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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”

#161

Post by ptidhomme »

spacenick88 wrote: post #144
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…

SpaceX is landing rocket stages on a drone ship after having them drop from 7400 km/h at 100 km altitude. JPL has a city car sized rover craned from a hovering lander on Mars and DeepMind has a computer win against the acting Go champion. Pretty sure that rules out the "today's engineers are bad" hypotheses.

Indeed we still make great technological achievements, and thanks God there are still brilliant engineers out there. But they may not be equally distributed in the industry.

And many of them (in my humble experience, at least) rely too much on computing tools and algorithms they do not completely master, expecting a "magical" answer out of them.

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

#162

Post by Scoundreller »

matwood wrote: post #111
cstross wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forgot the point I was trying to make while giving the background! It's not that the engineers of yesteryear were brilliant while today's engineers are second-rate: it's that what they were doing back then was in some respects easier . (And we remember the good planes: as often as not they invented utter turkeys: look at the history of the Supermarine Scimitar for example — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine…

Yeah. People tend to forget that as each problem is solved, the next problem is typically more complex.

I like to say we never solve problems, we try to replace bigger ones with smaller ones.

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

#163

Post by coupdejarnac »

puranjay wrote: post #123
basetop wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can thank their redesign. Try using "old.reddit.com" while it last. And stop using reddit once that gets taken down. Reddit was once a great site. Now it's a corporatized, censored mess that sold its soul for short-term cashout in their 2020 IPO.

I have never seen a more incompetent redesign in my life, especially for a "unicorn". That new redesign completely falls apart on Chrome on my mobile (a OnePlus 5T). Comment threads get squished together so much that by the 5th comment in a thread, all words are basically vertically arranged. If I switch to "desktop site" on Chrome, any text I enter gets automatically erased after hitting a certain number of characte…

I'm pretty sure the mobile website is designed to be as awful as possible to force users to use the mobile app.

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

#164

Post by tarabanga »

Pigo wrote: post #125

I contracted with a branch of Lockheed. While I couldn't/shouldn't talk about any of the technology involved, I can attest to the culture I witnessed. I always assumed it was horrible because of the government affiliation. But I think that mostly affected their focus, in that most of the branch was dedicated to wasting money so they could ask for more money. However, the culture itself was stagnate by design. Most of…

> wasting money so they could ask for more money.

When one strongly encourages government doing business with contractors over hiring govt FTEs, it should lead to (1) all technical duties being offloaded to contractors, (2) loss of govt FTEs with technical expertise, (3) inability to hire replacement govt FTEs because of stigma and budget priorities, (4) govt FTEs taking on contract administration duties, effectively administering the production and maintenance of things they know nothing of and have no interest/investment in, who are working with (5) businesses (private corps) whose legal duty is to make profit, employing management, sales, and technical people (contractors' employees) whose primary priorities are their own careers.

(6) is a bonus. If you get to hire a technical govt FTE somehow, s/he will start identifying the inefficiencies and irregularities of the contractors' practices. That means his/her manager and colleagues will feel threatened or fear retribution (for contract mismanagement), pushing the new FTE out in one way (demotivation) or another (bureaucratic and/or political games).

No one is evil or lazy in this dynamic. It's more simply the unintended consequences of public policy choices, which have slowly became the basic tenets of the culture of societies implementing those choices and quickly creating very sturdy social structures and roles.

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

#165

Post by koenigdavidmj »

salawat wrote: post #158
koenigdavidmj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that the flight immediately before this one had MCAS trouble too. Were both sensors busted, or was that actually an even number of cycles previous to the crash, and only the previous day?

There was an extra pilot in the cockpit uninvolved with flying the plane. His participation in Crew Resource Management allowed the previous flight to correctly identify and remediate the issue before things became unrecoverable.

I remember that, but if the issue was that one AOA instrument was broken, then only half the flights should be affected.

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

#166

Post by dotancohen »

PaulHoule wrote: post #149
mcguire wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the 737 obsolete?

The 737 predates the 747 and the Concorde, and both of those are out of passenger service. The circular cross-section, for one thing, makes it like the old American cars that were huge on the outside and small on the inside. The only way you'll really understand this is ride on an modern plane such as the E175 or A220 -- you'll get that you hate to fly not because you hate to fly but you hate to fly on a 737 and neve…

Why is this downvoted? It is 100% true.

The 737 has the _fundamental_ problem of having wings very low to the ground during ground operations. Taller landing gear is not an option, in fact the 737-max has slightly-extending landing gear to resolve this issue. It is part of the reason the plane is called "max" - they maxed out things like ground clearance, fuselage length, wing chord, and other parameters.

Back to the low wings: there is no room for a large (quieter, more efficient) engine. In the earlier 737s, the engine was just as high as it could go, you could even see the cowling squished at the bottom. In the max, the larger engine is placed in front of the wing, which means that it sits much further forward than the airframe was designed for. Thus, MCAS was needed to have the plane "behave in flight like the old 737".

These are _fundamental_ issues that cannot be fixed on the current airframe. Just as the 2019 Ford Mustang chassis is better (stiffer, lighter, safer) than the 1964 Ford Mustang chassis, newer airframes resolve many of the issues that were not designed into their 1960's counterparts.

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

#167

Post by PaulHoule »

andjd wrote: post #155
PaulHoule wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a new type rating is a fair punishment, I think, for Boeing and the airlines who have been stringing along this obsolete airliner for way too long. Note the 737 MAX was rushed out not just to fight the A320neo but also to counter this kind of jet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220 which is cheaper to run than the 737 MAX but also has much better passenger comfort than the 737. I was in the similar http…

>then Boeing nearly killed it by offering airlines a 70% discount on the 737 MAX. Actually, Boeing lobbied/sued to get punitive tariffs levied on the Bombardier CSeries. While they ultimately lost the case, while it was pending, Bombardier entered an agreement with Airbus to finish assembly of the planes for American customers as a US-based Airbus factory as a way to get around the tariffs. https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

You're right -- but Boeing provoked Bombardier into "dumping" its aircraft by offering that 70% discount!

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

#168

Post by morpheuskafka »

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 know very little about aircraft, but wouldn't making the MCAS less powerful increase the risk of a stall? How do we know that there would be a net decrease in crashes?

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

#169

Post by Scuds »

gruez wrote: post #119
tomohawk wrote: post #91

Its interesting how an unknown source making unverifiable claims on a site which is basically a rumor mill gets so much attention.

It's not, if you think about it. People believe what they want to hear. Unverified post agreeing with the popular narrative gets immediately accepted as fact, and posts disagreeing with the narrative gets accused of being shills or damage control. I'm not saying this guy is a fraud, but if there's no supporting evidence, there's no evidence to believe him.

I don't know about the safety record stuff - but I've been told stories from people who've seen it first hand about the waste and red tape and fiefdom defense and a staff counting the days to retirement and all the gross counter-examples to unionization like out of a General Motors horror story from thirty years ago.

> I'm not saying this guy is a fraud, but if there's no supporting evidence, there's no evidence to believe him.

C'mon you've been around long enough to know that this is just a datapoint in a field of datapoints. You're not going to get a youtube video of people putting their feet up on their desks. But you get enough data points and you can draw a trend line.

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

#170

Post by b_tterc_p »

m_mueller wrote: post #35
atemerev wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Russian, I hope that nuclear weapons still provide enough deterrence to avoid large-scale war between superpowers. However, this might not be the case, as said superpowers can just decide to avoid nuclear confrontation (because of immediate counterstrike) and still fight conventionally — just like chemical weapons weren’t used on large scale in WW2, compared to WW1.

What worries me is that the mechanics of MAD may be approaching their end. With increasing space technology, perimeter defense against ICBMs have become feasible (albeit still very expensive). Thinking this forward a couple of decades, I think that defense may become cheaper than offense, even with multiple warheads per ICBM. In a way that's good, as nuclear annihilation might be averted, on ther other hand it could…

Idk. I think we’re facing a different kind of MAD. Nations are full of sensitive spots that could utterly cripple their economies. Satellites, data centers, energy plants...

Or just send some hackers to cause as much chaos as they can with rewards instead of consequences.

Imagine the impact of deleting all financial records at a big bank.

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