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Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

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Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#51

Post by matz1 »

simion314 wrote: post #46
matz1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I don't think anyone insinuating that the probability of this happening in US was 0 but the fact remain that the number of crash so far is 0.

Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#52

Post by amelius »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37
FabHK wrote: post #9

> 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…

Forgive me a great deal of cynicism here. I suspect that a more accurate statement is "he learned that it works well for him to argue that every plane crash can be traced back to a single, simple cause." We don't ask lawyers to do surgery. We don't ask them to design bridges. And we don't ask them to do root cause analysis. We leave all of those things to those who actually know what they're doing in those areas.

You don't need to be able to analyze causes in order to count them.

Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#53

Post by hylaride »

xvector wrote: post #17
lisper wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could be wrong. You're not :-) The 737 still has direct mechanical linkages to the control surfaces. Changing that would require completely redesigning the aircraft.

What's the motivation for this? Regulatory, I get that. But why use direct mechanical linkage in an era where fly-by-wire would probably be faster/safer/etc?

Because the plane would have certainly then required expensive/time consuming re-certification and expensive/time consuming (for the airlines) retraining of pilots, which Boeing was trying to avoid with the max. Keep in mind, the 737 originally flew in the late 60s. It's obviously now a very different aircraft, but if they were going to go fly-by-wire and require re-certification, they'd have designed a whole new aircraft (something a lot of people would have preferred even before the crashes).

The 373 max was a comparative rush job. When Airbus released the A320neo (the A320 first flew in the late 1980s so already was fly-by-wire), Boeing needed to get a comparable plane out ASAP or else cede several thousands of plane sales to Airbus. There wasn't the time to design a whole new plane, so they pushed the design of the 1960s era 373 as far as they could go. The details of the "risky" changes to accommodate the larger engines (that significantly changed the planes aerodynamic profile) and attempts to compensate for that are already documented elsewhere, but adding fly-by-wire would have only made things more complicated.

Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#54

Post by homonculus1 »

avar wrote: post #44
jellicle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (le…

Actually, that idea is pretty interesting--throwing a whole group of people in jail for some trivial amount of time. A symbolic slap on the wrist, but maybe at scale it would actually cause some group shame without resorting to draconian collective punishment.

Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#55

Post by AnimalMuppet »

amelius wrote: post #52
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me a great deal of cynicism here. I suspect that a more accurate statement is "he learned that it works well for him to argue that every plane crash can be traced back to a single, simple cause." We don't ask lawyers to do surgery. We don't ask them to design bridges. And we don't ask them to do root cause analysis. We leave all of those things to those who actually know what they're doing in those areas.

You don't need to be able to analyze causes in order to count them.

No. But I've (as an amateur) looked at crash investigation reports, and they usually state more than one cause.

Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#56

Post by SilasX »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37
FabHK wrote: post #9

> 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…

Forgive me a great deal of cynicism here. I suspect that a more accurate statement is "he learned that it works well for him to argue that every plane crash can be traced back to a single, simple cause." We don't ask lawyers to do surgery. We don't ask them to design bridges. And we don't ask them to do root cause analysis. We leave all of those things to those who actually know what they're doing in those areas.

Yeah, but the work of lawyers has often forced industries to do things differently, even when the best science says they shouldn't do it that way. For example, lawsuits over botched baby deliveries that argued "you should have c[aesarean]-sectioned" resulted in extreme overuse of the procedure in the US, with higher resultant risks.

So ... I wish it worked like you described.

Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#57

Post by SilasX »

FabHK wrote: post #14
nness wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, as a lawyer, he's using the phase a "simple cause" to mean "a singular responsibility, culpability, and liability."

Probably. Goes to show that the lawyer representing the victims and the safety folks (NTSB etc.) trying to make sure an accident does not repeat have very different goals, incentives, ways of thinking, etc.

"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#59

Post by samstave »

CivBase wrote: post #34
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about the 787 here, not the 737 variant that's falling out of the sky. Despite initial teething issues (something all big systems like this have to some extent) the 787 has gone on to be a successful design. To say "I, for one, hope this plane never flies again" is an overreaction, especially since said problems have been fixed and the plane is in service without the issue popping up.

If those are teething issues, I'm scared to find out what you'd consider to be a serious problem.

>...a serious problem

Well the plane literally overriding the pilots physical commands of the controls and crashing into the ground killing ~300 people, IMHO is a “serious problem”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Re: Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings

#60

Post by magduf »

mieseratte wrote: post #18
FabHK wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. Goes to show that the lawyer representing the victims and the safety folks (NTSB etc.) trying to make sure an accident does not repeat have very different goals, incentives, ways of thinking, etc.

Given how vague the language is, I don't know that we can necessarily draw a conclusion. That "single item" might be the component-failure, that which fell through the aligned holes in the swiss-cheese, or it could be "the single layer of the system that was left out" that would have mitigated or otherwise precluding the class of failure. One could castigate Boeing for not having a more redundant use of sensors the M…

Yeah, I think the language used there just isn't being that precise, by engineering standards, that's all.

When you're assigning blame for something like an aircraft crash, what you want to single out is errors which were preventable. So, for instance, icing on critical sensors probably isn't preventable 100%, so that's why we do things like have redundant sensors, algorithms about how to use that sensor data to avoid letting a bad sensor reading cause a big problem, etc. Another thing that isn't preventable is weather, of course, so we engineer things to handle that. But preventable errors, especially ones which we've already learned how to handle in the past, are generally considered unforgivable and worthy of assigning blame. A crash caused by a Russian AA missile isn't really avoidable for a passenger jet, so we don't blame the pilot or the aircraft maker or airline. A crash caused by using a single sensor that's known to ice up and is used for a system that's only there because someone thought it'd be a great idea to slap some oversize engines on an obsolete airframe from the 60s in the wrong position, however, is clearly a preventable error.

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