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

reuters.com

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

#281

Post by alkonaut »

cjbprime wrote: post #279
alkonaut wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see lots of pilots or aviation experts saying the opposite? Are there Max pilots that have come out and said "I'm done flying that thing"?

I argued that it is untrue that aviation experts and pilots now consider it to be much safer than other models as a result of the scrutiny. You asked if any of those people have publicly refused to fly it, presumably because they think it's a deathtrap. That isn't a response to my actual position, or something I expected to happen.

Fair enough

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

#282

Post by 0xy »

cjbprime wrote: post #280
0xy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been hundreds of independent pilots and experts who have signed off on the plane from multiple regulatory bodies and other independents. Including 565 independent pilots in Europe alone. [1] No other plane in the history of aviation has had this level of scrutiny. [1] https://www.airlineratings.com/news/boeing-737-max-safe-fly-...

That's fine, but signing off on it just means that they were convinced that it's airworthy. Your own [1] link even says: > “While the software upgrades and changes are enough to get the plane back in the air, the agency is still demanding the development of a so-called synthetic sensor (that will be ready in 20 to 24 months) to reach even higher safety levels.” This seems clear that we're talking about a conditional…

Because safety is far from a binary equation. Safety is a sliding scale that never reaches 100%. If the Max is 99.9999% safe and regulators are demanding they make it at least 99.99991% safe it doesn't detract from my point.

If other planes received this level of scrutiny, changes would similarly be demanded. The practice of re-badging old models is widespread.

I'm telling you that personally, I'd exclusively travel on just the Max for the rest of my days and wouldn't lose sleep.

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

#283

Post by 0xy »

topspin wrote: post #268
0xy wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you disagree with the 565 independent pilots and aviation experts who signed off on the Max in Europe alone? It's the most scrutinized plane in aviation history, and has been vetted by multiple regulatory bodies and received thousands of test flights since fixes were made. Honest question: if this isn't enough for you, what is? All other planes have been scrutinized far less. The bar for the Max to return was much…

> Do you disagree with the 565 independent pilots and aviation experts who signed off on the Max in Europe alone? No, I do not disagree with any conclusion that the 737, including the MAX, is safe to operate. I disagree with the characterization that, as a result of recent scrutiny, the 737 is now 'far safer than other models.' It is not and no amount of additional scrutiny, and no signoffs by any number of pilots in…

>Things that operate safely tend not require so much scrutiny.

I don't understand this statement, it seems fundamentally wrong. Aviation is full of scrutiny. Aircraft maintenance checks happy every 500 flight hours. Engines get overhauled completely every 1,500 hours.

Maintenance and scrutiny ensure safety.

If the Max has received, at a guess, 200x the scrutiny of any other plane in history, then I'd wager it is the safest. And at this point, pilots will know the Max back to front and front to back in order to avoid issues. Do pilots have such deep knowledge of other planes which almost assuredly have latent bugs which rarely or never crop up due to exceedingly rare conditions?

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

#284

Post by gsnedders »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #271
gsnedders wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A couple questions here - I am assuming that planes are only at 50% usage now, so they obviously age but less hours right? Does that change how long they are kept so that you need less replacements?

So there's two limits to most commercial aircraft: one of the number of pressurisation cycles the airframe goes through, and the other is number of flight hours. Typically it's the former that's the limit run into in practice.

Clearly the fact that fewer aircraft are flying increases the lifespan of those aircraft (assuming they aren't scrapped or inappropriately stored!). But that's often not the only concern the airlines have: some airlines pride themselves on having a fleet of relatively new aircraft, fuel is a significant cost and can be a significant incentive to replace aircraft with more efficient ones regardless of age (especially if you have competitors on the same routes with more efficient aircraft), time out of service due to maintenance (at some point having the aircraft out of service for a couple of months with a large bill due just isn't worth it versus replacement, and aircraft maintenance is mostly done on a time basis so the clock is still ticking).

Delaying aircraft replacement by a couple of years due to 737 MAX delays is almost certainly viable, but delaying replacement by 5+ years to instead order A320neos is harder, and delaying replacement by 10+ years if you want to push Boeing to replace the 737 is likely implausible.

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

#285

Post by Geminidog »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #277
Geminidog wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is categorically wrong. The engines being too low will kill everyone on the plane should the special control mechanism not exist. The control mechanism existed to cover up a physical flaw then proceeded to be the cause of crashes itself. If a control mechanism can easily be fixed... What was the exact fix? Literally tell me.

> The engines being too low will kill everyone on the plane should the special control mechanism not exist. It makes the control curve slightly different, don't be so dramatic. > If a control mechanism can easily be fixed... What was the exact fix? Literally tell me. I'm not psychic, I can't tell you how they fixed it, but you can find a ton of people talking about how redundant sensors would have avoided the same is…

>It makes the control curve slightly different, don't be so dramatic.

I'm not being drastic, the plane has an unconventional control system built to hide a physical flaw that is never an actual physical property on planes designed from the ground up. The plane will literally stall:

https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/boeing-737-max-...

It's well known boeing used a hack to avoid costs of redesign.

>Tape, and the equivalent of tape, is a valid solution to many problems if you have an expert analyze it.

The experts who killed 300 people analyzed the mcas and also built it. No one will get on a plane covered in duck tape no matter how many experts analyzed it.

>I'm not psychic, I can't tell you how they fixed it,

Makes sense that you're not psychic. Likely you went to google at some point and tried to find out what that fix was and likely you found nothing. That's a red flag, a huge one.

Being psychic is the only possible way you'll know what the engineers did to duct tape the whole design. At the very least this is something any wise man should know about before getting onto that plane.

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

#286

Post by topspin »

0xy wrote: post #283
topspin wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you disagree with the 565 independent pilots and aviation experts who signed off on the Max in Europe alone? No, I do not disagree with any conclusion that the 737, including the MAX, is safe to operate. I disagree with the characterization that, as a result of recent scrutiny, the 737 is now 'far safer than other models.' It is not and no amount of additional scrutiny, and no signoffs by any number of pilots in…

>Things that operate safely tend not require so much scrutiny. I don't understand this statement, it seems fundamentally wrong. Aviation is full of scrutiny. Aircraft maintenance checks happy every 500 flight hours. Engines get overhauled completely every 1,500 hours. Maintenance and scrutiny ensure safety. If the Max has received, at a guess, 200x the scrutiny of any other plane in history, then I'd wager it is the…

> Aircraft maintenance checks happy every 500 flight hours. Engines get overhauled completely every 1,500 hours.

Maintenance and overhauls don't address design issues. Exactly the opposite; the people that perform checks and maintenance are expressly not supposed to deviate from approved designs and published processes. Conflating these tasks with regulatory scrutiny shows a fundamental misunderstanding about this discussion.

And airliner engines are not 'completely overhauled' every 1,500 hours. Figures that low are related to small aircraft engines, usually piston engines.

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

#287

Post by Dylan16807 »

Geminidog wrote: post #285
Dylan16807 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The engines being too low will kill everyone on the plane should the special control mechanism not exist. It makes the control curve slightly different, don't be so dramatic. > If a control mechanism can easily be fixed... What was the exact fix? Literally tell me. I'm not psychic, I can't tell you how they fixed it, but you can find a ton of people talking about how redundant sensors would have avoided the same is…

>It makes the control curve slightly different, don't be so dramatic. I'm not being drastic, the plane has an unconventional control system built to hide a physical flaw that is never an actual physical property on planes designed from the ground up. The plane will literally stall: https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/boeing-737-max-... It's well known boeing used a hack to avoid costs of redesign. >Tape, and…

The plane will stall unless you push the stick differently or adjust the trim. It's something you can compensate for. MCAS doesn't even adjust the trim very fast! It's a hack but that's mainly to avoid retraining, not because the design is inherently all that dangerous.

> The experts who killed 300 people analyzed the mcas and also built it.

It could be fair to avoid all planes coming from those experts. But if you don't trust them to fix a single flaw, why in god's name do you trust them to design an entirely new plane? This is not a reason to push for a redesign.

> No one will get on a plane covered in duck tape no matter how many experts analyzed it.

Ever heard of speed tape?

Most people will either get on the plane when it's fixed, or they will never get on the plane. They're not going to care about the exact details.

> Likely you went to google at some point and tried to find out what that fix was and likely you found nothing. That's a red flag, a huge one.

Sure. Red flag. But a flag is far from conclusive.

> At the very least this is something any wise man should know about before getting onto that plane.

I'm wise enough to not play armchair plane engineer when my life is on the line. If I don't trust the process, then I'll wait for a certain number of flight hours instead. I'm not going to depend on my own ability to analyze plane design.

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

#288

Post by Geminidog »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #287
Geminidog wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It makes the control curve slightly different, don't be so dramatic. I'm not being drastic, the plane has an unconventional control system built to hide a physical flaw that is never an actual physical property on planes designed from the ground up. The plane will literally stall: https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/boeing-737-max-... It's well known boeing used a hack to avoid costs of redesign. >Tape, and…

The plane will stall unless you push the stick differently or adjust the trim. It's something you can compensate for. MCAS doesn't even adjust the trim very fast! It's a hack but that's mainly to avoid retraining, not because the design is inherently all that dangerous. > The experts who killed 300 people analyzed the mcas and also built it. It could be fair to avoid all planes coming from those experts. But if you d…

>It could be fair to avoid all planes coming from those experts. But if you don't trust them to fix a single flaw, why in god's name do you trust them to design an entirely new plane? This is not a reason to push for a redesign.

Well it's not just experts. There's a bunch of factors surrounding this design decision. Business pressure. I would say the experts are aware of the flaw and went with it because of pressure. I would ask that the experts design the plane AS if they weren't under that same kind of pressure.

>Ever heard of speed tape?

Duct tape was a metaphor for a patch work fix that is unsound. Think: speed tape used to tape an entire tail onto a plane.

>Most people will either get on the plane when it's fixed, or they will never get on the plane. They're not going to care about the exact details.

Hard to say. I think for myself I can (possibly) be convinced to get back onto that plane if I knew more details and the details sounded pretty good to me.

>I'm wise enough to not play armchair plane engineer when my life is on the line. If I don't trust the process, then I'll wait for a certain number of flight hours instead. I'm not going to depend on my own ability to analyze plane design.

Agreed. Data trumps my own BS judgement. Still even with my garbage aerospace engineering knowledge I'm sure I can tell the difference in safety between an entire air frame redesign versus just software patches and if the latter was all they did, likely I'm never getting on that plane unless the data says otherwise.

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

#289

Post by SerLava »

scottlocklin wrote: post #234
SerLava wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't simply acculturate businesses against it- they will slowly be replaced by other businesses headed by ruthless sociopathic maximizers of shareholder value. This is the guaranteed outcome given this way of organizing commerce. Just as if you organized everyone into medieval guilds, we would replicate the behavior of medieval guilds.

>they will slowly be replaced by other businesses headed by ruthless sociopathic maximizers of shareholder value. I dunno man, the culture came from McDonnell-Douglass which was actually purchased by engineer-centric-at-the-time Boeing. How this culture spread in Boeing ought to be some kind of HBS case study, except they wouldn't notice that it should be taken as a cautionary tale.

My comment really didn't intend to rule out mergers, or even businesses changing by themselves. I'm just saying they inevitably end up that way, by replacement if necessary.

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

#290

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

hehetrthrthrjn wrote: post #135
bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the 737 MAX now require pilot retraining? Or did they make some other sort of adjustment?

Yes it's required.

I'm very glad to hear that!
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