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US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

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Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that this particular plane was new. So 'poor maintenance' is not likely. I don't think anyone serious literally thinks that 'Boeing built a POS that fell out of the sky', but there are indications that they built a plane that required substantially different handling and tried to abstract that fact via the onboard systems, which makes the pilots unable to handle the actual behavior of the plane when…

I would consider pilots not being made sufficiently aware of the implications of a faulty AoA sensor a maintenance failure. Clearly people have fucked up because planes have crashed. We're basically just arguing over whether the responsibility split goes 33/33/33 or 20/20/60 or something else.

> I would consider pilots not being made sufficiently aware of the implications of a faulty AoA sensor a maintenance failure.

From what others have said, I gather there is a problem of this plane behaving differently than the rest of the family, which is being 'masked' by the on-board software so that it 'feels' similar to the other planes in a regular situation and thus requires minimal additional training. This however goes out of the window when the pilot cannot rely on the software and suddenly has to deal with how the plane 'really' behaves, which is substantially differently.

If that's the case, I'd consider the root of the problem to be significantly on Boeing's side.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good grief, when was the last time Airbus grounded anything?

The French govt threw a pretty big fit about the Concorde, unwilling to admit it was "unsafe", but eventually gave up on the plane for "commercial" reasons. Aerospatiale was literally state-owned by the French.

The UK CAA and French DGAC both temporarily withdrew Concorde's Certificate of Airworthiness. There was no 'fit'.

It was reinstated and operations resumed.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#233
post #142
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.

-Quite different scenario. One was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile (And one can hardly fault Boeing for not providing ECM equipment as standard!), the other was (probably) wilfully flown into the great void. Here, on the other hand, there are two eerily similar cases where the likely -mind, likely- common denominator is a new 'feature' which has been undercommunicated to the pilots flying the thing…

MH 370's crew and passengers went hypoxic.

(edited from 17 to 370)

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#234
post #32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's based on data why not publishing it?

That's exactly the thing. There is no data to the contrary. You can't prove that the FAA is wrong, because we don't know why both planes crashed. We have assumptions, and there's a public perception - but it may not be correct.

But we do have data: two airplanes of the exact same model crashed within less than 6 months, sure maybe that's just an outlier and not indicative of poor safety but at this point it falls on them to prove that.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#235
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…

> there hasn't been a hull loss on US soil since 2009 Until 3 weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Air_Flight_3591

GP must have meant "hull loss of a passenger flight with mass fatalities". Asiana 214 was a hull loss on US soil, as was American 383, etc

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#236
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.

MH nearly went bust due to these two failures. The cause of MH17 was known immediately, and within two hours Ukraine had closed all routes in eastern Ukrainian airspace

all routes in whole UA airspace are closed I believe

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#237
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier for the EU, they don't have many MAX planes. It's likely too early to say something definitive and in times of social medial pressure one conformes if possible.

The US doesn’t have many MAX planes either. Southwest have 35/755 planes American 22/956 Norwegian by comparison have 18/163 - a far higher proportion (of course Norwegian isn’t an EU airlin but they have EU subsidiaries included in that total)

Norwegian is technically an EU airline because despite the name they're also headquartered in EU countries. This is so because being EU-based they're free to use all EU airports to base flights out of, which they use to good extent to make flights between the US and the French Caribbean islands, something that would be impossible had they been solely HQd in Norway :)

Check out this video about it (Norwegian starts at about 10 minutes in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thqbjA2DC-E

edit: turns out they're registed in several countries, not just Denmark.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#238
post #15

It’s scary to think how complicit the FAA was in granting Boeing’s wish that this 30 year newer plane with substantially larger engines only required 2-3 hours of new training and said training was able to miss covering entire systems like MCAS. Now 350 people are dead, all the FAA can be thankful of is the dead are foreigners so it’s unlikely they’ll be held properly accountable.

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…

Temporary Abnormal Behaviors, now there is a nice piece of jargon

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#239
post #196

But if you bring your own water then you wouldn't have the privilege of spending $4 for a single bottled water[0] at an airport vendor. Sounds like the common ground there is profits come before anything else. [0]: You could also bring your own empty water bottle and ask one of the bartenders to fill it up which is what I usually do and then drop them a $1 tip.

> But if you bring your own water then you wouldn't have the privilege of spending $4 for a single bottled water[0] at an airport vendor.

That's just good capitalists exploiting the situation for maximum selfish gain, like they were taught in school.

Re: US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

#240
The current head of FAA appointed by Trump was a lobbyist for Southwest, AA, United Airlines. No wonder he doesn't ground the Boeing 737 Max. Southwest alone operates the biggest 737 Max fleet in the world, with 280 planes. They'd lose a lot of money if their former employee grounds the plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Elwell
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