Meanwhile in Buffoonistan;
the president warned that hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama hard. Apparently the National Weather Service is part of the deep state because less than 20 minutes later it tweeted that hurricane Dorian was not Alabamy bound.
You have to follow Trumps tens of thousands of tweets pretty intently to have noticed this and I certainly don't and didn't. Trump the master manipulator ensured that the world did pay attention.
He went on television with the map showing the projected track of the storm. It included an odd final bulge that reached to the area around Mobile Bay. (His accomplice was Kevin Macaleenan, previously in charge of starving prisoners in concentration camps and kidnapping babies. Now we have a project thåt might keep both of them out of prison: they can spend the next wet afternoon with some of Trump's many dollar bills, drawing mustaches the the portrait of Washington.)
The map had been altered. It should not take detectives too long to pin down the culprit. It was someone who is addicted to the use of very large black Sharpies and who hasn't ever noticed that each successive segment of a cone of uncertainty is larger than the one before, like the segments on a nautilus.
The Alabama map looks more like a pimple.
It turns out that although falsifying and publicizing an official weather map is not an impeachable offense, it is a low crime and misdemeanor. Judging by the penalty, less serious then molesting a Coast and Geodetic Survey benchmark.
Perhaps Trump can mount a defense based on the fact that the map that was altered was not a weather map but a water district map.
I have a low opinion of Trump's followers but not as low as Trump's opinion of Trump's followers.
After scamming them so openly and so brazenly, he of course can't think otherwise.
ReplyDeleteHe has been testing and testing to see how far he can go. The answer is, as far as he wants.
ReplyDeleteHis backers just do not are. At an event last night, one woman told me 'the Democrats want to take away our guns.' She meant deer rifles and very few Democrats want to take those.
Trump has found the formula for making his party as self-centered as he is. There is now a cottage industry of handwringers advising us to 'come together.' It wasn't lefties who invented birtherism.
OT: Read this. You have heard a great deal of it before.
ReplyDeleteThen, having done so, perhaps you can correct this.
Not sure any amount of preparation would have been sufficient.
ReplyDeletehttps://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution?fbclid=IwAR0vM9MX6uLLh7x_U9NN10OzctH3JBv2Hg7-ldNLJ1DnY_y-HiQztf8fI5o
Note that this article specifically refutes the B.S. that the pilots had any chance to save the plane, at least in the Ethiopia crash.
DeleteThat TNR article is nothing more than the ravings of an idiot.
DeleteNB: The Ethiopian pilots completely failed. The pilot flying didn't fly, and the pilot monitoring didn't monitor. They left the engines in target thrust mode, which exists to prevent failures in autothrust system from reducing thrust at low altitude.
But if the pilots can't fly the airplane, that target thrust mode will make the airplane go as fast as the engines can manage.
Out of trim forces are a function of the square of indicated airspeed.
Why people who have absolutely no expertise, or even glancing knowledge, of a field feel like they are entitled to pass judgment is a real mystery.
Quite a few pilots and aviation experts, quoted in that article, that you need to ignore to say that.
DeleteI have an idea. Compare that your cite to mine.
DeleteThen show where my cite got it wrong.
It seems to me that the pilots had very little time to figure out what their plane was up to because 1) it was overriding their instructions and 2) reporting false information about the flight's performance.
ReplyDeleteBoeing's lying salesmen had told buyers the pilots wouldn't need any special training.
It wasn't so long ago that Skipper was lamenting on Great Guys the deficiencies of 'glass baby' experience compared to the old ways.
ReplyDeleteSince the fliers of the Max were going to be -- often -- glass babies, it should have been irresponsible, using Skipper's experience, to sell planes without sufficient appropriate training. Boeing chose not to do that.
[Harry:] It seems to me ...
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that you need to refer to that cite I gave you, and show how the pilots had very little time to figure out what was going on.
You won't, because you can't.
Their systems knowledge was deficient, task management nearly nonexistent, and ignorance of aerodynamic fundamentals nearly total.
It wasn't so long ago that Skipper was lamenting on Great Guys the deficiencies of 'glass baby' experience compared to the old ways.
Since the fliers of the Max were going to be -- often -- glass babies, it should have been irresponsible, using Skipper's experience, to sell planes without sufficient appropriate training. Boeing chose not to do that.
I have an idea. Before you hit Publish, do try to think through what you just typed.
It isn't Boeing's, or Airbus's job to determine qualification standards. But more than that, all airliners almost everywhere must be grounded right now.
Remember AF447?
Oh, I forgot to add this:
ReplyDeleteFundamentally, the situation posed by MCAS was simple to deal with. In the spectrum of aircraft faults that crews should be prepared to deal with, it is trivial, and differs in no significant way from any other fault producing an out of trim condition, all of which existed long before the MAX.
Please do try to take that on board.
M:
ReplyDeleteI non-specifically slimed that New Republic article. Which is kind of bad form.
So, I'm going to get specific, until I can't stand it anymore.
In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable.
This author takes the same approach to references that Harry does — reaching his preconceived conclusion, regardless what the cite actually says.
To wit: NASA's ASRS has 150 incidents of AOA vane failure, regardless of reason. AOA failure always produces dramatic results: warnings, stick shaker, horns, you name it. So the ASRS is bound to be a very accurate count. Compare 150 failures to the number of flights over the last 30 years.
Not "terribly reliable"?
Only to a profound sufferer of stage 4 simplism.
Oh, and another clue: "... the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software ..."
ReplyDeleteThat kind of pejorative language is the sound of axe grinding.
Same para: The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.
ReplyDeleteThe author is either an idiot, or a liar. The WSJ source says absolutely nothing about AOA van assembly line lapses.
Oh, and it didn't "promptly dive into the sea".
Once again, idiot, or liar.
Why should I read another word of this frothing dreck?
Okay, just one more:
ReplyDeleteTwenty-two times the demons had violently jerked down the nose, and 22 times the pilot had corrected with equivalent force. “I get so mad at Boeing trying to tar this captain when he was actually the most proficient pilot of all of them,” said Bjorn Fehrm, a former Swedish air force pilot whose technical blog on the aviation web site Leeham News is a 737 MAX must-read. “He was mastering this wild animal—22 times and he kept it in check!”
Aside from the fact that 22 times scarcely brings to mind "promptly".
How many repeats should it take for the pilots to conclude this is a case of uncommanded pitch trim, and just shut the system off?
For this pilot, two. If I'm feeling particularly generous.
So the real question this shit show of an article should have asked, but never does, is why the pilots took so long to fail to do the obvious?
Followed by just as critical a question: why couldn't they control their airspeed?
Now that I've rubbished this TNR disaster, how about comparing it to the cite I provided?
I'll bet the pilots were surprised to find out that the plane would not answer their controls. I'd like to see the section of the manual which alerted them that that might happen.
ReplyDeleteThe section is in the Quick Reference Handbook, in the Flight Controls section: Un-commanded Pitch Trim.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the Aircraft Systems Manual, Flight Controls, Stabilizer Trim System, Stabilizer Trim Cut Out Switches:
ReplyDeleteNORM: Hydraulic power is supplied to the related stabilizer trim module.
CUT OUT: Shuts off the respective center or right hydraulic system power to the related stabilizer trim control module.
Not what I said. The surprise was that they could not regain command.
ReplyDeleteNot what I said.
ReplyDeleteHere is what you said:
I'd like to see the section of the manual which alerted them that that might happen.
I showed you two sections. The systems manual, with which pilots need to be sufficiently familiar with in order to know what every control on the flight deck does, and the QRH, which has specific procedures with which to address non-normal situations when relying on memory alone isn't a good idea.
The surprise was that they could not regain command.
You were a journalist, right? At least you claim to have been.
The surprise isn't that they couldn't regain command -- because all along, they could have. (Okay, not entirely true; there was a point beyond which their failure to fly the airplane made recovery impossible, but that only reinforces my point.)
Rather, the surprise should be that "qualified" pilots completely failed to control their airspeed, and had insufficient systems knowledge to perform the obvious.
No response?
ReplyDeleteNo surprise.
Drip, drip, drip.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/business/boeing-flight-simulator-text-message.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
The dead have forever to wait for the last word.
It’s a shame you don’t know what they were talking about.
ReplyDeleteHint: wasn’t MCAS.
Second thing to keep in mind: they were talking about the implementation of the automatic trim system in the MAX simulator. It has been in the 737 from the beginning.
Unfortunately, I have only the word of a 737 Captain who has read all the emails to go on.
If there was ever a perfect example of inducing Gell-Mann amnesia, your NYT article is it.
ReplyDeleteLook at these paras:
In the messages, the pilot, Mark Forkner, who played a central role in the development of the plane, complained that the system, known as MCAS, was acting unpredictably in a flight simulator: “It’s running rampant.”
No. Wrong. Whether through negligence or malice is hard to say.
The plane is trimming itself like craxy,” he wrote to Patrik Gustavsson, a fellow 737 technical pilot at Boeing. “I’m like WHAT?
The emails aren't about MCAS, but rather the automatic trim system, which has been on 737s since approximately forever. This sentence completely invalidates the one above.
Flight simulators replicate real cockpits and are used to test planes during development. They can sometimes behave unpredictably, depending on their configuration.
Absolutely true. Going from wind tunnel data through computer code and simulator hardware to accurately mimic aircraft throughout the flight envelope is very challenging. Sometimes either the hardware or software produces behavior that is clearly wrong. Just so here. The simulator automatic trim system was wildly out of whack with actual behavior. Not MCAS, the auto trim system.
Oh, and those sentences are a monument to indefinite reference. What does "They" refer to — simulators or planes?
In the messages, he said that during tests in 2016, the simulator showed the plane making unexpected movements through a process called trimming.
I guess the NYT is just fine with publishing self-contradicting stories.
I don't think one needs to have any particular expertise to see how this story shoots itself in the foot. Clearly, though, the David Gelles and Natalie Kitreoff couldn't manage to spot the obvious. Nor could the editors.
Add to that list? You.
This raises some questions. First, why are journalists so incompetent? At least I presume it is incompetence. Maybe it is just a lousy attempt at malice. Hard to say.
You were a journalist, yet you absolutely failed to see the glaring errors in this article. Why is that?
Finally, I have previously posted comments analyzing these tragedies from the point of view of someone with extensive experience and expertise. Later, an in-depth article in the NYT, with a great deal of actual reporting to go on, pretty much corroborates what I had already written.
Yet you relentlessly pitch all that over the side in favor of anything, no matter how shallow and ignorant, just so long as it fluffs your narrative. Doesn't that bother you?
It would bother hell out of me.