August 5, 2019 • 49 mins
After introducing the 707, Boeing began to manufacture many more commercial jets. Some would become iconic in the aviation industry. And the 737 MAX would end up creating a huge problem for the company.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and a love
of all things tech. And we are continuing our series
on Boeing, and before we get into it, I just
(00:25):
want to tell you guys, technically, I probably could have
done maybe two or three or four more episodes about
Boeing because the company has done a lot of stuff.
There's been a lot of controversy around some of those things,
and all of those elements are pretty deep and could
they could all justify an episode all by themselves. But
(00:46):
rather than turn this into the Boeing Podcast, I thought
I would kind of some up things in this third part.
I'm gonna have to skip over a lot of stuff,
and if you guys are really interested, I could always
go back and do a couple of episodes that really
focus on some of the individual stories on a more
granular level. But rather than have this series go on indefinitely,
(01:10):
We're just going to press about seventy years of history
together into one episode. So, considering the first two episodes
were thirty years, we're gonna be taking some liberties. But
in our last episode, we looked at a very busy
time for Boeing because the company had become a major
(01:32):
part of the war effort for the United States during
World War Two, and we also looked at how Boeing
continued to develop both military and civilian aircraft after the
war was over, and we finished with a discussion about
the development of the seven oh seven, which was Boeing's
first mass produced commercial jet, so passenger jet like the
(01:53):
kind we have today now. As I mentioned in that episode,
the development process for the seven oh seven represented an
enormous investment, a huge risk for Boeing. It took up
nearly all the profits Boeing had made since World War
Two had ended. And making the matter more fraught was
that the havaland comment the British made commercial jet that
(02:16):
had inspired Boeing president William Allen to take this big
risk in the first place, well, it ended up having
some catastrophic problems of its own, and by the time
those problems became evident, Boeing had already committed to building
a commercial jet, so within the first year of operation
that would be the comment started to have some issues. Now,
(02:40):
the first accident only caused a couple of minor injuries,
and in that incident, the Commet the airplane failed to
become airborne at the end of a runway, so it
ran the whole length of the runway, could not take
off and it ended up crossing into really rough ground.
But people got bumped up, but that was the worst
of it. However, a similar accident in nineteen fifty three
(03:03):
was much more serious. Again, a Comet failed to take
off from a runway, this time in Pakistan, and it
collided with an embankment at the end of the runway.
All five members of the crew died and six passengers
did as well. It was the first commercial jet accident
that had fatalities UH and obviously this was a huge deal.
(03:25):
Then in nineteen fifty four, on two separate occasions, Commet
aircraft broke apart in midflight. The Commet fleet was grounded.
As a result, the aircraft lost its certificate of airworthiness
and a full inquiry was made and an investigation to
find out what exactly was happening. The investigation actually found
that the aircraft's frame was suffering fatigue and that led
(03:49):
to structural failures, particularly around the windows. It was that
the the pressurized cabins. You know that air pressure inside
the plane is much greater than the air pressure outside
in high altitudes, and so you have this force pushing
outward on the interior of the plane, and that push,
particularly at the windows, was what was causing fatigue on
(04:12):
the airframe. And thus you had structural failures in flight
with a couple of these comet flights, and that caused
in flight accidents, essentially the planes which just completely break
apart with all people aboard lost as a result. Now
all of this was going on, as I said, as
Boeing had already committed to creating its own commercial jet aircraft.
(04:33):
So one of the big challenges Boeing faced was creating
an aircraft that was demonstrably safe to travel in. And
then a second challenge was to convince the general public
that this was the case. And travelers were understandably concerned
after the high profile accidents involving the world's first commercial jets.
So Boeing produced a film titled This is Such a
(04:55):
Charming Name, Operation Guillotine. It was a a film that
was trying to counteract this public reservation of flying aboard
a commercial jet. And in the film, Boeing had test
footage where they had aircraft chambers that were pressurized. This
was inside a controlled environment, so this wasn't like flying
(05:16):
in the you know, over the United States or something.
And in the first demonstration they showed a pressurized airplane
fuselage like a regular propeller airplane type fuselage, and the
fuselage gets pierced by two metal blades. So this is
like a scenario where a propeller failure has happened and
(05:37):
part of a propeller breaks off and breaks into the
fuselage of a plane and that caused rapid depressurization and
the fuselage broke apart in that test. But then Bowing
showed a similar test with the fuselage of their seven
oh seven and they had five blades pierced this structure,
not just two. But in their test footage they show
(05:58):
that the Bowing fusel lodge can hold together even with
this this breach, and some air was escaping obviously because
there was, you know, now a hole in the plane.
It's not like you can just not have air leak
out if you have a differential in pressure on one
side and versus the other, but it did show that
the Bowing design was far more resilient to damage that
(06:21):
was going to hold together even in a catastrophic event
like that than the traditional aircraft, which is an interesting
way to build passenger confidence, to be sure, but it
was one of the things they tried. The seven oh
seven was meant to be a mid to low range
commercial jet, and I mentioned in the previous episode that
PanAm had put in an order for twenty seven oh seven's,
(06:43):
but PanAm also hedged its bets. It wasn't going all
in on Boeing. It also put in an order for
twenty five d C eights from boeing competitor Douglas. Boeing
was able to manufacture the seven oh seven faster than
Douglas could build the d C eights, and Bowing would
also customize the aircraft itself. They would have different load
(07:04):
outs and different variants of the seven oh seven, And
because of those customizations, there's not really one set of
measurements I can give you for a seven oh seven.
The same is true for all the different seven hundred
series aircraft that Boeing would produce. There are different variations
of those and they all have different stats. But here's
how the first seven oh seven stacked up. It was
(07:24):
a hundred forty five ft one inch long, that's about
forty four point two meters, and had a wingspan of
a hundred thirty feet ten inches or thirty nine point
nine ms. The fuselage, so you know, like the body
of the aircraft had a width of twelve feet four
inches or three point eight meters. And while it was
meant as a mid range aircraft, its first commercial flight
(07:45):
was actually between New York City and Paris, France, though
it did stop once in Newfoundland to refuel. The seven
oh seven could travel faster and hold more passengers than
the Comet could, and there were several variations of it.
There was the seven O seven one, the seven O
seven one twenty B, the seven oh seven to twenty,
the seven oh seven three twenty, the seven oh seven
(08:07):
four twenty, and then there was the seven twenty and
the seven twenty B variants. So those two seven twenties
you might wonder what's up with those because they didn't
follow that seven oh seven pattern. These were meant to
be short to medium range jets, and they were also
meant to service airports that had shorter runways that couldn't
accommodate the larger versions of the seven O seven, so
(08:28):
these were slightly smaller versions of those those commercial jets. Now,
differences between some of these variants could sometimes be tricky
to spot. Some of them were essentially the same design
but had different engines, so unless you were really really
observant and had an up close and personal look at
the interior of some of the workings of the jets,
(08:50):
you wouldn't be able to necessarily tell on site the
difference without seeing a designation. Now, Boeing would manufacture more
than one thousand of the seven oh seven aircraft across
US all families over the decades, and the seven oh
seven would be in continuous production from nineteen fifty four
to nineteen seventy seven. It helped establish commercial jet travel
(09:10):
across the world, not just for Boeing but for all companies,
and before long more people were traveling by air than
by sea, which was a first because while air travel
had been established for several decades, it was incredibly expensive
and it was very slow if you're using a propeller aircraft, uh,
and it there was this perception of real danger, so
(09:32):
a lot of people preferred to travel by boat rather
than by airplane, but jets were a different story. It
also established something else. The seven O seven had exit
doors on the front left and rear left side of
the plane, so the four and the aft of the plane.
This would become a standardized configuration for Boeing's commercial jets
and ultimately would mean that other manufacturers would have to
(09:54):
follow suit because airports would accommodate this particular configuration with
the design of their jetway. So if you've flown into
a major airport and you notice that all the jets
are pulling up to their jet ways the same way,
it's because the Boeing kind of established this, and then
it sort of became the standard. While Boeing was hard
at work on the seven oh seven, the company's aircraft
(10:17):
also made history in another way. On September one, nineteen
fifty three, a Boeing B forty seven Strato jet refueled
another B forty seven in midflight. It was the first
time a jet was being used as a tanker. The
arrangement relied upon what is called a probe and drogue
(10:37):
refueling system, so there are two main aerial refueling methods,
and by that I mean two main methods of refueling
a plane in air, not a way of refueling a mermaid.
One is to use a rigid boom extension that connects
two aircraft together in midflight for the purposes of fuel transfer.
It allows for a very high speed fuel transfer because
(10:59):
you're using a rigid boom. Um when you use something
that has flexibility to it, it actually slows down the
transfer of fuel a little bit. However, that system requires
both aircraft to fly pretty close to each other, and
if something should go wrong, the boom, because it's solid,
could cause serious damage to one or both aircraft, so
(11:20):
it's riskier. The probe and drogue method is slightly more safe.
The aircraft in need of refueling flies ahead of the
tanker aircraft, and the refueling plane extends a hose that
is otherwise retracted so that it would be flush against
the aircraft. So it starts to let this hose out,
(11:40):
and the hose trails behind the aircraft, and at the
end of this hose is a basket, and the trailing
aircraft the one that has all the fuel aboard it
that's going to refuel The first plane has the probe.
It's kind of like a uh, you know, a fuel
pump that you would use at a gas station. The
(12:01):
the pump part where you plug that, you know, you
slot that into your gas tank. That's kind of what
the probe is. The pilot guides this probe into the
basket and that connects the probe to the hose and
refueling can begin. Afterward, the tanker pilot can retract the
probe from the drobe. The basket um and the pilot
(12:22):
of the newly refueled plane retracts the drogue, winds it
back up, and then you've got a newly refueled plane
in flight and never had the land to refuel. And
I'm just gonna say this, I find the fact that
pilots can fly so steady as to allow for in
flight refueling to be absolutely mind blowing. I'm amazed at
(12:43):
that level of precision and skill, and also the ingenuity
required to create the refueling system in the first place.
Human beings can be pretty astounding sometimes, And of course
I say that as a human being. I'm not some
sort of transdimensional alien make observations or anything. So let's
get back to Boeing and stop asking silly questions human
(13:05):
by nint. Boeing had made some huge accomplishments. The Dash
E D had already had its first flight at that point,
and Boeing was producing the k C one five strato
tanker aircraft, which was based off this DASH eight design,
and it was also at this point working on that
seven oh seven commercial jet, which again was also based
(13:26):
off the Dash A D. So you can think of
the DASH E D as the parent to both the
k C one thirty five strato tanker and the seven
oh seven. And those two aircraft were not identical. They
were actually very different from each other, but they were
both based off that same ancestor. Now Boeing was still
building military aircraft like the B forty seven, and it
(13:47):
had begun production on the B fifty two A, so
things were going pretty well for the company in nineteen
fifty six. On September, William Boeing, who was the founder
of the company but had you know, sold off all
of his entry in years before, passed away. He had
a heart attack aboard his yacht. I can only hope
that I go the same way. But it was three
(14:08):
days before his seventy five birthday, and I'd prefer to
last a little longer than that. But other than that,
I think, um passing away on board your luxury yacht,
that's a pretty baller way to go if you've gotta
if you gotta choose, I think on May fift nifty eight,
the US Air Force put in an order for three
of the new seven oh seven's, specifically the seven oh
(14:30):
seven one twenties, because you remember they're all those variations,
and these planes would receive a new designation, which would
be VC one thirty seven A. They were meant for
something very special. They'd be used for transportation for the
president and for other high ranking government officials. And when
the president steps aboard one of those planes, that plane
(14:51):
then becomes known as air Force one for as long
as the president is on it. And that's fun bit
of trivia. Air Force one does not refer to a
single goal plane. It's the designation that we give whatever
plane happens to be carrying the president at any given time.
So there's no one air Force one. It's whatever plane
the president happens to be on that is air Force one.
(15:15):
These planes were not the first to be used for
presidential transportation. I mean they were customized specifically for that,
but they weren't even the first for that. They were
the first from Boeing Um. They were also not the
first planes to be called air Force one when the
president was aboard, but it was the first time Boeing
would be the company providing planes for that purpose, and
they would continue to do so. Boeing has frequently provided
(15:39):
well sold planes to the United States government for use
as presidential transportation. On October t n eight, Boeing landed
a contract to assemble an intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM,
called the minute Man. This was named after the members
of the American militia who were participated in the militia
(16:00):
leading up to the Revolutionary War. They were so called
the minutemen because they had to be ready to deploy
within a minute of getting a message. The i c
b M would rely upon solid rocket fuel, which would
also allow those missiles to stand ready for use indefinitely,
as opposed to the liquid fueled rockets of that time,
which had to be fueled pretty much immediately before use
(16:21):
and thus required more time to actually deploy. Now, it
would come about that they would find workarounds for that
limitation for liquid fuel, but at the time that was
not really you know, those rear options. Now, while the
Minutemen I c b M had been proposed earlier, the
US military originally dismissed those proposals, and the idea was
(16:43):
that they had already started development on other missiles, so
they thought, well, it doesn't make sense for US to
devote even more resources to building different types of missiles.
Were already building missiles. But then there was a report
which was later found to be inaccurate that suggests said
that the Soviet Union was actually far ahead of the
United States and missile production and deployment, and that pretty
(17:06):
much scared the dickens of the U. S. Government, and
soon the minute Man was given the fast track for
production and Boeing was in business. In nine Boeing began
development on what would have been a predecessor to the
Space Shuttle. I think I referred to this a little
bit in the Space Race episodes I did a year ago.
It was called the X twenty and was later known
(17:28):
as the Dina sore d Y in a dash s
O A R. It was a space plane meant to
be able to return to Earth as a sort of
plane or glider like the Space Shuttle. So this was
different from the Gemini or Giminy if you prefer, and
Apollo designs. Those were ballistic spacecraft, which meant they would
(17:49):
hurtle to Earth like you know, uh, just a cannonball,
and then deploy a parachute to slow them down, as
well as angle themselves properly so that you know, their
heat field was at the right angle, and then eventually
they would land in the water. From nineteen fifty nine
to the early nineteen sixties, Boeing would work on the
dinosaur design, and hundreds of millions of dollars were dedicated
(18:12):
to this development from the U. S government, But ultimately
the US government decided that the ballistic approach, which was
much less expensive and technically less complicated, would get priority,
so the project was canned in nineteen sixty three. It's
a shame too, because it was actually a pretty cool design.
I'll talk about a bit more after the break, but
(18:33):
first let's go and thank our sponsor. The dinosaur looked
pretty darn cool in a chunky way. It measured thirty
five and a half feet or ten point eight meters
long and had a delta wingspan of nearly twenty one ft.
(18:54):
Boeing had built a mocked up model of it and
was working on building out a prototo hype when the
project got jumped. The official decision was that the spacecraft
would have no military applications, so it would be useless
as a military vehicle. You couldn't use it for you know, wartime.
You couldn't use it for reconnaissance, so there was no
practical use of it in that sense. And it was
(19:17):
considered to be too expensive to be of any practical
use as a research and science vehicle, So there was
no practical scientific application. And so the dinosaur went the
way of the dinosaurs. And yes, I was waiting to
make that joke for ages. I couldn't wait for the
break to be over. In the spring of nineteen sixty,
Boeing acquired the Vital Aircraft Corporation and it formed a
(19:40):
new division within Boeing. Vital was a play on the
phrase vertical takeoff and landing, so it's this part of
Boeing's company that develops v t o L aircraft like
helicopters and related vehicles. Um they actually would be involved
in developing lots of helicopters. They don't talk about a
lot of them in this episode. That's one of the
thing things that I'm having to skip over quite a bit.
(20:02):
But they had a hand in designing several helicopters, both
for the military and for civilian use. In late nineteen
sixty one, Bowing would land a contract to produce the
first stage booster for the Saturn five, which would be
used in the Apollo program. That's pretty darn cool, And
the following year Boeing would test its first hydrofoil vehicle,
the high Point. So what's a hydrofoil. Well, as the
(20:25):
name suggests, it has to do with water, you know,
hydro water, and a foil is a surface that uh
provides lift. So a hydrofoil is a surface that, when
it moves in water, acts as a lifting surface. So
it's sort of like the wings on an airplane, except,
of course, an airplane moves through the air, hydrofoil moves
through the water, and of course water and air both
(20:47):
obey fluid dynamics. So if you've ever seen a boat
that travels really fast and it's on top of skis
that are on these long struts, that's a hydrofoil, and
Bowing would go on to produce hydro of foil vehicles
for the Navy as well as for other uses. And
hydrofoil boats can travel pretty darn fast, and it's largely
because they have decreased drag. There's reduced surface area making
(21:10):
contact with the water, so they can go much faster
than boats that have their full surface or you know,
the full lower surface in contact with the water. In
nineteen sixty two, Boeing began producing seven twenty seven aircraft.
So I guess now it's a good time to just
do a full run down on the seven hundred family
of commercial jets and get a general timeline for each
(21:30):
and describe how they are different. I'd like to get
them all all the way collectively, though obviously obviously we're
gonna have to come back for the seven thirty seven
Max designed to close out this episode. But yeah, let's
let's do all the seven hundreds, because if I just
keep on going through the timeline, it's just gonna get
tedious anyway. So it all started with the seven oh
seven that got things moving, and then next was the
(21:51):
seven twenty that was the variation on the seven oh
seven that was designed for the shorter flights and smaller airports,
and then after that came the seven twenty seven. Now,
depending on the lay out, it could hold between a
hundred forty nine to eighty nine passengers max. And it
had three engines. It had an engine under each wing,
and then the third engine was located at the tail
(22:12):
of the aircraft. It was built into the tail of
the fuselage, and it was also intended for short to
medium routes. The original seven thirty seven would follow in
the late nineteen sixties, and the original seven thirty seven
had twin engines, was also meant for short to medium
length trips, and Boeing has updated this particular line many
(22:34):
many times. There are several variations of the seven thirty
seven seven thirty seven seven thirty seven Classic, seven thirty
seven NG, seven thirty seven Crystal seven thirty seven Low Calorie.
I might be making some of these up, though, but
there really is a seven thirty seven n G that
stands for next Generation, just like Star Trek and uh
that one was a little bit more narrow than the
(22:56):
original seven thirty seven. And of course there's the seven
thirty seven MAX that here about in the News Currently,
there are several variants of these jets, even within these families,
and each variant has slightly different stats and passenger layouts,
and the variety means it's really hard to talk about
seven thirty seven's as a collective because there's so much
(23:16):
variation between them. There are versions that had a maximum
capacity of eighty five passengers and there are versions that
could carry up to two fifteen passengers. That's a pretty
big difference there. Seven seven would go on to be
Boeing's biggest commercial success. It is the highest selling commercial
jet liner model of all time, though again there are
(23:37):
a ton of variations, and that consideration has taken all
of them and putting them in a big collective group.
They've been in continuous production since their introduction in the
nineteen sixties, so a very big working horse for Boeing.
The Bowing seven forty seven was the very first aircraft
(23:58):
to receive the descriptor of eumbo jet, and it is
a beast of an aircraft. Now. I have never flown
on a seven forty seven, but I have toured a
grounded seven forty seven. They have one at Delta's Air
Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, and the seven forty seven is
a wide body airplane. If you were to look at
one in profile, you notice that at the front end
(24:20):
of the airplane has a hump on the top of it,
and that's because the forward section of the plane has
a second floor. It's a double decker. UH. Passenger cabin,
so you actually have a staircase inside the cabin that
leads up to the second floor. Uh. They can get
real swanky up there. The at least the model that
I went on, they had the the first class set
(24:42):
up in the upper deck and it was pretty nifty.
So when this seven forty seven debuted in nineteen seventy,
it was known as the commercial jet with the largest
capacity for passengers, and it would actually hold on to
that title for nearly forty years. There's also several variations
of the seven forty seven, and the seven eight is
(25:04):
still in production today. The seven fifty seven is kind
of a study in contrast to the seven forty seven.
It first went into production in n one and it's
a narrow body plane, has a single aisle down the
passenger cabin. It's got two engines and Boeing generally intended
it to take the place of the older seven twenty
(25:27):
seven's for those short to medium flight routes. It can
hold nearly three hundred passengers in at least some of
the configurations for the seven fifty seven, and it makes
it Boeing's largest single aisle passenger jet. This one, however,
is no longer in production. Then you have the seven
sixty seven that's a mid to long range aircraft. It
has a wide body and has two jet engines, and
(25:50):
there are lots of variations of this one to that
allow for a maximum passenger capacity of up to three
hundred seventy five passengers, depending upon the variation. Obviously, not
all buildouts can hold that many. In fact, some of
them top out at closer to passengers, which is less
than half of that other maximum. Like the seven fifty seven.
The seven sixty seven went into production in one and
(26:12):
it shares many design components with the seven fifty seven,
and it's so similar in operation that the f a
A said that pilots who had the proper type of
rating to fly a seven fifty seven could also fly
a seven sixty seven because the differences, at least in
operation were so few and far between they were practically
(26:33):
the same aircraft by operation, even though by actual specs
like by width and length and all that, they were
very different. The seventy seven sixty seven was much wider
than the seven fifty seven. Boeing still makes the seven
sixty seven aircraft today, but most of those are not
being used as passenger jets are being used for other stuff.
(26:54):
Then we have the Triple seven, the seven seventy seven.
It's a wide body, long range aircraft, the first one
to production in It is the largest twin jet commercial
aircraft in the world, and some variations of the seven
seventy seven can hold nearly four hundred passengers. It's also
the first Boeing commercial aircraft to have computer mediated controls,
(27:15):
which is going to become part of our story towards
the end of this episode two for the seven thirty
seven Max. The seven seventy seven became a big success
for Boeing, and airlines ordered enough of them to make
the seven seventy seven the best selling wide body commercial
jet of all time. It beat out the record that
was previously held by the seven forty seven, and as
(27:35):
I record this, Boeing is working on the latest generation
of the Triple seven family of aircraft with the seven
seventy seven X, which would start flying the skies in
twenty twenty. One of those is the seven seventy seven
nine and it's a huge, huge plane. It can hold
up to four fourteen passengers. Big plane. And now we're
(27:56):
up to seven eighty seven a k a. The Dreamliner.
It's an the wide body jet, though it's in the
mid size range, so it's not as big as the
seven seventy sevens, and it went into production in two
thousand nine. It's meant to replace the seven sixty seven.
So Boeing's goal was to create a commercial jet that
could fill the same role as the seven sixty seven,
but have much better fuel efficiency. And they did this
(28:17):
with lots of different changes in design, including using mostly
composite materials for the aircraft, which helped cut down on
the aircraft's weight, which therefore cuts down on the amount
of fuel it needs to stay in the air. It
can hold up to three five passengers, depending again upon
the layout, and it also can travel on long distance routes.
Oh and then there is one other one I should
(28:38):
mention the seven seventeen. So why would I leave that
one last? Why would I work up from seven oh
seven all the way up to seven eighty seven, then
go back to seven seventeen. Well, it's because Bowing didn't
actually design the seven seventeen, the Boeing seven seventeen, at
least the commercial jet version of the seven seventeen. There
was a Boeing military aircraft that had a seven seventeen
(28:58):
designation back in the nineteen fifties, but that's not what
we're talking about here anyway. It wasn't a Bowing aircraft. Originally.
It used to have the name MD and it was
designed by Boeing's competitor McDonald Douglas in the mid nineties.
But before the plane could go into production, something else
would happen. And I'll get back to that in a
little bit, all right. So that's the family of Boeing
(29:20):
commercial jets, and honestly, each of those could merit their
own episode. There are lots of stories about each of them.
There are stories about the different crazy configurations the airlines
would have for those aircraft, their stories about accidents with
those aircraft. Um, the seven forty seven has had a
lot of accidents, not not to say that the seven
(29:43):
seven itself was at fault. There were plenty of accidents
that were judged to be human error, not mechanical error.
But there's you know, there's just so much to talk about,
and again we've got it in this series at some point,
so I'm just gonna calling all double here. Also, it's
good to remember a few general notes about these planes. First,
(30:05):
the number designation doesn't indicate size. This took me a
long time to figure out. When I was a kid,
I just assumed that every number bigger was meant there's
gonna be a bigger plane. So when I heard I
was gonna fly on the seven sixties seven, I thought, Wow,
it's gonna be even bigger than the seven seven, And
I was wrong. Still getting over that. Also, another is
(30:28):
that the variations within a single family in the seven
series can be significant. It's not just about the seat layout.
It's also about the aircraft's dimensions, which engines it has,
and other design elements. And these differences, at least according
to Boeing, aren't so great as to necessitate a totally
new designation. You wouldn't call it a different type of plane,
(30:51):
but it does mean that not all seven forty seven's
are alike. For example, and there are a lot of
these Boeing aircraft out there in the wild. Boeing delivered
more than nine thousand seven thirty seven aircraft alone. That's
if you lump all the versions of the seven thirty
seven together. If you do that, then it's delivered more
than nine thousand of them to customers. That's nearly half
(31:12):
of all the commercial aircraft that Boeing has delivered since
it started producing the seven family. So it's pretty impressive
that the seven thirty seven takes up almost of all
the planes Boeing has ever sold, at least in the
commercial jet world. Okay, so back to the timeline and
bowing in the nineteen sixties. Gotta finish this episode out
before the number seven ceases to mean anything to me anymore.
(31:36):
Boeing would continue to play a crucial role in the
space race, landing the contract with NASA to build the
Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. Now, these were unmanned spacecraft that would
fly around the Moon and map out sites of the
Moon that could potentially be used by the Apollo program
for landing sites. Boeing would work with other companies to
produce the spacecraft, and the mission was a success. And
(31:58):
was very important for the planning of the Apollo missions.
In nineteen sixty six, Boeing celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and
it did so by flying a replica of the old
B and W biplane that had started it all so
many years before. On a less celebratory note, Boeing would
also land a contract and design a short Range Attack
(32:18):
missile or SRAM s RAM. This was a nuclear air
to surface missile, so this was meant to be fired
by bombers that would penetrate enemy airspace, presumably after the
surface to air missile capabilities of the enemy had been
knocked out and by enemy everyone was essentially thinking the
Soviet Union. This was still in the Cold War, so
(32:40):
Boeing would first produce the missiles in nineteen seventy two
and would continue to do so, upgrading the line, making
changes to it, but continuate producing these missiles until which
was when the program was discontinued. In nineteen sixty nine,
Boeing began production on the Lunar Rover vehicle, that's the
moon car that astronauts would us to make some wicked
(33:01):
donuts on the Moon. I'm told they also used to
do science and stuff up there too. Not everything went
without a hitch, however, Boeing had landed a contract to
develop a supersonic transport or s ST vehicle. This would
be a passenger aircraft capable of breaking the sound barrier.
In the nineteen sixties, Boeing landed a contract to develop
(33:24):
such an aircraft, and it would have been the first
of a new family of aircraft in Boeing. It had
the designation to seven oh seven, but the government scrapped
the project in nineteen seventy one and Boeing canceled the
development on the project. So what happened, Well, if you
listen to my episode about the Concorde, you know that
supersonic travel is challenging, not just from a technical standpoint,
(33:47):
but also an economical one. The expense of developing and
building the aircraft, of training crews and pilots of how
to fly them, and maintenance crews about how to maintain them,
also just paying to fuel the darned things. All that
ends up being a considerable amount of money. On top
of that, breaking the sound barrier means you produce more
(34:07):
sonic booms than I do after a dinner at Taco Bell.
So while Boeing was tackling the challenge with zeal The
general opinion in the industry was that it wasn't a
good idea to pursue, and the general public was concerned
about the environmental impact that such aircraft would have. So
at uh, it never got off the ground. Now, when
we come back, I'll quickly rush through the timeline and
(34:28):
then we'll talk about the seven thirty seven Max. But
first let's take a quick break. So while the SST
program went belly up, Boeing was continuing to not just
work on space, military and commercial air vehicles, but also
(34:49):
to diversify. That involved creating alternate uses for Boeing owned land,
like turning some of it into farmland, for example, And
this way they could put the land to work rather
than just you know, have it be land. And it
also involved Boeing bidding for contracts to develop rapid rail
transit technology. So at this point, Bowing is building components
(35:09):
for spacecraft, for military aircraft, including helicopters, for commercial aircraft,
for hydrofoil vehicles, and rail transit systems. Oh And by
the late nineteen seventies it was also building wind turbines
for electricity production. So it was really getting into lots
of stuff. One of the spacecraft Bowing created was the
Mariner ten, which was a satellite that did flybys of
(35:29):
Venus and Mercury sending information back to us on Earth,
which is pretty darn cool. And Boeing would contribute components
to the Space Telescope Hubble as well. Would also continue
designing and building missiles for the military, like the a
l C m or air launched Cruise missile, which was
designed to fire from a Bowing B fifty two, originally
getting up to the nineteen eighties. Now Boeing would work
(35:51):
on components for the boosters used by the Space Shuttle.
It would also design and build major sections of the
International Space Station, would was an incredibly lucrative contract. A
division called Boeing Computer Services would produce software to be
used on the International Space Station. The company produced the
Chinook military helicopter as well at this time, and Boeing
(36:14):
was one of the companies working on the osprey, which
is a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that has a
tilt rotor assembly. You've probably seen pictures of these, if
not one in person. It kind of looks like a
helicopter and kind of looks like a propeller plane. And
those tilt rotors actually can can angle to serve either
as a helicopter or an airplane. So you can have
(36:36):
it tilted so that they the propellers are facing up
and then do a vertical takeoff, and then you can
start to transition and tilt them in a more horizontal
wing position, and then with the propellers being ninety degrees
from that and turn it into essentially an airplane. I
have to do a full episode about the osprey at
some point because it's really an odd type of aircraft.
(36:58):
But it's also incredibly expensive and there was a lot
of controversy around it as well. But they're still ospray
aircraft in service today. That's more than thirty years after
Bowing first started working on them. Set it's impressive. In
the late nineteen eighties, Boeing built an unmanned aerial vehicle
called the Condor. This is a bigin has a wingspan
measuring two hundred five feet or sixty two meters, and
(37:21):
it has propellers for propulsion. It's not a jet drone,
it's it's a propeller drone. It looks kind of like
a very wide, like almost an unrealistically wide propeller plane.
It has an effective ceiling altitude of around seventy thousand
feet or twenty one thousand meters, and it can fly
(37:42):
completely under computer control from takeoff to landing. Only two
of them were ever built, and they were really meant
for Boeing to kind of research effective strategies for unmanned
aerial vehicles. In general, they weren't intended necessarily to be
production vehicles, and in fact, the military said there were
very few practical applications because they would be far too
(38:03):
vulnerable by to enemy attack if you were to try
and use them as reconnaissance vehicles. For example, Boeing was
involved in the design and production of the B two
stealth bomber, which was a top secret vehicle at the time.
I've talked about stealth technology and other episodes, so I'm
not going to go into detail here. It largely involves
creating surfaces with odd angles so the incoming radar waves
(38:26):
don't reflect back to the radar stations. But it gets
a little more compleated than that. But I've talked about
in previous episodes, Boeing and McDonald Douglas would get the
nod from NASA to lead R and D efforts into
the design of supersonic passenger aircraft, again, this time with
an eye to mitigate the challenges I mentioned earlier. This
is called the High Speed Civil Transport Project. And occasionally
(38:48):
you'll hear about various studies and ways to try and
do things like reduce or eliminate the sonic boom as
much as possible, which is tricky to do. It's hard
to fool physics. You ken in decrease its effect, it's
hard to get rid of it because air, you know,
nature still abhors a vacuum, so do I hate vacuuming.
(39:10):
In December nine, Boeing merged with Rockwell Aerospace, and Rockwell
became Boeing North American and it operated as a subsidiary company.
Also in August, Boeing would merge with its old competitor
McDonald Douglas. Harry Stone Cipher, who had been the CEO
of McDonald Douglas, would then come over to be the
(39:30):
Boeing president and the Boeing CEO and Chairman, Phil Condent
would remain at his role at the top. On September seven,
the f twenty two Raptor, which was based off an
experimental aircraft from a couple of years earlier, would make
its first flight. This is a high speed, stealth tactical
fighter and on that first flight it climbed to an
(39:51):
altitude of fifteen thousand feet in less than three minutes.
Boeing was responsible for several parts of this aircraft, but
it was working in a partner a ship with other companies,
including Lockheed, on this particular project. In Boeing would change
the name of the McDonald Douglas m d N that
I mentioned earlier, and when was the plane that had
(40:12):
not yet gone into production when Boeing had merged with
McDonald Douglas, and the new name was the seven seventeen,
So now it's the Boeing seven seventeen. In ninety nine,
Bowing landed a one point six billion dollar contract to
serve as the lead systems integrator for the National Missile
Defense Program. And there's a ton of other odds and
ends we could cover, like the Joint helmet mounted Queuing
(40:35):
system or the Joint Direct Attack Munition or j DAM platform,
or the rock and Roll satellites that Bowing produced for
XM satellite radio or the space launch complex at Cape Canaveral,
not to mention the various missiles and bombs and aircraft
that Boeing has worked on since two thousand for the
United States and other countries. But I'm running out of time,
(40:59):
and we still need to talk about the seven thirty
seven Max. Boeing announced this particular generation of its seven
thirty seven back in two thousand eleven, and they're very
similar in many ways in capacity to early generations of
the seven thirty seven, but in other ways they're very different.
The seven thirty seven Max aircraft received certification in two
(41:21):
thousand seventeen, staying the aircraft was suitable to enter into service.
But in October two thousand eighteen, a seven thirty seven
Max eight operated by Lion air Jet UH crashed into
the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia less than
twenty minutes after it had taken off, with all aboard lost.
The cause appeared to be a problem with the flight
(41:42):
control system. More on that in a moment. On March tenth,
two thousand nineteen, and Ethiopian Airlines flight also a seven
thirty seven Max eight crashed less than ten minutes after
it had taken off from Addis Ababa. There were no
survivors in that crash either. Investigations are ongoing as of
the recording of this podcast, but in any case, the
(42:03):
global fleet of seven thirty seven Max aircraft is currently
grounded and may continue to be so for the rest
of twenty nineteen, and Boeing has stated that it may
soon need to slow or even halt production on the aircraft.
So what actually happened, Well, it's premature to say everything,
but we have some ideas now. Boeing has maintained that
(42:25):
the aircraft were designed properly and they were operating properly,
but that cruise were not following the correct procedures as
indicated by the flight manual. Pilots have stated that they
were not adequately informed of a new type of software
that was incorporated into the flight control system that may
have played a part in these accidents. So what's going on? Well, first,
(42:46):
it's helpful to know that the seven thirty seven Max
is different from earlier seven thirty seven aircraft in its construction.
The engines are different from earlier seven thirty seven aircraft,
and they are placed further forward and higher up on
the fuselage. And that changes the balance of the aircraft.
(43:06):
It actually creates a tendency for the seven thirty seven's
nose to start pointing upwards, starts to pitch up when
it's traveling at lower speeds, and this in turn can
lead to engines stalling out. They don't get enough air
in them, and then they stall, and then you're in
a real dangerous situation. And this is where the software
comes in. The software is called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation
(43:30):
System or m CASTS, and the software detects when the
aircraft's nose is pointed upward at lower speeds. It has
sensors to detect the angle of attack, and if the
angle of attack is too great, it sends a command
to the horizontal stabilizers. They're at the tail of the plane.
The stabilizers tilt so that the aircraft will level out,
(43:52):
which supplies the air the engine's need for continuous operation
without stalling. So that's important. So in the case where
this aircraft is slowing down and it's just naturally the
noses creeping up, this computer system is supposed to account
for that. In the Lion air crash, here's what seems
(44:13):
to have happened the m casts incorrectly detected that the
nose of the aircraft was pointed too far upward and
the engines would be in dature of stalling, so it's
sent the command to the horizontal stabilizers, which tilted and
that caused the aircraft's nose to pitch downward, sending the
aircraft into a dive, and the crew were unable to
stop this malfunction or correct for it, and the plane crashed.
(44:35):
The same thing may have happened with the Ethiopian Airlines crash,
but that investigation is ongoing as of the recording of
this show. Now, I have seen several aviation industry experts
say that a big part of the issue is that
the seven seven Max is different enough from earlier seven
thirty seven models like the seven thirty seven in g
(44:55):
that it should necessitate an entirely new, distinct and thorough
highlot training program, and that a lot of airlines had
more casual training programs, like the kind you could complete
in an hour on a tablet, so that could be
a problem that might require much more extensive training for
(45:17):
pilots so they can familiarize themselves with the changes in
the seven thirty seven max before piloting the newer aircraft.
In addition, newspapers like The New York Times have investigated
the f a A and have come to the conclusion
that that agency is not well enough equipped to perform
adequate testing and certification procedures on aircraft in general, which
allows the possibility of malfunctions and mistakes to make their
(45:41):
way through the certification process because there's just not enough
funding and expertise to detect all of these, and that
means that you could have potentially tragic consequences. Boeing Bird's
part began working on a software patch to address problems
with the m casts pretty much immediately, and this was
(46:01):
made more difficult, the company said, because it's simulators were
unable to replicate the problems that the actual production aircraft
were experiencing. But the updated software, which puts measures into
place to prevent the m CAST system from activating prematurely,
has been completed and as I record this episode, it's
essentially awaiting f a A certification for distribution. So in
(46:24):
other words, the company says that they found a fix
for the issue and it just has to make sure
that the certification um agrees and that they can then
distribute it to all the aircraft. As I record this,
the future of the seven seven Max is in doubt.
There's the possibility that Boeing might have to scrap production
(46:46):
on that jet entirely. There are hundreds of outstanding orders
that could be canceled. It's possible that airlines would rather
look at alternatives than stick with the seven thirty seven Max,
even with software updates and training programs to help fix
these previous problem because now the seven thirty seven Max
has a very negative association with it, and so it's
hard to get away from that. It's hard to tell
(47:08):
passengers no, no, everything's fine now if, especially with the
amount of reporting then has happened on this issue, uh,
I think it's reasonable to say that a lot of
people would have reservations about getting on that type of plane,
even if they were told that things have been worked
out since the accidents. It's an ugly thing to see
(47:29):
it happened. I mean, obviously it's a tragedy and it's
terrible that people lost their lives in this. Uh. It's
also frustrating to see the blame game going around. I
don't honestly know ultimately who is to blame. Boeing says
that they felt the Flying Manual had all the information
needed to deal with these kind of situations. Pilots say
(47:52):
they weren't even really told about the m casts UH
software on the flying control system. I don't know who
to believe, UH. I just know it is a tragedy
and that things have to be fixed for people to
have at least the confidence that these aircraft can go
back into service safely. And that concludes our little series
(48:13):
on Boeing. As I said, I skipped over a ton
of stuff in this episode, and I apologize for that.
If you had a favorite Bowing story that I didn't
get to. But if you do have things you would
like me to talk about, whether it's about Boeing or
anything else, get in touch with me. You can send
me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or you can pop on over to
our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You're gonna
(48:37):
find an archive of all of our old episodes. You'll
find links to where we are on social media. You
also find a link to our online store, where every
purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly
appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is a production of I heart Radio's How
(48:57):
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from heart Radio, visit the
I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and a love
of all things tech. And we are continuing our series
on Boeing, and before we get into it, I just
(00:25):
want to tell you guys, technically, I probably could have
done maybe two or three or four more episodes about
Boeing because the company has done a lot of stuff.
There's been a lot of controversy around some of those things,
and all of those elements are pretty deep and could
they could all justify an episode all by themselves. But
(00:46):
rather than turn this into the Boeing Podcast, I thought
I would kind of some up things in this third part.
I'm gonna have to skip over a lot of stuff,
and if you guys are really interested, I could always
go back and do a couple of episodes that really
focus on some of the individual stories on a more
granular level. But rather than have this series go on indefinitely,
(01:10):
We're just going to press about seventy years of history
together into one episode. So, considering the first two episodes
were thirty years, we're gonna be taking some liberties. But
in our last episode, we looked at a very busy
time for Boeing because the company had become a major
(01:32):
part of the war effort for the United States during
World War Two, and we also looked at how Boeing
continued to develop both military and civilian aircraft after the
war was over, and we finished with a discussion about
the development of the seven oh seven, which was Boeing's
first mass produced commercial jet, so passenger jet like the
(01:53):
kind we have today now. As I mentioned in that episode,
the development process for the seven oh seven represented an
enormous investment, a huge risk for Boeing. It took up
nearly all the profits Boeing had made since World War
Two had ended. And making the matter more fraught was
that the havaland comment the British made commercial jet that
(02:16):
had inspired Boeing president William Allen to take this big
risk in the first place, well, it ended up having
some catastrophic problems of its own, and by the time
those problems became evident, Boeing had already committed to building
a commercial jet, so within the first year of operation
that would be the comment started to have some issues. Now,
(02:40):
the first accident only caused a couple of minor injuries,
and in that incident, the Commet the airplane failed to
become airborne at the end of a runway, so it
ran the whole length of the runway, could not take
off and it ended up crossing into really rough ground.
But people got bumped up, but that was the worst
of it. However, a similar accident in nineteen fifty three
(03:03):
was much more serious. Again, a Comet failed to take
off from a runway, this time in Pakistan, and it
collided with an embankment at the end of the runway.
All five members of the crew died and six passengers
did as well. It was the first commercial jet accident
that had fatalities UH and obviously this was a huge deal.
(03:25):
Then in nineteen fifty four, on two separate occasions, Commet
aircraft broke apart in midflight. The Commet fleet was grounded.
As a result, the aircraft lost its certificate of airworthiness
and a full inquiry was made and an investigation to
find out what exactly was happening. The investigation actually found
that the aircraft's frame was suffering fatigue and that led
(03:49):
to structural failures, particularly around the windows. It was that
the the pressurized cabins. You know that air pressure inside
the plane is much greater than the air pressure outside
in high altitudes, and so you have this force pushing
outward on the interior of the plane, and that push,
particularly at the windows, was what was causing fatigue on
(04:12):
the airframe. And thus you had structural failures in flight
with a couple of these comet flights, and that caused
in flight accidents, essentially the planes which just completely break
apart with all people aboard lost as a result. Now
all of this was going on, as I said, as
Boeing had already committed to creating its own commercial jet aircraft.
(04:33):
So one of the big challenges Boeing faced was creating
an aircraft that was demonstrably safe to travel in. And
then a second challenge was to convince the general public
that this was the case. And travelers were understandably concerned
after the high profile accidents involving the world's first commercial jets.
So Boeing produced a film titled This is Such a
(04:55):
Charming Name, Operation Guillotine. It was a a film that
was trying to counteract this public reservation of flying aboard
a commercial jet. And in the film, Boeing had test
footage where they had aircraft chambers that were pressurized. This
was inside a controlled environment, so this wasn't like flying
(05:16):
in the you know, over the United States or something.
And in the first demonstration they showed a pressurized airplane
fuselage like a regular propeller airplane type fuselage, and the
fuselage gets pierced by two metal blades. So this is
like a scenario where a propeller failure has happened and
(05:37):
part of a propeller breaks off and breaks into the
fuselage of a plane and that caused rapid depressurization and
the fuselage broke apart in that test. But then Bowing
showed a similar test with the fuselage of their seven
oh seven and they had five blades pierced this structure,
not just two. But in their test footage they show
(05:58):
that the Bowing fusel lodge can hold together even with
this this breach, and some air was escaping obviously because
there was, you know, now a hole in the plane.
It's not like you can just not have air leak
out if you have a differential in pressure on one
side and versus the other, but it did show that
the Bowing design was far more resilient to damage that
(06:21):
was going to hold together even in a catastrophic event
like that than the traditional aircraft, which is an interesting
way to build passenger confidence, to be sure, but it
was one of the things they tried. The seven oh
seven was meant to be a mid to low range
commercial jet, and I mentioned in the previous episode that
PanAm had put in an order for twenty seven oh seven's,
(06:43):
but PanAm also hedged its bets. It wasn't going all
in on Boeing. It also put in an order for
twenty five d C eights from boeing competitor Douglas. Boeing
was able to manufacture the seven oh seven faster than
Douglas could build the d C eights, and Bowing would
also customize the aircraft itself. They would have different load
(07:04):
outs and different variants of the seven oh seven, And
because of those customizations, there's not really one set of
measurements I can give you for a seven oh seven.
The same is true for all the different seven hundred
series aircraft that Boeing would produce. There are different variations
of those and they all have different stats. But here's
how the first seven oh seven stacked up. It was
(07:24):
a hundred forty five ft one inch long, that's about
forty four point two meters, and had a wingspan of
a hundred thirty feet ten inches or thirty nine point
nine ms. The fuselage, so you know, like the body
of the aircraft had a width of twelve feet four
inches or three point eight meters. And while it was
meant as a mid range aircraft, its first commercial flight
(07:45):
was actually between New York City and Paris, France, though
it did stop once in Newfoundland to refuel. The seven
oh seven could travel faster and hold more passengers than
the Comet could, and there were several variations of it.
There was the seven O seven one, the seven O
seven one twenty B, the seven oh seven to twenty,
the seven oh seven three twenty, the seven oh seven
(08:07):
four twenty, and then there was the seven twenty and
the seven twenty B variants. So those two seven twenties
you might wonder what's up with those because they didn't
follow that seven oh seven pattern. These were meant to
be short to medium range jets, and they were also
meant to service airports that had shorter runways that couldn't
accommodate the larger versions of the seven O seven, so
(08:28):
these were slightly smaller versions of those those commercial jets. Now,
differences between some of these variants could sometimes be tricky
to spot. Some of them were essentially the same design
but had different engines, so unless you were really really
observant and had an up close and personal look at
the interior of some of the workings of the jets,
(08:50):
you wouldn't be able to necessarily tell on site the
difference without seeing a designation. Now, Boeing would manufacture more
than one thousand of the seven oh seven aircraft across
US all families over the decades, and the seven oh
seven would be in continuous production from nineteen fifty four
to nineteen seventy seven. It helped establish commercial jet travel
(09:10):
across the world, not just for Boeing but for all companies,
and before long more people were traveling by air than
by sea, which was a first because while air travel
had been established for several decades, it was incredibly expensive
and it was very slow if you're using a propeller aircraft, uh,
and it there was this perception of real danger, so
(09:32):
a lot of people preferred to travel by boat rather
than by airplane, but jets were a different story. It
also established something else. The seven O seven had exit
doors on the front left and rear left side of
the plane, so the four and the aft of the plane.
This would become a standardized configuration for Boeing's commercial jets
and ultimately would mean that other manufacturers would have to
(09:54):
follow suit because airports would accommodate this particular configuration with
the design of their jetway. So if you've flown into
a major airport and you notice that all the jets
are pulling up to their jet ways the same way,
it's because the Boeing kind of established this, and then
it sort of became the standard. While Boeing was hard
at work on the seven oh seven, the company's aircraft
(10:17):
also made history in another way. On September one, nineteen
fifty three, a Boeing B forty seven Strato jet refueled
another B forty seven in midflight. It was the first
time a jet was being used as a tanker. The
arrangement relied upon what is called a probe and drogue
(10:37):
refueling system, so there are two main aerial refueling methods,
and by that I mean two main methods of refueling
a plane in air, not a way of refueling a mermaid.
One is to use a rigid boom extension that connects
two aircraft together in midflight for the purposes of fuel transfer.
It allows for a very high speed fuel transfer because
(10:59):
you're using a rigid boom. Um when you use something
that has flexibility to it, it actually slows down the
transfer of fuel a little bit. However, that system requires
both aircraft to fly pretty close to each other, and
if something should go wrong, the boom, because it's solid,
could cause serious damage to one or both aircraft, so
(11:20):
it's riskier. The probe and drogue method is slightly more safe.
The aircraft in need of refueling flies ahead of the
tanker aircraft, and the refueling plane extends a hose that
is otherwise retracted so that it would be flush against
the aircraft. So it starts to let this hose out,
(11:40):
and the hose trails behind the aircraft, and at the
end of this hose is a basket, and the trailing
aircraft the one that has all the fuel aboard it
that's going to refuel The first plane has the probe.
It's kind of like a uh, you know, a fuel
pump that you would use at a gas station. The
(12:01):
the pump part where you plug that, you know, you
slot that into your gas tank. That's kind of what
the probe is. The pilot guides this probe into the
basket and that connects the probe to the hose and
refueling can begin. Afterward, the tanker pilot can retract the
probe from the drobe. The basket um and the pilot
(12:22):
of the newly refueled plane retracts the drogue, winds it
back up, and then you've got a newly refueled plane
in flight and never had the land to refuel. And
I'm just gonna say this, I find the fact that
pilots can fly so steady as to allow for in
flight refueling to be absolutely mind blowing. I'm amazed at
(12:43):
that level of precision and skill, and also the ingenuity
required to create the refueling system in the first place.
Human beings can be pretty astounding sometimes, And of course
I say that as a human being. I'm not some
sort of transdimensional alien make observations or anything. So let's
get back to Boeing and stop asking silly questions human
(13:05):
by nint. Boeing had made some huge accomplishments. The Dash
E D had already had its first flight at that point,
and Boeing was producing the k C one five strato
tanker aircraft, which was based off this DASH eight design,
and it was also at this point working on that
seven oh seven commercial jet, which again was also based
(13:26):
off the Dash A D. So you can think of
the DASH E D as the parent to both the
k C one thirty five strato tanker and the seven
oh seven. And those two aircraft were not identical. They
were actually very different from each other, but they were
both based off that same ancestor. Now Boeing was still
building military aircraft like the B forty seven, and it
(13:47):
had begun production on the B fifty two A, so
things were going pretty well for the company in nineteen
fifty six. On September, William Boeing, who was the founder
of the company but had you know, sold off all
of his entry in years before, passed away. He had
a heart attack aboard his yacht. I can only hope
that I go the same way. But it was three
(14:08):
days before his seventy five birthday, and I'd prefer to
last a little longer than that. But other than that,
I think, um passing away on board your luxury yacht,
that's a pretty baller way to go if you've gotta
if you gotta choose, I think on May fift nifty eight,
the US Air Force put in an order for three
of the new seven oh seven's, specifically the seven oh
(14:30):
seven one twenties, because you remember they're all those variations,
and these planes would receive a new designation, which would
be VC one thirty seven A. They were meant for
something very special. They'd be used for transportation for the
president and for other high ranking government officials. And when
the president steps aboard one of those planes, that plane
(14:51):
then becomes known as air Force one for as long
as the president is on it. And that's fun bit
of trivia. Air Force one does not refer to a
single goal plane. It's the designation that we give whatever
plane happens to be carrying the president at any given time.
So there's no one air Force one. It's whatever plane
the president happens to be on that is air Force one.
(15:15):
These planes were not the first to be used for
presidential transportation. I mean they were customized specifically for that,
but they weren't even the first for that. They were
the first from Boeing Um. They were also not the
first planes to be called air Force one when the
president was aboard, but it was the first time Boeing
would be the company providing planes for that purpose, and
they would continue to do so. Boeing has frequently provided
(15:39):
well sold planes to the United States government for use
as presidential transportation. On October t n eight, Boeing landed
a contract to assemble an intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM,
called the minute Man. This was named after the members
of the American militia who were participated in the militia
(16:00):
leading up to the Revolutionary War. They were so called
the minutemen because they had to be ready to deploy
within a minute of getting a message. The i c
b M would rely upon solid rocket fuel, which would
also allow those missiles to stand ready for use indefinitely,
as opposed to the liquid fueled rockets of that time,
which had to be fueled pretty much immediately before use
(16:21):
and thus required more time to actually deploy. Now, it
would come about that they would find workarounds for that
limitation for liquid fuel, but at the time that was
not really you know, those rear options. Now, while the
Minutemen I c b M had been proposed earlier, the
US military originally dismissed those proposals, and the idea was
(16:43):
that they had already started development on other missiles, so
they thought, well, it doesn't make sense for US to
devote even more resources to building different types of missiles.
Were already building missiles. But then there was a report
which was later found to be inaccurate that suggests said
that the Soviet Union was actually far ahead of the
United States and missile production and deployment, and that pretty
(17:06):
much scared the dickens of the U. S. Government, and
soon the minute Man was given the fast track for
production and Boeing was in business. In nine Boeing began
development on what would have been a predecessor to the
Space Shuttle. I think I referred to this a little
bit in the Space Race episodes I did a year ago.
It was called the X twenty and was later known
(17:28):
as the Dina sore d Y in a dash s
O A R. It was a space plane meant to
be able to return to Earth as a sort of
plane or glider like the Space Shuttle. So this was
different from the Gemini or Giminy if you prefer, and
Apollo designs. Those were ballistic spacecraft, which meant they would
(17:49):
hurtle to Earth like you know, uh, just a cannonball,
and then deploy a parachute to slow them down, as
well as angle themselves properly so that you know, their
heat field was at the right angle, and then eventually
they would land in the water. From nineteen fifty nine
to the early nineteen sixties, Boeing would work on the
dinosaur design, and hundreds of millions of dollars were dedicated
(18:12):
to this development from the U. S government, But ultimately
the US government decided that the ballistic approach, which was
much less expensive and technically less complicated, would get priority,
so the project was canned in nineteen sixty three. It's
a shame too, because it was actually a pretty cool design.
I'll talk about a bit more after the break, but
(18:33):
first let's go and thank our sponsor. The dinosaur looked
pretty darn cool in a chunky way. It measured thirty
five and a half feet or ten point eight meters
long and had a delta wingspan of nearly twenty one ft.
(18:54):
Boeing had built a mocked up model of it and
was working on building out a prototo hype when the
project got jumped. The official decision was that the spacecraft
would have no military applications, so it would be useless
as a military vehicle. You couldn't use it for you know, wartime.
You couldn't use it for reconnaissance, so there was no
practical use of it in that sense. And it was
(19:17):
considered to be too expensive to be of any practical
use as a research and science vehicle, So there was
no practical scientific application. And so the dinosaur went the
way of the dinosaurs. And yes, I was waiting to
make that joke for ages. I couldn't wait for the
break to be over. In the spring of nineteen sixty,
Boeing acquired the Vital Aircraft Corporation and it formed a
(19:40):
new division within Boeing. Vital was a play on the
phrase vertical takeoff and landing, so it's this part of
Boeing's company that develops v t o L aircraft like
helicopters and related vehicles. Um they actually would be involved
in developing lots of helicopters. They don't talk about a
lot of them in this episode. That's one of the
thing things that I'm having to skip over quite a bit.
(20:02):
But they had a hand in designing several helicopters, both
for the military and for civilian use. In late nineteen
sixty one, Bowing would land a contract to produce the
first stage booster for the Saturn five, which would be
used in the Apollo program. That's pretty darn cool, And
the following year Boeing would test its first hydrofoil vehicle,
the high Point. So what's a hydrofoil. Well, as the
(20:25):
name suggests, it has to do with water, you know,
hydro water, and a foil is a surface that uh
provides lift. So a hydrofoil is a surface that, when
it moves in water, acts as a lifting surface. So
it's sort of like the wings on an airplane, except,
of course, an airplane moves through the air, hydrofoil moves
through the water, and of course water and air both
(20:47):
obey fluid dynamics. So if you've ever seen a boat
that travels really fast and it's on top of skis
that are on these long struts, that's a hydrofoil, and
Bowing would go on to produce hydro of foil vehicles
for the Navy as well as for other uses. And
hydrofoil boats can travel pretty darn fast, and it's largely
because they have decreased drag. There's reduced surface area making
(21:10):
contact with the water, so they can go much faster
than boats that have their full surface or you know,
the full lower surface in contact with the water. In
nineteen sixty two, Boeing began producing seven twenty seven aircraft.
So I guess now it's a good time to just
do a full run down on the seven hundred family
of commercial jets and get a general timeline for each
(21:30):
and describe how they are different. I'd like to get
them all all the way collectively, though obviously obviously we're
gonna have to come back for the seven thirty seven
Max designed to close out this episode. But yeah, let's
let's do all the seven hundreds, because if I just
keep on going through the timeline, it's just gonna get
tedious anyway. So it all started with the seven oh
seven that got things moving, and then next was the
(21:51):
seven twenty that was the variation on the seven oh
seven that was designed for the shorter flights and smaller airports,
and then after that came the seven twenty seven. Now,
depending on the lay out, it could hold between a
hundred forty nine to eighty nine passengers max. And it
had three engines. It had an engine under each wing,
and then the third engine was located at the tail
(22:12):
of the aircraft. It was built into the tail of
the fuselage, and it was also intended for short to
medium routes. The original seven thirty seven would follow in
the late nineteen sixties, and the original seven thirty seven
had twin engines, was also meant for short to medium
length trips, and Boeing has updated this particular line many
(22:34):
many times. There are several variations of the seven thirty
seven seven thirty seven seven thirty seven Classic, seven thirty
seven NG, seven thirty seven Crystal seven thirty seven Low Calorie.
I might be making some of these up, though, but
there really is a seven thirty seven n G that
stands for next Generation, just like Star Trek and uh
that one was a little bit more narrow than the
(22:56):
original seven thirty seven. And of course there's the seven
thirty seven MAX that here about in the News Currently,
there are several variants of these jets, even within these families,
and each variant has slightly different stats and passenger layouts,
and the variety means it's really hard to talk about
seven thirty seven's as a collective because there's so much
(23:16):
variation between them. There are versions that had a maximum
capacity of eighty five passengers and there are versions that
could carry up to two fifteen passengers. That's a pretty
big difference there. Seven seven would go on to be
Boeing's biggest commercial success. It is the highest selling commercial
jet liner model of all time, though again there are
(23:37):
a ton of variations, and that consideration has taken all
of them and putting them in a big collective group.
They've been in continuous production since their introduction in the
nineteen sixties, so a very big working horse for Boeing.
The Bowing seven forty seven was the very first aircraft
(23:58):
to receive the descriptor of eumbo jet, and it is
a beast of an aircraft. Now. I have never flown
on a seven forty seven, but I have toured a
grounded seven forty seven. They have one at Delta's Air
Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, and the seven forty seven is
a wide body airplane. If you were to look at
one in profile, you notice that at the front end
(24:20):
of the airplane has a hump on the top of it,
and that's because the forward section of the plane has
a second floor. It's a double decker. UH. Passenger cabin,
so you actually have a staircase inside the cabin that
leads up to the second floor. Uh. They can get
real swanky up there. The at least the model that
I went on, they had the the first class set
(24:42):
up in the upper deck and it was pretty nifty.
So when this seven forty seven debuted in nineteen seventy,
it was known as the commercial jet with the largest
capacity for passengers, and it would actually hold on to
that title for nearly forty years. There's also several variations
of the seven forty seven, and the seven eight is
(25:04):
still in production today. The seven fifty seven is kind
of a study in contrast to the seven forty seven.
It first went into production in n one and it's
a narrow body plane, has a single aisle down the
passenger cabin. It's got two engines and Boeing generally intended
it to take the place of the older seven twenty
(25:27):
seven's for those short to medium flight routes. It can
hold nearly three hundred passengers in at least some of
the configurations for the seven fifty seven, and it makes
it Boeing's largest single aisle passenger jet. This one, however,
is no longer in production. Then you have the seven
sixty seven that's a mid to long range aircraft. It
has a wide body and has two jet engines, and
(25:50):
there are lots of variations of this one to that
allow for a maximum passenger capacity of up to three
hundred seventy five passengers, depending upon the variation. Obviously, not
all buildouts can hold that many. In fact, some of
them top out at closer to passengers, which is less
than half of that other maximum. Like the seven fifty seven.
The seven sixty seven went into production in one and
(26:12):
it shares many design components with the seven fifty seven,
and it's so similar in operation that the f a
A said that pilots who had the proper type of
rating to fly a seven fifty seven could also fly
a seven sixty seven because the differences, at least in
operation were so few and far between they were practically
(26:33):
the same aircraft by operation, even though by actual specs
like by width and length and all that, they were
very different. The seventy seven sixty seven was much wider
than the seven fifty seven. Boeing still makes the seven
sixty seven aircraft today, but most of those are not
being used as passenger jets are being used for other stuff.
(26:54):
Then we have the Triple seven, the seven seventy seven.
It's a wide body, long range aircraft, the first one
to production in It is the largest twin jet commercial
aircraft in the world, and some variations of the seven
seventy seven can hold nearly four hundred passengers. It's also
the first Boeing commercial aircraft to have computer mediated controls,
(27:15):
which is going to become part of our story towards
the end of this episode two for the seven thirty
seven Max. The seven seventy seven became a big success
for Boeing, and airlines ordered enough of them to make
the seven seventy seven the best selling wide body commercial
jet of all time. It beat out the record that
was previously held by the seven forty seven, and as
(27:35):
I record this, Boeing is working on the latest generation
of the Triple seven family of aircraft with the seven
seventy seven X, which would start flying the skies in
twenty twenty. One of those is the seven seventy seven
nine and it's a huge, huge plane. It can hold
up to four fourteen passengers. Big plane. And now we're
(27:56):
up to seven eighty seven a k a. The Dreamliner.
It's an the wide body jet, though it's in the
mid size range, so it's not as big as the
seven seventy sevens, and it went into production in two
thousand nine. It's meant to replace the seven sixty seven.
So Boeing's goal was to create a commercial jet that
could fill the same role as the seven sixty seven,
but have much better fuel efficiency. And they did this
(28:17):
with lots of different changes in design, including using mostly
composite materials for the aircraft, which helped cut down on
the aircraft's weight, which therefore cuts down on the amount
of fuel it needs to stay in the air. It
can hold up to three five passengers, depending again upon
the layout, and it also can travel on long distance routes.
Oh and then there is one other one I should
(28:38):
mention the seven seventeen. So why would I leave that
one last? Why would I work up from seven oh
seven all the way up to seven eighty seven, then
go back to seven seventeen. Well, it's because Bowing didn't
actually design the seven seventeen, the Boeing seven seventeen, at
least the commercial jet version of the seven seventeen. There
was a Boeing military aircraft that had a seven seventeen
(28:58):
designation back in the nineteen fifties, but that's not what
we're talking about here anyway. It wasn't a Bowing aircraft. Originally.
It used to have the name MD and it was
designed by Boeing's competitor McDonald Douglas in the mid nineties.
But before the plane could go into production, something else
would happen. And I'll get back to that in a
little bit, all right. So that's the family of Boeing
(29:20):
commercial jets, and honestly, each of those could merit their
own episode. There are lots of stories about each of them.
There are stories about the different crazy configurations the airlines
would have for those aircraft, their stories about accidents with
those aircraft. Um, the seven forty seven has had a
lot of accidents, not not to say that the seven
(29:43):
seven itself was at fault. There were plenty of accidents
that were judged to be human error, not mechanical error.
But there's you know, there's just so much to talk about,
and again we've got it in this series at some point,
so I'm just gonna calling all double here. Also, it's
good to remember a few general notes about these planes. First,
(30:05):
the number designation doesn't indicate size. This took me a
long time to figure out. When I was a kid,
I just assumed that every number bigger was meant there's
gonna be a bigger plane. So when I heard I
was gonna fly on the seven sixties seven, I thought, Wow,
it's gonna be even bigger than the seven seven, And
I was wrong. Still getting over that. Also, another is
(30:28):
that the variations within a single family in the seven
series can be significant. It's not just about the seat layout.
It's also about the aircraft's dimensions, which engines it has,
and other design elements. And these differences, at least according
to Boeing, aren't so great as to necessitate a totally
new designation. You wouldn't call it a different type of plane,
(30:51):
but it does mean that not all seven forty seven's
are alike. For example, and there are a lot of
these Boeing aircraft out there in the wild. Boeing delivered
more than nine thousand seven thirty seven aircraft alone. That's
if you lump all the versions of the seven thirty
seven together. If you do that, then it's delivered more
than nine thousand of them to customers. That's nearly half
(31:12):
of all the commercial aircraft that Boeing has delivered since
it started producing the seven family. So it's pretty impressive
that the seven thirty seven takes up almost of all
the planes Boeing has ever sold, at least in the
commercial jet world. Okay, so back to the timeline and
bowing in the nineteen sixties. Gotta finish this episode out
before the number seven ceases to mean anything to me anymore.
(31:36):
Boeing would continue to play a crucial role in the
space race, landing the contract with NASA to build the
Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. Now, these were unmanned spacecraft that would
fly around the Moon and map out sites of the
Moon that could potentially be used by the Apollo program
for landing sites. Boeing would work with other companies to
produce the spacecraft, and the mission was a success. And
(31:58):
was very important for the planning of the Apollo missions.
In nineteen sixty six, Boeing celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and
it did so by flying a replica of the old
B and W biplane that had started it all so
many years before. On a less celebratory note, Boeing would
also land a contract and design a short Range Attack
(32:18):
missile or SRAM s RAM. This was a nuclear air
to surface missile, so this was meant to be fired
by bombers that would penetrate enemy airspace, presumably after the
surface to air missile capabilities of the enemy had been
knocked out and by enemy everyone was essentially thinking the
Soviet Union. This was still in the Cold War, so
(32:40):
Boeing would first produce the missiles in nineteen seventy two
and would continue to do so, upgrading the line, making
changes to it, but continuate producing these missiles until which
was when the program was discontinued. In nineteen sixty nine,
Boeing began production on the Lunar Rover vehicle, that's the
moon car that astronauts would us to make some wicked
(33:01):
donuts on the Moon. I'm told they also used to
do science and stuff up there too. Not everything went
without a hitch, however, Boeing had landed a contract to
develop a supersonic transport or s ST vehicle. This would
be a passenger aircraft capable of breaking the sound barrier.
In the nineteen sixties, Boeing landed a contract to develop
(33:24):
such an aircraft, and it would have been the first
of a new family of aircraft in Boeing. It had
the designation to seven oh seven, but the government scrapped
the project in nineteen seventy one and Boeing canceled the
development on the project. So what happened, Well, if you
listen to my episode about the Concorde, you know that
supersonic travel is challenging, not just from a technical standpoint,
(33:47):
but also an economical one. The expense of developing and
building the aircraft, of training crews and pilots of how
to fly them, and maintenance crews about how to maintain them,
also just paying to fuel the darned things. All that
ends up being a considerable amount of money. On top
of that, breaking the sound barrier means you produce more
(34:07):
sonic booms than I do after a dinner at Taco Bell.
So while Boeing was tackling the challenge with zeal The
general opinion in the industry was that it wasn't a
good idea to pursue, and the general public was concerned
about the environmental impact that such aircraft would have. So
at uh, it never got off the ground. Now, when
we come back, I'll quickly rush through the timeline and
(34:28):
then we'll talk about the seven thirty seven Max. But
first let's take a quick break. So while the SST
program went belly up, Boeing was continuing to not just
work on space, military and commercial air vehicles, but also
(34:49):
to diversify. That involved creating alternate uses for Boeing owned land,
like turning some of it into farmland, for example, And
this way they could put the land to work rather
than just you know, have it be land. And it
also involved Boeing bidding for contracts to develop rapid rail
transit technology. So at this point, Bowing is building components
(35:09):
for spacecraft, for military aircraft, including helicopters, for commercial aircraft,
for hydrofoil vehicles, and rail transit systems. Oh And by
the late nineteen seventies it was also building wind turbines
for electricity production. So it was really getting into lots
of stuff. One of the spacecraft Bowing created was the
Mariner ten, which was a satellite that did flybys of
(35:29):
Venus and Mercury sending information back to us on Earth,
which is pretty darn cool. And Boeing would contribute components
to the Space Telescope Hubble as well. Would also continue
designing and building missiles for the military, like the a
l C m or air launched Cruise missile, which was
designed to fire from a Bowing B fifty two, originally
getting up to the nineteen eighties. Now Boeing would work
(35:51):
on components for the boosters used by the Space Shuttle.
It would also design and build major sections of the
International Space Station, would was an incredibly lucrative contract. A
division called Boeing Computer Services would produce software to be
used on the International Space Station. The company produced the
Chinook military helicopter as well at this time, and Boeing
(36:14):
was one of the companies working on the osprey, which
is a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that has a
tilt rotor assembly. You've probably seen pictures of these, if
not one in person. It kind of looks like a
helicopter and kind of looks like a propeller plane. And
those tilt rotors actually can can angle to serve either
as a helicopter or an airplane. So you can have
(36:36):
it tilted so that they the propellers are facing up
and then do a vertical takeoff, and then you can
start to transition and tilt them in a more horizontal
wing position, and then with the propellers being ninety degrees
from that and turn it into essentially an airplane. I
have to do a full episode about the osprey at
some point because it's really an odd type of aircraft.
(36:58):
But it's also incredibly expensive and there was a lot
of controversy around it as well. But they're still ospray
aircraft in service today. That's more than thirty years after
Bowing first started working on them. Set it's impressive. In
the late nineteen eighties, Boeing built an unmanned aerial vehicle
called the Condor. This is a bigin has a wingspan
measuring two hundred five feet or sixty two meters, and
(37:21):
it has propellers for propulsion. It's not a jet drone,
it's it's a propeller drone. It looks kind of like
a very wide, like almost an unrealistically wide propeller plane.
It has an effective ceiling altitude of around seventy thousand
feet or twenty one thousand meters, and it can fly
(37:42):
completely under computer control from takeoff to landing. Only two
of them were ever built, and they were really meant
for Boeing to kind of research effective strategies for unmanned
aerial vehicles. In general, they weren't intended necessarily to be
production vehicles, and in fact, the military said there were
very few practical applications because they would be far too
(38:03):
vulnerable by to enemy attack if you were to try
and use them as reconnaissance vehicles. For example, Boeing was
involved in the design and production of the B two
stealth bomber, which was a top secret vehicle at the time.
I've talked about stealth technology and other episodes, so I'm
not going to go into detail here. It largely involves
creating surfaces with odd angles so the incoming radar waves
(38:26):
don't reflect back to the radar stations. But it gets
a little more compleated than that. But I've talked about
in previous episodes, Boeing and McDonald Douglas would get the
nod from NASA to lead R and D efforts into
the design of supersonic passenger aircraft, again, this time with
an eye to mitigate the challenges I mentioned earlier. This
is called the High Speed Civil Transport Project. And occasionally
(38:48):
you'll hear about various studies and ways to try and
do things like reduce or eliminate the sonic boom as
much as possible, which is tricky to do. It's hard
to fool physics. You ken in decrease its effect, it's
hard to get rid of it because air, you know,
nature still abhors a vacuum, so do I hate vacuuming.
(39:10):
In December nine, Boeing merged with Rockwell Aerospace, and Rockwell
became Boeing North American and it operated as a subsidiary company.
Also in August, Boeing would merge with its old competitor
McDonald Douglas. Harry Stone Cipher, who had been the CEO
of McDonald Douglas, would then come over to be the
(39:30):
Boeing president and the Boeing CEO and Chairman, Phil Condent
would remain at his role at the top. On September seven,
the f twenty two Raptor, which was based off an
experimental aircraft from a couple of years earlier, would make
its first flight. This is a high speed, stealth tactical
fighter and on that first flight it climbed to an
(39:51):
altitude of fifteen thousand feet in less than three minutes.
Boeing was responsible for several parts of this aircraft, but
it was working in a partner a ship with other companies,
including Lockheed, on this particular project. In Boeing would change
the name of the McDonald Douglas m d N that
I mentioned earlier, and when was the plane that had
(40:12):
not yet gone into production when Boeing had merged with
McDonald Douglas, and the new name was the seven seventeen,
So now it's the Boeing seven seventeen. In ninety nine,
Bowing landed a one point six billion dollar contract to
serve as the lead systems integrator for the National Missile
Defense Program. And there's a ton of other odds and
ends we could cover, like the Joint helmet mounted Queuing
(40:35):
system or the Joint Direct Attack Munition or j DAM platform,
or the rock and Roll satellites that Bowing produced for
XM satellite radio or the space launch complex at Cape Canaveral,
not to mention the various missiles and bombs and aircraft
that Boeing has worked on since two thousand for the
United States and other countries. But I'm running out of time,
(40:59):
and we still need to talk about the seven thirty
seven Max. Boeing announced this particular generation of its seven
thirty seven back in two thousand eleven, and they're very
similar in many ways in capacity to early generations of
the seven thirty seven, but in other ways they're very different.
The seven thirty seven Max aircraft received certification in two
(41:21):
thousand seventeen, staying the aircraft was suitable to enter into service.
But in October two thousand eighteen, a seven thirty seven
Max eight operated by Lion air Jet UH crashed into
the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia less than
twenty minutes after it had taken off, with all aboard lost.
The cause appeared to be a problem with the flight
(41:42):
control system. More on that in a moment. On March tenth,
two thousand nineteen, and Ethiopian Airlines flight also a seven
thirty seven Max eight crashed less than ten minutes after
it had taken off from Addis Ababa. There were no
survivors in that crash either. Investigations are ongoing as of
the recording of this podcast, but in any case, the
(42:03):
global fleet of seven thirty seven Max aircraft is currently
grounded and may continue to be so for the rest
of twenty nineteen, and Boeing has stated that it may
soon need to slow or even halt production on the aircraft.
So what actually happened, Well, it's premature to say everything,
but we have some ideas now. Boeing has maintained that
(42:25):
the aircraft were designed properly and they were operating properly,
but that cruise were not following the correct procedures as
indicated by the flight manual. Pilots have stated that they
were not adequately informed of a new type of software
that was incorporated into the flight control system that may
have played a part in these accidents. So what's going on? Well, first,
(42:46):
it's helpful to know that the seven thirty seven Max
is different from earlier seven thirty seven aircraft in its construction.
The engines are different from earlier seven thirty seven aircraft,
and they are placed further forward and higher up on
the fuselage. And that changes the balance of the aircraft.
(43:06):
It actually creates a tendency for the seven thirty seven's
nose to start pointing upwards, starts to pitch up when
it's traveling at lower speeds, and this in turn can
lead to engines stalling out. They don't get enough air
in them, and then they stall, and then you're in
a real dangerous situation. And this is where the software
comes in. The software is called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation
(43:30):
System or m CASTS, and the software detects when the
aircraft's nose is pointed upward at lower speeds. It has
sensors to detect the angle of attack, and if the
angle of attack is too great, it sends a command
to the horizontal stabilizers. They're at the tail of the plane.
The stabilizers tilt so that the aircraft will level out,
(43:52):
which supplies the air the engine's need for continuous operation
without stalling. So that's important. So in the case where
this aircraft is slowing down and it's just naturally the
noses creeping up, this computer system is supposed to account
for that. In the Lion air crash, here's what seems
(44:13):
to have happened the m casts incorrectly detected that the
nose of the aircraft was pointed too far upward and
the engines would be in dature of stalling, so it's
sent the command to the horizontal stabilizers, which tilted and
that caused the aircraft's nose to pitch downward, sending the
aircraft into a dive, and the crew were unable to
stop this malfunction or correct for it, and the plane crashed.
(44:35):
The same thing may have happened with the Ethiopian Airlines crash,
but that investigation is ongoing as of the recording of
this show. Now, I have seen several aviation industry experts
say that a big part of the issue is that
the seven seven Max is different enough from earlier seven
thirty seven models like the seven thirty seven in g
(44:55):
that it should necessitate an entirely new, distinct and thorough
highlot training program, and that a lot of airlines had
more casual training programs, like the kind you could complete
in an hour on a tablet, so that could be
a problem that might require much more extensive training for
(45:17):
pilots so they can familiarize themselves with the changes in
the seven thirty seven max before piloting the newer aircraft.
In addition, newspapers like The New York Times have investigated
the f a A and have come to the conclusion
that that agency is not well enough equipped to perform
adequate testing and certification procedures on aircraft in general, which
allows the possibility of malfunctions and mistakes to make their
(45:41):
way through the certification process because there's just not enough
funding and expertise to detect all of these, and that
means that you could have potentially tragic consequences. Boeing Bird's
part began working on a software patch to address problems
with the m casts pretty much immediately, and this was
(46:01):
made more difficult, the company said, because it's simulators were
unable to replicate the problems that the actual production aircraft
were experiencing. But the updated software, which puts measures into
place to prevent the m CAST system from activating prematurely,
has been completed and as I record this episode, it's
essentially awaiting f a A certification for distribution. So in
(46:24):
other words, the company says that they found a fix
for the issue and it just has to make sure
that the certification um agrees and that they can then
distribute it to all the aircraft. As I record this,
the future of the seven seven Max is in doubt.
There's the possibility that Boeing might have to scrap production
(46:46):
on that jet entirely. There are hundreds of outstanding orders
that could be canceled. It's possible that airlines would rather
look at alternatives than stick with the seven thirty seven Max,
even with software updates and training programs to help fix
these previous problem because now the seven thirty seven Max
has a very negative association with it, and so it's
hard to get away from that. It's hard to tell
(47:08):
passengers no, no, everything's fine now if, especially with the
amount of reporting then has happened on this issue, uh,
I think it's reasonable to say that a lot of
people would have reservations about getting on that type of plane,
even if they were told that things have been worked
out since the accidents. It's an ugly thing to see
(47:29):
it happened. I mean, obviously it's a tragedy and it's
terrible that people lost their lives in this. Uh. It's
also frustrating to see the blame game going around. I
don't honestly know ultimately who is to blame. Boeing says
that they felt the Flying Manual had all the information
needed to deal with these kind of situations. Pilots say
(47:52):
they weren't even really told about the m casts UH
software on the flying control system. I don't know who
to believe, UH. I just know it is a tragedy
and that things have to be fixed for people to
have at least the confidence that these aircraft can go
back into service safely. And that concludes our little series
(48:13):
on Boeing. As I said, I skipped over a ton
of stuff in this episode, and I apologize for that.
If you had a favorite Bowing story that I didn't
get to. But if you do have things you would
like me to talk about, whether it's about Boeing or
anything else, get in touch with me. You can send
me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or you can pop on over to
our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You're gonna
(48:37):
find an archive of all of our old episodes. You'll
find links to where we are on social media. You
also find a link to our online store, where every
purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly
appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is a production of I heart Radio's How
(48:57):
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from heart Radio, visit the
I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. H
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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