Airplane and airline stuff

[Tero]

I get these things in my newsfeed, and the fantastic stunts people want to post as "videos" are obvious flight simulator things about 1 minute into the video. But even at that, some have shown ridiculously short runways on Caribbean islands.

[Brian Peacock]

That's just what they want you to think.

[Scot Dutchy]

It was the speed of landing that got me; it stopped still.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Shareholder value maximization, that's the ticket.

'How Boeing Was Set on the Path to Disaster by the Cult of Jack Welch'

Every attempt to divine how Boeing’s culture went from exemplary to execrable tends to lead to a man who never laid his hands on Boeing, Jack Welch, the infamously bottom-line hatchet man, known as “Neutron Jack” for his ability to vaporize thousands of jobs at General Electric while its CEO from 1981 to 2001 before leaving with a $417 million exit payment. His leadership style, once hailed as a master class in squeezing as much money as possible out of any business, became posthumously toxic. Nonetheless, managers schooled by Welch fanned out to work their magic at other companies deemed in need of it.

...

Boeing’s readiness to blame the pilots persisted and was one of the things that most exasperated investigators, particularly the U.S. House Committee that reported in September 2020 that the crashes were the “horrific” result of flawed technical assumptions and a lack of transparency from the company’s leadership. In his evidence to the lawmakers, one of the most respected pilots in the world, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, said the chain of errors “began with decisions that had been made years before to update a half-century-old design…we owe it to everyone who flies to do much better than to design aircraft with inherent flaws that we intend pilots to have to compensate for and overcome.”

...

Pilot proficiency does vary, but not according to what language the pilots speak. It varies by age, experience, and sometimes the mood of the moment. Pilots are human. Decades have been spent equipping cockpits with constantly improving aids that eliminate the chance of pilot error—with spectacular results in safety. The MAX was, in the words of Sully Sullenberger, a death trap because Boeing made it so. Calhoun [current Boeing CEO], apparently just can’t go there.

Under Calhoun, the Boeing sickness is not in remission—far from it. Its next major airliner program is another iteration of an existing design, the widebody 777. With the disappearance from airline fleets of the two jumbo jets, the 747 and the Airbus A380, the upgraded 777 will be the largest jet in service. It made its first flight in January 2020, but 11 months later a serious problem showed up in a test flight—and, incredibly, it involved the same alarming event that was fatal to the 737MAX: an “un-commanded pitch”—meaning that the jet’s nose pitched upward without any action by the pilots.

...

Calhoun represents a particularly aggressive strain of carnivorous capitalism. He’s aggressively anti-union and anti-regulation, and at Boeing he is unrepentant in his zeal to slash and burn. During the course of this year, the workforce will have been cut by 20 percent. Plants have been shuttered, buildings sold off.

After listing the costs to Boeing of the 737MAX catastrophe—direct costs of $21 billion, the loss of orders for the jet amounting to $128 billion— Robison writes in his new book:

“Yet the people who made the most damaging decisions, and laid on the impossible demands, kept rising to the top. Like Jack Welch’s General Electric before it, Boeing became a collection of assets to be shuffled as managers saw fit to make the most beneficial combination for stockholders, not for customers or employees.”

...

[L]ast month, Mark Forkner, who had been the chief technical pilot on the 737MAX program, was indicted on charges that he deceived the regulators. Investigators for the House committee discovered that when other engineers told Forkner that airline pilots would need new training on simulators to adapt to the changes in the control system (the system that led to the crashes), he responded, “Boeing will not allow that to happen. We’ll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that requirement.”

Robison follows Forkner’s role closely, including a note that Forkner sent to another test pilot boasting that he had been “Jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I had got accepted by FAA etc.” Later, though, he admitted to being alarmed that the new automated control system could be triggered as soon as a few minutes after takeoff (which is what occurred in both fatal crashes). That did not, however, prevent Forkner from following the company line when Lion Air, receiving its first 737MAX jets, asked Boeing for simulator training for its pilots who were transitioning from the earlier model. Robison reports that Forkner’s response was to call the airline “idiots” and that, after a few conference calls, he had persuaded them that training wasn’t necessary and wrote to a colleague, “I save this company a sick amount of $$$$.”

Forkner’s defense lawyer told reporters, outside the court in Fort Worth, Texas, that Forkner was being used as a scapegoat: “The truth will show that Mark did not cause this tragedy, he did not lie, and he should not be charged.” Given all the evidence that Muilenburg [former CEO] had applied relentless pressure on the program’s managers to present an airplane to airlines that was little different than the previous model when, in fact, it introduced a critical and, as it turned out, fatally flawed system, Forkner appears to have been more a loyal messenger than a felon. Calhoun has claimed that Forkner was part of a “micro-culture” that did not represent Boeing, but if the case goes to trial, it’s likely that Muilenburg and Calhoun will be deposed, exposing them to discomforting questions about how such a “micro-culture” could have agency on their watch and about their own roles.

Ticket to disaster, that is.

[Scot Dutchy]

Corruption and chumocracy so what do you expect.

[Tero]

It's not just Boeing. It is a bit of a trap due to the fact that cars will go to electric rather quickly and airplanes will not. You can burn the same amount of fuel to make electricity for the car and go more miles than if you burned it in the car. So they are stuck juggling fuel costs, people worrying about carbon, Greta and the rest. The fuel cost will push planes to a type that does not fly well but is efficient.

Boeing is no longer an industry lodestar. The company has not launched a new jet since the 787 Dreamliner in 2004. Without the incentive of that kind of innovation, the best engineers go elsewhere. The industry is now under great pressure to go green by cutting emissions and noise pollution. Electric power and cleaner fuels like hydrogen are the way ahead. Airbus has a very ambitious program to transform its airplanes. Boeing’s effort is, in its own words, limited to “sustainability rather than step-change, breakthrough innovations.” Indeed, it is still dependent on the 737MAX for the majority of its profits. Despite lost orders and the stigma of the crashes, there are still 3,000 of the jets on order by airlines because it is being sold at a heavy discount.

same link

[Sean Hayden]

[Tero]

Young pilot

He revealed that challenges he had faced included sandstorms in Sudan, extreme heat in Dubai, airport closures in India, monsoon rains, and several technical issues. Most of the delays were caused by hold-ups in obtaining permits and other documents or having to alter scheduled routes if they were rejected.

But he said the “hairiest moment” had involved sleeping in a shed on an abandoned Pacific island while flying 11 hours across the Bering Sea, in the northern Pacific, from Japan to Alaska.

“After 10 hours, I arrived at this small island, it was starting to get dark, so I landed and it was quite low cloud, it was raining, it was getting quite dark, no lights on the runway,” he said.

“It’s actually an uninhabited island, so if anything had gone wrong I would be on my own, on that island, so really important that nothing went wrong. I landed there and had to sleep in a small shed on the side of the runway because it was completely abandoned for over 10 years.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... ound-world

[Tero]

3 fighter jets to be scrapped, because they have communist steel that might be disloyal in war:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/f35-pe ... -in-china/

[Brian Peacock]

[macdoc]

That was enjoyable/informative.
•••
I had a chance to fly in the Concorde back in yuppy days on a demo flight half way across the Atlantic. 2200 kph was awesome to see up on the speed reader. Sky was very dark at 60k feet and you could just see the curve of the earth.

WIndows were tiny.


Photo'd the last one leave Toronto too, on the world tour. Amazing plane.

[Svartalf]

Amazing technologically, but still kind of a white elephant

[macdoc]

Both Air France and British Airways managed to make a profit from Concorde operations. For British Airways, it was around £30-50m ($37-61m) when things were going well. Air France's profit was slightly less.

https://simpleflying.com/did-british-ai ... ny%20money.

The govs got hosed by development costs but the airlines made money and there remains a market for a supersonic craft.
Hydrogen version would be nice. 17 hours in the air for the long runs on the Dreamliner etc is just too long.
With communication tech these days ....there remains the question why is the shorter time useful.

Part of the issue was the ban against supersonic flight over land....the demo flight I was on could only go supersonic once it left New York and out over the ocean and then turn around half way to Europe. There was nothing perceptible cracking the sound barrier in the Concorde but the rush on take off with the fog suddenly appearing on the wing as we rotated .....the G-force on take off with the afterburners on was a crazy rush.

[Svartalf]

Well, it all depends on how big tanks you'd need and the volume to power provided ratio difference between hydrogen and kerosene.

and yeah, I think that supersonic shockwaves did cause sizable damage before overland supersonic flight was forbidden.

[macdoc]

Not sure of damage.

1985 picture of Concorde taken at super sonic speed. The Concorde had to slow down from Mach 2 to Mach 1.5-1.6 so that the RAF Tornado crew could get the shot. Fastest trip from New York to London was 2hrs 52 mins 59 secs in 1996.

It was very loud on takeoff standing outside ....not a lot from inside - just real rush.

Hydrogen fuel has a very high energy content by mass, 4 times higher than kerosene. A particular challenge is that it occupies 3 times the volume of kerosene

Aerospace Testing International
https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com › features
1 Feb 2023 — By contrast, hydrogen is carbon-free and beats kerosene for gravimetric efficiency, the energy-to-weight ratio crucial in aerospace.

https://www.fluxart.aero/post/hydrogen- ... n-aviation

Question is fuel cell vs turbine.