71–80 of 365 posts
What would financially happen to an airplane company with a fleet of dozens of Max 8s?
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The speculation I've seen is around a change to the autopilot system which pilots ave been struggling with: > Following the Lion Air crash, US aviation authorities issued an emergency directive to carriers to update flight manuals with information on what to do when the aircraft’s anti-stall system is triggered by erroneous data from what’s called an “angle-of-attack” sensor. The flight system can react to that data…
Traditionally the fly-by-wire systems have at least 3 AoA sensors, which each "vote" on the output value. That way, if you have one faulty sensor, it gets outvoted. The MCAS system in the new 737-MAX's only have 2 AoA sensors, which means a single faulty sensor can cause bad things to happen.
That way, if you have one faulty sensor, it gets outvoted.
That would make sense, but unfortunately it's not the way they're actually implemented. Several incidents with Airbus aircraft were due to one AoA sensor's faulty input being allowed to trigger uncommanded pitch down events, instead of the one faulty sensor being outvoted by the other two.
I agree having only two sensors is even worse.
Does anyone know if there is a material difference between the MAX-8 and the MAX-9? All the banning seems to be specifically for the MAX-8, but should they consider banning all MAX series aircraft? I realize the crashes themselves were MAX-8, but the difference between them seems not significant?
From what I could gather all Boeing 737 MAX have been banned by UK, France and Germany. This is not limited to just the MAX-8.
From the CAA: https://www.caa.co.uk/News/Boeing-737-MAX-Aircraft/
Does anyone actually know or suspect what's wrong with these planes? Hardware issue? Software issue?
The engines are larger than previous models and had to be moved forward, which causes it to (potentially) stall, so they implemented an anti-stalling mechanism called MCAS which relies on a particular sensor, which can malfunction potentially. They also didn't inform pilots that this system even existed which means they have trouble diagnosing the problem and will potentially only make it worse by trying other things…
If something else made the engine(s) catch fire and become inoperative, and the MCAS system enabled correctly due to low airspeed/stall conditions, but was fought by the panicked pilot(s) resulting in an unrecoverable stall, it's an entirely different story.
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Indeed. Norwegian is doing this because the optics now force them to do so, not self-assessment of the risk. They, and the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority, failed in that regard.
Do you have a reference to confirm that this was a knee-jerk/optics reaction, out of interest? (definitely curious to see how airlines/authorities are reaching these decisions) The MCAS system and the way it was introduced sound a little like a patch, and slightly haphazard. While training & runbooks and procedures are important, take-off is a busy time, and the Max-8 is (afaik) intended to operate very-nearly-like a…
Considering that pretty much any criticism can be dismissed with "better safe than sorry, also everyone else was doing it, we had to consider the optics" it makes perfect sense to step in line and ground them like everyone else. Not doing so would just be stupid when there's near zero downside to the people making the call.
It's like highway traffic. Sure you can obey the letter of the law but when everyone else is doing something drastically different your exposure to risk is minimized if you just do what they do whether it's right or wrong.
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Problem is, if they've added so much automation that trained pilots cannot determination the proper course of action 100% of the time, the system is at fault. "You don't have to do anything, the plane will fly itself. Unless there's a catastrophic emergency. Then you better remember everything you haven't practiced from 18 months ago" seems like a failed implementation.
That's definitely a mischaracterization of what the airlines do. Anyone that has been in a cockpit of a plane knows that you fly by checklists. There's a checklist procedure for almost any scenario they will run into (of course not every). This exact issue was seen by other airlines and the pilots followed the checklist procedures to safely regain control of the plane as expected. In theory, these checklists are opti…
Does anyone actually know or suspect what's wrong with these planes? Hardware issue? Software issue?
Let me also enter the impopular Null Theory: Maybe there is nothing in particular wrong with these planes, and they were just hit with two random accidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370
2 Boeing 777-200ERs down within three months of each other (one was shot down by Russia and the other is speculation)
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Let me also enter the impopular Null Theory: Maybe there is nothing in particular wrong with these planes, and they were just hit with two random accidents.
. Maybe this turns out to be true but right now you can't make decisions based on that.
[1] To a reasonable extent, of course, nothing can ever be proven 100% safe.
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It looks like Norwegian is already asking its 737 Max flights to return to their departing airports, at least according to this recent screenshot I found on reddit [1] [1] https://i.redd.it/6gtecemacpl21.png
Yikes. How would ya like to be a passenger on one of those planes: "We're returning to our departure airport because this airplane has been grounded."
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Problem is, if they've added so much automation that trained pilots cannot determination the proper course of action 100% of the time, the system is at fault. "You don't have to do anything, the plane will fly itself. Unless there's a catastrophic emergency. Then you better remember everything you haven't practiced from 18 months ago" seems like a failed implementation.
That is literally how Tesla and some otber players started car automation. With the same predictable results. A human just cannot stand on standby in perpetum. Either the human must be in control or out of the loop.
When a typical civilian passenger plane throws everything up and yields control to its pilot, the pilot gets 10+ minutes to fix it, helped by a copilot, mountains of checklists and a direct audio line to air traffic control.
Nothing to do with the 5s you maybe get when your Tesla yields.