The Questionable Engineering of the 737 Max
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KZhead has decided to limit this videos monetization because of "sensitive events". Bit ridiculous for an incident where no-one died. I can't afford to make videos if KZhead does this kind of thing. More reasons to sign up to Nebula go.nebula.tv/realengineering
This is ridiculous. Totally. I'm not a conspirationist, but I have hard time believing that youtube would have do something like that for any other company if that wasn't an american one. I'm pretty sure they'd not do this onto videos covering any of the airbus problems. Even though I'm too lazy to check that. So please don't quote me on that.
You should appeal
We don't believe for one second that one can't afford to make YT videos without YT ad revenue. Go get a real job. We don't NEED your videos, we don't NEED so damn many of them.
let those seals go
Welcome to post Russo Ukraine "free press"
Multiple crashes is bad for reputation... But RE calling your engineering 'questionable' instead of 'insane' is brutal
The bottom line is that the Max should never have been produced. It is an ancient dog of an aircraft, but it was pushed down the line because S.outhwest and R.yan wanted a cheap aircraft with lineal commonality with the 1967-certified B737. But in truth a 21st century aircraft should never have: a. Only one sensor controlling a safety system - because that is simply criminaI. Nobody except Boeing has had simplex systems in the last 70 years. b. A MCAS system that is able to stab-trim fully forwards - when it is known that the stab-trim is more powerful than the elevator. Thus the system has sufficient authority to overpower the pilot, and fly the aircraft into the ground. And if this authority was so easily reduced in the revised Max, then why was this not specified for the original Max? Were there occasional conditions where the system needed full trim authority (for a high-speed stall perhaps), and they are not telling us about it? c. A manual stab-trimmer that becomes mechanically locked if the pilots are pulling back on the control column - so that no manual re-trimming is possible. (The recommended roller-coaster recovery not being advisable at 2,000 ft, and never taught in the simulator.) d. An anti-stall device (MCAS) that operates on the stab-trimmer, rather than the control column. Look, dear Boeing, the design and mechanics of an anti-stall device are well-known, ever since the Bae Trident got into trouble. The solution is to push the control column forward, because once the nose is lowered and speed increases, the pressure can be released instantly. However, if you push forward on the stab-trim, you cannot easily pull out of the ensuing dive because you are still trimmed (fully) forward. (As several pilots have discovered, much to their dismay). So why did the FAA not recommend the complete scrapping of the MCAS system, and the installation of a stick-pusher? Cost? Time? Certification? Has the FAA skimped in their recommended MCAS fix? e. A master warning system that can be cancelled, so the warnings are extinguished and forgotten. Dimmed perhaps, but never extinguished. This must be the most stupid system ever invented for a commercial aircraft. f. Important warnings, like low engine oil pressure, that simply don’t appear on the master warning system. It does not take too much in the way of distractions or inattention to miss the fact that the engine is about to seize. g. Flight controls that cannot be separated if one side is jammed, because the two elevators are joined by a large torque tube. That would not be allowed on a modern aircraft. h. Engine overheat and fire warning lights that are not in the pilot’s line of sight, with no repeater lights on the thrust levers. Back in 1960 the handles and lights were on the coaming, where they should be, but they were relegated to the center console to make way for the MCP. That was a retrograde fix that should never have been allowed, at least not without repeater lights on the thrust levers. But what do the FAA care, as long as profits are still being made? i. Switches that are all identical, without even an attempt at colour coding. And the evidence for correct actioning is a light that goes bright and dim. Now between day and night, just what is bright and what is dim? Never in the history of aviation has there been such a stupid advisory/warning system. j. Switches which are all down for on - unless they are on the forward and center instrument panels, where they are up for on. Note that the all-important electric trim cutoff switches are down for off - the complete opposite to the majority of switches on a 737. There is so much room for confusion here, you could drive a semi-trailer through it. k. Paper checklists and emergency checklists. Now come on guys and gals, computer checklists were common back in the 80s, so why the hell are we still operating with bits of crumpled and torn paper? l. Mainwheels that retract into the hydraulics and flight-controls bay, where shredded tyres can inflict severe damage on a multitude of systems. Some airlines placed cages in the wheel-bay to protect the systems, but they did make routine maintenance difficult. And the hydraulic release fuses were hardly an adequate solution to a failed 1960s design. m. Center fuel pumps in the center tank, which can overheat and explode - and no auto-switching system was devised to prevent this. Has this been solved on the Max, because it was a butcher’s bin on the NG? n. Passenger doors that have to be armed by grovelling on the floor. This is rather like having a starter-handle on a modern car. o. Flight-deck windows that are smaller than an old-fashioned cruise-liner port-hole, because that was all they could make in 1950. Trouble is, we are in 2021 now. I could go on, but that is sufficient for now. See ‘Death Plane’ on the Russel Scott channel. I made these videos under the ‘Paul Spencer’ name, for employment reasons. These two videos have never been challenged. Ralph
Making it 'insane' could imply that it's either so great or extremely bad. Questionable directly implies that there's something wrong with it.
Them changing the centre of gravity by replacing the engines with new high bypass modern larger ones, and their flight control system fix for that, was utterly daft. Nuts. Etc..
@@RalphEllis American Airlines were about to buy the Airbus which had the high bypass engines so Boeing with the help of some high ranking politicians put pressure on AA to buy US made aircraft but they would only do so if they used high bypass engines. Rather than take the time and expense of designing a plane from scratch, Boeing took the cheap option all the way from rejigging an ancient design to taking shortcuts using software to mitigate the effect these bigger engines had on the old airframe design. Add to that the cutting of corners not requiring pilots to retrain or re-certification of aircraft along with getting rid of almost 1000 quality control staff, this was insanity from Boeing born out of greed. People should be in jail over a series of crashes and false statements of safety from Boeing executives to FAA hierarchy to politicians but it'll never happen.
@@RalphEllis I studied Aviation and the first thing we learned about aircraft certification was: No single points of failure for critical failure conditions. Having a system that nobody knows about and which may completely override pilot input depending on only 1!! sensor is the absolute opposite of that rule. I am still completely baffled how it was possible to even certify this. I know, the FAA 'outsources' certification work to engineers employed by Boing. I feel like this is ok, but if something happens, it is still the FAA's responsibility. Honestly, I think there should roll more heads... Why do we even have it if it is not held accountable for not doing its job?
I worked as a QA inspector for 13 years at Boeing. I was one of the first laid off and I knew it was because I was very vocal about the lack of quality because of increased demand. I specifically said in a town hall meeting that “Planes will start dropping if we don’t stop sacrificing quality to increase production”. Later that day I was written up for that comment. When I heard of the layoffs I started to prepare because I knew I was going and sure enough on the first day I was called in given my severance and escorted out of the building.
Your capitalist overlords would appreciate your sacrifice if they cared about you at all
I'm sorry for your experience, and appreciate that you tried. Respect.
It's a horrible situation to raise this smugness card here but I gotta say: vindicated.
Hope you have a copy of that writeup and sent it to the FAA.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 yeah save that shit and give boeing what they deserve.
RIP John Barnett, you will be remembered for standing up for what's right...
"Boeing killed the whistleblower" is high-status Qanon and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.
@@natowaveenjoyer9862 another whistleblower found dead
I think the fact that a Boeing not only didn't punish the executive responsible for bad management decisions but gave him a multimillion parting bonus says everything there is to be said about this company.
They are contractually bound to pay him the severance.
All companies do this now. Look at 2008 economic crash. All CEOs got bonuses to fix housing market😂
Bad management has never been a crime.
I'm no exec, just a wrench turner in my company, but if I'm fired for cause they have to pay severance per the contract they wrote. In the country I work, companies are responsible to pay the bank loans of the fired person for which they can use the severance to pay for.
In America you punish the little guy and reaard the fat cat. Elect me, I will jail the bigshots to keep them In line.
My ex wife just retired from Boeing after 42 years. She Originally was an engineer with McDonnell Douglas, and was "merged" into Boeing during what she termed "the reverse acquisition" (Where MD capital management wound up controlling Boeing). Her experience was that Boeing Was an Engineering-First driven company, and MD was always a Profit-First company. Some remember that the MD DC-10 had been involved in 55 accidents and incidents, including 32 hull-loss accidents, with 1,261 occupant fatalities. All because of the MD management culture of shareholder value, which they brought into Boeing.
That's it right there - McDonnell Douglas ruined a great company.
Then there was the MD DC-10 that crashed because a fan blade in the tail engine shattered, severing the hydraulic control lines.
Thanks for this insight. Very eye-opening!
@@KameraShyand at least the pilots managed to still save over 100 lives despite a complete failure of hydraulics. United Flight 232. The DC-10's design wasn't the initial causation there. But the DC-10's cargo door issue was, and entirely greed driven. 300+ dead in that Turkish Airlines crash, purely because of greed and corruption.
nothing to do with shareholder value, quite the opposite. It was culture of cronyism, laziness and collectivist cutting corners because they were not reliant on free market and capitalism and instead they live of taxpayers dollars and redistribution by federal government. Boeing on the other hand was taking care of shareholders and was subject to free market and capitalism which meant they had to do their job well and if they didn't they would loose money.
I think Boeing has more of a management problem that an engineering problem.
Absolutely. It was obvious this was the case the moment they decided to move their headquarters away from the production facilities. The whole culture involved in making that type of decision was an indicator of systemic issue with how they're handling their business
Nah, this is just another symptom of the capitalism problem heh
Oh you have no idea. It's so bad.
DEI is the Definitive Culprit
Why DEI when it comes to terrible, greedy and penny pinching top down management?@@TomikCsvk
I had dinner with an accountant years ago (yeah, my one night off..). It turned out to be one of the most gripping nights of my life. He worked for an airline. Companies like Boeing would issue frequent advisory maintenance fixes for each model of plane. His job was as an actuary, to calculate the cost of carrying out the fix for the fleet, against the possible cost should an accident occur as a result of not applying the fix. It was quite complex because time is a factor - how much downtime would there be etc, and which routes would be least or worst affected. Anyway the guy had us on the edges of our seats all night as he regaled us with stories of seats falling out of the backs of aeroplanes and engines catching fire. It was quite a night. My takeaway is that airlines have the value of our lives worked out to the nearest penny in an Excel spreadsheet.
They did that with the Ford Pinto, would cost $15 per car to fix it so Ford chose not to, knowing people would be burned alive. GM had similar car situations. Did not know that the airlines had these type of cost accountants on staff.
@@randyandtheretreads3144"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." One of my favorite quotes from Fight Club. People do not understand they are just a dollar sign to corporations. The world has no soul anymore. Mindless profits are destroying us because there is no moral foundation in which to actually maintain and uphold value and fair play.
Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
@@seemlesslies the world never had any soul. we thinking of "good old days" is just massive copium. it was far harder to get access to information before. if this was in 1960 you would not even know about this as most media was controlled by few giants. now its still the same but a small part of the population can still talk and still share information freely, ones who are tech literate enough.
@@seemlessliesI've been saying this for years and generally people agree. But then I point out that this is literally how capitalism is designed to work and suddenly *I'm* the bad one and not the soulless corporations calculating the value of human life down to a fraction of a cent.
Thank you for calling out that greed isn't limited to business majors. Anyone can get into an executive role, and greed can easily take over. When all you see are numbers on a spreadsheet, it's easy to take the human element out of play.
Or, you know, the shareholders insisting on infinite profit and growth, even an angel can be moral in the C-suite
8:11 I was slightly hopeful you were going to say "$62 million fine". The fact that man got off with that kind of money in his pocket after 300+ killed is nothing short of infuriating.
Company I used to work for had an apprentice die (pretty gruesome way)… They got fined £1 million, and order to pay the family £1 million. Which sounds decent, until you realise it’s only 2% of their annual net profits. So, £62 million for that many deaths is piss poor.
Previous executives are mostly to blame.
It's hush money so he doesn't tell regulators about all the other corners they were cutting.
That's management-culture for you. It is self-serving to the nines. Managers often try to justify their ridiculously high saleries by claiming that they "bear all the responsibility". But cases like that simply act to prove the obvious lie: If you suffer no negative consequences if things go wrong on your watch, then you DON'T bear the responsibility.
@@Jonathan_Doe_ I think you mis-understood. The $62m was what they paid their CEO when they fired him.
Used to work at Boeing. It’s all penny pinching management. Mechanics concerns are ignored and we’re worked to the bone to go faster so they can lay us off faster. Also, production was spread out far and wide to save money and caused quality to go to hell - the story of all companies, but terrifying when it happens to airplanes.
Production being spread is no issue when done right. See Airbus, they're made all over Europe and assembled in France. This is just the US' turbo-capitalism at work.
For a company that does such important things and has 18 billion in annual revenue it should be illegal for that type of behaviour to exist
Oh my God! Unfortunately qualify control is being ignored in favor of insane profits!
@@willpugh8865 You can thank Dodge v. Ford Motors co. For that. That's the lawsuit that in 1919 established that for companies, the interests of the shareholders came first, yes, before even that of the people, country (let alone employees lol). US companies have a legal duty to fuck everyone over if it increases quarterly profits.
All companies devolve to this due to capitalism in it's current form. Which I would argue, isn't capitalism at all. Hardworking engineers and technicians build a brand up through dedication and hard work. Businessmen move into to milk the company dry of all reputation by riding on the reputation of the past. All companies do this because the people that do it are massively reward with unfathomable amounts of money. They don't care that they are killing an American icon. These people are domestic economic series killers.
"The Questionable Death of John Barnett"
He was a threat to the shareholders.
As someone living in Wichita and working on aircraft cables for Spirit, its usually their management responsible for cost saving corner cutting. They demand we work with older, photocopied form boards (the blueprints for the cable, essentially) until we pressure them for months to send us vector graphic form boards, and these old photocopies are honestly some of the hardest documents I've ever had to interpret with fuzzy text and illegible dimensions. In addition, they give us documentation that you can't easily decipher without help when other companies, like Sundstrand, are capable of giving us easily discernable documentation. Its a miracle anything gets built to any kind of spec at my job with what they give us.
Daaamn
I work in nuclear power, and what's crazy is my industry derived a lot of its safety culture, corrective action programs, issue identification & resolution policies, and regulatory oversight management from the aviation industry, but they've loosened the reigns while we've stayed the course. The new push for 'innovate fast and get it to market' is a dumb way to run a business with this much at stake, and we've been seeing more and more examples of that recently
I agree, speed, bad quality assurance and innovation should not compromise safety. To me it seems that aviation is inherently so dangerous that serious steps have been taken to make it safe too the point becoming the safest way of travel. This has also happened with nuclear energy however it seems that ALARA is not the best safety target as radiation hormesis might be the actual mechanism for repair of damage by ionizing radiation. If this is true the radiation limits should be raised and the safety will still be the same. The other issue is how to deliver the maximum safety as it requires a certain ability to actually build which the us nuclear industry is lacking. Either way it is important to always think of safety first and not third.
And this is the reason why nuclear power is never completely safe, especially if it gets too common. People will loosen up, and no amount of tech can save you as long as humans are around.
@@cancan-wq9un Excellent comment. I don’t know what the solution is . Maybe Boeing should rip a finished aeroplane out of pre delivery & tear it apart piece by piece & see what other issues are hiding . If I travel in Australia it’s going to be on an 800 NG. Unless I want my knees up around my chin in an A320.
Bye bye B ad O ver E ngineering I nitiates N essasary G roundings
@@cancan-wq9un you clearly aren't an engineer.
People trying to fix an engineering issue with software is basically the new standard in every industry.
☝️ This. I got enough of this. Like there's physical fault, FIX IT. And it isn't just matter of "removing" error code.
When a physical device sometimes response with error when software requests call to it, the fix is very easy by updating the software into the way that will just retry request indefinitely until the device response with success signal. Now problem fixed.😋😋😋
I just commented the same thing...lol
Silicon Valley disease.
Not to mention boeing deciding to focus on diversity instead of the most qualified people for the job. But I'm sure that's just a coincidence
I know that its a very small chance of it happening. But from a passenger/customer's POV. I am now more comfortable and enjoyed flying airbus a lot more, especially the A380.
The A380's a dream of an experience. I love it. The plane isn't a "failure" - it's flagship proof that Airbus can trusted build the world's largest, most modern, most advanced passenger airliner ever. Airbus never made any profit (in fact, in relative terms, a small loss) but that didn't really harm the company - nor the operational reputation of this great, great airplane. If Boeing had made the A380, we'd be hearing about it for decades.
the problem is actually trying to cram 230 people into a 59 year old design for 124 people, the 737-100 which used a section of 707 fuselage (vintage 1954). Boeing, cutting corners for 70 years.
Boeing's managements needs to remember that they're not selling transportation; they're selling SAFE transportation. Air planes fall into the same category as elevators, in that people like the idea but are terrified of it in practice, and the only way it has found wide spread acceptance is by being so damn safe that people just had to get over their fears, but the backlash from this does have the possibility of affecting the entire airline industry.
They cannot hear you over the sound of their money.
You mean McDonnel Douglas?
If the market works the way it's supposed to, this means fewer flights taking off, airlines taking less profit, and eventually lower fees to try and lure people back. Win-win, really.
@@_PatrickOmore like over the sound of inclusion and diversity
@@ralphmarx7554 the problem is a transition in eras. Before confiscatory double-taxation of corporate profits forced companies to invest in long term growth while effective regulation ensured maintenance of basic quality standards. Now deregulation and self-regulation are all too common while greed-is-good is the rule unleashed by tax cuts on corporations and the top income of the wealthy, so companies have to strip mine their operations for every bit of profit they can or corporate raiders will buy them out and break them up.
I work in automotive as an engineer for drivetrain systems dealing with new product launches and established drivetrain systems. This problem is not specific to Boeing or Aerospace. Over the past 3 years there has been massive layoffs of support functions like Quality, Engineering, and even Maintenance in my facility. Everyone has 3 jobs, and many have quit because of it. Theres a huge push to get critical parts as cheap as possible, and nothing gets done to improve the design or integrity of the parts without a cost savings. It all started with the financial and logistical turmoil during 2020 and 2021, and has just continued afterwards.
hmm lack of proper training sounds like improperly installed not good not good at all.
It's the same in software. I am a dev and they fired all test engineers and now they only rely on us to write automated tests. Needless to say we had a lot of PROD incidents due to "edge cases" which at this point mean everything besides the basic success cases.
@@codyrap95 Tell me about it lol, I work in QA and the amount of corners management expect cut or put on devs by not having enough QA and say "it'll be fine" is just silly
That must be why Windows Updates sucks anymore and causes more problems that good. When Satya Nadella took over they laid off all the people that knew what they were doing,hired cheap foreigners and we get a less stellar product. I’ve had to do about a dozen system restores in the past three years to fix problems caused by Windows Updates. Never happened under Bill Gates,updates used to be exciting and beneficial.
lives are risked so a small group of people can just have bigger yachts, more expensive cars & vacation homes. all of these issues are symptoms of greed.
When you get our country's leaders announcing on national TV that "Greed is good", what do you expect? The world is run by bean-counters who work for big businesses and they know the price of everything but the value of nothing!
I worked over thirty years in Maintenace. Most inspection routes were just signed off and never completed because management told us not to worry about doing routes. Just sign them off as completed. The more routes signed off as completed, the larger the management's bonus. Grunts didn't get bonuses. When people would ask why I was doing the routes, I would tell that if we were an airline our planes would be falling out of the skies. It was a good thing we were a processing center. I have talked to airline mechanics over the years, and they have had similar stories. I don't fly anymore. Maintenace problems are usually traced back to bad management.
Managers are almost by default incompetent.
Geneva Airport Maintenance guys said the very same thing... Same goes with trains of the national company here... These people are criminals... Probably part of the natural 2% of psychopath ratio in the population. I personally saw 500'000 CHF of citizen taxes be stolen by the army with just two signatures, one was mine, on fake helicopter instruments change reports that actually never happend in reality... We were forced to sign by "some manager". This is all a great world we get from the past generation, so lovely to exist on this planet in 2024...
The video sladerously called out Muilenburg as the CEO for boeing during this. The CEO of boeing from 2005 to 2015 was a business moron named James McNerney. This guy outsourced everything at boeing. Spirit aerosystems was spun off as a separate company the first year he was CEO. The video completely ruined itself by not calling out the guy who did this to boeing. It took 10 years to screw boeing up. Muilenburg was used as a fall guy and then replaced by another crappy businessman. The current CEO is the one cutting inspectors. James McNerney stepped down as CEO 7 months before the first test flight of the 737 max. He knew it was crap and ran just before it started flying.
@@_PatrickO I'm glad somebody said it... It felt as dumb as apologetics. The neoliberal era of neoclassical economics made these business types, and they are ruining the world. And possibly killing any future for the human race. (It was afterall the neoclassical economists who were the ones doing the most egregious climate denialism in the 90's. That all the politicians then listened to as experts. The same economics that gets low level taught to these business morons)
@@_PatrickO if McNerney knew it was crap and ran just before it started flying, then Muilenburg let it fly while knowing it was crap.
I used to be a flight attendant. I heard a story from a flight mechanic: They noticed a gap where there wasn't supposed to be a gap between the wing and the wing-box (where the wing is attached to the fuselage). On inspection, they found an assembly tool, stuck between the wing and the body. That airline is now in the process of switching from Boeing to Airbus.
Then you’d love to hear the other dubious things found in Boeing aircraft like that. Besides tales like that-tools wedged between the fuselage and the panels, there have been reports of rags in the fuel tanks. Rags that could end up clogging the fuel intakes to the engines… But my personal favourite is how a flight mechanic once found an entire stepladder and lighting in the tail section of a flying, in-service 787.
@@mikoto7693Not surprised, and that is the scary part.
Fake story…
@@nhall00195No, you're the fake. Anything man produces, man will foul up. I once had a 70 year old musical instrument. The case for it was worn out. The case rattled though so I took it apart. I found a case production tool sealed inside it that had been there all those years.
@@nhall00195Completely possible though, especially with the pressure on on time delivery.
I'm glad that in the anime adaptation of Doctor Elise they changed the plane from an older 737 to what appears to be a 737 MAX. In the source material the pilot is somehow unable to handle a single engine failure. Well in the anime, it's still the same, but now fans can say "well, the computer probably messed up the single engine failure response somehow" since it's an acceptable target.
thanks a lot for your video ! I love the very engineering focus of your channel but it's a thing I see too often in the field (and in the people who gravitate around it) where people refuse to talk about systemic problems or just blame it on individuals or on engineers not being in charge enough, so you mentioning the fact that it's a much broader problem with the prioritization of revenue (whether we call that corporate greed or market forces) over listening to workers and regulations is a really important thing that I wish more people would talk about
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, "The Father of Quality", wrote extensively about how you can't buy quality with fancy technology; it helps, but quality is always ultimately made in the board room. Top management bears the ultimate responsibility, nobody under them can do quality work if their choices are being overridden or if they're not getting any support. Bank crashes aren't caused by tellers giving people the wrong change, they're caused by the choices of top management. Top management wants to only receive credit for things going right, blame everyone under them when something goes wrong, and have no accountability or consequences for any of their greedy and shortsighted decisions. It's immaturity of the highest order; "I want power without leadership, authority without responsibility, to not serve but be served."
PREACH! This should be higher up!
Jail time!!
I too, am a giant Deming fan. He basically wrote two books that describe how bad our business models have become & what they should actually look like. Very few companies know of Deming. It is sad to watch the world almost ignore his genius. Boeing (and many, many others) are trapped by the shareholders demanding instant gratification for their short term gain without a commitment to long term quality.
You can say things like this all you want. The simple fact is, they don't even understand what quality is in the first place. So, you're just talking gobbldiguk to them.
Hear hear
An overly simplistic explanation: This is what happens when Boeing is in charge of inspection oversight of Boeing.
tHe FrEe MaRkEt Is SeLf-ReGuLaTiNg
ask Nikki Haley about it
I know Boeing lobbied to regulate themselves. After previous catastrophes at Boeing I'd assumed executives were told to get their act together though.
It’s not just Boeing that has that “advantage”, though.
That's "free market" "Beacon of democracy" and "fairness" for u
This is a fine piece of journalism. The best I’ve seen on this 737 MAX topic. Thank you
I remember seeing on local (Seattle & Portland-area TV) news stations, that the door was found in a teacher's yard in Suburban Portland. So they have found the door, as of roughly a week to week-and-a-half ago. Very informative video.
My wife grew up in Seattle during a time when everyone who lived there took pride in their city and Boeing...those days are long gone.
I wish I had a wife
Now they take pride in perversion.
Costco is more fun to root for tbh
Yay unregulated big business! The free market definitely works!!
That's kinda how the rest of the USA seems to be heading, Detroit and the auto industry is the same story
I like Boeing planes, when I buy a window seats, there is a chance I can get free upgrade Balcony seats with a much better view.
or one free skydiving if you are not strapped, choice is yours boeing provides all the option
free reincarnation into anime world
At least you get fresh air😂
Great vid with excellent new background information - thank you 😊
Great reporting on the engine mounting! That’s the whole nine yards!
My dad worked for boeing (as an EE) until he retired 6ish years ago. He worked on the 787, and your video literally brought back memories of my childhood as it was loosely linked to that project. I also worked a short stint at boeing as a computer engineer. And that was the most miserable experience of my professional career. That entire company is completely mismanaged from the top down. When I told him this, he was like, "yeah that company has really changed".
😂😂 yk it's shit when the Computer Engineers complain
When McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money. Even after that, I wonder how many of Boeing's issues could have been avoided by not moving their corporate headquarters to Chicago. It is all fine and good to have senior executives with engineering backgrounds, but when they become isolated away from the factory floor they are just suits.
As a Software Engineer (altough nowadays working as a Site Reliability Engineer) I'm curious if your job title really was Computer Engineer or if you just simplified a usually complicated IT job title for the sake of a YT comment and if so, what you were working on? I would assume some kind of embedded software development and circuit board planning?
it seems more to me like an integrity/workmanship issue.. if a door plug cracks under pressure because the wall thickness of the plug is insufficient, or the door plug guide pin lock-out bolts shear because their diameter is questionable etc, those would be engineering's cross to bear. by loading pitch angle correction (MCAS) program into the airplane & being deceitful about it or leaving structure/safety integral hardware in all sorts of places loose, etc has NOTHING to do with engineers. engineers dont assemble airplanes.
Dam, got my curiosity. Why is it mismanaged? Is it that people there dont care about what theyr doing? Is it woke or both? What is it?
This goes down in history as the best iPhone drop test so far!
Or the case of the iphone drop test😅
@@CollectionLearning. pretty sure 90% of the impact was absorbed by the case
@@CollectionLearning. They mostly all fell in grass so eh
MAX DROP TEST
😂😂😂😂 bruh
Incredible graphics! Congrats!!
I vowed never to ever get on one of these death traps after the first incident, let alone the new stuff. No way, ever!
As a Boeing employee who got laid off too, you did a FANTASTIC job with this video! I know alot about those details. I took great pride in the work I did, but it's sad to see these events happen. I hope this issue at hand can be resolved.
Funny how everyone who works there at McDonnell Douglas says that.
Spill the beans! Give us all the juicy details of all the shortcuts.
Pretty sure man has an NDA in place 😅
@@mister_snoogles9031 Nope. I wasn't even compensated. Yall always assume the worst. Its Commercial aircraft too, not defense.
boeing is dead
Having read through the emails leaked about the crash issue, the corporate response to quality and safety issues is terrible. It's all about "how do we convince regulators it's okay to minimize costs" rather than actually addressing the root issues. The door thing is a symptom of underlying quality control issues, and just because those were inspected doesn't mean they won't have more major problems that have gone unnoticed.
Yeah but think of the short term bonuses for those execs if they cared about something as trivial as functioning planes. The bonus might be lower. Can't have that. Sure some of the filthy rabble will be hurt and inconvenienced. But that's a price worth paying.
@@Praisethesunson - yup, rotten-to-the-core corporate culture with executives more concerned about short-term cost savings than "not killing people."
That's what happens when sociopaths run society.
Profit over peoples lives.
Thanks for the explanation and research.
Wonderful news to hear mere days before my spouse and I’s long planned vacation using Alaska AL earlier this month. Funny aside in retrospect, but when we eventually did get an alternate flight (same airline different plane and slightly different destination) the flight was completely packed…EXCEPT for the one row in front of the hatch. The whole row of 6 seats completely empty. We couldn’t help but just laugh a bit at the whole thing. 😂
Former Boeing employee - worked 8 years as an engineer in BDS from 2014-2022. You make excellent points and explanations, but the one thing that I strongly disagree with was that the 737 Max program issues had anything to do with Dennis Muilenburg. When Muilenburg took over as CEO, he pushed for changes in quality and safety which, had they been adopted decades ago, would have avoided these fiascos. He was not CEO during a majority of the development of the 737 Max. He was handed this flaming pile of garbage, by the previous CEO James McNerney, who the 737 Max program was developed under. Muilenberg did his best to clean it up, but the damage was already long done and shareholders wanted to see someone fall to take the blame. My personal theory is that James McNerney knew about all this, and intentionally left before disaster struck. Side note, I can also confirm most of the comments about poor management, ridiculous bureaucracy, and focus on schedule over safety that happens there.
You are spot on, sir.
Doesn't matter. Dennis took the reigns, he should have identified and fix the problems before killing hundreds of people.
@@MrTweetyhack I don’t think you understand how development and engineering works. A single man can’t cause or fix every problem that exists, and unfortunately some problems will always make their way through. These projects were being run poorly before he ever got there. He was making much needed changes, unfortunately they came too late. You make it sound like he knew there would be crashes, but didn’t care enough to put in the effort to prevent them.
@@777XGangYou are either saying he didn't know about the issues, but it was his responsibility to know. Or you are saying he knew but was unable to fix them, in which case he should have scrapped the design. Either way, he carries a lot of the responsibility for the deaths.
@@mikaeljensen4399 It just isn’t that simple. These issues often come with a lack of communication and transparency, among other things. I understand it’s his job to know, but no one person can know about everything, especially when issues are numerous and people aren’t being honest about the work they’re doing. I get that people want someone to blame, but you have to actually blame the right people in order to solve the problems. Are there things he could have done better? Yes, but he inherited a huge mess of issues. By the time he was in a position to make positive changes, the seeds of disaster had already been sewn. I say it all the time: if you aren’t involved in the industry, you just won’t get it.
This is just like driving your car slowly because it shakes over 45. And turning your radio up because the noise. 😂
haha, this comment made me giggle, and you're completely right. then I realized this is actually horrible considering the potential implications.
@calvinwright5040 Such guys shan't be in management (in the first place).
More like driving down mountains with only 1 brake working!!!
Reminds me of another aviation story, someone was replacing a windshield and some of the bolts were bought third party, so they were lesser quality. Sheered the window out mid flight if I remember correctly.
Next video: the insane engineering of Boeing whistleblowrs' deaths
I'm sorry, I don't mean to make light of a good man falling.
Worked with a guy a few years ago that quit Boeing. He gave notice and told multiple managers, then did an exit interview. Then 3 months later he got a call asking him why he didn’t meet his production quotas. Not sure if this has happened before or since, that was late 2019…
Hly sht
looool
At this point, I would be hesitant to sit in a lawn chair built by Boeing.
i bet they did'nt forgot to stop paying him
Seeing how bad the management is at that company, it wouldn't surprise me if this was not the first or the last incident
Saw some other channel saying that the quality checklist / maintenance system had two options "opened the plug" or "removed the plug" - they're essentially the same thing, but if you chose remove then it proplerly inserted a work item for rechecking the bolts. (I forget where I saw that, but it was recent)
This has to be a series!!
What happened is McDonnell-Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's own money. Everything that's happening now is very similar to what happened to MD before they merged with Boeing. Prior to the merger, Boeing's company culture was one of engineering first. After the merger, when MD executives got into the company, it became overly cost conscious to the point of taking shortcuts in engineering.
The McDonnell-Douglas-Boeing merger and its ramifications have been disastrous for humanity
That explains how the MD execs ended up in charge of Boeing! How they managed to use Boeing's own money to buy MD and then end up in charge is quite a little feat and is a modern wonder. Not necessarily a good wonder mind you.
Boeing should have never allowed MD's managers and senior engineers to infiltrate the newly merged company. Boeing should have just cut all of them a check and let them go. MD ruined Boeing.
underrated comment!
Capitalism is great, up to a point. Then it turns into a dystopian cesspit of greed. McDonnell Douglas crossed that threshold and infected Boeing. It's a pity because Boeing was once a pride of USA. Sucking the life out of a company to line the pockets of executives is also in effect elsewhere at Boeing and its why SpaceX is making great strides while Boeing has little to show, other than lobbyists funnelling money from NASA.
Im gonna propose a new law/theory. Anytime a company subcontracts out anything the chance of something going wrong doubles. It would be called Boeings Law.
I actually work on the 737 line, and you're correct, and works in an extended way as well, since our suppliers (The sub contracted companies making our parts) have also started subcontracting, and one of those sub-sub-contractors messed up something on the plane so badly that we were only able to build maybe 5-6 planes in month, compared to producing 2 a day.
Airbus (and everyone else) does the same thing from what I understand.
@@cefb8923 Yeah, but Airbus has this weird thing called "basic competence".
@@Liberty2358 On the other hand, Boeing spun off their fuselage manufacturing division to a separate company. That's who provides the 737 Max fuselages.
@@Liberty2358 Well that particular mistake still haunts us here at the factory, a lot of the problems stem from the parts we get from spirit, misdrilled holes, upside down brackets, missing rivets, things being installed a little bit off of where they are supposed to be located. Then when we go to assemble the plane issues crop up from these things, some of which aren't noticed until a ton of work is already done, then there's alot of responsibility juggling, pressure from management to just "Get it done". Management will then take these issues and push the plane down the line and some of these problems get buried under even more components, causing workers to disassemble an entire plane to fix (and I shit you not) a single bolt that was 1/4" too long and was riding on the flight control cables, that was known about, and even documented (which is why they knew to go fix it). Of course some of it is the mechanics fault, since Boeings training course only includes a 3-4 week period of poorly delivered training before being expected to actively work on these planes, which leads to alot of mistakes until more senior mechanics can train them, but there's less senior mechanics, and not given time to really train the newer mechanics. Sorry that got abit long, TL;DR Spirit messes things up, then it butterflys into a huge mess at Boeing that Management pushes under the rug, while undertrained and overworked mechanics are running all over to put out fires.
Thank you for this report on the 737 Max. As more is learned it will interesting to see what is uncovered. I’m annoyed that your monetization was impacted for such a dubious reason, hence the donation. Have a great day.
Liked the use of the Wilhelm Scream when the hatch came off at the start of the video.
I have a family member who started work with Boeing as an inspector before the MD merger and just recently retired from Spirit. They talked about right at the MD merger, they cut inspection staff in half, and it was always continually be reduced right until they retired. Upper management would always push for stuff to go out the door with nothing more than a quick once over and a rubber stamp. If you held things up for inspection or correction, you weren't treated very well. On occasion, stuff was even sent out between shift changes before eyes could get on it. Near the end of their career, they were letting inspectors go just to bring them back as "independent contractors." At first they thought they were trying to get by the union or save some tax money, but later figured they just wanted to pass the blame if things went wrong.
"Independent contractor" is the corporate tactic to separate themselves from liability. Every gig economy "own boss" knows this.
You crack me up: “Upper management would always push for stuff to go out the door” THERE’S YOUR PROBLEM. I’m crying of laughter. I thought you made the joke on purpose when passengers went literally out of the door in flight, but it doesn’t look like. You still added “Stuff was even sent out between…” hahaha man stop it.
@@doujinflipWhat grinds my gears is how well companies in California were able to manipulate people into voting against themselves and basically creating a new law to weasel their way around being the slightest sense of a decent employer. What's worse is that despite their knowingly and open shady practices, few care enough to not give them their money or access to their data.
@@doujinflipI wonder if they split off Spirit AeroSystems because of this, too. They have control over the company, but if things go wrong, you can blame them first...the independent contractors is another layer isolating Boeing further from trouble...
The Max is the DC10 repeating itself in every single regard.
The engineering of the door plug on the 737 MAX 9 is exactly the same as the door plug on the 737-900ER. Unlike the MCAS fiasco, in this case, the problem isn't about engineering, it's about manufacturing and quality assurance going downhill. United and Delta have found 737-900ERs with loose door plug fasteners now, too. These quality lapses have been mounting for some time, before the MAX, and it's finally resulted in a high-profile incident.
Correct, and they've been an issue on the 787 also.
The plug was made in Malaysia with the serial number and part number written on the frame in Sharpie. Nuff said.
It just so happens that the failed door plug is manufactured by Spirit Aerosystems based in Wichita, KS, which proudly states that their main focus is on DEI rather than hiring competent workers that produce quality parts.
Cue flashbacks to DC10 and obligatory 'McDonnell-Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money' joke.
and the downhill trend in quality coincides with companies pushing ridiculous hiring requirements, focused entirely around diversity and equality, instead of intelligence and skill. 🤷♂
The plug looks like a well engineered solution with some build/execution issues (outsourcing to drive schedule and reduce cost). The mcas system, which was miss-engineered to save on development cost.
Love the Wilhelm scream at 0:19
not the wilhelm scream at 0:20 💀
lol not the only one to notice.
Came here for this 😂
Can we officially add this video to the list of movie classics?
As someone who works for one of Boeings suppliers its crazy to me that they've reduced quality inspection staff. Whereas where I work every component is inspected by a person at every stage of production, people are vital to the role.
Spirit personnel are spending much time at Boeing doing warranty rework.
That is the best transition into a sponsor mention at the end I've ever heard
Spirit Aerosystems, the company that makes the fuselages now, used to be Boeing. Exactly the same building, tools and bosses. Boeing corporate closed it down, laid off all the union employees, did some paperwork and re-opened under a new name. The same jobs pay half as much with zero benefits and they have fewer people making the same planes
Capitalism ❤
0:20 Excellent usage of the Wilhelm scream. Perfection!
nice catch! i missed it. 1951 movie first use of wihelm scream. kzhead.info/sun/rZybecltkGKFZIU/bejne.html&ab_channel=CrazyNate
Yes, I love to hear it!
Wait. the seats right by the hole in the plane were empty? I think I saw this in a movie...
Good info Real Engineering
I've never been fearful of flying on a particular type of aircraft, but there's something about the 737 max that makes me refuse to fly it. It's a brand new aircraft and has already had 2 very serious groundings. No bueno
I used to fly budget airlines and it was interesting (as well as reassuring) to see them all switch from Boeing planes to Airbuses after the very first wave of 737 Max crashes.
Yup. A321’s are taking Boeings lunch.
Boeing has noone to blame but themselves, they did a rush job with the 737 Max and now is suffering bc of it, noone believes in the newer boeings anymore, lot's of airlines are switching to Airbus, Boeing made the 737max to combat Airbus now because of their negligence, Airbus is taking more and more market share
@@AnontheGOAT the day of this accident I had a flight. My relief when an Airbus showed up was unreal.
Luckily here in Australia, they still use the 737-800 and not the MAX variants yet.
Which airlines did that? I haven't heard of any
When the CEO is responsible for hundreds of deaths: Gets a multi milion dollar golden handshake. When a fastfood employee salts fries not to company standard: Instantly fired, probably sued for the damage on 50Cents of fries.
That's US by design
Rich people don't go to jail. There's some picture floating around the internet which shows two news articles from the US.. Some homeless guy stole 100 USD and got 15 years in prison. Some banker scammed people out of 1.3 billion USD and got a few months of suspended prison sentence, didn't even have to pay any money back to anyone. If you're wealthy enough (in the US), you can do pretty much whatever you want and you'll get away with it with maybe a little slap on your wrist. The poorer you are, the more you're punished by the law. You'd think that the law is the same for everyone, but it isn't.
@@arth0heennot just US, my guy.
@@arth0heenunfortunately, that's everywhere now.
That's late-stage capitalism for ya. Slowling turning into feudalism
I am a happy Nebula subscriber, thank you, Brian.
Great video as always. I’m surprised counterfeit fasteners weren’t mentioned, they and ‘salvaged’ components have caused crashes on both civilian and military aircraft in the past. Minor detail and I know it was just a representation, but I never designed stuff with the screw/bolt head lower than the nut, falls out if the nut works loose 😅
Strong DC-10 vibes from this, both in terms of the dodgy engineering and the even dodgier management/regulatory structures that enabled it.
It's almost like when McDonnell Douglas took over Boeing, they continued their shitty management practices.
Exactly what "dodgy engineering" was involved here?
@@stargazer7644Designing an inherently unstable passenger plane to barely conform to type for the sake of profit and to circumvent regulations at the risk of passenger lives.
@@DangerB0neSounds like an american company
@@DangerB0neNo commercial aircraft is "inherently unstable". You sound like a raving lunatic and you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
“When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” - Harry Stonecipher, former CEO of Boeing, widely credited with changing the entire culture of Boeing, from that of a great engineering firm, to that of a business.
You mean the CEO of the company formerly known as McDonnell Douglas. Boeing retired after being bought out with their own money.
Do not forget James McNerney who was ceo from 2005 to 2015. During his first year, spirit was spun off as a separate company. McNerney outsourced it all and was in charge while the MAX was being designed and constructed. He stepped down as CEO seven months before the first max test flight. Muilenburg was nothing but a fall guy to take the blame for everything McNerney sabotaged. Calhoun took over when they successfully blamed Muilenburg. Calhoun is the guy cutting inspectors today. Muilenburg is least responsible here, the people who architected this were CEOs before and after Muilenburg. Muilenburg also should not be called an engineer because he was one 20 years prior. 20 years in management means he is not an engineer anymore. They don't let real engineers be CEOs because they won't cut the corners the board wants cut.
I think Alan Mulally was the last great CEO of Boeing.
Put back on those management office, no where to go when you are at 30000ft
Something *only* an MBA could say and think was a good thing. Literally anyone else with a brain (not even just engineers) would hear that and go "wow, that's fucking stupid."
Hi guys, thank you a lot for the videos, they are so well made and easy to understand even in a different language than my mother language.
Those executives should be held Personally accountable for damages, injuries, and loss of life - when they're intentionally and willfully seeking safety exemptions that can and have impacted people in very real ways.
It's actually illegal for them to do that. They can be sued by the shareholders for failing to act in a way that will make them a profit.
@@spinecho609 yeah dang. What a world!
7:44 AFAIK the MCAS was not only a software, it was a system that had a computer and a sensor. 1 sensor. The crashes were caused by the 1 sensor failling (a massive sin for aviation that has reduntant systems everywhere) and the pilots WERE NOT INFORMED of the MCAS system during training and manuals
Additionally, airlines had to pay extra for the second redundant sensor. But like you said, the lack of clear training and communication about MCAS with the pilots was the real issue, and is caused by the fact that Boeing was allowed to self-regulate.
they didn't want additional training as that is the selling point of the 737 MAX, to match airbus' A320neo which didn't require additional training.
@@rahul38474- the sensor is already on the plane for other reasons. There is also a 2nd sensor already installed that they were too cheap to tie into.
A system that doesn't allow the pilot to take over, I find it horrifying! Is like having a car that won't let you brake.
In a way, you can blame SouthWest Airlines for that one. They stipulated that for them to purchase MAX aircraft, the aircraft needed to be similar enough to keep the same type rating as an NG. If it didnt and their pilots needed to recertify on a new type, they were going to fine Boeing 1mil per aircraft purchased.
The door (or door plug) moves UP to unlock, not down. That's because the guide tracks are on the door/plug, and the guide pins are on the door frame. Also, Boeing does NOT remove the plugs to install interiors. This was initially reported but has since been corrected.
The only good info on all this comes from Juan Brown ( blancoLirio channel)
They literally used the first crashes to say "well ironically these planes are probably the safest there are now with all the new scrutiny on them." Wild.
Probably the best video exploring the 737 situation. Very clear and it didn't come off as an Airbus propaganda piece. 100% agreed, this is the result of regulatory oversight, and not just "the suits running an engineering company".
My worse experiences as an egnineer in my profession have come from management, not from bad engineering. We can fix bad engineering through reviews and letting stakeholders review. We can't accomplish anything when management treats the project as some budget sink per month and when they also don't even understand what they're looking at.
Perfectly said.
@Unb3arablePain True. But who'll bell that fat cat?
@@h0rriphicAgree. Very frustrating when upper management makes engineering related decisions while having no idea what they're talking about.
Boeing's leadership roles that could potentially endanger lives should require years of aerospace engineering experience and deep technical understanding, not MBAs. I wont be buying airplane tickets anytime soon.
The phones that fell out of Alaska 1282 landed less than a mile from my son's house. When I heard about the flight, and saw early reports showing where the depressurization happened, I joked "hey, that's near the hospital. I wonder if the door plug landed on the heliport?" It didn't; but one of the phones was found on the side of the road immediately next to the hospital. When it was shown on the local news, I did the "Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen" thing "THAT'S THE HOSPITAL!" (The reporter just said "by the side of the road in " but when the camera pointed up, the hospital building was clearly visible a block away.)
Aptly named "Providence" St Vincent is it ?
@@Dimsum256 That’s the one.
I appreciate the DiCaprio meme you did 😂
Well, never flying on 737 max again. Thank you for the valuable info!
Hi Brian, I’m a boy of 15, and I’m a pretty big fan, you and Grady over at practical engineering or what I do to relax in my free time. You say you’re inspiring the future engineers, I hope I’m one of them, I just wanted to say thank you for what you do, and keep doing it.
Grady is awesome! From a 24yo who has always been fascinated by engineering but never bothered getting good enough at math - work hard and discipline yourself to achieve what you want and you will do great things.
When i heard about this event. It hardly surprised me. The brutal truth is that since airlines dont really make money off ticket sales anymore, it is a race to the bottom for the airline industry. I worked in a manufacturing facility that produced parts for all the major engine producers (sorry, i cant be specific). The corners that were cut for the sake of a 1% increase in that quarter’s profit was shocking and scary. Luckily, we were far enough ahead in the manufacturing line that our customers caught our shenanigans for the most part. I always was trying to focus on quality, but it was an uphill battle. I am brutally honest with my friends and family about my experience there and how it has affected me. I get very nervous on airplanes now that I know what kind of corner cutting goes on in the industry. I used to not be afraid of flying. I trusted the engineers behind the curtain. I then i got a peak behind that curtain, and now i am scared of flying.
Bro I watched a few dozen mentour pilot accident breakdowns and i'll never fly again. It is always something stupid, everything i feared of not having control if something goes wrong. My car is much more dangerous, but the piloting is on me at least.
Coming from someone who is in aviation, I think it's a shit industry to work in (all things considered) personally unless you're a pilot or an engineer.
@@cefb8923shit if you're an engineer also
This why I'm so excited to see all this new investment in Amtrak and other rail projects. Bring on the train travel! If we could get trains to be the normal for travel between relatively close cities and save the planes for long haul travel, it'd give airlines something to think about.
The state of rail infrastructure and the corporate greed surrounding its operation wouldn't leave me more relaxed. Remember East Palestine? Just a symptom. Unchecked capitalism is the biggest threat for safety in any industry at this time@@savannah115
Another lucky fact is that the door plug blew out only at just under 16,000 ft at 30,000+ ft the aircraft would likely have had severe damage and even likely even lead to a hull loss, killing everyone on board. We just don't know how many more latent issues/defects lie within the 737 Max and any new aircraft Boeing puts out.
@cell5066 Yeah. That speaks of the soundness of design of "737". But other things should follow.
It looks like the door plug or debris could possibly strike the horizontal stabilizer which I'd think could have led to a crash as well.
Just a small nitpick, these door plugs are not unique to the 737 MAX 9. The older 737-900 uses the exact same door plugs.
@cell5066 It is their (fare-paying passengers') luck.
In the 80s/90s, a Dutch comedian coined the term 'boing' for Boeing airplanes (because so many crashed in a row back then) Seems like not much has changed since then ;))
although i'm inclined to assume you've done your research, i've seen in a Megaprojects video on MCAS that the MCAS system adjusts the entire horizontal stabiliser and the failure was not a software failure but the failure of a single non-redundant sensor. look at the tail of the second plane at 9:33, i'm pretty sure you can see where they slide up and down.
That “wire tie” is called a “cotter key” or “cotter pin”. They are typically used on castellated nuts as shown and these are fasteners that are torqued to spec and then the nut is either loosened or tightened to the next alignment of the hole to allow for installation. If properly installed it is impossible for the fasteners to come loose.
He shouldn't have said wire tie. It made it sound like lock wire, and that is definitely NOT lock wire.
Or “split pin”
@roscozone8092 either way, if the pin is in the bolt, the nut will not come loose. Even if the bolt jiggles around, it will still hold the door closed. I think the pin is the failure point.
The loose bolts holding the hinges are not lock wired so they could come out. which would allow the hinges to disconnect from the fuselage.
@crewdawg16 The only possible failure point is then the bolt shearing.
Did you add a "Wilhelm Scream" to the door plug blowing off? LOL
As an engineer in the aerospace field I have been well aware of Alaska’s obvious neglect to maintenance and checks. I think you did an accurate job at placing blame. This case it’s mostly Boeing but it also was not random that it happen to Alaska first. Worst airplane, worst airline…. Bound to have issues.
Alaska Airlines flight 261 that crashed in the Pacific because of neglected maintenance on some plane tail mechanism - a screw that lost its threads. Now, they have a plane warning of some decompression issue and waited until something flew off in said plane to take a look at it...
We always put my son in the window seat so he can look out and play more freely. This absolutely terrified me.
I try to remind myself that this is one accident happening to one plane out of a million out there. The fact it's such big news goes to show how rare these accidents are. That doesn't mean we shouldn't take these seriously, we absolutely should, but airplane travel is still immensely safe regardless.
@@AVdE10000except for the fact Boeing is in the process of laying off quality inspectors in huge numbers (in the thousands) and this same aircraft model is responsible for multiple incidents totalling hundreds of deaths due to gross mismanagement, and the fines reflect that. Risk analysis needs to factor in trends, and Boeing is imploding.
dont worry, if this happened to a window you were sitting next to all of you wouldve been sucked out of the plane
@@tonyhawk123correct… I’m pretty sure they don’t have a choice at this point. That’s a lot of money lost due to their own negligence.
The car ride to the airport is more dangerous than sitting next to the window.
Reset the warning and keep running. This happens in every production environment, regardless of the machine, if you don’t have proper people in charge of the mechanics. Upper management doesn’t want any down time so it takes someone w/ knowledge and power to keep it offline until the root cause of the problem is identified and fixed.
The more software I write the more amazing it is that people ignore warnings and errors. I cannot believe the number of projects just littered with warnings. The complacency it causes is unbelievable. Every single warning or error should be explicitly silenced with good reason, or better, actually fixed.
This is what happens when you gradually replace all the engineers in your management structures with financial people....😑😒😔
Fantastic use of the Wilhelm scream!
Today corporate companies prioritize revenue, stockholders, and CEO checks over anything, employees, customers, you name it.
They always used to, but they still do, too.
Thats usually not a problem. For normal companies to make money for stockholders they have to at least bring something to the table (good workplace environment so employees work well, good quality of products or service, etc), if they don't do it then some other company will, and will take away all the clients and talented employees, and profits from them. The problem here is Boeing is massive and doesn't have many competitors (just Airbus?), so if they mess up there aren't really any consequences, they won't lose clients because there really isn't anyone else (other than airbus) where airlines could go and buy their planes from, and so they won't lose profits and will keep doing the same shady shit over and over again
@@cdjwmusic except there are more and more monopolies where 3-5 companies control an entire sector, and more frankly garbage 'industry revolutionising' ideas that amount to data harvesting, or some other shady but legal actions. The idea that the company has to make something valuable or provide a good service is really only true for small businesses and some not-BS startups pre acquisition.
@@cdjwmusic yes indeed, but currently many corporations treat their employees as expandable tools and not as valuable assets.
The reason Alaska allowed the Max in question to keep flying is because they thought it was a pressurization controller, which has redundant control systems, including a back up manual control. No mechanic would suspect that a plug door was the culprit on a two month old airframe.
i'm sorry but they still should have investigated. if there is a redundant controller, could they not compare the readings from both controllers and if they both have the same reading then its not a faulty controller.
The controllers don’t work like that per se. They don’t compare readings and control pressurization based on the difference. One is active until it fails or until power is switched, then the other comes on line. And yes, in theory one would inspect the door but its an honest and obvious oversight. The aircraft is 2 months old AND the door assembly is essentially the exact same as the 737-900NG. Those models have never had a door plug issue like this, so why inspect that when it’s not a door for one. Meaning it doesn’t open and it’s bolted shut. Sorta like buying a brand new car that needs an alignment, the mechanic will check all 4 wheels except the frame itself. Because its the least likely culprit. On a brand new car.
@@skolariinot normally no as data at that level of fidelity is often proprietary and not available to the tooling the operator has
The door plug in question has a bit of a history of failures, all manufactured by Spirit.
But they didn't even try to find out what was causing it? Sounds like whomever made that decision has a piece of black tape hiding the check engine light flashing in their car.
@RealEngineering The Alaska Airliners didn't do anything wrong. The pressurisation warnings almost certainly didn't have anything to do with the door plug. The pressurisation system of an aircraft is made of several components: the pressure vessel aka the hull, air conditioning pacs, an outflow valve, and a pressure control system. The pressure control system has two independent automatic systems and a redundant manual system. The pressure warning light went out when swithching the pressure control to the other automatic system. If the door plug was leaking before, the pressurisation alarm would have stayed on regardless of the pressure control system used. Also an air leak makes a loud squaling noise.
that goes against the "rich powerful company bad, more regulations needed" narrative, but to be fair, there had to be some way to prevent what happened, else it would have been the issue of the engineers, and therefore alaska airliner's fault for picking them.
Look up Alaska Flight 261, the company has a history of shady maintenance
I don't know the cabin pressurisation systems on the 737 but expect it's just a modern version of the old cabin pressurisation system on the Victors I used to work on. Checks would involve blanking the sensing lines on the control valves and pressurising the cabin to a given differential. If the flow-rate into the cabin was too high or the required differential couldn't be achieved, there was a leak somewhere which you had to find and fix to get it within spec. Usually it was the cabin door or the seals around hatches that was leaking - places that were moved frequently or had been disturbed during maintenance. It was all basic stuff BUT the principles still apply no matter if you've got fancy electronic control systems or old steam-powered ones. The pressurisation problems on this aircraft are quite likely to have been due to the leak around the door-plug as I've seen more detailed photos showing the way the plug probably gradually over time moved upwards in the mounts thereby creating a gap which through vibration and other forces gradually increased until the door jettisoned the aircraft. Tolerances between the 2 automatic systems may account for the fact that one system kept failing whilst the other didn't, but either way this is one heck of a failure at many levels of management, production and maintenance.
Hi. Thanks for detailed coverage of this. Can you cover the details of how Boeing resolved the MCAT issue? Did they add one more sensor for redundancy? Are pilots properly retrained on how to get out of nose dive situations? Thank you!
Software update and informing the pilots about the system
As an industry insider, everyone I know throughout the industry seems to point to the event known colloquially as: "The day McDonnel Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money," as the inflection point where Boeing's culture went from that of engineering, manufacturing, and quality excellence to cost cutting, profit maximization. MCD was apparently very good at "making money" in the industry but Boeing was not. They leaned heavily on MCD executives AFTER the merger, to help realign the business direction Boeing would go in order to improve profits and become a more desirable company to invest in. This included divestitures of low profit business enterprises, like their Wichita manufacturing plant, which would later be named Spirit Aerosystems.
Wow, interesting. Thanks for sharing.. I am definitely looking more into this. What's odd though is MCD seemed to make a lot of great planes though too. I have worked on a few including the DC-10 which I feel like sometimes gets a little bit more hate than it deserved. I think in the context of its own time (mid 60s to early 70s) its really not much worse than many other planes, someone could chime in on this more I am sure.
It's so strange to me that they divested the Wichita factory, only to need to pump cash into it 15 years late so they could keep their production line running. It reads very much as a short sighted business decision to boost profits over long term stability.
'the questionable engineering of ...' is a great title. Hope this can become a new series. Would love to see more like this.
The title shows some restraint. “Boeing management cut more corners…” might have been more accurate.
Currently there is another one in this series about the titanic submersible.
It'd be nice to see more videos in the series about past incidents (like the DC-10). I don't want there to be more videos about recent events, because I don't want those recent events to happen at all in the near-future (but if they do happen, I was to see RE cover it!)
Except this issue appears to have nothing to do with engineering....
@@jeffbenton6183Maybe a different field of engineering. Say, Sampoong Superstore collapse or Eschede derailment.
I’m so happy that more and more flight search engines offer filters that remove all Boeing aircraft
On the MAX incidents it's important to state that Boeing expected pilots to use the runaway trim C/L which is a memory item. This C/L was to be used for uncommanded trim mouvement which is basically what happened in the crashes and after JT610, Boeing restated via AD to use this C/L in case of uncommanded trim movements due to MCAS
Airbus also works with Spirit aerosystem who have a unit at St Nazaire . The difference with Boeing is that Airbus double checks the work of sub contractors. Shorting the quality process is never a good idea, it cheaper at short terms but you-ll always pay a bigger price sooner or later .
Like others have said the door plug is not an engineering/design problem, it's an assembly/QA problem. The 737-900 ER has been flying since 2007 with (very likely) the exact same door plugs... pretty sure it'd be pointless to have changed that design for the Max. Engineering or no it's still a huge problem obviously, but details matter.
FAA has just ordered inspections of the -900 ER
If you are wanting to do more “questionable engineering videos” I would love to hear your analysis of the space shuttle, and whether it was a successful and efficient multi use spacecraft, or a merely mediocre compromise design that tried to satisfy the needs of multiple government entities at once, and in doing so crippled its ability to excel in any one aspect.