SEU wrote:

A3801000 wrote:

While we are mostly discussing the MAX, maybe we should have a look at what came out of Boeing over the last years and decades wrt 'safety culture':

- 787, grounded
- 748, nearly grounded and big flutter problems
- 767 (Tanker) client refused over 2 periods to take up any of them because of quality problems
- MAX, grounded

Coincidences? A pattern? Money savings?

I am not the one to judge but if I were a airline and Boeing would ask me to sign up for a upcoming new plane, well

I havent heard about the 747 and 767 issues, when did they happen?

748: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... Q420140326
767: https://www.defensenews.com/digital-sho ... eliveries/

There is plenty more to find if you want to read up.

Ok, I don't have any inside information about the 777X. Unquestionably the current 777 is a perfectly safe and reliable airplane, but so was the 737NG. With the seemingly less than rigorous development process of the MAX and the allegations that the FAA basically let Boeing certify it themselves, I will be reluctant to blanketly accept another Boeing model designed during the same time period as guaranteed safe. Once the 777X enters service, for some time I will be booking my long haul trips making sure that I will be traveling either on a non-X 777 or on an Airbus.

rigo wrote:

Ok, I don't have any inside information about the 777X. Unquestionably the current 777 is a perfectly safe and reliable airplane, but so was the 737NG. With the seemingly less than rigorous development process of the MAX and the allegations that the FAA basically let Boeing certify it themselves, I will be reluctant to blanketly accept another Boeing model designed during the same time period as guaranteed safe. Once the 777X enters service, for some time I will be booking my long haul trips making sure that I will be traveling either on a non-X 777 or on an Airbus.

I see where you are coming from, I for one, would think that regulatory agencies will look quite differently to the 777X, especially those in other countries, they will take a hard look at what the FAA and Boeing are saying. I think the 777X will be perfectly safe, or as safe as it could be, when it enters service.

BoeingGuy wrote:

Sure the MCAS design could have been robust, but there were in fact maintenance and pilot errors that contributed.

If maintenance and/or pilot error contributed that much to crash a plane, why doesn’t it happen to the NG’s and only to the MAX?

marcelh wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

Sure the MCAS design could have been robust, but there were in fact maintenance and pilot errors that contributed.

If maintenance and/or pilot error contributed that much to crash a plane, why doesn’t it happen to the NG’s and only to the MAX?

I think the better question is, why did the regulators ground the aircraft for an indefinite period till the problem is solved if the main thing was maintenance and pilot errors?

Hey

BoeingGuy wrote:

BoeingGuy

, I started the thread because I don't know. I am looking for some inside information and whom experiences the inner workings of Boeing, daily.

Could you give your perspective and if you have been working there for a long time, could you shed some light on the safety culture and the pressures from upper and middle management?
I am interested in your views, thanks, Jeroen

This identifies humans' propensity for delusional thinking - paints a negative picture of Boeing and FAA but has lessons everywhere:

https://aviationnews.online/2019/05/07/ ... -delusion/

The best bit of this thread is that statement. Not sure why you feel Boeing should or ever will again be the "unchallenged global leader", there are essentially no industries where one company carries a monopoly.[/quote]

But Boeing is the leader. It is by a significant margin the world's largest aerospace company with the largest technology patent portfolio in the industry. You don't need a "monopoly" to be the leader, you just need the largest market share. The 737 is the best selling jetliner in history. Boeing is still the leader by far in wide bodies. Time will tell if Boeing loses market share in commercial jetliners due to this catastrophe.

And yes there are monopolies. For the past 30 years, Intel has controlled 90% of the microprocessor industry. Today it is still over 80%, a monopoly by the legal definition. There are many others. Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and others control monstrous global market shares.

WIederling wrote:

seahawk wrote:

If you need to compare Boeing with Airbus, it shows that Boeing is in a crisis. Boeing should be the unchallenged global leader in commercial aviation.

Hmm.
they had their time ( mostly on borrowed IP ) when no viable competition was available.

US dominance was a post WWII "trashed European infrastructure" short term effect.
Without creating a similar situation MAGA will have no leverage.

Not exactly. US dominance happened prior to WWII. The US overtook Britain in the 1870's and by the early 1900's was by far the largest manufacturing nation. US economic success is not accidental and did not depend upon WWII. Over the past two centuries the US has built an incredible innovative culture and a very large share of the world's best universities and scientific research institutes. US firms achieved global dominance in market share in many categories between the 1910's and the 1940's. Their huge size aided their massive R&D spending which also played a role in helping US firms to assume technological leadership in many areas. This in turn helped them assume market leadership positions they mostly still hold today despite increased competition since the post WWII period. Despite "MAGA" rhetoric, the US never ceased being "great" economically.
Boeing may face a decline thanks to this disastrous turn of events but you are wrong that Boeing owes it's success to "borrowed" IP. Boeing is the largest aerospace company in the world and they possess massive technological skill. They continue to put out more technology patents than the competition.

BoeingGuy wrote:

kalvado wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

Do you how many Safety Review Board meetings I've seen where even the rarest one-off benign incident is approved for fix by management?

Quite honestly, if the only thing that had occurred with MCAS was the day-before near miss Lion Air incident, I bet the review board would have determined it a safety issue and a design change works have been made.
.

Hours spent in those meetings is not a safety or performance metrics. Two planes which bite the dust is the safety metrics. Billions of dollars Boeing is loosing is the performance metrics.
If your best argument is the number of meetings you attended - this is the problem right there.

Sounds like you didn’t read or understand my point at all. If the only thing you got out of my post is about sitting in meetings, it went right over your head.

There may be a gap between the message you sent and the message I received.
Was the message "no, none of Boeing managers are willing to kill to get a few more bucks in a bottom line"? Sure, lets leave those horror stories to pre-school kids.
Are you trying to say that there is a system in place to keep track? It may be a great system for minor things, but it failed in case of a serious crisis. No, you don't get partial credit for the effort. Moreover, the message I get - there is no understanding of that failure.

While I have joked that Buffet should buy Boeing commercial, I also recall that BNSF was happy as an independent company and probably did not really want to sell itself to Berkshire. But the demands of Wall Street and its damnable quarterly results thinking was the tipping point. A RR needs to spend inordinate amounts of money on those tracks, bridges, signals. Wall Street hates spending money on anything except buy backs and dividends. Boeing has listened to the unfettered market forces of capitalism run amok (as has the US medical system). The results are ugly - and in the long run unsustainable.

I think it has not been posted in the thread, this Bloomberg article with some interesting views from former, non anonymous, Boeing engineers:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... ced-safety?

Aviation737 wrote:

People here are making it seem that Boeing purposely made the MAX unsafe for the sake of profit which I think is complete bullshit.

Indirectly, yes. More reliable design of MAX would require pilot training, so they went on with disastrously error-prone design. because there was no time, to catch airbus and get AA's order.

That is a very essence of "purposely made the MAX unsafe". Any junior student of embedded system engineering can see that such system is unsafe, so Boeing clearly knew that. Yet the time was more important, because it meant more money.

frmrCapCadet wrote:

While I have joked that Buffet should buy Boeing commercial, I also recall that BNSF was happy as an independent company and probably did not really want to sell itself to Berkshire. But the demands of Wall Street and its damnable quarterly results thinking was the tipping point. A RR needs to spend inordinate amounts of money on those tracks, bridges, signals. Wall Street hates spending money on anything except buy backs and dividends. Boeing has listened to the unfettered market forces of capitalism run amok (as has the US medical system). The results are ugly - and in the long run unsustainable.

Can't you just short circuit the Wall Street bankers by not selling out to a billionaire and by not going public? It seems that companies do far worse when they become tokens in the stock market. Dell Computers comes to mind.

abies111 wrote:

I think it has not been posted in the thread, this Bloomberg article with some interesting views from former, non anonymous, Boeing engineers:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... ced-safety?

This kind of reporting drives me nuts. Boeing does not have any Level D sims, or for that matter any simulators in Seattle that are approved for training. Not a big deal in the outcome but it makes you wonder about all the other stories that appear in the press. Boeing does have a -8MAX sim in Miami, and the FAA had approved it for training, BUT, it did not have MCAS emulation so no one would have missed that serious flaw. There are so many simulator open issues at Boeing it makes one wonder why they even bother with training, as opposed to simply contracting it to an outside vendor. On the flip side you have to wonder why they don't build their own sims for BCA?

The contractural mandate driven by SWA had so many unintended consequences, it's almost as if they were a coconspirator in the process.

"They also made their desires known to the FAA team in charge of 737 training requirements, which was led by Stacey Klein, who’d previously been a pilot at now-defunct Skyway Airlines for six years. “She had no engineering background, her airplane experience was very limited,” Ludtke says. “It was just an impossible scenario.” FAA spokesman Greg Martin says the position Klein occupies, “while substantial,” is primarily that of “an organizer, facilitator, and executor of the FAA policy and guidelines,” and that in her role she calls on experts from multiple organizations."

The FAA should have engineers in charge of these programs. What is the point of having this woman there if she is just a facilitator. All too often I see the FAA outsourcing their thinking to stakeholders because they can't think for themselves. They don't have the requisite knowledge to make intelligent decisions. The stakeholders are only going to bring ideas supportive to their cause. The FAA might, at best, bring in one opposing opinion and then use sheer stakeholder numbers to dilute the opposition. The FAA is full of people who are simply managers and beurocrats. The FAA totally dropped the ball on this.

McNerney joking about keeping the employees cowering during a critical period of the MAX design should be part of the discussion, did the culture at Boeing undermine processes which should hold safety paramount.

kalvado wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

kalvado wrote:

Hours spent in those meetings is not a safety or performance metrics. Two planes which bite the dust is the safety metrics. Billions of dollars Boeing is loosing is the performance metrics.
If your best argument is the number of meetings you attended - this is the problem right there.

Sounds like you didn’t read or understand my point at all. If the only thing you got out of my post is about sitting in meetings, it went right over your head.

There may be a gap between the message you sent and the message I received.
Was the message "no, none of Boeing managers are willing to kill to get a few more bucks in a bottom line"? Sure, lets leave those horror stories to pre-school kids.
Are you trying to say that there is a system in place to keep track? It may be a great system for minor things, but it failed in case of a serious crisis. No, you don't get partial credit for the effort. Moreover, the message I get - there is no understanding of that failure.

Completely wrong. Go back and read my post.

marcelh wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

Sure the MCAS design could have been robust, but there were in fact maintenance and pilot errors that contributed.

If maintenance and/or pilot error contributed that much to crash a plane, why doesn’t it happen to the NG’s and only to the MAX?

People must have a hard time reading or understanding posts. What does “contributed” mean to you?

BoeingGuy wrote:

kalvado wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

Sounds like you didn’t read or understand my point at all. If the only thing you got out of my post is about sitting in meetings, it went right over your head.

There may be a gap between the message you sent and the message I received.
Was the message "no, none of Boeing managers are willing to kill to get a few more bucks in a bottom line"? Sure, lets leave those horror stories to pre-school kids.
Are you trying to say that there is a system in place to keep track? It may be a great system for minor things, but it failed in case of a serious crisis. No, you don't get partial credit for the effort. Moreover, the message I get - there is no understanding of that failure.

Completely wrong. Go back and read my post.

And that is exactly the problem we're discussing. Q.E.D.

kalvado wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

kalvado wrote:

There may be a gap between the message you sent and the message I received.
Was the message "no, none of Boeing managers are willing to kill to get a few more bucks in a bottom line"? Sure, lets leave those horror stories to pre-school kids.
Are you trying to say that there is a system in place to keep track? It may be a great system for minor things, but it failed in case of a serious crisis. No, you don't get partial credit for the effort. Moreover, the message I get - there is no understanding of that failure.

Completely wrong. Go back and read my post.

And that is exactly the problem we're discussing. Q.E.D.

I’m done with this thread. It’s getting nowhere. Let’s go talk about PAE, the DL A220 routes, or the FBW modes on modern airplanes.

No doubt some tragic mistakes and deaths have occurred, but many people on this thread and the media seem to want to overdramatize it with a lot of false information.

BoeingGuy wrote:

marcelh wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

Sure the MCAS design could have been robust, but there were in fact maintenance and pilot errors that contributed.

If maintenance and/or pilot error contributed that much to crash a plane, why doesn’t it happen to the NG’s and only to the MAX?

People must have a hard time reading or understanding posts. What does “contributed” mean to you?

Not willing to answer a question is also an answer.
So I’m asking you: why are they able to maintain and fly the NG, but not the MAX?

BoeingGuy wrote:

kalvado wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

Completely wrong. Go back and read my post.

And that is exactly the problem we're discussing. Q.E.D.

I’m done with this thread. It’s getting nowhere. Let’s go talk about PAE, the DL A220 routes, or the FBW modes on modern airplanes.

No doubt some tragic mistakes and deaths have occurred, but many people on this thread and the media seem to want to overdramatize it with a lot of false information.

Honestly speaking, I feel bad for you. I am truly sorry if I was too personal. But it is really a bad time to stand for the company, though.

BoeingGuy wrote:

I’m done with this thread. It’s getting nowhere. Let’s go talk about PAE, the DL A220 routes, or the FBW modes on modern airplanes.

No doubt some tragic mistakes and deaths have occurred, but many people on this thread and the media seem to want to overdramatize it with a lot of false information.

You seem too close to the fire. If you regard the many structural failings that already have been exposed as "overdramatising", I truly hope for Boeing there are people around that do see the gravity of the situation.

One part of the criminal investigations seems to focus on an aspect not mentioned before in the news: that the single sensor for MCAS might not be a mistake but a purposeful choice as it was necessary to get the plane certified under the common 737 type rating.

If you feel uncomfortable discussing the avelanche of revelations regarding the certification and design process, feel free to ignore this thread. This feels akin to a suspect objecting to media reporting about the criminal investigation into his actions. You or Boeing should not be above the law, the media has a duty to investigate and report, and we are entitled to discuss what is being reported.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... 650026002/

Apparently Boeing wants to prioritize efficiency over safety even further. Or do they really believe this will enhance QC?

The irony here is Boeing sees humans as those ultimately responsible to fly the plane ('airbus only has passengers'). But they can't rely on them for proper QC? SMH.

Absynth wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

I’m done with this thread. It’s getting nowhere. Let’s go talk about PAE, the DL A220 routes, or the FBW modes on modern airplanes.

No doubt some tragic mistakes and deaths have occurred, but many people on this thread and the media seem to want to overdramatize it with a lot of false information.

You seem too close to the fire. If you regard the many structural failings that already have been exposed as "overdramatising", I truly hope for Boeing there are people around that do see the gravity of the situation.

One part of the criminal investigations seems to focus on an aspect not mentioned before in the news: that the single sensor for MCAS might not be a mistake but a purposeful choice as it was necessary to get the plane certified under the common 737 type rating.

If you feel uncomfortable discussing the avelanche of revelations regarding the certification and design process, feel free to ignore this thread. This feels akin to a suspect objecting to media reporting about the criminal investigation into his actions. You or Boeing should not be above the law, the media has a duty to investigate and report, and we are entitled to discuss what is being reported.

Anyone know if those 737 decompressions are Southwest in the last 15 years were attributed to "manufacturing defects"? I vaguely remember that being the case but I don't remember what the reports say exactly.

greendot wrote:

Absynth wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

I’m done with this thread. It’s getting nowhere. Let’s go talk about PAE, the DL A220 routes, or the FBW modes on modern airplanes.

No doubt some tragic mistakes and deaths have occurred, but many people on this thread and the media seem to want to overdramatize it with a lot of false information.

You seem too close to the fire. If you regard the many structural failings that already have been exposed as "overdramatising", I truly hope for Boeing there are people around that do see the gravity of the situation.

One part of the criminal investigations seems to focus on an aspect not mentioned before in the news: that the single sensor for MCAS might not be a mistake but a purposeful choice as it was necessary to get the plane certified under the common 737 type rating.

If you feel uncomfortable discussing the avelanche of revelations regarding the certification and design process, feel free to ignore this thread. This feels akin to a suspect objecting to media reporting about the criminal investigation into his actions. You or Boeing should not be above the law, the media has a duty to investigate and report, and we are entitled to discuss what is being reported.

Anyone know if those 737 decompressions are Southwest in the last 15 years were attributed to "manufacturing defects"? I vaguely remember that being the case but I don't remember what the reports say exactly.

I don’t recall the root causes. I’d have to look it up. I remember one of them went into Yuma.

I sure bet it would give you and many others on this thread great pleasure and satisfaction if they were caused by a Boeing flaw though.

BoeingGuy wrote:

I don’t recall the root causes. I’d have to look it up. I remember one of them went into Yuma.

I sure bet it would give you and many others on this thread great pleasure and satisfaction if they were caused by a Boeing flaw though.

And you would take it personally and defend Boeing to the death, even if it was a flaw they admitted to.

The most salient quote from the 60 minutes report for me is:

"The Boeing whistleblower who is working with the FBI confirmed that making the MCAS flight control system reliant on only one sensor was a deliberate decision to avoid the need for expensive LEVEL D or flight simulator training. "MCAS was designed using data from only one of the sensors because we knew the FAA would not have certified a two sensor system without Level D training.""

https://youtu.be/QytfYyHmxtc?t=2120

Can someone elaborate what that means? If true the reasoning is shocking.

BoeingGuy wrote:

greendot wrote:

Absynth wrote:

You seem too close to the fire. If you regard the many structural failings that already have been exposed as "overdramatising", I truly hope for Boeing there are people around that do see the gravity of the situation.

One part of the criminal investigations seems to focus on an aspect not mentioned before in the news: that the single sensor for MCAS might not be a mistake but a purposeful choice as it was necessary to get the plane certified under the common 737 type rating.

If you feel uncomfortable discussing the avelanche of revelations regarding the certification and design process, feel free to ignore this thread. This feels akin to a suspect objecting to media reporting about the criminal investigation into his actions. You or Boeing should not be above the law, the media has a duty to investigate and report, and we are entitled to discuss what is being reported.

Anyone know if those 737 decompressions are Southwest in the last 15 years were attributed to "manufacturing defects"? I vaguely remember that being the case but I don't remember what the reports say exactly.

I don’t recall the root causes. I’d have to look it up. I remember one of them went into Yuma.

I sure bet it would give you and many others on this thread great pleasure and satisfaction if they were caused by a Boeing flaw though.

Well, people died. I've flown Boeings for a very long time so I'm familiar with them and I don't hate them. I really like the 787/777 but I dislike the 737 (as a pilot of it). It's really no better than a 707, which I flew for years. I hope that Boeing gets enough political attention right now so that their board of directors and senior management gets forced to allow engineers to make decisions rather than some clueless MBA. Let's face it, the two crashes were a fault of someone making a bad decision which any engineer (as you can see from this forum) would not go along with. The ultimate purpose of critiquing Boeing is to straighten them up so they don't go out of business or even have to downsize. I'm quite confident Boeing can design a great airplane, but the 737 programme demonstrates a lot of what should NOT happen. Also, they need to fix their manufacturing practices since the USAF had to reject tankers recently. As a former USAF pilot, I don't appreciate being given an airplane that is potentially unsafe enough that even USAF bureaucrats rejected it.

There's plenty of blame that needs to go around. My even bigger target is the FAA which has a long tradition of allowing unsafe or marginal practices without effective oversight. Why didn't someone in the FAA require them to have 3 independent sensors as part of MCAS? It's totally ridiculous that they had 1 sensor. I have several grievances against the FAA for lack of doing their job. Part of the problem is that they are not there to do what's best for the flying public, the pilots, or even safety. The PBS documentary "Flying Cheap" nails it when describing the problem with the FAA. In any case, I think people *need* to talk about this stuff, point fingers, and leave a long legacy of accountability so that people never die again from the scenario that caused it. If we forget, it could be Airbus next time that lets their clueless MBAs run the show leading to another tragedy.

WayexTDI wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

I don’t recall the root causes. I’d have to look it up. I remember one of them went into Yuma.

I sure bet it would give you and many others on this thread great pleasure and satisfaction if they were caused by a Boeing flaw though.

And you would take it personally and defend Boeing to the death, even if it was a flaw they admitted to.

Just to be clear, I personally had ZERO involvement or knowledge of 737 Max development. It’s the model I know by far the least about. I was off on a certain other program during all this time.

So I’m not defending or taking personally attacks against my own personal actions.

Dutchy wrote:

Is this systemic? The focus seems to be on making money and not on safety. On making money and not on engineering. On making spreadsheets work not on making aircraft work. Being proud at the bottomline, not proud on delivering a good product. Has it gone too far with Boeing?

Disclaimer: I do not want to trash Boeing, but it seems to me that Boeing suffers from a decease where large companies suffer from, just profit maximisation, not optimisation.

Unfortunately, that is a product of runaway Capitalism my friend. Shareholders, profits and share prices first. Another industry + another company - The GM fiasco with a faulty ignition switch that would have cost less than a $ to fix; but was not fixed due to a "business decision".

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/gm-re ... lem-n51731

Shockingly (or should i rather say UNshockingly); company made a cost benefit analysis on a spreadsheet and arrived at a decision of "well..deaths are just a cost of doing business versus spending money to fix the problem". In a nutshell GM put a price on a life - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwt1Dc2XD6Q

Question is; did Boeing do the same given that they knew about the problem 1 year before Lion Air - https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/us/boein ... index.html

Hopefully these are exceptions and not the norm.

arfbool wrote:

The most salient quote from the 60 minutes report for me is:

"The Boeing whistleblower who is working with the FBI confirmed that making the MCAS flight control system reliant on only one sensor was a deliberate decision to avoid the need for expensive LEVEL D or flight simulator training. "MCAS was designed using data from only one of the sensors because we knew the FAA would not have certified a two sensor system without Level D training.""

https://youtu.be/QytfYyHmxtc?t=2120

Can someone elaborate what that means? If true the reasoning is shocking.

I don't give this whistleblower much credence unless somebody can explain why making MCAS less likely to fail, relying on 2 sensors, would require simulator training. It doesn't make sense.

The role of the FAA will have to seen. Surely they can not look through the complete source code of a modern airliner, so they depend on the description of function by the OEM. The question is how Boeing described the MCAS function.

747megatop wrote:

Dutchy wrote:

Is this systemic? The focus seems to be on making money and not on safety. On making money and not on engineering. On making spreadsheets work not on making aircraft work. Being proud at the bottomline, not proud on delivering a good product. Has it gone too far with Boeing?

Disclaimer: I do not want to trash Boeing, but it seems to me that Boeing suffers from a decease where large companies suffer from, just profit maximisation, not optimisation.

Unfortunately, that is a product of runaway Capitalism my friend. Shareholders, profits and share prices first. Another industry + another company - The GM fiasco with a faulty ignition switch that would have cost less than a $ to fix; but was not fixed due to a "business decision".

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/gm-re ... lem-n51731

Shockingly (or should i rather say UNshockingly); company made a cost benefit analysis on a spreadsheet and arrived at a decision of "well..deaths are just a cost of doing business versus spending money to fix the problem". In a nutshell GM put a price on a life - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwt1Dc2XD6Q

Question is; did Boeing do the same given that they knew about the problem 1 year before Lion Air - https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/us/boein ... index.html

Hopefully these are exceptions and not the norm.

Keep in mind that Capitalism is not the real problem. It's merely a financial model. Capitalism is NOT a form of government nor is it the way to make decisions. Capitalism merely gives one person the freedom to deliver a service for compensation at an agreed upon rate. Capitalism says absolutely nothing about the need to have publicly traded companies, laws governing corporations, and government benevolent management of capitalism. Also, Capitalism was never intended to be used exclusively without regard to morality and ethics. The corporate legal framework gives the corporation the ability to run itself poorly or well. A company can choose to run its operations with morals and ethics or it can do so only using spreadsheets. Take a guess which one was relevant here. There are plenty of corporations, small businesses, and self-employed people who run their businesses with the highest standards and morals and ethics. Unfortunately people blame capitalism when in fact they need to blame individual people.

Also, we don't have true capitalism in the USA - we have corporatism. It's a combination of Capitalism plus government intervention, both good and bad. One of the worst examples of corporatism is the vaccine industry where you can't sue vaccine makers by law. Again, this was never something prescribed by capitalism. Quite simply, capitalism says nothing about this configuration of market forces and government.

morrisond wrote:

Rush job may be the incorrect term - it was almost 6 years from Launch to Certification. For a simple derivative that is a long time.

Except that due to very old base they were working with (airframe designed for 1960s airports - close to the ground to allow it to use airports without basic infrastructure) it turned out not to be simple. Instead of acknowledging this, they pushed through even though the timeframe was (given the encountered problems) clearly unrealistic. They should make bigger changes to the airframe, that would necessitate much longer certification and testing process, etc...

Paradoxically, the features that allowed 737 to be such a success over the decades, ended being MAX's undoing.I have heard from people who were flying pax on indonesian internal routes 10 years ago. 737 were operated there literally as flying buses on "airports" that were not much than a landing strip, stopping like three or five times on route, people boarding and disembarking with luggage, etc. This all had been made possible by 737's old airframe.

greendot wrote:

747megatop wrote:

Dutchy wrote:

Is this systemic? The focus seems to be on making money and not on safety. On making money and not on engineering. On making spreadsheets work not on making aircraft work. Being proud at the bottomline, not proud on delivering a good product. Has it gone too far with Boeing?

Disclaimer: I do not want to trash Boeing, but it seems to me that Boeing suffers from a decease where large companies suffer from, just profit maximisation, not optimisation.

Unfortunately, that is a product of runaway Capitalism my friend. Shareholders, profits and share prices first. Another industry + another company - The GM fiasco with a faulty ignition switch that would have cost less than a $ to fix; but was not fixed due to a "business decision".

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/gm-re ... lem-n51731

Shockingly (or should i rather say UNshockingly); company made a cost benefit analysis on a spreadsheet and arrived at a decision of "well..deaths are just a cost of doing business versus spending money to fix the problem". In a nutshell GM put a price on a life - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwt1Dc2XD6Q

Question is; did Boeing do the same given that they knew about the problem 1 year before Lion Air - https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/us/boein ... index.html

Hopefully these are exceptions and not the norm.

Keep in mind that Capitalism is not the real problem. It's merely a financial model. Capitalism is NOT a form of government nor is it the way to make decisions. Capitalism merely gives one person the freedom to deliver a service for compensation at an agreed upon rate. Capitalism says absolutely nothing about the need to have publicly traded companies, laws governing corporations, and government benevolent management of capitalism. Also, Capitalism was never intended to be used exclusively without regard to morality and ethics. The corporate legal framework gives the corporation the ability to run itself poorly or well. A company can choose to run its operations with morals and ethics or it can do so only using spreadsheets. Take a guess which one was relevant here. There are plenty of corporations, small businesses, and self-employed people who run their businesses with the highest standards and morals and ethics. Unfortunately people blame capitalism when in fact they need to blame individual people.

Also, we don't have true capitalism in the USA - we have corporatism. It's a combination of Capitalism plus government intervention, both good and bad. One of the worst examples of corporatism is the vaccine industry where you can't sue vaccine makers by law. Again, this was never something prescribed by capitalism. Quite simply, capitalism says nothing about this configuration of market forces and government.

Which is why i said RUNWAWAY capitalism. Anyways, I don't want to get drawn into capitalism or capitalism vs socialism etc. etc.

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

It's rather telling that the Lion Air aircraft had a similar problem on the previous flight, but the pilots on that flight was able to save the plane & land safely. Unfortunately this story doesn't get as much attention in the media as all the other stories about the MAX.

And you seem to forget that there were three pilots in that cockpit, yes? It has been stated numerous times (and even acknowledged by Boeing - in fact, that is the ONLY thing they acknowledged as their responsibility) that obvious contributing factor to ET crash was the overwhelming workload on pilots, faced with multiple conflicting alerts in the cockpit, while the plane was more and more difficult to control.

So we can safely assume that MAX is safe, as long it has two people actually flying the plane and third one doing the debugging the fcked up software design... because in the flight that survived it was the third pilot that disabled the trim switches, AFAIK. Because he was not busy flying the damn plane.

greendot wrote:

Well, people died. I've flown Boeings for a very long time so I'm familiar with them and I don't hate them. I really like the 787/777 but I dislike the 737 (as a pilot of it). It's really no better than a 707, which I flew for years. I hope that Boeing gets enough political attention right now so that their board of directors and senior management gets forced to allow engineers to make decisions rather than some clueless MBA. Let's face it, the two crashes were a fault of someone making a bad decision which any engineer (as you can see from this forum) would not go along with. The ultimate purpose of critiquing Boeing is to straighten them up so they don't go out of business or even have to downsize. I'm quite confident Boeing can design a great airplane, but the 737 programme demonstrates a lot of what should NOT happen. Also, they need to fix their manufacturing practices since the USAF had to reject tankers recently. As a former USAF pilot, I don't appreciate being given an airplane that is potentially unsafe enough that even USAF bureaucrats rejected it.

There's plenty of blame that needs to go around. My even bigger target is the FAA which has a long tradition of allowing unsafe or marginal practices without effective oversight. Why didn't someone in the FAA require them to have 3 independent sensors as part of MCAS? It's totally ridiculous that they had 1 sensor. I have several grievances against the FAA for lack of doing their job. Part of the problem is that they are not there to do what's best for the flying public, the pilots, or even safety. The PBS documentary "Flying Cheap" nails it when describing the problem with the FAA. In any case, I think people *need* to talk about this stuff, point fingers, and leave a long legacy of accountability so that people never die again from the scenario that caused it. If we forget, it could be Airbus next time that lets their clueless MBAs run the show leading to another tragedy.

Excellent summary and even better conclusion. My hat off to you, Sir.

seahawk wrote:

The role of the FAA will have to seen. Surely they can not look through the complete source code of a modern airliner, so they depend on the description of function by the OEM. The question is how Boeing described the MCAS function.

It seems the self certify model is not dependable. A corporation must never be trusted. History has always shown it to be foolish.

Isn't the problem not a software problem but rather a single input problem?

And, assuming there were software problems in the future, is the FAA really set up to regulate a high technology industry such as software? One day the problem really will be software and the FAA will not be adequate to regulate something it has no idea about. This isn't about just the FAA. We have similar problems with the FDA and EPA. Government agencies that are politically manipulated, not subject to public scrutiny, littered with people favoring a political party, and often led by people who came from or go to the very industry they are supposed to regulate.

seahawk wrote:

The role of the FAA will have to seen. Surely they can not look through the complete source code of a modern airliner, so they depend on the description of function by the OEM. The question is how Boeing described the MCAS function.

As far as I am familiar with the design of safety-critical embedded systems, it is common awareness that the results (the code) are impossible to check or test, due to code complexity. This holds for decades. Testing is unrealistic, because the error rates of very botched code may be extremely low in statistical terms already.There were 2 deadly MCAS-related crashes, but in that time, what, hundreds of thousand of MAX flights have taken place. So the probability of error would be like 2/100.000. No way you can test for this. One common example of extremely botched design that resulted in horrible deaths was the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine in 80ties. It managed to malfunction 6 times, killing 5 patients and getting familiar with that story is basic training for software development of medical systems. But in that timeframe when 6 malfunctions happened, 6000 patients went through it without any problems. And yet this was a classical example of very very bad code and very very bad design decisions.

So the very stringent design process is the the key to getting safe products. It is the only way. That means that certain rules that don't make sense at first are observed, certain coding standards, certain steps in the development are done, and so on. If you then have coked-up salesman getting his way because he just signed 200 aircraft deal which will go through "IF the engineering just stops complaining" this is a recipe for disaster.

Let's not forget that Toyota lost in court not because the engine control software caused deaths (it was impossible to prove or disprove it), but because they violated even THEIR OWN rules how to write engine control software code (the code which was suspected to cause acceleration violated 5 of Toyota's own 9 rules).

And this is not very different from how FDA works. AFAIK they don't take samples of medicines routinely (or this is not their main priority). When they show up at the pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, their main concern is paperwork, e.g. checking whether you as a manufacturer is following the process that results in safe medicines. I know many people think this is ridiculous but the modern manufacturing processes (and modern embedded software design) simply cannot be supervised otherwise.

Now, FAA outsourcing work to Boeing employees basically breaks that process at several places, I know it has been going on for long time, but in case of MCAS the system obviously broke down completely.

In the end it boils down to the risk analysis for a MCAS failure. If the whistle blowers are too believed, it does not look good for Boeing, as the risk seems to have been intentionally downplayed.

747megatop wrote:

Dutchy wrote:

Is this systemic? The focus seems to be on making money and not on safety. On making money and not on engineering. On making spreadsheets work not on making aircraft work. Being proud at the bottomline, not proud on delivering a good product. Has it gone too far with Boeing?

Disclaimer: I do not want to trash Boeing, but it seems to me that Boeing suffers from a decease where large companies suffer from, just profit maximisation, not optimisation.

Unfortunately, that is a product of runaway Capitalism my friend. Shareholders, profits and share prices first. Another industry + another company - The GM fiasco with a faulty ignition switch that would have cost less than a $ to fix; but was not fixed due to a "business decision".

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/gm-re ... lem-n51731

Shockingly (or should i rather say UNshockingly); company made a cost benefit analysis on a spreadsheet and arrived at a decision of "well..deaths are just a cost of doing business versus spending money to fix the problem". In a nutshell GM put a price on a life - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwt1Dc2XD6Q

Question is; did Boeing do the same given that they knew about the problem 1 year before Lion Air - https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/us/boein ... index.html

Hopefully these are exceptions and not the norm.

You’re mixing two different things: lack of the alert light and MCAS. You’re also forgetting, as is apparently the news sources, that the disagree light being incorrectly tied to an option was planning to be fixed.

Boeing knew about the alert light issue and planned to fix it. Lack of it doesn’t cause deaths. Boeing didn’t know about the MCAS problem, so didn’t intentionally ignore it or put a price on lives.

Another fact which both the media and some posters on A.net conveniently forget to mention is that the alert light issue was a supplier error, not Boeing. The design intent was to have it baseline on every airplane.

It’s posts like this are why I’ve gotten defensive and pushed back. So much factually inaccurate and distorted stuff being posted on A.net and reported by the media that over sensationalizes a tragic situation.

seahawk wrote:

In the end it boils down to the risk analysis for a MCAS failure. If the whistle blowers are too believed, it does not look good for Boeing, as the risk seems to have been intentionally downplayed.

No it wasn’t. More BS being posted on A.net.

As I’ve explained before, the Fault Hazard Analysis showed the failure was within a safe margin because it assumed the flight crew would correctly perform the Uncommanded Stab Trim procedure, which has been well trained on every Boeing model since the beginning of time.

Were there errors or incorrect assumption in that analysis? We’ll let the investigators made that determination.

But no risk was intentionally downplayed.

The real facts never make a good story though.

I know at least one “whistle blower” and the guy is a total jerk-off. He was laid off from Boeing because he contributed very little work. What work he did do was of poor quality too. And HE dropped the ball on some MCAS analysis, himself. Left Boeing with sour grapes, so he goes and talks to the media to get revenge. A number of things he stated, such as staffing numbers in his old team, are complete fiction.

xmp125a wrote:

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

It's rather telling that the Lion Air aircraft had a similar problem on the previous flight, but the pilots on that flight was able to save the plane & land safely. Unfortunately this story doesn't get as much attention in the media as all the other stories about the MAX.

And you seem to forget that there were three pilots in that cockpit, yes? It has been stated numerous times (and even acknowledged by Boeing - in fact, that is the ONLY thing they acknowledged as their responsibility) that obvious contributing factor to ET crash was the overwhelming workload on pilots, faced with multiple conflicting alerts in the cockpit, while the plane was more and more difficult to control.

So we can safely assume that MAX is safe, as long it has two people actually flying the plane and third one doing the debugging the fcked up software design... because in the flight that survived it was the third pilot that disabled the trim switches, AFAIK. Because he was not busy flying the damn plane.

Posts don’t get any more intelligent than this. Know much about aviation?

First, I’ve heard that it might be mis-reported that it was the jumpseat rider who is the one who actually remembered how to do a well trained procedure that is fundamental to every Boeing model. It may actually have been on of the flying pilots. So that shots down your highly intelligent comment that it took a 3rd pilot to actually remember how to correctly perform a basic emergency procedure.

BoeingGuy wrote:

seahawk wrote:

In the end it boils down to the risk analysis for a MCAS failure. If the whistle blowers are too believed, it does not look good for Boeing, as the risk seems to have been intentionally downplayed.

No it wasn’t. More BS being posted on A.net.

As I’ve explained before, the Fault Hazard Analysis showed the failure was within a safe margin because it assumed the flight crew would correctly perform the Uncommanded Stab Trim procedure, which has been well trained on every Boeing model since the beginning of time.

Were there errors or incorrect assumption in that analysis? We’ll let the investigators made that determination.

But no risk was intentionally downplayed.

The real facts never make a good story though.

I know at least one “whistle blower” and the guy is a total jerk-off. He was laid off from Boeing because he contributed very little work. What work he did do was of poor quality too. And HE dropped the ball on some MCAS analysis, himself. Left Boeing with sour grapes, so he goes and talks to the media to get revenge. A number of things he stated, such as staffing numbers in his old team, are complete fiction.

How should the crew perform the uncommanded Stab Trim procedure if they were not even aware of the existence of MCAS, much less on how it functions. The conventional runaway trim procedure is different in key aspects, like the trim working constantly and not intermittent and electric trim manual trim inputs not working in the conventional runaway trim scenario.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/ques ... -and-max-9

seahawk wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

seahawk wrote:

In the end it boils down to the risk analysis for a MCAS failure. If the whistle blowers are too believed, it does not look good for Boeing, as the risk seems to have been intentionally downplayed.

No it wasn’t. More BS being posted on A.net.

As I’ve explained before, the Fault Hazard Analysis showed the failure was within a safe margin because it assumed the flight crew would correctly perform the Uncommanded Stab Trim procedure, which has been well trained on every Boeing model since the beginning of time.

Were there errors or incorrect assumption in that analysis? We’ll let the investigators made that determination.

But no risk was intentionally downplayed.

The real facts never make a good story though.

I know at least one “whistle blower” and the guy is a total jerk-off. He was laid off from Boeing because he contributed very little work. What work he did do was of poor quality too. And HE dropped the ball on some MCAS analysis, himself. Left Boeing with sour grapes, so he goes and talks to the media to get revenge. A number of things he stated, such as staffing numbers in his old team, are complete fiction.

How should the crew perform the uncommanded Stab Trim procedure if they were not even aware of the existence of MCAS, much less on how it functions. The conventional runaway trim procedure is different in key aspects, like the trim working constantly and not intermittent and electric trim manual trim inputs not working in the conventional runaway trim scenario.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/ques ... -and-max-9

As you might know, the manual trim inputs did work with MCAS. That’s how the Lion Air captain was able to keep afloat. He was trimming out the MCAS nose down trim. It’s when he had the F/O take over, he didn’t apply opposing trim.

Maybe that was your point that scenario is different.

BoeingGuy wrote:

seahawk wrote:

BoeingGuy wrote:

No it wasn’t. More BS being posted on A.net.

As I’ve explained before, the Fault Hazard Analysis showed the failure was within a safe margin because it assumed the flight crew would correctly perform the Uncommanded Stab Trim procedure, which has been well trained on every Boeing model since the beginning of time.

Were there errors or incorrect assumption in that analysis? We’ll let the investigators made that determination.

But no risk was intentionally downplayed.

The real facts never make a good story though.

I know at least one “whistle blower” and the guy is a total jerk-off. He was laid off from Boeing because he contributed very little work. What work he did do was of poor quality too. And HE dropped the ball on some MCAS analysis, himself. Left Boeing with sour grapes, so he goes and talks to the media to get revenge. A number of things he stated, such as staffing numbers in his old team, are complete fiction.

How should the crew perform the uncommanded Stab Trim procedure if they were not even aware of the existence of MCAS, much less on how it functions. The conventional runaway trim procedure is different in key aspects, like the trim working constantly and not intermittent and electric trim manual trim inputs not working in the conventional runaway trim scenario.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/ques ... -and-max-9

As you might know, the manual trim inputs did work with MCAS. That’s how the Lion Air captain was able to keep afloat. He was trimming out the MCAS nose down trim. It’s when he had the F/O take over, he didn’t apply opposing trim.

Maybe that was your point that scenario is different.

And where does the original runaway trim checklist for the 737MAX mention this?

If manual trim works, it is not a runaway trim in the 737NG and the original MAX checklists.

planecane wrote:

I don't give this whistleblower much credence unless somebody can explain why making MCAS less likely to fail, relying on 2 sensors, would require simulator training. It doesn't make sense.

Handling AoA disagree would have turned into mandatory curriculum.
( not any longer a bespoke customer option where the customer is responsible for training/using that feature.)
No way around mentioning MCAS as (safety) dependent on AoA disagree ... tin of worms. $1m per plane. humans are only $60k per

BoeingGuy wrote:

747megatop wrote:

Dutchy wrote:

Is this systemic? The focus seems to be on making money and not on safety. On making money and not on engineering. On making spreadsheets work not on making aircraft work. Being proud at the bottomline, not proud on delivering a good product. Has it gone too far with Boeing?

Disclaimer: I do not want to trash Boeing, but it seems to me that Boeing suffers from a decease where large companies suffer from, just profit maximisation, not optimisation.

Unfortunately, that is a product of runaway Capitalism my friend. Shareholders, profits and share prices first. Another industry + another company - The GM fiasco with a faulty ignition switch that would have cost less than a $ to fix; but was not fixed due to a "business decision".

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/gm-re ... lem-n51731

Shockingly (or should i rather say UNshockingly); company made a cost benefit analysis on a spreadsheet and arrived at a decision of "well..deaths are just a cost of doing business versus spending money to fix the problem". In a nutshell GM put a price on a life - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwt1Dc2XD6Q

Question is; did Boeing do the same given that they knew about the problem 1 year before Lion Air - https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/us/boein ... index.html

Hopefully these are exceptions and not the norm.

You’re mixing two different things: lack of the alert light and MCAS. You’re also forgetting, as is apparently the news sources, that the disagree light being incorrectly tied to an option was planning to be fixed.

Boeing knew about the alert light issue and planned to fix it. Lack of it doesn’t cause deaths. Boeing didn’t know about the MCAS problem, so didn’t intentionally ignore it or put a price on lives.

Another fact which both the media and some posters on A.net conveniently forget to mention is that the alert light issue was a supplier error, not Boeing. The design intent was to have it baseline on every airplane.

It’s posts like this are why I’ve gotten defensive and pushed back. So much factually inaccurate and distorted stuff being posted on A.net and reported by the media that over sensationalizes a tragic situation.

Your post is as factually inaccurate and distorted as much as any in my view.

Lets just say - Boeing, as TC holder and manufacturer, has absolute responsibility for the safety and compliance of their product irrespective of where design or implementation is carried out including by separate corporate entities. Ignorance of or non-validation of the functionality, performance or lack of fault tolerance or notification of customer impacting non-compliance to operators and regulators is failure to execute their responsibilities. It is not a defence, rather an admission.

Ray