Yeah, it would have been a completely horrifying and infuriating way to die, especially for the pilots who probably had a pretty good idea of what was happening but just never got told how to deal with it
Also, it just blows me away that the corporation as a whole got charged with felony fraud, fraud which caused the deaths of hundreds of people, and they still just get to be a company after saying sorry and paying a little fine. When Fuckup Beauregard III decides to rob his local gas station with an unloaded gun and the clerk dies of a heart attack (or when his accomplice Cletus gets shot and killed by a responding police officer), the felony murder rule will kick in for him and say “someone dying as a result of your felonious behavior is legally equivalent to you intentionally murdering them,” but that sort of thing just doesn’t ever happen to rich and powerful people.
Part of it could just be the survivability. A lot of people get REALLY turned off of ideas if the result can be terrible death, even to the point of having something like a phobia of risk in general. Like some won’t ride a motorcycle even if it’s just down the street once.
Maybe it’s a phobia for me. I know, statistically, it’s the safest way to travel. But I hate having no control over my fate. Plane improperly maintained causes the flight I’m on to crash into the mountains? No thanks. I know it’s extremely irrational but it is still terrifying to me.
No idea. They’re related words, but I would say it should be the more generic term. Danger to my mind implies a specific thing. Like spinning blades that you could accidentally touch, or a driver not watching the road. Danger is exposure to a specific risk, so it’s just a matter of opinion on how “dangerous” something like a plane is beyond the stats.
and the stats say it’s highly safe. You just might have a terrible end you’ll see coming if you lose the lottery.
They also only used data from a SINGLE sensor for a safety critical system, which is a cardinal sin in aviation. The plane already has two angle of attack sensors, you couldn’t write a few more lines of code to have it use both of them? Not only did they not do that, they even went so far as to make the alarm that warns when the sensors are mismatched a paid option. They wanted airlines to fucking pay extra for the privilege of knowing when something on their plane isn’t working properly.
wait but if there are two sensors installed even without that “safety” option isn’t it purely software “limitation” then? Are they “selling” it like heated seats on cars? (drm)
IIRC it was an “optional safety enhancement” that airlines could buy and their logic for not including it by default was “well we display the outputs of the two sensors independently don’t we? Why aren’t your pilots paying attention and crosschecking the sensor readouts on our 21st century glass cockpit airplane like this was a B-52 with needle gauges then?”
What we do know is that they argued that the errant MCAS activation from a faulty sensor was “designed to” look like a stabilizer trim runaway (when the “rear wings” you see on the tail of the airplane start moving without pilot command) and therefore claimed that a “properly trained” pilot should have been able to deal with that since they’re supposed to be trained for a trim runaway.
This is a garbage argument of course, because a trim runaway is in itself an emergency that threatens the safety of the aircraft, especially if it happens at low altitude, so why the hell should your supposed “safety” system be putting the pilots in that position to begin with? And if this wasn’t a big deal, why go out of your way to hide the fact that a new system on the aircraft can effectively cause a trim runaway? Not to mention that Boeing is essentially victim blaming the pilots that died from their profit oriented decisions by insinuating that they were poorly trained in order to take the heat off their shoddy design, going as far as to say that the pilot training in those countries were not up to “American standards,” basically “those shithole countries don’t know how to fly our glorious American planes so it’s their own fault!”
Finally, it needs to be mentioned that when Boeing had its own test pilots use a flight simulator to demonstrate what a “properly trained” pilot should be doing when MCAS misbehaves, the pilots used unconventional maneuvers that are not apart of the standard operating procedures of the 737 (i.e. not apart of pilot training). What’s more, their own pilots lost more altitude in recovering from the failure than the pilots of the accident planes even had, so wouldn’t that mean that by their own admission the accident planes were in an impossible situation, proper pilot training or not?
If they extended the logic they had about MCAS and the angle of attack sensors, the solution to all of aviation safety would be to tell the pilots to “just don’t crash the plane.” If Boeing had their way and applied the same reasoning to all aircraft systems, they would probably make TCAS, GPWS, RAAS, and the evacuation slides optional features too, since the need for all of those can also be negated by the pilot simply paying more attention to not crashing.
“Life will have its up and downs… Unless you’re using our autopilot, then it’s just pretty much down.”
The thing is MCAS fucking used to overpower manual commands, unless you actually followed some specific procedure to disable it
Edit: And boeing didn’t think it was necessary to tell the pilots about this
Yeah, it would have been a completely horrifying and infuriating way to die, especially for the pilots who probably had a pretty good idea of what was happening but just never got told how to deal with it
Also, it just blows me away that the corporation as a whole got charged with felony fraud, fraud which caused the deaths of hundreds of people, and they still just get to be a company after saying sorry and paying a little fine. When Fuckup Beauregard III decides to rob his local gas station with an unloaded gun and the clerk dies of a heart attack (or when his accomplice Cletus gets shot and killed by a responding police officer), the felony murder rule will kick in for him and say “someone dying as a result of your felonious behavior is legally equivalent to you intentionally murdering them,” but that sort of thing just doesn’t ever happen to rich and powerful people.
This is why I refuse to fly. Just scandal and improper training and maintenance. It’s fucking dangerous.
It’s not yet more dangerous than most other modes of travel.
It’s just more dangerous than it needs to be thanks to capitalist “innovation”.
I know a (retired) guy who used to be an engineer designing commercial airliners. He, too, categorically refused to fly.
Makes ya think.
Part of it could just be the survivability. A lot of people get REALLY turned off of ideas if the result can be terrible death, even to the point of having something like a phobia of risk in general. Like some won’t ride a motorcycle even if it’s just down the street once.
Maybe it’s a phobia for me. I know, statistically, it’s the safest way to travel. But I hate having no control over my fate. Plane improperly maintained causes the flight I’m on to crash into the mountains? No thanks. I know it’s extremely irrational but it is still terrifying to me.
But people die every day in cars due to somebody else’s actions and/or poor maintenance.
Place crashes are very memorable and flashy though.
I agree. The situation is already dangerous enough without those in charge cutting corners for profit…
Exactly
Wouldn’t it technically be a phobia of danger rather than risk?
No idea. They’re related words, but I would say it should be the more generic term. Danger to my mind implies a specific thing. Like spinning blades that you could accidentally touch, or a driver not watching the road. Danger is exposure to a specific risk, so it’s just a matter of opinion on how “dangerous” something like a plane is beyond the stats.
and the stats say it’s highly safe. You just might have a terrible end you’ll see coming if you lose the lottery.
They also only used data from a SINGLE sensor for a safety critical system, which is a cardinal sin in aviation. The plane already has two angle of attack sensors, you couldn’t write a few more lines of code to have it use both of them? Not only did they not do that, they even went so far as to make the alarm that warns when the sensors are mismatched a paid option. They wanted airlines to fucking pay extra for the privilege of knowing when something on their plane isn’t working properly.
wait but if there are two sensors installed even without that “safety” option isn’t it purely software “limitation” then? Are they “selling” it like heated seats on cars? (drm)
IIRC it was an “optional safety enhancement” that airlines could buy and their logic for not including it by default was “well we display the outputs of the two sensors independently don’t we? Why aren’t your pilots paying attention and crosschecking the sensor readouts on our 21st century glass cockpit airplane like this was a B-52 with needle gauges then?”
What we do know is that they argued that the errant MCAS activation from a faulty sensor was “designed to” look like a stabilizer trim runaway (when the “rear wings” you see on the tail of the airplane start moving without pilot command) and therefore claimed that a “properly trained” pilot should have been able to deal with that since they’re supposed to be trained for a trim runaway.
This is a garbage argument of course, because a trim runaway is in itself an emergency that threatens the safety of the aircraft, especially if it happens at low altitude, so why the hell should your supposed “safety” system be putting the pilots in that position to begin with? And if this wasn’t a big deal, why go out of your way to hide the fact that a new system on the aircraft can effectively cause a trim runaway? Not to mention that Boeing is essentially victim blaming the pilots that died from their profit oriented decisions by insinuating that they were poorly trained in order to take the heat off their shoddy design, going as far as to say that the pilot training in those countries were not up to “American standards,” basically “those shithole countries don’t know how to fly our glorious American planes so it’s their own fault!”
Finally, it needs to be mentioned that when Boeing had its own test pilots use a flight simulator to demonstrate what a “properly trained” pilot should be doing when MCAS misbehaves, the pilots used unconventional maneuvers that are not apart of the standard operating procedures of the 737 (i.e. not apart of pilot training). What’s more, their own pilots lost more altitude in recovering from the failure than the pilots of the accident planes even had, so wouldn’t that mean that by their own admission the accident planes were in an impossible situation, proper pilot training or not?
If they extended the logic they had about MCAS and the angle of attack sensors, the solution to all of aviation safety would be to tell the pilots to “just don’t crash the plane.” If Boeing had their way and applied the same reasoning to all aircraft systems, they would probably make TCAS, GPWS, RAAS, and the evacuation slides optional features too, since the need for all of those can also be negated by the pilot simply paying more attention to not crashing.
Plainly Difficult has an excellent video about the technical aspects of the 737 MCAS scandal and Boeing’s botched response to it, if you’re interested!
The Boeing Autoland feature is activating.
Please do not resist.