"passenger says".
I'm dubious and betting on clear-air turbulence, but we'll know in a few days.
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
#42A 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…
How do you suppose a half a trillion dollar market is not a "huge industry"? I am definitely aware of the cultural issues at Boeing, but boiling it down to "sometimes things are simple" is just a lot of ignorance on your part.
Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
#43Reminds 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
That Tesla didn't "completely drop[] dead on the road" like the post you're replying to stated - it just had the non-driving controls go dark for a couple of minutes. Still terrible, and the Nissan Leaf also does it occasionally, though for less time.
Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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*
The cause of the corrupted data is not known but it did happen multiple times in a short period and only on an A330s.
Once Airbus knew what the problem was, they were able to detect and mitigate it with a software update. They didn’t fix the hardware.
Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
#45On a related note, one of the whistleblowers was just found dead: https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/boeing-whistleblower...
Boeing whistleblower found dead in US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39673589 (438 comments)
Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
#46On a related note, one of the whistleblowers was just found dead: https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/boeing-whistleblower...
"self inflicted gunshot wound"
Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
A lot of safety related improvements(at least in the US) are also due to the FAA and generally the open process of anonymously reporting issues on flights. Each crash has also been meticulously investigated and vast improvements were put in place. The reality is that the most dangerous times on a flight are take off and landing, which is also where human judgement and process plays a large part.
As far as breaking out of a duopoly, I don't know the path for that, as the barrier to entry to building commercial planes is sky high, but I do think one more player would be a net benefit.
Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
#48This is the FlightRadar24 playback of the flight: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/la800#34506b53
At time ~02:27, a dip in the altitude can be seen in the flight data chart.
Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Turbulence hasn't ripped an airplane apart at altitude, so yea turbulence alone hasn't caused a crash
The linked wiki article literally says it ripped the plane apart
> The aircraft then encountered strong turbulence, causing it to break up in flight and crash into a forest.
Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure
#50I'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…
modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable
Small nitpick, commercial jets are designed to be aerodynamically stable. If controls froze briefly, the plane would continue to be stable, flying as it was when the controls froze. You'd need to add in the turbulence or some external force for it to be a problem. That said, the 787 is 100% dependent on electronic controls, so anything more than brief loss of controls would lead to a crash.