221–230 of 368 posts
While we're bashing Boeing, let us not forget how they tried to swindle taxpayers into buying their tankers... a scandal which led to their CFO going to prison. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/10/06/t...
0) Nope.
Wow. The quote from Capt Ray Miller is particularly telling: “I have been told by my company . . . that the FAA and Boeing (were) aware of the problems with the spurious rudder inputs but considered them to be more of a nuisance problem than a flight safety issue. I was informed, that so far as everyone was concerned, the rudder hardovers were a problem but that the `industry' felt the losses would be in the acceptab…
Is it just me or a lot of big names in various industries are dropping the ball on QA? From exploding Nike shoes to crashing Beings, to faulty MacBooks.
> 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.…
But a) Boeing is typically a hyper competent corporate person, having executed massive, multi-decade engineering projects that have been largely successful, and b) regardless of (a), the disappearance of a very specific piece of technical evidence while in the possession of the potentially liable party, while the rest of the evidence is successfully delivered, is not adequately explained by incompetence.
>It is widely suspected that Boeing knew about the problems with the PCU for decades but had done nothing, despite the hundreds of reported incidents. Because no one was collecting all the accounts of rudder deflections, it was likely that no one except Boeing realized how common they were. It was not until people started dying in crashes that enough scrutiny was placed on the 737 to uncover this history of ignoring…
Though there are entire branches of fields that use statistics to mitigate risk, probabilities are tricky things. I found this interesting read a few days ago https://aeon.co/ideas/the-concept-of-probability-is-not-as-s... and it seems to have some overlap here.
How are we calculating "safety" when it comes to transportation. I'm not sure that air transportation is less safe than other forms, but I wanted to pass this along as support for some sort of skepticism.
It's easy to point to the various risks and lives at risk, due to the products of industry, such as aviation accidents as well as pollutants and even mundane things like typing on a computer (RSI anyone?).
However, what is often forgotten is all the amazing benefits of this industry -- from being able to fly to anywhere in the world in less than a day at a cost affordable by almost anyone in a developed country to having energy to light and heat our homes and run our medical devices, to the existence of this very forum. It is right and moral for both producers in setting their own safety and emission standards, as well as the state in setting limits on production in the name of "protecting society", to consider these positives as well as the negatives. It is morally right even knowing that not setting these limits higher will result in lives and health lost, because the alternative is, bit-by-bit going back to a pre-industrial society in which humans were lucky to live past 35. The way to achieve setting these limits higher is in fact by becoming richer, such that we can afford the better controls. If the state attempts to too tightly control an industry before it can afford those same controls, it is essentially the same as destroying it, and keeping its benefits from the world forever.
Aviation is an example of this whole process working. It's exactly why aviation has become so incredibly safe, while at the same time becoming ever more economical. Companies like Boeing are to be, overall, praised. When fraud occurs, it needs to be investigated and punished, but that doesn't change the essentially good nature of Boeing.
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.
This makes me wonder how we'll view space travel generations from now. Will the descendants of companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin face outrage and calls for criminal charges like Boeing is receiving now? Risk is inherent in fast modes of transportation, and I think it's very easy for us to ignore the underlying complexity of these feats. Great example: regular air travelers I'm sure are use to the preflight safety…
EDIT: I do pay a lot of attention during the takeoff and landing phases. That's when most of the issues happen, so headphones and sleep can wait.
Somewhat related: https://nsc.nasa.gov/resources/case-studies This one is interesting: In March 2010, a 29-year-old shift nurse left her job in Atlanta, Georgia and headed to her boyfriend’s house. She was driving her 2005 Chevy Cobalt on a two-lane road as she approached a half-mile downhill straightaway. As the road leveled after the straightaway, she approached an area where some rainwater had accumulated. Shortly…
In my opinion the GM ignition switch thing was over blown. Getting worn out and sloppy and failing in one of several ways (e.g. turning the car off unexpectedly) is not an atypical failure mode of old ignition switches. The only reason it was a big deal was because wealth-ish people (i.e. not someone driving a 1993 Corolla) driving fairly new (at the time) vehicles died. Their cover up was somewhat scummy but I don't…
The faulty ignitions have been linked (by GM itself) to 124 deaths.
> old ignition switches
Five years is not an old ignition switch.
> should have had to cover up
On June 5, 2014, Valukas' report on the recall was made public. In it, he asserted that the company's failure to fix the defective switches sooner was not due to a cover-up on the company's part, but rather due to "their failure to understand, quite simply, how the car was built."
As well, the case study doesn't mention cover up once, but instead points out a variety of secondary issues: inadequate communication, a lack of understanding of the problem, a lack of urgency, a lack of oversight, and company culture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a common pattern for posts on r/DIY on Reddit, where people have 5-100 photos covering each step of a project, and each photo has a bit of text below it explaining the process. I thing it works great, and I much prefer it over videos because I can take my time, and videos tend to gloss over the details. My only issue with Imgur is that on mobile the images are very low-res, so zooming in to see details doesn'…
My biggest complaint with the pattern is that there's no way to easily save the text with the images. If you "download the post", you get the images, but not the text. Even an XML or JSON of the text as a large "blob" would be better than nothing. Heck, for that matter, a flat ASCII file delimited with line breaks would be fine.