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posted by martyb on Monday March 11 2019, @08:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the sorry-dave dept.

All 157 passengers of an Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 died today, an accident that looks similar to the Indonesian Lion Air crash which caused 189 victims in October 2018.

The Ethiopian Boeing 737, a brand new plane, lost contact six minutes after departure from Bole International Airport; the 737 departing from Jakarta had done the same twelve minutes after taking off.

In both cases the weather was optimal and the pilots were experts. Ethiopian Airlines has a good safety record.

Both planes belong to the MAX variant, which features a "Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System" software to increase safety. Depending on sensor input, such software lowers the nose of the airplane, to prevent stalling. Investigations into the first disaster suggest the pilot might have had trouble with the automatic systems over this issue.

The two black boxes (with cockpit voice and flight data respectively), are likely to be recovered.

Sources:
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ethiopian-airlines-crash-news-latest-death-toll-addis-ababa-nairobi-boeing-737-max-a8816296.html
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/10/second-crash-of-new-boeing-737-max-8-aggravates-safety-concerns/


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mendax on Monday March 11 2019, @08:37AM (16 children)

    by mendax (2840) on Monday March 11 2019, @08:37AM (#812604)

    I would not want to be a Boeing stockholder right now.

    On the other hand, Boeing is going to resolve this problem just as it has resolved over problems with its newest planes in the past and the 737 MAX is going to be a very safe plane. A look into a flight safety database shows that the Boeing 707, its first jetliner, had a horrible safety record in the beginning. They fixed its problems and it became a reliable and safe work horse for decades.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Monday March 11 2019, @09:34AM (5 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Monday March 11 2019, @09:34AM (#812607)

    I might become a Boeing stock buyer soon. It's bound to dip quite a bit before the inevitable recovery.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Bot on Monday March 11 2019, @10:09AM (4 children)

      by Bot (3902) on Monday March 11 2019, @10:09AM (#812610) Journal

      >It's bound to dip quite a bit

      I see what you did there.

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      • (Score: 4, Funny) by ledow on Monday March 11 2019, @11:01AM (3 children)

        by ledow (5567) on Monday March 11 2019, @11:01AM (#812617) Homepage

        Stocks always crash a bit before they start to soar.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @10:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @10:14AM (#812612)
    I would not want to be a Boeing passenger.
    If it ain't Boeing, I ain't crashing ;-)
  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday March 11 2019, @12:02PM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Monday March 11 2019, @12:02PM (#812632) Journal

    Boeing is going to resolve this problem.

    Resolving software problems minihowto:

    1. does it run some sort of windows? start anew.
    2. does it run some sort of unix? linux maybe? remove systemd.
    3. there is no step 3

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    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @01:53PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @01:53PM (#812667)

      Many passengers died to bring us this "humor".

      • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:14AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:14AM (#812991)

        Hadn't I make the joke, they would still be here, right?

  • (Score: 2) by deadstick on Monday March 11 2019, @12:04PM (1 child)

    by deadstick (5110) on Monday March 11 2019, @12:04PM (#812635)

    OTOH, Lockheed successfully fixed the wing-shedding problem on the Electra, but the airplane never recovered. The US Navy version soldiers on, but airlines just flat stopped buying it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @10:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @10:28PM (#812941)

      The replacement for the P-3C Orion is the P-8A, based on the 737.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by choose another one on Monday March 11 2019, @12:49PM (3 children)

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 11 2019, @12:49PM (#812649)

    A look into a flight safety database shows that the Boeing 707, its first jetliner, had a horrible safety record in the beginning. They fixed its problems and it became a reliable and safe work horse for decades.

    Yes, but the problem with that comparison is that the MAX is not a new plane, it is a re-engined and modified version of the NG which is a modified version of the original 737. The 737 NG has a great safety record - the number built is 20x the current MAXes in service, and they've been in service about 20x longer, but without 20x the hull losses or fatalities the MAX now has.

    IF it turns out that (as with Lion Air) the cause of this accident lies in the differences between NG and MAX, it will be hard to escape the conclusion that far from fixing its problems, Boeing have introduced them and f***ed up a basically safe design in order to remain competitive with Airbus. We already know from the Lion Air fallout that the new engines on the MAX messed up the stability to the point that it was un-certifiable without adding Airbus/FBW-like protection systems that override pilot control inputs - that is something Boeing has never done before, probably shouldn't have done, and certainly not without telling the pilots.

    If you take a safe and proven building design and "just" add a couple of extra floors, and repeat, eventually you will get to the point where your building design is no longer safe and needs to be redesigned from the foundations up, it's possible the 737 edifice reached that point and no one noticed or if they did Boeing ignored them.

    The next question will be is the design actually fixable - Boeing were going to have a quick software fix for the MCAS issue but they have pulled back from that to reconsider, possibly indicating they've run into difficulties with it. The difficulty with the 737 is that most of it is still grandfathered in under the original 1960s type certificate and regulations, any change that threatens that will be too expensive - there will be an awful lot of the aircraft that just wouldn't meet current regs. The FAA will probably bend over backwards to help Boeing, but that may not be enough - the Chinese have already grounded the MAX and getting that reversed might prove to be very expensive... (there's probably a few chinese somewhere dancing for joy round a Trump voodoo doll right now).

    • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday March 11 2019, @06:21PM

      by RS3 (6367) on Monday March 11 2019, @06:21PM (#812819)

      From what little I know and have read, the angle-of-attack sensors seem to have problems and get replaced. And pitot tube problems. If the MCAS is getting bad information it might make very bad decisions and nosedive. There's a lot of finger-pointing going on, including whether the pilots knew about the systems and how to disable them. We've now seen several plane crashes caused by some kind of automation that contradicts the pilots.

      My point: it needs to be very easy for a pilot to override any autopilot. I'm okay with automation sounding alarms, suggesting corrective measures, but the pilot may know for sure that the automation is making bad decisions and it should not fight the pilots. Also, indicators need to be more prominent. Some crashes have occurred because automation was partially disabled, but the pilots didn't understand this. Both Boeing and Airbus have had these problems and crashes.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by RS3 on Monday March 11 2019, @06:32PM

      by RS3 (6367) on Monday March 11 2019, @06:32PM (#812830)

      Reading on in the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610 [wikipedia.org] it's revealed that Boeing did not even mention the MCAS in the flight training manual. I'm stunned. Is it me, or is this a really bad thing? What is going on with automation that can't be disabled? The robots slowly taking over, right? Little by little eliminating the meatbags, right? Robots, we are noticing, and we'll all be carrying wire cutters.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by legont on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:01AM

      by legont (4179) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:01AM (#812987)

      The issue here is that Boeing used new more economical engines, which are bigger. They did not fit under the wing where engines used to be so Boeing moved them forward. That introduced very undesirable flight characteristics such as a sudden departure stall and similar. Basically, under certain conditions, the airplane becomes unstable and hard to fly. Boeing "fixed" this problem using software that is supposedly never allows the airplane to get into those dangerous conditions. That software fails to address all the situations. Also, as with any software, it can't reliably work when sensors are faulty.

      That was a simplified version, mind you. The bottom line is that the airplane was intentionally made less safe to save money. It is not fixable. We'll have to accept the aditional risk.

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