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Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

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Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#241

Post by poof131 »

yason wrote: post #222

The thing that worries me most is that, based on mere amateur observations in the media, the number of incidents involving user interfaces, repeated changes to procedures, and software fixes to "unexpected" corner-cases seems to have been in the increase. To the uninitiated, it seems that problems in airline incidents used to revolve around mechanical failures, bad wiring, sensor malfunctions, toasted electronics cau…

I think you are on the right track about one of the underlying problems. From another comment on a different thread.

> My company's error rates have increased on the "common fleet" by almost triple. [1]

The aircraft manufacturers and carriers want to get the most change with the least impact: updated jets with better gas mileage that don’t require pilots to retrain. It seems the FAA and other regulators have become too lenient in letting the manufacturers put significant changes into aircraft without requiring them to have different type ratings or at least add new training requirements.[2] Not communicating the MCAS changes seems to indicate a broken process at Boeing too.[3]

But you are also observing the Swiss cheese model of safety.[4] As the easier individual issues are fixed (mechanical) more difficult compound issues cause the accident, where multiple things (pilot training, bad communication, new system) all need to line up.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19376565

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19377220

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#242

Post by mcv »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #100
iforgotpassword wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this shit doesn't sound any better: 1565207 At cruise flight, our Wi-Fi stopped working. I then saw that I was unable to access the Pilot Mobile app. Since I do not routinely copy the flight plan to iBook or acrobat (we are not required to do this), I was unable to access the flight plan. I've lost Wi-Fi before but not had this problem. Maybe it's a 737max thing. My First Officer had a copy on iBook and airdropp…

Boggles the mind on several levels: 1. That airlines would use consumer tablets without hard-copy backup as matter of procedure. I remember Air Canada announcing it and how it would save so much weight for both pilots and the airplane, and thinking... I print my Google Maps as a backup for roadtrips, I sure as heck would do it on a flight! 2. Perhaps I'm misjudging, but the tone and perspective of pilot makes me worr…

I know nothing about piloting, but I would have expected a flight plan to be stored on the plane itself. Accessible directly on some screen in the cockpit or something. Why rely on consumer devices that require wifi?

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#243

Post by neop1x »

therealmarv wrote: post #4

US media. Why do I need always a VPN from Europe? Beeing GDPR compliant is not rocket science. "Unfortunately, our site is unavailable to European Union visitors... blablabla". UPDATE: And this news website even detects if I use incognito mode: "To continue reading, please disable private/incognito mode, log in, or enroll as a member" omg

block javascript ;)

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#244

Post by mcv »

fsloth wrote: post #208
selectodude wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably southwest pilots. If it’s not analog it’s too much for them.

The appeal of the 737 MAX for airlines was that it was intentionally made so that you could take crews with a 737 qualification and put them in. I.e the airlines could save money on training. The main design constraint on that bird was that it should pass most of the old paperwork so that Boeing nor airlines would need to go through expensive training and quification. Yet, they modified the plane quite a bit - but th…

> The appeal of the 737 MAX for airlines was that it was intentionally made so that you could take crews with a 737 qualification and put them in.

Really? Everything I heard so far sounds like the 737 MAX has a few new, unusual or counter intuitive features that require extra training, and that training material skimped on training for that.

> "just old 737 nothing new here hop in"

Am I correct in understanding that was a blatant lie?

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#245

Post by cerebellum42 »

lixtra wrote: post #192
cjbprime wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're quoting the phrase "seems likely". It's not a conclusion. It's my guess at what's most probable based on what we know today. (Also, I don't agree that we only know "wild speculation" about the Lion Air crash. The investigators have told us much about the proximate cause of the crash, even though their final investigation is not yet complete.)

Maybe it’s my English. What probability do you assign to “seems likely”? Above 50% (the way I read it)? Or does it mean it’s a possible outcome among many others, all with very low probability?

I would read it the same way, but personally I would want to attach an additional qualifier: It's likely that this is one of the causes.

There may or may not be something inherently problematic about the way the MCAS works, but more thorough training would likely have lowered the chance of these accidents happening - having the same type rating was one of the root causes for the lacking training

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#246

Post by tapland »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #233
43920 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another one: 1603376: B737 Captain reported the flight recorder light was inoperative, which led to the discovery that the flight data recorder was not installed. Can anyone anyone with more experience with this say whether this is normal for a new aircraft? I get that it's easy to forget parts of the assembly process, but how do you put an aircraft into service without verifying that all the parts (especially import…

That's got to be illegal, having no flight recorder? Wouldn't it fail preflight checklists? Depending on the country I'd have thought that's a "lose your license to operate" kinda deal??

The oss ur probably got caught in preflight. We don't know how much the plane was used before that though.

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#247

Post by dsfyu404ed »

blattimwind wrote: post #141
crooked-v wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to wonder at the fit-and-finish that would allow full-sized pieces of paper to fall inside an instrument console.

Maybe Boeing poached the guys responsible for Tesla's panel gaps, who knows?

Speaking of panel gaps.

The panel gaps shrink in warm weather.

In case anyone was wondering that was actually a thing with early plastic body panels. They eventually refined it to the point where the gaps don't change noticeably and now pretty much every car has some plastic body panels.

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#248

Post by mannykannot »

acqq wrote: post #212
mannykannot wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article's title, one might get the impression that pilots have been saying that MCAS is dangerous. What I was trying to do was distinguish between possible MCAS incidents and safety concerns, complaints about Boeing's nondisclosure of MCAS, and pitch-down incidents that had other causes (incidents of the last case seem to be related to the autopilot, rather than MCAS.) The latest crash certainly looks suspic…

> One would certainly hope that after this was revealed, all Max-8 pilots would be well prepared to recognize the situation and handle it Far from certain, becaus Boeing is selling and the companies indeed treat it as "the same plane like old" even if it obviously isn't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19374386

There certainly seems to be a regrettable attempt to diminish the differences between this model and its predecessors in that case. With regard to the MCAS specifically, once the cause of the Lion Air crash was determined, the FAA issued a new Airworthiness Directive [1], and I would be surprised if this information was not sent to all operators globally.

For obvious reasons, pilots tend to take a keen interest in matters of aviation safety, so I wonder if this was not simply a repeat of the Lion Air crash (which, as I said elsewhere, might be even worse news for Boeing.)

[1] https://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf...

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#249

Post by simiones »

crooked-v wrote: post #58
jrockway wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1593699 is amazing.

I have to wonder at the fit-and-finish that would allow full-sized pieces of paper to fall inside an instrument console.

This reminds me of a Romanian joke about the national car maker, going something like this:

Some reporter is wondering around the international car expo, discussing with various car makers. Mercedes tells him "our car is the most air-tight ever produced. It scored 24 on the cat test!" The reporter wonders - "cat test? what is that?" ""Oh, it's a novel test! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, and 24 hours later it drew its last breath".

Impressed, the reporter moves on to Ferrari. They tell him the same story - most airtight car ever made! He asks them knowingly - "How did the cat test go?" to which they proudly reply - "Oh, very well, very well! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, 12 hours later the poor thing was dead".

Next he wonders to the Renault-Dacia stand. They also tell him about the air-tightness of their car, again he asks how the cat test went. The Dacia representative beams: "Oh, wonderful! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, and wherever its head poked out, we quickly plastered over".

Re: Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

#250

Post by ethbro »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #238
lixtra wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems likely to be the root cause of these deaths. Given that investigation in both accidents is still ongoing and all we know is wild speculation your conclusion is premature even though it finally may turn out to be true.

Flip that around: would you expect that pilots flying a new aeroplane without any conversion training would be more likely to cause an accident. It's a damning indictment of Boeing, and whichever authorities let them get away with it, that they pushed through an aircraft with a different pilot UI/UX knowing that pilots would then be under trained when using it: like someone said we train baristas better. I've driven…

At least in this particular instance... how is it Boeing and aviation authority's faults that pilots are given an hour's notification they'll be flying a new model of plane?

That would seem to fall directly on the operator / carrier.

Boeing takes responsibility if the training manuals were not comprehensive. Aviation authorities take responsibility if they under-mandated training. But ultimately neither know a given carrier's scheduling and pilot allocation.

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