161–170 of 568 posts
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Or how about pop-ups not take over my screen? I'm on a work computer without an ad blocker.
Or you can not complain about a dismissable popup on quality article being presented to you for free.
If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won't find it. It is not new information that Boeing started a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving. What this article offers is new detail into exactly how Boeing has gone about cannibalizing itself. Th…
> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon. This is all bad for Boeing, but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time. Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. Let's not FUD people into thinking that flying on the worst plane Boeing has ever put out is anywhere comparable to the daily risks of driving.
This is true, but disasters occur because those layers and layers get eroded until there is only one layer left which then fails.
The problem is that Boeing has eroded layers and layers and layers of that safety. The question is "How many of those layers are left?"
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Well, yes, but also no. It was a hardware design change that necessitated a software hack (to escape mandatory retraining of pilots) that relied on unreliable hardware, right? Sure, software played a big part in it, but I think it seems like it was more a management and communication failure. If it was just software it'd probably be much easier to diagnose and fix.
I disagree. The hardware design of the cockpit is intended to be such that any computer inputs also move the pilot's controls, so that the pilots can countermand computer inputs if necessary. In this case, software was written such that this was not possible. The software that operates MCAS operates on a garbage-in-garbage-out model, like most software. There was no software written to determine if the incoming data…
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. As far as I know there weren't any software bugs or 'hacks' involved, and the avionics operated as designed (aside from the AoA DISAGREE alert, which was due to a requirements miscommunication, not a bug). It was broken by design, which happened long before implementation, at Boeing.
> When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it’s about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot’s control columns forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column—indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.
The Elevator Feel Computer is a part of the 737NG as well, and would behave the same way in those airplanes when receiving such erroneous AoA data; it's nothing new in the MAX. It certainly did not help the crews during the fatal MAX incidents, and is clearly not an ideal design, but it's also barely a footnote in the root cause analysis, along with the stick shaker and stall warnings blaring at them constantly. The pilots would easily be able to overcome it long enough to get safely on the ground. What was a bigger problem for those crews was that the MCAS has enough trim authority to make it impossible, with any amount of elevator input, to restore level flight - limiting its trim authority was part of the 'fixes' required to get them airborne again.
I don't think it's reasonable to blame the implementation of MCAS for the accidents, its existence is to blame, and really highlights how nothing about the 737 platform has been designed holistically - it is a patchwork of hacks on hacks dating from the 1970s, which is difficult to reason about as a whole, and has dark corners. To truly 'fix' MCAS, you need to consider AoA as critical air data (which the 737 does not), and you need to integrate it holistically with the rest of the flight controls (which the 737 cannot, since it is not fly-by-wire), and you need to consider it critical equipment (it's an 'augmentation' and not considered critical on the 737, 'justifying' the lack of redundancy). Once you've done those things, you've basically got the bones of a proper envelope protection system in place, and you've obviated the need for MCAS in the first place. Of course the 737 team couldn't do this, because the business decided that it was more important to avoid (and hide) any differences than to bring the aircraft in line with modern standards.
Realistically, this should have been trapped by the safety analysis of the flawed design, which should have considered its effect on the whole flight control system when evaluating it, but Boeing again only considered MCAS to be an 'augmentation' and it got an abbreviated safety review as a result. Some engineers did express concern about some of these factors, but given the environment outlined in TFA, those concerns did not go anywhere, because they would have basically scuttled the idea and sent everyone back to the drawing board, which Boeing was desperate to avoid having already been caught flat-footed with the launch of the A320neo.
The 737 airframe needs to be put to rest, it is simply not safe or sane to keep stacking more hacks onto it. But there's no indication Boeing's working on a successor so it's probably going to be on the market for another 20+ years. Hard to imagine folks will probably be flying on an airframe with a 100 year old design (2024 + 20 years before a new revision + 20 years life span = 2064, around 100 years from the 737 launch before they start retiring)!
The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
Oh we could go on and on, for pages and pages. This story's not anything new.
I think a lot of people in the industry have just been waiting for the thud, but everyone underestimated just how good A&P mechanics are[1], and how tight aircrew is. As we approach the days when aircrew have to punch a de-ice button every five minutes, we're hitting the limits of those staff.
Something to think about: name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century. Something that can legitimately be called "Successful", and "Boeing"
[1] Who are not required in the Boeing fab - oh no - they are far too expensive. But wait, you might ask . . what credentials are required in the plant? Heh heh heh heh heh . . . oh that is a fun question.
Anyone who can explain the difference?
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The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is just as commoditizatable than those they seek to commoditize. Note that in the recent dialogue about AI eating jobs, there's zero mention of whether it could come for management positions. Nothing. Curious, isn't it? Why wouldn't an LLM be good enough at this? I mean, it's really data-driven, right?
Frankly I think ChatGPT 3.5 was already good enough to replace the majority of CxO positions
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I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago: Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the... The Free Press
The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack. The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be bla…
The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
> It just took 25 years to finally happen. "Quality inertia" is one thing which allows for giant amounts of damage to be done long before the wheels visibly come off, as deviance gets normalised (and even mandated in cases such as Boeing) and the company eats its reserve of quality and goodwill, it starts going off-track in small ways before it falls off a cliff. It took closer to 20 years than 25 for the wheels to c…
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Because, depressingly, the stock market is correct. Boeing is one of two manufacturers for planes of this size. The other is totally backlogged with orders. The stock market has assessed, correctly, that Boeing can withstand this loss of knowledge and keep generating profit. Does it result in shit equipment that literally kills people? Sure. But how many people are going to stop flying because of it? Not many. Throw…
I think that many of the managers honestly didn’t understand where the quality and safety came from. They probably thought that they could just coast and the quality would continue. As a counterpoint, I work at very large financial firm in technology and in general, the 20+ year veterans who’ve been here forever are terrible . They are hidebound in their actions, years behind in industry best practices and they maint…
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This is true, they also cut costs by 'finding' less defects in QA, deferring them to production deployment several quarters out.
This is the irony of good QA. 1) Company starts to notice a lot of quality problems. 2) Company institutes a good QA program. 3) Company notices less quality problems. 4) Company cuts QA program because there seems to be less need for it. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. (The same can be said for safety when dealing with low probability events).