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I think something's wrong with the Boeing 737 Max 8

Slap Stick said:
So Boeing still won't admit the MAX series is a dangerous design and is trying yet another software program designed to mask the poor design? What happens when it fails?
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While not actually coming out to say the design was bad, they are paying out money - $100 million - for the affected victims and communities of the two crashes. https://www.boeing.com/737-max-updates/
Meanwhile, the Max8 production lines, which are shut down, were supposed to re-start again this month. The virus may push that back.
https://www.news18.com/news/auto/bo...in-may-after-four-months-of-halt-2550151.html
Looking for a bail-out much greater than the auto industry got in the last decade, Boeing wants $60 Billion dollars to keep afloat. https://www.news18.com/news/auto/fi...us-government-nationalise-boeing-2545263.html

Quality control might need to be addressed first... https://www.news18.com/news/auto/bo...n-fuel-tanks-of-undelivered-jets-2510899.html
 
They're the only ones left that get paid more than they're worth. Everyone else got beat down, benefits cut, or just moved to some other country. I'm talking about assembly, not technology and or American intellectual property. I know a half a dozen people that work there and I can tell you they, never mind..............
 
so,on one of these pages i basically called this perfectly..
i asked if this was possible in the future...
and here it is.
boeing will get a bailout....from the govt...and we will pay for it...
 
MAX 8 re-certification could be inching closer. The FAA has outlined what it needs from Boeing to make it happen, (the August 2020 summary was 96 pages) and it looks like not only will the software problems be fixed, but actual pilot training will be part of the requirements this time. Boeing seems to be still chanting the same mantra: 'avoid hardware changes - do it with software.'
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/3/21353257/faa-review-instructions-boeing-737-fly-crash-fatal-mcas

An overview of some of the antique computers that run the Max 8 and the flight simulators: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21197162/boeing-737-max-software-hardware-computer-fcc-crash

Re-certification flights have already been started at the end of June. https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/boeing-737-max-resumes-flight-testing/

On top of that, hundreds of Max 8 orders have been cancelled. https://www.seattletimes.com/busine...nue-as-airline-downturn-shuts-off-jet-orders/
 
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If you are just now asking about the MAX, you are about 1.5y late. The accidents were tragic, and Boeing is blamed. However, the above comments were not written by pilots. I have 4000+hours in single seat fighters, and I have made every mistake one can think of without actually killing myself, including in combat, so I have learned to never criticize pilots. I might not have turned off the trim switches in the same situations, even tho' it sounds so simple...
Remember, Sully had not even gotten to the "ditching" items on the engine failure checklist when...they hit the water. Fortunately, i think he or Jeff, the copilot, actuated the switch out of sequence. The rest is history.
PS: In all my questions to my airline pilot buddies, I have only found 1 who thinks the system, as designed, is dangerous. These accidents were in 2nd world countries, with lesser able pilots, and in Indonesia, "production pressure" to get the jet on the line with this malfunction not completely fixed. I am puzzled as to why they don't just remove all auto-trim, and trim manually after take-off! By now, every would-be pilot knows the problem: increased moment arm from the bigger, stronger, lower engines that causes nose pitch up, compared to earlier 737. However, the FAA, EASA, etc. require it, since it is part of the MAX design. Go figure. PS: the day the MAX starts flying, Geff and Julie will be on board...'cause many people will refuse to fly it, and seats will be empty and cheap. !!
 
Geff McCarthy said:
If you are just now asking about the MAX, you are about 1.5y late. The accidents were tragic, and Boeing is blamed. However, the above comments were not written by pilots. I have 4000+hours in single seat fighters, and I have made every mistake one can think of without actually killing myself, including in combat, so I have learned to never criticize pilots. I might not have turned off the trim switches in the same situations, even tho' it sounds so simple...
Remember, Sully had not even gotten to the "ditching" items on the engine failure checklist when...they hit the water. Fortunately, i think he or Jeff, the copilot, actuated the switch out of sequence. The rest is history.
PS: In all my questions to my airline pilot buddies, I have only found 1 who thinks the system, as designed, is dangerous. These accidents were in 2nd world countries, with lesser able pilots, and in Indonesia, "production pressure" to get the jet on the line with this malfunction not completely fixed. I am puzzled as to why they don't just remove all auto-trim, and trim manually after take-off! By now, every would-be pilot knows the problem: increased moment arm from the bigger, stronger, lower engines that causes nose pitch up, compared to earlier 737. However, the FAA, EASA, etc. require it, since it is part of the MAX design. Go figure. PS: the day the MAX starts flying, Geff and Julie will be on board...'cause many people will refuse to fly it, and seats will be empty and cheap. !!
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I don't think anyone is "just now asking about the MAX", if you take a look you'll see that this thread was started over sixteen months ago, with many updates along the way.

If you have airline pilot buddies, right on! A great field to be in, I'm sure there are a lot of stories to be told. :) However, even before the crashes, pilots were uneasy about the MAX design. Not just as you say..."2nd world countries, with lesser able pilots". Why do you say they are lesser abled, do you know them and their training (much of which was done in the 'States)? You can't blame them for a lack of knowledge about a system that Boeing didn't even include in the pilot manual and misled the FAA about. American Airline's pilot union, among others, had concerns, and Sully himself told the congressional subcommittee that the plane "was fatally flawed and should never have been approved."

Yes, we all know that aerodynamics changed with the new design, but the "increased moment arm from the bigger, stronger, lower engines" isn't quite accurate, as the engine thrust center-line is actually higher than the older designs. Going lower simply wasn't an option due to the limited ground clearance so they were mounted higher and farther forward on the wing. It's the nacelle design that contributes to extra lift, not the moment arm.

I'm pretty sure that when the Max is cleared for flying again it will actually be pretty safe, the FAA and Boeing themselves will be much more cautious this time around. Of course there will be some people who won't fly on it, but likely after a few months of routine flights it'll start to be forgotten. If not, airlines will drop prices for incentives, as I'm sure they're already considering. With hundreds of Airbus NEO orders taken this year vs. hundreds more MAX orders dropped, that alone could be a telling indicator of how the airlines think things are going to go.
 
Its still an electronics "patch" designed to mask a fatal design flaw that Boeing refuses to admit and it exists in all 737s with the newer, relocated engines.
The MAX couldn't be certificated for flight because the problem was exacerbated by the newer engines so the MCAS was implemented.
Boeing had the real solution but eliminated it.
The solution is called the 757. It does everything they are trying to make the 737 do, and does it better.
We have seen what happens when electronics fail.
 
Geff McCarthy said:
...PS: In all my questions to my airline pilot buddies, I have only found 1 who thinks the system, as designed, is dangerous...
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I’ll have to disagree with your buddies as the system resulted in the deaths of 340+ people. Any aircraft fly by wire system that relies on a single sensor anywhere in its system is dangerous.

It’s retarded. Especially with 300+ lives aboard.

Here’s another fly-by-wire aircraft that has a single AOA probe controlling the pitch down in a stall condition: MQ-1 Predator. Great company to be in, huh? Except that plane has no passengers.

As an example, the fly-by-wire F16 has 2 AOA probes. If one fails, the other can supply the data. If both fail, a tertiary software program infers AOA by sampling differential pressure across the static ports. All of the above work in concert with increasing levels of warnings and degradation before the controls would be “buried full forward stick.”

The Boeing system didn’t even supply a warning of a failed AOA transmitter. And the Flight Manual didn’t even describe the system.

Boeing deserves to be torched.

Bryan
USAF Retired, 23 years
Former Ops Test Pilot; Test Director. China Lake and Dugway Army Proving Ground
Program Manager at various Aviation Companies.
 
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Bryan, all, I respect your analyses, and agree about the single AoA probe decision, (i had forgotten the F-16 tertiary source) but if you consider the current, most widely accepted accident classification system, HFACS, you can trace the causation all the way up to the FAA, who for decades have made it exorbitantly expensive to certify a new aircraft. Hence the endless expansions of 737s and others gradually into aircraft unrecognizable from their origins. Or, ask any private plane owner about expenses. My gps with WAAS for a dinky Cessna 210 cost over $17,000. Great capability, but should have been thousands less. (Sidebar: my partner in this aircraft tested new systems for Garmin. He estimates that 40% of the cost of avionics is due to the rigid FAA requirement for lightning protection alone. Price the innovations too high, private pilots can't buy...and die...)
Photon440s explanation of the mechanics is correct, but my point about the exaggerated nose up moment after take-off is also correct, and the reason for this auto-trim system.
The best overall explanation of these sad crashes was written by Langeweishe ?) in, i think, the New Yorker, my source for the info on the Indonesian airline culture. As to "torching" either Boeing or Airbus...well, Brian in the heat of battle...
For a while, I favored Airbus over Boeing, during the last 737 crisis: loss of 2-3 planes, which suddenly, uncontrollably rolled over and dived. Took years to find the fault in the rudder actuator. And as to Airbus design...French engineers apparently think that pilots do not get any useful info from...movement of the throttles, which sit there dumbly immobile while in auto-throttle mode...Maybe i will just fly Sukoi or Bombardier or Embraer!
 
Geff, I take no schadenfreude in Boeing’s problems.

Too many of my own relied on them to put roofs over their heads and food on the table. My father in law was a 35 year Boeing mechanical engineer (and Korea war vet) and raised his kids (one of them my wife) on a Boeing pay check. Uncles worked at Boeing’s Renton facility. I’m old enough to remember the sign off interstate 5 going south to Tacoma in 1974 that said “Last one out, turn off the lights” because Boeing had laid off most of its work force and Seattle was hurting.

It’s simply this. I can’t give management a pass for defying 40+ years of aviation and engineering convention in the hopes to save a few dimes while risking the passengers and crew. No airliner should be approved that has, as its primary requirement, pilot heroics to manage a single probe failure in the FLCS (even if the pilots are heroes). Their own engineers pointed out the risk during development. Their own test pilots discovered the flaws during the course of sim testing. All were over-ruled by management. This is all public record.

I sympathize with you on the costs to fly in the US. I fly the little planes too. I’d also argue the events of 911 are singularly more responsible for the costs of flying today than any other single reason. But Boeing profits were spectacular over the last decade prior to the Max incident anyway. (sidebar; Its still cheaper and better here than anywhere else to learn to fly. Ask all the German flight students at any FBO in Vegas why they learn to fly here in the US versus at home).

I’m confident Boeing will weather this crisis. It’ll just be painful.
 
GrabberOrange69 said:
I’ll have to disagree with your buddies as the system resulted in the deaths of 340+ people. Any aircraft fly by wire system that relies on a single sensor anywhere in its system is dangerous.
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Is the Max now fly-by-wire? I know the older 737 wasn't, and I thought the Max still had cables running from the stick to the rudder and through the wings. I understand that the spoilers are FBW (they seem to be the only FBW system mentioned in the Joint Authorities Technical Review for the Boeing 737 Max Flight control System on the FAA site) for but what about the rest of the control system? The Wikipedia entry on the 737 notes that "The 737 is unusual in that it still uses a hydro-mechanical flight control system, similar to the Boeing 707 and typical of the period,...".

Not that it would have likely changed the outcome of the crashes, if a computer operated screwjack in the elevator over-rides pilot input anyway.
 
Even older 737s have a problem in this regard. In certain attitudes the trim systems "aerodynamically lock". What happens is the stabilizers can't be manually adjusted due to aerodynamic forces. The pilots are trying to arrest a descent by pulling back on the yoke and rotating the trim wheel. But, the trim wheel won't move. And it gets worse as the plane's speed increases. The fix is to release pressure on the yoke which frees up the trim.
And its my understanding this isn't in the book, either.
 
737 Max flight controls may be hybrid...but there’s no doubt the AOA input is not hydro mechanical. It’s still single source which is the real foul; and a decision is still being made by “computer” on how much down to push in stall/approaching stall flight. They still didn’t describe the system in the Flight Manual.

F-16 has hydraulic actuators at the flight control surfaces...still considered fly-by-wire because the decisions on how much deflection and what direction is done by computer.

But great points.
 
The CF-105 Avro Arrow was FBW back in the late 1950s. It even had artificial feedback built into the stick to simulate flying loads, which I don't think the F-16 had.. It too had hydraulic actuators (and a 4,000 p.s.i. system) but no direct mechanical connection.

So it's not like the idea of FBW wasn't around when the original 737 was being conceived.
 
Brian, i very much respect your angst/support for Boeing. Yes they will survive and prosper again, and the MAX will fly safely.
 
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