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US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

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Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#221

Post by js2 »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #100
briandear wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a 200 hour pilot flying in the right seat of the crashed airplane. Star Alliance or not, who in the hell defends a low-time student pilot flying right seat in an airliner? In the US, that would be illegal as a first officer has a 1500 hour requirement along with significant multi-engine turbine training. That copilot wouldn’t even have enough hours for a commercial certificate, let alone ATP.

> They had a 200 hour pilot flying in the right seat of the crashed airplane. Star Alliance or not, who in the hell defends a low-time student pilot flying right seat in an airliner? So do European airlines and they have great safety records.

FWIW Malcolm Gladwell's business bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success has a chapter devoted to explaining the superior safety record of American major airlines compared to foreign carriers: "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes". Gladwell comes to the conclusion that foreigners are unsafe because they are ... foreign. They have a strange and defective culture that prevents the first officer (copilot) from speaking up and pointing out problems to the captain. If only everyone were American, the world would be a better and safer place. This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience.

https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#222

Post by rbanffy »

keiferski wrote: post #183
rbanffy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unsure about what you are implying here.

Near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — At least eight of the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines crash were confirmed Tuesday to have been Americans, including Melvin and Bennett Riffel from Redding, California. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ethiopian-airlines-crash-victim...

How is that relevant in FAA's decision not to ground the planes? Do you think they'd ground the planes if the majority of the victims were American?

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#223

Post by lagadu »

cesarb wrote: post #198
crubier wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sudden rush to judgment on this case is unjustified by the evidence. It might not be justified by a theoretical formal proof. It irks me that a lot of the HN population seems to always want to reason using formal proofs like if it was a silver bullet. In this situation, bayesian inference is appropriate, and tells us that grounding planes is highly justified. This succession of two relatively similar events in…

There are three scenarios, not two: - Ground them for nothing and lose money - Not ground them to save money, no crash happens before the cause is found and a fix is deployed - Not ground them to save money, and see a third crash happen, killing 150 again And that also doesn't consider secondary effects, like the loss of confidence from the public on that aircraft type, or the potential confusion from the public betw…

Those secondary effects are all part of the first point: "lose money".

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#224

Post by b_tterc_p »

_cerv wrote: post #45

Some points from personal experience from working at Boeing, family working at Boeing, and a close friend on the flight line for the 737-8; - not everything is back from the Lion Air incident, but internally there was strong confidence that a lack of pilot familiarity with the adjusted mechanics of MCAS contributed to the disaster - reproducing these failures has been extremely hard and has required a lot of cooperat…

Saying these areas are near the bottom feels disingenuous. Boeing should make minimum safety requirements explicitly clear and not sell planes to areas that don’t comply. Not just ethically, but for business reputation.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#225

Post by dingaling »

Axsuul wrote: post #57

Quite frankly I think it’s a bit sensationalist for people and the media to point fingers at the FAA for making “irresponsible decisions” and being beholden to lobbyists while conveniently ignoring their track record. The FAA is notorious for their draconian ways which has become the impetus behind why air travel is now the safest mode of transportation today. In fact, there hasn't been a hull loss on US soil since 2…

> The FAA is a very hands-on agency

Under the ODA scheme, the FAA delegated testing and certification of the 787 and 737-8 ( Max ) to Boeing.

That's not hands-on, that's arms-length.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#226

Post by bitwalker »

verytrivial wrote: post #160

Can someone with flight experience help me with this question? So, MCAS is watching the AOA sensor and dipping the nose to prevent aerodynamic stall. When activated (and altering the pilots loudly) what would happen to airspeed in the valid-AOA and borked-AOA sensor states? I would have thought in the bogus-AOA case, airspeed would be increasing MUCH faster? Is this factored into regarding validation of the AOA input…

Airspeed and angle-of-attack are different measurements, whether the AoA is borked or not would make no difference to airspeed measurements, and vice versa.

Without AoA though, airspeed alone is not enough to determine a stall. If one or both sets of probes are incorrect or inoperable, detection of stall conditions would be unreliable at best, either reporting a stall when there isn't one, or failing to report one that is valid.

As for MCAS, it would likely be able to see that two AoA probes disagree, but would be unable to choose the "correct" probe. A third AoA probe _might_ address that, but I never saw that kind of configuration on aircraft I worked on, and it isn't on the MAX. Regardless though, from what I've read, MCAS only applies gradual nose down trim, so ignoring whether or not MCAS even knows enough to disable itself in abnormal conditions, the pilot/first officer should have more plenty of time to react to it (I believe it was something like 2.5deg of trim every 10s). Either the pilots in these situations are not aware that it is a trim issue, which seems very unlikely, or they are overloaded and don't remember in time to set the stab trim to cutoff which would disable those inputs. Very much still on Boeing in my opinion, but it isn't like the aircraft is just diving into the ground the second MCAS starts nosing down.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#227

Post by sib »

poof131 wrote: post #131
av_throwaway_19 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just the FAA and Boeing. Where I work many of us have a "common type rating" between the A330 and A350 (-900 and -1000). While I commend Airbus for making them similar they are in no way common enough to justify the minuscule training course. Flying the A350 you get lots of brilliant features like brake-to-vacate, auto wing leveling during a crosswind landing (when you de-crab), differential flap setting in…

> My company's error rates have increased on the "common fleet" by almost triple. That is Terrifying. It seems like the FAA has optimized for allowing the Manufacturers and Airlines to streamline changes and operations while slowly letting safety deteriorate. Perhaps these accidents will force what seems like a needed change in type ratings.

From GP's comment, it appears that s/he is not referring to the FAA.

"It isn't just the FAA and Boeing."

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#228

Post by ataturk »

StreamBright wrote: post #170
Grue3 wrote: post #140

How improbable was two Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200ER flights crashing within five months? Should all Boeing 777-200ER airplanes be grounded? Or all Malaysian Airlines flights? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 By the way it took years to figure out how exactly these crashed.

Should we ground Russian surface to air rockets instead?

Sadly, due to the propaganda and intentional misreporting of facts, we don't know if the Russians did it or if that is just US intel operations placing blame there for political reasons. The whole Ukraine civil war thing was drummed up by Western intelligence agencies. The epicenter of the whole thing was H. Clinton's State Dept. the same assholes who kicked over Libya so they could run guns to ISIS. The US is bullshit, man. Some high-level people need to go to jail.

And now even our FAA is playing politics...

All I can say is "don't fly over war zones." Tragic.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#229

Post by lagadu »

briandear wrote: post #93
Legogris wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sudden rush to judgment on this case is unjustified by the evidence. If it turns out this was not Boeing's fault, a lot of people are going to have to eat their words, and millions of dollars will have been wasted for nothing. The prudent thing would be to err on the side of caution and suspend it until we know. What's millions of dollars (which I think is way exaggerated for a temporary suspension until the ev…

Did the E.U. ground the A320 when the Germanwings suicide pilot crashed the plane in the Alps, killing 150? Investigators didn’t know what brought that plane down for several days. Wouldn’t the prudent thing to do be to ground all Airbus A320s until the cause was confirmed? Did they ground the A320 after the Egyptair crash? They still aren’t sure what brought that plane down. But they didn’t ground the fleet. How abo…

Interesting that you mentioned Australia, who also grounded the plane. Clearly they're in the EU's pocked, right? Despite that Qantas' Boeing fleet is more than twice as numerous as their Airbus fleet.
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