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Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

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Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#91

Post by WooShoa »

This may be cynical, but I suspect this issue will be drawn out way longer, because Airbus (including maybe the nascent Chinese airline industry) will ... logically ... take any and all advantage of this self-inflicted flesh wound to keep Boeing on the ropes by at least shining the brightest of bright lights on any and all flaws they can find.

This will, as the article implies, come in combination with the justified and rightful concern that Boeing is and will continue and increasingly get more desperate and frantic to "fix" things (literally and, likely increasingly figuratively), as far greater testing and auditing requirements are placed on recertification.

I don't know about everyone else here, but I sure as heck am going to be quite careful not to fly on any MAX for quite some time if they are even ever re-certified again. The replacement for the 737, which the MAX was supposed to delay, was not scheduled to reach market until the 2030 timeframe (which could mean 2030 or 2039). I think it is anyone's guess whether Boeing has the resources to drastically accelerate that timeframe or the MAX village fire is draining all resources and it may delay that 2030 timeframe.

Please convince me otherwise, but I could see this MAX issue essentially crushing Boeing as it eats away at many different aspects of the enterprise over time. How long can you keep the concerns at bay and run on inertia? I think there may be hell to pay next year if this isn't really an "easy" issue that just takes some time and Boeing can scathe by. Maybe someone with deeper insight into Boeing's operations can substantiate why I am totally off base or … hopefully not … validate that my concerns are not unfounded.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#92

Post by DuskStar »

Merrill wrote: post #81
dk- wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not likely the NG didn't add new systems. not saying other cost-cutting won't be exposed but nothing as egregious as MCAS. the MAX added new engines, which required forward placement on the wings, which changed COG, which necessitated MCAS.

They changed flight control computers from Honeywell to Collins when going from the 737 to the 737 NG. Seems like a new system.

Right, but the recent change was from the 737 NG to the 737 MAX.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#94

Post by DuskStar »

0xffff2 wrote: post #88
imglorp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big "disagree" alarm for the pilots and let them decide to keep either computer or go direct. Airbus has the concept of flight control laws, surfaced and changeable by the wet backups. http://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_fltlaws.htm

>go direct That's not really a thing in modern airliners. The computer is still heavily involved even when hand-flying the plane.

"Thankfully", the 737 series isn't a modern airliner, and isn't fly-by-wire. All control inputs are directly linked to the relevant outputs, though sometimes with power assistance.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#95

Post by overcast »

dhimes wrote: post #28
joobus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing makes up 8.8% of the Dow right now, the largest component. There is a lot of pressure from the finance community and the government to get this recertified to keep the stock market from going down.

Tough shit. Index funds may take a hit, but better a market crash than and airline crash.

Let them take a hit, that's the best time to buy more.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#96

Post by msbarnett »

vesinisa wrote: post #90
jackhack wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Software does not need to be this complicated. >>Design a damned airframe that's airworthy without needing stabilization hacks. In effect you are stating that you understand better than the hundreds of engineers involved with this project why these design trade-offs were made. Careful with that line of thinking. You're nearly guaranteed to be wrong. There are a host of reasons for the design in place: Efficiency, e…

The reason for the MCAS hack was not any engineering wisdom but simply allowing them to build a completely different plane that they could claim was in fact the very same plane, and then sell it to airlines as such. While the aircraft manufacturing industry was decades ago heavily safety-focused, this oversight was possible because the FAA has resigned its regulatory powers to the industry's own "self-regulation". Wh…

> The reason for the MCAS hack was not any engineering wisdom but simply allowing them to build a completely different plane that they could claim was in fact the very same plane, and then sell it to airlines as such

The idea that MCAS is some kind of 737 emulator intended to keep the plane under the 737’s certification, and that without MCAS it would have needed more thorough training, is a persistent myth on HN.

The reality is that MCAS exists because without it the 737 MAX’s aerodynamics are uncertifiable no matter how much training pilots were given.

During testing the MAX was discovered to have an inverted force curve on the stick approaching a stall — as the aircraft approaches stall angle, forces flip around and it becomes easier to pull the stick back (into the stall) than push it forward (out of the stall angle).

This violates a fundamental airworthiness requirement — commercial aircraft cannot be certified as airworthy if the stick forces invert.

MCAS “solves” this by commanding the stabilizers down when it thinks the airplane approaches stall — effectively using the stabilizer to put the forces on the stick that are “missing” due to the MAX’s aerodynamics, ensuring the force curve never inverts. MCAS isn’t really allowing the plane to pretend to be anything other than “a plane that doesn’t want to stall mid-air”.

Desire to keep the MAX requiring minimal training for 737 pilots (probably) drove the concealment of MCAS mentions from the manual, but MCAS would need to exist even if the airframe had been totally recertified from the ground up.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#97

Post by lisper »

This article is incoherent:

> “It’s really complicated,” John Hansman, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is not involved in the repair, said of revising aircraft software. “It totally makes sense why it’s taking longer.”

But then...

> While the fix became more complex and politically charged after the second accident -- the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet on March 10 -- the changes to MCAS remained self-contained and relatively simple. “I could have a bunch of graduate students and rewrite MCAS in a couple of days and be done,” Hansman said.

So is it "really complicated" or "relatively simple" to the point where "a bunch of graduate students [could] rewrite MCAS in a couple of days and be done"? It can't be both.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#98

Post by drawkbox »

zaroth wrote: post #12

The can of worms has been officially opened, and this may turn out to be a case study in how bad software and outsourcing your centers of excellence can bankrupt a company. If TFA is to believed, Boeing has embarked on a project to take what is currently a master-slave failover design and jury-rig it into a master-master real-time system. This is based on bad performance in the simulator—not because of MCAS—but while…

Classic case of hitting the date but crunched out with technical debt and buggy software, a tell that management/finance/marketing is driving the decision over the engineer/designer/product people.

People forget a project was late if it succeeds, they never forget a project on time that failed because it was rushed, buggy and not polished production.

MBA/business and marketing need to go back to letting the product people and engineers create value, then they can extract the value and sell it. It is much easier to sell value of a good product, it basically sells itself. For some reason American business has completely forgotten the rule this millennia, product then marketing and selling.

You see this same thing happen at game companies when they put a date out there and it is driven by management and marketing over reality of engineering/product/design that makes a fun and solid game.

Boeing was greatly diminished in engineering/product excellence by the McDonnell Douglas management control takeover, everything newly produced since has the tell of this.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#99

Post by SQueeeeeL »

dboreham wrote: post #66
chkaloon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, or this article missed the boat somehow. I find it hard to believe that a total redesign is happening and that they expect to be done by the end of the year. Either this article is wrong, or something is terribly wrong at Boeing.

I'm a huge MAX skeptic, but this article just has to be wrong. Someone who had dropped out of a CS degree would know not to do what the article says they're doing.

You would be surprised, if managament is broken to it's core, the situation is "Do this unethical thing or we'll find someone who will!"

Computer Scientists aren't usually taught engineering ethics and definitely get fired all the time for arbitrary reasons.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#100

Post by jeanvalmarc »

lisper wrote: post #97

This article is incoherent: > “It’s really complicated,” John Hansman, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is not involved in the repair, said of revising aircraft software. “It totally makes sense why it’s taking longer.” But then... > While the fix became more complex and politically charged after the second accident -- the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet on…

They're talking about two different changes:

"bunch of grad students"="patch MCAS to not auto-crash"

"really complicated"="redesign entire compute architecture to be multi-master and failure tolerant"

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