Live data from Hacker News

Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 max crash

cnbc.com

141–145 of 145 posts

Re: Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 max crash

#141
post #90
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I pack air, sell it as panacea, and employ 150k people doing that, do I deserve to be be in business?

If you can actually pay 150k people, maybe you do, since you're bloody good at it! Joke aside, let's be fair, Boeing did not sell air. Their greed got the better of them, and the institutions set to prevent that did not do their job. They should take responsibility for the things they did (or in this case, did not). There is no penalty high enough to bring back lives.

Has the Overton window shifted so much that the idea of a somehow successful company that produces 0 positive value by selling a completely fake product is legitimately humorous or an appropriate subject for levity?

Perhaps my sense of humor is broken but I find the fact that jest was even made quite alarming. I'm used to playing word games, and taking refuge in audacity...but damn.

Re: Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 max crash

#142
The amount of Boeing hate is phenomenal. "scrap the plane" ! "require a new type certificate" "never fly in a 737 max, no matter what".

Boeing made a plane that conformed to all rules and regulations. As part of the design process, they made many, many tradeoff's. What kind of fastener goes on this panel? How often does this data go across the data bus? What material is used for this cable? Literally thousands of them. Not every one , by itself is safety critical; but many of them can turn out to be.

The MCAS design was not some engineer skirting the law, or wanting to kill people, or even disinterested in safety. It was a compromise design of cost vs safety; in hindsight it looks like the compromise was done poorly.

A 100% safe airplane weighs too much to fly and costs too much to build. This means every design decision has to take into account other things than just 'raw safety'.

They made a mistake. Even when you are not "moving fast and breaking things", people make mistakes. process adherence misses the mistake.

And in this case people die. Unfortunately, that is how we improve aviation safety. With the blood of passengers and crew. Not on purpose, not because boeing is greedy, but because people make mistakes, systems fail, airplanes crash. This was not a single failure of the aviation safety system. N things had to happen for these crashes. And the system is going to fix each one of them, and do a humans best effort to change the process so it does not happen again.

i would fly a Boeing aircraft tomorrow (yes, a 737 MAX 8). Or an Airbus. They are both built and overseen by the best our world has to offer.

This is not the first design failure that has been the cause of an incident (or even a series of incidents) and it will not be the last.

Re: Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 max crash

#143
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related question: how does regulatory approval of planes work, worldwide? I read a few times that the FAA had approved the new plane too quickly, but don't other regulators have their word?

Not only that, but apparently they also delegated most of the certification duties to Boeing itself .

Buy toilet duck.

Re: Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 max crash

#144
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market cap loss since crash of flight 303 is $27 billion. https://ycharts.com/companies/BA/market_cap

None of which matters to Boeing as an entity. Market cap is not liquidity. Outstanding Max order backlog is $600 billion at list price. That is what matters.

> None of which matters to Boeing as an entity. Market cap is not liquidity.

> Outstanding Max order backlog is $600 billion at list price. That is what matters.

So at 600 billion in orders they got greedy and didn't want to spend 1M extra per plane to make it safe.

Re: Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 max crash

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why isn't that enough to disable MCAS From what I understand it did but it would reengage again. It's the reason why the Lion Air flight lasted longer in the air than Ethiopian, because the pilots in that case kept hitting the trim and buying themselves 40-60 seconds each time

They could have disabled the whole thing if they simply followed the standard runaway trim procedure. A system malfunction should appear to a pilot the same way a runaway trim wheel appears. The result is that there is runaway trim checklist—and a procedure to work around it. You turn off the electric trim and go to a manual reversion. It’s something every 737 pilot trains for. Here’s some discussion about this from…

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/world/asia/ethiopia-crash...

Ah yes implying those weird "African" airlines cannot compare to the supreme training of the US ones. You closet racism is pretty self evident.

Post reply on HN