Letâs go back to Rachelâs show on this last week. In fact, she may have something on it tonite.
Canât wait for Drumpfy to turn this into PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!! You know heâs going to if it gets anywhere near him or the Cabinet.
On NPR this morning they revealed that the FAA allowed Boeing engineers to sign off on their own safety checks. What could possibly go wrong , I mean coal companies vet their own safety and environmental concerns
âThe FAA has let technical experts at aircraft makers act as its representatives to perform certain tests and approve some parts for decades. The FAA expanded the scope of that program in 2005 to address concerns about adequately keeping pace with its workload. Known as Organization Designation Authorization, or ODA, it let Boeing and other manufacturers choose the employees who approve design work on the agencyâs behalf.â
Well, all those folks that wanted tax cuts, those cuts have to come from somewhereâŚ
In all my working years, it never occurred to me that the way to address my workload was simply not to do my job. What an idiot I was!
ETA: This reminds me of an old favorite:
Thereâs nothing a priori wrong with having the experts sign off on things, just as long as you keep close tabs on those experts. Otherwise you have somebody at the FAA signing off who (quite possibly) doesnât have a lot of expertise in aircraft or software design because the FAA isnât funded to pay people to stay expert in aerospace engineering while not actually doing any engineering. (They have a small R&D group, but by necessity and design it works mostly with industry and with figuring out how to standardize/ regulate the things industry is coming up with.)
Maybe there is something here that warrants having a criminal investigation. But I also worry that if everybody lawyers up it will take that much longer to fix the real problems, because no one can say, âGee, that needs to be fixedâ without wondering whether theyâll go to jail for not having fixed it already.
Most likely there is. At what point in the design and testing phase did they figure out that they had screwed things up enough that they had to come up with the MCAS to fix it? And then was there pressure to run with things before the fixes could be totally run through and verified to work?
Itâs quite likely that the business processes of needing to deliver planes over-rode the safety processes at some point along the way.
In medicine they realized that to reduce errors they needed to be able to freely identify and discuss problems when something had gone wrong - without concern for legal liability. This is now the standard practice and it saves lives.
But that focus is really on whatâs going on, for example, in the Operating Room.
Whereas a criminal investigation here is likely going to hone in on the business overhead, whether there was pressure to prematurely get the plane out the door for deliveries when the problem was discovered.
MCAS was clearly a patch late in the game to an unexpected change in handling due to the forward posture of the engines. No problems there in the non-judging investigation.
But perfectly fair to check whether those engineers in the room were pressured to make that fix âworkâ to get the plane certified.
The real scandal is when warnings are ignored. Mistakes happen. Systematic mistakes should not happen.
Theyâve had the same thing in aviation for decades, run by NASA. Thatâs where we got the reports of unusual behavior in non-crashing aircraft. Itâs definitely a good idea. Doesnât really extend to the design side, though. Obviously some designs are unsafe (as later determined by the NTSB), but itâs vanishingly rare, I think, that engineers will deliberately design something they think is unsafe.
My entirely wild guess is that this may not be exactly about the MCAS, but rather more generally about the new modelâs reduced margins and about the question of whether it should have come under the same type (instead of being a new type that undergoes a different certification process and a different training regime).
It makes me think a little of my physics courses where the professor would explain that such-and-such an equation wasnât really exact, but under most conditions the errors stayed small and could be ignored or treated as simple perturbations. And then there were the conditions where that wasnât true.
I assume the investigation is driven by what was reported in the Seattle Times yesterday, namely Boeing telling the FAA they were complying with a limit for the angle of the depth of a dive from the automatic control when they were according to the newspaper article exceeding it by a factor of about five. That somehow seems to me to exceed the purview of a civil case.
It seems that it would be optimal if people at all stages felt free to voice concerns. My physics TA did not appreciate it when I said that one reason my results differed from the predicted was that the law of conservation of momentum might be wrong. I think itâs important to consider whether the basic premise might be incorrectâŚ
Thanks for the tip, just wandered over to read⌠Yup, looks like all the things in there⌠Management pressure to race to market, incomplete or fudged numbersâŚ
It looks like Trudeauâs strip inspired someone, just a few years ago:
Computer programmer âoutsourced job to Chinaâ
If they do a deep email search Iâm pretty sure some pretty condemning stuff will be exposed.
The expression is âhome in onâ. Please donât youtube this place.
Boeing ceased to be the best commercial jet manufacturer when they moved the headquarters to Chicago (Zurich was just too far) and stopped requiring that the CEO be an airplane person.
If a problem was discovered, it wasnât like Boeing had never pushed back a delivery date because things werenât right. Look at the âwonder planeâ 787. They oversold what it would be, didnât follow their time tested design and testing protocol and paid the price by delivering the first planes two years late. Delaying the Max wasnât going to even hurt the bottom line. The sad thing about it is itâs got the capacity that is better handled by a wider body twin aisle plane. Itâs ugly and has to be more uncomfortable to fly in than an -600 or -700 series.