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Shauna GM (shauna@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 06-Jan-2024 17:56:58 JST Shauna GM

"To review: Boeing built a plane that was difficult to fly, then added software that autocorrects these difficulties, but decided that if that software fails, the pilot should save the day by figuring out how to fly the difficult-to-fly plane."
They didn't even tell the pilots about the software.
The pilot of the first crashed 737 Max spent his final minutes "paging through the pilot manual, trying to determine what was going wrong. This was futile; any mention of MCAS had been removed."
In conversation about 11 months ago from social.coop permalink
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1. MCAS—that is, Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System—operated by automatically lifting the tail of a plane and moving the nose down, based on data from a sensor on the front of the aircraft. If the aircraft was approaching a stall—and the 737 Max was prone to stalling—this action would prevent it. The sensor at the front of the plane recorded the angle of oncoming airflow. If the angle was too high, it told the software that a stall was coming, automatically activating it. But it only took a single sensor to trigger this whole process—just one incorrect reading could do it. That’s what happened in both 737 Max accidents. The sensors took bad readings that said the plane was stalling when it was not, and the automated software lowered the nose of the aircraft as far as it would go. Even if a pilot realized that the software had bad data, the software would resist their attempts to control the plane. The machine steered the plane into the ground. Boeing didn’t even tell pilots that MCAS existed or how it worked.
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2. It’s fundamentally embedded in the handling qualities of the airplane. So when you train on the airplane, you are being trained on MCAS,” CEO Dennis Muilenburg told reporters when news of the omission came out. “It’s not a separate system to be trained on.” So it went unmentioned. Boeing defended this decision by explaining that the purpose of MCAS was to make the plane feel like it flew the same as the earlier generation of 737s. Boeing kept pilots in the dark because, to make sense as a design decision, MCAS, which corrected a known aerodynamic inefficiency in the plane, had to be considered like any other integral machinery in the plane. The New York Times reported that before the first 737 Max crashed, the pilot handed control over to the co-pilot. He then spent his final minutes, before he began to pray for his life, paging through the pilot manual, trying to determine what was going wrong. This was futile; any mention of MCAS had been removed
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  Shauna GM (shauna@social.coop)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 00:34:10 JST Shauna GM
  in reply to
  
  As you might expect, corporations don't like torts.
  "Tort reform" has been a Republican calling card for decades. What tort reform actually means is restricting your right to go to court, especially against corporations.
  For example, "tort reform" in Michigan has prevented people there from suing Merck for selling a pill that caused strokes or suing Purdue/the Sacklers for pushing opioids.
  The conservative legislation-peddling outfit ALEC has been pushing these kinds of laws for years.
  In conversation about 11 months ago permalink
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  1. But today, people file fewer and fewer tort lawsuits, and more courts seal documents in the cases that do make their way through. In 1993, around ten in 1,000 people filed a tort suit; in 2015, fewer than two in 1,000 did—a difference of 1.7 million cases. The reason for this decline is laws that restrict your right to go to court, particularly if you are in an accident caused by a corporation. These restrictions are known as “tort reform.” Tort reform is a nefarious bit of wordplay—it sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? It is not. Tort reform is a euphemism for an infringement on your right to sue in civil court. The wordplay and the reforms are both crafted by the people who profit from that infringement. In 1986, a few hundred of the largest corporations in the United States, together with the insurance industry, formed the American Tort Reform Association. Twelve years later, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce created its own “tort reform” branch, the Institute for Legal Reform, which is now one of the largest lobbying groups in the country. Around that time, small and seemingly grassroots tort reform groups cropped up, too. But these, too, were funded by corporations—in the guise of tax-exempt advocacy groups
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  2. The Michigan Product Liability Act, for example, provides pharmaceutical companies with widespread immunity from being sued by people hurt by their products. It says that you cannot sue a drug manufacturer for unintentional harm caused by a drug if federal regulators approved the drug. That was enough to stop even a $20 million lawsuit filed by the state attorney general against the drug manufacturer Merck for selling an arthritis pill that caused heart attacks and strokes. And it’s why countless victims of the opioid epidemic in Michigan are struggling to sue Purdue Pharma today.
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  Shauna GM (shauna@social.coop)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 00:34:12 JST Shauna GM
  in reply to
  
  Corporations like Boeing make these decisions because they are legally incentivized to.
  One way of holding them accountable for these decisions is through torts. Torts are a civil procedure whereby people who do harm negligently or intentionally can be held liable for damages even if they haven't broken a law or a contract.
  It's a vital part of preventing wrongdoing in a changing world where many kinds of harms can't be identified and legislated ahead of time.
  
  In conversation about 11 months ago permalink
  
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  Shauna GM (shauna@social.coop)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 00:34:13 JST Shauna GM
  in reply to
  
  You might ask: how could such a choice be allowed? Don't we have government regulators to oversee this sort of thing?
  Two words: regulatory capture. The head of the FAA at the time was a former Boeing lobbyist. With the encouragement of George W Bush, who was trying to "deregulate" the airline industry, he worked to make the FAA more corporate-friendly. The decision to remove MCAS from the pilot manuals was supported by the FAA.
  In conversation about 11 months ago permalink
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  1. At Boeing’s encouragement, and as part of a deregulatory agenda of his second term as president, George W. Bush turned this regulation over to the airplane manufacturers. Boeing would now hire safety monitors, and they would report to Boeing, and these monitors would ght the FAA when the FAA sought changes before certifying an airplane to y. The results of this power transfer are evident in the Boeing Max case on multiple levels. First, the head of aviation safety at the FAA at the time of these accidents, Ali Bahrami, was a former lobbyist for Boeing. And before the accidents, Bahrami successfully lobbied from inside the FAA to give Boeing more control, and the FAA less control, of approving the design of new airplanes. Moreover, when Boeing tested MCAS using ight simulators, pilots reported back to their employer that the system was buggy. Boeing didn’t report that to FAA regulators. The company also removed all mentions of MCAS from pilot manuals, a decision that the FAA supported.
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  Shauna GM (shauna@social.coop)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 00:34:14 JST Shauna GM
  in reply to
  
  I'm struggling to articulate how horrifying I find that previous section. It is some of the most reckless, arrogant, patronizing, and incompetent systems design I have ever heard of.
  To think you could *possibly* design software that would always work. To think that pilots didn't even need to know about it. And yet to somehow think that a pilot that *didn't even know the software existed* could somehow compensate in the "unlikely" case that something went wrong?
  In conversation about 11 months ago permalink
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