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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

#131

Post by robocat »

dh2022 wrote: post #108
chasd00 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hopefully the parachute is made by Boeing

maybe not made by Boeing, but certainly paid by it....

Engineers probably told to make a golden parachute for the execs.

Engineers love a good challenge. Let's compare tensile strength of gold to silk (the original parachute material): • Ultimate tensile strength of Gold is 220 MPa • degummed natural silk fibers, with a tensile strength of 614 MPa

So approximately just triple the gold thread versus silk thread. Expensive but doable. Gold may add to total weight (parachute + person) to keep floating causing velocity to increase versus silk. Attach warning label: IANA MECHENG.

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

#132

Post by wolverine876 »

The Boeing story is starting to sound a bit like the crime-in-cities story. We always can find some examples somewhere due to sheer volume of Boeing planes and people in cities. However, both are very safe.

We have a social problem of embracing speculation, misinformation and disinformation and movements that are little more than angry mobs, and of treating with contempt an adherence to facts and rationality. With ever more information out there, and ever more speculation, mis- and disinformation, we need to utilize the latter - the facts and rationality - more than ever. They are proven tools for distinguishing fact from all the fictions we humans have some urge to embrace.

I still think Boeing has legitimate liability and responsibility, and needs to fix their manufacturing and safety situations. Airplane manufacturing can't respond only when things get worse.

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

#133

Post by alistairSH »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #56
LaffertyDev wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

>Most aircraft outside of fighter jets are aerodynamically stable. Sure, but there is significant overlap between being stable and throwing around passengers, unfortunately. Dropping 500 feet is perfectly okay for the aircraft and it will largely continue to not simply fall out of the sky past that.

That's not what aerodynamically stables means. Anything external that would cause a 787 to drop 500 feet is probably going to do that with or without the flight computers working.

In the case of military aircraft, they quite literally can't glide or maintain stable flight without the flight computer actively managing the control surfaces.

A 787 is perfectly capable of flying in steady state should the computer glitch.

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

#134

Post by delfinom »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #72
_obviously wrote: post #60

Real time operating systems are expensive to develop for and require laborious system validation. That's why we decided to use a custom version of Android Jelly Bean running on the latest MediaTek quad core processors featuring Arm Mali gpus. Sensor communications are handled wirelessly with BlueTooth. Be sure to turn off all electronic devices before the flight. :)

All development was offshored to a lowest bidder. Thanks to this, all our critical flight control software is now developed by a single intern aided by Copilot (sic!) We are now looking for a way to optimize the intern away.

Yea I laugh at everyone try to shove AI into hardware and software design of physical products as if there's a market of engineers out there and not just hobbyists keeping things alive in the states.

We've long since offshored the development of any physical products that isn't considered ITAR/defense world.

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

#135

Post by gopher_space »

ryanisnan wrote: post #124
diputsmonro wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple whistleblowers have been raising concerns about Boeing safety and build quality issues for several years, so for you to say "so what, there have been issues on Boeing planes for several years" actually reinforces the "Boeing narrative". If there are multiple people on the inside raising alarm bells, there probably is some substance there. Finally the problems are getting big enough that they can't just be sw…

I don't understand why people seem to be disregarding highly related facts and are ignoring the fundamental nature of how or why the facts are related. Correlation does not imply causation, but when the facts are of the same substance, additional concern is warranted.

It's hard to criticize a power structure your point of view depends on, so you get weird apologists for industry in general that pop up in conversations like these.

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

#136

Post by tptacek »

lamontcg wrote: post #127
epolanski wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now Boeing gets much more attention on anything that goes bad. Can't but say the company brought it on themselves. That being said that was a noteworthy incident regardless.

Yeah after the MCAS incident showing a kind of malice and the door blowout showing incompetency, I'm perfectly happy to start treating Boeing as guilty until proven innocent on these incidents. They haven't really been behaving in a way that they're worthy of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Until they start to show that they're changing their behavior (which they clearly didn't do after the MCAS incident) then…

I'm fine if you want to distrust or dislike or sanction Boeing. But that's not a good epistemology; it's not bringing you closer to understanding what's happening. It's also deeply incurious (as a rhetorical strategy, not as a belief system).

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

#137

Post by sparrc »

wolverine876 wrote: post #132

The Boeing story is starting to sound a bit like the crime-in-cities story. We always can find some examples somewhere due to sheer volume of Boeing planes and people in cities. However, both are very safe. We have a social problem of embracing speculation, misinformation and disinformation and movements that are little more than angry mobs, and of treating with contempt an adherence to facts and rationality. With ev…

Not really. No airplane was ever grounded by the FAA since the 1970s, when they grounded the McDonnell Douglas DC-10.

Since the merger, the FAA has grounded both of Boeing's new planes (The 787 Dreamliner and the 737 Max).

Boeing's safety record is objectively declining. They are shipping out airplanes with safety issues that are being found "in production". This is why their planes are being grounded (something that never happened to Boeing pre-merger).

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

#138

Post by bluepizza »

tptacek wrote: post #90
627467 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe what most people are truly concerned is the Boeing Narrative? Increasingly more than just a narrative

Do you know that or do you just feel it? If you know it, how do you know? Is that knowledge reflected in the reporting? If you camped avherald watching for incidents, and you had an inciting incident like the door plug (indisputably a major story!) to start from, could you create the same narrative for Bombardier? I think you could.

Did Bombardier have a scandal where cost cutting measures led to the crash of two aeroplanes and the loss of hundreds of lives?

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

#139

Post by nsguy »

tptacek wrote: post #90
627467 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe what most people are truly concerned is the Boeing Narrative? Increasingly more than just a narrative

Do you know that or do you just feel it? If you know it, how do you know? Is that knowledge reflected in the reporting? If you camped avherald watching for incidents, and you had an inciting incident like the door plug (indisputably a major story!) to start from, could you create the same narrative for Bombardier? I think you could.

Does it sell more ads? Does it get more eyeballs? Do people click on the story? Does the writer get promoted? A bonus? Is this a conspiracy against Boeing? Is the owner of the newspaper short Boeing and long Airbus? (those last four questions are /s the first two maybe less so.)

I used to laugh at those pushing "mainstream media" wild stories (e.g. from a certain portion of Americans) but Journalism isn't what it used to be, and maybe it was never what it used to be.

I do think that focus on Boeing is somewhat warranted but it's a good question how do we get a real unbiased picture. Especially given that accidents are a low probability event and it's hard to determine what happens by chance, within reason, or is really reflecting something concerning that has to be addressed and how it should be addressed. Your average Journalist is lacking the training and tools to think about these things and they wouldn't even know who is the right expert and what is the right data to look at.

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

#140

Post by ajross »

tptacek wrote: post #81
notRobot wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is worthy of reporting. 50+ people were injured, one is in severe condition.

Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald. I guess I'm not saying it isn't worth reporting. Before the Boeing Narrative set in, these kinds of stories did get reported! But now they're tied into this long-running Boeing arc, and it's frustrating because there isn't enough in the story to know what's really going on.

> Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald.

Exactly. But the takeaway here is that "notable" and "newsworthy" are slightly different ideas, and the latter is more subjective.

This is absolutely the effect of the "Boeing Narrative". If the media is faced with data like this[2] in the face of a frame that says "Aviation is extremely safe and getting safer every year", they'll likely skip over the outliers. If they need to sell articles into a market that knows "Boeing Planes are Unsafe", they're going to have a much harder time with that notability analysis.

And that's 100% on Boeing, not the media. At the end of the day if your business depends on people believing your products are good products[1], cutting corners on the reality undergirding that perception is a disaster. Boeing had almost a full century of goodwill they've now flushed.

[1] Which is true for almost every business where the consumer sees the competition. Maybe not if you manufacture gaskets or capacitors, but airplanes and laptops for sure.

[2] Editted to add: it also hands out an easy scapegoat. We really don't know if there was an instrument failure here or if it was pilot culpability. We just know what the pilot said. And we have to recognize that the pilot might have lied knowing that Boeing made an easier target.

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