71–80 of 84 posts
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Nah bleed air is a pretty major system. 787 was a ground up design, so benefitted from lots of new tech. 737 max was something that they hoped wouldnt need a recert. So no this wasn’t the victim of a rescope.
But it was the victim of MBAs eating the world, since the 737-of-theseus concept wouldn't exist and we'd be flying in newer design planes.
This is a issue that may also affect Airbus aircraft, but so far, it has only caused problems on two Boeing planes. Like MCAS, it was not disclosed to pilots, prompting the FAA to recommend design changes and notify flight crews. https://simpleflying.com/boeing-cfm-international-update-737...
Boeing has gone off the rails, but the general lack of nuance in the common narrative about their failures is really over the top.
MCAS is how a fundamentally different plane behaves (in most cases) like a normal 737. The fact that such a system exists is described, and disclosed, in minute detail to pilots when they get their mandatory training on the 737-MAX.
The specific name wasn’t used in the training, and that’s where this ridiculous narrative came from.
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It doesn’t save the engine, it keeps it from ripping the wing off. It’s a good system. The part about filling the cabin with smoke because they couldn’t be bothered to make the software that detects the extreme vibration tell the AC units from that engine to shut down (which they already do if the rpm drops, indicating an engine failure-just not soon enough or reliable enough to prevent the smoke issue) - not so much…
If engine detects malfunction -> close its breathing air pathway to humans. How difficult is that?
Actually, I think this was less about cost and more about systemic creep of operational differentiation from earlier versions of the 737. A big selling point for the MBAs was that this was a 737 and pilot recertification was not necessary. So the MCAS system and its deadly potential was hidden from the pilot manual, as was the new failure mode introduced by this system. Acknowledgement that these systems required additional or different contingencies or checklists, or intruding an automatic shutdown of a pressurization would require recertification in type, or potentially even recertification of the aircraft if the changes were significant enough.
Significantly, for MCAS, the reason that the stability of the aircraft had to be patched in software, leading to hundreds of deaths, was that changing the empennage to reestablish aerodynamic stability might have been a big enough change to require recertification of the airframe. That would have been expensive, but it would have also opened the door to fixing all of these other issues that resulted from trying to pretend that the aircraft was not significantly different from earlier versions.
Its bean counters all the way down, and dead passengers is the price of that.
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Or... Alternatively... This YouTube video is incentivised to sensationalise as well. It is on YouTube after all, and there is an algorithm to please.
I haven't watched this channel recently, but from what I saw I the past he seems to have a bias of reassuring the public that air travel is safe and problems are uncommon and usually not as bad as they might seem to the uninitiated. E.g. airline mechanics on the wing applying "duct tape" is normal, not shoddy maintenance.
This is a issue that may also affect Airbus aircraft, but so far, it has only caused problems on two Boeing planes. Like MCAS, it was not disclosed to pilots, prompting the FAA to recommend design changes and notify flight crews. https://simpleflying.com/boeing-cfm-international-update-737...
Of course MCAS was disclosed to pilots, the idea that it wasn’t is ridiculous to the point of absurdity. Boeing has gone off the rails, but the general lack of nuance in the common narrative about their failures is really over the top. MCAS is how a fundamentally different plane behaves (in most cases) like a normal 737. The fact that such a system exists is described, and disclosed, in minute detail to pilots when t…
MCAS uses the same hardware but has different scenarios in which it activates and has a different effect. Not knowing of the existence of MCAS and not having a viable procedure to deactivate it if it went haywire was critical to the two accidents. I've looked into this a lot and to my knowledge this was never disclosed to pilots.
Can you provide a reference to MCAS being disclosed prior to the two accidents?
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Based on what legal reasoning…? I haven’t heard of any similar successful court cases in recent years in the US.
Based on aviation law they can notify the certification authority of a mandatory fix which will be then required to be applied for users to aircraft operators to apply. If necessary with 0 deadline, i.e. "if the plane is on the ground it's not flying till the following change is applied"
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If engine detects malfunction -> close its breathing air pathway to humans. How difficult is that?
That’s gonna cost tree fiddy. Actually, I think this was less about cost and more about systemic creep of operational differentiation from earlier versions of the 737. A big selling point for the MBAs was that this was a 737 and pilot recertification was not necessary. So the MCAS system and its deadly potential was hidden from the pilot manual, as was the new failure mode introduced by this system. Acknowledgement t…
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> Well, the configuration changes during takeoff mitigate the issue if it happens during takeoff. If it happens at any other time then they don’t do anything to help. There are no birds at higher altitudes
Fewer perhaps, but not none. :)
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Based on aviation law they can notify the certification authority of a mandatory fix which will be then required to be applied for users to aircraft operators to apply. If necessary with 0 deadline, i.e. "if the plane is on the ground it's not flying till the following change is applied"
Can you cite which parts of “aviation law” could have a decent chance of leading to the aformentioned outcome?
For USA [4], Title 14 of Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter I Subchapter C, Part 39
For EU [5] Article 76 (6) of the Basic Regulation (EU) 2018/1139
[1] https://www.icao.int/publications/pages/doc7300.aspx [2] https://ffac.ch/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ICAO-Annex-8-Airw... [3] https://ffac.ch/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ICAO-Annex-6-Oper... [4] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-C... [5] https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/document-library/regulations#b...