Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard • Hacker News Board

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#121

Post by gsnedders » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:14 AM UTC

zhte415 wrote: post #84

colejohnson66 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all excusing what’s happened, but if Boeing and Airbus disappear, who’ll create the new jumbo jets? You can’t just kill a company like that. You can fine the living daylights out of them, sure, but don’t kill them.

Bombardier, Embraer, Ilyushin, Mitsubishi, Tupolev, BAE - have flown on all these and really liked Bombardier and Embraer, very quiet, generally pleasant, for a short haul I'd opt for these rather than a 737 or A320. An expectation of a product creates a product. And a product (can) create(s) demand with or without that expectation. Of course that won't happen as aerospace is such a strategic industry.

FWIW, note that Bombardier is out of the commercial aviation market now; their only doing business jets now. BAe, now BAE Systems, is very much a defence company; the commercial side effectively went to Airbus with BAe's stake in it.

Multiple aviation projects have almost bankrupt Bombardier in recent history, so I don't really see them getting back into it. And it's hard to see what BAE Systems would get out of entering the commercial aviation market.

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#122

Post by gsnedders » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

fred_is_fred wrote: post #24

MattGaiser wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing has a years long backlog of orders. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... .

Interesting - so the airlines that didn't cancel just assumed that they were far enough down the list that Boeing would figure it out and passengers would forget? I'd be asking for a discount for sure - especially since commercial airlines are hurting for cash.

What would be the airline's alternative plan? The A320neo family has a multi-year backlog of orders, so you'd be delaying your aircraft replacement. Keep flying older 737 NGs? Then your competitors can beat you on costs due to lower fuel burn.

That all said, Boeing is liable for penalties due to late delivery of many (most?) aircraft.

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#123

Post by brianwawok » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:21 AM UTC

_ph_ wrote: post #50

jimbob45 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I disagree. If they’d taken the time to scrap the 737 Max and move to a new design, they’d have had the time and the public would have eaten the new product up. Instead, they doubled down and are now going to try to have to sell a product that many will refuse to ever fly on, myself included.

Considering that a new design would take like 10 years to get into production, how would that have been an immediate solution for Boeing? They need to be able to sell more 737 until a new design is ready, and no one wants that to be rushed. While I didn't hear anyting about a new design, I sincerely hope they are at it already though.

Can they not make more of the previous design? Or is 100% of production capacity 737 max

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#124

Post by NikolaeVarius » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:22 AM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #54

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #31

I love how hard parts of HN falls into the never 737 hysteria, even though its less probable than dying from the nearest sharp object.

,,The global fleet of nearly 400 737 MAXs flew 500,000 flights from March 2017 to March 2019, and experienced two fatal accidents for an accident rate of four per million flights when it was grounded. The previous generations of the Boeing 737 averaged 0.2 accidents per million flights.[180]'' - from Wikipedia

As it turns out, when you have a smaller set of results to work with, every point of data has outsized effect.

http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/a310.htm

The airbus A310 had 1.35 accidents per million flights, and for some reason people still fly in it

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#125

Post by NikolaeVarius » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:22 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #116

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #31

I love how hard parts of HN falls into the never 737 hysteria, even though its less probable than dying from the nearest sharp object.

Well since the chance of getting cancer is ~30%, we should not even bother with traffic laws, food safety or guns - anything short of nuclear weapons is just unlikely to ever get you!

How do you get out of bed when literally everything in the world is out to kill you

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#126

Post by myrandomcomment » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:23 AM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #118

myrandomcomment wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is an irrational human fear. Hold one, humans are dumb so yes, it will be a money maker playing on that fear!

Depends on what you consider rational. E.g. flying a few hours on the pre-fixes 737 Max would have been more dangerous than driving a few hours in a car. And a cautious person can greatly reduce their risk of death in car driving by being a cautious driver.

Flying is much safer then driving, but that a statement based on real statistics. However, a large number of people have an irrational fear of flying vs driving. That’s the point.

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#127

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:27 AM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #87

Don’t care. Show me real movement on the corporate mindset. The plane is a STEM engineer fixable issue. The corporate mess that pushed this across flying clearance is not. I’ll aim to fly airbus until Boeing understands that difference and fixes the root cause.

[deleted]

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#128

Post by cjbprime » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:29 AM UTC

throwaway201103 wrote: post #98

HPsquared wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of an urban myth that keeps flying around. The plane is perfectly stable without MCAS, but would have had different handling characteristics than the previous version. The purpose of MCAS was to modify the handling to match the previous plane, so pilots' type ratings would carry over with minimal retraining. At its heart, it was a (poorly implemented) kludge in an attempt to sidestep a lot of paperwork.

You're mostly right, but it wasn't just to make it handle like the previous versions, it was to satisfy FAA certification rules on how it handled.

This is my understanding too, though Boeing hasn't really come out and said it definitively. Specifically:

> MCAS was devised to fulfill an airworthiness certification condition in 14 CFR 25.173 and 14 CFR 25.175. In high angle-of-attack (AoA) flight configuration, it is required that stick force/g (the stick force necessary to produce (hold) an incremental normal acceleration of 1g) and stick movement/g (ditto mutatis mutandis) must increase (or at least not decrease) with an increase in AoA (thanks to Clive Leyman for this formulation). I understand that in flight test, in which “wind-up turns” were conducted (a turn with increasing angle of bank; an increasing angle of bank means ceteris paribus increasing AoA), this condition was not fulfilled.

-- https://abnormaldistribution.org/index.php/2019/04/30/ieee-s...

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#129

Post by gsnedders » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:31 AM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #77

Analemma_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original 737 wasn't broken-by-design in the way the Max is. The Max _requires_ software kludges to paper over its deliberate mistakes; that's very different from just having a few bugs to work out in a fundamentally sound design.

I'm not so sure I'd call it a 'kludge'. The implementation is certainly not "elegant". It's like this random batch job that triggers when some conditions are satisfied and does its own thing without regard for anything else, sure. Not integrated with the auto-pilot, does not display anything in the panel. We have plenty of aircraft (even though most are military) which are aerodynamically unstable, and require fly-by…

The 737 MAX is aerodynamically stable. MCAS is primarily concerned with making the forces one needs to apply on the stick at high angles of attack comparable to earlier generations of 737.

An interesting question is going to be as to what happens elsewhere in the world; I'd be intrigued to see if Boeing ends up certifying the 737 MAX with MCAS as an optional feature with additional difference training required, as some things mentioned suggest that it's not implausible that this will happen.

Re: Boeing's upgraded 737 Max completes first flight with media onboard

#130

Post by cjbprime » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 3:32 AM UTC

0xy wrote: post #79

DevX101 wrote: post #7

I recently had the frivolous idea of creating a flight search engine for flights that DID NOT use the 737 Max. Any actual interest in this?

This seems utterly counter-productive, considering the Max is now the most scrutinized plane in history. It's probably far safer now than other models.

FWIW, I don't see any pilots or aviation experts saying this. I think it's actually still poorly designed -- I don't think they added a third AoA sensor and used a quorum on them, as Airbus does given their own link of AoA to an automatic flight control.