Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report • Hacker News Board

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#321

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

neuronic wrote: post #281

ncmncm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, the Air France Airbus dive into the ocean was caused by an equally stupid design decision that should never have shipped. Pilot and copilot were applying opposite force on the joystick, and instead of a siren going off, it just averaged them. Have they even fixed that yet? It was in ever Airbus.

> it just averaged them As opposed to Boeing's "lets pick one and hope to dear God that it's the correct one"? How would you handle opposing input where any of the two pilots might give the incorrect input?

[deleted]

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#322

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #241

ncmncm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, the Air France Airbus dive into the ocean was caused by an equally stupid design decision that should never have shipped. Pilot and copilot were applying opposite force on the joystick, and instead of a siren going off, it just averaged them. Have they even fixed that yet? It was in ever Airbus.

The difference being that Airbus pilots are trained and aware of this behaviour. If it's inherently dangerous why aren't they falling out of the sky?

They are trained and aware, but in high stress situations pilots sometimes forget things like that, which was significant in the air france crash. The pilot who had better control of the situation only momentarily pressed the button used to take full control, when you are supposed to hold it as long as you wish to keep control. I believe the "dual input" warning was also not aggressive enough at the time

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#323

Post by tmd83 » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #295

tmd83 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the world was fair they should all (decision makers at Boeing and FAA both) be packed by the lot and send to stand trial in Ethiopia and Indonesia for 300+ murder, which is what I consider this to be. If you don't have food in your belly and you steal you get jailed. You are not satisfied with your million dollar salary and your billion dollar company profit and don't care if people get killed, you get to have PR…

>If the world was fair they should all (decision makers at Boeing and FAA both) be packed by the lot and send to stand trial in Ethiopia and Indonesia for 300+ murder And they're totally going go get a fair trial and not some sort of kangaroo court to appease the locals?

I actually thought about that a little also but if I have to find a fairer choice between Boeing most likely to get away with a slap in US because big corps almost always do (too big to fail) vs. them getting taken down by a kangeroo court in those two countries it's not hard not to pick a potential kangeroo court.

But I do get your point.

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#324

Post by Chris_Chambers » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

bitreality wrote: post #154

ndespres wrote: post #55

I know better than to read between the lines on a press release like this, but can't help but notice that it falls far short of accepting responsibility for the problem. He admits that MCAS "activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information" but doesn't admit that this alone directly resulted in the crashes. Rather, he implies that this sets off a chain of events which the pilots are unable to deal with…

With the way litigation works, corporations will never admit blame for anything, since it greatly increases their legal risk. It's unfortunate, but their responsibilities lie with their shareholders, not the people who lost their lives on their planes.

Why is ncmncm’s interesting response to this flagged? HN is officially pozzed.

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#325

Post by tmd83 » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

cal5k wrote: post #282

tmd83 wrote: post #135

Corporate irresponsibility and getting away with it is something I have mostly gotten used to at this point. But this particular incident is still really getting to me specially after the press release. I was just trying to read up a little about sings of sociopath. It seems to me that a big chunk of major corporate big brash could be considered extreme versions of sociopath.

What exactly does “getting away with it” mean in this context? Boeing will get sued from many different directions, their share price will suffer, and likely they’ll have lost orders for their aircraft. Let’s say we wanted to get really punitive... who do we blame? The engineers that worked on it? The Boeing CEO for not personally verifying every piece of software on all of their aircraft? Do we throw someone in jail…

Assuming what's revealed so far is reasonably accurate and the decisions were not taken for some yet to be revealed completely unexpected reason (unlikely) here's who to blame.

This was a business decision to remove re-certification/re-training for some 60B sales. So yes the CEO is responsible. If you can float on money for the success you can spend the lifetime in jail for the deaths too.

But that might be a little extreme. So here's a better one for after Lion Air crash there is no reason to believe that Boeing including the CEO didn't go over this, didn't realize they made a risky plan and even then they didn't go through with their temporary mitigation with a fine tooth comb. So yes it seems the CEO and some big shots and maybe some down the line should go to jail.

No one is sent to jail for complicated to reason or never before seen problem that they didn't know about or didn't think about and it happened. This wasn't an accident, they implemented absolutely critical safety feature by design without triple redundancy as well understood to be required then they lied about it (if I understood the max change from earlier to later version), tried to downplay it and when a crash happened due to this didn't own up to it. So for sure this helps safely culture. If you hide safety problem knowingly for greed/money, because your boss asked and you didn't care you shouldn't be working in safety critical system.

> Boeing & Airbus are largely responsible for the massive improvements in flight safety over the last 40 years. It’s incredible that flying is as safe as it. Yes the deaths are a tragedy, but every time I get in a plane I accept the fact that the physics of flying could ultimately kill me, and I trade that off against the convenience of getting somewhere quickly.

I don't even know what to say to this. So I drove safely for 40 years and today I decided to see if I can safely drunk drive if I play the music really loud and killed a family of four.

This was not physics, this was not a complicated software bug (at the core) but it was cutting corners for profit.

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#326

Post by bitreality » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #311

bilbo0s wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may get angry about this fact, but it really is the simple reality of an executive's fiduciary obligations. Ideally you run the enterprise in a manner that keeps the discharge of fiduciary duties within your personal moral constraints, but if you're not careful enough, you end up in this guy's shoes. And that's why they pay him the big bucks, because of such risks. That said, it's also true that Boeing is in a…

>People may get angry about this fact, but it really is the simple reality of an executive's fiduciary obligations. With all due respect, that's Bullshit, and anyone who cares to look into the provenance of the modern concept of a corporation can see that. A corporation is a mechanism by which people pool resources and distribute risk such that endeavors unachievable by any individual of that collective group. This p…

Your point is well received, and one would expect society to function that way, but it does not. People won't knock any house of cards to the ground unless they are starving. It's impossible to achieve anything of significance as individuals. And no organization fighting against the status quo could acquire enough resources to make a dent.

Corporations and government have hands in each others' pockets. They are protected by court systems designed in their favor, weapons which could wipe out populations in an instant, and complete control of the technology we all use to communicate.

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#327

Post by ddalex » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

drstewart wrote: post #28

Stryder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives. Realistically and pragmatically speaking, you only ever get to have just one single shot at establishing and maintaining that kind of life/death level of trust. Fuck it up, and you're gone- quite literally, mind you. This is some Challenger O-ring type of shitshow. Accidents are on…

>The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives. That's just unrealistic. Unless you want plane and car rides to cost as much as a trip to space, after all, since everything would need to be engineered to that level of quality.

Or you could fly Airbus.

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#328

Post by thefurman » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

"From the days immediately following the Lion Air accident, we've had teams of our top engineers and technical experts working tirelessly..."

If they've been working tirelessly, then they should have understood the risks and grounded the fleet.

Either they understood the risks, but neglected to ground the fleet, or they didn't understand the risks and hence we can't trust the fix.

I also find it sort of nauseating that the CEO implicitly gets the message through that the fix already has been worked on for a long time, has thus matured, can now be fully trusted, and we are just weeks away from flying with a safe plane.

I don't buy any of it. Let's analyse this critically.

The MCAS still needs to augment the flight characteristics. There is nothing that can be fundamentally changed regarding this fact. We can only change the conditions under which MCAS activates and the conditions under which it is deactivated.

It still has to have the same authority for a nose-down and recovering from an erroneous high-magnitude nose-down will still be mechanically hard or require additional pilot knowledge and actions. The latter should be impossible without recertification.

The operational characteristics of the airplane are not matched with the operational controls offered to the pilots, by design constraint. The plane is thus unsafe and will forever be unsafe, without redesign and recertification, because with the constraints in place, they can only add additional information on displays, add more reliability by having the MCAS utilise input from more sensors, add more conditions under which the the MCAS deactivates, etc, but none of this attacks the fundamental impedance mismatch between characteristics and controls, as well as the lack of education for it. Deactivation also simply exchanges the risk of stalls for nose downs.

All-in-all, the MAX is simply an airplane with a worse flight envelope as far as safety is concerned, and nothing can be done about it.

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#329

Post by ddalex » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #319

cjbprime wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind that they're at low altitude and the pilot is busy supplying maximum pull on the yoke, and therefore likely unavailable to help crank a stiff trim wheel.

>Bear in mind that they're at low altitude They weren't >the pilot is busy supplying maximum pull on the yoke, Probably not true either >and therefore likely unavailable to help crank a stiff trim wheel Runaway trim should be a recoverable situation. If that's impossible then that means there is a distinct and major issue beyond MCAS.

I wouldn't feed the troll, but I don't want your misinformation to spread.

> They weren't

They just took off, max height of the airplane was 1000 feet above the ground. That's a definely low altitude.

> Runaway trim should be a recoverable situation.

The trim pointed the nose down. The aerodynamic forces were so high on the elevator that the trim wheels could not be moved by a single person. This was confirmed in 737 simulator.

Re: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report

#330

Post by woofcat » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #298

woofcat wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, however BA is part of the S&P500. I would wager almost every American who has retirement savings owns a chunk of BA. As well as most people in the Western world. As much as we would love to having Boeing stock plummet, it will impact most people even if they're not aware that they own it.

Does not the majority have index fonds, which mean that a drop for BA is rather minor overall and stock money released from people selling BA stocks will then be invested in other companies on the market?

You are correct they have index funds, and the people selling off BA stock _may_ be investing in one of the other 499 S&P listed companies, or they may not be.