MSN
The message to Boeing Co. from the Federal Aviation Administration was clear: The grounded 737 Max won’t get approval to fly again anytime soon. So the company had little choice but to idle the giant factory where the plane is made.
Boeing announced Monday that it will suspend production of the Max starting sometime in January, with no specific date for when the Renton, Washington, plant will be restarted.
The company said it won’t lay off any of the factory’s 12,000 workers “at this time,” and many could be diverted to plants elsewhere in the Seattle region. Some could also be assigned to work on the 400 jets that Boeing has built since the Max was grounded in March but couldn’t be delivered. More
So how long will it take the software people to tweak the anti-stall feature so that ill-trained, low hour, third world pilots can remember where the disable switch is.
Oh wait… It has a switch for that?
Meanwhile, work on the 737 MIN and 737 NORM continues unabated.
Yes but they saved a bunch of money using H1-B engineers!
If it’s Boeing I’m not going
…this is why trusting computers is BAD.
…programs are simply conditional logic that a human being came up with. This means a human being tried to think of every possible consequence, including what would happen if other human beings who don’t know the program logic interact with it in some way other than the programmer intended, and what if a field input is incorrect or field inputs conflict, what if an output doesn’t work properly, how do you KNOW if they are working properly, to name but a few.
…and no human being since Jesus the Christ can know EVERY possible consequence.
You missed something. Guarenteed.
I never consider a subroutine reliable till a user gets ahold of it. People can ALWAYS do something you don’t expect, usually from laziness, haste, or anger, and you have to take THAT into account too.
…aircraft have been downed from people washing them improperly, taping over things that shouldn’t be, repairs impropely made YEARS ago, bad training, poor skills…and that’s BEFORE we get to Muslim terrorsts.
And someone who DOES NOT FLY PLANES has to figure out how to control an INHERENTLY unstable one against all this? IN COMMERCIAL USE?
…yeah, good luck with THAT…
Smart machines make dumb people. If the machine does all the “thinking”, the human gets used to this, and may not even realize there’s a problem with the automation until flight 737 looks like a Beastie Boys album cover. Making the plane less stable so you HAVE to trust the computer more, ain’t NEVER gonna do any good for ANY one.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6b/70/0b/6b700b6806088333825640914ba689ce.jpg
” Get them out there to the customers, we’ll work out any bugs as we go along.”
@Lowell December 17, 2019 at 5:25 pm
> how long will it take the software people to tweak the anti-stall feature so that ill-trained, low hour, third world pilots can remember where the disable switch is
You mean the ill-trained, low hour, third world software engineers? They’re already on that. Top men. Top. Men.
From SNS: “And someone who DOES NOT FLY PLANES has to figure out how to control an INHERENTLY unstable one against all this?”
All commercial airliners are inherently stable. So are the vast majority of general aviation airframes. There are only a few military airframes that are inherently unstable (the B-2 bomber being the most notable) and that is unavoidable due to the performance envelope they operate within.
The 737 Max is a good plane. Not one instance of a mid air emergency occurred with this variant with an american or european crew. Which flew tens of thousands of more flights than the airlines that flew their 737’s into the ground. You should ask why this is the case. You should ask a Delta, or Alaska Air, or Southwest Airline pilot if they would have misgivings about flying the Max.
I have. In all three cases.
They are truly sorry for the tragedies. It impacts every airline, every crew when a plane goes down. But what happened was inexperienced, poorly trained people were flying a plane they weren’t really qualified to operate. That’s not the PC version, and why it doesn’t get talked about.
Open the bay doors Hal, I’m sorry dave, real sorry.
Lowell
DECEMBER 17, 2019 AT 6:51 PM
“All commercial airliners are inherently stable.”
…I was under the impression that the anti-stall feature was REQUIRED because the larger engines were placed differently and would, if not corrected for in some way, pitch the aircraft gradually UP, hence causing a stall, and therefor the reason for it. If so, that’s not inherenly stable. Not super UNstable like an F-117, maybe, but a stability issue that SOMETHING, Pilot or machine, has to CONSTANTLY compensate for. Is this not the case?
…and my positon on automation stands. Dumb pilots, even in the third world, would not be possible without “smart” machines. If the airline thinks it can get by with less-trained, less-paid “pilots”, it will.
Look what happened with DOCTORS after Obamacare!
…look for that with PILOTS, in the U.S. too, if they keep pushing…
No idea if blogger comments are legit. Have been following story since second crash. Lately bloggers are blaming HQ move to Chicongo, the bottom line TODAY, accountants making decisions engineers used to make, prioritizing political correctness, affirmative action, immigrants, homos, lesbians, minorities, and every leftist movement out there.
I’ve got several patients who work for a major corp. that does flight control systems, and several airline pilots. The engineers work for a competitive company that didn’t get the contract. They explained that the flaw is a software issue in the autopilot that an ill-trained pilot couldn’t handle. The pilots say that the solution is simple. Turn off the autopilot and manually fly the plane. The autopilot caused the problem so there is absolutely no reason you should turn it back on. The idiots turned the AP back on because they don’t know how to fly the plane, and the AP crashed the plane.
From SNS: “I was under the impression that the anti-stall feature was REQUIRED because the larger engines were placed differently and would, if not corrected for in some way, pitch the aircraft gradually UP, hence causing a stall,…”
Nope. The MCAS system (the one in contention) detects when the plane is in a high angle of attack (nose up) when the flaps are up (not in landing configuration) and manual flight mode. It look for decreasing flight speed and increasing sink rate. This tells the flight director (autopilot) that the crew is asleep at the switch and not flying the plane.
The crashes occurred because the angle of attack (nose up angle or position) sensor faulted and the flight director commanded nose down elevator input. This resulted in the plane assuming a descent posture without command from the pilot. This is immediately noticeable to the pilot.
The very first action should have been to disable the MCAS system via the toggle switches on the center console.
A secondary angle of attack sensor (backup) was an option on planes equipped with MCAS. In planes so equipped, the pilots would have been given an alarm condition that the sensors disagreed. In these planes, a single sensor fault caused the flight director to command a nose down elevator input. The crew did not disable the malfunctioning MCAS. They did not disable the Flight Director. They did not apply control force to the yoke to correct the descent posture of the aircraft. Any one of which would have prevented a steep descent into the ground.
They poked at the instrumentation and looked at readouts all the way to the dirt.
If Boeing is smart, they will resume production of the 737 Max, but with a different name. How about “737 Obama”; it will be immune from criticism.
At least it’s in Seattle.