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How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

seattletimes.com

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Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#121

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

ajross wrote: post #65
tafda wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile... Quote: The discrepancy over this number is magnified by another element in the System Safety Analysis: The limit of the system’s authority to move the tail applies each time MCAS is triggered. And it can be triggered multiple times, as it was on the Lion Air flight. One current FAA safety engineer said that every time the pilots on the Lion Air…

Yes true.[1] You're misunderstanding that quote. It's talking about "authority" in the sense of software's authorization to move the trim tab, not the aerodynamic authority of the tailplane. The 737 has a 60 year old, very conventional elevator with a trim tab. The tab changes the resting angle of the overall elevator, and thus the "center point" of tailplane force on the airframe. Being out of trim means that the ai…

I think you should perhaps reconsider your line of argument in relation to your own footnote.

What you are saying is directly contradicted by the article unless you apply a very unconventional reading to the word "authority". What you're saying is also contradicted by just looking at an image of a 737's tail arrangement. Lastly, you're claiming that two pilots fell out of the sky to their deaths and it simply never occurred to them to try pulling back hard. I find that not just implausible, but bordering on poor taste.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#122

Post by CamperBob2 »

sundaeofshock wrote: post #26
stcredzero wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more of this has been delegated to the manufacturers themselves. They simply assert to the FAA that the aircraft meets the type requirements. To assert this, but also change such a critical emergency procedure, which is made more critical by a decision motivated primarily by economics -- this just sounds bad. Basically, we've set up a situation where short term thinking is eventually, over many thousands of…

“Unfortunately, substituting regulations for good thinking has the potential to nonsensically stymie progress if done incorrectly.” Help me understand this statement. Are you suggesting that regulation in this instance would not help with safety?

Regulation is why Boeing felt the need to construct and jump through such elaborate hoops to avoid losing the 737's original certification. The better approach would have been to treat the Max as an entirety new aircraft model, and not try to fool pilots into thinking it was just another boring old 737 variant. But the regs are written to encourage the latter approach.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#123

Post by ineedasername »

briandear wrote: post #113
ineedasername wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have an example. The parent comment was about regulation in general, and mine was in response to that. However, there was the massive deregulation of the FAA in 1978 due to this sort of pressure. It had one effect of creating more competition in the industry, but it arguably went too far and has had an impact on safety as well. [0] [0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/perspective-on-airline-sa...

I am not sure if you know what you are talking about. The FAA can’t be “deregulated” as it is the regulatory body. And the airline deregulation that happened in ‘78 was deregulation of airline routes, not airline safety requirements. Furthermore, that 1996 Brookings opinion; that hasn’t held up very well considering that US aviation has an extraordinary safety record since that time and an even better record than dur…

I think you're cherry picking and looking for reasons for me to be wrong because you don't like my conclusion. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and FAA were closely affiliated agencies until the '78 deregulation, and in the wake of it the FAA picked up some of the CAB's former duties. The CAB was deregulated out of existence.

And simply saying the Brooking's opinion isn't relevant isn't actually a supporting argument. Neither is stating that trains have more deaths: so do cars, but neither point is relevant to whether or not airplane safety was damaged by deregulation. Besides which, I think your estimate misses the much higher casualty rates among private aircraft, which do in fact rival cars [0]

The question has little to do with whether the FAA has done a good job, it's about what happened after the deregulation, and whether it would be even better without it.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#124

Post by CharlesColeman »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #120
CharlesColeman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess. > But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising. It's a failure of regulation t…

Yes, among other aspects of regulatory capture.

Is the solution to eliminate regulation, so the regulated don't have to bother to "capture it" -- and just decide to live with all the problems regulation can solve or mitigate?

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#125

Post by ineedasername »

WalterBright wrote: post #69
ineedasername wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back a hundred or more years when the market was more free, your vision of how things might work does not hold. There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider. The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does so…

> no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider. Probably because the culture of the time was that everyone knew horses were dangerous and if you borrowed a horse and it threw you, it was your fault, not the lender's.

Really? Because at the time "everyone knew" sea-bound shipping was dangerous and if you were directly tied to that industry the "culture of the time" was very much bound up in insurance markets that protected against loss.

There, the free market did provide a solution, but not for my original example. Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#126

Post by ineedasername »

chrismeller wrote: post #67
ineedasername wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back a hundred or more years when the market was more free, your vision of how things might work does not hold. There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider. The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does so…

A horse was also a much less complex animal (literally) than a 737. Using that as a justification for the lack of an insurance market is just wrong...

By that theory it should have just made it all the simpler for a horse to be inspected and certified.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#127

Post by ineedasername »

linuxftw wrote: post #87
ineedasername wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back a hundred or more years when the market was more free, your vision of how things might work does not hold. There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider. The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does so…

Large ships did have insurance. > There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider. Insurance markets have appeared for all manner of things now. This argument doesn't really make any sense. > The free market is not a panacea that solves ev…

Your right, insurance markets have appeared for many things. I'm not sure why you think that's evidence against my argument. I cited an example where they did not, where the free market did not come up with a solution.

Your argument amounts to an article of faith. "The free market solves all problems, because if we let it, it would find a way." The crux of your comment when given an example where there was no such solution was to repeat your article of faith.

Re: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

#129

Post by sctb »

wnevets wrote: post #30

>FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves. How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulation is a fool's errand?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19422650.
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