Quote: (03-12-2019 03:45 PM)Jetset Wrote:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-to-m...1552413489
From what I'm reading, the MCAS is a single-sensor design that relies on one stream of data to decide whether or not the aircraft is in danger of stalling, and Boeing knew this was the suspected issue from Lion Air but hadn't completed the software update to incorporate multiple sensors yet?
Uh...
Good luck in court, guys.
Single sensor causing potential catastrophe for the whole plane.
That is a systematic design flaw (hope they can fix it with software update), that can only be mitigated by human intervention which they prevented by not disclosing the necessary information.
According to NYT a big selling point of the new design was, that it doesn't require pilot training for the new model if pilots had old 747 experience.
To not disclose all necessary information and keep the selling point of "no pilot re-training required" was a decision of the business unit + project managers + marketing. Congratulations, you may have killed a few 100 people.
Anecdote: I receive similar requests in all my projects: "Make it better, but don't change too much. Especially this feature can't change, because the customers want to have it that way"
Result: A mediocre compromise that will neither achieve the best performance, nor the highest reliability, nor cost.
In case of an aircraft, one shouldn't compromise on reliability and safety.
This shouldn't apply to an aircraft in general, seems like it does to the new model:
The recent accidents can only be traced back to random failures or "infant mortality". I doubt wear is an issue for brand new planes, and they have regular maintenance schedules to ensure reliability.
Infant mortality occurs if the design is flawed in a severe way, or process and quality control for the assembly is so bad that a certain percentage of assembled products are actually a lot less reliable than the rest. Could also be caused by faulty specification limits.