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Comment by sesteel | Hacker News Reader

We're not going to solve this problem in a HN forum. Planes have a ton of hours put on them before a passenger ever steps onboard. This is a heavily regulated industry; and a lot of trust is placed in Boeing and the FAA to only build and certify safe planes. People make mistakes and that is why so many people are involved using best practices in the development of complex systems such as these.

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The FAA burned all the trust and goodwill it gathered in the last 20-30 years -- depending who you ask -- within an extremely short time frame: on March 12 between 7am and 10am Pacific or so. It was pretty impressive. It was crystal clear the EASA is offering a face saving opportuntity to them by using the member states to do airspace bans but not suspending the planes of their respective airlines. Then, a few hours after that, when the FAA decided to continue the wave the "I am with stupid" flag they did the unthinkable and declared the 737 MAX not airworthy contradicting the FAA. This has never happened before. At this point the trust in FAA is gone and it is seen as a political and corporate puppet.

It was reported a day or two ago that Trump had a phone call with the CEO of Boeing, with the result being continued operation. Then, Trump makes the announcement today about the grounding, seemingly to try to take some credit for it.

It’s insane. There must be some despondent folks at the FAA right now. Years of trust squandered.

Is it possible the US have grounded them because Canada banned them in their airspace?

If the FAA didn't cave in immediately from the EASA issuing "do not operate the airplane" then it certainly wouldn't from Transport Canada. These two do not quite carry the same weight, you know? 150M passengers enplaned and deplaned in Canada in 2017 as per https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=231002... and https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... says this number was 1043 million in the EU. According to https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2017-traffic-data-us-airlines-a... even the USA is below that nunber with 965M.

Thank you for a detailed answer.

> There must be some despondent folks at the FAA right now. Years of trust squandered.

Can you imagine the real workers, now some idiot Trump named to be deputy director and currently is the acting FAA director wiped out so much of their work... oh dear.

Even if they had been 100% sure the plane is sound, just to keep the larger status quo they should've acted in accordance with the EASA.

The Space Shuttle had a tonne of hours put on it before we learned of the O-ring problem catastrophically.

Everyone was trying their hardest and did their best, everything was built to spec but there were organisational and communication problems. The message that the dreaded O-rings weren't good for a cold weather launch was not heard or understood. No malice was involved but, when you have a schedule and deadlines with lots of large organisation hubris these things happen.

In only the broadest strokes is the current Boeing situation analogous to the sad fate of the Space Shuttle, however, just because a lot of testing has gone on and just because there is a lot of regulation does not mean that the layman appreciation of the situation is wrong. The layman understanding can be big picture rather than bogged down by intricacy of details.

These calls always seem easy in the aftermath, when you have the benefit of hindsight. In both of these cases, billions of dollars are on the line, but the truth is, there is always some risk. There is, as we've all heard, a greater risk of us dying in our car than any type of air catastrophe. Yet we still drive. How many flights have these planes taken? I can almost guarantee that Boeing did not build this sensor; the sensor has a spec sheet, its operational capability was verified in a laboratory and the FAA approved it. If the problem was not recoverable, they would have grounded the planes after the first accident; it appeared to be a training issue. Anyway, we can only make decisions with the information we have; it was the satellite data that suggested there was a link. It was then that the direction was clear and the call was made; this system is too dangerous as it is.

Making decisions based on fear is a fools errand. It is how you spend trillions of dollars waging wars combating terrorism when the risk of a terror related death is the US is lower than getting struck by lightening.

But the choice here is not "fly or drive", the choice here is "fly 737 MAX or fly another plane". I expect very few fliers have the budget and time to change flights, and those who can, will.

No they knew of O-ring burns before the catastrophe. They measured it, and determined that it was a tolerable amount, because it was less then 10% penetration. Problem was the root cause of the burns was not adequately determined. When you don't know the o-rings are twisting due to internal stress and that those stresses have a dependence on temperature, you miss that catastrophic O-ring failure is a risk at near freezing temperatures.

The second space shuttle crash was the same problem again. Falling chunks of ice and foam. Since nothing major had happened previously, it was assumed everything would be fine.

These failure and problems were the warning signs that something was wrong. There was no design spec for acceptable o-ring burn through or a leading edge heat shield damage threshold spec.

I bet we will find that Boeing and the FAA talked themselves into believing that

> The Vertical Pitch Indicator is reading on some MAX 8's 10-20 degrees higher than what the aircraft actually is pitched at.

Seems like not everything was built to spec

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