Good book describing the cultural change from engineering-focus to business-focus of Boeing:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...
Good book describing the cultural change from engineering-focus to business-focus of Boeing:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55994102-flying-blind
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646497/flying-blind...
One troubling aspect of this is that it appears Alaska had reason to believe something was wrong with this plane but basically ignored it. They were getting pressurization warnings on prior flights, but the only action they took was restricting the plane from flying ETOPS routes.
They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount of inconvenience.
Things like this are always alarming until you learn the base rate. Unfortunately, I cannot find a quick reference for this, but many many flights take off with some anomaly noted in the technical log book.
And it's not like driving is especially safe. It's just that traffic deaths are so routine that they're not generally widely reported, while pretty much every major issue with an airplane gets national attention. In the US, traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 lost with all hands every couple days.
Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I control my fate when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad conditions, etc.) but have little to no control once I board a plane.
It is true that you control your fate more when driving. Once the door shuts on the plane you have little ability to do anything other than get yourself arrested.
That’s part of WHY air travel is safer.
I like to consider what is safer when something goes wromg. Are there statistics that track this across different modes of travel?
Yes. Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars. There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
Airplanes are inherently much, much less reliable than cars and only reach reliability through however many millions or billions of dollars worth of redundant systems and maintenance intervals and however many man-hours. That means that when you get on an airplane, you are extremely reliant on those systems and processes having been followed.
We are seeing more and more that these systems and processes have been breaking down, from regulation to manufacturing to pilots to systems to maintenance.
It really is hard to compare, but for an airplane, a passenger has to have faith that literally hundreds of thousands of people and things have done their job correctly. When I drive my car, I am much less reliant on people, systems, and processes, as cars are just plain simple. Most leople barely change their oil or check tire pressure. I even once had a complete engine failure and was able to just roll to a stop from highway speeds. Furthermore, I am in control. If I am too tired, I don't drive. I can pay attention to other drivers. I am directly responsible for maintenance. Etc.
I think it's hard to compare airplanes to cars by numbers alone. There are subtleties that are not exposed by numbers.
For an airplane passenger, it is absolutely a risk. You rely on so much happening correctly, and you are not in control of any of it. As little bits in that chain of things that need to happen don't happen correctly, percentages of failure and death go way up, and fast.
And we haven't even discussed in-flight medical emergencies, as there are actually quite a few in-flight deaths every year that would likely not yield a death if the medical emergency happened on the ground.
There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
Wikipedia says there has been 51, not counting private or military. And that list doesnt include American aircraft flying overseas, to which the MAX planes would add hundreds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_...
And that is why I think it is absolutely, mind bogglingly bonkers that Tesla is currently using "drive by wire" in a mass production car when this technology is not common in aviation at all. Only the huge airliners that benefit from extremely expensive maintenance schedules use full "fly by wire".
Drive by wire isn’t the problem. You already have tons of electronics in a 10 year old car, from the ECU to ABS. However, there are relevant important standards and certifications in aviation, and I’m not sure if vehicular certs are as strict.
It’s only not in small planes, and then because of cost.
Every Airbus built in the last 40 years is fly by wire.
Plane Operated by a US Airline != Plane Manufactured in the US
Yes. And? I didn't conflate those two.
People die in cars due to medical emergency all the time. I even know someone who had a heart attack and it caused him to hit a utility pole and die. We just don’t have any way of tracking it, whereas the FAA keeps very detailed statistics.
You’re leaving out the biggest risk: other people. Most deaths, in planes or cars, are caused by human error. In a car you’re dependent on everyone going down the road (and there may be thousands in one trip) not drifting across the median. You’re dependent on the person coming the other way at an intersection to stop. Etc.
Traffic deaths have been climbing again after decades of decline, probably due to distracted driving. Driving is much more dangerous.
Southwest 1380 would like a word with you.
Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 was a Boeing 737-700 that experienced an uncontained engine failure[a] in the left CFM56-7B engine after departing from New York–LaGuardia Airport en route to Dallas Love Field on April 17, 2018. […] One passenger was partially ejected from the aircraft and sustained fatal injuries[…]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_13...
Based on this https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca... between 2009 and 2021 there were indeed 2. I think that the point stands, it is very impressive and safe.
Wikipedia says 51.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_...
The numbers would go up quite a bit if it included private and military. The numbers you linked to seem to have a very tight definition of which flights were considered, as the Wikipedia list showcases several more in-flight deaths involving air carrier class airplanes than just two.
I don't understand how you arrived at the number 51. Did you just tally up all the incidents in that list that occurred after 2009?
That list includes a bunch of incidents that are not really relevant for assessing risk level when flying on a commercial airline:
- Someone committing suicide by getting sucked into a plane engine while the plane was on the ground.
- Someone sneaking onto a runway and getting struck by a plane that was landing.
- Another person stealing a plane and intentionally crashing it into the ground.
- The Kobe Bryant helicopter crash.
Looking through the list I would conclude the parent comment was correct. The only incidents with passenger fatalities on US airlines since 2009 were Southwest 1380 and PenAir 3296.
It's definitely more than two.
Can you specify which other incidents on that list you think are relevant?
Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars
A weird metric. I'd prefer travel time, not per mile.
Still far safer.
Why is it a weird metric? People travel exactly as far as they need to, not based on time.
Because when trying to compare different things (car, train, plane, space ship, etc), they all travel at different speeds, by different methods, with different categories.
An example? Travel to the moon would be the safest thing ever, even if 50% of the ships exploded, because of how far it is. I bet travel to Mars would the safest thing ever, based upon miles, even if 99% of the ships exploded.
Things break based upon two things. One is maintenance per trip. And each trip has riskier parts, of which start and end are parts. Planes have issues taking off and landing, a lot more than cruising. Same for space ships. Even cars have issues at start and end of trip, if you're driving very long distances.
What, no? Earth to the moon is 200,000 miles away. Call it a half million for a round trip.
Airliner passenger deaths are 1 per several billion miles.
Yes, but your response does not invalidate the premise.
An old article from 1998 says the risk of death per hour of travel for air vs car is about the same.
https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat...
But, I disagree with the article, I think the debate is hardly settled.
Your car won't fall out of the sky in the event of a malfunction so I guess cars are safer "when something goes wrong"? Then again cars travel with less margin of error to other cars and objects than airplanes.
An airplane falling out the sky is something like the equivalent of the wheels falling off of a car traveling at speed. It's not that it can't happen, but it's hardly the only possible result of a malfunction.
There's also a giant speed difference plus the fact that a car will decelerate even if uncontrollably for basically any mechanical failure. Even at speed vehicle accidents are quite safe comparatively to a plane that has lost its ability to fly. A plane tends to have all or nothing incidents while vehicles have lots of accidents with a wide variety of severity.
Naturally that tends to push aviation towards avoidance of mechanical issues and on cars we are much more tolerant. I've seen people driving cars with their door duck taped on!
When someone runs a red light at speed and t-bones you on your left you're dead no matter how defensively you drive.
The illusion of control doesn't change your odds much.
It does change odds. So when considering defensive driving the rule "flying is safer" may not hold.
Flying is safer by several orders of magnitude. Especially in the US.
Let's do some math, shall we?
In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html
So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops!
Of course one should consider that:
(a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?),
(b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference),
(c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either.
Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.
The report you seem to be citing is this one, which summarizes the data on General Aviation flights. Those are small private planes. Commercial air transport is not part of General Aviation.
https://www.aopa.org/-/media/files/aopa/home/training-and-sa...
The last passenger death in a US Commercial Air Carrier was in 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_in...
Even assuming your 24-million flight hour number, that would mean 1 death over 100-million flight hours from 2020-2023.
Yep, I'm not actually claiming that driving is safer per se, but it's apples vs oranges. I'm also not sure about 24M hours, total commercial airlines hours (i.e. aircraft hours, not passengers') is around 14M/year in 2018 (link in my other comment), so we need to multiply by the average number of passengers. Which gives >1B hours/year for commercial airlines only.
If that door had hit horizontal stabilizer though we would have had a completely different statistics even with 1B hours. Fortunately it didn't happen, but with the current trend the idea that flying is always safer may become not so obvious, and "orders of magnitude" thing may disappear pretty fast.
IMHO the comparison is to inform the decision point of whether to fly or drive somewhere, so the inputs should be limited accordingly: exclude drives that couldn't reasonably be flown.
Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more when driving unfamiliar roads, with additional fatigue of long durations, with additional distraction of kids, etc. Or perhaps routine drives are worse because one lets their guard down!
Statistics is a tricky thing. There are 43K traffic fatalities in the US per year and 53K deaths from colorectal cancer. Which means chances of dying from colorectal cancer is higher than dying in a traffic accident. Well, over a lifetime, but distribution over age can be different etc. In the same way 43K fatalities are not an even distribution over region, type of driving, destination, age etc.
Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good.
But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.
This is roughly accurate for general aviation (people taking a Cessna out for a ride on a weekend, etc.) - it is about 10x deadlier than driving and the rates have been pretty stable for decades.
If you look at just airlines, they’re in turn 10x _safer_ than driving if I remember correctly. There’s this anecdote that after 9/11 people were afraid to fly and died on the highways in much higher numbers. There’s also the fact that there there was a very small number of passenger deaths involving airliners in the US in over a decade (meaning no major crashes). Compared to thousands and thousands of traffic deaths a year that should drive the point home, even when you have to adjust for base rates.
There is no amount of defensive driving you can do that would make driving safer than flying commercial.
That's certainly true in the sense that flying from NYC to LA is 750x safer than doing the same as a road trip, on a fatalities-per-km basis. But on a per-trip basis, boarding that flight will be about equally as safe as taking a 5 km trip by car to the hardware store, and above-average defensive driving can certainly boost that radius considerably, maybe to 50 km.
Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite.
On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
Even then, that is a scenario that you can train to look for. I often look both ways before taking off on a green.
I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the situation with defensive driving. There's very little you can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.
Especially since, most of the time, they weren't intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt) was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed instantly or when he hit the ditch.
A death every 100 million miles driven in the US. That's pretty safe.
Not compared to flying.
True, but it's not an apples-to-apple comparison. If you compare by miles, then flying wins by a lot. If you compare by hour, it's much closer (though I'm pretty sure flying still wins, yes).
Only commercial. If you add in General Aviation with some random poorly maintained Cessnas from the 70s piloted by some randoms in their 70s then it's a completely different picture.
I've heard that private aviation and private driving have comparable accident rate, which makes sense. Now I wonder how's the rate of both public transportation.
According to this chart https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... buses and trains have 0.02 to 0.04 deaths per 100,000,000 miles travelled. This compares to 0.01 deaths in the commercial aviation. So pretty much on par, but if you switched to deaths per hours of travel, which is IMHO better statistic, assuming that a average plane flights say 10 times faster than a bus/train (800km/h vs 80km/h which seems reasonable) then the commercial aviation is actually less safe, but not by a big margin either, within the same order of magnitude.
Why is comparing per hour better? The utility of a transport system is in its ability to move things, not in its ability to consume time.
Not if you consider general aviation statistics and instead stick to the commercial planes only. And anyway these statistics are kinda massaged because they compare amount of miles travelled instead of comparing amount of time spend travelling.
Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. There's still a chance of you getting ambulance on road accidents but you're plummeting to your death on major aircraft malfunction.
Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash.
It isn't though. Airliners have suffered in-flight engine explosions and decompressions multiple times since 2001 without fatalities. The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. Modern airliners don't just fall out of the sky. They feature robust designs and highly competent crews.
Cars regularly crash fatally without mechanical failures at all. And that says nothing of the dire state of car maintenance among the general population.
The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959.
While I agree with your point, if the scope is scheduled airline flights in the USA, AA flight 587 crashed on 2001-11-12; globally, Egypt Air 804 on 2016-05-19. There have also been a few close calls, such as Qantas 32 on 2010-11-04, and collisions can also occur, such as that between BAL flight 2937 and DHL slight 611 on 2002-07-01, and Gol Transportes Aéreos flight 1907 with a business jet on 2006-09-29. And, given the topic is things going catastrophically wrong at altitude, there is AF447 on 2009-06-01.
Now do a similar list with every road fatality following mechanical problems. We’ll wait.
We only need to wait as long as it takes you to find, read and understand my first six words here.
It feels like this should be true, but your chance to survive a serious in-flight mishap are actually really good. Like a 90%+ chance of survival.
How can that be? Very few serious in flight mishaps STAY in the news for more than one day, but proportionally MANY mishaps that lead to death stay in the news.
This incident has juice because it's a Boing 737 series aircraft.
It may be hard to believe what I wrote here, and it would be hard to verify if you just look at the general news. You'll need to look at specialized air transport reporting to see the baseline of major mishaps.
How many people died in today’s incident? None.
While I think it’s good to keep things in perspective and recognize that statistically you’re more likely to die on the ride to the airport than on the plane itself, it needs to be said that these statistics shouldn’t lead to a complacent mindset especially because the redundancies in aviation can lead to such a mindset.
Slowly but surely we see more cutting corners in aviation, especially in the US.
This ranges from trying to evade certification for planes to crew hours, to more lax regulation on how air traffic is managed to increase movements at airports, to overworked and understaffed ATC.
I don’t think it has risen to levels that affect statistics in terms of death, but the statistics in terms of near catastrophic events has risen over the years.
I can't link you an independent source just my word as an aircraft mechanic.
I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can never achieve.
Got any undercover advice for Airlines or plane models to avoid? When you book at ticket is there anything you just won't fly knowing what you know?
Commercial aviation is ridiculously safe and well-regulated. Worry about the ride to the airport instead.
You're far more likely to die in a private plane or in an executive jet. GA aircraft crash constantly.
Providing an negative economic incentive for bad actors is still a good idea.
Given the number of parts on one, it would be impossible for them all to be working perfectly at once.
Yes, it's actually an FAA approved document for each aircraft type called the Mimimum Equipment List (MEL). It defines which non-critical equipment is permitted to be inoperative and not prevent dispatch of the aircraft.
Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.
There's a joke about asking skydivers why they'd jump out of a perfectly good airplane and the punch line is that there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.
Every single plane has things that are broken, things that are inoperative, things that behave slightly out of tolerance. This is true for commercial aircraft the whole way down to single engine trainers. 172s are notorious for having fuel gauges that are basically only good for telling you how many fuel tanks you have and not anything related to quantity of fuel on the plane.
Alaskan Airlines is notorious for taking maintenance shortcuts, this is likely not an inherent problem with the airframe but rather this operators SOP.
Alaskan Airline flight 261 is one example.
The subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that inadequate maintenance led to excessive wear and eventual failure of a critical flight control system during flight.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261
Although I can sympathize with the story, this particular aircraft had been in their hands just a couple months. Its first commercial flight was just a couple weeks back. Maintenance isn't the issue here, clearly.
Maintenance isn't the issue here, clearly.
It is. Maintenance was aware of the pressurization warnings on this plane. They did nothing.
No, they logged it. Logging is not nothing.
Planes are incredibly complex and have little problems like that all the time. It's not a safety issue.
This was a brand new aircraft, this is almost certainly a manufacturing defect of some kind.
Fixing known problems as you learn of them is maintenance is it not? That's just as important as changing out the lubricants and checking that the working parts are working.
When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras. A pressurization fault on the ground where the plane is not pressurized almost certainly doesn't hint at problems with a permanently installed door plug.
Do you have any examples that aren't from a quarter century ago?
isn't alaska airlines rated one of the safest airline? What airline is safe these days?
Do you have a source for that? I'm not denying it, just curious to read more.
cursory search:
Preliminary information about the accident remains scarce, though two people familiar with the aircraft tell The Air Current that the aircraft in question, N704AL, had presented spurious indications of pressurization issues during two instances on January 4. The first intermittent warning light appeared during taxi-in following a previous flight, which prompted the airline to remove the aircraft from extended range operations (ETOPS) per maintenance rules. The light appeared again later the same day in flight, the people said.
https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/alaska-737-max-9-t...
No idea about the accuracy of the site. And it seems like they have some script that prevents text highlighting for whatever reason (turn off Javascript).
Well, that's an interesting thing. During taxi-in, the cabin altitude should be the ground altitude; outflow valves open at touchdown.
Hard to understand how an an incipient failure could manifest then (e.g. from increased leakage).
Of course, there's warning lights for excessive cabin pressure, etc, too... which would point to a different theory of the problem than a structural manufacturing problem.
Is "sensor just no longer responding" a failure mode which could trigger the alarm?
Jon Ostower is one of the best aviation reporters in the business and the Air Current is a site many professionals and executives in the industry trust.
It's too bad that asking "source?" comes across as hostile unless clarified to be otherwise. Maybe the internet should adopt something similar to the "/s" tag that signals that sentiment.
Asking for any sort of clarifying information inevitably leads to argumentation on Reddit. It’s like we’ve all learned to be so polite that the truth barely matters (I’m exaggerating of course).
It will come out in the NTSB report, if it's true. Though that will take quite a bit of time.
I haven't trusted Alaska since the Flight 261 crash, where they failed to do basic maintenance for so long that the screw threads in the stabilizer system wore away and locked the plane in the "straight down" orientation. And fired and sued a mechanic who reported the problem. 100% fatalities.
That's more than two decades ago. People involved must have long left the company. They might even be working for other airlines.
That's not how organizations work. You can't just slowly take out the "bad" people and replace them with "good" people and expect that to fix anything. It's the wrong mental model.
Organizations are sticky. They get stuck in a rut, basically. The slow trickle of new people gets indoctrinated into the Company Way (or else selectively ejected), and the people that are able to leave often use it as a lesson of what not to do.
In short, turnover isn't a magic bullet.
What do you call 8 bad cops and two good cops sitting at a table? Ten bad cops. Actual good cops wouldn’t associate with bad cops.
Wait until people figure this out about Washington.
They might even be working for other airlines.
They are part of management now. ;)
I live in Alaska and Alaska Airlines (which isn't Alaskan - it's HQ is in Seattle) has a rather... notorious history with safety/maintenance issues. I fly Delta whenever possible when travelling to the lower 48.
There’s more than one of us up here that goes to hacker news!? Hello fellow northerner!
Do we remember when the referenced article from here [1] hit the top of HackerNews soon after the Max crashes?
[1] https://christinenegroni.com/irony-of-pilot-laying-blame-on-...
At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft.
I would not be surprised though if Boeing's sales drop if the US government brings in tariffs or etc to try and force companies to buy their flying coffins.
At least Airbus seems to be competent in building safe aircraft.
Prior to new models released in the last ~10yrs-ish, Boeing made the safest planes in the sky (as measured by passenger miles). Many of those planes are still flying and still doing great.
For me the interesting question is what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes which is apparently resulting in worse safety performance.
I've heard that when they merged with McDonnell Douglas their new (McDonnell) management pushed out the good engineering culture and dropped their quality standards in a chase for more profit, leading to engineering experiencing the dead sea effect.
in other words: capitalism, the system we've designed our whole society around
No, this isn't a well-functioning capitalist system. Competition is a core principle of capitalism. What occurred in the aerospace industry represents a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Competition is a core principle of capitalism
Capitalism is literally defined by the ability to invest capital to accumulate more of it by way of profit. The logical end of this process is straightforwardly monopoly.
And if the world/environment/context of the business didn’t change then the monopolies might last, but because there is change there is room to innovate and outcompete the monopolies.
Yeah, no. You'll be bought in 95% of cases if you threaten a monopolistic position. That's why I'm really fond of signal btw.
Who doesn't love a fundamentally disastrous system justified by a sometimes possible exception?
Capitalism is not only defined by the accumulation of capital, but also by competition. The interplay between market forces, competition, innovation, and regulation in capitalism works against the formation of monopolies.
The aerospace industry is not a good example of capitalism. What we have with Boeing is basically a government sanctioned monopoly. It’s basically a weak form of nationalization, without the stigma.
Capitalism is not only defined by the accumulation of capital, but also by competition
That's wrong. In reality, the mere theoretical potential for competition has always been more than enough to call it capitalism from any perspective. The facts are that actual competition is not a requirement.
Capitalism is simple: The capital rules supreme. As opposed to the previous system of aristocracy, where it was the land owners. Nobody would seriously claim that aristocracy requires any kind of competition between the aristocrats. Even the very first capitalist big enterprises, such as East India Company were created as _monopolies_
It’s always so funny to read this kind of answer when someone points out the evident flaws of capitalism! “Hey, wait a minute, this is not how capitalism is supposed to work, so you can’t say it’s capitalism”. Too bad that capitalism isn’t one monolithic thing and this is ABSOLUTELY how loosely regulated American capitalism works. It’s a form of capitalism where human life is an optimization problem that sits on the way to profits.
And Soviet built airliners are known for their safety?
Is there any kind of alternative that could be found, or have we reached the end of history, with our only two options being 2023 capitalism versus 1960s Soviet state capitalism?
Airplanes are designed by people, and are enormously complex. No system involving humans will be free of mistakes.
I'm less concerned about mistakes as I am about systemic failures and bad incentives.
Boeing seems to have created a political and regulatory environment for itself where its better for it to design and build planes poorly, than it is for it to design and build planes well.
Consider the incentives of the people at the FAA. Their incentive is to never approve a design, because if they approve a faulty design, they get the heat, too. It's much safer to just not approve anything, or at least delay demanding ever more documentation.
Hence there's always going to be a tug of war between the FAA and the industry. The FAA never wants to approve anything, and industry goes out of business if the FAA doesn't approve it.
You'll see the same forces in action with the FDA.
BTW, as is abundantly clear from history, a fatal design mistake can and has destroyed several airframe companies. Boeing's finances were punished severely after the MAX crashes. Boeing does not win by making an unsafe design. When I worked at Boeing, I didn't know any engineer who was willing to sign his name to a faulty design. Yes, the engineer responsible for a piece of work gets his name on the drawings. It's career suicide for him if he signed off on a bad design.
A working alternative has not been found yet. Even the Soviet system was not sustainable.
Monopolies are the end goal of capitalism
Monopolies are broken by capitalism just as much as they're created by capitalism. The whole "end-stage capitalism" schtick is wrong because a free market will lead to the ossification and then breakdown of a monopolist. You just have to finish spring semester of Econ101 to find out how.
Capitalism != free market. You think of liberalism here.
Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production, no? Maybe the definition changed in the US?
In it's origins it was about the capital ruling, as opposed to the aristocracy. So political power would be in the hands of people with capital, not the landed aristocracy. The means of production only entered the equation with the industrial revolution. And capitalism is older than that, albeit not much older
Monopolies are broken by capitalism just as much as they're created by capitalism.
Source?
In the last 20 years nearly every industry has seen major consolidation between just a few large companies.
Is any part of the capitalist system "well functioning" anymore?
Ah yes, the same capitalism that was around for the building of this industry that was incredibly safe up until it wasnt? Or was it safe because it was heavily regulated back then but the heavy regulations today we ignore because "capitalism"? You cant just throw these single word thought-terminators out there. When an actual cartoon is doing better than you it's time to recalibrate. "Think Mark! Think!"
Why do you think regulatory efforts have been undermined? Karl Marx showed us 150 years ago how a government under capitalism always tends toward domination by capitalists.
So you think that the failure of industry regulation is not due to capitalism as it actually exists? What then causes regulatory failure over time?
Any system where management incentives are not aligned with end-user incentives. So all of them really.
There is also capitalism in Switzerland, Singapore, Australia and countless other countries.
America looks like it's speed running the soviet union and south africa.
787 program:
- designed to outsource most manufacturing to the lowest bidder, many program management problems, overruns and delays
- to bust unions new factory was created in South Carolina and this has very poor QC, there are rumors that a certain large middle eastern airline refuses to accept any planes assembled there
737 program:
- they decided that they are not going to do a clean sheet 737NG and use the existing platform to put on new engines and do other modernization. They did it the cheap way and tried to paper over problems in software to make sure that their biggest customers would not need to send their pilots through extra training. Killed hundreds already.
It's safer to have a new airplane design behave like the old one. There have been many crashes due a pilot being stressed and automatically doing something that would have been right on a previous airplane he was familiar with, but which was wrong for the current airplane he is flying.
All jet airliners are aerodynamically unstable and use active controls to "paper over" that. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing that.
The MCAS problem was not due to its purpose. The problem was the software for it had too much authority, and did not shut off when the pilot countermanded it. A worse problem was the pilots did not follow emergency procedures for runaway trim.
For reference, the emergency procedures are:
1. restore normal trim with the electric trim switches (which overrides MCAS)
2. turn off the trim via a switch on the console
All jet airliners are aerodynamically unstable and use active controls to "paper over" that.
This is flatly wrong. The only aerodynamically unstable planes are experimental and some fighter jets.
No passenger plane can be certified if it can't be proven that it is aerodynamically stable.
EDIT: don't take my word, here is a short explanation by a 777 pilot: https://youtu.be/EuVlbVr_jrs?feature=shared&t=129
This is flatly wrong.
Look up dutch roll, the active yaw damper that suppresses it, and the FAA requirement that all of them have a yaw damper installed.
Besides, the MAX is not unstable. All it was supposed to do was just nudge the nose down a bit to match the profile of the previous 737 jets.
All jet airliners are aerodynamically unstable
Besides, the MAX is not unstable.
You might want to address your seeming hypocrisy there.
MCAS was not designed to address an instability issue.
Aerodynamic stability refers to the desire of an aircraft to return to straight and level flight without any control inputs.
Stability is also commonly understood as the opposite of maneuverability, as a more stable aircraft is less maneuverable.
Combat aircraft such as fighters are designed to be aerodynamically unstable so their maneuverability is unhindered. Likewise stunt planes and other aircraft whose job is to not fly straight and level.
Aircraft such as passenger and cargo airliners are designed to be aerodynamically stable because their job is to fly straight and level with good fuel economy and minimal piloting, they do not need swift and nimble maneuverability.
The safety of an aircraft has no relation to that aircraft's aerodynamic stability.
Airliners also have to work at low speed in thick air, and high speed in thin air. Swept wings, for example, perform poorly at lower speeds.
An airliner has to perform well at both, which is why wings are swept, yet have flaps and slats to modify their aerodynamic profile. Swept wings have other problems, like dutch roll.
Airliners also become uncontrollable above a certain speed, which was a contributing factor to the EA crash (the crew ignored the overspeed warning).
I don't think it's worth relitigating MCAS here but your analysis here is very generous to Boeing and harsh to the pilots who where unwitting test pilots in Boeing's mistake.
In the LA crash, the crew restored normal trim 25 times, and never thought to turn off the trim. Turning off the trim is a "memory item", meaning the pilots should not need to consult a checklist for it. The switch is right there on the center console within easy reach.
The FAA sent around an Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterating the two step process before the EA crash:
Boeing Emergency Airworthiness Directive
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
They also ignored the overspeed warning horn because they were apparently operating at full throttle. This was a large contributory factor to being unable to move the trim by hand.
So, yeah, it is harsh to the crews. I've also talked with MAX pilots who were quite harsh towards them. I'm amazed that one would not be harsh towards a pilot who did not bother to read/understand/remember and EMERGENCY AIRWORTHINESS DIRECTIVE about how not to crash.
Would you get on an airplane knowing it had such a pilot? Not me.
I assign 50% responsibility to the pilots and 50% to Boeing.
Maybe I'd buy that if the exact same thing didn't happen 5 months later with Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. Most of the blame has to be on Boeing.
The EA crew did not follow the 2 step procedure in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive given to all MAX crews before the EA crash.
Also, before the LA crash, the MCAS failure happened on the previous flight of the same aircraft, and the crew just turned off the stab trim, and continued the flight normally and landed safely. That crew was unaware of MCAS, but they followed standard runaway trim emergency procedure.
It literally killed hundreds of people by pretending to be the same plane.
This is a good tabloid take but I don't believe it's accurate. It wasn't pretending to be the same plane - it was pretending to be any aircraft with certifiable flight characteristics, particularly control forces on approach to the stall.
Indeed there is no requirement for aircraft with the same training / type certificate to handle identically. For example the whole CitationJet class from the Mustang to the CJ4.
The premise that MCAS makes pilot type training unnecessary, then under some circumstances the pilot should override MCAS, is dangerously flawed.
Pilots are already trained to stop runaway trim failures, and received an Emergency Airworthiness Directive explaining trivial procedure to counter MCAS failure.
Of course, the MCAS software was badly designed, and the single path failure, are squarely Boeing's fault.
Pilots must always be ready to deal with runaway stabilizer trim, on any aircraft type. It's a "memory item".
I believe that the 737NG is not the problem aircraft. The new engines and the problematic MCAS are on the 737 MAX, a different model.
Sure I apologize, there is NG and there is "New NG" or MAX.
there are rumors that a certain large middle eastern airline
Thank god there are airlines with standards. I'm certainly glad my Middle Eastern long haul option for a particular cross-continent journey does not have any faulty Boeing models.
After the unfortunate incident in Japan this week, the Boeing 787, a plane designed in the 2000s and flying since 2013, is now the only passenger airliner without a hull loss. So they are clearly capable of producing modern safe airliners post merger.
There was an engineer who got fired for worrying publicly about the fire safety of the carbon fiber hulls during the 787 leadup.
It turned out I worked in the same building he had, and I found his old office. Word is after he left they locked it up, like a crime scene. I think they were worried his whistleblowing would turn to leaks and I guess they thought his office would have some sort of evidence? It was an interior office so no big loss real estate wise, but that was a super weird chapter.
He was painted as an aluminum bigot but I always wondered.
I used to talk to a coworker about how Mitsubishi - which built the 787 wings (something Boeing has never done before) - had introduced a regional jet and would be coming after a Boeing’s lunch. He was not worried. I’m a little shocked he’s been right so far. In fact that particular division of MHI seems to be defunct as of last February, which is news to me, so I suppose he was right. Maybe the 787 experience was as unpleasant for them as it was for Boeing.
From the looks of it the composite fuselage of the A350 did its job splendidly, it held out against the fire long enough for everyone to evacuate, only flashing over after >20 minutes.
An emergency divert due to serious in-air fire could last far longer than 20 minutes.
And at speed it would act like a blast furnace.
That everyone survived the collision last week makes be feel better but still not great.
It turned out I worked in the same building he had, and I found his old office. Word is after he left they locked it up, like a crime scene. I think they were worried his whistleblowing would turn to leaks and I guess they thought his office would have some sort of evidence? It was an interior office so no big loss real estate wise, but that was a super weird chapter.
If they were worried about a lawsuit from him they might want to preserve everything in case it was subpoenaed regardless of guilt or innocent - possibly especially if they thought his claims were wrong.
Word is after he left they locked it up, like a crime scene. I think they were worried his whistleblowing would turn to leaks and I guess they thought his office would have some sort of evidence?
If Boeing did clear it out, they'd be open to charges of doing a coverup. The smart thing to do is lock it up as is.
I don’t feel like hull loss without context is a meaningful metric of anything. At the end of the day they are airplanes flown by pilots. You could have a less safe design flown by highly competent pilots and never lose a plane, or an incredibly sophisticated, technically advanced aircraft where the pilot makes a decision resulting the destruction of the aircraft.
what changed in Boeing's design, testing and/or manufacturing processes
My theory is that this is not limited to Boeing or even aircraft design, it's a much deeper and systemic problem affecting all kinds of fields. We've had a lot of industrial accidents lately.
When aircraft manufacturing was an emerging industry there were tons of undocumented safety margins and "slack" in the design and production pipeline.
Over time, the beancounters start optimizing stuff, so these undocumented safety margins are eroded in the name of efficiency/profit (and sometimes even documented safety margins too).
Furthermore, workers back in the day had a much better life when it comes to purchasing power (especially when it comes to property), and so could actually "give more fucks" about the job than they do now which is a compounding factor. You used to get a lot of implicit quality assurance back then which you don't get now.
We've now reached a stage where these undocumented safety margins have been eroded enough that it actually starts to cause issues, and the safeguards that are supposed to catch them aren't good enough, either due to 1) they've never been good enough but just weren't really needed before or 2) they too have been eroded in the same way for the same reason.
This also applies to software - software quality nowadays has gone down the drain for the same reasons, and even brands that were built on quality and polish (Apple) are now churning out shit (see the endless calls for another "Snow Leopard" bugfix-only macOS release).
I pretty much agree with this. The aggressive push towards optimisation everywhere in life is causing strain at the margins. I think this has always happened though, including without capitalism – it's basically the definition of growing pains. It's a natural process to some extent, and I'm not sure that corrections ever really happen, we just find new areas, new things that don't have the same limitations and grow into those.
Back when their planes blew up on their own (TWA 800, Philippine 143, Thai Airways 114), and when the rudders liked to jam themselves to full-deflection (UA 525, USAir 427)?
Read this: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout
One of the tenets of the article is that the breakdown of the once-impermeable wall between civilian and military divisions has resulted in disaster.
The A380 is the best plane ever made in the entirety of human history. It’s a damn shame it’s not used more. I’m hoping new fuel efficient engines make it viable again because there simply is NOTHING like first class on an A380.
What makes it the best? I've flown on it, and it seems nice enough, though it isn't the most comfortable airliner I've flown on. It's certainly the biggest! But there are only what, 250 or so that were put into service? It's hard to have a strong opinion about a plane in such a small niche.
For me the A380 is the most comfortable. I'm slightly scared of flying, and turbulence making the entire plane jump around makes it that much worse. I'm only speculating, but I think it might be the sheer bulk of the A380 making it the smoothest rides I've ever been on.
Agreed, I fly long haul a lot and the A380 is the best. A350 is pretty good. 787 is fine, and 777 is crap.
Flying the A380 doesn't even feel like flying. Even the takeoff roll is sedate.
If the engineering of this plane wouldn't have been that great disaster would have loomed.[0]
No question about that.
[0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...
That was an excellent read. Thanks for that.
It’s resistant to turbulence. It has the nicest cabins for business class and up. It has many entrances which is nice because then economy doesn’t need to walk past you in contempt. It also has more safety features than I can list which makes it very hard to crash even intentionally.
It's interesting how so many people sounded the death knell on the A380 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Production of new A380s even ceased around this time. Now it seems demand for that size of aircraft is only increasing (at least for specific hub and spoke models).
A380s were scheduled to end production in 2021 even before COVID.
Airbus may have mistimed the A380 versus industry trends - though this is certainly up to debate and is still up in the air.
The first A380 deliveries were back in 2007, so the also had to eat the impact of the 09 financial crisis.
The control stick on the airbus is pretty bad, the fact that neither pilot knows what inputs the other is giving makes them far inferior to the system in boeing aircraft, even with warnings.
Interesting timeline.
Following the two fatal crashes involving the MCAS system and the 737 Max … The FAA gave Boeing until Dec of 2022 to implement a fix. The fix was to reconfigure the 737 Max with 2 sensors (instead of one) and include an manual shutoff
Guess what happened? Boeing didn’t fix anything.. instead they cried to congress that the fix is too expensive and they cannot get it done.
So what happens is congress includes a provision in the omnibus spending bill to exempt Boeing from having to fix the MCAS system. So today in 2024 .. the 737 Max still only have one sensor although they did retrofit a manual shutoff
https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2022/12/23/boeing-max-221223/
Pretty interesting after millions spent on investigation , congressional hearings, developing engineering a better MCAS system … quietly Boeing just bypasses everything.
Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)
That is pretty concerning. The way how Boeing can get its way simply by threatening to can the entire MAX program (which they'd never actually do) shows that there's a very deep level of integration between the US government and its biggest companies, especially one like Boeing that's often seen as kind of a minor point of national pride.
Not only that, but the article mentions that the 737 MAXs got an exemption on providing a modern crew alerting system. Of course, all of that is done so they could certify these aircraft as being basically the same as the first 737 from the 60s. Meanwhile, A320s have been flying with ECAMs (a centralized system for viewing the plane's status and alerts) since the 1980s.
Boeing doesn't have a real business plan until they have a plan to replace the 737. Boeing and Airbus have been going crazy over the past 30 years developing widebody airliners, some of which were solidly rejected by the market, but domestic flyers (most of them) are stuck with a 1967 design. It's a disaster when it comes to managing the social and environmental impacts of air travel.
A ride in this plane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_family
radically changed my view of what is possible in a small airliner, because it has a squared-off cross section it feels much larger on the inside than a 737... And this is a previous generation plane, now there is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220
There's a crisis brewing at America's small airports in that they've really stopped building the sub-50 seat regional jets that serve smaller airports. (In the small city near me, almost every organization lists the local airport as a weakness in a SWOT analysis) Manufacturers know that airliners around 70 seats would be dramatically lower cost to operate than the status quo, enough that prices would drop and service quality would increase and filling the extra seats would be easy. Trouble is the unions won't let the airlines upgrade
Yes! I rode in an E195 recently and I was kinda dreading it because it's a much smaller plane than a 737. I was so pleasantly surprised how roomy the cabin was. And how quiet and convenient. There was even a little holder for my tablet.
It is quieter for folks on the ground too. And it doesn’t get grounded when the temperature is too high nearly as much as the 737.
If people realized you could get widebody comfort in a regional jet they’d quit flying on legacy airlines.
Is it more expensive? Where do you search for these flights?
In my case it was not more expensive, no. But I was flying in Europe. Not sure about the US.
They just use them for the quieter flights where they have trouble filling up a 737.
I was dreading it because the last time I flew on an airliner this size it was a 717 and it was horrible. Very noisy in particular (I was seated right beside the engine I have to say). The Embraer was really delightful and it has under-wing engines.
Here in the US basically all the regional airlines use them. Horizon Airlines is one that I know of specifically, and Wikipedia lists Sky West, Envoy Air, Mesa Airlines, Republic Airways, JetBlue, etc, etc. Many of them contract for the more well–known airlines like Delta, US Airways, and so on, so you could end up on an Embraer even if you don’t seek it out.
A lot of those are the smaller and older regional jets like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_ERJ_family
which personally I like less than
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_Dash_8
The newer and larger E-Jets are on a whole different level in terms of comfort.
Delta has some A220s, I got put on an E-Jet on an American from Philadelphia to Montreal.
The A220 / CSeries is another great example of the corruption that exists between Boeing and the US government. Locking out new competitors via dubious anti-dumping petitions.
Seems to me the solution to the union problem would be some kind of direct deal with the union on outsourcing rather than a workaround based on staff rules relating to seat numbers.
The best part is that Boeing had EICAS, the engine indicating and crew alerting system, in the early 80s with the introduction of the 757/767.
In the mid-90s, when they updated the 737 to the Next Generation, they opted to stay with the six-pack recall light system that every 737 pilot hates. Same in the Max. Too expensive to change and would likely require a new type rating.
The A320 was such a technological leap forward in commercial aviation. Boeing wasn’t able to match it until the introduction of the 777, almost a decade later.
I can't imagine EICAS is that expensive, the P-8 has it. Requiring a new type rating seems far more likely given that's how we got MCAS.
The type rating is the big factor, and that's largely driven by desire and/or pressure from customers.
IMO type ratings, and particularly the categorization of types, needs an overhaul. The current type rating system is, IMO, the primary indirect factor leading to the max accidents (customers demanded the impossible - more efficient engines with a 37 type rating) as well as countless other design decisions that seem silly from the outside.
Which in itself is ironic as the US government spends a large portion of it's current time accusing China of the same thing. As usual you should always expect projection when shade is being thrown.
At least in China when greed kills people there are consequences for executives: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
Chinese system has a huge number of flaws but one thing it gets right is the government stands above corporations.
Corporate control over government is the path to dystopia, it's how the climate situation got out of control, why the drug epidemics keep coming back, why obesity is killing the country, etc. etc.
Occasionally people wake up and fight back for a moment but it's always fleeting because the deck is stacked against the people. The corporates have the money for the research and "lobbying" aka bribes to keep regulation at bay for decades usually.
Corporate greed is all consuming and thus regulation is meant to exist as it's counter-balance. When the corpos are the ones regulating themselves well... you can't be surprised when this is the result.
The integration of government and these big businesses is one thing. The fact that it always seems to run in the direction of undermining citizen safety and protections, and weakening the country's capacity to actually hold these companies accountable to even national level interests is astonishing.
What purpose does this integration serve if not to allow the government leverage? These days you have the US government acting like its a 2nd-world power, just desperately trying to hang on to any businesses willing to grace the US with their presence, instead of a nation that holds the key to glibal economic power. Frankly it's pathetic.
Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless it is to add more limitations based on past (bad) performance and then only to document the reason the law exists, never to provide exemptions.
Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless
No "unless". No law should target a specific company or individual by name, ever, whether to give them special exceptions or special permissions or special restrictions or anything else.
(They also shouldn't target specific companies by sufficiently-specific-description-it-only-applies-to-one-or-two-companies, either.)
If course they can: laws frequently cite specific cases and specific abuses in their supporting documentation in order to point out the exact intent of the law.
Laws are not research papers, they don't need to cite sources.
The fact that they do not need to is true, but the typical law rests on a body of data and some of that data will be supplied with the bill depending on what the material is about.
This is because most laws are created with specific goals and purposes in mind, they're not born finished and ready to be voted on derived from first principles, they usually exist to address something quite specific.
I never said they "can't", I said they shouldn't.
Also, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with citing something as an example in the argumentation around a bill enacting a law (unless it's by way of targeting them with polemic), but there is something fundamentally wrong with putting that in the legal code itself.
US Congress has been passing acts concerning specific people or institutions, directly referenced by their name since its inception. It's called private laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Congress#Public_law,_pr...
Washington State has been making Boeing-specific laws for decades, without having to mention them by name - the legislature just writes up a bill which sets such-and-such a lower tax rate for every aircraft manufacturer which employs at least so many workers, et voila! There happens to be only one.
Somewhere, the NFL is quickly checking its shoes...
You raise a good point, and there definitely exists a pile of related jurisprudence on the subject of "attainder"[0]. Afaik that only applies to negative consequences though.
Congress will be happy to replace “Boeing” with “American companies which manufacture all of commercial and military aircraft, satellites, and space vehicles and launchers”.
I hate to turn this into a political comment, but your comment about it being depressing struck a nerve with me.
Many conservatives and people worried about the border have been feeling this depression pretty hard the last few years, if not 20+ years. Add in the crime problem with no cash bail, and honestly a few friends and I have felt something is really wrong for several years on a pretty deep sad level.
Interesting that something slighlt convoluted like a plane retrofit was what brought about it in you.
Feeling sad and depressed can be a medical condition rather than a reality issue. There are many numerically things (can't check everything) that are not much worse than 20 years ago (and some even better), but people seem more and more upset. It's like they just spend time online/on TV and WANT to find reasons to feel bad. Or that they expect that because things CAN be good they will be good tomorrow without any effort.
I'm in California since 1989. Things are definitely different and IMO worse than before.
If I had to guess, previously the crime was in obvious rough areas. Now it seems it's expanding to everywhere.
But even if crime/illegal border crossings were down... Just because we were unaware of it 20 years ago and are now aware doesn't really make people feel better about it.
"Hey, you know how you were wondering why wages are stagnant, yet housing prices are still rising? Turns out there were millions of people entering illegally every year and you just weren't aware of it previously! Better turn off the news or you'll feel worse about that $3k 2bdroom."
One has got nothing to do with the other. Illegal immigrants aren’t driving up housing costs. Standard of living is stagnant, because wealth doesn’t “trickle down” like Reagan promised us. It trickles up. You’re repeating right wing talking points.
How are immigrants not driving up housing costs? Aren't they using housing? Isn't housing driven by supply and demand?
You are confusing two different issues. The article you reference is from December 2022. The MAX 8 had already returned to service two years prior, with the required fixes to the MCAS system, in 2020.
This law had to do with a deadline for certifying the MAX 7 without completely redesigning some of the systems.
I'm not a Boeing defender here -- these issues are incredibly concerning.
What are all the differences between these MAX <n> planes? Is this an intentional strategy by Boeing to confuse so that they can make all these loose arguments and skirt regulations?
Bigger number = longer plane. They start counting from 7 because the MAX 7 was the successor to the 737-700.
Thank you for answering, especially when so many doenvoted. Now I know!
It does appear that Boeing tries to get away with "you've approved it for MAX <x>, so just approve it already for MAX <y>".
Fortunately, Boeings work on the 737 MAX was independently checked by non-US aviation authorities who aren't subject to US Congress provisions.
<Non-US aviation authority reads FAA papers>
"All good boss. Let's certify this!"
https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/newsroom-and-events/press-rele...
"Following extensive analysis by EASA, we have determined that the 737 MAX can safely return to service. This assessment was carried out in full independence of Boeing or the Federal Aviation Administration and without any economic or political pressure – we asked difficult questions until we got answers and pushed for solutions which satisfied our exacting safety requirements. We carried out our own flight tests and simulator sessions and did not rely on others to do this for us."
That is not at all accurate. The MAX has two AoA sensors from day one.
We're talking about what the MCAS used for input. The aircraft has two AoA sensors and three computers. MCAS used 1 and 1 because it was believed to be non-safety-critical system. Here is a direct quote from Wikipedia's MCAS article:
Though there are two sensors on the MAX only one of them is used at a time to trigger MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. Any fault in this sensor, perhaps due to physical damage, creates a single point failure: the flight control system lacks any basis for rejecting its input as faulty information.
There is a whole subsection just about MCAS and AoA sensors.
So what you're saying is that I'm right, it in fact had 2 AoA sensors from day one.
Yeah, I heard Boeing even has it's own Presidential candidate...
A brief search of who Boeing donates to is a bit depressing.
I know that they have parted ways now, but Haley has managed to sit on both sides of negotiations between government and Boeing.
makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy
The US has not been a functioning democracy for a very long time, if it ever even was.
Don’t despair! Plenty of people have fulfilling and happy lives in non-democracies. But it’s important to be realistic about the chances of anything about the political system fundamentally changing.
Single item spending bills ftw
It's almost comically evil at this point. Boeing actually argued that the victims didn't experience any suffering, because they died on impact.
So in your final screaming moments as you hurtle toward the ground, be comforted to know that the ultimate perpetrators of your death will say your terror never even happened.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-families-argue-over-pay-...
I guess that depends on what you believe a "functioning democracy" because yes we are are "functioning democracy", the fact that the outcome is not what you desire do not mean it is non-functional.
Keeping in mind that a democracy was never the goal, and being a democracy is actually the root of the problem. Looking to the federal government for solutions to all of these problems is the the problem itself.
People expecting the government to fix everything is the problem....
Maybe instead of acting "are we a functioning democracy", the better question is "how can we solve these problems with out government..."
Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)
By international standards, US ‘democracy’ doesn’t get rated that highly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde....
This is completely wrong. Boeing did make the changes to include input from two AoA sensors, they did change the system to prevent recurrent horizontal stabilizer movements, they did include a manual shut-off.
What you are talking about has very little to do with MCAS. Congress required any new aircraft type certified after 2022 to include an Engine-Indicating and Crew Alerting System.
It was never even intended to apply to the 737-10, but because the certification took longer than expected, it became likely the -10 would fall under the regulation, which would cause pilots to have to be re-trained for the -10.
All of this is only peripherally related to MCAS.
Honestly it’s super depressing and makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy (inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)
We're not. There was a coup attempt scant years ago, and there will absolutely be another in November.
There should be people on life sentences for manslaughter of 346 people that happened as a result of corporate greed and a company culture which made company profits the only important metric of success.
(inverted corporate democracy perhaps?)
The word you are looking for is oligarchy.
Such an americentric take... as if Boeing only had to deal with FAA only. You completely forgot about other regulatory bodies. How was Boeing supposed to sway EU bodies, for example? Once you realize there's more of those, your conspiracy theory ends up in shambles.
makes me question if we are even a functioning democracy
Obviously, obviously not.
You'd probably want to cite such a big claim ("Boeing didn't fix anything"), which is not supported by your link. Other online sources say Boeing did fix MCAS, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
The only remedy at this point is to hold executives financially and morally culpable.
Anyone opposed to seeing the entire C-suite and board of directors having their bonuses clawed back and sent to jail? I'm not.
Let the guillotine come out, I want to see heads roll.
Executives are personally liable for loss of life, regardless of the law it is morally contemptible to hide behind a corporation. Until people go to jail for manslaughter this will not change.
worth noting for no particular reason China had a baby formula scandal in 2008 that led to the death of four infants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
The Intermediate People's Court in Shijiazhuang sentenced a farmer, Zhang Yujun, and a senior manager, Geng Jinping, to death in 2009. five more people received life sentences and the main company behind it went bankrupt.
this was for four infant deaths.
Boeing killed 189 indonesians in 2021 and executives didnt so much as take a breather at the country club between swings, so good luck.
Capitalism just isnt set up to punish the Bourgeois.
Capitalism just isnt set up to punish the Bourgeois.
Its not a problem of capitalism its a problem of a judicial system having no balls to put execs in prison.
The problem is called regulatory capture. And it’s by our campaign finance system. And that’s a result of unhindered capital accumulation by a minority.
regulatory capture
You don’t need a campaign finance problem to get regulatory capture. Only industry insiders have the context to regulate industries. They come from industry, they know and are known by all the players, and back to industry is where they want options to return. They see the world in terms other insiders do and they don’t want to burn any bridges. This is a recipe for industry getting what they want in most cases.
I agree "revolving door" is also a huge problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal
The US had one of these scandals too. nobody was arrested, no one charged. Tammany Hall politician Alderman Michael Tuomey, known as "Butcher Mike", defended the distillers vigorously throughout the scandal—in fact, he was put in charge of the Board of Health investigation.
The guy basically ended all investigation and shielded all guilty parties.
The US had one of these scandals too
In 1850, we were in the buildup to the civil war and hadn’t even ended slavery, the political and legal environment were drastically different. I’m not suggesting there aren’t lessons to learn but the comparison is ridiculous.
It's not Capitalism, it's just a result of the judicial system that results from Capitalism. Right?
America is not founded on capitalism and our judicial system is not innately born from it. Not saying capitalism via corporate lobbying and bribes hasn’t had an effect on the notion of justice, but our foundational legal principles exist outside of our nation’s choice of economic policy.
Its not a problem of capitalism its a problem of a judicial system having no balls to put execs in prison.
Parent was talking about root cause, not cause.
In the US, corporations, through campaign contributions, lobbying, etc. have influence at all levels of governance. In the end this requires money above all.
The conclusion that the system (including the judical one) is rigged in favor of such coroporations has "something" to do with capitalism isn't too far fetched.
Or for the case at hand: your point would be that the 346 people didn't die because of Boing taking shortcuts for profit; they rather died because their resp. planes fell out of the sky? ;)
I'm sure sometimes China's legal system works, but we should also consider frequent cases when it does not, e.g.,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision (2011)
40 people died in train collision, and then:
On orders from the authorities, the rescue effort concluded less than a day following the accident, and the damaged train cars were seen being broken apart by backhoes and buried nearby. The Railway Ministry justified the burial by claiming that the trains contained valuable "national level" technology that could be stolen. However, hours after the rescuers had been told to stop searching for survivors, a 2-year-old girl was found alive in the wreckage.
So, basically, all we know is that Chinese political system is set up to protect powerful people (such as politicians who are overseeing national rail projects). On the other hand, a local milk dealer is expendable, just as he would be in America.
The main difference is whether these powerful people are called "bourgeois" or something else.
Or one of the infants that died drinking the tainted milk belonged to someone powerful.
China executes billionaires with some regularity. Li Jianping got the death penalty last year. There were like a dozen that got it in the aughts from mining corruption. Not to say they are free of corruption but America will never do this.
this is wrong. China cracked down on milk whistleblowers and severely repressed and harassed them, they stopped anyone from discussing the problem on the internet. Parents of the children who were harmed basically were told to shut up by the government.
Capitalism just isnt set up to punish the Bourgeois.
Please read your own link. There were coverups and censorship galore. The problem was this story eventually got so big it could no longer be swept under the rug like so many things were and still are.
I mean, China still has food safety issues to this day, so it's not as if this seems to be working https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_China
Sounds like a great way to create an airplane company that no competent people will want to run. Might want to think through the game-theoretic consequences a bit further.
For example, instead of ranting and howling about prisons and guillotines, you could point to some successful examples of other companies or orgs that have operated in a similar fashion. That might provide more productive grounds for further discussion. Any good examples?
... Yeah, I thought so.
Sounds like a great way to create an airplane company that no competent people will want to run.
Is it your assertion that Boeing is currently operated by competent people? They're getting crushed by SpaceX at rockets. How much more of this incompetence will it take before someone does the same to them with airliners? Relying on being "too big to fail" isn't a viable long term strategy. It only lowers the barrier to entry for competitors.
Is it your assertion that Boeing is currently operated by competent people?
Is it your assertion that they can't get any worse? Because this sounds like a good way to get worse.
You know, they could be killing more than 0.5 people per ten billion passenger miles, right...?
You wouldn’t build a website with a single point of failure, yet the argument here is it’s okay to engineer things badly because of the success rate of requests is high.
For air travel impacting human lives.
I think it speaks to current generation of leaders avoiding thought, consideration, foresight, insight, and just using any statistic that can justify a decision.
It’s a decline and one that also explains the excitement that LLMs/AI might be able to help us think less, know less, and perhaps be even less responsible for our work products.
This statement makes no sense. It has never been safer to fly, precisely because aviation is so dedicated to root cause analysis.
A whole door exploded out of a plane and
1. The plane did not suffer structural damage and could land safely 2. Nobody died because seat belts are mandatory 3. The crew is drilled over and over on what to do 4. The plane has extensive monitoring and logging so RCA is easier 5. The US funds a whole org dedicated to investigating this sort of thing and the results are public
and that's just the ones I can think of.
This is shocking precisely because aviation is so good at this. There are multiple layers in the swiss cheese model and this somehow made it past them.
Yeah, not to be totally insensitive, but 45,000 Americans died on our roads last year and basically no one has even a single fuck to give about it. For some reason all we ever complain about is the only safe transportation system we have.
People most certainly do give a fuck. The ones who are trying to fix it -- and the only ones who have a shot at it -- are held to impossible standards, far beyond what we hold humans to. A handful of accidents, even when they're not actually at fault, is enough to get an entire autonomous driving project shut down.
What we're hearing in this thread, from people who have clearly never done much of anything, is that passenger aviation needs to work exactly the same way. "If it can't be perfect, heads must roll. Surely that will fix it."
You’re arguing past the GP. Just because it’s never been safer to fly doesn't mean we should relax any part of the rigid and high bar the aviation industry holds itself to. You’re both right…
You know, they could be killing more than 0.5 people per ten billion passenger miles, right...?
You know that current management's numbers are a lot worse than that right?
This latest debacle is obviously due to some schlub on the factory floor who was more interested in checking his Facebook than installing bolts. Guillotining the CEO won't help.
I wish I knew what would, believe me. I have to deal with the exact same problem, luckily in a factory where there is a lot less at stake.
I’m not advocating for guillotining anyone. That’s absurd.
Then perhaps you meant to reply to a different subthread. I'm merely addressing the upstream poster's childish argument. ("Let the guillotine come out, I want to see heads roll.")
The aviation side of Boeing doesn't do rockets. That's a completely separate org which is part of the ULA consortium.
SpaceX has (ok, had) good PR, but they don't do anything others couldn't do. And they'd be bankrupt without NASA.
they'd be bankrupt without NASA
Most companies would be bankrupt without their customers. A $5 billion government contract isn’t something that can be dismissed as the recipient ‘being kept solvent by Uncle Sam.’
SpaceX is doing things nobody else has done. ULA is equally reliant on government dollars. Boeing is a company that builds rockets and airliners and they aren't doing a great job of either at the moment. Who else is responsible for that if not the C-suite?
Premeditation is the important aspect to look at i believe. It was possible to get prosecutors involved in the VW emission scandal.
Yeah, if we did that we'd have broken sensor systems and doors falling off the plane!
From FAA.gov:
We're responsible for the safety of civil aviation.
https://www.faa.gov/about/mission/activities
Maybe the people responsible are the people who say they’re responsible?
So if the FAA works with Boeing to fix a safety issue and Congress overrides FAA on the implementation we should blame the FAA.
Why?
Because the FAA is "responsible for the safety of civil aviation." They don't get to say that, and accept tax monies for that, and then throw up their hands when someone else tries to block them from doing their job. The director (or whoever heads the agency) should have resigned, alongwith the entire rest of the management. Instead of being content with letting someone else take the blame when the next accident claims 100s of lives.
Imagine if you were tasked with making sure that your app's customer's data were safe. Your boss goes against your recommendation and does something you know will put sensitive data in the hands of hackers. What would you do?
The FAA gets authorized by Congress. Congress is actually the one with the constitutional power to legislate, so can override executive agencies like the grandparent describes.
"Criminally," is the word you are looking for.
Please don't post clichés of internet indignation to Hacker News. It leads to tedious, repetitive, generic subthreads, as in this case. That's the opposite of the curious conversation we're trying for.
Don’t just pierce the corporate veil, shred it.
It’s been used to escape responsibility and shirk transparency entirely too much, and if orgs can’t be trusted with it (as they evidently cannot) then they don’t deserve to have it.
Ways in which you can experience an unexpected cabin decompression to the next world...Or join the mile-high never-come-back club, on a Boeing 737 MAX...
1- Loose bolts: "Boeing Urges Airlines to Check for Loose Bolt in newer 737 MAX Aircraft" - https://www.european-views.com/2023/12/boeing-urges-airlines...
2- Leave the anti-icing system on for more than 5 min after non-icing conditions: "Boeing still hasn't fixed this problem on Max jets, so it's asking for an exemption to safety rules" - https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/boeing-still-ha...
3- Sit too close to a door not in use: "Alaska Airlines grounds 737 Max 9 planes after section blows out mid-air" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67899564
4 - Possible unscheduled decompression, from incorrectly drilled fastener holes in the aft pressure bulkhead, if being in the wrong plane, at the wrong time: "Boeing and a key supplier find a new manufacturing issue that affects the 737 Max airliner" - https://apnews.com/article/spirit-aerosystems-boeing-737-fus...
I think I am going to need a shared Google Sheet...
Two of those are manufacturing mistakes, and it seems likely the door one is as well. Not that that helps the passengers, but they're not systemic design flaws.
That anti-icing system is deranged, though. They effectively installed a timed detonator on the engines and want a safety exemption for it.
Ah you’re right. They’re not design flaws, just manufacturing issues, so sign me up for the first flight when the max flies again…
People falling out the sky because the wing falls off because someone forgot to bolt it on aren’t going to care if it’s a design issue or a manufacturing issue. Boeing is doing both, so the blame lies with them either way.
The statement pointing out that it’s a manufacturing error (I’m guessing) was not intended to be solution to the problem. It pointed out that those problems have less to do the certification of the design and more to do with a manufacturing defect. If the manufacturer created parts that were up to specifications, these things would have not been a problem. This is a very important distinction because a design flaw is a much bigger deal for this aircraft type than that poorly manufactured components.
Boing is still at fault, yes, but we should exercise restraint in becoming too reductionistic on complicated engineering problems.
Why exactly should we "exercise restraint in becoming too reductionistic on complicated engineering problems"?
When we reduce complicated problems down to inaccurate trivial ones by stripping out important details and nuance, we end up with a caricature of the original - one that easily devolves into a to strawman argument to serve someone’s point. This new representation masquerading as the original can carry the same weight as the one it was based off of.
This is spreadsheet brain thinking – likely the same MDD dorks used to justify cutting corners.
There's no nuance when people are dying. None whatsoever.
If someone can't agree to that sort of black-and-white thinking, probably they should be working in an industry where innocent lives aren't dependent upon sound decision-making.
It pointed out that those problems have less to do the certification of the design and more to do with a manufacturing defect.
You might really enjoy a book called the The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. He covers your comment here in detail.
One of his key insights is that "human error" are far too often weasel words that prematurely end a conversation (or investigation) into root cause. He goes on to detail a whole tree of "human error" so we can speak about mistakes, lapses, and errors that humans make.
The meat of his point is that some types of human error are very hard to design out of your system, but _many_ types of human error can and should be expected by the designer (or engineer), and appropriately handled.
In this instance, if a human (or perhaps a few) can make a single error when affixing the door plug to the aircraft, like improperly torquing a bolt. And that simple error risks a catastrophic loss of the airframe, then you probably have a _design_ issue and not a "manufacturing issue caused by human error".
I absolutely agree. I meant it as a comparison to issues like the infamous MCAS, which was wrong on purpose on all 737 Max 8s everywhere.
There isn't a change in outcome between the flaws, but I think the difference between a mistake and a known issue that was left in while the company tried to change regulations to allow it, all for a tiny cut to the BOM, is worth noting.
Question is, why were these things manufactured wrong. It's well possible that Boeing's engineering documents are poor or misleading, triggering human error during manufacturing.
This is of course pure speculation and it might equally well be some single manufacturer pressuring ("optimizing") their employees (or even machines) past the point of reliability.
Either way I'm not gonna fault anyone for refusing to fly on a 737 MAX. At some point you gotta make a call and shift your assumption from "isolated engineering/manufacturing mishap" to "corporate screwed the entire product top to bottom".
Spirit [AeroSystems] is responsible for the entire fuselage, including the cockpit, in all Boeing jets, and the entire fuselage for the 737 MAX models, according to the Seattle Times.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/boeing-737-max-loses-e...
So Boeing didn’t actually manufacture the plane. But they are still responsible for ensuring its manufactured correctly.
Separating “manufacturing mistakes” only makes sense if someone else is responsible for manufacturing. As far as I know, Boeing is responsible for both the design and the manufacturing of these aircraft so the difference is purely informational, but in terms of criticizing Boeing mostly irrelevant.
Spirit AeroSystems makes the fuselage for the 737 Max. [1][2]
It's even in the article: "Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselages for the planes, referred CNBC to Boeing when asked about the incident"
Boeing decided to outsource to Spirit, Boeing is responsible to attest the quality of what Spirit is delivering for a Boeing product.
If Samsung/Apple would outsource their batteries to Megabattery Company LLC and those batteries started to randomly explode we would all be blaming Samsung/Apple for not doing proper QC. I hope we all hold Boeing to a much higher level of scrutiny than cellphone manufacturers.
For all intents and purposes, Spirit is part of Boeing.
Spirit was Boeing Wichita until 2005, and today Boeing represents 85% of sales.
At some point it has to be simple liability for the final seller, ignoring all subcontractors.
Otherwise there’s too many shellgames you can play.
A manufacturing mistake which makes it into service is a failure of QA and testing systems design. (At least above a certain threshold which varies depending on the industry etc. etc.)
Depends. You can’t do e.g. crystallographical analysis of metals inside an engine if the engine is already put together. You have to trust your vendor that they built the engine correctly and checked the materials themselves. Or at most send auditors to the vendor.
You can’t do e.g. crystallographical analysis of metals inside an engine if the engine is already put together.
QA is not forced to only deal with assembled components. They can be embeded before the assembly process to QA the parts. For example they could peform crystallographical analysis on a subset of blades which are ready for assembly.
They can also take apart a certain percentage of randomly selected engines, perform crystallographical analysis on a subset of parts and then re-assemble the engines. Many options.
Titanium fan disks, for example are all required to be inspected not just when installed but also at regular engine maintenance intervals. The inspection requires essentially complete disassembly of the fan (so it is required during particular engine maintenance events) followed by the application of penetrating dye and inspection at a narrow granularity.
This kind of maintenance and inspection actually can be required and performed, it just costs more time and money. If we want to be all market capitalism about this we could require tests necessary to ensure safety and let engineers, business people, and executives make decisions that price in the cost of dangerous and risky designs that require constant and invasive inspection and maintenance.
The only real difference with today would be regulators having a spine and/or more than pro forma power to enforce their decisions.
but they're not systemic design flaws.
Hum, yes, instead Boeing seems to have systemic manufacturing flaws. Do we have a reason to believe those are contained into the Max line?
Isn’t the manufacturing process and quality assurance part of the design in “products” like these? It is in car manufacturing so i assume it should, I don’t believe is sort of an “artisan” production line.
The procedures are part of the design certification. And while some vary from one design to another, many of them do not.
A manufacturing mistake is, in all likelihood, another type of systemic fault. Why would you think only one aircraft would suffer from it?
Back in 2014[1] Al Jazeera (the international edition) had a pretty good in-depth report of issues with the manufacturing line for the 787.
There are known issues regarding quality assurance at Boeing for a decade now, they keep going down the drain. The MBAs from McDonnell-Douglas won, and properly tarnished Boeing's image...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...
So not only the design quality is flawed but also the manufacturing process is botched up. That’s reassuring, I guess, because two kind of flaws cancel each other out
Sure they do. At this rate the planes will stop working well enough to take off, eliminating accidents forever.
The troubling thing to me here over and above these issues is if they (Boeing) think some of these things are ok to the point that they ask for an exemption, what else is there that would fail rigorous safety checks but has been deemed ok by management, and has not come to light yet? We may never know until it’s too late.
This looks like manufacture cost cutting - an issue no amount of good design/engineering can fix.
Boeing is no longer engineering focused. It’s a numbers business pumping out planes as fast and as cheap as they can get away with.
design for manufacturing is a part of engineering
Honestly a website for this wouldn’t be a bad idea. In future flights if I’m going to look if there is a 737 max I’m gonna change my flight .
Yep, prefer designs from the Old Boeing (pre-merger). The 737 MAX doesn't count because it is not really a 737...
after the crashes a few years ago Southwest allowed passengers to switch to other planes at no charge: https://www.newsweek.com/southwest-waiving-fare-differences-...
Wonder if that will happen again.
Wasn't there also the whole runaway trim issue leading to un-commanded climb and stall?
Supposedly fixed with software when the root cause was retrofitting engines too large for the airframe leading to pitch instability under high thrust.
MCAS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
Need a Wikipedia page tracking all of these Boeing issues tbh.
I am amazed at how fast we went from “if it’s not Boeing I’m not going” to this. I think Americans need to start considering their own financial industry as a strategic threat to their economy and industry.
This is what happens when bean counters run the show.
Fuck Jack Welch and fuck his devil spawn, the likes of Boeing CEO's Dave Calhoun and James McNerney, and sycophant Dennis Muilenburg. They belong in prison for the people that died flying on their planes. CEOs should be able to be held criminally liable.
At the very least we should have a corporate death penalty. Force the company into bankruptcy, de-list it from the stock market, and turn it into a worker-owned co-op that can never be publicly traded or be sold to private equity.
A death penalty for grossly negligent execs is also necessary.
They'd get their shit together so fast if they faced meaningful consequences to their fuckups.
I am not going to defend execs/board members, but that seems ill advised.
If you had a death penalty for execs, most competent people would refuse the job, and you'd end up in a worse situation.
Where are the competent people taking the job now?
Airbus? The death penalty would apply to them too, presumably.
Prison and even the death penalty should absolutely be considered for the bean-counting Boeing execs that deliberately drove safety into the ground for profit. The blood of innocents is on their hands, and yet they get to cheerfully cash in their stock options.
Airbus execs seem fine[1], so they'd have nothing to fear here.
[1]: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...
Lol nothing to fear except the death penalty if employees you never heard of 5 reporting lines below you screw up badly enough?
Where do people come up with this stuff. If you want a mass exodus from airline management and sudden collapse of the entire industry that would be a fast way to do it.
They should at least revoke financial liability protection for the members of the board.
If a corporation can be "punished" to become a co-op, what incentive does that give the employees?
Most workers are already hopelessly alienated and don’t give an eff…
I think GP meant that they might give more of a fuck (in the wrong direction) if sabotaging "just this one bolt" means this they can own a significant chunk of stock in the company they are part of.
According to a quick search Boeing has a market cap of ~150 billion and 150k employees, so if you manage to hide that it was you who installed the bolt wrong then assuming the company gets distributed roughly equally among employees then that's a quick 1 million payday. How certain are you that "hopelessly alienated" employees wouldn't sell out a few hundred anonymous passengers for a million bucks?
Seems the fix is going to co-op straight away then.
Even if we had it politicians would rush to protect Boeing. It’s too critical a partner for many large national defense projects.
They should break the civil aviation business off into a new company.
If it's important enough to national defense, let's nationalize it. Or at least move the parts we absolutely need to the DoD.
Yes I feel this needs to hit the shareholders hard. But they'll just continue to cut costs to get the value back up and we'll be back here in a couple of years. It needs deep institutional changes and I can't see that happening.
Worker-owned companies have a unbelievably shitty record in the aviation space.It's been tried.
The right thing to do at this point is to go the airbus route, make the government responsible for launch aid, and put engineers back in charge of the company.
Yeah and their practices have spread into big tech too.
Can you elaborate?
Probably they refer to Tesla, Full Self Driving feature but the small print explains that is not "full self driving" the name is just an aspiration, the advertisement statement are also false because are also aspirations etc. AFAIK there is soem kind of investigation about the mode this feature was advertised and I expect that sooner or later the people that were tricked to pay for a FSD would demand their money back since the promises were not kept. About their safety, the human must pay attention all the time so we can judge the safety of the software because the human intervenes when the situation is to unsafe and prevents the crashes, with the exception when the humans do not pay attention and the car kills/injures them.(any idea what happen with that software guy killed in a Tesla? did the family pursue the cause in justice or they got money to give up?)
Amazon was the one that came to mind with prime air/drone delivery https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/amazon-hires-former-boei...
I guess it all really started with everyone’s favorite CEO of GE, Jack Welch. It seems like he created the blueprint for the cost cutting/stack ranking/MBAs/profits over quality that we see today.
Their practices spread everywhere, most corporations behave following Jack Welch's MBA teachings: cut costs (massive layoffs are Welch's bread and butter), return as much as possible to shareholders because they are the only important players in the corporate game (fuck society, fuck the workers).
I hate Welch and all of his acolytes with a passion.
Don't forget that f-er Harry Stonecipher, a man who gave "don't give a shit" a bad name.
The way you phrased it, I figured that "don't give a shit" was a Stonecipher catch phrase or something. Sort of like Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things".
Stonecipher was the "leadership" that came in from McD when they effectively took over Boeing, replacing their traditional care with literally anything for a buck.
He did say "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm" and he does seem to have been successful at making it into something other than a great engineering firm.
How is Jack Welch implicated?
Jack Welch is (in)famous for his management style and the impact that his style has had on American business.
I won't opine too much on it, but the most concise way to put it is an extreme concentration on producing shareholder value as quickly as possible at the expense of basically everything else.
It's a shame you can't short their shares during the weekend...
Already priced in
The FAA said the inspections will take between four and eight hours per plane.
Seems reasonable. I was wondering if a single event should really be enough to "ground" all similar planes, but seems like they just want to do a quick inspection.
It was a catastrophic failure of a two month old plane. I think grounding is warranted until the scope of the problem is understood.
Yeah especially given the public trust the FAA needs to rebuild after it came out how Boeing got the 737 certified in the first place. It’s an unmitigated shit show top to bottom.
737
You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that have no fatalities, but they also have very low production numbers to go with it.
> safest airliner ever built ... very low production numbers
If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?
I’ll take the one with 50 crashes any time. That’s 50 times something went catastrophically wrong and 50 times measures were taken to fix the underlying problems.
A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new problems.
I think this is the wrong take, for the following reasons:
- There is no reason to assume that the learnings from the 50 crashes weren't also applied to the newer model. In fact you'd expect that they all were. - Faults in a new design are likely to be front-loaded, meaning most of the crashes would have happened earlier than later. Therefore the new model seems to be a much safer design if it flew 10% of the miles without even 10% of the crashes (actually 0%).
The point is that commercial aviation is so extraordinarily safe, that mechanical failures that result in fatalities are too rare to determine if a model with 5 million flight hours is more or less safe than another model with 500 million flight hours.
Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.
What has been done by Boeing that makes you feel that they have fixed everything up and that safety is their top priority?
They seem more keen on getting legislative change and regulation bypass or exemption.
Until 1980-1990 I would completely agree but with the more recent history of basically everything I am not so sure anymore.
I'm not sure if I agree or not, but my thinking were that it wouldn't reach great safety by upgrades until long after it became too expensive for Boeing and would instead be replaced with a new model.
The point in the outer comment was that the 737NG has both many flight hours and ... if I skimmed Wikipedia correctly, only 1 mechanically-attributed fatality.
For reference, the most-produced passenger/cargo aircraft:
16K Douglas DC-3 (1935)
11K Boeing 737 family:
1K Original (1967)
2K Classic (1984)
7K NG (1998)
1K MAX (2016)
11K Airbus A320 family (1988)
its actually kind of crazy how much military planes where produces during world war 2.
Look at this list[0]: the soviet IL-2 plane has produced more planes the the entire list of planes mentioned above over a period of 4 years!
That is just one type of plane, for one country during a very short period..
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircraft
I think grounding is warranted until the scope of the problem is understood.
If the problem is the whole model or ‘Boeing’, both of which seem possible, what then?
If Boeing is necessary for national defence and no longer knows how to build aircraft, drastic action is needed by the US government on a very short timeframe to get their shit together. War is a thing.
In the meantime it's hard to disagree with the sentiment elsewhere in this thread that flying with airbus seems a better idea.
A single explosive decompression event, comprising the spontaneous loss of an assembly the size of an entire exit door, two months off the factory floor?
I should certainly hope they’d take a gander at the others before I’d sit next to one.
Especially with the memory of the last time they chose to keep flying 737 MAXes instead of fixing the defect in the rest of the fleet, at the cost of 157 lives, not even 5 years ago.
Let's also consider just how much worse this situation could have been. The door panel blew out next to the one seat that happened to be unoccupied, and it happened at 16,000 ft instead of 26,000 ft.
And even so, sucked the shirt right off the boy in the middle seat! I shudder to imagine how things would have gone 20 minutes further in to the flight.
Almost certainly a fatal crash if they were a few minutes later into the flight
No it's not. Crews are trained for decompression events and they've happened at higher altitudes than 26,000 feet before with no airframe loss at all (for example, the Southwest 737-700 where a fan blade ruptured the window happened at 33,000 feet). It may likely have been a fatal incident but definitely not likely a crash.
Not a big difference if everyone was with fastened seat belt.
There is a real story of another 737 of Aloha Airlines flight 243 where part of the fuselage blown away together with unlucky flight attendant at 24000 feet: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-to-pieces-the-ne...
Aloha Airlines Flight 243 (Apr 28, 1988) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
Of course it should. This is a manufacturing defect that could easily have sucked someone out the plane or dropped debris on someone’s head. Should it happen during cruise over water the consequences could be much worse.
It seems to have ripped the shirt off the person in the middle seat.
It was only dumb luck that no one got killed because the adjacent seats were empty.
To give you some idea, a teenager seated across the aisle had his shirt completely torn off.
His mother held on to him to keep him from getting suck out too.
We can do it in two!
Boeing probably.
And if we can't, is there some way we can blame the pilots? Maintenance crew? Anyone but business leadership?
How to avoid the 737 Max? Fly only airlines that don’t have it. Luckily there are still a few around in Europe. Since the two fatal crashes I have avoided doing flights with 737s.
I have made the decision that unless I absolutely can’t avoid it I am avoiding Boeing for the near future entirely.
But a 737 max is full no go for me no matter what the situation is. I will do multiple stops before stepping foot on one.
Personally I fly exclusively JetBlue in the US and they use Airbus almost exclusively. They have a few of whatever that other brand is. No Boeing.
Embraer, the Brazilian-made aircraft. They're being replaced with Airbus A220s, which was called a Bombardier CSeries before Airbus bought Bombardier's airliner division.
(Embraer) which Boeing tried buying but the deal was reverted due to the failure of the 737-max..
Wait, what? How did that caused the deal to fall apart?
(I was actually under the impression this acquisition had happened until a few minutes ago)
I thought that too. From Wikipedia:
in April 2020 Boeing terminated the joint venture deal due to impact of the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic on aviation and market uncertainty. Embraer alleges that the financial impact of the Boeing 737 MAX groundings contributed to the demise of the deal
So, the deal was broken before both governments had time to decide if they allowed it.
(I do remember some of Embraer clients canceling orders in 2020. AFAIK, they are still bottlenecked by their manufacturing capacity.)
Didn't it look like Brazilian government was almost 100% gonna have it called off because of the "hit" to national reputation? (losing one of their largest and most internationally famous powerhouses)
It didn't look that way to me. But then, I'm not good at guessing this.
Please don’t read this as a defense of Boeing, especially the MAX series aircraft, but from a flyer-safety standpoint the statistics show most Boeing aircraft in operation today are extremely safe.
The post-200 series 737s, not including the MAX, have some of the largest accumulated flight miles and lowest incident rates of any aircraft ever. The 777 and 747-400 also have exceptional safety records. Even the aging 757 and 767 fleets have only slightly higher rates. The 787, though relatively newer and with plenty of documented early issues has had no passenger fatalities that I’m aware of.
Just some food for thought.
I assume that a lot of people here want to avoid the 737s not necessarily because they're scared for their lives, but as a way to show disapproval to Boeing. Like, I won't avoid flying a 737 Max if it's the only option for flying, but I generally prefer to pick a different manufacturer if it's available. On a large scale, many people avoiding a specific aircraft model puts pressure on airlines to not start or continue ordering said model.
That is valid and that’s why I am not quite No Boeing.
But it’s a last choice for me, if the choice exists and I am willing to put up with some inconveniences.
Especially given that this seems to be a manufacturing problem and not a problem with the series itself, does have me worried about other planes even on those other lines if it is a fundamental issue with Boeing in recent years.
but from a flyer-safety standpoint the statistics show most Boeing aircraft in operation today are extremely safe.
it's the ones being delivered right now I'm particularly worried about
such as the two month old one here where the side fell off
I have booked a 10 hours flight to NYC with Americna Airlines and I think the craft is a 772-boeing 777. Should it be OK? I am scared now...
The ancients reached for divination methods when reason failed them. You on the other hand can write a quick python script with a random number source in it.
Just about every airline I’ve ever flown lets you see what kind of aircraft they’re using for the flight you book. It’s pretty easy to avoid flying on a 737 max if you want.
I don’t think that’s a legally binding guarantee, though. Last-minute changes for operational reasons do happen, and I don’t think you can expect compensation in that case.
Still, it definitely increases your chances of not flying on a MAX.
It's usually accurate, but I've had planes changed on me a couple times. For example, there could be a delay that results in it being used for a different flight, and you end up with something else. Or if the plane you're supposed to fly has mechanical issues.
1. Go to Google Flights[1], pick your search options, click Explore
2. On search results[2], find the Departing flight you want
3. On the right-hand side of the flight summary, click the Down arrow ( \/ )
4. In the drop-down description, below each flight leg is the plane description and flight number.
5. Confirm all planes used for legs of both departing and returning flights.
First flight listed:
Departure:
SYR to CLT: American Economy Airbus A320 AA 1739
CLT to SFO: American Economy Airbus A321neo AA 1580
*Select departure to see return flights*
Return:
SFO to DFW: American Economy Airbus A321neo AA 2504
DFW to SYR: American Economy Airbus A320 AA 421
You can also find plane information at time of purchase, at least from the airline's website. I highly recommend booking direct at the airline's website, as [in the US] by law you have a 24 hour window to cancel your reservation with no cancellation fee.
[1] https://google.com/flights [2] https://www.google.com/travel/flights/search?tfs=CBwQAhoeEgo...
In the US, Delta seems to fly a lot of Airbus but unfortunately this is fast changing too based on their recent-ish large Boeing orders.
JetBlue has an all Airbus and Embraer 175 fleet. No matter what you book on B6 mainline, you're getting a comfortable airliner.
Virgin America had an all-Airbus fleet...until Alaska bought them and ditched the Airbus leases because 'Merica-Seattle-Boeing or something. (I'm sure they justified it as mechanical/maintenance efficiencies from operating a single type, but they made a bad mistake staying all-in on a failing company's product.)
Delta's famously agnostic - they fly whatever is net cheapest for them, even if it's an old airframe (that they own outright) that sucks fuel (rather than a more fuel-efficient plane that they lease). Boeings got cheap after the MAX problems. On the plus side, Delta is a very well run operation with competent maintenance.
And then there's Southwest. All Boeing, bad maintenance history. A culture that hates change and new technology.
I'm bored while waiting for my flight to take off in KLIA2 airport that AirAsia uses as its base. Their whole fleet is A320s. If the A320sbwere to be grounded, this airline will be pretty much done for.
Two days ago before we got on one of these planes I said to my partner “don’t worry, it’s the most scrutinized plane in history”.
Famous last words.
It's like sneaking a bomb on board for safety purposes. "I mean, what are the odds that there are TWO bombs on this plane?"
I wish we had an updated remake of Airplane! that uses this line. THere's so much room for good political satire but it seems like it's not being made.
I believe the above is actually a paraphrase of Jim Jefferies’s bit about the difference between Australian and American airport security actually.
The sketch in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyqBZBC3RbY
‘Satisfaction of search’ is very much a thing. In my field (I’m a radiographer), finding an abnormally is a classic reason to miss another one nearby.
To quote a cardiologist I worked with, ‘keep scanning, you can have ticks and lice’.
https://radiopaedia.org/articles/satisfaction-of-search-erro...
This phenomenon was really useful for sneaking booze into football games as undergrads.
Two airplane bottles in your pocket, belt loop, etc. - somewhere obvious but not too obvious - can absolutely blind a ticket taker to the 6-8 you have taped to the back of your calves.
I notice this a lot in everyday life, with things like getting a text while heading out the door, answering it, then forgetting there were other tasks and leaving sans keys and wallet
Guessing you're quoting Laurie Anderson.
Yeah it's really not. Age is the only thing that will do that.
It's hard to know how much time has to elapse before all the problems have been teased out though.
Anyone who thought the DC-10 was in the clear after its cargo door problems were fixed was in for a nasty surprise a few years later when an engine fell off of one at O'Hare, but if the industry had written it off after that incident they'd have missed out on 35 years of an otherwise reliable plane.
The thing I see missing is that it’s totally normal and even justified to not want to fly on one of these planes at this point. Regardless of whether there is some period of time on the order of years after which all the bugs will be worked out, in the meantime it makes absolutely no sense to take a gamble flying on one of these, but many, especially those within aviation, insist otherwise.
There is a reason they are the most scrutinized.
The problem wasn’t finding problems, it was acknowledging them
don’t worry, it’s the most scrutinized plane in history
That's a bad thing, not a positive one that it needs so much scrutiny.
When all of that scrutiny stops finding issues, I'll not worry about it. Sadly, every time they look, they find new issues.
I certainly know nothing about planes yet from the reading I've done on the 737 Max I'm a bit uneasy that these planes are still flying.
I usually subscribe to the mentality that something that had a significant issue that was fixed is overly scrutinized and thus becomes safe but in this case it seems like the decision-making involved in the making of this plane from the start was flawed, such that I'm not sure patches on patches are enough.
Someone who knows more about planes might say all the issues are unrelated but fundamentally in a system like this I think one thing is bound to affect another, and if not that, then the mentality that led to one issue is likely to have been present in the developing of other components of the system.
The FAA will never ban it because politically its untenable in the US, the only thing that could kill the Max off would be if another big regulator such as EASA refused to let the Max into their airspace.
FAA will never ban it because politically its untenable in the US
What are you basing this on?
Boeing is basically an extension of .gov
So it'd be .gov.boeing?
Common sense
common sense
How do you think we would judge someone using common sense to work out a problem in computing? Because saying the FAA is existentially deferential to Boeing is a "series of tubes" analog.
Another poster above described it but Boeing managed to lobby congress into passing a law that basically says they don’t have to add a sensor that the FAA required them to.
And EASA, which is also politically controlled, will not do it because the US government pressure.
it works the same way the other way around no? airbus planes are still flying in the US even though they are currently eating boeing's lunch.
what do you mean? There is no equivalency here though in terms of safety issues.
Are they eating Boeing's lunch? Do you mean in terms of quality/safety, or economically/financially?
Or some combined major crashes on US soil?
They could refuse to certify any new MAX planes. Grandfathering only existing planes if they are thoroughly and independently inspected.
Need a pilot strike until it's banned
No, that's absolutely not true. They can and have grounded entire aircraft lines.
There's literally no reason to ban the aircraft.
At what point does Boeing just scrap the 9s? Completely, for good?
It’s all starting to feel like the galaxy note, where you pass a tipping point of no return with public perception.
Because some guy at the factory forgot to lock the door? Isn't that a little melodramatic?
What makes you think that this was the only door he forgot to lock? There is clearly a pattern here with Boeing QA, doors, bolts, etc
Based on n=1, I’m hesitant to speculate much and so I don’t have any opinion on whether there will be more. I always don’t see how scrapping the 9 makes sense even if he forgot to do all of them.
When will you be happy to extrapolate? When the next incident has bodies? Or will that be another n=1 event?
The whole scenario has ‘the front fell off’, dark comedy vibes. Wish the guy was still alive.
Low n is pretty unavoidable here, considering how few aircraft generally get made. Even for the world's leading manufacturers, deliveries are counted in units per month.
The point here is that the aviation industry is one of the most regulated and scrutinized industries in regards to safety, and yet despite all that, one manufacturer keeps making very dangerous slip-ups.
“One doesn’t just” forget things like that. It’s aviation we’re talking about, not toy cars. This absolutely must not happen, and there should be processes in place to make sure it doesn’t.
It doesn’t actually matter if it’s an engineering or a process problem, because both of those point to an organisational problem that needs to be rooted out at a company to which we basically entrust our lives.
There was the accident with Turkish Airlines Flight 981 caused by the cargo door not locking properly and it seems there was an attempt to blame the baggage handler who couldn't understand the English/Turkish language instructions, was not trained to do the check and it was someone's else job anyway.
The 346 people who died in 2018/2019 because of the 737 Max's incompetent safety standards and engineering beg to differ.
Apparently the door was permanently plugged, as Alaska Airlines didn't order the airplane with that optional door in place. So... turns out it wasn't so permanent - and definitely an issue with Boeing rather than the airline.
That attempt to spin this would be far worse for the company: if “some guy” forgot a step, it would mean that Boeing’s process is horribly broken because the worker needed a better confirmation check for that step, and the independent safety checks which are supposed to happen either didn’t or were not setup correctly. It’s not like changing the toner in the office printer, this industry is all about multiple independent safety measures because the alternatives are horrific.
For machines which hundreds of lives depend on, the correct response to that excuse would be to shut the factory down and replace the management who faked the safety process. I doubt they’ll use it for that reason.
That isn't going to happen, they are too many out there and they have too much money invested. It would take FAA action (or European I suppose)
Is the 9 really that different from the 8, other than being a few meters longer?
Why the 9? Both crashes were on 8s.
Is there any place to get the full list of tail numbers involved in the grounding? I just flew on an Alaska 737 Max 9 out of PDX a few days ago and am morbidly curious if my plane was one of the ones grounded.
Alaska grounded their whole fleet of Max 9s before the FAA ordered it for everyone else. So yes. It was grounded.
When did they ground it? I'm looking at the tail number on FlightAware and it's on a scheduled flight to SEA since 9am.
I can only assume major hubs have already completed inspection, because a buddy of mine flew out of Seattle on a 737 Max9 this morning. Guess I assumed inspections took longer than half a day
Supposedly the flaw exists on a section where a “false door” exists for future alterations to the exit points. Perhaps not all of their planes were built with this feature. Nothing to inspect in that case.
Do we really know the root cause this quickly?
The number of emergency exits required depends on how many seats you cram on a plane. A Ryanair Max 9 would need that extra exit for compliance.
*Slaps door of 737 MAX* this bad boy can fit so much air in it.
It seems like they grounded all of their 737 Max 9 fleet immediately after the incident. But apparently they have begun inspections and returned some of the fleet to service - https://twitter.com/jonostrower/status/1743668287106678866 and https://twitter.com/AlaskaAir/status/1743677307644944797
* https://www.planespotters.net/aircraft/production/boeing-737...
* https://www.airfleets.net/listing/b737ng-1-statasc.htm
* https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-airlines/
?
There don't see to be to be a lot of MAX 9s out there (relative to other MAX variants).
In all likelihood it is all of them, there aren't that many flying in the US..
United says all aircraft 7535 and above. 7501-7533 have already received inspections.
Just check the production list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38891172
Now i wonder, where did that broken door land?
Somewhere in the suburbs south of Portland, possibly near Metzger.
NTSB will find it, they’re surprisingly thorough.
How would triangulation of that small of an item be done?
They'll know from flight data recorder the exact time the decompression occurred. They'll know where and at what altitude the airplane was in the sky at that time and in which direction and speed it was moving. It's nearly a high school physics problem at that point to calculate where the door landed.
Eh, considering wind speed and direction (and its differences at different altitudes), varying pressure and inherent aerodynamic properties of the door plug itself, it's hardly a high school problem. They'll find a decent estimate, but they'll have to search some area unless a person on the ground finds it first.
I agree, it's not a point mass falling in a vacuum. But they'll have a ballpark idea (probably within a few square miles) of where it is.
They drop another door from the same place, this time with an airtag taped to it
Poor people who get a second door in the head.
Apparently there's "radar data" indicating location. <https://www.opb.org/article/2024/01/06/alaska-airlines-737-l...>
They certainly will. A friend and I were speculating whether or not someone will find it and report it before NTSB finds it. I also wondered if it would be in one large piece of several smaller ones. All I can say for sure is that it didn't land on someone's house or car, or we'd have heard by now.
I did find an article saying, "The door that blew off Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 shortly after takeoff from Portland Friday night is believed to be around Barnes Road near Hwy 217 and the Cedar Hills neighborhood" <https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/ntsb-press-briefing-alaska-...>
Edit: and another article saying "radar data" gives them the approximate location. <https://www.opb.org/article/2024/01/06/alaska-airlines-737-l...>
That's a matter of active speculation on the Portland subreddit, as you might imagine. As far as I know, no land owner has come forward with the missing window.
There's a lot of green space in and around Portland. There's good odds it may never be found, especially if it lands in some remote corner of Forest Park.
Here's one person's approximate location guess:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/190col8/probable_...
What's the back of the envelope on whether the 737 Max is more dangerous than driving?
1,300 aircraft have been built since the first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe 3 years (1000 days) of flying to date per aircraft on average, giving a very rough estimate of a few billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.
maybe 3 years (1000 days) of flying to date per aircraft on average
It's probably a lot less. 950 out of those 1300 aircraft were delivered in the last three years, and the other 350 were grounded throughout most of 2019 and 2020.
Cool, thanks. So probably a factor of ~2 fewer miles, or twice the accident rate.
divide by the # of passengers...
Not really necessary. The two accidents killed everyone on board, and it was a typical load. The number I estimated is something like "fatal crash for everyone per mile". You could multiply by average of passengers on each flight and divide by the average number of passengers on the deadly flights to get a slightly more accurate risk, but not much would change.
What's the back of the envelope on whether the 737 Max is more dangerous than driving?
Driving is an absurdly dangerous mode of transportation, so it’s probably not the best comparison.
It's the one most Americans use everyday, so it tells us about the risks that most people find accessible for the benefit they get.
Perhaps on an individual level, but on a policy level, it makes sense that the safety standards for flying are higher for flying than for driving.
You can’t compare like that.
If you drive into a tree and get maimed, it’s different to someone else driving you into a tree and maiming you.
When you’re welfare is in someone else’s hands, they need to better than you would.
I wasn't drawing an equivalence, moral or otherwise
Who cares? The age-old comparison against cars is just to illustrate that flying, on average, is safer than driving, which most people intuitively don’t “feel” to be true (or at least they didn’t back in the days).
In this case we’re talking about a company that consistently makes mistakes and puts their passengers lives at risk due to negligence, whether “it’s still safer than driving” or not is completely irrelevant, because what they’re doing is not OK no matter how much safer it is than driving.
It helps me tell if I should personally care about this. (There are people in this talking about how they would never get on one of these planes, etc.) It also is informative for how much public attention its worth.
The plane that had the issue was new, so I guess they want to make sure it wasn't an issue with other planes off the line maybe?
Sure is a good thing nobody was sitting in that seat.
Another good reason to keep that seat belt fastened even when the sign is off.
The light only means that having it fastened is mandatory. There are many reasons to keep it on during the entire flight, the most common of which is turbulence.
In Europe that's what seems to be a standard announcement. "The captain has switched off the fasten seatbelt sign, but we recommend you keep your seatbelt fastened at all times when seated, in case of sudden turbulence."
It’s the same with canadian and asian airlines. Is it not the case in the US?
I just assumed all airlines did it.
Last year I flew domestic U.S. on several airlines and the preflight safety briefing on all of them included a line that passengers should always keep their seat belt buckled for safety whenever seated (or something to that effect).
I didn't want to claim it was universal when I've mostly flown within Europe.
Or the window falling off.
Being a fat guy, I disregard that during flight other than takeoff, landing, and turbulence. I drive to work on most days, and the chance that I die that way is FAR, FAR higher than the few flights I take each year. I'll live with the odds. Yes, I wear my seat belt in my car, it's actually comfortable
A bit off-topic, but I found it curious that Ryanair refuses to call their Max fleet "737 Max-8", instead they go for "737-8200" in both their safety cards and cabin briefings. I wonder if this is common and if other airlines do the same after the reputational damage from the crashes and groundings.
They call it that because their plane is in fact not a 737 Max 8.
Ryanair’s aircraft is a different variant, made only for them, the Max 200 which is the same size as a Max 8 but has the extra exits for up to 200 pax.
That's called a different configuration.
It is still a MAX8. A rose, by any other name...
Sure but if you read what I’m replying to, they are not “lying” to call it a 737-8-200. That is what it is.
It is in fact a 737 Max 8. It’s a 737-8-200
This reminds me of the old mattress store scam, where each mattress store has its own slightly different SKU of basically the same mattress purely to make it harder for the customer to compare prices between stores.
...so basically the same just named to sound remarkably different. One more exit and it is not at all the problematic MAX anymore! ;)
Surprised they still call it 737 then. :)
ryanair using misleading advertising? say it's not so!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair#Misleading_advertising
o'leary bought them as he got them cheap, exactly the same as ryanair's fleet in the 90s
How even does a "plug" door blow out like that? That's a seemingly very robust design where cabin pressure holds the door in place passively, in addition to the latches holding it in place.
It is not a plug door in this case. There was no door - this was a kind of blanker for a space where there could have been a door.
A bit like when you buy a car model that doesn’t have all the options installed, there’s a space for the button or switch for the option in the dashboard or whatever but it’s filled in with a fixed bit of plastic - it saves them from having to produce multiple different versions of dashboard, or in this case plane fuselages.
Are you sure of that? I've read that it is the same or very similar to an emergency exit, except that the interior is covered by an interior panel. It would be uncovered and equipped as an emergency exit in cases where very tight seating would bring the number of passengers above a threshold requiring more emergency exits. And down the rabbit hole I go wondering if this non-equipped exit is new for 737 MAX planes because they can have more rows of seats.
I’m fairly sure of it based on the reports but of course we need to wait for the actual investigation.
I think it is indeed new for these Max planes and the airline purchased this one in this configuration that would not require it (fewer seats), and adding a functioning exit in (including life rafts and slides) would simply cost a lot more (and weigh more) than just blanking it out with a piece of metal. Not to mention extra maintenance and testing of said exit.
The airline may have the desire to buy a model with fewer seats because it’s cheaper and weighs less, but might also have a requirement for fewer cabin crew members too.
In /r/Aviation they were talking like it gets installed from the outside.
It looks that way. It's not the same as the doors you see on some safety cards where, if you are in an exit row, you should remove the door inward and place it on the exit row seats. It looks like it is meant to be lifted up and outward, assisted by springs. When it is not configured as an emergency exit, it is supposed to be bolted in place. Hmmm. Bolted in place.
How does the cabin pressure hold it in place passively? Isn't the pressure on the inside higher than the pressure on the outside?
It's a plug, sort of. There are fingers that interlock, but if the plug is moved vertically the fingers do not align and the "plug" can be removed outwards. There are supposed to be bolts installed (or in case of an actual door, a latching mechanism) to prevent this vertical movement.
This is sort of ironic because they asked to bypass some safety checks on the 737 max 7 recently. Note this is a different model. EDIT: The bypass is about the deicer. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
Does it have the same manufacturing process? It wasn't anything specific to the plane's model, it was the fact that it was a manufacturing defect that caused the door to blow out.
The problem here is the company and its management, not a specific plane.
The management trying to weasel out of yet another regulation is entirely showing what’s going on here.
> It wasn't anything specific to the plane's model, it was the fact that it was a manufacturing defect that caused the door to blow out.
We don't know that yet. The NTSB report will tell.
It's not a safety check bypass. Boeing wants to make pilots responsible for turning off the deicer within 5 min of ice disappearing to prevent the flawed engines breaking apart in flight.
How does one even know if ice has disappeared in the vicinity of the engines?
Hacker news discussion
I've been following this story for a bit. I'm traveling to Mexico soon and the last leg is on a 737 MAX 9. I'm looking into contacting Aeromexico to see about changing flights to a different airplane.
Is that a good idea? I always feel like the best time to fly a plane or airliner is after they've had some incident that leads them to being under a microscope.
That is, all the MAX 9s have been grounded, and I'm guessing they'll all be thoroughly inspected for this issue before they fly again. So if your concern is that you'll hit a repeat of this same issue, that seems like the wrong concern.
There's also the engine-nacelles-melting issue.
When I searched for the engine nacelles issue, that appears to only apply to an earlier version (737 NG) of the 737, not the MAX.
Which kinda proves my point - someone saying "I don't want to fly on a 737 MAX" may just get put on another plane that has different issues. I guess if you've completely lost faith in Boeing you can decide not to fly any of their planes, but that's going to make flying at all very difficult. And if you decide to drive instead you'd just be taking a more dangerous mode of transportation.
Actually, it's the new Max 7: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
It's not clear if older models suffer from the same defect.
Any of the newly engined Max models are involved, even the Max 8 and 9. The problem with the de-icing mechanism was only found _after_ the 8 and 9 were certified so they've been allowed to continue flying with the "pilot fix" in place (this is ludicrous btw).
The Max 7 is being blocked currently because it hasn't been certified yet.
That's what I thought, thanks. As you note, the "solution" is absurd, and insulting and offensive. The older models should be pulled too. WTF.
On the other hand we have the proof that an Airbus can hit another plane when landing and deliver everyone fine.
It's honestly astonishing how well the A350 held up for evacuation, which supposedly took 10 minutes. This is the first hull loss, and it actually improves the safety record.
Allegedly, some of it can be attributed to the extensive use of carbon fiber in the A350s fuselage and wings.
What can be attributed to the carbon fibre?
The plane faring better in the collision than expected and, allegedly, not burning through quickly and buying the passengers more time to evacuate.
My naive assuming would have been that carbon fibre would burn easier than aluminium
Well, yes, the plane did burn down almost completely. The quote I heard that complimented it wasn't that it wasn't flammable, but that it (again, allegedly - I'm not a material scientist) insulated the interior from the fire outside for long enough.
Most Airbus manufacturing happens in or near big cities like Toulouse, Hamburg, and Seville. These cities have plenty of engineering talent and plenty of colleges, universities, and other companies creating and nurturing this talent.
Meanwhile most Boeing manufacturing seems to be taking place in rural areas (or "flyover states" as you Americans put it). This is of course because of the local and state subsidies that Boeing is getting to create jobs. The question is if the lack of engineering talent in these rural areas is beginning to show its face.
Even in my tiny country (Denmark) there is significant decrease in quality of engineering talent outside the tier 1 cities.
The 737 is made at Boeing Renton and Boeing Everett, two factories in the Seattle area, Boeing's home town, that have been running since the 40s. Fuselages are made at the former Wichita plant, which also dates from the 40s.
737's problems do not stem from being made at a new plant.
That's a pretty awful take on engineering culture. I grew up in a city that is one of the most remote in the US and it creates a massive engineering pipeline. It started with civil engineering but moved into ICs, utility power, trains, on and on. Those companies helped build an engineering college which in turn trained engineers.. etc.
None of those companies have had issues getting talent. Not all good engineers want to live in mega urban areas and infact it was quite easy pulling talent away with the promise of a back yard and skiing fifteen minutes away if said talent had kids. Especially when the salary goes 2x as far.
Which rural areas are you thinking of? Toulouse and Seville are really not that big (they’re both around the size of Oklahoma City when considering their metro areas). Hamburg is quite a bit bigger.
Traditional engineering in the US pays pretty poorly, not enough to live comfortably in T1 cities. My civil, chemical, and mechanical engineering friends all live and work in “fly over” states for major multinationals.
The designs are unsound and the strategy for fixing is to persuade the regulators to look the other way. No way to blame that on the manufacturing teams.
Boeing 737 Max is quite the case study in how to ruin a company via merger
Boeing made the 737 NG until 2019. It also allegedly had issues with the contractor Ducommun making the airframe, including "hammering alignment holes into place". But it wasn't nearly as problematic of a plane.
The Max is a desperate attempt to compete with the A320 neo ("new engine option"). It is the aviation efficiency gain equivalent of a die shrink, except these engines get bigger, and while Airbus had space to spare under the wing of the A320 ceo, the 737 NG did not. So they angled it, changing flight characteristics. Thus, MCAS, because the entire point of keeping the 737 - a 55 year old design - alive is pilots not having to do an entirely new type certificate. Because given availability (not a given, the only reason Ryanair went with Boeing) and staff type certificates not playing a role, Airbus is the clear winner on every metric.
pilots not having to do an entirely new type certificate
And consequently, their intention seems to be to bend the rules about the validity of the existing certifications to the max (no pun intended). At what point can an agency rule that Boeing no longer follows the spirit of the pilot certification rules?
Brazil has decided that since the first day.
And honestly, it didn't create any huge roadblocks for Boeing.
MCAS absolutely should have triggered a recertification. It's essentially meant to make the Max feel like the NG by slightly pulling down to compensate for the angled engines. And we all know how that ended when the plane's angle of attack sensor failed, the backup wasn't being checked, and the pilots didn't know their plane suddenly had an extra system pulling on the trim. Even with the autopilot off. This is normal and expected on Airbus craft and later Boeing planes like the Dreamliner, but not the 737.
Oh, and the indicator for your AOA sensors disagreeing? Used to be a physical part of the cockpit, and was moved to an optional addon in the Max. But Boeing then forgot to put the indicator in the glass cockpit. Presumably because their development aircraft all had the option.
None of the accident airlines had the option.
So they angled it, changing flight characteristics. Thus, MCAS, because the entire point of keeping the 737 - a 55 year old design - alive is pilots not having to do an entirely new type certificate.
Holy hell, anyone who does computer modelling can tell you how insane this is. The model, or instrument, will never be able to cover the entire domain space of the real world conditions. You can’t do this an expect nothing to go wrong.
Boeing is what happens when an engineering focused company gets taken over by MBAs. When it happens to a webtech company we call it enshitification. When it happens to a transportation company lives are actually at risk. Sadly Boeing is important enough to DC that they seem to be allowed to casually risk American lives.
Boeing is late stage MBA.
Intel is mid-stage MBA.
Google/Alphabet is early stage MBA.
This seems basically right and there is no known cure save bringing back a founder (Jobs & Apple).
Microsoft seems to be "coming back" by essentially becoming an umbrella company, much like how all food manufacturers consolidated and are basically a couple of mega umbrella companies
They need it since Apple is right there with Intel.
Oh I like this framing.
I realize it might not be fair to ask right at this moment, but:
How come Boeing hasn't produced a clean-sheet-design replacement for the 737, despite its extreme age? I mean, since its design, the 747, 757 and 767 have come and gone, variants and all, no production continuing. Why the endless adaptations of this old thing:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Boeing_7...
?
clean-sheet-design
Won't help if there are issues at each step. Design, manufacturing, certification, pilot training, "self-certification" etc. Even if they start from scratch - until they fix their corporate culture the outcomes will stay the same.
It seems that many of the issues - certainly the MCAS thing - stem from the desire to hold on to it still being a 737. Point taken about the corporate culture though.
1. The 737 is so ubiquitous that they didn't want to create something new. They wanted old 737 pilots to be almost automatically certified to fly their new aircraft, and they wanted all the 737-oriented equipment to keep working. So, instead of making a new design, they opted for the easier, cheaper and faster "lipstick on a pig" approach.
2. It was the quicker option. The A320neo was a real gut punch to Boeing, and the execs wanted their response out, fast. Reusing the existing design was a faster and cheaper approach for them.
Because Southwest Airlines won’t let them.
1. Volume. They've sold so many 737s they're scared to upset the market. 747s
2. Target market. There are airlines like Southwest and Ryanair who use a lot of 737s and have optimised their routines around very specific aircraft, so want as little change as possible. In comparison the bigger aircraft are used more by the legacy carriers and flag carriers, who are more used to operating a mixed fleet and more willing to try something new.
How does Embraer compare to Boeing/Airbus? Why don't they take Boeing's position in the market?
Embraer was a smaller manufacturer, much smaller than Boeing. The had some success, but it was tough for them to compete with Boeing, especially because Boeing bullied them through regulators. They outmanoeuvred Boeing by letting Airbus buy them for 1 dollar. Now Embraer planes are rebranded as Airbus 200 series
This is a good opportunity for BOOM aerospace too
That was Bombardier, not Embraer.
It's also not clear at all that that was a win for Bombardier, other than giving a free win to Airbus to spite Boeing. Given up the project that they were relying on for the future direction of the company for a nominal sum?
Airbus made out like bandits, and the government of Quebec cut their losses, but Bombardier almost certainly lost as badly as Boeing in the C-Series/A200 outcome.
The commercial pilots that I know really enjoy flying Embraer planes. I’ve always enjoyed being a passenger on them too.
See what happened when Bombardier tried to muscle into the "big plane" market.
I flew a United MAX 9 last night, I was sitting in the window seat of a visible (Not plugged) emergency exit door. Landed a little while after this incident was reported. About an hour and a half before landing at SFO the pilot announced a hurried “Flight attendants check in” with no follow up announcement to the passengers. It was probably because of the turbulence we had been experiencing a few minutes before, but I wonder if the cockpit was giving flight attendants a heads up in case any passengers got word.
I feel like this is pretty unlikely - as far as I know, they don't really pass news bulletins and such to pilots, if it's not something that they need to know. Besides, even if some passenger found out, what could they even do?
even if some passenger found out, what could they even do?
Panic and freak out?
Intercom announcements like "flight attendants check-in" are a matter of routine.
Yeah, I imagine this could be a call to go to the bathroom or part of a security check-in.
I’d at first read the plane was without passengers and just being flown somewhere… and I thought, great.
Today I read that it was full of passengers, and the two people supposed to be in the two seats in the row the panel blew out happened to miss their flight.
If that’s true… what an interesting set of statistics coming together.
Amount of people that sleep through flights Amount of panels that blow out of passenger planes Chance to be seated next to said panel
I'm just going to leave you with this frightening quote: "They said there was a kid in that row who had his shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn't go with it."
Shirt sucked off him. Mother was holding onto him. Oh hello, a thousand nightmares of my youth.
I suppose after that you’ll be either absolutely unafraid of planes or never go on one with a shirt again.
Wear your seat belt while in the seat.
We are seeing the "inverted Swiss cheese" model of disaster avoidance: you are only safe if several independent, random events go your way.
Juan Browne's YouTube channel posts about basically every aviation accident, and as usual he somehow already has a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9EvHpf8jZg
The chick's tiktok went viral immediately. And fast followers were already posting tiktoks with pictures of the actual plane, breakdowns of how door plugs are made, etc.
You just have to go where the content is. Reuters has been sending journalists across the world for over 100 years. You just have to dl tiktok.
Screw TikTok. It's a cesspool of shit, compounded by its idiotic aspect ratio.
So, as bad as any other social media, yet with access to as much or more information. At least it is better than videos on Facebook or Reddit.
Not always. And "information" is an aggrandizement of TikTok content.
Facebook doesn't even occur to me anymore, and the only videos I see on Reddit are hosted on YouTube.
We really need another player in this space. There are these startups like Boom etc. Trying to do new things, we should do one that's just normal planes, made right.
I am so excited for the SV move fast and break things philosophy applied to commercial aircraft. Control software via javascript, make lots of it out of lithium for the ecological branding, don't bother with pilots. Going to be very exciting.
I'm actually saying the opposite.
I'm saying instead of that (boom, etc) we should just make another commercial airplane company that makes regular planes, safely, in a normal way.
You and I are agreeing...
Yeah, I'm poking fun at the modern US engineering model.
Actually fixing the problem is much harder. It probably goes something like aggressively fire everyone at Boeing who looks vaguely associated with management and reconstitute it as a division of some company that seems to know how to build things that work.
Reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861
Made in America! And america can't understand why people go elsewhere...
Please, let's keep this at a higher level than Reddit :)
Ok fair, but although it was a bit inflammatory, it's a real problem
Sometimes, 'reddit-style' (whatever the fuck that may infer) comments are necessary...er, in a functioning society. You could have just ignored it?
Clearly they need more exemptions.
I bet they are lobbying for it right now
Already working on it as of yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358
Boeing may think they fly above it all (get it?) but I can assure you despite my largely unwavering confidence in the air travel industry, I will not travel on a Boeing aircraft in the near future. I will see to it that I fly Airbus or not at all, which I'm perfectly fine with should it spare my life. This type of large-scale and continued negligence can only be defined as a company that thinks they're too big to fail. I would rather see the US's airplane manufacturing capabilities decrease than allow such heinous acts of negligence to continue. Shame on Boeing. You'd have thought that the previous 787 and MCAS problems would've straightened them up, but you'd of course be wrong. Let them bleed; dry if need be. This is no way to operate in such an important industry with deadly consequences.
Objectively, even a 737 MAX is probably safer than driving.
Very true. But there is probably something about the fact that traffic accidents are direct human error, usually, that make us more comfortable with the risk than the prospect of a systemic, corporate or technical error. Entirely irrational of course.
How do you enforce that rule? It’s not always easy to pick your flight and aircraft like that (without a lot of money). I’ve got a flight with a national carrier and it’s on a 777; a tried and trusted aircraft and airline so that’s decent reassurance.
I think the big thing out of this is that 737s specifically are just outright scary to see on your flight. You should try to avoid any new (2014 onwards?) Boeing aircraft.
Back in 2019, I made a lil microsite covering the 737 MAX groundings. Didn't think I'd have to update it again. https://www.isthe737maxstillgrounded.com/
It's chilling that both Alaska knew of pressurization issues in prior flights in this aircraft, and Boeing was already trying to get the FAA to look past known safety issues in the 737 MAX 7 certification. "Safety is our top priority"? Ha, absolutely not.
FWIW my understanding is that only a subset (not sure how they determine which) of the 737 MAX 9s that are grounded.
Yeah, that's fair. The tone of the website is sort of like other single-serving websites like "is California on fire", which displays yes even if a small part of California is on fire. http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/
It's chilling that both Alaska knew of pressurization issues in prior flights in this aircraft,
Actually this isn’t a big deal, they’d taken it off of ETOPS trips and were following the mx requirements.
Intermittent pressurization aren’t that rare. In a brand new airplane I would expect all sorts of weird faults.
Good. Finally the FAA got a spine with Boeing.
They did it for the DC10 and 787 (grounded for inspections). They didn’t need to do it before because Boeing was an actual engineering company
To be fair, there are a lot of rose-colored sunglasses in the crowd of Boeing critics. The rudder problems with the original 737 weren't exactly McDonnell-Douglas's fault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
Especially since the two are so tightly intertwined.
Is there any detail anywhere on what exactly is being inspected? Just the bits of airframe around the where the panel that failed? Can a broader issue with how the airframes were manufactured be ruled out at this point?
The cynical part of me wonders if this isn't just a bit of PR to 'ground' the planes for 'inspections' without actually addressing some kind of root cause.
It’s not a hole in the airframe. It’s a plugged emergency exit door that failed. I guess that’s what they check. The bolts there.
Inspection will involve this plane, every other plane around this door/panel, and current manufacturing. Records and maintenance logs will be inspected until they know what happened and why, and then check where it could occur on these planes and others.
Almost all of this can be laid specifically to the moment when Boeing passed over Alan Mullally for its next CEO in favor of a bean counter. Mullaly went to Ford and rescued that company. If Boeings board were serious about a true turnover here, they need to try and find Mullally And get him on the board right now. At this point the best outcome that I see is a BCA sale to Lockheed. That’s a high order, Elon tried to lure him to Tesla, but was unsuccessful.
It’s also worth noting that this is the ultimate outcome of the never rewrite anything mentality. Sooner or later technical debt catches up with you, they needed to launch a new, narrow body 15 years ago, but kept soldering on with the 737, which in turn is really a Boeing 707. While the 797 is the plane that launched the jet and unquestionably the greatest airliner of all time, it’s time is long long past.
You can recover from where boeing is at now. It’s not that much worse than airbus was at after their A320 flew into a forest and they hid the flight data recorders, or commercial disaster that was the A380, or the first 350 proposal but they have to want to change.
It’s not that much worse than airbus was at after their A320 flew into a forest and they hid the flight data recorders,...
This one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296Q
Doesn't read like "they" = Airbus hid the recorders.
Comparing Boeing's woes to the A320 crash is to take a false middle ground. The A320 crash was the result of pilot risk taking for the purpose of showing off the plane. It didn't happen as the inevitable consequence of a company that prioritised profits over safety and had established management culture and government relationships to enable that.
I’m sitting in Mexico City about to board a Boeing Max 737 (fortunately, I guess, an 8) back to the US.
If I am to be randomly thrust upon the afternoon sky against my will, please distribute all my HN karma to my extended family.
The two lost air frames from the MCAS issue were 8's I'm sorry to tell you. But its been two hours so hopefully you're in the air and/or landed safely already :)
Why doesn't Boeing split into a commercial airplane producer and a pure defense contractor company. The former will then have to struggle like a real company while the defense contractor will still be above the law.
I'm sure I'm missing lots of logical steps which say that this is a bad idea, but I'd like to hear reasons on why.
I don't know anything about this topic, but it seems straightforward to me. Why would they split up a company that is protected into something that is not above the law?
It would hurt both the company and the US.
Thanks! We merged that thread hither since the current article seems to have a bit more background.
This feels like the attention that shark attacks get--way more than it deserves. Somehow as a society we've decided that the correct number of deaths from airplanes is zero, but we're fine with thousands of people dying from other causes that could be prevented.
What the...? Hey, the model of phone or computer you're using might be prone to lethally exploding, but hey, don't worry, you can keep using it because dying by computer/phone explosion would be a very rare thing indeed!
A door blows out, and you think no one should say "Wait a minute, let's check all the other doors before you use that model of plane..."?
Looks like I have to stop making jokes about Scarebus. Boeing quality has been in a steady decline since the McDonnell-Douglas merger.
Scarebus? You mean “Boeing 737 sMAX into the ground sometimes?”
The whole point of this aircraft is to avoid modern safety regulations.
Exactly. This plane was created as a modernization of a several decades old design clearly just to be easily approved without major scrutiny by the FAA. There are many bad decisions made to create this plane that we don't even know yet.
Investigative journalism report into Boeing by Al Jazeera in 2014:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...
I don't know about this one, but a few years earlier they also reported on the 737 NG, and those claims did not hold up all too well. So I'd take this one with a large grain of salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_Next_Generation#Str...
Some of the comments in this thread are talking about government corruption and safety issues but I think we should put something into perspective. Not a single passenger has died on a commercial flight in the United States in the last five years, and even then, it was a single fatality in a freak occurrence. To me, that’s not government corruption but mind boggling success.
To put that into perspective, you have a significantly better chance of winning the lottery than dying on a United Airlines flight.
Thanks. I feel so much better now.
If it's Boeing, I ain't going.
(out the door, midair)
My dude what is going on with these planss
"Whatever the reasons (market pressures, rushing processes, inadequate certifications, fear of being fired, or poor project management), Leveson’s insights are being ignored. For example, after the first fatal Boeing 737 Max flight, why was the entire fleet not grounded indefinitely? Or not grounded after an Indonesian safety committee report uncovered multiple failures? Or not grounded when an off-duty pilot helped avert a crash? What analysis procedures failed to prevent the second fatal Boeing 737 Max flight?"
Would this door incident be specific to the 737 Max, or just general Boeing shoddiness?
I thought the main big difference about the Max was the engines, and the ensuing software fixes to aerodynamics. But would the doors be very different to other modern 737s?
Im wondering if focusing on the Max is a red herring and this is potentially indicative of issues with many more 737s. #armchair-aviation-geek
So who is ever going to want to sit next to a seat plug again?!
When price trumps quality, integrity becomes fallacy.
I
If it ain't Boeing it ain't blowing.
is this international, or just domestic flights?
im on a Mexico City to Vegas flight next week
Management should rot in prison.
Recent and related:
Alaska Airlines grounds Boeing 737 Max 9 planes after mid-air window blowout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38889774 - Jan 2024 (324 comments)
Alaska Airlines 737 Max makes emergency landing due to depressurization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38887840 - Jan 2024 (330 comments)
This is going to put a dent in Boeing's request for an FAA waiver for the Max 7
There was a comment on one of the other threads asking if FAA would be slow to react again. I'm glad they learned from the first incident on the same plane.
"FAA Statement on Temporary Grounding of Certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 Aircraft" - https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-temporary-groundi...
"EASA yet to follow FAA’s action against 737 Max 9" - https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/easa-yet-to-follow-faas-...
This reminded me of this unrelated incident:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/17/philadelphi...
Who was the exec that led the Boeing 737 Max?
They had a loose rudder bolt issue literally 8 days ago.
https://en.swissquote.ae/newsroom/research/morning-news/2023...
Boeing is in deep trouble. $16B underwater ($134B assets, $150B liabilities) [0]
Turns out focusing on profits over quality leads to neither.
Weird this happens right before Alaska Airlines is about to replace Hawaiian Airlines Airbus fleet
Good news, everyone: The United 737 Max 9 I’m supposed to board tomorrow has “already been checked out and returned to service.”
Everyone seems to be jumping to conclusions too quickly. It was a plug that failed that filled the spot where a door normally goes, not the actual airframe.
Window and wall flew off mid flight?
Yeah, I'm not flying on a Boeing 737 Max 9 ever again.
I watched a documentary on Netflix recently that alleged that a lot of this change came from importing McDonnell Douglas management into Boeing after the acquisition. I wonder if the book concurs on that, I don't have time to read it right now.
If this is the case I wonder if it could be reversible.
Yes: the running joke is/was that McD bought Boeing with Boeing's money.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
* https://archive.is/q5pQV
* https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
* https://simpleflying.com/mcdonnel-douglas-boeing-merger/
B was pressured to buy McD for 'national security' reasons. What would have been a better idea would have been, instead of doing an 'total' acquisition, is to wait for McD to go bankrupt, and then buy the parts that didn't suck.
When they did the acquisition, they also got the management folks… who ran McD into the ground in the first place.
Creating monopolies and reducing suppliers actually harms "national security." Our braindead managerial class in action.
That is correct. However MDD was manufacturing key military products (F-15, F-18) and it was doing bad financially, going bankrupt and jeopardizing the fighter plane production and maintenance was a "national security" problem that forced the Boeing acquisition of MDD.
Weird how you can be a "key manufacturer" yet "go bankrupt." Perhaps they should have just been auctioned off and other investors given an opportunity to create new lines of business out of the incompetent mess they had become. Taking the mess and wholesale buying it into another company and then keeping the management that created the problem in the first place is astronomically dumb.
We massively drew down defence spending at the end of the Cold War.
Umm, no we didn’t. We spent less as a percentage of GDP. But total spending barely shrank by the late 90’s. We hadn’t even started to shift spending away from piloted jets by then either.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...
Nowadays the reduction of the increase of military spending is called 'budget cuts'. Not the actual budget reduction, just increasing the budget slower than in previous budget somehow is a 'cut'. That's the reality we live in now.
But at least we have thorough audits that tell us where each of our dollars is spent…
If you change the endpoints on that graph to 1985 and 2000, the drop in spending in the 1990’s is a lot clearer. 325 billion to 287 billion is a sizable decrease—about 11%—, especially in non-inflation-adjusted dollars. It only looks small compared to the post-9/11 increase in spending, and a larger share of that spending was operations rather than procurement.
Also real, versus nominal, dollars.
I almost couldn’t believe this statement so I looked it up. Sure enough you’re correct. As a factor of GDP, it dropped by about half.
Incidentally, however, as a factor of gdp, it had gone down 50% since the Korean War before that too.
I think all this means is that military spending isn’t outpacing gdp growth (a good thing) rather than we’re actually cutting spending.
Actually, spending was cut in an absolute sense as well, especially if you factor in inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
But it is - obviously - on the rise right now.
With relation to inflation?
In part, but not all of it.
Even in dollar terms it actually did go down.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...
Late 1989 was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in most of Eastern Europe and 1991 was the end of the Soviet Union itself. There’s a drop between 1990 and 1991, a slight increase in 1992 (replenishment after Desert Storm?) and then a gradual decline in nominal dollars throughout the 1990’s. Also remember that federal budgets were usually passed ahead of time; this was before the government normalized all the government shutdowns and other monkeyshines we have grown accustomed to today, so budget changes might be a year behind current events. Adjusting for inflation the drop in spending would be even more.
Spending does start to increase after 1998. I’m not exactly sure why, but a lot of things started happening in 1998 and 1999, ranging from Bin Laden’s attacks on American embassies, the Kosovo conflict, Saddam Hussein ejecting UN weapons inspectors from Iraq, the discovery of Chinese interference in the 1996 elections and China stealing nuclear secrets.
Also, at the end of the Cold War, there were a number of systems that were in the late stages of design and development that were either radically cut back or canceled outright. These included the F-22, B-2, and Seawolf class submarine, just to name a few big ticket items. This saved a lot of money and made sense at the time since these were all designed specifically for Cold War missions that no longer seemed relevant. But eventually the older hardware still needs to be replaced; instead of replacing the Los Angeles class submarines with the Seawolf class starting in the 90’s, you end up replacing them with the Virginia class starting in the 00’s.
Other cutbacks during the post-Cold War period included closing military bases (which was fraught with political difficulty; no congressman wants the base in his district to be closed!) and reducing the number of US forces permanently stationed in countries like Germany.
Dollars aren’t the only measure, either. One of Reagan’s goals was a 600 ship navy. It takes time to build ships so it wasn’t until 1987 that the US Navy reached a peak size of 594 ships. Currently the US Navy has 238 ships. Sometimes a higher defense budget means you’re building a larger military but sometimes it means health care has gotten more expensive or you need to buy more fuel and ammunition to support operations. This also explains the drop after Korea.
Also, all the money in the world doesn't mean you spend it on things that make money later. If you spend your manufacturing budget on strippers, you won't have anything to sell later.
woah woah now, someone has to put those young ladies through college and the manufacturing budget has to be spent.
What is even weirder to me is how could you be key manufacturer, go bankrupt, cause forcing a merger, then being promoted to Boeing to 'carry on!' ...
That is the definition of "failing upwards". It's the fashion of the past 50 years in business.
The reason Boeing had to buy them was that nobody was willing to do so otherwise.
Now whether doing a full blown merger vs an asset deal would have been more advisable can be debated.
How was MDD going bankrupt Boeings problem?
If it’s a national security issue, that’s the governments problem to fix, surely?
Boeing is in its position only because of a close relationship with government. They didn't get rich because of their brains. They will do anything for government to maintain the current benefits.
They did get rich because of their brains. But they then replaced those brains with accountants and since then it is a steady downward trajectory, which if it were any other company would likely result in controlled descent into terrain.
They both acted in the same area. In case an important company is going under, you can merge it into a similar company to keep it running.
Well now we can add all the planes Boeing manufactures to the list of things which the inevitable bankruptcy will jeopardise.
All the manufacturers of key pieces of military advanced weapons are on that list. Fighter jets are on the very top. When corporate America is now more about "business" than engineering, making a good plane is very expensive. It's just business :|
That's when the government goes, "buys" the design for some price it decides, and distributes for other companies to manufacture.
Yeah, but that won't help my buddies at MDM that have been buying me lunch and beers on the golf course
Aka privatize profits, socialize losses.
It may potentially harm the security of the nation's subject, but it does not harm the interests of the ruling elites - and that's the real "national security" in practice.
I’ve heard variations on this story a few times, successful company swallows failing company and gets infected by failing-culture. Isn’t that what happened to Netscape?
Who poisoned Netscape?
AOL
Didn't AOL buy Netscape?
There's a long list of companies that died by being acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent company.
AOL was borgified by Time Warner management post acquisition the same way Boeing was by MD.
You make it sound like AOL was cool before the Time-Warner merger and people didn't joke about e.g. the free trial CD's
They were a successful online service before the internet. Yes. They were just as cool as Compuserve and Prodigy.
By the time of the merger with Time Warner they were a joke among technical people. They were in the same category as Compuserve and Prodigy, but marketed specifically as an "easy" service for less technical users.
Netscape died because browser became a utility in the OS.
It's not that simple.
Netscape died because Microsoft bundled their browser with the operating system and made it free for commercial use, what essentially led to the huge antitrust case.
Only after that did browsers become utilities in the OS, with open source engines like Konqueror's KHTML (which later became WebKit, which later became Blink) and Netscape/Mozilla's Gecko
Microsoft was the overwhelming majority of all installations. So effectively, once Microsoft added it, it was a utility. I'm well aware of that history.
Collabra, per jwz. See "groupware bad" (not direct linking in case he still has the referer block up).
Is Collabora not a good product?
Not Collabora. Collabra was a groupware company Netscape acquired to shore up the E-mail portion of Communicator. It didn't work and ended up substantially delaying future development of the browser suite.
thanks, I couldn’t remember where I had heard it
Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. Pretty much everything they started after that point has failed because the focus has been on selling ads rather than building something normal people enjoy using.
On the other hand how much of the things Google has built/bought and grew today we enjoy could exist without the firehose of money that ads represented? I'm not sure Youtube happens without the ad money.
Google had enough 3rd party ad revenue before they bought DoubleClick (2008) to buy YouTube (2006).
I'm mostly wondering if they could have kept it as open as they do to non revenue generating users or would they have had to do something like Vimeo where after a certain number of views they come asking for money or would have had to limit the quality/quantity of uploads from small creators due to the costs of storing and serving their videos with limited ad returns.
AdWords was doing just fine before DoubleClick. That's how they got the money to buy DoubleClick in the first place.
The problem was specifically DoubleClick management, who then got inserted in high levels within the Ads organization, forcing out the very technically & economically savvy people who were there before.
This is a recurring problem in large organizations. People who spend their time learning to be politically savvy will be...politically savvy, and be at an advantage when playing power politics that determines who is in charge. The effort needed to become politically savvy usually comes at the expense of domain/technical/economic knowledge required to actually get the job done. Eventually the organization becomes very good at playing political games and very bad at getting stuff done, until it collapses.
Yes, ad money built a lot of the web. I’m not saying it’s evil on a conceptual level, but rather that a lot of companies start failing when they switch from thinking about what their users would like which happen to be ad supported as opposed to building products which are designed around ad revenue first. It’s what gives you things like Google+ but also things like social media sites optimizing for outrage or other low-quality interactions which maximize ad sales revenue.
YouTube has obviously done well, but look at everything they’ve done since the ad sales mentality dominated their thinking. Stuff like Google+ happens when you are thinking “we need X to keep Facebook from cutting into our ad revenue, therefore our users will use X” rather than asking “what will our users like more than Facebook?”.
The other side is what we saw with things like Stadia, GCP, or G-Suite where executives used to the ad model have trouble with other business models. The problem there again isn’t that ads are evil but rather that you need to understand your users and what they want so you can think about the product the right way.
Not a good example. Google reinterviewed every DoubleClick employee and fired half of them.
That doesn’t say anything about whether it’s a good example: even if it’s true, the real question would be whether they looked for the right things and especially who they kept at the management level – at the time, Google announced they were laying off a quarter of the employees due to redundancy, which tends to mean that groups like HR and accounting get hammered more than senior managers. This is especially important to get right when you consider that the most damaging people aren’t comic book villains but rather people who sound like they know what they’re talking about and are charismatic – exactly the sort of people who would make it through an interview process.
You don't have to keep the management from the company you've bought.
Well clearly the McD people were more skilled politicians.
This is exactly it. The skilled politicians are the reason why the company failed in the first place. They then take over the acquiring company from within like a virus and destroy that next. Rule of thumb: If a company is failing and you purchase it, fire everybody. Either the culture or the people are poison, and they will infect you.
At the very least, anyone in a management position.
Yes absolutely - keep the skilled folks below the VP level and perhaps some of the Directors. Generally garbage flows from the top down, and they've been putting up with it this entire time.
We just had a close call with this where I work. Bought a company, because they were failing and being crushed under their own weight. Somehow they convinced the management at my company that they knew the path forward and we've been in complete gridlock trying to get anything done for a couple years, eventually they hired outside management for the company we bought, set clear KPIs which they failed to deliver on (in some cases failing to even attempt to deliver on) and the got fired.
But god damn, when you buy a company that can no longer afford to support its own weight, don't let those fuckers convince you that they somehow know how to run your business too when they can't run theirs.
This can't be emphasized enough. Businesses (and most organizations) are not meritocracies.
In a broad sense high level management tends to take care of it's own in a bit of self interest so when they screw up and run a company into the ground chasing short term quarterly profits they'll also get taken care of.
Phil Condit only had his job through the influence of his wife at the time. Unfortunately, he was busy diddling his executive assistant at the time of the merger, clearing a path for Harry Stonechiseler to be CEO.
Are we seeing similar things right now? Will companies like OpenAI or Nvidia be forced to merge or buy other players in the space?
Nvidia already has to work around export restrictions. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/17/23921131/us-china-restri...
After seeng your comment, I just went ahead and watched the doc, and I frankly I find myself in a state of rage right now. From my limited understanding, I had this impression this was an engineering failure. And you know, when you have a complicated machine, sometimes shit happens.
But it wasn't that at all. Boeing knew clearly what the dangers of MCAS system were, they went to great lengths to completely hide the presence of the system from the world before delivery of the planes. Within days of the first crash, they knew it was MCAS, and kept trying to blame uneducated "foreign" pilots, kept trying to go on and tell the world again and again it was safe to fly, until that second crash happened. I understand greed, we all have that, but I don't understand how a company-wide culture can get so toxic, how utterly devoid of humanity do you have to be that your first concern after that crash and knowing there might be more deaths coming, is keeping wall street happy.
And what the hell FAA? 1) they didn't regulate properly before the plane was delivered, 2) After first crash they knew how dangerous the plane is, but didn't ground it (TAMARA report), 3) After second crash, you had the transportation secratary basically saying 737 Max was "innocent untill proven guilty" so let it fly before China forced its hand, 4) No criminal proescution in the end for those fanatic executives, just a cash fine.
And today this happens.
You have to view all US regulatory goings-on wrt Boeing through the lens of Airbus-Boeing/EU-US trade rivalry (plus China's COMAC as a new entrant).
Boeing is the US's largest exporter (defense + civilian), and also the 65th largest US stock overall. Any US regulator action against Boeing would affect all that, plus US stock markets. You have to wonder how independent the FAA head can afford to be from Congressional interference, in the current setup. In the US, the FAA head is appointed (or, in recent admins, left vacant) by the Senate.
Back in the 2018/9 first 737MAX scandal [0], it was the Canadian, EU and Chinese regulators which were more aggressive about investigating and grounding, meanwhile the US FAA dragged its feet on taking action against Boeing while its donees like Congressman Sam Graves (R-MO 6) [1] continued to blame foreign pilot training, which was dishonest and adding insult to injury.
PS consider also in 2020, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA 27) secretly sold $50K Boeing stock ahead of his committee's damning 737MAX report; then avoided election scrutiny by simply blowing the deadline to report the stock sale... When he finally did disclose the sale, it was two weeks after the 2020 general election votes were cast, and three days after Garcia declared victory. He won by 333 votes. [2]
There's some scrutiny of Congressmen insider-trading biotech/pharma stocks esp. which their own committees (gasp) regulate, but really not a lot of scrutiny on aerospace. [3] Compare to George Santos, who wasn't implicated in a coverup that actually killed hundreds of people.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings#2019
[1]: https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/sam-graves/s...
[2]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-rep-mike-garcia-secretly-s...
[3]: NYT 2022/09 : These 97 Members of Congress Reported Trades in Companies Influenced by Their Committees https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...
Self-correction: the US did ground 737MAXes at the same time as the Canadian and other regulators, but dragged its feet on any criminal investigation.
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-grounded-by-mo...
The most garbage human being I know personally is a project manager at Boeing. Unfortunately the only way to get this person completely out of my life would be to move to a different neighborhood.
Has there been any push to break up Boeing?
The problem with breaking up Boeing is Airbus.
Nowadays, to realistically restore competiveness in an industry, you'd have to coordinate a worldwide breakup of similarly-integrated competitors.
Is the argument here that it's more economically viable to run a plane building company whose planes accidentally falls out of the sky? Naively, it would seem to me to be a bad business decision to design aero planes that can't fly, but what do I know.
Business school may say if your product never fails perhaps you are overspending on it and some known small failure rate is acceptable to control costs to have better profits. Boeing leadership may have took that logic and applied it to airplanes.
Is that argument wrong? If it isn't, then you've successfully identified capitalism as the problem. I'm all for anti-capitalism, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect that to start with Boeing.
This is not a problem of "pointy haired MBA's", we can either fix this within the current regime by imposing heavy fines on this sort of reckless behavior, or we can tear down the current regime and replace it with communism/fascism/monarchy/whatever. In the system we are currently in, what happened at Boeing looks to be "correct", in the sense that it's what the system incentivizes.
It is wrong because people will not want to fly on this plane, and carriers will be less likely to buy this model. This hurts Boeing's bottom line.
They've sold nearly 6000 Max's. Seems like the market accepts that behaviour.
It's a sticky product. There isn't an alternative from Boeing in this market segment that's viable in a modern fleet from what I understand, and airlines tend to be either Boeing or Airbus, so it would take a huge push to get an airline to migrate from one to the other – possibly multiple failed models and significant compensation to fund building up the maintenance infrastructure for the other manufacturer and pilot retraining.
Then it's not wrong.
PS: I realize you're not the person responding previously.
If the broken-up bits are uncompetitive with a monolith, that’s an argument against pursuing a break-up.
I believe that was the point. Aircraft economics barely sustains two airframers per market segment, and uncompetitive offerings aren't going to raise safety/QC bars in a regulated industry
(and whilst you've got the scope to leave the airframe design/sales op alone and [further] vertically disintegrate the supply chain instead, that might actually make it worse, with the Spirit/Boeing relationship plausibly having a causal relationship with this incident)
Well, there's product-price-uncompetitive and then externality-inclusive-uncompetitive.
which will never happen. Airbus is a pan european political project asmuch as a competitor to boeing. (also, one which is hugely important for independence of european airtransport).
It's functionally impossible for Airbus to take over all of Boeing's contracts. Airbus itself has an order backlog in the thousands. They're not REALLY competing with Boeing.
Boeings breaking up is how we got here.
I know we're not supposed to be funny on this website. But that just broke me up.
Humor is fine here, it just has to be actually funny - no tired memes or chains of replies or that sort of thing.
Even that's predictably shifted in the last few years. HN is perpetually turning into Reddit in the sense of being on a level with where Reddit was 3-5 years ago.
Boeing was reasonably broken up until merged with McDonnell Douglas.
The consolidation in aerospace and defense was a much longer process than that. All of the companies with names like “McDonnell Douglas”, “Lockheed Martin”, or “Northrop Grumman” were formed by mergers. If you actually break apart Boeing’s merger history there were at least a half dozen WWII-era companies that slowly consolidated over half a century.
Part of this was because WWII subsidized an unsustainable and frankly absurd level of demand. For instance, Grumman almost exclusively built carrier-based fighters, and by the end of WWII they were producing planes so quickly that the Navy stopped doing periodic heavy maintenance of their aircraft in lieu of dumping them into the sea and replacing them with brand new planes. Obviously business for Grumman would never be quite that good ever again.
How about nationalizing it?
Nationalize a critical piece of our infrastructure? Perish the thought!
The moment Boeing breakup discourse entering public discourse all of their lobbyists retinue will shout "Airbus, COMAC, Great Power Competition"
A friend of mine works in Boeing as a data scientist. His team has 10 people. Two of them can write code for analytics and models. The other 8 "manage projects", whatever that means. They spend their days creating processes, managing tickets, enforcing specific formats of tickets and stories and what not. Yet, none of the eight knew how to write product specs nor could be bothered with basic things like understanding how git works.
I have a hard time imagining how Boeing could survive in the long run with this level of bureaucracy.
Edit: Saw the summary of the book Flying Blind: "A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation". One has to ask: where did the cost cutting go? What's cutting throat? It looks to me that the management of Boeing is grossly incompetent.
Been there. It's half bad if the "managers" can swallow their ego and let developers lead while only just keeping an eye on any potential troubles.
At many big corporations these "management" hires are just political. To fill in the certain quotas and tick the boxes.
Problems starts if they put their egos first. Then talented staff quit and projects go down the pan.
And BTW, we have a market mechanism for this: bankruptcy. Preferably restructuring, not liquidating, though both are useful. Just leave the job and maybe one day the whole thing gets rewired.
Let me introduce you to this relatively new concept: Too Big To Fail.
I feel like this is especially pervasive in the data and ML fields. Perhaps just to many formally cloistered academic PhDs are cashing in on the corporate rush to data and ML "everything", but have no actual ability to execute or even code.
I went to a large "AI" conference this year and was surprised to see some talks being given by the "VP of ML" at the company I work at. I'd never heard of him or the position before, and when I looked him up in our company directory he appeared to sit somewhere in Pharmacy data science. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
When I attended his first talk wearing our company swag he seemed visibly uncomfortable and...grumpy(?) after he noticed me. His talk was a very non-technical, superficial fly-over of how ML can be used to profile and predict customer spending habits on our company e-commerce domains. Nothing even to do with pharma! At another table session in the day he dropped that his PhD is from MIT. Our company is big -name brand in its field- but by no means does it attract "MIT level" talent; not in pay, problems, or prestige. But again, it's a massive company, so who know? Yet at this point I'm entertaining my own little conference conspiracy theory that this guy is just a corporate cutout.
The next day I ran into him at the conference lunch line and gave him a: "Hey, how's it going! I'm at {our company} too, over in {line-of-business}". He nodded, chuckled to himself, and without even looking up said "oh yeah, you here to call me on my bullshit"? I was so confused that this would be the first thing out of his mouth with no context between us, even as a seeming joke, that I didn't know what to say. He politely excused himself to run to another table session before I could figure out how to respond.
Since then I've tried to track his team and any work/product/output they might provide but for the life of me cannot find anything other than some Jira tickets that get pushed around. But it's a massive company, so who knows?
This doesn't surprise me at all lol. Someone higher up maybe wanted an AI bullet point on the accomplishments/goals and just made it happen on paper-only.
Reminds me of the ol' adage: what's the difference between ML and AI? ML is written in Python, while AI is written in Power Point.
Not disregarding your point, I think we all agree Boeing sounds like bureaucracy hell, but could it be that the 8 who are "managing projects" are in fact managing contractors or outsourced employees who are writing code?
I worked with a large multi-national fashion company, and they had an app development team that consisted of a product manager, scrum master, and senior technical advisor. You could look at them and say that 2/3 being non-technical was a problem, or you could look past that team to the several developers in India who weren't exposed to the rest of the company or clients/collaborators, and who actually got the work done.
Unfortunately no. They are just an internal team that take internal requirements from different orgs and does not handle contractors or vendors.
They have "people skills"
Stock buy-backs, executive compensation, and lobbying. That's where the cost cutting goes.
That would be a very efficient way of running things under a cost plus military contract. For a single contract win they're able to spend four times as much money on salaries and therefore earn four times as much profit.
I find this genuinely incomprehensible. I have never encountered a single person who was not technically proficient in the team’s tasks across the 10 years of my hodgepodge career in a variety of semi-independent small teams and currently a small business.
Small teams don’t have the margin for non technical folk. It often falls on people like me to become, temporarily, the admin or become the GIS department as such things are needed.
Considering the consistent gross mismanagement of Boeing, who receive free bailouts just for being Boeing
Well, I was going to say that calling them “business oriented” is laughable, but I guess that running a business in to the ground then laughing all the way to the bail out bank is just standard operating procedure now around the world.
Thanks, had credits that needed burning so picked up an Audible version of that.
The Netflix series Downfall is very good and focuses a lot on the root causes of these technical issues (i.e. business-focus of the company).