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Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

cnn.com

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Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#51

Post by tzs »

yourapostasy wrote: post #38

What is the cost to restart both the supply chain and production line? If this lasts long enough, then there are portions of the supply chain that will start to simply disappear as vendors go under or switch away to different customers and de-prioritize Boeing. It isn't just the monetary cost to re-calibrate machining and tooling, also the staff time and monetary cost to fill in gaps that appeared during the shutdown…

> If Boeing was forward-looking, then they would bite the bullet and keep production going, but use the downtime to crawl through every aspect of production to look for and fix any quality and safety-related concerns on the line (including absolute bottom-up authority for production line escalating concerns through to engineering and design) and in the supply chain.

Where would they put them? These things ain't small.

Airliners are expensive. The manufacturers do not build a large number speculatively and then find customers. They find customers, then build what has been ordered. They have enough storage space to serve as a buffer between output and delivery so that minor glitches on either don't affect the other.

Also because airliners are expensive, and they get paid on delivery not on order, once past the initial production current production is paid for from recent deliveries. If deliveries have to stop for an extended time, there is no money to fund more production.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#52

Post by TJSomething »

mrtksn wrote: post #34
madengr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will probably be the safest plane to fly on, considering the amount of scrutiny the FAA is now applying.

Would restarting Chernobyl make it the safest NPP considering the amount of scrutiny that it would be put through? Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.

But Windows 7 was just Windows Vista with some relatively minor changes and it was fine.

The problem with the 737 MAX is that Boeing tried to make a plane with a completely different airframe and added a bunch of software to try to make it fly exactly like second generation 737s so that pilots didn't need to retrain. But the abstraction was leaky and it turns out that when you have a different airframe, you have to retrain your pilots.

That said, Boeing did some janky stuff to get this nonsense certified by the FAA and the whole design probably needs to be recertified, which will take years.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#54

Post by klodolph »

growlist wrote: post #33
HenryKissinger wrote: post #15

I can't wait to read a senior Boeing manager's future book about the way the company mishandled the development of the 737 Max and how the upper echelons of decision makers managed the ensuing crisis. How many screaming matches occurred between VPs and engineering directors behind closed doors, how many angry emails were exchanged, how many panicked phone calls from the investor relations department to Muilenberg, et…

What's incredible to me is how this could be allowed to happen. Are the higher echelons of these industries staffed by charlatans? Has something changed in the engineering culture? Did greed override diligence and if so, how was this allowed to happen when the consequences can be so catastrophic both to passengers and to the company? It just doesn't make sense to me how, with such high stakes, a company could manage…

At some point, engineering gets displaced by short-term business concerns, driven by managers who have incentives to cut costs and deliver faster even if it destroys the company in the long term. Make a management chain long enough, and most of the decisions will get made this way. Each layer in the hierarchy serves both to insulate decision-makers from the impacts of their decisions and to amplify perverse incentives (e.g. a VP is asked to cut costs, who asks a middle manager to use cheaper solutions for problem X and recoup costs where possible, who asks a direct manager to spend no more than $Y and Z weeks on problem X, and the engineers can no longer do it safely).

This happens all the time, everywhere. I think of “good company culture” as a temporary, unstable situation. Any movement away from that position will accelerate towards failure.

The entire system is not necessarily engineered to avoid accountability, but the system encourages people to figure out a way to avoid accountability, and so you end up with this.

As another example, take a look at clothing companies which use child labor to produce cheap clothing. The companies don’t directly employ the children, but they use a chain of contractors and subcontractors. Each layer in the chain makes it more likely that leadership is unaware of ground truth, and with this many links in the chain, a top-level directive to cut costs will inevitably end up with something like child labor at the bottom, because it’s cheap. If you get bad press coverage for it, you look to assign blame to a specific link in the chain, fire that contractor, and then rehire someone else (but the chain repairs itself around the missing link and you end up with the same child laborers working for you).

Systems are usually to blame more than people are.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#55

Post by scottlawson »

mark-r wrote: post #53

Total clickbait. Based on the title "Boeing has officially stopped making 737 Max airplanes" I thought maybe they had finally decided the plane was unsalvageable. No, they just finally implemented the widely reported decision to temporarily stop construction.

Reminds me of the exaggerated news stories about "Pewdiepie QUITS YouTube!"

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#56

Post by miscPerson »

grenoire wrote: post #18
jayd16 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What browser still allows this?

I think there is a new way to bypass this; FF recently missed an autoplay video on Bloomberg (?). Arms race as usual.

Isn’t that “hacking” in the cyber crime sense?

I know Bloomberg et al don’t appreciate my attempting to bypass their technical controls and cause undesired effects on their systems, and would likely file a criminal complaint.

Why is it legal for advertisers to write code which is meant to bypass a system control and exceed their authorization?

I think we need a browser that automates CFAA complaints to the FBI when a company engages in behavior that would be illegal for an individual — such as hacking your audio.

I believe at the point where a company writes code with the explicit purpose of bypassing your control of the computer, eg autoplaying a video despite technical measures being taken to prohibit that behavior, it constitutes a breach of the CFAA.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#57

Post by madengr »

mrtksn wrote: post #34
madengr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will probably be the safest plane to fly on, considering the amount of scrutiny the FAA is now applying.

Would restarting Chernobyl make it the safest NPP considering the amount of scrutiny that it would be put through? Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.

No, that reactor had an inherent instability that could not be fixed.

The MCAS has an issue with redundant AOA sensors; that specifically needs to be fixed. The MCAS caused problems on other flights, but the pilots knew to disable it by flipping the circuit breaker. The pilots on the crashed planes did not know to disable it. That is a training issue.

Fix the redundant AOA and provide training to disable the MCAS, and it will be fine.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#58

Post by mrtksn »

TJSomething wrote: post #52
mrtksn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would restarting Chernobyl make it the safest NPP considering the amount of scrutiny that it would be put through? Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.

But Windows 7 was just Windows Vista with some relatively minor changes and it was fine. The problem with the 737 MAX is that Boeing tried to make a plane with a completely different airframe and added a bunch of software to try to make it fly exactly like second generation 737s so that pilots didn't need to retrain. But the abstraction was leaky and it turns out that when you have a different airframe, you have to r…

Windows Me was probably a better example but not everyone will remember it.

Anyhow, the point is that scrutinizing a bad architecture doesn't make it any better. Scrutinizing a chicken won't make it an eagle.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#59

Post by mrtksn »

madengr wrote: post #57
mrtksn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would restarting Chernobyl make it the safest NPP considering the amount of scrutiny that it would be put through? Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.

No, that reactor had an inherent instability that could not be fixed. The MCAS has an issue with redundant AOA sensors; that specifically needs to be fixed. The MCAS caused problems on other flights, but the pilots knew to disable it by flipping the circuit breaker. The pilots on the crashed planes did not know to disable it. That is a training issue. Fix the redundant AOA and provide training to disable the MCAS, an…

>No, that reactor had an inherent instability that could not be fixed.

Interesting maybe could have been fixed with software. I am thinking of Reactor Characteristics Augmentation System, or RCAS.

Also, Chernobyl exploded because they pressed the halt button at a very bad time. This also sounds like something that can be fixed in software.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#60

Post by yeezul »

linsomniac wrote: post #28
BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

According to the article Boeing has halted production, but this leaves the door open to producing them again in the future after design updates. I predict they'll try to rename the model and fly it again after making changes and certifying. That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.

I've heard that the "Max" name doesn't appear on FAA filings and the like, they use the name "737-8". I'm guessing that they'll be switching to using that name once the issues are ironed out.

I hope not. That's going to be confusing with the 737-800 model.
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