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Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

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Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#41

Post by celticninja »

gist wrote: post #34
docker_up wrote: post #26

Did Boeing executives go to jail for this disgusting cover up? I hope that the diesel cover-up of Volkswagen and the people that went to jail will motivate governments to pursue criminal charges against Boeing and/or Airbus if similar things happen. Fighting blame by lying and deflection at the risk of death should be a criminal offense. It's mass murder.

Why are you assuming what you have just seen is even true? An image, no attribution and you honestly don't even know who cooked it up or why.

Is it possible that you looked at the top image and didnt scroll down and read the entire thing? Everything is detailed and each incident is a matter of record, along with the outcomes and changes made by Boeing. Perhaps most damning is the fact that once Boeing were forced to fix the issue there were no more reports of this malfunction ocurring, prior to that there were many non-fatal ones which the general public didnt hear about as well as the fatal ones that received publicity.

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#42

Post by rkangel »

usaphp wrote: post #13

> Instead, Boeing tried to claim that flight 427 crashed because a pilot had a seizure and depressed the rudder. NTSB investigators dismissed this as ridiculous. > Boeing had no choice but to carry out the changes, but the company never stopped trying to deflect blame. While the investigation was ongoing, it adopted a philosophy of trying to avoid paying out damages to families of crews because this could be legally…

That would require more evidence than it sounds like there is. And that's assuming that you subscribe to the motivations put forward in this article. I generally follow Hanlon's razor - "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence". I have a hard time believing that a cover-up in Boeing was orchestrated over several years by a group of people all who didn't care about loss of life. I can easily believe that they didn't take the problem seriously, and that they were biased towards conclusions that weren't their fault.

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#43

Post by benj111 »

fixermark wrote: post #14
0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #7

Can't you just stop buying airplanes from them? Edit: Do the downvoters also want to throw the executives in jail for life?

Not really. Aerospace is a very tight-knit oligarchy where the devil you know is entirely too often (historically shown to be) leagues better than the devil you don't. A company ceasing to be a Boeing customer over an issue like this runs the risk that the next company they work with is just as bad in different ways, but now they're ways the company's ground technicians are wholly unfamiliar with.

It may be an oligopoly, but it is in the airlines interests to keep them on their toes.

If you're an airline of any size it would make sense to have relationships with multiple manufacturers, for the reasons you describe.

They can decrease their Boeing orders and increase competitors orders, to maintain relationships and punish Boeing.

If you single source your your fleet, you increase the odds of something like this grounding your entire fleet, and you don't even have any leverage to negotiate better terms from Boeing.

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#44

Post by sleepybrett »

gnud wrote: post #11
howard941 wrote: post #5

FWIW the rudder hardover described in this very interesting link doesn't appear to be related to the Max 8 issues near MCAS.

The articles says that since the valve was redisigned, there has been no more accidents. I think the point here was to show how Boeing has responded to issues in the past.

Of course they haven't, no different than car manufacturers doing the same types of deflections and cover-ups. See also tesla autopilot problems, or any of dozens of other such scenarios.

A problem is found with a design after a fatality (or near fatality), manufacturer deflects, blames the operator, etc until someone proves that they are 100% at fault. Eventual recall.

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#45

Post by rkangel »

iooi wrote: post #12

Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Even assuming you leave morals out of the argument, there are more variables, like the effect on future sales due to reputation (which could affect the equation either way).

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#46

Post by jackschultz »

I know these comments are kind of frowned upon on threads talking about an issue like this, but very interesting use of imgur. Effectively a blog post focused on images, which is a very good way of thinking about posts I feel. People love images rather than only words. Has imgur been looking at this? Trying to push it as another big use for its platform?

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#47

Post by eppp »

amelius wrote: post #18

If the extreme deflection of the rudder causes serious control problems, then shouldn't the extremes simply be set at lower deflections (using a physical barrier/limiter)?

That assumes that you do not need high deflection for low speed maneuvering. I would think you would in fact need that much for taxiing and landing/takeoff in a crosswind.

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#48

Post by ams6110 »

g-erson wrote: post #21

Was that the final resolution then; that Boeing were ordered to replace the part, and the crashes stopped happening? Was there ever a formal investigation into whether Boeing knew the true cause of the rudder hardover, and chose to ignore it and blame other stuff?

Without doing any research I'd assume that either there was an investigation and insufficient evidence was found, or that there was not because there was not even probable cause to begin one.

To think otherwise is to believe in a conspiracy between Boeing, NTSB, FAA, and the FBI or whichever law enforcement agency would have jurisdiction.

The FAA has some conflict of interest in its mission, but the NTSB does not and is generally considered to be the premier accident safety investigation group in the world.

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#49

Post by avar »

Aside from this specific issue, all of aviation works like this.

E.g. the reason the 747 was decommissioned from passenger flight in the US when it was is because they flew it right up to the day that the FAA mandated that they couldn't fly it anymore.

The reason was that they didn't have then-mandatory fuel tank inerting. For something like a decade there were a bunch of planes in the air carrying people that were known to be more likely to explode than some other planes.

Regulatory safety is always a messy combination of new requirement and timed phase-out of old systems.

Same with cars, you can buy a used car today and even use it as a taxi to ferry passengers without it having safety features that would make it illegal to sell as a newly manufactured vehicle.

Re: Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

#50

Post by fingerlocks »

gist wrote: post #32

Here we go. Someone uploads an image from Jan and all the sudden whatever it says must be interpreted as fact in some way and true. [1] We don't know who the poster of this is or even if this is correct: > Images sourced from The Seattle Times, the NTSB, Boeing, Tails Through Time, the Colorado Springs Gazette, The Times of India, Wikipedia, TribLIVE, The Flight 427 Air Disaster Support League, and Forbes. Video clip…

Original Seattle Times post is here:

http://old.seattletimes.com/news/local/737/part01/

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