On 9/19/2019 at 2:44 PM, honanhal said:

Great new piece here: https://newrepublic.com/amp/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution?utm_content=buffer74268&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&__twitter_impression=true

That's a really strong piece of analysis - a little weak on the aviation side (e.g. she compares the MAX design changes to the original design instead of the NG series, which makes them seem more drastic) but she's an excellent business reporter, and she's really insightful about the specific ways in which the Boeing culture went south.

There's another very long MAX piece out this week that's sort of a complementary opposite - it's very much in the "blame the pilots" camp (and too kind to Boeing) but not in a simplistic way.  Langewiesche knows aviation (as he should - he father was Wolfgang Langewiesche, who wrote Stick and Rudder), and his focus here is on the pilot training and safety culture, or lack of same, at Lion Air and Ethiopian.  It's not about "underdeveloped countries" or anything to do with ethnicity - rather, it's about what happens when low-cost airlines start up and operate in largely unregulated markets.  So the focus is really on another kind of business failure, in this case the airlines rather than the manufacturer.

His reporting is the result of the time he spent in the region developing another long article, this one about MH370.

He does have his biases - he's strongly pro-Airbus (something that goes back to his book about the Miracle on the Hudson), and believes that most pilots are average or below, and that the answer is strong computer protections, not "pilot-centric" airplanes.  In fairness he backtracks a little bit from that here, in talking about the failure of airmanship and the way that Airbus, too, contributed to the decline while trying to solve the problem.

The two articles should really be read together, for a comprehensive take on what we know about the MAX and the two crashes, at least to date.

20 hours ago, Alan_A said:

The two articles should really be read together, for a comprehensive take on what we know about the MAX and the two crashes, at least to date.

Absolutely — as strange as it seems at first blush (ie that the first piece is scathing about Boeing’s decisions while the second arguably goes too easy on them) they really are complementary to each other about the bigger picture.

James

On 9/21/2019 at 10:59 AM, Alan_A said:

That's a really strong piece of analysis - a little weak on the aviation side (e.g. she compares the MAX design changes to the original design instead of the NG series, which makes them seem more drastic) but she's an excellent business reporter, and she's really insightful about the specific ways in which the Boeing culture went south.

Well... I have to admit that I didn't make it through the article.  The author's ignorance on aviation (and dismissive over-simplification of MCAS and the issues surrounding it) put me off so badly at the start that I assumed the article simply wasn't worth reading.  It starts off more as a hit piece than a qualified analysis.  I assume from comments here that it got better, but...

Scott

...one way to find out would be to read it.

I approached it without any preconceptions and found it to be extremely interesting.

Assumption very rarely do more than impose the person's opinion onto a situation and

very often with a less than good outcome.

 

24 minutes ago, Reader said:

..one way to find out would be to read it.

I approached it without any preconceptions and found it to be extremely interesting.

Assumption very rarely do more than impose the person's opinion onto a situation and

very often with a less than good outcome.

Well, good for you, but I also went in to my reading with no assumptions about the article whatsoever, and just for the record I'm anything but a Boeing apologist.  They screwed up on the MAX - big time.

It was the author's tone and my take that either the author a) didn't understand much about aviation, or b) understood the underlying issues but was going to intentionally present the topic of MCAS in as derogatory and simplistic a fashion as possible to push a preconceived agenda that stopped me a few paragraphs in.  It simply began with the characteristics of an ill-informed hit piece and not worth my time to continue.

I respect the opinions of those who continued, but honestly I couldn't get that far.

Scott

4 hours ago, tttocs said:

I assume from comments here that it got better, but...

Well, as noted, she's not an aviation writer and those points were weak.  But, unlike Langewiesche, she's a very accomplished business reporter.  So as an account of what happened inside Boeing's management - the dominance of shareholder interests, the focus on RONA (return on net assets) as the be-all-and-end-all performance metric, and the contempt in which the finance people hold anyone with specific engineering knowledge ("don't fall in love with the box"), it's authoritative.  And those elements are completely missing from Langewiesche's article - so while he's much better on what happened on the flight deck, and in the airline training systems, he's weak on the corporate side.  Case in point - he says that Boeing never explained why the MCAS was slaved to a single sensor, as opposed to reconciling the data from both sensors.  She accounts for it. 

So, if you're able to power through the missing/off-target aviation details, you get an account that fills in a lot of important information that Langewiesche doesn't cover. To me, it was worth the effort.  YMMV, of course...

On 8/18/2019 at 10:51 AM, AviatorMan said:

From an article in today's London Sunday Times:

The Sunday Times reports that thousands of tickets are still being sold for flights on Boeing planes that remain grounded following two accidents in which 346 people died.

It says a number of airlines, including American, Norwegian and TUI, have scheduled more than 32,000 departures on the 737 Max jets later this year.

One British tourist says he felt like "a guinea pig" when he found out he would be travelling to the Caribbean on one of the planes, despite being given assurances to the contrary when he booked the flight. He then asked for a refund but was refused one.

Do you realised how hard scheduing is?? 

It's done months and years in advanced to be able to keep your 'historical slots'  which, when you get them you have to specify what aircraft you are using as some airports charge per the max take off weight. 

The clueless journo from the times obviously has never worked in scheduling, let alone been to the iata slot conference to find out how it works  a few months ago in Cape Town before writing his piece. 

Edited September 25, 20196 yr by fluffyflops

Do I detect a maneuvering pattern deployment here? Wasn't advertised the upgrading from early models to the B737 Max as a simple one hour Ipod refresher?

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/faa-urges-icao-to-address-erosion-of-manual-piloti-461057/

The 'old blame the user' maybe??? Naaaah! Can't be, right?

Cheers,  

Interesting,

http://www.sullysullenberger.com/my-letter-to-the-editor-of-new-york-times-magazine/

Cheers,

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/text-messages-show-boeing-employees-knew-in-2016-of-problems-that-turned-deadly-on-the-737-max/2019/10/18/8578c990-f1ca-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html

19 minutes ago, honanhal said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/text-messages-show-boeing-employees-knew-in-2016-of-problems-that-turned-deadly-on-the-737-max/2019/10/18/8578c990-f1ca-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html

Looks like they never bothered to make changes and basically released a work in progress software. Goes to show again what a massive screw up this whole thing is.

7 minutes ago, threegreen said:

Looks like they never bothered to make changes and basically released a work in progress software. Goes to show again what a massive screw up this whole thing is.

Sounds like FS without the tragic consequences.

10 minutes ago, Adrian123 said:

Sounds like FS without the tragic consequences.

That's actually shockingly true...

Another thing I recently came to think about: The differences between MCAS that crashed the two planes and the new, updated MCAS (which to a large extent is the initial MCAS version AFAIK). The new version has so much less authority, specifically because it only engages once instead of resetting and engaging again and that it applies significantly less stab trim. If this is actually enough to reliably help save the plane, one has to wonder what on earth made them think it was necessary to turn it into such an aggressive death trap.

Real FDR data playback of flight ET302 with X-plane.  First 2 minutes for now. Based on the real FDR data released in the preliminary report.  

(So not me flying by hand, this is real data playback)