On Tuesday, Boeing’s president and chief executive Dave Calhoun said the firm was “acknowledging our mistake”.
The door “plug” which fell away from the aircraft weighed 27kg (60lb) and was used to fill an emergency exit that was built into the plane, but not required by Alaska Airlines.
The missing section of the plane was retrieved from the back garden of a Portland teacher, according to the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
Speaking to Boeing staff, Mr Calhoun said: “We’re going to approach this number one acknowledging our mistake. We’re going to approach it with 100% and complete transparency every step of the way.”
Mr Calhoun reassured staff that Boeing would work with the NTSB to investigate the cause of the accident.
“Well that’s not too typical, I’d like to point that out,” Calhoun tried to explain.
“How is it untypical?” Asked Dawe
“Well there are a lot of these planes going around the world all the time and very seldom does anything like this happen. I don’t want people to think planes aren’t safe.” replied Calhoun
“Was this plane safe?” Dawe continued
“Well I was thinking more about the other ones.”
“The ones that are safe?”
“The ones where the doors don’t fall off.”
“If this one wasn’t safe, why was it flying around at tens of thousands of feet?”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t safe. It just perhaps isn’t quite as safe as the other ones.”
“Why?” Dawe said with a puzzled expression.
“Well some of them are built so that the doors don’t fall off at all.”
“Wasn’t this one built so that the doors wouldn’t fall off?”
“Obviously not.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, because the door fell out!” Calhoun, starting to sound a little exasperated.
-The Original, for those who may not be 50 years old
“Well there are regulations governing the materials that they can be made of”
“What materials?”
“Well wood glue is out, and no wood glue derivatives”
“No insulation foam or glue?”
“No, foam and glue are out. I suppose there’s a minimum fastener requirement”
“What’s the minimum fastener requirement?”
“Well one, I suppose…”
I thought this was a legit conversation.
It probably was an off-the-record conversation.
Is this the Socratic method, sort of?
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Meanwhile, they will still be pursuing exemption from… you know, any kind of actual effective oversight, inspection and or regulation from the relevant government agency.
For the exact same model of plane.
https://fortune.com/2024/01/06/boeing-737-max-safety-exemption-crashes-2018-2019-alaska-airlines/
We live in Clown World.
In the meantime, they told pilots to limit use of an anti-icing system in some conditions to avoid damage that “could result in loss of control of the airplane.”
The classic neoliberal move of individualizing the issue. The individual is responsible not us.
Corporation being corporation. Lives don’t matter until it hits profitability.
So, the other two 37 MAXs of an earlier variant that crashed a few years ago due to basically malfunctioning autopilot?
The first one crashed because this new autopilot subsystem was present on the plane, and the Pilots did not even know it existed.
Boeing specifically told the airline that bought the plane that new training for the new MAX variant would not be necessary, because /that would cost more and make the airline less likely to buy the new variant/.
Turns out it was necessary, as the Pilots had no idea the system existed, it engaged, and as they tried everything that would work on a plane without that system to disengage it, the system they did not know about essentially fought them until the aircraft entered an unrecoverable state.
The second MAX variant that crashed a few years ago of course also had this same system. But now Boeing was actually mandating airlines train the pilots on this system.
The system engaged, malfunctioned, and the pilots followed the training from Boeing to basically handle the situation they were in, … and, despite following the procedures outlined from Boeings training… their procedure /did not work/, and this aircraft also crashed.
I do not understand how Boeing executives are not in prison at this point.
EDIT: Technically this system I am referring to is not an ‘autopilot’ as that kind of system generally refers to something that maintains course and heading, while this new system was … ironically enough, a stall recovery/warning/prevention system, but for the lay person, any process that overrides a pilots ability to manually control the orientation and airspeed of an aircraft is generally thought of as an ‘autopilot’.
The problem that keeps cropping up is that this system revolves around pitot tubes, basically little holes that measure the rate of air flowing through them. This gives you your airspeed.
Unless the pitot tubes ice up, as often happens.
Then, the system believes you have a very low airspeed and tells the craft to dive, to gain airspeed to prevent a stall.
And because of the way this system is implemented (if you pilots are even aware it exists), it is pretty confusing and complicated to disengage it /while your aircraft has suddenly entered into a likely panic inducing, likely unrecoverable dive for no apparent reason/.
Problem: if the pitot tube is frozen… indicated airspeed will never go up, and the system will not stop telling the aircraft to dive until you figure out how to turn it off.
As you can imagine, Pilots do not have much time to do this in an aircraft diving at an extreme angle, and unlike with fighter jets or in movies, large commercial aircraft take a lot of time to safely recover from an extreme dive without ripping the wings off from pulling up to hard or at too high an airspeed.
So the pilots basically go from ‘everything is fine’ to ‘aircraft is now diving at an extreme angle, time to remember and execute an exact amd complex operation of checking all indicators and toggling switches in perfect correct order’ in a couple of seconds, all while the in flight manuals for executing this procedure are flying about the cabin, stewardesses are tumbling around the aircraft and all of the passengers are screaming.
As you mention it wasn’t autopilot, the max really just isn’t designed to fly well and needs a system to assist the pilots in keeping it flying in certain situations. I don’t believe the issue was the pitot tubes, there are many on an aircraft of this size and they have deicing abilities. The issue was a separate sensor, of which there was only one (which breaks traditional standards of having at least 3) and that sensor sent incorrect data causing the mcas to nose dive the plane.
That’s issue 1. There is also the issue with engine deicing that can catastrophically destroy the engines if left on for 5+ minutes with no ice (wtf?? Pilots are used to a system that can be left on with no harm), as well as insecure bolts, and now this door plug not being secure. Boeing is not a company to trust anymore and MD had a similar record before their board took over Boeing, so it’s not a surprise.
They’ll get it too. The lives of us plebs are irrelevant compared to bribes.
This is of course a heinous act of negligence, and Boeing sucks, but I can’t help but wish that toxic chemical train derailments got this kind of scrutiny and regulatory revision.
This could have been prevented by not even offering a plug door. Just the emergency exit and that’s it.
This could have been prevented if engineers, and not accountants, still ran the company.
I mean loose bolts are loose bolts no matter what part they’re in. They could have just as easily not installed the door correctly. Who know what else is only being kept in check by other redundancies
I dare say, that because an emergency exit door is more critical, that there would be more oversight and inspection in its installation, therefore, being safer
Difference between an industry used to being regulated like planes dropping out of the sky onto people’s houses might be a Bad Thing, versus one that is used to regulatory capture and a low public profile.
I mean, it was a brand new plane, delivered to Alaska Airlines like two months ago. It’s not like there was a lot of time or mileage for normal wear and tear to do it’s thing.
“Mr Calhoun reassured staff that Boeing would work with the NTSB to investigate the cause of the accident.”
Pretty sure they already know…
https://abcnews.go.com/US/united-finds-loose-bolts-737-max-9-planes/story?id=106204513
"United Airlines said Monday that it has found loose bolts during inspections of its 737 Max 9 fleet in the wake of a door plug getting blown out of an Alaska Airlines plane over the weekend.
Monday evening Alaska Airlines said initial inspections of its 737 MAX 9 fleet revealed “some loose hardware” visible on some aircraft."
That’s the direct cause of the accident, but there’s still the question of how the bolts came loose in the first place. It could be a quality control issue which is relatively easy to rectify, or it could be a design issue with the plane leading to excessive vibrations loosening them, which is a MUCH bigger issue.
Boing: “Ah, put some Loc-Tite on it, it will be fine…” Probably.
They’ve already killed over 300 people with their “mistakes”
That was the Ethiopian Air and Lion Air accidents, right? I remember Boeing’s initial statements around that was something like “pilot error due to inadequate training and controls” and how…condescending it sounded. Of course it couldn’t be Boeing’s fault, the accidents happened in so-called developing countries with no regulations!
Then the news came out that Lion Air literally almost had the same error happen the day before the crash, and it was prevented by a 3rd pilot in the jump seat identifying the problem with the sensors and MCAS. Boeing sure shut up fast when the crash investigations corroborated that.
“Inadequate training” is ridiculous. As if they let pilots who don’t know what they’re doing fly their very expensive airplanes.
Looking at that door it is clear that it hit nothing else on the way down. Also looking at the seat next to the door, it makes me wonder if there was a passenger there or not. Did it happen when passengers or the crew were seat belted?
Imagine for a second if that was not the case…the door flew out and then boomeranged right onto the fuselage or got jammed in between control surfaces or if it struck the elevator or the rudder. That could have been pretty bad for everyone on board.
Now if the people inside were not strapped and happened to be right next to the door…hmmm there would have been some people outside the plane real quick and probably lost of people screaming.
I think Boeing got fucking lucky that it did not end up as a bigger loss including lives. This issue should bring more attention to their decision making. Maybe change their board and management to engineers so that they make informed decisions next time.
Apparently there were only 7 empty seats on the entire plane and 2 of them were the ones beside the door blowout.
Probably because it was considered an “exit seat row” with extra leg room, so those seats were 3x as expensive.
Did it happen when passengers or the crew were seat belted?
Yes. Fortunately the plane was still climbing and seatbelts were still required at the time it blew off.
It seems like it would have been hard to avoid acknowledging the mistake, given that the mistake was very clearly lodged into somebody’s backyard, as opposed to still being attached to the rest of the plane, but alright.
Hey, some people can have a human interaction when doing damage control during a crisis, and apparently this CEO I didn’t know about until just now isn’t one of those. There are now two different lessons to take away from this, apparently.
For the record, flashy as this thing was it’s not that big of a deal, but it sure is funny and spectacular.
We’re so used to companies lying and cheating every chance they have that even something as obvious as this is seen as honesty.
Mr Calhoun reassured staff that Boeing would work with the NTSB to investigate the cause of the accident.
Oh, how generous of him /s
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We’re sorry.
We’re sorry.
We’re sorry.
At this point, you couldn’t pay me to board a 737.
Older variants of the 737 are some of the most ubiquitous aircraft in the world, with very solid safety records. The 737 MAX, however, is the product of a Boeing much diminished in terms of engineering mindset, and it shows badly.
I’m flying on a 737 this Saturday, wish me luck 🥲
“His name was Robert Paulson…”
Roberta
Seems like they’re handling this in the kind of completely respectable way that I’d like to see any other company handle their mistakes.
Given the fuck up with the MCAS system and how they handled it…
Makes me wonder how bad they fucked up the door plug?
