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Corperate greed & the 737 max, read this

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SparkyFX:

--- Quote from: coppercone2 on October 17, 2020, 08:33:14 am ---Then they complain because they setup their business logistics in some inefficient and crazy way and claim its not profitable and impossible to do any better and bitch to the government then try to strong arm global travel and national economies.
--- End quote ---
What you described there is a way for clueless/very inexperienced people to stay in control of things. Or as they say: Never argue with idiots, they pull you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Any group of people that work on a project kind of need some list of priorities to follow to not whir off, but handing out priorities that are outside of an individuals control or get them in conflict with a real-world priority is just a dumb way to hand down responsibility. In the ideal case those real-world priorities would be included and conflicts sorted out by management long before they even reach one's desk or should go upstream once they are discovered.

I've seen both...

pwlps:
I have read the report but couldn't get any answer to a basic question I was asking myself from the beginning: why MCAS was not designed to disengage on AOA disagree. I don't see any way such a basic security lock could interfere with the certification process especially as both the MCAS and AOA disagree alert were hidden anyway.  This remains a mystery for me, I can hardly believe it's just a simple omission. I guess it was rather because the whole MCAS development process was covered with such a heavy veil of secrecy that nobody would know what others were doing about it.

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: pwlps on October 18, 2020, 12:28:50 pm ---I have read the report but couldn't get any answer to a basic question I was asking myself from the beginning: why MCAS was not designed to disengage on AOA disagree. I don't see any way such a basic security lock could interfere with the certification process especially as both the MCAS and AOA disagree alert were hidden anyway.  This remains a mystery for me, I can hardly believe it's just a simple omission. I guess it was rather because the whole MCAS development process was covered with such a heavy veil of secrecy that nobody would know what others were doing about it.

--- End quote ---

I think we discussed this point on EEVBlog almost right from the start (don't remember the thread.)
AFAIR, there were already strong pro and con arguments, already among just engineers on this forum. I was one to agree with your point, but certainly not everyone did.

Seeing how there were a significant number of engineers seemingly *against* the idea of disengaging the MCAS in such an event, I'm also pretty sure this wasn't mere omission, and tend to think this was part of the spec. The whole "we don't really want people to know/notice about MCAS" was probably a big part of it, but there may have been other reasons. Maybe they were pretty sure (again as some people even on here seemed to be) that NOT disengaging it was the best approach in terms of the risks involved. Maybe, or most likely, they were also largely underestimating the potential consequences.

Another maybe: IIRC, there was actually a way of disengaging the MCAS manually that would be similar to disengaging auto-trimming (correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe the people in charge of the specs thought that was good enough in case something went wrong, and again maybe they assumed this would actually be part of the pilots training - whereas Boeing's upper management decided to make this feature largely hidden and there was (AFAIK at least) absolutely no significant training or even basic information on how the MCAS worked and what to do in case there would be a failure.

It's just maybe's and I'm just making hypotheses here from what I gathered. The fact the report doesn't answer any of this is concerning.

SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: pwlps on October 18, 2020, 12:28:50 pm ---I have read the report but couldn't get any answer to a basic question I was asking myself from the beginning: why MCAS was not designed to disengage on AOA disagree. I don't see any way such a basic security lock could interfere with the certification process especially as both the MCAS and AOA disagree alert were hidden anyway.  This remains a mystery for me, I can hardly believe it's just a simple omission. I guess it was rather because the whole MCAS development process was covered with such a heavy veil of secrecy that nobody would know what others were doing about it.

--- End quote ---

"They" are not going to want to reveal to the world that all of the loss of life and money could have been very simply prevented if "they" hadn't been sleeping at the switch.

SparkyFX:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 18, 2020, 04:25:16 pm ---there was (AFAIK at least) absolutely no significant training or even basic information on how the MCAS worked and what to do in case there would be a failure.
--- End quote ---
Their set goal was to not have to retrain the flight crews for a new model/an upgraded model and provide the same user interface although the new model requires an additional system to fly.

That's the fundamental problem no one can work around. Runs down to the definition of what is a "new model" and what is an "upgraded model", i guess the FAA and other regulatory bodies like EASA did not cover themselves in honor with that one.

Does anyone know how the feedback from pilots to manufacturer/aviation administration looks like? I wonder which priority reports of previous malfunctions had where and how they are supposed to be distributed, if at all. I reckon that any aviation administration tries to distinct between recommendation and prohibition and might not try to mess with "maybe", but having even a hint of information at the right time would have saved lives.

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