The Boeing 737 MAX and Alaska Airlines Flight 1282
Luke Bodell (via Hacker News):
In August, the FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive (AD) warning MAX operators about using the engine anti-icing system in dry air. The AD came about following in-flight testing, which found that deploying the anti-icing system for longer than five minutes under specific conditions led to overheating and damage to the inlet cowl.
Boeing states it is working on a “long-term solution” for the problem, which would be rolled out across the entire global Boeing 737 MAX fleet.
The temporary solution is to tell the pilots not to forget to turn off the anti-icer. This is reminding me of the Therac-25 except that, as with Mac and iOS permission prompts, Boeing is setting it up so that any mishaps become the operator’s fault.
The Guardian (via Hacker News):
US regulators have ordered the temporary grounding of 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft following a cabin panel blowout late Friday that forced a brand-new airplane operated by Alaska Airlines to make an emergency landing.
[…]
A passenger sent the broadcaster KATU-TV a photo showing a gaping hole in the side of the airplane next to passenger seats. The airline said the plane, carrying 174 passengers and six crew members, landed safely.
Evan Smith, who was among those on board, told KATU that a boy sitting in a row with his mother had his shirt sucked off him and out of the plane. “His mother was holding on to him,” he said. “You heard a big loud bang to the left rear. A whooshing sound and all the oxygen masks deployed instantly and everyone got those on.”
Leslie Josephs (via Hacker News):
United Airlines said Monday that it has found loose bolts on door plugs of several Boeing 737 Max 9 planes during inspections spurred when a panel of that type blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight using that type of aircraft last week.
[…]
The National Transportation Safety Board said the accident would have been worse at cruising altitude when passengers and crews are walking around the cabin.
But the accident places fresh scrutiny on Boeing, which has spent years trying to clean up a host of quality defects, while also ramping up aircraft production, including of the 737 Max. CEO Dave Calhoun has spent months trying to assure airlines, investors and financial analysts that the company is improving its supply chain and working to resolve its quality problems.
Seanathan Bates (via Hacker News):
Found an iPhone on the side of the road… Still in airplane mode with half a battery and open to a baggage claim for #AlaskaAirlines ASA1282 Survived a 16,000 foot drop perfectly in tact!
When I called it in, Zoe at @NTSB said it was the SECOND phone to be found. No door yet😅
And no auto-lock.
In case you didn’t see it, there was a broken-off charger plug still inside it! Thing got yanked out the door
The other end of the cable?
Rhett Allain (2011):
This isn’t really breaking news, but there was this story of a guy that dropped his iPhone 4 out of a plane. The man was quite happy to find his iPhone unharmed. It was partially protected by Griffin case, but still this got me thinking. Was this a miracle or not so crazy?
He estimates the terminal velocity at 27.2 mph.
The takeaway from the story is that a phone can only go so fast, and how much the landing surface gives in reaction to the falling phone is important — ground in a wooded area will displace a lot more, accepting and spreading the impact more than, say, concrete. Plus, the iPhone 4, like the phone that dropped from Friday’s flight, was in a case, increasing its odds of survival.
Reuters (via Hacker News):
The cockpit voice recorder data on the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet which lost a panel mid-flight on Friday was overwritten, U.S. authorities said, renewing attention on long-standing safety calls for longer in-flight recordings.
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy said on Sunday no data was available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours - when recording restarts, erasing previous data.
[…]
The U.S. FAA has previously rejected the NTSB’s call for retrofitting aircraft with new cockpit voice recorders, saying the costs would be significant at $741 million versus $196 million under incremental upgrades it proposed.
Several pilot groups oppose longer recordings.
“(It) would significantly infringe upon the privacy rights of pilots and other flight crew members, as well as drastically increase the likelihood that CVR recordings will be misused or disseminated without authorization,” the union representing pilots for Atlas Air told the FAA last month.
Even 2 hours would have been enough if there had been a way to automatically halt the auto-erasure in the event of a safety issue occurring.
See also: Hacker News.
Previously:
Update (2024-01-10): Zeynep Tufekci:
We’ve since learned all this may not have been a complete surprise. The N.T.S.B. told reporters that a pressurization warning light in this plane had come on three times before, at least once in flight, during its short time in service. The maintenance crews had checked and cleared the light, but Alaska Airlines thankfully restricted the plane to flying over land so it could return rapidly to an airport if it came on again. Whew. If the door had blown out at high altitude and over the ocean we may not have had the same happy ending.
PBS:
The jet involved in Friday’s blowout is brand-new, having been put in service in November. After a cabin-pressurization system warning light came on during three flights, the airline stopped flying it over the Pacific to Hawaii. Some aviation experts questioned why Alaska continued using the plane on overland routes until it figured out what was causing the pressurization warnings.
Homendy said Monday, however, that NTSB has seen no evidence to link the warnings with the blowout of the door plug.
Via John Gruber:
There may be no evidence yet, but what are the odds that a door plug that blew off a brand-new jet mid-flight — in a fleet of planes they’ve now discovered have loose bolts holding those doors in place — wasn’t to blame for the cabin-pressurization warnings? And, even if it’s true that the pressurization warnings were unrelated to last week’s incident, that’s even worse for Boeing — that would mean they have a problem with these door plugs and an as-yet undetermined other problem.
But the phone had no passcode[…] I find that almost as crazy as the phone surviving a 16,000-foot drop, but I’d probably be shocked to know how many people rock the no-passcode lifestyle. I just don’t get it, given how Face ID makes it feel like you don’t have a passcode.
[…]
(Judging by this thread, it’s also apparently quite common for people to turn off Auto-Lock in Settings → Display & Brightness.)
Update (2024-02-06): Liz Alderman (via Slashdot):
In the long-running duel between the two aviation rivals, Airbus has pulled far ahead.
Gareth Corfield (2020, via Hacker News):
Boeing’s 737 Next Generation airliners have been struck by a peculiar software flaw that blanks the airliners’ cockpit screens if pilots dare attempt a westwards landing at specific airports.
Gareth Corfield (2020, via Hacker News):
The US Federal Aviation Administration has ordered Boeing 787 operators to switch their aircraft off and on every 51 days to prevent what it called “several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios” – including the crashing of onboard network switches.
Reddit (via Hacker News):
Kayak’s New Flight Filter Allows You to Exclude Aircraft Models From Your Results
Gary Leff (via Hacker News):
A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the aircraft.
The takeaway appears to be that outsourced plane components have so many problems when they show up at the production line that Boeing’s quality control staff can’t keep up with them all.
David Koenig (via Hacker News):
The leaders of United Airlines and Alaska Airlines took turns Tuesday blasting Boeing over manufacturing problems that have led to the grounding of more than 140 of their planes, with United’s CEO saying his airline will consider alternatives to buying a future, larger version of the Boeing 737 Max.
Ryan Beene and Julie Johnsson (via Hacker News):
Boeing Co. faces a major commercial setback after the US Federal Aviation Administration froze planned production increases for its 737 Max aircraft, a move that interrupts the planemaker’s growth ambitions at a time of surging demand and intensifying competition with Airbus SE.
The nose wheel of a Boeing 757 jet fell off and rolled away while the plane was waiting on the runway for takeoff clearance, with almost 200 people on board.
Delta Air Lines Flight 982 was moments away from taking off from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta on Saturday when the wheel “came off and rolled down the hill,” according to a preliminary report from the Federal Aviation Administration published Monday.
A just organizational culture recognizes that a high level of operational safety can be achieved only when the root causes of human error are examined; who made a mistake is far less important than why it was made.
As someone who has been on four different Boeing-made airplanes in the last week, I can attest to the limits of this fantasy in the face of the prospect that a door on your airplane—the production of which was outsourced and subcontracted by a flub-prone duopoly to save some money; the installation and inspection of which was overseen by an overworked and multiply pressured person working in a conflicted and careless system, also to save some money—might blow off at altitude. There are some problems an individual is not equipped to fix, and “airplane now has moonroof” is one of the classics, there.
[…]
There’s a bit in Maureen Tkacik’s comprehensively damning 2019 feature about Boeing in The New Republic that I keep coming back to, both here and in general. The central tension of that story is about how, as a former Boeing physicist told Tkacik, “a long and proud ‘safety culture’ was rapidly being replaced… with ‘a culture of financial bullshit.’”
[…]
The erosion of Boeing’s former, engineer-driven culture and the rise of its ravening and reckless financial-capitalism one can be traced, in Tkacik’s story, in part to Boeing’s 1997 purchase of the failing aerospace company McDonnell Douglas. The merger was more or less the corporate equivalent of inviting a vampire to cross your threshold. The heedless, shortsighted cost-cutting and contingency of the smaller and more dysfunctional company took hold at the larger and more effective one; little by little, and then all at once, Boeing got to work on making its products worse—as much worse as they could be without tanking the stock price, and occasionally, tragically, even worse than that.
Angus Whitley and Julie Johnsson (via Hacker News):
Boeing Co. found more mistakes with holes drilled in the fuselage of its 737 Max jet, a setback that could further slow deliveries on a critical program already restricted by regulators over quality lapses.
The latest manufacturing slip originated with a supplier and will require rework on about 50 undelivered 737 jets to repair the faulty rivet holes, Boeing commercial chief Stan Deal said in a note to staff.
Update (2024-02-14): David Koenig (via Slashdot):
The new chief of the Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday that his agency is midway through a review of manufacturing at Boeing, but he already knows that changes must be made in how the government oversees the aircraft manufacturer.
FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker suggested that Boeing — under pressure from airlines to produce large numbers of planes — is not paying enough attention to safety.
See also: How Boeing Lost Its Way (via Hacker News).
Update (2024-02-23): Dominic Gates (via Hacker News):
Boeing has ousted the leader of the 737 MAX program at its Renton plant and reshuffled its leadership team at the Commercial Airplanes division, effective immediately.
[…]
Ed Clark, vice president of the MAX program and general manager at the Renton facility, will leave the company. He’s being replaced by Katie Ringgold, the current vice president 737 delivery operations.
[…]
Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance and troubleshooting on C-130 cargo aircraft in the U.S. Air Force.
Update (2024-02-27): Gregory Polek (via Hacker News):
The FAA blamed Boeing for a deficient safety culture in a 50-page report issued on Monday[…]
[…]
In a review of the employment culture at the company, an expert panel found what it called gaps in Boeing’s safety journey and that a majority of employees did not show “skillful awareness” of the concepts of just culture and reporting culture.
The panel further reported that it could not find a “consistent and clear” safety reporting channel or process within the business unit. It also noted that employees do not understand how to use the different reporting systems and which reporting system to use and when. The panel expressed concern that the confusion might discourage employees from reporting what they see as safety problems.
Oriana Pawlyk (via Hacker News):
Pierson [former Boeing senior manager] is again trying to sound the alarm. Regulators ultimately approved the plane to return to the air nearly two years after the 2019 crash, but Pierson still doesn’t trust the MAX line — the modernized, more fuel-efficient version of Boeing’s predecessor planes.
I just don’t think it’s safe. I said I purposely scheduled myself not to fly [on a MAX].
[…]
That’s all Boeing does is talk. The leadership doesn’t get down there and get involved with the people that are building the products. They don’t value the engineers, they think the engineers are replaceable. You can’t take a 20- or 30-year employee and just dump them off to the side and think that you’re going to find somebody off the street that’s going to be able to do what that person does. Then they don’t have the support mechanisms and they’re tired and they’re fatigued and they’re working like dogs — they can make mistakes.
[…]
They spent 90 percent of their energy telling the media things [like] “renewed quality” and using language in their press releases and their financial statements like “a renewed safety focus.” And then meanwhile, I’m hearing from people, “No, it’s actually just as bad or worse in the factory now than it was before.
Update (2024-03-08): Taiyler S. Mitchell:
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating yet another Boeing aircraft, after a Feb. 6 incident in which a United Airlines plane landed with “stuck” rudder pedals.
Last month, Flight 1539 from the Bahamas, to Newark, New Jersey, “experienced ‘stuck’ rudder pedals during the landing rollout,” according to a preliminary report from NTSB. The plane, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, was still able to land safely, without injury to crew members or the 155 flyers onboard.
Joel Rose (via Hacker News):
More than two months after a door plug panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet in midair, the top federal safety investigator says Boeing still has not provided key information that could shed light on what went wrong.
dzdt:
There is a huge amount of context in an early whistleblower report [1]. This reported before the FAA did the likelihood that the bolts were not reinstalled and the problems with the documentation. Per that whistleblower account, the door plug removal was not documented in the official records system (“CMES”) but the required work was discussed in an unofficial system (“SAT”) including whether or not an official record should be made. Boeing concluded the work could be done without an official record in CMES. Per the discussion on SAT, the official “removal” record was not needed if the operation was treated as an “opening” instead, despite the safety-critical bolts being removed in either case.
The FAA obviously will have problems with the entire system that lets factory workers do safety-critical work without official documentation, standards, or oversight.
Boeing, on Wednesday provided U.S. regulators with the names of employees on its 737 MAX door team after lawmakers and a federal safety official sharply criticized the planemaker’s failure to do so at a Senate hearing.
Will Potter and Keith Griffith:
A Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by United Airlines veered off the runway after landing in Houston early Friday in the latest near-miss involving the embattled airliner.
The aircraft, which arrived from Memphis, is said to have suffered some form of gear collapse as it exited the runway at George Bush Airport, although the 160 passengers and six crew were not injured.
Shocking footage showed the plane lying flat on its wings on grass by the side of the runway, while passengers were hurried off from an emergency gate ladder.
It is the latest in a string of disastrous failings involving Boeing aircraft in recent days, including a 737 engine that caught fire mid-flight on Monday and a wheel falling off shortly after takeoff in San Francisco on Thursday.
Update (2024-03-11): Niraj Chokshi, Glenn Thrush and Mark Walker (via Hacker News):
The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation into Boeing after a panel on one of the company’s planes blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January, a person familiar with the matter said.
Update (2024-03-14): Lukas Souza (via Hacker News):
United Airlines CEO has decided to halt Boeing 737 MAX 10 production in favor of MAX 9 due to certification uncertainties.
CNN (via Hacker News, Slashdot):
The pilot of a terrifying flight from Australia to New Zealand told those on board he temporarily lost control of his Boeing 787 after one of its instruments failed, a passenger said Monday, as authorities investigate what caused a sudden drop that threw travelers around the cabin, injuring dozens.
Barnett’s body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said. One day earlier, he testified in a deposition related to the string of problems he says he identified at Boeing’s plant where he once helped inspect the 787 Dreamliner aircraft before delivery to customers.
Barnett was in the middle of giving deposition testimony in his whistleblower retaliation case against Boeing when he died, his lawyers, Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, told NPR.
Theo Leggett (via Hacker News):
In 2019, Mr Barnett told the BBC that under-pressure workers had been deliberately fitting sub-standard parts to aircraft on the production line.
He also said he had uncovered serious problems with oxygen systems, which could mean one in four breathing masks would not work in an emergency.
Mark Walker (via Hacker News):
A six-week audit by the Federal Aviation Administration of Boeing’s production of the 737 Max jet found dozens of problems throughout the manufacturing process at the plane maker and one of its key suppliers, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times.
[…]
For the portion of the examination focused on Boeing, the F.A.A. conducted 89 product audits, a type of review that looks at aspects of the production process. The plane maker passed 56 of the audits and failed 33 of them, with a total of 97 instances of alleged noncompliance, according to the presentation.
Andrew Childers (via Hacker News):
Boeing overwrote security camera footage of repair work on the door plug of an Alaska Airlines 737-9 plane that failed during a flight in January, federal inspectors said Wednesday.
Update (2024-03-25): CNBC:
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun will step down at the end of 2024 in part of a broad management shake-up for the embattled aerospace giant.
Larry Kellner, chairman of the board, will not stand for reelection at Boeing’s annual meeting in May, Boeing said Monday.
David Shepardson and Allison Lampert (via Hacker News):
COO Stephanie Pope has been appointed to lead Boeing Commercial Airplanes, effective Monday.
Steve Mollenkopf, former CEO of tech company Qualcomm, opens new tab, has been appointed new chair of the board and is leading the search for the next CEO.
Update (2024-04-02): Maureen Tkacik (via Hacker News):
John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
[…]
CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors.
[…]
Sorscher has warned Boeing management for decades now of the catastrophic effects of the brain drain inflicted by its war on “brilliance.” He says McDonnell Douglas managers published a statistical analysis in 1997 gauging productivity against the average seniority of managers across various programs that found that greener workforces were substantially less productive, which he found to be a “mirror image” of a kind of “rule of thumb” within Boeing that held that every Boeing employee takes four years to become “fully productive.” But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years[…]
Update (2024-04-08): Gage Goulding:
Southwest Airlines flight 3695 took off from Denver International Airport took off around 7:39 MDT, according to data from FlightAware. Roughly 33 minutes later, the Boeing 737-800 airplane made an emergency landing after a part called an “engine cowling” came loose and damaged the flaps on the right side of the airplane.
See also: NBC, Hacker News.
Update (2024-04-11): Mark Walker and James Glanz (Hacker News):
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating claims made by a Boeing engineer who says that sections of the fuselage of the 787 Dreamliner are improperly fastened together and could break apart mid-flight after thousands of trips.
[…]
The fuselages for the plane come in several pieces, all from different manufacturers, and they are not exactly the same shape where they fit together, he said.
[…]
Boeing concedes those manufacturing changes were made, but a spokesman for the company, Paul Lewis, said there was “no impact on durability or safe longevity of the airframe.”
I know I seem obsessive about this issue, and I am. It saddens me that a company known for—some would say who defined—engineering excellence has been hijacked by a pack of bean counters who care for nothing but its stock price.
Update (2024-04-12): Joel Rose (via Hacker News):
Salehpour joins a growing list of current and former Boeing employees who say the company has ignored their concerns — and then retaliated against them when they spoke up.
Update (2024-04-26): Patrick Smith:
Boeing is facing newly revealed whistleblower claims that its 787 Dreamliner planes have structural failings that could eventually cause them to break apart, adding to the unprecedented crisis facing the aviation giant.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating claims made by Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
In 2022, as Boeing worked to integrate new avionics packages into its 777 and 787 widebody aircraft, two of its engineers insisted the company needed to reevaluate prior engineering work completed on the two aircraft. The engineering union contends Boeing managers objected to this on the grounds that it would add costs and slow production.
After the FAA backed the engineers about how the work should be performed and the dispute was settled, in mid-2023 Boeing gave both men negative performance reviews, which cuts pay raises and promotion prospects.
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> Several pilot groups oppose longer recordings.
> “(It) would significantly infringe upon the privacy rights of pilots and other flight crew members,..."
Pilots and crew have an expectation of privacy when on the job? HAHAHAHAHA! Welcome to OUR world.
@Paul According to Reuters, that’s still how it’s supposed to work, but they forgot to pull it in all the chaos.
> Even 2 hours would have been enough if there had been a way to automatically halt the auto-erasure in the event of a safety issue occurring.
When do you halt though?
Often one safety issue is the start of a chain of issues.
And if you build a system to auto-stop in some defined circumstance, then that can potentially fire incorrectly
There _is_ a breaker that the crew could pull once safely landed and back at the gate - but unsurprisingly in all the excitement, they forgot.
I can't remember when, but I think within the past ~20 or fewer years, after an incident but also a safe landing, the cockpit crew knew to pull a circuit breaker to the voice and flight data recorders so they wouldn't be overwritten before authorities could obtain them.