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Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

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Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#151

Post by anal_reactor »

mmooss wrote: post #133
anal_reactor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the problem is, Boeing is a company that has a proven record of lying about the flaws of their products. There's a huge difference between "shit, nobody thought this part would crack in this way" and "we knew someone would eventually die, but we realized that paying the damages in case this happens is cheaper than preventing the disaster in the first place".

> "we knew someone would eventually die, but we realized that paying the damages in case this happens is cheaper than preventing the disaster in the first place". The fundamental reality is, we can always spend more to prevent another death; and we must draw the line somewhere. People don't like it, but your latter example is the risk management I'm talking about, and it's unavoidable. Nobody can make airplanes that…

Boeing sacrifices 346 people in order to avoid plane recertification. Just so that we don't forget the context of the specific risk management strategies we're talking about.

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#152

Post by lazide »

cmurf wrote: post #141
autoexec wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A former air accident investigator who works as an aviation safety consultant said "It's extraordinary that Boeing concluded that a failure of this part would not have safety consequences," and said the report was "disturbing" Doesn't seem like gray to me. It seems a company who has a history of cutting corners and ignoring or downplaying safety problems did exactly that in this case too which resulted in the deaths…

Laws that limit liability promote “cost of doing business“ mentality as if lives are acceptable losses. This is how you get mentally and morally weak bean counters running companies instead of engineers with a conscience. It’s an engineering company and yet it’s run like a bank that just so happens to have an engineering branch.

Lives have ALWAYS been acceptable losses vs money, it’s just a matter of how much money.

$5mln? $100mln? Old school, $50?

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#153

Post by autoexec »

rootusrootus wrote: post #130
autoexec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully they don't usually downplay the risks of dangerous known flaws in critical parts like Boeing seems to have done in this case.

Is that your professional assessment as an aerospace engineer, or as a software engineer?

It's my assessment of the professional assessments of experts such as aviation safety consultant and former air accident investigator Tim Atkinson and former FAA and NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti, as well as the contents of the NTSB's report, and Boeing's well documented history of putting profit over safety.

I believe that it's the opinion of experts that Boeing either misjudged the safety risk of the bearing assembly when they should not have or that they incorrectly downplayed that risk when disclosing the flaw to their customers and I'm inclined to believe those experts because Boeing has already demonstrated themselves to be outright dishonest and negligent when it comes to the safety of their products.

That said, while I would not be surprised if things truly are as they currently appear to be, my assessment is always subject to change if additional information comes to light which makes that less likely to be the case.

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#154

Post by autoexec »

lazide wrote: post #152
cmurf wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws that limit liability promote “cost of doing business“ mentality as if lives are acceptable losses. This is how you get mentally and morally weak bean counters running companies instead of engineers with a conscience. It’s an engineering company and yet it’s run like a bank that just so happens to have an engineering branch.

Lives have ALWAYS been acceptable losses vs money, it’s just a matter of how much money. $5mln? $100mln? Old school, $50?

This is exactly why laws need to exist to ensure that human lives are prioritized by companies to a reasonable extent. Companies can often make a lot of money if they can get away with doing things that kill their customers, and we've repeatedly seen them do exactly that. In order to protect the public, corporate greed needs to be constrained by laws and legal consequences just like they're used to help to constrain the greed of muggers and thieves.

In the US we've done a pretty poor job of doing that and it's resulted in countless lives lost and every living person and animal on earth being poisoned. It's long past time our government and its legal system took their responsibility to public safety more seriously.

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#155

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

anal_reactor wrote: post #151
mmooss wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "we knew someone would eventually die, but we realized that paying the damages in case this happens is cheaper than preventing the disaster in the first place". The fundamental reality is, we can always spend more to prevent another death; and we must draw the line somewhere. People don't like it, but your latter example is the risk management I'm talking about, and it's unavoidable. Nobody can make airplanes that…

Boeing sacrifices 346 people in order to avoid plane recertification. Just so that we don't forget the context of the specific risk management strategies we're talking about.

Yeah but how valuable were those 346 people anyway? Are those lives really worth the tiny decrease in share price?

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#156

Post by dandelany »

tiahura wrote: post #146
12_throw_away wrote: post #144

Reading the actual NTSB report [1], my first reaction is just my usual awe at the professionalism of the NTSB. They started with a 3000-ft-long debris field and in the end could say "here are the microscopic stress fractures in the left pylon aft mount bulkhead's wing clevis spherical bearing assembly's ball element's forward bearing race". [1] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA26MA024%20I...

To be fair, there were a few folks on x avh and the other typical sites who guessed the cause pretty quickly.

Like most things, guessing and proving require vastly different efforts. In aviation, a few more orders of magnitude than most.

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#157

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

rozap wrote: post #114
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. And you could pay for the MCAS to use both sensors which all US airlines did. Edit: I was misremembering. Both sensors were enabled on all planes and MCAS only used one at a time on all planes. What was disabled, unless paid for, was software which displayed to the pilots that the 2 sensors were disagreeing, which would immediately have alerted them to what may have been wrong. > According to Bjorn Fehrm, Ae…

Wait so this is like the bmw heated seat thing? Where all cars have the heaters but they are only enabled via software if you pay? But in an airplane? Is that what I'm reading?

This kind of thing is not new. In 1998 I worked for a large corporation (I think they were an F100 at the time) that built machines with a feature that could only be enabled if the customer paid an extra fee and had a field technician come out to "install" it.

Unknown to the customer was that all machines were identical. The technician's "installation procedure" was to enter the Service Mode password, select the feature enable option, and exit Service Mode then run a test to make sure it worked.

This is pretty common in commercial/industrial manufacturing. The exception cost to omit certain hardware subsystems when building a product is often higher than the cost of the hardware itself, so it makes more sense to build everything identically and enable/disable features in software.

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#158

Post by nobodyandproud »

autoexec wrote: post #12
rabidonrails wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes but Boeing also said it "would not result in a safety of flight condition." There's a lot of gray going on here.

A former air accident investigator who works as an aviation safety consultant said "It's extraordinary that Boeing concluded that a failure of this part would not have safety consequences," and said the report was "disturbing" Doesn't seem like gray to me. It seems a company who has a history of cutting corners and ignoring or downplaying safety problems did exactly that in this case too which resulted in the deaths…

> out of an abundance of caution

I’m sorry, but this phrase has worn out its welcome.

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#159

Post by burnt-resistor »

This is the problem with regulatory capture (corruption), "self-regulation", and billionaire bootlicking bozos who shoot their mouths off about "red tape" and "big gubberment".

The part was redesigned without the groove but wasn't mandated because Boeing said even the old part could be used, which is insane. Clearly, the new part wasn't installed and likely 1-2 inspections failed to notice it was broken.

Re: Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

#160

Post by K0balt »

lucianbr wrote: post #95
K0balt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mmmm…. Not saying us pilots are universally great, but I have definitely seen a significant regression from the mean in many foreign cohorts. I imagine it’s due to fundamental differences in the concept of training. It’s one of the things besides war that fear based societies seem to do better than shame based societies.

There exists a concept called "regression to the mean". I don't think "regression from the mean" means anything. There is no way pilots form all over the world could "regress to the mean". They could not have been all, or most, "above the mean". The mean would be higher then.

Well, it may not be a term of art, but regression from the mean is reasonable to imagine as a failure to rise to the mean level.
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