This is what I thought. They needed either a better design or better training. Both incidents involving new planes may indicate lack of training. Boeing was stupid to shortcut training.
Just got an email from Icelandair that D2’s flight tonight to Paris is now on Delta, leaving from a different terminal, an hour later, different connection, 3 hour later arrival at destination. She is already on the road, good thing we have smart phones these days and can easily coordinate the change. No charge to us, and not a huge disruption to plans. Flight back in a week still unchanged. I’m just glad they didn’t cancel it. Not sure if it is just good airline behavior, or cheaper for them under European rules than the compensation they have to pay if they cancel it. Either way, glad they took care of it.
Checked our SW flight for next week and it was moved to the 800. It is a smaller plane and now all flights are showing sold out so glad they made the change and I don’t have to do anything.
And… now AirFrance might be having an “industrial action”, so there is a risk that D2’s last leg might get cancelled (it is Delta, but operated by AirFrance). And she is now stuck in a middle seat for the long first leg. Sigh.
My husband and I both work in IT and have done or are still doing software development. I find myself worried about how the software developers who worked on this new MCAS system are dealing with the knowledge that the product they worked on could have contributed to these crashes and the resulting deaths of so many people. The same would hold true for the designers who were responsible for the changes to move the engine placement which then resulted in the need for the new MCAS system. This gives me pause to consider what life is life for individuals who truly hold the lives of other individuals in their hands (whether directly like a surgeon or soldier or police officer) or indirectly by building a product that is assumed to be safe but if not can cause death or grievous injury.
I realize that you can probably through multiple degrees of separation find a way to connect someone’s job to a way that another person can be killed or harmed but these folks are living with a very direct connection to the cause of these deaths.
^As structural engineers, my husband and I think about this a lot. A building failure can kill a lot of people. The Kansas City Hilton collapse occurred when we were in grad school and scared us to death.
@MaineLonghorn Yes that recent pedestrian bridge collapse in Florida would be another example.
Both Max 8 and -800 are 175 seats on Southwest. But they may have combined passengers from different flights after cancelling one into this flight, making it full.
My D is stuck now, having trouble getting back with SW and she’s in Cuba! Ironically, the problem is with the second leg of her return flight, from Tampa to Denver. Florida is full to bursting with spring break travelers and they are having trouble getting her on a different flight. She’ll probably have to stay over in Tampa and leave the next morning, but here’s my beef:
Two part flight with one confirmation number, let’s call it DOOMED. She can’t check in for flight 1 because flight 2 was cancelled. She can’t be confirmed for new flight 2 on a new reservation, let’s call it SCREWED, and I still can’t figure out why. She can’t switch the original DOOMED to route through Fort Lauderdale instead of Tampa because it would have a 6 hour layover and that is somehow illegal. Yes, the word they used was illegal! But an overnight stay isn’t illegal?
I had to do all the phoning because her wifi is spotty at best. I told her to get to the airport in Havana early. Talk to a gate agent in Tampa as soon as she can and make sure she is on the SCREWED flight the next day (there were only 2 seats left and her seat is “on hold” since it couldn’t be confirmed), and also politely ask for a hotel voucher. Phone person couldn’t help with that - “they have to do it at the gate”. They kept trying to reschedule D for the next day but I said she had no place to stay in Havana. Really!
Honestly, it reminded me of dealing with Sprint, and that is the lowest compliment I can think of. Many flights get cancelled and your system needs to be able to deal with that so that is WORKS and you don’t have to patch things together on the fly at the airport. Their system is working against itself.
Here’s my mini-rant on this issue as a software developer: I can’t imagine a scenario where my code would override a human’s input unless I was damn sure that I was right! Relying a single input, the angle-of-attack (AoA) sensor, is definitely not being damn sure I was right. Who thought this was a good idea and who approved this “good idea”??? I admit I’m too paranoid about my code (I’d probably want 50+ AoA sensors on any plane I’d work with) but, jeez, only a single hardware input is ridiculous. You’d want a minimum of three and then use the majority decision from them – basically, if two out of three agree within a tolerance, use that as your first guess as to the physical state.
I have no idea if the following played a part in this code … but I’ve seen a disturbing trend in software development lately. Programmers are assuming everything is “correct”. I’ve seen this in everything from applications to operating system APIs. That works great for “demo” code but not in production code, where the real world quickly teaches you hard lessons. I think CS schools need to have a course on the results of bad practice (e.g. dissect the anti-cancer radiation machine fiasco several years ago, dissect the 737-MAX fiasco, etc.), have the students come up with their own solutions, then throw their solutions in a simulator that screws with the inputs.
@droppedit Controls are a lost art in the IT & CS world, in my opinion. The generation who taught me came out of an accounting or finance background, and double checking was the rule, not the exception. Agree that today’s developers give little consideration to the “not happy” path.
Here’s one of the best articles on the problem I’ve seen so far:
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-fi-boeing-max-design-20190315-story.html
The plane needs longer “legs”, plain and simple. Those ugly “hamster pouch” engines on previous versions were a terrible kluge … and like many kluges, indicate an underlying problem that will come back to bite you someday.
Totally agree with @droppedit’s post #210.
So sorry your daughter is going though that hassle, especially being in Cuba with bad cell service, @greenwitch. That is just awful. I can’t believe some of the idiocy of the airlines sometimes. They should make it as easy as possible and be totally flexible…giving you whatever you ask for. They need to cater to the customer right now, as much as possible, or they may not get them back. Rebook people on different airlines, change the route, anything. Especially if you are giving them suggestions!
Kid is now stuck in Tampa, the “hold” on her flight out tomorrow morning vanished so I guess SCREWED was an appropriate confirmation number! I recorded my conversation with the SW agent, not that it helps today.
SW put her on a flight to Fort Lauderdale that gets in after midnight, and she’ll be leaving at 5 AM for Denver. Oh, it would be comical if it weren’t so uncomfortable to contemplate! But the 6 hour layover in FLL was “illegal”? SMH.
Oh! American just canceled our flight and rebooked on red eye that will arrive next day. And we even were not booked on MAX originally. It seems that they reducing number of flights by canceling one out of two they have to this destination per day.
has this, regarding the MCAS and the angle-of-attack sensors:
So MCAS is dependent on a single point of failure, rather than paying attention to the two sensors installed in the aircraft, so that it can detect whether there is a failure in one of them.
If that is the case, it suggests that the MCAS was relying on the sensor that was faulty while ignoring the good one.
The article also mentions that the software update that was being developed since the earlier crash will cause MCAS to use both sensors, have a more limited movement of the horizontal tail, and activate for only one cycle instead of multiple cycles.
I think the article by @ucbalumnus finally gives us the reason for the total loss of control:
This is a huge bug in the design of the system. The whole point of the limit was to prevent loss of control by too strong of an automated action. That limit should have been the total amount of motion in the horizontal stabilizer allowed by automation, not an incremental amount … especially considering that the limit was already half of the range of physical motion. So, two triggers of the MCAS in rapid succession, which is what happened on the Lion Air flight, was enough to peg the stabilizer nose-down.
Final note: the crew on the previous flight of the doomed Lion Air 737 encountered the same problem but knew to turn off the MCAS. Why didn’t the other crews, especially the Ethiopian Air crew?
Just in case there is any doubt, unfortunately, pilots do not all share a Hive Mind. 
Every situation is different, every person is different. One brief distraction or difference can be all it takes for a different outcome. Likely the previous crew on Lion Air didn’t know anything about the MCAS, because it wasn’t even in the manuals, due to the arrogance of the Boeing engineers who decided pilots didn’t even need to know about it. Maybe they noticed the trim moving and thought it was runaway trim, or were just trying possible solutions. Who knows, it’s not as if every situation, or any situation happens in a vacuum, there are unlimited numbers of variables.