@CNBCnow — Boeing CEO Muilenburg has resigned, effective immediately.
42 Replies to “It’s Probably Nothing”
As a 70-yesr-old curmudgeon, I have long been suspicious of the supposed “foolproof” software marketed to we consumers. So the techno-nerds invented software that would override pilots’ commands, no matter what. It took a pilots union to refuse to drive the cursed plane with this murderous doftware The Boeing CEO should have been dumped long ago.
I considered putting it in the self-driving overlords category.
“It’s Probably Not Our Self Driving Overlords”
Well, we were warned about a scientific technological elite holding the world captive to narrow interests. We were the ones who didn’t listen.
Welcome to the climate industrial Malthusian complex.
Boeing announced previously that it would cease production of the 737 MAX (40% of the company’s production) and not lay off any workers (12,000 people at one factory). How is that even possible?
they keep building 737s that aren’t MAX’s?
I meant 767, 787 etc… apparently the stock was halted because they have a new CEO.
There is a sense that there is more to the story.
It would seem to be an attack on Boing, can’t figure the reason though.
Agree with the notion that the code nerds hit the wall.
Selling 1st world technology to 3rd world users, is a recipe for disaster. This is Airbus trying to destroy their competition
Agree 100% with the first point, would tentatively agree with the second, until there is more truth about the story.
Uh oh … All my current Doctors are third world ex pats. Guess Sutter Medical couldn’t find any 1st world Doctors to work for their HMO
Why was the problem only in shithole countries with English as a Second Language pilots? I suspect the problem was not requiring a butts in seats certifying course. Instead they relied on the pilots’ ability to read.
The Max was built to – you guessed it – meet green fuel efficiency regulations. This resulted in the use of engines the fuselage was not designed for. The software “ fix “was necessitated by these engines. The green regulators – this time European – are in large part responsible for this. The US should have responded that the Euro regulations were a non-tariff barrier against US planes, and that they would put tariffs on Airbus if the new regs were not dropped, but the office of the President was vacant at the time, being filled instead by an eco-grifter and Democrat punk by the name of Hussein Obama.
Fuel efficiency has always been important to the airlines as it’s a major cost component. The emissions thing is just an add-on. When I took the Boeing plant tour in Seattle (Everett) six years ago, the guide discussed the then new 787 Dreamliner. This was an advanced all new design using carbon fibre composites and promised improved performance. The guide stated Boeing had quizzed airline executives asking which would they prefer – a 10% increase in speed or a similar decrease in fuel consumption at the existing performance level. Apparently the answer was overwhelmingly increased fuel efficiency (i.e. cost). In my opinion, Boeing was going for a quick and cheaper solution rather than designing a new plane and it bit them in the ass.
OMG! That’s fkciung infuriating! … and the WORST of it all … speaking of self-landing jetliners?
Boeing has lost more than $25 billion in market value and this week belatedly replaced a senior executive, after messages came to light between senior pilots complaining about the 737 MAX software “running rampant” during a test simulation in 2016
The senior Boeing Officials who knew this … but put the planes into service anyway, should be summarily arrested and charged with murder. And all the officials in the Obama Admin who blithely accepted the eco rules imposed by the EU upon Boeing should be named as accessories to murder.
Sorry. White collar crime needs to be enforced as vigorously as marijuana crime. More vigorously, in fact, because the stakes are so much higher.
Is someone doing a Death by Climate Scam Tally?
And a dollar cost of the Climate Scam?
Someone is going to pay someday.
The Mother of all Class Action Suits!
I want pilots on my flight. Not software end users.
There is something to be said for that. Virtually all large aircraft are so automated now that many if most younger pilots have never learned how to fly manually in a pinch.
Thanks a pantload for that info. May as well have the “Airplane” autopilot.
It’s complicated…
When Concorde was being designed it became clear that it was going to be the first commercial airliner that was “fly by wire” – no direct connection between the pilot’s yolk and the control surfaces. But FAA rules for commercial aircraft required a mechanical backup. Other regulators were quite happy with the triple redundancy in the design, but not the Americans, so mechanical linkages were added, even though it would be impossible for the pilot to move the control surfaces at supersonic speed even if they wanted to. I was also told that it was fairly certain that even if someone with super-human strength was at the controls, the linkages would likely just bend.
The real issue with the 737 Max is not just the lack of redundancy and third-world coding standards that the FFA let slide, but the fact that the aircraft is unstable in some real world circumstances. Military fighters are unstable in pretty much any conditions, and only stay in the air thanks to the control software (which does have redundancy). Moving from unconditionally stable to marginally stable is a big deal. Covering that up with software in commercial passenger service is something that needs real debate, and in my opinion, a LOT of testing, including for example, several years using the design in non-passenger applications such as freight. Purchasers need to be fully aware and make the conscious decision.
On the comment above about Boeing customers preferring efficiency over speed, I think Boeing asked the wrong people. Given the choice a lot of the people that really matter, those that actually pay, the flying public, may have a different preference. The carrier that chose lower operating cost might just find that they have to give that up, and then some, trying to compete with other companies that offer faster transport.
Lower fuel consumption has benefits additional to direct fuel cost. Longer range for a given fuel load, increased carrying capacity for paying passengers/cargo, reduced take-off weight (able to use shorter runway) making it possible to fly in/out of more destinations without changing planes. The flying public that actually pays might be quite as likely when informed of the trade-offs to appreciate these benefits.
techno nerds have NO empathy, it’s not just Boeing, but every were. Try being a dyslexic and getting schitt done, using crap these fools designed. I owned one of the first business’s to try direct deposit, what a joke, those assholes have no clue
Agree fully.
I think the main cause of Boeing’s woes is not tech, it’s accountants. There is a ton of tech in a plane, only becomes a problem if corners are cut on testing and design, etc. You may recall the reason the problem started was because, unlike the airbus, the Boeing needed to do a major design mod to mount the new efficient engines in the appropriate spot. Would have been to expensive, so work around solution was to mount the engines in the easiest spot, which altered the flight characteristics. Then, they addressed the bad flight characterisitcs with software and sensors. So it’s clearly the fault of the money guys.
I bought BA @ 329.00 thinking their 737 Max would be fixed. I liked the fact that only Airbus was competition on the civilian side and that BA has a sizable defense side. Top that with space exploration. Then they have a clock problem that scuttles the re-supply mission to the space station. As Gartman says there is never just one rat.
I almost did the same. Almost.
– And please remember, this WAS NOT “software engineers”. Boeing laid-off all their software engineers, the ones with years of experience on the 737 and others, and replaced them with $9-an-hour Indian coders with no experience on the 737 (or others).
– And please remember, the FAA LET THEM. They deserve the adjoining cell.
The problem of the 737MAX, for those who didn’t really see what was going-on, is simple; the hardest part of a modern airliner to design and build, is the wing; supercritical wings are why modern airliners exist. Boeing 737’s were losing in competitiveness because they use more fuel; the solution would be to put bigger engines on, because bigger engines = bigger fans = better fuel economy. But if you look at head-on pictures of a mid-life 737, you’ll notice that the bottom of the engine cowlings isn’t round; it’s noticeably flattened, to keep the engine cowlings from dragging on the ground and hopefully, from vacuuming-up stray pebbles on the runway – FOD (foreign object damage) is murderous to modern $multi-million engines.
So Boeing wants to put bigger engines on the 737, to get better fuel mileage. But to do this, they have to put taller landing gear on the aircraft, to keep the bigger engines off the ground. This. Ain’t. Simple. Or. Cheap. The wing spar that holds the whole plane off the ground, is what the gear attaches-to; if the gear is made longer, it won’t be able to swing-inward when you retract the gear after takeoff; the tires will hit in the middle. Or if the mounting point is moved farther outward so longer gear can use the existing wheelwells, you’re talking a longer main spar, which entails a complete redesign of the wing – it would be cheaper to design (and flight-certify, a years-long procedure) a whole new aircraft.
And the 737 is the most numerous and profitable airliner in existence – if Boeing could dodge such a hugely-expensive redesign, they certainly would.
So they mounted new, bigger engines FORWARD and UPWARD of the 737’s wing, to give them the needed ground clearance. But herein lies the problem – the new aircraft does not fly like a 737 anymore; it is indeed, marginally-flyable because there’s more weight forward of the wing (which means the centre of gravity has moved – and the elevators may not have enough ‘bite’ to keep the nose up anymore), and the engines are canted at a different angle, and therefore they’re blowing in another direction – and the pilots MUST know all this, and know how to fly the new aircraft. So all the 737 pilots in the world are going to need extensive re-training to fly the ‘MAX; they can’t just sit down in one and take-off – and the higher training bill is a big factor for airlines to swallow, when they’re already operating on razor-thin profit margins and the training problem exists with the 737MAX but not its competitors.
And that’s after the FAA thoroughly evaluates all the above, to ensure the 737MAX is actually safely flyable in the first place; the centre of gravity is one of those ‘magic’ criteria on an aircraft that MUST be fully understood by all concerned.
So Boeing got cheap; and they snookered the FAA into believing they’d done their homework, and the airlines into believing that only minimal retraining was needed for their pilots; and then they didn’t even provide that. And there’s more, of course – there always is. The Angle of Attack (AoA) indicator would be a sure means of alerting pilots they have a problem, and the 737MAX comes with one. But they’re unreliable – and a second AoA indicator and a warning light that they weren’t reading the same value, so a pilot would be alerted that he had a problem, was offered by Boeing for the 737MAX – as an extra-cost option. A lot of the lower-cost airlines didn’t bother, likely because they didn’t know any better – after all, this is BOEING, right?
All of the U.S. carriers equipped their MAX’s with the optional second AoA indicator, and none of them crashed – and the very Lion Air MAX that crashed, was rescued from doing exactly that by a standards pilot in the jump seat, on the very flight before the flight it crashed on.
At some point “tragedy” becomes “criminal negligence causing death” – Boeing and the FAA are well beyond that with the MAX; Boeing for doing it, and the FAA for letting them.
“Meet Bubba, your cellmate…”
Thanks for the highly informative, technical, read. I had no idea of how all those design details came together to create such a mess. One thing I’ve learned as a designer (of things much simpler than an airliner) is that the more complex things get, the more unstable they become. The more likely problems will occur.
The idea that “technology” will solve inelegant design cock-ups is beyond optimistic, it’s downright insane. Every successful design starts with a good “idea”. It’s that “idea” which makes or breaks the design. If you try to design around a bad idea … it will never get “fixed”. It sounds like the 737 max jet was simply a bad idea. A very bad idea. And no amount of software “fixes” will rescue the poor hardware decisions.
It would be nice to fly in an aircraft developed by engineers and not by the Sales Department.
It would.
Again: there’s never money to pay the engineers to do the job right.
There’s always plenty of money to pay lawyers to clean up the mess.
Thanks for a very good comment and background on the issue. I found this comment today in the Financial Post which adds some background:
“Boeing’s problems snowballed as additional problems arose and regulators expanded their review of the Max beyond MCAS. There was the revelation that a cockpit light that might have alerted the crews to the sensor malfunction was inoperable in most Max jets because of a coding error. While Boeing had known of the issue for more than a year, it didn’t alert the FAA or airlines until after the Lion Air crash.” https://business.financialpost.com/transportation/airlines/boeing-ceo-resigns-as-737-max-crisis-deepens#comments-area
There’s always plenty of money for the CEO’s yacht, a make-work job for his sugar baby, and for a gang of lawyers to clean up the mess.
There’s never money to pay white men to do the job right the first time.
boing !!!! boing !!!!! boing !!!!!!
hey there boEing, the name *wasn’t* supposed to symbolize the sound of an aircraft bouncing.
m’kay????
I grieve for the passengers in any 737 crash whose sacrifice it took to get thing back on track.
that includes certain mindsets.
Guys – The 737 MAX crashes were caused by a combination of things. Poorly trained pilots, a trim management system that relied too much on pilot capability to detect the malfunction, poor maintenance practices, and probably some othere stuff. What has not been a cause is software programming errors. The system and software did what they were designed to do.
Also a factor but rarely mentioned is the economics of airplane design. Along with safety, weight, power, and volume are key design criteria which means engineers strive to meet the safety requirements with the smallest weight using the least power and the smallest volume. Safety requirements are developed from a Functional Hazard Assessment – this gets a ton of scrutiny within Boeing and the regulators (usually the European regulators look at this stuff and often the Canadian regulators). For a given system, the FHA looks at what the consequences of a failure would be for the function. Failures examined include both loss and erroneous operation. For failures that are deemed potentially catastrophic, the system design must be such that no single failure can result in the catastrophic event and that combination of failures that could lead to catastrophy must be less probable than 1E-9 per flight hour. In other words, the combination of failures cannot happen any more often than once every billion hours of flight.
What this means is that the regulators and Boeing designers made the assumption that the failure of this system was much less serious than a catastrophic event. If you talk to experienced American and Canadian airline pilots, they will tell you that a failure of the automatic trim system is a pain, but not serious. In the industry, this translates to what they call a Major event due to the extra flight crew work load required. The reason these pilots say this is not a big deal is that the failure of the auto trim is pretty obvious to the pilot and the response is easy to correct by turning off the auto trim and handling the trim manually.
What that means for the engineering design teams is that a system only needing to meet the Major event classification is allowed to suffer failures as often as once every 100,000 hours of flight. Which means that the design can be much simpler and not as robust.
What is clear from the reports of the accident is that the pilots did not realize that the auto trim had failed and did not take the correct actions. The mistake that Boeing and the various regulators made was in assuming that pilots of large air transports around the world would have sufficient training to detect basic failures of aircraft systems. Yes, this autotrim function was different from the autotrim functions on older 737s, but the way the failure manifests was not.
The fact that Boeing’s CEO is taking the fall for this is ridiculous, in my opinion. He certainly had nothing to do with any of the design or even the design culture in the engineering community for the 737MAX.
So … full disclosure… I am a retired Boeing engineer that has been responsible for the design and certification of safety critical systems on their commercial aircraft. I have never worked on the 737 MAX or on a flight control system for any aircraft.
I was informed by a reliable source that Southwest Airlines told Boeing the Max configuration should not require any re certification for Pilots or they would not buy. Boeing then designed the cockpit accordingly, but there are differences that should have mandated Sim. time. There are too few Max Sims. in the USA and the costs to re certify all their Pilots would be enormous. In second world countries even less. Canada has five. So who made the decision to acquiesce to the Southwest statement.
Pauligon, I invite you to read Denninger (market-ticker.org) – he’s not an aircraft software engineer, but he has designed control systems for industrial machinery so he has a shmick – and his #1 concern in doing so has always been the danger of a big, powerful machine putting an operator’s head through a cinder-block wall. He writes at length on the MAX, and his major complaint is that the auto-trim was given far too much authority by people who didn’t really know what they were doing, and then inadequately tested by Boeing or the FAA in the interests of “minimizing” the training bills for the airlines.
Either way, it can be agreed that events show it shouldn’a been dun like that… I gather Boeing has full blueprints of what they want to replace the 737 with – carbon fibre airframes offer huge advantages for airliners, in that aluminium corrodes and work-hardens, whereas carbon fibre doesn’t corrode, doesn’t work-harden, is a lot stronger WRT pressurization and on top of all that, is cheaper. But introducing a new airliner is MONDO expensive, and the 737 has been Boeing’s most profitable offering for decades; no surprise they wouldn’t slaughter the goose-with-the-golden-eggs any sooner than they absolutely had to.
Doing damage control for Boeing, I note.
It isn’t so much that the pilots were poorly trained (always blame the pilots) as that they were unaware of the existence of the MCAS.
Don’t blame the CEO? Why not? This was one of Boeing’s major projects. I’d turn the bugger over to ISIS for “interrogation.”
Would this software land a planeload of people safely on the hudson river after the engines failed from goose strikes to the engine ??
Nope – it takes a Sully to do that!
Like a few of the other commentators, I too once worked for Boeing. Having been around the block more than a few times I can offer my opinion that Boeing is probably the best run organization ever seen.
Considering the second crash occurred in an aircraft that had been diverted from disaster by a pilot who simply followed the instruction having been provided by Boing and only crashed the next day because the next pilot did not follow the instruction – I cannot fault the manufacturer.
The problem is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Let Boeing design and build the plane and these ‘accidents’ would not happen. The FAA, major airline customers, foreign (EU) regulators, and lax standards accepted in third world countries have been and continue to be the problem. Everyone thinks they know best but when things go wrong it is always the fault of the aircraft manufacturer.
As a 70-yesr-old curmudgeon, I have long been suspicious of the supposed “foolproof” software marketed to we consumers. So the techno-nerds invented software that would override pilots’ commands, no matter what. It took a pilots union to refuse to drive the cursed plane with this murderous doftware The Boeing CEO should have been dumped long ago.
I considered putting it in the self-driving overlords category.
“It’s Probably Not Our Self Driving Overlords”
Well, we were warned about a scientific technological elite holding the world captive to narrow interests. We were the ones who didn’t listen.
Welcome to the climate industrial Malthusian complex.
Boeing announced previously that it would cease production of the 737 MAX (40% of the company’s production) and not lay off any workers (12,000 people at one factory). How is that even possible?
they keep building 737s that aren’t MAX’s?
I meant 767, 787 etc… apparently the stock was halted because they have a new CEO.
There is a sense that there is more to the story.
It would seem to be an attack on Boing, can’t figure the reason though.
Agree with the notion that the code nerds hit the wall.
Selling 1st world technology to 3rd world users, is a recipe for disaster. This is Airbus trying to destroy their competition
Agree 100% with the first point, would tentatively agree with the second, until there is more truth about the story.
Uh oh … All my current Doctors are third world ex pats. Guess Sutter Medical couldn’t find any 1st world Doctors to work for their HMO
Why was the problem only in shithole countries with English as a Second Language pilots? I suspect the problem was not requiring a butts in seats certifying course. Instead they relied on the pilots’ ability to read.
The Max was built to – you guessed it – meet green fuel efficiency regulations. This resulted in the use of engines the fuselage was not designed for. The software “ fix “was necessitated by these engines. The green regulators – this time European – are in large part responsible for this. The US should have responded that the Euro regulations were a non-tariff barrier against US planes, and that they would put tariffs on Airbus if the new regs were not dropped, but the office of the President was vacant at the time, being filled instead by an eco-grifter and Democrat punk by the name of Hussein Obama.
The whole, sorry story:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/10/23/devine-eco-madness-may-be-reason-for-disastrous-boeing-737-max-safety-issues/amp/
Fuel efficiency has always been important to the airlines as it’s a major cost component. The emissions thing is just an add-on. When I took the Boeing plant tour in Seattle (Everett) six years ago, the guide discussed the then new 787 Dreamliner. This was an advanced all new design using carbon fibre composites and promised improved performance. The guide stated Boeing had quizzed airline executives asking which would they prefer – a 10% increase in speed or a similar decrease in fuel consumption at the existing performance level. Apparently the answer was overwhelmingly increased fuel efficiency (i.e. cost). In my opinion, Boeing was going for a quick and cheaper solution rather than designing a new plane and it bit them in the ass.
OMG! That’s fkciung infuriating! … and the WORST of it all … speaking of self-landing jetliners?
Boeing has lost more than $25 billion in market value and this week belatedly replaced a senior executive, after messages came to light between senior pilots complaining about the 737 MAX software “running rampant” during a test simulation in 2016
The senior Boeing Officials who knew this … but put the planes into service anyway, should be summarily arrested and charged with murder. And all the officials in the Obama Admin who blithely accepted the eco rules imposed by the EU upon Boeing should be named as accessories to murder.
Sorry. White collar crime needs to be enforced as vigorously as marijuana crime. More vigorously, in fact, because the stakes are so much higher.
Is someone doing a Death by Climate Scam Tally?
And a dollar cost of the Climate Scam?
Someone is going to pay someday.
The Mother of all Class Action Suits!
I want pilots on my flight. Not software end users.
There is something to be said for that. Virtually all large aircraft are so automated now that many if most younger pilots have never learned how to fly manually in a pinch.
Thanks a pantload for that info. May as well have the “Airplane” autopilot.
It’s complicated…
When Concorde was being designed it became clear that it was going to be the first commercial airliner that was “fly by wire” – no direct connection between the pilot’s yolk and the control surfaces. But FAA rules for commercial aircraft required a mechanical backup. Other regulators were quite happy with the triple redundancy in the design, but not the Americans, so mechanical linkages were added, even though it would be impossible for the pilot to move the control surfaces at supersonic speed even if they wanted to. I was also told that it was fairly certain that even if someone with super-human strength was at the controls, the linkages would likely just bend.
The real issue with the 737 Max is not just the lack of redundancy and third-world coding standards that the FFA let slide, but the fact that the aircraft is unstable in some real world circumstances. Military fighters are unstable in pretty much any conditions, and only stay in the air thanks to the control software (which does have redundancy). Moving from unconditionally stable to marginally stable is a big deal. Covering that up with software in commercial passenger service is something that needs real debate, and in my opinion, a LOT of testing, including for example, several years using the design in non-passenger applications such as freight. Purchasers need to be fully aware and make the conscious decision.
On the comment above about Boeing customers preferring efficiency over speed, I think Boeing asked the wrong people. Given the choice a lot of the people that really matter, those that actually pay, the flying public, may have a different preference. The carrier that chose lower operating cost might just find that they have to give that up, and then some, trying to compete with other companies that offer faster transport.
Lower fuel consumption has benefits additional to direct fuel cost. Longer range for a given fuel load, increased carrying capacity for paying passengers/cargo, reduced take-off weight (able to use shorter runway) making it possible to fly in/out of more destinations without changing planes. The flying public that actually pays might be quite as likely when informed of the trade-offs to appreciate these benefits.
Have a read of
https://www.pilotweb.aero/features/737-max-scandal-analysis-1-6127413
techno nerds have NO empathy, it’s not just Boeing, but every were. Try being a dyslexic and getting schitt done, using crap these fools designed. I owned one of the first business’s to try direct deposit, what a joke, those assholes have no clue
Agree fully.
I think the main cause of Boeing’s woes is not tech, it’s accountants. There is a ton of tech in a plane, only becomes a problem if corners are cut on testing and design, etc. You may recall the reason the problem started was because, unlike the airbus, the Boeing needed to do a major design mod to mount the new efficient engines in the appropriate spot. Would have been to expensive, so work around solution was to mount the engines in the easiest spot, which altered the flight characteristics. Then, they addressed the bad flight characterisitcs with software and sensors. So it’s clearly the fault of the money guys.
I bought BA @ 329.00 thinking their 737 Max would be fixed. I liked the fact that only Airbus was competition on the civilian side and that BA has a sizable defense side. Top that with space exploration. Then they have a clock problem that scuttles the re-supply mission to the space station. As Gartman says there is never just one rat.
I almost did the same. Almost.
– And please remember, this WAS NOT “software engineers”. Boeing laid-off all their software engineers, the ones with years of experience on the 737 and others, and replaced them with $9-an-hour Indian coders with no experience on the 737 (or others).
– And please remember, the FAA LET THEM. They deserve the adjoining cell.
The problem of the 737MAX, for those who didn’t really see what was going-on, is simple; the hardest part of a modern airliner to design and build, is the wing; supercritical wings are why modern airliners exist. Boeing 737’s were losing in competitiveness because they use more fuel; the solution would be to put bigger engines on, because bigger engines = bigger fans = better fuel economy. But if you look at head-on pictures of a mid-life 737, you’ll notice that the bottom of the engine cowlings isn’t round; it’s noticeably flattened, to keep the engine cowlings from dragging on the ground and hopefully, from vacuuming-up stray pebbles on the runway – FOD (foreign object damage) is murderous to modern $multi-million engines.
So Boeing wants to put bigger engines on the 737, to get better fuel mileage. But to do this, they have to put taller landing gear on the aircraft, to keep the bigger engines off the ground. This. Ain’t. Simple. Or. Cheap. The wing spar that holds the whole plane off the ground, is what the gear attaches-to; if the gear is made longer, it won’t be able to swing-inward when you retract the gear after takeoff; the tires will hit in the middle. Or if the mounting point is moved farther outward so longer gear can use the existing wheelwells, you’re talking a longer main spar, which entails a complete redesign of the wing – it would be cheaper to design (and flight-certify, a years-long procedure) a whole new aircraft.
And the 737 is the most numerous and profitable airliner in existence – if Boeing could dodge such a hugely-expensive redesign, they certainly would.
So they mounted new, bigger engines FORWARD and UPWARD of the 737’s wing, to give them the needed ground clearance. But herein lies the problem – the new aircraft does not fly like a 737 anymore; it is indeed, marginally-flyable because there’s more weight forward of the wing (which means the centre of gravity has moved – and the elevators may not have enough ‘bite’ to keep the nose up anymore), and the engines are canted at a different angle, and therefore they’re blowing in another direction – and the pilots MUST know all this, and know how to fly the new aircraft. So all the 737 pilots in the world are going to need extensive re-training to fly the ‘MAX; they can’t just sit down in one and take-off – and the higher training bill is a big factor for airlines to swallow, when they’re already operating on razor-thin profit margins and the training problem exists with the 737MAX but not its competitors.
And that’s after the FAA thoroughly evaluates all the above, to ensure the 737MAX is actually safely flyable in the first place; the centre of gravity is one of those ‘magic’ criteria on an aircraft that MUST be fully understood by all concerned.
So Boeing got cheap; and they snookered the FAA into believing they’d done their homework, and the airlines into believing that only minimal retraining was needed for their pilots; and then they didn’t even provide that. And there’s more, of course – there always is. The Angle of Attack (AoA) indicator would be a sure means of alerting pilots they have a problem, and the 737MAX comes with one. But they’re unreliable – and a second AoA indicator and a warning light that they weren’t reading the same value, so a pilot would be alerted that he had a problem, was offered by Boeing for the 737MAX – as an extra-cost option. A lot of the lower-cost airlines didn’t bother, likely because they didn’t know any better – after all, this is BOEING, right?
All of the U.S. carriers equipped their MAX’s with the optional second AoA indicator, and none of them crashed – and the very Lion Air MAX that crashed, was rescued from doing exactly that by a standards pilot in the jump seat, on the very flight before the flight it crashed on.
At some point “tragedy” becomes “criminal negligence causing death” – Boeing and the FAA are well beyond that with the MAX; Boeing for doing it, and the FAA for letting them.
“Meet Bubba, your cellmate…”
Thanks for the highly informative, technical, read. I had no idea of how all those design details came together to create such a mess. One thing I’ve learned as a designer (of things much simpler than an airliner) is that the more complex things get, the more unstable they become. The more likely problems will occur.
The idea that “technology” will solve inelegant design cock-ups is beyond optimistic, it’s downright insane. Every successful design starts with a good “idea”. It’s that “idea” which makes or breaks the design. If you try to design around a bad idea … it will never get “fixed”. It sounds like the 737 max jet was simply a bad idea. A very bad idea. And no amount of software “fixes” will rescue the poor hardware decisions.
Oh! And jail time? Abso-damn-lutely
This article from IEEE Spectrum is informative. https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer
The author is a software developer and a private pilot.
It would be nice to fly in an aircraft developed by engineers and not by the Sales Department.
It would.
Again: there’s never money to pay the engineers to do the job right.
There’s always plenty of money to pay lawyers to clean up the mess.
Thanks for a very good comment and background on the issue. I found this comment today in the Financial Post which adds some background:
“Boeing’s problems snowballed as additional problems arose and regulators expanded their review of the Max beyond MCAS. There was the revelation that a cockpit light that might have alerted the crews to the sensor malfunction was inoperable in most Max jets because of a coding error. While Boeing had known of the issue for more than a year, it didn’t alert the FAA or airlines until after the Lion Air crash.”
https://business.financialpost.com/transportation/airlines/boeing-ceo-resigns-as-737-max-crisis-deepens#comments-area
There’s always plenty of money for the CEO’s yacht, a make-work job for his sugar baby, and for a gang of lawyers to clean up the mess.
There’s never money to pay white men to do the job right the first time.
boing !!!! boing !!!!! boing !!!!!!
hey there boEing, the name *wasn’t* supposed to symbolize the sound of an aircraft bouncing.
m’kay????
I grieve for the passengers in any 737 crash whose sacrifice it took to get thing back on track.
that includes certain mindsets.
Guys – The 737 MAX crashes were caused by a combination of things. Poorly trained pilots, a trim management system that relied too much on pilot capability to detect the malfunction, poor maintenance practices, and probably some othere stuff. What has not been a cause is software programming errors. The system and software did what they were designed to do.
Also a factor but rarely mentioned is the economics of airplane design. Along with safety, weight, power, and volume are key design criteria which means engineers strive to meet the safety requirements with the smallest weight using the least power and the smallest volume. Safety requirements are developed from a Functional Hazard Assessment – this gets a ton of scrutiny within Boeing and the regulators (usually the European regulators look at this stuff and often the Canadian regulators). For a given system, the FHA looks at what the consequences of a failure would be for the function. Failures examined include both loss and erroneous operation. For failures that are deemed potentially catastrophic, the system design must be such that no single failure can result in the catastrophic event and that combination of failures that could lead to catastrophy must be less probable than 1E-9 per flight hour. In other words, the combination of failures cannot happen any more often than once every billion hours of flight.
What this means is that the regulators and Boeing designers made the assumption that the failure of this system was much less serious than a catastrophic event. If you talk to experienced American and Canadian airline pilots, they will tell you that a failure of the automatic trim system is a pain, but not serious. In the industry, this translates to what they call a Major event due to the extra flight crew work load required. The reason these pilots say this is not a big deal is that the failure of the auto trim is pretty obvious to the pilot and the response is easy to correct by turning off the auto trim and handling the trim manually.
What that means for the engineering design teams is that a system only needing to meet the Major event classification is allowed to suffer failures as often as once every 100,000 hours of flight. Which means that the design can be much simpler and not as robust.
What is clear from the reports of the accident is that the pilots did not realize that the auto trim had failed and did not take the correct actions. The mistake that Boeing and the various regulators made was in assuming that pilots of large air transports around the world would have sufficient training to detect basic failures of aircraft systems. Yes, this autotrim function was different from the autotrim functions on older 737s, but the way the failure manifests was not.
The fact that Boeing’s CEO is taking the fall for this is ridiculous, in my opinion. He certainly had nothing to do with any of the design or even the design culture in the engineering community for the 737MAX.
So … full disclosure… I am a retired Boeing engineer that has been responsible for the design and certification of safety critical systems on their commercial aircraft. I have never worked on the 737 MAX or on a flight control system for any aircraft.
I was informed by a reliable source that Southwest Airlines told Boeing the Max configuration should not require any re certification for Pilots or they would not buy. Boeing then designed the cockpit accordingly, but there are differences that should have mandated Sim. time. There are too few Max Sims. in the USA and the costs to re certify all their Pilots would be enormous. In second world countries even less. Canada has five. So who made the decision to acquiesce to the Southwest statement.
Pauligon, I invite you to read Denninger (market-ticker.org) – he’s not an aircraft software engineer, but he has designed control systems for industrial machinery so he has a shmick – and his #1 concern in doing so has always been the danger of a big, powerful machine putting an operator’s head through a cinder-block wall. He writes at length on the MAX, and his major complaint is that the auto-trim was given far too much authority by people who didn’t really know what they were doing, and then inadequately tested by Boeing or the FAA in the interests of “minimizing” the training bills for the airlines.
Either way, it can be agreed that events show it shouldn’a been dun like that… I gather Boeing has full blueprints of what they want to replace the 737 with – carbon fibre airframes offer huge advantages for airliners, in that aluminium corrodes and work-hardens, whereas carbon fibre doesn’t corrode, doesn’t work-harden, is a lot stronger WRT pressurization and on top of all that, is cheaper. But introducing a new airliner is MONDO expensive, and the 737 has been Boeing’s most profitable offering for decades; no surprise they wouldn’t slaughter the goose-with-the-golden-eggs any sooner than they absolutely had to.
Doing damage control for Boeing, I note.
It isn’t so much that the pilots were poorly trained (always blame the pilots) as that they were unaware of the existence of the MCAS.
Don’t blame the CEO? Why not? This was one of Boeing’s major projects. I’d turn the bugger over to ISIS for “interrogation.”
Would this software land a planeload of people safely on the hudson river after the engines failed from goose strikes to the engine ??
Nope – it takes a Sully to do that!
Like a few of the other commentators, I too once worked for Boeing. Having been around the block more than a few times I can offer my opinion that Boeing is probably the best run organization ever seen.
Considering the second crash occurred in an aircraft that had been diverted from disaster by a pilot who simply followed the instruction having been provided by Boing and only crashed the next day because the next pilot did not follow the instruction – I cannot fault the manufacturer.
The problem is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Let Boeing design and build the plane and these ‘accidents’ would not happen. The FAA, major airline customers, foreign (EU) regulators, and lax standards accepted in third world countries have been and continue to be the problem. Everyone thinks they know best but when things go wrong it is always the fault of the aircraft manufacturer.
This article from IEEE Spectrum is informative. https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer
The author is a software developer and a private pilot.
It would be nice to fly in an aircraft developed by engineers and not by the Sales Department.