized by other certification authorities worldwide so the plane does not have to be certified separately in Europe by EASA and in every other country separately. The same way, if EASA certifies a plane, it can fly in US.
Is not valid in other cases I believe, eg if Cocos Islands (as an example) certifies a plane, that is definitely not recognized worldwide.
So: if FAA said it can fly and the. It crashed all over the world itâ(TM)s defjnitdly FAA problem. And more acutely Boeing problem.
Just barely, but he's sure as heck no Millennial.
And "Millennialism" isn't a thing because being a Millennial isn't an ethos or belief system, it's a generation. You're misusing the "-ism" prefix. Generations develop certain behaviors in response to their environment. That's very different than what you're implying by using the phrase "Millennialism", which is that the behavior is a deliberate adherence to an ideal; like Catholicism or Capitalism or Socialism.
Thing is I'm not sure you're aware of what you're implying. There's a lot of general hate for Millennials going around (as there always is for the current up and coming generation. Seriously, Socrates did this crap) and I think you're honestly just picking up on it. I'm not calling you out or anything, but I think your general understanding of the world would improve if you'd reflect on where your opinions of the current generation came from and why you have them.
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Now they are, but American pilots were pissed that Boeing withheld information.
https://www.post-gazette.com/business/pittsburgh-company-news/2018/11/13/Boeing-US-pilots-flight-feature-737-MAX-Indonesia-crash-Lion-Air/stories/201811200001
And the aircraft as a whole are airworthy. The Lion Air aircraft was not airworthy because it had not been repaired. That's a maintenance failure, which led to a crash when combined with pilot error. There's nothing in that crash to indicate that the MAX as a fleet are not airworthy. There may be something about this second crash which eventually leads to that conclusion, but at this point it's all just speculation.
apple-using idiot.
It may come as a shock to Slashdot followers that airplanes do crash once in a while. It is called "gravity."
I would like to make several points here:
1. The FAA is charged with promoting the flying industry and to keep flying safe. Anybody see a conflict here. This conflict is not Trump’s or the Russian’s fault.
2. Experienced air travelers and those who follow the air transport industry do not fly on a brand new airplane. Or a new model that has a lot of new changes on it.
3. Unforeseen things happen when an airplane is flying:
a. The first jet commercial transport was the British de Havilland Comet. No one at that time knew of the effects of constantly pressurizing and de-pressurizing an airplane that flew at jet altitudes. Two comets suffered structural fatigue and disintegrated at high altitude. The fault was found and the problem was the square windows the comet had. That is why all jet transports have rounded corners on the windows; stress builds up at right angles. When Boeing built the 707 they put structural supports on the skin of the airplane, much like a seam on a shit. The shit will tear until it gets to the seam.
b. The Lockheed Electra had a problem with the wings coming off. There was a phenomena with the outboard turbine engines called “whirl mode” by the engineers which would under some circumstances cause failure of the wing. A damaged engine mounting would allow the engine to oscillate which would cause catastrophic damage to the wing.
c. The Boeing 707 had problems that resulted in deaths of passengers.
d. The most celebrated or infamous jet transport was the DC-10. An American Airlines flight in 1972 had the cargo door blow out at altitude. Fortunately the aft floor did not collapse enough to preclude a safe landing; the control cables from the cockpit to the floor run under the floor on the DC-10. The door was recovered and analyzed and found to be of unsafe design. The door could be forced to close and sufficient strength applied to the locking mechanism handle to prevent a secure closing but the instrumentation would give the cargo door a green light. An Airworthiness Directive (AD) should have been issued by the FAA which would have grounded the DC-10 fleet until the door was fixed. Instead the FAA reached a gentleman’s agreement with McDonnel Douglas about the door fix. Some cosmetic changes were made to the door but the problem wasn’t fixed. On March 3, 1974 Turkish airlines DC-10 flight 981, Paris to London crashed after takeoff when the cargo door failed. The aft floor collapsed and the plane was uncontrollable. All 346 people onboard died. Finally an AD was issued and the door was finally fixed.
4. An Air France flight 447, Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed in the Atlantic on June 1, 2009. The crew failed to react correctly when the air speed indicator froze over and the auto pilot disconnected. One of the criticisms was that with all the automatic flight controls now available, the fear is that pilots are losing their flying edge.
5. I suggest that everybody getting so worked up about the 737 problem watch the History Channel on Sunday evenings. There is a program which takes a passenger jet transport crash and analyses the causes. There is usually a chain of events that leads to the crash. If any one of those events didn’t happen the crash would not have happened.
6. Of I would suggest you take a few flying lessons. That will cure a lot of your misconceptions.
Here is the 78-page prelim from the Indonesia NTSC (counterpart to US NTSB) on the Lion Air 610 crash on 2018-10-29;
Very technical reading:
http://knkt.dephub.go.id/knkt/...
No, the DC-10 continued to fly passengers long after problems were fixed. I flew it twice.
Read what I wrote.
If you cannot understand, then feel free to ask for clarification.
If you have nothing to say about it, then perhaps you should say nothing.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I think the training is critical. The crew that flew the next-to-last flight of the Lion Air plane did figure it out. Literally - they had the same problem but figured out they needed to turn off the autotrim. This really seems like it might be an interaction of a changed flight characteristic and under-trained pilots. What surprises me is that, after the Lion Air disaster, that these pilots would still not properly diagnose the issue. Presumably the investigation will shed more light on that. Sure Boeing is preparing an update to make this outcome less likely, but surely every pilot flying a 737 max would be super-aware of this problem after Lion Air. It seems like maybe the issue is that the pilot can think they've turned off the auto-trim when they actually haven't.
The repubtard double tard fallacy: call everyone an incel.
You are stating things like they are facts tho, when you yourself stated it's all speculation.
Admit you don't know shit like the rest of us. Yesterday you were a staunch supporter of "these planes are airworthy". Well the FAA is saying, no right now they are not.
I think the idea is that the pilot shouldn't actually need the AoA data to fly, so just indicating that data is not available because the sensors disagree is sufficient. So the purpose of the second AoA sensor is just to detect a fault, not to provide redundancy. Possibly the issue is that if the pilot doesn't expect the system to use the AoA sensor data once it is known to be bad, he may not realize that the automatic system needs to be disabled.
Are you fucking kidding me? Did you design these? are they your baby? Because you are all up and down this thread defending the design choices.
1. It was a bad design choice AND a bad decision to only have 1 fucking sensor.
2. The pilots were told they didn't need any training, apparently they do.
Stop fucking shilling and admit they fucked up. It was a stupid design choice AND it was arrogance on their part for feeling like pilots didn't need the training.
It's just boeing cutting corners, airbus came out with a new plane and it caught them off guard. So they scrambled to make a competitor and came out with the MaX.
It seems like this might come down to a situational awareness issue. i.e. for some reason the pilots don't think the automated system is still active and therefore don't follow the runaway trim checklist. Another alternative is that this happens more often than one would expect or is very similar to something else that the pilots are used to just fighting for a bit and then it goes away. Either way, the pilots are not acting as Boeing expects in this situation and it is necessary to understand why.
Lol right. C6 spent all day yesterday blaming pilots. Now he's backtracking saying it's not Boeing's fault, but let's wait for the data.
He is starting to look like the biggest idiot on slashdot ever. Next to APK of course.
LOL. Such a fucking idiot. Keep lying and sucking Boeing's dick.
How does one get hours of they are never allowed to start in the first place? The pilot has 10 years and over 8,000 hours
And I mean that. Your thoughts are too well organized for the talking points you're putting forth. You're writing from a script someone gave you on Millennials.
/. worth it to whoever pays you? Is the pay itself worth it? Maybe you'll be dead before the problems your causing come to roost, but your children won't be.
Is
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Lol, funny how my 'arrogant 5 second idea' was already implemented by Airbus. Chill man, let the engineers design the plane. It seems like you are the one having an arrogance problem looking at your reply/comments, thinking you know things just because you work on planes. If you really wanted knowledge about planes, you should go finish that engineering degree.
https://www.faa.gov/about/key_officials/elwell/
"Prior to serving as Acting Administrator, Mr. Elwell was the Deputy Administrator of the FAA. President Trump announced the appointment of Mr. Elwell as the Deputy Administrator in June 2017 and he was sworn in to office on June 26, 2017."
There is an acting head in charge - stop acting like no one is running the FAA.
Odd definition of "fixed".
If you're an engineer, we are in big trouble. I never suggested that "your idea" was bad because it was shit sensor design; I pointed out it was stupid because it doesn't fix the problem you were trying to address. If you believe that 2 of those sensors would be fully redundant you must be mystified by why Airbus uses 3 of them, and you definitely shouldn't be allowed to engineer anything.
The first crash, they at least had the complicating factor of not knowing anything about MCAS. I don't really understand how they could not realize that their trim system was malfunctioning, given that they kept countering it with the trim switches, but ok, lacking knowledge of MCAS, maybe they got confused and thought it was something else.
That should never be the case with any other aircrew again. Everyone knows about it now. So it'll be interesting to see what happened in the second crash.
You are stating things like they are facts tho, when you yourself stated it's all speculation.
Which things?
Admit you don't know shit like the rest of us. Yesterday you were a staunch supporter of "these planes are airworthy". Well the FAA is saying, no right now they are not.
The FAA isn't saying any such thing; if you really insist on paraphrasing their actual statement it is more along the lines of "given new data we are temporarily grounding these aircraft until more information can be gathered". That's it.
I will gladly admit that I don't know any more about the Ethiopian Airlines crash than anyone else here.
Given all the nonsense that has been posted here, I clearly know far more about the Lion Air crash, the 737 MAX, and aviation in general than the vast majority of you.
I'm happy to admit that I know less about the avionics systems than one other guy who commented earlier, and I'm happy to defer to him on those topics. The rest of the incompetents repeating shit they heard from a buddy ... you can go fly a kite.
Do you even have a tongue left from the amount of boots you lick? I mean fucking hell! If there's an authority figure, you're on your knees in 2.5 seconds. You have got to be a royal pain in the ass in real life. We had a shithead like you at work who spent the first and last 3 hours of the day under the boss's desk. We ran his ass off. Suck that dick harder, you brown nosing shitheel.
Nobody asked for your opinion either ya fucktard
That's fine, but time will tell.
If it turns in both cases to be 100% pilot error and not at all the fault of Boeing changing the 737 and making them unsafe then I will apologise to everyone for being wrong.
Without it, on full throttle, the aircraft doesn't have enough authority to bring the nose down once it goes up too high.
If "the aircraft" doesn't have enough authority to bring the nose down, then how can the pilot ever bring the nose down, and how can the MCAS bring it down? The MCAS doesn't create new control surfaces. It adjusts the trim. Just like the pilots can. And the pilots can always push the yoke forward ... to bring the nose down.
Every aircraft where the engines are not on the center of drag (thus drag and thrust are not coaxial) will either pitch up or down when the throttles are changed. The aircraft can handle it. And the pilots can handle it.
It has nothing to do with auto-pilot, except the system is disabled when auto-pilot is engaged.
It uses the same control surfaces that the autopilot uses, including the same electric trim. If you can disable the electric trim control for the autopilot (which you can) then it will be disabled for MCAS.
And Boeing distributed this information to all customers last November.
That is not entirely true. If FAA certifies an airplane as airworthy, it's recognized by other certification authorities worldwide
And then the AD that FAA issues are also recognized worldwide. Which clearly wasn't followed in this case, since the Nov, 2018 Emergency AD was ignored by Ethiopian Airlines, just as they ignored the Boeing notice the same month.
So: if FAA said it can fly and the. It crashed all over the world itÃ(TM)s defjnitdly FAA problem.
First, it's not FAA's fault that non-US airlines ignore ADs and notices from the aircraft manufacturer. Second, it's not FAA's fault that you can't use a simple apostrophe or write a complete sentence.
It does seem odd that given an apparently working solution they didn't stick with it at least long enough to go around and land or at least return to it, then land.
...or criticism, or any sort of information that contradicts their world view.
They're trolls
They're paid
They're regurgitating a script
They're Fake News
They're Russian/Chinese
(The irony of course is that theses cookie cutter responses themselves can easily be accused of the same)
Even as the parent admits my post look well organized, he doesn't see that as a sign I'm a reasonable person just offering my thoughts, but that I must be part of some conspiracy out to get them.
The only response to all those empty baseless accusations is, to paraphrase a film that a lot of millennials seem to enjoyed: everything in that statement is wrong.
See you around kid
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Just stop with your delusion.
No. A bodge may retroactively qualify as a design decision by dint of actually fucking working.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."