It means that regardless of the design flaws, foreign airlines that falsify maintenance records, have abysmal pilot training and experience, and use substandard parts are going to crash airplanes when things go wrong. Did you read the article? The press screaming that the airplane is "unstable" does not change the hard facts that it is NOT.
I read the article you posted. There is nothing in there that's relevant to the airworthiness of the MAX in general. Just because the airline is bad doesn't mean that there was no problem with the design of the airplane, unless you're seeing something in the article that I'm not seeing. And again, the press didn't ground the airplane. Why aren't you mad at the FAA? If there's nothing wrong with it, they should have returned it to flight a long time ago.
I wonder how the legal world will work out on this one between the media and the manufacturer...........
On a side note Delta is making a killing with supplying capacity to the other airlines that lost it when the Max was grounded. Gotta love sideline chit chat.
Yeah it sucks. I'm trying to book shit for a November race and the flights I want are already booked.
I'm certainly no expert but what I've read about this subject say there was a problem with the airplane: Namely the MCAS wasn't well (enough) thought-out and is capable of forcing the nose of the plane down no matter how hard the pilot attempts to resist. The plane didn't get grounded because of improper maintenance on the part of some 3rd world airline. It got grounded because there was a real and present danger presented by the MCAS system as implemented. Those implementation failures are (hopefully) being addressed and the plane will be safer to fly in the future.
Small correction. The mcas system will let you pull the nose up effectively overriding it, but as soon as you let go, it tries to nose it back down again. A properly trained pilot would have noticed the uncommanded movement and disconnected the mcas system, like they’ve done on US airlines.
This is really not true. I don't blame you for thinking this, as everything that has been published certainly leads you to conclude this. All the MCAS does is add nose down trim during a very narrow window of aircraft operation, (which should never be encountered outside of test flying anyway)- it is completely overridable and preventable, should it misfire for whatever reason, as it did in these two incidents. It simply wasn't overridden by pilots who were comfortable and proficient in hand flying the airplane. i.e. they lacked basic airmanship skills to hand fly the aircraft. I agree there was some design flaws (single sensor failure activating MCAS, repeat cycling of MCAS, etc.) but the foundation of the software /system and its intention is solid. I'm not "mad" at anyone; this is just a subject that I happen to be passionate about. The FAA stood by Boeing until Trump weighed in and said "the airplane should be grounded." I'm a Trump guy but he shot off his mouth and politics took over. Don't you think these foreign airlines and governments have a vested interest in Boeing being the culprit? My statement about the press is more a generalization about how the "twitterverse" (led by the mainstream media) commands the actions of corporations and governments these days- proper investigations be damned. You can only shut down the truth so much, at some point, it manifests itself. That is what is happening now. These are some of the most complex machines available to civilians. Do you think if you put a 5th grader in charge of a CNC machine or MIG welder that they would not hurt themselves eventually? My point is, of course there is some situation where you can put the aircraft in an unrecoverable state and then blame the airplane for crashing- it should have never been put in that position to begin with. Of course Boeing has some culpability, the system had flaws, I don't deny that. But they are taking it on the chin because they are complicit- they need to sell airplanes and the biggest markets are foreign countries where pilot training / experience is LACKING. If one of these pilots couldn't land with a simple engine failure, is it a design flaw that the engine failed?
Gino, did you happen to see this article which was written by a software engineer / pilot? I posted a link to it in this thread awhile back, didn't see much (if anything) in the way of reaction to it. It's a long read, that's for sure. But being a software engineer myself and having dealt with many of the same things over the life cycle of a long-lived device it made a lot of sense to me. It's certainly possible this dude doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground and is simply parroting misinformation he's read somewhere else. But he certainly fooled me.
I have read it, and I just re read it now. My problem with this article is that, while many of the things he states are true, they are not the whole story. The placement of the engines farther forward for example, leaves out the part that the landing gear is taller and other aerodynamic changes that were made to compensate for this. Also, his major statement that the airplane is "dynamically unstable" is flat wrong. I won't get into the definition of stability here, but the 737 is absolutely not unstable by any definition. What DOES happen is that at high angles of attack with lots of nose up trim and thrust at a high setting, as you near the stall stick forces become very light and there is very little (if any) natural pitch down tendency. The FAA doesn't like that. so Boeing added MCAS to satisfy that requirement. It's a complicated subject, for sure, but just to show how different things are now- Remember the Air France accident, Pitot tubes froze (a known issue with Airbus and there was a program ongoing to replace them) same tubes were on several Airbus types. Despite this accident, and the pitot tubes being a known problem, did they ground any aircraft? Even the ones with known faulty pitot tubes were kept flying.
Thanks for the perspective on this Gino. I tend to be skeptical about opinion pieces I read, but IEEE Spectrum is a pretty dang respectable source for the most part. The "dynamically unstable" part wasn't what concerned me, although now that you mention it that's a very serious allegation. My concern was the implication that the computer had the power to win in a contest of wills against a human, inexorably forcing the nose of the plane down until the pilot was too exhausted to fight back. Also this: Strike 3 concerned me. The failure to even check and be sure the other angle-of-attack sensor agreed with the one it was reading before swinging MCAS into action seems such a basic software design oversight that I don't understand how it could be overlooked. The writer alludes to several cross-checks that could have been used to avoid this danger and they make a lot of sense to me. He makes the assertion that these are the steps that Boeing's engineers are taking to fix this: Again, these make sense to me as a software developer. Considering the rarity of crashes that were directly tied to MCAS it seems reasonable to expect that these corrections will be adequate. But having witnessed firsthand the many ways even a minor change to code can have unexpected results in a complex software system it is imperative that these be put to rigorous tests before putting thousands of customer lives on these planes.
Boeing CEO is no longer CEO..... https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-analysis-ceo-dennis-muilenburg-loses-chairman-role-2019-10