Do you really think Congress has the competence to tell Boeing how to design an airplane so as to improve flight safety?!

(Written on 10/31/2022)(Permalink)

I doubt they can even recognize quality anymore. They have grown so lazy that they can't even think for themselves. It wouldn't have taken much scrutiny to realize that the news media's narrative of the MAX crashes was grossly contradictory to what the voice and flight data recorders had recorded. But a willingness to let Pulitzer Prize-seeking media reporters delude them with a fictional tale that would put Pinocchio to shame plus a mindless penchant for mob action helped to ground an airplane that didn't have anything wrong with it. Then a spineless FAA playing politics kept it grounded for 20 months, with nothing of substance to show at the end, at least nothing that truly improved safety. And the true cause of the crashes, which the data recordings make obvious to those competent in aviation, remains unaddressed.

(Written on 10/31/2022)(Permalink)

They were found liable, not negligent. Although it may not matter to you, there IS a difference in meaning. In fact, Boeing found the cause after an occurrence that didn't end fatally and the pilot was able to recall in detail what he experienced and the servo actuator wasn't destroyed. They found that an in-rush of very hot hydraulic fluid with gritty contamination of a certain size into an extremely cold servo valve could cause the valve to jam and/or reverse. The failure was not initially observed on the test rig, but predicted by an engineer who happened to look at a printout of the hydraulic fluid flow of the valve under test and noticed an anomaly in the flow values that seemed to indicate that the valve would malfunction if the numbers got worse. So he exaggerated the test conditions on the test rig… and triggered a reversal. The NTSB was about to report that the cause was a servo valve malfunction that could not be verified, but held off while Boeing analyzed the details of the

(Written on 10/31/2022)(Permalink)

Why would corporate USA strive for perfection when consuming America settles for the cheapest price junk made abroad?

(Written on 10/25/2022)(Permalink)

And yet you accept Congress forcing airplane design decisions by way of law?! Is there even one aeronautical engineer in the House or Senate subcommittee on Aviation?

(Written on 10/25/2022)(Permalink)

Thank you! That would explain the paucity of intelligent commenters: Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.

(Written on 10/25/2022)(Permalink)

Yes, imagine that! The platform design was done so well that 60 years later it is still suitable for transporting passengers and cargo—thar is, if the pilots somehow aren't deprived the training that was specified as mandatory 60 years ago. The automobile industry endures recall after recall, year after year, on simple items like brake pads because it is driven to change the design and fix what ain't broken every single year, driven by stupid customers who will not buy a new car if it is not THIS YEAR's model, because, you know, they don't want to miss out on the quantum leaps that technology made in the past 12 months. Commercial aviation is headed in that direction thanks to legislators, because little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

(Written on 10/25/2022)(Permalink)

Did the FAA indicate exactly what Human Factors considerations were not taken into account in the safety analyses or is that detail being suppressed by the media? Human Factors generally don't figure in safety analyses because physiological factors such as strength, reach, size, visual acuity, hearing threshold, G-force tolerance, etc. which are statistically quantifiable are designed in with some acceptable range (typically 5th to 95th percentile) and are not a "failure probability" during system operation. Psychological factors like memory recall, recall accuracy, distraction, fatigue, spatial disorientation, selection error, etc. have poor repeatability and the underlying triggering and progression mechanisms are not well understood, making statistical predictability meaningless. More than a decade ago I asked a reliability expert how he factored human error into a fault tree diagram that calculated the probability of an adverse event occurring. His response was we don't, a human

(Written on 10/25/2022)(Permalink)

CEOs and Accountants don't do engineering. Also, don't forget that what "we all can see" is limited to what the media chooses to reveal to us and is possibly affected by omission, fabrication, distortion, error, etc. Those who report the technicalities about the 737 MAX and the two crashes usually have little to no competence in aeronautical engineering and use "common sense" to understand, explain and analyze complex concepts and issues; whereas it typically takes many years of specialized education in numerous supporting fields of science and technology and years of experience for professionals to do so. The resulting explanations, analyses, etc. are likely to be flawed, but being written in common sense, they appear sensible to those who only have common sense—and nothing more advanced. And what is sensible is often presumed to be valid and true. And that's how the vast amount of "sensible rubbish" about the 737 MAX originated and proliferated, with the vast majority of us not co

(Written on 10/25/2022)(Permalink)

Do you have a link to the report that evaluated the -8 as "a bit of a slug?" Why would Boeing design an airplane from scratch when the competition was merely upgrading the engine on an existing model to bring it up to state-if-the-art and Boeing could do the same with its existing model that competed equally (at least) before the upgrade and would continue to do so after the upgrade? Your belief that a manufacturer should design something other than what the market has a need for is baffling, unless you know of secret customers that wanted a "new" model, were willing to wait for it and accept the risks that such an endeavor carries, and would pay a higher price for it. In which case, do tell, because no one else seems to know of their existence. And what would they be getting with this new airplane model that would justify the delay, the risk and the expense?

(Written on 10/21/2022)(Permalink)