Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 137 posts

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#61

Post by muse900 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #5

I hate the "everything must be a profit center" MBA attitude. Boeing is a profitable company because they make machines that fly people from place to place safely and efficiently. Part of that is having training, support, service, replacement parts, sales, manufacturing, IT, R&D, and all the other things required to make things fly. It's easy to sit in a conference room and say "gee, IT hasn't made any money, instead…

I can't stress enough about the first sentence and how important it is.

Metrics have become the goto into having a business nowadays and we min/max everything, squeeze every little bit we can out of things. Its an open market and anyone is able to do however he pleases with his company, but I hate it.

The most recent example that comes to mind is Activision-Blizzard where they exceeded their revenue and profits for 2018 but they went on and downsized the company letting people go and cutting down the overall experience. I hate when this happens really, especially when its crucial to safety like airplanes. I think Boeing should have gotten more than a slap on the wrist for the max's that crashed.

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#62

Post by SequoiaHope »

ljm wrote: post #44
andrepd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly it's not a feature of Boeing, but a feature of unchecked capitalism.

I think all of us here remember the setup for the Wall Street crash in 1929. That was influenced heavily by unchecked capitalism, along with the pressure of WW1 going on in Europe and other world events. One of the responses was to restrict capitalism (it became fettered vs. unfettered at the point). And it was a good one, one that has seemingly been forgotten or ignored. Unfettered capitalism, through history, is a…

So I’m a leftist. So I sympathize with what you are saying. But you have to be careful using the term “capitalism”. It’s a highly overloaded term. For example I’ve come to realize that libertarians use the term quite differently from leftists. So if you use the term in mixed company you will find a lot of confusion results. It can be helpful to use other terminology which is less confusing. For example, Marxist economist Richard Wolff describes “capitalism” as the mode of production where a small elite own and control the means of production, inevitably shifting the focus of production to satisfy the needs of that small elite (endless growth being one). But libertarians describe “capitalism” as free economic exchange through markets. Richard Wolff was recently in a debate with a prominent libertarian and the man agreed with Wolff on almost everything. And Wolff is not opposed to markets, he’s opposed to elite control of the means of production.

So it’s best not to use “capitalism” in the leftist sense and expect people to understand you. I also think there is a very serious and legitimate concern over the power of the state. The US state killed the leader of the Black Panthers, for example. We need regulatory control in the hands of the people. You may do well to study leftist critiques of the state. Mikhail Bakunun was active at the same time as Marx and was a critic of Marxism. Bakunin famously said in 1873:

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick"

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#63

Post by masonic »

ljm wrote: post #44
andrepd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly it's not a feature of Boeing, but a feature of unchecked capitalism.

I think all of us here remember the setup for the Wall Street crash in 1929. That was influenced heavily by unchecked capitalism, along with the pressure of WW1 going on in Europe and other world events. One of the responses was to restrict capitalism (it became fettered vs. unfettered at the point). And it was a good one, one that has seemingly been forgotten or ignored. Unfettered capitalism, through history, is a…

  the pressure of WW1 going on in Europe
In 1929?

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#64

Post by perl4ever »

notreallymee wrote: post #32
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #5

I hate the "everything must be a profit center" MBA attitude. Boeing is a profitable company because they make machines that fly people from place to place safely and efficiently. Part of that is having training, support, service, replacement parts, sales, manufacturing, IT, R&D, and all the other things required to make things fly. It's easy to sit in a conference room and say "gee, IT hasn't made any money, instead…

Using a throwaway account. A few years ago I did some consulting work for British Airways. It was interesting in that as far as the planes themselves, and the operational risk of the planes was concerned, the company had their shit together. Decisions made from a safety first point of view. Engineers making the calls. Everything else no object. But ALL the software around the planes, from the ops to ALL of the b2c wa…

That's an interesting contrast to what I remember Richard Feynman saying about NASA after the Challenger - that the software was the area that was impeccably run compared to everything else.

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#65

Post by na85 »

petilon wrote: post #48
sokoloff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The airframe is not unstable. It exhibits positive longitudinal aerodynamic stability. It’s positively but insufficiently stable to meet certification requirements, which is what required them to add MCAS. MCAS is nowhere near fast enough to compensate if the Max were actually unstable.

> insufficiently stable to meet certification requirements Sounds like unstable to me. "I am not fat, I am just insufficiently thin".

It's stable. In aerodynamics, stability has a specific meaning and it's possible for two things to be stable, and for one of those things to be less stable than the other.

Picture a pendulum that is hinged on a greased axle vs one that is hinged on a high-friction axle.

Both will reach equilibrium eventually (they're stable) but one will do it faster/with fewer oscillations.

The 737 MAX is longitudinally stable, but it doesn't meet certain nuanced requirements of the Airworthiness regs.

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#66

Post by perl4ever »

codys wrote: post #49
baddox wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you even define “optimize for maximizing the next quarters results at the expense of everything else”? Obviously big companies don’t literally do this. I’m pretty sure every big public tech company is currently spending money on products that will not be released before the end of the next quarter.

Big companies make decisions all the time that harm long term prospects (sometimes in ways that are difficult to measure) in favor of obvious short term gains. As an example, when I worked for IBM, they furloughed the entire Systems technology group (essentially the folks working on things that aren't pure software or contracting) for a week. This was done purely to reduce the payroll for the STG so that it's income…

Sure they do, but people can and do get just as angry when companies ignore short term harm with the promise of long term gains. So the issue isn't short term vs. long term, but rather being right vs. wrong and honest vs. dishonest. It's really hard to always be right.

I mean, if you want "long term thinking", does that mean that WeWork is a better model than Boeing? Because people seem to hold it up as a failure of capitalism just as much.

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#67

Post by tim333 »

na85 wrote: post #65
petilon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insufficiently stable to meet certification requirements Sounds like unstable to me. "I am not fat, I am just insufficiently thin".

It's stable. In aerodynamics, stability has a specific meaning and it's possible for two things to be stable, and for one of those things to be less stable than the other. Picture a pendulum that is hinged on a greased axle vs one that is hinged on a high-friction axle. Both will reach equilibrium eventually (they're stable) but one will do it faster/with fewer oscillations. The 737 MAX is longitudinally stable, but…

Seems so. More info here: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Boeing-737-MAX-aerodynamically-...

> what happens is that the stick force lessens as angle of attack increases at high AoA and low airspeed, whereas in order to be compliant with certification it has to gradually increase with increasing AoA, just like a 737–100.

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#68

Post by WoodTree »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #59
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unchecked capitalism Airplane manufacturing has lots of problems. But it’s a highly regulated industry. “Unchecked capitalism” is a bad description.

Well, yes the airplane industry is highly regulated. But the endless pursuit of growth is a feature of unchecked capitalism. And my understanding is that there has been more “self regulation” attitudes in the airline industry in recent years. So it makes sense that you would begin to see features typical of unregulated capitalism in an industry that is relaxing regulation.

Regulation doesn’t mean it would be safer, just more bureaucratic. There are plenty of examples in the US of regulators failing to properly regulate like in Flint. Adding these regulations often benefits the capitalists more, as it raises the barrier of entry for smaller competitors and makes the market less competitive in the long run.

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#69

Post by blotter_paper »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #62
ljm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all of us here remember the setup for the Wall Street crash in 1929. That was influenced heavily by unchecked capitalism, along with the pressure of WW1 going on in Europe and other world events. One of the responses was to restrict capitalism (it became fettered vs. unfettered at the point). And it was a good one, one that has seemingly been forgotten or ignored. Unfettered capitalism, through history, is a…

So I’m a leftist. So I sympathize with what you are saying. But you have to be careful using the term “capitalism”. It’s a highly overloaded term. For example I’ve come to realize that libertarians use the term quite differently from leftists. So if you use the term in mixed company you will find a lot of confusion results. It can be helpful to use other terminology which is less confusing. For example, Marxist econo…

Anarchist here, used to identify as a communist. I'd argue that both of your "capitalism" definitions can be pointed to as potential causes of the 737 fiasco, but that the latter ("free economic exchange through markets") seems more in line with what GP was wanting to, err, correct; I read GP as wanting more regulation for airplanes, which is antithetical to free exchange. I feel like the market itself will correct for these problems on a long enough time scale -- if people value the lives of their families enough they'll stop buying tickets for flights on planes made by this clearly inept entity, and if they don't value the lives of their families that much then that's another tradeoff they're free to make. (Yes, some people are too poor to exercise choice between options of varying cost, but that's a problem with poverty rather than choice -- regulating single engine Cessnas out of existence won't mean that radically impoverished people have access to better planes, it will just take away their freedom to bet their lives on flying in the first place.)

Re: Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

#70

Post by speedplane »

blotter_paper wrote: post #69
SequoiaHope wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I’m a leftist. So I sympathize with what you are saying. But you have to be careful using the term “capitalism”. It’s a highly overloaded term. For example I’ve come to realize that libertarians use the term quite differently from leftists. So if you use the term in mixed company you will find a lot of confusion results. It can be helpful to use other terminology which is less confusing. For example, Marxist econo…

Anarchist here, used to identify as a communist. I'd argue that both of your "capitalism" definitions can be pointed to as potential causes of the 737 fiasco, but that the latter ("free economic exchange through markets") seems more in line with what GP was wanting to, err, correct; I read GP as wanting more regulation for airplanes, which is antithetical to free exchange. I feel like the market itself will correct f…

> your "capitalism" definitions can be pointed to as potential causes of the 737 fiasco

For capitalism to work as intended, there has to be "perfect information", i.e., no lying and everyone knows what they're paying for. This is obviously a practical impossibility: companies and people lie, and most consumers buy things without fully researching or knowing what it is that they're getting.

One purpose of regulation is to improve the situation. If the FAA certifies a plane as safe, then consumers can rely on that certification and don't need to do their own safety research. They still don't have "perfect information", but it's a lot better than without it.

Good regulation is not "antithetical" to capitalism, it is often necessary for it.

Post reply on HN