7 ms·

Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX

154 points by HugoHobling 7y ago

situational87 7y ago
>The pilot, Mark Forkner, complained that the system, known as MCAS, was causing him trouble. “It’s running rampant in the sim,” he said in a message to a colleague, referring to the simulator. "Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” he went on to say, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed by The New York Times. People need to go to prison over this.
- Judson 7y ago
  I'm not sure if the link originally pointed to NYT, but the currently linked reuters report adds a bit more context to the messages. >Forkner said in one text message, “I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly).” The other employee responded that “it wasn’t a lie, no one told us that was the case” of an issue with MCAS. >Forkner responded soon after: “Granted I suck at flying, but even this was egregious.”
  - jonplackett 7y ago
    I don’t really understand the context of these messages. The one about MCAS running rampant is clear enough but what does he mean saying that he sucks at flying? What is egregious?
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      I interpreted that as “I may be a bad pilot but MCAS made my trying to fly in the simulators particularly unsuccessful”
      - dmix 7y ago
        Nope he was complaining they made changes to the MCAS without telling him and he was concerned the simulator wasn’t accurate to the planes actual experience. Those are the pilots words and he’s saying the messages are being misinterpreted and cherry picked without context.
        arcticbull 7y ago
        That's not what it appears from context.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      I read it as self-deprecation. Something people do to take the edge off of bad news.
    - sz4kerto 7y ago
      He was joking, as if you'd be a professional F1 pilot and when testing a new car you would say "I suck at driving but this thing loses grip in the corners".
    - anon1m0us 7y ago
      Think about it from a Dunning-Kruger perspective. The more you know about flying, the worse you think you are. The pilot is an expert and very experienced. He knows what he doesn't know. He's acknowledging that even with all his experience, he could be wrong -- but clearly he wasn't.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  Boeing has designed planes that have an INCREDIBLE safety record, particularly when flying in US regulated airspace. Interesting that prison time is demanded here when a much more simple explanation is that this was an oversight by the pilots in the sim who didn't fully understand the issue was MCAS related. Millions killed from opioid epidemics, thousands killed from violence and various preventable diseases, huge number of road fatalities do not result in prison time. The safety record of aviation in the US should be applauded.
  - atonse 7y ago
    So you want to use their historical record as some kind of justification for their dismal record with the 737 MAX, as if one is related to the other? Cold comfort to the 300+ lives, and families destroyed. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2tuKiiznsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2tuKiiznsY This isn't just some "oops, these were badly trained pilots" – the whole premise of MCAS is seriously screwed up and smacks of non-engineers running the place.
    - LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
      Sometimes a place can fall apart from the inside, knowledge rot eating away at a engineering culture, like termites at a house. In the end, its all still there- but not reliable. MCAS is ducttape. Ducttape applied, because the whole culture is by now incentivize screwed, pennywise optimizing instead of pound problem solving. A "carry on" is actually the hostile action in this situation. Sidenote: I like that you can not lie in modern society, because all data has copies and copies of copies.
    - Gpetrium 7y ago
      What op seems to imply is that airplane incidents rates actually have a stronger track record as opposed to the opioid epidemic, road fatality, etc. And that if society believes that this individual/group should go to prison based on this mistake and in hindsight, without account for all the other factors that were a part of the decision making process, then society should start reconsidering the way it treats opioid, road fatality, etc. The mindset of "quick to imprison" can also run the risk of creating a society that is overly averse to risk taking, which can hinder technology and scientific advances. For example, it may take 10 times as long to get a new, more advanced traffic light implemented in your city because now everyone wants to make sure no stone was left unturned, otherwise someone will get into an accident and a staff/group will be imprisoned. Or a new software is implemented but 3 months later it is found that failure under very specific scenarios has caused over 50 deaths. There are millions of potential scenarios that may fall under similar conditions as exemplified above. Please note that this writing is not advocating for or against either views, it is simply shedding light on risks that should be considered.
- atonse 7y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. These are crimes that have resulted in hundreds of deaths.
- nostromo 7y ago
  Prison: our solution to every problem.
  - davidw 7y ago
    IDK, it's overused in the US, but a lot of people died too and that's... pretty bad?
    - miracle2k 7y ago
      Sometimes people die and there is no one to blame. The tendency to find a scapegoat is strong and human and needs to be resisted. Maybe someone should go to jail here, but I doubt it.
      - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        The legal definition of culpable negligence is actually pretty straightforward. I see no reason not to hold key decision-makers responsible for the consequences of decisions that aren't just misguided or incorrect, but actively and wilfully negligent of factual information - especially if they cause even more deaths by attempting to suppress that information and place blame on innocent parties.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    I'm normally against prison as a deterrent because it is used against people where it wouldn't work as a deterrent. In cases such as these it might actually work if the execs of such companies were simply jailed for a very long time as though they were about equally responsible as a regular bus driver would be if they were negligent at their job and killed a bunch of people. It just might have a positive effect the next time someone thinks they might get away with cutting some corners.
    - WJW 7y ago
      I would support this sentiment usually, but in this case I don't really see a way to determine the chain of responsibility. Who do we force into prison in this scenario? The engineer(s) who made MCAS? Just the one that wrote the lines of code that monitor the airflow sensors? Do we also imprison the QA people that signed off on this? Why not also their managers? Who of the C-suite? Probably the CTO and maybe the CEO, but isn't their behavior influenced by financial pressures from the CFO. Maybe we should just put them all into jail? The FAA was supposed to monitor this stuff but didn't. Should they be jailed as well? How about any congress people that cut the budget for the FAA? The list goes on. There are negative modifiers as well: what if the person who made MCAS was a very junior engineer in his/her first week? Are they still culpable? What if the CTO can prove they were never involved? I don't think it's all that easy who is responsible.
- markus_zhang 7y ago
  I'd LOL if it's just the pilot who gets the boot (to prison).
notadoc 7y ago
The repetitional damage to Boeing on this has to be considerable.
jonplackett 7y ago
What’s the implication here? That it’s these pilot’s fault? Surely their job is just to report what they experience during a flight sim and it’s someone else who would have decided to hide that.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  The implication is that people at Boeing knew there were problems with MCAS before the crashes happened. I am not saying these particular guys are at fault. The transcript (https://tmsnrt.rs/2OZl4Ic https://tmsnrt.rs/2OZl4Ic) shows them specifically talking about MCAS doing weird stuff in simulators and they they didn't know what was going on, or what the expected behaviour was. Interesting that it happened in a simulator where I presume that sensors don't sporadically break or deliberately give duff readings in what is probably a lot of highly controlled tests... perhaps a pure software error? Did this problem just get lost somewhere in the noise of development? Was it "unreproducible" (in the bug sense)? Was it willfully ignored by "the management"? Who knows - but we now do know that some people at Boeing involved in development were aware of problems before the crashes. Pretty sad really.
  - MFLoon 7y ago
    Simulators can "break" in the sense that support simulating various failure modes, including presumably sensor malfunctions. It's very possible that they stumbled on the exact conditions that led to the real world crashes, which would be even more damning.
    - mattlondon 7y ago
      Yeah absolutely but if you are running a simulation/test would you deliberately inject some random sensor failure if you are doing your tests for something else? It is not clear what they were testing - perhaps they were indeed testing the MCAS system with sensor failures, but if so I probably wouldn't have expected such a surprised resction from them. It seemed like it was totally unexpected and unexplained, which is not a reaction I would expect if they were testing this.
stupidcar 7y ago
Quelle surprise
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tspike 7y ago
The actual transcript is illuminating. This feels like corporate throwing the test pilots under the bus. https://graphics.reuters.com/BOEING-737/0100B2J51TY/Boeing%20Document.pdf https://graphics.reuters.com/BOEING-737/0100B2J51TY/Boeing%2...
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
Why are journalists still calling this an 'anti-stall' system. It's not, and it's so deceptive about what it actually does. The crashes had nothing to do with stalls, the system does nothing to prevent stalls, and the safety regulations that brought it about are only indirectly related to stalls. The system affects how the flight stick feels and that's really it. The more you pull up (higher AoA), the more force is needed on the stick. That's supposed to be linear within some margin of error. The big fat new engines took it out of the linear envelope, making it a bit lighter than it 'should' be at high AoA as the engines caught the wind. They either fixed this, or else needed a new type rating (pilots can't hold more than one, so it's a huge issue for existing operators of 737s). The solution was MCAS which, as originally designed, wasn't powerful enough to cause problems. But test pilots said that the stick was still a bit light, so they reworked it and made it way too strong, while still being invisible to pilots and lacking the reliability of a critical system. Then several hundred people died.
- anticensor 7y ago
  > pilots can't hold more than one, so it's a huge issue for existing operators of 737s You can hold more than one but you need to maintain each separately.
- ckcheng 7y ago
  > system affects how the flight stick feels and that's really it I kept hearing this too, so I wondered why they didn't just directly change how the stick feels, like with a force feedback system? And I looked it up[1]: Turns out MCAS was also there to push the nose down at high AoA, to imitate what the 737 NG does even in the absence of control input, so it's not just a stick feel thing. "The added nose down trim has the side effect of requiring more elevator input at high angles of attack", so simultaneously fixing the stick feel issue. It seems to me like MCAS solved two related problems at the same time... and sadly thus created an even larger unintended problem. [1]: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/62067 https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/62067

154 points by HugoHobling 7y ago

>The pilot, Mark Forkner, complained that the system, known as MCAS, was causing him trouble. “It’s running rampant in the sim,” he said in a message to a colleague, referring to the simulator. "Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” he went on to say, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed by The New York Times. People need to go to prison over this.

Judson 7y ago
I'm not sure if the link originally pointed to NYT, but the currently linked reuters report adds a bit more context to the messages. >Forkner said in one text message, “I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly).” The other employee responded that “it wasn’t a lie, no one told us that was the case” of an issue with MCAS. >Forkner responded soon after: “Granted I suck at flying, but even this was egregious.”
- jonplackett 7y ago
  I don’t really understand the context of these messages. The one about MCAS running rampant is clear enough but what does he mean saying that he sucks at flying? What is egregious?
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    I interpreted that as “I may be a bad pilot but MCAS made my trying to fly in the simulators particularly unsuccessful”
    - dmix 7y ago
      Nope he was complaining they made changes to the MCAS without telling him and he was concerned the simulator wasn’t accurate to the planes actual experience. Those are the pilots words and he’s saying the messages are being misinterpreted and cherry picked without context.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        That's not what it appears from context.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I read it as self-deprecation. Something people do to take the edge off of bad news.
  - sz4kerto 7y ago
    He was joking, as if you'd be a professional F1 pilot and when testing a new car you would say "I suck at driving but this thing loses grip in the corners".
  - anon1m0us 7y ago
    Think about it from a Dunning-Kruger perspective. The more you know about flying, the worse you think you are. The pilot is an expert and very experienced. He knows what he doesn't know. He's acknowledging that even with all his experience, he could be wrong -- but clearly he wasn't.
privateSFacct 7y ago
Boeing has designed planes that have an INCREDIBLE safety record, particularly when flying in US regulated airspace. Interesting that prison time is demanded here when a much more simple explanation is that this was an oversight by the pilots in the sim who didn't fully understand the issue was MCAS related. Millions killed from opioid epidemics, thousands killed from violence and various preventable diseases, huge number of road fatalities do not result in prison time. The safety record of aviation in the US should be applauded.
- atonse 7y ago
  So you want to use their historical record as some kind of justification for their dismal record with the 737 MAX, as if one is related to the other? Cold comfort to the 300+ lives, and families destroyed. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2tuKiiznsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2tuKiiznsY This isn't just some "oops, these were badly trained pilots" – the whole premise of MCAS is seriously screwed up and smacks of non-engineers running the place.
  - LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
    Sometimes a place can fall apart from the inside, knowledge rot eating away at a engineering culture, like termites at a house. In the end, its all still there- but not reliable. MCAS is ducttape. Ducttape applied, because the whole culture is by now incentivize screwed, pennywise optimizing instead of pound problem solving. A "carry on" is actually the hostile action in this situation. Sidenote: I like that you can not lie in modern society, because all data has copies and copies of copies.
  - Gpetrium 7y ago
    What op seems to imply is that airplane incidents rates actually have a stronger track record as opposed to the opioid epidemic, road fatality, etc. And that if society believes that this individual/group should go to prison based on this mistake and in hindsight, without account for all the other factors that were a part of the decision making process, then society should start reconsidering the way it treats opioid, road fatality, etc. The mindset of "quick to imprison" can also run the risk of creating a society that is overly averse to risk taking, which can hinder technology and scientific advances. For example, it may take 10 times as long to get a new, more advanced traffic light implemented in your city because now everyone wants to make sure no stone was left unturned, otherwise someone will get into an accident and a staff/group will be imprisoned. Or a new software is implemented but 3 months later it is found that failure under very specific scenarios has caused over 50 deaths. There are millions of potential scenarios that may fall under similar conditions as exemplified above. Please note that this writing is not advocating for or against either views, it is simply shedding light on risks that should be considered.
atonse 7y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. These are crimes that have resulted in hundreds of deaths.
nostromo 7y ago
Prison: our solution to every problem.
- davidw 7y ago
  IDK, it's overused in the US, but a lot of people died too and that's... pretty bad?
  - miracle2k 7y ago
    Sometimes people die and there is no one to blame. The tendency to find a scapegoat is strong and human and needs to be resisted. Maybe someone should go to jail here, but I doubt it.
    - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      The legal definition of culpable negligence is actually pretty straightforward. I see no reason not to hold key decision-makers responsible for the consequences of decisions that aren't just misguided or incorrect, but actively and wilfully negligent of factual information - especially if they cause even more deaths by attempting to suppress that information and place blame on innocent parties.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I'm normally against prison as a deterrent because it is used against people where it wouldn't work as a deterrent. In cases such as these it might actually work if the execs of such companies were simply jailed for a very long time as though they were about equally responsible as a regular bus driver would be if they were negligent at their job and killed a bunch of people. It just might have a positive effect the next time someone thinks they might get away with cutting some corners.
  - WJW 7y ago
    I would support this sentiment usually, but in this case I don't really see a way to determine the chain of responsibility. Who do we force into prison in this scenario? The engineer(s) who made MCAS? Just the one that wrote the lines of code that monitor the airflow sensors? Do we also imprison the QA people that signed off on this? Why not also their managers? Who of the C-suite? Probably the CTO and maybe the CEO, but isn't their behavior influenced by financial pressures from the CFO. Maybe we should just put them all into jail? The FAA was supposed to monitor this stuff but didn't. Should they be jailed as well? How about any congress people that cut the budget for the FAA? The list goes on. There are negative modifiers as well: what if the person who made MCAS was a very junior engineer in his/her first week? Are they still culpable? What if the CTO can prove they were never involved? I don't think it's all that easy who is responsible.
markus_zhang 7y ago
I'd LOL if it's just the pilot who gets the boot (to prison).

notadoc 7y ago

The repetitional damage to Boeing on this has to be considerable.

jonplackett 7y ago

What’s the implication here? That it’s these pilot’s fault? Surely their job is just to report what they experience during a flight sim and it’s someone else who would have decided to hide that.

mattlondon 7y ago
The implication is that people at Boeing knew there were problems with MCAS before the crashes happened. I am not saying these particular guys are at fault. The transcript (https://tmsnrt.rs/2OZl4Ic https://tmsnrt.rs/2OZl4Ic) shows them specifically talking about MCAS doing weird stuff in simulators and they they didn't know what was going on, or what the expected behaviour was. Interesting that it happened in a simulator where I presume that sensors don't sporadically break or deliberately give duff readings in what is probably a lot of highly controlled tests... perhaps a pure software error? Did this problem just get lost somewhere in the noise of development? Was it "unreproducible" (in the bug sense)? Was it willfully ignored by "the management"? Who knows - but we now do know that some people at Boeing involved in development were aware of problems before the crashes. Pretty sad really.
- MFLoon 7y ago
  Simulators can "break" in the sense that support simulating various failure modes, including presumably sensor malfunctions. It's very possible that they stumbled on the exact conditions that led to the real world crashes, which would be even more damning.
  - mattlondon 7y ago
    Yeah absolutely but if you are running a simulation/test would you deliberately inject some random sensor failure if you are doing your tests for something else? It is not clear what they were testing - perhaps they were indeed testing the MCAS system with sensor failures, but if so I probably wouldn't have expected such a surprised resction from them. It seemed like it was totally unexpected and unexplained, which is not a reaction I would expect if they were testing this.

stupidcar 7y ago

Quelle surprise

dang 7y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tspike 7y ago

The actual transcript is illuminating. This feels like corporate throwing the test pilots under the bus. https://graphics.reuters.com/BOEING-737/0100B2J51TY/Boeing%20Document.pdf https://graphics.reuters.com/BOEING-737/0100B2J51TY/Boeing%2...

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago

Why are journalists still calling this an 'anti-stall' system. It's not, and it's so deceptive about what it actually does. The crashes had nothing to do with stalls, the system does nothing to prevent stalls, and the safety regulations that brought it about are only indirectly related to stalls. The system affects how the flight stick feels and that's really it. The more you pull up (higher AoA), the more force is needed on the stick. That's supposed to be linear within some margin of error. The big fat new engines took it out of the linear envelope, making it a bit lighter than it 'should' be at high AoA as the engines caught the wind. They either fixed this, or else needed a new type rating (pilots can't hold more than one, so it's a huge issue for existing operators of 737s). The solution was MCAS which, as originally designed, wasn't powerful enough to cause problems. But test pilots said that the stick was still a bit light, so they reworked it and made it way too strong, while still being invisible to pilots and lacking the reliability of a critical system. Then several hundred people died.

anticensor 7y ago
> pilots can't hold more than one, so it's a huge issue for existing operators of 737s You can hold more than one but you need to maintain each separately.
ckcheng 7y ago
> system affects how the flight stick feels and that's really it I kept hearing this too, so I wondered why they didn't just directly change how the stick feels, like with a force feedback system? And I looked it up[1]: Turns out MCAS was also there to push the nose down at high AoA, to imitate what the 737 NG does even in the absence of control input, so it's not just a stick feel thing. "The added nose down trim has the side effect of requiring more elevator input at high angles of attack", so simultaneously fixing the stick feel issue. It seems to me like MCAS solved two related problems at the same time... and sadly thus created an even larger unintended problem. [1]: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/62067 https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/62067