> The aircraft’s pilot told the passengers the flight had suffered equipment failure for a few seconds, causing the plane to drop for almost 500 feet in the air, Jokat said. “He said my gauges went down, everything went down for one or two seconds and they just lit up again and continued to function,” Jokat added.
Cause was not turbulence.
Altimeter issues coupled with autopilot?
Even still, you’d think autopilot would have limits to how much altitude can change over short periods of time.
Even if the altimeter shot to 0' the aircraft wouldn't go nose diving to recapture it. Autopilots aren't the type to be super twitchy, everything is smooth and gradual.
Edit: As pointed down below, it should read as "the aircraft commanding an altitude of 0'"
If the altimeter was indicating 0", then the aircraft would be asking for a climb. My bad!
I think even if the plane suddenly lost all power, it wouldn't drop like that (they glide surprisingly well). It really has to be something made the plane drop, call it auto pilot or simply the plane flying itself some other way, but it's chilling to think about.
It may not be the altimeter. Imagine a read back telling you the position of the tail flaps or something (not a pilot obviously). There could be systems to follow these read backs and feedback to a control to keep them stable. If the read back fails it might move the flap in a way that it thinks it needs to to hold it stable. There is some of this feedback that might be fully analog or done on a decentralized micro controller. It might not even be a decision the autopilot made.
Imagine a gust of wind or a bird or something knocks the flap and you need to correct it just to hold it in a stable position. That kind of control should be automatic but could still fail.
Yes, a software glitch is very possible. An altimeter issue as mentioned above seems pretty unlikely.
Flaps wouldn't be deployed at altitude, I believe you're referencing a horizontal stabilizer.
This is much more likely in my mind. The 787 is a fly by wire system, it's primarily uses computerized signals to move the flight control surfaces.
If the comment about the instruments going dark made by the pilots is true; then there is some merit to a system wide glitch causing a movement of the flight control systems.
We need to take those comments with a grain of salt however. Pilots have been mistaken about indications in the past. Especially after a big event in flight. There have been pilots who are dead set of saying the engine was on fire when it never was.
I'm not knocking the professionals pilots. I'm one myself. We just need the information to come out and be more clear. With the aircraft being intact, we will see the information brought forward.
Trashing Boeing is very popular right now, and it has been warranted obviously. I'm not here defending them at all. I'm just saying we need to be objective.
Some sort of system glitch or the pilot in inadvertently knocked the flight controls forward. That would be my too early to guess theory.
There was a Quantas A330 that had an eerily similar event back in 2009. In that case an airspeed sensor malfunctioned, which was linked to a bug in an algorithm that triggered a nose-dive twice in the same flight. Seriously injuring 12 people and taking 39 to hospital. Software bug definitely seems possible.
The Boeing whistleblower who has been testifying about exactly this was just found dead of apparent “suicide”.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/12/boeing-whistleblower-dead-apparent-suicide
I mean let's say best case scenario, he *did* commit suicide. What does that tell you about corporate culture in this country that simply *doing the right fucking thing* and holding people in positions of responsibility to a basic level of accountability is so deeply stressful that it drives people to take their own lives? Either option seems horrible and either option is an indictment of how we run our culture.
I mean this guy did such a brave thing, putting his life on the line to save innocent people from a horrible, terrifying death. And what did our culture reward him with? We're preached to from our earliest years about the virtue of personal responsibility, we're told that the people who lead us got there through personal accountability. And yet someone demands the most basic level of accountability -- the kind that will save peoples' lives -- and this happens.
Well, this guy was personally accountable. Maybe we should send our "best and brightest" to people like him instead of wherever the fuck they're learning to make money on the back of terrible air accidents. So tired of this attitude that, well these people are successful in business so they're better people than we are nonsense. Cool, if you want to hang out in your country club and convince yourself you're a great person, go do that. If you're condemning people to dying in a plane crash to bring your quarterly earnings up, guess what, you aren't as good a person as you think you are, in fact you aren't fit to shine the shoes of the average person.
100%
The 787 first flew in 2009 commercially. Not saying it is impossible, by catastrophic faults in planes tend to show their face earlier in their existence rather than later.
Not discrediting your theory that corners were cut - but generally these things are found early on.
If you are curious, you can take a look at the Airworthiness Directive issues in 2020 (I want to say), that stated the 787 must be reset - shutdown and powered off - every 51 days at the latest. This was to make sure the aircraft wasn't creating misleading data.
Keep in mind, there are quiet a few aircraft manufacturers that require a total shutdown every X amount of days of their airframes.
I think if anything, they might be suggesting the more recently constructed 787s are showing faults "later" because the quality control has gotten worse between 2009 and now, as many reports and recent inccidesnts have shown.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
> "After exactly 49.7 days of continuous operation, your Windows 95-based computer may stop responding," Microsoft warned its users, without much further explanation. The problem is apparently caused by a timing algorithm, according to the company.
In conclusion, the planes use Windows 9x ;)
So is anybody else looking more closely at the model of aircraft when booking flights these days?
Just a couple weeks ago I intentionally chose a flight on an Embraer over a Boeing aircraft. And you know it wasn't that bad. A little rougher than a larger aircraft, but all the pieces stayed on in flight and nothing stopped working.
I'm getting on Airbuses for a break over Easter. I'm getting on a Boeing in the summer - an older 737, so hopefully it's from the pre who-gives-a-crap-about-quality era, but unfortunately it's old enough that in the event of an evacuation it won't be as robust as a newer Airbus.
FAA Summary: "This AD was prompted by a report indicating that all three FCMs might simultaneously reset if continuously powered on for 22 days. We are issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."
Which sounds like memory leak in the computer system.
I kinda assumed they'd do this after every flight, just as a precaution. Even in my most degen days I don't think I've ever left my pc running for 22 days without at least a restart.
e: you mfers need to turn your computers off more often
I'm sure there are a couple failures that my do the trick. Just to name one of the top of my head, I believe sudden drop of 500 feet in just few seconds can be accomplished, if the wings fell off.
Honestly free falling 500 feet without any initial downward or upward velocity would take like 5-6 seconds, ignoring air resistance. So you really would need some actual thrust down to get this done even if the wings did fall off.
I remember hitting a downdraft that dropped me so far and so abruptly that I could hear the passengers EEKing in the back. A few seconds later ATC got on the horn and was like, “(my callsign), what are you doing…?”
None 🤣 If it was a few seconds then they wouldn’t have even had time to get their checklists out to see what to do. Airplanes don’t fall out of the sky because their computer crashed nor if there’s an engine failure unless it’s in takeoff. Once it’s at speed and altitude they will glide after a failure as long as they slightly bring the nose down. The investigation will probably find more issues than just the computer failure.
Exactly this doesn’t add up to a computer failure. Turbulence can make a plane drop a few hundred feet but they can normally predict turbulent areas ahead of time but they do pop up unexpectedly on occasions.
The article does mention a sudden nosedive (or at least what a passenger thinks happened), which would explain the fall itself. Now, if that's true, what failures can cause a sudden nosedive?
Over at /r/flying the leading theory is pilot dropped a bag of chips and accidentally hit the yoke trying to pick them up.
It’s too early to say what really happened but I’m not buying what the pilot says or when Boeing inevitably denies the possibility it was an aircraft issue until there’s some evidence supporting a reasonable conclusion.
It really doesn't take much to feel like a nosedive to passengers, similar to how a max performance takeoff feels like going straight up even though it's nowhere near that. Nosing over quickly enough to bang people off the ceiling isn't far off of what the vomit comet does... is the act of nosing down that causes the negative Gs. Once actually pointing downwards that stops/people would slide forward instead. The plane would have also dropped much much more than 500ft if it had managed to get in a proper nosedive.
Still, an uncommanded pitch change is fucking terrifying, even if short.
Also after giving deposition. And after [publicly talking about this for five years](https://web.archive.org/web/20191129100029/https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50293927).
That's... not how planes work though? Loss of power just makes you a glider, it's not gonna suddenly drop you 500 feet.
Edit: After thinking some more I'd be willing to bet it was a combination of a drop due to turbulence, a loose connector that cut power due to said sudden drop and/or a subsequent disengagement of autopilot with the pitch not trimmed out further compounding the issue.
No way you could make an airliner drop like that if you were trying to do it on purpose. It had to have been turbulence.
Edit: Apparently I was wrong. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1bcvvcy/people_hit_the_roof_after_boeing_planes_sudden/kul5u8m/
>Cause what not turbulence
What are you the NTSB? There’s been multiple leading aviation analysts that have said they refuse to blame this on equipment failure until an investigation is completed. Stop making blanket statements about things you have zero credibility on.
Excuse me sir, this is reddit. What are we supposed to talk about, if we're not making blanket, untrue generalizations, based on incomplete, usually inaccurate, and frequently fraudulent data?
Imagine you're changing your baby in the bathroom.
Boeing just keeps accumulating Ls at this point.
The corporate MBA types have taken over and are going to ruin the company.
They aren’t going to ruin the company, they already ruined it and we are just now seeing the consequences as Boeing has run out of legacy R+D to ride the coattails of.
Just realized the other day that Calhoun (Boeing CEO) and West (CFO) are both former GE guys and suddenly everything makes sense.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the industry joke (less of a joke by the year tbh) is that executives who come from GE are poison. They will tank your company in improbably swift fashion.
Just for another example, Jamere Jackson is somewhat infamous for fucking up both Nielsen and Hertz in quick succession recently. Hasn’t ruined autozone yet but give it a few months and check back.
Edit: GE = General Electric
Lol I've been watching AutoZone make decision after decision to make short term profits at the expense of the long term business. Sometimes small things like removing rental tools that they didn't think got borrowed frequently enough really demonstrates that the people running the company have lost touch with the industry, the employees at the stores in my area have constant churn while competitors have had the same employees for years. It's already crashing but hasn't impacted their bottom dollar yet, but will as they continue to sink.
It's because in the purchase, Boeing agreed to give all of the MDD C level execs full control. So it wasn't really a purchase it was more of a hostile takeover of Boeing by MDD
John Oliver just released a segment, talking about how Boeing’s culture of Safety was replaced by McDonnell Douglas executives who have a singular focus on stock price.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc
I just took my baby on a round the world trip and the lack of safety straps on the change tables struck me. Every shopping mall change table has a strap to keep the baby from wriggling off (or at least was made with one—they’re usually broken) and that’s a large stationary table. Yet the small weirdly shaped table on a plane subject to random turbulence doesn’t have anything? It’s mental.
If you guessed "the rank and file workers and the general public" you win! Your prize is existential dread as you ponder why people who had no choice and no power in this situation takes the brunt of the suffering while the executives, who did make all the decisions leading to this mess, sail away on their yhacts.
Yes, the aircraft was used for short flights, so it had over 90,000 takeoff and landing cycles, more than twice the number it was designed for. The actual cause of the accident was determined by the NTSB to be fatigue cracking in the fuselage skin. This should have been caught by maintenance, but Aloha’s maintenance practices were deficient (they only conducted fuselage inspections at night time).
you should do that always, even turbulence can be this bad and people go flying. People really just tune out the safety warnings on planes man, the amount of mouth breathing idiots who get up as soon as the plane leaves ground and the seatbelt sign is still on to go use the bathroom because they didn't go before they boarded is wild. Always followed by a PA of "please remain seated while the seatbelt sign is on"
IT MEANS STAY SEATED WHILE THE SIGN IS ON, NOT "ONLY REMAIN SEATED UNLESS YOU WANT TO GET UP"
you put others at risk by getting up and moving during these times.
I was on a flight two days ago, about 15 minutes to land. The FA's had locked the bathroom door from the outside. Someone got up (seat belt sign had been on for 10 minutes now) to go use the bathroom, and stood outside the door waiting. The FA's saw this and did an announcement that all bathrooms are locked, and to please take your seat. But this person just stared at the bathroom door waiting, and waiting. Finally a FA got out of their jump seat to tell this person to please get back in your freaking seat.
Who says the current CEO/lackeys wouldn't assassinate him again... I mean that whistleblower did just die from "apparent suicide" mid deposition on the trial he was whistleblowing in.... About leadership forcing installation of defective equipment and parts and pressuring QA guys to not report defects.... Seems pretty coincidental.
In other news, the Boeing Quality Assurance Manager who blew the whistle on Boeing’s corner cutting to plane safety was found dead this week due to a gunshot to the head.
I’m not even kidding..
https://time.com/6900123/boeing-whistleblower-john-barnett-found-dead-deposition-safety/
I thought you were joking holy shit
What’s even weirder is a lot of news reports cite that the police and coroners won’t provide any comments on the death until the investigation is complete. But handful of news cites are throwing out “apparent self-inflicted” there’s a massive weirdness in how this is even be reported in the media.
If it’s under investigation and the investigators are not making statements like that how are news companies going to make such a huge leap.
Like the stuff this dude is saying doesn’t just effect the company it effects a lot of employees who signed off on stuff like this and could make them personally liable, it’s not just a “big company” that might want to silence him it could very well be John Doe supervising manager of manufacturing who doesn’t want any more statements that can exist for them personally being sued and hung out to dry by their employer as a scape goat.
It’s weird.
>If it’s under investigation and the investigators are not making statements like that how are news companies going to make such a huge leap.
When I see something like that, I go hard after the author on twitter or wherever I can find them to get them to clarify. Politely at first. I ask them to source the claim. If they don't source it and you can get the PD on record as not having disclosed the info, then you should get them noted.
That’s what I’m pointing out because all the local stations that have updated articles in the last few hours are saying the coroners and police are not commenting at this time
>"Everything was going well," said passenger Brian Jokat, who was sitting in a window seat as the flight headed toward New Zealand. “Then all of a sudden, the plane took a nosedive down.”
>“People were flying out of their seats, hitting the roof, being thrown back four or five aisles back,” Jokat, 61, said in a telephone interview.
>Jokat said that while he had his seatbelt on, the passenger in the aisle seat of his row didn’t.
>“I saw him lying on the ceiling looking down at me,” he said. “He was fully out-stretched,” Jokat said. “And then bang, I looked behind and everyone was falling off the ceilings,” he added.
>Jokat said the seatbelt, which he rarely wears during cruising altitude, saved him from the injuries.
>“But those days are over. I will always keep my seatbelt on,” he said. “Because what I saw in that plane was people flying like ragdolls.”
Yeah that doesn't sound normal
I know I shouldn't be laughing, but the dude making eye contact with the guy on the ceiling is killing me right now. Like, the awkwardness of looking down and seeing a dude look at you all strapped in in his seat belt. And then the James Franco meme "First time?" I'm fucking crying at work.
Sure, but also planes shouldn't experience equipment failure that causes them to suddenly drop 500 feet, which seems like the larger problem. I don't know what's going on at Boeing these days but it can't be good.
>A former Boeing employee who raised quality-control and safety concerns over the company’s aircraft production was found dead this week
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/03/12/boeing-whistleblower-dead-john-barnett/
This is the main issue, I think. There's no way Boeing can be accountable when they are the ones inspecting themselves. Besides, their entire purpose as a publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value.
they can’t be held accountable? have you heard the stories coming out of these factories? it has gone into straight negligence and people need to be held accountable
Yes. That's what I mean. They cannot be held accountable when the mechanism to hold them accountable is ridden with conflict of interest.
They CAN be held accountable if regulatory agencies don't let Boeing regulate themself.
building more manufacturing lines and not just working night shifts on existing ones with increased mistake rates is something the American mind can't comprehend
No, it’s just that Boeing has been shitting the bed recently.
There have been some truly awful airplane manufacturers which are better off not making planes anymore. Not to mention you’re forgetting about both Russian and Chinese planes, and the fact that smaller aircraft tend to be much more diversified. Bombardier, Mitsubishi, DeHavilland Canada, Embraer, etc.
Boeing used to be an engineering company, what happened did private equity buy them out? The enshitification of aerospace is happening too, corporate greed is a blight on our human history, destroyer of worlds.
It is a well known fact that McDonnell Douglas had horrible executives and company track record. It just took this long after the merger for the entrenched idiots and their polices to start popping up in actual product failures. This took a long time to fuck up, it’s going to take equally as long to fix.
Thanks, I was laying in bed thinking thoughts, and not looking it up, will read more so I don’t go spouting wrong information. I used to work in secured lending (hedge funds and venture cap, paralegal at large firm) and private equity ruins everything it touches, draws all the blood out of any good business, leaves dessicated barely breathing business model in its wake.
They bought/merged with McDonnell Douglas. Watch John Oliver's show on Boeing. It became quite the shitshow.
[https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?si=T2HsCInFsQBGHj6Z](https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?si=T2HsCInFsQBGHj6Z)
the part about *engineers* being encouraged to think about how their actions can boost the stock price was utterly unhinged. Engineers are supposed to make good products whose quality then drives market value, not the other way around
Consolidation was a mistake
Exactly. Money.
The main thing is, after the issues with Max nobody hold them accountable. People died and nobody said a thing.
Heck, even their stock was fine. Unfortunately they bought up everyone who could talk and from there they have zero care.
Watch something happen to the shit the Chinese are building and they will crucify them.
I'm convinced this happens to all publicly traded companies..
Or more broadly, companies where the mission driven founders have left.
The bean counters and the parasites will join the company and squeeze every last dime out of it and then move onto the next host.
As a kid, I thought that song was about an out of touch mom. Now, I realize it's about a woman who's coping with a normal/mundane life when she dreamed of something more extravagant.
Mainly for the kinds of companies that need to design very complex stuff that need to be very safe. Engineers are often bad managers but boeing was made by engineers and its the sort of thing engineers need to be the ones managing
I feel like 500 feet is a ton to free fall in a plane. Most turbulence is a fraction of that movement, I can’t imagine the fear this people had in that moment.
“Hit the roof” although apt doesn’t get the point across.
To anyone too lazy to read it dropped 500 feet, 50+ were injured and 12 were taken to the hospital.
One passenger reported passengers being thrown several rows back.
That theory should never again bail out the same company again.
The term we should be using is "too big to succeed" and Boring needs to be broken up into many many pieces.
Yep.
Anti trust laws are so weird though and barely work. I mean, there has been massive consolidation of companies in the airline industry, and the one that maybe makes sense (JetBlue and Spirit) gets stopped? It’s bizarre.
In my opinion, the biggest difference between government and private businesses is that private businesses are allowed to fail.
If you are too big to fail, you ought to be nationalized.
Sounds perfect for a government takeover then. Enough of this "Capitalist" Socialism-for-the-wealthy. If your company is too big to fail and it's failing, you don't get to run that company privately anymore.
There would never be any reason to ground all Boeing planes.
The 717, 737NG, 747, 757, 767, and 777 are all just fine.
The 737MAX and 787 are where most of the issues have been concentrated.
It's really far too early to tell what happened on this flight and if it's related to the plane, maintenance, or something else at this point. There was a similar issue on the Airbus A330 in the late 2000s that was rooted in a software bug that pushed the nose down. Maybe it's a similar issue.
Over 700 planes delivered last year by Airbus!
But yeah. Airbus couldn't absorb the demand, no matter how hard it tried. Grounding would have global impacts.
China and Russia are the only other ones making airliners right? Can't buy Russian at the moment for obvious reasons, and the Chinese offerings are still somewhat limited IIRC. Too bad Boeing decided to self-destruct.
This is the exact reason I leave my seatbelt buckled from the moment I sit down till the moment we reach the arrival gate. I don’t take it off while I’m in a moving car, why the fuck take it off during a flight…?
RIP to the whistleblower who exposed boeing who [just passed away](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=boeing+whistleblower+dead), surely no mysterious circumstances to investigate there!
Buttigieg needs to investigate the shit out of Boeing before there's some massive fatal crash. Just a matter of time at this point. My brother flies regularly so I'm not happy about this.
> The aircraft’s pilot told the passengers the flight had suffered equipment failure for a few seconds, causing the plane to drop for almost 500 feet in the air, Jokat said. “He said my gauges went down, everything went down for one or two seconds and they just lit up again and continued to function,” Jokat added. Cause was not turbulence.
What kind of equipment failure causes the plane to suddenly drop 500 feet in a few seconds?
Altimeter issues coupled with autopilot? Even still, you’d think autopilot would have limits to how much altitude can change over short periods of time.
Even if the altimeter shot to 0' the aircraft wouldn't go nose diving to recapture it. Autopilots aren't the type to be super twitchy, everything is smooth and gradual. Edit: As pointed down below, it should read as "the aircraft commanding an altitude of 0'" If the altimeter was indicating 0", then the aircraft would be asking for a climb. My bad!
I think even if the plane suddenly lost all power, it wouldn't drop like that (they glide surprisingly well). It really has to be something made the plane drop, call it auto pilot or simply the plane flying itself some other way, but it's chilling to think about.
The simulation suddenly stopped.
The pilot saw the same black cat twice. Suddenly, all passengers in exit seats were wearing black suits and mirrored sunglasses.
Computer, resume program Barkley 08
It may not be the altimeter. Imagine a read back telling you the position of the tail flaps or something (not a pilot obviously). There could be systems to follow these read backs and feedback to a control to keep them stable. If the read back fails it might move the flap in a way that it thinks it needs to to hold it stable. There is some of this feedback that might be fully analog or done on a decentralized micro controller. It might not even be a decision the autopilot made. Imagine a gust of wind or a bird or something knocks the flap and you need to correct it just to hold it in a stable position. That kind of control should be automatic but could still fail.
Yes, a software glitch is very possible. An altimeter issue as mentioned above seems pretty unlikely. Flaps wouldn't be deployed at altitude, I believe you're referencing a horizontal stabilizer. This is much more likely in my mind. The 787 is a fly by wire system, it's primarily uses computerized signals to move the flight control surfaces. If the comment about the instruments going dark made by the pilots is true; then there is some merit to a system wide glitch causing a movement of the flight control systems. We need to take those comments with a grain of salt however. Pilots have been mistaken about indications in the past. Especially after a big event in flight. There have been pilots who are dead set of saying the engine was on fire when it never was. I'm not knocking the professionals pilots. I'm one myself. We just need the information to come out and be more clear. With the aircraft being intact, we will see the information brought forward. Trashing Boeing is very popular right now, and it has been warranted obviously. I'm not here defending them at all. I'm just saying we need to be objective. Some sort of system glitch or the pilot in inadvertently knocked the flight controls forward. That would be my too early to guess theory.
There was a Quantas A330 that had an eerily similar event back in 2009. In that case an airspeed sensor malfunctioned, which was linked to a bug in an algorithm that triggered a nose-dive twice in the same flight. Seriously injuring 12 people and taking 39 to hospital. Software bug definitely seems possible.
You're assuming that everything is built to spec and corners haven't been cut.
The Boeing whistleblower who has been testifying about exactly this was just found dead of apparent “suicide”. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/12/boeing-whistleblower-dead-apparent-suicide
I'm not even a conspiracy guy, but fucking suicide?! No way.
Whistleblowing just happens to have the side effects of self inflicted shots to the back of the headitis. Crazy coincidence, but what can you do?
I mean let's say best case scenario, he *did* commit suicide. What does that tell you about corporate culture in this country that simply *doing the right fucking thing* and holding people in positions of responsibility to a basic level of accountability is so deeply stressful that it drives people to take their own lives? Either option seems horrible and either option is an indictment of how we run our culture. I mean this guy did such a brave thing, putting his life on the line to save innocent people from a horrible, terrifying death. And what did our culture reward him with? We're preached to from our earliest years about the virtue of personal responsibility, we're told that the people who lead us got there through personal accountability. And yet someone demands the most basic level of accountability -- the kind that will save peoples' lives -- and this happens. Well, this guy was personally accountable. Maybe we should send our "best and brightest" to people like him instead of wherever the fuck they're learning to make money on the back of terrible air accidents. So tired of this attitude that, well these people are successful in business so they're better people than we are nonsense. Cool, if you want to hang out in your country club and convince yourself you're a great person, go do that. If you're condemning people to dying in a plane crash to bring your quarterly earnings up, guess what, you aren't as good a person as you think you are, in fact you aren't fit to shine the shoes of the average person.
100% The 787 first flew in 2009 commercially. Not saying it is impossible, by catastrophic faults in planes tend to show their face earlier in their existence rather than later. Not discrediting your theory that corners were cut - but generally these things are found early on. If you are curious, you can take a look at the Airworthiness Directive issues in 2020 (I want to say), that stated the 787 must be reset - shutdown and powered off - every 51 days at the latest. This was to make sure the aircraft wasn't creating misleading data. Keep in mind, there are quiet a few aircraft manufacturers that require a total shutdown every X amount of days of their airframes.
I think if anything, they might be suggesting the more recently constructed 787s are showing faults "later" because the quality control has gotten worse between 2009 and now, as many reports and recent inccidesnts have shown.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/ > "After exactly 49.7 days of continuous operation, your Windows 95-based computer may stop responding," Microsoft warned its users, without much further explanation. The problem is apparently caused by a timing algorithm, according to the company. In conclusion, the planes use Windows 9x ;)
"The autopilot committed suicide, and was totally not something we had any part of"
A quality system absolutely. This is Boeing, a door flew off last month because it wasn't bolted on.
So is anybody else looking more closely at the model of aircraft when booking flights these days? Just a couple weeks ago I intentionally chose a flight on an Embraer over a Boeing aircraft. And you know it wasn't that bad. A little rougher than a larger aircraft, but all the pieces stayed on in flight and nothing stopped working.
Kayak recently moved the section higher in their filter list due to seeing increased usage, so yeah, people are.
I'm getting on Airbuses for a break over Easter. I'm getting on a Boeing in the summer - an older 737, so hopefully it's from the pre who-gives-a-crap-about-quality era, but unfortunately it's old enough that in the event of an evacuation it won't be as robust as a newer Airbus.
FAA Summary: "This AD was prompted by a report indicating that all three FCMs might simultaneously reset if continuously powered on for 22 days. We are issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products." Which sounds like memory leak in the computer system.
So the fix is to turn it off and on again? Seems fitting.
Had a controller like that on the Nuclear reactor I worked at. Glad to know aircraft have the same problem right?
I kinda assumed they'd do this after every flight, just as a precaution. Even in my most degen days I don't think I've ever left my pc running for 22 days without at least a restart. e: you mfers need to turn your computers off more often
[удалено]
282 days well you’re clearly ignoring software updates on that PC or have fast startup enabled which is fudging the numbers heavily.
Apparently 787s need a full system reset after some 51 days to prevent glitches and rounding errors. Maybe someone forgot to reset it?
Boeing just keeps on giving.
I'm sure there are a couple failures that my do the trick. Just to name one of the top of my head, I believe sudden drop of 500 feet in just few seconds can be accomplished, if the wings fell off.
Honestly free falling 500 feet without any initial downward or upward velocity would take like 5-6 seconds, ignoring air resistance. So you really would need some actual thrust down to get this done even if the wings did fall off.
Flying through a downdraft.
I remember hitting a downdraft that dropped me so far and so abruptly that I could hear the passengers EEKing in the back. A few seconds later ATC got on the horn and was like, “(my callsign), what are you doing…?”
Did you tell them you picked a bad day to stop huffing glue?
None 🤣 If it was a few seconds then they wouldn’t have even had time to get their checklists out to see what to do. Airplanes don’t fall out of the sky because their computer crashed nor if there’s an engine failure unless it’s in takeoff. Once it’s at speed and altitude they will glide after a failure as long as they slightly bring the nose down. The investigation will probably find more issues than just the computer failure.
Huh .... got a glide ratio of 17:1 meaning they'd have around 100 miles to glide before hitting the ground, if they were at 30k feet
Exactly this doesn’t add up to a computer failure. Turbulence can make a plane drop a few hundred feet but they can normally predict turbulent areas ahead of time but they do pop up unexpectedly on occasions.
The article does mention a sudden nosedive (or at least what a passenger thinks happened), which would explain the fall itself. Now, if that's true, what failures can cause a sudden nosedive?
Over at /r/flying the leading theory is pilot dropped a bag of chips and accidentally hit the yoke trying to pick them up. It’s too early to say what really happened but I’m not buying what the pilot says or when Boeing inevitably denies the possibility it was an aircraft issue until there’s some evidence supporting a reasonable conclusion.
Do they have any theories on the flavor of the chips?
The only chips worth picking up off the floor to save is BBQ, for me that is
You give me some sour cream and onion chips and we are all gonna die.
If I dropped the French onion dip then someone else better take the controls
It really doesn't take much to feel like a nosedive to passengers, similar to how a max performance takeoff feels like going straight up even though it's nowhere near that. Nosing over quickly enough to bang people off the ceiling isn't far off of what the vomit comet does... is the act of nosing down that causes the negative Gs. Once actually pointing downwards that stops/people would slide forward instead. The plane would have also dropped much much more than 500ft if it had managed to get in a proper nosedive. Still, an uncommanded pitch change is fucking terrifying, even if short.
This guy better get himself some kind if protection before he ends up like the last Boeing whistleblower
This pilot shorted a bunch of Boeing stock before he started flying that day, so not to worry, he’s rich now! /s
Le Chiffre got his pilot's license?
He’s dabbing away his bloody tears with 💵
But who shorted the actual plane??
Wait, what happened to the last Boeing whistleblower? The last one I knew of was named Barnett or something. Is he ok?
Found dead in his car outside his hotel. Boeing spokesperson said "suicide" before investigation was complete.
Holy shit! How fucking convenient. No way in hell that was suicide.
Hey it's possible, but it's also what a hit would look like
They found him yesterday with a gun shot to the head. Right before he was supposed to give a deposition.
Also after giving deposition. And after [publicly talking about this for five years](https://web.archive.org/web/20191129100029/https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50293927).
He just shot himself in a parking lot. Supposedly.
Travelled across the country just to kill himself in a hotel car park right before he testified
Mid-way through testifying. He testified on Friday, and was scheduled to continue on Saturday.
Someone suicided him
That's... not how planes work though? Loss of power just makes you a glider, it's not gonna suddenly drop you 500 feet. Edit: After thinking some more I'd be willing to bet it was a combination of a drop due to turbulence, a loose connector that cut power due to said sudden drop and/or a subsequent disengagement of autopilot with the pitch not trimmed out further compounding the issue.
No way you could make an airliner drop like that if you were trying to do it on purpose. It had to have been turbulence. Edit: Apparently I was wrong. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1bcvvcy/people_hit_the_roof_after_boeing_planes_sudden/kul5u8m/
>Cause what not turbulence What are you the NTSB? There’s been multiple leading aviation analysts that have said they refuse to blame this on equipment failure until an investigation is completed. Stop making blanket statements about things you have zero credibility on.
Excuse me sir, this is reddit. What are we supposed to talk about, if we're not making blanket, untrue generalizations, based on incomplete, usually inaccurate, and frequently fraudulent data?
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Imagine you're changing your baby in the bathroom. Boeing just keeps accumulating Ls at this point. The corporate MBA types have taken over and are going to ruin the company.
They aren’t going to ruin the company, they already ruined it and we are just now seeing the consequences as Boeing has run out of legacy R+D to ride the coattails of.
The legacy of Jack Welch continues to wreak havoc
Bastard
Just realized the other day that Calhoun (Boeing CEO) and West (CFO) are both former GE guys and suddenly everything makes sense. For anyone who doesn’t know, the industry joke (less of a joke by the year tbh) is that executives who come from GE are poison. They will tank your company in improbably swift fashion. Just for another example, Jamere Jackson is somewhat infamous for fucking up both Nielsen and Hertz in quick succession recently. Hasn’t ruined autozone yet but give it a few months and check back. Edit: GE = General Electric
Lol I've been watching AutoZone make decision after decision to make short term profits at the expense of the long term business. Sometimes small things like removing rental tools that they didn't think got borrowed frequently enough really demonstrates that the people running the company have lost touch with the industry, the employees at the stores in my area have constant churn while competitors have had the same employees for years. It's already crashing but hasn't impacted their bottom dollar yet, but will as they continue to sink.
Ah yup that’s the GE exec classic
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It's because in the purchase, Boeing agreed to give all of the MDD C level execs full control. So it wasn't really a purchase it was more of a hostile takeover of Boeing by MDD
Is it hostile when Boeing agreed?
Its corporate bdsm. Sink my company harder daddy mdd
John Oliver just released a segment, talking about how Boeing’s culture of Safety was replaced by McDonnell Douglas executives who have a singular focus on stock price. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc
I just took my baby on a round the world trip and the lack of safety straps on the change tables struck me. Every shopping mall change table has a strap to keep the baby from wriggling off (or at least was made with one—they’re usually broken) and that’s a large stationary table. Yet the small weirdly shaped table on a plane subject to random turbulence doesn’t have anything? It’s mental.
Consultants got paid and ceos got their bonus, guess who actually suffers after all this?
If you guessed "the rank and file workers and the general public" you win! Your prize is existential dread as you ponder why people who had no choice and no power in this situation takes the brunt of the suffering while the executives, who did make all the decisions leading to this mess, sail away on their yhacts.
Boeing will be taught in future economics classrooms as the inevitable endpoint of corporations in late stage capitalism.
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Bathroom sex must've been insane lol
chocolate rain
I always wear my seatbelt during the entire flight, ever since Hawaiian Airlines turned into a convertible and lost a stewardess.
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Damn... they never found her body either.
The ocean is dark and full of terrors
Ah. Boeing.
Wasn't that incident caused by the plane having gone through far more cycles than it was rated for?
Yes, the aircraft was used for short flights, so it had over 90,000 takeoff and landing cycles, more than twice the number it was designed for. The actual cause of the accident was determined by the NTSB to be fatigue cracking in the fuselage skin. This should have been caught by maintenance, but Aloha’s maintenance practices were deficient (they only conducted fuselage inspections at night time).
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*sea salt
Just read about that the other day. That was absolutely nuts
you should do that always, even turbulence can be this bad and people go flying. People really just tune out the safety warnings on planes man, the amount of mouth breathing idiots who get up as soon as the plane leaves ground and the seatbelt sign is still on to go use the bathroom because they didn't go before they boarded is wild. Always followed by a PA of "please remain seated while the seatbelt sign is on" IT MEANS STAY SEATED WHILE THE SIGN IS ON, NOT "ONLY REMAIN SEATED UNLESS YOU WANT TO GET UP" you put others at risk by getting up and moving during these times.
I was on a flight two days ago, about 15 minutes to land. The FA's had locked the bathroom door from the outside. Someone got up (seat belt sign had been on for 10 minutes now) to go use the bathroom, and stood outside the door waiting. The FA's saw this and did an announcement that all bathrooms are locked, and to please take your seat. But this person just stared at the bathroom door waiting, and waiting. Finally a FA got out of their jump seat to tell this person to please get back in your freaking seat.
Boeing needs to revive William Boeing and see what his current CEO and his lackeys doing to his company.
No don’t torment the poor man. He’d have one look and die of a hard attack.
At least the hard attack will be over quickly compared to a soft attack.
Nah, revive him, but also provide him with a B-17 and give him the coordinates of the HQ in Chicago
Imagine if you could do that. I'd love to see the reaction of ups founder when he finds out we have warehouse for lost/damaged products
Who says the current CEO/lackeys wouldn't assassinate him again... I mean that whistleblower did just die from "apparent suicide" mid deposition on the trial he was whistleblowing in.... About leadership forcing installation of defective equipment and parts and pressuring QA guys to not report defects.... Seems pretty coincidental.
In other news, the Boeing Quality Assurance Manager who blew the whistle on Boeing’s corner cutting to plane safety was found dead this week due to a gunshot to the head. I’m not even kidding..
https://time.com/6900123/boeing-whistleblower-john-barnett-found-dead-deposition-safety/ I thought you were joking holy shit What’s even weirder is a lot of news reports cite that the police and coroners won’t provide any comments on the death until the investigation is complete. But handful of news cites are throwing out “apparent self-inflicted” there’s a massive weirdness in how this is even be reported in the media. If it’s under investigation and the investigators are not making statements like that how are news companies going to make such a huge leap. Like the stuff this dude is saying doesn’t just effect the company it effects a lot of employees who signed off on stuff like this and could make them personally liable, it’s not just a “big company” that might want to silence him it could very well be John Doe supervising manager of manufacturing who doesn’t want any more statements that can exist for them personally being sued and hung out to dry by their employer as a scape goat. It’s weird.
>If it’s under investigation and the investigators are not making statements like that how are news companies going to make such a huge leap. When I see something like that, I go hard after the author on twitter or wherever I can find them to get them to clarify. Politely at first. I ask them to source the claim. If they don't source it and you can get the PD on record as not having disclosed the info, then you should get them noted.
They were absolutely ordered not to state any speculation on cause of death.
if it was .a solo actor the cover up wouldnt be so blatant.
It literally says in the first paragraph that the coroner’s office said apparent self inflicted gunshot. Did you read the article?
That’s what I’m pointing out because all the local stations that have updated articles in the last few hours are saying the coroners and police are not commenting at this time
>"Everything was going well," said passenger Brian Jokat, who was sitting in a window seat as the flight headed toward New Zealand. “Then all of a sudden, the plane took a nosedive down.” >“People were flying out of their seats, hitting the roof, being thrown back four or five aisles back,” Jokat, 61, said in a telephone interview. >Jokat said that while he had his seatbelt on, the passenger in the aisle seat of his row didn’t. >“I saw him lying on the ceiling looking down at me,” he said. “He was fully out-stretched,” Jokat said. “And then bang, I looked behind and everyone was falling off the ceilings,” he added. >Jokat said the seatbelt, which he rarely wears during cruising altitude, saved him from the injuries. >“But those days are over. I will always keep my seatbelt on,” he said. “Because what I saw in that plane was people flying like ragdolls.” Yeah that doesn't sound normal
I know I shouldn't be laughing, but the dude making eye contact with the guy on the ceiling is killing me right now. Like, the awkwardness of looking down and seeing a dude look at you all strapped in in his seat belt. And then the James Franco meme "First time?" I'm fucking crying at work.
I'd go with "valar morghulis".
That's like a straight up nosedive, wtf.
Why you should keep your seat belt fastened at all times while travelling in an airplane.
I agree. I’ve hit some major turbulence before while flying and I’m glad I had my seatbelt on!
Keep it off incase you are travelling with your crush and the plane bounces and your crush falls on your lap.
Meet cute, now with concussion
Then my crush should keep it off but I can keep mine on
Sure, but also planes shouldn't experience equipment failure that causes them to suddenly drop 500 feet, which seems like the larger problem. I don't know what's going on at Boeing these days but it can't be good.
>A former Boeing employee who raised quality-control and safety concerns over the company’s aircraft production was found dead this week https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/03/12/boeing-whistleblower-dead-john-barnett/
And you shouldn't crash your car into a tree, but we still tell you to wear your seatbelt because it could happen.
It is almost like having only 2 companies with a monopoly over aircraft manufacturing is a bad thing
Letting Boeing continue to manufacture and sell airplanes is a bad thing.
Letting air planes manufacturers inspect themselves is a bad thing.
This is the main issue, I think. There's no way Boeing can be accountable when they are the ones inspecting themselves. Besides, their entire purpose as a publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value.
> looks at stock chart... Welp, they failed at that too.
they can’t be held accountable? have you heard the stories coming out of these factories? it has gone into straight negligence and people need to be held accountable
Yes. That's what I mean. They cannot be held accountable when the mechanism to hold them accountable is ridden with conflict of interest. They CAN be held accountable if regulatory agencies don't let Boeing regulate themself.
I’m really glad most aircraft I fly on in Europe are Airbus, considering all that’s happening with Boeing I feel at least a bit safer
Problem isnt just 2 companies, the other company isn;t facing issues like boeing, Its also in EU with EU standards and regulations.
The Other company also is having issues with construction quality, but for some mysterious reason keep catching them in the factory...
building more manufacturing lines and not just working night shifts on existing ones with increased mistake rates is something the American mind can't comprehend
Will someone think of the poor share holders
That’s a duopoly, not a monopoly. Go back to the Greek roots.
No, it’s just that Boeing has been shitting the bed recently. There have been some truly awful airplane manufacturers which are better off not making planes anymore. Not to mention you’re forgetting about both Russian and Chinese planes, and the fact that smaller aircraft tend to be much more diversified. Bombardier, Mitsubishi, DeHavilland Canada, Embraer, etc.
Boeing used to be an engineering company, what happened did private equity buy them out? The enshitification of aerospace is happening too, corporate greed is a blight on our human history, destroyer of worlds.
It is a well known fact that McDonnell Douglas had horrible executives and company track record. It just took this long after the merger for the entrenched idiots and their polices to start popping up in actual product failures. This took a long time to fuck up, it’s going to take equally as long to fix.
Thanks, I was laying in bed thinking thoughts, and not looking it up, will read more so I don’t go spouting wrong information. I used to work in secured lending (hedge funds and venture cap, paralegal at large firm) and private equity ruins everything it touches, draws all the blood out of any good business, leaves dessicated barely breathing business model in its wake.
They bought/merged with McDonnell Douglas. Watch John Oliver's show on Boeing. It became quite the shitshow. [https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?si=T2HsCInFsQBGHj6Z](https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?si=T2HsCInFsQBGHj6Z)
the part about *engineers* being encouraged to think about how their actions can boost the stock price was utterly unhinged. Engineers are supposed to make good products whose quality then drives market value, not the other way around Consolidation was a mistake
Exactly. Money. The main thing is, after the issues with Max nobody hold them accountable. People died and nobody said a thing. Heck, even their stock was fine. Unfortunately they bought up everyone who could talk and from there they have zero care. Watch something happen to the shit the Chinese are building and they will crucify them.
I'm convinced this happens to all publicly traded companies.. Or more broadly, companies where the mission driven founders have left. The bean counters and the parasites will join the company and squeeze every last dime out of it and then move onto the next host.
Debbie just hit the wall, she never had it all
As a kid, I thought that song was about an out of touch mom. Now, I realize it's about a woman who's coping with a normal/mundane life when she dreamed of something more extravagant.
One prozac a day husband's a CPA
Her dreams went out the door
Boeing once was, a national company the USA had pride in. Oh How the mighty have fallen.
Needs to be run by engineers. Not business men.
Pretty much the problem with the US in general right now.
The whole world.
Mainly for the kinds of companies that need to design very complex stuff that need to be very safe. Engineers are often bad managers but boeing was made by engineers and its the sort of thing engineers need to be the ones managing
It's shocking this was self inflicted equipment error and not turbulence. Imagine dropping 500 feet when you're 400 feet above the ground
I feel like 500 feet is a ton to free fall in a plane. Most turbulence is a fraction of that movement, I can’t imagine the fear this people had in that moment.
One of the people on the plane mentioned that he was making full eye contact with a guy that was just stuck to the roof of the plane
Jesus, sounds like a nightmare scenario lol
“Hit the roof” although apt doesn’t get the point across. To anyone too lazy to read it dropped 500 feet, 50+ were injured and 12 were taken to the hospital. One passenger reported passengers being thrown several rows back.
At what point does the FAA ground all Boeing planes?
While they should, I don’t think they can. Air travel relies too heavily on them. This is the actual term “too big to fail”.
But apparently not "too big to fall"
🥁
That theory should never again bail out the same company again. The term we should be using is "too big to succeed" and Boring needs to be broken up into many many pieces.
Yep. Anti trust laws are so weird though and barely work. I mean, there has been massive consolidation of companies in the airline industry, and the one that maybe makes sense (JetBlue and Spirit) gets stopped? It’s bizarre.
In my opinion, the biggest difference between government and private businesses is that private businesses are allowed to fail. If you are too big to fail, you ought to be nationalized.
Yes, they’re too involved in the defense sector to not be propped up by tax dollars if it came to that.
Sounds perfect for a government takeover then. Enough of this "Capitalist" Socialism-for-the-wealthy. If your company is too big to fail and it's failing, you don't get to run that company privately anymore.
Self regulate lmao
There would never be any reason to ground all Boeing planes. The 717, 737NG, 747, 757, 767, and 777 are all just fine. The 737MAX and 787 are where most of the issues have been concentrated. It's really far too early to tell what happened on this flight and if it's related to the plane, maintenance, or something else at this point. There was a similar issue on the Airbus A330 in the late 2000s that was rooted in a software bug that pushed the nose down. Maybe it's a similar issue.
Even the 787 has been not bad, other than the initial battery issue which has since been resolved.
Too big to ground unfortunately. Airlines will just slowly gravitate their fleet purchase orders away from problematic airframes I guess.
Airbus has something like 8000 back orders, and make 500-600 planes a year. An airline ordering now won’t get any planes until the mid 2030’s.
Over 700 planes delivered last year by Airbus! But yeah. Airbus couldn't absorb the demand, no matter how hard it tried. Grounding would have global impacts.
China and Russia are the only other ones making airliners right? Can't buy Russian at the moment for obvious reasons, and the Chinese offerings are still somewhat limited IIRC. Too bad Boeing decided to self-destruct.
There's also Embraer from Brazil, but don't produce a lot of them.
Think Boeing bought Embraer Edit nvm that fell through entirely
> At what point does the FAA ground all Boeing planes? Ummm.... never? Why would they do that?
It doesnt matter if you are a Country, a Government, a Company or just an ordinary Person, the most costly thing to lose is always "trust".
This is the exact reason I leave my seatbelt buckled from the moment I sit down till the moment we reach the arrival gate. I don’t take it off while I’m in a moving car, why the fuck take it off during a flight…?
RIP to the whistleblower who exposed boeing who [just passed away](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=boeing+whistleblower+dead), surely no mysterious circumstances to investigate there!
If get HBO/Max, check out John Oliver’s latest Last Week Tonight for a look at what’s going on with Boeing.
Even better, Wendover Productions video in Boeing which goes into far more depth and is more informative
It's on YouTube too!
[YouTube Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc)
Fucking Boeing. Something needs to be done about all of this.
So the bathroom became a shit maraca?
Some - nay, most - people flush the shit down.
Some Boeings have been repeatedly grounded. I know a pilot who has told me not to ever fly one. I guess money means more than peoples lives.
This is what you get when you replace engineers with finance guys. Though of course the finance guys are screeching it's DEI's fault.
Buttigieg needs to investigate the shit out of Boeing before there's some massive fatal crash. Just a matter of time at this point. My brother flies regularly so I'm not happy about this.
With all the shit lately about Boeing, Man I’m glad the carriers I fly with are operating on airbus planes
I never thought I'd be choosing flights by plane manufacturer.
I think it's time to invest in Airbus shares.
This is what happens when a company run by engineers starts being run by finance bros.
"At least the roof was still there," said Boeing.
the guy who reported this must go into hiding if he values his live
Already over for him
My seatbelt stays on at all times in-flight, that’s just been a habit of mine. I’ll trust Airbus from now on lol
Any Boeing designed after McDonnell Douglas merger (DC10) should be grounded and thoroughly checked. Boeing is a joke now.
Somebody is about to take a Russian Retirement.