Boeing 737 MAX 8

More details here:

https://x.com/seasheltie/status/1743513527493833075

Long story short don’t sit in seats 26A or F on a Boeing 737 MAX 9. They are next to ‘plugs’ filling unused emergency exits in other versions (higher density seating so need more exits) of the plane.

Of the 178 passenger capacity of the plane there were 174 pax on this flight. One of the four empty seats just happened to be the one sucked out.

Somebody is lucky to have missed a flight.

Regulators order grounding of some Boeings after midair emergency

TIL 737 bodies can be configured to have a second emergency exit row. Is that on only the MAX ones, or all of them?

That seems like a serious design flaw. Sounds like the airline industry's self-regulation is working quite well!

Which regulations are Boeing no longer operating under that they used to be that would have prevented this?

My comment was really about the practice of self-regulation in general, which historically has never been good for anyone except corporate shareholders and executives.

As I understand it, the FAA does allow a company's own engineer to sign off on aircraft safety measures.

This guy is a veteran airline pilot who does a great job of sorting out accident reports and shedding light on findings and/or interim reports. I found this extremely helpful in understanding some of what happened.

My Wife works at Boeing. She thinks Spirit AeroSystems is responsible for the flaws in the 737. Apparently, they make the fuselages, and they don't have the best track record when it comes to the construction of said fuselages lately.

So would your family be okay just working on one salary in the very near future?

https://bsky.app/profile/rudell.bsky.social/post/3kig4pvzu4q2x

This is from 2019, but probably good to use this feature for any flights in the future:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/13/tech/kayak-737-max-filter/index.html

GREAT SCOTT!!!

Oh, I thought that it was going to be these.

Shit, she can get a job at any Aerospace company, she's in management.

https://www.levernews.com/boeing-su...ve-amount-of-defects-former-employees-allege/

@Dr. Krieg ?

Here's the full class action lawsuit filed against Spirit Aerosystems last month:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pzxFhXIxXWUjZkAaLGICuyR8Vi-u1HN6/view

iPhone Survives 16,000-Foot Drop From Alaska Airlines Plane That Blew Apart Mid-Air

Meanwhile, you knock yours off the table and your screen shatters

Keep in mind terminal velocity. 1600ft is no different than 50ft except the cellphone had more time to consider the nature of its existence and why there was a bowl of petunias beside it.

Throw in a bush breaking the fall and hitting soft wet earth (it is winter in Portland remember) and you get a miracle.

I’m sure that Boeing would love to blame this on their workers, but even if some workers did screw up there’s more to it. They certainly won’t be happy to discuss the possibility that there is a design flaw/mistake that made the screw up possible. Those whistle blower reports paint a picture of a culture where pressure from management led to an atmosphere where workers were under pressure to speed up their work at the cost of quality control. It’s like those incidents blamed on “pilot error” there’s almost always a chain of events that puts a pilot in an untenable position. I think Boeing’s Board of Directors should fire everyone in upper management then resign. I also think a grand jury investigation might be warranted.

The petunias: Oh not again

Note to self: build planes out of iphones.

Nopte to self, watch out driving near WPB for boeing parts falling from the sky.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/all-...ends-new-instructions-faa-says-204212691.html

The MAX. It’s basically a new concept that they were going to use on all new designs (to give carriers maximum flexibility) but now we’ll see.

It looks to me like Boeing had to figure out a cost-effective way to come up with a new product line without the cost and delays of going with new clean sheet designs as happened with the 787. So they decided to use the same basic airframe designs while bolting on new technologies, like composite materials, new wings, new interior designs and more efficient engines, not mention the infamous MCAS system. It must have looked great on paper. With the FAA conveniently co-opted at least going back to the Obama administration in the name of fostering competition with Airbus, they didn't have to deal with a lot of the issues and the 737 was a proven design...what could possibly go wrong?
In hindsight, it sure likes they would have been better off going with clean sheet designs...but

Some of you seem to have a bit of knowledge about the design and engineering, so I am going to ask a question that is bugging me about this. Looking at the way the door seems to have failed, wouldn't there have been a better way to plug these holes while still allowing them to be available? I am not an engineer, but I could make a plug better than that with a pressurized structure.

It is like the guy was saying in the video above, why isn't there damage where more structure would have been torn away? I can also understand to some extent you may want to limit the failure point so the plug doesn't rip a much bigger hole in the structure when it goes, but this almost seems like there was barely anything holding that plug there.

I am just glad no one was hurt, but we need better regulations and engineers employed for the government to design and test these things.

Very much along the lines of what I'm thinking. While Boeing wants to blame "workers" for a bad installation, it seems to me there ought to be some way to idiot proof the design. I'm certainly not going to condone sloppy work, but if such a potentially critical piece of the airplane has to be installed perfectly to work properly that doesn't sit well with me. When we are talking nearly 200 lives at risk it seems like some built in margin of error is called for.

As I recall, Boeing came up with the 737 Max because they were paranoid that the Airbus 500 (or WTF their giant plane was called) would steal their business. What nobody seemed to realize was that since the Airbus 500 was so goddamned big there were only a couple of airports it could use without the airports making really expensive modifications to their facilities (not merely runways but also things like gates and gangways) the actual market for such planes was really goddamned small.

Also, speaking as someone who has worked for a Boeing supplier before, there had to have been a real breakdown of Boeing's culture for shit like this to happen. Here's the short list of what it was like for us:
1. Boeing supplied not only all the material needed to make the parts they wanted, but they also supplied the tooling.
2.They had their own inspectors in the plant, and we didn't make shit for Boeing if their inspector wasn't there.
3. It didn't matter what the tooling looked like, after it had been used to make X number of parts, it had to be replaced, and we didn't throw out that tooling, we gave it back to Boeing.
4. Every single piece of scrap material created from the stuff Boeing supplied us had to be given back to Boeing.
5. Boeing weighed all that scrap, not merely to make sure that we weren't stealing material from them, but to make sure that we weren't fucking up too many parts.

There's more, but you get the idea.