Programmed by $9 per hour engineers.
That’s actually a shame to blame software issue on such design failure. they want to make cheap Indian contractors software writers as guilty guys… I don’t know if it’s going to have traction.
I agree Greg. The programmers wrote what they were told to write. Yet the concept was faulty from the start.
I honestly think that the damage to the 737 is far greater than to just the Max.And I am darn sure that this was what the Russian MAK was on about after the -500 and -900NG crashes when they wanted to ground the whole 737 fleet even then but got stopped by Rossavia. Both airplanes hit the ground in a total out of trim condition which was also hard to correct even without MCAS and, if misinterpreted as a runaway, not recoverable at all once the plane reached speeds where the manual trim does not work.
For me, frankly, any airplane which has a flight condition in which the normal manual trim does NOT work, i.e. you are not able to move it due to airloads, is an unairworthy design. This should NEVER have been certified, even on the initial airplane.
The Max just is the logical consequence of all of this, an airplane which relies on almost constant trim, which implies that it is instable as a whole and very hard to fly manually due to the massive pitch changes with those engines and which has an inherent design flaw which disallows the emergence backup to work when it is most needed borders on total disregard for safety. Frankly I don’t understand why legions of 737 crews never thought of questioning this and the rather shocking recovery procedure.
Yes, a good summary by Sullenberger.
Programmed by $9 per hour engineers.
The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
Well, yes, everybody knows by now that getting code knocked up in India is a waste of money in the long run and no good if you want a polished product, but it is hard to convince the accountants of that, when the quotes are so attractive. I know a guy in a UK insurance company where they did this and even after everything was chucked back to India half a dozen times it was still cheaper than getting it done in the West, where anybody who can write server side code is earning plenty of money. And if you are just doing some user interfaces for databases then it can work well enough.
I doubt Boeing got critical code done in India (normally you keep important stuff in-house, to protect the expertise, while contracting out the crap) but it certainly looks like they used Indian coders as a part of an offset trade deal to sell them some places 
Even if they externalized the actual coding, spec’ing, FMEAs and QA is still Boeing’s own responsibility.
Arne wrote:
Even if they externalized the actual coding, spec’ing, FMEAs and QA is still Boeing’s own responsibility.
And the problem doesn’t seem to be the software bug (which could be the result of poor coding) but design flaw.
I believe it was Timothy who predicted this would at some point blamed on (I quote from memory) “little brown pilots who don’t know what they are doing”. I’m a bit surprised to see this happen under the pen of William Langewiesche in the NY Times.
denopa wrote:
I’m a bit surprised to see this happen under the pen of William Langewiesche in the NY Times.
Well, I disagree with him. It might well be that the airmanship of the Ethiopian and Indonesian flight crews were substandard, but the root cause of the accidents are obviously several design mistakes by Boeing.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Very applicable to airline pilots. It’s always easy to blame them. The question arises: What exactly did they do differently on this particular flight compared to the thousands of flights they have done before. Airline pilots are very much an „end product“ of many instances. Would another pilot have saved the day and not crashed in the 737-8 Max?
Snoopy wrote:
Would another pilot have saved the day and not crashed in the 737-8 Max?
According to the NYT article that’s exactly what happened on the penultimate LionAir flight. A Jumpseater suggested to disable the electric trim, which they did and carried on w/o further incident.
As a side note, I have to say I am negatively surprised by this NYT article. Langewiesche normally is one of the few journos who understands aviation and writes well about it. While here he points out several systemic deficiencies, he just papers over the underlying decision making process at Boeing.
