October 1, 2024 • 24 mins
As the shareholder revolution takeover continues, Boeing builds a plan that tries to crash itself and fixes it with software that also tries to crash the plane. Hundreds die.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to take it out here, a podcast about things
happening to Boeing. I'm your host, Mio Long. When we
last left our intrepid aerospace company, Boeing had gotten caught
up in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the nineteen
nineties and bought out its rival McDonald douglas, after which
McDonald douglas CEO and Jack Welsh disciple Harry Stonezeipher effectively
(00:26):
launched an administrative coup and sees control of the company.
Now stone Ceipher wasn't able to hold onto power for
long because he was very quickly forced to resign after
he had what CNN describes as a quote improper relationship
with a female executive. So things are going great for everyone.
I'm realizing reading the script that I should mention it
(00:49):
wasn't like an abuse thing. It's just that he was
having a relationship with one of his subordinates, which is
also not great. But it yeah, it wasn't good, and
he gets kicked out of media almost immediately. But by
the time he was forced out, his model for how
Boeing should work going forwards, you know, the layoffs, the outsourcing, slashing,
the research and development budget, and above all, taking power
(01:12):
from engineers and giving it to the shareholder value fanatics
had already been embedded at the core of Boeing's management structure.
Here's journalist Natasha Frost writing in Courts two decades on.
Perhaps the most lasting consequence of the change in culture
has been in Boeing's approach to building aircraft. Cutting costs
(01:32):
and diversifying revenue ought to have served as an ideal
way to subsidize the expensive process of plane development. Oh
boy did it not. Instead, with engineers now disempowered and
management far away in Chicago, the actual building of new
planes in Seattle all but stalled. Boeing would not actually
announce even the plans for a new plan until two
(01:55):
thousand and three with the seven to eighty seven Dreamliner.
Throughout this time, Boeing was led by its first chairman
without a traditional aviation background, James McNerney. James McNee had
instead spent almost two decades in management at General Electric.
Now he was following a tried and tested route of cutting, downsizing,
(02:15):
and shifting. That approach was applied to upgrading the seven
thirty seven, which had become the victim of its own success.
In its five decade history, airlines have cumulatively ordered more
than ten thousand of the plane, an aviation rock star.
But rather than retiring the plane replacing it with the
next big thing, Boeing often to keep costs down by
tinkering and adjusting the model to fit still more passengers.
(02:38):
And this is how you get planes falling out of
the sky instead of you doing the normal thing, which
is putting money into building a new airplane, which is
you know, expensive in the short run. And again remember
that the finance goals are now in charge for these people.
The only thing that exists is the short run in
immediate stock price. So instead of doing that management, when eh,
(03:01):
we already have this plane were first designed in the
fucking sixties, let's keep modifying that. And this, this is
going to kill an extremely large number of people. Now.
The seven thirty seven again came out originally in nineteen
sixty seven. In the two thousands, in the century the millennia,
(03:24):
the two thousands, Boeing begins to design a new version
of this plane from the last millennium called the seven
thirty seven Max. For shareholders. Again, this is this is
a great idea. It's not just that, you know, building
new planes is expensive, and this is cheaper because you're
not spending the money on building a new plane. There's
(03:45):
a bunch of other advantages for Boeing for this, and
one of the biggest is that you can tell everyone,
from you know, the FAA to the airlines of the
pilots that hey, this is just a regular seven thirty seven.
It's it's just the same plane. You don't need to
like reach train your pilots to learn how our new
systems work, because there's really like no new systems and
that you know that costs money, so they don't want
(04:07):
to do it. You don't need to have the FAA
do the regulatory shit they would do for a new plane,
or even like a substantial change to like the original plane,
which you know, again costs money and time that Boeing
does not want to, you know, do The problem is that,
you know, I tried to find a sort of delicate
way to say this, and then I realized you simply
(04:27):
should not do it like that. The problem is that
the seven thirty seven Max is a plane that is
trying to kill you. If you know anything about the story,
you're probably assuming that when I say this plane is
trying to kill you. I'm talking about the Maneuvering Characteristics
Augmentation System or m CASTS, the piece of software that
directly caused the crashes, and to some extents, like I
(04:48):
am talking about MCASTS, we'll we'll get into it in
a second. It absolutely did kill all those people. But
I think there's a problem with a lot of the
way the story has been covered, which is that but
a lot of the coverage of this has been obsessively
focused on the software problem, specifically on MCAST, And I
understand why people focus on the software. It is the
(05:09):
immediate cause of the crash, But the real problem with
the seven thirty seven Max is that the actual physical
plane is also trying to kill you. And the software
MCAST was developed to again stop the plane from trying
to kill you. Now that software is also trying to
kill you. But both the software and the physical plane
(05:31):
are trying to burdy you. So you know what do
I mean when I say the physical plane is trying
to kill you. For this, I'm going to turn to
an actual engineer and pilot, Gregory Travis, who wrote probably
the best piece in the technical details of this whole
problem that I've seen for I triple ET spectrum. I
Triple E is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
(05:52):
They know who they're talking about spectrums their magazine. So
the initial problem, as Travis explains, was this, the original
seven thirty seven was designed for nineteen sixties engines. Modern
airplanes have way bigger engines because, due to a bunch
of engineering stuff that we're not going to get into here,
large engines are more efficient than small engines, and this
(06:14):
is a huge deal for aircraft which consume unbelievably large
quantities of extremely expensive fuel. The safe and sensible, but
again expensive option would have been to design a new
aircraft to replace the seven thirty seven that is actually
designed to accommodate the new giant engines. The chief skate
option would be just bolt the new giant engines onto
(06:37):
the old plane design. Now, the problem is that the
only way to do this is to move the engines forward.
The engines on the seven thirty seven are you under
the wing, which is like the normal thing, but the
engines would no longer fit under the way because they
were too large, and moving the engines forward changes where
(06:57):
the thrust is coming from here's Travis quote. Now, when
pilots supplied power to the engine, the aircraft would have
a significant propensity to pitch up or raise its nose. Now, this,
as you might expect, is not good. It is quite bad.
I mean airplanes and Trumps talks about this. Airplanes do
kind of naturally do this a little bit. This plane
(07:19):
does it way, way more than it's supposed to. So
here's where things, unfortunately get a bit technical. So the
nose going up increases something called the angle of attack.
I'm going to read a description of this. Fully. Understanding
exactly how the angle of attack works is not enormously
important to understanding the story. But you know, the crux
(07:39):
of this story is angle of attack. Center is not working,
so we have to explain it a little bit. Quote.
The angle of attack is the angle between the wings
and the airflow over the wings. So if you want
to understand exactly what this is, go read the piece.
The important thing for our purposes is that if the
angle of attack gets too high, Right, if the planes
(08:01):
are a level and it is flying normally, the angle
of attack is like zero, but the angle attack can
get higher as like you know, if you're not flying
like level, and if the angle attack gets too high,
the plane's stalls, and this is one of the ways
that you crash a plane. Worse still, in the seven
thirty seven Max, basically, the engine casings themselves can at
(08:22):
high angles of attack, work as a wing and produced lift,
and the lift they produce is well ahead of the
wings center of lift meeting the engine casings will cause
the seven thirty seven at a high angle of attack
to go to a higher angle of attack. This is
aerodynamic mispractice of the worst kind. An airplane approaching an
(08:43):
aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have the tendency to
go further into the stall. This is called quote dynamic instability,
and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic fighter jets
are also fitted with ejector seats. So let me let
me try to kind of like explain the sort of
frux of this. Well, A, they've they've managed to position
(09:05):
the engines in such a way the engines can act
as a wing, which is insane. And b once you
get to a high enough angle of attack, which again,
the higher the angle of attack you're at, the more
risk you're out installing the plane starts trying to kill
you by making the angle of attack increase. It is
a feedback loop that means when you start to stall,
the airplane makes you stall more. Planes are not supposed
(09:27):
to do this. Again, and I cannot epicize this enough quote.
This is called dynamic instability. And the only airplanes which
exhibit this characteristic fighter jets, are also fitted with ejector seats.
So again, this is the thing that is dangerous enough
that you get like regular, regular civilian airplanes are not
supposed to do this, they do it on fighter jets
because fighter jets are doing things that planes aren't supposed
(09:49):
to do. And you can leave the plane if it
fucks up and does something like this. And the worst
part about this is that you can kick off this
problem by trying to get the plane going faster, like
while it's going slow. What part of flying a plane
does it start slow is kind of at a high
angle of attack and then has to go faster. Oh wait,
(10:10):
take off the thing you have to do every single
time we fly. This is fucking batshit. No one would
intentionally design a new airliner like this, right, No one,
not even modern I mean like Boeings, like other airplanes
like even the modern ones, even the Dreamliner doesn't fucking
do this right. It's completely nuts. The only way that
(10:31):
you could get something like this is as a pure
product of trying to bolt increasingly large engines onto a
plane from the sixties, because you are too cheap to
try to do anything new. But you know who isn't
afraid of doing new things. It's the products and services
that support this podcast. We've never gotten a Boeing ad,
but if it was gonna happen, I guess it'd probably
happen now, dear God. But instead of you know, dealing
(11:04):
with this problem by either making a new fucking plane
or figuring out some way to not have the engines
literally become wings, Boeing was like, ah, fuck it, We'll
just build some software that pushes the plane's nose down
if it starts doing this. Now, if your reaction to
hearing let's put software on the plane that makes it
(11:24):
fly towards the ground is Wait, that's a terrible idea.
You have the right idea. These people did not have
the right idea. But stunningly, there's like a version of
this system that isn't like lethally unsafe, but com Combing
did not design a version of this that is even
remotely safe. I don't know if that's more egregious than
(11:46):
designing an aircraft that has that Amaic instability, but uh,
the way they implement this is egregious. They decided in
their infinite wisdom that the entire system would work on
a single sensor, and I we need to know it
before we start this. So this is we're gonna be
talking about angle attack sensors. They're kind of just like
pieces of metal that stick out the side of the
(12:08):
plane and they break a lot, and they break a
lot because flying a plane is like the worst thing
you can possibly do to a piece of equipment doesn't
involve leaving the atmosphere or putting it under the ocean. Yeah.
So here's from the Seattle Times, which the Scale Times actually,
because you know, Boeing has traditionally been in Seattle, like,
does a lot of very very good coverage on this.
They have good sources. Yeah, from the Seattle Times quote.
(12:30):
The most controversial deal of the mcast design has been
the reliance on a single angle of attack sensor. Of
both of the deadly flights, Everything started with a faulty
sensor in the second crash in Ethiopia. The data trace
strongly suggests that the sensor was destorted an instant, likely
by a bird strike. There are two such sensors, one
on either side of the fuselage. Why didn't Boeing, especially
(12:53):
after discarding the g forces a trigger, use both angle
of attack sensors. The thinking was that requiring input from
two angle of attack sensors would mean that if one failed,
the system would not function. Now, the article goes on
to talk about how their justification for for why they
only use one sensor, and you know, they talked about
(13:14):
the safety and simplicity if not wanting to add complexity
to a system. You know, because if you have two
things that you're running for, it's slightly more complex than
having one thing that you're running from. Now, this kind
of sounds reasonable at first glance, But first off, if
your plane has dynamic instability that causes it to snowball
to stalling, and this software system to make it not
(13:34):
do that is so important you can't risk it not
being on. If one of the two sensors breaks, then
maybe you shouldn't have you designed your plane like this.
And second, this entire system violates every design principle that
you see in sort of like Boeing's Good Aircraft Design
for simplicity and safety risk. And I want to go
back to that Spectrum article because it lays out how
(13:55):
this kind of thing is supposed to work. Quote, there
were two sets angle of attack censors and two sets
of p hot tubes, one on either side of the fuselage.
Normal usage is to have the set on the pilot
side feed the instruments to the pilot side, and the
set on the copilot side feed the instrument to the
copilot side. That gives a state of natural redundancy and
(14:17):
instrumentation that can be easily cross checked by either pilot.
If the copilot thinks his airspeed indicator is acting up,
he can look over at the pilot's airspeed indicator and
see if it agrees. If not, both pilot and copilot
can engage in a bit of triage determine which instrument
is profane and which is sacred. Now, this is great engineering, right,
(14:38):
It is simple, It is redundant, and it allows humans
and sort out issues, you know, and like this is
a product of what aerospace engineering used to be, you know,
and we still have this in the world, but the
fact that there are a bunch of very very good
engineers who have spent an enormously long time trying to
work out how this kind of stuff should work. Boeing
(15:00):
was like, well, you know, instead of of our system
where multiple centers can be cross referenced by pilots, you know,
and the pilots can then disable the system. Fuck that,
what if we insaid, use a single sensor that can't
be overridden. This is a complete violation of Boeing design principle.
The thing about Boeing planes is that there isn't supposed
to be like automated shit running in the background that
pilots don't know about or don't know how to turn off.
(15:23):
The pilot is supposed to be in complete control of
the plane. You know the old joke, and I mean
I remember hearing this like every once in a while,
like when I was a kid. Was that Airbus planes,
which you know, Airbus obviously is a rival to Boeing.
Airbus planes were quote die by wire because you know,
they didn't give you control. The documentary that Frontline did
called Boeing's Fatal Flaw, which I didn't really use. The
(15:44):
source for this, but I just this is this is
the one part that I remember from when I watched
this in twenty nineteen about the crash, described how like
pilots trusted that they were flying an aircraft designed by Boeing,
so there would be a way to kill the system.
And again there's something I remember, like from talking to
people growing up, you know, so these pilots figure that
there'd be a way to kill the system, those voices
a plane down, and they were trying to find it,
(16:07):
like they're trying to figure out how to turn the
system off in the manual when they died, because they
didn't realize the plane wasn't designed by Boeing engineers, was
designed by Boeing shareholders. Going back to the process on
how this was added, the stated reason for again why
you don't want a second sensor is that it in
theory like adds complexity by adding a second sensor. But
(16:29):
you know, that's actually terrible reasoning from the perspective of engineering,
like of engineering in general, but also like from the
perspective of the engineering that the rest of the plane
works on right, The rest of the plane works on
different principles than this, and it works well and It's
something that Travis describes as being a product of the
destruction of Bowie's collective knowledge base, but something I don't know.
(16:54):
I don't know to what extent, Travis, he's kind of
writing about this, but I'm not sure that a lot
of people writing able this understand that, like this was
the point, right, destroying this kind of collective knowledge. This
is something that was done deliberately, right, This was the
inevitable sort of product of going management trying to make
the company quote unquote run like a business. They were
(17:15):
trying to destroy the interpersonal bonds that create the system
of collective knowledge, and they were trying to take power
out of the hands that people who had that collective
knowledge and put it into the hands of people who
you could pay for really cheap and exploit more who
did not have access to that kind of information. Right,
this is a case forre like, yeah, you're you're you're
(17:36):
putting power in the hands software engineers instead of sort
of aviation engineers, speaking of I don't know, taking power
out of the hands of the consumer and giving it
to a corporation. Here's ads. Now, if you're trying to
(17:58):
make the company quote unquot run like a business. What
else would you do, Oh yeah, you would not tell
the pilots about this new system that you've added to
your airplane, because if you talk about the system, everyone
from you know, the FAA to the airlines of the
pilots unions might realize that this is not the same
(18:19):
plane as the seven thirty seven, and that would require
all sorts of stuff like again re certifying the plane,
training pilots on simulators of your new plane which is
not the old plane. It requires all sorts of stuff
that would have very well could have prevented these crashes.
But you know, that stuff all costs money, and Boeing
(18:39):
doesn't fucking want to spend money trying to make sure
that its planes don't crash. So when they moved on
to this version of like the seven thirty seven max right,
pilots famously got I think half an hour of iPad
training and that maybe I might have been an hour
of iPad training. And that training that they got on
their iPad again not in a simulator, didn't even have
(19:03):
any information about the MCAST system that killed all these people.
And the product of this was that on October twenty ninth,
twenty nineteen, seven point thirty seven Max flying from Jakarta
crashed as the pilot was, you know, physically unable to
fight the control stick. And that's another thing that's going
on with this, you know, with his decision to put
Howard in the hands of software and not pilots, is
(19:25):
that mcast is also physically exerting control over the pilot
stick and these people are trying to fight it, and
they're not able to fight it enough to stop the
plane from tipping down and crashing into the ground. And
Boeing runs this really like pretty racist campaign blaming this
pilot who was not white, for this error to try to,
(19:47):
you know, cover up the fact that they fucking did this.
And this maybe would have worked, except a few months later,
Ethiopia air Flight three zero two went down and also
killed everyone on board, and you know, all told displayed
the Boeing seventy seven Max killed three hundred and forty
six people the Seattle time, which broke a lot of
(20:08):
the initial story said quote. A variety of employees have
described internal pressure to advance the Max to completion as
Boeing hurry to catch up with the hot selling a
three twenty from rival Airbus Mark Rabin, an engineer who
had flight testing work unrelated to the flight controls, said
there was always talk about how delays of even one
day can cause substantial amounts. Meanwhile, staff were expected to
(20:32):
stay in line. Rebin said it was all about loyalty.
Rebin said, I had managers tell me, don't rock the boat.
You don't want to be upsetting executives. And I find
this very funny because again, part of the whole jack
Well strategy was to destroy the concept of loyalty to
like Boeing as a company. But you have to be
loyal to these shitty fucking executives because these executives, you know,
(20:52):
have all of the power in this company and they
want to make sure they can just ring out every
single last drop of profit. And if you upset them,
they're going to fire you. And so the product of
this is this process that we've seen, which is that
this plane isn't being designed by aircraft. This is what
happens when shareholders design an airplane. And of course the
(21:13):
seven thirty seven Max continues to have problems right earlier
this year, famously, the fucking door flew off in Alaska
air flight. Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to describe. I mean,
just like all of the things that you would have
expected from Boeing, outsourcing shit to overwork and undertrained contractors.
Now several of those whistle blowers have died. When I
(21:36):
was originally doing this, I was considering basically making this
episode just about the whistleblowers being killed. But like I,
I don't know, I don't really have any more information
than anyone else about these deaths. So I'm just going
to put on the record that if I go out here,
it was murder. Yeah, And I think the more important
(21:57):
story is this one, because I think I think at
this point everyone everyone kind of knows that something is
wrong with Boeing, And every day we're getting more and
more sort of specifics about every single part of this
production process that you used to be entirely run by
highly paid, while at least sort of highly paid and
(22:18):
highly trained employees, that's now being run by a bunch
of non unionized, underpaid contractors who are producing shitty equipment.
But what we're looking at here is Boeing coming apart
somewhat more famously. I think the rescue flight is like
being prepped, but a bunch of astronauts have been stranded
on the space station because Boeing's launch craft was like
(22:42):
veering off course. There are a bunch of visues with it,
and so NASA just was just like, no, fuck this.
And the most hideously galling part of this entire story
is that the craft that's going to pick up the
astronauts is made by fucking SpaceX, because we have reached
a point where an Elon Musk company is somehow designing
rockets that are you know, like designing spacecraft that are
(23:04):
less likely to fucking explode than Boeing. That is, that
is an unbelievably depressing idea. And to close, I think
we need to ask who killed these people, because it's
not just Boeing. Jack Welsh killed these people. Michael Milken
killed these people. Ronald Reagan killed these people, and in
(23:27):
a way, all of us killed them because none of
us stopped them. And these people could have been stopped
at any point in the process, from Reagan to Stone,
Cipher to Kelly or Berg. We could have stopped these people.
To quote for a final time, David Graeber, the ultimate
hidden truth of this world is that it is something
that we make and could just as easily make differently.
(23:50):
I add only this, If we don't make the world differently,
people are going to die. Why should these murderers be
allowed to run the world. We know how to make
planes don't fall out of the sky. The people who
are fucking running this planet apparently don't. It shouldn't be
enormously controversial to say that the people who know how
to build airplanes should control how we fucking design and
(24:11):
build airplanes. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, this idea
was called worker self management, and it was considered so
dangerous that from Chile that she off us to algeriat A, Hungary,
to Korea. Capitalist communists and fascists alike killed anyone who
dared believe it. But now our choices are stark. We
even let these people continue to drop planes out of
the sky as the world burns in our cities sink
(24:33):
into the sea. But we do something about it. So
what are you going to do?
Speaker 1 (24:40):
It could happen.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to take it out here, a podcast about things
happening to Boeing. I'm your host, Mio Long. When we
last left our intrepid aerospace company, Boeing had gotten caught
up in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the nineteen
nineties and bought out its rival McDonald douglas, after which
McDonald douglas CEO and Jack Welsh disciple Harry Stonezeipher effectively
(00:26):
launched an administrative coup and sees control of the company.
Now stone Ceipher wasn't able to hold onto power for
long because he was very quickly forced to resign after
he had what CNN describes as a quote improper relationship
with a female executive. So things are going great for everyone.
I'm realizing reading the script that I should mention it
(00:49):
wasn't like an abuse thing. It's just that he was
having a relationship with one of his subordinates, which is
also not great. But it yeah, it wasn't good, and
he gets kicked out of media almost immediately. But by
the time he was forced out, his model for how
Boeing should work going forwards, you know, the layoffs, the outsourcing, slashing,
the research and development budget, and above all, taking power
(01:12):
from engineers and giving it to the shareholder value fanatics
had already been embedded at the core of Boeing's management structure.
Here's journalist Natasha Frost writing in Courts two decades on.
Perhaps the most lasting consequence of the change in culture
has been in Boeing's approach to building aircraft. Cutting costs
(01:32):
and diversifying revenue ought to have served as an ideal
way to subsidize the expensive process of plane development. Oh
boy did it not. Instead, with engineers now disempowered and
management far away in Chicago, the actual building of new
planes in Seattle all but stalled. Boeing would not actually
announce even the plans for a new plan until two
(01:55):
thousand and three with the seven to eighty seven Dreamliner.
Throughout this time, Boeing was led by its first chairman
without a traditional aviation background, James McNerney. James McNee had
instead spent almost two decades in management at General Electric.
Now he was following a tried and tested route of cutting, downsizing,
(02:15):
and shifting. That approach was applied to upgrading the seven
thirty seven, which had become the victim of its own success.
In its five decade history, airlines have cumulatively ordered more
than ten thousand of the plane, an aviation rock star.
But rather than retiring the plane replacing it with the
next big thing, Boeing often to keep costs down by
tinkering and adjusting the model to fit still more passengers.
(02:38):
And this is how you get planes falling out of
the sky instead of you doing the normal thing, which
is putting money into building a new airplane, which is
you know, expensive in the short run. And again remember
that the finance goals are now in charge for these people.
The only thing that exists is the short run in
immediate stock price. So instead of doing that management, when eh,
(03:01):
we already have this plane were first designed in the
fucking sixties, let's keep modifying that. And this, this is
going to kill an extremely large number of people. Now.
The seven thirty seven again came out originally in nineteen
sixty seven. In the two thousands, in the century the millennia,
(03:24):
the two thousands, Boeing begins to design a new version
of this plane from the last millennium called the seven
thirty seven Max. For shareholders. Again, this is this is
a great idea. It's not just that, you know, building
new planes is expensive, and this is cheaper because you're
not spending the money on building a new plane. There's
(03:45):
a bunch of other advantages for Boeing for this, and
one of the biggest is that you can tell everyone,
from you know, the FAA to the airlines of the
pilots that hey, this is just a regular seven thirty seven.
It's it's just the same plane. You don't need to
like reach train your pilots to learn how our new
systems work, because there's really like no new systems and
that you know that costs money, so they don't want
(04:07):
to do it. You don't need to have the FAA
do the regulatory shit they would do for a new plane,
or even like a substantial change to like the original plane,
which you know, again costs money and time that Boeing
does not want to, you know, do The problem is that,
you know, I tried to find a sort of delicate
way to say this, and then I realized you simply
(04:27):
should not do it like that. The problem is that
the seven thirty seven Max is a plane that is
trying to kill you. If you know anything about the story,
you're probably assuming that when I say this plane is
trying to kill you. I'm talking about the Maneuvering Characteristics
Augmentation System or m CASTS, the piece of software that
directly caused the crashes, and to some extents, like I
(04:48):
am talking about MCASTS, we'll we'll get into it in
a second. It absolutely did kill all those people. But
I think there's a problem with a lot of the
way the story has been covered, which is that but
a lot of the coverage of this has been obsessively
focused on the software problem, specifically on MCAST, And I
understand why people focus on the software. It is the
(05:09):
immediate cause of the crash, But the real problem with
the seven thirty seven Max is that the actual physical
plane is also trying to kill you. And the software
MCAST was developed to again stop the plane from trying
to kill you. Now that software is also trying to
kill you. But both the software and the physical plane
(05:31):
are trying to burdy you. So you know what do
I mean when I say the physical plane is trying
to kill you. For this, I'm going to turn to
an actual engineer and pilot, Gregory Travis, who wrote probably
the best piece in the technical details of this whole
problem that I've seen for I triple ET spectrum. I
Triple E is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
(05:52):
They know who they're talking about spectrums their magazine. So
the initial problem, as Travis explains, was this, the original
seven thirty seven was designed for nineteen sixties engines. Modern
airplanes have way bigger engines because, due to a bunch
of engineering stuff that we're not going to get into here,
large engines are more efficient than small engines, and this
(06:14):
is a huge deal for aircraft which consume unbelievably large
quantities of extremely expensive fuel. The safe and sensible, but
again expensive option would have been to design a new
aircraft to replace the seven thirty seven that is actually
designed to accommodate the new giant engines. The chief skate
option would be just bolt the new giant engines onto
(06:37):
the old plane design. Now, the problem is that the
only way to do this is to move the engines forward.
The engines on the seven thirty seven are you under
the wing, which is like the normal thing, but the
engines would no longer fit under the way because they
were too large, and moving the engines forward changes where
(06:57):
the thrust is coming from here's Travis quote. Now, when
pilots supplied power to the engine, the aircraft would have
a significant propensity to pitch up or raise its nose. Now, this,
as you might expect, is not good. It is quite bad.
I mean airplanes and Trumps talks about this. Airplanes do
kind of naturally do this a little bit. This plane
(07:19):
does it way, way more than it's supposed to. So
here's where things, unfortunately get a bit technical. So the
nose going up increases something called the angle of attack.
I'm going to read a description of this. Fully. Understanding
exactly how the angle of attack works is not enormously
important to understanding the story. But you know, the crux
(07:39):
of this story is angle of attack. Center is not working,
so we have to explain it a little bit. Quote.
The angle of attack is the angle between the wings
and the airflow over the wings. So if you want
to understand exactly what this is, go read the piece.
The important thing for our purposes is that if the
angle of attack gets too high, Right, if the planes
(08:01):
are a level and it is flying normally, the angle
of attack is like zero, but the angle attack can
get higher as like you know, if you're not flying
like level, and if the angle attack gets too high,
the plane's stalls, and this is one of the ways
that you crash a plane. Worse still, in the seven
thirty seven Max, basically, the engine casings themselves can at
(08:22):
high angles of attack, work as a wing and produced lift,
and the lift they produce is well ahead of the
wings center of lift meeting the engine casings will cause
the seven thirty seven at a high angle of attack
to go to a higher angle of attack. This is
aerodynamic mispractice of the worst kind. An airplane approaching an
(08:43):
aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have the tendency to
go further into the stall. This is called quote dynamic instability,
and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic fighter jets
are also fitted with ejector seats. So let me let
me try to kind of like explain the sort of
frux of this. Well, A, they've they've managed to position
(09:05):
the engines in such a way the engines can act
as a wing, which is insane. And b once you
get to a high enough angle of attack, which again,
the higher the angle of attack you're at, the more
risk you're out installing the plane starts trying to kill
you by making the angle of attack increase. It is
a feedback loop that means when you start to stall,
the airplane makes you stall more. Planes are not supposed
(09:27):
to do this. Again, and I cannot epicize this enough quote.
This is called dynamic instability. And the only airplanes which
exhibit this characteristic fighter jets, are also fitted with ejector seats.
So again, this is the thing that is dangerous enough
that you get like regular, regular civilian airplanes are not
supposed to do this, they do it on fighter jets
because fighter jets are doing things that planes aren't supposed
(09:49):
to do. And you can leave the plane if it
fucks up and does something like this. And the worst
part about this is that you can kick off this
problem by trying to get the plane going faster, like
while it's going slow. What part of flying a plane
does it start slow is kind of at a high
angle of attack and then has to go faster. Oh wait,
(10:10):
take off the thing you have to do every single
time we fly. This is fucking batshit. No one would
intentionally design a new airliner like this, right, No one,
not even modern I mean like Boeings, like other airplanes
like even the modern ones, even the Dreamliner doesn't fucking
do this right. It's completely nuts. The only way that
(10:31):
you could get something like this is as a pure
product of trying to bolt increasingly large engines onto a
plane from the sixties, because you are too cheap to
try to do anything new. But you know who isn't
afraid of doing new things. It's the products and services
that support this podcast. We've never gotten a Boeing ad,
but if it was gonna happen, I guess it'd probably
happen now, dear God. But instead of you know, dealing
(11:04):
with this problem by either making a new fucking plane
or figuring out some way to not have the engines
literally become wings, Boeing was like, ah, fuck it, We'll
just build some software that pushes the plane's nose down
if it starts doing this. Now, if your reaction to
hearing let's put software on the plane that makes it
(11:24):
fly towards the ground is Wait, that's a terrible idea.
You have the right idea. These people did not have
the right idea. But stunningly, there's like a version of
this system that isn't like lethally unsafe, but com Combing
did not design a version of this that is even
remotely safe. I don't know if that's more egregious than
(11:46):
designing an aircraft that has that Amaic instability, but uh,
the way they implement this is egregious. They decided in
their infinite wisdom that the entire system would work on
a single sensor, and I we need to know it
before we start this. So this is we're gonna be
talking about angle attack sensors. They're kind of just like
pieces of metal that stick out the side of the
(12:08):
plane and they break a lot, and they break a
lot because flying a plane is like the worst thing
you can possibly do to a piece of equipment doesn't
involve leaving the atmosphere or putting it under the ocean. Yeah.
So here's from the Seattle Times, which the Scale Times actually,
because you know, Boeing has traditionally been in Seattle, like,
does a lot of very very good coverage on this.
They have good sources. Yeah, from the Seattle Times quote.
(12:30):
The most controversial deal of the mcast design has been
the reliance on a single angle of attack sensor. Of
both of the deadly flights, Everything started with a faulty
sensor in the second crash in Ethiopia. The data trace
strongly suggests that the sensor was destorted an instant, likely
by a bird strike. There are two such sensors, one
on either side of the fuselage. Why didn't Boeing, especially
(12:53):
after discarding the g forces a trigger, use both angle
of attack sensors. The thinking was that requiring input from
two angle of attack sensors would mean that if one failed,
the system would not function. Now, the article goes on
to talk about how their justification for for why they
only use one sensor, and you know, they talked about
(13:14):
the safety and simplicity if not wanting to add complexity
to a system. You know, because if you have two
things that you're running for, it's slightly more complex than
having one thing that you're running from. Now, this kind
of sounds reasonable at first glance, But first off, if
your plane has dynamic instability that causes it to snowball
to stalling, and this software system to make it not
(13:34):
do that is so important you can't risk it not
being on. If one of the two sensors breaks, then
maybe you shouldn't have you designed your plane like this.
And second, this entire system violates every design principle that
you see in sort of like Boeing's Good Aircraft Design
for simplicity and safety risk. And I want to go
back to that Spectrum article because it lays out how
(13:55):
this kind of thing is supposed to work. Quote, there
were two sets angle of attack censors and two sets
of p hot tubes, one on either side of the fuselage.
Normal usage is to have the set on the pilot
side feed the instruments to the pilot side, and the
set on the copilot side feed the instrument to the
copilot side. That gives a state of natural redundancy and
(14:17):
instrumentation that can be easily cross checked by either pilot.
If the copilot thinks his airspeed indicator is acting up,
he can look over at the pilot's airspeed indicator and
see if it agrees. If not, both pilot and copilot
can engage in a bit of triage determine which instrument
is profane and which is sacred. Now, this is great engineering, right,
(14:38):
It is simple, It is redundant, and it allows humans
and sort out issues, you know, and like this is
a product of what aerospace engineering used to be, you know,
and we still have this in the world, but the
fact that there are a bunch of very very good
engineers who have spent an enormously long time trying to
work out how this kind of stuff should work. Boeing
(15:00):
was like, well, you know, instead of of our system
where multiple centers can be cross referenced by pilots, you know,
and the pilots can then disable the system. Fuck that,
what if we insaid, use a single sensor that can't
be overridden. This is a complete violation of Boeing design principle.
The thing about Boeing planes is that there isn't supposed
to be like automated shit running in the background that
pilots don't know about or don't know how to turn off.
(15:23):
The pilot is supposed to be in complete control of
the plane. You know the old joke, and I mean
I remember hearing this like every once in a while,
like when I was a kid. Was that Airbus planes,
which you know, Airbus obviously is a rival to Boeing.
Airbus planes were quote die by wire because you know,
they didn't give you control. The documentary that Frontline did
called Boeing's Fatal Flaw, which I didn't really use. The
(15:44):
source for this, but I just this is this is
the one part that I remember from when I watched
this in twenty nineteen about the crash, described how like
pilots trusted that they were flying an aircraft designed by Boeing,
so there would be a way to kill the system.
And again there's something I remember, like from talking to
people growing up, you know, so these pilots figure that
there'd be a way to kill the system, those voices
a plane down, and they were trying to find it,
(16:07):
like they're trying to figure out how to turn the
system off in the manual when they died, because they
didn't realize the plane wasn't designed by Boeing engineers, was
designed by Boeing shareholders. Going back to the process on
how this was added, the stated reason for again why
you don't want a second sensor is that it in
theory like adds complexity by adding a second sensor. But
(16:29):
you know, that's actually terrible reasoning from the perspective of engineering,
like of engineering in general, but also like from the
perspective of the engineering that the rest of the plane
works on right, The rest of the plane works on
different principles than this, and it works well and It's
something that Travis describes as being a product of the
destruction of Bowie's collective knowledge base, but something I don't know.
(16:54):
I don't know to what extent, Travis, he's kind of
writing about this, but I'm not sure that a lot
of people writing able this understand that, like this was
the point, right, destroying this kind of collective knowledge. This
is something that was done deliberately, right, This was the
inevitable sort of product of going management trying to make
the company quote unquote run like a business. They were
(17:15):
trying to destroy the interpersonal bonds that create the system
of collective knowledge, and they were trying to take power
out of the hands that people who had that collective
knowledge and put it into the hands of people who
you could pay for really cheap and exploit more who
did not have access to that kind of information. Right,
this is a case forre like, yeah, you're you're you're
(17:36):
putting power in the hands software engineers instead of sort
of aviation engineers, speaking of I don't know, taking power
out of the hands of the consumer and giving it
to a corporation. Here's ads. Now, if you're trying to
(17:58):
make the company quote unquot run like a business. What
else would you do, Oh yeah, you would not tell
the pilots about this new system that you've added to
your airplane, because if you talk about the system, everyone
from you know, the FAA to the airlines of the
pilots unions might realize that this is not the same
(18:19):
plane as the seven thirty seven, and that would require
all sorts of stuff like again re certifying the plane,
training pilots on simulators of your new plane which is
not the old plane. It requires all sorts of stuff
that would have very well could have prevented these crashes.
But you know, that stuff all costs money, and Boeing
(18:39):
doesn't fucking want to spend money trying to make sure
that its planes don't crash. So when they moved on
to this version of like the seven thirty seven max right,
pilots famously got I think half an hour of iPad
training and that maybe I might have been an hour
of iPad training. And that training that they got on
their iPad again not in a simulator, didn't even have
(19:03):
any information about the MCAST system that killed all these people.
And the product of this was that on October twenty ninth,
twenty nineteen, seven point thirty seven Max flying from Jakarta
crashed as the pilot was, you know, physically unable to
fight the control stick. And that's another thing that's going
on with this, you know, with his decision to put
Howard in the hands of software and not pilots, is
(19:25):
that mcast is also physically exerting control over the pilot
stick and these people are trying to fight it, and
they're not able to fight it enough to stop the
plane from tipping down and crashing into the ground. And
Boeing runs this really like pretty racist campaign blaming this
pilot who was not white, for this error to try to,
(19:47):
you know, cover up the fact that they fucking did this.
And this maybe would have worked, except a few months later,
Ethiopia air Flight three zero two went down and also
killed everyone on board, and you know, all told displayed
the Boeing seventy seven Max killed three hundred and forty
six people the Seattle time, which broke a lot of
(20:08):
the initial story said quote. A variety of employees have
described internal pressure to advance the Max to completion as
Boeing hurry to catch up with the hot selling a
three twenty from rival Airbus Mark Rabin, an engineer who
had flight testing work unrelated to the flight controls, said
there was always talk about how delays of even one
day can cause substantial amounts. Meanwhile, staff were expected to
(20:32):
stay in line. Rebin said it was all about loyalty.
Rebin said, I had managers tell me, don't rock the boat.
You don't want to be upsetting executives. And I find
this very funny because again, part of the whole jack
Well strategy was to destroy the concept of loyalty to
like Boeing as a company. But you have to be
loyal to these shitty fucking executives because these executives, you know,
(20:52):
have all of the power in this company and they
want to make sure they can just ring out every
single last drop of profit. And if you upset them,
they're going to fire you. And so the product of
this is this process that we've seen, which is that
this plane isn't being designed by aircraft. This is what
happens when shareholders design an airplane. And of course the
(21:13):
seven thirty seven Max continues to have problems right earlier
this year, famously, the fucking door flew off in Alaska
air flight. Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to describe. I mean,
just like all of the things that you would have
expected from Boeing, outsourcing shit to overwork and undertrained contractors.
Now several of those whistle blowers have died. When I
(21:36):
was originally doing this, I was considering basically making this
episode just about the whistleblowers being killed. But like I,
I don't know, I don't really have any more information
than anyone else about these deaths. So I'm just going
to put on the record that if I go out here,
it was murder. Yeah, And I think the more important
(21:57):
story is this one, because I think I think at
this point everyone everyone kind of knows that something is
wrong with Boeing, And every day we're getting more and
more sort of specifics about every single part of this
production process that you used to be entirely run by
highly paid, while at least sort of highly paid and
(22:18):
highly trained employees, that's now being run by a bunch
of non unionized, underpaid contractors who are producing shitty equipment.
But what we're looking at here is Boeing coming apart
somewhat more famously. I think the rescue flight is like
being prepped, but a bunch of astronauts have been stranded
on the space station because Boeing's launch craft was like
(22:42):
veering off course. There are a bunch of visues with it,
and so NASA just was just like, no, fuck this.
And the most hideously galling part of this entire story
is that the craft that's going to pick up the
astronauts is made by fucking SpaceX, because we have reached
a point where an Elon Musk company is somehow designing
rockets that are you know, like designing spacecraft that are
(23:04):
less likely to fucking explode than Boeing. That is, that
is an unbelievably depressing idea. And to close, I think
we need to ask who killed these people, because it's
not just Boeing. Jack Welsh killed these people. Michael Milken
killed these people. Ronald Reagan killed these people, and in
(23:27):
a way, all of us killed them because none of
us stopped them. And these people could have been stopped
at any point in the process, from Reagan to Stone,
Cipher to Kelly or Berg. We could have stopped these people.
To quote for a final time, David Graeber, the ultimate
hidden truth of this world is that it is something
that we make and could just as easily make differently.
(23:50):
I add only this, If we don't make the world differently,
people are going to die. Why should these murderers be
allowed to run the world. We know how to make
planes don't fall out of the sky. The people who
are fucking running this planet apparently don't. It shouldn't be
enormously controversial to say that the people who know how
to build airplanes should control how we fucking design and
(24:11):
build airplanes. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, this idea
was called worker self management, and it was considered so
dangerous that from Chile that she off us to algeriat A, Hungary,
to Korea. Capitalist communists and fascists alike killed anyone who
dared believe it. But now our choices are stark. We
even let these people continue to drop planes out of
the sky as the world burns in our cities sink
(24:33):
into the sea. But we do something about it. So
what are you going to do?
Speaker 1 (24:40):
It could happen.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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It Could Happen Here News
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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