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What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

nytimes.com

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Re: What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

#11

Post by miketery »

"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." - Dr Joseph Goebbels.

My god, the PR on behalf of Boeing by The NY Times is embarrassing. The accidents were the result of various actions which increased the risk and decreased safety. All beginning with moving the engines forward and up which changed the flight envelope, requiring more complex systems. Followed by not informing pilots of said new systems, and additionally selling as an add on (for profit reasons) indicators which would have informed pilots whether this system was activated.

Imagine your cruise control automatically was turning on in your car, but you had no idea, and hitting the brake pedal did nothing. This is what those pilots were experiencing.

Planes aren’t hard to fly if you follow basic principles, take appropriate safety measures, and know the physics.

Responsibility for these deaths rests with Boeing.

Re: What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

#12

Post by zelienople »

Finally, one lone voice cuts through the hysteria and garbage and speaks the unpopular truth.

The good old boy culture of training men inadequately so that they can, at best, monitor an aircraft's systems, and then pretending that they are pilots is what killed those people.

You don't like it, but it's the truth.

Re: What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

#14

Post by chmaynard »

The author has done a great deal of thoughtful investigative work and that's always a good thing. However, in his attempt to reach conclusions and assign blame he has diluted the effectiveness of the article. I'm very interested in this topic, so I skimmed through it (a very long read) and get a sense of whether it's worth further study. I decided to move on.

Re: What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

#15

Post by pytester »

wayoutthere wrote: post #9
pytester wrote: post #5

This reads like yet another PR attempt by Boeing execs to shift the blame for the deaths away from their chronic mismanagement to pilot error.

I would actually still place this failure directly at Boeing's feet. Games like the ones Boeing was trying to play (overhauling an entire aircraft without having to change type rating and retrain pilots) directly lead to situations like this. Yes, the FAA / NTSB should have been more effective, but regulatory capture like this is common. It's ultimately Boeing's job to manage the risk: losing 2 airframes in a matter…

Yes, I'm surprised that more shareholders and more of Congress haven't been calling both for Dennis Muilenburg's head and the end to self certification.

Re: What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

#17

Post by zaroth »

miketery wrote: post #11

"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." - Dr Joseph Goebbels. My god, the PR on behalf of Boeing by The NY Times is embarrassing. The accidents were the result of various actions which increased the risk and decreased safety. All beginning with moving the engines forward and up which changed the flight envelope, requiring more complex systems. Followe…

I like the brake pedal analogy. It's not perfect, but it makes the point well. To add insult to injury, when the driver flipped a cut-out switch to disable the cruise control, the brakes were useless, the manual brake adjustment lever failed, and the only documented procedure to fix them at that point (for that model plane, err, car) was to turn cruise control back on.

Re: What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

#18

Post by SolaceQuantum »

"Even more pernicious was the F.A.A.’s longstanding delegation of regulatory authority to Boeing employees — a worry that is perennially available to chew on if you like and may indeed be related to the configuration of the troublesome system as it was installed. Nonetheless, in Seattle, at the level where such small choices are made, corruption, like cynicism, is rare."

This is really embarassing to read, due to the intense naivete to have these two sentences side by side.

Re: What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

#19

Post by matthewtoast »

ecmascript wrote: post #10

Wow, such a long article in what probably could be condensed into 1 a4 sized page if you really are just about answering the question posed. Who actually reads articles like this? I am genuinely curious. Comes off as information overload to me and it's hard to know what to believe.

I do. William Langewiesche is probably the best writer on aviation - if you want really deep and detailed analysis.

Re: What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?

#20

Post by dsfyu404ed »

zaroth wrote: post #17
miketery wrote: post #11

"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." - Dr Joseph Goebbels. My god, the PR on behalf of Boeing by The NY Times is embarrassing. The accidents were the result of various actions which increased the risk and decreased safety. All beginning with moving the engines forward and up which changed the flight envelope, requiring more complex systems. Followe…

I like the brake pedal analogy. It's not perfect, but it makes the point well. To add insult to injury, when the driver flipped a cut-out switch to disable the cruise control, the brakes were useless, the manual brake adjustment lever failed, and the only documented procedure to fix them at that point (for that model plane, err, car) was to turn cruise control back on.

As someone who's driven a lot of vehicles in various states of mechanical failure I don't. Once you stop treating a vehicle as a magical black box where everything affects everything the analogy falls apart.

Vehicles have predictable failure mode and systems that are integrated with each other in known and fairly standardized ways. Short of catastrophic mechanical failure (i. e the front fell off) someone with sufficient experience to recognize what is going on should be able to disable systems until some level of basic control is restored. Your brakes have nothing to do with cruise control other than having a little switch on them (usually two switches) to tell cruise control to turn off when you press them. I feel like airline pilots should in theory have that level of understanding of the systems in their aircraft since they are trained professionals and the stakes are very high so they need to be able to handle failures gracefully.

And before anyone puts words in my mouth I'm not saying Boeing isn't the most at fault party in all of this.

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