Posted on 04/27/2022 12:07:54 PM PDT by algore
Boeing employees mocked federal rules, talked about deceiving regulators and joked about potential flaws in the 737 Max as it was being developed, according to over a hundred pages of internal messages delivered Thursday to congressional investigators.
“I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one of the employees said in messages from 2018, apparently in reference to interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration.
The most damaging messages included conversations among Boeing pilots and other employees about software issues and other problems with flight simulators for the Max, a plane later involved in two accidents, in late 2018 and early 2019, that killed 346 people and threw the company into chaos.
The employees appear to discuss instances in which the company concealed such problems from the F.A.A. during the regulator’s certification of the simulators, which were used in the development of the Max, as well as in training for pilots who had not previously flown a 737.
“Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. “No,” the colleague responded.
In another set of messages, employees questioned the design of the Max and even denigrated their own colleagues. “This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” an employee wrote in an exchange from 2017.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Not taking any relationship advice from him...
The 737 MAX software was written by inexpensive Indian programmers.
Notice he still retained all his wives and concubines.
the magic number is zero, btw
Unless you’re designing a military fighter, where maneuverability trumps everything else, you don’t want to create an aircraft with negative static stability. I’m not sure if the Max design quite qualifies as being statically unstable, but it certainly has a serious stability flaw that was intentionally designed in. That made it a beast that will always need some level of automation beyond the pilot’s skills to tame it. Hopefully, the modified version of MCAS that is now installed can do that without the fatal problems its previous version created.
Boeing thought they could take an airframe designed in the mid 1960’s and make it compete with a brand new design from Airbus. They tried to do it to save time and money. They failed.
They did not have redundant AoA sensors, well they did, but it was an optional extra.
If it had been standard possibly things would be different
I agree with the stability issues being an issue. Not good. Should not be designed that way. However that would not have crashed the plane had the pilot been able to control the trim. It seems all they basically did to fix the problem was to redesign Mcas parameters and to force having two air speed sensors. The computer still cannot be cutout without also cutting out manual electric control. I imagine that problem is on other types of Boeing planes as well.
yup...kind of like putting jets on a biplane frame designed in the 19teens.
I have not and will not fly on that plane as I don’t care how much they see they fixed the programming.
No one in jail except they chased some test pilot around for sometime. I know crap flows down stream, but blaming a test pilot for this fiasco is criminal in itself.
What business they are in is getting their clock cleaned by everyone including that pipsqueak upstart Musk.
Is it Harvard Business school that does this, that keeps teaching people that the way ahead in business is to discount innovation because we keep trying it over and over again. It's like we hate ourselves for having a national talent in inventing new things.
Sure but having planes go down killing 100s is bad for the bottom line! Consider the source!
Like the Animas River project and the Deepwater Horizon project the 737 Max jets were designed and built under the Obama administration’s direction. Obama’s FAA relaxed regulatory oversight of airliner design and construction. Incompetence doesn’t even touch it.
Boeing placed the engines forward of the wings in order to make the plane boardable from the ground in cheap foreign airports. This moved the center of gravity so far forward that heroic “fly by wire” computer programs were needed to keep the Max airborne. Then these knuckleheads only gave the Max one pitch indicator and which is doomed to failure at some point. When that failure happened the computer “fly by wire” program sent the plane into wild gyrations. The pilots could only take control of the Max with a complicated counter-intuitive set of commands which were buried in the massive operations manual.
This dog was a mass murder waiting to happen.
article is datelined Jan. 29, 2020, so naturally you fail to list any date at all so as to make this look like “news” ...
Actually MCAS was even worse. The MAX flies just fine as an airplane. However, because of the engine modifications it flew differently than a older 737. To save the new buyers money on not having to retrain the MCAS was designed to fly just like an older 737.
It’s like a racing organization switching from Porsche to Ferrari cars but not wanting to retrain their drivers so they install software to make the Ferraris drive like Porsches. A stupid idea that should have been obvious.
Technology is never a substitute for good management. (Decision making)
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