[nrau]

An interesting part of the history of the 737 is that when it launched it originally had a serious rudder design flaw that contributed to several fatal crashes where a lot of folks lost their lives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues

However, Boeing did fix the problem, and the 737 went on to be one of the best selling airplanes in history.

This MCAS issue is eerily similar in that it has also resulted in two fatal crashes. But if history is any guide, the problems will be fixed, and the memory of MCAS and MAX issues will likely fade from the public as well.

[dreamcompiler]

The Boeing of those days was a different company than Boeing today, and the public knows it. That Boeing was driven by engineers with safety as their highest priority. Today's Boeing is driven by suits with profit as their highest priority. This Boeing has lost the public's trust. Even if they fix MCAS, how do we know there aren't other safety corners cut in the design just waiting to kill somebody?

[chopin]

Not only Boeing lost public trust but presumably the FAA as well. At least outside US this may have even more severe implications.

Boeing better not loses one more plane due to design issues.

[IAmEveryone]

The "suits" didn't just take over last year. The complaint is at least as old as their move to Chicago in 2001. That would at least put the 787 in the same class of "suit-designed" aircraft.

And yet, air travel today is far safer than it has ever been, the 737 non-withstanding. Considering air travel has increased by almost an order of magnitude since the heydays of engineering-run Boeing in the 60s, and fatalities have decreased by a similar factor, air travel today is about 70x safer than it was in the past.

Based on this data, any nostalgic theories of how safety today is being ruined by <x> are really hard to defend.

[slumdev]

> That would at least put the 787 in the same class of "suit-designed" aircraft.

The 787 is a suit-designed aircraft. Composite materials are not ready for prime time. They are a gamble that Boeing suits have made against passenger lives. If the bet pays out, the planes save a miniscule amount of fuel compared to planes made of traditional materials. If the bet does not pay out, people die.

Only a few months ago, we discovered more 737 problems. These were unrelated to MCAS. Instead, they affected the part that holds the wing to the fuselage:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/29/boeing...

[Robotbeat]

Strongly disagree there. The material is perfectly fine, in part due to massive safety margins.

Composites have been in use in crewed aerospace vehicles for ~55 years (or arguably >80 years).

Composite aircraft were developed in the early 1960s, although first use of composites goes back to the 1930s, and even the Space Shuttle developed in the 1970s made extensive use of composites... not just carbon fiber and kevlar, but also materials considered cutting edge today, like metal-matrix boron fiber and carbon-carbon.

The materials are perfectly ready, if you're willing to pay the cost of testing, analysis, and margin. It took just ~35 years to go from Wright Brothers and their wooden aircraft to all-aluminum pressurized airliners (and yeah, there were folks who were skeptical of aluminum at that time as well).

Given at least 50 years in extensive use, I can't see how waiting longer will help[0]. The alternative is permanent stasis.

[0]More analysis or more margin or more testing is an argument I could buy into, but not being "too early for prime time."

[ladyattis]

"Composite materials are not ready for prime time."

Wow, I didn't know the 787 was built with that in mind. Seriously, my dad has worked at Beechcraft since the 80s and he remembers when they tried that nonsense with the Starship. It's like no one remembers why the idea was scrapped beyond the initial costs (composites have to have aluminum weave to allow lightning strikes and static discharge dissipate through the wings otherwise it'll blow off said wing).

[RomanBob]

people still die more driving to the airport than in a plane crash.

The fact that people smoke, drive while texting, drive drunk, don't exercise and so on, show that they don't really care about not dying. They just like to complain when dying is caused by somebody else.

[oska]

> They just like to complain when dying is caused by somebody else.

Which is completely legitimate.

[rusticpenn]

Should we have an eligibility criteria for people who can be allowed to complain?

[braindeath]

The data we have is the 737 MAX itself that stands out in the backdrop of ever increasing safety. That happened. The 787 possibly being a safe plane is irrelevant and doesn’t change that.

> And yet, air travel today is far safer than it has ever been, the 737 non-withstanding.

Boeing doesn’t get to take credit for all the advances in air safety in the past 40 years.

[DuskStar]

> Boeing doesn’t get to take credit for all the advances in air safety in the past 40 years.

No, but they can certainly take credit for some of those advances.

[dmix]

The 1990s of those initial failures also predated the information heavy internet hyper analysis and outrage machines

[nosianu]

It's the messenger's fault. Of course!

What arguments do you have that show that lots and lots of articles about about Boeings culture change are all wrong or insignificant (not a contributor to the Max's issues)?

I'm also not sure why you think a heuristic that uses amount of outrage as an inverse measure of the validity of an issue is a useful one. I would assume the connection is either non-existent or very weak, meaning you cannot infer anything useful about an issue from how much it is being discussed in the media and in public forums.

[jakemal]

The point of the comment was that people likely cared less because people heard about it significantly less.

[extempore]

You are reading a great deal into an innocuous comment.

[piva00]

Given what we know now, after the outrage took out of the closet a lot of information previously obscured and out of the limelight, about Boeing's issues in production and design and the regulatory capture of the FAA: do you still think this whole backlash against the 737 MAX is purely the internet hyper analysis and outrage machine?

[dmix]

Nope, that wasn't my point obviously. Just highlighting it was a different time for media and analysis.

[SkyMarshal]

I'm not so sure about that. Besides what was already mentioned about news getting around much faster in 2019 vs 1991, the problems with the Max are harder to fix.

It's a fundamentally unstable airframe. The engines are too big and too far forward. They can't fix that without a major redesign of the fuselage to lengthen the landing gear. At which point it may better to simply design and build a whole new airplane.

[jacquesm]

> It's a fundamentally unstable airframe.

The 737 MAX is not a 'fundamentally unstable airframe', though there are points in the flight envelope where it is close to becoming unstable. The definition of an unstable aircraft is when the center of pressure is forward of the center of gravity, a condition which never occurs in the 747 MAX flight envelope, though it comes perilously close to it in some edge cases.

As you correctly identify the engines being 'too big and too far forward' is a factor here, but the most important part of it is the extra lift created by the engine bodies, not the power of the engines themselves.

[CaptainZapp]

Let's just say that Boeing pushed a 50 year old design to places to which it never was supposed to pushed to.

Full blown panic about Airbus' offerings had a lot to do with this faithful decision.

The first crash was a combination of greed, bad design decisions, rush to market and all that in combination with an FAA that was in Boeing's pocket.

The fact that they didn't immediately pulled the plane after the Lion Air crash and the second crash was nothing less than corporate mass murder for profit.

[AlphaSite]

I was under the impression the Max vs a clean room design was actually pushed by airlines, rather than by Boeing it’s self. They wanted a new form scratch design, much like the 787.

Now not to remove responsibility from them, ultimately they buckled under pressure and did the deed.

[kayfox]

That's exactly what happened, Boeing wanted to re-design the 737 with a new type certificate and all that, but the airlines pushed for a re-engined 737.

In the end the 737 MAX is largely a good design, just with one big fuckup.

There's also a certain irony that Boeing would have been able to push out a software update before the Ethiopian crash if the government was not shut down for a month over Dec 2018-Jan 2019.

[kayfox]

They had a software update to correct a bunch of issues with MCAS in the pipe, but it was delayed by the government shutdown.

If there had been no government shutdown, the Ethiopian Airlines crash might not have happened.

[ddalex]

You keep pushing the blame on the government shutdown.

Boeing could itself grounded the airplanes without government intervention but corporate greed won.

Other governments are to blame ibdeed for relying on FAA certification instead of doing their own. I guess that won't happen again.

[kayfox]

> You keep pushing the blame on the government shutdown.

I've actually only mentioned it in two or maybe three comments over the last year.

Your operating from the benefit of hindsight. All the information about the Lion Air crash is out now, you can look at it and decide it should have been grounded. At the time it was not very clear what had happened and why and if it was issues with the pilots or the aircraft or both. Boeing had more information than the public, but not as much as came to light after the Ethiopian Airlines crash.

Also, Boeing does not actually have the authority to ground aircraft they make, they have to push the FAA to do it. The FAA will want to have a good reason, because if the FAA does something that needlessly costs the airline industry lots of money, people at the FAA loose their jobs.

So, its pretty much fuckups all around.

[mechhacker]

Yes, from everything that I've researched about this (not working in this industry anymore), MCAS was to adjust the feel of the controls when at the edge of the flight envelope. The plane, during normal flight, would behave very similarly to existing 737s.

What I read that shocked me was that Boeing was relying on a single angle of attack sensor at a time, with software rules that should have never flown. Such as: not tossing out obviously impossible angle of attack readings, doubling down on nose-down stall corrections, and not limiting MCAS to an input that ensured pilot controllability if the electric trim had to be disabled. (this may not have been possible, actually, in certain flight regimes)

The system pushed the plane into a regime where, from everything I have read, the aerodynamic forces were strong enough that manual pilot trimming (via a physical wheel near the control column) was not possible for a normal human, especially while the pilots were experiencing negative G's from such a strong nose-down trim. The flight log information I could find showed a very difficult cockpit situation. Enabling electric trim (and MCAS) shoved the nose downward, but also allowed some level of trim correction by the pilots that they could not achieve with the trim wheel. Stick forces were also enormous on the elevator, having to pull back over 50lbs if my memory serves.

Imagine yanking back with all your might while fiddling with secondary controls that also required enormous force to move, while the plane is forcing you up and out of your seat, against the seatbelt. This is where any cockpit communication issues between the two pilots would be severely complicating.

That Boeing released this with such flaws, and the FAA accepted it, seems quite damning to Boeing and the FAA. This is something that I can imagine technical leadership and management at Boeing would know about and should have caught and stopped much earlier in the process.

[TrueDuality]

A part of me joins you in this pessimistic view, but the other side of me recognizes that the rudder issues took place in 1991 and most likely the vast majority of the public was never made aware of those issues. I had never heard of it, though that doesn't mean much as a statistical sample.

I know a lot of people are now aware of this particular design flaw and I would put money on it being more generally known now then then.

[georgeplusplus]

You can’t really compare the two.

The 80s and 90s were loaded with severe accidents where the NTSB was really giving the taxpayers their money’s worth since there would be a major accident almost every month and the agency had to create a new division to handle all the cases.

Most weren’t design issues like the MCAS and the 91’ rudder issue but faulty 3rd party parts, poor maintenance, unknown stresses on aging fleets, pilot issues, and on and on.

We are in an unprecedented age of aviation safety and the MCAS issue is a huge blow to that record, thus you’re hearing about it in this level because it is fresh in the news. Accidents were common place back then, so common that I’d wager the 91 crash wasn’t on peoples radars since they just accepted that aircraft crash frequently and to be honest the general public doesn’t know what a rudder is in the first place.

[puranjay]

In 1991, the number of deaths in air crashes was also nearly 5x the number of deaths in 2017. A plane crashing in 1991 was, for better or worse, just news.

But today, a plane crashing due to an engineering failure is rare enough that it makes headlines that people don't forget easily

[rangibaby]

> A plane crashing in 1991 was, for better or worse, just news.

IDK, the Lockerbie and TWA crashes were all over the news for what seemed like years

[NeedMoreTea]

They weren't "just" plane crashes. Most of the follow up surrounded the terrorism and hunt for the bombers...

[orisho]

I also believe most people hadn't heard of it. For one, news gets around much faster and easier nowadays with the advent of the internet. Anecdotally, it appears as if anyone who flies would've had the right exposure to Western media to hear about it.

[jellicle]

The difference between them is that the rudder flaw could be fixed; once the problem was identified it was a trivial fix. They replaced a single part the size of a soda can.

The 737 Max can't be fixed. The engine location unbalances the plane. Full stop. Huge changes to the entire plane must be made to fix that. Software fixes are bandaids and any time the software either fails to activate when it should, or activates when it should not, people die. Unless you think software is 100% infallible, this plane is going to be much less safe than it could have been, forever, unfixably.

[mseidl]

They should have never made the Max. They need to make a new plane from the ground up. The 737 is ancient.

[mcv]

Yeah, the stories about how the new requirements didn't fit the limitations of the 737 design, and how they had to make it unbalanced and correct that inherent instability in software, throws up a bunch of red flags. At some point, you need to accept that the original design doesn't work anymore for the current requirements and redesign the whole thing from scratch. Or at least more thoroughly than the quick & dirty fix they used here.

[jaywalk]

The 737 MAX does not have "inherent instability."

The position of the engines causes the plane to pitch up more significantly when power is added. This is not necessarily bad, but it's different enough from the 737 NG that it would have required retraining pilots. MCAS was designed to remove the need for retraining, by using software to make the MAX act like the NG.

If everyone would have simply accepted that pilots needed to be retrained for the 737 MAX, MCAS wouldn't have been developed and those planes wouldn't have crashed.

[sokoloff]

You’re right in the first point, but wrong on the second and then maybe right again on the third. There’s a specific federal law concerning the pitch force curve stability (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.173) that the Max violated, meaning it was not going to be able to be certified as a 737 or as a new, clean sheet airplane, with the demonstrated stick force curve.

Now, if you’re going to make a clean sheet design and allow a new type rating, you can change the landing gear and wing design to achieve enough room to set the engines farther back and change the airfoil around them to design a plane that meets 25.173. Boeing already has such a plane: the 757.

[kayfox]

Boeing wanted a whole new design, the airlines pushed for a re-engined 737.

[Tempest1981]

Who at Boeing made the final decision? Was there a debate?

[kayfox]

Boeing, like many successful businesses these days, is a customer focused company. So ultimately the customers made that decision.

You don't spend billions of dollars developing a product that wont sell... unless your Airbus with the A380.

[qrbLPHiKpiux]

Why does everything have to be new?

[consp]

It basically is a new plane but fitted in the box of the old which did not fit and was 'altered' by a software system to behave like it fitted in the box.