Indonesia plane crash: All 189 passengers presumed dead in latest aviation disaster (Oct 2018)

Elefantman said:

I could be wrong but my understanding the system works on just one angle of attack (AOA) sensor. This system should be using three sensors so if one acts up, the other two will override it.

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In a multi-million dollar plane they cut corners to save money with systems, testing (apparently), and pilot training (this saved the airlines money and made the plane more lucrative/less costly).

The FAA put a rubber stamp on it. I appreciate that the FAA has a reputation for being too cumbersome and costly and they have made efforts to alleviate the burden they cause, but there's a balance to be had - particularly with commercial aviation and it crossed the line when Boeing said pilots would not need to be retrained on a plane that can behave very differently in some apparently common circumstances. This solution did not pass the smell test. Not even close.

For that matter could they not program it to sense altitude and terrain and NOT fly the thing into the ground?

A good read from a pilot perspective.

https://airfactsjournal.com/2019/03/can-boeing-trust-pilots/

What the much ballyhooed system in the 737 MAX does is sense an increasing AOA when the pilot is hand flying the airplane. When the AOA reaches a point without enough stall margin, the system adds some nose-down pitch trim. That pitches the nose down and gives the pilot the stick force to know that he is pulling too close to the stall margin.This concept of adding artificial feel using the pitch trim has been around for years. It has been used to add stick force at high speed cruise where Mach effects can alter stick force as well as at higher AOA where stall margins must be maintained.
What’s critical to the current, mostly uninformed discussion is that the 737 MAX system is not triply redundant. In other words, it can be expected to fail more frequently than one in a billion flights, which is the certification standard for flight critical systems and structures.
What Boeing is doing is using the age-old concept of using the human pilots as a critical element of the system. Before fly-by-wire (FBW) came along, nearly all critical systems in all sizes of airplanes counted on the pilot to be a crucial part of the system operation.
The certification concept for relying on the human involves identification of a failure, and a reaction time. The way it works is that the pilot must be able to recognize the failure, then take three seconds to analyze what is wrong, and then take corrective action before the airplane flies into a critical condition.
If you fly an airplane with an electric pitch trim system, you are flying under this certification concept. A pitch trim system running away can obviously fly the airplane into a dangerous condition, particularly when the autopilot is engaged which masks the trim runaway for some time.

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Though the pitch system in the MAX is somewhat new, the pilot actions after a failure are exactly the same as would be for a runaway trim in any 737 built since the 1960s. As pilots we really don’t need to know why the trim is running away, but we must know, and practice, how to disable it.
The problem for Boeing, and maybe eventually all airplane designers, is that FBW avoids these issues. FBW removes the pilot as a critical part of the system and relies on multiple computers to handle failures.
Boeing is now faced with the difficult task of explaining to the media why pilots must know how to intervene after a system failure. And also to explain that airplanes have been built and certified this way for many decades. Pilots have been the last line of defense when things go wrong.
What makes that such a tall order is that FBW airplanes – which include all the recent Airbus fleet, and the 777 and 787 from Boeing – don’t rely on the pilots to handle flight control system failures. FBW uses at least a triple redundant computer control system to interpret the inputs of the cockpit controls by pilots into movement of the airplane flight controls, including the trim. If part of the FBW system fails, the computer identifies the faulty elements and flies on without the human pilots needing to know how to disable the failed system.

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I understand the point, but I'll reiterate that Boeing intentionally avoided having pilots train on this new system.

TIDE-HSV said:

I'd forgotten, but another friend/client, now retired from Boeing, who got pulled into commuting from HSV to Seattle to finish the Dreamliner confirmed the chaos at the end..

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I can't help but wonder if we have the same friend, Bill B. Bill did the same thing if it's not the same guy.

this dude missed the flight by two minutes.

A Passenger Missed the Fatal Ethiopian Airlines Flight by 2 Minutes

Antonis Mavropoulos did everything he could to catch his connection, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302: He didn’t bring a suitcase. He was the first passenger off his plane. And when he got to the airport in Ethiopia, he ran.

He didn’t make it. A few hours later, he learned that what he thought was his misfortune was, in fact, the kind of spectacular good luck that can make you spend the rest of your life wondering about fate and chance.

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TIDE-HSV said:

Lord, Boeing better be glad for the limitation on liability on international flights and glad it didn't happen in the US. I said above that one prime sensor vendor no-bid the Dreamliner because of corner-cutting. I'd forgotten, but another friend/client, now retired from Boeing, who got pulled into commuting from HSV to Seattle to finish the Dreamliner confirmed the chaos at the end. He walked into, I think, the Hilton, to be greeted by a chorus of employees serenading him for being the worldwide point winner for Hilton Honors points...

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This is what irks me about politicians who complain about regulations...pollution, air safety, traffic safety, etc. Sure, regulations add to costs. But they are there for a reason.

this is not going well for boeing

Boeing 737 Max 8 pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

Pilots repeatedly voiced safety concerns about the Boeing 737 Max 8 to federal authorities, with one captain calling the flight manual "inadequate and almost criminally insufficient" several months before Sunday's Ethiopian Air crash that killed 157 people, an investigation by The Dallas Morning News found.
The News found at least five complaints about the Boeing model in a federal database where pilots can voluntarily report about aviation incidents without fear of repercussions.

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https://twitter.com/abc/status/1105546135555489799

https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/1105546135555489799

R. Maddow had an depth look at the situation. She reported the fix is already underway, with a deadline of the end of April as a finish date. She specifically cited the recent government shutdown with a five week delay in gettting the work done. There was more in the report, it’s worth looking up and watching.

TIDE-HSV said:

President Ignoramus has spoken - planes have become too complicated and pilots are no longer needed. Surely I misheard this...

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Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are....94.3K7:00 AM - Mar 12, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacy54.7K people are talking about thisDonald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump ....needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!69.6K7:12 AM - Mar 12, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacy38.3K people are talking about thisI'm sure this has something to do with the crash of t

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He's still ignorant.

Chukker Veteran said:

R. Maddow had an depth look at the situation. She reported the fix is already underway, with a deadline of the end of April as a finish date. She specifically cited the recent government shutdown with a five week delay in gettting the work done. There was more in the report, it’s worth looking up and watching.

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To be clear, it's the WSJ that's reporting Boeing software fix (which adds redundancy by turning on the other sensors) was originally scheduled to be rolled out in January, but was delayed until April because of the shutdown. But hey, gubment is bad and stuff, right?

92tide said:

https://twitter.com/abc/status/1105546135555489799

https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/1105546135555489799

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Of course it's bribery. The rest of the modern world has banned this aircraft but we have not. These decisions always seem to come down to how the president benefits personally. What's a few hundred lives weighed against a few million dollars in Trump's bank account, Bazza?

I'll also note that Trump has never bothered to nominate anyone to head the FAA. We've had an "acting director" since the end of Obama's term.