Post by Brad Nelson on Mar 1, 2022 9:11:28 GMT -8
Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
This plodding, weepy documentary (made by a woman) could have been condensed into a 5 minute PragerU video. I'll save you the trouble of watching it, although it is just interesting enough to watch.
The story (according to the documentary) of the 737 Max crashes (there were two of them within months) could be summed up thusly: The culture of Boeing changed from being engineer-centered to Wall-Street-centered after the acquisition by Boeing of McDonnell-Douglas. Profits, not safety, became central to operations. Corners were cut.
In the specific case of the 737 Max, it was Boeing's (highly successful) attempt to match Airbus's low-fuel aircraft that they had just introduced. Boeing didn't have time to create an entirely new aircraft so they just did a revision of the existing 737. And to keep costs down (and to make the plane attractive to buyers), there could be no changes so drastic that pilots would require training in simulators. At most, they would need to view a refresher video on an iPad.
The fuel-efficient engines that Boeing bolted onto the 737 (to make it the "Max") were larger and had to be positioned in such a way (higher up and more toward the front) that stalling became a hazard. And this is where the documentary falls completely flat. We see nothing about just how big a problem this was perceived to be – such a big problem that an entirely new and automatic anti-stall system would be part of the 737 Max. But no info is provided on this key point the required the existence of this new anti-stall system.
As it turns out, this anti-stall system was so radically new (and potentially dangerous) that the FAA would not have seen it as a mere revision requiring little more than a presentation to a pilot on an iPad but one that required new, intensive training (likely in a simulator). That process would slow things down and up the costs, making it difficult to compete with Airbus's new fuel-efficient model.
So Boeing basically hid or underplayed this new technology as anything particularly new or important. But oh (somewhere the manuals say) if the system acts up you have (no kidding) ten seconds to turn it off or you couldn't likely get out of the fatal loop it would put you in.
This new anti-stall system (a mission-critical system) relied on only one sensor that was hanging on the outside of the plane near the cockpit. There was no redundancy. As pilots noted, it was not unusual for a plane to hit a bird or get tangled with Mylar balloons. Plus, the pilots were apparently not even told of its existence or at least the nature of what it did.
When the accidents did happen, both times Boeing blamed the pilots and declared that their planes were safe. But documents uncovered showed that some study was done (by someone) that predicted a regular occurrence of these events. It wasn't pilot error.
Any documentary you find on Netflix can rightly be assumed to be a hit piece with an agenda. And this documentary does seem to slant that way. Still, it does seem obvious that Boeing was being run by the kind of sociopathic bean-counters typical of some industries, such as Wall Street. I don't argue against the main conclusions of the documentary. But I would say it glosses over some details and is heavy-handed enough that you can be sure that you are not getting a balanced view.
Even so, it seems clear that there were a bunch of Dilbert clowns running Boeing for a number of years. Would I fly in a 737 Max? Apparently those problems have been fixed. But it would give me pause.
This plodding, weepy documentary (made by a woman) could have been condensed into a 5 minute PragerU video. I'll save you the trouble of watching it, although it is just interesting enough to watch.
The story (according to the documentary) of the 737 Max crashes (there were two of them within months) could be summed up thusly: The culture of Boeing changed from being engineer-centered to Wall-Street-centered after the acquisition by Boeing of McDonnell-Douglas. Profits, not safety, became central to operations. Corners were cut.
In the specific case of the 737 Max, it was Boeing's (highly successful) attempt to match Airbus's low-fuel aircraft that they had just introduced. Boeing didn't have time to create an entirely new aircraft so they just did a revision of the existing 737. And to keep costs down (and to make the plane attractive to buyers), there could be no changes so drastic that pilots would require training in simulators. At most, they would need to view a refresher video on an iPad.
The fuel-efficient engines that Boeing bolted onto the 737 (to make it the "Max") were larger and had to be positioned in such a way (higher up and more toward the front) that stalling became a hazard. And this is where the documentary falls completely flat. We see nothing about just how big a problem this was perceived to be – such a big problem that an entirely new and automatic anti-stall system would be part of the 737 Max. But no info is provided on this key point the required the existence of this new anti-stall system.
As it turns out, this anti-stall system was so radically new (and potentially dangerous) that the FAA would not have seen it as a mere revision requiring little more than a presentation to a pilot on an iPad but one that required new, intensive training (likely in a simulator). That process would slow things down and up the costs, making it difficult to compete with Airbus's new fuel-efficient model.
So Boeing basically hid or underplayed this new technology as anything particularly new or important. But oh (somewhere the manuals say) if the system acts up you have (no kidding) ten seconds to turn it off or you couldn't likely get out of the fatal loop it would put you in.
This new anti-stall system (a mission-critical system) relied on only one sensor that was hanging on the outside of the plane near the cockpit. There was no redundancy. As pilots noted, it was not unusual for a plane to hit a bird or get tangled with Mylar balloons. Plus, the pilots were apparently not even told of its existence or at least the nature of what it did.
When the accidents did happen, both times Boeing blamed the pilots and declared that their planes were safe. But documents uncovered showed that some study was done (by someone) that predicted a regular occurrence of these events. It wasn't pilot error.
Any documentary you find on Netflix can rightly be assumed to be a hit piece with an agenda. And this documentary does seem to slant that way. Still, it does seem obvious that Boeing was being run by the kind of sociopathic bean-counters typical of some industries, such as Wall Street. I don't argue against the main conclusions of the documentary. But I would say it glosses over some details and is heavy-handed enough that you can be sure that you are not getting a balanced view.
Even so, it seems clear that there were a bunch of Dilbert clowns running Boeing for a number of years. Would I fly in a 737 Max? Apparently those problems have been fixed. But it would give me pause.