anson harris

Were that to be true if Boeing hadn't hoovered up all the major US manufacturers. Now their greed for power and market share has put the whole picnic in peril.

maxter

Or is capitalism in this case 'pushing the edges until the death rate becomes intolerable.' Surely there must be a compromise where we can have innovation but not at the expense of lives. I think we see too much going wrong across many industries where 'let the market decide' is not working well

Tomaski

I also think one can reasonably discuss inadequate training and adverse corporate culture without going down the path of labeling anyone as a "bad" pilot.

FlightDetent

Towards which I submit the following:

Recent comms by B.A. suggest an angle where the global achieved skill standard needs to be reviewed due to anecdotal evidence that assumptions about pilots capabilities the manufacturers and regulators hold are overly optimistic, upsets my stomach.

It actually is true, though. Namely, Ethiopean had 2 and LionAir too many to count. Still there's a bad tail about such win-win statements, subtly suggesting the Runaway Trim NNC was enough to keep souls alive. Flying brick it wasn't!

Our much beloved industry need Boeing to raise reborn out of all this, the ideas at the beginning of this thread need to be applauded and we all hold fingers crossed.

fdr

[QUOTE=FlightDetent;10572486]Towards which I submit the following:

Recent comms by B.A. suggest an angle where the global achieved skill standard needs to be reviewed due to anecdotal evidence that assumptions about pilots capabilities the manufacturers and regulators hold are overly optimistic, upsets my stomach.

It actually is true, though. Namely, Ethiopean had 2 and LionAir too many to count. Still there's a bad tail about such win-win statements, subtly suggesting the Runaway Trim NNC was enough to keep souls alive. Flying brick it wasn't!

Our much beloved industry need Boeing to raise reborn out of all this, the ideas at the beginning of this thread need to be applauded and we all hold fingers crossed.[/QUOTE

Hmmm...

OK....


​​​
And Air France had, let's see, an off at Toronto, a splash in the Atlantic, and a huge number of other events. There was the forest pruning at Habsheim, and Air Inters FPA vs FPM into Strasburg. Those were all Airbus products, not Boeing, (there are sundry antics with Boeing by AFR as well along the way, Delhi, Papeete come to mind). In the period since the Max had issues, non ET and JT planes have gone off the end of runways in countries that are considered first World, English speaking... and we have splashed one or two as re runs of one of the pointed commentary events.

Pan Am knew the 7 seas, they left debris in each one.

The pilots we have today are the product of the desires of the industry. The pilot is not responsible for a standard being great or otherwise.

Flying is a dynamic task, that requires engagement and participation by all concerned, not just the crew that get selected.

Not picking on Air France in particular... But it doesn't have a lost in translation issue, and assuming that the ills of the aviation world today is due to the pilot, 3rd World, Boeing, does not hold up to any level of scrutiny.

S. A. Maintenance is the pernicious, intractable issue, that dates back before the Red Baron took a. 303 round in a soft
​​spot. Fix the root problem, not the symptoms.

Other than in quantum physics, our universe has time flowing from before to after, so fix the root cause, which is not what most of the strident calls on this forum hold as causation.

Before. >>>>>>> not before

FD, if you think the ET crew didn't have a considerable HQ issue to deal with, which was not fully covered in the AD and NTC, then you should start reading the applicable threads again from the beginning, or have a chat with people who fly the737 or are involved in flight test involving HQ.

Your jet manages to kill competent people today, that aren't out of Sea or Africa, including for loss of control, remember Excel at Perpignan.?

rightseatNsweating

Exactly. I am angered by some (let’s be honest, racist) comments about 3rd world pilots. However, it is a fact that many pilots in Africa do emerge from deeply flawed training systems, built on deeply flawed education systems. I have personally seen this forcing a mentality of working the system and playing the odds rather than focusing on developing core skills and knowledge. These kids do not choose to work like that, the system forces them into it.

It is also a fact that the responses of the Ethiopian and Lion Air crews were less than perfect. None of us can be sure how we would have responded to the situations that they found themselves in. But particularly in the case of ET, there were (in)actions that in the cold light of day are hard to understand. I weep for the young ET FO apparently getting it right at first but subsequently doubting his own judgement.

Dropping in and out of here for a while, I was triggered to post by the comment about Boeing being advised by their own board to design aircraft for less well-trained pilots. That may be a cynical ploy to keep the pressure on pilot error as the real cause, but we must work to maintain the reputation of the profession in the face of a growing tendency to portray pilots as robotic button pushers.

FlightDetent

fdr you seem to be arguing against things that I oppose myself. Hence the overall tone of you reply is a bit confusing, and there are chunks lost in translation I cannot make any sense of at all. Shall try to rephrase mine when there's bit more RnR time. Off to test the stickforces on Airbus approaching stall.

Oh, that. Could we please not spoil Boeing threads with (anti) Airbus-connected agenda, which you are actually very bad at? Just to reiterate we paddling on the same boat: AF of not so distant era deserves to be picked on by all means possible.

Mac the Knife

If the aircraft manufacturers were operated under a socialist system, ownership, pricing, and probably the costs of labor and materials would be controlled by the workers/community/government.

There. Fixed that for ya'

Mac

OldnGrounded

You didn't fix it. You just demonstrated an overly-narrow understanding of the concept of socialism.

twochai

Absolutely true - here's a very good piece in today's NYT from the great aviation writer, William Langewiesche 'What really brought down the 737 MAX?'

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/m...gtype=Homepage

OldnGrounded

To me, Langewiesche's piece reads very much like pilot-blaming (especially blaming "third-world" pilots) with a strong slant toward minimizing Boeing responsibility for the MAX crashes.

GordonR_Cape

I stumbled on a link that discusses many technical errors and omissions in the article: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/0...x-failure.html

pilotmike

Some quotes"from the great aviation writer, William Langewiesche"...

Quote:

Like thousands of new pilots now meeting the demands for crews — especially those in developing countries with rapid airline growth — his experience with flying was scripted, bounded by checklists and cockpit mandates and dependent on autopilots. He had some rote knowledge of cockpit procedures as handed down from the big manufacturers, but he was weak in an essential quality known as airmanship. Sadly, his captain turned out to be weak in it, too.

Quote:

Airplanes are living things. The best pilots do not sit in cockpits so much as strap them on.

Quote:

... airline pilots who never fly solo and whose entire experience consists of catering to passengers who flinch in mild turbulence, refer to “air pockets” in cocktail conversation and think they are near death if bank angles exceed 30 degrees.... The worst of them are intimidated by their airplanes and remain so until they retire or die. It is unfortunate that those who die in cockpits tend to take their passengers with them

Quote:

twenty-five seconds later (a long interlude in flight), Harvino requested a clearance to “some holding point” where the airplane could linger in the sky. The request was surprising. The controller did not provide a holding point but asked about the nature of the problem. Harvino answered, “Flight-control problem.” He did not mention which kind, but before they die, pilots are rarely so descriptive.

Quote:

After both accidents, the flight-data recordings indicated that the immediate culprit was a sensor failure tied to a new and obscure control function that was unique to the 737 Max: the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). The system automatically applies double-speed impulses of nose-down trim, but only under circumstances so narrow that no regular airline pilot will ever experience its activation — unless a sensor fails. Boeing believed the system to be so innocuous, even if it malfunctioned, that the company did not inform pilots of its existence or include a description of it in the airplane’s flight manuals.

=The system in question is complicated, and we will return to it later, but for now it is enough to know that after the loss of Lion Air 610, the company suggested that the 737 Max was as safe as its predecessors. Its tone was uncharacteristically meek, but not for lack of conviction. The company seemed hesitant to point the finger at a prickly customer — Lion Air — that had several billion dollars’ worth of orders on the table and could withdraw them at any time. The dilemma is familiar to manufacturers after major accidents in which it is usually some pilot and not an airplane that has gone wrong. Nonetheless, Boeing’s reticence allowed a narrative to emerge: that the company had developed the system to elude regulators; that it was all about shortcuts and greed; that it had cynically gambled with the lives of the flying public; that the Lion Air pilots were overwhelmed by the failures of a hidden system they could not reasonably have been expected to resist; and that the design of the MCAS was unquestionably the cause of the accident. But none of this was quite true. The rush to lay blame was based in part on a poor understanding not just of the technicalities but also of Boeing’s commercial aviation culture. The Max’s creation took place in suburban Seattle among engineers and pilots of unquestionable if bland integrity, including supervising officials from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Quote:

After President Trump weighed in on the basis of no perceptible knowledge, and the F.A.A. was forced to retreat from its initial defense of the airplane, Boeing had to accept a public onslaught. The onslaught has included congressional hearings, federal investigations, calls for the criminal prosecution of Boeing executives, revelations by whistle-blowers, attacks in the news media, the exploitation of personal tragedy and the construction of a whole new economic sector built around perceptions of the company’s liability. Boeing has grown largely silent, perhaps as much at the request of its sales force as of its lawyers. To point fingers at important clients would risk alienating not only those airlines but others who have been conditioned to buy its airplanes, no matter how incompetent their pilots may be.

"William Langewiesche is a newly named writer at large for the magazine. He is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic and international correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he covered a wide variety of subjects throughout the world. He grew up in aviation and got his start as a pilot before turning to journalism. This is his first article for the magazine."

Shocking. I hope this might be his last article.

DaveReidUK

Not forgetting The Atlantic Dusts Off Discredited Conspiracy Theory to Accuse MH370 Pilot of Hijacking

Suicide-murder by the captain, in case anyone was wondering, according to Langewiesche.

Preemo

I did not say it was socialism, but what I did say was, “The more regulation and red tape, the more socialistic the industry.“

Back to Boeing

Preemo

Any drive to an extreme at either end will end badly. In my view this is a failure of the regulator - when the FAA put the fox in charge of the chicken run, bad things were more likely to happen. When the FAA has conflicting goals (safety and the encouraging travel). There is some good background on this alleged example of regulatory capture in the FAA wikipedia article.

OldnGrounded

Yikes.

In the comments below today's Times article, posters who question Langewieshce's analysis are being asked (paraphrasing): Do you know who he is and who his father is? People often perceive expertise based upon fairly irrelevant factors.

n5296s

To be fair to Langewische, he is a decent writer and does actually know something about aviation, unlike most people who write about it. However he does seem to have taken a serious overdose of Boeing Kool-Aid here.

In fact, even if he were right that all right-thinking 'murcan pilots would have flown their way out of this (and there are certainly plenty of those who believe that) - it's STILL irresponsible (at best) to build an aircraft that can't be flown by 75% of the pilots who will get to do so. Suppose Toyota or Ford built a car that had 10x the fatal accidents of other cars, and their defence was "but the drivers just needed better training, it's terrible how under-qualified today's drivers are". I don't think that would go down very well. Maybe in 1960 it would have (the Renault Floride c. 1960 was indeed pretty much undrivable by normal mortals).

GordonR_Cape

I was prepared to give Langewiesche the benefit of the doubt in only focusing on the pilots, but now mainstream media are using his article as 'proof' that the crashes were not Boeing's fault: https://www.businessinsider.com/737-...-report-2019-9

OldnGrounded

I think that's exactly what was intended by the writer and those who enabled the placement of the op-ed (not a "report").