True! And if I was Airbus i'd be taking an even closer look!
Perhaps the bigger question for the 737 is will it survive not just this but the massive contraction of the aviation industry under Covid 19. It'll be some time before any airline that survives will want to buy any new planes - for sure they need to see if passenger numbers recover first.
That's another issue. But there are lots of examples of jets (and attack helicopters) being hit by AA or missiles and still being able to make it home. Don't try that with your regular civilian airliner!
Jan
Airbus just announced cutting production with massive layoffs. Nobody is safe in these bizarre times!
Jan
Airbus has a fundamentally different view of how to fly a plane. They will always keep the pilot in the loop and/or make it easy for the pilot to take back control. That's what saved them in the situation you described.
That is also why their pilot training is much more costly than Boeing's.
It's all about the mighty $. Or €.
Jan
About the $ or € and engineering decisions in general: system xyz costs a company a certain amount of money to develop and market. System xyz3er might be a quantum leap forward and solve potential issues the costumers are having but if there is no threat that not incorporating something new leads to market share losses then the cost of development of the old system needs to be gained back. And then some. Basic business.
Last edited:
I would not reduce it to Airbus planes being fundamentally different. The B737 in general is totally different to any large passenger AC currently produced as it has a primarily mechanical flight control System. This caused a special design solution which is potentially dangerous. A 767 or 777 is much more inherently safe by design.
The Quantas flight 72 incident was a malfunction with total loss of control of the plane. If such thing would have happened right after take off or during final approach the desaster would have been inevitable by the pilots.
The problem of the ADIRU spikes was not mentioned in the software design as the ADIRU manufacturer assured that in any case of a malfunction it would deactivate itself causing the flight control computer to ignore this unit and only use the inputs from the remaining operational ADIRU units. In reality the faulty ADIRU produced wrong outputs and was unable to detect this for whatever reason (check Google for "tin Whiskers" if you are still not frightened of flying) and the flight control computer went nuts because of that.
The Eurowings Alpha Protect incident took the Crew 1 hour with the help of ground technicians they called by sattelite phone to prevent the AC going into an uncommanded dive. In this case the higher redundancy allowed them to switch off 2 of the 3 ADR (basically the Cockpit appearance of ADIRU) which caused the FCS to disable the Alpha Protection. Rather an engineers solution than how pilots are intended to fly Airbus AC.
A-10 Warthog being a prime example. Tough and ugly and does what it says on the tin!
The far more important lesson for me is that, even in a safety/thorough culture things are sufficiently complex that it's easy to let mistakes/oversights/shortcuts creep in. And an increasing, intoxicating culture, oft derived from software engineering of, "fail fast." We want to talk about the corruption from above, but Hanlon's razor is definitely worth paying attention to.
The "fail fast" mentality has its value, don't get me wrong, but there are plenty of places where it has no right to be.
The "fail fast" mentality has its value, don't get me wrong, but there are plenty of places where it has no right to be.
It was also a call to humility, given how easily everyone here has been Monday morning quarterbacking the issue. I'm sure all of us, if we actually stopped to think about it, could find ourselves as a part of such a chain of failures.
Hmmm... everything I suspected to be wrong with Boeing and the 737Max in the beginning has come to pass and then some.
I have a feeling the Boeing will fly on and our side of Airbus might not. My old boss ran Hypertac. I had no idea until recently it was widely used. He overcame many problems to get it to market. His main one was using nitric acid to find duds. The bean counters didn't like that. If green was seen junk it.
Good point. I don't think anyone here is qualified to talk about aeronautical engineering. I know from my experience working in development for 7 yrs that engineers (and my only experience in this regard is electronic engineers) seem to think they can wade into any problem and pontificate about the causes, solutions and why the people in the middle of it are useless.
Lucky I worked with a very, very smart Polish engineer (MSc level guy) who's wife was a medical doctor. When we started 'Monday morning quaterbacking' on an issue one time, he politely explained to us that the previous evening he had accompanied his wife to a dinner hosted by a pharma company in which a talk on some new drug they had just had approved was given. He told us it was all complete gobbledygook to him. Moral of the story, knowledge is sticky and its very domain specific (and one of the reasons problems that lie across multiple knowledge domains are so difficult to solve).
So, we know squat about aero engineering (even though some us may be pilots).
However, that does not stop us legitimately questioning the motives behind the management failings that led to this disaster. I am sure the Boeing engineers are brilliant and all highly qualified. But, the leadership stank to high heaven and their best efforts were all for nothing.
I hope this thing is turned around for the hardworking people at Boeing. But I also hope and the FAA circles back and there is a criminal investigation and Dennis Mueller's **** gets ripped out.
Nasty words, but that's what is needed.
That is the crux of the matter and as you said there is no need to be an aeronautical engineer to notice that.
Not exactly related to this aircraft, but news from the company:
Boeing Quietly Pulls Plug on the 747, Closing Era of Jumbo Jets
Boeing Quietly Pulls Plug on the 747, Closing Era of Jumbo Jets - Bloomberg
Boeing Quietly Pulls Plug on the 747, Closing Era of Jumbo Jets
Boeing Quietly Pulls Plug on the 747, Closing Era of Jumbo Jets - Bloomberg
Thanks, Andrew for expounding my point. I do not want to shirk away from the rotten core of leadership, but I can also see how sloppiness in implementation could occur very easily *even* among good engineers. That should give us pause.
* I'm an EE that works in a cancer diagnostics center -- your story about your Polish colleague sounds very familiar. 🙂
It was said electronic engineers shouldn't believe themselves experts of aero engineering. Many projects I work on need just general engineering. Most engineers I know work very well in new engineering areas. Not because they want to, they have to. Mechanical engineers never will understand an engineer who never got their hands dirty. They don't mind that you don't know, they mind that you wont learn. As my old boss said. He worked down a hole at Christmas, in water to 1 micron and no one would allow less than 100% sucess.
Not saying that, but the different conceptual view of the role of pilot and automation between the two is well documented. It was also discussed here.
Jan
- Status
- Not open for further replies.