Pelican Parts Forums - Another brand new 737 Max crashes

Pelican Parts Forums (http://forums.pelicanparts.com/)

- Off Topic Discussions (http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/)

- - Another brand new 737 Max crashes (http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/1023264-another-brand-new-737-max-crashes.html)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins (Post 10436696)

Our union mechanics lovingly refer to them as the "South Carolina Airplane Builders" - SCAB.

Damn, Jeff, that is both fascinating and scary stuff... Can't help but wonder what gets missed even on the rework... Far cry from the early "if it ain't boeing, I ain't going..." - Though I'm sure The union folks all over Airbus plants are exactly the same (though possibly better educated as the school system is Europe isn't too bad). Crap.

What's scary to me in the end is - the more you know, the scarier this world gets. In every field that I either know experts in, and the very few I consider myself knowledgeable in (hospitals and software) - it's exactly the same... There are %uckwits at every level that can't seem to get fired and produce shoddy work that can kill people, and everywhere the desire to make a buck overrides safety and reason (oh and also the media is full of $hit on almost every technical topic they ever report on)... I liked it more when I was young and blissfully unaware and thought adults were smart. Now I fully realize the idiot that could barely tie his own shoelaces back in highschool has a job, he could be building airplanes, coding driverless automation, digging into gas lines, or just texting while driving and plowing into me...
They're everywhere.. Idiocracy has arrived.

The mechanical bits of planes are simple, the software that (helps you) fly them is not.

There is indeed some correlation between aircraft manufacturing and, say, automobile manufacturing, but there are also some important differences. The differences are driven by production volumes. What would be considered a very short, custom, or even "bespoke" production run in the automotive world, for example, might very well be considered a very long production run in aircraft manufacturing.

In what we refer to as the "back shops", or the detail part and small assembly part of aircraft production, they can often be found building the same thing, in the same configuration, day after day, week after week, month after month, and even year after year. These are the parts and assemblies that go on each aircraft (of the same model) for each and every aircraft configuration for each and every customer. It is at this level that we have found that a less skilled, less educated workforce can produce the quality desired. In other words, if it is repetitive enough, and they do enough of it, they get good at it.

Once we get beyond that level, however, aircraft manufacturing veers sharply away from automotive and other such production. There is a saying at Boeing that "every airplane is a prototype", and that really is no exaggeration. Once customer specific, or sub model specific differences enter the picture, we will see no two airplanes on the very same assembly line that are alike.

And that is where the problems start. You can't just "build it like the last one", because that last one was significantly different than this one. The airplane to airplane variation, even within the same "customer block", is astonishing to anyone not familiar with it. This is where the problem solving skills, the ability to work through and solve new and different problems each and every day plays a vital role in airplane manufacturing.

And, ultimately, this is where SCAB fails. They are incapable of working at that level. They can perform the repetitive work just fine, and crank out some very high quality work. No doubt about it. But when it gets down to assembling a new and different variation of a major assembly or installation, they are at a loss. This is what has driven both their markedly lower production rate, and their markedly lower quality.

And no, one cannot "manage" their way out of this. The only level at which this is a management problem, or a processes problem, is in that management decided to try to build an item of this complexity with that workforce to begin with. Believe me, SCAB has been the focus of a great deal of management attention, "Kaisan" type process improvement efforts, endless coaching by folks from Everett who are doing this successfully - all for naught.

One cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear. They need to understand the limits of manufacturing capability in that region. And yes, a large part of the problem lies in the fact that Boeing has recruited high level management personnel from the automotive and similar mass production industries. These execs didn't "grow up" in the world or aircraft manufacturing, and cannot understand the nuances of it. It's just another product to them. They have tried and tried to introduce automotive style mass production techniques and philosophies to aircraft manufacturing and have failed miserably. The methods employed to manufacture tens of thousands of the exact same thing just do not transfer well when a "long" production run is several dozen, or maybe a few hundred at the most. That, and the problem solving skills required when "every one is a prototype" are vastly under appreciated by these folks. "We build cars there, why can't we build airplanes there?"...

Today a lot of human capital was dropped.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seahawk (Post 10437717)

I agree.

At the Sikorsky Factory nearly every issue I faced was caused by management, not the engineers, foremen and workers.

In a fit of revelation, Sikorsky decided to take my challenge of doing a Kaisan event (Six Sigma in the 90's). The event covered processes and practices in administrative, engineering and manufacturing - initially focused on my bailiwick, the flight test and production hanger.

We found so much institutionalized stupidity that UT/Sikorsky expanded the Kaisan event to include the whole Bridgeport facility. Factories are all about human nature and human's compete against each other, often to the detriment of quality and efficiency.

We reduced the flight test acceptance process (leading to "selling" the aircraft to the government via what is called a DD-250) from 14 days to 12. Common sense stuff.

We also found that there were DEAD PEOPLE still getting paper copies of the DD-250 sent to their old drop box(es).

Old saying: "everyone knows what's wrong except those with the power to fix it".

If you can get management to actually pay attention to the details, you can really streamline the process.
Unless your managers are idiots.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1556141801.gif

Man-o-man, there is some serious vitriol in this thread.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hawkeye's-911T (Post 10438715)

Man-o-man, there is some serious vitriol in this thread.

If I can expand on the previous post a little, I am in management and many times have worked hard to solve a problem, only to have a worker-bee deliver a gift solution and all I had to do was ask.
"everybody knows what's wrong".
Well i didn't.
It's easy to get caught up in the technology and get out of touch with the people on the front lines.
So part of my post was directed right back at me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sammyg2 (Post 10443740)

I always found the easiest and best way to solve a tooling issue (which was my gig, after all) was to walk right past the manager raising hell about it to my manager and talk to the mechanic using the tool. We always spoke the same language. We would most often have a workable solution before either of our respective managers quit yelling at the other one about it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins (Post 10443774)

Yep, but sometimes you have to have a good "filter" to separate the BS from the good stuff.
If you can sift through it, you'll find the gold.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins (Post 10443774)

This.
I used to get so GD frustrated with the office manager at head office who used to redesign shipping forms with zero input from the people who had to actually use the darned forms in the fridges and freezers. Up in his cozy,well lit office, he couldn't understand and didn't care why he contributed to thousands of dollars worth of shipping errors each week. What an arrogant A hole.
Rant over.
Les

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins (Post 10443774)

agree 100%, my way of working too, talk straight with the guy doing the job not through his boss, not in a rude way, more of filtering out the noise way

Back during my glory years when I was a 'Wheel Nut and Pitstop Gear Chief Designer' ;) my boss told me the chief mechanic had complained because I talked directly to his mechanics that did the team's pit stop's.

I kept up my approach all race season and eventually the chief mechanic got fed up of complaining ;)

Here's a vid of what we called a 'Doppio' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXjjEKb0um4

A lot goes on in a very short time so I needed to know about every single movement so I could figure out how to design out the time. The really quick guys would have the wheel nut off the car before it had stopped which I'd have never guess until I'd talked with them :eek:

Quote:

Originally Posted by sammyg2 (Post 10443740)

I am in management and many times have worked hard to solve a problem, only to have a worker-bee deliver a gift solution and all I had to do was ask.

This is golden.

During the Kaisan Event at Sikorsky, the floor guys, away from their Foreman, said a big time driver on Blackhawks was interior install (sound proofing)...nothing lined up.

Seemed the old ink-on-mylar drawings and the manufacturing processes drifted out of spec over 20 years...imagine. Easy fix.

No one had listened to the kids who knew the holes did not line up!

in my previous line of work, one of the things that frustrated me most was all the work that kept me from my work.

Lots of meetings that could have been e-mails.
Lots data shuffling "just because we've always done that".
Lots of time spent keeping the exec. leadership team informed of things that should NOT be any of their concern (micro-managing)
Lots of paperwork that serves no real purpose.
Lots of time spent staying "in compliance" with gubmint red tape
Lots of time doing things that my bosses didn't want to do (but should have).
Lots of time dealing with a couple of union trouble-makers who made trouble just because they could

Not much time managing.

The 787 is in trouble too now... Apparently some major defect in fire suppression/extinguisher issues where they cannot be activated in case of an engine fire. Not seeing too much in english yet but it's coming... Not a good time to hold boeing stock.

As has been pointed out in this thread, the same flaw was discovered in the A-380 but better trained pilots (Quantis) recovered and disabled the crap off before it crashed the airplanes.

it isn't a boeing problem, it isn't an airbus problem, it's an automation problem.
relying on machines to think for themselves when they are not capable of thinking for themselves is a problem, no matter how much we pretend.

This was posted on our Union website:

Quote:

Why Boeing’s emergency directions may have failed to save 737 MAX

.
1 of 2 The stabilizer trim wheel in the cockpit of a grounded Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8 in Indonesia is seen last month. The wheel is connected by cables to the jet’s horizontal tail, and turns a jackscrew that swivels the tail to pitch the jet’s nose up or down. (Dimas Ardian / Bloomberg, file) 2 of 2 The center console between the captain and first officer in a MAX cockpit. The black wheels on either side are directly connected to the horizontal tail and will spin if it swivels. The two switches toward bottom right, labeled “STAB TRIM,” are the cut-off switches that will end any automated movement of the horizontal tail. (Dimas Ardian / Bloomberg) By Dominic GatesSeattle Times aerospace reporter

The pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX that crashed last month appear to have followed the emergency procedure laid out by both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration — cutting off the suspect flight-control system — but could not regain control and avert the plunge that killed all 157 on board.

Press reports citing people briefed on the crash investigation’s preliminary findings said the pilots hit the system-cutoff switches as Boeing had instructed after October’s Lion Air MAX crash, but couldn’t get the plane’s nose back up. They then turned the system back on before the plane nose-dived into the ground.

While the new software fix Boeing has proposed will likely prevent this situation recurring, if the preliminary investigation confirms that the Ethiopian pilots did cut off the automatic flight-control system, this is still a nightmarish outcome for Boeing and the FAA.
It would suggest the emergency procedure laid out by Boeing and passed along by the FAA after the Lion Air crash is wholly inadequate and failed the Ethiopian flight crew.A local expert, former Boeing flight-control engineer Peter Lemme, recently explained how the emergency procedure could fail disastrously. His scenario is backed up by extracts from a 1982 Boeing 737-200 Pilot Training Manual posted to an online pilot forum a month ago by an Australian pilot.

That old 737 pilot manual lays out a scenario where a much more elaborate pilot response is required than the one that Boeing outlined in November and has reiterated ever since. The explanation in that manual from nearly 40 years ago is no longer detailed in the current flight manual.

Just a week after the Oct. 29 Lion Air crash, Boeing sent out an urgent bulletin to all 737 MAX operators across the world, cautioning them that a sensor failure could cause a new MAX flight-control system to automatically swivel upward the horizontal tail — also called the stabilizer — and push the jet’s nose down.

Boeing’s bulletin laid out a seemingly simple response: Hit a pair of cutoff switches to turn off the electrical motor that moves the stabilizer, disabling the automatic system — known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. Then swivel the tail down manually by turning a large stabilizer trim wheel, next to the pilot’s seat, that connects mechanically to the tail via cables.

Boeing has publicly contended for five months that this simple procedure was all that was needed to save the airplane if MCAS was inadvertently activated.
RELATED Ethiopian pilots fought the 737 MAX flight controls almost from take-off, preliminary report shows

In a November television interview on the Fox Business Network, Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg, when asked if information had been withheld from pilots, cited this procedure as “part of the training manual” and said Boeing’s bulletin to airlines “pointed to that existing flight procedure.”

Vice president Mike Sinnett repeatedly described the procedure as a “memory item,” meaning a routine that pilots may need to do quickly without consulting a manual and so must commit to memory.

But Lemme said the Ethiopian pilots most likely were unable to carry out that last instruction in the Boeing emergency procedure — because they simply couldn’t physically move that wheel against the heavy forces acting on the tail.

“The forces on the tail could have been too great,” Lemme said. “They couldn’t turn the manual trim wheel.”

The stabilizer in the Ethiopian jet could have been in an extreme position with two separate forces acting on it:

MCAS had swiveled the stabilizer upward by turning a large mechanical screw inside the tail called the jackscrew. This is pushing the jet’s nose down.
But the pilot had pulled his control column far back in an attempt to counter, which would flip up a separate movable surface called the elevator on the trailing edge of the tail.
The elevator and stabilizer normally work together to minimize the loads on the jackscrew. But in certain conditions, the elevator and stabilizer loads combine to present high forces on the jackscrewand make it very difficult to turn manually.
As the jet’s airspeed increases — and with nose down it will accelerate — these forces grow even stronger.

In this scenario, the air flow pushing downward against the elevator would have created an equal and opposite load on the jackscrew, a force tending to hold the stabilizer in its upward displacement. This heavy force would resist the pilot’s manual effort to swivel the stabilizer back down.

This analysis suggests the stabilizer trim wheel at the Ethiopian captain’s right hand could have been difficult to budge. As a result, the pilots would have struggled to get the nose up and the plane to climb.

If after much physical exertion failed, the pilots gave up their manual strategy and switched the electric trim system back on — as indicated in the preliminary reports on the Ethiopian flight — MCAS would have begun pushing the nose down again.

Boeing on Wednesday issued a statement following the first account, published Tuesday night by The Wall Street Journal, that the Ethiopian pilots had followed the recommended procedures.
“We urge caution against speculating and drawing conclusions on the findings prior to the release of the flight data and the preliminary report,” Boeing said.

However, a separate analysis done by Bjorn Fehrm, a former jet-fighter pilot and an aeronautical engineer who is now an analyst with Leeham.net, replicates Lemme’s conclusion that excessive forces on the stabilizer trim wheel led the pilots to lose control.

Fehrm collaborated with a Swedish pilot for a major European airline to do a simulator test that recreated the possible conditions in the Ethiopian cockpit.

A chilling video of how that simulator test played out was posted to YouTube and showed exactly the scenario envisaged in the analysis, elevating it from plausible theory to demonstrated possibility.

The Swedish pilot is a 737 flight instructor and training captain who hosts a popular YouTube channel called Mentour Pilot, where he communicates the intricate details of flying an airliner. To protect his employment, his name and the name of his airline are not revealed, but he is very clearly an expert 737 pilot.

In the test, the two European pilots in the 737 simulator set up a situation reflecting what happens when the pre-software fix MCAS is activated: They moved the stabilizer to push the nose down. They set the indicators to show disagreement over the air speed and followed normal procedures to address that, which increases airspeed.
They then followed the instructions Boeing recommended and, as airspeed increases, the forces on the control column and on the stabilizer wheel become increasingly strong.

After just a few minutes, with the plane still nose down, the Swedish 737 training pilot is exerting all his might to hold the control column, locking his upper arms around it. Meanwhile, on his right, the first officer tries vainly to turn the stabilizer wheel, barely able to budge it by the end.

If this had been a real flight, these two very competent 737 pilots would have been all but lost.

The Swedish pilot says at the start of the video that he’s posting it both as a cautionary safety alert but also to undercut the narrative among some pilots, especially Americans, that the Indonesian and Ethiopian flight crews must have been incompetent and couldn’t “just fly the airplane.”

Early Wednesday, the Swedish pilot removed the video after a colleague advised that he do so, given that all the facts are not yet in from the ongoing investigation of the crash of Flight 302.

Continued:

Quote:

More detailed instructions that conceivably could have saved the Ethiopian plane are provided in the 1982 pilot manual for the old 737. As described in the extract posted by the Australian pilot, they require the pilot to do something counterintuitive: to let go of the control column for a brief moment.
As Lemme explains, this “will make the nose drop a bit,” but it will relax the force on the elevator and on the jackscrew, allowing the pilot to crank the stabilizer trim wheel. The instructions in the old manual say that the pilot should repeatedly do this: Release the control column and crank the stabilizer wheel, release and crank, release and crank, until the stabilizer is swiveled back to where it should be.

The 1982 manual refers to this as “the ‘roller coaster’ technique” to trim the airplane, which means to get it back on the required flight path with no force pushing it away from that path.

“If nose-up trim is required, raise the nose well above the horizon with elevator control. Then slowly relax the control column pressure and manually trim nose-up. Allow the nose to drop below the horizon while trimming (manually). Repeat this sequence until the airplane is trim,” the manual states.

The Australian pilot also posted an extract from Boeing’s “Airliner” magazine published in May 1961, describing a similar technique as applied to Boeing’s first jet, the 707.

Clearly this unusual circumstance of having to move the stabilizer manually while maintaining a high stick force on the control column demands significant piloting skill.

“We learned all about these maneuvers in the 1950-60s,” the pilot wrote on the online forum. “Yet, for some inexplicable reason, Boeing manuals have since deleted what was then — and still is — vital handling information for flight crews.”
Aviation safety consultant John Cox, chief executive of Safety Operating Systems and formerly the top safety official for the Air Line Pilots Association, said that’s because in the later 737 models that followed the -200, what was called a “runaway stabilizer” ceased to be a problem.

Cox said he was trained on the “roller coaster’ technique” back in the 1980s to deal with that possibility, but that “since the 737-300, the product got so reliable you didn’t have that failure,” said Cox.

However, he added, the introduction of MCAS in the 737 MAX creates a condition similar to a runaway stabilizer, so the potential for the manual stabilizer wheel to seize up at high airspeed has returned.

Cox said the failure of both Boeing and the FAA to warn pilots of this possibility will be “a big issue” as the Ethiopian crash is evaluated.

“I don’t think Boeing realized the complexity of the failure,” he said.

The procedure Boeing recommended to airlines after the Lion Air crash, which was repeated in an airworthiness directive issued by the FAA, includes a line near the bottom that “higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose-down” position. The instructions add that the pilots can use the electric system to neutralize the forces on the control column before hitting the cut-out switches.
But there’s no indication whatever in the wording that this is essential, and that heavy forces could render the manual stabilizer wheel almost immovable if the control column is not relaxed.

It’s possible the Ethiopian pilots, hyper alert after the Lion Air accident to the possibility that MCAS had activated, jumped straight to the end of the procedure checklist and hit the cut-off switches before attempting even to counter the nose-down movement with the thumb switches on the control column.

That would have subjected them almost immediately to the high tail forces that could have made recovery impossible.

The good news for Boeing is that the proposed software fix announced for MCAS should prevent the failure that led to this scenario in the cockpit.

“I think the MAX will be safe with the improved MCAS,” said Fehrm of Leeham.net.

On Wednesday, CEO Muilenburg joined Boeing test pilots aboard a 737 MAX 7 flight out of Boeing Field for a demonstration of the MCAS software fix and a test of various failure conditions. “The software update worked as designed,” Boeing said.
The bad news for Boeing is twofold, according to Fehrm. First, the original MCAS design was badly flawed and appears to be the principal cause of the Lion Air crash. Second, the procedure Boeing offered after that accident to keep planes safe now appears to have been woefully inadequate and may have doomed the Ethiopian Airlines jet.

On Wednesday the FAA , facing worldwide skepticism of its oversight, announced that it is establishing a team including foreign regulators to conduct a “comprehensive review of the certification of the automated flight control system on the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.”

The Joint Authorities Technical Review, chaired by former NTSB Chairman Chris Hart and including experts from the FAA, NASA, and international aviation authorities, will evaluate all aspects of MCAS, including its design and pilots’ interaction with the system.

The preliminary investigation report into the Ethiopian crash is expected early Thursday and should offer definitive detail on what happened in the cockpit

Quote:

Originally Posted by sammyg2 (Post 10443958)

Errr....what are you talking about? A-380? Quantis? Automation problem?

Qantas A380 suffered engine fire/turbine explosion due to RR manufacture defect (wrongly machined oil pipe). Automation performed flawlessly and A/C landed with all passengers unharmed.

Automation is not going anywhere. Even Boeing has seen writing on the wall.

Quote:

Originally Posted by beepbeep (Post 10444320)

Correction, A-330 and not a 380.

First mention of it was in post 196.

The fancy airbus computer took altitude readings and labeled them as angle of attack readings. Then the fancy computer said nose down 6 degrees. then it decided it was going into stall, which it wasn't, so it pitched down another 4 degrees for a total of 10.
It tried doing that a couple of times.
That was enough to send passengers and crew into the ceiling of the plane and hurt a bunch of people.

The pilot was ex-military and did a really good job of recovering and landing the plane.
It happened again on two other A-330s. They never figured out why, so they just disabled that function.

Quote:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Qantas Flight 72
Date
7 October 2008

Summary
In-flight upset due to software error

Aircraft type
Airbus A330-303

Operator
Qantas

Flight origin
Singapore Changi Airport, Singapore

Destination
Perth Airport, Australia

Passengers
303

Crew
12

Fatalities
0

Injuries
119 (12 serious)

Survivors
315 (all)

Qantas Flight 72 (QF72) was a scheduled flight from Singapore Changi Airport to Perth Airport on 7 October 2008 that made an emergency landing at Learmonth airport near the town of Exmouth, Western Australia following an inflight accident featuring a pair of sudden uncommanded pitch-down manoeuvres that severely injured many of the passengers and crew.[1][2][3][4][5] The injuries included fractures, lacerations and spinal injuries. At Learmonth, the plane was met by the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia and CareFlight,[6][7] where 14 people were airlifted to Perth for hospitalisation, with 39 others also attending hospital.[8][9][10] Two planes were sent by Qantas to Learmonth to collect the remaining passengers and crew.[11] In all, one crew member and 11 passengers suffered serious injuries, while eight crew and 99 passengers suffered minor injuries.[12] The Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigation found a fault with one of the aircraft's three air data inertial reference units and a previously unknown software design limitation of the Airbus A330's fly-by-wire flight control primary computer (FCPC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

<iframe width="964" height="542" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8AwPg6jbYMg" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>