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Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

cbc.ca

201–210 of 304 posts

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#201

And then there was one. I do wonder if we can halt and revert the deterioration of the Civil Service before the whole "civilization is two days worth of food and water" scenario arrives. If it does, I think it'll be through something that generates a disproportionate amount of fear and anxiety in people resulting in a significant impact to the economy in a sector where middle to upper class folks are heavily exposed…

Call me a partisan hack but the fact of the matter is this situation is murkier politically than a lot of other similar controversies. There is a direct conflict of interest between our president and the CEO of a major American multi-national country and due to an amazing lack of transparency we have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

President's divest from their holdings upon taking the office for a very specific reason, the fact that Boeing's CEO is a customer of one of the president's properties really should be scrutinized heavily. If these crashes happened on our soil there would be no doubt in my mind that this plane would be grounded.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#202
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I cannot believe your conclusion is that "most pilot will know about this specific issue and know how to handle it"...

I mean I would not be afraid if I have to fly 737 Max 8 tomorrow

Please do.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#203
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- We have a preliminary report from Lion Air, including a Emergency Airworthiness Directive and a Airworthiness Directive suggesting MCAS (w/faulty single AOA sensor) was closely tied to the accident. - The Lion Air flight had a certain aerial profile before the crash (a wave, as MCAS fought the pilots). - The Ethiopian Airlines aircraft has the same tell tale aerial profile It would be better to have the black box d…

At least according to Southwest’s pilots union SWA has seen no MCAS issues in its fleet (edit: this may not be correct - see reply from antsar) and its pilots are prepared to handle any MCAS issue were it to occur.[1] I think a worse scenario is if the Ethiopian flight crashed due to some other not yet known issue specific to the Max. [1] https://swaparesources.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/pdf...

> SWA has seen no MCAS issues in its fleet

I don't see how your link supports this. Closest I found in the text:

> Southwest has compiled and analyzed a tremendous amount of data from more than 41,000 flights operated by the 34 MAX aircraft on property, and the data supports Southwest's continued confidence in the airworthiness and safety of the MAX.

That doesn't preclude having experienced MCAS issues while remaining confident in their pilots' ability to overcome the issues.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that enters into the FAA's calculus here. It is more likely that there is not enough information to show that the plane is unsafe (a sample size of 2 is not statistically significant). The FAA has already approved this design, and to say that there is a design flaw would cast a shadow on their own approval process, and by extension their authority. Of course, over the last 10 years or so the FAA has delegated…

No, it doesn’t enter into this decision because there are other planes that can step in, and grounding this type won’t encourage more driving. That was just an example of how safety measures can potentially backfire. The FAA absolutely does consider this in general. For example, this is a major reason they don’t require child safety seats: their analysis is that the extra expense would shift some travel to cars and u…

If I had to hazard a guess at the logic behind not grounding the Max it’s something like this:

We believe there may be an MCAS issue due to the preliminary Lion investigation but we haven’t seen it in our fleet and our pilots are confident they are prepared for it anyway. We don’t yet have enough data to draw any conclusion on the Ethiopian crash and so we’re currently treating it as an independent incident and a single incident doesn’t warrant grounding the plane.

Would I personally feel safer on a new Southwest Max or on an older Southwest 737? I don’t know. Statistically, there have been no 737 Max crashes in the US.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#205
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…

> They're probably the best independent regulator the US has at the moment.

Aren't most of the safety statistics they publish basically fake? If you look at the star ratings they give for crash tests, there is an asterisk with fine print saying that they only compare vehicles within 250lbs of each other. Which means that when you're trying to figure out which car is actually the safest, a car that gets a 3-star crash rating might actually be safer than one that gets a 5-star crash rating.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#206
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FAA was under an ethical Obama administration Let's not be naive that any major political party can be ethical, Obama simply had a nicer public image but there were still scandals* during his administration. * = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obama_administration_...

A controversy is not the same thing as a scandal. For example, this is on that list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One_photo_op_inciden...

I would wager mass surveillance programs, Fast/Furious, and spying on White House journalists to be scandalous.

Not sure why many people can't fathom seeing both parties as unethical.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#207
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A controversy is not the same thing as a scandal. For example, this is on that list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One_photo_op_inciden...

I would wager mass surveillance programs, Fast/Furious, and spying on White House journalists to be scandalous. Not sure why many people can't fathom seeing both parties as unethical.

I can fathom seeing both parties as falling below some threshold of being "acceptably ethical".

I cannot fathom seeing every administration as being equally and indistinguishably unethical, however.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really going to use a UPS crash as an argument here? You actually raise some good points but I can’t get past that one.

"UPS Airlines Flight 1354 was a scheduled cargo flight from Louisville, Kentucky, to Birmingham, Alabama" U.S. Airline U.S. origin U.S. destination European aircraft (A320) Seems that the cause was problems with American trained pilots, so it's a strong refutation to the assertion "Maybe from the fact that the last fatality in a US airline crash was over ten years ago? "

Despite the name, UPS Airlines is a cargo company, not an airline. If you want to quibble over semantics, just pretend I specified “passenger airline” since that’s what I was talking about and that’s the relevant category.

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#209
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…

Countering my own claim about the FAA I’ll link to this piece from 2010 that doesn’t make the FAA look so great in that decade:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/etc/cro...

Re: Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

#210

And then there was one. I do wonder if we can halt and revert the deterioration of the Civil Service before the whole "civilization is two days worth of food and water" scenario arrives. If it does, I think it'll be through something that generates a disproportionate amount of fear and anxiety in people resulting in a significant impact to the economy in a sector where middle to upper class folks are heavily exposed…

Call me a partisan hack but the fact of the matter is this situation is murkier politically than a lot of other similar controversies. There is a direct conflict of interest between our president and the CEO of a major American multi-national country and due to an amazing lack of transparency we have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. President's divest from their holdings upon taking the office for a very specif…

It's a conflict of interest of course. The good thing is that it hurts a lot of people, especially people with disposable income with the power to change things, and especially people with stores of capital/influence. It's like a SaaS product, where sales/marketing (the most important division of a company) literally cannot do their jobs if engineering-provided services go down. It's much less easy to gouge engineering in such a situation than say releasing a waterfall build, and having it fail after the sale.

If POTUS & Co. restrained themselves to separating children at the border and disappearing them into pedophile rings that they may frequent later (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/nyregion/children-separat...), people may not be as outraged, because it doesn't affect them. Instead, they flaunt their power in our faces, in a way that may affect our physical safety. They don't whisper, and that's good.

What would be really concerning is if people think this is okay, and the people with means realize the only way to really stay safe in a world where laws don't mean too much is to become part of the government, like in Russia. Then you have things like ambulance limos (https://jalopnik.com/ultra-rich-russians-hire-fake-ambulance...). I wouldn't know how to work backwards from that.

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