But the incident of this post here really sounds concerning, according to The Aviation Herald [0]:
> The aircraft accelerated and climbed through about 4000 feet at 197 knots over ground when the aircraft began to rapidly descend to 2175 feet MSL (1825 feet AGL) within 17 seconds accelerating to 280 knots over ground, climbed and descended a second time reaching a minimum height of about 1700 feet AGL. The aircraft subsequently climbed to and stabilized at 3000 feet, positioned for another approach and landed without further incident about 12 minutes after the initiation of the go around.
> The British AAIB reported they have opened an investigation stating: "High speed and high nose down pitch attitude during go-around, London Stansted."
It seems interesting that they aren't coming out with any clear indicator that it was an issue with the plane itself? If there was some faulty sensor/software override that caused the nose dive, it feels like they would've mentioned that was a suspect.
7000 fpm is not all that unusual during a descent. What’s unusual here is the proximity to the ground. Nothing in this story indicates there is necessarily anything wrong with the aircraft, and I think more likely this is pilot error.
I’m as much of a 737 MAX critic as anyone, but nothing indicates the aircraft is the cause as of now.
Apparently human terminal velocity is just a bit over 50m/s - I doubt there’s much of a perceptible difference between this and full-on free fall. Yikes.
> You will experience the same acceleration at terminal velocity that you do on the ground: none.
That's correct and all but the lizard part of my brain would be _far_ more concerned with the sudden change in direction/speed and not super concerned with "at least we're not continuing to fall faster!"
(assuming I wasn't standing by the bathrooms and thus thrown into the ceiling; then who knows what i'd be thinking)
at terminal velocity would you feel that things have "stabilized" and then not notice anything until it stops, when I imagine you would feel crushed into your chair?
At some point there has to be acknowledgement that the design envelope is unsound.
Newly fitted engines have moved the center of thrust far away off the center of mass. This creates huge torque; especially as is it often done in emergency situations: stalling avoidance advises to push thrust to the maximum. If you've practiced a bit with plane simulators (the ones where you design your planes), you know these things are uncontrollable.
And us software engineers should know better: software-patching design errors sometimes just doesn't work. You can't just "polish it". Without active control you can't do it (which by law is reserved for the military casualty risk tradeoff)
MCAS-patching it yet another time isn't the answer.
Do you think if these planes were manufactured by e.g. SpaceX, or another company with a less cozy relationship with the government they'd still be flying? It seems me to that Boeing can do no wrong by regulators even though they can do no right in terms of competence. And it's not only in airplanes but also rockets.
For those who only casually followed the maiden manned spaceflight of the Boeing Starliner, the astronauts barely made it to the ISS after numerous malfunctions, the exact sort of malfunctions that have been repeatedly cropping up in literally every single testflight, but NASA gave them the green-light anyhow. The astronauts were scheduled to return on June 16. That was delayed to June 26th as Boeing tried to figure out a way to make their craft safe to fly in. And their return has now been delayed indefinitely. [1] There's a real chance either SpaceX or Roscosmos will need to come rescue them.
I just think the government actions following these degrees of ongoing and serious failures would be so starkly different if it was a company other than Boeing.
I don't think SpaceX is a great example. They have incidents of all kinds but the community has accepted that as the price of advancing the technology. This is probably okay given their goal. They are not a passenger airliner manufacturer.
It also sounds like you are misinformed as to why the astronauts have not returned. Granted, the media is not really doing a commendable job explaining it, because clicks matter more. But it has been discussed accurately here on HN a few times. Spoiler: the astronauts can leave anytime they want, on the Starliner, and nobody (aside from laypersons unfamiliar with the situation) thinks otherwise. Nobody is going to need to 'rescue' them, because they are staying voluntarily.
SpaceX has literally the lowest incident rate of any space launch company in existence (though it is dramatically higher than for any airplanes). You're confusing public test launches with incidents on commercial (let alone crewed) flights. And no, the astronauts cannot return from the ISS. The article hits on all the recent findings,
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Just a few days ago, on Tuesday, officials from NASA and Boeing set a return date to Earth for June 26. But that was before a series of meetings on Thursday and Friday during which mission managers were to review findings about two significant issues with the Starliner spacecraft: five separate leaks in the helium system that pressurizes Starliner's propulsion system and the failure of five of the vehicle's 28 reaction-control system thrusters as Starliner approached the station.
The NASA update did not provide any information about deliberations during these meetings, but it is clear that the agency's leaders were not able to get comfortable with all contingencies that Wilmore and Williams might encounter during a return flight to Earth, including safely undocking from the space station, maneuvering away, performing a de-orbit burn, separating the crew capsule from the service module, and then flying through the planet's atmosphere before landing under parachutes in a New Mexico desert.
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NASA is understating everything because this flight should never have been greenlit in the first place. It's Challenger all over again. Nobody has died and for that we should be thankful, but NASA is behaving in a way that will result in deaths if they don't fix whatever is going on over there. It's like the most safety conscious culture from the outside, and then they just greenlight flights that are leaking like a sieve in every test, failing to properly deploy parachutes, and more. But Boeing always gets the 'special' treatment from the government.
It's absolutely a problem, and it needs to be fixed, and Boeing should be punished for letting it get this far. But it's not worth disrupting flight plans to very, very, very slightly improve the safety of a mode of travel that is already like seven orders of magnitude safer than driving, which most of us do every day.
just for info, for planes it depends, for daily short-distances (aka, because of the "per trip" risk), they are actually more dangerous than a car. It's true for long-distances, but not for short.
Interesting. Do you have a source for that? Does that include people crashing privately owned airplanes (which I don't think are relevant to this conversation)?
That seems to be sourced from a plain HTML page from 2001, reporting stats limited to the UK through the year 2000[1]. I guess it's not implausible, but it doesn't seem to line up with these more up to date US-based stats[2] where airline deaths are so close to 0 that it's hard to form a meaningful ratio between them and road deaths. If it were truly more dangerous on a per-trip basis, you'd expect the number to at least be a significant fraction.
I'm tired of flying. It's a miserable experience to begin with, and getting worse, and now all this junk is happening. Next year my wife and I are planning to try out a train trip to NYC, from Minnesota. It will take quite a bit longer, but I hope it will be a more pleasant trip.
That commonly repeated datum is one of those that falls under the lies, dirty lies, and then statistics - type of lies. Because most people would think this means that if you instead had a private jet and just started flying literally everywhere (instead of driving) then it'd be much more safe, right? Nope - it'd be dramatically more dangerous in fact.
This owes to the fact that the stat compares deaths per mile, but the real risk in a plane is not measured in miles, but in takeoff/landing/pressurization cycles. Whether the plane then flies for 10 miles or 5000, the risk is pretty much the same. And so if you mask out the danger by looking at deaths/mile then yeah - they're safer. But if you look at it in terms of 'what are my odds of dying on an average trip' - then they're much less safe than driving.
You can really intuit this by imagining some ultra-high risk interstellar starship. If it traveled quadrillions upon quadrillions of miles, but 99% of them randomly blew up and killed everybody on board, then it'd still be far safer than driving in terms of deaths/mile. The deaths/mile datum is not really very useful for modes of transport where the risk models are very different, and that's very much the case for driving vs flying.
Sure thing. This site [1] gives a hull loss rate of 1 per 4.94 million flights for jets. For vehicles, the average person makes two trips a day over a total of 29.2 miles. [2] So we can say the average trip is 14.6 miles. And the average fatality rate is 1.33 per 100 million miles traveled [3]. So that's 1.33 fatalities per (100 / 14.6) = 6.8 million trips, or 1 fatality per 5.17 million trips.
On a first level analysis, vehicles are already slightly safer than jets on a trip for trip basis. But this dramatically understates the actual difference, because the mortality numbers I'm using for vehicles are per person, not per fatal incident. In other words 1 PERSON dies per 5.17 million vehicle trips. And I'm comparing that against one entire JET 'dying' per 4.94 million flights, which is generally going to have tens to hundreds of people on it. If you do an apples to apples comparison in terms of trips (as would be the case if somebody just replaced their car with a private plane), vehicles would be orders of magnitude safer than jets, trip for trip.
I've started taking longer train trips when I need to get from NYC to anywhere in the Northeast corridor (between DC and Boston), instead of driving or flying. Often the price is the same or higher than flying, and the time is longer (even accounting for getting to/from the airport), but the ride is much more pleasant, with plenty of leg room, pleasant views, more quiet. A few times I even had a pleasant conversation in the meal car.
I used to live in Japan and I'm intensely jealous of the high-speed trains there. A bullet-train equivalent in the northeast corridor, or between LA/SF would be a dream. I can't imagine that it wouldn't pay for itself in under 10 years and reduce air traffic considerably.
>A bullet-train equivalent in the northeast corridor, or between LA/SF would be a dream.
There's a train between Miami and Orlando with an average speed of 69 mph. My guess as to why it happened there instead of in the northeast corridor is that the costs of procuring rights of way were significantly lower.
I’m bit confused by your comment as a bullet train is significantly faster than this train you mention.
The French TGV has hit 574 km/h (356 mph) nearly 20 years ago. I can’t immediately find the average speed of the TGV, but considering there’s hundreds of km between stops, and that the cruising speed is just over 300 km/h (186 mph), I’d wager it’s significantly higher than the 111 km/h of the Brightline.
In Europe, the high speed rail standard dictates 200 km/h (124 mph) for retrofitted rail and 250 km/h (155 mph) for dedicated high speed rail.
> The French TGV has hit 574 km/h (356 mph) nearly 20 years ago. I can’t immediately find the average speed of the TGV, but considering there’s hundreds of km between stops, and that the cruising speed is just over 300 km/h (186 mph), I’d wager it’s significantly higher than the 111 km/h of the Brightline.
It really depends. Often, on the same line, you will have at least 2 TGVs: one with a single stop midpoint(or none), and another with multiple stops.
Rennes-Paris (330 km train station to train station) could take me as low as 1h10, and as high as 1h55 depending on which train i took. So the minimum seems to be 165 km/h (sightly more than the Brightline) and the max around 280.
You are really going to try to draw a parallel between this event from last year and the Oklahoma incident? Everything about the Southwest airlines flight suggests pilot error. The plane did not dive unexpectedly at a high rate, it executed a dead perfect final approach, the right descent rate, the right speeds ... 9 miles before the runway it was lined up with.
Thank you I missed that, still.. 7 months? Too many incidents in 7 months. If those incidents were spread over 5 years ok, but 7 months.. Nah, ground the Max.
Don't let yourself get caught up in media focus on events that are usually not reported beyond the aviation enthusiast community. Boeing headlines get clicks. The 737 MAX flies thousands of time every day. A couple incidents in 7 months which don't appear to be specific to the model are not really compelling evidence of anything.
'plunges', 'alarming speed', 'The shocking incident' but in the end 'none of the passengers or crew aboard the 197-seat aircraft were harmed'
Once again we have a non-story overflowing with hyperbole. These types of articles increase unreasonable fear and do an injustice to journalism. I am flat out done with bad journalism that gets its viewership by hyping fear. 'The Standard' is off my list of credible news outlets.
Why can't all these things be true? Something highly abnormal and dangerous can happen, and thankfully not result in any harm. And what's the alternative: only addressing issues after tragedy strikes?
Do these stories come out for cars? The level of unreasonable fear in flying is past the point where actual harm is happening. My wife is so afraid to fly that she cries at even the smallest turbulence. Is flying unsafe? No. It is incredibly safe. Does the occasional uncomfortable event happen? Yes. So? This article fails on many levels. Where is the context in this article? Where does it discuss what is normal to see and how often things like this happen to give an idea of how dangerous and abnormal this was or wasn't? Where does it compare aviation to other transportation sectors to give an idea of how dangerous the industry is or isn't? None of this happened. Instead it used bombastic terms to get a quick headline. This was bad journalism and caused real harm and should be called out.
