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Breaking news: Ethiopian Airlines flight has crashed on way to Nairobi

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  • Evan
    replied
    Best possible outcome: a top-down purge of Boeing management, a mea culpa admission that Boeing had lost its primary mission while pursuing wealth building strategies, a commitment to always allow engineering concerns to reach the highest levels of the company, a divorce from the FAA (they can remain friends, but without privileges) and the announcement of a B737 replacement that will leverage the best technologies of the day and re-establish Boeing as an innovation leader in aerospace and a trusted household name.

    The outcome I expect: a patched-up B737-MAX that will be as safe as the NG (marketed mainly for fleet commonality), upper management survival and a continued focus on short-term financial goals over longer-term investments in engineering while other airframers take the lead on short-to-medium-haul innovation. I expect even the Chinese to soon have an indigenous single-aisle in service that will make the MAX seem downright antique.

    Meanwhile, there are rumors that the 797 might be a 757/767 widebody replacement. So the bellcrankity 737 might become the domestic workhorse for yet another generation.

    Leave a comment:


  • Evan
    replied
    Originally posted by Gabriel View Post
    I don't get it. What's the difference between that and a fully automated system?

    A system where the last line of defense is the human but that you can never can allow to come to that because then they will need to revert to procedures that they are unlikely to perform successfully???
    What's that?
    That's the future, if we don't prevent these industries from going there.

    And I fully agree with that. But a lot of other non-acceptable things done (or not done) by a lot of other entities were bound to to happen, and these accidents were bound to materialize.
    (Fixed.)

    Yes, everything you say is true. Bad pilots. Bad maintenance. Bad management. Bad civil aviation authority. Bad safety culture. Welcome to the underdeveloped world.

    Was Boeing aware of this when it sold Lion Air all those airplanes that depended so heavily on pilots being exceptional under pressure and bewilderment? Yes. Boeing knew this.

    Again, nothing of that removes a gram of blame from Boeing. But we need to apportion blame to where it belongs, and Boeing is not the only place.
    We have to focus blame where the chain of events began and, more importantly, where it will make a difference. Indonesia isn't going to miraculously purge their aviation industry of lassitude, incompetence and corruption. Boeing, however, could purge their executive management tomorrow.

    We need to identify every aspect and apportion blame to each one, but the stateside focus must remain on Boeing, while allowing them about as much wiggle room as a 737-MAX lavatory.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gabriel
    replied
    Originally posted by Evan View Post
    You're talking about practiced airmanship. They won't have it. So that's the reality. That's why they have to be the last line of defense. That's why it can never come to that. If it does, they must have procedures to follow, and a great deal of luck.
    I don't get it. What's the difference between that and a fully automated system?

    A system where the last line of defense is the human but that you can never can allow to come to that because then they will need to revert to procedures that they are unlikely to perform successfully???
    What's that?

    That's not acceptable as the sole form of redundancy. Boeing knew this.
    And I fully agree with that. But a lot of other non-acceptable things done (or not done) by a lot of other entities needed to happen for these accidents to materialize.

    Lion Air's response to the previous occurrence is ridiculous. The pilot not reporting what happened anywhere close to the full extent (in particular no mentioning the trim moving my itself, the stickshaker active all the time, or that they used the trim cutout switches). The maintenance that did nothing, or worse, just did something to be able to say "we did something, plane cleared".

    And the response from the Ethiopian pilots is hard to understand too. One would think that they would know what to expect and how to react to this after the lessons learned from Lion Air. And I never understood why they reconnected the trim cutout switches to be able to use the electric trim but then didn't use it, but the article gave an hypothesis of that. What if they did it just to try to connect the autopilot? It would not be the first case where the pilots react to a an upset by trying to connect the AP and have it save them.

    Again, nothing of that removes a gram of blame from Boeing. But we need to apportion blame to where it belongs, and Boeing is not the only place.

    Leave a comment:


  • Evan
    replied
    Originally posted by Gabriel View Post
    Depending on what you mean with that, that doesn't work. Having someone doing only easy tasks while the automation takes most of the workload and suddenly expect that person to take over and do what he never does when the automation says "that's it, good bye" is naive.
    You're talking about practiced airmanship. They won't have it. So that's the reality. That's why they have to be the last line of defense. That's why it can never come to that. If it does, they must have procedures to follow, and a great deal of luck.

    The marginal pilots of the current era should still have marginal airmanship. So they can possibly be trained and counted on to fly out of upsets that are not bewildering. Like trim runaway. But not this MCAS scenario. No way.

    Maybe they could. Maybe they couldn't. That's not acceptable as the sole form of redundancy. Boeing knew this.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gabriel
    replied
    Originally posted by Evan View Post
    Soon, if industry has its way, we will have flying taxis. They will either be piloted or automonous. If piloted, they will have to be designed with the pilot as the final line of defense rather than the first.
    Depending on what you mean with that, that doesn't work. Having someone doing only easy tasks while the automation takes most of the workload and suddenly expect that person to take over and do what he never does when the automation says "that's it, good bye" is naive.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gabriel
    replied
    Originally posted by LH-B744 View Post
    But is a 29 year old Flight Captain rather prone to .. let's say bad decisions which are outside his influence, than let's say with 39?
    No. Age and experience is a double-edged sword. You have EXCELLENT youngster pilots and TERRIBLE highly experienced ones.

    Leave a comment:


  • Evan
    replied
    Soon, if industry has its way, we will have flying taxis. They will either be piloted or automonous. If piloted, they will have to be designed with the pilot as the final line of defense rather than the first, and with ample systems redundancy to ensure it never gets that far. This is because the industry will demand such a large number of 'pilots' (at gig economy wages) that vetting them, training them, checkriding them and recurrently training them would, if even possible on this scale, sink their business model. The problem is in the numbers.

    The same issue on a lesser scale and to a lesser degree already exists in the low cost airline industry. Therefore, airframers must also design their airframes with the pilot as the final line of defense rather than the first, and with ample systems redundancy to ensure it never gets that far. This is not the age of aviation that BoeingBobby grew up in, where safely flying the DC-3 depended entirely on the pilot's skills and judgement. Nor it is the age of pre-deregulation or the age of free snacks and dignity. This is the race-to-the-bottom age. This is the expand-into-developing-world-markets age. This is the age of, as one young woman put it last week, fairy tales about endless industrial growth. Pilot quality obviously cannot keep pace with this expansion. So, obviously, we must either curtail this growth or produce aircraft that require lower (but still adequate) pilot expectations, ideally both.

    Airbus recognized this in the 1980's. Of course, so did Boeing. But, while Airbus took steps to somewhat address it, Boeing clung to an anachronistic philosophy, essentially handing off the responsibility for pilot error and system failures almost entirely to the operators and their pilots. Both need to go further if industry intends to remain in their current business model. More protections must be introduced (we've discussed a few potentially viable ones on this forum). The reality is a remarkable rise in systems reliability and a troubling decline in average pilot quality. Where we place our trust must be determined with that reality in mind.

    But one thing is clearly obvious: Boeing cannot design a 21st century airliner that entirely depends on a crew to sort out and safely contain the failure scenario seen in these two crashes. Not in this age. Not in this market. Boeing knew this. Boeing knew this.

    Leave a comment:


  • LH-B744
    replied
    Now, I've learned that the Flight Captain of ET # 302 was 29 years old when he died.

    As Evan said, passage airlines will always be prone to human-ness. And as Habsheim shows, even 44 years in life do not protect us from a fatal mistake.

    But is a 29 year old Flight Captain rather prone to .. let's say bad decisions which are outside his influence, than let's say with 39?

    We'll never know. He died in March 2019. Born 1990? Damn, so young.

    --

    PS: One last thought for this Friday Morning. If I had been killed in a car or in an aircraft at the age 29, I would've never become a jetphotos forum member!
    I was 30.8 years old, almost 31, when I joined this forum.
    ...
    Last edited by LH-B744; 2019-09-27, 05:59. Reason: Incredibile. How time flies, for the living.

    Leave a comment:


  • LH-B744
    replied
    Originally posted by Evan View Post
    Or a philosophy of convenience. What if the dominant sensor fails? Eh, the pilots will take care of it... they'll sort it out...

    Boeing had a good ride with that. Sure they killed some people here and there, like at Schiphol with a similar lack of redundancy issue, but nobody seemed to see past the pilot error, which was conveniently written off as bad piloting. But it was bound to end badly. Pilots do suffer from human-ness. You can't put them in a flying blender of shit and expect them to reliably sort it out. And now it seems that Boeing has finally reached that conclusion.

    Who needs vision when you have tragedy to show you the way.
    Still IATA-Code ET # 302.

    After more than six months we have reached the stadium of philosophy. And I can fully understand that. Aviation is not free of philosophy if you ask me.
    Do you sometimes feel that F/Os and Flight Captains in everyday passenger aviation are used to determine if a totally altered a/c version still is safe?

    I don't know if that's true for the Boeing 737 Max-8 which we are talking about here. But I'm old enough to say where this philosophy already totally failed.

    Habsheim, 1988.

    Again, a totally new type of aircraft. Again 'tested' with 130 passengers on board (!). And again, it ended in a disaster.

    Has someone learned during the last 31 years?

    PS: I can say what I've learned from Habsheim. I only watched it on TV, Thank God I was not there. A flight is only good with enough time for preparation. And The French BEA (Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile - there must be a reason why there is this abbreviation) by then found out that the Flight Captain was not really well prepared for Habsheim.

    But why on Earth he didn't take his time to learn everything about Habsheim, a tiny airstrip which he never in his life visited before, that's a question which he probably is not even able to answer today. By then he was 44 years old. Is there somebody who can bring a 44 year old Flight Captain in a hurry? Someone like the CEO of an airline?

    I know a German airline where the difference between an Aviation enthusiast and the CEO is only 12 years. So, almost impossible that this CEO would make useless pressure. Plus he is an experienced A320 Flight Captain..
    Last edited by LH-B744; 2019-09-27, 05:01. Reason: Preparation is everything. Not for nothing there is a simulator called 'prepar3d'.

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  • Evan
    replied
    Originally posted by TeeVee View Post
    or, human-ness
    Or a philosophy of convenience. What if the dominant sensor fails? Eh, the pilots will take care of it... they'll sort it out...

    Boeing had a good ride with that. Sure they killed some people here and there, like at Schiphol with a similar lack of redundancy issue, but nobody seemed to see past the pilot error, which was conveniently written off as bad piloting. But it was bound to end badly. Pilots do suffer from human-ness. You can't put them in a flying blender of shit and expect them to reliably sort it out. And now it seems that Boeing has finally reached that conclusion.

    Who needs vision when you have tragedy to show you the way.

    Leave a comment:


  • elaw
    replied
    Originally posted by Evan View Post
    That reveals an enormous lack of vision.
    Which is mind-boggling, because if there's one thing the FAA is known for, it's vision!

    Leave a comment:


  • TeeVee
    replied
    Originally posted by Evan View Post
    That reveals an enormous lack of vision.
    or, human-ness

    Leave a comment:


  • Evan
    replied
    Originally posted by flashcrash View Post
    Indeed. NTSB is now on record saying that the crews in the fatal crashes "did not react in the ways Boeing and the FAA assumed they would".

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49846510
    That reveals an enormous lack of vision.

    Leave a comment:


  • flashcrash
    replied
    Originally posted by Evan View Post
    The pilots cannot be expected to handle a situation until they can understand it.
    Indeed. NTSB is now on record saying that the crews in the fatal crashes "did not react in the ways Boeing and the FAA assumed they would".

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49846510

    Leave a comment:


  • 3WE
    replied
    Originally posted by Gabriel View Post
    Yes, I said that, but then I reminded myself that they had the stick shaker (on one side only) since rotation, after which they climbed for a couple of minutes and retracted the flaps (not something you would do if stall was a concern). Only then the MCAS kicked in and both crews responded by pulling up and nose-up trim. I think they had decided long ago that the sticshaker was a false warning.
    Noted (in a literal sense).

    Leave a comment:

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