111–120 of 165 posts
According to the article Boeing has halted production, but this leaves the door open to producing them again in the future after design updates. I predict they'll try to rename the model and fly it again after making changes and certifying. That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
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Just look on FlightAware or similar. They've all got the historical record for a given route (though of course it's possible an airline might substitute after you've bought the ticket, it's unlikely; most flights fit a specific profile and most airlines have only a couple of models to fit that profile). The major users from North American airlines are Southwest (34 planes), Air Canada (24), American (24), United (14)…
I strongly doubt the overwhelming majority of consumers are going to cross reference booking details against an external site to avoid a specific plane unless there are planes falling out of the air on a daily basis. People may say they will, but in practice they'll look up the cheapest flight and book that, as usual.
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Yes, I imagine the rebranding will be as ineffective as Comcast rebranding as Xfinity, where everyone knows they are the same.
I've never understood the comcast hate. I've been using Xfinity for years and it's been very reliable and fast. My only gripe is the price.
One question in my mind is: what would it take for the old "engineer" faction of Boeing to come to the top again? Or is this unrealistic as the "management/costcutting" faction is just inherently better a "management" politics to ever be dislodged? Failing this, what is the likelihood a competitor with old-school Boeing values might emerge to compete, in such a capital-heavy industry?
Airplane travel today is also about 70x safer than it was in, say, the 1960s, on a per-passenger-per-mile basis. Despite Boeing's trouble, plane construction, pilot instruction, and flight management have all done a rather good job. There are no "good old times", at least none better than the present.
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At some point, engineering gets displaced by short-term business concerns, driven by managers who have incentives to cut costs and deliver faster even if it destroys the company in the long term. Make a management chain long enough, and most of the decisions will get made this way. Each layer in the hierarchy serves both to insulate decision-makers from the impacts of their decisions and to amplify perverse incentive…
>Systems are usually to blame more than people are. IDK, honestly. Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting. But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design. I don't know about US companies, but I think most big enterprises have an internal whistleblower system, that c…
You can think all you want, but the system is larger and more complicated than you are. You might as well ask a gear to think about the engine.
The system has, in it, people who are smarter than you. You can’t hope to understand all the implications of incentives you create in a system.
> But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design.
I feel that a statement leading with “in the end” is too reductionist. These are complicated problems, and pointing fingers is too simple a tool to solve them.
The system is set up so that you can blame the people who hired child laborers, fire them, replace them, and still end up with the same child laborers making the same clothes in the same factory. Same with Boeing—no matter who you point fingers at with the 737 MAX, you can fire those people and rehire new ones but the disaster will happen again as long as the system encourages it.
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Would restarting Chernobyl make it the safest NPP considering the amount of scrutiny that it would be put through? Maybe we should look into re-introducing Windows Vista, considering the scrutiny that it would require it must be the safest and most stable OS ever.
But Windows 7 was just Windows Vista with some relatively minor changes and it was fine. The problem with the 737 MAX is that Boeing tried to make a plane with a completely different airframe and added a bunch of software to try to make it fly exactly like second generation 737s so that pilots didn't need to retrain. But the abstraction was leaky and it turns out that when you have a different airframe, you have to r…
You've got it backwards. The problem was that they used the same airframe with larger engines that had to be mounted differently due to ground clearance issues.
Warning: CNN has autoplaying video with sound enabled.
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Yes, I imagine the rebranding will be as ineffective as Comcast rebranding as Xfinity, where everyone knows they are the same.
I've never understood the comcast hate. I've been using Xfinity for years and it's been very reliable and fast. My only gripe is the price.
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Is it unstable? I thought the problem was that they didn't want to require retraining so they built in a flight control system that made it seem like the previous generation plane from a flight dynamics pov. That system would only take inputs from a single sensor on any given flight. If that sensor had issues then the flight control system would misbehave. If they had gone the retraining route and not included MCAS,…
I think most aircraft are unstable or have quirks outside their approved flight envelope. For passenger aircraft you want it to be docile and predictable inside that. The MAX far as I've gleaned naturally wants to pitch up at high angles of attack. And that the problem is more severe than they expected when they initially designed the thing. The MCAS might have been okay if the behavior matched initial expectations.
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MAX is Defective by Design. Leave the aerodynamically unstable designs for the hotshot fighter planes; everyone else just wants to get from A to B without cratering into the ground inbetween.
It's not aerodynamically unstable. It's aerodynamically different than the 737-800 but Boeing decided instead of new pilot training and possibly re-certification, they would address the difference in it's flight characteristics by automatically adjusting the elevator trim when the aircraft is in a specific off-nominal situation such that the 737 MAX 8 feels and behaves just like the 737-800 (MCAS). That's not a bad e…
All the rest—dodgy sensors, crappy software kludge, no pilot retraining—is hacks laid on top of that initial flaw just to pretend it isn’t there. A lot of us here build complex systems for a living; if that isn’t a “smell”, what is?
(Aerodynamically unstable design is a thing, btw, e.g. Typhoon. But that’s Military, which can afford fly-by-wire software that works.)
A stable design might’ve lifted the airframe further from the ground to give those huge engines the clearance they need under the wing, keeping them to the COG and thus ensuring the plane continues to fly naturally level as per its original design. (Any air geeks want to check me on that?)
But obviously that would’ve cost more, and now Boeing’s run by short-term profit chasers, not adult engineers, the attitude is “What can we get away with?”, not “What do we need to build?” That alone’s reason not to trust their bloody product any more. Not least cos what else might they be tempted to cut corners on?
I mean, a shitty iPhone will screw up your day; a shitty Boeing will screw up the rest of your life.
This is why Corporate Manslaughter laws should include hanging the Board by its heels.