Why the 737 MAX has been such a headache for Boeing | Hacker News Reader

Why the 737 MAX has been such a headache for Boeing

jalopnik.com

39 pointscebert54 comments

Offhand, what I remember reading during the initial 737 MAX crashes:

Part of the appeal of the 737 series of airplanes was pilot certification across a wide fleet allowed for carrier flexibility and cost savings. Same airframe, same 'response', 'same certification'. So they tried to lie to everyone. Mount the engines on the same airframe a bit differently. Use software to make the behavior (in most circumstances) the same as the older models. etc.

The rational was that they 'couldn't' spend the time, money, or above pilot training needs to field a new competitive model. They'd just come off of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner . Which skimming the Wikipedia article, probably also dovetails in with the seemingly eternal struggle between the Machinists union and Boeing the company who used to be headquartered in Seattle. Penny pinching decisions there probably had negative effects on safety too.

Yeah, because the legacy carriers apparently can't be bothered with spending any more money in moving out of the 70s

But pray tell me, did you save money in having part of your fleet grounded for 1.5yrs?

"That's a different budget." -- a comment I've heard several times, from several bean counters, justifying $billions wasted.

This is not the carriers fault. Boeing promised one thing and was lying about it. Why would the customers take the heat?

A miser pays twice...and kills 346 people.

I'm actually sympathetic to using fly-by-wire technology to keep the interface the same. When it works, it can be safer since pilots' experience transfers directly, they don't mix up subtle differences between the models, and it makes it an easy sell to airlines. I fault Boeing for not making it robust enough. It needed to be bullet-proof, and it wasn't.

I mean, it is easy to be sympathetic to something if you add the constraint that it must be perfect under the assumption that it could be perfect... the issue is that there is no way this wasn't going to be a leaky abstraction, and so I would thereby offer the decision no sympathy.

Aircraft rely on a lot of systems that are not perfect. They are however generally very well made. The implementation that caused the 737 max crashes was terrible.

Because if it had redundancy, that would be a sign to the FAA that it was important. If it was important, the FAA would make them teach their customers and pilots about it.

Obviously the problem here is the fact that aeroplanes are regulated.

problem is you can't just take pilots input alone. You need angle of attack, air speed and probably other inputs to correct it. When your sensors disagree or are unreliable you get garbage out. Or you can switch the system off and revert to something like direct law mode. But then pilots would have to train flying a plane in that mode to be familiar with it. Which is the thing you want to avoid in the first place.

It's the company providing their customers what they asked for. Because of the way pilot licensing works, the airliners really want to field as few separate types as they possibly can. If a Boeing executive goes to meet the people who buy his airplanes, upgrades that fit on existing type certificates is the first (and only) thing they ask for.

The job of a CEO is sometimes to tell the customers no. It's just really hard to do.

Little else symbolises technological stagnation better than Boeing reusing the design of its 737 series for its new airplane.

EMBRAER of Brazil has been slowly expanding its market for 60 years but they've been reluctant to move into the A320/737 category. I don't understand why - there are over 12,000 orders backlogged with Airbus and Boeing, surely that's the strongest possible indicator of potential demand.

An airline placing an order for an A320 or 737 now will have a decade to wait for delivery.

Instead EMBRAER keep themselves locked in the regional jet market and are lucky to get 80 orders a year.

It is a very complicated product. Whole countries like Russia and China are trying to build even somewhat smaller modern jets and basically haven't been able so far.

And for "national jet" the task is easy as you can allow some inefficiencies. For a pure commercial jet product like EMBRAER would supposedly build, it must be a topline on all KPIs otherwise some ROI numbers over 10-20 years would project it to be several percent worse than Boeing/Airbus, and the airlines wouldn't buy it.

Look what happened when Bombardier tried to do something similar. Brazilian market is too small to accomodate that and other markets will try to protected their own aircraft industry, if they have one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220#Boeing_dumping_pet...

I don't really understand how a company can be criminally liable without any person working in it (especially the president)

Corporations are legally people who can't be jailed. Make sense?

That never made sense to me. Isn't the whole reason the 'board' gets paid so much that they're the ones who go to jail if stuff is messed up (and they're culpable rather than clearly wronged by someone else)?

Theoretically sure, that is the excuse given for their massive pay. But really that has only been true in practice for a few short periods of time, atleast in the US.

How much do you think the board gets paid?

In my company our chairman has a yearly compensation less than our CEO, but greater than our CFO.

corporations are not people, they don't have personal privilege, corporations are governments, they have governmental privilege.

A corporation is the ruling apparatus for a group of people, which is a fancy way of saying government.

County of Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.

I remember suggesting during the VW emissions scandal that we needed something like a corporate guillotine to execute companies of scale that were involved in serious crime. Not just a change out of directors, but wholesale breakup.

But you know, just a person on the internet yelling into the void...

They jailed the engineer, all working as expected

Someone said "Speaking truth to power isn't just shouting into the cannons"

Corporations can be jailed. You can freeze their assets and suspend their operations for a period of time. We do this in some circumstances like failing to renew a business license, but not for say, murder.

It's because of dilution of responsibility, each individual didn't do anything wrong, but take all together it adds up to wrongdoing.

It's not usually nefarious, it's usually a result of imperfect information - each individual works off of the information they have which leads them to wrong actions as a whole, but correct actions individually.

,,It's because of dilution of responsibility, each individual didn't do anything wrong''

In that case it would be true, but it would be hard for me to think that nobody told the leader of Boeing (who should have known it himself as the leader of the biggest airplane company) that putting an engine over the wing is both stupid and dangerous and unstable.

Yes. It's good to inflict huge fine on the company itself, as it will eventually hurt stockholders; but management should be held accountable too, especially C-level personnel who quit with golden parachutes of various sizes. They should have to pay those back, at the very least.

As an American I sort of live in a bubble. I didn't realize the rest of the world views the US as a country that's falling apart until recently. This article solidifies what I've heard even further. With Airbus dominating the commercial aviation market, what is the US currently best at?

Space, Defense, cinema and software?

Medical devices

Pretty much all of the above. And drugs, although America's healthcare model is so well known it cancels that out.

Tbf, the rest of the world also views Europe in the same boat (if not having taken an early-bird ticket on it).

Software, cloud, AI, financial services, movies, computer games, space (i.e.: Starlink), military technology, etc...

There are entire categories of things where it is just the US doing the thing, OR without the US the thing would implode.

For example, there are only two popular mobile phone operating systems: Android and iOS. Both are made by US companies (Google and Apple).

Let me put it this way: If every undersea fibre link out of the Americas was suddenly severed, people in the USA might not even notice for a while. The rest of the planet would make a winding down noise as every second piece of hardware or software stopped dead because of some missing dependency.

> For example, there are only two popular mobile phone operating systems: Android and iOS. Both are made by US companies (Google and Apple).

Not for long.

https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_unveils_its_own_pc_os__harmo...

There's also Sailfish OS and Tizen, which could become suitable replacements if investment and necessity arose.

American Exceptionalism.

From my neck of the woods, we've largely viewed the Americans as part of a security arrangement (Pacific) but, as a trading partner, they are far behind the Chinese (so much so that its a constant political discussion on how to balance the two competing alliances).

This is largely what Trump was trying, and failing (miserably) to address with his tariffs, nobody buys from the US anymore.

If the fibre was cut through the USA, then yes there would be a period of difficulty, but it would be very quickly replaced with other countries technology (keeping in mind that most Western governments were looking to move to Chinese Huawei telecommunications kit until the US made aspersions as to how secure peoples data/secrets would be if that happened, completely ignoring Snowden's revelations that the US had been engaged in using the hardware in overseas telecommunications systems for that exact purpose)

Sure, that'll be easy!

Just clone the repos from GitHub, wait... oh no.

We'll just deploy it to AWS... wait... IAM is in US East 1 only. Dammit.

Okay, fine, we can live without all of those JS CDN URLs, right?

Where's NPM managed from again?

Crates.io?

NuGet?

Uh-oh.

Right - cool, there are no offshore backups

Go you :\

Just yesterday I applied for several job postings for building European Sovereign Cloud at AWS as well as other companies doing a similar thing. The tariff disaster was a global wake-up moment. Don't expect all of these things to remain US-only.

BTW Europe is already the center of the Internet at layer 3. Servers are cheaper in Europe. Bandwidth is cheaper in Europe. So I assume all those services, especially the free ones, are only hosted in the US because of latency or national pride.

You live in a bubble and you think that just because you use American products (GitHub owned by MS, AWS and the rest) the rest of the world does too.

Why don't you have a look at Asia (and it doesn't even have to be China, it can be Japan too)? Most major Asian companies have clones of the software stack that you mentioned and do not rely on it as much as you think.

These days there are (luckily) alternatives to American products, and this American-first ideology will only accelerate the speed at which the rest of the world will switch to alternative ones.

I thought Huawei's only competitors in telecommunications are European, though?

I'm not in the telco space anymore, but Motorola, Cisco, Alcatel Lucent (or whatever they are now) are all a mix aren't they, Euro/US

I think it’s Ericsson and Nokia (which bought Alcatel Lucent I think) that are the main competitors.

IMHO USA is still the best in many of those things, it's just that its no longer uncontested. USA is going through the stage all the former European empires went through. You are even trying to do the nationalism thing which by itself means if you adopt it you will become a nation instead of an empire and instead of doing global stuff you will do what a nation of 340M people do. All those isolationist stuff, identity crisis etc. looks like post-imperial Europe to me. Sometimes I wonder if USA is trying to do soft-transition from being global superpower empire into a largish country like on of the others. I just can't see the mechanism where all that can be orchestrated, so maybe it's not orchestrated but because US have only 2 neighbors and they are well behaved the US empire isn't going down with a huge war but its just pulling back as it is contested.

Is self-destruction a soft transition?

The UK (empire) didn't go down in a big war (although they fought in several, that also threatened them). It seems wars are definitely not needed for the transition to a nation rather then empire.

I'd say wars have historically been a part of all nations/geographical areas more or less continuously - and empires are more inclined to participate due to 1) being bigger and 2) thinking there's more to gain from those wars (usually due to capability/likelihood of winning).

Maybe being an island helps, maybe the WW1, WW2 and other conflicts were the process of downfall of the British empire I'm not too sure about it but after centuries of global European dominance Europe(including UK and the Turks) ended up transforming into something completely different than their glory days and its alright.

Similarly, maybe the conflicts US was involved last 30+ were the wars that broke the empire?

Personally, I'm looking forward to a world where our planet belongs to all of us and we are not limited by borders and not dying for the careers of politicians. IMHO the technology has advanced enough and the resource scarcity and most issues are artificial.

Regarding defense while US is still ahead, DJI in itself is already far superior in manufacturing small drones, it's just that they are used in both sides of the wars, that's why there was not much focus on them so far.

For anyone who is interested, Petter @MentourPilot on Youtube has a few videos about this topic that are worth watching.

This isn't the kind of technical post I'd expect to see on HN. There's not much details on the MCAS[0]. It wasn't only for the 737 Max to be cheap to make, it was up to MCAS to make it so current 737(NG) pilots could fly them without extensive retraining. This is where multiple things went wrong, basically MCAS is lying to the pilots pretending to be a plane it's not, and unfortunately relying on a single AOA sensor that it bases those lies upon.

The MCAS that's in 737 MAX today is different than what were the source of confusion and fatalities in the past. (e.g. Pilots can now always override MCAS inputs using the control column; MCAS can no longer command more stabilizer movement than the pilots can counteract by pulling back on the yoke). The whole idea isn't bad in itself, but the bean counters gleefully skimped to save too many beans in initial/early versions and there wasn't a culture where engineers could pull 'the brake' and blamelessly improve a bad situation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...

Boeing: we should cut costs by getting away from being an engineering company. Then we’ll make very bad decisions because we’re behind AirBus.

Execs: sounds perfect

first of all, Boeing does not exist as the company the created the truely great airliners that they were known for...747's the current compsny is the result of Boeing buying/merging with Macdonald Douglas and then having the Mac Doug executives perform an internal coup, and oust the manager/engineers from Boeing Second, the 737 max was designed partialy in Russia, not that there is anything wrong with rusdian aviation engineering, but that the russians worked cheap, and boeing set up a campus there,the issues bieng that it's non engineering managers running dirrerent teams, who dont speak the same language, and the old way, where the engineers worked directly with each other and the factory floor in real time, was lost. Three, the software was also out sourced to India, or some of it, and lo there you have it, a management frenzy, oooooooo, I bet it sure is busy busy busy, memo storms, and brisk self congradulaotory got it done's and fourth, Boeing moved head office to be as close to the pentagon and the faa as possible in order to concentrate on what they saw as important

The first fault that bedeviled the MAX was the compliance and safety bodies. They built what turned out to be a trap for corporate executives, and Boeing flew right into it

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