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Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

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171–180 of 304 posts

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe from the fact that the last fatality in a US airline crash was over ten years ago?

That means nothing. All airlines based out of France and Germany are ISOA certified, never had a fatality, and are rated 7/7 by AirlineRatings [0] (industry leader on airline safety ratings), for example. [0] https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/

I assume you mean they haven’t had a fatality in the last ten years, not that they’ve never had a fatality?

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I haven't followed the news closely enough, but wasn't the Ethiopian plane also spewing excess smoke at the time of the crash? If so, wouldn't that suggest a failure mode other than the one that's viewed as a training issue?

Eyewitness reports of plane crashes nearly always involve fires in locations no two eye-witnesses agree on, smoke, wings falling off, etc. These are rarely born out by subsequent investigations. See, eg, " Reliability of Eyewitness Reports to a Major Aviation Accident" https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&co... . A plane crash is a very fast, horrifying tragedy to witness. It shouldn't be surpris…

Yup. Even professional pilots get it all wrong:

> almost all the eyewitnesses, including experienced pilots, gave grossly inaccurate accounts when compared to the film record

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#173
post #131
post #20

Having read many commments on HN and elsewhere since the crash, I know I’m in the minority here when I say this but to me it seems like the US airlines and FAA are following their procedures, the same procedures that make the US airlines the safest in the world, while the rest of the world is, I don’t quite want to use the word panicking, but at least giving into pressure from people who aren’t aviation safety expert…

My father used to work for Transport Canada (Canada's version of the FAA), and I've found it rather dismaying how little faith people seem to have in the FAA/NTSB despite many years of evidence as to their competence. They're probably the best independent regulator the US has at the moment. Ironically, if you were to dive into a thread about "Urban Air Transport", a hot topic in Silicon Valley, you'd likely see peopl…

What would it take for you to change your opinion of them? How do we know they're not current asleep at the wheel?

The FAA is not some singular, autonomous entity. It's real live humans with biases and potentially some level of political influence. No regulatory body is above suspicion.

There's no way for them to know at this point what caused the second crash. It might actually be a critical defect, something that was overlooked or blame mis-applied on the first crash investigation. We simply don't know at this point, and neither do they.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#174
post #100

Is it normal for there to be this kind of obsession about a particular plane following a crash? I feel like I've never seen this before. I literally saw someone on Twitter suggesting that you print out a page of the manual and hand it to your pilot…

Read up on the DC-10. It had some pretty well known issues, such as cargo bay door latches failing and blowing open in flight.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#175
post #100

Is it normal for there to be this kind of obsession about a particular plane following a crash? I feel like I've never seen this before. I literally saw someone on Twitter suggesting that you print out a page of the manual and hand it to your pilot…

The obsession is because the plane is new (<2 years) and there have been two fatal crashes in the past 6 months, making it by far the most dangerous plane in the skies today.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#176
post #127
post #20

Having read many commments on HN and elsewhere since the crash, I know I’m in the minority here when I say this but to me it seems like the US airlines and FAA are following their procedures, the same procedures that make the US airlines the safest in the world, while the rest of the world is, I don’t quite want to use the word panicking, but at least giving into pressure from people who aren’t aviation safety expert…

WaPo's lead fact checker who covered FAA for four years as a journalist disagrees with you: https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/110585814000275456...

> WaPo's lead fact checker ...

That's not the type of fact I would lead with.

Also, it's a bit ironic to blame the FAA for other countries not following it. The mistakes of other nations are theirs to bear.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it worrying that it took them so long to come to the obvious conclusion Aviation regulators and internet forums are literally at the opposite end of the spectrum with regards to jumping to conclusions.

That's a truism. You're kind of ignoring their point though, which was that the data existed and was readily available. Internet forums may be "jumping to conclusion" but regulators have had this data for days, and didn't act on it. They only acted after regulators in Europe and elsewhere acted first.

Timing does not carry much information here. Those decisions are taken by bureaucracies, and we are talking about days.

The Brazilian flight authority, for example, makes this kind of decision once a week, and there's a backlog. Even if all the technical analysis was ready minutes after the accident, it wouldn't have decided on it yet. Most western ones have a similar organizational model.

Data gathering takes days, data verification takes days, every time one has to contact somebody in a timezone with 4+ hours of difference, it takes a couple of days, informing superiors takes days, scheduling a decision takes days, even publishing it takes days.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#178
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US Government is sadly conflicted. FAA claiming there is "no evidence" of this aircraft having a systemic flaw. Meanwhile: Boeing brought $70B into Washington State's economy in one year. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeingrsquos-economic-... Boeing is a major defense contractor, providing transportation, weapons, and other supplies to the US Military.

Boeing was a big employer, contractor, etc. back in 2013 when the FAA grounded the entire 787 fleet. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169555027...

2013’s FAA was under an ethical Obama administration. Anything touched by Trump is assumed to be corrupt. Witness the black box being sent to Europe and not the USA. The soft power of ethics in action.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#179

Can someone chime in on the following-- One possible lead in cause has to do with either software or sensors related to Angle of Attack (AOT). For such an intermittent bug in a safety-critical application, how do you even begin fixing it when reproducibility might be a 1 in 500,000 likelihood? (Obviously I'm not in software testing, but I'm curious how one approaches this problem.)

There's another comment on how Southwest ordered retrofits of the AOA user interface and training for all pilots following the 2018 crash. One solution is to make that change global in a mass recall/retrofit, along with additional training; possibly even adding it as a situation in 737 simulators to judge how quickly pilots will react to it.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#180
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WaPo's lead fact checker who covered FAA for four years as a journalist disagrees with you: https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/110585814000275456...

Quote: "I covered airline safety and the FAA for four years, and I cannot remember a time when the FAA was so alone among world regulators on a serious safety issue. " Neither viewpoint is supported here. The anomaly is that there is a disagreement between the FAA and the other aviation authorities, but no evidence has yet surfaced that would vindicate either party.

at least quote it all please, "When a major accident like this happened, global aviation authorities conferred with the FAA -- which took the lead."
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