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0 pointsKennyBlanken4y ago0 comments

Your comment boils down to a false dilemma fallacy between "FAA blindly trusts manufacturers" and "FAA conducts their own testing and validation." Clearly they could have been more actively reviewing stuff coming from Boeing, or engaging in some level of auditing.

If the FAA had paid attention they would have seen a company desperate to compete modifying numerous basic characteristics of an airplane to the point of making it aerodynamically unstable, using a flight control system as a bandaid to fix this.

Not to mention being such massively cheap assholes that they literally didn't install warning lights in the cockpit to tell the pilots when the sensor their flight computer would use to override control inputs, had failed.

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8 comments · 2 top-level

asah4y ago· 4 in thread

Actually, this is a sauce effect of the complexity of modern systems: regulators have no choice but to trust companies and regulate the results of tests, with heavy penalties for cheating. Consider pharmaceutical trials: it's impractical for the FDA to check on each patient. Financial audits often assume the client isn't directly lying to the auditor, with criminal penalties as the disincentive.

The alternative requires raising costs and slowing progress and innovation, which is a nonstart in a competitive environment such as Boeing vs Airbus.

OneTimePetes4y ago

It can be done, it just costs money. It can not be done within the liberal frame of mind, were everything that costs money is tax and thus theft.

So why not reformulate it correctly. In my ideology, it is not possible to solve this problem.

If that ideology would be out of the way, it could actually be tested pretty good via unittest running a simulation. So once developed those tests would actually be pretty cheap to run.

Its just this ideologic blindspot that prevents good safety.

kiklion4y ago

> It can be done, it just costs money.

Well money and time.

You speak as if you think that if only the great billionaires accepted a little less money then we could have safety.

How many lives are you willing to lose for a multi year delay to accommodate the FDA recreating every required test that the pharmaceutical company did? How many lives are currently lost because the current system doesn’t work?

Your suggestion is akin to voter id’s as a requirement to prevent voter fraud. How many legitimate voters are going to be prevented from voting due to the new rules to stop how many prior confirmed cases of voter fraud?

This isn’t a lack of resources. This is society deciding that the resources are better used elsewhere.

2 more replies

verve_rat4y ago

But in the case of aircraft we pay for that innovation and "progress" with dead bodies. Maybe it is time to rethink the cost/benefit of how we enforce these regulations.

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asah4y ago

LOL speling: sauce effect => side effect!

snowwrestler4y ago· 2 in thread

The 737 Max is not aerodynamically unstable. I don’t know where people got this idea. The purpose of MCAS is to match existing stick pressure progression in certain situations. It’s not a fly-by-wire system like the F-16.

roelschroeven4y ago

Not just existing stick pressure progression, but required stick pressure progression. As far as I understand it, in that specific situation the 737 MAX without MCAS does not comply with the rules regarding aerodynamic stability. It's not dramatic, doesn't manifest itself in normal flight, and could be dealt with by pilots quite easily as far as I understand it. But it's a rule, and it was important enough for Boeing to first put a quite gentle MCAS on the plane, and then to increase the effect of MCAS.

salawat4y ago

This is correct. It is non-compliance for control stick forces to slacken towards a stall on a passenger carrying aircraft. They put a gadget in the system to render it compliant.

Unfortunately, they did not work as hard as they should have to ensure that it would not malfunction. Or to make sure if it did pilot's were aware and had a chance to develop muscle memory for it.

All of that was Management's push.

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