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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

#141

Post by linuxftw »

ineedasername wrote: post #125
WalterBright wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, we don't have the department of horse safety, do we? I'm sure operators of business that do horse rides have general liability insurance. So, in effect, the free market did solve this problem.

> Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market.

If it's a solvable problem, it can be solved with the free market. If a solution is possible that is merely not implemented, that means the market decided it wasn't of sufficient utility.

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

#142

Post by lagolinguini »

ajross wrote: post #55
mimixco wrote: post #10

Notable and disturbing here is the lack of Max simulators in existence. It looks like neither Lion Air nor Ethiopian nor any US airline had access to one. Also linked in this article is the original FAA table of differences between the Max and other 737 models. It makes no metion of MCAS.

Yeah. As much blame as Boeing and the FAA certification process seems to deserve here, it's worth pointing out how much of the cascade of failures is in the airlines and cockpits too. I mean, yes, the trim system was being driven by input from a single nonredundant sensor, which is a violation of the kind of engineering for failure process that airliners should be designed in. But at the same time that trim system is…

> But at the same time that trim system is, by design, not strong enough to overpower pilot input to the other control surfaces.

No this is not true. In near stall situations for which the MCAS is designed, a full deflection of the elevators is not enough to counter the stabiliser effects. I'm not sure about the entire flight envelope, but I guarantee there are other situations where the elevator cannot counter the stabiliser.

The right way to "regain control" isn't to overpower the stabiliser by inputs to other flight control surfaces, but to disable automatic stabiliser trim and manually trim the aircraft.

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

#143

Post by MockObject »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #138
MockObject wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone reports a software bug to you, do you often ask them if the solution is to abandon the entire product? This doesn't seem like a productive methodology.

No, that's why I phrased my comment as a question. When the implementation difficulties of regulation come up on libertarian-leaning forums, it often seems like it's really an indirect way of arguing against the whole concept and practice of regulation (e.g. like this comment describes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19424511 ). I just wanted to see if that was the case here or not, hence the question.

Libertarians probably don't often advocate the strawman position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies, such as is the case in the kosher food certification industry, or the Underwriters Laboratories, or PCI compliance.

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

#144

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

ken wrote: post #68
GuB-42 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, the FAA, like many regulating bodies take everything at face value, making sure they are not getting lied to isn't their jobs. An audit usually goes like: "I see that you mentioned a change in document X, show me the corresponding test report", "who is responsible for that part?", "does document Y match document X, as required by norm Z?". They will never check that you actually did the tests, or that the anal…

Exactly. I worked at Boeing for a couple years (on a different aircraft project, on software tools that would never fly on an aircraft), and my boss made it very clear that our job was not to make sure the airplane didn't crash. It was to make sure if anything went wrong, we had the proper paper trail. As a software person, this led to some results that seemed rather counterintuitive. Then again, this level of detach…

our job was not to make sure the airplane didn't crash. It was to make sure if anything went wrong, we had the proper paper trail.

Right. The more paper you have the cleaner your bottom will be.

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

#145

Post by linuxftw »

ineedasername wrote: post #127
linuxftw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Just because the marketplace didn't do something 100 years ago doesn't mean that it never would. Obviously, there wasn't a need for such a thing, so what problem is being solved here? You just contrived some set of circumstances that you believe fits your hypothesis; in no way is this a reflection on the free market's capabilities.

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

#146

Post by tracker1 »

linuxftw wrote: post #80
michaelcampbell wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > AFAIK, the FAA, like many regulating bodies take everything at face value, making sure they are not getting lied to isn't their jobs. > I don't think this is accurate whatsoever. Which part, that the FAA encourages delegation to Boeing? This is established, AFAIK.

Regulatory agencies taking things at face value.

It's pretty common all around... it's as much about documenting who to point the finger at as anything else.

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

#147

Post by tracker1 »

dmix wrote: post #38
ineedasername wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, regulation doesn't fit with the narrative of self-determination and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" Instead the narrative is about big, bloated bureaucracies, ignoring the fact that they got so big by having to respond and add additional layers every time someone figured out a new way to screw things up, as with Boeing.

I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Or are you just making a general politicized point about deregulation? On the other hand I've seen many people complain about "regulatory capture" between FAA + Boeing repeatedly. That's even on the Wikipedia for FAA. > The FAA has been cited as an example of regulatory capture,…

See: personal drones.

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

#148

Post by yason »

mcv wrote: post #12
Insanity wrote: post #11

>, “Boeing 737-800 pilots were required to receive some additional training on the MAX 8, which included an hour lesson on some differences. Additional training was not required, as the 737-800 and the MAX 8 have same type certification.” How are those type certifications determined? It seems to me that there should be an instance checking if the type certifications make sense. Or perhaps they did, and they just real…

It makes sense that very minor differences don't require extra training if the differences have no meaningful impact on cockpit design or flight characteristics. But in this case, flight characteristics were clearly different, and MCAS was supposed to compensate for those differences. I don't know how they measure such differences, but you'd think that different engines, different aerodynamics, and a new control syst…

They should really have type certification diffs. If 90% of the airplane is the same as the previous version, the manufacturer should expect a type certification procedure that costs about 10% of a fully new design and pilots should gain the new type rating with about 10% of the effort and hours of what would be required for a completely new plane.

It sounds really cumbersome to have it either-or way, making it difficult to develop planes too much incrementally and keeping it very costly to start from scratch with a completely new design.

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

#149

Post by ineedasername »

linuxftw wrote: post #141
ineedasername wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, we don't have the department of horse safety, do we? I'm sure operators of business that do horse rides have general liability insurance. So, in effect, the free market did solve this problem. > Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market. If it's a solvable problem, it can be solved with the free market. If a solution is possible that is mer…

Your counter is that now, a hundred years after they ceased to be widely used for personal transport, the free market has a solution? After centuries of their use where it did not solve the problem? That is pretty weak reasoning. I'm honestly not sure if you're just trolling me now. It amounts to saying something like "evolution can solve all problems". Even if true, the timeline leaves a bit to be desired, and a bit of manual intervention can do better. Not only that, but insurance happens to be a regulated industry, so your argument is flawed on that account as well.

My argument doesn't say the free market can't solve problems. It's not terribly difficult to think of theoretical free-market solutions to many problems. My argument is that the free market doesn't solve all problems. Or if I grant your reasoning on the horse problem, they don't appear anything like as quickly as we'd want.

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

#150

Post by azernik »

outworlder wrote: post #88
azernik wrote: post #8

For those who were wondering why pilots didn't override the autopilot? Turns out that just made things worse: ================================================== 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.…

> For those who were wondering why pilots didn't override the autopilot? MCAS only works when autopilot is OFF (and flaps retracted).

I'm using autopilot in the loose sense, to refer to the general suite of mavhine inputs to the flight controls.
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