You can bring them back with no issue. It has never been an issue, just a regulatory prohibition on selling them.

Have you met Lemmy? There’s a reason it will never truly take off no matter how shitty Reddit gets; it’s the people.

Yeah, but to say a Mach 3 cruise missile isn’t high speed because it isn’t hypersonic is missing the point.

Just because hypersonic are reported on frequently as a catchy headline doesn’t mean they are functional weapons that any given country could go out and buy on the open market. They are very much in the test/development stage and only in reach for the top global super powers. No, it’s not as fast as the vaporwave buzzwords and if we’re doing our procurement from the ACE Combat DLC marketplace then sure, but for context, the US still relies primarily on the Tomahawk which flies at M.74, the same as a C-17. This absolutely is a high speed cruise missile.

“The missile were delivered on the back of an Indian air force Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, images showed“

…right below a picture of them being downloaded from an IL-76.

Shit that was learned the hard way three generations ago and is now forgotten for $600 Alex.

It would probably be easier for them to mess with it and not affect themselves than it is with GPS and Galileo.

Gasoline has 100 times the energy density of lithium ion batteries. From a technical standpoint, increasing capacity by 20% is a huge scientific breakthrough, the issue is that batteries are so much weaker/heavier that 20% is negligible. Going from 100 to 120 is a great increase but when you’re competing against something that is at 1000 it’s not even a drop in the bucket.

So your pathological need to lie for political bias so strong that you get mad at summary bots for not adding nonexistent changes to news stories? Got it.

Cool, so your entire post was calling out the bot for not including a word that doesn’t appear anywhere in the article and isn’t correct for describing what is stated in the article. Got it. Not really sure what you’re getting at here, are you mad at the bot for not lying to make it fit your views on the conflict? 300 isn’t the “unintended” figure, it is the total figure. It’s also an average for a wildly varying number across the last several months. Any way you look at it though it doesn’t represent only “unintended” deaths because that is literally not what the article says.

Yeah, the article doesn’t specify 300 civilian deaths, it’s all encompassing. Casualties also includes injuries, not just deaths.

Where does it say 300 “unintended” casualties a day? The only reference I can find in the article is an average of 300 a day total.

The Su-57 is vaporware. They aren’t actually that stealth and Russia can’t even make enough for a single squadron for themselves.

Revisions to aircraft designs are nothing new and the amount of detail in the flight manual is often times limited to “sufficient to safely fly the plane.” The procedure for uncommanded stabilizer motion was sufficient to recover the plane in both situations, neither crew executed it properly or in time. Using fly by wire to make handling characteristics standardized is completely normal and being fed from a single sensor isn’t uncommon for a system that itself has backups. Boeing never lied to the FAA, they told them the minimum required and the FAA said it was fine; for a crew from a first world airline it was.

A single sensor failure did not cause a fatal nose dive. A sensor failure led to a situation where pilots from airlines not well regarded for quality failed to correct it for between 5-10 minutes despite having suitable checklists guidance to do so. Any complex machine can be dangerous if not operated the way it was designed to be and some nations do not take aviation safety as seriously as others, planes are designed and built expecting a certain standard and failing to meet that standard can lead to dangerous situations.

OK, I flubbed that one I will admit. I mixed up which of the multiple Boeing locations all within a stones throw various things were at. Other than mixing that up I have not made up a single thing. Not sure what you want me to post to prove anything. I legitimately am a pilot, I am safety trained and coded as a flight safety officer, I have been to mishap investigator training and I have personally done investigations on Boeing aircraft to include the black box story. What “proof” would you suggest for any of this? I can show my redacted pilots license, my mishap investigator course certificate or anything else like that. Specific investigations are privileged so I can’t share anything like that. I don’t think I still have my access pass from when I was at the MDC since I have since moved from WA to OK and didn’t keep it. All of that doesn’t change the fact that my actual description of the issue with MCAS and how the mishaps occurred is 100% accurate and you have absolutely nothing tangible to counter it with, hence your anecdotal “BoInG EMpLoYeeS WoN’T FlY oN THeM” response.

I get it, CNN man told you to hate Boeing and you’re independent and smart enough to do whatever the internet media tells you. But for actual pilots that actually fly things like this, the issue was way overblown by the media.

I never said they built it in Charleston or Everett, I just said that the majority of drama amongst Boeing employees that I came across was about the Everett vs Charleston split and not the Max. Renton is actually the location that I worked directly with and spent time at since that is where the MDC is. But yes, your 3 seconds of googling loaded terms and reading shock value “journalism” makes you the expert here. It’s not like I’ve literally put a black box in the back of my Ford Focus to drive it to the post office and mail it to Boeing for an investigation or anything.

That is an ambiguous and purely anecdotal statement. Obviously a news outlet looking to paint the Max as a death trap will be able to find a guy or two to say that for the camera. Meanwhile when I lived in the Seattle area and had neighbors that worked for Boeing they all had virtually the exact same opinion as me on this, which isn’t surprising since talking to actual Boeing employees and engineers is how I developed this opinion. The main bickering and strife for employees is about the Everett plant vs Charleston plant drama. While I am sure there are people that worked for Boeing that are still scared of the Max, I actually lived near the factory and interacted with employees in both social and professional settings and never came across any. But hey, if one person is literally a trained aviation mishap investigator and another one read something on the internet purely designed to cause outrage the latter is definitely the one to focus on when talking about aviation safety.

OK, I finally got some time with my laptop to actually type this out. Also, I can’t get line breaks to work so I’m splitting paragraphs with hard lines for readability.

The bottom line is that most info on the 737 Max is from news sources that make money off of controversy or parties with an agenda.

Re-engining existing designs is not new and this isn’t unique to the 737-Max. The 737-100 was an old school low bypass engine that was much smaller in diameter than modern high bypass engines. When they wanted to go with more modern engines with the 737-300 they ran into the issue of the wing being too low for the wider engines and they moved it in front of the wing and up to get required ground clearance, this is also what gave the 737 the signature lopsided engine look since they put all the accessories on the sides to maximize ground clearance. For the 737-Max they were fitting even larger engines than before so they use the tried and true “move it forward and lift it technique” that had worked for decades. This did affect center of gravity and thrust (and also lift, Mean Aerodynamic Chord or MAC is equally if not more important here) and as a result introduced some pitch tendencies to power changes.

Handling characteristics are nothing to to planes, airliners, Boeing or the 737; they’re a fact of life. Wanting similar planes to handle similarly isn’t “gaming the system” or cheating, it is a desirable outcome. With fly by wire systems, handling characteristics are tunable, the same as any modern car with stability control. Teaching the system to overcome the difference in center of thrust vs MAC isn’t scandalous or evil, it’s just basic aircraft design in modern times. Also, when the FAA asks how it handles, telling them “we added software fixes to the flight controls that make it mirror previous generations, independent test pilots all agree it is comparable” is a valid answer.

Now I will break and say this is where I do disagree with some of the choices Boeing made. I am not a Boeing fanboy and despite flying a Boeing (albeit one that became a “Boeing” when they bought McDonnell Douglas). I think their shift from having engineers in charge at the executive level to bean counters from GE/3M they made decisions that have degraded the quality of their product. This doesn’t mean they aren’t safe and functional aircraft, it’s like when I bitch about Subaru putting the oil filter inside the “ring of fire” circle of hot exhaust manifold or placing the fuel filter inside the fuel tank. My main issue with the 737-Max and MCAS is the way the fly by wire corrected for the handling by using pitch trim, but I’ll explain that next.

As I said Boeing didn’t lie or hide anything, they simply did the minimum required and the FAA didn’t ask for any more when given a simple answer. The plane passed all tests and, per all the test pilots, flew the way they said it would. The issue is what happened if anything went wrong with the way that they made it fly the way they said it would. For any large aircraft, pitch trim is a big deal. Leaving the elevator deflected at cruise creates tremendous drag so instead the entire rear stabilizer moves. This is far more aerodynamic but creates a danger because the moving surface is so large that if it does go outside of the normal range, the plane becomes unflyable. Because of this, every single pilot of large planes is taught to be aware of unintended stabilizer motion. Now going back to what I was saying before, the way MCAS worked is that it was basic computer code saying “if power makes nose go up, move tail until nose goes down.” It works and all, but inducing continuous stabilizer motion just seems sloppy to me as both a pilot and a computer science degree holder. I am not an aerospace engineer though, so I’m guessing there is more to it such as elevator not having enough authority to counter it the way the stabilizer does and odds are there is a reason they picked this, I just don’t personally like it because as a pilot “stabilizer motion” scares me more than “stall, stall, stall” when the jet yells at me.

This brings me to my final point and back to what I was originally saying. Even if MCAS was a subjectively sloppy execution of a system, it should not have ever led to a fatal mishap. If a car company has a system that under very rare, unknown and specific circumstances can deflate a tire over the course of 20 highway miles or so, is it their problem for not predicting this and informing the NTSB prior to selling it to the public despite meeting all requirements and passing all tests for certification? While yes, it’s an issue and yes, the cars can be made safer once it is known, if you have 15 miles to pull over after your TPMS light comes on would you expect someone that is unaware of this car feature/flaw to keep driving for another 10 minutes, with the TPMS light on, without ever pulling over and checking their tires? That is what happened in both 737-Max crashes. No, pilots were not given specific training on MCAS, but they were absolutely trained on what to do for stabilizer motion. The fact that they had uncommanded stabilizer motion and never ran the appropriate checklists is absurdly damning of them. A huge part of pilot training for type ratings is learning how to triage situations and pick the correct checklist to run; “stabilizer motion” is virtually always the first one. Seriously, if I have an engine on fire and stabilizer motion, I’m disabling the trim before I shut down the engine, it can burn clean off the pylon for all I care, the plane can fly just fine on the remaining engines. It’s also worth saying that during mishap investigation training “blaming the pilots” is the easiest answer that is discouraged in virtually all situations. It’s never “he flipped the wrong switch” but “his training made him mistake this switch for another” or something else. Human error is the easiest scapegoat in any mishap while human factors is what can actually be changed to prevent the next one. Mishap investigation is about prevention, not blame. This is why the second crash is unforgivable. The first crew were in a bad situation beyond their skills and paid the ultimate price for it. The second crew had every resource not just available, but shoved down their throats by the entire world for weeks and still didn’t bother to even brush up on the checklist for a runaway stabilizer. Sometimes, human error is beyond human factors and this is the epitome of it.

All that aside, once there was blood in the water the sharks were sure to circle and that is how the documentaries, exposés and hit pieces on Boeing progressed on the natural cycle. There is always more to the story, but sometimes the full answer is closer to the simple answer than the long answer.

I know the entire story. I’m also a pilot who has flown Boeing aircraft, a trained aviation mishap investigator and flight safety officer. It was a slightly sloppy job done by Boeing consistent with FAA guidelines and oversight. It could have been done better but it was absolutely sufficient for standard ops. The only issue was when substandardly/proficient pilots had an issue. The jets were flyable and recoverable.