What a deceitful headline, the upper management knows about the flaws, they've been in spin control since 2012. There have been whistleblowers, and no corrective action was taken.
There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media on this, and it was damning and that was done a decade ago. No one has been held to account for the systematic failures that were largely introduced as a result of upper management and propagated due to failures in process with the FAA. I'd like to see a corruption probe, and mandatory cool-off periods for regulators seeking to jump from regulation to working in the industry.
> There was an Al-Jazeera report that was more substantial than any of the other mainstream US media
As the name might suggest, Al Jazeera isn't a US media company. And despite being Qatari state owned, has mostly retained its editorial independence. It reminds me of what the BBC used to represent.
Boeing's board has just three people with degrees in engineering. They are outnumbered by accountants. Only two worked as engineers (the other is a pilot/Air Force) and only one of the two working engineers is from aviation.
The Netflix documentary Downfall talked a little about it as well. It's absolutely cost cutting measures and horrendous engineering and QA across all of Boeing.
Sabotaged QA you mean. When you're getting hounded about polishing that apple because management wants crap out the door, that's a powerful message that not even some of the most insanely dedicated QA groups can fully defang.
Absolutely agree.. And I don't think they needed to look very far to find flaws in that plane.. I probably shouldn't have been certified to start with. It's maybe not as bad as the MAX, but it ain't great either. Apparently they've made changes to the lightning strike protection systems in the wings, to decrease costs. And it's for the worse. Like removing insulation for lightning diffusers going straight through the fuel tanks. And let's not talk about the li-ion batteries..
> The agency now has more power to choose which Boeing employees represent the FAA’s interests, and there are new protections for them from undue pressure by company managers.
This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
I wonder if after it's all said and done, whether the splitting up of parts manufacturing will really have saved that much money. I also wonder how much of this is caused by pushing materials as far as they can go to get to the fuel/efficiency targets they want to hit.
1) it is absolutely a problem, but...
2) to fix it, you'd have to pay federal FAA employeees as much as equally-skilled members of the private sector at Boeing, and that hasn't happened in a long time. My understanding is this system started because the FAA's best technical people kept leaving for Boeing and other private-sector employers.
Build it into the cost of certification. You absolutely want the brightest people working their hardest to uncover potentially fatal issues so they can be fixed before people die.
There's problems on any side, if they're direct FAA employees they end up being paid way more than other similar FAA employees - though given that the only major airplane manufacturer is Boeing you could just charge Boeing enough to pay all FAA airplane examiners the requisite amount.
It’s not a money issue. The US government has plenty of money. It’s a perception of corruption issue. The government can’t have high paying jobs because voters will punish politicians if they do.
I don't have a US-context, so excuse my naivety but to me it'd appear as if government can't pay well for _some_ jobs.
If the politician themselves make too much, then voters might not like that. If all government jobs pay "too well" then that too would meet opposition. But, as a colorful example: suppose that being a politician was tied to the median wage of the nation, then would anyone object to paying this type of oversight position adequately?
Also, I'm not necessarily convinced a decent enough paycheck is enough to dissuade from corruption. Sure, it helps but it isn't enough on its own. If a person is getting money under the table, then they are making even more money even if they are already making a pretty sum. It's just that the size of the bribe would have to increase proportionally to their salary.
In my country (the Netherlands) there is a norm that says "No government employee shall earn more than the prime minister". The idea being to prevent certain heads of departments from setting their own pay to high.
This has had a side-effect of some actually qualified technical people from leaving because of salary.
The US federal government is similar. The President makes $400k, cabinet secretaries $225k, and everyone else less than that. There are a very few exceptions—-some doctors for example.
How often do you certify a new plane of this magnitude? I’d wager you would have to plan on contracting that out vs hiring a bunch of people to only work periodically, and how are you going to find contractors who know how to build these?
A way out that is popular with governments is to use contractors. Certification is a highly specialist job that requires independent experts. Perfect job for subcontracting to companies that employ such specialists.
The FAAs job is to ensure that certification happens and that it is done right; but not necessarily doing it themselves. And effectively they aren't because they let Boeing self certify currently. So, this would be an improvement.
No you want the brightest people (I object to the term brightest in general but anyway) making the systems so that people don't die. That's the first priority, it doesn't work to get them to check other people's works, they have to make the best works, actually perform what needs to be performed. Then check.
Maybe it's time to finally pay market rate for government employees?
The underpayment is a consistent factor that keeps cropping up wherever you search for the reason why a government project or entire structure failed or went over time/budget.
I agree, but you'd probably also need to have government NOT offer the job security far above what the private sector does, otherwise you have the opposite problem of all the people with the most in-demand skills in the government, not producing, just checking what other people produce.
It does seem, though, like you might want to have something like government pay at 90% of the market rate, so that highly-skilled and in-demand jobs do get pay that is close to the market rate.
The total of base compensation and benefits are already more or less required by law to be 100% of the market rate, as justified by surveys in the private sector. However, that does not include any stock compensation or bonuses. So government employees make about the same in industries that don't have significant stock or bonus. They make considerably less when more compensation is in those categories.
So the situation is already what you describe, for the most part.
>> even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
Yeah but after I read this:
>The FAA delegated an increasing number of tasks to a group of Boeing employees authorized to work on the agency’s behalf.
I first imagined a typical corporate group which might have turnover and I thought: What if the FAA delegated to individual people, so if Boeing fired someone for raising too much concern the role would fall back to the FAA? But yeah, its still a conflict of interest no matter how you do it.
> This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.
This is what happens in the US when your company is in a regulated industry and has been found to be so far from best practices that the regulatory body shows up one day, says "We need x number of offices" and then takes over managing your firm until they are satisfied enough Corrective Action have been performed and enough Preventive Actions are in place to right the ship.
Solution: don't get into a regulated industry, and if you must, keep your house in order.
It does seem strange but, even including the 737 MAX disaster, air travel is safer today than it ever was. Since the 1960s, miles traveled increased tenfold while deaths (in absolute numbers) dropped by 90 %, for a combined 100-fold increase in safety.
If engineering standards had dropped 5 years ago, that would not really be reflected in the current numbers yet.
A commonly heard thesis is that this track record of safety has been used as an excuse for reducing engineering standards. I don't think the historical track record of safety can be used to disprove that thesis.
Honestly, the engineering standards dropped much longer ago than 5 years ago.. The Dreamliner probably shouldn't have been certified in it's current state, to start with. Among other reasons, because of li-ion batteries and all..
No thanks to the MBAs flying people into the ground to pay for their yachts.
Consider the record of the 737 MAX alone and up to the point where it was grounded worldwide. I bet that's not a great ratio of fight hours to lives lost compared to Boeing pre-merger.
Yes, these unscientific MBAs that will just ignore data if it doesn't fit their opinions.
FWIW the only person charged with criminal offenses in the 737 max is the chief test pilot, Mark Forkner[0]. Guess how many business degrees the guy has?
you’re spot on with how safe commercial air travel is today. it’s actually insane when you think about it.
but the reason its so safe is because there are so many redundancies built into so many different layers of the system.
once rot starts to happen, it’ll take the better part of several years or a decade for a wave of elevated fatalities to manifest themselves in these stats.
The overlooked point is that the MCAS system had been in place and functioning for 10,000 hours +, with hundreds of pilots, and none of them even noticed MCAS existed.
If not for a brain dead design decision to not check for bad AOA data, we probably still would never have heard of MCAS.
Even if ground crews reliably checked and fixed AOAs, we probably would never have heard of it.
But ultimately MCAS was a symptom of a failure of process, with people whose entire job was to check and veto designs failing to veto designs, apparently for fear of management pressure. To be clear, the failure was in management. It sucks that people had to die to get us to notice ordinary management failure.
The Lion Air jet had the same MCAS failure on its previous flight. If you dig through ASRS you'll find other reports of uncommanded pitch down events on the MAX. Just because MCAS hadn't yet crashed a plane doesn't mean that nobody noticed its presence.
The last time ASRS came up I looked, all of the uncommanded pitch down incidents to that point on MAX aircraft were while the autopilot was connected or flaps extended, those conditions disable MCAS.
Do you have examples of incidents that appear otherwise?
I think it's more of the airliner version of the X-29. Yes, it can be made to fly, but only when controlled against normal aeronautic tendencies. In other words, unless you have compensating (automated) controls, the things would not fly as a conventional aircraft and would soon lose control and lift.
As far as I'm aware, it would glide as well as any other 737 if both engines were cut. It merely had a slightly lower maximum nose-up because of the increased engine thrust or something like that.
> It merely had a slightly lower maximum nose-up because of the increased engine thrust or something like that.
It wasn't the engine thrust. There were a bunch of subtle design changes because newer, fuel efficient engines are much larger than the style of engine when the 737 was first designed. Unlike the competing A320, the 737 didn't have the necessary clearance under the wing to fit the new engines.
They had to make a bunch of tweaks like moving the engine higher up, further forward, tweak the wings etc. to make it fit with the necessary ground clearance. These subtle differences added up so they added MCAS to make it handle closer to the original design.
My take on it has been that it might have been fine as it was if it was considered a new plane. Just not software patched modified-737 that it really wasn't. If the pilots were certified with the new characteristic and there wasn't system over riding them, it would have been fine.
But instead they wanted to handle like something it wasn't and then made buggy fix for it to do so.
There was a specific part of the flight envelope where a higher angle of attack would lead to less pressure on the stick. This was a result of the engines being further forward, and thus at high angles of attack having more 'leverage' trying to pitch up the plane.
This had two problems. Firstly, this flight characteristic (more AoA gives less stick pressure) is considered risky, because it can trick pilots into thinking the AoA is decreasing. Secondly, and apparently more importantly to Boeing and American Airlines, this meant that pilots certified to fly the old 737 would need to go through new training. This new training was required because of a significant change in flight characteristics and would be very expensive to airlines.
So Boeing created MCAS, and tried their best to hide the change so no one would question whether new training might be required. If I recall correctly lion air (the airline of the second MAX crash) had actually asked Boeing if they should do some new simulator training for the 737 max in an e-mail and had been ridiculed for even asking that.
I'm not in aeronautics obviously and I overstated the case, but my understanding is that the MAX series have different flight characteristics (behaves differently) due to bigger engines which also were moved forward both of which resulted in altering the aerodynamics and flight characteristics --making it different to non MAX 737s... so far, so good. They fly different and you have to treat them differently. But in order to make the pre MAX 737 pilots pre-crosstrained for the new MAXes they installed MCAS systems that made the controls feel like they would respond in a pre MAX 737. In other words computerized compensation. But due to the new flight characteristics you could not exactly fly it like a ore MAX 737 and so if you did bad things could happen if you were not being attentive.
The design goal for the software was to make it fly like other 737s. The software did not actually do that, but did "something" that inspectors allowed was just enough different from without to certify. And, in case of equipment failure, or various other circumstances, the software failed completely, because it was just really badly designed. If you knew about the system, you could turn it off in case of trouble, and then the plane would fly fine, just not enough like a real 737 that you could completely ignore the difference.
Then they made it hard to know that the system was there. People who knew how to turn it off could prevent disaster.
This isn’t correct. There’s one portion of the flight regime where the new engines result in different characteristics. To counter that, the MAX has an automated stick pusher. What’s the alleged fix? Pull the breaker on the overhead panel.
There’s a similar failure mode in pre-MAX 737s called “runaway trim”. The giant trim wheels on the center pedestal spin in a loud and attention-getting fashion. The fix? Pull the breaker on the overhead panel.
> To counter that, the MAX has an automated stick pusher.
The MAX does not have a stick pusher. MCAS works on the position (trim) of the stabilizer. The elevator feel system (which the NGs have as well) works by creating additional resistance at the yoke (which is hydraulically assisted). Neither are stick pushers.
> There’s a similar failure mode in pre-MAX 737s called “runaway trim”.
That's a thing that can happen on any plane with a similar horizontal stabilizer setup. I'm sure even a plane with a flying stabilizer (e.g. L-1011) has similar failure modes.
> The giant trim wheels on the center pedestal spin in a loud and attention-getting fashion.
The "giant" trim wheels were reduced in size on the NG (and MAX?) reducing their leverage.
> The fix? Pull the breaker on the overhead panel.
There are two switches (whose function was subtly changed with the MAX) that control the trim motors and they're located behind/below the thrust levers.
I would like a system where the airline had to declare the type of aircraft used on the flight at the time of booking. If at the time of departure the aircraft model actually use for the flight is different then the passenger must on request be repaid the entire value of the ticket.
This means that there is no (financial) pressure on the passenger to fly on an aircraft they do not trust.
Currently the live-or-die risk devolves to the passenger and they have no direct say in the choice of aircraft: after ticket purchase they are left with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
This system might force airlines to think much much harder when making their aircraft purchasing decisions.
Just because the aircraft is certified will no longer amount to adequate commercial due diligence.
An airline which wants to protect its revenue will now need to deep-dive into the manufacturers quality procedures themselves.
Otherwise their customers can vote with their feet, at no financial cost, any time prior to departure.
You can already vote as a customer as to which fleet you want to fly on. It may not be practical but it is possible.
For example, jetBlue only flies Airbus and Embraer. Spirit and Frontier exclusively fly Airbus. Lufthansa's commercial fleet is mostly Airbus and the Boeing aircraft it does operate have good track records.
If you're flying commercial, I don't think laws are going to get made for you against the interests of airlines and aircraft manufacturers. And before you think market pressures will work, they know you'll keep flying.
I’ve flown three times since the 800 has been green lighted. I have very intentionally picked Airbus flights. I’ll never get on one of those Boeing jets.
Good thinking. Airbus planes are impervious to software glitches[1] and sensor failures[2] that result in catastrophic loss of control of the aircraft.
Better bring a gas mask[3] though. And bring one for the flight crew too in case they become incapacitated.
AF 447 was first and foremost a problem between the controls and the seat. The sensor problem you're referring to did not render the plane incapable of flying, but it did remove one level of idiot proofing. As a result one of the pilots pulled the stick back and didn't relent even as the plane stalled. If you did that in a Boeing plane (or any plane) with functioning sensors you'd have the same end result.
Neither did the MAX debacle render the plane incapable of flight.
Both flights gave flight crews unexpected tests on unexpected situations-- something that seemed like runaway trim for the MAX, and simultaneous overspeed (better nose up) and stall (better nose down) indications for AF447.
Test were done with MCAS regarding how soon you have to react before it becomes unrecoverable. This was 10 seconds and it was hard for boeing-trained pilots instructed in MCAS to recover from this in tests where they knew it would happen.
The problem was that at some point the trim is so much that it becomes nigh impossible to hand crank the trim down, the trim flap applies so much pressure it cannot be overcome by hand. You had to disable mechanized trim because otherwise MCAS would kick in. So you would need to recognize the problem soon enough to prevent MCAS from moving the trim so far that it became unrecoverable.
10 seconds is a long time of the trim wheel being cranked nose up. The same situation would apply to a stuck trim switch on the yoke. (Indeed, a stuck trim switch is worse in this respect because it cranks constantly and doesn't "yield" to the pilot pushing the switch the other way... of course, the checklist didn't presume a pilot should be diagnosing stuck AOA vs. stuck trim switch and thus recommended immediate use of the trim cutout switches instead of trying to electrically trim the other way).
There's a reason that trim runaway is a "recall" procedure in the QRH that pilots are expected to know-- it gets scary. http://www.b737.org.uk/images/runawaystab2020.jpg But it was the assumption before the MCAS disaster that pilots could deal with trim runaway, given that there was a history of flight crews dealing with trim runaway incidents in flight successfully. But MCAS was worse because:
A) It did it more often, so flight crews were exposed to this dangerous situation more than ever before
B) It did it in a sneakier, strange way (no constant movement of the trim wheel).
Still, some real-world flight crews did overcome MCAS doing the wrong thing without crashing, even if others failed the test.
I imagine point B is quite relevant here. MCAS going wrong is meaningfully different (and less immediately scary) from the recall procedure that the training doesn't kick in.
- It's perhaps understandable why engineering teams-- pushed by management to deliver a 737 that doesn't require retraining-- decided that if flight crews could handle runaway trim, they could handle any errant MCAS activations and that the level of redundancy and fault tolerance necessary in the system would be low.
- On the other hand, real flight crews obviously do not do great when exposed to this test.
- If you give a flight crew a wacky situation with conflicting information (like AF447 or the 737 MAX)-- expect failures, even if the situation is technically 100% recoverable and flyable and some crews exposed to the situation succeed.
It's great that we have humans capable of reason up in the front of the plane, but reason is often faulty and doesn't get you the solution you need on the first try.
Couldn't do what? Pull the stick back into a stall? Sure you can. Under normal law you can't do that with an Airbus, that's one of many things that caught the AF crew off guard.
There's no such protection on the 737. Nobody's done that because unlike on the Airbus, it's never safe to do so. There are, however, plenty of ways to get caught off guard in a 737 and stall it. Take a look at the UTAir and Thomsonair go arounds that got their planes to about 45° nose up. Or the 737 Air Florida planted right into the Potomac because they didn't have the elevator authority to avoid the stall. Or Fly Dubai…
As for human interactions, the 737 is a series of bad choices (especially the MAX). Take a look at the Helios Air crash, the pilots were confused by an alarm that could mean two different things. Unfortunately hypoxic pilots aren't known for their reasoning ability.
Couldn't have both pilots fighting each other on the controls (hard nose-up vs. hard nose-down) without knowing about it, since the yokes are physically linked (unlike sidesticks).
yes, this is what i meant. i should have been clearer in my original statement.
here is what happened in the airbus air france incident:
- one pilot had the sidestick full hard nose up, the other full hard nose down.
- neither pilot realized what the other pilot was doing.
on a boeing airliner:
- the controls for each pilot are physically linked.
- if pilots try to put “their” yolk into an opposing position, they will start having to physically wrestle for control.
- this type of failure mode of the air france crash wouldn’t have happened in a boeing airplane; the pilots would have realized what was going on within seconds.
general note:
- when flying, it is highly unusual for both pilots to be giving input into the controls at the same time. one pilot “has the airplane”, the other is there to assist, help with the radios, planning, etc. the handoff between who “has the airplane” is very deliberate. this was another failure mode of the air france flight.
- but my point still stands, the fact that the controls are linked makes the gp point a bit moot.
> this type of failure mode of the air france crash wouldn’t have happened in a boeing airplane; the pilots would have realized what was going on within seconds.
Say what? Atlas Air face planted a 767 with pilots doing just that:
> The captain’s and the FO’s opposing elevator control
> forces continued for about 10 seconds, during which the
> airplane’s dive continued to steepen. Thus, the NTSB
> concludes that the captain’s failure to command a positive
> transfer of control of the airplane as soon as he attempted
> to intervene on the controls enabled the FO to continue to
> force the airplane into a steepening dive.
Or the Air France thing that's now on the front page. In a Boeing 777.
Poor training is poor training. Physical feedback is not a safety benefit. It sounds nice in theory but in practice doesn't do much. You can easily say the same thing about A vs B thrust levers, look at that Sriwijaya Air crash. The Boeing design sounds more intuitive until you look at crashes where the feedback didn't do a single thing to help the pilots or avoid a crash.
The sidesticks aren't linked on an Airbus but there is a "DUAL INPUT" alarm. If you're already panicked enough to ignore a dual input alarm you're likely to ignore stick feedback from someone countering your inputs.
Airplane safety is a function of fatalities over capacity, flight hours and model service life. As such, planes that have been in production longer usually tend to become "more safe" (which is a self-fulfilling thing - notoriously unsafe planes eventually won't be sold anymore). See [1] for a short overview.
As such, the 737NG - which had fatalities - is unlikely to be a contender, considering the much older A340 has had none.
Most flight booking portals I know do tell you which equipment a flight is using.
And yes, I strongly prefer airlines that do not use "modern" Boeing planes at all (which arguably might be a lot easier here in Europe). If it's Boeing, I'm not going.
How much of this is to be expected anyway? I.e. in any sufficiently complicated system, you can never find all the flaws. Is there a particular reason to believe the 787 in particular has a disproportionate number of flaws given what it is?
The reasons I've heard is that after merging McDonald-Douglass, Boeing developed a culture of cost-cutting and gutting engineering, and it's only gotten worse over time.
From what I've read, following the merger Boeing was no longer run out of Seattle but Chicago. How can you effectively manage a manufacturing facility from halfway across the country?
What we are seeing is regulatory capture by McDonald-Douglass top level executives and board of the FAA. Standard operating procedure for the capitalists. Everything is permissible as long as it increases their and the shareholders' profiteering.
> From what I've read, following the merger Boeing was no longer run out of Seattle but Chicago. How can you effectively manage a manufacturing facility from halfway across the country?
It's worse than that: They deliberately moved management to Chicago to separate management decisions from engineers. All those pesky pocket-protector-wearing eggheads were considered a nuisance who were apparently hellbent to rain on MBA powerpoint parades.
There’s a huge facility in Everett where they “manage the manufacturing facility”. It was built during the 777 era and, at least when I was there, everyone called it the “Taj Mulally” after Alan Mulally the director of engineering. Mulally stayed with Boeing in increasingly higher positions until he left to be the CEO of Ford in 2006.
I had some contact with Airbus engineers, and none of them complained about their managment, which might be an i dicator. But the sample size is small..
Because of the end of the 380, Airbus will be shedding staff at some point. If enough of them are disaffected, some of the NDA knowledge will leak. Sure, you have to discount sour grapes, but this is also true of the ex-Boeing engineers who are backfilling our belief in the corporate failure there.
I don't think there is an elephant in the room, but there's potential for an unknown problem, sure.
One way to understand the risk might be to do the differential on each companies commercial and military product, and its failure rate: the mil stuff has different pricing, and might have different 'six sigma' type rules around things because it has to manage being flown in much more variant constraints: bigger envelope, more risk. If they can do it "better" for mil spec, and don't do it better for commercial, then something is bust in the culture.
Airbus is hiring, actually. I know periods when Airbus had hiring freezes. I cannot remember a time were they reduced internal workforce in the last 20 years, despite sharp drops in their defense business.
That's what happens when your executives vindictively outsource important software to the cheapest devshop they can find.
You end up with a product being built by a team that by default has no sense of ownership.
Because they don't own anything. They're paid to enrich the requirements into software specifications and nothing else. It gains them absolutely nothing - so why would they ever feel any sense of ownership after the job is delivered and accepted?
The business relationship is predicated on them being disposable contract workers. At a minimum, a sense of ongoing engineering ownership requires an ongoing relationship predicated on trust and support - which requires ongoing financial support after the software project is 'completed' - which Boeing, in hiring contract workers, explicitly did not want to provide.
Given this, how can we seriously expect the engineers of an outsourced development shop, working under a piecework contract, to ever feel any sense of ongoing ownership?
Ah, yes. Of course... "exposure". You know, the offering of that as compensation for work done has become a meme amongst creative professionals to the point of mocking absurdity.
There was nothing wrong with the software developed for the MAX. The flaw was in the specification of what the software was supposed to do. The delivered software adhered to the specification.
I’ve given up arguing this on HN. We have to repeat this every time this topic comes up and despite those of us with air industry experience setting the record straight repeatedly, the number of posters parroting this line never decreases.
Common! This gets brought up all the time when the topic is Boeing. Max's issue had nothing to do with the outsourced software. Netflix has a documentary called 'Downfall' which talks about what all went wrong. AirBus also outsources, they haven't crashed right?
When I mentioned AirBus, I was thinking of this - that the Max crash is clearly due to corporate greed. I am not aware of any such scenario with AirBus. Not only that, according to the Netflix documentary, Boeing was trying to blame the pilots of the Indonesian and Ethiopian airlines initially. Then in turns out that the Indonesian pilot was an Indian who was trained in US, and the Ethiopian pilots followed Boeing's guidelines on MCAS failure properly.
I am looking at these blames on outsourcing from that perspective - that Boeing is trying to blame others to hide their greed.
> the Ethiopian pilots followed Boeing's guidelines on MCAS failure properly.
The Ethiopian pilots did not follow the procedure in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive distributed to all MAX pilots that says:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any
stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be
used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB
TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be
used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved
to CUTOUT."
Thanks for the links. I am not trying to refute what you said above. But I don’t want anyone to think that I am spreading misinformation here. So I checked the Netflix Downfall documentary again. It says at 34:30 that the pilots did what Boeing instructed them to do.
The documentary talks about the Ethiopian crash from 32:00 onwards. The below excerpt is from 34:30 onwards. Name of the person talking is in '[]' brackets.
[Pasztor] Soon after the hearings got underway, we managed to get more information about what actually happened in the cockpit of the Ethiopian aircraft. We got the information from the FAA within hours after they received it from the Ethiopian investigators. It was very late at night, and we tried to put together the most comprehensive story we could. When it came out, this was the first story that revealed that the crew, in fact, realized that MCAS had kicked off. And they did what Boeing instructed them to do.
[Tajer] When the MCAS kicks in, it runs for ten seconds and pushes the airplane very powerfully nose-down. Runs for ten, off for five. Runs for ten, off for five.
[Cox] They’ve got this cacophony of stick shaker, master cautions, airspeed disagree, altitude disagree. All of these…these warnings going off. The captain, who’s flying the airplane, is trying to figure out what’s gone wrong.
[Tajer] The first officer called out, “Stab trim cutout switches, Captain.” I think he said it twice. He did what Boeing said. He turned off the MCAS system. I remember reading that, and I said, “Man, the kid got it right. The kid got it right”.
[Cox] The problem now is that the airplane is going too fast. And because of the force on the tail itself, they cannot manually trim the airplane to be able to recover.
That is not following the instructions in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive issued to all MAX pilots:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any
stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be
used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB
TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be
used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved
to CUTOUT."
The airframe was changed significantly, creating the need for the whole MCAS solution — why? Because this was seen as a solution to avoid a recertification of the airframe, which would mean pilots had to re-train, which would mean airlines wouldn't buy, which means money would not flow.
Avoiding this recertification was the only reason MCAS was chosen instead of designing an airframe in such ways the now bigger engines actually have their center of gravity where it is expected to be.
This was ultimately a cost saving measure. Boeing could not be bothered to recertify the airframe purely for comercial reasons, not because it objectively made sense.
There is nothing wrong with making an airplane behave like the previous version. In fact, it enhances safety, as pilots can and do make errors when under stress they do the right thing for the wrong airplane. Making airplanes predictable and consistent with existing training is a safety enhancing practice.
I worked on the 757 design, which was designed concurrently with the 767. A lot of effort was made to make them behave in a common manner, even though they were quite different airplanes. This makes perfect sense.
It's the same reason the steering wheel and pedals on your car are laid out the same and do the same things across nearly all very diverse cars. And yes, carmakers adjust the handling characteristics to be predictable and not need the drivers to have additional training.
Boeing had originally proposed a new small aircraft (with carbon fiber), but the airlines did not want this as it would have higher operations costs to have two different types of aircraft, so Boeing had to come up with a new 737, and the MAX was it.
Boeing was claimed to have "known the FAA would not certify a dual sensor system without Level D simulator training".
This was from an insider at the time, and admittedly, I've not heard of an identity being put to them, but that signal was claimed to have been there.
There is also corroborating evidence that the Chief Technical Pilot actively dissuaded customers who asked for simulator time anyway, characterizing it as unnecessary. I don't have those at my fingertips right now, and unfortunately, my memory is failing me as to whether or not an "oh shit" moment was had at some point as to whether the Chief Technical Pilot had mischaracterized the system to regulators.
I just remember I thought it was awful convenient at the yime that this Chief Technical Pilot had all the hallmarks of a scapegoat for management to start piling blame on, and being glad he got independent counsel instead of relying on Boeing's General Counsel.
Thanks for that bit of information, I didn't know that. It sounds like it could be true. But being uncorroborated, and considering all the false information swirling around the issue, I'd want some confirmation.
I watch every episode of "Aviation Disasters". On more than one, the pilots would get some warning light and would ask each other what it meant. That implies that simulator training is not required for every warning light.
I figure we'll find out more if/when a criminal case is finally brought and prosecuted, until then, I consider anecdotally credible. Here's those texts and articles btw...
It seems they never leveraged anything more from this supposed whistleblower, so until more is seen, it's kinda moot. Still thought Forkner was a fall guy for bad management though.
That, of course, immediately raises the question of why, then, this was not done.
There is a proximate answer that still does not get us to root causes: An MCAS failure was rated as a Major condition as opposed to Hazardous, in which case the regulations allowed (but did not, of course, require) a single source of input.
This rating was arguably justifiable for the 737 MCAS in its original form, but its power had to be increased significantly after flight testing revealed the original version to be inadequate.
As it happens, the 737 MAX airframe was not the first use of MCAS: the KC-46 also has it. Despite the fact that this system is less powerful than that which was fitted to the initial production 737 MAXs, it uses two AofA sensors. There is clearly a strong and obvious engineering case for doing so, so simply observing that Boeing did not have to do so does not exhaust the questions that should be asked.
I have seen it stated in several places that using two AofA sensors would have required a warning in the case of their being in disagreement, which in turn would require it to be mentioned in the AFM, which might have prompted a reevaluation of the no-training decision, either directly or through a reevaluation of the risk classification. Unless a smoking gun has been found, Boeing can stonewall on whether the training concern suppressed a full and objective evaluation of the risks posed by MCAS (especially after its strengthening), and thereby improperly influenced design decisions (among other issues), but the concern is obvious to everyone except those who want to avoid considering it.
> That, of course, immediately raises the question of why, then, this was not done.
Which I raised in the antecedent post.
I did not write that Boeing "did not have to" have dual sensor input. I said if they did have dual sensor input, and had done the other changes to the software, in my not-so-humble opinion additional simulator training would have been entirely unnecessary.
The other question I have is why two sets of pilots did not understand what the STAB TRIM CUTOFF switch was for, despite it being in a very prominent position on the console and is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning the pilot should not have to look it up in an emergency. That indicates inadequate training, whether the airplane had MCAS or not.
Keep in mind that the first MCAS incident, which is never mentioned by the press, landed safely because the crew simply turned off the misbehaving trim system. That crew didn't even seem particularly concerned about it after they landed.
>> That, of course, immediately raises the question of why, then, this was not done.
> Which I raised in the antecedent post.
You did, in the sense that you wrote "I've never seen an explanation for why this mistake was made." That does not mean it is somehow wrong for me to also make that point as a prelude to continuing that line of thought.
> I did not write that Boeing "did not have to" have dual sensor input...
And I did not say that you did. I pointed out that this would not be a full answer to the question that both of us raised.
> ...in my not-so-humble opinion additional simulator training would have been entirely unnecessary.
I very much doubt that Boeing was at all concerned about what you or I think. It is rather more plausible that it was concerned about what the FAA might think, especially if the FAA also understood the extent to which MCAS's power had been increased.
And nothing else you have written here has any bearing on the possible motives behind Boeing making a decision that you yourself call a mistake - one which was made before these incidents.
It happens everywhere - executives think they'll save money by outsourcing (mainly to India where wages are 1/6 what they are in the USA).
One most of the projects I've worked on they got what they paid for. However, the executives who'd made the money-saving decision had moved on by then.
Some passages in the article are suggestive that Boeing is being proactive about finding issues, even beyond what the FAA is making them do. It’s a welcome change and hopefully they remain serious about safety despite the pushback from customers who’re focused on cost and timelines.
It is what their PR staff identified would increase people's confidence if they published things saying it. That has nothing to do with anything actually happening in the factories, except more or less by accident.
Has anyone noticed the windows on these planes become very hot when dimmed? They don’t have regular blinds but instead include a gel which can be electrically dimmed. They aren’t hot enough to burn you but uncomfortable to touch.
I got to work on these windows a decade ago! They use basically the same chemistry as in auto-dimming rearview mirrors.
Feel your mirror sometime when you're driving in traffic at night on the interstate and it's been dimmed because of the vehicle following you for some time...it will be perfectly cold.
The electrochromic material between the panes goes through an oxidation/redox reaction in the presence of a voltage. In circuit, it functions something like a low-storage battery or capacitor. It does not have enough leakage current to cause it to get hot, that's just the effect of the sun on the plane.
> The person you are replying to sounds to me like they put their hand on a window and it was hot.
The person that responded to that didn't say it was impossible: they did convey that the reason it was hot was not due to the window itself. The heat could easily be from the light being absorbed by the panel.
In my experience as someone who regularily measures temperatures of surfaces (electronics) something as low as 45°C (so just a handful degrees over body temperature) can already feel hot to the touch.
This would the area where it could just be the effects of the sun.
My experience with regular windows on airplanes is that the shutters can get quite hot as well. The energy they absorb from the sun has to go somewhere — and it gets radiated away as heat.
Do they dim to a dark color? The shades can get warm but they're white and reflect a lot of energy. If the windows are dimming to a dark color it might just be the difference in how much sun they absorb vs. reflect. I wonder if it adds up enough to become a frustration for cabin temperature.
> In 2019, they detected gaps between sections of the Dreamliner’s fuselage that were slightly wider than specified in the FAA-approved designs. The gaps, about the width of a piece of paper, were wider than the manufacturing tolerance of 0.005 of an inch allowed under the approved design.
I feel like the article is really grasping at straws here, and I'd be willing to bet the author doesn't even comprehend how small this is. 0.005" is small. For the hardware-challenged: 0.005" is a typical manufacturing tolerance for a standard-spec PCB. Some of the Chinese board-houses that deal in high volume are higher than that[1]. The fact that they even found a gap this size on something the size of an airplane is amazing to me.
0.005 inch is indeed quite small, and a demanding tolerance indeed for carbon fiber composite construction. I trust that Boeing design engineers would have know full well that this tight tolerance would cost a lot of money, and would therefore specify it only if necessary. When the out of spec assemblies were discovered, Boeing could either use testing and analysis to show these gaps are OK or rework the aircraft to get them in spec. They chose the latter.
In short, just because 0.005 inch is a small number does not mean the article is grasping at straws. I routinely design mechanical assemblies where the difference between 0.005 inch and 0.010 inch is the difference between a comfortable factor of safety and guaranteed failure under design loads.
Because gaps like this multiply out at the end of a beam. If for example the abutting structural member relies on that joint for support and is 12 feet long (144 inches) and lets say the flange is 6" across, .005/6 x 144 = .12" which is about 1/8 of an inch of wiggle at the end. If your gap were, say .010" instead, there is suddenly 1/4" of wiggle and when things can wiggle like that vibration gets much worse.
There might be someone on HN who can legitimately answer you but I think this question isn't really helpful to discussion. Some experts have said y should be less than x, instead, y is greater than x... this is a problem. Someone may very well chime in with an explanation about how as long as y is less than 1.2 * x it's actually probably fine, but considering this is a highly technical field and considering the expense of making such a small gap I think it's a good idea to just assume there is some really good for y to be less than x.
Edit: Actually there are some highly technical replies and that's awesome! But I still stand by my point - the time to evaluate whether a test is fair or not is generally not when you're failing the test.
>the time to evaluate whether a test is fair or not is generally not when you're failing the test.
...well, this is a technical forum, and mechanical engineers get these types of questions all of the time. "Hey, the machinist accidentally machined this wall 0.010" too thin. Is it OK to use?" Then you run an analysis, and report something like, no, that's too thin, scrap it. Or, yes, because of X, Y, and Z, this one is acceptable. And maybe this means that you can update the drawing to use a looser tolerance. Or maybe it just means that this one time it is OK, because there is another expensive process that you can do to the part to salvage it. Then there is a procedure to track this non-conformance, until it becomes conformant again. And it becomes part of the permanent record. The missing piece of the article's puzzle is whether this was a critical dimension that should have passed some sort of inspection process. Maybe it should have been a critical (inspected) dimension, but wasn't called out as such on the drawing (a documentation error). Or maybe the inspection was called out, but wasn't done. Or the inspection wasn't done correctly (i.e. inspector reported that it met the tolerance). Or the failed inspection reports were ignored. Or the non-conformance was reported, and an analysis was done and was shown to be fine, but that paper-trail has disappeared. Or in fact all the paper-work is in order, but for some reason wasn't available to the person informing the author of the article. Lots of different rabbit holes to go down here, but we don't have much to go off of.
This response of “trust the experts” is not interesting, intellectual, or appropriate for this particular forum. There are tons of people here both qualified and motivated to answer this question so telling people not to ask is just generating noise.
What matters isn’t the size of the gap, what matters is the size of the gap relative to the size of the gap it was designed for.
If I design a 10” Diam part to be assembled to another with a .001” gap, then a .010 gap is huge. If it’s a 10’ part that has the same tolerance, a 0.01” gap is still huge.
Tolerances aren’t arbitrary, they are analyzed and the issue is you generally don’t k ow what happens accurately if those tolerance limits are violated.
As for the mechanism, you need to worry not just about a single cycle load to failure, you need to also worry about shortened fatigue life (I,e, failure after many cycles - but many less cycles than predicted). Overall, load transfer is highly complicated in thin skin structures and that the gap is small doesn’t mean that a change in that gap crosses a small change in load
Both for pieces abutted against each other and for E.G. rivet holes, mechanical interfaces have extremely precise tolerances to support a range of possible stresses. Too wide a tolerance in one area can allow deformation and wiggle that applies unexpected forces on other areas. You should also remember that many aircraft are pressure vessels, since they operate at altitudes where the density of our atmosphere is substantially different.
Why do you suppose there are gaps in the first place?
Why don't they make it one solid piece? You can do that with composite construction. Just overlap layers and glue it all together.
It could have something to do with how the fuselage change shapes and distorts under different conditions. The airplane goes through various different shapes depending on things like pressurization and thermal expansion. The body gets a bit bigger, the wings flap up and down, things get wider and shorter and harder, etc. etc.
With composite construction things are glued into place, but they need to be designed to accommodate this movement. The glues and such things have a particular amount of elasticity and fatigue limits.
Could be that a 0.005 amounts to 10% less gluing surface and thus the projected fatigue life of the glue is now much different because there is much less.
Expansion with temperature changes over the length of a plane is surprising large. They put in gaps along the lenght to take this up so the whole is to size
>Are you suggesting they build the entire fuselage as one piece and "glue it all together"?
That's basically how they build ships. The glue is just a little hotter.
It seems doable but QC would probably be a nightmare and it wouldn't be very repairable adding up to it not being an economically sane choice.
Edit: Since apparently this has to be said, they weld ships together creating what is in effect one single piece assembly. The point is that while the techniques for joining fibrous materials are very different, large single piece structures that flex and bow are fairly well understood and there's no reason you couldn't create one out of carbon fiber if doing so penciled out.
IIRC a major rationale behind the 787 design is to allow sections to be manufactured complete with wiring harness etc in different locations and then shipped for final assembly. You can build really big parts (check out Janicki) but for this application probably not desirable.
If you have multiple parts in an assembly, each with small deviations from the specification, those deviations add up. Now add some substantial load (like a whole airplane), and you can have a real bad time.
Edit: in this case it looks like it was airplane skin panels, some (most?) of which may be stressed members - meaning that it's not a cosmetic piece, it's a load bearing piece. If you have multiple panels with tiny deviations, that changes the loading of the whole structure, potentially leading to warping, flexing, and premature failure.
It doesn't matter. It just matters that they cause problems, not how. If the gaps cause problems when outside a certain spec, one needs to ensure the gaps are kept within those bounds. Why they fail outside of those bounds matters not.
This is a fair question but the answer can get complex. Honestly the design/manufacturing of this aircraft joint is way above my expertise and pay grade. I would hope that Boeing has some extremely specialized and talented people working on this. In short, the question of how a gap might affect this assembly is far outside my expertise. However if you want a simple example:
Consider a geometrically perfect cylinder resting on a perfect plane. The contact is a line, with zero width. Therefore a contact area of zero. Pressure is force divided by area. So the nonzero weight of the pin, divided by area (zero) is... infinite? You run into the same problem with a pin in a slightly larger hole. How does this seemingly infinite pressure not lead to failures in wheels (think of train wheels on tracks), ball bearings (spherical balls in torroidal raceways with slight clearance), roller bearings, etc? We are surrounded by geometries that have seemingly zero area points of contact, but they support tremendous loads.
Hertz (yeah, the same guy for whom the 1/s unit is named) figured out the math behind these contact stresses. Basically, for round (and round-ish) things in 2d and 3d, the contact stress has a lot to do with the deformation of the materials. To answer the riddle above (of the cylinder on plane infinite contact stress), you have to consider the deformation of the cylinder and the plane. The stiffness of the materials comes into play, as well as the geometry. You can read up on Herz (or Hertzian) contact stresses if you would like to know more. The math is not terribly difficult, especially for 2d geometries. For a 2d case of a pinned joint, you can often find that a change of a couple thousandths of an inch can mean the difference between a comfortable factor of safety and failure.
I have given a hand-waving example of the importance of tight tolerances on clearances for a small class of problems. I hope it is close enough to the subject matter at hand to be of some use. My comment is from memory, so please forgive (and correct!) any mistakes I've made.
edit: I am rereading my comment, and realize that I didn't make explicit the importance of tight fit for Hertzian contact stress. The smaller the gap between a pin and hole, the greater the contact area (with the same amount of deformation). Think of it this way--for a fixed amount of deformation (say strain at failure), you can carry way more load if the contact area is greater. How do you increase this contact area? By a smaller difference in diameters (smaller gap) of pin and hole. So all things equal (material properties, load), a smaller difference between pin and hole diameters will increase load the joint can carry.
Another point: calculating these contact stresses is doable for most metals, but is far more complex for anisotropic materials (mechanical properties vary in different directions) materials like the carbon fiber composites.
I think others might be forgetting (or not know) that the factors of safety* for the parts in airplanes (around 2, or less?) are very different than factors of safety for the structural parts of bridges (around 5?). Compared on those terms, planes are light and fragile, on purpose, so you can't f around with cheating tolerances.
It causes a failure because it is not according to the design. Who knows what happens when you start doing things differently? You're not supposed to add or remove wings and the tolerances should be as described. You don't need to understand the math involved to understand that when an engineer tells you something is important, you should probably listen.
The line of discussion started out with a frankly confrontational tone and had so far not yielded incredibly interesting results. I read this question in the same tone when I probably shouldn't have, that's fair.
> I trust that Boeing design engineers would have know full well that this tight tolerance would cost a lot of money, and would therefore specify it only if necessary
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Source: worked in places that manufactured aerospace stuff.
The .005 is likely the output of some other calculation that got copypasta'd because why not.
Even if the deviation has no effect, the fact remains that the design was not updated.
It's perfectly fine for manufacturing to say, "We can't meet this tolerance, are you sure it has to be this exact?" Then design engineering looks at it, decides it does not need to be that exact, and updates the tolerance.
It's not okay to just ship passenger airplanes that don't meet the build specs.
Years ago, I worked in a manufacturing facility for heavy machinery and there was an engineer on staff who spent most of their time redoing calculations for expensive parts that were machined incorrectly (e.g. an extra notch cut into the part because the machinist measured from the wrong end the first time). The updated calculations were then filed along with a new revision of the drawings that specified the part as built.
I have no idea what aircraft manufacturing is like, but the idea that a part might go out the door without matching its drawing is definitely concerning. The drawing and the associated calculations are supposed to be the proof that the matter was considered, and that an informed decision was made.
I don't see enough information in the text to help us out here. The say it is out of the tolerance band of presumably +/- 0.005". But they don't tell us how far out of tolerance it was. Was it, say 0.0055", or 0.060"? What was engineering purpose was driving that tolerance? I could see that a +/-0.005" tolerance is from the title block (common default on mechanical engineering drawings), and that this was a reference dimension and not a critical dimension. But yes, 0.005" on something 20 feet in diameter is pretty dang tight.
And for reference a sheet of bog-standard copy paper is right around 0.004".
I’m not expert enough to know if this is dangerous are not. But an aircraft is a combinatorial explosion of complexity. For example, innocuous sounding changes for the 737 Max caused several hundred deaths.
If the tolerance was indeed too strict I would expect Boeing to go through a engineering review and seek approval from the FAA.
People who work on assembly lines are really good at keeping the line moving. But I don’t want someone who’s perf bonus relies on pushing out aircraft determining on-the-fly if something that’s outside of the spec is safe or not…
And this isn’t a knock on blue collar labor, almost no one at Boeing has the knowledge to work through all the potential side effects like this.
What really matters is where that 5 thousandths is ... If it's in the wrong place, that could compromise all kinds of things. Maybe not immediately, but definitely down the road. Watch a few May Day Air disaster episodes, some of the most innocuous sounding things can cause a crash a decade down the line ...
That and Boeing defined the specification, the FAA approved it and Boeing isn't meeting their own design specification. If it doesn't really matter, then why is it the specification?
Sucks to be Boeing, I want them to be successful. Hell, I even liked that big goofy looking X-32 which was a JSF competitor. People die when their planes fail, it's nothing like a PCB as mentioned by the grandparent. They f-ed around with the 737Max and found out. Honestly though, if your loved ones died on a 737Max and then you found out that they weren't building planes to the specs that they defined, what would you think?
This reads to me like Alice just isn't doing her job properly. If this results in specs that are really hard to fulfill, hopefully the process is accountable enough to trace it back to her.
In aerospace, if Alice needed a hole drilled and didn’t care about tolerance, she’d have specified a class III hole per her company’s hole drilling process and gone to get a latte. The process document has the appropriate tolerance called out for each diameter and class.
Not every hole needs a tight tolerance, depending on the loading and assembly methods. And manufacturing prefers a standard tolerance range to be specified to enable consistency in manufacturing operations, rather than some weird lopsided super precise tolerance callout. So you determine the largest tolerances that will meet your design requirements, then select a fit class from the manufacturing standard that meets your tolerance requirement.
>If it doesn't really matter, then why is it the specification?
Sometimes you just need a specification, because you have to tell your mfgr something[0]. Notably 5 thou is a pretty standard idgaf-tolerance, but in this specific case might be important.
[0] e.g. a spec of 5" is meaningless, 5.00000 +/-.000001 is insane, and 5.000 +/- 0.005" is (generally) readily achievable and good enough.
0.005 is 1/200. How thick is a 200 page book? About an inch seems right. Its not clear to me how much difference there is between 0.005" and the thickness of a sheet of paper.
The thickness of typical copy paper in the US is 0.1 mm. I measure it by measuring the height of a ream (500 sheets) and dividing by 500. This bit of trivia turns out to be rather helpful for 3D printing.
Also, 0.005 inches = 0.127mm, so we're talking about slightly more tolerance than the thickness of copy paper.
It's helpful to know how high above the print bed to print, so you can slide a piece of paper freely underneath the nozzle while only just feeling a tiny bit of drag from the nozzle. That way you have enough space to put your material down.
South Carolina planes were getting flown to Washington before delivery to customers when I had a friend still working there. He was finding metal shavings in the fuselage of the plane, along with tools, nicked wires and such.
None of this should have made it out of the factory floor. Every crew that works on a plane has to certify (literally sign off a form) that when they worked on the plane they left it in good shape (no obvious defects, like metal shavings, tools left inside, etc). If the next shift comes in and finds dangerous debris or damage the prior crew should have noted, then the prior crew is required by the FAA to have a formal report written against them, as they have created a dangerous plane.
Management has applied heavy pressure to my friend repeatedly to not report these incidents, despite his legal obligation. Ultimately, he took a $25k hit paying back the Boeing relocation package and left after 10 months to work on repairing trains (which has been a significant improvement).
There are numerous reports on debris (metal shavings, tools, and even a whole ladder) being discovered in aircraft by customers after delivery. This requires not only that assembly signed off on the aircraft, but that the issues are not discovered in final inspection either.
Some reporting suggests several major customers (airlines) were so fed up with this 'foreign object debris' (metal shavings etc) problem that they said they would only accept aircraft from Washington. From your story, I can't help but wonder if Boeing management got around this by flying near-complete aircraft from SC to WA to get around this.
To give you a sense of how bad this debris issue is: the US Air Force refused delivery of new air tankers after finding debris (in fuel tanks if I remember correctly).
The story about airlines only accepting 787 aircraft from Washington was from the time when it was still being assembled in two plants (Everett, WA and North Charleston, SC). Since March 2021 (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner), the only plant assembling 787s is the SC plant, which is cheaper and non-unionized. I guess that's more important to Boeing than occasional quality issues...
Hiring mechanics & technicians for Boeing in the Pacific Northwest is also quite difficult with their poor reputation, middling pay and the high cost of living. FAANG has increased the cost of living in the region to the point of pricing out whole neighborhoods that used to be Boeing employees, pushing them out of the inner suburbs.
Shooting the messenger seems to be Boeing tradition of the last decade.
When I was a kid, half the parents I knew worked at Boeing and were proud of the quality engineering or manufacturing they did, but over the past two decades Boeing has had this crew retire and has worked to shift to a blame the messenger culture.
There's this documentary on Netflix that also notes the cultural shift, and largely blames it on the 1997 acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas, and the subsequent shift, roughly speaking, from an engineering-dominated culture to an MBA-dominated culture.
The trope is that the South Carolina facility is largely un-unionized (because it's in a freedom-to-work state), which has caused poor quality. I have not seen any clear evidence of this, as all Boeing facilities seem to have QC issues. On a related note, I'm not sure how Boeing's QC compares to Airbus, though both seem to have similar aircraft availability rates, which would indicate similar levels of QC.
SpaceX manufacturing facility in California is also un-unionized. The amount of difference between the two places is very large, to just conclude that it has to do with unions seems like a stretch to me.
That one factory is the home factory close to where the designs are made and the other is so far away seems like a pretty important thing.
This seems like the kind of argument people who really love unions would make.
Where you have unions, people are not as afraid of management pressure.
When the management pressure is for better quality, the union may interfere. Where management pressure is for lower quality, the union should interfere.
We see the harmful effect of unions where the police are in one.
Among other things: the safety tolerances for SpaceX are substantially different than those for commercial airliners. When a SpaceX launch craft fails, it explodes somewhere over the ocean or in LEO. When a commercial passenger airliner fails, several hundred human beings die.
SpaceX management is currently oriented to both high quality and high production rate. When their commitment to quality slips, such as traded off for production rate, quality will slip. When quality in a rocket engine slips, they explode.
When that starts, we may expect they will start by exploding mainly on test stands, instead of vehicles.
How many launch failures have been attributed to materials failures in the engines themselves, and not improper process and/or maintenance before actual launches?
My intuition is that the latter would exceed the former, and that test stands aren’t a realistic environment for predicting their likelihood.
Probably the main difference from operating bolted to a test stand is vibration both from its own operation and from all the other engines operating at the same time, and instabilities in fuel flow caused by the same. The bottom end of a launching rocket is a really hostile environment. Just the noise would kill you. Top is marginally better, depending on what happens at the bottom.
It is hard to imagine how you would determine, after the fact, whether a rocket blew up because of material failure or something else, but they seem to do it, anyway during development when they have a zillion sensors attached logging everything in real time: "hmm, a millisecond before the explosion, this reading went out of tolerance, and then this one, then this one, and then the data ends."
"Freedom to work" and "Right to work" are both Orwellian euphemistic terms, to be honest. Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".
> "Freedom to work" and "Right to work" are both Orwellian euphemistic terms, to be honest.
The latter is essentially a term of art, the former is not. Using the former is imprecise and confusing.
> Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".
That is a completely different concept called at-will employment. RTW is about union shops (not to be confused with closed shops, which have been illegal in the US since Taft-Hartley)
They're euphemisms, but I am not sure they're Orwellian. How would you say they're Orwellian?
It's better to just allow people to name their own movement, otherwise, you end up endlessly fighting about names (i.e. are people 'pro-life' or 'anti-choice' and 'pro-murder'/'anti-life' and 'pro-choice').
No, not in any sense of the word. There's no guarantee that you'll get any job let alone a specific one in an RTW state. Therefore it's not a right to anything. It's just union busting.
Especially since RTW legislation is not about closed shops (which are illegal at the federal level), so these were jobs you could always get.
I don't blame you for confusing the terms but I am so upset that the average person upvoted you without checking. You have the wrong term, and I'm going to comment here just to give people an extra chance to know that.
That's the whole point of 'right to work.' Allow new employees to freeload on the union-negotiated rates for the shop without requiring them to actually join the union. Who would pay if they got the benefits anyway? So the union gets defunded.
Interestingly, back when Jesse Jackson was in the news a lot, he did a lot of advocating for Right-to-Work legislation. The idea was that unions were racially discriminating against blacks, and RtW laws prevented this.
- based near the engineering teams; frequent collaborations
- unionized, highly skilled workforce
The people who took over Boeing and moved the HQ out of SEA intentionally picked SC to union-bust their own workforce.
MBAs just refuse to believe that workplace culture and experience matter — so they treat high skilled workers like dumb, replaceable cogs and then their companies fail a decade later when the senior/principal staff are incompetent or non-existent.
That same mentality is why their new planes have major issues:
They don’t have competent senior/principal engineers because they viewed mid-career engineers as “too expensive” — and so didn’t train any.
The WSJ article was maddening in failing to even mention that for the years when the 787 was assembled in both Washington and South Carolina (up until 2020?), the vast majority of quality issues were coming from South Carolina. So much so that some airlines stipulated they would only take Washington-assembled planes. Now that the 787 is only assembled in South Carolina (Boeing doubled-down on their strategy despite the well-known quality issues), no doubt the ongoing defects issue is as least partly related, and not merely "microscope" related.
I guess you have to read "moved the HQ out of SEA" (to Chicago) and "intentionally picked SC [for 787 final assembly] to union-bust their own workforce" separately, then it makes more sense...
Kansas is a right-to-work state and is where Boeing builds 737 fuselages, does passenger to cargo conversions, and does a hefty chunk of their work for the DoD on pre-merger products.
Boeing sold off the fuselage plant in 2005, closed up conversions, and moved the DOD work to San Antonio in 2014. There are a few small subsidiary companies there, but no mainline Boeing.
Edit: we've unfortunately had to ask you many times for many years to stop breaking the HN guidelines. Would you please fix this? I don't want to ban you.
