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Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

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Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#161

Post by DanBC »

rsynnott wrote: post #140
seibelj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people in the government knew about the NSA spying on citizens before Snowden finally spilled the info? That was a massive effort involving many (thousands?) of people. Then when Snowden reveals it, his life is destroyed and he’s forced to live in exile. Sends a very strong warning to any other potential do-gooders considering telling the truth.

Eh. In that case, there _had_ been prior leaks, for years; they were just much less complete and taken less seriously. As far as I know, there was never a pre-production leak that Boeing employees thought the MAX was unsafe.

Yes.

For example, this report from the EU parliament from 2001: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP/...

This details a lot of what we knew about ECHELON from the mid 1990s to 2002: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_Affair...

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#162

Post by tareqak »

dgzl wrote: post #75
noodlesUK wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between knowing something that would improve a system and knowing that there are specific flaws with a significant degree of lethality. It should be acceptable to miss someone telling you the first (if perhaps a missed opportunity), but it’s negligent to miss the second. It sounds to me that these people were taken aback and appalled by the cavalier attitude towards safety. If you have a decent n…

To me, your attitude is that problems shouldn't exist because we should solve them, as if there's a magical process that guarantees perfection. But what happens when we miss something? What happens when an employee has a thought about an engineering technique that maybe didn't quite make sense, but speaking out would disrupt an entire chain of command within the culture we invest into day-in day-out, and they get dis…

We can cross that bridge when we get there. At the moment, getting there seems to be the problem because if you hide problems and you ignore the people complaining about them, then you get the situation we are in.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#163

Post by wayoutthere »

jeffnappi wrote: post #147
phire wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me angry. Not that 3 hours of simulator training would have helped in either crash. The problem wasn't that the ipad course was inadequate training for the new procedures (as he said there were no major procedural differences), but that any mention of MCAS had been removed from the manual to avoid needing new or modified procedures. Even worse, MCAS was designed to be near-impossible to override, using dat…

Not to defend Boeing or the folks in these messages in any way, but as I understand it MCAS initially was making use of multiple sensors. It was changed at one point to only use 1[1]. It would be important to know the timing of these messages relative to the development. Another _unverified_ thing I heard was that initially MCAS would only be able to issue a single nose down command, and was later modified to be able…

From what I understand, the decision to change it from using 2 sensors to 1 sensor was specifically because if the system used 2 sensors it was considered a safety system requiring simulator training for the failure scenarios.

IMO Boeing should be required to separate the military and civilian parts of the company and allow the military side to build civilian aircraft based on existing civilian models. I honestly think it's the only way to save the company, because right now airlines, regulators, pilots and passengers do not trust the current incarnation of Boeing. With their shady culture, we don't know what else is hiding in the airplane. Culture issues aren't solved overnight.

I fly a lot of miles and am the type of person who keeps the airlines in business, and I will not fly on a 737 MAX for the foreseeable future. My coworkers are in the same boat. I don't see the American carriers being able to return these planes to service before 2022. This is absolutely an existential threat to the US aviation industry, and I think the only solution is to split Boeing up.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#164

Post by xiphias2 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #113
cedivad wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VW wasn't nearly as bad. People need to go to jail over those deaths and their legacy used as a reminder for those that come next. Here is another damning Boeing message, follow the source for more: https://twitter.com/cedivad/status/1215558552229683200

Define bad. As a cyclist in Europe I breathe in fumes from VWs diesel engines on a daily basis. I'm wondering how shorter the lifespan for me and others like me will be in the long run. I'd say that's pretty bad but as the deaths are not instantaneous, the long term damage is difficult to quantify.

My suggestion is to just stop doing it, especially if you start sleeping worse (the first symptom if you're affected). My life was ruined by not caring about living near a highway even though I easily had the money to get into a better apartment.

Now for the past 5 years (I'm 38 now) my life is about trying to find places with clean enough air, which is much harder and more expensive in winter time.

I'm always looking at experiments that reverse methylation damage, and hoping that those experiments succeed before I get cancer, but there's only 1 successful experiment so far, and I have no idea if it would help me.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#165

Post by ddalex »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #122
tigershark wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my back of the envelope calculations at the time of the second crash they had worse safety than a car. Did you run the actual numbers?

I'm confident I'm a safer driver than at least 50% of the people on the roads - if I thought pilots were only as safe as an average driver I'd be worried.

80% of the drivers rank themselves in the top 20% of skill

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#166

Post by polytely »

seibelj wrote: post #10
thaumasiotes wrote: post #3

Geez. > "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, "No." > Peter DeFazio, [D-Oregon], called newly released documents "incredibly damning" That's hard to argue with. You'd like to think this kind of thing would... leak. Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?

How many people in the government knew about the NSA spying on citizens before Snowden finally spilled the info? That was a massive effort involving many (thousands?) of people. Then when Snowden reveals it, his life is destroyed and he’s forced to live in exile. Sends a very strong warning to any other potential do-gooders considering telling the truth.

While true, Snowden position as administrator placed him outside the usual compartmentalization (because he worked on connecting separate parts of the infrastructure)[0], and placed him in a unique position to realize what was happening and to exfiltrate the proof. I suspect most of the other people who knew the whole picture, were a lot higher up the food chain.

[0]: see his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast (it's really long and rambly but there are some fun nuggets in there) Snowdens book might be a better source but I haven't read it yet.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#167

Post by HarryHirsch »

svara wrote: post #134
morsch wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only per mile. Per journey it's the most dangerous transport typically used. Per hour it's about average. This doesn't matter if you have to make a specific trip (the number of miles is fixed), but that's not always the case. Whatever you do, don't walk, that seems to be the most dangerous common mode of transportation (unless motorcycles are common). "Aviation industry insurers base their calculations on the deaths…

Your point that accidents per journey might be more interesting than accidents per passenger-kilometer is a very good one, however it seems like the data in the table in the Wikipedia article you linked is a bit old ("The following table displays these statistics for the United Kingdom 1990–2000"). If you take a look at the "Fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometres" plot in the same article, it looks like…

The other thing is that the statistics for car travel include all journeys by car. You can do a lot to improve your own safety by avoiding the common risk factors: not driving drunk, driving in daytime (that also avoids drunk drivers), not being in an all-teenage vehicle, driving well-rested & so on. If you do that, per journey you'll be safer than in your regular commercial aviation airplane.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#168

Post by P_I_Staker »

cedivad wrote: post #110
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Boeing is a company of national importance and also a monopoly on home turf, vital to the US security and economy so they're untouchable in the US. Just like how no VW employee went to jail in Germany for emissions cheating.

VW wasn't nearly as bad. People need to go to jail over those deaths and their legacy used as a reminder for those that come next. Here is another damning Boeing message, follow the source for more: https://twitter.com/cedivad/status/1215558552229683200

While still substantially less than the 737 Max, plenty of people died because of that. We're not even really talking orders of magnitude, but around 10-20% @~59 premature deaths estimated (vs ~300 w/the max). That's not accounting for other health issues, and stress on the environment

source: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/11/1...

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#169

Post by phire »

jeffnappi wrote: post #147
phire wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me angry. Not that 3 hours of simulator training would have helped in either crash. The problem wasn't that the ipad course was inadequate training for the new procedures (as he said there were no major procedural differences), but that any mention of MCAS had been removed from the manual to avoid needing new or modified procedures. Even worse, MCAS was designed to be near-impossible to override, using dat…

Not to defend Boeing or the folks in these messages in any way, but as I understand it MCAS initially was making use of multiple sensors. It was changed at one point to only use 1[1]. It would be important to know the timing of these messages relative to the development. Another _unverified_ thing I heard was that initially MCAS would only be able to issue a single nose down command, and was later modified to be able…

> Another _unverified_ thing I heard was that initially MCAS would only be able to issue a single nose down command, and was later modified to be able to issue multiple.

My understanding is that it was never limited to one command.

Instead, all their failure analysis was based on the assumption the pilot would correctly identify the problem immediately after the first activation and follow the runaway stabilizer checklist (disabling all electric trim) before the second activation could occur.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#170

Post by Wheaties466 »

chopin wrote: post #135
rusk wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me in this day and age that people don't realise that anything they say on these systems can be dug out and read by anybody, anywhere at any time ...

You're not thinking about this with every keystroke even if you know this. I certainly don't.

I know I do and im sure others that are often under regulatory scrutiny do as well.
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