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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

> The FAA has issued a new Airworthiness Directive (AD) that will allow most MAX 9s to return to service.

Contrast this few-week stint with what happened with NASA after Challenger and Columbia. Everything came to a grinding halt while questions were asked about culture and entire operating principles. And then here, we just have an airworthiness directive followed by business as usual. This is pathetic.

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> there are 4 bolts that prevent the mid-exit door plug from sliding up off of the door stop fittings that take the actual pressurization loads in flight, and these 4 bolts were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane, our own records reflect this.

Yeah. Wtf.

if their best software engineers designed MCAS, gotta wonder at the skill level of the folks designing the internal tooling that does qc checks.

MCAS isn't an issue from a software perspective; it does what it's supposed to do, the issue was that its existence was not communicated to pilots, somewhat intentionally, out of a misplaced assertion that the 737-MAX should not require any additional type rating (i.e. to save money). In other words it was a business management failure.

Effectively zero economic activity is changed depending upon the outcome of engineering challenges of a NASA vehicle.

In contrast, grounding hundreds of planes for an indeterminate amount of time has severe implications for many companies. As far as I know, there are no claimed underlying engineering faults to the design. Ask the uncomfortable questions, but if all of the planes can be reviewed to confirm basic airworthiness, at some point you have to let them fly again.

> but if all of the planes can be reviewed to confirm basic airworthiness, at some point you have to let them fly again.

Doesn’t this review and confirmation take place before they even go into service? So if they missed these bolts on the last review, what’s to say they won’t miss them or something equally as important on the next review?

“Oh think of the economy” is the worst excuse I can imagine to let these back into service.

The shuttle program was a significant source of economic activity in a number of different areas of the country. [1][2] Just because we really want to have planes flying, isn't a good reason to let them fly if they're not fit to do so. This is known in aviation as "get-there-itis". You really don't have to fly.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/jul/07/space-shuttl...

[2] https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts135/110706preview/inde...

Very little of that economic activity was directly linked to the Shuttle flying. If we had moved the Shuttle through the fabrication, preparation and refurbishment cycles without actually launching it, the economic impact would be more or less the same. That's not true of airline flights, which generate most of their economic value by actually moving people and/or stuff.

But just as with pilots and get-there-itis, the "need" to fly the planes is secondary. The primary concern is making sure the higher order system is operating correctly, which we know it isn't. Flying planes will be counterproductive if it leads to a bad crash, setting the industry back even further than grounding the planes and planning ahead would in the first place. If your goal is to move people and stuff as much as possible, the strategy should be to make sure you can do that safely. We can and will abandon air travel as soon as it loses its safety record.

I would like Boeing to get through this and be able to produce new aircraft, though. NASA hasn't produced a new human-capable spacecraft since these disasters, and it has been a long, long time.

If NASA was a private enterprise, it would've simply gone out of business. Instead, it stopped being an exciting organization willing to push the boundaries of space travel, which is inherently risky, and became a risk-averse bureaucracy mostly wasting taxpayer money until they eventually got/get the fire lit under their ass by organizations like SpaceX showing that it is still possible to progress in space exploration in ways other than launching robots

NASA worked through its issues. When the shuttle program ended, it wasn’t directly because of either of the disasters. Both of those were followed by extensive reworking of the system behind the missions.

Also, Boeing is not a fully private enterprise and receives significant federal funding.

Think of the shareholders though /s

In all seriousness though, what can be done? It appears that Boeing has to much power in their relationship with the FAA.

Reduce the power. It's much more easily said than done obviously, but things like exemptions just should not be done. If the FAA makes a rule, it needs to be adhered to. The FAA needs a spine. Whatever we need to do in terms of reform to achieve that is up for debate, but we aren't even having that conversation yet.

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