Discussion: Pilots Have Reported Issues In US With New Boeing Jet

Software/firmware bug or common-mode hardware failure? Hard to tell without more information.

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#othershoes

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This just makes me want to puke. Too many opportunities to puke nowadays. This administration makes patriots effectively bulimics. It’s gotten to the point that one has to ask “who hasn’t tried to buy influence?”

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That’s why I was wondering why Trump said something about this. I stopped wondering, after I remembered Josh’s ‘Trump razor’ rule.

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Well duh. Those things are just so darn complicated. Who knew?

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Are you sure that his name isn’t Dennis Boeing?

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I know nothing but it sounds like a software issue. Trump in his clumsy politicking may have accidentally hit on something. Also I always wonder how much of this aircraft software is hackable by the black hats.

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If it is a purely software-related issue, Boeing (and maybe the airlines) should have some sort of training/testing simulator that they can run it through to investigate. Though it obviously doesn’t happen every time or more pilots would have noticed by now.

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Yeah the speculation is all very premature, with so many factors involved. The new engines on the 737-MAX did force Boeing to move the wing to the rear to preserve the center of gravity, which in turn contributes to a tendency for the aircraft to pitch up in certain extreme flight regimes (and in turn led to the features like MACS intended to push the nose down again, if pilots didn’t realize this was happening). Still, all anyone can definitively say is the MAX’s flight characteristics aren’t quite like other 737’s, and that the pilots of both flights complained about keeping pitch on the fatal flights, or flight immediately prior. I can’t blame aviation authorities for temporarily grounding the aircraft given that fact alone.

That said, for Boeing’s sake I do hope the two crashes are unrelated bad-luck or bad-maintenance situations, because it does seem like a pretty big coincidence otherwise.

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It could take a year to get this sorted out and it might be a random thing in the end, or it might in fact be some sort of engineering problem. Nobody knowledgeable would want to do much guessing at this point. As always, Trump is a moron, and complicatedness is not the problem here. Modern engineering makes stuff much, much safer.

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The rest of the world cares about it’s citizens, America, under trump, only gives a shit about the stock market and Boeing’s stock health. If a plane falls out of the sky, it is because if is fucking complicated. Capitalism is failing folks, and we are watching its death throes.

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If the Boeing CEO lobbied Trump on this issue, we can rest assured his lobbying would be totally devoid of any complicated facts 'n stuff. Probably more like “Mr. Trump, the Chinese and the French are trying to play you, and steal American jobs! If only someone was manly and strong enough to stand up to them” (in my minds eye I can see Trump grabbing his lapels and puffing out his chest at that point… he’s so easy to play)

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Well…the 757 anyway…

https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/featured/boeing-757-hacked/

While not every design flaw -if it’s even that -can be caught in the testing phase, it seems to me, as a non-expert, that more diligence was necessary prior to allowing sales of a relatively new type of aircraft on a large scale. It’s mind-boggling to me that even the pilots were caught off-guard regarding some of the attributes of this particular aircraft.

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Much of the world has grounded these planes, at least for now, while we haven’t. I fervently hope that the reasons we haven’t are for the right reasons, but knowing Trump, I can’t assume anything.

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They do an incredible amount of testing and simulation when developing a new aircraft, but they can’t be exhaustive. In addition, weight&balance calculations for aircraft are based in part on assumptions about the mass of passengers and baggage (afaik freight gets weighed and positioned exactly). The procedures for estimation have gotten better, but if you have a new aircraft where the center of gravity is already a bit hinky, it’s possible that the effects of any errors in calculating exact CG might be magnified in unanticipated ways.

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No thanks

MCAS kicks in apparently only after the flaps are retracted - so about 1000-3000 ft above ground level. That’s somewhat reassuring since this problem won’t therefore happen too close to the ground and now every pilot knows you gotta turn off the electrical power to the stabilizer servos pronto if this happens. So it makes sense then that they aren’t grounding them yet without more information. There is a quick way to defeat it.

That said, I wouldn’t want to fly on one till the “black-box” information is reviewed to determine what happened in Ethiopia. Some reports have the plane in flames or smoking as it went down which doesn’t sound like a wayward stabilizer at all.

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Somewhere in the code, there’s a “float” that’s defined as a “double,” instead.

I do software development in my dotage, to keep myself off the streets. The well-known First Rule of Software: “There’s always one more bug.”

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