FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s • Hacker News Board

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#471

Post by I_Am_Nous » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:50 PM UTC

mertd wrote: post #252

laweijfmvo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I control my fate when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad conditions, etc.) but have little to no control once I board a plane.

I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the situation with defensive driving. There's very little you can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.

Especially since, most of the time, they weren't intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt) was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed instantly or when he hit the ditch.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#472

Post by philwelch » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:51 PM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #306

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been any push to break up Boeing?

Boeing was reasonably broken up until merged with McDonnell Douglas.

The consolidation in aerospace and defense was a much longer process than that. All of the companies with names like “McDonnell Douglas”, “Lockheed Martin”, or “Northrop Grumman” were formed by mergers. If you actually break apart Boeing’s merger history there were at least a half dozen WWII-era companies that slowly consolidated over half a century.

Part of this was because WWII subsidized an unsustainable and frankly absurd level of demand. For instance, Grumman almost exclusively built carrier-based fighters, and by the end of WWII they were producing planes so quickly that the Navy stopped doing periodic heavy maintenance of their aircraft in lieu of dumping them into the sea and replacing them with brand new planes. Obviously business for Grumman would never be quite that good ever again.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#473

Post by cptcobalt » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:52 PM UTC

mysecretaccount wrote: post #452

cptcobalt wrote: post #436

Back in 2019, I made a lil microsite covering the 737 MAX groundings. Didn't think I'd have to update it again. https://www.isthe737maxstillgrounded.com/ It's chilling that both Alaska knew of pressurization issues in prior flights in this aircraft, and Boeing was already trying to get the FAA to look past known safety issues in the 737 MAX 7 certification. "Safety is our top priority"? Ha, absolutely not.

FWIW my understanding is that only a subset (not sure how they determine which) of the 737 MAX 9s that are grounded.

Yeah, that's fair. The tone of the website is sort of like other single-serving websites like "is California on fire", which displays yes even if a small part of California is on fire. http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#474

Post by tavavex » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:52 PM UTC

tiahura wrote: post #158

hypothesis wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that this was the only door he forgot to lock? There is clearly a pattern here with Boeing QA, doors, bolts, etc

Based on n=1, I’m hesitant to speculate much and so I don’t have any opinion on whether there will be more. I always don’t see how scrapping the 9 makes sense even if he forgot to do all of them.

Low n is pretty unavoidable here, considering how few aircraft generally get made. Even for the world's leading manufacturers, deliveries are counted in units per month.

The point here is that the aviation industry is one of the most regulated and scrutinized industries in regards to safety, and yet despite all that, one manufacturer keeps making very dangerous slip-ups.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

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Post by vkou » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:52 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #416

camillomiller wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s always so funny to read this kind of answer when someone points out the evident flaws of capitalism! “Hey, wait a minute, this is not how capitalism is supposed to work, so you can’t say it’s capitalism”. Too bad that capitalism isn’t one monolithic thing and this is ABSOLUTELY how loosely regulated American capitalism works. It’s a form of capitalism where human life is an optimization problem that sits on the…

And Soviet built airliners are known for their safety?

Is there any kind of alternative that could be found, or have we reached the end of history, with our only two options being 2023 capitalism versus 1960s Soviet state capitalism?

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#476

Post by smcin » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:52 PM UTC

ponector wrote: post #444

nerdponx wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's also consider just how much worse this situation could have been. The door panel blew out next to the one seat that happened to be unoccupied, and it happened at 16,000 ft instead of 26,000 ft.

Not a big difference if everyone was with fastened seat belt. There is a real story of another 737 of Aloha Airlines flight 243 where part of the fuselage blown away together with unlucky flight attendant at 24000 feet: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-to-pieces-the-ne...

Aloha Airlines Flight 243 (Apr 28, 1988) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#477

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:53 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #323

Zigurd wrote: post #124

How even does a "plug" door blow out like that? That's a seemingly very robust design where cabin pressure holds the door in place passively, in addition to the latches holding it in place.

How does the cabin pressure hold it in place passively? Isn't the pressure on the inside higher than the pressure on the outside?

[deleted]

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#478

Post by I_Am_Nous » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:53 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #223

whycome wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cursory search: > Preliminary information about the accident remains scarce, though two people familiar with the aircraft tell The Air Current that the aircraft in question, N704AL, had presented spurious indications of pressurization issues during two instances on January 4. The first intermittent warning light appeared during taxi-in following a previous flight, which prompted the airline to remove the aircraft fro…

Well, that's an interesting thing. During taxi-in, the cabin altitude should be the ground altitude; outflow valves open at touchdown. Hard to understand how an an incipient failure could manifest then (e.g. from increased leakage). Of course, there's warning lights for excessive cabin pressure, etc, too... which would point to a different theory of the problem than a structural manufacturing problem.

Is "sensor just no longer responding" a failure mode which could trigger the alarm?

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#479

Post by philwelch » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:56 PM UTC

throwaheyy wrote: post #181

agubelu wrote: post #156

A bit off-topic, but I found it curious that Ryanair refuses to call their Max fleet "737 Max-8", instead they go for "737-8200" in both their safety cards and cabin briefings. I wonder if this is common and if other airlines do the same after the reputational damage from the crashes and groundings.

They call it that because their plane is in fact not a 737 Max 8. Ryanair’s aircraft is a different variant, made only for them, the Max 200 which is the same size as a Max 8 but has the extra exits for up to 200 pax.

This reminds me of the old mattress store scam, where each mattress store has its own slightly different SKU of basically the same mattress purely to make it harder for the customer to compare prices between stores.

Re: FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

#480

Post by Kwpolska » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 10:57 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #427

roody15 wrote: post #419

Interesting timeline. Following the two fatal crashes involving the MCAS system and the 737 Max … The FAA gave Boeing until Dec of 2022 to implement a fix. The fix was to reconfigure the 737 Max with 2 sensors (instead of one) and include an manual shutoff Guess what happened? Boeing didn’t fix anything.. instead they cried to congress that the fix is too expensive and they cannot get it done. So what happens is cong…

Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless it is to add more limitations based on past (bad) performance and then only to document the reason the law exists, never to provide exemptions.

Congress will be happy to replace “Boeing” with “American companies which manufacture all of commercial and military aircraft, satellites, and space vehicles and launchers”.