Boeing Shares Plunge and Recover Post Plane Crash

[barbos]

Indonesia cancel 49 planes order with Boeing
https://www.afp.com/en/news/717/ind...ne-boeing-737-order-after-crashes-doc-1ex5964

 

[lpetrich]

Boeing 737 Max is the 737 pushed to the limit - Business Insider

• The Boeing 737 is best-selling airliner of all time.
• There have been four distinct generations of the plane in the five decades years since the original 737-100 entered service in 1967.
• The latest version, the Boeing 737 Max, entered service in 2017.
• The plane we fly on today is very different in design and capability than aircraft that originally debuted.
• The 737 platform has been effectively pushed the limit of its capabilities with the Max. Boeing will probably need to come up with a brand-new plane to take on the successor to the Airbus A320neo.

Over the past five decades, Boeing has sold a whopping 15,000 of the planes, the most of any airliner.

Currently, Boeing boasts a backlog of 5,826 planes worth upwards of $400 billion; 80% of those orders are for the 737.

...
What started as a 93-foot-long, 100-seat short-range airliner has morphed over the years into something quite different.

The upcoming 737 Max 10 airliner is 53% larger at nearly 144 feet long, and it can carry up to 230 passengers. It can also fly three times as far as the original 737-100.

Boeing quietly unveiled the 777X that will replace the 747 jumbo jet - Business Insider

• The Boeing 777X was unveiled on March 13 in a private, employees-only event.
• The 777X is destined to serve as Boeing's new flagship and replace the iconic 747 jumbo jet.
• The 777X comes in two variants: the $410.2 million 777-8, and the $442.2 million 777-9.
• The jet is expected to enter service in 2020 with its launch customer, Emirates.

 

[barbos]

Saw somewhere some expert saying turning MCAS off is not that easy, takes about 30 seconds, during which plane is speeding up to the ground.
and it takes time to return stabilizer back after MCAS is off, cause it's slow process.

 

[Copernicus]

Saw somewhere some expert saying turning MCAS off is not that easy, takes about 30 seconds, during which plane is speeding up to the ground.
and it takes time to return stabilizer back after MCAS is off, cause it's slow process.

I think that you would need to have had some experience with the aircraft to be able to make such a claim. From what I have read, it just requires two switches to be set, and all pilots flying the aircraft should have had simulator training in which they did that. That said, I don't know how well the pilots were trained. Ethiopian Airlines probably ought to share some of the blame for what happened. How well were their pilots trained before being certified to fly the aircraft?

The MCAS issue is a red herring, because all fly-by-wire aircraft have had anti-stall software that used angle-of-attack sensors since Airbus first introduced them in the A300 series of airliners. Moreover, Airbus also had similar problems of sensor misinterpretations in the past. The term "MCAS" is just a brand name for a new iteration of such software that was designed specifically before the nose-heavy configuration in the 737 airframe. As one of my colleagues had pointed out last week, Boeing has been piling more and more new hardware into an old airframe, and that is what required them to redesign the anti-stall software.

As I explicitly pointed out much earlier, and contrary to barbos's assertions, I have not been defending Boeing. In fact, I wanted all the Max 8 and 9 aircraft grounded until this problem was solved. Moreover, I am quite outraged to learn that marketers were apparently given approval to sell extra safety features as "optional" at extra cost on these aircraft. That is like charging passengers extra to have the use of seat belts. If an extra fire extinguisher is offered as "optional" for the cargo compartment, then one has to ask what the marketers thought ought to be a good reason for asking customers to pay more in order to get it. If it wasn't needed, then why offer it at all? For peace of mind? Peace of mind about what?

It appears that extra safety features connected to this flight control system were offered as options at extra costs. One of those was a warning system to detect whether the two angle-of-attack sensors were at odds in their readings. Why was this considered optional? In any case, Boeing will now install them as standard in all new aircraft. There is yet another feature that they apparently still want to charge extra money for. If so, then they are still delusional. Muilenberg should lose his job over this, but, unfortunately, it is the board of trustees that really ought to go. They have really screwed up on this one.

 

[Copernicus]

This NY Times article adds some interesting new information to the discussion: Boeing Was ‘Go, Go, Go’ to Beat Airbus With the 737 Max.

It turns out that the problem was not that the aircraft was too "nose-heavy", as I had previously thought, but something of the opposite. By adding more powerful, heavier engines to the wings, the old 737 airframe had a tendency to lift the nose, which could have produced stalls. So the reconfiguration of the anti-stall software was driven by that consideration back in 2011. That was when I was working quite a bit on 737 nomenclature, so it must have been when I first encountered the acronym "MCAS" in FCOM language (Flight Crew Operations Manuals). In any case, the engineers were trying to overcompensate. There may also have been quality control lapses because of the compressed schedules brought on by the rush to sell airplanes to American Airlines, some of whose pilots later reported incidents of struggling to keep the nose up after takeoff. One rumor that I did hear was that the current trend has been to lay off quality control personnel as a cost-saving measure, but that may not have been happening before the Max 8 rollout.

Another thing I learned was that pilots were not necessarily required to learn to handle stalls in flight simulators, and that somewhat shocked me. They installed a new method for shutting down the autopilot, but they discouraged recertification of pilots. This was done in order to make the aircraft more palatable to airlines. (Airbus touts the fact that its entire line of aircraft are standardized enough to minimize training required for pilots to fly in new aircraft.) Hence, experienced 737 pilots would have been familiar with using the yoke to shut off the autopilot and less prepared to use the new manual two-switch method. That is, they would have been predisposed to continue to fight with the yoke. It seems that the drive to shorten schedules and cut costs overrode everything else:

At the heart of Boeing’s push was a focus on creating a plane that was essentially the same as earlier 737 models, important for getting the jet certified quickly. It would also help limit the training that pilots would need, cutting down costs for airlines.

Rick Ludtke, an engineer who helped design the 737 Max cockpit and spent 19 years at Boeing, said the company had set a ground rule for engineers: Limit changes to hopefully avert a requirement that pilots spend time training in a flight simulator before flying the Max.

“Any designs we created could not drive any new training that required a simulator,” Mr. Ludtke said. “That was a first.”

When upgrading the cockpit with a digital display, he said, his team wanted to redesign the layout of information to give pilots more data that were easier to read. But that might have required new pilot training.

So instead, they simply recreated the decades-old gauges on the screen. “We just went from an analog presentation to a digital presentation,” Mr. Ludtke said. “There was so much opportunity to make big jumps, but the training differences held us back.”

“This program was a much more intense pressure cooker than I’ve ever been in,” he added. “The company was trying to avoid costs and trying to contain the level of change. They wanted the minimum change to simplify the training differences, minimum change to reduce costs, and to get it done quickly.”

Boeing said in a statement that the 2011 decision to build the Max had beaten out other options, including developing a new airplane.

 

[bilby]

"It seems like the drive to ... cut costs overrode everything else" is becoming the most popular conclusion of disaster investigations these days.

It's almost as if the profit motive were sometimes harmful, and that the free market needed strong regulation and oversight in order to remain safe.

 

[barbos]

Saw somewhere some expert saying turning MCAS off is not that easy, takes about 30 seconds, during which plane is speeding up to the ground.
and it takes time to return stabilizer back after MCAS is off, cause it's slow process.

I think that you would need to have had some experience with the aircraft to be able to make such a claim.

The guy was a pilot.

From what I have read, it just requires two switches to be set, and all pilots flying the aircraft should have had simulator training in which they did that.

I think it's been established that they have not had that

That said, I don't know how well the pilots were trained. Ethiopian Airlines probably ought to share some of the blame for what happened. How well were their pilots trained before being certified to fly the aircraft?

The MCAS issue is a red herring, because all fly-by-wire aircraft have had anti-stall software that used angle-of-attack sensors since Airbus first introduced them in the A300 series of airliners.

Nope. No other plane have such a system which specifically designed for MAX to "assist" pilots during certain phases of the flight only, all because new engines were too powerful.

Moreover, Airbus also had similar problems of sensor misinterpretations in the past.

Oh, they had more than plenty of SIMILAR problems.

The term "MCAS" is just a brand name for a new iteration of such software that was designed specifically before the nose-heavy configuration in the 737 airframe.

Not nose heavy, off-center and too powerful engine

As one of my colleagues had pointed out last week, Boeing has been piling more and more new hardware into an old airframe, and that is what required them to redesign the anti-stall software.

As I explicitly pointed out much earlier, and contrary to barbos's assertions, I have not been defending Boeing. In fact, I wanted all the Max 8 and 9 aircraft grounded until this problem was solved.

No, you did not, I wanted that. In fact it should never have been allowed to fly in the first place.

 

[Copernicus]

Barbos, please update yourself by reading the second post I wrote with information from the NY Times article. You only attempted to respond to the first post. In fact, read the NY Times article yourself, because it is pretty good. It quotes Rick Lutke, one of the designers of the 737 Max flight deck and hints at some possible tension between engineers and management. That is, Lutke complained that the company had tried to get away with not requiring pilots to undergo simulator training on the new system--something that was "a first" in his opinion. The primary concern at the time was to try to keep American Airlines from buying Airbus airliners that did not require expensive downtime for pilots to train in simulators. I don't want to have to have to repeat what I said in the post that you seem not to have read.

I will repeat this once again, although it appears that it either isn't getting through your defensive shields, so I won't bother pursuing the matter further: All fly-by-wire aircraft have anti-stall software. The Airbus line introduced it first, and they had some similar problems with software controlling their angle-of-attack sensors. The MCAS was part of the problem here, but it was not some totally new idea that Boeing just came up with. It was a redesign of existing software to interpret angle-of-attack sensors. The redesign was absolutely essential in order for the old 737 airframe to handle the tendency of the nose to lift because of the weight of the heavier engines on the wings. So they came up with a new name for the anti-stall system. The fixes will not require the MCAS to be replaced, just upgraded to handle greater redundancy in the system. What I fear is that the late April "fix" that the company has announced will not allow sufficient time for the changes to be tested.

 

[barbos]

I read NY times after the first crash

 

[J842P]

"It seems like the drive to ... cut costs overrode everything else" is becoming the most popular conclusion of disaster investigations these days.

It's almost as if the profit motive were sometimes harmful, and that the free market needed strong regulation and oversight in order to remain safe.

I have it on good authority that Boeing would never act that way, because the people that work at Boeing are good people.

 

[barbos]

"It seems like the drive to ... cut costs overrode everything else" is becoming the most popular conclusion of disaster investigations these days.

It's almost as if the profit motive were sometimes harmful, and that the free market needed strong regulation and oversight in order to remain safe.

I have it on good authority that Boeing would never act that way, because the people that work at Boeing are good people.

Stop channeling Copernicus

 

[Worldtraveller]

"It seems like the drive to ... cut costs overrode everything else" is becoming the most popular conclusion of disaster investigations these days.

It's almost as if the profit motive were sometimes harmful, and that the free market needed strong regulation and oversight in order to remain safe.

I have it on good authority that Boeing would never act that way, because the people that work at Boeing are good people.

There's a difference, sometimes significantly so, between the engineers, designers, and even the people that actually build the aircraft, and the management and sometimes certification offices at large aircraft companies.

 

[J842P]

"It seems like the drive to ... cut costs overrode everything else" is becoming the most popular conclusion of disaster investigations these days.

It's almost as if the profit motive were sometimes harmful, and that the free market needed strong regulation and oversight in order to remain safe.

I have it on good authority that Boeing would never act that way, because the people that work at Boeing are good people.

There's a difference, sometimes significantly so, between the engineers, designers, and even the people that actually build the aircraft, and the management and sometimes certification offices at large aircraft companies.

Who could have guessed.

 

[Gun Nut]

Shares dropped because it looked like Boeing might have to deal with the grounding and expensive mitigation of some serious problem - and replacement of components... The recovery of shares was due to the realization that it was "just" a software update needed. The capital cost of which is minimal.

 

[Gun Nut]

Shares dropped because it looked like Boeing might have to deal with the grounding and expensive mitigation of some serious problem - and replacement of components... The recovery of shares was due to the realization that it was "just" a software update needed. The capital cost of which is minimal.

... and shares just dropped again after it was announced that they needed to install an additional AoA indicator and a software error indicator as standard equipment (which was available previously as optional equipment - and only included with the heated leather seats.. j/k).

In my opinion, added indicators for AoA is silly. Just patch the software so that any downward pitch triggered by software is only as much as recoverable via manual override.

That was the issue.. .that the software would pitch down more than the pilot could recover from at low altitude, not that the plane would disallow manual intervention... it just acted too dramatically in certain circumstances such that even with manual override, the attitude of the plane was unrecoverable. You need thousands of feet to recover from an extreme dive, even with pulling lots of Gs. So, just patch the protection mode solution to take altitude more into account when correcting for near stall. The best landing a pilot can make is one where the plane stalls just as it is touching down... theoretically.

 

[barbos]

https://www.seattletimes.com/busine...-737-max-may-have-failed-on-ethiopian-flight/

So they determined that pilots acted according to the latest Boeing instruction and turned MCAS off but then turned it back ON when they failed to manually set the trim. In other words Boeing emergency instructions don't work as written and the article explains why.

In any case, Issue here is dumb software which does not account for sensor malfunction and air-speed sensors malfunction a lot.
It's pretty trivial to detect malfunction and ignore them. In fact that's what AirBus does It seems. That crash over Atlantic happened because software detected malfunction and turned auto-pilot off. But pilots panicked and stalled the plane.
As for the sensors, plane have enough other more reliable sensors not only to detect malfunction but to even fly without them, albeit less optimal.

 

[Copernicus]

I haven't had much to say since my last post, since I didn't have anything more to add. However, I have now come across an article published by the IEEE that is better than anything else I have read on the subject. It is very thorough and fits well with my experience as a 25-year employee of the company.

See How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer

The root cause of the problem, as I said in my last post, was Boeing's competition with Airbus. They actually did originally produce designs for a new airframe to accommodate the heavier fuel-efficient engines. However, they scrapped those in favor of retaining the old airframe. The requirement for fuel-efficient engines required placing them further forward on the wing, and that introduced aerodynamic instability. The motivation was that using an old airframe would cut costs and bring it to market more quickly. They should have kept to their original intention to launch a new airframe. To address the instability caused by their bad decision, engineers required a total redesign of the software for interpreting angle-of-attack avionics, so they renamed the control system "MCAS" to reflect its total redesign. There was no possibility of keeping the same avionic software that existed for previous 737 aircraft.

Unfortunately, that changed Boeing's past philosophy about its line of aircraft--that pilot control should be preferred over automation. The new design made it extremely difficult for pilots to circumvent the automation or to gain a manual "feel" for the aerodynamics. Everything was being mediated through the automation system--a philosophy that predominates in Airbus designs. However, the software was perhaps hastily designed and probably not designed by very experienced engineers. Boeing is applying patches, but I suspect that the public will shun this aircraft, even if it is "rebranded" with a new name. Personally, I would not want to fly on it.

A big part of the problem was that Airbus advertises cockpit-compatibility across its product line, which means that minimal retraining is required for pilots to pilot different Airbus planes. This reflects the fact that Airbus is a newer company, so it was able to implement this kind of compatibility from its inception. Boeing is a decades-old company, and the practice there has always been to introduce different cockpit (or "flight deck") designs with each new airframe. So Boeing tends to build a new "company" around each new line--727, 737, 747, 767, 787, etc. The 737 Max was really a totally new aircraft with an outdated airframe. It should have required new simulator training, but Boeing wanted to pretend that experienced 737 pilots could handle it. They did not want to tell potential customers that they would need to undergo the expense of retraining 737 pilots.

Anyway, there were a lot of other details that went into this catastrophic manufacturing failure, and those are described very nicely in the article.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I just read that article as well. There was also a good article (linked from the iee column) that was recently updated with a bit more information on the FAA.

https://www.seattletimes.com/busine...-max-system-implicated-in-the-lion-air-crash/

 

[atrib]

However, the software was perhaps hastily designed and probably not designed by very experienced engineers. Boeing is applying patches, but I suspect that the public will shun this aircraft, even if it is "rebranded" with a new name. Personally, I would not want to fly on it.

I wouldn't have any problems with flying on the 737 Max line once the software has been patched. That being said, I suspect the branding will be changed to get around the public's lack of trust.

The preliminary report on the Ethiopian Airlines crash seems to indicate that a significant contributing factor (in addition to the poorly programmed MCAS software) was the very high airspeed that the aircraft had achieved while the pilots were working to recover it. The pilots had left auto-thrust on, apparently going against the Boeing directive in the Runaway Stabilizer Trim Checklist, which allowed the airspeed to climb well beyond the safe limits of the aircraft. Following the checklist, they had apparently activated the Trim Cutoff Switches, which deactivated the MCAS nose down trim command by removing electrical power from the trim controls, which was the right thing to do. The pilots then tried to adjust the trim manually to bring the nose up using the trim wheels (also following the checklist), but the extreme airspeed made it virtually impossible for them to turn the wheels using their hands because of the very high forces acting on the elevators. The black box data indicate that electrical power to the trim controls was restored just before the crash, which was probably a last ditch effort by the pilots to trim the aircraft using electrical power since manual trim was not feasible under the conditions.

If the aircraft had undergone a runaway stabilizer trim problem at regular cruising altitude (300 and above), the pilots would have had the time to use the Boeing checklist procedures to bring the aircraft under control using manual controls. Even at the altitude they were at, if the airspeed had been controlled by the pilots, they might have been able to recover the aircraft following the checklist. It is scary that the software was given so much authority over the flight control system, overriding the pilot's judgement, and that the only way to turn it off also required electrical power to the elevator controls being turned off.

 

[Copernicus]

Atrib, there were a lot of other issues that bothered me, for example the lack of simulator training for an aircraft that was essentially no longer a 737. The aerodynamics had been changed to the point where the pilots were unable to "feel" the aircraft through the yoke in the same way that they could a previous 737. (See the article I posted a link to.) So it wasn't just a matter of following a checklist.

In fact, I worked on the language in the 737 Nonnormal checklists when I worked at Boeing, and some of them were very poorly written. We were supposed to convert them into plainer English, but I don't think that the company followed through on that. The engineers and pilots in our sessions frequently disagreed on the clarity of the instructions. Because the quality is relatively poor, especially for nonnative speakers of English, some airlines write their own checklists, but I have no idea whether the affected airlines did that. We were supposed to offer suggested revisions, but we did not make the final decisions.

Anyway, my decision not to fly on these aircraft has to do with the fact that the airframes are not designed for engines of the size that they are equipped with. Hence, the placement of the engines is what forced a redesign of the anti-stall system. Boeing dealt with the hardware problem by trying to find a software fix, and that is still what they are trying to do. I do not trust their efforts. They should have redesigned the airframe, not used a modified 737 shell.