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Pierson reiterated that Boeing’s woes began around 2017 when supply chain issues led to aircraft being assembled out of sequence. The pressure from management to crank out planes lowered quality control standards and employee morale. He retired over these issues in August 2018 and Lion Air Flight 610 crashed October that year. Pierson claimed that nothing has changed since the Boeing 737 Max’s two crashes. //
Polysyllabic
Ryan Erik King
2/27/24 1:12pm
At this point, the MAX design has been scrutinized over by pretty much everyone, from NTSB, FAA, Boeing, independent teams, etc. If all of them are wrong and Pierson’s the only one who’s right, that would be some amazing fail. I can’t believe, with the sheer number of outside experts reviewing this plane, that its design is faulty. Perhaps its construction is dogshit, but the design has been deemed acceptable by so many SMEs at this point. //
krhodes1
Margin Of Error
2/28/24 2:01pm
No, that is exactly oppositely WRONG. The bigger engines act as wings at high angles of attack, which pushes the nose UP slightly more than the old engines do. And more importantly, as I said, it causes the controls to get lighter as the angle of attack increases, which is the opposite of the certification requirements that control force increase with angle of attack to prevent over-controlling the aircraft. So MCAS was intended to add a SLIGHT nose-down force to counter act that. And as I said, after that, some well-meaning engineers decided to enhance it to provide the sort of stall protection that Airbus has, which meant GREATLY increasing how much nose-down force it could apply. Unfortunately without increasing the redundancy of the system to match that new-found control authority.
But any competent pilot would have zero problem flying a MAX without MCAS. the difference in how a MAX flies and the equivalent NG is very, very, minor, but it is technically in violation of the rather arbitrary certification requirements without it. For that matter, no competent pilot would have crashed the airplanes that had the AoA sensor failures that caused MCAS to activate unnecessarily. A trim runaway is a trim runaway, regardless of what causes it and any competent 737 pilot knows what to do about that (turn off the electric trim and trim the airplane manually). At the end of the day, all MCAS does then or now is adjust the horizontal stabilizer trim via the electric trim automatically under certain conditions.
I can guarantee you that the Airbus NEOs do the exact same thing with their also much larger and more forward engines. But being FBW, they don’t need a separate system to counter that slight tendency. On the other hand, WHEN the computers shit the bed and throw their electronic hands up in the air and say Jesus Take the Sidestick to the pilots (as has happened) you end up with an airplane that flies VERY differently than normal right when having more wierd things going on is the last thing a pilot needs.
Here’s some interesting reading about how things change on an Airbus when things start to get wonky:
https://apstraining.com/wp-content/uploads/FCS-Airbus-Quick-Reference.pdf
What this document doesn’t say is the big difference - under “normal law” and “alternate law” he sidestick sets the attitude of the airplane in pitch and roll and the computer maintains that attitude. So you ask for 10 degrees bank and let go of the stick and the airplane continues in a 10 degree bank. But in “direct law” you literally have direct control and have to fly it like the computer doesn’t exist - because at that point it doesn’t exist. And since that happens about never other than a few minutes in a simulator a few times a year, good luck when it does. Again, competent pilots can handle this, but my feeling it that Airbuses are really good at making pilots less competent at actual stick and rudder flying. But you are flying a 737 stick and rudder whenever the autopilot is off.
Many Airbuses have crashed because pilots did not understand what the airplane was or was NOT going to do for them, right back to the loss of the third A320 ever built at an airshow in France. And then there is AF447, a crash that was both an example of some stupendously bad airmanship AND something that simply could not have happened at all in a Boeing aircraft, even a FBW one.
Boeing has some REALLY serious issues with quality control currently that they need to sort out yesterday, but there is not a thing wrong with the design of the current generation of 737. Simple, rugged, very safe airplanes that make airlines a LOT of money, which is why Boeing is going to sell 5000-6000 of them.