Ethiopian Airlines flight to Nairobi crashes with 'no survivors' of 157 people aboard

StriderX said:
To be fair, is there a feature creep in these new Boeing models for such a high failure rate?

I don’t see how the quality of pilots has just suddenly gone down.
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It's the quality of the engineers that design them that went terribly wrong.

These planes should have all types of automatic systems keeping the plane in the air no matter what.
 
4K8KW10 said:
These planes should have all types of automatic systems keeping the plane in the air no matter what.
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Simple point, but quite pertinent, my car senses an obstruction ahead and will take control of steering and braking in order to
avoid collision, why is it not possible for a plane to sense the ground approaching at 180mph ?

if one malfunctioning rogue system puts the plane in a catastrophic dive, the overriding rescue system should cancel it and
return the plane to a level flight at the require altitude.

Christ, we are still light years away from the technology on Star Trek and a thinking Hal 9000 computer.

PS. One for the 9/11 tinfoil hatters, Interesting the small crater, lack of huge bits of wreckage and bodies at the Ethiopian crash site,
the deniers made such a fuss about this at the time of 9/11 when Flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania, they doubted a full sized airliner
could crash and produce such a small crater and evidence a paltry amount of wreckage.
 
Roland Butter said:
Simple point, but quite pertinent, my car senses an obstruction ahead and will take control of steering and braking in order to
avoid collision, why is it not possible for a plane to sense the ground approaching at 180mph ?

if one malfunctioning rogue system puts the plane in a catastrophic dive, the overriding rescue system should cancel it and
return the plane to a level flight at the require altitude.

Christ, we are still light years away from the technology on Star Trek and a thinking Hal 9000 computer.

PS. One for the 9/11 tinfoil hatters, Interesting the small crater, lack of huge bits of wreckage and bodies at the Ethiopian crash site,
the deniers made such a fuss about this at the time of 9/11 when Flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania, they doubted a full sized airliner
could crash and produce such a small crater and evidence a paltry amount of wreckage.
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My 6th sense is tingling, the deep state is near I can feel it....
 
4K8KW10 said:
It's the quality of the engineers that design them that went terribly wrong.

These planes should have all types of automatic systems keeping the plane in the air no matter what.
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Maybe they could have fairy dust dispensers! Or a really really big paracute.
 
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Roland Butter said:
Simple point, but quite pertinent, my car senses an obstruction ahead and will take control of steering and braking in order to
avoid collision, why is it not possible for a plane to sense the ground approaching at 180mph ?
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I suspect it can, but not in enough time to do anything about it when at <1000ft. Either that, or systems telling each other that everything is actually ok.
 
Basher said:
I suspect it can, but not in enough time to do anything about it when at <1000ft. Either that, or systems telling each other that everything is actually ok.
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Trying to design a system that integrates the plane's sensors (which can be faulty), the plane's controls (that can fail), human input (which can be wrong) and external influences is no simple task.

It's easy to be a simpleton and say "Dems engineerz should make this not crash mate" but that task has been going on for decades and it's still not been perfected for good reason.

There are times when a pilot can save a plane by going against the autopilot and there are times a pilot has crashed a plane by fighting the autopilot. The interplay between a group of humans, autopilot software and a highly complex machine flying in all kinds of circumstances is deeply complex.
 
Roland Butter said:
PS. One for the 9/11 tinfoil hatters, Interesting the small crater, lack of huge bits of wreckage and bodies at the Ethiopian crash site, the deniers made such a fuss about this at the time of 9/11 when Flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania, they doubted a full sized airliner could crash and produce such a small crater and evidence a paltry amount of wreckage.
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Modern aircraft use modern materials.

They are very strong compared to traditional Alloy and/or Steel.

But they are also very frangible.

If a 70 year old DC3 (or whatever) crashed you would find the crash site strewn with significant amounts of recognizable, even identifiable, lumps of metal (And indeed the bodies and body parts of passengers/crew that were on board)

Modern plane=Plastic/Composites/Whatever.

Very strong in the air. but when it hits the ground it will turn to dust, along with everything that was inside it (Including bodies!)

This doesn't surprise me at all, and indeed, I was talking to a friend on the phone about just this matter just a couple of minutes before I started preparing this post.
 
I love how people think you can just design something and stick it on a plane.
The equipment we make takes years to design, then years of testing, re-design, test. You have multiple levels of testing as well.
The aerospace industry doesn't particularly like new things it likes very slightly newer than the previous item so testing is easier, faster and cheaper.
They love qual-by-sim.
 
More pilots coming forward with their experience of faults on the MAX:

Airline pilots on at least two US flights have reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes to tilt down suddenly.

In reports filed last year in a database compiled by NASA, the pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on their planes, the nose tilted down sharply.
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In both cases they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot, they said.

The problem as described by the pilots, however, did not appear related to a new automated anti-stall system that was suspected of contributing to a deadly October crash in Indonesia.
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(Source).

Isolated incidents, or a pattern emerging?
 
We got no access to black boxes, but of what has been made public it would seem related to some kind of auto pilot type function bugging out aka software bug.

I can understand why it was developed, there has been crashes in the past due to pilot error causing pane's to stall.

However I dont agree with just activating this on planes and not telling pilots about it.
 
Minstadave said:
Trying to design a system that integrates the plane's sensors (which can be faulty), the plane's controls (that can fail), human input (which can be wrong) and external influences is no simple task.

It's easy to be a simpleton and say "Dems engineerz should make this not crash mate" but that task has been going on for decades and it's still not been perfected for good reason.

There are times when a pilot can save a plane by going against the autopilot and there are times a pilot has crashed a plane by fighting the autopilot. The interplay between a group of humans, autopilot software and a highly complex machine flying in all kinds of circumstances is deeply complex.
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Yeah it is also one of those situations where a human can still be better than a computer at figuring out a solution.
 
Orionaut said:
Modern aircraft use modern materials.

They are very strong compared to traditional Alloy and/or Steel.

But they are also very frangible.

If a 70 year old DC3 (or whatever) crashed you would find the crash site strewn with significant amounts of recognizable, even identifiable, lumps of metal (And indeed the bodies and body parts of passengers/crew that were on board)

Modern plane=Plastic/Composites/Whatever.

Very strong in the air. but when it hits the ground it will turn to dust, along with everything that was inside it (Including bodies!)

This doesn't surprise me at all, and indeed, I was talking to a friend on the phone about just this matter just a couple of minutes before I started preparing this post.
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The 737 isn't a composite plane though. The dreamliner is
 
unclebob123 said:
The 737 isn't a composite plane though. The dreamliner is
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Fair enough, however I suspect that they are nevertheless far more lightly constructed (Albeit from very strong high tensile materials) than aircraft of, say, 50 years ago.

WW2 era stuff would hit the ground and bounce, sure everybody on board would be dead, but you would still nevertheless end up with a recognisable wrecked aircraft.

(And of course, the impact speeds would be lower too, though I dont think this particular plane was going that fast at the time of impact)
 
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