
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Report - kaboro
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2019-04-04-Boeing-CEO-Dennis-Muilenburg-Addresses-the-Ethiopian-Airlines-Flight-302-Preliminary-Report
======
ndespres
I know better than to read between the lines on a press release like this, but
can't help but notice that it falls far short of accepting responsibility for
the problem.

He admits that MCAS "activated in response to erroneous angle of attack
information" but doesn't admit that this alone directly resulted in the
crashes. Rather, he implies that this sets off a chain of events which the
pilots are unable to deal with ("pilots have told us, erroneous activation of
the MCAS function can add to what is already a high workload environment")
which puts undue blame on the pilots rather than the system.

If you'll excuse the analogy, it's as if they installed a new griddle in a
restaurant kitchen which randomly gets ten times more hot than it ought to be,
with no warning. The cook doesn't know it's too hot until the eggs start
burning. Now the manager is saying that since the kitchen is so busy, the cook
can't flip the eggs fast enough in response to these randomly fluctuating high
temperature events. We're being told it's the cooks' fault.

I don't like being bullshitted and find this sort of dodgy language completely
inappropriate when 300 people died.

~~~
bitreality
With the way litigation works, corporations will never admit blame for
anything, since it greatly increases their legal risk. It's unfortunate, but
their responsibilities lie with their shareholders, not the people who lost
their lives on their planes.

~~~
pauljurczak
> their responsibilities lie with their shareholders

This is the "shareholder value" theory, modern economists successfully
brainwashed the population with. It became popular during the 1980s, "greed is
good" times. It's just an ideology disguised as a science. The purpose and
structure of modern corporation hasn't changed in the last hundred years or
so. In 1950s and 1960s the public good, among others, role of corporations was
wildly accepted. What changed is the ideologues who became more vicious and
took complete control of the narrative.

~~~
TrolTure
Somewhat hilariously it's also often claimed that CEO's are not allowed to lie
due to then being liable for misinforming shareholders.

~~~
Judgmentality
Are you saying it's okay to commit fraud?

~~~
bitreality
They avoid making actionable statements. In this case, the CEO did not
explicitly assign blame, so it would be difficult to call them a liar.
Omitting is different from lying. Using vague terminology isn't lying. So you
get stuck with all this corporate talk, where they act as if they're
apologizing, but won't even really say what they are specifically apologizing
for.

------
xiphias2
,,We remain confident in the fundamental safety of the 737 MAX.''

Am I irrational for not wanting to be on the first 1-2 years of flights on 737
MAX after it gets its software update?

~~~
781
Well, then I'm irrational too, because I won't set foot in a 737 MAX after
this shitfest. The FAA also lost a lot of trust, for rubber-stamping this.

The first accident was maybe understandable. We all know that shit happens.
But Boeing has zero excuses for not immediately grounding the whole fleet
after, and for putting out that useless recovery procedure which didn't work
in this case. They let a deadly plane fly for 5 months after they were aware
of it, and after the second crash they were phoning Trump to keep it in the
air.

~~~
Stryder
The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit
and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives. Realistically and
pragmatically speaking, you only ever get to have just one single shot at
establishing and maintaining that kind of life/death level of trust. Fuck it
up, and you're gone- quite literally, mind you.

This is some Challenger O-ring type of shitshow. Accidents are one thing;
incompetency or, worse yet, callous indifference is absolutely unacceptable.

~~~
drstewart
>The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit
and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives.

That's just unrealistic. Unless you want plane and car rides to cost as much
as a trip to space, after all, since everything would need to be engineered to
that level of quality.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
I continue to be fascinated with consumers who assume the role of shareholder
in times of crisis, even against their own interests.

~~~
traek
Affordable air travel is in most people's interests.

~~~
objektif
Safe travel surprasses affordable for ALL customers not most.

~~~
tomp
Then why do people still drive (i.e. use cars)?

~~~
objektif
Because they think it is safe.

------
tmd83
"We regret the impact the grounding has had on our airline customers and their
passengers." \- I really hated this. As if they did the grounding for safety
reason and regrets the cost. As if the passengers and clamoring for flying in
737-MAX.

There's obviously a lot of concern and outrage. But I wonder if Boeing's share
price would have been higher than last year if the two crashes were in first
world countries specially US.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Indeed. Less a case of "sorry 300 people died" and more a case of "sorry it
caused an inconvenience for everyone else".

------
Xcelerate
I don't doubt that Boeing will fix the MCAS problem, but the bigger issue for
me is what _other_ systems were hacked into place in order to rush this plane
to market to compete with Airbus? The whole philosophy behind the design of
the 737 MAX is what has me unsettled, not necessarily this one particular
issue.

~~~
ncmncm
This. We have seen that there was another problem only noticed because of the
extra scrutiny. We have a saying in the software business: two is an
impossible number.

~~~
ncmncm
That said, the Air France Airbus dive into the ocean was caused by an equally
stupid design decision that should never have shipped. Pilot and copilot were
applying opposite force on the joystick, and instead of a siren going off, it
just averaged them. Have they even fixed that yet? It was in ever Airbus.

~~~
neuronic
> it just averaged them

As opposed to Boeing's "lets pick one and hope to dear God that it's the
correct one"?

How would you handle opposing input where any of the two pilots might give the
incorrect input?

------
kerng
It sounds like right after the first crash they knew what was going on but
didn't bother to ground the fleet.

This stands out to me, and I have severely lost trust in Boeing and the FAA.

This plane should have not allowed to fly after the first crash, and Boeing
knows this!

What a disaster - I will refuse to fly in any if these MAX planes going
forward. I will not step my foot onboard.

------
supernova87a
This has been a 50 year problem in the making, and whether it's for better or
worse should be more carefully studied. Because here's my understanding of the
history:

Through WW2 and the proliferating age of defense contractors, the government
(mostly defense department, but also civilian agencies) stood almost on equal
footing with contractors in their ability to design, scope, and evaluate big
projects.

You would see scientists and in-house advisers at these departments able to
expertly evaluate proposals/designs by contractors with sufficient background
knowledge and tools to do so. They even worked closely with contractors to lay
out the requirements and designs for systems, or products.

But, through the decades, a couple factors eroded this equal footing of the
government / regulatory experts:

\-- Shrinking of government budgets for (or unwillingness of the public to
stomach) the ranks of Washington "bureaucrats" who represented this expert
class of people (what harm is there in cutting "fat" from public servants who
don't seem to produce anything tangible?)

\-- More attractive pay, career potential, prestige, etc. of working in the
private sector

\-- Political distaste for being seen as working too closely with contractors

So what happened is that gradually but surely, government lost the tools to do
these things themselves, and by sheer need to still have things approved,
shifted the work onto industry.

What can you do when industry comes to you with new complicated designs for
things, and you have no one who can assess (and no budget to pay for
assessments of) whether those designs are safe? You ask the person proposing
to critique themselves, and in many cases, they seem to know more than you
anyway.

Of course, what in part probably led to our current situation.

As I said in the beginning, the pros and cons of operating a system in this
way should be looked at.

As a society, my question is, how do we make it possible to choose to do these
things in the way that produces the right outcome? For a start, I think we
need to stop asking everyone to make uninformed votes about certain detailed
things we don't understand, yet rely on every day. That definitely produces
bad consequences for many issues.

~~~
AuthorizedCust
Can you provide evidence the FAA lacks sufficient expertise?

~~~
GuiA
It is unclear if they are lacking technical expertise, but they are certainly
being significantly more lax than one would want a regulatory body to be.

[https://www.npr.org/2019/04/04/709431845/faa-is-not-alone-
in...](https://www.npr.org/2019/04/04/709431845/faa-is-not-alone-in-allowing-
industry-to-self-regulate)

~~~
supernova87a
You must be joking if you think the FAA technical staff have the software
tools and expertise to the level of Boeing's engineering organization.

------
bambax
It's now fairly obvious MCAS was at the root of those two crashes. But, did it
save lives in other circumstances?

Meaning, was there ever a case where the nose went up so much, because of the
bigger motors and their different location on the wings, that the activation
of MCAS prevented a stall? I'm surprised no one seems to talk about this.

It's also surprising the MCAS was implemented at all, instead of an alarm.
Yes, the point of MCAS is to make appear the MAX is the same plane as earlier
models (when in fact it's not), but if pilots need to learn how to deal with
MCAS malfunction, isn't it the same as learning to deal with unexpected
stalling during take-off? The whole reasoning sounds kind of circular.

~~~
robbiep
You’re missing the point of why MCAS was implemented in the first place - for
type certification & to avoid retraining.

Essentially it was an emulation layer to make what is effectively a new plane
behave like an old plane. And now 300+ people are dead.

~~~
pfortuny
That is what it looks like. In some sense, you are not “contrlling” a 737MAX,
you are flying a virtual machine emulating the 737 previous gen, whose host is
a new generation.

Quite the feat, Boeing.

------
acqq
Now read again what Boeing issued to the airlines and the pilots after the
first crash:

[https://www.avm-mag.com/faa-issues-emergency-ad-for-
boeing-7...](https://www.avm-mag.com/faa-issues-emergency-ad-for-
boeing-737-8-and-9/)

"An erroneous AOA input can cause some or all of the following indications and
effects:"

"IAS DISAGREE alert."

The whole "what to do" is then:

"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer
nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to
neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT
switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the
STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."

We know now that the pilots performed what was there laconically written, and
that even these actions couldn't save the plane.

Which means either:

\- Boeing never actually tested how to really handle the situation described
then or

\- Boeing indeed tested that and knew that IAS DISAGREE procedures would also
be followed and which would guarantee to make the plane uncontrollable (for
details see here: [https://leehamnews.com/2019/04/03/et302-used-the-cut-out-
swi...](https://leehamnews.com/2019/04/03/et302-used-the-cut-out-switches-to-
stop-mcas/) how one pilot recently reconstructed that and made a video about
it, which was later withdrawn on the demand of the pilot's company -- note a
single pilot here did what Boeing, which is supposed to sell hundreds of
billions USD worth of these planes didn't want to do), but bet on "it won't
happen soon enough, we can get away with it."

I can't find that anybody can excuse either of these.

~~~
ams6110
The pilots didn't actually do that. They did not use electric stabilizer trim
to "neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT
switches to CUTOUT" in fact the trim had been run markedly down by MCAS by the
time they switched off the electric trim.

------
blatherard
"We're taking a comprehensive, disciplined approach, and taking the time, to
get the software update right."

So what approach did they use the first time around?

~~~
Forge36
I'm pretty sure this will end with retraining or the restoration of "pull up"
method of the pilot overriding the feature (the later may require retraining
anyway)

------
DevX101
> We remain confident in the fundamental safety of the 737 MAX

He just finished several paragraphs about how the plane and it's software was
not safe ("erroneous activation of the MCAS function"), and then arrives at
this conclusion?

If my car erroneously responds to the pressure on the gas pedal it's not safe.

~~~
Aloha
Would you throw out your computer because of a bad hardware driver? This is
effectively a software issue, that will eventually be solved

~~~
gpm
This is a hardware issue. Lack of redundancy in sensors. Lack of knobs to turn
MCAS off without turning off the electric motors that are apparently necessary
to control the plane in challenging circumstances (which a hardware failure
can put you in).

It's also a training issue, especially with the first flight pilots not being
informed about this system.

Maybe it can be worked around via software changes and human training. But the
software appears to have done what it was supposed to.

~~~
cjbprime
Every MAX already had two AoA vanes, MCAS just wasn't hooked up to both in
software.

~~~
gpm
Yes, two. The standard for critical systems is 3.

Two isn't good for much, if they give different readings you don't know which
to believe. Either that kills you like in real life, or it kills you because
of the stall problem it was invented to fix.

Edit: And yes, you could do something more sensible than what they did, but
that doesn't "fix" the issue, it merely mitigates it to some extent.

~~~
cjbprime
This seems a little overstated. As I understand it the plane isn't actually
aerodynamically unstable and isn't going to stall itself without the pilot
pulling into it. The main issue seems to have been software to me.

I'm not saying they should avoid using a third sensor. It sounds like a good
idea. But I'm not sure it's required for airworthiness, after you move from
one to two.

~~~
gpm
Maybe a little overstated to avoid getting into subtleties, but I stand behind
the point.

Yes, it seems the plane is probably mostly flyable if you kill the MCAS system
(which is the only reasonable step to take in a two sensor system when they
disagree). But

\- The plane no longer handles the same, you definitely need to be alerting
the pilots, and put this change into manuals and training. This isn't just a
thing you should silently do in software and expect not to kill people.

\- The plane no longer meets the FAA rules for the class under these
conditions. Maybe that's acceptable because it is an error state, but I think
that meets the definition of a "workaround" and not a "fix".

\- At least one of these planes took off when one of the sensors was known to
be bad from the previous flight (as I understand it). I can only assume that
they don't do that when something critical to the handling of the plane is
broken. This is another process bug that needs to be fixed before a software
workaround might be acceptable.

I don't see any way to interpret this other than "the hardware didn't work as
we thought it did", which leads me to say "hardware bug", even if you can
maybe work around it with process, training, and software changes.

------
phkahler
>> We're taking a comprehensive, disciplined approach, and taking the time, to
get the software update right.

If only you had done that the first time.

>> This update, along with the associated training and additional educational
materials that pilots want in the wake of these accidents, will eliminate the
possibility of unintended MCAS activation and prevent an MCAS-related accident
from ever happening again.

From what we've read, your company thought that cost too much the first time
around. Maybe it's time to reconsider the costs of NOT doing the work up
front. Boeing used to be better at this.

------
bruceb
Any PR pro worth their rate would have him and senior management very publicly
flying only on 737 Max flights when they comeback online.

Assurances alone are going to mean a very rocky road back for this plane.

~~~
781
They did that. Doesn't prove a thing.

[https://www.airlineratings.com/news/boeing-ceo-muilenburg-
ab...](https://www.airlineratings.com/news/boeing-ceo-muilenburg-
aboard-737-max-test-flight/)

~~~
dylan604
You think they did that with pilots specifically trained in MCAS
functionality, or with pilots from some small country halfway around the world
where they were specifically told it was the same as any ol' 737?

~~~
esoterica
Which small country? Ethiopia has 104 million people and Indonesia has 264
million.

------
zaroth
This is Boeing’s first volley as MCAS is now definitely and undeniably fatally
flawed.

I am fairly confident that by the time we are done with this, a system called
MCAS never flies again. Even if it means the entire MAX is shelved.

~~~
peteradio
That would be an astronomical loss, I just don't see that happening.

~~~
zaroth
I think $3B in R&D, half of that is the engines, but more importantly, time to
market trying to compete with Airbus.

They can reuse the engines. If the airframe can’t fly safely without MCAS
(it’s getting a new type rating anyway at this point, right?) then I think
perhaps it shouldn’t fly.

~~~
peteradio
Yea somehow I don't think that's how they are crunching the numbers. Stock
price is probably sitting on the assumption that those 5000 orders at cool
128M are going to go through. That would be considered 600B loss.

~~~
mnm1
That's two billion roughly per life lost. Seems like a small price to pay. The
CEO should be going to jail too. I highly doubt any of this will happen. Human
lives are probably worth a million or two at most to a corporation like Boeing
and the political apparatus that lets it operate these planes.

------
tuna-piano
Would the Boeing executives put their families on a 737MAX running the same
version of the software that Ethiopian was running? Would they be willing to
do this with a purposeful placed hypothetical AoA sensor that was known to
manfunction quite often? Can that really be considered a safe plane?

------
xvf22
Safety is one thing but the problem is that MCAS was brought in to keep the
common type rating. It's hard to see that common type rating holding now with
what we know.

------
kaveh_h
Don’t put the blame squarely on Boeing.

It’s clear FAA lacks the expertise to regulate this kind safety issues. It’s
not easy for them to have it either since the innovators are always a step
ahead but it’s clear they need to shape up.

I don’t have any knowledge of the process for verification of new airplane
models, but one thought as software developer would perhaps be for FAA to
become more digital in their efforts. Require from manufacturers (At least for
bigger models) a digital virtual model of the entire airplane that will be
used for simulated tests. You could for instance test faulty signaling sensors
but also the whole subseqqunt chain of events taking into account pilot
actions (or lack of).

It should be a routine to replay a simulation with data from previous crashes.
In this particular instance perhaps FAA would have understood the reasons of
the first crash and been able to stopped the second crash from ever happening.

You could even develop methods that can generate data to be able to predict
hidden issues with an existing design without a real crash ever happening.

~~~
ncmncm
There is more than enough blame to go around.

Boeing fucked up. FAA fucked up. Boeing management fucked up after Lion.
Boeing mgmt fucked up after EA. They should resign in disgrace, not issue
self-serving press releases.

Shame!

------
thefurman
"From the days immediately following the Lion Air accident, we've had teams of
our top engineers and technical experts working tirelessly..."

If they've been working tirelessly, then they should have understood the risks
and grounded the fleet.

Either they understood the risks, but neglected to ground the fleet, or they
didn't understand the risks and hence we can't trust the fix.

I also find it sort of nauseating that the CEO implicitly gets the message
through that the fix already has been worked on for a long time, has thus
matured, can now be fully trusted, and we are just weeks away from flying with
a safe plane.

I don't buy any of it. Let's analyse this critically.

The MCAS still needs to augment the flight characteristics. There is nothing
that can be fundamentally changed regarding this fact. We can only change the
conditions under which MCAS activates and the conditions under which it is
deactivated.

It still has to have the same authority for a nose-down and recovering from an
erroneous high-magnitude nose-down will still be mechanically hard or require
additional pilot knowledge and actions. The latter should be impossible
without recertification.

The operational characteristics of the airplane are not matched with the
operational controls offered to the pilots, by design constraint. The plane is
thus unsafe and will forever be unsafe, without redesign and recertification,
because with the constraints in place, they can only add additional
information on displays, add more reliability by having the MCAS utilise input
from more sensors, add more conditions under which the the MCAS deactivates,
etc, but none of this attacks the fundamental impedance mismatch between
characteristics and controls, as well as the lack of education for it.
Deactivation also simply exchanges the risk of stalls for nose downs.

All-in-all, the MAX is simply an airplane with a worse flight envelope as far
as safety is concerned, and nothing can be done about it.

------
unionemployee
Ugh. I just read the report and maintain that the pilots acted incompetently.
Though they regained control of the plane and turned off the stab trim system,
their reaction took considerable time. The fatal blow, however, is this:
distracted by the problem, neither pilot paid attention to the aircraft's
speed as they flew along in level flight. They had tunnel vision. You can see
in the report that the overspeed clacker began alerting them midway through
the incident. With the nose-down trim, this high airspeed exacerbated the
difficulty of holding the nose up. Had they slowed down, the aircraft would
have been controllable. The moment they reactivated the system at high speed,
adding even more nose down trim, they killed themselves and everyone on board.

I also question the lack of clear communication between the two pilots.
Examples such as the captain asking the first officer if the aircraft could be
manually trimmed and the first officer replying in the negative, with no
verification on the part of the captain and no checklist use make me wonder.
Maybe they were doing those things. I'd be interested in seeing a transcript.
It's understandable why Muilenburg doesn't seem particularly remorseful.

------
EngineerDude
As a few posters mentioned, an interesting question is why the plane needs
MCAS in the first place. I read somewhere that the max 8 got new engines which
were bigger than engines on previous 737 series, and that makes the plane nose
up. Any kid who ever made a model plane understands the idea of CG - if it
pitches up you change something, maybe move the wings back. Is it possible
that an industry leader shipped a plane that’s not even freakin balanced,
tried to fix it in software(!) to avoid an expensive redesign, screwed up the
software and maybe the safety analysis, and then didn’t even manage to mention
to the pilots that this software hack even existed? This is hard for me to
fathom. If the Ethiopian report is right, it might even be that the procedure
to turn off MCAS didn’t even work. I hope I am misunderstanding something
here.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
You're partway there. The design isn't inherently unstable under normal
conditions, it just becomes unstable under slightly _different_ extreme
conditions than the previous 737. Rather than training pilots on this
difference, Boeing tried to emulate the old behaviour in software.

~~~
EngineerDude
OK, so maybe it’s unfair to say that MCAS (as a concept) is a hack, since it
could be seen as a good-faith effort to provide a predictable aircraft?

~~~
mpcjanssen
Not quite, without MCAS the flight behavior is quite predictable, it just
doesn't match the existing type certification and it falls outside of the
allowed parameters for this class of planes.

------
sbeef
Wonder how much of this is also related to the Mcdonnell Douglas merger.
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/04/requiem-
for-a-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/04/requiem-for-a-
dreamliner)

------
eruci
The root problem seems to be FAA not having qualified engineers to thoroughly
test the planes Boeing makes. Boeing pays better, so it hires the best
engineers. FAA pays less so it gets second-grade engineers. And we all pay by
flying in unsafe planes.

~~~
cabaalis
Following your line of reasoning, wouldn't the supposedly better engineers
build more safe planes, relegating the poor dunces to only validating the
designs from their intellectual superiors? In your hypothetical, they aren't
paying more for safety dodgers.

~~~
BFLpL0QNek
Even smart engineers ultimately have a product manager who makes the call.
Many times before I've been on projects where the team said we should not do
something in a particular way only for a product manager or their superior to
say no, we'll do this as it aligns with company goals or "we'll come back and
fix it later".

Then you either have to put up and do it or you'll be strategically moved
elsewhere or be managed out of the job.

------
revskill
Just saying "it's safe" without any linked proof is kind of useless to me.

------
sathackr
This address does nothing to make me feel better about flying on any future
Boeing plane. They promise to fix the MCAS system in the current crop, but say
nothing about the organizational choices and structures that allowed this to
happen in the first place.

Allowing the company to produce a plane, equipped with a non-redundant system
with control over the vertical attitude of the plane, and doing so in a way
that intentionally minimizes the perceived impact and required training to
operate a plane with this system is the true mistake here.

This is a failure of the both the FAA, Boeing, and pretty much every player
along the chain.

------
tmd83
Corporate irresponsibility and getting away with it is something I have mostly
gotten used to at this point. But this particular incident is still really
getting to me specially after the press release.

I was just trying to read up a little about sings of sociopath. It seems to me
that a big chunk of major corporate big brash could be considered extreme
versions of sociopath.

~~~
cal5k
What exactly does “getting away with it” mean in this context? Boeing will get
sued from many different directions, their share price will suffer, and likely
they’ll have lost orders for their aircraft.

Let’s say we wanted to get really punitive... who do we blame? The engineers
that worked on it? The Boeing CEO for not personally verifying every piece of
software on all of their aircraft?

Do we throw someone in jail? How does that help improve safety culture
exactly?

Boeing & Airbus are largely responsible for the massive improvements in flight
safety over the last 40 years. It’s incredible that flying is as safe as it.
Yes the deaths are a tragedy, but every time I get in a plane I accept the
fact that the physics of flying could ultimately kill me, and I trade that off
against the convenience of getting somewhere quickly.

~~~
tmd83
Assuming what's revealed so far is reasonably accurate and the decisions were
not taken for some yet to be revealed completely unexpected reason (unlikely)
here's who to blame.

This was a business decision to remove re-certification/re-training for some
60B sales. So yes the CEO is responsible. If you can float on money for the
success you can spend the lifetime in jail for the deaths too.

But that might be a little extreme. So here's a better one for after Lion Air
crash there is no reason to believe that Boeing including the CEO didn't go
over this, didn't realize they made a risky plan and even then they didn't go
through with their temporary mitigation with a fine tooth comb. So yes it
seems the CEO and some big shots and maybe some down the line should go to
jail.

No one is sent to jail for complicated to reason or never before seen problem
that they didn't know about or didn't think about and it happened. This wasn't
an accident, they implemented absolutely critical safety feature by design
without triple redundancy as well understood to be required then they lied
about it (if I understood the max change from earlier to later version), tried
to downplay it and when a crash happened due to this didn't own up to it. So
for sure this helps safely culture. If you hide safety problem knowingly for
greed/money, because your boss asked and you didn't care you shouldn't be
working in safety critical system.

> Boeing & Airbus are largely responsible for the massive improvements in
> flight safety over the last 40 years. It’s incredible that flying is as safe
> as it. Yes the deaths are a tragedy, but every time I get in a plane I
> accept the fact that the physics of flying could ultimately kill me, and I
> trade that off against the convenience of getting somewhere quickly.

I don't even know what to say to this. So I drove safely for 40 years and
today I decided to see if I can safely drunk drive if I play the music really
loud and killed a family of four.

This was not physics, this was not a complicated software bug (at the core)
but it was cutting corners for profit.

------
lolc
> This update, along with the associated training and additional educational
> materials that pilots want in the wake of these accidents, will eliminate
> the possibility of unintended MCAS activation and prevent an MCAS-related
> accident from ever happening again.

How can he claim this? They'd have to remove MCAS for this to be true.

------
tigershark
So after hundred of lives lost the only thing that they will do is a software
fix. Thanks, but when the max won’t be grounded again I’ll check all my
flights to avoid going on that death machine.

------
refurb
My guess is the 737-MAX will get enough of an update to keep it going for a
few years, followed by an overhaul and new model name.

Boeing wants to get as far away from this as possible.

------
nikofeyn
this is just a total saving face scenario. he even mentions that after the
lion air flight they knew about this (i would claim they knew about it long
before that anyway) and have been working on a fix. then why the cold response
still after the ethiopian airlines crash?

furthermore, this is summed up by just "we'll fix it in software". hurray,
everything we touch including cars and airplanes are now subscribing to the
"we'll fix it in software" approach. failed a safety brake test? fix it with
software. kill a few hundred people by an automatic system crashing a plane?
fix it with software.

i really hope society wakes up and SLOWS DOWN. we're trying to move so fast,
with hardly any reason at all, and in doing so, we are throwing away all
ability to properly design, build, and god forbid, _think_ about things. i
don't know what it's going to take, but it feels out of control. everywhere
you look is people hurrying and hurrying to release, to productize, to ship
it, etc. whenever i ask "why?" to schedules, there has NEVER been a clear
answer. it always boils down to basically "just because".

in addition, we simply have too much laziness and greed taking place, which is
what added to boeing's misstep here. they tried pulling a fast one on buyers
(and basically accomplished it) to make a few bucks towards that everlasting
capitalist dream.

------
thomasedwards
> Dennis Muilenburg

> Chairman, President & CEO

Aren’t these suppose to be different people to keep the board independent?

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god_bless_texas
The amount of oh gotchas and keyboard guesses from lots of google searching is
quite comical. Think any real in-depth analysis has been done yet? Silly.

------
jfptech
Airbus had similar issues a while back. The software was forcing the nose of
the plane down and the pilots had to fight with it to bring the plane out of a
dive.

Is it absolutely necessary for the computer to be adjusting the angle of
attack?

[https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/the-untold-story-of-
qf72-wh...](https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/the-untold-story-of-qf72-what-
happens-when-psycho-automation-leaves-pilots-powerless-20170511-gw26ae.html)

[https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2...](https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2008/aair/ao-2008-070/)

*edited to cite sources

~~~
dingaling
Issues?

"The occurrence was the only known example where this design limitation led to
a pitch-down command in over 28 million flight hours on A330/A340 aircraft"

The common-platform A330/40 had been in service for 15 years before this
event. It really was a freak failure of one computer unit which went haywire
and which led to a design change to mitigate it. That was 11 years ago.

It is deceptive to claim it's anything like the 737 Max issue.

