Nothing is more infuriating than a UI redesign to fix what's not broken.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/uss-m...
Some reporter is wondering around the international car expo, discussing with various car makers. Mercedes tells him "our car is the most air-tight ever produced. It scored 24 on the cat test!" The reporter wonders - "cat test? what is that?" ""Oh, it's a novel test! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, and 24 hours later it drew its last breath".
Impressed, the reporter moves on to Ferrari. They tell him the same story - most airtight car ever made! He asks them knowingly - "How did the cat test go?" to which they proudly reply - "Oh, very well, very well! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, 12 hours later the poor thing was dead".
Next he wonders to the Renault-Dacia stand. They also tell him about the air-tightness of their car, again he asks how the cat test went. The Dacia representative beams: "Oh, wonderful! We put the cat in the car, closed all of the windows and doors, and wherever its head poked out, we quickly plastered over".
<90s Saturn> The panel gaps shrink in warm weather. </90s Saturn>
In case anyone was wondering that was actually a thing with early plastic body panels. They eventually refined it to the point where the gaps don't change noticeably and now pretty much every car has some plastic body panels.
The oil, though, was interesting. The s-series engine had a design flaw with the oil control piston ring where it would get stuck in its groove due to carbon build-up. The engine would then start burning prodigious amounts of oil — mine burned 1 quart every 500 miles. I put the cheapest oil I could find in as a result and when I did a filter change I’d save the old oil to pour back into the engine (diluted — about 1 qt of old oil and 3 qts of new.). By the time I used up all of the old oil it was time to change filters again.
1565207 At cruise flight, our Wi-Fi stopped working. I then saw that I was unable to access the Pilot Mobile app. Since I do not routinely copy the flight plan to iBook or acrobat (we are not required to do this), I was unable to access the flight plan. I've lost Wi-Fi before but not had this problem. Maybe it's a 737max thing. My First Officer had a copy on iBook and airdropped it to me. Later we were able to restore the Wi-Fi and I could login to pilot mobile but the [flight plan] was not there anymore.
It's time we make radio with the ATC VoIP. Just run an asterisk on the plane.
2. Perhaps I'm misjudging, but the tone and perspective of pilot makes me worry for their approach and technical skills. Does not routinely copy to local device before takeoff? "Maybe it's a 737max thing"? Airdropping as a solution?
This does not smell off setting up for success... :<
Of course, it'll fail at some point, but it's not like they were cut off from the world, they could have radioed for the information if the copilot didn't have it, or something.
Especially if (a) it’s not part of your extensive checklists, which would reasonably be expected to be included if it was important, and (b) you’ve lost WiFi in other planes before without losing your flight plan.
I.e the airlines could save money on training.
The main design constraint on that bird was that it should pass most of the old paperwork so that Boeing nor airlines would need to go through expensive training and quification.
Yet, they modified the plane quite a bit - but they could not modernize several systems since they would have to then go through rigorous and expensive testing. ..
Nobody seems to underline this fact.
I bet that's the actual reason they didn't put the automatic pitch modification system to any documentation - it would not fit on the description of "just old 737 nothing new here hop in".
Really? Everything I heard so far sounds like the 737 MAX has a few new, unusual or counter intuitive features that require extra training, and that training material skimped on training for that.
> "just old 737 nothing new here hop in"
Am I correct in understanding that was a blatant lie?
It does not sound to me like lying, more like a confusion of project constraints. I.e. "make the plane better but don't touch this and this and this arbitrary system".
