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Ed 737 Max Crashes (was Shutdown caused Boeing crash.)

a_unique_person said:
That is partly due due to the vigorous anti-competitive legal efforts on the part of Boeing. They didn't just get their market share based on merit alone.
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There is also a limited market for large commercial aircraft. A big company can produce cheaper aircraft than a smaller one. Then consider the pilots.If there was a small manufacturer of big aircraft then there would be very hard to recruit trained pilots as their would be so few of them. And it would be expensive to re-train an experienced pilot to fly this type of aircraft. This is why the 737 max was so popular. Pilots knew how to fly such an aircraft without heaps of training which would be necessary if Boeing had produced a completely new aircraft.
 
The culture at Boeing: Never admit a mistake.
Boeing employees are trained to avoid discussing safety in ways that may open the company up to liability, former employees said. New workers are given a one-day seminar from Perkins Coie, Boeing’s outside law firm, on how to “watch your language” when discussing and documenting anything involving safety, said one former employee who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal company matters.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...boeing-learns-plane-crashes/#comments-wrapper
 
rjh01 said:
There is also a limited market for large commercial aircraft. A big company can produce cheaper aircraft than a smaller one. Then consider the pilots.If there was a small manufacturer of big aircraft then there would be very hard to recruit trained pilots as their would be so few of them. And it would be expensive to re-train an experienced pilot to fly this type of aircraft. This is why the 737 max was so popular. Pilots knew how to fly such an aircraft without heaps of training which would be necessary if Boeing had produced a completely new aircraft.
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Well clearly they didn't, as evidenced, not just by the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes, but by the numerous instances of pilots having to fight for control with their Max 8 aircraft (including the flight crew on the same plane on a flight the night before the Lion Air crash, who were damned lucky there happened to be an off-duty pilot riding in the jump seat, and he was able to help them).

The Lion Air & Ethiopian flight crew fought MCAS all the way to the ground - had they been properly trained about MCAS, they might have avoided those crashes.
 
smartcooky said:
Well clearly they didn't, as evidenced, not just by the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes, but by the numerous instances of pilots having to fight for control with their Max 8 aircraft (including the flight crew on the same plane on a flight the night before the Lion Air crash, who were damned lucky there happened to be an off-duty pilot riding in the jump seat, and he was able to help them).

The Lion Air & Ethiopian flight crew fought MCAS all the way to the ground - had they been properly trained about MCAS, they might have avoided those crashes.
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I agree. But that would involve Boeing admitting that the 737 and 737 max were not similar aircraft and that the pilots needed extra training. This they could not do.
 
Eddie Dane said:
What do you guys think of the impact of this whole affair on Boeing's stock price?

I'm a little shocked by how little impact it has.

Are large companies really this insulated from their mistakes by their size and market share? Or am I overestimating the importance of commercial aircraft for Boeing?
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What has been the impact? I seem to recall it being hammered in the wake of the bad news stories, but perhaps it has recovered somewhat.

Could liability insurance explain it? Maybe it's also because the duopoly situation means that it won't really hurt them in the long run. There will be some costs in the short term obviously, but once the fixes have been made, it's back to business because buyers don't have many other options.
 
rjh01 said:
There is also a limited market for large commercial aircraft. A big company can produce cheaper aircraft than a smaller one. Then consider the pilots.If there was a small manufacturer of big aircraft then there would be very hard to recruit trained pilots as their would be so few of them. And it would be expensive to re-train an experienced pilot to fly this type of aircraft. This is why the 737 max was so popular. Pilots knew how to fly such an aircraft without heaps of training which would be necessary if Boeing had produced a completely new aircraft.
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And pilots are only allowed to fly one type of aircraft at a time legally irregardless of training. So until you could build of a fleet of them you would have serious issues with pilots.
 
ponderingturtle said:
And pilots are only allowed to fly one type of aircraft at a time legally irregardless of training.
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This is simply not true.

While it is not recommended that pilots swap between different aircraft at short intervals, there is nothing in the regulations to prevent a pilot from obtaining a type rating for a different aircraft to that which he is currently flying, and to fly both types commercially. I know of a number of Air NZ domestic pilots who are rated on both the ATR-72 and the Bombardier Q300, and who fly both.
 
smartcooky said:
This is simply not true.

While it is not recommended that pilots swap between different aircraft at short intervals, there is nothing in the regulations to prevent a pilot from obtaining a type rating for a different aircraft to that which he is currently flying, and to fly both types commercially. I know of a number of Air NZ domestic pilots who are rated on both the ATR-72 and the Bombardier Q300, and who fly both.
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I don't recall where I read this, but apparently Boeing was facing a dilemma:
Either start a new series of modern planes or upgrade the old ones. Again.

Large airlines weren't exactly jumping for joy at the idea of having to retrain hundreds of pilots, so they offered Boeing a huge order if they chose the latter route.
 
Puppycow said:
What has been the impact? I seem to recall it being hammered in the wake of the bad news stories, but perhaps it has recovered somewhat.

Could liability insurance explain it? Maybe it's also because the duopoly situation means that it won't really hurt them in the long run. There will be some costs in the short term obviously, but once the fixes have been made, it's back to business because buyers don't have many other options.
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I've been immersed in penny stocks recently so my view of this is likely skewed.

In penny stocks:
Bad news: stock loses 70% of its value.
Good news: you get to live the best scenes from the Wolf of Wallstreet for a weekend.

Blue-chip companies are just much less volatile.
 
Eddie Dane said:
I don't recall where I read this, but apparently Boeing was facing a dilemma:
Either start a new series of modern planes or upgrade the old ones. Again.

Large airlines weren't exactly jumping for joy at the idea of having to retrain hundreds of pilots, so they offered Boeing a huge order if they chose the latter route.
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True, but that doesn't mean that it was illegal for pilots to fly two different types.

It was the cost of the retraining, not the fact of the retraining that airlines didn't like, and caused Boeing to go the path they did.

The simple fact here is that the introduction of the CFM LEAP-1B engines, and their forced positioning forwards and upwards of where the engines used to be, made the 737 Max behave significantly differently from previous 737s, especially during take-off & climb out. In order to allow the aircraft to be flown by pilots without needing a new type rating, a software quick fix was introduced that was supposed to be a workaround that, from a flight characteristics standpoint, made the flying the 737 Max look and feel like flying previous 737s models...... and then they didn't tell the pilots about it.

AIUI, technically, what was supposed to happen is, as the aircraft would pitch up due to the flight dynamics of the new engine position, MCAS would command the nose to pitch down in such a way that the pilots would not notice. The aircraft would feel, from their perspective, just like a bog-standard 737. The problem came when one of the inputs to the system failed - in this case, the angle of attack (AoA) transmitter; an input that is absolutely vital for the correct operation of MCAS. For some inexplicable reason, Boeing chose to connect MCAS to only one of the two AoA transmitters on the aircraft (heaven only knows what possessed them to do it this way) and when it failed, it started sending information that the aircraft in level flight was actually approaching "alpha max" (α max) the critical angle of attack, or the highest nose-up attitude at speed before stalling. When that happened, MCAS pitched the nose down.

Now, had the pilots been told about MCAS, what it does and why, and how it operated, and how to disable it,. they may have been able to determine the problem and save their aircraft. The simple act of setting the flaps to any down position disables MCAS, but in order take that step, the pilots would need to have known about it. In the normal course of take-off and climb-out, setting flaps to any down position after having retracted them during climb-out is not a procedure that a pilot would ever need to do.
 
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smartcooky said:
(snip for brevity)

AIUI, technically, what was supposed to happen is, as the aircraft would pitch up due to the flight dynamics of the new engine position, MCAS would command the nose to pitch down in such a way that the pilots would not notice. The aircraft would feel, from their perspective, just like a bog-standard 737. The problem came when one of the inputs to the system failed - in this case, the angle of attack (AoA) transmitter; an input that is absolutely vital for the correct operation of MCAS. For some inexplicable reason, Boeing chose to connect MCAS to only one of the two AoA transmitters on the aircraft (heaven only knows what possessed them to do it this way) and when it failed, it started sending information that the aircraft in level flight was actually approaching "alpha max" (α max) the critical angle of attack, or the highest nose-up attitude at speed before stalling. When that happened, MCAS pitched the nose down.
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That's a very succinct explanation of MCAS. It's useful to note that the software actually worked for its intended purpose—making the takeoff (and possibly landing) characteristics of the MAX feel like any other 737.

Unfortunately they don't appear to have investigated possible failure modes. It looks like nobody asked "What if this thing kicks in during normal flight? What do you mean, 'It can't happen'? Forget that—just assume a totally unexpected series of events and this software starts interfering with otherwise normal operation. How can we reduce that possibility? Can we add code to MCAS to disable itself when it's obvious we're not in climb-out? And can that code fail and turn off MCAS during climb-out and cause a stall?"

I've been writing software for nearly forty years. Nothing as critical as this stuff, yet I find myself asking questions like this whenever I put systems together.
 
How about "The U.S. Congress, While it Didn't Actually Accept Special Junior Pilot Pins in Return for Exonerating Boeing, Does Routinely Solicit and Accept Political Bribes, is Unconcerned with the Public Interest, and is Completely in the Pocket of Large Corporations"?

I think that clarifies the meaning, without all the attendant risks of tragic misunderstanding that plague comedy headlines.
 
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