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Boeing Delays 737 Max Software Fix (arstechnica.com)
Boeing's promised software fix for its 737 Max planes involved in two deadly crashes since October has been pushed back several weeks after an internal review by engineers not connected to the aircraft raised additional safety questions. "The results of the 'non-advocate' review have not been revealed, but the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed on April 1 that the software needed additional work," reports Ars Technica. From the report: "The FAA expects to receive Boeing's final package of its software enhancement over the coming weeks for FAA approval," an FAA spokesperson said in a statement. "Time is needed for additional work by Boeing as the result of an ongoing review of the 737 MAX Flight Control System to ensure that Boeing has identified and appropriately addressed all pertinent issues." Just how far back the delivery of the MCAS patch has been pushed is uncertain. The New York Times reports that the update's schedule has been pushed back "several weeks." And after its delivery, an FAA spokesperson said, "the FAA will subject Boeing's completed submission to a rigorous safety review. The FAA will not approve the software for installation until the agency is satisfied with the submission."
This means it could be months before grounded Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are once again deemed airworthy. And that means more flight cancellations for airlines that have the aircraft in their inventory. Southwest Airlines, Boeing's largest 737 MAX customer, canceled all of its flights dependent on its 34 737 MAX aircraft through April 20 so far -- about 150 flights per day. And Boeing's delivery of new 737 MAX aircraft -- the company's best-seller -- has been indefinitely delayed.
This means it could be months before grounded Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are once again deemed airworthy. And that means more flight cancellations for airlines that have the aircraft in their inventory. Southwest Airlines, Boeing's largest 737 MAX customer, canceled all of its flights dependent on its 34 737 MAX aircraft through April 20 so far -- about 150 flights per day. And Boeing's delivery of new 737 MAX aircraft -- the company's best-seller -- has been indefinitely delayed.
Boeing will be sued out of existence for this negligence. The MBA-esque desire to charge a few extra bucks for an essential safety system will mean they shall pay billions.
right... and some idiots are out there panting over how much we need to ban driver controlled vehicles and we must move to AI/Autonomous vehicles ASAP!!!! This right here is why we shouldn't /sensor issue was worked out/tested and approved before the Dept of _____________ signed off on it. horse hockey.. no thank you.
can you imagine if your car was "grounded" for months while a safety computer control
If internal reviewers are brave enough to point out flaws with this huge amount of pressure, it must be a really bad mess. Or they actually have some engineers left that found a backbone and are unwilling to be responsible for hundreds of people killed, no matter what management wants.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What a concept. :/
As someone that has worked in both functional safety and off-highway vehicles.
How the fuck did this ever make it into production. Why is a 'second sensor' an upsell?
When given the option to completely update the cockpit to the latest and greatest with digital displays.
They chose to replicate the old mechanical dials so the pilots couldn't be retrained.
The entire thing from start to finish was rushed. Mechanical design comes first. There is no 'try and develop software in parallel'. A clean software design depends on a good mechanical design.
The plane should have been a white board redesign, it should have been balanced such that a pilot could fly it stable with no avionics. This isn't a jet fighter.
But it was rushed because Europe invested in R&D and beat them to economy routes. How much money did Boeing C-suites make before 2011? During the 2009 crash there was a hiring spree by some companies because the market was flooded with cheap, good engineers that just got laid off. Companies invested in talent. Did Boeing?
People died because... Boeing sat on R&D from post WWII while making a ton of money so when Airbus released a good plane they scrambled to retrofit an old design by putting huge engines on an airframe causing it to pitch up but to appease its clients it added software to mimic the old plane behavior and tested it themselves and told the FAA they promise they did it right.
More or less.
boeing shrill alert
Who will write down the loss the 150 flight per day canceled for months. I assume airlines are insured for that risk, but still, the cost will be close to the billion USD.
MAX hidden settings
From what I understand, the planned change involves adding one more trim sensor and leaving the pilot to notice a "disagreement" light in the middle of trying to keep a flying bucking bronco stable. It's almost like they're ASKING for another major crash.
They added Clippy: "It looks like you are battling an aggressive autopilot. Would you like some help?"
Table-ized A.I.
Fucking Idiot misspelling turd located.
Except mcas was designed not as an anti-stall mechanism exclusively but rather a software solution to make this abomination of an aircraft fly move like the NG models. The design was so shitty from the start they had to install a new system and keep it quiet from pilots. Further more this is not just a simple trim runaway like pilots have been trained on, MCAS runs the trim a whole lot faster than standard trim inputs, do this during takeoff when there's a lot going on and you can quickly find yourself in an extremely bad situation. It's a shit plane that Boeing rushed to the market in order to compete with the Airbus A320Neo. This pile of shit should have never been drafted on paper much less frankenstined onto a 60+ year old design like those 707's you reference.
In any normal flying, the trim is just a help. So even if this system trims badly, it should just annoy the pilot that has to countermand it. But apparently that was not possible, and that seems to be the real design issue. Nothing to do with sensors.
It would be like having automatic lane sensors in a car. If they go wrong the driver should be able to just grab the wheel and override them. The driver should NOT have to read some checklist in the manual to figure out which buttons to press to disable the system all while the car is heading towards a tree.
What a damn mess is all I can. So as a pilot you deal with a badly designed aircraft that has handling issues, which were addressed with software that fights you in deciding how to keep the aircraft in flight. Its like having two people try to drive a car at the same time.
Sounds like someone is shorting Boeing.
Fine by me. I set straddles whenever enough of you nutters try to crash a stock. You may not move it much or for long, but I'll still get to skim your profits and leave you with the costs and potential fraud liabilities.
Well, not your profits, you don't have any. But your master's.
Only 8?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Shrill? Bare you retarded?
How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
None - we'll fix it in software.
How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
None - we'll document a workaround.
How many tech writers does it take to change a light bulb?
None - the user can figure it out.
So in this case we have:
How many hardware engineers does it take to not crash an airplane with a faulty sensor?
None - we'll detect and avoid it in software.
How many software engineers does it take to not crash an airplane with a faulty sensor?
None - the pilots can be trained to disable the auto-trim mechanism.
How many trainers does it take to not crash an airplane with a faulty sensor?
None - the pilots can figure it out.
How many pilots who have no idea why the plane is reacting as it is does it take to crash an airplane with a faulty sensor?
None - the plane will do it for them.
(No, this isn't meant to be funny.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The reason aircraft software should always be able to be overriden by the pilot is that software can never be proven to work as specified.
In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running (i.e., halt) or continue to run forever.
Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.
MCAS still only controls the trim. The quick temporary solution is to tag the breaker so it's easier and faster to find. And the GP is right, all the recent fatal airline crashes are happening with third world airlines and/or with crazy mixed up international crews that barely understand each other. The real problem is cultural. Boeing's design is defective, but needn't result in catastrophe. Simple competence would have saved the day. Look through all the squawk sheets over the last year or two. You will see lots of write ups on the system, pulled the breaker, landed, ground check ok, sign the fucker off, rinse, repeat... The Indonesian and African crews pray to Allah, and everybody blames big bad Boeing! That's fucked up
The "MAX" in 737 Max is code for the aircraft being a substandard POS.
Kind of like Windows 10 "S" means you are getting a badly crippled, junk version of Windows 10.
n/t
Blame Boeing
Fuck Yeah
Its a super reliable sensor so we can do anything we want!
Fuck the artificial horizon
Fuck the GPS
Fuck the pilots
Fuck the terrain radar
Deliberately driving a plane into the ground in order to avoid the ground is as dumb as fuck
Dear Pilot -
We are going to point the plane at the ground
You have 30 seconds to figure out what is wrong and pop the right circuit breaker
We aren't going to give you any info at all let alone a light hidden among lots of other lights
we are just going to point the the plane at the ground come what may
Opps too late - every one is dead - its not the planes fault - its your fault for not being fast enough
Bullshit
0.1% pilot 99.9% incompetent plane designers.
Even if this one is fixed, what other short cuts have the idiots at Boeing taken ????
Ethiopians are Christians you racist knobhead
https://slashdot.org/comments.... you lazy tosser.
And you didn't answer my questions: https://slashdot.org/comments....
Honestly the whole 737 scandal only raised a little concern. You make products for long enough one will crash and burn. Thinking that you can actually design, produce, and QA, and begin delivering a solution which lives depended in a matter of weeks, is a institutional cultural problem that will take a major effort to overhaul. Agile has its uses, this is a abomination of what looks to be a corporations attempt at it.
Agree, what a screw up it is, just today I read about the latest accident, that MCAS was engaged several times just before the crash even after it had been deactivated.
Always fond of Boeing, fully aware that nobody's perfect (Airbus also had their issues with overriding pilots decisions - yet not on such a scale), honestly have to say that this crack in their reputation cannot be easily repaired.
Finally about the way it was handled: FAA let Boeing engineers verify their own work, reports about MCAS problems were coming long before accidents, but it took 2 crashes and hundreds lost lives to do something about it - disgusting - and the whole reason for MCAS was to make the new plane feel like the old one, because they didn't bother to properly design it.
*bear you
...would simply disable that computer driven bullshit system and simply set the trim appropriately.
Aviation gets better, one crash at a time.
Lol you're a piece of work flyover retard :) :) :)
Ethiopian is a very good company dumbass, if your weren't so focused on inbreeding in your shitty 'murica you would realize this
It's probably better than most US airlines
Same difference. They're all superstitious primitives. They can barely drive a donkey cart. They have no business operating an airliner.
You don't get it. The only people that had a problem are the third worlders. Nobody else crashed the plane because they knew how to handle a relatively minor issue. Pilot error played a big part. It's that simple. So you can stop with all that SJW crap.
The problem is not African donkey cart drivers being pilots, the problem is fat American beer guzzlers designing crap planes.
The donkey cart drivers are the only ones that have crashed the plane. You have to take that into account. All recent airline crashes, not just these, are in third world countries. The cause is obvious, but nobody is allowed to address it, so more people are going to die for this very reason. We are compromising safety for profit and politics.
Stupid euroserf doesn't get term limits.
The fuck up here is miniscule.
Cutting corners and not telling the pilots what's going on in their own aircraft, all to save a few bucks and kill hundreds of people. Is not a miniscule fuckup