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Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

reuters.com

101–110 of 173 posts

Re: Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

#101
post #35

The trouble is, Boeing hasn't built a new single-aisle transport since the 757, which first flew in 1982. There was supposed to be a 797 by now, but it keeps slipping into the far future. So they're still cranking out 737 variants, a 1960s design. This is pathetic. Boeing could end up losing out to the COMAC C919, which, although years late, is finally flying a few routes.

> This is pathetic. Boeing could end up losing out to the COMAC C919

Maybe that's a good thing. It will be a lesson to the US to not prop up a shitty monopolies for decades just because it's currently the only local option and losing dominance in the short term is oh-so-scary to techocrats who want to orchestrate everything.

They should have encouraged and enabled the domestic development of competitors to Boeing - as a long term play - instead of repeatedly propping them up in the short term, just to keep the status quo going.

It shows how little confidence, or interest, the US gov and US business community as a whole have in America's ability to compete on merit alone. With lots of juice by Boeing to manipulate an easily manipulated system that has become overly comfortable manufacturing these pseudo private businesses, without true accountability to either the market or gov.

Although I don't blame any up and coming US manufacturer that looks at Boeing's cushy arrangement with the gov and the regulatory system bending over for them alone and hard passing attempting to compete.

Re: Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

#102
post #2

I honestly don’t even know anymore if I’m living in a cracked / badly modded version of the sims, how can one wake up in the morning and seek for a safety exemption regarding I quote the article: She noted the exemption Boeing had sought "involves an anti-ice system that can overheat and cause the engine nacelle to break apart and fall off. This could generate fuselage-penetrating debris, which could endanger passeng…

I know the broader context is that Boeing has some fundamentally broken culture with regards to safety. Setting that aside I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a system were you can say "Hey, we have this problem, it has this impact, it occurs in the following situations. We'll fix it, but in the meantime we want an exemption to keep flying and we'll restrict the use to the following situations where the issue c…

Afaik they also thought that MCAS was so safe that the pilots didn’t even have to know about its existence

Re: Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DeHavilland Comet was the first practical civil jet airliner ever produced. It literally invented the systems that were onboard. The 737 is a 60 year old design with a stellar safety record up to this point. It's not comparable at all. The only reason those planes fell apart is rotten management.

You're off your rocker. Comet's square windows were fundamentally unsound. 737 NG contains Ducommun garbage structural components deemed "airworthy", going back between 1996 and 2004. 737 Classic != NG != MAX. No amount of MCAS or engineering exceptions will make it so, or make it safe.

> Despite findings of the Cohen Inquiry, a number of myths have evolved around the cause of the Comet 1's accidents. Most commonly quoted are the 'square' passenger windows. While the report noted that stress around fuselage cut-outs, emergency exits and windows was found to be much higher than expected due to DeHavilland's assumptions and testing methods[122] the passenger windows shape has been commonly misunderstood and cited as a cause of the fuselage failure. In fact the mention of 'windows' in the Cohen report's conclusion, refers specifically to the origin point of failure in the ADF Antenna cut-out 'windows', located above the cockpit, not passenger windows.[123] The shape of the passenger windows were not indicated in any failure mode detailed in the accident report and were not viewed as a contributing factor. A number of other pressurised airliners of the period including the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, Douglas DC-7, and DC-8 had larger more 'square' windows than the Comet 1 and experienced no such failures.[124] In fact, the Comet 1's window general shape resembles a slightly larger Boeing 737 window mounted horizontally. They are rectangular not square, have rounded corners and are within 5% of the radius of the Boeing 737 windows and virtually identical to modern airliners.[124] Paul Withey, Professor of Casting at the University of Birmingham School of Metallurgy states in a video presentation delivered in 2019, analysing all available data that: "The fact that DeHavilland put oval windows into later marks, is not because of any 'squareness' of the windows that caused failure."[125] "DeHavilland went to oval windows on the subsequent Marks because it was easier to Redux them in (use adhesive) – nothing to do with the stress concentration and it's purely to remove rivets." (from the structure)[126]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet#Square_wind...

Re: Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

#104
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overall shape of it That's the problem. It was designed for 60s-style boarding via air-stairs on the ground (rather than modern jetways from the terminal) so it's too low down. This requires doing funky things to fit modern, large, energy-efficient engines, starting with those weird flat-bottom cowlings and ending in moving the engines back and changing their angle, which changes the flight characteristics of the p…

> It was designed for 60s-style boarding via air-stairs on the ground (rather than modern jetways from the terminal) Note that boarding a plane in the middle of the tarmac via bus+stairs is still quite common at many major European airports. Using jet bridges exclusively requires the planes to all be parked in one long line beside a building, which can never be as space-efficient as a 2D-grid parking lot.

The air stairs thing is a _bit_ of a red herring. 737s are arguably designed to be ideal for them, whereas A320s do support them, but they're a bit taller and sometimes steeper than you'd like. But the taller A320 can and does operate with air stairs.

Re: Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

#105
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it troublesome? As someone with very limited knowledge in aircraft development, I'm genuinely curious about what more modern designs would bring to the table compared to the modern 737s, which I assume are heavily updated versions of the original 1960s design?

Solely being old isn't the problem. The early variants of 737s were solid. It became a problem with later versions with bigger engines etc: you can probably get away with some minor CHANGES without overhaul the design as long as it's still within the threshold of the original design, but those MAX variants crossed the line. Thus MACS was introduced. MACS, to some extent, was a feasible workaround if Boeing did not cu…

Its amazing you can´t prosecute some of these people for murder. 346 people are dead because of this.

Re: Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did not acknowledge and admit wrong doing. Of course not. Wouldn't it just open them up to legal liability and additional lawsuits if they admitted wrong doing? It seems like saying "we have updated our plan and will now focus on an engineered solution" is exactly the kind of language I would expect from a large corporation that has made such visible failures as to be very vulnerable to lawsuits. I am not even…

...mm... but they didnt say "we have updated our plan and will now focus on an engineered solution". That's not even a paraphrase of what they said. They said: > we are confident that the proposed time-limited exemption for that system follows established FAA processes When we know that: 1) The established FAA processes resulted in a variation of this aircraft that crashed. 2) The established FAA processes resulted i…

> while we are confident that the proposed time-limited exemption for that system follows established FAA processes to ensure safe operation, we will instead incorporate an engineering solution that will be completed during the certification process.

Emphasis mine.

Boeing literally said they won’t seek an exemption and will instead engineer a solution.

Re: Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the broader context is that Boeing has some fundamentally broken culture with regards to safety. Setting that aside I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a system were you can say "Hey, we have this problem, it has this impact, it occurs in the following situations. We'll fix it, but in the meantime we want an exemption to keep flying and we'll restrict the use to the following situations where the issue c…

Afaik they also thought that MCAS was so safe that the pilots didn’t even have to know about its existence

The pilots must've been absolutely pissed discovering that the stick wasn't following their commands, and Boeing gaslighting by denying MCAS existed. That there even exists a condition where the stick/steering can ignore direct commands given is insane to me.

Re: Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

#110
post #7

> Boeing said late on Monday "while we are confident that the proposed time-limited exemption for that system follows established FAA processes to ensure safe operation, we will instead incorporate an engineering solution that will be completed during the certification process." Anybody else get the exact opposite of a warm fuzzy feeling about the specific wording choice used by Boeing there?

They will try to MacGyver some shit together last minute. The irony is the 707 replaced then De Havilland Comet 4, which is much like the 737 MAX today. The difference being Boeing is a strategic defense contractor that is "too big to fail". There are enormous pressures on the FAA to let Boeing slide with a stern warning again.

Eh, I'm not sure that's a great analogy; the Comet 1 was the _really_ problematic plane.
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