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“I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

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Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#11

Post by tus87 »

spectramax wrote: post #2

Btw, the new "fix" for the MCAS has just been announced and discussed by a 40-year experienced pilot [1]. Turns out that while we shouldn't be doing armchair analysis and assuming the worst of the engineering, management and executive team; the software fix released appears to be rather elementary and MCAS should have been designed with these safety checks in the first place. Why it wasn't is a huge concern and we wo…

> 1. Use inputs from both AOA sensors, if they disagree by 5.5 degrees, disable MCAS.

Great, and now you have the other problem the MCAS was supposed to mitigate (the tendency of the MAX to do backflips).

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#12

Post by carlmr »

lordnacho wrote: post #3

My view of aircraft engineering has certainly changed since the 737 stuff came out. You always get told software engineers are a bunch of cowboys compared to aircraft people, because they have to put everything through a bunch of rigourous tests. I asked a friend who trains commercial pilots about it, and to my surprise he told me the processes to get things certified are political and hand-wavy.

>the processes to get things certified are political and hand-wavy

The big processes that make everything less cowboy inevitably lead to the build-up of people that only do politics and processes and are far removed from actually desigining code.

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#13

Post by ptidhomme »

noncoml wrote: post #10
ptidhomme wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how we, humans, collectively build extraordinary monuments while we individually rest on stilts My take is that we used to have brilliant engineers in the time where computational ressources were scarce (60s, 70 , 80s...), and they thought out their design thoroughly starting with a fucking paper and pencil. Aerospace indutries still rely on the designs from these times. But now engineering seems to be : l…

Brilliant engineers are still there. We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years. It’s the economics that changed. As people say “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. First we started going cheap on the materials. Now we are going cheap on the engineers too. Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ when a fresh out of college “average” engineer can write the “same piece of code” for $$

Indeed, and I'd add that we are going cheap because we can, thanks to computing power.

As a matter of fact : computing tools make a lot of things easier and cheaper (which is good). But the setback is a tendency to "laziness" in the whole process...

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#14

Post by gmueckl »

lordnacho wrote: post #3

My view of aircraft engineering has certainly changed since the 737 stuff came out. You always get told software engineers are a bunch of cowboys compared to aircraft people, because they have to put everything through a bunch of rigourous tests. I asked a friend who trains commercial pilots about it, and to my surprise he told me the processes to get things certified are political and hand-wavy.

I haven't worked for aviation yet, but from what I have seen in other areas that need certification processes, the system is setup in a way that invites gaming it. In Europe, most certifications are performed by competing private companies. That cannot possibly go wrong and erode standards, right?

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#15

Post by codingslave »

curiousDog wrote: post #7

Unpopular opinion, but had this happened at a company that hired H1-Bs, people would’ve jumped on the incompetent immigrants band-wagon immediately. This here is a fine example of the classic American work ethic devolving into sheer laziness. FWIW, I saw this happen at another Military contractor (Northrop Grumman) too!

Boeing is full of H1Bs...

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#16

Post by noir_lord »

noncoml wrote: post #10
ptidhomme wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how we, humans, collectively build extraordinary monuments while we individually rest on stilts My take is that we used to have brilliant engineers in the time where computational ressources were scarce (60s, 70 , 80s...), and they thought out their design thoroughly starting with a fucking paper and pencil. Aerospace indutries still rely on the designs from these times. But now engineering seems to be : l…

Brilliant engineers are still there. We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years. It’s the economics that changed. As people say “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. First we started going cheap on the materials. Now we are going cheap on the engineers too. Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ when a fresh out of college “average” engineer can write the “same piece of code” for $$

> “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”.

In fairness part (but far from all) of the reason we don't build stuff like we used too, is because we have much better understanding of material limits so we don't need to over-design structual elements like we used to.

How that understanding of material limits feeds into design obsolescence is where I do get annoyed though.

With everything we know now we could (obviously) build things better (for whatever criteria you chose) than they did 50 or 100 years ago, if that was the goal but it rarely is.

My favourite piece of civil engineering in the world (because it's nearby and I've ridden over it many times) was built in 1980 though (it's the exact same age as me) and its still awe-inspiring to look at.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Humber_B...

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#17

Post by atemerev »

lordnacho wrote: post #3

My view of aircraft engineering has certainly changed since the 737 stuff came out. You always get told software engineers are a bunch of cowboys compared to aircraft people, because they have to put everything through a bunch of rigourous tests. I asked a friend who trains commercial pilots about it, and to my surprise he told me the processes to get things certified are political and hand-wavy.

The problem is not “cowboy attitude” or “bureaucratic swamp”; these are two sides of the same coin, process inefficiency promotes corner-cutting.

The problem is lack of care. They don’t even seem to care about the money, judging from their current stock prices.

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#18

Post by noir_lord »

tus87 wrote: post #11
spectramax wrote: post #2

Btw, the new "fix" for the MCAS has just been announced and discussed by a 40-year experienced pilot [1]. Turns out that while we shouldn't be doing armchair analysis and assuming the worst of the engineering, management and executive team; the software fix released appears to be rather elementary and MCAS should have been designed with these safety checks in the first place. Why it wasn't is a huge concern and we wo…

> 1. Use inputs from both AOA sensors, if they disagree by 5.5 degrees, disable MCAS. Great, and now you have the other problem the MCAS was supposed to mitigate (the tendency of the MAX to do backflips).

Shrugs, if the MCAS disables with a clear notification to the pilots I think at this point most 737-Max pilots would know the procedure to deal with that.

Better than the plane flying itself into the ground.

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#19

Post by atemerev »

curiousDog wrote: post #7

Unpopular opinion, but had this happened at a company that hired H1-Bs, people would’ve jumped on the incompetent immigrants band-wagon immediately. This here is a fine example of the classic American work ethic devolving into sheer laziness. FWIW, I saw this happen at another Military contractor (Northrop Grumman) too!

There definitely are, or at least were, H-1Bs at Boeing. In the beginning of my career, I nearly became one myself (this was at the time when Russia and the US were on much friendlier terms), but I decided to steer into computational finance instead.

Not all H-1Bs are incompetent or lazy. I still have good memories of my team back in Russia — some people there did contractor work for Boeing (documentation management software), and a few moved to the US via H-1Bs. They were competent professionals, I’d vouch for them anytime.

There are no guarantees for all contractors, of course.

Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”

#20

Post by yiyus »

ptidhomme wrote: post #5
spectramax wrote: post #2

Btw, the new "fix" for the MCAS has just been announced and discussed by a 40-year experienced pilot [1]. Turns out that while we shouldn't be doing armchair analysis and assuming the worst of the engineering, management and executive team; the software fix released appears to be rather elementary and MCAS should have been designed with these safety checks in the first place. Why it wasn't is a huge concern and we wo…

> I wonder how we, humans, collectively build extraordinary monuments while we individually rest on stilts My take is that we used to have brilliant engineers in the time where computational ressources were scarce (60s, 70 , 80s...), and they thought out their design thoroughly starting with a fucking paper and pencil. Aerospace indutries still rely on the designs from these times. But now engineering seems to be : l…

> But now engineering seems to be : let's ask my computing power what is the good design, with little further questioning.

I see this quite often at the undergrad level. Even for the simplest problem that can be solved with a pencil and a couple of calculations, many students launch their finite element software and blindly trust the results, even if it is telling them something obviously wrong, like orders of magnitude larger or smaller than expected, or with the opposite sign.

I acknowledge the problem, but I do not know where it comes from, or how to stop it.

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