737 Max 8 Debacle

Economics 101….

When the planes continue to crash less people will want to buy new ones.

So what happened with the 737?

In a nutshell….. Boeing cut corners, and the FAA cut corners, and the result was lots of people died.

With the Boeing Dreamliner……..Boeing started from scratch. They outsourced the manufacturing all over the world (to countries that had no idea how to build an airplane) and it was a disaster.

Those poor decisions cost the company billions of dollars, and many lost years to correct the issues.

Boeing didn’t want to make that mistake again.

By using the 737 platform they were using a proven (popular) design the airlines were already familiar with.

The problem is the 737 platform has some fundamental issues.

1) The 737 sits very low to the ground. In 1968 that was not an issue. Jet engines were thin and long and the clearance of the engine to the ground was acceptable. In 2019 Jet engines are much bigger. To prevent the PR nightmare of having the engines scraping the runway Boeing moved the engines forward on the wing. By moving the engines forward on the wing they changed the aerodynamics of the plane. The forward leaning engines now want to pitch the nose of the plane up. This if gone unnoticed could cause the plane to stall and crash.

To prevent that issue Boeing designed a computer system to take over the controls and push the nose down if it pitchs up.

Historically Boeing always wanted the pilot to have ultimate control of the plane. But with the 737 Max they took that control away from the pilots and handed it to the computer. That would be fine if the computer was working off accurate information.

In the two planes that crashed it did not have accurate information. The sensor at the front of the plane (that monitors the orientation of the plane) were giving faulty readings. It said the plane was pitched up, when it really wasn’t. It then took over the controls and pushed the nose down. The pilots tried to pull the nose back up but the computer program over rode their efforts and continued to push the nose down. It did this over and over until the plane flew into the ground at 600 MPH. Oops!

See the Boeing’s programmers broke a cardinal rule. Redundancy. You are ALWAYS supposed to have a backup system. If one system fails you have a backup. But the 737 software was based on just one sensor. If that one sensor did not work properly (which is what happened) then incorrect information is fed into the computer. Then the pilots are fighting for control of the plane being flown by a computer that has bad information. The results of that are not great.

There is supposed to be FAA oversight of all these systems ( but it was all deregulated under Obama) and Boeing was left to watch after themselves. They did a terrible job. Not only was the design poor, but they never bothered to train the pilots on the new computer systems. When the system took over the plane the pilots didn’t know what to do. They didn’t have a lot of time to figure it out. In the end they didn’t figure it out and everyone died.

Now Boeing is scrambling to redesign the software so the plane does not act like a Steven King Movie and force a crash. It is a long process to get it right, and a longer process to rebuild peoples confidence. Meanwhile the orders for new planes are going away and the company stock is being pounded. Was it worth it?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/business/boeing-737-sales-orders.html?fbclid=IwAR0B5ML3yC6wHm4ap1Dripmzu9vhSFKOvBUoDKq06IJailNHhWIPPC1sgqQ