Boeing Update, for Air Canada Pilots — News and Views

[Duke Point]

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[Duke Point]

I'd like to add that Calin has been amazing for Air Canada. There is no doubt. He is a business icon, and deserves the fruits of his work. His job is to protect the shareholders interest, and he is doing an amazing job. The share value reflects that.

His job is to extract value from suppliers and workers. He's great at it. However, our Union has done little to protect the Membership from the onslaught, therein lies my beef, and only there.

DP.

[Raymond Hall]

Fellow Pilots... This thread shows many signs of drifting off track. It is about Boeing and its relation to Air Canada pilots. Anyone can start a new thread to discuss Air Canada's history, management and the current controversies related to those issues. So, in order that this thread not be deleted or moved or restricted, may I ask you that you keep your comments here related strictly to the impact of the Boeing issues on Air Canada pilots? Many thanks.

[Raymond Hall]

From Business Insider:

Catastrophic software errors doomed Boeing's airplanes and nearly destroyed its NASA spaceship. Experts blame the leadership's 'lack of engineering culture.'

Just 31 minutes after Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spaceship launched into space, Mission Control knew something was wrong. In the early stages of that crucial test flight on December 20, the Starliner's engines were supposed to fire automatically, setting the ship on a course toward the International Space Station — but they never did.

Mission controllers soon realized the problem: The Starliner's clock was 11 hours ahead. It was following the steps of a phase of the mission it had not yet reached, firing small thrusters to adjust its position. The uncrewed flight was meant to demonstrate that the spaceship Boeing designed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the space station could successfully get there and dock, proving that the Starliner was ready to fly astronauts.

Instead, the spaceship wound up burning through about 25% of its fuel before engineers on the ground could get it back under their control. By then, there wasn't enough fuel to reach the space station — only to maneuver the ship into a stable orbit and prevent it from crashing to Earth.

As Boeing workers frantically checked hundreds of thousands of lines of the spaceship's code, they found a second error — one that would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire after two modules of the spacecraft separated. That could have led to a disastrous collision in space. Boeing and NASA didn't publicly reveal that second error for another seven weeks.

The doomed Starliner flight, of course, wasn't the first time in recent years that issues with Boeing software caused a crisis. Software flaws in the 737 Max airplanes were the reason two of those planes crashed — the Lion Air flight in October 2018 and the Ethiopian Airlines plane in March 2019 — killing 346 people.
…
"The question is now: Is this a software problem, or is it a deeper culture problem?" Bjorn Fehrm, an aeronautics industry analyst at the Leeham Company, told Business Insider. "Part of why they do these [flight] tests like they did is to check everything. And then they find bugs, and that's not extraordinary, but it comes in the backwater of this big debacle of [the 737] Max."
…
The two errors discovered in-flight "are likely only symptoms," Doug Loverro, a NASA associate administrator, said in a call with reporters. "They are not the real problem."

The bigger issue, NASA found, was that Boeing's testing team didn't catch several defects before the flight. "We want to understand what the culture is at Boeing that may have led to that," Loverro said. The Orlando Sentinel reported on Wednesday that a critical end-to-end software test ahead of the Starliner launch could have caught the two coding errors, but Boeing didn't conduct that test at all.
….
NASA announced on February 7 that it would investigate Boeing because of the flaws revealed in the Starliner test flight. That puts the company under intense scrutiny across sectors, with experts at many government agencies questioning whether Boeing's spaceship or its newest planes are safe enough for people.

Article continues…
https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing- ... nes-2020-2

[Northboundguy]

There was a whistle blower a few months back discussing the fact Boeing laid off all the senior programmers in favour of outsourcing the work to India for cheaper. Sounds to me Boeing has the same cultural issue as the rest of North America .. Savings over Safety.

[Localizer]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... -engineers

Here ya go ...

[TheStig]

There was a whistle blower a few months back discussing the fact Boeing laid off all the senior programmers in favour of outsourcing the work to India for cheaper. Sounds to me Boeing has the same cultural issue as the rest of North America .. Savings over Safety.

The software functioned exactly as it was designed to.

-Auto pilot off + Flap/slats retracted + high AoA = MCAS activation.

-Garbage in = Garbage out.

[yycflyguy]

There was a whistle blower a few months back discussing the fact Boeing laid off all the senior programmers in favour of outsourcing the work to India for cheaper. Sounds to me Boeing has the same cultural issue as the rest of North America .. Savings over Safety.

The software functioned exactly as it was designed to.

-Auto pilot off + Flap/slats retracted + high AoA = MCAS activation.

-Garbage in = Garbage out.

You're sorta forgetting the failure to implement a redundant system from bad AoA sensing. At least to have a couple lines of code that could look at the big picture (GS, A/C configuration etc) before activating an overly aggressive system that wasn't in any AOM all the while other warning systems were freaking out. But you are right, engineering garbage in - engineering garbage out.

[TheStig]

There was a whistle blower a few months back discussing the fact Boeing laid off all the senior programmers in favour of outsourcing the work to India for cheaper. Sounds to me Boeing has the same cultural issue as the rest of North America .. Savings over Safety.

The software functioned exactly as it was designed to.

-Auto pilot off + Flap/slats retracted + high AoA = MCAS activation.

-Garbage in = Garbage out.

You're sorta forgetting the failure to implement a redundant system from bad AoA sensing. At least to have a couple lines of code that could look at the big picture (GS, A/C configuration etc) before activating an overly aggressive system that wasn't in any AOM all the while other warning systems were freaking out. But you are right, engineering garbage in - engineering garbage out.

You're right, my post was firmly tongue-in-cheek insofar as none of the problems you mentioned are the fault of the software which functioned exactly as it was designed to. The 'garbage in' engineering was in Seattle not India.

[yycflyguy]

The software functioned exactly as it was designed to.

-Auto pilot off + Flap/slats retracted + high AoA = MCAS activation.

-Garbage in = Garbage out.

You're sorta forgetting the failure to implement a redundant system from bad AoA sensing. At least to have a couple lines of code that could look at the big picture (GS, A/C configuration etc) before activating an overly aggressive system that wasn't in any AOM all the while other warning systems were freaking out. But you are right, engineering garbage in - engineering garbage out.

You're right, my post was firmly tongue-in-cheek insofar as none of the problems you mentioned are the fault of the software which functioned exactly as it was designed to. The 'garbage in' engineering was in Seattle not India.

Agreed!

[derateNO]

The software functioned exactly as it was designed to.

-Auto pilot off + Flap/slats retracted + high AoA = MCAS activation.

-Garbage in = Garbage out.

You're sorta forgetting the failure to implement a redundant system from bad AoA sensing. At least to have a couple lines of code that could look at the big picture (GS, A/C configuration etc) before activating an overly aggressive system that wasn't in any AOM all the while other warning systems were freaking out. But you are right, engineering garbage in - engineering garbage out.

You're right, my post was firmly tongue-in-cheek insofar as none of the problems you mentioned are the fault of the software which functioned exactly as it was designed to. The 'garbage in' engineering was in Seattle not India.

truth.

everyone loves to point fingers at anyone from another country. that because they are Indian they are somehow worth less.

India has a ridiculous amount of very very smart people.

[Raymond Hall]

From today's New York Times:

‘It’s More Than I Imagined’: Boeing’s New C.E.O. Confronts Its Challenges

In a candid interview, David Calhoun largely laid the blame for the company’s 737 Max crisis on his predecessor.

FLORISSANT, Mo. — In his eight weeks on the job, Boeing’s chief executive, David L. Calhoun, has come to one overriding conclusion: Things inside the aerospace giant were even worse than he had thought.

In a wide-ranging interview this week, Mr. Calhoun criticized his predecessor in blunt terms and said he was focused on transforming the internal culture of a company mired in crisis after two crashes killed 346 people.

To get Boeing back on track, Mr. Calhoun said, he is working to mend relationships with angry airlines, win back the confidence of international regulators and appease an anxious President Trump — all while moving as quickly as possible to get the grounded 737 Max back in the air.

“It’s more than I imagined it would be, honestly,” Mr. Calhoun said, describing the problems he is confronting. “And it speaks to the weaknesses of our leadership.”
......
When designing the Max, the company made a “fatal mistake” by assuming pilots would immediately counteract a failure of new software on the plane that played a role in the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines accidents. But he implied that the pilots from Indonesia and Ethiopia, “where pilots don’t have anywhere near the experience that they have here in the U.S.,” were part of the problem, too.

[Emphasis added]

Article continues…

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/busi ... e=Homepage

[Raymond Hall]

Today, from Reuters:

FAA administrator: Boeing 737 MAX certification flight could come within 'a few weeks'

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Aviation Administration chief Stephen Dickson said on Thursday he thinks a certification test flight for the Boeing 737 MAX - a key milestone for the return of the grounded plane - could come soon.

"We're working though the last few software review and documentation issues and then I think within a matter of a few weeks we should be seeing a certification flight," Dickson said at a Washington aviation conference.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/boeing-7 ... 56303.html

[pilotbzh]

Sure, anytime now..... I've heard that for the last 8 months

[ayseven]

I think basically it comes down to Airbus vs Boeing, and nobody wants old ideas dressed up as new ones, which is what the Max seems to be - although I am very sure it is a nice airplane (how would I know?). Sales is about perceptions, though, and if you have to compromise so much just to get people to buy your stuff, you have to rethink everything about your business model. The old days of relying on easy money US government contracts for making killing machines seem over, and Boeing doesn't know how to do anything else for money.

[derateNO]

It really is too bad they got rid of all the 757 tooling. That would have been a great airframe to re engine.

[daedalusx]

To make things more complicated.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... t-guidance

[Raymond Hall]

From today's Washington Post:

NASA shows it’s lost confidence in Boeing’s ability to police its own work on Starliner space capsule

The space agency will embed software experts alongside Boeing’s engineers to increase oversight

In the initial days and weeks after Boeing’s test flight of its new spacecraft went awry, the company and NASA went to great lengths to highlight the positives of the mission — how, as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said then, “a lot of things went right.”
But more than two months after the test mission was cut short by what Boeing and NASA now acknowledge were potentially catastrophic software errors, the space agency is being far more blunt about the poor performance of one of its most trusted contractors and dictating the steps Boeing must take to fix the serious problems that have been uncovered.

In a call with reporters Friday, NASA officials said an independent investigation of the marred test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has produced 61 corrective actions and identified 49 gaps in Boeing’s testing procedures. A decision on whether Boeing will be allowed to proceed with flying astronauts or have to redo the test mission without humans on board may be months away, they said.

“We could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission,” said Doug Loverro, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and mission operations. “So clearly this was a close call.”

Article continues…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... e-capsule/

[daedalusx]

But more than two months after the test mission was cut short by what Boeing and NASA now acknowledge were potentially catastrophic software errors

Geee wiz, it's almost as if you don't really save money when you get rid of your in-house engineering team and outsource the work to 9$/hr Indian "software engineers".

It’s okay though. They appointed warmonger Nikki Haley to their BOD, didn’t she study aerospace and engineering ?

Oh wait.

She graduated from Clemson University[12] with a bachelor's degree in accounting.

.

There are currently 13 directors including a former White House chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush, a former U.S. trade representative under President George W. Bush, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the younger Bush, and Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Japan under President Barack Obama.

Huh ... almost as if the entire BOD is made up of MIC, Big Pharma, Lobbyists and Ivy League bean counters.

[derateNO]

Given Covid-19, maybe now would be a great time to just remove these aircraft from the fleet for good. Retrain, slow hiring for 6 months... buy up planes from airlines that have gone under (320s) and expand the A220 order with the options.

The way things are looking in China these days who knows maybe lots of A330's up for sale for cheap when Dragon or Cathay kicks the bucket. Or HK Airlines.