What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane • Hacker News Board

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#541

Post by panick21_ » Sat, Mar 30, 2024, 7:24 PM UTC

GolfPopper wrote: post #534

panick21_ wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objectivly speaking flying with Boeing is still safe. People like us think news about planes and crashes are big but they really arent. Most people dont have the faintest idea of who makes planes, and what plane models exist or how save they are. And there isn't any system to activly avoid certain planes even if you wanted too. Sure at some point with enough failures this can happen. But this is unlikely. Most Boeing…

People aren't rational. Particularly in very large groups. If a half-dozen (or whatever the magic number ends up being to set the zeigeist on fire) of Boeing aircraft suffer fatal or near-fatal accidents in the near future, everyone will suddenly know who makes which planes, and there will be systems to make sure you don't fly Boeing. And while I think such a scenario is unlikely, it's hardly impossible. The real dri…

> And while I think such a scenario is unlikely, it's hardly impossible.

Witch is why I said 'practically'.

> So eventually things get to the point where you're not operating safely anymore, and then you can get multiple bad outcomes in a short period of time.

Assuming no margin is ever added.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#542

Post by mrbadguy » Sat, Mar 30, 2024, 8:35 PM UTC

justrealist wrote: post #497

mrbadguy wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, why does it matter that no one has died on an American carrier for a while? Not so long ago, Boeing sent over 300 people to their deaths with their shoddy MCAS scheme. It’s pure chance that this didn’t happen in the USA so I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the nationalities of the deceased.

It's not pure chance. It was a plane error, but trained pilots following procedure would have responded appropriately and avoided a crash. In response to a plane malfunction, the pilots panicked, did the wrong thing, and everyone died. This does not excuse Boeing, but it's just the way it is. Training standards are higher in the US than, for example, Ethiopian airlines.

> trained pilots following procedure would have responded appropriately and avoided a crash.

Boeing acted like there was nothing different about the new aeroplanes and therefore did not train the pilots in how to react to the new system. Indeed, that was the original point of MCAS - to avoid pilot re-training. The pilots were not trained in doing the "right thing" and so had no chance of recovering the aircraft. I don't think it's right to blame them. Regardless of whether their overall training was of higher standard, I don't think American pilots would have fared any better since they, too, would have been in the dark.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#543

Post by error503 » Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 2:29 AM UTC

canucker2016 wrote: post #181

error503 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day, if the person who wrote that software had written it differently, then those planes would not have crashed and hundreds of people would not have died. You can't really blame the software engineers. This was all thought out and tightly specified by Boeing to their avionics subcontractor (Collins, IIRC). This is how it was designed and engineered to work at a systems level - it is a design hack…

Buying an airplane is not the same as buying a consumer item from a big box retailer. It's more like buying an expensive car/enterprise software. There are options. Options cost extra.... excerpts from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/business/boeing-safety-fe... : As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockp…

Yes, this was the root of the miscommunication. The AoA indicator (ie. an instrument that gives a numeric value of AoA to the pilots) was optional. The AoA disagree alert (ie. an indication that the two AoA sensors do not agree) was not intended to be optional, and I believe it's required equipment, but it ended up tied to the indicator option. What is worth noting about this is that Boeing knew about it for a long time (I forget the timeline, but at least a year, I believe), without telling airlines or releasing a fix.

I'm not sure where the NYT information comes form that AOA DISAGREE was an option. The congressional report https://democrats-transportation.house.gov/imo/media/doc/202... is pretty clear on this aspect:

> Boeing has publicly blamed its software supplier, a company now known as Collins Aerospace Systems, for tying the AOA Disagree alert, which was supposed to be a standard feature on all 737 MAX aircraft, to an optional AOA Indicator display714—the result of which rendered the AOA Disagree alert inoperable on more than 80 percent of the MAX aircraft.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#544

Post by MilStdJunkie » Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 3:15 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #205

MilStdJunkie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to show it was all done, but it was actually an empty metal tube with landing gear duct taped on it? And remember the venom that people got for bringing up the fact that, you know, you could see the sky from the wheel wells? Or the second rollout, when they had to strap the fuse segments together because no one knew where the fasteners were? Oh we could go on and on,…

> Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to show it was all done, but it was actually an empty metal tube with landing gear duct taped on it? It was in 2007 (on July 8th, a date obviously picked for the memes). Maiden flight was supposed to be two months or so away with introduction in 2008. Maiden flight was on December 15, 2009. Commercial service started October 2011. > name a commercially successful B…

Sheesh, what the heck was I thinking. Yeah, 2007.

I should have been a little more precise. I mean a wholly Boeing designed product, from the 21st century. The MAX is still a 737 in its heart, and that design goes back a ways.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#545

Post by runeb » Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 3:45 AM UTC

proc0 wrote: post #5

> Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal This sounds like the changes that have taken place in the software industry in the past 10-20 years. Engineers are meant to do much more than engineering, including testing their own software, managing project timelines, etc., however with software nobody dies, you just get crappy software that constantly breaks and need…

> however with software nobody dies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#546

Post by MilStdJunkie » Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 3:49 AM UTC

freeopinion wrote: post #289

c-linkage wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not like airlines really have a lot of choice in manufacturer. Just because the backlog is there doesn't mean airlines wouldn't prefer a different supplier. And standing up a competitor is not really an option.

> standing up a competitor is not really an option This is the part that bothers me. Why isn't it an option? Standing up a new orbital rocket company was not really an option in 2000. If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6. Then aim to deliver one p…

So everyone else here brings up great points, but something else to consider is that the barriers to market entry are, to some extent, created by the OEMs themselves, by dominating the ISO and AS9100 committees and TWGs/TSGs[1]. This means a couple things.

First, Boeing never needs to take an external audit - they wrote the thing - but their suppliers need to cross every T and dot every I or else they owe Boeing money. In the worst case, a supplier can end up handing over product and STILL owing money. But Boeing - and especially BCA - they have never, and will never, undergo an actual AS9100 audit.

Second, since the standards are existing Boeing process, that represents a pretty much undefined cost for any market entrant. And that cost can be cranked arbitrarily if/when Boeing feels threatened, by amending the specs themselves - as they tried to do to SpaceX in 2010. That's probably a story for later, but it's pretty disgusting, although not as disgusting as what happened to the C-Series. OK, none of those are as disgusting as a million other things, but you get the point.

[1] And, to some extent, the FAA itself, but that's a whole other subject.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#547

Post by taylodl » Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 11:19 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #491

amtamt wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something very similar is happening, at a very rapid pace, in software development.

Writing software is nothing like building airplanes. 99% of the time it doesn't matter because most software is worthless or trivial. A sibling thread highlights the decline of Google: What a horror if someone were to receive subpar search results or view an advert that hadn't been auctioned at the most profitable rate.

Yeah, that's what the MCAS team thought. Oops!

There is a lot of software used in finance, medicine, transportation, logistics, aerospace, manufacturing, and robotics where a simple whoopsies isn't going to undo the loss of money and the loss of life.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#548

Post by throw0101c » Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 1:44 PM UTC

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #504

class3shock wrote: post #269

"But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt." It don't think it's possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I've never seen…

>...irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them... There are no words. Best response I can offer is Kurt Vonnegut's quote: "We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective."

> "We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective."

Meta: Is it Vonnegut?

* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11432253-we-ll-go-down-in-h...

> “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” Often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, sometimes to Donella Meadows, it’s one of those quotes that’s so good, it seems to have multiple claims of ancestry.

> Wherever it came from and however accurately it may have described the blinkered bookkeepers, Akshat Rathi wants you to know it’s not true anymore. “It’s now cheaper to save the world than destroy it,” he declares at the opening of his new book, Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age.

* https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/03/18/opinion/climate-...

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#549

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 2:06 PM UTC

throw0101c wrote: post #548

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them... There are no words. Best response I can offer is Kurt Vonnegut's quote: "We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective."

> "We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective." Meta: Is it Vonnegut? * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11432253-we-ll-go-down-in-h... > “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” Often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, sometimes to Donella Meadows, it’s one of those quotes that’s so good, it see…

[deleted]

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#550

Post by singleshot_ » Sun, Mar 31, 2024, 5:07 PM UTC

makerdiety wrote: post #540

singleshot_ wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every bay is a harbor, but every harbor is a bay.

That's a generalization. And the general is often blind to specific cases which disprove general principles. You'll need to zoom out if you want a better picture of phenomena. Increase your video resolution to arrive at awesome conclusions like I do.

Oh, it's a generalization, all right. But every harbor is a bay; not every bay is a harbor.