121–130 of 164 posts
Not only a longer grounding, but some airlines are canceling orders and many passengers don't want to fly in them. The 737 Max could become the Edsel of airplanes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel
I won’t fly one unless it has 3 angle of attack sensors. Since that can’t be easily found out, I’ll avoid them.
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I do not know why you are getting the downvotes, but you are correct. The DoT and independent inspectors backed up this scenario. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15125313/its-all-your...
This doesn't mention the horrible spaghetti code NASA found when reviewing the code. 250k lines of C with thousands of global variables. It leaves a pretty bad taste. Then again, I still wouldn't be surprised if most people were just too perplexed if their car suddenly accelerated like crazy and not stay calm and hit the brakes as hard as possible right away. It might take you a second or two to get what's going on,…
I stood on the brakes and didn't let up. He reached over and shut off the key, which locked the steering and put us in the ditch, but at relatively low speed due to the continuous braking.
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I won’t fly one unless it has 3 angle of attack sensors. Since that can’t be easily found out, I’ll avoid them.
It's very easy to see the two AOA sensors on a Boeing jet when it's parked at the gate--there's one on each side of the plane. What I don't know is where Airbus puts the third one.
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As far as I understand without MCAS software the aircraft is impossible to fly manually. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. Like turning off self driving just to find out that the car still changes direction by itself to compensate for a twisted wheel.
> As far as I understand without MCAS software the aircraft is impossible to fly manually. Why does anyone think this? The MCAS system rarely engages. The issue is simply to make the stick behavior similar to the older 737s at high AoA. For an older 737, when you're pitching way up, you really have to pull on the yoke to keep that high AoA. The plane naturally wants to return to a neutral AoA, so you have to fight it…
For Lion Air, the pilots didnt run (or even recall) the checklist so didn't disable MCAS.
However Ethiopian appears much worse, pilots did run the checklist, had some success with MCAS turned off but couldn't operate the manual trim (unclear why). They then made the fatal decision to turn back on electric trim (and MCAS with it) and MCAS almost immediately nosed them down into an unrecoverable state.
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I would be perfectly comfortable flying on the 737 Max right now even without the software fixes.
That's an irrational position. After the Ethiopian Airlines initial report was released pilots were discussing refusing to fly them even for ferry flights (i.e. no passengers). The Ethiopian airlines crew followed Boeing's post-Lion Air safety bulletin and still crashed. There's no safe way to operate a 737 Max in its current state. The hypothetical recovery techniques (e.g. point nose down to release pressure on the…
That's not quite right. Manually operating the motorized trim as soon as unwanted nose-down trim is detected prior to disabling it with the cutout switches appears to be a viable means of recovery. It's also an undocumented, timing-sensitive procedure in a critical phase of flight, which is not anything resembling what airline pilots want from their planes.
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I won’t fly one unless it has 3 angle of attack sensors. Since that can’t be easily found out, I’ll avoid them.
No 737 has 3 AoA vanes, and it’s extremely unlikely they’ll ever change the design to accommodate that. Every MAX will have an indicator to show if they disagree though.
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Then you don't understand irony. Which is itself ironic. I was using the word in this sense: "Irony: a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character."
This isn't a story, and I am not a character. If that's what you were using it like, you are wrong. It'd make at least some sense if you incorrectly meant "irony" in the sense that fucking with the FAA, which I said was bad, is how the MAX was made so poorly. Your fake choice of definition is even worse than what you actually meant.
All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cageEarlier quoted context omitted.
All it takes to destroy a great reputation is one massive moral screwup. That's what happened here. And all over a relatively minor technical and economic issue: whether to require additional training. (Also there is the issue that two sensors is not enough redundancy, and using only one of them is a result of that lack of redundancy.)
There is more: the airframe of the 737 MAX is not in and of itself stable. Because of the forward positioning of the large engines, the MAX's airframe has a tendency to pitch up when accelerating. Boeing decided to fix this hardware problem with software. This is flawed design. In a multi-layer system, each layer should be intrinsically safe. The job of the higher layers should be to add functionality, not fix flaws…
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All it takes to destroy a great reputation is one massive moral screwup. That's what happened here. And all over a relatively minor technical and economic issue: whether to require additional training. (Also there is the issue that two sensors is not enough redundancy, and using only one of them is a result of that lack of redundancy.)
There is more: the airframe of the 737 MAX is not in and of itself stable. Because of the forward positioning of the large engines, the MAX's airframe has a tendency to pitch up when accelerating. Boeing decided to fix this hardware problem with software. This is flawed design. In a multi-layer system, each layer should be intrinsically safe. The job of the higher layers should be to add functionality, not fix flaws…
The 737 MAX additionally has a tendency to pitch up when pitching up. The more you pitch the aircraft up, the more it wants to pitch up. As you pitch up more and more, you'd like the required force on the controls to increase, but in the 737 MAX it would naturally decrease.
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Is this written into law, or is it "well, you at least need a ferry certificate for anything built in the US, because what're you going to do, push it onto a barge?"
Does it matter? We are talking about type approvals here. And this type is also sold in the US.
It's somewhat abstract, but it's an interesting question to me, which is why I asked. Does the FAA's authority to regulate aircraft construction come from Congress specifically delegating authority over aircraft construction to them- or does the FAA only effectively have the ability to control construction because they can prevent the aircraft from flying in US airspace?