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A comment on Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 max crash. Parent comment

Re:Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 m... by ptero on Friday March 29, 2019 @08:05AM (#19520869)
It is possible that it was clear from the start that this is the right way to go, but a modern plane is a very complex and highly regulated piece of equipment. Even minor changes could have a long tail of ramifications for operation (some of those have been noted, such as likely very different performance when crabbing at crosswinds).

I am not saying that Boeing did not try to cut corners (I just do not know), but the current media circus painting Boeing as a bunch of [idiot engineers | greedy execs | lazy testers] is likely far from reality or at least a major oversimplification. Boeing planes (including 737 max) are still very safe (compare to cars). Mistakes should be calmly assessed and fixed and making a public circus of this simply pushes engineers to avoid everything but uber-conservative, uber-safe solutions, which has major costs in itself. My 2c.

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Re:Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 m... by CaptainZapp on Friday March 29, 2019 @08:15AM (#19520935)
What I think they're absolutely and criminally guilty of is to not ground the plane after the first crash.

Instead they wasted time and resources to smear the airline and the pilots.

And that's inexcusable.

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Re:Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 m... by ams6110 on Friday March 29, 2019 @08:29AM (#19521012)
So any time there's a crash now, we're going to ground the worldwide fleet of that model of aircraft until we have a final report on the cause?
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Re:Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 m... by CaptainZapp on Friday March 29, 2019 @08:32AM (#19521035)
If it happens to a brand new plane? I'd say: Yes; that's reasonable.

At least until the cause is known.

Edit : Some clarification

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Re:Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 m... by ams6110 on Friday March 29, 2019 @08:53AM (#19521154)
Cause is always complicated in an air crash. We don't officially know the cause of either of these crashes.

When MCAS was established to be a likely factor in the first crash, Boeing issued an emergency airworthiness directive to all operators of the 737 Max, alerting pilots to the possibility of undesired nose down trim, and reminding them that the runaway trim procedure would disable it.

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Re:Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 m... by saiya-jin on Friday March 29, 2019 @09:14AM (#19521311)
Which was far from enough as we can see. Full retraining and perhaps other actions should have happened immediately so Boeing could hold any form of moral high ground here.

When it comes to mass transport, safety should definitely have higher priority than pushing some potentially new cool tech ASAP (which is debatable, making plane unstable ain't cool by any measure)

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Re:Preliminary conclusion MCAS misfired in Ethiopian's 737 m... by CaptainZapp on Friday March 29, 2019 @09:19AM (#19521371)
And they're still draging their feet on the retraining issue.

No simulator time required, no sire!

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