OT: Boeing 737 MAX

[saab2000]

Originally Posted by verticaldoug

Do you drive a ford bronco II?

Only Ferraris for me.

[oldpotatoe]

Originally Posted by benb

The press wants to point all the fingers at the US and/or the FAA and/or Boeing.

Most of these accidents get investigated and it turns out to be Pilot Error, but no one in the press wants to point that finger.

Lion Air in particular.. you should be pointing a lot of fingers at them before you point at the airplane. Low training requirements, meth in the cockpit, blacklisted from flying into large areas of the world until very recently, crashes/hour rates orders of magnitude higher than US airlines. And yet it is instant knee jerk to assume it's the airplane.

The other thing about all this hysteria is it's still probably orders of magnitude safer to hop on a Lion Air or Ethiopian flight than it is to hop in the car and drive across town and we are fine ignoring the auto risk, and hopping on one of our domestic airlines is vastly safer than Lion or Ethiopian.

Originally Posted by benb

What plane was that? Lots of planes don't even have them and fly fine.

No kidding, AOA is essentially just a backup for indicated airspeed.

[CunegoFan]

Originally Posted by saab2000

All the experts here need to contact the FAA and NTSB immediately with these accurate hypotheses. I’m sure nobody there, or at Boeing, thought of these things before.

Let’s wait for some more facts before we light the torches and get the pitchforks.

Pitchforks and torches first. Facts later. It's the American way.

[sailorboy]

Didn't the investigations, (or at least the preliminary) into the two previous crashes reveal the same issue? It's gotta be only a matter of time before Congress steps in and once again, rebukes this president's ill-informed guidance to Boeing and grounds these things pending more detailed investigations.

And guess what, if it isn't done the right way through regulation like, you know, what we have a government for in the first place, then people will stop boarding the things or even buying a ticket from an airline that can't promise them they won't be flying on one, and the flights will be grounded anyhow.

[vincenz]

Originally Posted by goonster

If Ford sells cars that lock up the front and rear right side wheels when a yaw sensor fails, do we let them off the hook because the drivers couldn't figure out how to disable the traction control in the limited amount of time before they spin into opposing traffic?

Absolutely not. It shouldn’t be a scenario in the first place.

Originally Posted by MattTuck

The fact that Boeing is scrambling to push out a software update suggests that the rest of the world is justified in their concern.

Yes, this was my thought when I found out that they had been working on software updates after the Lion Air crash, but it was prevented from being rolled out due to push back from the FAA and then the govt shutdown came along shortly after. And then now this.

I work in software. From experience, if a behavior is sometimes reproducible, there is definitely something there. Sorry to say, but people’s lives are in play here. Not just an inconvenience of an app on your phone not loading.

[Bruce K]

And now they are grounded in the US

BK

[vincenz]

Originally Posted by Bruce K

And now they are grounded in the US



BK

Yep, and there it is.

[sailorboy]

He and he alone can fix this...

[goonster]

Originally Posted by saab2000

All the experts here need to contact the FAA and NTSB immediately with these accurate hypotheses.

When you say "hypotheses" does that include this Airworthyness Directive from December?

"This AD was prompted by analysis performed by the manufacturer showing that if an erroneously high single angle of attack (AOA) sensor input is received by the flight control system, there is a potential for repeated nose-down trim commands of the horizontal stabilizer. We are issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."

[saab2000]

Originally Posted by goonster

When you say "hypotheses" does that include this Airworthyness Directive from December?

"This AD was prompted by analysis performed by the manufacturer showing that if an erroneously high single angle of attack (AOA) sensor input is received by the flight control system, there is a potential for repeated nose-down trim commands of the horizontal stabilizer. We are issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."

No. I mean the folks who think they know what happened to the Ethiopian airplane. I don’t thing the data recorders or voice recorders have yet been analyzed.

Anyway, it’s moot now. They’re going to be grounded and that’s probably a good thing. It will force some light onto the design and could save Boeing’s hide in the long run.

As with all aviation tragedies, I hope we can learn from these and prevent more from happening.

Btw, I’m not in the least bit opposed to this grounding. It’s a reasonable precaution in light of two terrible accidents. I only asked for folks to get more facts before coming to conclusions.

[AngryScientist]

makes sense. let's get the RCA done and any corrective actions implemented while the planes are on the ground, not in the air.

[biker72]

Time to buy some Boeing stock.

[benb]

To be honest despite being skeptical of the "jump to conclustions" aspect of all this I think POTUS did a good thing here... he's actually stepped up and taken responsibility for this.

Now.. can we get some hysteria to get numerous models of car "grounded" or something? Cars have gotten way safer the last 10 years but they are still something like 200X more dangerous than flying airlines.

[AngryScientist]

i bet the halls are buzzing over at boeing HQ today!

[donevwil]

Originally Posted by AngryScientist

i bet the halls are buzzing over at boeing HQ today!

Half my Seattle Metro family works at Boeing, buzzing is an understatement.