Boeing 737 Max by SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The grunts usually know what's going on ...

Quote:
"This Plane Was Designed By Clowns, Who Are Supervised By Monkeys [FAA]" - Shocking Boeing Emails Reveal Contempt For Management, FAA

...According to more than 100 pages of internal company communications (which were apparently withheld from the FAA during the certification process for the jet) Boeing employees could be heard mocking federal rules, openly discussing their deception of regulators, and joking about the MAX's potential flaws.

The most shocking messages were sent by Boeing pilots and other employees who can be seen discussing software issues and problems with the flight simulator software for the MAX, which is particularly disturbing since it was issues with the plane's MCAS software that were found to have contributed to two avoidable crashes and the brutal deaths of 346 people

In one message, one Boeing employee openly admits to deceiving the FAA on behalf of the company.

"I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year," one of the employees said in messages from 2018, apparently in reference to interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration.

In another, a group of Boeing test pilots agreed that they wouldn't want their families flying with pilots trained on the new Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight simulator.

"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t," one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. "No," the colleague responded.

As the New York Times explains, the release of these communications, both emails and instant messages, is "the latest embarrassing episode for Boeing in a crisis that has cost the company billions of dollars and wreaked havoc on the aviation industry across the globe."

It should go without saying that these messages "threaten to complicate Boeing's relationship with the FAA" at a time when it's still unclear when the MAX might be cleared to fly again.
Yet, as we mentioned above, this is only the latest and perhaps most jarring of a string of revelations citing internal documents and communications. Forget "regulatory capture" - a term that's often used to criticize the revolving-door nature of Wall Street compliance officials and the regulatory agencies supposed to keep their firms in line - this is regulatory irrelevance.

MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/plane-was-designed-clowns-shocking-b
oeing-emails-reveal-contempt-management-faa

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Sunday, January 12, 2020 2:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The grunts usually know what's going on ...

Quote:
"This Plane Was Designed By Clowns, Who Are Supervised By Monkeys [FAA]" - Shocking Boeing Emails Reveal Contempt For Management, FAA

...According to more than 100 pages of internal company communications (which were apparently withheld from the FAA during the certification process for the jet) Boeing employees could be heard mocking federal rules, openly discussing their deception of regulators, and joking about the MAX's potential flaws.

The most shocking messages were sent by Boeing pilots and other employees who can be seen discussing software issues and problems with the flight simulator software for the MAX, which is particularly disturbing since it was issues with the plane's MCAS software that were found to have contributed to two avoidable crashes and the brutal deaths of 346 people

In one message, one Boeing employee openly admits to deceiving the FAA on behalf of the company.

"I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year," one of the employees said in messages from 2018, apparently in reference to interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration.

In another, a group of Boeing test pilots agreed that they wouldn't want their families flying with pilots trained on the new Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight simulator.

"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t," one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. "No," the colleague responded.

As the New York Times explains, the release of these communications, both emails and instant messages, is "the latest embarrassing episode for Boeing in a crisis that has cost the company billions of dollars and wreaked havoc on the aviation industry across the globe."

It should go without saying that these messages "threaten to complicate Boeing's relationship with the FAA" at a time when it's still unclear when the MAX might be cleared to fly again.
Yet, as we mentioned above, this is only the latest and perhaps most jarring of a string of revelations citing internal documents and communications. Forget "regulatory capture" - a term that's often used to criticize the revolving-door nature of Wall Street compliance officials and the regulatory agencies supposed to keep their firms in line - this is regulatory irrelevance.
MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/plane-was-designed-clowns-shocking-b
oeing-emails-reveal-contempt-management-faa

I can tell you that some in the airline or aircraft industry have trouble sleeping at night, knowing how many lives are in danger. And some do not have ny trouble sleeping at night - they just tell their family members and significant others to not fly certain planes. I expect these in your article have no problem sleeping at night, knowing these hundreds of people died as a result of their deceptions.

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Monday, January 13, 2020 6:54 PM

Now Execs are leaving before they get sent to prison.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/boeing-new-ceo-1.5425407?cmp=rss

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Monday, January 13, 2020 7:56 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Now Execs are leaving before they get sent to prison.

There are hundreds of engineers who knew what was wrong with the 737 MAX, but none of them went to the FAA to stop Boeing. It is just the way Americans are -- born with a backbone, but fear of being fired causes them to lose it, becoming cowards.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62996&mid=10769
35#1076935

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 20, 2020 9:00 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

How Boeing’s Responsibility in a Deadly Crash ‘Got Buried’

Jan. 20, 2020, 6:00 a.m. ET

After a Boeing 737 NG crashed near Amsterdam more than a decade ago, the Dutch investigators focused blame on the pilots for failing to react properly when an automated system malfunctioned and caused the plane to plummet into a field, killing nine people.

Some of the parallels between that accident and the more recent ones are particularly noteworthy. Boeing’s design decisions on both the 737 Max and the plane involved in the 2009 crash — the 737 NG, or Next Generation — allowed a powerful computer command to be triggered by a single faulty sensor, even though each plane was equipped with two sensors. In the two 737 Max accidents, a sensor measuring the plane’s angle to the wind prompted a flight control computer to push its nose down after takeoff; on the 737 NG accident, an altitude sensor caused a different computer to cut the plane’s speed just before landing.

Dutch investigators determined that the cause of the malfunction was a sensor on the plane’s exterior measuring altitude. The sensor had mistakenly indicated that the plane was just moments from touchdown, prompting the computer to idle the engines at about 450 feet. Immediately, one of the pilots pushed the thrust lever forward to gain speed, but when he let go, the computer again commanded it to idle.

The captain intervened, disabling the autothrottle and setting the thrust levers to their maximum. Nine seconds had elapsed since the stall warning. By then, it was too late.

Decisions by Boeing, including risky design choices and faulty safety assessments, contributed to the 737 NG accident. But the Dutch Safety Board either excluded or played down criticisms of the manufacturer in its final report after pushback from a team of Americans that included Boeing and federal safety officials, documents and interviews show.

. . . the Dutch board deleted or amended findings in its own accident report about issues with the plane when the American team weighed in. The board also inserted statements, some nearly verbatim and without attribution, written by the Americans, who said that certain pilot errors had not been “properly emphasized.”

The muted criticism of Boeing after the 2009 accident fits within a broader pattern, brought to light since the Max tragedies, of the company benefiting from a light-touch approach by safety officials.

More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/business/boeing-737-accidents.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 7, 2020 6:49 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Coronavirus means airlines don’t need those grounded Boeing 737 Maxes after all

Airlines are finding themselves with too many airplanes, relative to consumer demand.

No airline would have chosen what happened with the Max, of course, both in terms of the tragedies themselves and the extremely expensive grounding that has followed. But given the reduction in consumer demand, some carriers may see the situation as a silver lining—albeit a slim one. “If you’re United, it’s not such a bad thing that the Maxes haven’t yet been delivered,” says Kaplan. “It’s kind of a blessing in disguise not to be paying for those additional five, 10, 20, 30 airplanes, depending on the airline.” In addition to its 14 grounded Maxes, United had more than 100 on order.

And though airlines don’t need as many airplanes today, the situation may be totally different in just a few short months. Either way, for the first time in a while, Boeing isn’t the greatest problem plaguing the industry.

https://qz.com/1813657/coronavirus-reduces-the-impact-of-grounded-boei
ng-737-maxes/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 8, 2020 4:49 PM

I believe today is the 1st anniversary of the 2nd crash.

Full report supposed to come out Tuesday.

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Thursday, May 28, 2020 8:13 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer

Everyone in the aviation community wants an airplane that flies as simply and as naturally as possible. That means that conditions should not change markedly, there should be no significant roll, no significant pitch change, no nothing when the pilot is adding power, lowering the flaps, or extending the landing gear.

The airframe, the hardware, should get it right the first time and not need a lot of added bells and whistles to fly predictably. This has been an aviation canon from the day the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk.

Apparently the 737 Max pitched up a bit too much for comfort on power application as well as at already-high angles of attack. It violated that most ancient of aviation canons and probably violated the certification criteria of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. But instead of going back to the drawing board and getting the airframe hardware right, Boeing relied on something called the “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,” or MCAS.

Boeing’s solution to its hardware problem was software.

MCAS is certainly much less expensive than extensively modifying the airframe to accommodate the larger engines. Such an airframe modification would have meant things like longer landing gear (which might not then fit in the fuselage when retracted), more wing dihedral (upward bend), and so forth. All of those hardware changes would be horribly expensive.

What’s worse, those changes could be extensive enough to require not only that the FAA recertify the 737 but that Boeing build an entirely new aircraft. Now we’re talking real money, both for the manufacturer as well as the manufacturer’s customers.

That’s because the major selling point of the 737 Max is that it is just a 737, and any pilot who has flown other 737s can fly a 737 Max without expensive training, without recertification, without another type of rating. Airlines—Southwest is a prominent example—tend to go for one “standard” airplane. They want to have one airplane that all their pilots can fly because that makes both pilots and airplanes fungible, maximizing flexibility and minimizing costs.

It all comes down to money, and in this case, MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction. The necessity to insist that the 737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in systems, from any other 737 was the key to the 737 Max’s fleet fungibility. That’s probably also the reason why the documentation about the MCAS system was kept on the down-low.

Put in a change with too much visibility, particularly a change to the aircraft’s operating handbook or to pilot training, and someone—probably a pilot—would have piped up and said, “Hey. This doesn’t look like a 737 anymore.” And then the money would flow the wrong way.

More at https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-di
saster-looks-to-a-software-developer

The final paragraph in the story: It is likely that MCAS, originally added in the spirit of increasing safety, has now killed more people than it could have ever saved. It doesn’t need to be “fixed” with more complexity, more software. It needs to be removed altogether.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, July 28, 2020 4:58 PM

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-23/southwest-air-am
erican-outlook-undercuts-boeing-737-max-optimism

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Friday, October 2, 2020 2:02 PM

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/30/faa-chief-upbeat-after-flying-boeing-7
37-max-no-timeline-on-approval.html

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Tuesday, November 10, 2020 10:36 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

American Airlines quietly announced that it would return the Max to its schedule next month.

European regulators have already declared the Max is safe to fly. What's curious is that Boeing hasn't yet made the software change that European regulators insisted was necessary. This is one software update that simply cannot go wrong. It has to be perfect and enjoy the absolute confidence of those who use it. Therefore I was a little disturbed to read: "Southwest, American pilots say new Boeing 737 Max manual may lead to errors in emergencies."

The pilots are concerned that the Federal Aviation Authority's manual for handling the new software in the event of an emergency is inadequate. They say there are simply too many steps to remember. This, they insist, has been proved in simulator flights.

An intriguing element is whether American and other airlines will tell customers they're flying in a Max at all. At the end of last year, they began referring to it as the 737-8. Which is quite bizarre, given that there's already a 737-800, a bastion of flying for many years. Could it be, then, that one of the ways airlines will try and reassure passengers is to only tell them it was a Max after they've landed?

More at https://www.zdnet.com/article/american-airlines-is-quietly-bringing-ba
ck-the-737-max-heres-why-thats-disturbing/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, November 18, 2020 8:22 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The Federal Aviation Administration cleared Boeing’s 737 MAX for flight Wednesday, ending the 20-month grounding of the jet in the United States.

The nation’s air safety agency announced the move early Wednesday, saying it was done after a comprehensive and methodical 20-month review process.

https://www.king5.com/article/tech/science/aerospace/boeing/faa-will-l
ift-us-grounding-of-737-max-on-wednesday-according-to-sources/281-c37fe280-9e68-42e9-b693-91f658652a7c

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, November 18, 2020 1:49 PM

How many got fired at Boeing?

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Saturday, December 19, 2020 8:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

How many got fired at Boeing?

None. How many got fired at the FAA? None, again, but Boeing and the FAA are colluding together to make the redesign of the 737 MAX look far better than it actually is. How? By reminding, just before the test in the simulator, what the test pilots must do during an emergency in order to make the redesign look good. In a real life emergency, there won't be somebody reminding the pilot what to do during an emergency. That is why a simulator test of the redesign must NOT have somebody coaching the pilot.

Boeing officials "inappropriately coached" test pilots during recertification efforts after two fatal 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people, according to a lengthy congressional report released on Friday.

Reuters reports:
The report from the Senate Commerce Committee Republican staff said testing this year of a key safety system known as MCAS tied to both fatal crashes was contrary to proper protocol.

The report citing a whistleblower who alleged Boeing officials encouraged test pilots to “remember, get right on that pickle switch” prior to the exercise that resulted in pilot reaction in approximately four seconds, while another pilot in a separate test reacted in approximately 16 seconds.

The account was corroborated during an FAA staff interview, the committee added.

Numerous reports have found Boeing failed to adequately consider how pilots respond to cockpit emergencies in its development of the 737 MAX.

More at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737-max/boeing-inappropriate
ly-coached-pilots-in-737-max-testing-u-s-senate-report-idUSKBN28S314

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 20, 2020 8:04 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Wicker Releases Committee’s FAA Investigation Report of Boeing 737 MAX
December 18, 2020

U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today released the Committee’s investigation report on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This investigation began in April of 2019, weeks after the second of two tragic crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, when Committee staff began receiving information from whistleblowers disclosing numerous concerns related to aviation safety.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2020/12/wicker-releases-committee-s-fa
a-investigation-report

Click here to read the Committee’s report, which includes a one-page executive summary and a six-page overview.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/FFDA35FA-0442-465D-AC63
-5634D9D3CEF6

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 20, 2020 12:14 PM

A lot of deaths a lot of PR disasters

Sad to see a good manufacturing and aviation company go this way

Hopefully they will get their shit together

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Sunday, March 7, 2021 4:57 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

'What the Truth Is': FAA Safety Engineer Slams Oversight of Boeing's 737 MAX

The Seattle Times reports:

Haunted by the two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 MAX jets and his agency's role in approving the plane, veteran Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety engineer Joe Jacobsen is stepping forward publicly to give the victims' families "a firsthand account of what the truth is." In a detailed letter sent last month to a family that lost their daughter in the second MAX crash in Ethiopia two years ago this week, and in interviews with The Seattle Times, Jacobsen gave the first personal account by an insider of the federal safety agency's response to the MAX crashes...

He believes additional system upgrades are needed beyond Boeing's fix for the MAX that was blessed by the FAA and other regulators.

And Jacobsen argues that the plane would be safer if Boeing simply removed altogether the new software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that went wrong in the two crashes that killed 346 people. Jacobsen also calls for the replacement of some of the people at "the highest levels of FAA management," whom he blames for creating a culture too concerned with fulfilling the demands of industry. In his letter and interview, Jacobsen also described in more depth than previously reported how an autothrottle system issue may have contributed to the crash in Ethiopia in March 2019.

Boeing and the FAA said in separate statements they believe the MAX is fixed and safe, and that regulators worldwide have validated this conclusion...

A week after the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, 2018, Jacobsen received an email from a colleague asking if there was an issue paper on MCAS. "This was the first day that I heard about MCAS," he wrote. "We had no issue papers, and if we had, I would have been the engineer responsible for providing technical content and comment on such an issue paper." When he did get a look at the system, Jacobsen said he was "shocked to discover that the airplane was purposely designed and certified to use just one AOA (Angle of Attack) input for a flight critical function."

If given the chance during the original certification, he's certain that he and "6 to 8 of our most experienced engineers in the Seattle office" would have identified that as a serious design flaw because there's "a long history of AOA sensor failures."

Instead, Boeing minimized MCAS and kept the details of its assessment to itself...

The article also argues that Boeing itself didn't grasp the danger of its system. "Michael Teal, 737 MAX chief engineer, testified to Congress that he first learned only after the Lion Air crash that MCAS relied on a single sensor.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-safety-engi
neer-goes-public-to-slam-the-agencys-oversight-of-boeings-737-max/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 7, 2021 4:57 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The autothrottle problem

The instructions Boeing and the FAA gave pilots immediately after the first crash — instructions the Ethiopian pilots tried to follow — have been heavily criticized.

Boeing’s procedure failed to emphasize that pilots need to bring the nose of the jet back up electrically before hitting the cutoff switches to stop MCAS acting.

Jacobsen’s letter adds something new about the inadequacy of those instructions: There was no mention of an issue with the autothrottle — the automated system controlling the thrust of the engines — that added to the jet’s excessive speed and made it impossible to manually bring the jet’s nose up.

According to the interim investigation report released a year ago, the faulty Angle of Attack sensor on Flight ET302, even before it triggered MCAS to push the plane’s nose down, interfered with other sensor readings of altitude and airspeed.

Registering the plane as still below 800 feet above the ground even after it passed that threshold, the jet’s computer had the autothrottle maintain full takeoff thrust for 16 seconds after it should have reduced the power for the climb phase.

More significantly, seconds later the pilots set the jet’s speed target at 238 knots, but the autothrottle didn’t follow through.

Again because of the faulty sensor on the left, the flight computer detected the discrepancy between the left and right airspeed values and flagged the data as invalid. Unable to validate the aircraft’s speed, the computer stopped sending thrust instructions to the autothrottle.

As a result, the engines remained at maximum thrust for the rest of the fatal flight.

The plane eventually exceeded the 737’s maximum design speed of 340 knots. This so increased the forces on the jet’s tail that the pilots couldn’t budge it manually.

Some pilots faulted the Ethiopian crew for allowing the plane to gather so much speed.

Jacobsen recalls how he was angered listening to Rep. Sam Graves, R-Missouri, say during a May 2019 House hearing that U.S.-trained pilots would have been able to handle the emergency.

The Ethiopian crew indeed should have throttled back the engines manually. But apparently they were confused by the cacophony of alerts going off. Those alerts did not include any autothrottle warning to indicate it had stopped responding to their speed setting.

Boeing has said that for this kind of emergency it relies on pilots to execute a standard checklist from memory that includes an instruction to disengage the autothrottle.

The FAA, in a statement, said this checklist tells pilots “to turn off all automatic systems, including autopilot and auto-throttle.”

The ET302 pilots, however, jumped immediately to the step in the checklist that Boeing emphasized in its bulletin after the Lion Air crash: hitting the cutoff switches to stop MCAS from pushing the jet’s nose down. In their rush to do that, they didn’t first bring the nose back up with the electrical switches and didn’t disengage the autothrottle.

And Jacobsen points out that the FAA’s emergency directive after the Lion Air crash lists the procedure pilots should follow — but omits the instruction on the autothrottle and fails to mention that it could malfunction.

“I think it was just a miss,” said Jacobsen. “I don’t think anyone recognized the Angle of Attack malfunction would also mess with the autothrottle.”

In an interview, Capt. John Cox, a veteran pilot and founder of Washington, D.C.-based aviation safety consultancy Safety Operating Systems, called this autothrottle behavior on ET 302 a “hard-to-detect failure.”

“To fail this way and not tell the crew, that bothers me. Humans are not good at picking up omissions,” Cox said. “It’s a significant miss.”

Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the celebrated pilot from the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” emergency, agreed that Boeing and the FAA provided pilots inadequate information after the Lion Air crash, including a lack of warning about the autothrottle issue.

The ET302 crew “did take affirmative action to set a reasonable speed, but the system failed to command that speed and didn’t tell them,” Sullenberger said.

In his letter, Jacobsen recommends that Boeing upgrade the MAX’s autothrottle logic to either disconnect or give the pilots a warning when the computer registers invalid data.

In the upgrade to the MAX that allowed it to return to service, the FAA did not require any such change but did add an explicit instruction that pilots in this kind of emergency should “disengage the autothrottle.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-safety-engi
neer-goes-public-to-slam-the-agencys-oversight-of-boeings-737-max/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 12, 2021 12:41 PM

A "simple flaw" caused by a language difference led to a "serious incident" for a flight from Birmingham last year.
All female passengers whose title was "Miss" were classified as children - not adults - on the Tui flight after a software upgrade, a report said.
That meant that their average weight used for take-off calculations was lower than it should have been.
The difference could have had an impact on take-off thrust, but the report said flight operation was not compromised.
Take-off prep documents told the pilot that his Boeing 737 jet was 1,244kg lighter than it actually was after using 35kg as the average weight of the females involved rather than 69kg.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56690529
That "load sheet" is used to determine how much weight is safe, how the plane is balanced, and other important information for a safe flight within safety regulations.
The AAIB report on the incident said the reservation system that produces the load sheet had been upgraded in the downtime caused by the coronavirus lockdown last year, when the airline suspended flights "for several months".
Safety officials said the problem was that the software had been programmed in a foreign country where "Miss" is used to refer to children, and "Ms" to adult women.

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Wednesday, May 5, 2021 7:48 PM

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/exclusive-boeing-faces-hurdle-737-014153906.
html

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Thursday, October 14, 2021 9:26 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Boeing 737 MAX chief technical pilot indicted for fraud

In January, Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion in fines and compensation after reaching a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Justice Department over the MAX crashes, which cost Boeing more than $20 billion.

The January agreement faulted Boeing's conduct and said it was holding the largest U.S. planemaker "accountable for its employees’ criminal misconduct."

In January, Boeing admitted in court documents that through two former employees it deceived the FAA about the MCAS.

Prosecutors noted that a key FAA document lacked any reference to the MCAS, and as a result airplane manuals and pilot-training materials for U.S.-based airlines also lacked any reference.

One November 2016 message from Forkner said he was working at "jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by FAA."

If the FAA required pilot simulator training for MAX pilots, Boeing would have been required to pay Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) nearly $400 million to offset the simulator-based pilot training requirements, a 2020 U.S. House of Representatives report said.

In 2019, the FAA required simulator training before pilots could resume flying the MAX.

Forkner is charged with two counts of fraud involving aircraft parts in interstate commerce and four counts of wire fraud. He is expected to make his initial court appearance Friday in Fort Worth, Texas.

If convicted, he potentially faces decades in prison.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ex-boeing-737-max-c
hief-technical-pilot-indicted-fraud-us-justice-dept-2021-10-14/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, January 14, 2022 8:32 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

How Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created The 737 MAX Disaster

Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”

Sorscher, a physicist who’d worked at Boeing more than two decades and had led negotiations there for the engineers’ union, had become obsessed with management culture. He said he didn’t previously imagine Boeing’s brave new managerial caste creating a problem as dumb and glaringly obvious as MCAS (or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, as a handful of software wizards had dubbed it).

In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.

It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators: AIG famously told investors it was hard for management to contemplate “a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions” that would, a few months later, lose the firm well over $100 billion—but hey, the risk management algorithms had been wrong. A couple of years later, a single JP Morgan trader lost $6 billion because someone had programmed one of the cells in the bank’s risk management spreadsheet to divide two numbers by their sum instead of their average. Boeing was not, of course, a hedge fund: It was way better, a stock that had more than doubled since the Trump inauguration, outperforming the Dow in the 22 months before Lion Air 610 plunged into the Java Sea.

And so there was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.

Here, a generation after Boeing’s initial lurch into financialization, was the entirely predictable outcome of the byzantine process by which investment capital becomes completely abstracted from basic protocols of production and oversight: a flight-correction system that was essentially jerry-built to crash a plane. “If you’re looking for an example of late stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it,” said longtime aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia, “it’s a pretty good one.”

“As an investment professional, allow me to inform Congress as to how Boeing has viewed this whole crisis.” Paul Njoroge laid out the sequence of 737 MAX orders, ten-figure stock buybacks, and dividend hikes.

“Could that be the reason Boeing did not feel obliged to ground the MAX even after the second crash of the Boeing 737 MAX?” he asked. “Back to my very essential question, why wasn’t the MAX 8 grounded in November after the first crash in the Java Sea? One hundred and eighty-nine lives were lost, and executives at Boeing cared more about its stock price than preventing such a tragedy from occurring again,” and so had begun “a pattern of behavior blaming innocent pilots.”

More at https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-in
donesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, March 1, 2022 9:56 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Netflix documentary 'Downfall: The Case Against Boeing' is a deadly tale of greed

Boeing reached a settlement with the DOJ that did not deliver anything close to accountability.

This investigation did lead to the passage of the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act, which DeFazio described as necessary to “make sure what happened with the Boeing 737 MAX is never repeated.”

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/netflix-documentary-downfa
ll-case-against-boeing-deadly-tale-greed-n1289973

https://www.netflix.com/title/81272421

https://yts.mx/movies/downfall-the-case-against-boeing-2022

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, March 1, 2022 9:59 AM

Which is more modernized the "dot or feather" ?

https://files.catbox.moe/u7adzs.mp4

Boeing engineers still blame cheap Indian Hindu software from the H-1B visa Street Shitters?

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Tuesday, March 1, 2022 10:27 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:

Boeing engineers still blame cheap Indian Hindu software from the H-1B visa Street Shitters?

It was a hardware problem. And then Americans didn't fix the problem because they would be forced to admit the 737 MAX needs special training for the pilots, in which case Boeing would have to pay, according to contract, a million dollars per plane sold to Southwest Airlines. That is literally thousands of planes and billions of dollars.

To convince Southwest Airlines Co to buy the Boeing 737 MAX, the plane maker reassured the airline that pilots would not need expensive simulator training and backed up the promise with a $1 million per plane rebate if training was needed.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-airplane-southwest/u-s-lawma
kers-question-boeings-1-mln-rebate-clause-for-southwest-737-max-orders-idUSKBN1X92D4

Here's stuff Boeing didn't do until after two crashes:

So Boeing made some changes to the MAX and the MCAS system. The MCAS system now has a maximum limit of one nose-down input during a single event of high angle of attack. The limit doesn’t reset if the pilots activate the electric trim switches. Further, an AOA sensor monitor was added to make sure MCAS doesn’t use AOA input if sensors disagree with each other by more than 5.5 degrees. The Flight Control Computer itself also no longer relies on a single sensor. Another important change is with the AOA DISAGREE alert. Previously, this alert was part of an optional AOA Gauge offered by Boeing. Now the AOA DISAGREE alert is always enabled, regardless of whether the airline has the option or not. All these changes are in the FAA summary.

In addition to the above changes, Boeing also improved training procedures and added safeguards to the Flight Control Computer to detect and stop erronous stabilizer commands. It also added a requirement for operators to test AOA sensors after repairs have been made.

In essence, the changes Boeing made are honestly what should have been done in the first place. Modern aviation is known for its redundancy. MCAS should have never relied on a single sensor, and the system should have never been allowed to continuously enter nose-down inputs.

https://jalopnik.com/heres-everything-boeing-did-to-fix-the-737-max-af
ter-tw-1845716820

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, March 17, 2022 8:44 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

(March 16, 2022, 9:39 PM EDT) — The Boeing Co.'s former chief technical pilot will stand trial Friday in a Texas district court for allegedly misleading safety regulators and airlines about the 737 MAX, in the first U. S. criminal trial over Boeing’s 737 MAX.

The families of 737 MAX crash victims have said the U.S. Justice Department violated their rights when it struck a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing. As part of the deferred prosecution deal, Boeing test pilot Mark Forkner is the only person to be criminally charged in the two disastrous 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.

https://www.law360.com/consumerprotection/articles/1472445/breaking-do
wn-the-doj-s-1st-737-max-criminal-fraud-trial

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, March 17, 2022 8:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Families of victims of the two 737 MAX crashes filed a court motion on Thursday
Say DOJ ‘lied and violated their rights through a secret process’ with Boeing

Accuse prosecutors of allowing Boeing to make a patsy of test pilot

Test pilot Mark Forkner is the only one to be criminally charged in the scandal

The 737 MAX jets had two deadly crashes within months, killing 346 people

The families of 737 MAX crash victims have said the U.S. Justice Department violated their rights when it struck a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing in January.

Relatives filed a motion on Thursday arguing the United States government ‘lied and violated their rights through a secret process’ by allowing Boeing to escape criminal charges.

As part of the deferred prosecution deal, Boeing test pilot Mark Forkner is the only person to be criminally charged in the two disastrous 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.

Families of two victims have asked a U.S. judge to declare that the order violated victims´ families rights to rescind Boeing’s immunity from criminal prosecution that was part of the $2.5 billion agreement.

The families of 737 MAX crash victims have said the U.S. Justice Department violated their rights when it struck a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing in January.

‘Boeing and the Government deliberately excluded those who were most concerned with the negotiations: the families of the victims,’ said attorney Paul G. Cassell, a former federal judge who is currently a professor of law at the University of Utah and considered one of the nation’s leading experts on crime victims’ rights.

‘If the Government is going to craft a DPA for a serious felony crime, including one that gives a corporation like Boeing immunity, it cannot do so secretly. In concealing its negotiations from Boeing’s victims, the Government plainly violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act – a broad bill of rights protecting victims of federal crimes.’

The motion was brought by the families of Mick Ryan and Jared Babu Mwazo, who both perished in the Ethiopian Flight 302 crash.

The victims’ families are seeking an order for the government to confer with them and provide evidence related to Boeing’s crimes and require Boeing to appear for a public arraignment where the victims can be heard.

They also ask the court to exercise its supervisory powers over the DPA which may include rescinding the immunity provision.

‘If the U.S. Justice Department had advised us of our right to confer with it about the crimes associated with the crash, we would have urged the Department to hold Boeing accountable to the full extent of U.S. criminal law,’ said Mick Ryan’s widow Naoise Connolly Ryan in a statement to DailyMail.com.

‘We would have pointed out that the Boeing employees whose conduct form the basis of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement were acting in furtherance of Boeing’s program goals, set at the highest levels of the company,’ she added.

‘Boeing should be fully prosecuted. The agreement reached under the Trump administration is merely a slap on the wrist that wrongly holds no executive accountable.’

Forkner, Boeing’s former chief technical pilot, was charged with fraud for deceiving federal regulators evaluating the company’s 737 MAX jet.
Boeing test pilot Mark Forkner is the only person to be criminally charged

His attorneys said this week that a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) official called him a ‘scapegoat’ for two fatal crashes.

Lawyers for Mark Forkner said the FAA official with personal knowledge of the 737-MAX contacted the government and said Forkner ‘is a ‘scapegoat’ and should ‘not be charged.’ The court filing on Monday did not disclose the official’s name.

Boeing did not respond to a request for comment. The FAA did not immediately comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Northern Texas, where the case is being heard, declined to comment.

The filing also included parts of a PowerPoint from an unnamed FAA employee that defense lawyers said contain new disclosures about a key system known as MCAS that should have been disclosed by Boeing´s engineering team.

The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) is a software feature designed to automatically push the airplane´s nose down in certain conditions. It was tied to two crashes of the 737 MAX in Indonesia and Ethiopia over a five-month period in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people and led to the FAA’s grounding the plane for 20 months, an action lifted in November 2020.

The filing said Boeing engineers did not disclose key details of MCAS to Forkner or the FAA – including that MCAS could activate when it was not intended after a single faulty sensor.

In January, Boeing agreed to a $2.5 billion deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department over the MAX crashes, which cost Boeing more than $20 billion.

The PowerPoint said the 737 MAX crashes ‘were caused by a failure of the engineering processes’ and argued the focus on training and the Forkner criminal charges ‘is not only incorrect and misguided, it is detracting from the real lessons.’

Excerpts of the presentation made public said it was to address a ‘potential miscarriage of justice.’

Lawyers asked a U.S. judge to allow current or former FAA officials permission to talk with Forkner’s defense team ahead of a trial set to begin in February. A redacted filing appears to show Forkner’s team wants to talk to two current officials and a former FAA employee.

Forkner was indicted in October on six counts of scheming to defraud Boeing’s U.S.-based airline customers to obtain tens of millions of dollars for Boeing. His lawyers said they have not been allowed to speak to the PowerPoint author.

According to the indictment, Forkner, largely in the run-up to the FAA’s decision to approve the 737 MAX in 2017, provided the FAA Aircraft Evaluation Group with ‘materially false, inaccurate, and incomplete information’ about MCAS. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, March 17, 2022 9:57 PM

Jeez. What weasels.

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Thursday, March 17, 2022 10:33 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Jeez. What weasels.

In the movie Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022), starting at 1 hour 17 minutes into the movie, it was revealed that the FAA did a Quantitative Risk Assessment of the 737 MAX after the first crash, the Lion Air crash. What was the conclusion?

The FAA calculated that there was a probability of 15 more crashes of this plane over the next 30 years. That would make the MAX the most dangerous modern plane ever built.

Boeing comes back with the response that it averages only 1 crash every 2 years, so will the FAA please, please, pretty please not tell the airlines? If Boeing has 2 years to fix the software, nobody would ever need to know how dangerous the MAX had been before it was fixed. The weird part is that the FAA agreed with this screwy reasoning. It turns out that the next crash happened sooner than 2 years after the first.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11893274/

On November 18, 2020, the FAA ended the 20-month grounding, the longest ever of a U.S. airliner. If the crashes had been evenly space every 24 months, as Boeing hoped, then Boeing could have gotten the planes fixed without airlines realizing how dangerous the MAX had been before the fix was completed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, March 21, 2022 9:26 AM

Boeing 737 Crashes In China With 132 People Onboard
https://www.baystreet.ca/articles/stockstowatch/75684/Boeing-737-Crash
es-In-China-With-132-People-Onboard
China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 crash: Flight MU5735 crash - Boeing 737 model accident timeline
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-60821189

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Monday, March 21, 2022 10:00 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Boeing 737 Crashes In China With 132 People Onboard
https://www.baystreet.ca/articles/stockstowatch/75684/Boeing-737-Crash
es-In-China-With-132-People-Onboard
China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 crash: Flight MU5735 crash - Boeing 737 model accident timeline
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-60821189

The crash was a Boeing 737-800, not a 737 MAX.
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1505863117343014916

The industry keeps track of "hull-losses", which sounds so much better than crashes/explosions/fires/midair collisions/being hit by antiaircraft missiles/suicidal-pilot-kills-self-and-passengers/whatevers for the 737.

Hull-losses: 225
4796 fatalities

https://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Boeing-737-series/index

This latest "hull-loss" is already in database:
https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20220321-0

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, March 21, 2022 11:04 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Boeing 737 Crashes In China With 132 People Onboard
https://www.baystreet.ca/articles/stockstowatch/75684/Boeing-737-Crash
es-In-China-With-132-People-Onboard
China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 crash: Flight MU5735 crash - Boeing 737 model accident timeline
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-60821189
The crash was a Boeing 737-800, not a 737 MAX.
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1505863117343014916

The industry keeps track of "hull-losses", which sounds so much better than crashes/explosions/fires/midair collisions/being hit by antiaircraft missiles/suicidal-pilot-kills-self-and-passengers/whatevers for the 737.

Hull-losses: 225
4796 fatalities

https://aviation-safety.net/database/types/Boeing-737-series/index

This latest "hull-loss" is already in database:
https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20220321-0

That's weird. Flight does rapid descent, brief recovery, and final rapid descent in the same location and same altitude as the same Flight Number the day before. But the prior day the pilots were able to recover. Unclear if it was the same bird (hull number).

Impacted in a mountain range. Loss of altitude started 1 hour 5 minutes into flight.

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Thursday, March 24, 2022 10:40 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Boeing pilot who tested 737 MAX jets is found not guilty of 'deceiving safety regulators and giving incomplete information' about flight-control system that caused two deadly crashes

A federal district court jury in Fort Worth deliberated less than two hours before finding Mark Forkner, 49, not guilty on four counts of wire fraud.

Prosecutors accused Forkner of misleading Federal Aviation Administration regulators about the amount of training pilots would need to fly the Max

The FAA required only brief computer-based training for pilots instead of more extensive practice in simulators that could have cost Boeing up to $1million per plane sold.

Defense lawyers said Boeing engineers did not tell Forkner about changes to the flight software, known by its acronym, MCAS

The lawyers said Forkner was a scapegoat for Boeing and FAA officials who sought to avoid blame after the Max crashes, which killed 346 people

Justice Department spokesman Joshua Stueve said the department stands by its investigation and prosecution of the case

More at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10645881/U-S-jury-finds-forme
r-Boeing-737-MAX-pilot-not-guilty-fraud-case.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, March 24, 2022 11:32 PM

Why was the trial in Fort Worth?

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Friday, March 25, 2022 12:47 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Why was the trial in Fort Worth?

Because the defendant lives in Keller, TX, a suburb of Fort Worth, according to Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Since he was charged with "wire-fraud", I presume he sent those emails that got him into trouble from his home in Keller.

He could have dodged the whole legal issue and avoided a trial if only he had sent his written answers to his bosses at Boeing and they would later forward his misrepresentations, also known as lies, to the people that chief pilot Mark Forkner was misleading or lying to. Pilot Forkner could then blame his bosses and his bosses could blame Forkner and the prosecutors would have nobody to prosecute because typical juries can't understand who is lying, either the bosses or Forkner. Then the innocent-until-proven-guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt defense gambit gets everyone declared innocent.

With stupid juries, that gambit works every single time when the defense attorneys are good enough to sell nonsense to dumb juries. Prosecutors know that crappy closing statement succeeds with the kind of dummies that show up for jury duty. But in this particular case, the prosecutors hoped that since the chief pilot sent the emails directly to the people he was trying to bamboozle, the jury wouldn't get confused about who to blame, but jury still did, anyway.

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/aviation/article259574139.
html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, January 7, 2024 3:16 PM

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/06/boeing-737-max-9-grounding-after-alask
a-airlines-door-blows-midflight.html

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Oh Boeing, Boeing, Boeing ....what ARE you doing???

Quote:
FAA grounds more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s after section of Alaska Airlines plane blows out

The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday ordered a temporary grounding of dozens of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft for inspections, a day after a piece of the aircraft blew out in the middle of an Alaska Airlines flight....

The section of the fuselage missing appeared to correspond to an exit not used by Alaska Airlines, or other carriers that don't have high-density seating configurations, and was plugged....

The incident was described as "an explosive decompression at the window exit," according to Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA...

The Boeing 737 Max 9 is a larger version of Boeing's best-selling jetliner, the 737 Max 8. ... The Boeing 737 Max 9 has an emergency exit door cut behind the wings for use in dense seating cabin configurations, like those used by budget airlines, according to Flightradar24.

"The doors are not activated on Alaska Airlines aircraft and are permanently 'plugged,'" Flightradar24 said.

Boeing didn't comment beyond its statement when asked about the sealed emergency exit door. Spirit AeroSystems , which makes the fuselages for the 737 Max, confirmed to CNBC that it installed the plugged door on the aircraft...

Late last year, Boeing urged airlines to inspect aircraft for a "possible" loose bolt in the rudder control system, the latest in a series of manufacturing flaws on Boeing jets

Quote:
The new Boeing 737 Max 9 involved in the incident was delivered to Alaska Airlines in late October and certified in early November, according to FAA data. It had been in service for just eight weeks.

The Max is Boeing’s newest version of the 737 and went into service in May 2017.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/7/boeing-18

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Sunday, January 7, 2024 3:53 PM

The USA has started losing an ability, this is more than just 'Boeing'

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Sunday, January 7, 2024 5:43 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Well, I looked up Spirit Aerosystems. And unless I do a deep dive, which I don't have time for, I couldn't learn much from their website except that they have "facilities" in the USA, Malaysia, and Morocco.

And I would bet dollars to donuts that corporate HQ is in America but fabrication is someplace cheap and far away, where it's impossible to QA properly. And I would say that's typical of many American companies, even high tech ones. Our lab principally bought GC and GC MSs from Agilent (formerly Hewitt Packard) and we could tell which ones were made in China and which were made in America bc the serial numbers either began with a "C" or a "U". And every single GC MS (costing about $130,000 each) that came from China had a SIGNIFICANT flaw. Two were shipped with defective flow controllers (We spent a few weeks troubleshooting that) and one arrived so dirty it took three weeks to bake it out.

Quality control ain't what it used to be!

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, January 15, 2024 11:13 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quality control ain't what it used to be!

You handle that by inspecting the product while the subcontractor makes it. If you wait until the product is in its final form before inspecting, you will never get better than whatever the lackadaisical subcontractor feels is good enough, even if it is no good at all.

What’s Gone Wrong at Boeing

By James Surowiecki | January 15, 2024, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/boeing-737-max-corpo
rate-culture/677120/

Behind the 737 Max’s persistent problems is the erosion of a valuable corporate culture. That will be harder to fix than a loose bolt.

When, last week, a panel called a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane in mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the plane’s fuselage, air travelers everywhere no doubt felt a shudder of horror—even though the aircraft was able to turn around and land safely. But in a sense, the startling thing was how unstartling the news was. In the six years since the Max—an updated version of the long-running 737, Boeing’s most popular plane—made its debut, the aircraft has been plagued by quality problems. The most dramatic of these resulted in two catastrophic crashes, in 2018 and in 2019, which together killed 346 people.

Those crashes, caused by a faulty flight-control system, led to the Max being grounded for almost two years. Even after it returned to service, additional issues cropped up. Last April, deliveries of the Max 8 version of the plane were delayed because of problems with one of Boeing’s key suppliers’ installation of brackets joining the rear of the fuselage to the plane’s tail fin. A few months later, Boeing said it had identified a new concern, over improperly drilled holes on a bulkhead. Then, in December, the Federal Aviation Administration said an overseas airline had found that a bolt on the plane’s rudder-control system was missing a nut—a seemingly elementary fault that now chimes with the door-plug incident, which has led to the grounding of Max 9s: Both Alaska Airlines and United Airlines said that they subsequently discovered loose bolts in some of their aircraft.

Boeing was once among the most respected American companies. It helped NASA put a man on the moon. It built the 747, the most famous passenger airplane of all time. The firm’s reputation for safety and excellence was such that people used to say, “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going”—and actually mean it. So what went wrong?

The answer that pretty much everyone arrived at after those two fatal crashes was the same: Boeing’s culture had changed. And here, the conventional wisdom is correct. For most of its history, Boeing had what you might call an engineering-centric culture, with power in the company resting in the hands of engineering and design. But in 1997, Boeing bought another aircraft manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, in what turned out to be a kind of reverse acquisition—executives from McDonnell Douglas ended up dominating and remaking Boeing. They turned it from a company that was relentlessly focused on product to one more focused on profit.

This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

Corporate culture can be a notoriously squishy topic—too readily subject to broad generalizations. And, of course, all big companies are interested in making money and boosting their stock price. But even if corporate cultures are hard to characterize accurately, they’re still real. As the management theorist Edgar Schein defined it, the essence of corporate culture is “the learned, shared, tacit assumptions on which people base their daily behavior.” In the old Boeing, the people who dictated those assumptions were the engineers. In the post-merger Boeing, the people who did so were more likely to be accountants.

For some businesses, a shift to a greater emphasis on bottom-line considerations might not have mattered that much. But manufacturing airliners in large numbers is not one of those businesses. That’s because making big aircraft is an unreasonably difficult thing to do. A plane like the 737 Max has, by some accounts, more than half a million parts. Boeing now outsources much of its production, leaving assembly as its main job, so those parts are made by at least 600 suppliers (many of which, in turn, rely on subcontractors). Supervising the reliability of the manufacturing and quality-control processes at all of those different suppliers, while ensuring the reliability of Boeing’s own assembly processes, requires a maniacal attention to detail, a willingness to spend freely on reliability and safety, and a culture that tolerates the reporting of mistakes and the investment of serious resources in fixing them.

That ethos is hard to instill using only financial incentives or the threat of firing. What’s really needed is a culture of perfectionism—and that’s what Boeing seems to have lost over the past 20 or so years. To take only the most obvious example: The two fatal crashes of the 737 Max were the result of a new flight-control system that depended on data from a single sensor that had no backup. In both cases, the sensor failed, giving the flight-control system the wrong information and precipitating disaster. Designing a system that had a single point of failure violated the canon of aviation engineering, which has always emphasized the need for redundancy in cases where failure would have disastrous consequences. But in the new Boeing, people thought the risk was worth taking—or perhaps the new corporate culture they’d absorbed had simply stopped making them value what the engineers said.

After those two crashes, Boeing vowed to reinvent itself. This latest debacle suggests that it still has a long way to go. Just as public trust in a brand is easier and quicker to lose than to build, restoring a corporate culture that values engineering excellence foremost will take more time and effort. And Boeing needs to get going, because making airplanes is a business where even a single failure can have disastrous consequences for the bottom line—and Airbus, Boeing’s principal international rival, is now selling more aircraft than ever before. Boeing migrated away from an engineering-centric culture in order to boost profits and shareholder value. But over the past five years, while the S&P 500 index has risen by roughly 80 percent, Boeing’s stock price has fallen by about 35 percent; over the past decade, its annual returns have trailed the S&P 500 by almost 6 percent a year.

Putting profit over product has been bad for Boeing’s products. The irony now painfully apparent is that it’s been bad for Boeing’s profits too.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 15, 2024 2:41 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quality control ain't what it used to be!

SECOND: You handle that by inspecting the product while the subcontractor makes it. If you wait until the product is in its final form before inspecting, you will never get better than whatever the lackadaisical subcontractor feels is good enough, even if it is no good at all.

No kidding! But the problem is, when you're assembling a plane in Indonesia, from parts made in a bunch of small sub-sub contractors in India, Vietnam, Philippines, and Bangladesh ... you gonna send 400 inspectors to all those facilities?

Just looking at cars, Ford Mustang example. Last we looked ... Engines made in Spain. Transmissions made in Mexico. Who knows where the wiring harnesses and instrument panels was made. Parts sent to China and Bangladesh for chroming. Heat treatment of valve springs?

Given GLOBAL supply chain ... same part could be made in three different countries, for example... quality control has gone to shit.

And everything that was written about corporate culture? So true!

And it could be said of any large technical-centric business, from software operating systems, applications, servers, and cyber security; to the military industrial complex which designs, builds, and maintains weapons for profit, not for war. Could add big pharma, tool-makers, and food suppliers to that list.

It's not so important if your towels are thin and your jeans have uneven hems, but there are areas where you should insist on good quality, and some areas where it's literally a matter of life and death.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Tuesday, January 16, 2024 9:20 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

No kidding! But the problem is, when you're assembling a plane in Indonesia, from parts made in a bunch of small sub-sub contractors in India, Vietnam, Philippines, and Bangladesh ... you gonna send 400 inspectors to all those facilities?

From a much longer article I saw this morning:

China Manufacturing and Its Potential Costs

Bill Haskell | January 16, 2024 7:00 am

https://angrybearblog.com/2024/01/china-manufacturing-and-its-potentia
l-costs

Nick Dewhurst of Boothroyd Dewhurst has some data on what it may cost you to move manufacturing of a product overseas. In the pie chart above, part costs represent 72% of a product, overhead is 24%, and labor only 4%.

It’s rare to see an OEM in the U.S. today questioning the presumed logic of lower-cost manufacturing in China. They say . . . “Can’t beat those labor rates. My competitors are all doing it, and I have to stay competitive.”

AB: Labor is not the big cost it is made out to be. The percentage of it in a product has been steadily decreasing over the years. Labor is not the enemy. Doing stupid things is by far the enemy. This article touches on one of them . . . sourcing.

The fervor to go to China is a bit similar to those in the stock market shortly before the dot-com bubble burst.

A few voices have risen above the cacophony, however, pointing out that perhaps this lemming-like exodus to China has not been fully examined from a cost perspective. Business analysts such as Boston Consulting Group and Aberdeen Group are uncovering both the risks of outsourcing and the limited view most U.S. manufacturers have about what it costs them to produce their products.

AB: I was with Ingersoll Engineers a smaller consulting firm. Not an engineer, just a supply chain person who handled many different products.

Nicholas P. Dewhurst, executive VP for Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc. (BDI), and David Meeker, a consultant with Neoteric Product Development, published a study recently (“Improved Product Design Practices Would Make U.S. Manufacturing More Cost Effective – A Case to Consider Before Outsourcing to China”) examining some of the hidden costs of outsourcing that U.S. manufacturers may not be taking into account.

Boothroyd Dewhurst develops and implements design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) software. Dewhurst, an experienced project engineer, spends most of his time working with U.S. companies to make DFMA part of their product development process. He says:

“I ran into several clients who wanted to eliminate domestic manufacturing entirely in favor of outsourcing to China. But when I asked them about the real cost of producing, shipping, and distributing the products, they didn’t have an answer. It was clear they hadn’t done the math or thought it through.”

Dewhurst also saw that companies were not taking the time to understand the potential for cost savings during the design of their products.

“OEMs are drawn to China by the lure of reduced manufacturing costs via extremely low labor rates. But it is a given that most of the cost of a product is fixed during design, so the best time to find cost reductions is during the design stage, not during manufacturing. Yet most products are moved offshore without any such considerations.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, January 19, 2024 1:34 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Why Europe’s mixed economy produces safer planes than America

By Harold Meyerson | January 18, 2024

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-01-18-airbus-advan
tage/

In the wake of the midair blowout of a door on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 earlier this month, the lead that Airbus has taken over Boeing in the manufacture and sales of the world’s commercial aircraft has, not surprisingly, grown. It’s actually been growing for some time: Last year, Airbus delivered 735 new planes to airlines and leasing companies, The New York Times reported, while Boeing delivered just 528. Airbus had an order backlog of 8,600 new planes, against Boeing’s 5,626. This month’s blowout reinforced the public’s—and consequently, the airlines’—doubts about Boeing’s commitment to safety, which soared after two disastrous crashes of its 737s in 2018 and 2019.

“What used to be a duopoly” in the manufacture of commercial aircraft, Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory told the Times, “has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing.”

The long descent of Boeing has now become the subject of widespread analysis in the mainstream media. A story last Saturday in The Wall Street Journal began with an account of one Boeing engineer’s white paper in 2001 that warned against the company’s new commitment to outsourcing production of key parts of the aircraft it assembled. But continuing to produce the parts in-house, with the work done by Boeing’s very experienced and unionized workforce, cut no mustard with Wall Street and the company’s new-model CEOs, who no longer came to their posts from careers in production, but rather from the financial side of the industry. In 2005, the company sold its Wichita plant to a private equity firm that slashed costs before unloading the plant to Spirit AeroSystems, which has become notorious for its deficient quality inspection practices.

But this fish stunk from the head. Boeing continually objected to what it said were Spirit’s high costs and inability to meet deadlines. As the workers on the shop floor and their union repeatedly noted, this led to rushed production and deficient oversight. Workers—members of the International Association of Machinists—had “great quality and safety concerns,” one union representative wrote to union leaders, but their concerns were routinely ignored by senior management, the Journal reported.

So how are work practices at Airbus different from those at Boeing? I’m not arguing that Airbus provides a panacea for 21st-century production; a chunk of their own production, for instance, is outsourced as well. But consider, for starters, who actually owns the two companies. Airbus’s four largest shareholders, in order, are the government of France, the government of Germany, the Capital Research and Management Company, and the government of Spain. Boeing’s four largest shareholders, in order, are The Vanguard Group, Vanguard Group subfiler, Newport Trust Company, and State Street Corporation (a bank and asset manager). In other words, Airbus’s largest shareholders are mainly politically accountable governments that must pay heed to such public concerns as air safety; Boeing’s are entirely investors in business for profits.

Moreover, as the merger of German, French, and Spanish companies, Airbus production is centered in nations where workers historically and currently have more power than their U.S. counterparts. Forty-six thousand of Airbus’s roughly 130,000 employees work in the company’s German factories, where workers, by law, routinely discuss production and safety issues with managers in works councils. In the U.S., the Machinists are a union in which workers do have voice and power by American standards, but lack mechanisms like works councils through which management must take at least some heed of their concerns.

In sum, Airbus’s clear leadership over Boeing in matters of flight safety stem in good measure from their differences in ownership and worker power—that is, from the European model of mitigating laissez-faire capitalism with a measure of public and worker power, and from the American model of subjecting corporate policy almost entirely to the demands of investment institutions. Which, if you track the value of Boeing’s stock, hasn’t worked out that well for those investment institutions, either.

By the way, just how outsourced is Boeing production? Only yesterday, it was revealed the door plug that blew out of the Alaska Airlines plane wasn’t actually produced in Wichita. It was produced in Malaysia, where I very much doubt that workers’ concerns about speed of production and quality oversight have much impact on their managers. More significantly, the fact that the Malaysian production of the door plug didn’t come to light until yesterday—12 days after the blowout—suggests just how profoundly outsourcing can obscure the public visibility required for corporate accountability.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 24, 2024 8:14 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Boeing, not Spirit, mis-installed piece that blew off Alaska MAX 9 jet, industry source says

By Dominic Gates | Jan. 24, 2024 at 6:04 am

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-not-spir
it-mis-installed-piece-that-blew-off-alaska-max-9-jet/

It was clear soon after the incident that the plug must have been mis-installed.

When the cabin is pressurized, six small stop fittings on either side of the plug press against corresponding stop pads on the door frame.

The only way for the plug to have blown out is if it moved up, so that the twelve stop fittings were no longer aligned with the twelve stop pads — which is how the plug is opened for maintenance.

Four key bolts that prevent such upward movement in flight could not have been in place.

The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, “were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane.” the whistleblower stated. “Our own records reflect this.”

NTSB investigators already publicly raised the possibility that the bolts had not been installed.

The account goes on to describe shocking lapses in Boeing’s quality control process in Renton.

The work of the mechanics on the door plug should have been formally inspected and signed off by a Boeing quality inspector.

It wasn’t, the whistleblower wrote, because of a process failure and the use of two separate systems to record what work was accomplished.

Boeing’s 737 production system is described as “a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.”

If that account of what happened is indeed fully documented in Boeing’s system it should be readily verified by the investigation.

The Seattle Times offered Boeing the opportunity to dispute the details in this story. Citing the ongoing investigation, Boeing declined to comment. Likewise, so did Spirit, the FAA, the Machinists union and the NTSB.

The anonymous whistleblower posted his account online, in the comments appended to an article about the door plug incident on the Leeham.net aviation website.

https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspe
ction-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962

At the end of his second online post, the whistleblower asks “So, where are the bolts?” then offers a guess:

“Probably sitting forgotten and unlabeled … on a work-in-progress bench. Unless someone already tossed them in the scrap bin to tidy up.”

https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspe
ction-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509963

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, January 26, 2024 9:33 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Alaska Airlines resumes flying Boeing 737 Max 9 plane after door plug blowout

By Meredith Deliso | January 26, 2024, 6:45 PM

The service return comes two days after the Federal Aviation Administration released final instructions to airlines to begin conducting inspections of their 737 Max 9 planes.

Alaska confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that it planned to return some of its 737 MAX-9 aircraft back to the skies on Friday following a thorough inspection.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/alaska-airlines-resumes-flying-boeing-737-ma
x-9/story?id=106723983

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 1:40 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The fall of Boeing has been decades in the making

Jan 31, 2024, 10:05am EST

https://www.vox.com/money/24052245/boeing-corporate-culture-737-airpla
ne-safety-door-plug

Consumers have little choice when it comes to plane manufacturers: It’s pretty much Boeing or Airbus. There are currently over 10,000 Boeing commercial planes in service, and over 13,600 Airbuses.

Until the deadly Max crashes, the FAA allowed Boeing, like other aircraft manufacturers, to “self-certify” that their planes met air safety rules because the FAA doesn’t have the staff to do all the certifications itself. After the agency grounded some Max planes for a flaw in the de-icing system, Boeing asked for an exemption because engine disintegration would be “extremely improbable.”

Weak enforcement of regulation means that Boeing isn’t held accountable to the degree that it should. “The mantra in Washington for years has been ‘starve the beast, big government bad,’” says Aboulafia. “Sometimes you kind of need that [big government], whether it’s monitoring drinking water or keeping the air travel system safe.”

Boeing’s biggest defect? Corporate culture.

Experts say that the root of Boeing’s present troubles is a longstanding culture issue. Over the years, the company’s top decision-makers went from detail-oriented engineers to slick suits with MBAs.

“You’ve got a management team that doesn’t seem terribly concerned with their core business in building aircraft,” says Aboulafia.

There’s one name that keeps popping up when people talk about Boeing’s cultural downslide: Jack Welch, the legendary — and infamous — executive who helmed the conglomerate General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Welch was known for ushering in a sea change of “lean” management that ruthlessly made cuts in both manufacturing processes and the workforce, all in the service of pumping up stock prices. His leadership style included firing the worst-performing 10 percent of GE staff every year; he reportedly laid off over 250,000 people during his tenure. He inspired an entire generation of business leaders, and this Welchian GE philosophy was eventually brought over to Boeing.

In Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, journalist Peter Robison describes an environment where safety concerns were concealed or downplayed, in part to be faster and cheaper than Airbus, the former underdog that overtook Boeing as the biggest commercial aircraft manufacturer in the world in 2019.

While lean management was the name of the game for Boeing’s rank-and-file, in the past decade the company’s executives spent over $43 billion buying back their own stocks and paying out nearly $22 billion in profits to shareholders. By buying back shares and removing them from the public market, the individual value of a share automatically rises even though nothing about the company’s operations has changed.

Those billions represent cash that could have been reinvested in developing the next line of Boeing planes or hiring more quality inspectors. Former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who led the company during the deadly Max crashes, reportedly received an exit package of $62 million.

Boeing’s strategy to continually shrink costs doesn’t appear to have paid off. The company hasn’t turned an annual profit in the past five years. Airbus is selling more planes, and recent headlines about Boeing are putting a halo over Airbus’s comparative reputation. In January alone, Boeing lost $35 billion in market value as its stock price fell. https://www.google.com/search?q=total+stockmarket+value+of+boeing

In the aftermath of the fatal Max crashes, the grounding of the planes cost Boeing about $20 billion. It paid another $200 million in a legal settlement in which its shareholders claimed it had made misleading statements about the Max planes. It lost billions more from canceled orders. “The big criticism is that they’re solely focused on finance, but they’re not even good at that,” says Aboulafia.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 1, 2024 9:08 AM