Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashes killing 157

[GringoSalado 1652]

20 hours ago, RPM said:

And this one point why I keep crying bean counters. Critical safety features shouldn't be optional. You know it could be a problem, you have a solution, put it on every plane and roll in the cost. It's not like an upgrade for rich Corinthian leather seats.

(sigh)

 

Yes those decisions aren't made by accountants.

[Pasken 1309]

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

 

This.

 

And way back early in this thread, that’s what I was trying to communicate. I love failure analysis. It’s fascinating. In complex systems (as most modern aircraft are), it almost always is a chain of failures, and the removal of any link prevents the failure.

 

That means a couple of things. First, we are REGULARLY in a chain of failure that could result in catastrophe. But, the redundancies/safeties almost always work, and break the chain. You don’t know how many flights you’ve been on (as one example) that COULD have crashed, but didn’t, because the safeties/training/etc engaged and quickly broke the chain.

 

The other thing it means is that while every element is critical, the LAST element I want to count on is a human being under immense pressure in a timeframe limited to seconds/minutes. If we’re counting on a human being in a life or death situation to follow an even remotely complex process, that’s a bad plan. The EASIEST place to address the issue is on the ground, with proper engineering and maintenance procedures. Thus, it is there that failures are more inexcusable.

 

Designing an aircraft that will occasionally act in a way that it requires truly expert piloting to save - when a different engineering approach could address that flaw - is a bad design. Always. I’m not talking about how hard it is to fly a plane if something shears off the stabilizer - you really can’t design around a catastrophic physical failure. I’m talking about something that is part of the ordinary operation and avionics of the aircraft.

 

You shouldn’t design a car that may periodically lurch to the right at 70 mph. Ever. Sure, a good driver may be able to react and save the car. But my aunt Edna also drives, and she’s no Mario Andretti. The car needs to be safe for her, too.

 

There may be pilot error here. But it seems apparent that a design error set them up to fail, and that’s unforgivable.

 

The Pilots were not under a rush because they were not losing altitude until they turned the system back on. Given that we now know that only ONE stick was shaking, it should have been very extremely obvious to the pilots they had a bad sensor as they were going faster than the plane was designed for and were not nose up so they aren’t stalling and the copilots stick was not shaking so his sensors weren’t detecting a stall.

Turning the system back on when you know it has incorrect input ESPECIALLY when you are not in some last ditch effort as the plane was not losing altitude was stupid. They should have trusted the procedure and if it wasn’t working, tried to figure out why. Given that the overspeed warning was going off, it shouldn’t have taken them long.

 

this feels like the pilots thinking they know more than they do. There was a plane that went down because a pilot reset a autopilot breaker switch instead of following the in flight procedure which was repetitive because he saw a maintenance guy do it while on the ground and it brought the plane down.

 

 

Edited April 6, 2019 by Pasken

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

4 hours ago, Pasken said:

So there is no way to change the input of the MCAS to the copilot’s sensors? 

Not in flight if the plane was bought with single sourced MCAS. Looks like that’s part of the fix with a miscompare annunciation and programming logic to not activate if that happens.  

[Telegraph_it 3359]

I accidentally turned on MCAS in the Baron today flying back to Houston. 

 

[bschoolprof 6272]

1) did your ghost post this?

2) epic humble brag

3) I'm going to try to turn it on in my gulfstream tomorrow.  

[Telegraph_it 3359]

Haha nope. That’s me (well not exactly, I’m in right seat. I wish I could fly twins). Autopilot started pitching plane into 20 degree bank in IMC while in Class B space. It was interesting. 

Edited April 6, 2019 by Telegraph_it

[Eskimohorn 5642]

The FAA f’d up by abdicating certification to Boeing.

I’m guessing Boeing lobbied for this. Coupled with budget cuts, it was an inevitable conclusion.

[retread 2951]

Quote

The preliminary report finds the pilots did everything required to try to bring the plane back safely but ultimately couldn't control it. Former Boeing operations analyst Rick Ludtke says during development of the 737 Max, the company had a mandate to make sure any changes to the plane would not require additional pilot training in a simulator, something he called "unprecedented."

"(That's) never happened in the past that I'm aware of. We were very uncomfortable with this," he said.

Ludtke says Boeing managers told him they even sold the plane to Southwest Airlines with a guarantee a rebate of $1 million per plane if simulator training was required.

The flight control analyst says the demand to avoid simulator training known as Level D took over design of the aircraft.

"Throughout the design iteration, all the status meetings with managers, that was something that was always asked. You know, 'Are we threatened or are we risking Level D?'" Ludtke said. "'And if you are, you've got to change it.' I think philosophically it was the wrong thing for the company to do, to mandate such a limitation.

"To strongly avoid it makes sense, but to prevent it - I think you can see the line from that to these accidents."

https://www.wndu.com/content/news/Boeing-acknowledges-its-softwares-role-in-plane-crashes-that-killed-hundreds-508163721.html?ref=721

[JimmyJames 12271]

2 hours ago, retread said:

https://www.wndu.com/content/news/Boeing-acknowledges-its-softwares-role-in-plane-crashes-that-killed-hundreds-508163721.html?ref=721

Given what’s happened, not a surprise. Anyone still arguing pilot error here?

[Your Mom 4850]

Bad design... pilot error... not mutually exclusive.  Nobody has argued that Boeing shouldn't shoulder most of the blame.  

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

44 minutes ago, Your Mom said:

Bad design... pilot error... not mutually exclusive.  Nobody has argued that Boeing shouldn't shoulder most of the blame.  

He can’t figure that out. 

[Pasken 1309]

On 4/5/2019 at 10:07 PM, DaysOff said:

On 4/5/2019 at 4:48 PM, C-Man said:

Any theories on why the AOA sensor malfunctioned in the first place? Does that happen more often than I really want to know?

This is the crux of the issue. MCAS responded as designed. I've been on the airplane 15 years and never heard of an AoA vane failing. Its simplicity makes it damn near fail safe outside of being hit by a Turkey vulture. Did a bad batch roll of ths assembly line one day?

2 of 3 AoA sensors failed on a New Zealand Airbus 320 because a maintenance dude washed them with a fire hose on the ground before the flight  and the water froze when they got in the air. The Airbus computer system raised the nose into a stall and everyone died in the crash. There were only a few people in it though since they were testing the aircraft before they took it back from the German airline that was leasing it.

 

I don’t think that happened here. Just shit happens and when you have a string of errors...

Edited April 7, 2019 by Pasken

[C-Man 27257]

3 hours ago, Pasken said:

2 of 3 AoA sensors failed on a New Zealand Airbus 320 because a maintenance dude washed them with a fire hose on the ground before the flight  and the water froze when they got in the air. The Airbus computer system raised the nose into a stall and everyone died in the crash. There were only a few people in it though since they were testing the aircraft before they took it back from the German airline that was leasing it.

 

I don’t think that happened here. Just shit happens and when you have a string of errors...

Wasn't that also kind of what happened on the Air France flight from Brazil? Freezing on the tubes or something leading to faulty readings.

[Telegraph_it 3359]

1 hour ago, C-Man said:

Wasn't that also kind of what happened on the Air France flight from Brazil? Freezing on the tubes or something leading to faulty readings.

Pitot tube froze or gave faulty CAS and pilot stalled it into the ocean. 

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4977]

Swiss cheese model, ya'll. Line up enough holes and you have an accident. Seems to me that Boeing put up a slice of cheese with the engineering design that had extra holes in it, and offered as an option a slice of cheese with extra holes in it for a reduced cost, but then the airlines put up a slice of cheese full of holes because they were too cheap to hire competent pilots. While there's no such thing as a slice of cheese with no holes in this model, pretty much everybody putting up slices of cheese deserves some blame for not doing anything to reduce the number of holes.

[retread 2951]

"F-GZCP [Air France 447] was scheduled to have its pitot tubes replaced as soon as it returned to Paris.[194]"

Crazy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

Quote

When it was introduced in 1994, the Airbus A330 was equipped with pitot tubes, part number 0851GR, manufactured by Goodrich Sensors and Integrated Systems. A 2001 Airworthiness Directive required these to be replaced with either a later Goodrich design, part number 0851HL, or with pitot tubes made by Thales, part number C16195AA.[190] Air France chose to equip its fleet with the Thales pitot tubes. In September 2007, Airbus recommended that Thales C16195AA pitot tubes should be replaced by Thales model C16195BA to address the problem of water ingress that had been observed.[191] Since it was not an Airworthiness Directive, the guidelines allow the operator to apply the recommendations at its discretion. Air France implemented the change on its A320 fleet where the incidents of water ingress were observed and decided to do so in its A330/340 fleet only when failures started to occur in May 2008.[192][193]

After discussing these issues with the manufacturer, Air France sought a means of reducing these incidents, and Airbus indicated that the new pitot probe designed for the A320 was not designed to prevent cruise level ice-over. In 2009, tests suggested that the new probe could improve its reliability, prompting Air France to accelerate the replacement program,[193] which started on 29 May. F-GZCP was scheduled to have its pitot tubes replaced as soon as it returned to Paris.[194] By 17 June 2009, Air France had replaced all pitot probes on its A330 type aircraft.[195]

In July 2009, Airbus issued new advice to A330 and A340 operators to exchange Thales pitot tubes for tubes from Goodrich.[196][197][198]

[Asithappens 974]

17 minutes ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

Swiss cheese model, ya'll. Line up enough holes and you have an accident. Seems to me that Boeing put up a slice of cheese with the engineering design that had extra holes in it, and offered as an option a slice of cheese with extra holes in it for a reduced cost, but then the airlines put up a slice of cheese full of holes because they were too cheap to hire competent pilots. While there's no such thing as a slice of cheese with no holes in this model, pretty much everybody putting up slices of cheese deserves some blame for not doing anything to reduce the number of holes.

A cheesy analogy, but a good one.

[XYZ 2154]

6 hours ago, C-Man said:

Wasn't that also kind of what happened on the Air France flight from Brazil? Freezing on the tubes or something leading to faulty readings.

AF447 went through a severe storm that froze the pitot tubes (they detect air speed). When they froze, the autopilot said “I don’t have air speed so I can’t drive this plane anymore”. When it disengaged, the #3 pilot started flying the plane and inexplicably started climbing. I can’t remember the rest but he stalled the plane. At some point during the fateful descent #3 was pulling on the joystick while #2 was pushing. Neither of the 3 pilots ever said that they were stalled, I don’t think. Their communication with each other sucked. It was so bizarre, and so needless. All the pilot had to do was keep the previous thrust and attitude and they would have been fine. 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

32 minutes ago, Asithappens said:

A cheesy analogy, but a good one.

I like cheese.

[retread 2951]

Vanity Fair narrative of 447

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash

[4th and 5 4915]

Man! This thread. All these articles, Mentour Pilot’s You Tube Page. I just can’t get enough of this stuff. 

[Wally Fairway 5584]

6 hours ago, Asithappens said:

A cheesy analogy, but a gouda one.

fify

[XYZ 2154]

6 hours ago, retread said:

Vanity Fair narrative of 447

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash

That is harrowing.

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

7 hours ago, XYZ said:

AF447 went through a severe storm that froze the pitot tubes (they detect air speed). When they froze, the autopilot said “I don’t have air speed so I can’t drive this plane anymore”. When it disengaged, the #3 pilot started flying the plane and inexplicably started climbing. I can’t remember the rest but he stalled the plane. At some point during the fateful descent #3 was pulling on the joystick while #2 was pushing. Neither of the 3 pilots ever said that they were stalled, I don’t think. Their communication with each other sucked. It was so bizarre, and so needless. All the pilot had to do was keep the previous thrust and attitude and they would have been fine. 

I believe the #2 pilot realized it when the #3 verbally announced that he was holding full aft stick. He took over and tried to lower the nose, but the #3 inexplicably pulled full aft again. The control inputs are then summed from the two stick inputs and sent to the flight controls.  So #3 offset #2, and the aural warning of “Dual Input” was trumped by other aural warnings even though the visual indicator was illuminated.  

If the plane had not been stalled then full aft stick would have made some sense as the plane would have settled at alpha max (Max AOA allowed by the flight computers short of a stall) and the autothrust would have gone to alpha floor which is Toga thrust, and stayed there until the ATHR was disconnected. 

This is actually part of the EGPWS escape maneuver. Disconnect the autopilot,  pull aft stick,  the load factor protection will prevent you from over stressing the airplane and the AOA  protection will keep the plane from stalling providing maximum climb performance. 

Btw, that’s the same AOA protection that would push the nose over in an erroneous AOA situation with redundancy failure. 

It pays to know your pitch and power settings. 

Edited April 7, 2019 by Bobby_Batronic

[XYZ 2154]

Bobby:

In regards to AF447, when things started going to shit, shouldn’t Roberts (#2) have told #3 “I’m taking over”? What would have been the proper response from the FO and from the captain?

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

Not necessarily. At that point it was two FO’s with the CA in rest. Typically, but not always, the pilot flying remains the pilot flying in an emergency situation though the CA has the authority to delegate responsibilities. 

“I have control and ATC. ECAM actions.” Is what he should have said if he wanted the plane. Also, once he understood that #3 was incorrectly manipulating the controls he should have held down the pilot takeover button which would have taken control authority away from #3. 

More than likely he was dealing with cascading ECAMs and trying to decipher the situation, and wasn’t interested in taking control. 

[XYZ 2154]

43 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

Not necessarily. At that point it was two FO’s with the CA in rest. Typically, but not always, the pilot flying remains the pilot flying in an emergency situation though the CA has the authority to delegate responsibilities. 

“I have control and ATC. ECAM actions.” Is what he should have said if he wanted the plane. Also, once he understood that #3 was incorrectly manipulating the controls he should have held down the pilot takeover button which would have taken control authority away from #3. 

More than likely he was dealing with cascading ECAMs and trying to decipher the situation, and wasn’t interested in taking control. 

Okay. So why do you think #3 was so clueless about being in a stall? I’m not a pilot, but to me the combination of nose pointing high and losing altitude (fast) screams ‘stall’. Was he overwhelmed?

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

11 minutes ago, XYZ said:

Okay. So why do you think #3 was so clueless about being in a stall? I’m not a pilot, but to me the combination of nose pointing high and losing altitude (fast) screams ‘stall’. Was he overwhelmed?

Probably the same reason the Ethiopian crew neglected the thrust levers. Overwhelmed, mind locked into looking for the answer to the problem instead of flying the plane, and not a little bit of training. The Airbus isn’t supposed to stall in normal law, and full aft stick will only result in alpha max AOA.

He also probably never saw a fully developed stall at high altitude in training. The typical profile has the stall occurring at 5-7k feet in faulty benign conditions. Expanded Envelope Training is just now becoming a thing in the states where pilots get to see scenarios like a fully developed stall at altitude. 

Edited April 9, 2019 by Bobby_Batronic

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

32 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

Probably the same reason the Ethiopian crew neglected the thrust levers. Overwhelmed, mind locked into looking for the answer to the problem instead of flying the plane, and not a little bit of training. The Airbus isn’t supposed to stall in normal law, and full aft stick will only result in alpha max AOA.

He also probably never saw a fully developed stall at high altitude in training. The typical profile has the stall occurring at 5-7k feet in faulty benign conditions. Expanded Envelope Training is just now becoming a thing in the states where pilots get to see scenarios like a fully developed stall at altitude. 

Seemed like the article lays some blame on the dual control sticks that cancel each other out, and the everybody is the pilot attitude that seems to be in the French aviation community. Is that way off or close to accurate ?

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

I can’t speak about the French Aviation Community. 

The control stick issue is one that has aural and visual indications of dual input. The aural warnings were likely silenced in favor of more important warnings, but the dual input visual warning is right in front of the pilot’s face. They never saw it. Not having tactile feedback to what the other stick is doing is probably one of the biggest failings of the Airbus design. 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

6 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

I can’t speak about the French Aviation Community. 

The control stick issue is one that has aural and visual indications of dual input. The aural warnings were likely silenced in favor of more important warnings, but the dual input visual warning is right in front of the pilot’s face. They never saw it. Not having tactile feedback to what the other stick is doing is probably one of the biggest failings of the Airbus design. 

They talked about the stick's control being cut when the other pilot would counter a move by the guy sitting next to him.

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

The inputs from the two sticks are summed and sent to the flight controls from the computers. One stick full back plus one stick full forward equals no control input. 

[DaysOff 7971]

And people laugh at MCAS.

[phdhorn 6224]

On 4/7/2019 at 7:49 AM, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

Swiss cheese model, ya'll. Line up enough holes and you have an accident. Seems to me that Boeing put up a slice of cheese with the engineering design that had extra holes in it, and offered as an option a slice of cheese with extra holes in it for a reduced cost, but then the airlines put up a slice of cheese full of holes because they were too cheap to hire competent pilots. While there's no such thing as a slice of cheese with no holes in this model, pretty much everybody putting up slices of cheese deserves some blame for not doing anything to reduce the number of holes.

In other words...

 

[Homercles 10206]

Probably the same reason the Ethiopian crew neglected the thrust levers. Overwhelmed, mind locked into looking for the answer to the problem instead of flying the plane, and not a little bit of training. The Airbus isn’t supposed to stall in normal law, and full aft stick will only result in alpha max AOA.
He also probably never saw a fully developed stall at high altitude in training. The typical profile has the stall occurring at 5-7k feet in faulty benign conditions. Expanded Envelope Training is just now becoming a thing in the states where pilots get to see scenarios like a fully developed stall at altitude. 

Reading the CVR translations, Bonin was itching to climb the whole second half of cruise...which was really odd. He seemed obsessed with getting above the cloud layer or turbulence or whatever his mind was locked on. Believe the captain override him a couple times...he even suggested a non standard 36k heading east when they were assigned 35k.

I understand that the whole crew was overwhelmed and cannot imagine what that flight deck sounded like with constant wailing alarms...point being, if I recall correctly, Bonin was fixated on climbing even before their pitots froze over.

Those Goodrich pitots were set to be replaced by Thales as they were prone to freeze, the pilots had no high altitude stall recovery training, Bonin was obsessed with climbing, the other FO wasn’t understanding dual input was in play, due to erroneous data the stall warnings cutout at high AoA and came back on when pitched downwards, the captain ‘lucked’ into a horrible time to rest, etc. as stated above, accidents are the result of a lot of holes lining up, plugging any of them would have saved 447 and thus the same with the MAX.

Boeing will recover and aviation will be better for it, at the expense of too many lost lives.

[Pato del Muerto 52584]

Have you not been in a simulator with multiple audible alarms going off?  What’s the point of having a thousand indicators, switches, and levers if you can’t use them under high stress situations?

[Your Mom 4850]

  I’m not sure exactly what you mean by that but generally the first thing you do is silence the alarms and punch the flashing lights to get rid of the distraction. 

 But people freeze up and it’s really common.  We used to call over-speeding the airplane “Saying hi to Steve” because of one notorious guy in the sim who was so overwhelmed  during some unusual attitude recovery that he never silenced the “High Speed!” aural warning even after he uprighted the airplane.   It was barking “High Speed, high speed”  the whole time and when he finished he finally looked up and said “Who the fuck is Steve?” 

 It’s just really easy to get tunnel vision and to be ultra focused on the one single task that you think is most important while completely ignoring everything around it.  

 I think the flying public is generally under the assumption that we’re up there furiously throwing switches and barking out dramatic commands to solve problems.   The truth is that you’re almost always better off calling back to order a cup of coffee and then sipping on that coffee while you calmly discuss the emergency at hand and decide together which checklist to run.   Now that may be some hyperbole but there is a big effort in the industry to just have pilots slow the fuck down and not feel like they have to rush into every action.  

There are a couple hundred different abnormal/emergency situations that require a procedure to rectify in a 737. Of all those, only 4 have memory items that must be accomplished quickly before opening the book  (only 3 in the MAX).  And only a very small number of flight situations that require immediate response (stall, windshear escape, ground proximity, etc..).   But even those items are often fucked up by rushing and not just being calm, smooth, and deliberate.  Being calm in the face of a bunch of bells, horns, and flashing lights is harder than it sounds.  

Edited April 9, 2019 by Your Mom

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

1 hour ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Have you not been in a simulator with multiple audible alarms going off?  What’s the point of having a thousand indicators, switches, and levers if you can’t use them under high stress situations?

Those warnings are prioritized. Warnings before Cautions before Advisories. A Warning takes precedence and it’s aural alarm will supersede a Caution, and the the annunciation on the ECAM/EICAS or whatever it’s called in the airplane will prioritize them that way too. 

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

1 hour ago, Homercles said:

 

Reading the CVR translations, Bonin was itching to climb the whole second half of cruise...which was really odd. He seemed obsessed with getting above the cloud layer or turbulence or whatever his mind was locked on. Believe the captain override him a couple times...he even suggested a non standard 36k heading east when they were assigned 35k.

I understand that the whole crew was overwhelmed and cannot imagine what that flight deck sounded like with constant wailing alarms...point being, if I recall correctly, Bonin was fixated on climbing even before their pitots froze over.

Those Goodrich pitots were set to be replaced by Thales as they were prone to freeze, the pilots had no high altitude stall recovery training, Bonin was obsessed with climbing, the other FO wasn’t understanding dual input was in play, due to erroneous data the stall warnings cutout at high AoA and came back on when pitched downwards, the captain ‘lucked’ into a horrible time to rest, etc. as stated above, accidents are the result of a lot of holes lining up, plugging any of them would have saved 447 and thus the same with the MAX.

Boeing will recover and aviation will be better for it, at the expense of too many lost lives.

 

Total conjecture, but most Europeans don’t have a lot of experience with convective weather. This may have been his concern.  

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

11 minutes ago, Your Mom said:

  I’m not sure exactly what you mean by that but generally the first thing you do is silence the alarms and punch the flashing lights to get rid of the distraction. 

 But people freeze up and it’s really common.  We used to call over-speeding the airplane “Saying hi to Steve” because of one notorious guy in the sim who was so overwhelmed  during some unusual attitude recovery that he never silenced the “High Speed!” aural warning even after he uprighted the airplane.   It was barking “High Speed, high speed”  the whole time and when he finished he finally looked up and said “Who the fuck is Steve?” 

 It’s just really easy to get tunnel vision and to be ultra focused on the one single task that you think is most important while completely ignoring everything around it.  

 I think the flying public is generally under the assumption that we’re up there furiously throwing switches and barking out dramatic commands to solve problems.   The truth is that you’re almost always better off calling back to order a cup of coffee and then sipping on that coffee while you calmly discuss the emergency at hand and decide together which checklist to run.   Now that may be some hyperbole but there is a big effort in the industry to just have pilots slow the fuck down and not feel like they have to rush into every action.  

There are a couple hundred different abnormal/emergency situations that require a procedure to rectify in a 737. Of all those, only 4 have memory items that must be accomplished quickly before opening the book  (only 3 in the MAX).  And only a very small number of flight situations that require immediate response (stall, windshear escape, ground proximity, etc..).   But even those items are often fucked up by rushing and not just being calm, smooth, and deliberate.  Being calm in the face of a bunch of bells, horns, and flashing lights is harder than it sounds.  

Wind the clock is as salient now as when it was taught to me in a 152 as is the first priority in the sage axiom...aviate, navigate, communicate. 

Edited April 9, 2019 by Bobby_Batronic

[Wally Fairway 5584]

This shows there won't be a "quick" fix

from the link in the tweet

Quote

I want to take a moment to provide an update on our current plans surrounding the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. As you might know, Southwest removed the MAX from service on March 13, 2019.

Our Teams are working to further increase the Reliability of our schedule and reduce the amount of last-minute flight changes—especially during the upcoming summer travel season. With that in mind, we’ve now modified our schedule through August 5, 2019 to add further stability for Customers booking their summer travel.

While the timing for the return to service of the MAX remains unclear, what is very clear is our commitment to operate a reliable schedule and provide the famous Customer Service you expect from us. Our revised summer schedule allows us to accomplish those objectives. 

The limited number of Customers, who have already booked their travel and will be affected by this amended schedule, are being proactively notified so that we can reaccommodate their flight plans well in advance of their travel date.

While the vast majority of our Customers' itineraries have remained unaffected, flight schedule changes have inconvenienced some of our valued Customers, and, for that, I offer my sincerest apologies. 

Safety has always been our most sacred responsibility to both our Employees and our Customers, and we will continue to remain in full compliance with all FAA directives and any additional requirements necessary to return this aircraft to service.

Again, our goal is to deliver the excellent Customer Service that you’ve come to know and expect from us and we remain steadfastly committed to that. We will continue to keep you informed of any new developments, and we invite you to visit Southwest.com for the latest updates.

Thanks for your patience and understanding during this time, and please know that the entire Southwest Team looks forward to serving you soon.

Tom

 

Edited April 11, 2019 by Wally Fairway

[MrPhlegm 3413]

I am not a pilot but I am retired from 40+ years of working with computer systems including using them operating them designing them and building and programming and testing them.

 

Systems include hardware, software, and the wetware on the other side of the screen.

 

It boggles the mind that Boeing and the FAA and the buyers of the planes allowed a HAL 9000 situation to occur where a computer could kill an aircraft and all aboard.

 

Designing and building a system to do its core functionality is easy. Having it work when everything is nominal is easy.

 

It is the idoit proofing that is hard. You have to do idoit proofing for the hardware, software, and wetware so that when the hardware fails and it WILL, or the software experiences a state you have not planned for, or the wetware does something stupid or forgets something and they WILL even highly trained wetware like pilots WILL fuck up, that the system does not kill itself and its users.

 

You have to have diabolical motherfuckers thinking up failure scenarios and beating on the system in an attempt to break it.

 

What happens when I do this stupid thing does it kill the system? What happens when I do that does it kill the system? What happens when I do both at the same time does it kill the system? What happens when this hardware fails does it kill the system. Etc. Etc. Etc. Ad infinitum.

 

These diabolical motherfuckers should be on the team that builds the system, they should be on the oversight team both within and outside the system with regulatory oversight. They should be on the customer's team that is buying or using the system.

 

In the case of these crashes all of these actors have blood on their hands. The designers, the programmers, the engineers, the testers, the customers, the bean counters and risk assesors and all the management have blood on their hands. About the only ones without blood on their hands are the pilots of the planes that crashed that were presented a Kobayashi Maru situation where unless they reacted perfectly the system was going to kill them and their charges in back.

 

I blame a lot of this on the newfangled system building protocols where different parts of the system are built by separate teams who have no fucking clue what other teams are doing and then the mishmashed parts are kludged together, "tested" and the "finished" system is blessed by a management moron who has no fucking idea how anything actually works and pushed out the door.

 

 

Everyone along the way has the DUTY to speak up if a fatal defect is detected. And scream bloody murder if ignored.

 

Never say it won't ever happen. Because if it can happen it WILL happen. And when it DOES happen it should not cause a catastrophe.

 

When someone or something says hold my beer, it shouldn't kill everbody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[XYZ 2154]

You forgot to post a bunch of pictures of aggy squeezing their balls, etc.

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

The fact that previous crews successfully diagnosed the problem and landed safely means it’s not the “no win scenario”. 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

6 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

The fact that previous crews successfully diagnosed the problem and landed safely means it’s not the “no win scenario”. 

Well let's put it this way. Crews have to over ride a defect in a planes computer operating system that if not handled correctly kills people pretty much 100% of the time.  This argument has gotten stale. Boeing fucked up royally , and needs a huge penally to remind then to never do it again.

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

2 hours ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Well let's put it this way. Crews have to over ride a defect in a planes computer operating system that if not handled correctly kills people pretty much 100% of the time.  This argument has gotten stale. Boeing fucked up royally , and needs a huge penally to remind then to never do it again.

The inability to realize both statements are true is really something. 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

5 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

The inability to realize both statements are true is really something. 

It's an interesting topic.  I'm not a pilot or an aviation engineer.  They knew it was wrong, and tried to charge for an added feature to over ride the systems design glitch.  

I'm not sure what inability I have about the veracity of both statements 'splain it to me in Engrish prease.

[Pato del Muerto 52584]

Boeing executives:  we’ve placed a code in the software to randomly shut off all engines.  It might never happen, but if it does, here’s a rundown sheet of the 24 steps that must be followed exactly in order to turn them back on.

with our deluxe package, only 15 million more, we go ahead and disable that software command.

what’ll it be?

 

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

36 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

It's an interesting topic.  I'm not a pilot or an aviation engineer.  They knew it was wrong, and tried to charge for an added feature to over ride the systems design glitch.  

I'm not sure what inability I have about the veracity of both statements 'splain it to me in Engrish prease.

There’s lots of things that will kill people if handled incorrectly in an airplane. The Lion Air Crew literally quit trimming the plane until they couldn’t handle it once control was exchanged and they died. The Ethiopian crew initially reacted correctly before doing much of the rest of it wrong. Boeing and friends led them down the primrose path and are going to feel a lot of pain from this episode, but it wasn’t a no win scenario, and some pretty basic airmanship likely saves a bunch of lives. 

The Ethiopian crew in particular had some distractions going on in the form of the stick shaker, but flying the airplane saves the day. Folks can’t wrap their head around that because they still don’t fundamentally understand what is meant by stick the nose somewhere, trimming the force off of it and putting the power at a setting for a desired speed.  And those three things worked just fine in both accidents until the failure to do those things led to an uncontrollable situation.  Literally everyone failed at their juncture of the error chain.   

 

[Wally Fairway 5584]

21 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

There’s lots of things that will kill people if handled incorrectly in an airplane. The Lion Air Crew literally quit trimming the plane until they couldn’t handle it once control was exchanged and they died. The Ethiopian crew initially reacted correctly before doing much of the rest of it wrong. Boeing and friends led them down the primrose path and are going to feel a lot of pain from this episode, but it wasn’t a no win scenario, and some pretty basic airmanship likely saves a bunch of lives. 

The Ethiopian crew in particular had some distractions going on in the form of the stick shaker, but flying the airplane saves the day. Folks can’t wrap their head around that because they still don’t fundamentally understand what is meant by stick the nose somewhere, trimming the force off of it and putting the power at a setting for a desired speed.  And those three things worked just fine in both accidents until the failure to do those things led to an uncontrollable situation.  Literally everyone failed at their juncture of the error chain.   

 

maybe if there was adequate (I hate that word), or superior training, training on more that ipads; and detailed user manual that explained how the system worked (which they didn't do, because they didn't even inform buyers that MCAS was a new software system).
Maybe the training shouldn't be structured for the best of the best of the best, or even the average but for all pilots - even those on budget airlines, who Boeing is happy to sell the stripped down version of their shiny new toy (the one without the rich corinthian leather - and error indicators)

Maybe these accidents were different enough from others that these average, or below average pilots didn't have the training or equipment to save the plane from HAL; HAL who was not operating as designed.
 I have just one more question before I call Airman O'Malley and Airman Rodriguez. If you gave an order that Santiago wasn't to be touched, and your orders are always followed, then why would Santiago be in danger? Why would it be necesary to transfer him off the base?
Or to put it another way - if there was no danger with MCAS, why was Boeing (secretly) working on an update after the Lion air crash? And why are all those shiny new planes sitting around waiting for an update that won't crash the planes moments after take-off.