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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”

#211

Post by parrellel »

garaetjjte wrote: post #133
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…

>Furthermore, electric trim with the yoke switch will override MCAS. Does that mean it didn't override MCAS before? Really?

Yep, this being one of the reasons the planes went splat.

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

#212

Post by weaksauce »

cwilkes wrote: post #124
ilogik wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Original MCAS system used only 1 AOA sensor and switched back and forth between the two after every flight. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea??? Let's make it 10x more difficult to detect that there is a problem.

Well if you have two sensors you never know which one is right.

You either trust both when they are nearly in agreement or disengage any autopilot type system like the mcas. The engineering solution is three sensors voting on agreement and disregarding the one that is out of agreement with the other two.

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

#213

Post by dotancohen »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #205
dotancohen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Taller landing gear is not an option Why?

Nowhere to stow it.

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

#214

Post by thinkcontext »

treis wrote: post #150
ozmaverick72 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software fixes as described sound sensible and it's hard to believe they were not in the original design. Unfortunately I don't see how these changes will allow them to keep a common type rating with the 737 NG. After the updated MCAS has made its one shot trim adjustment you will now be flying an aircraft with different handling characteristics if you keep increasing the angle of attack into the stall. Surely th…

>The software fixes as described sound sensible and it's hard to believe they were not in the original design Without the benefit of hind sight it's not obvious that it's a better decision. MCAS being turned off changes the flight characteristics of the plane. If you do that silently you might run into a situation where an aircraft stalls because a pilot is used to having MCAS correcting their input.

If both aggressive MCAS is unsafe because pilots can't control the plane and nonaggressive MCAS is unsafe because of stall risk that would seem to imply that 737 MAX should not be certified to fly.

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

#215

Post by whitepoplar »

ndmrcf wrote: post #179
koolba wrote: post #52

> To this day, I refuse to fly on a 787. I'm sure that the Dreamliners that came off the assembly line after about a year or so were fine but there's that first year of production that, as far as I'm concerned, are ticking time bombs. I talked to many engineers who had worked on that program to know just how badly they rushed that initial production. Ouch. Anybody know where to get a list of who’s operating the plane…

Slightly unrelated but I've built https://myplane.info/ to quickly check if my plane is still the same before the flight. AFAIK, in case of a plane change than the scheduled, we have right to get a full refund* with most of the airlines. I'm thinking about adding a notification feature on that. *Edit: Upon my findings, full refund case above is not available with all airlines, but rebooking option being offered inste…

Which airlines provide full refunds? Do they allow this for both changed aircraft types and N-numbers, or only the former?

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

#216

Post by tellak »

philpem wrote: post #102
amelius wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So switching seats during the flight would have solved the problem?

That sounds so unlikely that most people would dismiss it as silly... I'm not a pilot, but if the controls are linked -- why would the plane need to know where the pilot is sitting (or even have a switch for it)? (Any 747 pilots reading? Can you please fill in the gaps for me?)

Not a 747 pilot (not sure why that matters here)... but a pilot. The flight positions are equal. The plane is designed to be flown the same from either flight position and this is routinely done. The guy saying otherwise is talking out their ass.

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

#217

Post by magduf »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #205
dotancohen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Taller landing gear is not an option Why?

Because the plane wasn't designed that way in the 1960s, that's why. They can't change it without designing a different chassis, which means it's a different plane and a whole new type rating that pilots have to be trained for and certified on.

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

#218

Post by Rebelgecko »

cesarb wrote: post #47
chippy wrote: post #33

"I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period and I can absolutely guarantee this happened." was in response to this comment: "I would be very surprised if in a few years from today a bunch of engineers don't testify that ample of warning was given to management about this. " Reddit doesn't make it easy to find what they replied to.

> Reddit doesn't make it easy to find what they replied to. The trick is to add ?context=3 to the end of the URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bdfqm4/the_real_rea... (or for the better "old" interface: https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bdfqm4/the_real_rea... )

Using old.reddit also lets you read the entire comment, which seems to be truncated for me in the new UI

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

#219

Post by imglorp »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #163
puranjay wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or one of the very nice crop of 3rd party API consuming apps.

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #60
noncoml wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $$$$ when a fresh out of college “average” engineer can write the “same piece of code” for $$

I think it may be that brilliant engineers still exist somewhere, but I suspect they're less likely to go into aerospace than in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Heck or even the 40s. Immediately after the war aerospace was red hot - there were countless countries and companies putting out new jet designs - both commercial and military. The competition and pace was intense and there was quite some cachet and public interest in a…

[deleted]
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