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Airlines beginning to ground Boeing 737-Max following Ethiopian Airline crash [UP: Trump orders grounding of fleet in the US]
- Thread starter OtherWorldly
- Start date
Southwest has had significant delays to its Hawaii rollout due to this
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-max-faa/index.html
Boeing relied on single sensor for 737 Max that had been flagged 216 times to FAA
Boeing relied on single sensor for 737 Max that had been flagged 216 times to FAA
It's crazy to me. People say putting profits over safety, but how much are we actually talking about here? Coding to error check an easily damaged sensor against another sensor couldn't have been hard or expensive in the design phase. That just leaves us with ineptness and I'm not sure that's any better than profit making decisions
Single sensor? FUCK ME. I thought it had two (which is also pretty shit because aircrafts generally have 3 or more redundancies so they can isolate errors like this)
Motherfucking parachutes have emergency chute, in case one fails.
Boeing, smh.
Motherfucking parachutes have emergency chute, in case one fails.
Boeing, smh.
Stay on target. Greed and lobbying led them to do their own saftey certification.
They knew there were issues. They just went with it anyway to amass orders and let people die that flew their plane. It should have been grounded after the fiest one and investigated..
Its not like this is a big deal to boeing. They make oodles on military contracts. This is just going out of their way to show how little they care about the saftey of their customers vs shareholder wallets.
From the article:
216 refers to total AoA sensor issues reported on all airplanes from any manufacturer. Cited issues include all causes of problems including improper installation, bird strikes and lightning.
216 refers to total AoA sensor issues reported on all airplanes from any manufacturer. Cited issues include all causes of problems including improper installation, bird strikes and lightning.
Yup, that's why Airbus installs three of them on each of their planes. One can be ignored when it gets faulty. Curious why Boeing didn't do the same.
The issue with the way it's presented is 216 reported issues over all flight operations the last 15 years is a very small rate of failure. If it doesn't violate the failure tolerance for the relevant DAL rating I'm not sure what should have been done differently.
This plane has to be done now, hasn't it. Their failure to provide a fix in any timely manner just further highlights the systemic nature of the problem, namely that the design of the plane is structurally unsound. Even if they deliver a patch, I still wouldn't book a flight if it said 737MAX in the foreseeable future. If I want a static unstable plane I'll book a fighter jet thank you very much. Maybe the conman in chief was right and the only way to salvage this thing is to give it an unrecognizable name.
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well... arguably because Airbus is European and Boeing is american. As far as I am aware, European "public" companies do not have feduciary requirements towards their shareholders, meaning they are not required by law to make decisions which would result in maximized profits. As such, they are more flexible to... you know, spend a few extra cent on making sure stuff doesn't kill people.
what should have been done differently about a sensor that was required for the plane to function that is known to fail sometimes...? really?
so I guess you're still defending that despicable corporation? got it.
Uh...all planes rely on systems that fail "sometimes." The goal is knowing how often "sometimes" occurs and categorizing and dealing with it effectively. And "effectively" is also a probabilistic distribution.
My totally unsubstantiated guess is that the issue is that they don't devote much manpower to safety so this issue wasn't even caught.
Which would be worse because if no one did an analysis on how risky this sensor arrangement is, compared to the 4 sensor arrangement many aircraft, then probably there were another million design decisions that got glossed over and rubber stamped.
Either way, I would never trust a profit driven company to do their own safety certification.
The tolerance threshold should have been lower. That's what should have been done. If you are talking about policy and ratings the DAL rating, whatever it is, isn't good enough. Simple as that.
It only didn't do that because Boeing lied to the FAA about the amount of influence MCAS had on the plane's systems. But if you've read the articles published in the last few weeks on that matter, you already know that.
You know how often it happens, more than 10 sensors will fail every year on average.
Now, what is the solution? Install the sole sensor and cross-fingers that it does not fail... or install 3 sensors and have the safeguard software automatically reject one sensor's data should it fail or send faulty data?
Lower doesn't mean 0, and a failure rate of 0 is impossible. There are so many millions of flight hours that accidents will absolutely occur no matter what, especially when that failure is largely dependent on humans.
If there was lying, deception or fraud on the part of Boeing that will be substantiated by authorities and it's clear they will deserve all possible blame. Having dealt with aerospace certification I expect the story is more complicated than that and likely involved changes over time. We will know either way.
Regulatory authorities and the pilots they had review the risks felt the probability was low enough and the pilots had sufficient tools to deal with it if it did occur.
And to be clear there are 2 AoA sensors already. The software is being updated to reject inputs when they disagree.
And you don't think there was any need for the software to be designed like that in the first place?
AoA sensors have failed before and will fail again. You think it's okay for a plane to override pilots commands and nose dive the plane into the ground relying on one AoA sensor during takeoff? And in the case of the first crash, not even informing the pilots that the plane could potentially do this and telling them it has identical characteristics to the previous model 737. I have no words, it is simply a recipe for disaster and I cannot understand why you would disagree.
Remembering that this is only one of the bad decisions Boeing made when it came to this aircraft. There are only two possible outcomes; Boeing engineers are inept or they prioritised profit over safety. There are literally no other reasons to explain this aircraft model.
But I didn't mention 0. I know you're an engineer from previous discussions, I am as well. And I was a damn good one. Whatever threshold they have is not good enough. There is no getting around that fact. I don't care what it is, it's not low enough.
I'm not defending Boeing but you are taking a weird stance here and throwing out being an engineer makes it even weirder.
If you were a damn good one, you would have done the math on an average of 14 failures a year on 15.8 million flights a year.
A failure rate of 0.0000088608% is something that will be seen as 0 for most tolerances
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Better quality control, testing and certification would delay when they could finish the plane, thus losing orders. Proper retraining of pilots to this new plane that does not behave like old 737:s would cost airlines and lead to Boeing losing orders. There's a strong case for greed being the reason for the 737 max crashes.
I guess the boeing defenders are in favor of this as well
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/03/boeing-union-workers-fired-south-carolina
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/03/boeing-union-workers-fired-south-carolina
But this is based on a single sensor design, why is there no redundancy? And of course the threshold isn't low enough if it ended in two planes crashing without the specific model of plane being grounded previously. There can be arguments based on that, but I will be on the side that says the threshold isn't low enough.
I used to design n-2 substations, but why do you think hospitals have their own power generation even if they are being supplied via n-2 designed substations?
Edit: Also, you are literally defending Boeing by the way.
14 failures a year on 15.8 million flights a year.
Enough to make the 737 Max 8 the unsafiest commercial plane at the point of its lifetime.
https://qz.com/1571820/deaths-on-the-boeing-737-max-8-vs-other-commercial-aircraft/
A rather high death count for a "0% failure rate"
I will also go back to your math here a bit. This is executive math, this is what a Boeing Executive would present to FAA based on a 3rd year associates powerpoint deck. 15.8 million toltal flights a year, 14 sensor failures....divide 14/15.8....hey look!!! Almost 0 percent failure, let's all pat each other on the back.
No.
The modeling has to be a whole lot more nuanced and critical than that.
14 failure on a critical sensor that takes control of the plane and pushes its nose down. Based on failure of a single contingency design of sensor,altitude and speed of plane, nose being pushed down, what is the amount of time required to assume control and stabilize the flight?
Then iterate this model for different speeds and altitudes.
Then re model using n-2, n-3, n-4 design contingency scenarios.
It also doesn't somehow proof that the design of the flight control & sensors was flawless. The failure rate is just a result of the sensor being robust and study.
It's a shitshow. And at the cost of many, many lives. Not excusable IMO.
Nope. By this time next year people will have forgotten about this whole thing.
Well, in automotive industry (which is far more tolerant than aircraft industry), you'd usually try for at the very least less than one critical error every million hour (I think even more, but I don't remember the exact number) for a system that overrides the driver; the goal for autonomous cars is one in a billion hours, though it's unlikely to ever be reached.
If you rely only on one sensor, and the sensor has an error every millionth flight (IIRC, average flight length is around 2 hours?), you're quite close to this minimum requirement. So the failure rate is very low, but not insignificant.
The url is delightfully silly.
That said, we need more unions in every industry. If there was one in mine (software) I would join it in a heartbeat.
Eh. I'm not arguing that something shouldn't have been done with a sensor that can take over a plane control system, especially with redundancy already there just not used in SW. It's a dumb design decision with an "easy" fix. Anything that had a failure, however low it is that would result in loss of control should be redundant. I'm just being a pendantic ass.
It's pretty obvious that the management of Boeing knew there are big issues with the plane but every decision was driven by cutting costs rather than have proper flight safety. It's a pity that probably none of these decision makers will pay for the loss of life they caused.
... and somehow people are still defending this despicable company, even here.
Well at least it might finally put a huge damper on US efforts to force acceptance of US certifications on other countries. Given how agencies like the FAA seem to be more about defending company profits than guaranteeing passenger security, certification bodies in other areas might be similarly corrupt. Given the US commercial history over the last ~40 years, I don't see things to change, hence I hope that other countries will stop accepting US certified goods no questions asked. Profits over people certainly should not be rewarded with more sales.
Well at least it might finally put a huge damper on US efforts to force acceptance of US certifications on other countries. Given how agencies like the FAA seem to be more about defending company profits than guaranteeing passenger security, certification bodies in other areas might be similarly corrupt. Given the US commercial history over the last ~40 years, I don't see things to change, hence I hope that other countries will stop accepting US certified goods no questions asked. Profits over people certainly should not be rewarded with more sales.
somewhat of an update:
Looks like the FAA wants to get these planes back in the air, but Easa refuses to accept further FAA certification and issued three demands:
1) design changes must first be approved by the Easa
2) an independent body must test the planes for airworthiness
3) the crew must undergo Max-specfic re-training
https://derstandard.at/2000103645226/Europaeer-bremsen-bei-Neuzulassung-von-Ungluecks-Boeing
in short... don't bank on the US to regulate its own industries - ever.
Looks like the FAA wants to get these planes back in the air, but Easa refuses to accept further FAA certification and issued three demands:
1) design changes must first be approved by the Easa
2) an independent body must test the planes for airworthiness
3) the crew must undergo Max-specfic re-training
https://derstandard.at/2000103645226/Europaeer-bremsen-bei-Neuzulassung-von-Ungluecks-Boeing
in short... don't bank on the US to regulate its own industries - ever.
And another example of how the US is falling apart because of un-checked, crony capitalism. I'm glad that the EU is putting people and safety before profit.
I'm sure Airbus will be held to similar standards, because Europeans care more about people than corporations. One would hope.