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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

#141

Post by kayfox »

csours wrote: post #95
samstave wrote: post #83

ELI5: why can’t the auto safety system be removed and the plane be sound? Is the design so flawed that it can’t be safely flown by a human without this system that causes random catastrophic failures?

Briefly: It could be, but that would mean reclassifying the airplane. Maybe think about it like anti-lock brakes. Cars without ABS can be driven safely in many/most circumstances, but most drivers are accustomed to ABS. (This is necessarily a limited analogy) Also, there are government requirements per aircraft type, and removing this system would change the aircraft type, triggering a significant amount of required…

It cant, the forces have to linearly increase per FARs, so MCAS has to be a thing, same type certificate or not.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#143

Post by missosoup »

madengr wrote: post #30
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.

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

It's pretty funny watching HN downvote these statements. Statements that everyone in the industry agrees on.

I don't know if HN is getting worse or has always been an uninformed mob, but the amount of ignorance and blind downvoting around the max 8 issue has been pretty eye opening. The quality of discussion here is only marginally less uninformed garbage than on reddit. Suddenly everyone is a backseat aerospace engineer and aviation safety expert on the side.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#144

Post by techsupporter »

Treblemaker wrote: post #79
linsomniac wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you're talking about, Comcast has had amazing support the last few months in my area. We even had a rep come to our house, and leave a handwritten note on the door when we didn't answer, asking if we had any questions or concerns and to give them a call if there was anything they could do for us. ... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the city fiber to the home buildout that is going on in our nei…

I just got comcast installed in a new home, and the experience was completely different from what I've experienced in the past -- think "apple store", rather than "we're the phone company; we don't have to care". The customer service rep that helped me said they just finished six months of training, and even they were surprised that the system "just worked" when I went in to pick up the gear (my choice to pick it up…

My kid recently moved apartments from one served only by Comcast to one not served by Comcast. He filed the cancel request online and took his cable modem to a Comcast office in a nearby mall. The cancel process took about six minutes total; nobody called to beg for him to stay or stall him on the phone for over an hour.

My view is that the indication is how a company treats you when you leave versus when you arrive and, at least this once, Comcast did well on both.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#145

Post by lolc »

I'm amazed to see such a big fleet grounded for such a long time. Since MCAS was employed to avoid retraining of pilots, I'd assume that at this point retraining the pilots out of their pockets would be cheaper for Boeing than paying airlines' damages for grounded planes.

Is that training of no use because disabling MCAS would also need re-certification? Is the process of getting certification for a MCAS-free version roughly the same as getting the fixed version certified? Speculating way out my depth now: maybe it would still be worth it to pursue parallel certification to have the option of retraining when MCAS should be deemed uncertifiable.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#146

Post by jacquesm »

JaRail wrote: post #127
missosoup wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as. Yeah you will. Good luck selectively avoiding the most popular international route plane. Historically, people have been very quick to forget mishaps with particular airframes and revert to flying the most convenient/economical routes. And by the time it's flying again, it will be hands down the safest plane that's being opera…

You can check it all you want. That won't change the physics of its dynamically unstable design.

It's a stable design. Barely so in some edge cases, but it is stable across the whole flight envelope.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#147

Post by m463 »

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.

Diebold -> Premier Election Solutions

Blackwater -> Xe -> Academi

737 Max -> ?

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#149

Post by cameldrv »

phkahler wrote: post #133
cameldrv wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 737NG is out of production, and Airbus currently has something like a 5 year backlog of A320 orders. The only other direct competitor is the Comac C919. Boeing has already made about 1000 737MAXes. The 737MAX is going to be a significant part of the global airline fleet whether you like it or not. There will be many routes where the 737MAX is the only aircraft flying that route. I think it's fairly unlikely that…

MCAS is not the fundamental problem. The new CEO has said they may require training for this 737 variant after all. Given a failure to simply drop MCAS, do extra pilot training and move on, we can conclude the plane isn't safe without additional computer control - of the quality MCAS was not. I hope I'm wrong about that, but the longer it drags on the more it looks like that may be the case.

I'm not directly involved, but my understanding is that to some degree the entire computer system is now involved. The problem is that the design philosophy of the instruments and computers on the 737 is the idea of having two "sides" to many sensors and instruments, a left and right. If the captain's airspeed readout differs from the FO's readout, the pilots are supposed to decide which one to trust.

Crucially, in order for this concept to work, the two sides are supposed to be totally independent -- the computers are different, the displays are different, and the sensors are different. However, at any one time, only one FCC is active, in that it is actually controlling the plane. Comparing the two sides AoA now violates this assumption and so many of the other engineering and certification assumptions may be violated since now the two FCCs are sharing AoA inputs.

Furthermore, my understanding is that now that everything is being looked at more closely, the FAA is having a change of heart about the idea of having one FCC active at a time being acceptable. If there is a hardware fault in the FCC, it has a lot of authority to cause problems, possibly faster than the crew can resolve them. My understanding is that now the FAA wants the FCCs to cross-check each other. Making this happen will require a lot of engineering and testing, and I think that this is the big reason for the delay. The MCAS fix itself was flight tested way back in April and May of last year.

All of that said, I don't believe an FCC fault has ever been implicated in an accident, so this IMO doesn't really present a safety issue big enough to be relevant to say, my decision of whether to fly on a 737MAX, but it looks like the FAA is deeming it not adequate for certification.

Airbus of course uses a different philosophy and uses multiple FCCs that continuously compare their output and vote.

Re: Boeing has temporarily stopped making 737 Max airplanes

#150

Post by [deleted] »

codegeek wrote: post #27
heavymark wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I imagine the rebranding will be as ineffective as Comcast rebranding as Xfinity, where everyone knows they are the same.

Yea it is hilarious how Comcast thinks rebranding to xfinity etc is going to help. To be fair to them, the internet service mostly has been excellent where I live. The issue is the predatory pricing/cost and ever decreasing TV channels for existing customers.

[deleted]
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