Utopia Talk / Politics / RIP Boeing

Paramount Member	Sun Mar 17 16:36:05 I hope everyone sues the shit out of Boeing. I think some people needs to go to jail also. Flawed analysis, failed oversight: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system Federal Aviation Administration managers pushed its engineers to delegate wide responsibility for assessing the safety of the 737 MAX to Boeing itself. But safety engineers familiar with the documents shared details that show the analysis included crucial flaws. As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 MAX, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis. But the original safety analysis that Boeing delivered to the FAA for a new flight control system on the MAX — a report used to certify the plane as safe to fly — had several crucial flaws. That flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), is now under scrutiny after two crashes of the jet in less than five months resulted in Wednesday’s FAA order to ground the plane. Current and former engineers directly involved with the evaluations or familiar with the document shared details of Boeing’s “System Safety Analysis” of MCAS, which The Seattle Times confirmed. The safety analysis: * Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document. * Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward. Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed. The people who spoke to The Seattle Times and shared details of the safety analysis all spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs at the FAA and other aviation organizations. Both Boeing and the FAA were informed of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago, before the second crash of a 737 MAX last Sunday. [...] Delegated to Boeing The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes. Early on in certification of the 737 MAX, the FAA safety engineering team divided up the technical assessments that would be delegated to Boeing versus those they considered more critical and would be retained within the FAA. But several FAA technical experts said in interviews that as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process. Development of the MAX was lagging nine months behind the rival Airbus A320neo. Time was of the essence for Boeing. A former FAA safety engineer who was directly involved in certifying the MAX said that halfway through the certification process, “we were asked by management to re-evaluate what would be delegated. Management thought we had retained too much at the FAA.” “There was constant pressure to re-evaluate our initial decisions,” the former engineer said. “And even after we had reassessed it … there was continued discussion by management about delegating even more items down to the Boeing Company.” Even the work that was retained, such as reviewing technical documents provided by Boeing, was sometimes curtailed. “There wasn’t a complete and proper review of the documents,” the former engineer added. “Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates.” When time was too short for FAA technical staff to complete a review, sometimes managers either signed off on the documents themselves or delegated their review back to Boeing. “The FAA managers, not the agency technical experts, have final authority on delegation,” the engineer said. Inaccurate limit In this atmosphere, the System Safety Analysis on MCAS, just one piece of the mountain of documents needed for certification, was delegated to Boeing. The original Boeing document provided to the FAA included a description specifying a limit to how much the system could move the horizontal tail — a limit of 0.6 degrees, out of a physical maximum of just less than 5 degrees of nose-down movement. That limit was later increased after flight tests showed that a more powerful movement of the tail was required to avert a high-speed stall, when the plane is in danger of losing lift and spiraling down. The behavior of a plane in a high angle-of-attack stall is difficult to model in advance purely by analysis and so, as test pilots work through stall-recovery routines during flight tests on a new airplane, it’s not uncommon to tweak the control software to refine the jet’s performance. After the Lion Air Flight 610 crash, Boeing for the first time provided to airlines details about MCAS. Boeing’s bulletin to the airlines stated that the limit of MCAS’s command was 2.5 degrees. That number was new to FAA engineers who had seen 0.6 degrees in the safety assessment. “The FAA believed the airplane was designed to the 0.6 limit, and that’s what the foreign regulatory authorities thought, too,” said an FAA engineer. “It makes a difference in your assessment of the hazard involved.” The higher limit meant that each time MCAS was triggered, it caused a much greater movement of the tail than was specified in that original safety analysis document. The former FAA safety engineer who worked on the MAX certification, and a former Boeing flight controls engineer who worked on the MAX as an authorized representative of the FAA, both said that such safety analyses are required to be updated to reflect the most accurate aircraft information following flight tests. “The numbers should match whatever design was tested and fielded,” said the former FAA engineer. But both said that sometimes agreements were made to update documents only at some later date. “It’s possible the latest numbers wouldn’t be in there, as long as it was reviewed and they concluded the differences wouldn’t change the conclusions or the severity of the hazard assessment,” said the former Boeing flight controls engineer. If the final safety analysis document was updated in parts, it certainly still contained the 0.6 limit in some places and the update was not widely communicated within the FAA technical evaluation team. “None of the engineers were aware of a higher limit,” said a second current FAA engineer. The discrepancy over this number is magnified by another element in the System Safety Analysis: The limit of the system’s authority to move the tail applies each time MCAS is triggered. And it can be triggered multiple times, as it was on the Lion Air flight. One current FAA safety engineer said that every time the pilots on the Lion Air flight reset the switches on their control columns to pull the nose back up, MCAS would have kicked in again and “allowed new increments of 2.5 degrees.” “So once they pushed a couple of times, they were at full stop,” meaning at the full extent of the tail swivel, he said. Peter Lemme, a former Boeing flight controls engineer who is now an avionics and satellite-communications consultant, said that because MCAS reset each time it was used, “it effectively has unlimited authority.” Swiveling the horizontal tail, which is technically called the stabilizer, to the end stop gives the airplane’s nose the maximum possible push downward. “It had full authority to move the stabilizer the full amount,” Lemme said. “There was no need for that. Nobody should have agreed to giving it unlimited authority.” On the Lion Air flight, when the MCAS pushed the jet’s nose down, the captain pulled it back up, using thumb switches on the control column. Still operating under the false angle-of-attack reading, MCAS kicked in each time to swivel the horizontal tail and push the nose down again. The black box data released in the preliminary investigation report shows that after this cycle repeated 21 times, the plane’s captain ceded control to the first officer. As MCAS pushed the nose down two or three times more, the first officer responded with only two short flicks of the thumb switches. At a limit of 2.5 degrees, two cycles of MCAS without correction would have been enough to reach the maximum nose-down effect. In the final seconds, the black box data shows the captain resumed control and pulled back up with high force. But it was too late. The plane dived into the sea at more than 500 miles per hour. Read all here: http://www...licated-in-the-lion-air-crash/
The Children Member	Mon Mar 18 13:34:27 from what i dug up on the internet last few days, even the engineerin and design are faulty. this is nottin but expensive overpriced american crap. they also KNEW it wasnt designed properly so they tried 2 use shitty software to fix this shit. even after the first disaster they did nottin but try 2 issue another software patch but allowed and pretended that the shit the crap the overpriced american crap was fit to fly. they knowinly let us fly a coffin!! how dare they. everyone that got on a boein max plane since culdve died!!! everyone that got on a boeing crap needs to start suing just another example of expensive overpriced american crap. america and manufacturin and designing dunt go hand in hand. they cant make shit other than overpriced stuff. this is why consumers went to cheap chinese crap. why overpay for crap anyway. u have the choice for cheap chinese crap. or u can expensive overpriced american crap. u r retarded if u chose american.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Mar 18 14:03:18 If this story is true, then the real fault lies with the FAA. This is why regulation and third party verification of compliance is important. You need to pay for these things.
Paramount Member	Mon Mar 18 14:16:46 ”they also KNEW it wasnt designed properly so they tried 2 use shitty software to fix this shit. even after the first disaster they did nottin but try 2 issue another software patch but allowed and pretended that the shit the crap the overpriced american crap was fit to fly. ” This is straight up criminal.
Paramount Member	Mon Mar 18 14:24:06 ”If this story is true, then the real fault lies with the FAA.” The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It sounds like Trump would be the one who has the ultimate responsibility, being the President of the federal goverment. Lock him up.
Paramount Member	Mon Mar 18 14:35:48 If I would Google would I find that Trump cut FAA’s budget in 2016, 2017 and in 2018?
Paramount Member	Mon Mar 18 14:40:10 *2017-2018
kargen Member	Mon Mar 18 15:41:44 Actually an increase from 2016 to 2019. Of course you well know congress is in charge of the purse strings. We are reminded this several times a day as of late.
Paramount Member	Mon Mar 18 16:16:29 Got a link?
kargen Member	Mon Mar 18 16:27:40 I went to the FAA site and opened the budget PDFs.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Tue Mar 19 05:51:57 I started reading the documentation on the certification scheme. For the FAA to outsource part of their own function as an independant third party, that is very retarded and a grave sin. Yet ultimately it is Boing who will get screwed, they are obligated to comply with US regulation. I guess they could try to sue the FAA afterwards for not doing their job. Good luck with that.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Tue Mar 19 05:55:46 "delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis." LOL :) There is always this risk when you invite manufacturers to be part of or provide feedback to a framework, be it regulatory or in other ways showing compliance. They may set the tone and pace according the needs of the quarterly increment world view.
Paramount Member	Tue Mar 19 08:39:44 "kargen Member Mon Mar 18 16:27:40 I went to the FAA site and opened the budget PDFs." Can you paste the numbers and the source here?
Seb Member	Tue Mar 19 12:59:12 Regulatory capture. Happens when you have a large manufacturer: "as regulators we can't kill the industry" Cf. US regulator approving the GE boiling water reactor design and containment design over their engineers own assessment because they were being rushed into production. They later exploded and containment failed at Fukushima.
kargen Member	Tue Mar 19 13:32:53 I found something better than the FAA budget PDFs I think. The PDFs were requested budgets. Some years more is given than was requested and some years less is given. http://www...a_budget_briefing_oct_2016.pdf About half way down is a bar chart of enacted budget history. Only get a partial story here because I don't have a subscription but I think there is enough. http://atwonline.com/government-affairs/us-senate-approves-faa-budget-177-billion-fy2019 The US Senate approved a $17.7 billion FY2019 budget for the FAA Aug. 1. The funding bill was included as part of a “minibus” appropriations package, which consists of four separate appropriations bills. The minibus package passed the Senate by a 92-6 vote. The $17.7 billion amount is roughly $1.6 billion more than the budget request and $300 million less than the FY2018 enacted level. The bar chart shows the budget to be a little over 16 billion.
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 04:10:57 I've flown Boeing planes countless times. They are wonderful machines that historically have made qirtravel the safest AND fastest form of mass transit in human history. I will wait for the investigation concludes before I start slinging shit at Boeing for no reason. Until then, uh, 3rd world countries suck at flying planes. This is pretty well established by now.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 20 04:14:07 SD The core problem is that they slapped oversized engines on the air frames you love and trust. The resulting aircraft are aerodynamically unstable and the corrective programming fails occassionally.
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 04:31:26 So Jergul cannot read apparently. And he also assumes I dont know the basic facts about this case. The second is fair (though incorrect) and the first is just frustrating.
jergul large member	Wed Mar 20 04:36:11 SD Your willingness to blame certified pilots seemed to indicate you had not quite embraced likely causation.
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 06:23:32 i know i immediately thought that shithole countries with their corrupt regulators and their shithole pilots are to blame, considering how it was ethiopian and malaysian boeings. Who knew that US is now one example of these shitholes, so let this be a lesson to people who thought the same
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 06:23:59 http://www...licated-in-the-lion-air-crash/ seattle times did some great work here
jergul large member	Wed Mar 20 06:32:31 CR My immediate thought after the 2nd crash is that temperature plays a part in the program malfunction. Shall I just leave it like that and have posters think I am blaming global warming? Or am I suggesting that air density calculations are done incorrectly (stall speed is as we all know a function of air density, not altitude, though the two often correspond).
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 06:57:37 “Shall I just leave it like that and have posters think I am blaming global warming? “ Yes. I mean, I don’t know what that’ll achieve, but do it anyway
adelaide Member	Wed Mar 20 07:08:52 RIP Boeing http://lee...ynamic-events-upend-max-story/ ... The ink was hardly dry on this when The Wall Street Journal published, on Sunday night, news that the US Department of Transportation launched an investigation about the FAA-Boeing MCAS dynamics. This report included the startling information that the US Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation. Unheard of in the US A US criminal investigation, outside of suspected bombing or terrorism, is unheard of in accidents. The only one I can remember is the 1996 crash of a ValuJet DC-9 in which the maintenance company, Sabre Tech, loaded oxygen canisters in the cargo bay, failing to secure the load or cap the canisters. Some triggered on taxi, starting a conflagration that destroyed the airplane as the pilots tried to return to Miami shortly after takeoff. ... On late Monday, Transport Canada announced it wants to do its own evaluation of Boeing’s software upgrade. This, too, is unprecedented. Under international agreements, the regulators of one country generally follow reciprocities when certifying the airplanes of another country. They typically follow Service Bulletin and Airworthiness Directive notices. It’s an efficient and timely way to get the job done. Now, with confidence in the FAA shattered by its slow response to grounding—it was the last agency to do so—Transport Canada said, in essence, it won’t take the FAA’s word the problem is solved. On Tuesday, Europe’s EASA followed suit; it, too, will conduct its own review of the MCAS software upgrade before lifting the grounding order on the MAX. There are indications the two agencies may even go one step further and review the very certification of the MAX. This completely blows up any hope of a global lifting of the grounding by May. Air Canada said it will be July 1 at the earlier before its MAX fleet returns to the skies.
Paramount Member	Wed Mar 20 07:21:42 Even if the Boeing 737 Max returns to the skies, I'm not going to fly on that plane. It doesn't matter what they do to that model now. They fucked up and I'm not trusting their shit anymore.
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:19:47 'i know i immediately thought that shithole countries with their corrupt regulators and their shithole pilots are to blame, considering how it was ethiopian and malaysian boeings." Sorry, but the adults are talking. There was no Malaysian airliner involved. Please fuck of or at the very least learn the basic details. My whole POINT is that the investigation(s) have not concluded. But why even have investigations at all? *thinks for a long time* Oh, because they might actually be useful.
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:21:16 *off
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:23:57 "Malaysia and Indonesia are the same country." -Virtue signalling asshole who doesn't actually care about "third world" counries." Or maybe just a regular asshole who doesn't care about essential facts relating to the event he is talking about. Also probably doesn't know anything about airlines.
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:26:16 "Durrr why you care about the difference between two very large countries???? They're all brown people amirite lol.???" -woke asshole
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 09:30:47 "Sorry, but the adults are talking. There was no Malaysian airliner involved. Please fuck of or at the very least learn the basic details. " This just shows how easy it is to confuse the shitholes, no?
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 09:34:06 "My whole POINT is that the investigation(s) have not concluded. " ahahaha http://www...hread=84148&time=1552511702697
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:40:11 "The most successful commercial airliner in the world is the 737. Airtravel is the safest and fastest form of transportation of all time. A 737 touches down or lands, on average, every 5 seconds of every day. The company that makes these machines is terrible because I read an article on the Internet. Malaysia and Indonesia and Ethiopia are flawless first-world countries that have no problems and their pilots are perfect. The investigation into the crashes is 100% completed and we know exactly what happened. Avionics is bad technology and software has no place aboard a commercial airliner. I am not rushing to conclusions. The FAA is full of corrupt people who joined a regulatory agency to make big, big bucks. Why would some asshole choice the air as a cool place for transportation? Flying is baaaaad. Boeing sucks. -CR.
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:42:04 "This just shows how easy it is to confuse the shitholes, no?" Nice try. But this is the very definition of backtracking. You don't even know what countries are involved. And you refuse to acknowledge your mistake.
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 09:45:06 Boeing rocks. Flying sucks, for me at least, I hate it lately. But I digress. I am laughing at the person who is imploring people to wait until investigation to be concluded, before making conclusions. Because the advise to not jump to conclusions is coming from the same person who made this conclusion after the crash - "Another shithole country crashes another airplane."
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:45:57 "Malaysia and Indonesia are both Southeastern countries that I've never been to and so I don't actually care about them. Therefore they are the same country. Details and facts are irrelevant." -CR
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 09:47:23 "Nice try. But this is the very definition of backtracking. " indeed it is, I am freely admitting my backtracking, there is no malaysian MAX, wrong country. In fact, i jumped to the same conclusion you did, shithole country. mea culpa, thats the first thing I said here
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:48:30 I never said the 737 MAX 8/9 is a great plane or that heads at Boeing shouldn't roll. Never. I think accountability is a real thing and that people made bad choices and that many of Boeing's decisions contrevened >100 years of aviation design priciples. Not just aviation, but engineering in general. Why can't people READ things?
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 09:48:35 " Details and facts are irrelevant." ahahahaha http://www...hread=84148&time=1552511702697 ^check out the SD's attention to details and facts. First post
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 09:49:43 "I never said the 737 MAX 8/9 is a great plane or that heads at Boeing shouldn't roll. " Anybody is accusing you of saying these terrible things?
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:50:27 I've said this before, CR. You and I don't even disagree about a lot of things (except in the phrasings, such as "shithole country," which I use ironically). Just read between the lines.
CrownRoyal Member	Wed Mar 20 09:51:26 Alright, if you didn't mean it, you didn't mean it. I'll try to read between the lines next time
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:57:32 "Anybody is accusing you of saying these terrible things?" Nope. And I'm probably guilty of accusing you of some of the same things that I'm salty about people of accusing me of. My point is there is no such thing as an airframe aerodynamically suited to be 100% successful in real-world situations. Boeing in 2011 choose to continue a tried and trusted design (since the 1960s) rather than return to the drawing board and design a new design from scratch. They decided to implement a software design that corrected an aerodynamic flaw (pitching up automatically when the AOT sensors incorrectly detected an increase in pitch) and allegedly failed to instruct pilots about this chance in avionics. It sucks and people died because of it. But to what extent did pilots fail to respond correctly to this new design change? Nobody knows. So we can wait to find the results of the investigation. Meanwhile, guess what? Flying is stil safer than any other form of transportation (besides elevators, I guess.)
smart dude Member	Wed Mar 20 09:59:44 sorry for typos. AOT = AoA = Angle of attack. plus a couple obvious ones
The Children Member	Wed Mar 20 13:22:49 "Even if the Boeing 737 Max returns to the skies, I'm not going to fly on that plane. It doesn't matter what they do to that model now. They fucked up and I'm not trusting their shit anymore. " >> e xactly. why the fuck wuld anyone still board a coffin like this. what is the lesson learned here 2day kids. BUY CHINESE. Chinese COMAC
The Children Member	Wed Mar 20 13:28:21 i read somewhere that someone posted and said that based on these 2 crashes, it is a 2% crash rate on boeing max with a 100% death rate it crashes. so if u board that coffin, u have a 2% chance of dyin and never returnin. so fuck off with ur "great plane". this thing is a horrible piece of shit. its a flyin coffin.
kargen Member	Wed Mar 20 14:39:44 "i read somewhere that someone posted and said that based on these 2 crashes, it is a 2% crash rate on boeing max with a 100% death rate it crashes." You either read it wrong or they lied to you. The chances of dying on any commercial flight is less than 1 chance in a million. The 737 Max was flying thousands of flights a day. With just 1000 flights 2% would mean twenty crashes every day.
swordtail Anarchist Prime	Thu Mar 21 10:22:46 Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras http://www...ng-safety-features-charge.html
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