Internal Boeing emails on 737 max, "designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys"

[foghorn67]

Bah....The Max design was a typical 2000's era engineering snafu.

1. Someone said, "Let's build a new 737 variant that can hold more passengers."
2. Engineers probably said, "The added weight will require a bigger engine though?"
3. Reply: "Do it...add a bigger engine then"
4. Engineers said, "The airframe sits too low, we'd have to move the engines forward on the wing and squash their housing design and that would generate more lift!"
5. Reply: "Make it work."

So they added bigger engines, moved them forward on the wing (the only way to 'make it work') and that generated more lift. The hard assets were only corrected in the fly-by-wire model through software by having it use elevator trim to even out the poor design. So....software fix to permanently resolve a hardware issue.

In my opinion, that jet will never be safe to fly because it will always require a computer to make those adjustments and I'm not sure it would fly itself otherwise. I doubt it would even glide accordingly for the same distance as another 737 variant, even if it had less weight.

I'm no engineer, but those are the assessments based on what I saw in the design and my understanding of the need of the computer. (not necessarily the computer failures that caused the crashes)

All to delay the 737 replacement and save a buck.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I could argue with every point written in this thread, but what's the point? People will believe what they want to. I do this kind of stuff for a living with other professionals and get paid. Arguing with the internet isn't a great use of my time.

The bottom line is the expectation of the pilots. The event was expected to be recognized as a standard runaway tail trim, solved by flipping 2 switches on the aisle stand to turn off the motor. After the first accident, a lot more guidance was given about more ways to avoid the situation, which the pilots in the 2nd accident also ignored.

The issue at hand is - should the pilots been expected to recognize the failure and act appropriately?

At the end of the day, these accidents will result in more automation, not less - and less reliance on the pilot to work through failures. On top of that, average pilot experience is much less than it was past, especially outside the U.S. Some operators have ab initio pilots training in the right seat of a 777 with 40 hours of experience.

If anyone does have questions, I can answer them via pm, otherwise I'm just gonna watch this thread with a bucket of popcorn.

Now that you have brow-beat everyone in this thread and placed yourself up on the proverbial pedestal maybe the 'more automation' will result in Tesla-like autopilot. And just for the record, I'm being very facetious here. Because not all of us are dumb.