A former air accident investigator who works as an aviation safety consultant said "It's extraordinary that Boeing concluded that a failure of this part would not have safety consequences," and said the report was "disturbing"
Doesn't seem like gray to me. It seems a company who has a history of cutting corners and ignoring or downplaying safety problems did exactly that in this case too which resulted in the deaths of many people. UPS made an error here as well in trusting Boeing when they said it wasn't a safety issue and they should have installed the revised bearing assembly out of an abundance of caution, but I don't know much they would have known back in 2011 about the changes at Boeing that prioritized profit over safety following the merger with McDonnell Douglas
I think every company operating Boeing aircraft should have reviewed their stance on Boeing directives in light of MCAS and the aftermath by now. If they did not that is a failure of sorts as well.
> I think every company operating Boeing aircraft should have reviewed their stance on Boeing directives in light of MCAS and the aftermath by now. If they did not that is a failure of sorts as well.
Actual question: would an airline have the engineering competence to second-guess an airplane manufacturer's engineering guidance? They operate airplanes but don't build them, and I'd assume they'd out of necessity need to trust the manufacturer's judgement.
If my elevator manufacturer sent me a note about my elevator wire, but says I have to not do anything, because it is probably nothing my number 1 question would be:
Why did you need to tell me about the wire then?
The answer is an attempt to transfer the liability to me. The liability for a thing they think could happen, but didn't tell me about.
They certainly have a responsibility towards their passengers that goes beyond their relationship with Boeing. Passengers trust airlines with their lives, with Boeing they have 'just' a business relationship.
Airlines have every reason to be skeptical of their supplier even if they do not have the engineering competence to second guess them. They could for instance look through their past communications with the manufacturer and see for themselves which advisories they agree with because for instance they are obviously not safety critical, this would then allow them hire specialists to evaluate the remainder for a second opinion.
Agreed. Among multiple organizations that large and complex, the buck can be passed infinitely. There's the lowly worker who installed the flawed part - the safest target, of course - who can pass it to the worker who made it, who can pass it to engineer, to their manager, back to the engineer who the manager relied on after all, the CAD software developer, to the materials supplier, to the machine tool manufacturer, the HVAC contractor who made the manufacturing facility too humid ...
For almost any act, we rely on other people. That doesn't absolve us of our personal responsibility.
That was in a general case, but in this specific case to satisfy you we can postulate that those on the ground would like to be able to get through their day without having their trajectories intersect with disintegrating aircraft or parts thereof.
perhaps it would behoove a company that routinely has the safety of millions of people a year in their hands to consult 3rd party experts to ensure that those people aren't maimed or killed.
But I'm just some guy with no incentive to endanger human life if I think it will save money so what do I know
I would say no. UPS bought the planes from Boeing. Boeing built them, Boeing identified the flaw, Boeing notified it's customers, and said it wasn't an issue.
I think in light of MCAS every company operating Boeing aircraft should have reviewed their stance on operating Boeing aircraft.
And the worst thing is I don't think even after mcas things have substantially improved there. I've seen more spin and damage control than actual safety focus. They could have launched a huge company program and management reorganization to really turn this mindset around.
I think the biggest issue that Boeing is too big to fail. They'll never fall because the government needs them for all their warplanes.
Laws that limit liability promote “cost of doing business“ mentality as if lives are acceptable losses.
This is how you get mentally and morally weak bean counters running companies instead of engineers with a conscience. It’s an engineering company and yet it’s run like a bank that just so happens to have an engineering branch.
This is exactly why laws need to exist to ensure that human lives are prioritized by companies to a reasonable extent. Companies can often make a lot of money if they can get away with doing things that kill their customers, and we've repeatedly seen them do exactly that. In order to protect the public, corporate greed needs to be constrained by laws and legal consequences just like they're used to help to constrain the greed of muggers and thieves.
In the US we've done a pretty poor job of doing that and it's resulted in countless lives lost and every living person and animal on earth being poisoned. It's long past time our government and its legal system took their responsibility to public safety more seriously.
How? I'm not particularly attached to it, but it seems to continue to be a commonly used expression and this is the first time I've seen someone raise an objection to its use.
Because the phrase and mindset leads to the wrong lessons and actions.
In aviation, there is little room for error. It’s also the case that resources and time are limited. So there are multiple constraints.
We both agree that Boeing is the big problem. I’d also say its a problem of the FAA and the aviation industry.
But UPS? Why would they be taking action “out of an abundance of caution”?
The worst you can say for UPS is they could have sought a second opinion out of “an abundance of caution”, and recommendations of next actions and how.
Keep in mind UPS core competency isn’t aerospace and aeronautical engineering.
Would they even be able to assess the risk of changing said bearings en masse?
The actual lesson here is that most of the advisories and self-certifying from Boeing over the past 30 years need to be reconsidered; most likely redone, by independent third parties and also an FAA with a mandate to be fully independent.
Because my naive conclusion after looking at the part in question is exactly the same "would not result in a safety of flight condition." if the bearing cracked at the point in question it is going nowhere, the bearing is still captive in its housing. hell it looks like it could have been designed as two pieces and it would work the same. the large bolt is what is holding the engine on.
The best I can come up with is that a split bearing causes increased wear on the mounting bracket and nobody noticed for a long time.
That's indeed a very naive conclusion. Once that bearing is gone the stress that it would normally allow to escape on account of rotation would be directly transferred to the metal around it and to the bolts holding the whole thing in place. Guess what broke first?
So if that bearing went that's not quite a smoking gun yet but it would definitely be a step closer to a root cause.
After watching the below video, it's the excess bearing play and thus no-longer-constrained force directions that would seem to be the issue.
With a proper tolerance bearing in place, the force is constrained so that other parts are only stressed in directions they're well suited to handle (because the bearing takes the load).
Once the bearing develops excess tolerance, you've got a bucking engine that (to your point) is directly loading other parts in unexpected ways/directions, eventually causing failure.
The fact that Boeing supposedly modeled this and came up with non-safety critical in the event of bearing breakage... curious how that will turn out.
> The fact that Boeing supposedly modeled this and came up with non-safety critical in the event of bearing breakage... curious how that will turn out.
They'd have to show at least one plane with a bearing gone that still flies as intended. I suggest we break one on purpose, put the full complement of Boeing execs on that plane to prove its safety given the alternative of retracting that statement.
My company has a policy limiting the number of high level execs traveling on a plane at a time. I wonder if plane manufacturers have similar restrictions. It’d be an ironic to for them to simultaneously assert that their planes are safe for the general public, and also believe the risk is too high for a planeload of their execs to fly in one.
> They'd have to show at least one plane with a bearing gone that still flies as intended.
That depends on the meaning of “safety of flight”. I don’t know what it means in aviation, but do not rule out that there is significant room between “flies as intended” and “result in a safety of flight condition”.
For example, if an engine were to complete drop off the plane, would that necessarily result in a safety of flight condition, or does “the plane will be able to continue take off and land again” mean safety of flight isn’t affected?
To see extreme examples of this, look at any wallowed-out/wallered-out through-bore in construction equipment (e.g. excavator buckets), particularly when a pin hasn't been greased, or is seized.
This same scenario combined with the amount of vibration and stresses caused by the engine, should scream "this is a catastrophe waiting to happen" for any engineer.
> Once that bearing is gone the stress that it would normally allow to escape on account of rotation would be directly transferred to the metal around it
The bearing would have to sieze up and the bearing axle be locked to the race. There is some limit to rotational torque even with a siezed bearings.
Metaphor: arthritic joints are not smooth, but they will rotate if given enough torque.
From the images, it looks like the bearing had siezed. So presumably rotational vibration was transmitted to airframe and the vibration caused structural failure?
I'm assuming it is not an issue of extreme rotational torque causing the issue (and given it is a bearing the design is for very little torque there!)
The forces on that mount are pretty extreme. Once the bearing seized it was really a matter of time before something gave and given the strength of the casing as well as the strength of the material and mount points it was a toss-up between the bolts and the casing. The previous evidence showed a clear order to the bolts breaking suggesting one bolt was heavier loaded than the remaining ones. The new evidence points to a much more extreme failure.
As for your 'limit to rotational torque': seized bearings do not 'rotate if given enough torque' they will break right out of their casings and whatever those casings are surrounded by. The reason is that unlike your cartilage the bearings are orders of magnitude harder than the materials around them. For a bearing to seize indicates that the material has already deformed, you either catch it before the race goes or it will crack and after that all bets are quite literally off. I'm not aware of any design that would spec a bearing in a situation with such forces that would still happily work with that bearing replaced by a bushing welded to the shaft and the surrounding material even if it is statically in exactly the same position.
What you describe is a worn bearing with an excess of play, not a seized one, which tends to exhibit roughly the same characteristics as a welded joint with dissimilar materials.
Bearings are wear items, bearings that are worn or seized are something that should never ever happen in an aircraft, there is no way that this particular design would continue to function with sufficient margin if that bearing would fail. If not caught before it breaks the next flight is going to be a disaster. Take off in a fully loaded aircraft of this size puts extreme stress on the engine mounts. They are designed with all of their parts in working order, this is not a case of 'oh, we'll fix that the next time this craft is in for maintenance'. All parts of a plane that is certified as airworthy are supposed to be operating as originally specified.
The default assumption is that it all looked good during the last inspection and that the time between the failure occurring and the plane going down was short. If it was not that would be highly unexpected. But again, until the final report is in that's speculative, and if anything the people at the NTSB are scary good at getting to root causes.
> What you describe is a worn bearing with an excess of play, not a seized one
Yeah. Worn or seized bearings are relevant to rotation, but on second thoughts, rotation isn't the issue here.
Rereading the PDF, I can see that I entirely misunderstood the function of the bearing and how it failed, and I suspect I've mislead you. The two lugs mislead me! I would guess they make the lug as two parts for redundancy (if the lug was a single part then it's failure would be bad). My previous comment was wildly incorrect about rotation, but now I think rotation is not the issue.
The casing split in half all the way around the circumference at the weakest point (where the recess is), splitting into two pieces, a forward half and a rearward half. The half forward of the split moves forward and the half rearward of the split moves rearward. That is what they inspect for every sixty months to see if the bearing casing has broken.
An unbroken casing is normally prevented from moving forward or backwards by the ball (how the hell do they make the bearing like that?!).
It appears that the unbroken casing itself is designed for the outside to be able to slide forwards and backwards within the lugs (very little movement?).
The primary force this bearing is preventing is pitching of the engine relative to the wing (vertical force). And secondarily to prevent yawing of the engine relative to the wing (horizontal force). Rotation (roll of the engine relative to the wing) has to be prevented by the main mount and the engine surely can't twist much therefore I suspect rotational forces at that bearing are rather irrelevant.
As the engine thrusts and stops thrusting, the thrust changes create pitching forces on the engine, and there would be vertical movement at the broken bearing - a clunk!?
The main mount would flex a little more due to the extra pitch movement; and I guess we'll have to wait and see whether the bearing failure is relevant to the crash. It appears to be a smoking gun, but could be a red herring?
The main mount is obviously not supposed to fail even if that bearing has broken.
Which may have been a very reasonable conclusion based on what they knew of the issue. The letter sent out reported a split of the bearing race. A split bearing race won't prevent it from supporting the load. It's easily possible that Boeing's simulation of an aircraft operating with a split bearing race was fine.
The NTSB investigation found that for this crash, not only did the bearing race crack, but also that the bearing lugs, which hold the bearing in place, were fractured. I don't have access to the original text of the letter Boeing sent out, but based on the NTSB report, it sounds like only the issue with the bearing race was previously identified. The two may very well be related, but that doesn't mean that the lug fractures are an expected result of the race failure - perhaps some contributing factor made the lugs more susceptible than predicted. It also remains possible that the bearing damage is a red herring; the aircraft was nearing the end of its service life and had known structural issues in other parts of the pylon. The fact is that for more than a decade after the bearing race issue was reported, it didn't result in a safety of flight condition.
The insinuation that Boeing was deliberately trying to hide or downplay a known issue is simply unwarranted. It would be irresponsible for the NSTB not to mention a known issue that could have potentially been relevant, it's not evidence the issue was improperly handled.
Doesn't seem like gray to me. It seems a company who has a history of cutting corners and ignoring or downplaying safety problems did exactly that in this case too which resulted in the deaths of many people. UPS made an error here as well in trusting Boeing when they said it wasn't a safety issue and they should have installed the revised bearing assembly out of an abundance of caution, but I don't know much they would have known back in 2011 about the changes at Boeing that prioritized profit over safety following the merger with McDonnell Douglas