How much shit do you think the Chief of Police has seen in his life and career? And, discussing this case made him cry on TV. I don't think he's Northaming through this.
Even though the Cohen testimony is the headline, whats going on between India and Pakistan now is concerning. Pakistani terrorists blew up a bus and killed Indian soldiers. Indian fighter jets crossed into Pakistani territory and did an airstrike on a training camp. Pakistan shot down two Indian fighter jets and captured a pilot. Both are vowing escalating retaliation. Both are nuclear powers. India has a "no first use" policy, but the problem is there is no central command over Pakistan's arsenal.
I’ve said for years that there is nothing on this earth that scares me more than Pakistan: the kooks with nukes. These idiots have “accidentally” sold nuclear secrets to the Taliban in the past. They never should have been allowed to have them in the first place.
So... how about airplanes being grounded? Personally, I'm fucking pissed that the "news" and morons are dictating actions based on Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. And a huge dose of "no fucking clue". 99.9% of the people cannot tell you what happened with the Max 8's, technically, or what the cause of the problem was, or anything actually technical about the problem. All they read is "a Boeing crashed, and there are other Boeings of the same model, so ergo they will crash as well." Tell them that it was a training and human error, and they won't listen... "but they were both Max 8's!". Yes, they were. So? The FAA is one of the most safety conscious and successful organizations in history, and they don't fuck around. If they think that there was something mechanically wrong, they'd pull the plug without hesitation; no politics, no second guessing, nothing... just "grounded". But instead you have morons that might as well be anti-vaxxors and flat-earth enthusiasts applying their news-driven "logic" and magically know more than the subject matter experts. Never mind the historical EU bans on Boeing are hugely political in their support of Airbus. I hate people.
My understanding is that the new larger, more efficient, engines on the MAX changed the balance of the plane, causing it to nose-up more than the earlier model. Boeing addressed this by adding software that would sense such an issue and point the nose downward with control surfaces. They didn't consider this a big enough change to warrant requiring retraining of pilots, so when a sensor busted and told the auto-pilot to nose-down even though they were already flying level, the auto-pilot basically put the plane into a dive. The pilots had no idea what was going on because they weren't aware of this new feature, and therefore couldn't properly override it and regain manual control. That's my understanding at least.
Yep. The issue sounds like it has a large pilot training component. Or, in this case, lack of pilot training. The situation manifests itself over a fairly long period of time, during which the pilot is supposed to be trained to kill a switch on the stick, flip 2 toggle switches on a panel, and then manually set the trim tabs that were being electronically driven (until switched off) to change the elevators to induce the dive. The information I've seen shows that the pilots that experienced this failure were not trained to recognize or react to it, so the trim tabs basically went to max deflection, which pretty well killed the pilot's ability to control the elevator. Some pilots said that they were never even informed that their 737's were updated to include such anti-stall systems in the first place, never mind trained on how they used them. It'll be interesting to see what the final report from the FAA says.
I read somewhere that the FAA was working on a solution with this, with Boeing, and it got delayed due to the government shutdown. I dunno how plausible that is, but if it's true...holy shit.
I have two different family members and a close friend who were on board one of these planes, all three at various airports, ready to take off, when the planes were grounded. They had to get off the plane and find other arrangements. One almost missed a wedding. One almost missed a cruise. I thought it was hysterical.
It's looking like it's not a design or mechanical flaw with the aircraft, it's about shitty flight operations and training. The "fix" they're putting in place sounds like some limits on how far the automatic systems will take something. Right now they'll go full stop, which then makes it impossible for the pilot to physically pull out of (the trim tab force on the elevator pushing the nose down is more than two pilots can counter to pull the yoke/nose back). This mod will still automatically push the nose forward/down in the event that a stall is (correctly or otherwise) detected, but only to a certain amount of force, thereby allowing the pilots to physically override it by pulling back on the controls. This means that even if a pilot has zero idea of how the automated system works never mind failure modes and procedures, they can still manually recover from the nose down attitude. There is also talk about any manual action on the trim tabs (button on the control stick) will disable the automatic system as well. I still think that Boeing is getting a shit deal in all of this... and a lot of it is due to fear mongering by news agencies.
I think the aviation industry in general gets a shit deal. The MSM is all about it when a plane crashes or something happens, and then the public freaks out, then everyone is afraid planes are gonna start falling out of the sky. Fear of flying is a real thing that affects a lot of people, yet flying is safer than riding in a car. And who the fuck is scared of driving? I view government regulation with aviation a lot like how I view their regulation with education: let the experts write the rules, instead of the people who think they know what they're talking about. If your car was designed strictly by mechanics and engineers, it'd run a hell of a lot better than if they let the marketing and finance guys pervert the final product.
And why is that? In no small part, because of the FAA. The same group that people are saying, "we know better than you" to, when they actually don't know fuck all. And now that they have grounded the aircraft, there's going to be a ton of "see, I told you so". The FAA is data-driven... go figure.
I dont get the controversy then. The FAA said they hadnt seen any evidence that warranted grounding the aircraft. They then received new data, passed it up to the administration. Trump orders the grounding based on those reports. He talks to the Boeing CEO, who agrees. Where is the dissent coming from? I get that there is serious financial motivations that Airbus has a ton of power in Europe, particularly the UK. Ironically Airbus's incoming orders fell way short of expectations of reports from yesterday. Short-sellers are going to be crushing them if they havent started already.
49 dead so far in the New Zealand white supremacist terror attack. He live streamed it in first person shooter style video. Something I had known was just a matter of time for a big event like this. New standard I’m sure every nut job will imitate.
His manifesto is very obviously meant to be inflammatory. Wants to start a race war. Hates Trump. Loves Trump. Video games trained him for it. Hates Jews.
Yep, agreed, which is what they recognized earlier and have been working on fixing. But taken on its own it was not enough to warrant emergency action... just official warnings to airlines to be sure to train up your pilots on how to detect this and handle it while they work on a new revision as a high priority. (Because it does take many minutes for this to happen, it's not a sudden onset condition). But then it seems like some airlines didn't heed the Boeing warnings, and shit happened, and it became, almost literally, "the sky is falling". Typical in these kinds of conditions, it's not just a single thing that causes problems, it's the aggregate of them. That being said, I don't think that the blame should be totally on Boeing... the airlines have to do their part with the proper training as well.