Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/12/australia/latam-airlines-flight-injuries-new-zealand-tuesday-intl-hnk/index.html

by breadwinner • 2 years ago

257 271 2 years ago

wkat42422• 2 years ago

This sounds more worrying now. When I heard it originally it sounded like a mountain wave. Those are extremely powerful natural downdrafts (or up!) and common in South New Zealand.. They've crashed flights before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911 though that was at mount Fuji in Japan.

But if the plane did this by itself.. wow. The 787 is fly by wire. Worrying. And very bad timing for Boeing.

nop_slide2• 2 years ago

Not sure how I acquired the "common" knowledge that a plane has never crashed before due to turbulence alone, but this looks like an example of such a case!

avemg• 2 years ago

I think maybe you've misunderstood what the common knowledge said. Turbulence hasn't ripped an airplane apart at altitude, so yea turbulence alone hasn't caused a crash. But anything near terrain is plenty risky (mountain waves, low-level wind shear). If the turbulence makes you drop a couple of hundred feet that's no big deal at 35,000 feet and no matter how bumpy it gets, the wings aren't going to break off. But if you're near the ground (or a mountain), well....

BasilPH• 2 years ago

Fascinating article. Some interesting anecdotes:

The victims even included several survivors of the Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 402 crash. (Note: A plane that crashed the day prior, with only 8 out of 72 people on board surviving)
Several booked passengers cancelled their tickets at the last moment to see a ninja demonstration. These passengers, Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, Ken Adam, Lewis Gilbert, and Freddie Young, were in Japan scouting locations for the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967).

Coincidences like this are of course bound to happen with large enough numbers of people traveling, but I still find this interesting.

joecasson2• 2 years ago

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable.

The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.

rco8786• 2 years ago

Yea I have the same question. Objectively it appears that Boeing is having some really serious safety issues. Things that absolutely do not jive with what we’ve been taught our entire lives about how safe airline travel is. But I’m open to the idea that 5-10 “major” incidents a year is maybe within the normal range and we just don’t ever hear about them.

Aetheridon• 2 years ago

appears to be the newer manufactured aircraft (737 Max series and 787's) that are having these issues... the 777 has one of the best safety records for airliners out there for example

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

More plausible than hearsay from Boeing or LATAM

joecasson2• 2 years ago

Fair, but - for the sake of the argument - who's to say that Brian Jokat doesn't have a major short position on Boeing?

I agree that both of the airlines have incentives to cover it up, but it's strange this is being "reported" as verified.

kefirlife• 2 years ago

Given the stories reported about the safety culture at Boeing I expect there are other quality issues. The instances where those quality issues are so apparent that customers experience them, like the door blowout, are unlikely to be unique.

John Oliver did a report on Boeing recently that is pretty damning.

rob742• 2 years ago

Even with zero controls, and even if one or more of the various computers decided spontaneously to restart, I would expect the plane to continue flying the way it did before the incident rather than going into an (apparently) uncommanded descent? I mean, we had that with the 737 MAX, so I wouldn't rule it out, but it sounds suspiciously like the pilot messed up and is trying to blame the airplane. However I'm no specialist, so it's probably best to wait until further details emerge...

cm2187• 2 years ago

Well, something of that sort happened with the A330 also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

kayodelycaon2• 2 years ago

Airbus had a problem like this on an A330 due to corrupted AOA data in the flight computers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

thombat• 2 years ago

But what control input could a pilot make that abruptly produces significant negative gees for just a couple of seconds? Other than the bland references to "technical issue" it sounds like clear air turbulence. (Although one possible mistake could be that the weather radar did warn of it and the pilot didn't react?)

zoeysmithe• 2 years ago

" hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable."

Maybe, but also the alternative is that pilots may be pressued not to report these things due to career or crony capitalist concerns like pressure from their employer or are told this crash is 'normal'. Airlines and Boeing are not "nice guys" and are historically toxic and vindictive companies against the working class.

So that leaves us whistleblowers of lower professional value than pilots. The same way Snowden was a lowly sysadmin contractor and not a high ranking NSA general or CISO or whatever. Or Reality Winner or Chelsea Manning had relatively low level positions.

At a certain point, in a corrupt system, we have to accept the quality of whistleblower is never going to be that gold standard we want. Maybe this is fake, but its worth taking on face value considering what we know about Boeing culture and the capitalism dynamics and government corruption they've helped create that keeps them away from proper regulation and disclosure.

Not to mention we still know next to nothing about Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which was a Boeing too. The narrative of "nothing to see here, its just a pilot suicide or freak swamp gas accident" is now a lot more questionable as we've seen Boeing quality decline lately.

"Hey this isnt good enough" is wrong thinking here. In a system of corruption and secrecy its rare to have "good enough" but instead we have to deal with the cards we're dealt by witnesses and whistleblowers.

honkycat• 2 years ago

Did you really not hear about one of their door plugs falling off mid air? Or how TWO of their passenger planes crashed into the ocean killing all passengers due to gross negligence in implementing their computer assisted control for their new plane?

They are having HUGE quality issues for the exact reason you would expect: finance bros took over the company and they now blow tons of money on stock buybacks and not unnecessary things like QA.

Businesses doing Big Things cannot just blow all of their money on stock buybacks and expect to do great things. It is all profits without prosperity. It used to be illegal for a reason.

It is not just hype. They have screwed the pooch.

cjbgkagh3• 2 years ago

Boeing being safe was the default, what we're seeing is the disillusion of this default. What's the alternative for the news; "plane lands successfully and without issue". As with any complex system things when things go wrong they go wrong in a myriad of ways with a great deal of uncertainty and randomness - which in and of itself makes them interesting. The erosion of the culture of safety at Boeing is a slow gradual process that has occured over several decades. Incidents that make it to the public are a lagging indicator, which suggests that there is much more to come. Culture is easy to destroy and very very hard to fix, like how cutting down a forest is much faster and easier than growing one. And a culture that has destroyed itself is very unlikely able to fix itself. So we could very well be witnessing a terminal decline. Boeing will make a ton of money providing drones for the US military so there is no real incentive to force leadership to do any course corrections - instead they will just have to act surprised each time a new Boeing issue pops up.

jajko2• 2 years ago

These issues are killing people in hundreds. You are right that national security is more important, but world is not binary. Current execs could easily say rot in jail while company keeps churning whatever hardware military wants, nothing mutually exclusive there.

Now what will happen with civilian avionics is another story, for me they lost my trust for good but I & my family choices are insignificant forces on the market.

pxeboot• 2 years ago

If you are curious just how common minor incidents are, https://avherald.com does a good job of listing most of them.

bbor4• 2 years ago

This isn’t a “hype cycle”, Boeing has very publicly abandoned their engineering culture in favor of stock buybacks ever since the McDonnell-Douglas merger. It’s not hidden at all, and we have countless whistleblower employees, undercover investigations, and the obvious fiscal facts (eg they planned to spend half as much on the MAX as they originally thought it would take).

Plus this isn’t exactly a huge industry, and I don’t recall airbus having these problems. Probably because “spend the normal amount of money on engineering” is about the easiest decision a company could ever make - the most obvious, no-shit-Sherlock board room decision possible for building the long-term value of a company.

IMO sometimes things are simple, and sometimes the rich and powerful are blinded by short-term greed.

mym19906• 2 years ago

How do you suppose a half a trillion dollar market is not a "huge industry"? I am definitely aware of the cultural issues at Boeing, but boiling it down to "sometimes things are simple" is just a lot of ignorance on your part.

somenameforme• 2 years ago

You can test this, to some degree, by using custom date ranges on most of any search engine. Just exclude from the past several days and search for whatever. So for instance, I assume most people know that amongst numerous other issues, a Boeing also had a wheel fall off and cause damage to vehicles and what no on the ground below. So I searched for 'wheel falls off airplane' [1] while excluding the past few months. And yeah, every time it happened, even on relatively small planes, it received lots of coverage.

So it seems fairly safe to say that something has gone seriously wrong with Boeing, rather than there just being a big focus on them. I always thought the safest time to fly would be shortly after an airline had a major safety incident, because that's exactly when they're going to be checking everything ten times over. And I'm sure this is exactly what Boeing is still doing, yet they still can't seem to keep their planes in the air and in one piece.

[1] https://search.brave.com/search?q=wheel+falls+off+airplane&s...

metalliqaz• 2 years ago

But for the planes that are in-service, any extra scrutiny in the wake of an incident would mostly fall on the airlines, not on Boeing.

chmod7753• 2 years ago

There's databases that are going to make that a bit more precise.

https://aviation-safety.net/database/

https://avherald.com/ (has fulltext search)

This query returns some results about dropped wheels:

https://avherald.com/h?search_term=dropped+wheel&opt=7168&do...

mym19906• 2 years ago

I would lean towards an anti-Boeing hype cycle with some confluence of a series of unfortunate events. This is not to say that the QA issues aren't leading to something catastrophic, but on the whole I don't think people quite comprehend the number of flights that take off and land in a day, and how few fatalities and injuries result as of these trips relative to the passenger load.

jajko2• 2 years ago

Yet competition can and does better, much better re safety currently. Any issue of Airbus would get at least same press coverage, in US even more since media are usually not impartial.

Are we already into some boeing whitewashing cycle too?

chmod7753• 2 years ago

The problem isn't that "accidents happen", the problem is that airplane safety culture isn't meeting people's expectations anymore. Two planes crashing for the exact same preventable reason mere months apart just does not compute. A single crash would've been quickly forgotten. But two crashes and a long chain of incidents all while the planes were allowed to stay in the air is going to change people's perceptions.

The fuckups being directly attributable to inept leadership, bad policy, and a focus shift away from building planes does not help, especially since the same incompetent clowns are still in charge at Boeing. One of the first remedies should've been getting rid of the businesses school types that have crept in and making sure decision making is again done by engineers. Instead, they blamed the 737 MAX's issues on engineers in the corporate ladder, such as then CEO Dennis Muilenburg, replacing them with lesser-qualified people. Even though the plane was developed during his predecessor's term, who definitely wasn't an engineer and brought most of the relevant organizational issues about! Now you can blame him for not substantially reversing the course set by his predecessor, but the answer definitely isn't to have Boeing be run by yet another non-engineer.

Boeing's current leadership does not have the trust of the public or that of the engineers working under them. After all of this, they won't ever.

aniftythrifrty• 2 years ago

Carry that skepticism forward when reading anti-Israel headlines.

bigbillheck• 2 years ago

In the sense that there's evidence of a problem with planes right now, and the question is if that problem was already there, whereas there's evidence of IDF war crimes right now, and the question is if they've always been doing them?

SomeoneFromCA2• 2 years ago

proisreal, antiisarael, skepticism is always useful.

jerf• 2 years ago

The problem with engineering defense in depth is that systems naturally evolve to "spend" that defense in depth. Constant, active vigilance is required to maintain a culture that honors and preserves defense in depth rather than exploiting it. It isn't that hard to believe that Boeing has failed to preserve that culture. A company like Boeing would be constantly fighting against multiple forces pushing them to exploit the defense in depth rather than maintain it. Some of them, like the Harvard MBA mindset, are very difficult for large companies to resist. Short term costs that result in long term benefits are a hard sell to almost anyone, but current American business culture is definitely not strong against that.

philip1209• 2 years ago

I'm skeptical of this account - Newton's First Law says that an object in motion stays in motion. Losing instruments for a second doesn't cause a change in momentum - that would have needed to be a stall, a change in trim, or an external weather event such as a downdraft. A stall would have been accompanied by a stall recovery procedure involving attitude + thrust changes, and nobody seems to be reporting that in the article.

I'm no professional, but if I had to guess - the plane got hit by a hard gust, and the gust triggered a short in some electronics that caused the screens to go blank. (So, the opposite direction of causality).

marvin• 2 years ago

If passengers were touching the ceiling, it would have required either a very powerful downdraft or control surface inputs leading to greater-than gravity acceleration downwards. Very interested to hear the investigation into this.

whoknowsidont3• 2 years ago

Newton's First Law says that an object in motion stays in motion.

How is this relevant? There is turbulence and gravity, this isn't "empty" space.

Losing instruments for a second doesn't cause a change in momentum

No, but modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable.

If the account is accurate sounds like quite literally everything had a blip for a second, which would have prevented computer-intervention when encountering severe turbulence, or worse, flight control surfaces became "stuck."

LaffertyDev• 2 years ago

Nitpicking. I agree with your broader point.

No, but modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable.

Most aircraft outside of fighter jets are aerodynamically stable. Loss of powered flight would mean the airplane will glide (in nominal operation). Even the 737MAX7/9 aircraft are still stable (although that brings up defining exactly what we mean by aerodynamically stable... )

WillPostForFood3• 2 years ago

modern jets need computer-aided control of flight control surfaces to keep the aircraft stable

Small nitpick, commercial jets are designed to be aerodynamically stable. If controls froze briefly, the plane would continue to be stable, flying as it was when the controls froze. You'd need to add in the turbulence or some external force for it to be a problem. That said, the 787 is 100% dependent on electronic controls, so anything more than brief loss of controls would lead to a crash.

cjbgkagh3• 2 years ago

Murphy's law, "anything that can go wrong (eventually) will go wrong". Gusts triggering a short that blocks out fly-by-wire would be even more worrying than poor coding. You know landings generally have lots of gusts and would be a terrible time to locked out.

ikekkdcjkfke• 2 years ago

Better make sure nothing can gonwrobg then with robust systems

jurassicfoxy• 2 years ago

and the gust triggered a short in some electronics that caused the screens to go blank

That is a hilariously complex first guess.

datavirtue• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the time my brand new F-250 "crashed" and rebooted. Lost all functionality for almost a minute, completely dropped dead on the road. It rebooted and continued on. Happened one time in five years and ~50k miles.

post_break• 2 years ago

Teslas were known for doing the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWWRx6ZuV80

WillPostForFood3• 2 years ago

Not the same thing, He said the f-250 lost all functionality, including power. The video you posted is just the Tesla screen rebooting, while keeping all driving functionality.

ghusbands• 2 years ago

That Tesla didn't "completely drop[] dead on the road" like the post you're replying to stated - it just had the non-driving controls go dark for a couple of minutes. Still terrible, and the Nissan Leaf also does it occasionally, though for less time.

burgerrito• 2 years ago

This gives a whole new meaning to the sentence "My car crashed"

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Heh, yeah. Had a Subaru Forrester decide that something was wrong with the throttle or cruise control or something, and the appropriate response was to ignore the accelerator and just leave the engine at idle. On the freeway. In the middle of a road trip.

Manual "reboot" fixed that one. But "have you tried turning it off and back on again" is not a good answer for an airliner...

fotta• 2 years ago

I had a Chrysler Pacifica go into limp mode several times due to issues in a CAN bus connector sending bad ECM data. It was very intermittent so service couldn't do anything. Eventually someone in an owner's forum figured it out so I was able to swap out the $5 connector.

queuebert• 2 years ago

On a related note, one of the whistleblowers was just found dead: https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/boeing-whistleblower...

dang• 2 years ago

Boeing whistleblower found dead in US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39673589 (438 comments)

engineer_22• 2 years ago

"self inflicted gunshot wound"

psunavy03• 2 years ago

If the FBW system is getting spurious inputs, that's a Very Bad Thing. But I'm skeptical about CNN reporting from some rando non-aviator being accurate as to what exactly is going on. This is like asking some random person what their doctor or lawyer told them, and expecting them to get it all right.

lenerdenator• 2 years ago

They're down ~27% YTD.

Something tells me that there's going to be a "come to Jesus" meeting soon in the C-suite's future that results in the deployment of a golden parachute.

ChicagoBoy11• 2 years ago

Can only hope to unfortunately find myself with one such meeting scheduled on my calendar!

chasd00• 2 years ago

hopefully the parachute is made by Boeing

dh2022• 2 years ago

maybe not made by Boeing, but certainly paid by it....

michaelcampbell• 2 years ago

There will be a scapegoat, and then big bonuses for everyone else for eliminating the bad seed, at the expense of the workers who won't get raises to pay for it all.

dessimus• 2 years ago

Calhoun opens the third envelope...

sio8ohPi3• 2 years ago

"passenger says".

I'm dubious and betting on clear-air turbulence, but we'll know in a few days.

new23d• 2 years ago

This is the FlightRadar24 playback of the flight: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/la800#34506b53

At time ~02:27, a dip in the altitude can be seen in the flight data chart.

_obviously• 2 years ago

Real time operating systems are expensive to develop for and require laborious system validation. That's why we decided to use a custom version of Android Jelly Bean running on the latest MediaTek quad core processors featuring Arm Mali gpus. Sensor communications are handled wirelessly with BlueTooth. Be sure to turn off all electronic devices before the flight. :)

onetimeuse923042• 2 years ago

All development was offshored to a lowest bidder. Thanks to this, all our critical flight control software is now developed by a single intern aided by Copilot (sic!) We are now looking for a way to optimize the intern away.

SomeoneFromCA2• 2 years ago

It would be nice, if someone could train stray cats. I have very smart in my neighborhood. And can be hired for cheap, basically a slice of sausage.

delfinom• 2 years ago

Yea I laugh at everyone try to shove AI into hardware and software design of physical products as if there's a market of engineers out there and not just hobbyists keeping things alive in the states.

We've long since offshored the development of any physical products that isn't considered ITAR/defense world.

pylua• 2 years ago

I can’t wait until they replace pilots with remote workers in a low cost of living area.

shnkr• 2 years ago

AI should be in life critical software.

beembeem• 2 years ago

Giving me a heart attack reading this

DanielHB• 2 years ago

You joke, but relying on bluetooth could be reasonable as a redundant system, wires can break too. Probably more as a failure detection mechanism though.

bfrog2• 2 years ago

Probably some software written in C++ by one of those "I never write bugs" types followed by a hardware watchdog thankfully catching it and rebooting.

Maybe its time to rethink software safety and verification there of? Safety in software is a bit of a joke. Document the behavior, its safe! Yeah no.

callalex• 2 years ago

Where did you gain this insight into how the plane’s software was built?

bfrog2• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9476139 but many other possible ad-hoc informative pieces of info are out there from googling around

tptacek7• 2 years ago

If you watch The Aviation Herald, this kind of reporting feels a little like trying to write news stories off VAERS data. Crazy shit is happening more or less all the time in planes; the idea isn't that nothing ever goes wrong, but that layered controls prevent injuries or hull losses.

It's not that there necessarily isn't a thru-line to these stories. And I read "Flying Blind" like everyone else and share the popular opinion of Boeing's modern engineering culture. But there's basically no content in these stories. There are experts somewhere that can put events like this into context, but they're not cited and the story isn't written around that kind of analysis, so we're left to supply it ourselves. Human nature suggests that the blanks we'll fill in will be a disaster movie, because that's "fun" to think about.

https://avherald.com/h?article=5138ccfe&opt=0

notRobot2• 2 years ago

This is worthy of reporting. 50+ people were injured, one is in severe condition.

tptacek7• 2 years ago

Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald.

I guess I'm not saying it isn't worth reporting. Before the Boeing Narrative set in, these kinds of stories did get reported! But now they're tied into this long-running Boeing arc, and it's frustrating because there isn't enough in the story to know what's really going on.

kelnos3• 2 years ago

It feels irresponsible to me to report some random thing a layperson passenger said without verifying the information.

The passenger could have misheard or be lying. Even if the pilot did say that, he may have just said that to save face, when it was pilot error all along. Hopefully the FDR data will be made public.

epolanski2• 2 years ago

Right now Boeing gets much more attention on anything that goes bad.

Can't but say the company brought it on themselves.

That being said that was a noteworthy incident regardless.

tptacek7• 2 years ago

Nothing I'm saying has anything to do with sympathy for Boeing.

lamontcg2• 2 years ago

Yeah after the MCAS incident showing a kind of malice and the door blowout showing incompetency, I'm perfectly happy to start treating Boeing as guilty until proven innocent on these incidents. They haven't really been behaving in a way that they're worthy of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Until they start to show that they're changing their behavior (which they clearly didn't do after the MCAS incident) then they really deserve the gut reactions to their own bad headlines. The public doesn't have to try to search for perfect judicial fairness once they've burned our trust, that's a standard that only makes sense to apply to the actual courts.

11101010001100• 2 years ago

Sure, let's talk to more pilots of Boeing airplanes....which is what they are doing.

dynisor2• 2 years ago

74gear[1] on YouTube is a 747 Captain. It's a great aviation channel in general if anyone is interested in that stuff. He had mentioned two things that really illustrated to me your point a while back:

A) Stuff breaks on planes. All the time. They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies that unless there is a completely catastrophic failure, they are still perfectly safe to fly. An example: a starter is out in one of the engines, but there are four starters for an engine. Once the issue is known, if they can't fix it where they are currently at, they will do an empty flight (well, crew only) to the next maintenance hub and get it fixed. Before a plane even gets off the ground they have a checklist and do their best to determine if the plane is airworthy and safe to fly or not. If they feel the plane is unsafe, they can refuse to fly it. It is important to them to make sure the plane is safe to fly because:

B) They also don't want to die.

That last bit really hit hard for me for some reason, it's hilarious but at the same time eye opening. I think that I just never really thought of it in that way before. Maybe it's just me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@74gear

_ea1k2• 2 years ago

Regarding that last part, you'd be surprised at how many people at the FAA/DOT also haven't come to this realization.

satellite2• 2 years ago

Yes but do the flight crew have the ability to tell if a plane is safe to fly?

Without a deep understanding of the design of the plane they rely a lot on the metrics that the plane manufacturer display and on the manufacturers manuals to interpret them.

breadwinner4• 2 years ago

They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies

But Boeing reduced redundancies, presumably to cut costs. The 737 MAX planes that crashed only had one AoA sensor. Where else did they cut costs? Where else did they reduce redundancies? The public trust has been lost. Boeing needs to design a new plane from scratch, this time let engineers design the plane without interference from accountants.

trompetenaccoun• 2 years ago

It's a great aviation channel in general if anyone is interested in that stuff.

It's an aviation channel for people who aren't into aviation. Lot's of clickbait + obvious optimization of titles and topics to appeal to the masses. The Mr Beast of pilots.

cs702• 2 years ago

Thank you for the context.

I will hold off on passing judgment for now, even though I too share the popular opinion of Boeing's current (lack of) engineering culture.

weaksauce• 2 years ago

I think it's worth reporting on because this particular issue is known to everyone... you need to cycle the power on the planes every 3 days or else the reset themselves. it's crazy that a modern plane needs to have that happen but it does. the most likely situation is that the plane didn't get shutdown and happened to occur at a level flying situation and the pilots probably freaked out and overflew the plane which got it into upset territory. the plane was trimmed and would have been fine if the pilots(likely) didn't do what they did.

thejazzman• 2 years ago

Unless you're a pilot I'm not sure why anyone would expect that to be common knowledge.

And it's insane such a system would ever be authorized IMO. That sounds like a hack to fix a memory leak or similarly some bug they can't figure out

MadnessASAP2• 2 years ago

There was a mandatory patch for that in 2020.

rootusrootus2• 2 years ago

you need to cycle the power on the planes every 3 days or else the reset themselves

Huh? Try 51. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33233827

devb• 2 years ago

the most likely situation

What is the value in posting a long, entirely speculative comment like this? It doesn't even appear that you have any credibility in this field. Even if you did, this comment would be useless.

tim333• 2 years ago

pilots probably freaked out and overflew the plane

I've got a pilots license and shoving the stick forward such that you pull negative Gs and passengers get stuck on the roof is not a normal reaction to the instuments going out.

It sounds more like one of the computer systems crashed or lost power causing a lack of control until a backup kicked in, and caused the fly by wire to pitch downwards briefly.

anigbrowl• 2 years ago

50 injuries on a commercial flight is very unusual. The story is about half description of the incident and half background info on Boeing's ongoing woes. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect an engineering explainer on a breaking news story.

There are experts somewhere that can put events like this into context, but they're not cited and the story isn't written around that kind of analysis, so we're left to supply it ourselves. Human nature suggests that the blanks we'll fill in will be a disaster movie, because that's "fun" to think about.

That seems kinda patronizing, considering there's a first hand report describing the effect of the sudden drop:

“That’s when I opened my eyes and there was various individuals at the top of the plane. Just stuck to the roof and then they fell to the floor. And then I just realized I’m not in a movie, this is actually for real,” he told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

Are readers supposed to just ignore this, or the pilot's comment that the plane apparently rebooted and he lost all control of it?

paulmd• 2 years ago

787 is known to have computer bugs that are tied to system uptime too.

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_...

Like obviously that is not the failure mode in this scenario… but it’s the same aircraft type. It’s totally believable imo that they just bumped into some other bug/timeout/overflow, especially on the 787 of all aircraft.

In fairness these types of reports can also “prime” people to favor certain explanations. It doesn’t mean it is a software bug, or related in any way to the previous ones. But as a software engineer… yeah that really does sound like some kind of overflow or hang, followed by a lockup, followed by a watchdog timeout and reboot. Good thing it’s not booting off spinning rust there. “Please wait while windows checks your file system for errors” is not what I’d want to see as I’m falling out of the sky :V

It obviously has to be something very edgy otherwise it would have been caught already. Uptime is a good theory imo. But that’s pure unfounded speculation.

On the other hand, not good news for Boeing given the other situation. Yes, it’s unrelated and a totally different aircraft type, and small bugs are routine in newer types. But people don’t have confidence in Boeing to engineer and manufacture well anymore - when people know deep down in their heart of hearts it’s another big Boeing bug you have a mindshare problem. It’s like smeltdown etc. Even if it affects everyone it certainly reminds them of intel the most.

sooheon• 2 years ago

You want a news story to be an engineering postmortem instead?

hammock• 2 years ago

What is VAERS data?

tptacek7• 2 years ago

The WSJ just ran a story suggesting that an FA accidentally hit a seat switch that pushed a pilot into the flight controls, which is what caused this incident --- a cause incompatible with most of the comments on this thread.

notRobot2• 2 years ago

For those who haven't read the article: this was a severe failure, the plan dropped altitude suddenly, the pilot had no control, and people in the flight were literally tossed around.

About 50 people were injured in the incident, with one person in serious condition, emergency services said.

coolThingsFirst• 2 years ago

how come, it's the safest mode of transportation.

it's just jet fuel and meat travelling in a tight tube together.

maybelsyrup2• 2 years ago

Anyone have the tail number for the airplane involved? Is it CC-BGG? Wondering if there's any way to tell if this is one of the 787s built in South Carolina or in Washington state.

damiankennedy• 2 years ago

Yes, it was CC-BGG that had the incident and landed in Auckland, then the flight to Santiago was cancelled.

Havoc• 2 years ago

You can probably fish it off flight radar. If you have an adsb broadcaster they’ll give you a free pro subscription

cco2• 2 years ago

Let me introduce you to two tools!

The first is https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/354285. A fairly complete database of aviation incidents.

The second is https://avherald.com/h?article=51601631&opt=256, similar to Aviation Safety but has comments and is more like hackernews but for commercial aviation.

And yes, tail number was CC-BGG.

maybelsyrup2• 2 years ago

Thanks! Either of these tools allow you to see where an airframe was assembled?

astrange• 2 years ago

Don't think I like the news article structure where the reporter spends half the article listing everything bad that happened recently, that isn't actually a cause of the event, but is just there to make you feel bad about who they've decided to make the article about.

robmusial• 2 years ago

In the Air France flight 11 [0] situation the pilots thought they were having instrument and control issues, they had to go around, and there was much panic in the cockpit. It turned out the entire thing was pilot induced and the aircraft was fine. Because of Boeing's massive failures on the minds of everyone it'll be interesting to see if this was truly an instrumentation failure or something else.

[0] https://simpleflying.com/air-france-boeing-777-serious-incid...

chrisbolt• 2 years ago

Reminiscent of AF447[0] which also involved pilots making conflicting inputs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

bombcar6• 2 years ago

At some point the systems are going to be so good that the second pilot is more of a liability than an asset.

sofixa4• 2 years ago

If you read the final incident report[1] from BEA, you'll see that there was a hardware failure - the control yokes got desynchronised from one another which isn't supposed to happen, and the pilots were therefore unaware of conflicting inputs. Worst of all, Boeing doesn't warn in any way if that happens, because why would they? Airbuses (which don't have synchronised sticks) have "dual input" warnings audio and visual warnings.

They should have communicated better, but we've seen this many times - in panic situations or under pressure, communication is hard.

https://bea.aero/fileadmin/user_upload/F-GSQJ_finalreport_EN...

inferiorhuman6• 2 years ago

the control yokes got desynchronised from one another which isn't supposed to happen

No, that's precisely what's supposed to happen.

inferiorhuman6• 2 years ago

Ah, since I see the peanut gallery needs some education.

  the control yokes got desynchronised from one another which isn't supposed to happen

No, that's precisely what's supposed to happen. Seriously. On an Airbus with sidesticks opposing inputs get you a dual input warning and have a button to lock out the other set of controls, and the computers just average the inputs. On a Boeing with yokes (e.g. the 777 in question) the way you overcome opposing inputs is simply to pull harder. Past a certain point (I want to say about 50 lb of force), the torque tube linking the controls "breaks" and the controls are desynchronized. If memory serves that means each pilot gets control of the elevator on one side.

  Worst of all, Boeing doesn't warn in any way if that happens, because why would they?

This is also wildly inaccurate. The yokes are mechanically connected up until you apply enough force to break the connection. The feedback you get as a result serves as a warning. Airbus uses the aural and visual warnings because their sidesticks aren't backfed and you'd otherwise have no idea what the other pilot is doing.

There was no hardware failure. Air France simply trains their pilots to a very low standard compared to other airlines.

seatac76• 2 years ago

Oh wow I was expecting some really bad turbulence. Saw the WSJ video of the passenger who mentioned that the pilot told him “he lost his instruments”, how does this even happen aren’t they supposed to have redundancy.

space_oddity• 2 years ago

I'm becoming more and more afraid of flying with each passing day. And this fear sometimes hinders my life.

kelnos3• 2 years ago

Title is misleading, and should be changed to match the original headline. Pilot has not reported that information directly; this is hearsay from a passenger.

Johnny555• 2 years ago

I remember being on a 787 not long after they were introduced and after boarding, we had a 20 minute delay because of an equipment problem that required "rebooting the plane" (the pilot's words). They did a full power shutoff, the cabin lights went off for a few minutes (and the cabin quickly warmed up because the A/C was off and the electronic window shades turned clear), then about 20 minutes later the pilot said everything was good and we were ready for departure. The rest of the flight was uneventful.

ricardobeat4• 2 years ago

The first versions of the Dreamliner had some kind of software bug that ended up generating a requirement of a hard reboot every X hours until it could be fixed. I don’t know if I would have the guts to board the plane after seeing that!

bombcar6• 2 years ago

It was a timer that overflowed, I think, and nobody had left the plane "on" without shutting it down for whatever time it took to overflow.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/8548-reboot-...

To be fair, 248 days is quite a long time.

wolverine8762• 2 years ago

The Boeing story is starting to sound a bit like the crime-in-cities story. We always can find some examples somewhere due to sheer volume of Boeing planes and people in cities. However, both are very safe.

We have a social problem of embracing speculation, misinformation and disinformation and movements that are little more than angry mobs, and of treating with contempt an adherence to facts and rationality. With ever more information out there, and ever more speculation, mis- and disinformation, we need to utilize the latter - the facts and rationality - more than ever. They are proven tools for distinguishing fact from all the fictions we humans have some urge to embrace.

I still think Boeing has legitimate liability and responsibility, and needs to fix their manufacturing and safety situations. Airplane manufacturing can't respond only when things get worse.

sparrc2• 2 years ago

Not really. No airplane was ever grounded by the FAA since the 1970s, when they grounded the McDonnell Douglas DC-10.

Since the merger, the FAA has grounded both of Boeing's new planes (The 787 Dreamliner and the 737 Max).

Boeing's safety record is objectively declining. They are shipping out airplanes with safety issues that are being found "in production". This is why their planes are being grounded (something that never happened to Boeing pre-merger).

sio8ohPi3• 2 years ago

Number of groundings depends on the subjective judgement of FAA employees. It's not useful as an objective measure.

Christ, Boeing planes used to just spontaneously explode back in the 90s, and the only reason more people weren't killed was that two of the three had the good fortune to happen on the ground.

wolverine8762• 2 years ago

The fact is that very people have been killed by Boeing planes, and you won't be killed in one either.

The FAA's job is to prevent that - to stop it before it happens. I don't at all object to them grounding planes.

WalterBright2• 2 years ago

Or maybe the pilot made a mistake and is trying to save face by blaming the instruments. I suggest waiting for the investigation to figure out what went wrong.

For example, he could have slipped while climbing out of the seat and fell against the control column.

fransje264• 2 years ago

Or maybe the pilot made a mistake and is trying to save face

That wouldn't be the first time

WalterBright2• 2 years ago

Looks like I wasn't far off:

"Flight attendant hit a seat switch that pushed pilot into controls during flight to New Zealand, industry officials say"

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/cockpit-mishap-might-h...

ricardobeat4• 2 years ago

Aren’t turbulence / tailwinds / low pressure zone the only things that can cause a plane to suddenly lose lift and drop?

I don’t think there’s any control input that can cause that, this story doesn’t seem to make sense.

sio8ohPi3• 2 years ago

Quantas 72 is a flight that experienced a sudden uncommanded pitch-down (-0.8g), causing injuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

So it's in principle possible.

But passengers are notoriously clueless, to the point that "there was a go around and I thought we were all going to die" is practically a meme in aviation circles. Wait a few days and see what comes to light once it's investigated.

ricardobeat4• 2 years ago

Wow, I never imagined these aircraft could make violent maneuvers like this, at cruise speeds, without structural damage.

fransje264• 2 years ago

Good find. I was wondering it was possible.

spiderxxxx• 2 years ago

Ice can do that too. And engine failure.

ricardobeat4• 2 years ago

In those cases the plane doesn't suddenly drop though? You just lose speed and start gliding.

rootusrootus2• 2 years ago

Given that all we have is hearsay, and we've seen many incidents like this in the past that were caused by "clear air turbulence" ... I'm going to default to assuming it was not a mechanical defect in the plane until we know otherwise. It is by far the most likely answer.

Animats• 2 years ago

The 787 is full fly by wire. Was there actually a failure of the flight control system? So far, there's not much info.

Overview of 787 control system.[1]

[1] https://ioactive.com/reverse-engineers-perspective-on-the-bo...

codalan• 2 years ago

Fun fact: So is the braking. There are no hydraulic backup systems in place.

berkut• 2 years ago

This sounds a bit like this issue:

https://www.aviationtoday.com/2015/05/05/boeing-787-power-is...

Which was an issue where the 787's Generator Control Units went into failsafe mode after being powered on for 248 days...

dz0ny• 2 years ago

On Dec 2nd 2016 the FAA had issued their airworthiness directive AD 2016–24–09 summarizing: "We are adopting a new airworthiness directive (AD) for all The Boeing Company Model 787–8 and 787–9 airplanes. This AD requires repetitive cycling of either the airplane electrical power or the power to the three flight control modules (FCMs). This AD was prompted by a report indicating that all three FCMs might simultaneously reset if continuously powered on for 22 days. We are issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."

nightowl_games• 2 years ago

Oh my god that is pathetic. 22 days is so short.

fransje264• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, that AD got superseded in 2020, after a hardware and software update:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/09/2020-22...

elihu• 2 years ago

John Oliver did an episode on Boeing quality control just 5 days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc

mriziq• 2 years ago

Boeing news … meanwhile doors or flying off planes, planes are dropping mid flight … and the whistleblower is dead. What a strange time. I’m afraid of airplanes (made by Boeing) now.

fransje264• 2 years ago

No. It's a turbulent time with new opportunities.

    When one door closes, an other door opens.  Boeing.

Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

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