The Sound of a Techno-Crash: Boeing, Boeing

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The Boeing 737 Max, the most technologically advanced airliner there is, a.k.a. a thoroughly crapified and deadly airplane, currently grounded.

The Boeing 737 Max is an almost perfect embodiment of all the trends driving the industrial age to destruction: the worship of money to the exclusion of all other values; government of the people, for the industrialists; and a pathetic faith in ever more complex technological solutions for simple problems.

When brand-new 737 Maxes began to fall out of the sky — an Indonesian airliner crashed in October, an Ethiopian ship in April, with a total death toll of 346 souls — the entire fleet of 393 aircraft, each worth over $100 million, was and remains grounded. The search for a cause of the crashes immediately focussed on a software upgrade. You know, like the Windows 10 updates that come unbidden in the middle of the night and obliterate all your computer files, or the sudden improvements that turn your useful cell phone into a maddening, contrary, spastic piece of junk (or is that just my experience?).  

In that tradition, Boeing coders improved the software that controls the operations of the aircraft in flight. Flight computers not only fly the plane when autopilot is engaged, typically when cruising at altitude, but they monitor flight data all the time to detect anything abnormal or dangerous. Once upon a time, if the computer detected something wrong it would warn the pilot, sounding a stall warning or playing a voice command: “Pull up! Pull up!” Now it does more.

The problem the Boeing engineers had was that when they installed the Max’s larger engines, they had to move them forward and upward on the wings so that they cleared the ground when taxiing. In their new position, at full thrust they tended to push the aircraft’s nose up. Full thrust is usually used during takeoff, during which the aircraft is flying at low speed and low altitude. Raising the nose in this situation can bring on an aerodynamic stall, giving the aircraft the flying characteristics of a large rock.

To prevent this, the helpful code writers told the flight computer that if it ever detected a nose-high attitude — whether the autopilot was engaged or not — the computer was to seize control, pitch the nose downward, and apply hydraulic pressure to the controls to prevent the pilots from pulling the nose back up.

How do the flight computers (there are two them) detect a nose-high attitude? Each computer relies on a single angle-of-attack sensor. If the two sensors disagree, meaning one of them is out of whack, normal airliners sound a warning to the pilots. But not on the new improved 737 Max.

And this is where the love of money comes in. If you build a new airplane, it has to be certified as airworthy by the FAA before you can sell it. If your airline buys a new airplane, it has to train and certify all its pilots in the new bird. To avoid these enormous costs, Boeing and its airline customers insisted that the Max was not a new airplane, just another Boeing 737, of which 13 models had been produced since it first flew in 1967, none requiring re-certification of air frame or pilots. None involved the scale of re-engineering done on the Max, either.

And here’s where we get government of the people, for the industrialists. Because Boeing, one of America’s largest companies (it employs 140,000 people), didn’t want the hassle of re-certification, the FAA didn’t want it either. In fact the FAA no longer hires its own people to work alongside the designers and builders of airplanes to make sure safety is  the number one priority; they just ask the company to assure them that safety is number one. It’s so much more convenient for almost everybody, and it’s cheaper, too.

So everybody pretended the Max was just another 737, just get in it and go, nothing to see here, until, on board Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, startled pilots on climbout saw and felt the nose of the aircraft drop precipitously, encountered strong resistance from the controls when they tried to counteract the dive, could not remember how to shut the damn autopilot off, and died trying. (Of course the investigations of these crashes have not been concluded and these opinions about what happened are not official. But they are pretty much universal among pilots and other aviation people not affiliated with Boeing.)

Greed, technological over-reach and government laxity continue to rule in American aviation as in the rest of America. So Brace for Impact.

[Two excellent reads on this subject: How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer; and Boeing Might Represent the Greatest Indictment of 21st Century Capitalism.]