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Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashes killing 157


Nueces River Rat

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31 minutes ago, SpiralOut said:

If you ever want to cure yourself of flying again, watch those Air Crash Investigation shows.  Shit is nightmare fuel when you realize a bunch of these crashes come down to morons in the cockpit, morons working on the planes, or arcane designs in shit like the autopilot.

Like when some Russians flying an Airbus decided to let the pilot's kids sit at the controls while the autopilot was on.  Kid pushes the yoke and turns the autopilot off.  Well, sort of.  It turned off the autopilot control of the ailerons.  It just didn't turn off autopilot control of anything else.  Pilot and his co-pilot freak the fuck out and manage to stall/corkscrew the damn plane and 75 people into a hillside.  Turns out the plane actually has an indicator that lets you know that the full autopilot isn't running, but the Russians were used to audio cues and not visual ones.  Derp.

 

 

Air Disasters has actually made me a much better flier for some crazy reason. There are like 13 seasons of it on the Smithsonian channel. 

 

 I'm willing to bet the pilots were overwhelmed and didn't understand what the problem was and that they could just flip 2 switches. There isn't a lot of time to fix a problem on takeoff with how close you are to the ground and how slow you are going especially when it requires some deductive reasoning to isolate where the fault is coming from. 

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Buncha goddamn knee jerk over-reactors everywhere the last few days that all need some perspective.

We would have lost WW2 had we had this mentality back then.  Forget what the FAA or Boeing C-suite alone says, at the end of the day the pilots who have spent thousands of hours training and flying these things wouldn't continue flying them if they truly thought they were unsafe or if they felt unable to maintain control under virtually any circumstance.  Media needs to stop trying to sensationalize this story.

 

Edited by McCroskey
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1 minute ago, McCroskey said:

Buncha goddamn knee jerk over-reactors everywhere the last few days that all need some perspective.

We would have lost WW2 had we had this mentality back then.  Forget what the FAA or Boeing C-suite alone says, at the end of the day the pilots who have spent thousands of hours training and flying these things wouldn't continue flying them if they truly thought they were unsafe or if they felt unable to maintain control under virtually any circumstance.  Media needs to stop trying to sensationalize this story.

 

Boeing shareholder ^^^^

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Yup.  It may well be something training/airline level. We don't know enough yet.  But PR 101 is to get ahead of the issue and be proactive.  At this point, the perception is that there's something wrong with the plane.  The damage to Boeing is already done. Get in front of it and make it clear that you're taking it seriously and if the problem is with the plane, it will be fixed before more passengers die.


PR 101 wont kick in until after they ground the planes. We dont know enough yet? Fuck that, until you know the worst pilots in the US cant fuck it up, you ground the plains.
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Buncha goddamn knee jerk over-reactors everywhere the last few days that all need some perspective.
We would have lost WW2 had we had this mentality back then.  Forget what the FAA or Boeing C-suite alone says, at the end of the day the pilots who have spent thousands of hours training and flying these things wouldn't continue flying them if they truly thought they were unsafe or if they felt unable to maintain control under virtually any circumstance.  Media needs to stop trying to sensationalize this story.
 


Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
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10 hours ago, Your Mom said:

They've already done exactly what you're asking for.  The identified the flaw in detail, they communicated that to the airlines along with the procedure that would have prevented the Lion Air crash, which as DaysOff posted earlier has been in place for 50 years.  They started tweaking the airplanes right after the Lion Air crash so the auto-trim would be more apparent to the pilots.  That procedure was reiterated to the pilots as a reminder of the simple 2-step process and the 2 switches to be turned off if the airplane is opposing your pitch inputs.  If the flying public thinks this is being too secretive it's because they haven't looked for the information.  Maybe from a PR standpoint it hasn't been visible enough but everything you're asking for has already been done and more changes are coming in the weeks ahead.

 

I'm admittedly a moron when it comes to aeronautical engineering, but if this particular airplane is such a triumph of modern technology, why is the following necessary

Quote

Boeing said in a statement to the Post late in the evening of March 11 "that it would implement a software update to the 737 MAX 8 in the coming weeks designed to 'make an already safe aircraft even safer,' with changes to 'flight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training.'"

I assume a "fix" implies an improvement, so the logical question would be "Why now? Why not after the first one went down?" I cant speak to the engineering merits of Boeing's response, but I 100% agree with Brisket that Boeing is fucking up the PR on this. When the inevitable lawsuits come, I'd be curious what changes make sense only after the second plane went down. Why wasn't this done after Lion Air? What mandates the response now?

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30 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

 


PR 101 wont kick in until after they ground the planes. We dont know enough yet? Fuck that, until you know the worst pilots in the US cant fuck it up, you ground the plains.

 

He's looking at you, Mesa Airlines.

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This all stems from the original fuselage of be 737 being designed sometime in the 50s. The landing gear on a 737 are short and ground clearance for new engines with larger fan blades (which are more economical) is now an issue. As a result the angle of attack envelope has decreased resulting in a more finely tuned auto pilot which runs on software. 

At least I think this is kind of correct. 

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6 minutes ago, Telegraph_it said:

This all stems from the original fuselage of be 737 being designed sometime in the 50s. The landing gear on a 737 are short and ground clearance for new engines with larger fan blades (which are more economical) is now an issue. As a result the angle of attack envelope has decreased resulting in a more finely tuned auto pilot which runs on software. 

At least I think this is kind of correct. 

Thats what I heard too.  The nose wants to angle up because the power of the new engines is MAXIMUMER.

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1 hour ago, McCroskey said:

Buncha goddamn knee jerk over-reactors everywhere the last few days that all need some perspective.

We would have lost WW2 had we had this mentality back then.  Forget what the FAA or Boeing C-suite alone says, at the end of the day the pilots who have spent thousands of hours training and flying these things wouldn't continue flying them if they truly thought they were unsafe or if they felt unable to maintain control under virtually any circumstance.  Media needs to stop trying to sensationalize this story.

The English, Germans, French and Australians have all grounded the Max8.  This is not a drill.

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18 minutes ago, Blotto said:

Why wasn't this done after Lion Air? What mandates the response now?

"Everyone" (not the argument of the thread) "believed" the LionAir incident was *possibly* just another southeast asian shenanigan.  And were the LionAir boxes ever recovered?  Objective and subjective evidence for Lion Air did not have much, if any, credibility at all.  The Ethiopian voice boxes will tell the tale.  You will get your mandate.

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8 hours ago, Telegraph_it said:

I know a current 737 captain and my uncle is a 767 captain. One continues to fly max no hesitation and the other would fly the plane. This is the rest of the world using an opportunity to take Boeing and FAA down a peg. 

Was thinking the same thing. Airbus must love this. 

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10 hours ago, McCroskey said:

Buncha goddamn knee jerk over-reactors everywhere the last few days that all need some perspective.

Wait, are you saying we don’t need computer scientists from MIT by the name of Albert Einstein flying our planes?

Next, you’re going to tell us flying is safer than it was in the 1970s.  

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8 hours ago, Blotto said:

I assume a "fix" implies an improvement, so the logical question would be "Why now? Why not after the first one went down?"

Software takes time to jell, especially life-critical software.

If they knew that the first airplane was just missing a feature that was already developed and tested they could just turn on the missing feature.  An actual software change would easily take months to identify, develop, test and deliver a fix to a real problem.

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19 minutes ago, Texas Jeff said:

Software takes time to jell, especially life-critical software.

If they knew that the first airplane was just missing a feature that was already developed and tested they could just turn on the missing feature.  An actual software change would easily take months to identify, develop, test and deliver a fix to a real problem.

I work for a software company so I would agree with your statement, I was merely commenting on the optics/PR discussion. Language like "we're making a safe plane even safer" reaks of the same kind of bullshit I hear from Tesla who maintains that their self-driving software is bulletproof, yet you have morons sleeping in their fucking cars on the way to work. Tesla keeps claiming that the fault is on the driver abusing the spirit of how the feature should be used, which is crap. When it comes to human behavior, assume the worst and design around it.

If you have two planes down in 6 months and determine a similar root cause in each scenario, I'm not sure a "our bad, we just didnt have the software right yet" argument will play well with a jury. Several people on this thread that know a lot more about flying than I do have claimed it's a training issue, and you dont see this happening with the major US carriers. That might also be true, but Boeing sells planes all over the globe. What happens if a 3rd plane goes down in June? Another software fix?

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Speaking of the FAA:



On March 11, Boeing announced that the company "has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX, designed to make an already safe aircraft even safer." The shutdown of non-essential operations at the FAA caused work on the fix to be suspended for five weeks, according to unnamed US officials cited by the Wall Street Journal. The fix is expected to be mandated for installation by the FAA by the end of April.

[/Quote]



https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/boeings-fixes-to-737-max-software-delayed-by-government-shutdown-report-claims/
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I just logged into my company's concur instance and there'a a big note that they have hidden all 737 max flights in the search tool, and if you are currently booked on a max flight, you can call the travel desk and change it for no fee, if you want. 
I just wanted to say fuck concur. Please continue the discussion.
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2 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

 


Great analysis. Which of these scenarios is more likely:

1) The entire civilized world has it in for Boeing and is disrupting its own travel industry for shits and giggles.

2) The FAA is making a business decision on behalf of a US company.

 

 

 

I hear what you're saying, and please explain to me in 500 words or less how either of those scenarios are the US "operating like a third world country".

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15 hours ago, McCroskey said:

Buncha goddamn knee jerk over-reactors everywhere the last few days that all need some perspective.

We would have lost WW2 had we had this mentality back then.  Forget what the FAA or Boeing C-suite alone says, at the end of the day the pilots who have spent thousands of hours training and flying these things wouldn't continue flying them if they truly thought they were unsafe or if they felt unable to maintain control under virtually any circumstance.  Media needs to stop trying to sensationalize this story.

 

This was especially noticeable in the media stories about the AA flight attendants union demanding the planes be grounded, with a typical angry flight attendant talking about how the safety of the flight attendants needs to be considered.  The story ended with "the pilots union believes the planes are safe and does not support grounding the planes".

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15 minutes ago, DCA_HORN said:
33 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:
I just logged into my company's concur instance and there'a a big note that they have hidden all 737 max flights in the search tool, and if you are currently booked on a max flight, you can call the travel desk and change it for no fee, if you want. 

I just wanted to say fuck concur. Please continue the discussion.

I concur

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