Author Topic: Boeing 737 Max again, it would be nice if the windows [door plugs] stayed in!  (Read 127126 times)

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Offline GyroTopic starter

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The final 4 minutes of data is missing from both flight data recorders of the 737-800 in the South Korean air disaster...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjr8dwd1rdno

I wonder what sort of system failure/shortcoming could have caused that. I thought they were fairly autonomous (especially the CVR), or at least had some sort of short term backup capability. It's probably going to seriously hamper the investigation anyway, especially around the deployment of the landing gear.


Edit: Not sure what happened there, I was editing and it re-posted.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2025, 03:02:02 pm by Gyro »
Best Regards, Chris
 

Offline abeyer

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I wonder what sort of system failure/shortcoming could have caused that. I thought they were fairly autonomous (especially the CVR), or at least had some sort of short term backup capability. It's probably going to seriously hamper the investigation anyway, especially around the deployment of the landing gear.

My understanding is that there is a requirement for autonomous power backup on the recorders in new designs, but the 737 predates that so it's not required. The 737 does have a system wide battery backup, which can be switched in to power systems, but apparently that failed to happen for some reason.
 

Offline floobydust

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"Under US regulations (14 CFR 121.359), aircraft manufactured on or after April 7, 2010 require a CVR with an independent power source, known as a Recorder Independent Power Supply, or RIPS. The RIPS must provide 10 ±1 minutes of electrical power to operate both the cockpit voice recorder and cockpit-mounted area microphone. The requirement is not applicable to aircraft manufactured before April 7, 2010. My understanding is the accident aircraft was manufactured in 2009." source some post

Boeing 737NG Electrical Power Sources very complex.
 

Offline GyroTopic starter

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"Under US regulations (14 CFR 121.359), aircraft manufactured on or after April 7, 2010 require a CVR with an independent power source, known as a Recorder Independent Power Supply, or RIPS. The RIPS must provide 10 ±1 minutes of electrical power to operate both the cockpit voice recorder and cockpit-mounted area microphone. The requirement is not applicable to aircraft manufactured before April 7, 2010. My understanding is the accident aircraft was manufactured in 2009." source some post

Boeing 737NG Electrical Power Sources very complex.

Another case of let's hold off on an obvious feature until it's actually compulsory then.  ::)
Best Regards, Chris
 

Offline floobydust

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Who pays for this (newer CVR with battery backup)? The component, the airplane manufacturer, the airline?

I see the aviation industry drag its feet, as if you want blood from a stone to the point it causes deaths, when there are critical upgrades or faulty product.
AF447 faulty Thales pitot tubes were known to ice up and no flights not cancelled, snails pace slowly being swapped out but... it crashed crashed due to them. Airbus, Air France etc. fully knew about it there was negligence and nobody went to jail. Think of all the money saved.
Swissair SWR111 the flammable ducting was known and again snails pace at swapping that out.

Boeing is notorious for avoiding any recertifications the 737's are full of legacy design. It's a major exploit towards greater profit.
 

Online SiliconWizard

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Boeing is notorious for avoiding any recertifications the 737's are full of legacy design. It's a major exploit towards greater profit.

Yes. Short-term profit, yes. How much has Boeing lost with all this crap in the end?
 

Offline floobydust

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Legendary Boeing engineer John-Hart Smith passed away, a month ago, aged 84. {He was Australian. From that story:}

"In an internal Boeing presentation in 2001, and in essays written with hilariously dry wit and sharp insight, he lampooned America’s corporate business culture of outsourcing, cost-cutting and downsizing.
“I had lived through the destruction of Douglas Aircraft and I saw the same thing about to happen at Boeing,” Hart-Smith explained in a 2019 interview.
"Boeing’s senior nontechnical leaders, champions of the management strategies he mocked, dismissed as naive the views of a top engineer about business matters. They sidelined him within the company."

"He presented www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-outsourcing]essentially an economics paper,[/url] delivered with a trademark deadpan humor. {"Out-sourced Profits - The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting" Boeing Paper MDC 00K0096}
It scathingly critiqued the McDonnell Douglas strategy, now foisted on Boeing, of outsourcing work and divesting core design and manufacturing assets.
He explained in clear, commonsense terms how this would ultimately increase costs, lower profits and jeopardize Boeing’s ability to develop future airplanes."

THIS IS FROM 2001. 24 years later... there will be no course correction with Boeing. We'll all have to realize this myself included.

edit: fixed url
« Last Edit: January 13, 2025, 06:45:40 pm by floobydust »
 
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Offline coppercone2

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I wonder what kind of chain of events would need to happen for a analysis like to get taken seriously by business people.

It sounds like he got "risk matrixed". When the non technical people get a risk matrix its like that scene in the first resident evil movie with the laser trap.  ::)

"based on this unitless abstract graph, and some insane analogies we made up, we have decided to take you as seriously as a drunkard in the mall fountain yelling about batman"
« Last Edit: January 13, 2025, 08:16:17 am by coppercone2 »
 
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Online Ranayna

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I wonder what kind of chain of events would need to happen for a analysis like to get taken seriously by business people.
The responsible people need to go to jail.
Not "rich people jail" (I don't know if these exist in the US, but i wouldn't be surprised), but proper "everyman" jail. Preferrably one where their workforce is used. Like firefighting in California.

But this happens so rarely that it is not a deterrent at all. We know of Elizabeth Holmes, and a couple of Volkswagen managers went to jail in the US. But i can't think of any other high profile cases.
 

Offline floobydust

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They will never take engineers seriously. Business and politics are from a different planet. People from that planet of greed, corruption and stupidity are... in charge of us and our paycheques.

I see Boeing was flat out told by this very highly respected engineer 24 years ago that they were on the wrong path. Proof we have no voice, or it needs to be silenced.
Even when people are killed, the exec's, CEO's can buy their innocence and avoid prosecution.

Normally I wouldn't rehash this but it showed up again with the California fires - incompetent, greedy leadership ruins essential services. A replay of what we are seeing.
Engineers would say "hey you need some water in order to firefight!" but instead massive budget cuts etc. when it's too late now.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Ah, the beauty of hindsight.  If you go back to the beginnings of any major event you will find someone saying that the sky is falling.  Engineers.  Accountants.  Safety Experts.  Human Factors.  Business Gurus.  Time sorts out who was right and who was "wrong"

This engineers concerns were valid, and seem like gospel from today's point of view.

But we can't really know what would have happened if his advice had prevailed.  Maybe the airplanes wouldn't have fallen out of the sky, but it is equally possible that they never would have been built.  Or turned out like the Concorde and Airbus 380.  Engineering marvels that have proven to be economic failures.  Or something else that he didn't predict and I can't think of.

One of the advantages of the western economic system is its ability to discard failed approaches.  Not necessarily quickly.  Or painlessly.  But the evidence suggests that it is on average faster and more painless than the planned economic systems or assigning all power to a king or emperor.   Boeing may get discarded.

 

Online krish2487

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One of the advantages of the western economic system is its ability to discard failed approaches.  Not necessarily quickly.  Or painlessly.  But the evidence suggests that it is on average faster and more painless than the planned economic systems or assigning all power to a king or emperor.   Boeing may get discarded.

Tell that to the families who have lost loved ones on each and everyone of the Boeing failures.. that evidence suggests that their pain is "painless"..
If god made us in his image,
and we are this stupid
then....
 

Online krish2487

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Ah, the beauty of hindsight.  If you go back to the beginnings of any major event you will find someone saying that the sky is falling.  Engineers.  Accountants.  Safety Experts.  Human Factors.  Business Gurus.  Time sorts out who was right and who was "wrong"

This engineers concerns were valid, and seem like gospel from today's point of view.

But it wasnt an unfounded concern or fearmongering was it.. He specifically quoted McDonnell Douglas failure as a case study and saw the same signs happening all over again.. at what point do we start treating empirical data as valid data and not hindsight ?? How many occurrences does it take before we start taking data as valid, actionable data and not an outlier.. or a fluke.. - one event, ten?? a hundred ??? Given the way Boeing is faltering.. my guess is a hundred such events is not far fetched...
« Last Edit: January 14, 2025, 08:59:58 am by krish2487 »
If god made us in his image,
and we are this stupid
then....
 

Offline coppercone2

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so the 737m was released approx 10 years after the guy left, and its been causing all sorts of problems.


It takes 10 years to develop one of these big airplanes.

They started designing after his last day?
 

Offline jfiresto

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... One of the advantages of the western economic system is its ability to discard failed approaches.  Not necessarily quickly.  Or painlessly.  But the evidence suggests that it is on average faster and more painless than the planned economic systems or assigning all power to a king or emperor.   Boeing may get discarded....
If you are referring to the capitalism that was once vibrant in the United States, what you describe has not been true for decades, because of militarization and financialization. Seymour Melman in his book, "Profits without Production" (1983), was one of the pioneers in understanding and explaining the problems.
-John
 
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Offline paulca

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I think in the 2000s most western capitalist democracies are about as capitalist democratic as the Soviet union was communist.

Watching a lot of farming channels on YouTube.  It would seem that full on communism is alive and well and function nearly as intended In Dakota and Idaho in the form of farming cooperatives, networks and community grain elevators et. al.  Collaberating as a community to get a better price for all, rather than competing for the best price between each other.  Communism.  Along with "used to be illegal in capitalism" cooperatives and price fixing.... deadly sins of capitalism!
« Last Edit: January 14, 2025, 10:23:49 am by paulca »
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Offline tom66

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Only 10 minutes of backup power?  That seems quite poor.  It should be possible to have hours-long backup in case a CVR/FDR breaker is incidentally tripped.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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It would seem that full on communism is alive and well and function nearly as intended In Dakota and Idaho in the form of farming cooperatives, networks and community grain elevators et. al.  Collaberating as a community to get a better price for all, rather than competing for the best price between each other.  Communism.
By that logic, stock market (on actual shares of companies, so excluding derivatives) would also be communism.

Co-ops are not communism, because the shareholders own the operation, and can join and exit the co-op.  Neither is allowed in communism: common ownership and distribution of yields to everyone precludes those, and is at the very heart of communism as sketched out by Marx and Engels in 1848.

We could discuss whether co-ops are "socialist", but it turns out that even in communist settings (soviet collectives, early kibbutzim) competition between farms/co-ops/kibbutzim is always desirable for both production and human social reasons.  When examining the classical definition of capitalism, co-operatives follow all key definitions of capitalism, except for one: accumulation of capital.  Personally, I consider that one to be in conflict with the others, although many consider it a key part of capitalism...  unfortunately, I'm not aware of any better word for an economic system that only differs from capitalism by accumulation of capital; if there is one, emphasizing continuous competition and enlightened self-interest, then that is the one co-operatives belong to.  (They're not new, either: most known human hunter-gatherer societies, "bands" or "tribes", can easily be modeled as co-operatives.)

It is very unfortunate that these terms are used imprecisely and incorrectly, rather to evoke emotions, than to exactly describe things.  Many ignore everything but accumulation of capital when thinking about capitalism, and consider anything where individuals or organizations co-operate communism or socialism.  This is utterly wrong.  I think it happens because people are continuously subjected to simplified emotive crap by all over the media, some even knowingly misusing the terms just to foment discord (and thus get clicks and get paid).  Instead of using the terms to precisely describe things, they're now used and understood to emotively label things –– people only disagreeing which one is "good" and which one "bad".  At least us analytical/technical people can do much better.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2025, 02:40:39 pm by Nominal Animal »
 
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Nominal, I agree with your post in general, but will point out that those of us in this forum are not well versed on economic theory.  Just as you couldn't come up with a term to describe the enlightened cooperative economy, most of us literally can't speak quantitatively on this subject.  I know I can't.  It is one of the reasons I used western economics to describe the concept I was straining for.  I didn't want to tie it specifically to the US system.

The language and technical problem is deep and pervasive.  For example - accumulation of capital.  Is it good or bad?  If done solely for ego reasons it is bad (in my opinion).  But necessary to achieve economies of scale in production (often, but not always a good thing).  Even ego built capitol can have good effects, through a change of heart by the accumulator or other effects.  The Carnegie fortune in the US isn't a bad example of this.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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If I sounded negative or scalding to paulca or anyone else, I apologize.  I intended to point out the emotiveness and lack of specificity in the common usage of the terms, leading to flamewars and discussions derailing: to show how useless it is to discuss communism vs capitalism vs any other economic model, simply because most of us do not use the terms precisely enough to make useful discussion possible.  Myself included!  All it does is bring out the emotions.

As discussed in other threads by many, including Dave, we are now in a very polarized world where significant nuances are by default ignored, and everything easily slips into black and white, us and them, pro or con.  I say, we need to avoid such discussions (by avoiding emotive terms), because to learn and to explore, we need to understand, not get the upper hand in some emotion-based battle.  Right?

To tie this firmly back to the original thread, the reasons for the Boeing failure here are practical, not ideological or political.  That is, we can trace the causality chain back to the executives making decisions that could have been made otherwise without board and shareholders objecting.  It is "obvious" now in hindsight that those decisions were wrong, but it really is debatable –– and I mean, worthy of discussing, especially in the context of how engineers and designers can/should effectively pass important information to executives, especially when changing the opinion of the executives is as important as it would have been here (or, say, the O-ring problem in the Challenger shuttle)  –– as such decisions should be examined in the context they were made, based on the information available at that point and not afterwards.

As a related sidetrack, even companies can form co-operatives.  I'm not sure if patent pools qualify, but corporate sponsorship in the form of paid developer time to open source projects do, in my opinion.  Whether a company or organization does that, when relying on the products of such projects, is a similar question to whether Boeing's long-term development plans were correct –– in the "sustainable in the long term, or just maximizing short-term and executive enrichment" sense.

As such, I am very interested in the discussion, but see the use of the economic system labels as tugging it from the factual/objective/opinion-based-on-experience, towards the emotive.

Of course, as usual, I could be utterly wrong here.  But I don't think so.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2025, 05:39:13 pm by Nominal Animal »
 

Offline floobydust

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Ultimately- the negative feedback loop, the correction mechanism is not there. Instead it's a positive feedback loop towards profit.
I credit China for their nationalism - is it good for the people, is it good for the nation? A basic business requirement that the West does not have, despite all the talk. This is a serious problem, if not the problem.
What we worship - is the shareholders. Is it good for Wall Street and my executive bonus? Piss on those engineers, sack them and outsource everything.

A few of the worst performing US stocks in 2024: Boeing -32%, Intel -60%.

We all know the corporate death spiral - mismanaged to the point of failure, even death, losses happening hedge funds having a party. Stock price is a downhill ramp, then borrowing and debt is maxxed out, meanwhile exec's get their bonuses. Accountants make the best CEO's...
But the Company is too important - for military and defense, the number of employees and industry etc.
Here come the taxpayer funded bailouts, the money transfusion. It happened with GM, the financial institutions etc. so it will happen here- Boeing is too important to fail.

But the reasons for the company failing will never be learned or fixed.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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The failure of Boeings management is obvious in the results.  But blaming all on the bean counters isn't right either.  Those folks made one monumentally correct decision in roughly the same era.  At the time that the A380 was being planned both Boeing and Airbus evaluated the market for a super large passenger transport.  I don't remember the exact numbers now but Boeing projected something like 600 aircraft while Airbus projected 2000.   Boeing felt economic breakeven would be around 500 aircraft, and couldn't project a high enough market share and decided not to enter the market. 

In retrospect, Boeings market projection was relatively accurate.  Apparently their estimate of the break even point was about right also, since publicly available data indicates that the A380 program has been a small money earner at best for Airbus.

Saying engineering should rule at Boeing is incorrect.  How to listen to and evaluate all of the disparate voices is the essence of skillful management.  Clearly that skill was lacking at Boeing at the time, but engineers are not noted repositories of that skill either.  I know that from the inside.  I am an engineer.
 

Offline floobydust

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Boeing has proven it doesn't matter who rules, the CEO's background - engineer (Muilenburg) or accountant (Calhoun, Ortberg).
I think a big problem with bean counters is "management by numbers" they are prone to making decisions ignoring the intangibles.
They know nothing of aircraft design or manufacturing - which are the big issues. How does an expert in beans qualify, which clown thinks that is the answer?

The stall is caused by top priority being maximum short-term profit, for decades now. A widely known destructive business practice but it's an awesome party as she burns.
For me, an engineer as well, working in these profit sweatshops makes the profession basically shit. Fighting for safety is extra stress, and they want you held responsible for it all, outsourcing included.

Boeing gave over $1M for Trump's inauguration. That'll secure the champagne lol.
 

Offline tom66

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The other big issue with an organisation like Boeing is these practices get entrenched. If you've risen to, say, Vice President of Door Bolts and Fasteners at Boeing and the mantra has been "cost above all else", it's very hard to shift that mindset.  You might not even be ready to shift to a quality-driven method.  It requires an entirely different approach.  Now multiply this over the thousands of midlevel management and higher level engineers...  Companies can change, but it can take years for that change to happen, and require root and branch reform.
 

Offline paulca

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I was kinda of asking to be put in my place LOL.  Also slightly teasing our US peers.

When I have previously ranted about some economics function or disfunction I have gotten (grammar?) the response, "It's the way it's always been, just deal."

The thing is, the more I actually study economics and history of (and I don't mean to any academic level just hobby interest level), I see that for something that's "always been that way", they sure have been making a lot of changes.

It's like (sorry to poke fun again), but "You cannot change the 4th amendment".  Stop.  Stop and read that carefully.  Now start again.

They keep changing capitalism.  Certainly the US has removed most of the sensible restrictions which were meant to prevent the current situations where "corporate entities" have more power than the state and the state powerless to control them. The state now serves the corporations.  The corporations serve the people, for a fee, with whatever they are told they want.

Without education, a return to respect of intelligence, knowledge and experience, we have no democracy.  If ill informed people are asked to vote on anything, the result will be ... ill informed.

As a politician all you have to do is pick your demographic and tell them what they want to here.  Perfect isn't it?
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