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Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

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Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with zero controls, and even if one or more of the various computers decided spontaneously to restart, I would expect the plane to continue flying the way it did before the incident rather than going into an (apparently) uncommanded descent? I mean, we had that with the 737 MAX, so I wouldn't rule it out, but it sounds suspiciously like the pilot messed up and is trying to blame the airplane. However I'm no spec…

Airbus had a problem like this on an A330 due to corrupted AOA data in the flight computers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

Cosmic rays*

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#22

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable. The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.

More plausible than hearsay from Boeing or LATAM

Fair, but - for the sake of the argument - who's to say that Brian Jokat doesn't have a major short position on Boeing?

I agree that both of the airlines have incentives to cover it up, but it's strange this is being "reported" as verified.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#23

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable. The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.

This isn’t a “hype cycle”, Boeing has very publicly abandoned their engineering culture in favor of stock buybacks ever since the McDonnell-Douglas merger. It’s not hidden at all, and we have countless whistleblower employees, undercover investigations, and the obvious fiscal facts (eg they planned to spend half as much on the MAX as they originally thought it would take).

Plus this isn’t exactly a huge industry, and I don’t recall airbus having these problems. Probably because “spend the normal amount of money on engineering” is about the easiest decision a company could ever make - the most obvious, no-shit-Sherlock board room decision possible for building the long-term value of a company.

IMO sometimes things are simple, and sometimes the rich and powerful are blinded by short-term greed.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#24

Reminds me of the time my brand new F-250 "crashed" and rebooted. Lost all functionality for almost a minute, completely dropped dead on the road. It rebooted and continued on. Happened one time in five years and ~50k miles.

Teslas were known for doing the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWWRx6ZuV80

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#25

I'm skeptical of this account - Newton's First Law says that an object in motion stays in motion. Losing instruments for a second doesn't cause a change in momentum - that would have needed to be a stall, a change in trim, or an external weather event such as a downdraft. A stall would have been accompanied by a stall recovery procedure involving attitude + thrust changes, and nobody seems to be reporting that in the…

Murphy's law, "anything that can go wrong (eventually) will go wrong". Gusts triggering a short that blocks out fly-by-wire would be even more worrying than poor coding. You know landings generally have lots of gusts and would be a terrible time to locked out.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#26

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable. The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.

You can test this, to some degree, by using custom date ranges on most of any search engine. Just exclude from the past several days and search for whatever. So for instance, I assume most people know that amongst numerous other issues, a Boeing also had a wheel fall off and cause damage to vehicles and what no on the ground below. So I searched for 'wheel falls off airplane' [1] while excluding the past few months. And yeah, every time it happened, even on relatively small planes, it received lots of coverage.

So it seems fairly safe to say that something has gone seriously wrong with Boeing, rather than there just being a big focus on them. I always thought the safest time to fly would be shortly after an airline had a major safety incident, because that's exactly when they're going to be checking everything ten times over. And I'm sure this is exactly what Boeing is still doing, yet they still can't seem to keep their planes in the air and in one piece.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=wheel+falls+off+airplane&s...

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#27

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable. The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.

I would lean towards an anti-Boeing hype cycle with some confluence of a series of unfortunate events. This is not to say that the QA issues aren't leading to something catastrophic, but on the whole I don't think people quite comprehend the number of flights that take off and land in a day, and how few fatalities and injuries result as of these trips relative to the passenger load.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#28

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable. The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.

" hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable." Maybe, but also the alternative is that pilots may be pressued not to report these things due to career or crony capitalist concerns like pressure from their employer or are told this crash is 'normal'. Airlines and Boeing are not "nice guys" and are historically toxic and vindictive companies against the working class. So that leaves us whistleblowers of lower prof…

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Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#29
post #4

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable. The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.

Yea I have the same question. Objectively it appears that Boeing is having some really serious safety issues. Things that absolutely do not jive with what we’ve been taught our entire lives about how safe airline travel is. But I’m open to the idea that 5-10 “major” incidents a year is maybe within the normal range and we just don’t ever hear about them.

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Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#30
post #2

This sounds more worrying now. When I heard it originally it sounded like a mountain wave. Those are extremely powerful natural downdrafts (or up!) and common in South New Zealand.. They've crashed flights before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911 though that was at mount Fuji in Japan. But if the plane did this by itself.. wow. The 787 is fly by wire. Worrying. And very bad timing for Boeing.

Not sure how I acquired the "common" knowledge that a plane has never crashed before due to turbulence alone, but this looks like an example of such a case!
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