This is probably the best piece I've read about this:
"How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer"
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-...
Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
41–50 of 138 posts
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#42It's obvious to me neither the FAA nor Boeing attempted to accurately replicate the first crash scenario, because this could have wholly averted the second crash. As soon as the planes were grounded, we were getting all sorts of reports about the stablizer being too hard to move and basically an unrecover situation. Jail time is the only outcome I will accept.
I would not be so hard on the investigation of the first crash, they take time, and the second crash happened before the end of the first one.
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're fixed now, is the point. It wouldn't make sense to pull 787s now because the problems are fixed and it would throw global air travel into chaos and disarray (since this plane is now so widely used).
Wot? Potentially-dangerous planes must be kept flying, because air-travel chaos and widely-used-ness?
I think you missed the point. "They're fixed now" != "potentially dangerous". (Unless you define all planes to be "potentially dangerous". But if you ground all such planes, you don't have an air travel industry at all.)
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it obvious to you that they didn't investigate the first crash sufficiently? I'd say some time after the first accident it was reasonably well understood what had happened, and the FAA (and many others!) concluded that it was still safe to fly the plane, as the pilots could easily interrupt the accident chain by doing the right thing quick (as the pilots on the Lion Air flight preceding the accident flight had…
I've never quite understood that argument that only little people benefit from jail time and important people do not. Surely if we can put someone in jail for a year for having a forbidden plant in their pocket then we could put someone in jail for - how about a week? Three days? An hour? - for choosing to cut corners on safety and smashing two planes full of people into jelly? The root cause here is "Boeing manageme…
This idea that there's one guy or set of people to be found whose fault it is that you have a systemic problem is so uniquely American.
In this case you're proposing to punish the smallest cog in the machine, some middle-manager or executive at Boeing.
It would be just as logical to throw every single American in prison for around 45 minutes (~1 person dead in 737 MAX crashes for every million Americans, 80 years (let's call that life in prison) / 1 million =~ 45 minutes).
After all those are the people responsible for electing the people whose job it was to oversee Boeing. Shouldn't we blame them for their disinterest in the activities of the FAA? Maybe give people who complained about the FAA's rubber-stamp regulatory policy before the 737 MAX parole?
All you'd accomplish by throwing people in jail is to incentivize these companies to restructure decision making to be more diffuse, and make all subsequent air crash investigations much more difficult due to everyone involved being afraid of having made some prison-worthy mistake.
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#45It's obvious to me neither the FAA nor Boeing attempted to accurately replicate the first crash scenario, because this could have wholly averted the second crash. As soon as the planes were grounded, we were getting all sorts of reports about the stablizer being too hard to move and basically an unrecover situation. Jail time is the only outcome I will accept.
Wow. We have an drug problem that kills 40,000+/year from overdoses. Over a million people die driving in the world PER YEAR. A small bit of perspective. Plane flying used to be much MORE dangerous before the "corrupt" FAA got involved with the airplane companies to regulate things more closely. The 737 MAX has had no US passenger fatalities flying with US licensed pilots. The record of safety in aviation in the last…
And, the grounding of these planes probably indirectly causes more deaths than keeping them flying.
Imagine how many more people choose to drive to their destination? Or who have to keep using older models of plane which pump out more tons of CO2, killing the environment and people who might not even be born yet?
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason you think that this crashes would not have ever happened in US? Before the first crash the pilots did not even known abut MCAS existence so I am not sure why you think that US pilots are extraordinary, I assume that not all MAX pilots are ex fighter pilots with super skills and whatever you imagine that makes ALL US pilots superior to the rest of the world.
So is it merely luck that this crashes doesn't happen in US ?
IMO yes, but even if US pilots are in average 10x better there still was a chance that you would fly with a 1x pilot and because he would have followed the checklist and crash the plane.
Do you have facts that say that the probability of this happening in US was 0 ?
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're fixed now, is the point. It wouldn't make sense to pull 787s now because the problems are fixed and it would throw global air travel into chaos and disarray (since this plane is now so widely used).
Wot? Potentially-dangerous planes must be kept flying, because air-travel chaos and widely-used-ness?
You seem to have missed the multiple times that it was mentioned that the "potential problems" have been fixed.
And yes, by the way, we keep potentially dangerous products in use all the time because the benefit of them remaining in service far outweighs the danger. Nearly every single medicine on the market comes with significant, dangerous side effects, but do we pull them all off the shelves and abandon the practice of medicine altogether? No, because that would be stupid.
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#48It's obvious to me neither the FAA nor Boeing attempted to accurately replicate the first crash scenario, because this could have wholly averted the second crash. As soon as the planes were grounded, we were getting all sorts of reports about the stablizer being too hard to move and basically an unrecover situation. Jail time is the only outcome I will accept.
How is it obvious to you that they didn't investigate the first crash sufficiently? I'd say some time after the first accident it was reasonably well understood what had happened, and the FAA (and many others!) concluded that it was still safe to fly the plane, as the pilots could easily interrupt the accident chain by doing the right thing quick (as the pilots on the Lion Air flight preceding the accident flight had…
[deleted]
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason you think that this crashes would not have ever happened in US? Before the first crash the pilots did not even known abut MCAS existence so I am not sure why you think that US pilots are extraordinary, I assume that not all MAX pilots are ex fighter pilots with super skills and whatever you imagine that makes ALL US pilots superior to the rest of the world.
So is it merely luck that this crashes doesn't happen in US ?
The majority of the delivered ones were so outside the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...
Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings
#50> What's more, over the course of his 55 years in the profession, he [lawyer Marc Moller] [has] learned that every plane crash can be traced back to a single, simple cause. I don't know, that strikes me as nonsense. It's precisely the interplay of many factors that lead to an accident - and if any one of them had been different, the outcome might have been different. See Reason's "swiss cheese" model of accidents - a…
I also wanted to mention this after reading the paragraph, but it is a pretty unimportant side note in the article. The framing here is obviously from a lawyers perspective. A lawyer that has been very successful at extracting money from companies. Making the issue appear simple and traceable to a single problem seems like a great way to convince a jury.
> Making the issue appear simple and traceable to a single problem seems like a great way to convince a jury.
Or, an electorate. Maybe oversimplification is the path to popularity.