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Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

seattletimes.com

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Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#81

Post by skellera »

nikofeyn wrote: post #52
skybrian wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rather weird to ask a huge number of mostly-good airplanes to be thrown away for PR reasons, rather than fixing them. (Not to mention that these planes have never crashed in most countries, even with an admittedly serious bug.)

it’s not just pr reasons. they tried to hot patch this airplane design with software, and now they are hot patching that fix. it seems it is a fundamentally flawed design that they tried to hide and get away with rather than doing the right thing. i know i don’t want to fly on a 737 max ever, and this whole ordeal with boeing and the faa has made me less confident in the airline industry as a whole. your parenthetica…

Pilots are highly trained. They go through many hours of simulated flights. After an incident like this, any pilots still flying a MAX will be drilled on this specific failure. If you start to see pilots refuse to fly it, that’s when you should worry.

Aviation adapts to problems and it always has. Southwest installed additional gear on their planes to help prevent this when the first plane crashed. It’s not far fetched that companies in countries with lesser regulations might skip out on training or plane enhancements that would lessen the chances of this problem.

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#82

Post by chimpburger »

oldmantaiter wrote: post #59

Off topic, but oh man does that website embody everything that is wrong with display advertising. Left the site open for 6 minutes: 8000 requests, 100MB transferred and a memory footprint of 700MB for that tab and climbing. Absolute garbage.

This article requires more computational resources than a Cray-2 supercomputer (1985).

It loads much better in Lynx with a tiny fraction of the resources.

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#83

Post by nwallin »

deskamess wrote: post #57
erentz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had Boeing built the 737 at the time Airbus built the A320 they would've had a taller undercarriage also. For example the narrow body 757 built around the time of the A320 does have this. When the 737 was built back in the 60s it was intended to be a small regional jet, not the continent and ocean crossing aircraft it evolved into over the years since. It originally came with a retractable staircase for passengers to…

Why would they not have gone with a, say, 757 MAX - it seems to fit the bill spec wise. Is it that global pilot pool is not as great for the 757 as 737?

The 757 "max" is a 767. 757s and 767s share a common type rating.

It's not so much that the pilot pool is lacking, it's that a lot of airlines have a pool of existing 737 pilots already on their payroll. If you need to lay off half your employees, and replace them with an entire new pool of people, half of them are going to be terrible employees, and it will take you years to weed out the bad ones. For better or worse, pilot unions tend to be very strong. Firing them is difficult.

The 737 MAX wasn't beset by technical problems, they were social and political ones.

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#84

Post by samstave »

manigandham wrote: post #80
djsumdog wrote: post #28

What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? Every airline using them has had several weeks to totally reorganize to deal with these huge missing parts of their fleets. Boeing keeps talking about fixing them and putting them back in the air, but I dunno. At this point, it should be agreed the fundamental design flaws are serious, and Boeing should have simply made a brand new plane, with much more modern controls and…

There's no fundamental design flaw, the aircraft is sound. The problem came from using software systems to artificially make the plane behave like older designs to avoid entirely new training and certifications. Even that would've been acceptable and similar systems are already in use in other planes but it was the inadequate info, redundancy, warnings and controls to disable the system that created the problem. It's…

Exactly. Structurally it is sound.

Tear out the MCAS and get the bodies in the air. Period.

However, fuck boeing's engineering team on this one.

They should pay a price.

Fuck you for downvoting, be informed:

https://www.vox.com/videos/2019/4/15/18306644/boeing-737-max...

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#85

Post by samstave »

old-gregg wrote: post #65
erentz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? The bugs will be addressed and they'll still fly. Airlines have no choice, there's a limited capacity in the world for airplane construction, several thousands of orders on the books for the 737 and 320 waiting to be filled. What can an airline do? They can cut back some orders but not all orders. > I'd honestly like to see the 737 MAX taken out of service and Boeing simp…

> The bugs will be addressed and they'll still fly. The engines are mounted incorrectly, so much so that Boeing believed pilots need the assistance of MCAS on take-off now. The bug isn't with its algorithms, rather the need for MCAS to begin with. They can't "address" it. That's why I'll be very careful not to ever book a flight on a 737 Max, probably easier to simply stick to Airbus-only airlines: Jetblue, Alaska/Vi…

Yup:

https://www.vox.com/videos/2019/4/15/18306644/boeing-737-max...

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#86

Post by contravariant »

manigandham wrote: post #80
djsumdog wrote: post #28

What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? Every airline using them has had several weeks to totally reorganize to deal with these huge missing parts of their fleets. Boeing keeps talking about fixing them and putting them back in the air, but I dunno. At this point, it should be agreed the fundamental design flaws are serious, and Boeing should have simply made a brand new plane, with much more modern controls and…

There's no fundamental design flaw, the aircraft is sound. The problem came from using software systems to artificially make the plane behave like older designs to avoid entirely new training and certifications. Even that would've been acceptable and similar systems are already in use in other planes but it was the inadequate info, redundancy, warnings and controls to disable the system that created the problem. It's…

This is pretty far from my area of expertise but I if it was behaving as the older designs did then why did it crash?

As far as I can tell there are definitely some flaws, which seemed to have crept in as a result of the attempt to make them behave like older designs, but it seems optimistic to assume you can simply remove the flaws by sacrificing on that point.

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#87

Post by jhayward »

old-gregg wrote: post #65
erentz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? The bugs will be addressed and they'll still fly. Airlines have no choice, there's a limited capacity in the world for airplane construction, several thousands of orders on the books for the 737 and 320 waiting to be filled. What can an airline do? They can cut back some orders but not all orders. > I'd honestly like to see the 737 MAX taken out of service and Boeing simp…

> The bugs will be addressed and they'll still fly. The engines are mounted incorrectly, so much so that Boeing believed pilots need the assistance of MCAS on take-off now. The bug isn't with its algorithms, rather the need for MCAS to begin with. They can't "address" it. That's why I'll be very careful not to ever book a flight on a 737 Max, probably easier to simply stick to Airbus-only airlines: Jetblue, Alaska/Vi…

> The engines are mounted incorrectly, so much so that Boeing believed pilots need the assistance of MCAS on take-off now.

This overstates the issue. The engine mounting changes the flight characteristics enough that the MAX 8 needs to be flown differently in certain corners of the flight envelope. The MCAS was added to avoid having to re-train pilots or trigger a new type certification.

The engine mounting certainly does not make the plane unsafe.

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#88

Post by oakesm9 »

deskamess wrote: post #57
erentz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had Boeing built the 737 at the time Airbus built the A320 they would've had a taller undercarriage also. For example the narrow body 757 built around the time of the A320 does have this. When the 737 was built back in the 60s it was intended to be a small regional jet, not the continent and ocean crossing aircraft it evolved into over the years since. It originally came with a retractable staircase for passengers to…

Why would they not have gone with a, say, 757 MAX - it seems to fit the bill spec wise. Is it that global pilot pool is not as great for the 757 as 737?

Correct. For example, Southwest Airlines _only_ operates 737's[0] so they would need to hire or retrain pilots if they brought any 757's. With the 737 Max they could get longer range and better efficiency with minimal additional training.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#89

Post by jhayward »

davewasthere wrote: post #66
massysett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These planes cost at least $100 million each. They will fix them and get them flying again.

Yeah, but who is going to want to fly in one again? Even working in aviation in the past and knowing that they've probably nailed the issue, I'd still be less than keen.

Have you ever flown in a 737? I'll bet you have. Are you aware that at one point in the deployment of the 737 they had a "runaway rudder" issue [1] that caused two crashes and one near crash, and hundreds died from it? The 737 has flow millions upon millions of flights, safely, since then.

The problem will be addressed, and life will continue. It is tragic, and there will be major repercussions within the manufacturer and regulator but the design will be fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

Re: Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS

#90

Post by owenversteeg »

skybrian wrote: post #49
djsumdog wrote: post #28

What is the endgame now for 737 MAX planes? Every airline using them has had several weeks to totally reorganize to deal with these huge missing parts of their fleets. Boeing keeps talking about fixing them and putting them back in the air, but I dunno. At this point, it should be agreed the fundamental design flaws are serious, and Boeing should have simply made a brand new plane, with much more modern controls and…

It's rather weird to ask a huge number of mostly-good airplanes to be thrown away for PR reasons, rather than fixing them. (Not to mention that these planes have never crashed in most countries, even with an admittedly serious bug.)

>(Not to mention that these planes have never crashed in most countries, even with an admittedly serious bug.)

In... Most countries? That's such a weird standard to hold an aircraft to. Even very serious aircraft issues before typically only resulted in crashes in a handful of countries!

Did I read that wrong or do you want 100+ of the 200ish countries in the world to have experienced a 737 MAX crash before scrapping the MAX?

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