It was from the article Kennebeck shared.
I am certain many dont understand the Export _ Import bank , my point was politics played a part in this very I’ll conceived idea from Boeing.
The export import bank is a corporate handout of taxpayer money. It was partially crippled in 2015 but with encouragement from the Trump administration this year it is back in the welfare business.
it will be going flat out with the new free trade deal with the UK after brexit
Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”
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That’s quite an article. I’ve seen Mentour Pilot’s now-withdrawn video about extreme forces on the trim wheels.
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Good journalism. This excerpt immediately made me think about the probable cause of the Conception fire:
(The 787) debuted three years behind schedule, tens of billions over budget, and was grounded 14 months after its maiden voyage, following a rash of mysterious lithium ion battery fires. This was a surprise only because the batteries were the last thing anyone (with the exception of Boeing’s battery team) thought would ground the 787 Dreamliner. (As for those battery specialists, there’s a fantastic 2014 Al-Jazeera English documentary recounting how the subcontractors tasked with manufacturing the 787’s battery chargers struggled to meet Boeing’s specifications and ended up burning down an entire 10,000-square-foot plant in the worst chemical fire in the history of Tucson, Arizona.)
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Yes, there is a lot in that article. Upper management changing from aeronautical engineering to financial engineering, playing the blame game for financial gain and everything in between.
For example this:
The pilot errorists took their primary talking points from a blog post titled “The Boeing 737 Max 8 Crashes: The Case for Pilot Error,” written by two pilots and published on a site called Seeking Alpha . According to The Seattle Times, the post in question had been commissioned by one of Boeing’s institutional shareholders; and the error-narrative picked up additional bursts of momentum by aggregating random little scooplets turned up in the media’s voracious focus on the MAX soap opera. The Wall Street Journal, in particular, homed in laserlike on matters of pilot behavior—even managing to transform the impossibility of manual flight under the conditions of the Ethiopian crash into a story about the FAA’s new concern that “female” pilots might lack the physical strength to fly the old-fashioned way.
Here’s the headline from the WSJ :
Boeing’s Latest 737 MAX Concern: Pilots’ Physical Strength
Turning manual crank during emergency procedure may be too difficult for some people
As if the discussion is about operating horse-drawn farm equipment instead of flying a modern commercial jet.
FAA blames 737 MAX crashes on Swiss cheese!
Former FAA administrator explains the snafu with the 737 Max’s MCAS this way “every now and then, the holes in the Swiss cheese line up, and that’s what happened.” (video 7:06).
As the airliner’s grounding ripples through the industry, Steve Dickson, the FAA’s new boss is dusting off his dancing shoes. He is scheduled to meet four dozen foreign regulators in Montreal today to provide closed-door update on fixes to the MCAS.
Error trapping is another way of looking at this.
The first error was the design of the 737 Max with the larger engine. The engineers tried to trap the error with software. The software had errors. At this point it’s up to the crew to correct. In some situations the crew is able to correct the error and in other situations they are not.
If the crew fails to correct properly when the original error manifest itself the aircraft crashes.
The Swiss cheese model is a model that tries to explain how accidents can occur in an organization. The model was devised in 1990 by the English psychologist James T. Reason of the University of Manchester and is often used in risk analysis and risk management.
The two crashes had nothing to do with the Swiss cheese theory. To save some fuel the much bigger and heavier engines had to be placed more forward to give sufficient turmac clearance what ended up in an unbalanced aircraft what had to be compensated by the MCAS which was in fact a cheap patch to cover up a major deficiency of the airworthiness of the aircraft. Reinstall the old Pratney and Whitney engines and all is well again…
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That’s another way of looking at things, similar to “the perfect storm” of circumstances.
One point that Anand, the author of this post: Light bulbs, red lines and rotten onions was making that the problem with the Swiss cheese model is that the fix looks to be adding another layer of cheese rather than fixing the original problem.
And what exactly is the purpose of the SMS? It can be illustrated using the ‘Swiss Cheese’ model of accident prevention, where several slices of cheese are lined up against each other. The cheese slices represent organisational barriers to prevent accidents. The barriers typically include crew competence and training, emergency preparedness, maintenance of safety equipment, analysis and reporting of accidents, documentation control, effective control and monitoring from the shore side etc. The holes in the cheese are termed as noncompliances; instances where rules, regulations and procedures are not followed. When an accident happens the conventional explanation is that because rules and procedures were not followed the barriers were holed. The purpose of the SMS is to ensure a systematic identification, detection and follow up of holes so that the organisation is better prepared to manage safety risks.
The accident investigation report into the Hoegh Osaka found that there were a total of 213 checks to be completed by the chief officer for cargo operations alone. This exemplifies a ‘rotten onion’ style of management; one where multiple layers of procedures and checklists can cover up the core issues
I thought it was a feeble excuse from a former administrator and couldn’t help ridiculing it.
It’s taking much longer than Boeing originally projected to get the planes back in the air and it’s not over. Foreign regulators aren’t likely to take the FAA’s solutions at face value after this and plan on doing their own recertification protocols. In addition to Boeing reconfiguring the software, I expect those regulators will push for simulator training and more forthright instruction manuals. Both of those point to the revolving door between Boeing’s senior management and the FAA. They’ve both lost some credibility in the international aviation community.
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In fact if they adhere to these these bigger engines it will always remain an unbalanced and unairworthy aircraft flying by the grace of a patch. Back to the good ole Pratney and Witney’s.
It’s worth pointing out that the administrator might have reason to be biased in this case but without knowing his intentions it’s not possible to tell for sure if it’s an excuse or a genuine belief, these things tend to get muddled up in humans. " It is difficult to get a man to understand something , when his salary depends upon his not understanding it !"
I’d see this as a case of “all models are wrong but some a useful”. The swiss cheese model is one way of looking at things, error trapping is another, there are other ways as well. Take your pick.
Is the problem being worked backwards or forwards? Are we using the swiss cheese model to get an answer or using it to justify the answer we want?
I don’t think Boeing would find any more customers for a MAX with the gas guzzling Pratt & Whitneys under the wings any more than Chevy could sell new Corvettes with the same era’s 270 horsepower V-8s.
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This is from The New Republic article, it’s a quote from Boeing from 1996. This is the rule they broke with the 737 software patch:
One of the things that we do in the basic design is the pilot always has the ultimate authority of control. There’s no computer on the airplane that he cannot override, or turn off if the ultimate comes, but, in terms of any of our features, even those that are built to prevent the airplane from stalling, which is the lowest speed you can fly and beyond which you would lose the control. We don’t inhibit that totally; we make it difficult, but if something in the box should inappropriately think that it’s stalling when it isn’t, the pilot can say, this is wrong and he can override it. That’s a fundamental difference in philosophy that we have versus some of the competition.
Too bad they couldn’t stick to it but that’s what happens when bean counters take over.
Are you type rated in 737’s? Several pilots that are have commented all around the internet stating that the MCAS failure was a failure…HOWEVER the result of the MCAS failure was no different than a vanilla trim run away that they train for regularly in simulator sessions.
Put more simply: The MCAS caused a TRIM RUN AWAY which is a failure that every 737 pilot should recognize and have no issue addressing by flipping the power off on the trim system.
All the MCAS comments are true about cutting costs and an inferior design. But the MCAS did not crash the plane, the pilots did.
I know more about ships then aircraft that is true, but what I don’t understand then is, if it were pilot errors, why they are kicking up all this fuss. No need for that it seems, only a matter of some additional training,
Did you read the article that @Earl_Boebert1 posted in the india boat sink thread? It does a decent job of explaining things.
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