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Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

cnn.com

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

#31

Post by jajko »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #17
joecasson wrote: post #3

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.

Boeing being safe was the default, what we're seeing is the disillusion of this default. What's the alternative for the news; "plane lands successfully and without issue". As with any complex system things when things go wrong they go wrong in a myriad of ways with a great deal of uncertainty and randomness - which in and of itself makes them interesting. The erosion of the culture of safety at Boeing is a slow gradu…

These issues are killing people in hundreds. You are right that national security is more important, but world is not binary. Current execs could easily say rot in jail while company keeps churning whatever hardware military wants, nothing mutually exclusive there.

Now what will happen with civilian avionics is another story, for me they lost my trust for good but I & my family choices are insignificant forces on the market.

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

#32

Post by AnimalMuppet »

datavirtue wrote: post #8

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.

Heh, yeah. Had a Subaru Forrester decide that something was wrong with the throttle or cruise control or something, and the appropriate response was to ignore the accelerator and just leave the engine at idle. On the freeway. In the middle of a road trip.

Manual "reboot" fixed that one. But "have you tried turning it off and back on again" is not a good answer for an airliner...

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

#33

Post by chung8123 »

bbor wrote: post #29
rco8786 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

I don't this this allegedly happened. What authorities are saying Boeing killed a whistleblower?

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

#34

Post by jajko »

mym1990 wrote: post #27
joecasson wrote: post #3

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.

Yet competition can and does better, much better re safety currently. Any issue of Airbus would get at least same press coverage, in US even more since media are usually not impartial.

Are we already into some boeing whitewashing cycle too?

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

#35

Post by cjbgkagh »

jajko wrote: post #31
cjbgkagh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing being safe was the default, what we're seeing is the disillusion of this default. What's the alternative for the news; "plane lands successfully and without issue". As with any complex system things when things go wrong they go wrong in a myriad of ways with a great deal of uncertainty and randomness - which in and of itself makes them interesting. The erosion of the culture of safety at Boeing is a slow gradu…

These issues are killing people in hundreds. You are right that national security is more important, but world is not binary. Current execs could easily say rot in jail while company keeps churning whatever hardware military wants, nothing mutually exclusive there. Now what will happen with civilian avionics is another story, for me they lost my trust for good but I & my family choices are insignificant forces on the…

I'm not suggesting national security is more important, just that Boeing's leadership won't learn any lessons from this as they'll keep getting bailed out with sweet MIC contracts. I would probably feel much safer if we didn't have a MIC that is constantly trying to play a nuclear game of chicken with political adversaries. 'Russia will not use nukes because Russia has not used nukes' - what kind of effed up logic is that. I feel very unsafe being governed by morons. I can easily avoid flying but dodging nukes is much more difficult.

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

#36

Post by avemg »

nop_slide wrote: post #30
wkat4242 wrote: 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!

I think maybe you've misunderstood what the common knowledge said. Turbulence hasn't ripped an airplane apart at altitude, so yea turbulence alone hasn't caused a crash. But anything near terrain is plenty risky (mountain waves, low-level wind shear). If the turbulence makes you drop a couple of hundred feet that's no big deal at 35,000 feet and no matter how bumpy it gets, the wings aren't going to break off. But if you're near the ground (or a mountain), well....

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

#37

Post by WillPostForFood »

post_break wrote: post #24
datavirtue wrote: post #8

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

Not the same thing, He said the f-250 lost all functionality, including power. The video you posted is just the Tesla screen rebooting, while keeping all driving functionality.

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

#38

Post by chmod775 »

mym1990 wrote: post #27
joecasson wrote: post #3

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.

The problem isn't that "accidents happen", the problem is that airplane safety culture isn't meeting people's expectations anymore. Two planes crashing for the exact same preventable reason mere months apart just does not compute. A single crash would've been quickly forgotten. But two crashes and a long chain of incidents all while the planes were allowed to stay in the air is going to change people's perceptions.

The fuckups being directly attributable to inept leadership, bad policy, and a focus shift away from building planes does not help, especially since the same incompetent clowns are still in charge at Boeing. One of the first remedies should've been getting rid of the businesses school types that have crept in and making sure decision making is again done by engineers. Instead, they blamed the 737 MAX's issues on engineers in the corporate ladder, such as then CEO Dennis Muilenburg, replacing them with lesser-qualified people. Even though the plane was developed during his predecessor's term, who definitely wasn't an engineer and brought most of the relevant organizational issues about! Now you can blame him for not substantially reversing the course set by his predecessor, but the answer definitely isn't to have Boeing be run by yet another non-engineer.

Boeing's current leadership does not have the trust of the public or that of the engineers working under them. After all of this, they won't ever.

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

#39

Post by LaffertyDev »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #11
philip1209 wrote: post #6

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…

>Newton's First Law says that an object in motion stays in motion. How is this relevant? There is turbulence and gravity, this isn't "empty" space. > Losing instruments for a second doesn't cause a change in momentum No, but modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable. If the account is accurate sounds like quite literally everything had a blip for a second, which wo…

Nitpicking. I agree with your broader point.

> No, but modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable.

Most aircraft outside of fighter jets are aerodynamically stable. Loss of powered flight would mean the airplane will glide (in nominal operation). Even the 737MAX7/9 aircraft are still stable (although that brings up defining exactly what we mean by aerodynamically stable... )

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