According to the article Boeing has halted production, but this leaves the door open to producing them again in the future after design updates. I predict they'll try to rename the model and fly it again after making changes and certifying.
That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
Yea it is hilarious how Comcast thinks rebranding to xfinity etc is going to help. To be fair to them, the internet service mostly has been excellent where I live. The issue is the predatory pricing/cost and ever decreasing TV channels for existing customers.
Having worked there during the rebranding, a big part of it was more to drive clarity around the business units (think Alphabet vs Google, only in reverse). "Comcast" refers to the overall holding company over the cable business, media business and stadium / real estate holdings.
They referred to the cable business as "Comcast Cable" for a while before rebranding it to Xfinity. The public rebranding was definitely intentional, but it wasn't the only reason behind it.
I don't know what you're talking about, Comcast has had amazing support the last few months in my area. We even had a rep come to our house, and leave a handwritten note on the door when we didn't answer, asking if we had any questions or concerns and to give them a call if there was anything they could do for us.
... I'm sure this has nothing to do with the city fiber to the home buildout that is going on in our neighborhood... ;-)
FYI: I had that problem a decade ago, and the problem ended up being a nick in the coax sheathing on the run from the house to the neighborhood box. Water would get in and ruin the signal, but it was fine when it was dry.
I just got comcast installed in a new home, and the experience was completely different from what I've experienced in the past -- think "apple store", rather than "we're the phone company; we don't have to care". The customer service rep that helped me said they just finished six months of training, and even they were surprised that the system "just worked" when I went in to pick up the gear (my choice to pick it up two hours after calling them rather than waiting for delivery). I won't go into detail about all the other things that "went right" to avoid sounding like a marketing bird, but from what I heard it is a corporate initiative and not just for the fiber buildout.
My kid recently moved apartments from one served only by Comcast to one not served by Comcast. He filed the cancel request online and took his cable modem to a Comcast office in a nearby mall. The cancel process took about six minutes total; nobody called to beg for him to stay or stall him on the phone for over an hour.
My view is that the indication is how a company treats you when you leave versus when you arrive and, at least this once, Comcast did well on both.
It took 4 of Comcasts contractor technician visits to my house to fix a bad coax running to the building. The first tech identified the problem and said another would come to fix it, and no one did. The next two were completely useless beyond checking that the modem connected, and wasting my time.
Aside from that my 300Mbps service frequently tops out at 30Mbps, seemingly whenever I want to download something large. The upstream bandwidth they offer is also abysmal.
Rebranding works when it’s paired with significant changes.
Without that people tend to keep using the old name for a long time. People still call the Willis tower the sears tower and that change happened 11 years ago.
Comcast used to do some pretty bad stuff, but they've definitely cleaned up their act. I've been a customer for 10+ years, and have had zero significant issues with my service.
It's not so much the service itself as the crappy customer support, shady billing processes (eg, accidentally overcharging on a regular basis...) and things like that.
I'd assume this is only temporary. How many orders for the Max do they still have unfulfilled? That'd be a significant loss if they intended to not fill them sometime in the future.
Edit: It says in the article
> The assembly line in Renton, Washington, has stopped building Boeing's bestselling plane, the company confirmed late Monday. Boeing announced plans to temporarily halt production for an undetermined period in December, but it had not previously announced a precise day for the shutdown.
I think you’re underestimating how much fear people have of flying. If there’s a plane that is considered “dangerous” then people are going to avoid it. It’s not like airlines losing your luggage which people just put up with.
I’m the opposite. I figure the safest time to fly is when all the problems are foremost in everyone’s mind. Not worried/haven’t checked if I’m flying one today.
I have many friends who fly a lot more than me, and I've never heard any of them mention the type of airplane as an issue. Most of them don't know the exact model or even brand of "that plane that was grounded"..
I guess people in general rely on the government agencies to do this decision for us..
I don’t think I’ve ever made a flight decision based on the safety of a particular airline type. I prefer certain types for long hauls as well as caring about seat configuration and schedule/price. But I figure getting back and forth to the airport is more dangerous.
> I don’t think I’ve ever made a flight decision based on the safety of a particular airline type.
Neither had I, until I took a Tupolev jet between Moscow and India. I then decided I would never fly another aircraft that wasn't certified to fly in American and European airspaces. The reason for this was that I had trust in the FAA's and European aviation authory's standards and integrity. That trust has been greatly eroded (particularly with the FAA) for me.
I've definitely looked up plane models, I've looked at airline records. Just this month I re-booked to asia via South Korea instead of Qatar because my flight went over Iran or near the border on the flight maps and the assassination was <24 hours old. I ended up in a middle seat trans pacific instead, but I don't regret that decision in hindsight at all.
Most people I know look up the aircraft type on sites like SeatGuru to choose the best seats, or at least to avoid the worst. They also have a preference in aircraft, e.g. couples prefer 2+2 seating over 3+3, or jet over turboprop.
How many people even check what kind of equipment they are flying on before booking a ticket? I know a lot of people who are not even vaguely aware which manufacturer the plane they are flying on was made by.
I'm willing to bet airliners are going to remove any indication of what aircraft submodel is planned for the flight prior to ticketing, if not aggressively debating that move.
Great opportunity for a "SkySafe" app; filter out known flight/tail numbers based on the equipment (with data from public FAA feed). Can't lie about your equipment in flight plans to the FAA.
Plenty of aircraft have a history of crashing. There need to be more metrics, like recent crash history, maintenance routines, even things like financial performance.
Even the best airframe will go down if poorly maintained or their pilots aren't experienced and properly rotated.
I'm almost there, after reading about how much Boeing has spent on stock buybacks (5x all of R&D over the past six years) I think I'm going to start looking into which model typically services a route and avoid all modern Boeing planes.
Boeing made a lot of executives super rich with buybacks and equity compensation, this led directly to the shoddy engineering choices.
No, the current buyback madness (at least at these levels) is a very recent invention of the past decade and quite abnormal. We can go back to reinvesting in companies and employees and research tomorrow if we want to.
But this would require boards and executives who didn't want to just grant themselves huge amounts of equity while buying back stock. So far not many boards are standing up for this.
Yeah recent like you said for boening last six years. They are doing what everyone else is doing so it is pretty strange to single them out on this issue.
I've complained about many companies that are devoting even more resources to buybacks on this very forum, including Chevron, Texas Instruments, Google and Oracle. Google in particular has been the trendsetter, everyone else is trying to keep up with their buybacks.
This news story is about Boeing, so yes I'm going to talk about Boeing here.
Do you work in defense or aerospace? You seem to be taking this personally for some reason.
First, if you think Airbus is any better, you should think again.
Second, what do you mean by "all modern Boeing planes"? If you just mean "planes designed after the merger with McDonnell Douglas", that's just the 787 and the 737 Max. The latter is grounded and the former only flies select long haul routes. For the average US business traveler they're a non-issue.
Just look on FlightAware or similar. They've all got the historical record for a given route (though of course it's possible an airline might substitute after you've bought the ticket, it's unlikely; most flights fit a specific profile and most airlines have only a couple of models to fit that profile).
The major users from North American airlines are Southwest (34 planes), Air Canada (24), American (24), United (14), and Aeromexico (6), so it's not super common here at least.
I strongly doubt the overwhelming majority of consumers are going to cross reference booking details against an external site to avoid a specific plane unless there are planes falling out of the air on a daily basis. People may say they will, but in practice they'll look up the cheapest flight and book that, as usual.
Depends on how prominently the information is displayed, and the price difference.
If I can see the plane type in the list of available flights, and the difference is $15 on a $250 ticket I would choose the non Max flight, all else being equal.
Fair, and someone mentioned that Kayak does display that, but I think you will probably have to move to a different airline to get a different aircraft type (airlines use one common type for most flights on a given route) and the price differences are often steep and/or there are other sacrifices to be made (frequent flyer miles, more expensive bag checkins, etc).
I've heard that the "Max" name doesn't appear on FAA filings and the like, they use the name "737-8". I'm guessing that they'll be switching to using that name once the issues are ironed out.
But Windows 7 was just Windows Vista with some relatively minor changes and it was fine.
The problem with the 737 MAX is that Boeing tried to make a plane with a completely different airframe and added a bunch of software to try to make it fly exactly like second generation 737s so that pilots didn't need to retrain. But the abstraction was leaky and it turns out that when you have a different airframe, you have to retrain your pilots.
That said, Boeing did some janky stuff to get this nonsense certified by the FAA and the whole design probably needs to be recertified, which will take years.
I worked at a help desk when Windows ME came out. As I recall, the most salient difference I found between it and XP was that they removed a bunch of tools that I had come to rely on for diagnosis, troubleshooting, and just generally understanding what was going on under the hood. I guess it was ostensibly better, but I never did feel as comfortable working with an ME box.
With that in mind, yeah, Windows ME sounds like a pretty great analogy.
> The problem with the 737 MAX is that Boeing tried to make a plane with a completely different airframe
You've got it backwards. The problem was that they used the same airframe with larger engines that had to be mounted differently due to ground clearance issues.
No, that reactor had an inherent instability that could not be fixed.
The MCAS has an issue with redundant AOA sensors; that specifically needs to be fixed. The MCAS caused problems on other flights, but the pilots knew to disable it by flipping the circuit breaker. The pilots on the crashed planes did not know to disable it. That is a training issue.
Fix the redundant AOA and provide training to disable the MCAS, and it will be fine.
> No, that reactor had an inherent instability that could not be fixed.
There are many exactly same reactors as was in Chernobyl fixed and running still:
> Most of the flaws in the design of RBMK-1000 reactors were corrected after the Chernobyl accident and a dozen reactors have since been operating without any serious incidents for over twenty years.
Even Chernobyl itself had 3 remaining reactors working for many years after the disaster, last decommissioned in 2000.
The positive void coefficient problem[1] was intractable (without putting the whole reactor vessel inside a pressurized tank), but it was the combination of that and the control rod design that caused the explosion. The control rods were modified trivially. The reactor is basically safe, though you wouldn't repeat the design choices.
[1] An IMHO stupidly obfuscated way of saying that the cooling water around the reactor was an unpressurized pool that would boil if it got hot. Low-density bubbles of steam absorb fewer neutrons than liquid water, so when it boils the core gets hotter, not cooler.
> Most of the flaws in the design of RBMK-1000 reactors were corrected after the Chernobyl accident and a dozen reactors have since been operating without any serious incidents for over twenty years. [99]
Including 3 remaining reactors of Chernobyl Power Plant itself.
Little known fact:
Chernobyl was still a functional power plant after the meltdown and the remaining 3 reactors in the building were operated until 91, 96, and 2000.
Ten plants of same design are still operational today.
MAX is Defective by Design. Leave the aerodynamically unstable designs for the hotshot fighter planes; everyone else just wants to get from A to B without cratering into the ground inbetween.
It's not aerodynamically unstable. It's aerodynamically different than the 737-800 but Boeing decided instead of new pilot training and possibly re-certification, they would address the difference in it's flight characteristics by automatically adjusting the elevator trim when the aircraft is in a specific off-nominal situation such that the 737 MAX 8 feels and behaves just like the 737-800 (MCAS). That's not a bad engineering design decision IMO, but the follow-on decisions (or mistakes) made by Boeing (one AoA truth source instead of two, no extra training, zero indications, basically don't tell anyone about it) is the problem. Once those problems are fixed, no 737 MAX 8 will ever fail due to MCAS again. In fact it's going to be one of the - if not the - most scrutinized (and thereby safer) aircraft ever made.
I exaggerate slightly for [black] humor, but the point is hanging those huge engines so far forward puts its center of thrust uncomfortably ahead of its center of gravity, making it naturally want to pitch nose-up in flight.
All the rest—dodgy sensors, crappy software kludge, no pilot retraining—is hacks laid on top of that initial flaw just to pretend it isn’t there. A lot of us here build complex systems for a living; if that isn’t a “smell”, what is?
(Aerodynamically unstable design is a thing, btw, e.g. Typhoon. But that’s Military, which can afford fly-by-wire software that works.)
A stable design might’ve lifted the airframe further from the ground to give those huge engines the clearance they need under the wing, keeping them to the COG and thus ensuring the plane continues to fly naturally level as per its original design. (Any air geeks want to check me on that?)
But obviously that would’ve cost more, and now Boeing’s run by short-term profit chasers, not adult engineers, the attitude is “What can we get away with?”, not “What do we need to build?” That alone’s reason not to trust their bloody product any more. Not least cos what else might they be tempted to cut corners on?
I mean, a shitty iPhone will screw up your day; a shitty Boeing will screw up the rest of your life.
This is why Corporate Manslaughter laws should include hanging the Board by its heels.
Is it unstable? I thought the problem was that they didn't want to require retraining so they built in a flight control system that made it seem like the previous generation plane from a flight dynamics pov. That system would only take inputs from a single sensor on any given flight. If that sensor had issues then the flight control system would misbehave. If they had gone the retraining route and not included MCAS, then the plane would be fine. At least that was my understanding.
I think most aircraft are unstable or have quirks outside their approved flight envelope. For passenger aircraft you want it to be docile and predictable inside that. The MAX far as I've gleaned naturally wants to pitch up at high angles of attack. And that the problem is more severe than they expected when they initially designed the thing.
The MCAS might have been okay if the behavior matched initial expectations.
I think what I've read is the engine nacelles create lift at higher angles of attack. Because the nacelles are larger and located more forward than in older models. That's the source of the extra lift. Might also be the engines also contribute.
On the other hand I'm just a bystander in all this.
Also consider the position of the thrust point relative to the plane’s center of gravity. Being positioned below and ahead of the CoG, the engines naturally try to push the plane around it, i.e. nose-up.
Mind you, my physics ed stopped after high school (though even that much is enough to do a double-take at MAX). This looks like a much better explanation:
It pitches up with throttle, due to the position of the engines. Angle of attack sensors feed MCAS, so it can detect the pitching up and adjust the elevator trim to counteract it.
I suspect they’d need to teach those pilots to add a lot of trim. Putting those big engines well ahead of the CoG makes them throw its nose up; it’s basic Newtonian levers.
Not that any plane flies perfectly level at all speeds, which is why they need trim in the first place. But presumably there’s a “sweet spot” which the original 737 was designed to nail in normal flight, which subsequent revisions have moved further and further away from.
At some point you really need an adult in the room to stand up and declare “no more”. But by accounts McDonnell-Douglas already showed all the grown-ups the door. That’s the nice thing about responsibility: just disseminate it enough, and no-one’s to blame.
It's pretty funny watching HN downvote these statements. Statements that everyone in the industry agrees on.
I don't know if HN is getting worse or has always been an uninformed mob, but the amount of ignorance and blind downvoting around the max 8 issue has been pretty eye opening. The quality of discussion here is only marginally less uninformed garbage than on reddit. Suddenly everyone is a backseat aerospace engineer and aviation safety expert on the side.
> That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
Yeah you will. Good luck selectively avoiding the most popular international route plane. Historically, people have been very quick to forget mishaps with particular airframes and revert to flying the most convenient/economical routes.
And by the time it's flying again, it will be hands down the safest plane that's being operated because every minute detail of it will have been checked with far more scrutiny than any other newly launched platform.
The max 8 doesn't have an inherently unstable design. This meme now only lives in the minds of the most ignorant out-of-the-loop individuals who wilfully consume FUD and ignore expert evidence.
If the airframe is truly unsafe, then it'll never fly again. But everyone knows it will. Because it isn't.
The only thing that'll happen is the max 8 will probably require a new type rating which will hurt airline economy a bit. Other than that, you'll be flying in it a year from now and have forgotten all about this.
The force MCAS is correcting is a lightening of control forces near a stall. This is not allowed per FARs, so they added MCAS to force some extra force.
It will fly just fine with the computers turned off.
The 737NG is out of production, and Airbus currently has something like a 5 year backlog of A320 orders. The only other direct competitor is the Comac C919. Boeing has already made about 1000 737MAXes. The 737MAX is going to be a significant part of the global airline fleet whether you like it or not. There will be many routes where the 737MAX is the only aircraft flying that route.
I think it's fairly unlikely that there's some other massively dangerous failure mode of the 737MAX, because the fleet has flown enough hours, and the only crashes have been the result of the MCAS. When that's fixed, it's quite possible that there are other gremlins that cause crashes, but they probably will be much less severe/likely than the MCAS problem.
MCAS is not the fundamental problem. The new CEO has said they may require training for this 737 variant after all. Given a failure to simply drop MCAS, do extra pilot training and move on, we can conclude the plane isn't safe without additional computer control - of the quality MCAS was not. I hope I'm wrong about that, but the longer it drags on the more it looks like that may be the case.
I'm not directly involved, but my understanding is that to some degree the entire computer system is now involved. The problem is that the design philosophy of the instruments and computers on the 737 is the idea of having two "sides" to many sensors and instruments, a left and right. If the captain's airspeed readout differs from the FO's readout, the pilots are supposed to decide which one to trust.
Crucially, in order for this concept to work, the two sides are supposed to be totally independent -- the computers are different, the displays are different, and the sensors are different. However, at any one time, only one FCC is active, in that it is actually controlling the plane. Comparing the two sides AoA now violates this assumption and so many of the other engineering and certification assumptions may be violated since now the two FCCs are sharing AoA inputs.
Furthermore, my understanding is that now that everything is being looked at more closely, the FAA is having a change of heart about the idea of having one FCC active at a time being acceptable. If there is a hardware fault in the FCC, it has a lot of authority to cause problems, possibly faster than the crew can resolve them. My understanding is that now the FAA wants the FCCs to cross-check each other. Making this happen will require a lot of engineering and testing, and I think that this is the big reason for the delay. The MCAS fix itself was flight tested way back in April and May of last year.
All of that said, I don't believe an FCC fault has ever been implicated in an accident, so this IMO doesn't really present a safety issue big enough to be relevant to say, my decision of whether to fly on a 737MAX, but it looks like the FAA is deeming it not adequate for certification.
Airbus of course uses a different philosophy and uses multiple FCCs that continuously compare their output and vote.
Thank you for elaborating on the deeper issues surrounding MCAS. Where can I read more about Boeing's design philosophy around FCC redundancy, or more about Boeing vs Airbus philosophies?
I know Bloomberg et al don’t appreciate my attempting to bypass their technical controls and cause undesired effects on their systems, and would likely file a criminal complaint.
Why is it legal for advertisers to write code which is meant to bypass a system control and exceed their authorization?
I think we need a browser that automates CFAA complaints to the FBI when a company engages in behavior that would be illegal for an individual — such as hacking your audio.
I believe at the point where a company writes code with the explicit purpose of bypassing your control of the computer, eg autoplaying a video despite technical measures being taken to prohibit that behavior, it constitutes a breach of the CFAA.
What's more annoying, if you run an adblocker, their player will stall while it tries to load and ad and you get surprised ~20 seconds later with sound blasting at you.
I can't wait to read a senior Boeing manager's future book about the way the company mishandled the development of the 737 Max and how the upper echelons of decision makers managed the ensuing crisis. How many screaming matches occurred between VPs and engineering directors behind closed doors, how many angry emails were exchanged, how many panicked phone calls from the investor relations department to Muilenberg, etc.
What's incredible to me is how this could be allowed to happen. Are the higher echelons of these industries staffed by charlatans? Has something changed in the engineering culture? Did greed override diligence and if so, how was this allowed to happen when the consequences can be so catastrophic both to passengers and to the company? It just doesn't make sense to me how, with such high stakes, a company could manage to let things go so awry. Seems to me like the entire management team for years should have the entirety of their assets seized, as I assume they were very well rewarded for presiding over failure.
It's precisely due to this lack of real accountability that these kinds of things happen in C-suites everywhere. Massive golden parachutes are the "punishment".
Asset seizure and jail time work wonders, too bad they're not being used.
At some point, engineering gets displaced by short-term business concerns, driven by managers who have incentives to cut costs and deliver faster even if it destroys the company in the long term. Make a management chain long enough, and most of the decisions will get made this way. Each layer in the hierarchy serves both to insulate decision-makers from the impacts of their decisions and to amplify perverse incentives (e.g. a VP is asked to cut costs, who asks a middle manager to use cheaper solutions for problem X and recoup costs where possible, who asks a direct manager to spend no more than $Y and Z weeks on problem X, and the engineers can no longer do it safely).
This happens all the time, everywhere. I think of “good company culture” as a temporary, unstable situation. Any movement away from that position will accelerate towards failure.
The entire system is not necessarily engineered to avoid accountability, but the system encourages people to figure out a way to avoid accountability, and so you end up with this.
As another example, take a look at clothing companies which use child labor to produce cheap clothing. The companies don’t directly employ the children, but they use a chain of contractors and subcontractors. Each layer in the chain makes it more likely that leadership is unaware of ground truth, and with this many links in the chain, a top-level directive to cut costs will inevitably end up with something like child labor at the bottom, because it’s cheap. If you get bad press coverage for it, you look to assign blame to a specific link in the chain, fire that contractor, and then rehire someone else (but the chain repairs itself around the missing link and you end up with the same child laborers working for you).
Systems are usually to blame more than people are.
>Systems are usually to blame more than people are.
IDK, honestly. Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting. But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design.
I don't know about US companies, but I think most big enterprises have an internal whistleblower system, that can and should be used if unethical decisions are pushed down.
> Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting.
You can think all you want, but the system is larger and more complicated than you are. You might as well ask a gear to think about the engine.
The system has, in it, people who are smarter than you. You can’t hope to understand all the implications of incentives you create in a system.
> But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design.
I feel that a statement leading with “in the end” is too reductionist. These are complicated problems, and pointing fingers is too simple a tool to solve them.
The system is set up so that you can blame the people who hired child laborers, fire them, replace them, and still end up with the same child laborers making the same clothes in the same factory. Same with Boeing—no matter who you point fingers at with the 737 MAX, you can fire those people and rehire new ones but the disaster will happen again as long as the system encourages it.
I've found real life to be very complicated and making good decisions to be difficult in cases with strongly competing goals.
It's very easy to see that the wrong decision was made in this case, but this is just one of thousands (or more) that were made in this program; much less the company as a whole.
So while this was definitely bad, it's much simpler to say "this decision was bad and you shouldn't done this" than it is to say "you shouldn't make bad decisions"
I don't know about anyone else but personally, I would never fly a 737 max. Yes it could be fixed and yes it may be the same as other models going forward but the amount of coverage it has received and the fear it has created, I would always check if I am flying a 737 max or not. Yes that doesn't necessarily mean anything but it is now tainted. Boeing is smart to just discontinue the name even if it repackages it again with a new name.
The simple fact for Boeing to continue "operating as usual" without real consequences dis-aligns incentives that have been present until now in air travel making it so safe. The precedence it creates can ripple so that e.g. Airbus also slacks on safety to stay competitive if this is the new normal...
EDIT: And an hour after writing this Boeing just now announcing (surprise, surprise) they don’t expect return-to-service until July and stock is currently trading down 5.5%)
I shorted BA for a few months based on many HN posts after the crashes, but covered my position after it seemed to stabilize at ~320. I think it will probably head lower, but as a general rule I try to find companies I believe in rather than companies I don’t.
It was a very interesting choice to maintain the dividend for now. I think they will have to revisit that and it will kick-off the next big swing downward.
Last week the WSJ reported [1] that they are in the process of raising a new $5 billion round. Now [2] the word on the street is they’re looking for $10 billion over 2 years - a “mid term” debt round, structured as a line they can draw on over several years - somehow this is supposed to limit the effect it will have on their debt rating. A significant Moody’s downgrade seems like it’s past due, and Moody’s recently announced they put BA “on review”. [3]
Their debt at the start of Q4 was $15 billion and then rose to $20 billion by the end of Q4. Back in 2018 it was closer to $12 billion. I wouldn’t be surprise to see it near $25 billion at the end of Q1.
Supposedly Boeing keeps about $10 billion in liquidity “available” but they’ve burned through that by now.
The “charges” they take against the MAX disaster which started at $5.6 billion could balloon as high as $20 billion as the ramifications continue to unfold. [4]
Lastly I would point out that over the last decade plus timeframe the FAA hollowed out as a regulatory agency into a box checker. Today they have as I understand it just ~750 total pilots and engineers on staff to review technical data from the plane manufacturers. The FAA said last year to do it themselves they would need 10,000 more. [5]
> “It would require roughly 10,000 more employees and another $1.8 billion for our certification office,” Elwell told the Senate subcommittee on aviation and space.
> The FAA Aircraft Certification Service had a budget of $239 million for fiscal 2019 and about 1,300 employees, 745 of whom are pilots, engineers and technical staff who oversee design approvals and production.
I recall news articles claiming Congress recently approved significant new funding for the FAA, but looking at their budget [6] PDF page 37 it seems like “Regulation & Certification” remains level-funded at $1.3 billion the last three years.
A more recent report on the MAX specifically [7] said;
> The report said the FAA had just 45 people in an office overseeing Boeing's Organization Designation Authority (ODA) and its 1,500 employees.
...
> The FAA's office oveseeing Boeing has just 24 engineers and they face a wide range of tasks to ensure compliance in overseeing Boeing's 737, 747, 767, 777, and 787 programs.
> The review added there are only two technical FAA staff assigned per Boeing program and some are "new engineers with limited airworthiness experience."
The full report which this article is excerpting I believe is this one. [8] See specifically PDF Page 47 but put down any objects you might be prone to throwing before beginning to read.
I would imagine engineers qualified to actual critically review detailed 737 specifications aren’t unemployed and take a long time to hire. How long will it take the FAA to even staff up to the point where they can start doing their job if they are only just now getting the money to hire? Pundits saying they expected the 737 return-to-service to happen before New Years and now say it’s happening any day now I think don’t comprehend the massive gap between what the FAA used to do and what they are now tasked with doing, and that they literally don’t have the qualified people in-house to even start doing much of this work. All that assumes necessary funding has even been appropriated and there are the people and the culture in place to even do the work. Big IFs.
To me that points to a extremely delayed return to service as new engineers are hired and brought on to critically review documentation which used to be rubber stamped — let alone dealing with the actual software failures and faulty design specifications which straight up didn’t/don’t conform to modern safety standards.
In short, my prediction is that BA will inevitably have to suspend its dividend, it will take a charge upwards of $20 billion for the MAX, return to service will be extremely delayed beyond analysts wildest expectations, they will be downgraded by Moody’s and their debt load will increase to nearly $30 billion over the course of 2020 into 2021, and there is a remote chance of a debt squeeze, and the company declaring bankruptcy and having to restructure.
I don’t currently own any position in Boeing (other than through holdings in the S&P500) and do not plan on initiating any BA position in the next 72 hours. This is not investment advice.
They have 1300 total employees and only 24 review all of Boeing's planes? That's insane! What the fuck are the others doing? Can't be all HR (no offense to HR)
Your claim here is that FAA's Certification practice has been hollowed out, but your evidence is that it's been funded consistently. Can you further support the claim? 230MM is less than 0.2% of DoT's budget; what would the incentive have been to downsize it?
The top-level Certification & Regulation line item is constant over just the last 3 years. I did not look at historical data going back decades. I thought that I had read reports of the FAA getting a massive funding increase for Certification but the budget seems to dispute that. So this piece of the puzzle — whether or not major new funding has been made available for Certification in the last few months — I am not very clear on.
Delegation seems to have steadily increased in scope since the 1930s. A brief and interesting history of Delegation from the FAA is here. [1] It has evolved over decades to become what it is today.
The specific concept of the ODA - Organization Designation Authorization — which is the program which delegates certification work to Boeing, didn’t exist until 2009. Last year Boeing had 1,500 people working internally in their ODA Compliance program, and there were just 45 people at the FAA BASOO (Boeing Aviation Safety Oversight Office).
Cost was one factor, but perhaps not the primary driver. Wanting to leverage private industry expertise is usually the reason cited. I don’t think it was downsizing necessarily as a cost control measure. It was downsized as a policy decision that delegating increasing amounts of the compliance work to industry was the right way to get the job done because that’s where the experts were.
In concept it’s almost reasonable. In practice they underestimated the degree to which Boeing could fuck up on the designs, overestimated the level of independent authority would vest in the ODAs to correct deficiencies, and I think eventually you lose “critical mass” back at home base (the FAA) and the ability to actually oversee the people doing the work.
I mean, the FAA Director went on record saying they would need to hire 10,000 people to fully staff this function. This to me indicates they have lost the critical mass required to perform the role even primarily as an outsourced effort.
Excerpting from PDF Page 13 of the JATR report;
> The BASOO is required to perform a certification function, including making findings of compliance of retained (non-delegated) requirements, while also performing the oversight function of the Boeing ODA. The BASOO must have the resources to carry out these two primary functions without compromise. The JATR team concluded that FAA resource shortfalls in the BASOO (and other allocated resources) may have contributed to an inadequate number of FAA specialists being involved in the B737 MAX certification program. In some cases, BASOO engineers had limited experience and knowledge of key technical aspects of the B737 MAX program.
> The BASOO delegated a high percentage of approvals and findings of compliance to the Boeing ODA for the B737 MAX program. With adequate FAA engagement and oversight, the extent of delegation does not in itself compromise safety. However, in the B737 MAX program, the FAA had inadequate awareness of the MCAS function which, coupled with limited involvement, resulted in an inability of the FAA to provide an independent assessment of the adequacy of the Boeing proposed certification activities associated with MCAS. In addition, signs were reported of undue pressures on Boeing ODA engineering unit members (E-UMs) performing certification activities on the B737 MAX program, which further erodes the level of assurance in this system of delegation.
Further, from PDF Page 46;
> The FAA initially delegated acceptance of approximately 40% of the B737 MAX project’s certification plans to the Boeing ODA. Additional certification plans that were originally retained for acceptance by the FAA were later delegated to the Boeing ODA as the certification project progressed. While the JATR team did not conduct an exhaustive review of other ODAs, the team observed that delegating the acceptance of certification plans does not appear to be a widespread practice for the FAA.
“Does not appear to be widespread” seems to me to be a political way of saying “outside of acceptable practice and this should never have been done.”
The next paragraph continues;
> Finding F5.1-A: The FAA extensively delegated compliance findings on the B737-8 MAX project to the Boeing ODA. Safety critical areas, including system safety documents related to MCAS, were initially retained by the FAA and then delegated to the Boeing ODA. (See also Findings F4.1-A, F4.1-B, and F4.1-C.)
Delegation was used to an improper extent in the project, and what little staff they had dedicated to the BASOO appear to have insufficient experience, technical expertise, or knowledge of the 737-8 systems themselves.
Now the FAA is on record as saying those same people will have all the time they need to get it right without any compromises. In my experience, a team that failed under undue pressure the first time will take a deliberately exorbitant amount of time, given a second bite at the apple and the instructions to “do whatever it takes to get it done right.”
> Today they have as I understand it just ~750 total pilots and engineers on staff to review technical data from the plane manufacturers. The FAA said last year to do it themselves they would need 10,000 more. [5]
Not 10000 more pilots and engineers. 10000 more employees. Now they have "1,300 employees, 745 of whom are pilots, engineers and technical staff who oversee design approvals and production."
Well they aren’t talking about hiring 10,000 for the mail room.
This is the number he gave to answer what it would take to do the whole thing internally with no delegation whatsoever. Hard to say how of this number is just political grandstanding.
What is the cost to restart both the supply chain and production line? If this lasts long enough, then there are portions of the supply chain that will start to simply disappear as vendors go under or switch away to different customers and de-prioritize Boeing.
It isn't just the monetary cost to re-calibrate machining and tooling, also the staff time and monetary cost to fill in gaps that appeared during the shutdown, both material and vendor relationships. And an abundantly clear lesson (as if the domain experts in sourcing shouldn't know this already) from the debacle is that outsourcing is not plug-and-play: there will be both product and relationship re-alignment and re-certification going on anywhere vendors are swapped out in the supply chain.
If Boeing was forward-looking, then they would bite the bullet and keep production going, but use the downtime to crawl through every aspect of production to look for and fix any quality and safety-related concerns on the line (including absolute bottom-up authority for production line escalating concerns through to engineering and design) and in the supply chain. It massively slows down the production, which is perfectly fine right now. It wouldn't matter if they slowed to 10% of normal output, if the deliverable was absolute confidence in what is built on that line; they should have started this a long time ago when the shutdown passed 90 days.
Even after the design is amended, planes modified, re-certification awarded by all the aviation agencies around the world, there will be a titanic push to run the line as fast as possible. And if they don't completely debug every piece of that line to an inch of its life, there will be guaranteed production quality problems when it restarts, and if those problems lead to more crashes, Boeing is getting bailed out by taxpayers and unalterably changed. Better to keep the line on "warm standby" while debugging it before the pressure is on.
> If Boeing was forward-looking, then they would bite the bullet and keep production going, but use the downtime to crawl through every aspect of production to look for and fix any quality and safety-related concerns on the line (including absolute bottom-up authority for production line escalating concerns through to engineering and design) and in the supply chain.
Where would they put them? These things ain't small.
Airliners are expensive. The manufacturers do not build a large number speculatively and then find customers. They find customers, then build what has been ordered. They have enough storage space to serve as a buffer between output and delivery so that minor glitches on either don't affect the other.
Also because airliners are expensive, and they get paid on delivery not on order, once past the initial production current production is paid for from recent deliveries. If deliveries have to stop for an extended time, there is no money to fund more production.
Good point. IMHO the company's survival is on the line, and the storage opex expense is worth it if it takes dropping production rate to 1% (about 0.6 737 MAX per month) or less to find out what other quality problems are lurking outside of the design realm, and catch technical debt that they would regret later. This is far preferable to writing off the entire product, and would be a concrete start to re-establishing the old company culture's emphasis upon quality. They're under a regulatory and compliance microscope now, and any production problems when they restart are going to get a lot of negative attention.
They're tapping more debt and still plan on issuing dividends. Those dividends are likely going to be accompanied by equity buybacks. Those buybacks are measured in billions [1]. Carve out from the buyback funds what it costs to ensure quality where they can control it while waiting for clearance to reassure regulators, politicians and the general public, and tell the investors that it is either hold on with the team until quality is re-established within the culture, sell and come back later, or eventually zero out the investment because no one wants to buy from a plane manufacturer with suspect quality.
Total clickbait. Based on the title "Boeing has officially stopped making 737 Max airplanes" I thought maybe they had finally decided the plane was unsalvageable. No, they just finally implemented the widely reported decision to temporarily stop construction.
One question in my mind is: what would it take for the old "engineer" faction of Boeing to come to the top again? Or is this unrealistic as the "management/costcutting" faction is just inherently better a "management" politics to ever be dislodged?
Failing this, what is the likelihood a competitor with old-school Boeing values might emerge to compete, in such a capital-heavy industry?
It's basically impossible for a competitor with "old school" values to emerge. The regulatory hurdles and foreign competition are daunting. There are only two companies in the world that can do what Airbus and Boeing do.
This MBA vs engineering dichotomy is a myth. One of the people with a lot of responsibility for this disaster is the Chief Test Pilot, who is a Navy Veteran, engineer and prototypical flight enthusiast. That didn't stop him from lying to the FAA.
Airplane travel today is also about 70x safer than it was in, say, the 1960s, on a per-passenger-per-mile basis. Despite Boeing's trouble, plane construction, pilot instruction, and flight management have all done a rather good job. There are no "good old times", at least none better than the present.
A miracle. Bringing focus and engineering discipline back to a large company that has atrophied is difficult bordering on impossible. A change like that would be an uphill battle the entire time. Fighting against all the careerist empire builders. It's easier to start over with a new company than it is to fix an existing one.
There are a few instances of a true turnaround from a company that has lost the plot, but even in those instances it looks like jettisoning large portions of an organization and re-growing it along a new axis.
Briefly: It could be, but that would mean reclassifying the airplane.
Maybe think about it like anti-lock brakes. Cars without ABS can be driven safely in many/most circumstances, but most drivers are accustomed to ABS. (This is necessarily a limited analogy)
Also, there are government requirements per aircraft type, and removing this system would change the aircraft type, triggering a significant amount of required re-training.
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Not directly related to your question, but I think [pure speculation/psychological theory] one thing that went badly wrong here was engineers thinking about this as a convenience system. Because it was thought of as a convenience system, they didn't fully consider the safety aspect of it.
The problem with reporting around this issue is that its emotionally driven and done often by people who have little experience with how the aviation industry works. So while the exact details are accurately reported in aviation industry news, the mainstream news keeps parroting things that are false and confirmation bias keeps people from picking up when those things are false.
The departure from reality in this case is pretty severe:
1. There were severe issues with pilot's performance on both flights.
2. Airline maintenance is culpable in the Lion Air flight.
3. MCAS is required irregardless of what type certificate is used.
4. Boeing's "new problems with the 737" are not as much a result of faults previously ignored, but new issues created by reassessing the risk factors related to those systems.
5. The 737 MAX is not aerodynamically unstable.
6. The 737 MAX issue has brought to light severe issues in the aviation industry that may require retraining many pilots in the industry or being way more aggressive with refresh training (also see the Atlas Air crash recently).
TL;DR The 737 design is super, super old and they wanted to install new engines on it that are more efficient and powerful. These engines are much bigger than the engines that were initially installed, meaning they had to be installed further up the wing in order to ensure adequate ground clearance. Unfortunately that changes the flight model of the airplane and makes it prone to pitching up, especially during take off. Pitching up too far can cause a stall and result in a crash. MCAS was designed to detect this pitch up and counter it with a pitch down.
It's entirely possible, even likely I would say, that the majority of pilots would intervene before a stall is ever reached in a scenario where MCAS would kick in. I think you could fly this plane for hundreds of thousands of hours without incident without MCAS. Unfortunately, there have been cases (AF447) where the pilots were so confused/tired/inexperienced that they ignored the stall horn and let the plane stall and crash. MCAS was meant to address situations like those but tragically it only made things worse.
The other thing is that Boeing didn't want to have to re-certify this aircraft with the FAA, as that would also require airlines to train their pilots for this new aircraft type. Note that the whole purpose of the MAX was to compete with the A320neo, and re-certification would have taken a long time and cost a whole lot of money. This would negate the purpose of the MAX in the first place. MCAS allowed Boeing to "pretend" the 737 MAX was the same exact airplane as the 737NG (which the MAX was based off, I believe), and thus pilots didn't need additional training outside of a 30 minute iPad session.
It's like if you replaced your 2015 car with a new, but heavier 2020 model. Since its heavier, but has the same braking system as the 2015 model, it has a longer braking distance. To remedy that the engineers put in a "braking characteristics augmentation system" (BCAS) to augment the braking power applied, so that it stops sooner than a person normally would. It uses a single camera and computer vision to detect obstacles ahead. The car company didn't think they need to tell its drivers about it. One day you'll be driving and all of a sudden come to a screeching halt (and maybe cause a wreck) and come to find out the camera was obscured by a precise strike of bird poop.
The car company could have either A) told and trained their drivers at the dealership to brake harder than normal, B) used a two-camera backup system, or C) redesigned the brakes to accommodate for the increased vehicle weight.
MCAS is basically that. It makes the MAX8 maneuver and behave just like the previous 737 models, even though the larger engine and more forward placement causes it to fly somewhat differently in certain situations. The failures came from the lack of training and understanding of the system as well as a flawed implementation using input from only a single sensor instead of two. Without MCAS, they would have required a significant amount of training and possibly re certification, which costs at least a few billion dollars more than a few hundred lines of code (but unfortunately a lot less than 346 people's lives and many many billions of dollars of follow-on debt).
They are betting that a key component of the US Military Industrial Complex survives long enough to pay back the interest or whatever profit tool the loans operate under. I'd take that bet.
I'm amazed to see such a big fleet grounded for such a long time. Since MCAS was employed to avoid retraining of pilots, I'd assume that at this point retraining the pilots out of their pockets would be cheaper for Boeing than paying airlines' damages for grounded planes.
Is that training of no use because disabling MCAS would also need re-certification? Is the process of getting certification for a MCAS-free version roughly the same as getting the fixed version certified? Speculating way out my depth now: maybe it would still be worth it to pursue parallel certification to have the option of retraining when MCAS should be deemed uncertifiable.
That being said, I never want to fly on a 737 Max or whatever they plan to rebrand it as.
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