Another one:

1603376: B737 Captain reported the flight recorder light was inoperative, which led to the discovery that the flight data recorder was not installed.

Can anyone anyone with more experience with this say whether this is normal for a new aircraft? I get that it's easy to forget parts of the assembly process, but how do you put an aircraft into service without verifying that all the parts (especially important parts like this one) are installed?

That's got to be illegal, having no flight recorder?

Wouldn't it fail preflight checklists? Depending on the country I'd have thought that's a "lose your license to operate" kinda deal??

The oss ur probably got caught in preflight. We don't know how much the plane was used before that though.

IIRC, The flight recorders are tested by Boeing before delivery to the customer. Planes undergo several weeks to a month of tests by Boeing before delivery and sometimes undergo even more testing by the customer after delivery.

Most likely, the part is pulled for maintenance and its not properly recorded. If its not properly recorded, the plane can be put back into service without the part that was removed.

Air Canada Flight 143 is an example of maintenance records not being kept properly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

1555013: B737 MAX First Officer reported feeling unprepared for first flight in the MAX, citing inadequate training.

1593017: B737MAX Captain expressed concern that some systems such as the MCAS are not fully described in the aircraft Flight Manual.

Edit: A CSV of all incidents that include "MAX" in their report text: https://pastebin.com/ezhffWRn

1593699 is amazing.

To me, it's rather scary that even the aviation industry is now seemingly changing the UI and confusing users; HN (and a lot of other people) love talking about how much they hate a redesign of some site or software because it broke their workflow and hid/removed critical functionality, and now it's happening to pilots in life-or-death situations.

I use webflow regularly. Recently they updated the UI but didn't bother addressing the hundreds of other requests for obvious missing features. If anyone here has the capacity to make a dumb webflow - you'll make a lot of money. Include all the basic building like drop-down menus, tabs, carousels etc... And make some freely available premium themes (I can help with this) and you have yourself some loyal users myself included.

Nothing is more infuriating than a UI redesign to fix what's not broken.

I'm generally okay with fixing what's not broken. At worst it's a waste of time. What most people hate is intentionally creating breakage by removing and/or shuffling around features they'd been relying on.

Please get in touch. Email in profile.

It's not just the civilian aviation industry who has this problem, by now it's even an issue with military hardware [0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/uss-m...

I have to wonder at the fit-and-finish that would allow full-sized pieces of paper to fall inside an instrument console.

This reminds me of a Romanian joke about the national car maker, going something like this:

Some reporter is wondering around the international car expo, discussing with various car makers. Mercedes tells him "our car is the most air-tight ever produced. It scored 24 on the cat test!" The reporter wonders - "cat test? what is that?" ""Oh, it's a novel test! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, and 24 hours later it drew its last breath".

Impressed, the reporter moves on to Ferrari. They tell him the same story - most airtight car ever made! He asks them knowingly - "How did the cat test go?" to which they proudly reply - "Oh, very well, very well! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, 12 hours later the poor thing was dead".

Next he wonders to the Renault-Dacia stand. They also tell him about the air-tightness of their car, again he asks how the cat test went. The Dacia representative beams: "Oh, wonderful! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, and wherever its head poked out, we quickly plastered over".

Maybe Boeing poached the guys responsible for Tesla's panel gaps, who knows?

Speaking of panel gaps.

<90s Saturn> The panel gaps shrink in warm weather. </90s Saturn>

In case anyone was wondering that was actually a thing with early plastic body panels. They eventually refined it to the point where the gaps don't change noticeably and now pretty much every car has some plastic body panels.

Saturn had a lot of fit-and-finish issues, but man the S-series was reliable. I had one for 13 years/250,000 miles and barely put more than tires, brakes, and oil into the car.

The oil, though, was interesting. The s-series engine had a design flaw with the oil control piston ring where it would get stuck in its groove due to carbon build-up. The engine would then start burning prodigious amounts of oil — mine burned 1 quart every 500 miles. I put the cheapest oil I could find in as a result and when I did a filter change I’d save the old oil to pour back into the engine (diluted — about 1 qt of old oil and 3 qts of new.). By the time I used up all of the old oil it was time to change filters again.

What I've heard (i.e. this may just be hearsay) was that for much of its history Saturn used engines that had bores with a fairly rough surface finish which resulted in them holding more oil and reducing wear on the bores and rings but at the cost of burning more oil. Sometimes they burned quite a lot of oil as they got old.

GM treated Saturn like a throwaway brand so they used them for a lot of R&D they didn't want to risk "important brands" over and consequently there's a bunch of random Saturn cars that have features that even some new cars don't have. My friend had one from the early 2000s that would vary radio volume with speed and window position.

The rough cylinder bore didn’t help, but the root cause was the design of the bottom ledge of the oil control ring grooves and the lack of proper drainage.

A popular shade tree mechanic fix was to drill drain back holes in the oil control ring groove: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UrnblJ8VZtY

Probably southwest pilots. If it’s not analog it’s too much for them.

Well this shit doesn't sound any better:

1565207 At cruise flight, our Wi-Fi stopped working. I then saw that I was unable to access the Pilot Mobile app. Since I do not routinely copy the flight plan to iBook or acrobat (we are not required to do this), I was unable to access the flight plan. I've lost Wi-Fi before but not had this problem. Maybe it's a 737max thing. My First Officer had a copy on iBook and airdropped it to me. Later we were able to restore the Wi-Fi and I could login to pilot mobile but the [flight plan] was not there anymore.

It's time we make radio with the ATC VoIP. Just run an asterisk on the plane.

Boggles the mind on several levels: 1. That airlines would use consumer tablets without hard-copy backup as matter of procedure. I remember Air Canada announcing it and how it would save so much weight for both pilots and the airplane, and thinking... I print my Google Maps as a backup for roadtrips, I sure as heck would do it on a flight!

2. Perhaps I'm misjudging, but the tone and perspective of pilot makes me worry for their approach and technical skills. Does not routinely copy to local device before takeoff? "Maybe it's a 737max thing"? Airdropping as a solution?

This does not smell off setting up for success... :<

I'd be curious to know what "WiFi" means here exactly. If it means "my flight plan is stored on the internet and I didn't save a local copy" then yeah, I think that's insane. But if it's a local WiFi network it doesn't seem so weird to me. You should, in the course of day to day operation, be able to expect a WiFi router will work.

Of course, it'll fail at some point, but it's not like they were cut off from the world, they could have radioed for the information if the copilot didn't have it, or something.

> You should, in the course of day to day operation, be able to expect a WiFi router will work.

My experience with WiFi routers is the opposite. I will wire anything important.

I very much doubt they're using consumer grade Linksys boxes in there, though.

Enterprise WiFi networks work better but my experience has still been far from what I'd call reliable.

I'd like to say an airplane might work better as a controlled environment than an office building, but probably not if you have 300 passengers in the back, half of whom have forgotten their MiFi devices running in their carryon.

Yeah me too.

You know if WiFi was so awesome, wifi routers wouldn't have wires in them!

As a non technical person, who is about to fly an 80 ton vehicle for extended distances, local backups of WiFi dependent data is not likely to be a major concern.

Especially if (a) it’s not part of your extensive checklists, which would reasonably be expected to be included if it was important, and (b) you’ve lost WiFi in other planes before without losing your flight plan.

I’m a technical person and it is a major concern.

They were in cruise, which means the flight plan was already set and can be viewed on the MCDU. Sure they lost a fancy map on the ipad but that doesn't mean they suddenly don't know where to go.

There are a number of situations where the checklist calls for reinsertion of the flightplan during flight, they would be lost in those situations.

I know nothing about piloting, but I would have expected a flight plan to be stored on the plane itself. Accessible directly on some screen in the cockpit or something. Why rely on consumer devices that require wifi?

It is called "electronic flight bag" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_flight_bag . I see it as a technical loophole that allows to gives handy tools to pilots and airlines with reduced hassles of certification processes.

The appeal of the 737 MAX for airlines was that it was intentionally made so that you could take crews with a 737 qualification and put them in.

I.e the airlines could save money on training.

The main design constraint on that bird was that it should pass most of the old paperwork so that Boeing nor airlines would need to go through expensive training and quification.

Yet, they modified the plane quite a bit - but they could not modernize several systems since they would have to then go through rigorous and expensive testing. ..

Nobody seems to underline this fact.

I bet that's the actual reason they didn't put the automatic pitch modification system to any documentation - it would not fit on the description of "just old 737 nothing new here hop in".

> The appeal of the 737 MAX for airlines was that it was intentionally made so that you could take crews with a 737 qualification and put them in.

Really? Everything I heard so far sounds like the 737 MAX has a few new, unusual or counter intuitive features that require extra training, and that training material skimped on training for that.

> "just old 737 nothing new here hop in"

Am I correct in understanding that was a blatant lie?

Not an expert, I'm basing my comment on stuff I've learned from third party sources.

It does not sound to me like lying, more like a confusion of project constraints. I.e. "make the plane better but don't touch this and this and this arbitrary system".

In short: the safety requirements for doing it properly are so high that they were artfully avoided. The aeronautical analog to byzantine password requirements that only make people susceptible to post-it password management?