More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback • Hacker News Board

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#331

Post by kelnos » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:42 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #108

randmeerkat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk is an interesting standards bearer for sanity. Think what you will about Musk, but SpaceX has completely revolutionized space travel and will be in the history books a hundred years from now.

And dozens of his projects have utterly failed. Remember The Boring Company? Hyperloop? The-site-formerlly-and-forever-known-as-Twitter-until-Musk-ruined-it? Throw an unlimited supply of darts and you're going to get a few bulleyes. Doesn't make you the worlds greatest dart's player.

I'm no fan of Musk, but it's hard to argue that SpaceX hasn't been revolutionary, to the point where I question if there's anyone else who could have pulled that off. Moving focus to The Boring Company or Hyperloop feels a little like whataboutism. No one succeeds at everything they do. Musk is in the unique (and lucky, for him) position that he can throw a lot of darts and lose a lot of money, but keep on going even if many of his bets don't work out.

And I don't think the usual "throw shit at the wall until something sticks" thing applies to Musk. Certainly he's had some things that slid to the floor, but he hardly has an "unlimited" supply of darts. And even if his finances were infinite, he still only has 24 hours in a day, and can only focus on a certain number of things. By and large, the things with a lot of his focus do seem to be doing pretty well.

Twitter is clearly a huge blind spot for Musk; while I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand, it does seem like an outlier. Regardless, it's still running, somehow, when I expected it to have been shut down by the middle of last year. While I know people who have stopped using it, I know more people who still use it and get value out of it, regardless of the negatives since Musk bought it.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#332

Post by Simon_ORourke » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:43 PM UTC

nimish wrote: post #233

mayneack wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, in "Flying Blind", the book written about the first round of 737 max issues, the author has a pretty negative outlook on Calhoun as being mostly aligned with Muilenburg. > Robison, however, finds little reason for optimism. While Boeing has now accepted responsibility for one of the crashes as part of a settlement, no one at the company besides Forkner has been charged with a crime. Muilenburg wa…

> Jack Welch protégé At this point pre-emptively firing any Jack Welch associated executive would probably be a good idea

Why stop there - the man was such poison, that such top-down layoff should include any private chefs, baristas or garbage guys that dealt with him.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#333

Post by ken47 » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:45 PM UTC

strangattractor wrote: post #246

BoxFour wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like this guy? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg

More like this guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk Someone with an engineering background and a pinch of Vlad the Impaler;)

This kind of CEO is more likely to make Boeing's safety even worse.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#334

Post by krisoft » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:48 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #296

mayneack wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, in "Flying Blind", the book written about the first round of 737 max issues, the author has a pretty negative outlook on Calhoun as being mostly aligned with Muilenburg. > Robison, however, finds little reason for optimism. While Boeing has now accepted responsibility for one of the crashes as part of a settlement, no one at the company besides Forkner has been charged with a crime. Muilenburg wa…

Can ELI5 why do investors (owners of the company) accept CEO's pay packages that involve golden parachutes? It doesn't make sense to me (I mean, it might in case of offensive takeovers, but who's gonna take over Boeing?!)

> why do investors (owners of the company) accept CEO's pay packages that involve golden parachutes

My understanding is that this is seen as a cost of acquiring the right expertise. “Pay peanuts, get monkeys” kinda thing. They want the best of the best, and according to their perception these people can do a number of things with their time. Why would they work on this thing instead of their own thing, or a number of other people’s things? By choosing to work with you they close other doors in their life, so you need to both sweeten the deal and make the risk of things not working out between you reasonably low. Not so low that the expert is not incentivised to work hard for you, but low enough that you can convince someone to risk it getting in business with you.

In short they agree to it because if they don’t they can’t get the right caliber of person through the door.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#335

Post by phatfish » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:49 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #296

mayneack wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, in "Flying Blind", the book written about the first round of 737 max issues, the author has a pretty negative outlook on Calhoun as being mostly aligned with Muilenburg. > Robison, however, finds little reason for optimism. While Boeing has now accepted responsibility for one of the crashes as part of a settlement, no one at the company besides Forkner has been charged with a crime. Muilenburg wa…

Can ELI5 why do investors (owners of the company) accept CEO's pay packages that involve golden parachutes? It doesn't make sense to me (I mean, it might in case of offensive takeovers, but who's gonna take over Boeing?!)

You don't screw over your peers. Those that control the big investment funds or have a private fortune probably liked having a golden parachute themselves at some point.

Same as when normal people quit a job they don't like it's better to go quietly and be glad you are out rather than burn bridges.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#336

Post by abtinf » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:50 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #241

abtinf wrote: post #105

I happen to have quite a bit of first-hand knowledge about aerospace rivets. AMA.

Is this as much of a non issue as I think it is? I'm thinking non structural bits of aluminum fuselage having a few extra holes is embarrassing but probably easily fixed/painted over and not that critical. Not generally a reason to get all upset and replace the part. But kind of embarrassing to have on a new part (i.e. get a discount). I've been watching a lot of rebuild rescue on Youtube lately where a bunch of mech…

It depends on how pervasive the issue is. Is it just two slightly nonconforming holes, or is it random sampling that suggests many nonconformances?

It is not really feasible to test an installed rivet without destructive testing, because usually we are talking about blind rivets, which are remarkably complex fasteners. Think of them more like "small, ultra-precise one-time use machines", not "nails". This is part of the reason aircraft have so many rivets: each rivet is often capable of supporting a substantial fraction of the load where it is installed (sometimes even the entire load), but we install a huge number of them.

The fact that this defect was caught during what seems like normal inspection processes also moves it closed to being a "non-issue". Manufacturing defects happen all the time and liability is massive, so there are extensive inspection and quality regimes in place.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#337

Post by pests » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:58 PM UTC

craig_s_bell wrote: post #198

stouset wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is irrational. Since November 2001, there has been one death aboard a major airline operating in the U.S.[1]. That was a Southwest flight where an entire engine self-destructed. It was an issue with the CFM engine, Not with anything Boeing did. You might choose to include one more. An Asiana flight tumbled end over end after arriving short at SFO. Everyone survived the crash, but a passenger was killed when an eme…

There were a total of three fatalities resulting from Asiana 214. Two passengers died onboard, as a direct consequence of the crash. As for the third, it was later speculated that they could possibly have already died before encountering airport fire and rescue vehicles. This is still controversial; it is also possible that the original sequence of events was correct. The primary cause of the crash was a profound lac…

Thanks, I came back to point this out.

Why link to a source that says directly opposite of what is being claimed? It doesn't make sense to me.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#338

Post by kelnos » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:58 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #148

PaulHoule wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just about safety, it's about the flying experience and environmental responsibility. If you think "flying sucks" it's probably because you've flown in a 737 and similar (A320) aircraft. Many people find it highly stressful to fly in a 737-class airplane because the curve of the fuselage is circular. My neck starts to lock up just thinking about it, but you don't have the same problem riding in a car, bus, o…

> domestic flyers in the U.S. deserve something better than a 1967 design. Or maybe the market has spoken. Similar to how people complain about lack of legroom but proceed to book with airlines that have less legroom because it's cheaper, they're happy to fly on 1967 design planes to save a buck.

The market has spoken only in the sense that air travel used to be prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of people, and now it isn't.

For many trips, there are no reasonable alternatives to air travel. If you live in New York and really want to treat your kids to a trip to Disney World in Florida, you can drive, and can take a train/bus, but you'll be burning a significant amount of your precious time off work on travel.

The interesting thing is that I don't believe air travel is all that much cheaper now than it was in, say, 2010, when things were quite a bit more comfortable. Maybe not as comfortable as pre-deregulation, but certainly better than today, with more comfortable seats and more leg room.

Has it become much more costly to run an airline over the past decade? Maybe? I don't know. But if not, this doesn't seem to be "the market", at least not in the way a healthy market, with ample competition, would behave.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#339

Post by rpmisms » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:59 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #314

rpmisms wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think describing Elon as a small-e engineer (not designing powertrains, but at least understanding them) is accurate, and saying that an an engineering-first mindset is important for companies like Boeing and SpaceX would ring true. Engineering background is different than engineering mindset.

What do you mean by the engineering mindset? To me, it is the way of looking at the world that attempts to transform intractable real-world problems into tractable ones by translating them into the battle-tested model(s) of your field. For example, the RLC model of circuits is certainly not able to express all of EM physics but it sure is easy to solve problems in (although, I only did the degree, maybe working engin…

Good point, I should define my terms better. I mean holding the product and how it's built above MBA stuff, which is the part I admire about Musk companies. If they want to cut costs, they typically find a new technique or new process to build a part, instead of reaching for typical MBA levers like new suppliers or outsourcing.

Your point about transforming intractability is cogent and I think we agree. To your last point about polymath tactics, you're right to a degree, but you can also watch Everyday Astronaut's SpaceX factory tour and realize that it's far more than a basic understanding, which is probably a big part of SpaceX's wild success.

Re: More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback

#340

Post by kelnos » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 10:02 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #291

PaulHoule wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just about safety, it's about the flying experience and environmental responsibility. If you think "flying sucks" it's probably because you've flown in a 737 and similar (A320) aircraft. Many people find it highly stressful to fly in a 737-class airplane because the curve of the fuselage is circular. My neck starts to lock up just thinking about it, but you don't have the same problem riding in a car, bus, o…

> domestic flyers in the U.S. deserve something better than a 1967 design. And Boeing was working on a replacement for the entire 737-757 line, a brand new airplane using many of the same concepts as the 787 "Dreamliner" but it took a long time and in 2011 Southwest blackmailed them if they need to retrain their pilots then they might as well buy Airbus. Sources. First for the replacement airplane. https://www.dallas…

Obviously 2011 Boeing couldn't see into the future, but I do wonder if standing firm against Southwest -- even if they went and bought Airbus -- would still have been better for the company in the long run.

Wikipedia says Southwest has the fourth-largest fleet in the world (today, dunno about in 2011); while that's a lot, that's still only 800-some planes; did Boeing really let an airline with a 7%-or-so share of their business hold them over the barrel? I guess that's not entirely unreasonable, but... it's not great.

And if you look at the breakdown, more than 70% of Southwest's fleet still consists of 737-700 and -800. Boeing in 2011 was "taking too long" with their next-gen plane, and yet, 13 years later, Southwest is still largely on the previous generation. Maybe their blackmail was more a bluff. Hell, maybe at this point they regret their blackmail; it possibly would have been better for them to just wait for a new plane, or not bother and just go with Airbus.

But really, the problem didn't start in 2011. They'd already rode on the coattails of the 737/737NG design for too long. They should have started on a new narrowbody design even earlier. Sure, hindsight, and all that.