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According to Bloomberg:
Boeing Co. told U.S regulators on Friday that it didn't see the need to undertake a potentially costly fix for a wiring issue on the company's grounded 737 Max, according to two people familiar with the briefing.
The planemaker found in an audit last year of the 737 Max that wires were bundled improperly in a way that could trigger a failure similar to what happened in two crashes of the plane in which a total of 346 people died.
U.S. law requires wiring that could cause a hazardous condition in a failure to be separated from other wires. [...]
The wiring issues have been found in more than a dozen locations on the 737 Max.
From The Seattle Times [May require that Ad-Blockers be switched off, or at least disable style sheets]:
During the original design and certification of Boeing's 737 MAX, company engineers didn't notice that the electrical wiring doesn't meet federal aviation regulations for safe wire separation. And the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) failed to detect Boeing's miss.
The wiring vulnerability creates the theoretical potential for an electrical short to move the jet's horizontal tail uncommanded by the pilot, which could be catastrophic. If that were to happen, it could lead to a flight control emergency similar to the one that brought down two MAX jets, causing 346 deaths and the grounding of the aircraft.
Because this danger is extremely remote, the FAA faces a dilemma over what to do about it. The issue has complicated the return of the MAX to service after a grounding that is edging close to one year. [...]
"There are 205 million flight hours in the 737 fleet with this wiring type," a Boeing official said. "There have been 16 failures in service, none of which were applicable to this scenario. We've had no hot shorts."
In addition, Boeing says pulling out and rerouting wires on the almost 800 MAXs already built would pose a potentially higher risk of causing an electrical short, because insulation could chafe or crack in the process of moving the wires.
However, an FAA safety engineer familiar with the issue, who asked not to be identified because he spoke without agency permission, said agency technical staff have been clear that the wiring doesn't comply with regulations and have told their Boeing counterparts it has to be fixed.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Monday February 17 2020, @03:44PM
I read that and immediately laughed out loud. Above all else? On what planet? The Space Shuttle earned itself the award of being the most deadly space craft ever made. The original official estimate by NASA was one failure in never gonna happen so don't even worry about it. The Feinman analysis of the Challenger disaster back in the mid 80s came up with a failure estimate around 1 out of every 30 or 40 flights which wound up being very close to the actual vehicle failure rate observed in usage. The reason Challenger exploded was because of the booster design. The boosters were designed the way they were to ease transport after manufacturing. And the manufacturing requirements were set so the manufacturing was lucrative to some specific congressional districts. The boosters were designed with a priority on politics and not the safety of the crew.
Columbia exploded because NASA adopted a stance of "if it didn't cause a problem before, even though we know it's going wrong, then it won't cause a problem in the future." This was the same approach they took with the Challenger booster and launching in environments that are out of tolerance according to the manufactured spec. Here we have NASA prioritizing not being embarrassed over the safety of the human crew.
Finally the same boosters that were designed for politics have returned to use on the SLS so we again have design with priority on politics and not learning from their own visible and painful mistakes. I think NASA is cool too but they are fucking reckless at times.