Eco Madness: Cause of 737max Crashes?

Something from very ancient pre-history, like weeks ago.

 

It's a new Boeing passenger plane, an update of the original 1980's 737. It was meant to compete with the Airbus A320neo. Supposed to be cleaner, greener, more economical to operate. A couple of them fell out of the sky for no good reason and now people are getting all fussy about them.

 

"Oh, it’s a big, pretty, white plane with red stripes, curtains in the window, and wheels. It looks like a big Tylenol."​

 

Well, also supposed to be cheap for airlines to buy, saving training hours for pilots, because there would just be software added to the flight computer to make it fly just like the old plane the pilots were already trained on.

Only, the old plane didn't have a piece of software relying on one non-redundant angle-of-attack sensor to decide whether to point the airplane at the ground. Some of the airlines also saved the cost of the optional alarm that would have said "the AOA sensor has malfunctioned and that is why the airplane is pointed at the ground."

So it that regard, it wasn't just like the old plane, and the avoided training hours didn't save as much money as anticipated.

 

Also, changing and moving the engine nacelles forward and up higher on the leading edge of the wings to avoid redesigning the landing gear changes the entire relationship between the center of pressure and the center of mass of the airplane. The flight dynamics and the handling of the airplane has thus also completely changed.

 

Yeah, that was the reason for the added software, to make it fly as if they hadn't done that.

 

Local news is indicating that the 737 MAX 8 is expected be ungrounded in the U.S. Wednesday.

A separate report indicated that several airlines appear to be dropping the MAX name from their information, including the seatback pocket safety information cards. Now labeling as 737-8.

 

When Europe and other regulatory bodies sign off on this, please tell us here.

 

The word here is that Europe, Canada, and Brazil are close to conditional approvals. The conditions are that additional changes are required before the next model, the 737 MAX 10, is approved. E.g. the 'sticker shaker' needs to have a shut-off to reduce pilot distraction, not currently available in any 737. And a third AoA measure is needed, though it may be 'synthetic' (e.g. the third airspeed measure in 787s), not necessary a third hard sensor.

My impression is that these additional changes will also need to be retrofitted into the existing MAXs by a certain time, but that isn't actually clear yet.

Chinese approval may be more dependent on improvements in political relations.

My understanding had been that the MAXs (and latest Airbus too?) are the first planes designed to a new higher level of safety standards, not imposed on any previous craft. In addition to redoing MCAS and some other flight controls, Boeing and the FAA did a much deeper dive, identifying some unnoticed deficiencies of other systems under the latest standards, looking beyond to find some additional risks, and applying a new level of fault tolerance testing to the controls.

Aviation folks are often reluctant to make changes to existing reasonably-well-proven systems, for fear of introducing new bugs that outweigh the intended improvements. Boeing had no choice but to implement improvement changes this time. If these have been done without serious introduced bugs piggybacking on these changes, and reviewed and tested thoroughly enough, then these should be the safest planes ever.

But anyone who has worked much around software and hardware development, knows how frequently new bugs typically appear. No matter how well tested, serious nail-biting is unavoidable.

Boeing 737 MAX can return to the skies, FAA says | The Seattle Times

(June) Foreign regulators demand substantial new changes to Boeing 737 MAX flight controls | The Seattle Times

Boeing Max cleared for takeoff, 2 years after deadly crashes | The Seattle Times

 

After Indonesia but before Ethiopia, I boarded a 737 max in Beijing. Took a photo of portside AoA sensor from boarding bridge, which my fellow pax found somewhat odd. I wanted it to be last photo in my phone if necessary.

 

Too bad you couldn't get to the starboard side for the other AoA sensor too. I had understood that back then, they alternated which one was used each flight.

 

What is REALLY mind-boggling is how an industry that has redundancy in everything could have allowed a design to slip through that uses only one sensor for mission-critical part of the system. This is even more mind-boggling than what held number 1 spot in my mind for mind bogglingness of corporate idiocy. That was the VW decision to cheat on their diesel engine emissions. At least with the VW idiocy no lives were lost before the whole thing came to light, though plenty of damage was done to environment and other things like consumer trust.

In any case, both the VW and the Boeing lunacy happened solely because of corporate douche bags hungry for their idiotic bonus check (or whatever). I hope people responsible in both cases and in cases not yet illuminated go to special kind of hell...

 

Huh? Multiple sources indicate that 'diesel-gate' cost tens of thousands of lives:

38,000 people a year die early because of diesel emissions testing failures

Study links these excess NOx emissions to 38,000 premature deaths worldwide in 2015—mostly in the European Union, China, and India.

5,000 deaths annually from Diesel-gate in Europe

 

Remember the diesel exhaust monkey ‘study’?

Bob Wilson

 

One of the reasons why they presented it as a slight reworking of their existing design is that this kept it under the old standards. If they had presented it as a whole new plane it would have had to meet 1990's safety standards. Don't know about the Airbuses.

Do you know if they did anything about the elevator control wire problem? I was wondering if they would have to tear the whole plane apart to fix it.

 

I was not aware of that, but still, this is just estimates and guesses at best. It's impossible to know exactly if and how many people died because of diesel gate. We really have no idea how the actual emissions came out of the tailpipes of these cars. For all you know, it may have been clean until one stepped on the throttle hard, not all the time.

What I am saying is that we did not see 300+ souls go up in smoke as a direct consequence of some corporate weenie trying to make the numbers look good. I am not defending VW by any means here. Just noting a difference. Boing directly killed those 300+ people on those two flights by, among other things, not making an AOA sensor redundant. That executive may have put those people against the wall and shot them. There are indications that the top brass knew some planes will go down, but went ahead anyway as with acceptable risk. Well, I hope Boeing learns the lesson of acceptable risk as did VW (or did they?).

If pushed into the corner, the corporation will sacrifice the people for the bottom line. This is not likely to change, I don't think.

 

I'm not sure I see quite as bright a line there as you do. A lot of what we know about why the MAXes went down is also the result of careful reasoning applied to the evidence at hand to fill in what was not directly seen. If we insist on calling that process "estimates and guesses" then we end up convinced we don't know squat about much of anything. But we know more than that.

 

I have understood that they can get grandfathered on only some of the standards, not all of them.

That grandfathering is also a training issue, they wanted the cockpit look/touch/feel similar enough to the prior 737s that essentially no new training was required, pilots could move back and forth between 737 versions at will. It seems that sales promise was a pipedream that is now quite dead.

I saw some initial coverage of that, but not any followup. But then I've read only a fraction of the coverage, so could have very easily missed it.

It should be buried somewhere in this huge pile:
Boeing 737 MAX | The Seattle Times

 

I disagree. We have very real evidence of very concrete events that happened to bring the two flights down. There is no uncertainty at all. I am not sure we can say x number of people died because of VW with any kind of certainty. The cars in question behaved perfectly fine as far as emissions most of the time and only exceeded allowed limits at certain conditions. We would need to take ever single driver of every single VW diesel and map their entire history of driving to know for sure the exact effects. In the Boeing case we have 300+ dead and two crashed planes. It is very much more clear in this case that Boeing killed those people. We know their names. It is not as abstract as in VW case.

But I really do not want to argue the point here. Both companies exhibited malignant behavior towards human life and well being. My point is that corporations are amoral by design and this will continue to happen unless laws are changed.

 

I think that you may have this backwards. I thought it worked fine only part of the time, recognizing the pattern of the official emissions test cycles, then was turned off most of the rest of time to save serious money on emissions control capacity.

And give their owners brag-worthy real-world MPG figures much of the time, while claiming to be nearly as clean as low emissions gassers, quite unknowing of their real toxic dirtiness.