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Halfway through the article is this extraordinarily helpful information (given that I know nothing at all about aircraft paint):
When Airbus 15 years ago launched the A350, it chose to follow Boeing's new 787 in using carbon-fibre instead of metal.
Experts say the lighter jets consume less fuel but are harder to deck out in a way that makes paint stick.
The new jets also need a layer of metallic mesh to dissipate lightning strikes because carbon-fibre is not conductive.
Finally, unlike metal, carbon does not expand and shrink as temperatures change. Yet paint does, resulting in a tug of war between plane and paint that can cause peeling over time.
Problems reported by Qatar Airways and some - though far from all - other A350 operators suggest this is happening earlier than expected, two people familiar with the design said.
The problem may have been compounded by the paint's especially weak adhesion to titanium rivets, they added.
I wonder how dissimilar the paint and/or painting process is to the 787. Perhaps it will one day suffer the same issues.
From the article:
> Airbus is also not alone in facing problems. Boeing has had paint issues and a phenomenon known as rivet rash, or flecks of missing paint, on its competing 787s.
You'd think we'd have more sophisticated paint in this day and age.
Paint isn't a new technology. Paint _on that kind of material_, though, is new enough to not be well understood yet.
It seems that victim blaming is not something specific to just Boeing. Airbus blamed Qatar airways and the hot weather till similar issues emerged with planes of Finn Air and Air France in colder climates.
Whatever happened to the customer is always right?
Guess it is easier to victim blame when you operate in essence a duopoly. Competition is critical to solve these issues in the long run.
>> Whatever happened to the customer is always right?
Enough people worked retail to know that's a lie.
But yes, this is the sort of thing Airbus should have responded better to, even if it was without any real promise of making things right (i.e., "We are investigating fully as to what has happened here and will seek to make things right if we find this in any way weakens the structural stability of our planes, known the world over as some of the (insert whatever marketing speak)")
Boeing also initially blamed pilots for 737 MAX crashes, until too many of them crashed, the regulators caught up and grounded the planes, and forced them to take responsibility. It seems like shifting the blame is the norm in the airline industry.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-16/are-boein...
I thought Boeing blamed it on a combination of poor maintenance practices by the relevant airlines, poor handling and response to inflight error messages and maintenance requests on previous flights that left the issue unaddressed, and then weaknesses on the pilot side during the accident flights?
I personally think they went a bit overboard with the revised procedure memory items.
The problems were:
1. poor MCAS design
2. poor maintenance
3. pilots not following runaway trim emergency procedures
The media pretty much never mentions (3).
Note that 3 flights experienced the MCAS malfunction. 1 applied runaway trim emergency procedures, continued with the flight, and landed safely.
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
2018 - 035 - PK-LQP Final Report
http://knkt.dephub.go.id/knkt/ntsc_aviation/baru/2018%20-%20...
For those who don't like what I wrote, I encourage you to read the cites, which are official documents, rather than what journalists who literally know nothing about flying, piloting, or aircraft design, imagine is true.
I think the biggest lie I have seen the news on the MAX make "true" has been that MCAS exists to make the MAX fly like previous 737s and that it could have been omitted if the aircraft were a new type...
Of course:
1. The MAX can't be a new type, it would have to be clean-sheet at that point just from all the grandfathered items.
2. That view grossly oversimplifies how type ratings work for pilots.
3. MCAS exists to conform to the FARs (control force curves), not some "make it fly like a 737NG" thing.
I am no expert, but I remember the main culprit was that Boeing had insisted no further training is required for pilots to avoid some sort of expensive recertification. _Weakness of pilots_ was the direct result of this. Pilots having experience with previous 737 planes were told in no uncertain terms that they can fly this new plane the exact same as the previous one and no further training or testing is required or even available. They did just that, but actions which would have saved the plane in previous generations ensured its crash in the MAX generation.
And Boeing had the audacity of blaming the pilots when they inevitably died in crashes.
> _In vivid detail, the documentary pieces together what Boeing knew about the potential for disaster with the 737 Max and when the company knew it. Pasternak says in the film that in 2012, a âBoeing test pilot was flying the MAX in a flight simulator and trying to respond to an activation of MCAS, and that resulted in what he described as a catastrophic event. It showed that if that had been in real life, he [could] have lost the airplane. They realize from that moment on, even a Boeing test pilot may have trouble responding to MCAS.â_
> _Yet internal communications explored in the film show that Boeing was determined to maintain the status quo: avoiding potential scrutiny by the Federal Aviation Administration that would add costs; keeping new simulator training for pilots to a minimum; and even requesting that MCAS be removed from pilot training manuals._
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/video-clip-boeing...
> Boeing had the audacity of blaming the pilots when they inevitably died in crashes.
That wasnât a great look, but Boeing is correct that if the pilots had _followed the existing checklist memory items_ for stab trim runaway, the airplanes would not have crashed.
The difficulty is that prior generations had breakout switches which would inhibit the stab trim from running in a direction counter to the control column deflection. That obviously wonât work for the intended purpose of MCAS (to give flight control feel in opposition to excessive pitch up).
The checklist item for runaway trim is not âstop stab trim by deflecting control columnâ but rather âstop stab trim by throwing the stab trim cutout switchesâ. Pilots who used the âdeflect control columnâ technique contrary to the checklist would have gotten away with the error in non-Max 73s, but not in the -Max edition. Thatâs pretty far from â0% pilot contributionâ to the mishap IMO.
The first Lion Air flight crew correctly followed the runaway trim procedure and landed safely. The next crew on the same airplane crashed.
Boeing then issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive to ALL 737MAX PILOTS:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved to CUTOUT."
https://theaircurrent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/B737-MA...
which the EA pilots did not follow.
ET302 (the second crash) is worse in some ways. That crew correctly diagnosed the stab trim runaway, (eventually) executed the stab trim cutout procedure, got the aircraft somewhat under control (albeit still at full thrust), flew for a time, then (somewhat correctly) judged that unless they were going to pull power, they needed to use the electric stab trim (the manual trim was difficult to move because of the high airspeed), _turned the stab trim back on_ and commanded electric nose-up trim (which the airplane did), then for some unknowable reason stopped commanding nose-up trim while leaving the stab trim powered, whereupon the aircraft MCAS commanded the final round of nose-down trim that they couldnât overcome.
They were _this close_ to saving the airplane, had IDâd the issue, patched it, largely recovered control, and lost the airplane subsequent to that.
(This is not meant to denigrate the crew. They were dealt a bad hand, including continuous stick shaker activation which surely added to confusion and likely led them to leave the thrust at max. Additionally, they were getting split airspeed and FD command bars for the crew. Itâs frustrating how tantalizingly close they were to saving it even with those hurdles.)
https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20190310-...
Hopefully the final report on that crash will come out soon. It will probably be like the final report on the Lion Air crash where the training factors are downplayed in contrast to fixing blame on Boeing and noone else.
I worry that this obsession with fixing only the hardware is the industry trying to sweep the training factors under the rug in hope that the current trend towards accidents being a result of serious training deficiencies will remain widely unnoticed.
> the industry trying to
Perhaps, but the _Frontline_ episode didn't play like an industry point of view. It was pretty anti-industry.
_Aviation Week_ is more of a pro-industry publication, and their coverage of the MAX seemed pretty even-handed to me.
Cars are designed for people who don't read the manual. Airplanes cannot be that way, but I get the feeling that non-aviation people expect this to be possible. An airplane cannot just pull over and call AAA.
Excellent point.
A lot of focus is on pilots, but the safety chain was also weak. Maint, communication with flight dept, communication to subsequent pilots etc, training dept and required experience / education to fly. Not a good combo. Someone with 200 hrs of time, plane badly maintained, no good handoff around prior issues etc.
I still think Boeings safety model with humans as the backup for computers probably doesn't work in a world where a large majority of pilots lean on fully fly by wire (computerized) planes. Someone with 240 hours, a bunch of that just sim time - can they hand fly a plane in its entire envelope?
This is where Boeing sounded really tone deaf. They built a model around humans as backup, a very US centric model (ie, folks with tons of general aviation experience just as a hobby from young ages, military flight experience etc) which was not really appropriate here.
Thereâs a genuine question as to whether someone with 240 hours should be holding the yoke of a jet airliner. For me, that answer is âhell no!â as we saw in Colgan 3407 (and others) which led to the FAA 1500-hour minimum for an ATP.
At 240 hours, I couldnât be trusted with a Bonanza.
Yes, in the US we (now) think of 250 as too low.
1,500 is pretty dang high. Persoanlly, 500 - 1000 wouldn't be unreasonable in my view.
Major airlines might still be at 3,000+ hours.
Remember, it used to be in the US you could also fly as a FO with a commercial pilots license at 250 hours!
FAA Commercial Pilot is 250 (50 of which need to be in powered airplane).
https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/active-pilots/safet...
50 hours behind the actual yoke? 200 lives 30,000 feet in the air?
Overseas, some of the cadet / local pilot programs - you get pretty low time and/or connected pilots into the seat.
"The committee noted that these deficiencies had been identified previously in training and reemerged during the accident flight. When the MCAS activated, it took the first officer four minutes to locate the proper checklist because he wasnât familiar with required memory items. During training, the same pilot had shown unfamiliarity with Boeing and airline standard operating procedures and had weak aircraft handling skills, the report revealed. His training record reflected numerous deficiencies, including âmajor problemsâ controlling the aircraft."
There is a reason Boeing initially said there might have been some pilot factors. They look at that memory item checklist, and think, trim problem, stab cutout memory item.
In the US they have Capt Sully (glider / fighter pilots, lots of experience, with a strong FO) gliding a plane with two engines out to a safe landing. So human in the loop kind of works in the US. Could you program a computer for that? Probably, but not there yet.
That said, I still blame Boeing to a large degree. If you are going to sell new planes to countries that have this type of system, you must design the plane for purpose. Ie, low time pilots who struggle / are connected / can't be fired etc - you don't then design the plane assuming the human in the loop will have hand flying ability to step in. That was pure greed, roll out this type of plane in the US / EU / UK etc. Good maintenance, good safety reporting systems (ASAP etc) work out the kinks, then go overseas.
First Max 8 to Malindo air!!? Really??
They really need to get to airbus and beyond envelope protection etc in these markets.
I'm also curious about checkrides overseas. Stuff like engine out on takeoff etc is just hammered into folks in the US.
The old procedure was
Control Column - Hold Firmly
Autopilot - Disengage. Do NOT re-engage.
Control pitch attitude manually with column and electric trim.
If runaway continues, stab trim cutout (both) to cutout.
http://www.b737.org.uk/images/runawaystab2000.jpg
The new procedure is not that much different.
With PK-LQP - previous flight it took 6 minutes for them to get to this procedure - and it was suggestion of a dead-heading pilot. This resolved things. Despite going through this exact issue on previous flight, the next flight takes off, same issue develops because of underlying maintenance issue, they were dealing with this for 8 minutes, 28 activations of incorrect trim but with a fatal outcome.
Yes, MCAS was a bad design, yes it increased risk. I'm not sure it was a "nothing could be done" type situation. Better maintenance? Better communication between flights? Stab trim cutout earlier if you don't like how the automatic trim is working?
Airbus has historically pushed more automation / flight protection. My own suspicion is Boeing will go that way as well, ie, human in loop model they had (where human fixes the computer going crazy) just doesn't work well especially for folks flying these big jets without much earlier GA / manual flying time.
For example, in the US, a pilot would have done lots of manual flying on small planes first, and so might be a bit less automation dependent and better able to take over when computers go crazy. Also more hours before you fly the big jets (think 1,500 hours flight time). Usually a 4 year degree.
Overseas, you can come off the street and be flying a jet with 200 - 240 hours of time including sim time? That is a TON less flying time, probably very very little manual stick and rudder flying. A fair number of saves in the US have come from folks with great stick and rudder flying experience, even things like glider experience you just don't have overseas.
There usually is something called differences training for variants like this. Wouldn't cover MCAS, and is usually brief, but not normally zero. I'm surprised they did zero differences training if that was the case - that is very unusual. You've got to do normally at least an hour or two. A new variant is not unheard off, 737 probably has something like 12 variants under one type certificate. I would check your source there that no differences training came up.
> Overseas ... in the US
It's a bad habit to split the world into US/overseas. Canada and Western Europe are clearly much closer to the US than Indonesia and Pakistan, and Eastern Europe / CIS states have a history of ex-military/experienced pilots too.
The Frontline episode is a mess of misinformation and omission of crucial facts. I submitted on the Frontline site a list of omitted facts and corrections supported by cited FAA documents. The moderators refused to post it.
I used to watch Frontline regularly. Although they had an obvious left wing bias, I thought they made good faith efforts to present the facts.
No more. I no longer watch Frontline nor consider them a reliable source of news.
BTW, the "Aviation Disasters" did an episode on the 737MAX that was pretty decent (although a bit shallow due to time constraints), so it is possible to do a good story on it. Recommended.
Shifting blame is the norm, period.
Remember the coverage around Toyotaâs stuck accelerators, or the woman who suffered third degree burns from McDonaldâs coffee?
If you apply that proverb to a customer who is trying to haggle with you over the price (or other contractual details) of their ordered planes, soon _you_ will be paying _them_ to take your jets...
>Whatever happened to the customer is always right?
The full quote is: "In matters of taste, the customer is always right."
>Whatever happened to the customer is always right?
That never made it to Europe to begin with.
It did, at least as a proverb. E.g. In German there is a saying "der Kunde ist König" (customer is king)
Judging by the quality of German customer care/support, that has got to be sarcasm :D
Ans that's very good. Customers are wrong most if the time really, so it's generally better to have honest service providers that aren't bending to ridiculous customer demands.
could you expand in this point?
_Whatever happened to the customer is always right?_
Have you ever met a customer?
We have a lot of them where I live. They're always in the stores and restaurants trying to get stuff. I mostly shop online so I don't run into too many of them, which is nice.
> Whatever happened to the customer is always right?
The customer not being right.
Blaming climate is not blaming victim. When they blame climate they know they will have to fix this themselves and take this problem into account for new planes. They won't ask Qatar Airways to change climate of Qatar.
Blaming climate was more a way to tell other customers "we thing you will not have this problem"
_Whatever happened to the customer is always right?_
Marshall Field, the man who coined that phrase, went out of business. His department store got eaten by Macy's.
Marshall Field died in 1906. Marshall Field's was an independent public company from 1930 until 1982.
OK, fine...
Marshall Field's, _the company founded by_ the man who coined that phrase _and which used it as a slogan and marketing campaign for decades_, went out of business. It _eventually_ got eaten by Macy's.
Happy?
Itâs because of trust and money. Saying something is wrong is very expensive in this business, in outright money to fix (hundreds of millions - or more if this is fleet wide) and in public perception (âA350 is unsafe!â).
Much easier to water down the issue and turn it to a mutual blame game.
"Whatever happened to the customer is always right?"
These are serious issues with massive costs and liabilities. We don't resort to platitudes at that scale.
'Who is Right' should be as objective as we can feasibly determine and it may be complicated.
>Guess it is easier to victim blame when you operate in essence a duopoly.
The lesson the public repeatedly teaches to MBA types is that the narrative matters more than reality. It makes complete business sense to blame the customer.
The standard is a fair bit higher now in airplane safety than it was. The 787 issues make you realize this (shims / flatness stuff etc). Go back 50 years this wouldn't have gotten a second look in most cases (and yes, there were more fatalities).
the customer is always right?
you're old school. i like that.
Wow. People were speculating that this was a ruse by Qatar to get out of contracts with Airbus.
After seeing the images, that's no ruse. And that appears to be a bit more than "cosmetic".
Feedback from Qatar is always taken with a grain of salt given the long history of Akbar Al Baker using fallacious pretexts to engage in ruthless contractual fights.
I'm not sure there exists a more complex set of requirements for paint than for aircraft. Extreme cold to surface temperatures, the requirement to flex with adhered surfaces without cracking, plus the desire for a paint job to last for years.
It looks like conductivity is also desired, to some degree, to help the metal surfaces dissipate lightning.
Don't forget that besides the thermal effects, the plane hull contracts and expands due to external air pressure and internal pressurization.
>I'm not sure there exists a more complex set of requirements for paint than for aircraft. Extreme cold to surface temperatures, the requirement to flex with adhered surfaces without cracking, plus the desire for a paint job to last for years.
That's basically a walk in the park compared to anything that needs to deal with unearthly temperatures and harsh chemicals at the same time. Furthermore, air (and airborne water) isn't very abrasive which helps a lot even if you do go through it at hundreds of miles per hour.
You can more or less think most modern paint as a plastic coating. High speed air with the occasional water droplet or Canadaian goose, easy. Abrasives, hydrocarbons, high temperatures, not so easy.
I really liked the old American Airlines scheme where they just didn't paint the airplane. It was beautiful.
But in the modern age, if you need a metal mesh around a carbon fiber fuselage then not painting the airplane is probably not an option. Sad.
>_" I really liked the old American Airlines scheme where they just didn't paint the airplane."_
It wasn't quite that simple. I believe the 'bare metal' finish actually had a layer of protective varnish painted on, to protect the metal from oxidation (anyone who has handled bare aluminum can tell you that it develops a layer of oxide very quickly). In addition to that, the panels had to be specially chosen and very carefully handled, as small blemishes were very obvious.
Wouldn't e.g. landing and starting from an airport near the sea with constant saltwater droplets in the air also damage the paint?
Iâm not even close to an aviation expert but Iâm curious if we are reaching a point where aerospace tech is too complicated. Both major manufacturers are having issues with their latest generation of planes. Iâm curious what someone with expertise thinks about Boeing and Airbusâ issues
You could basically make this statement every year since commercial airliners were introduced. For commercial air transport, the 'bleeding edge' (which I put in quotes because it's actually quite conservative, relative to the bleeding edge in other fields) has always suffered from minor (and sometimes major and deadly) product quirks. Military aircraft even more so.
This is also why there's a very strong industry preference for airframes that are 'tried and true' - e.g. 737 variants up until the MAX, A320 and A330, etc.
And itâs also unavoidable. To really know how an airplane will age during its lifetime, you have to build it and use it for 50+ years.
That would mean all âin serviceâ aircraft would be based on 50+ year old designs. That clearly is undesirable, if only because it would be too expensive.
So, instead, one uses models for the effects of aging, for example by repeatedly freezing and heating parts while they also are being stressed physically and are under intense UV lighting. Those models can be wrong, but if youâre using new tech, you canât afford to wait with selling airplanes until you know they are right.
(Of course, this isnât limited to the aircraft industry; it happens in all engineering. For example, hard disk manufacturers donât run new hard disk technology for decades to measure its MTBF, either)
Sometimes, such models need major adjustment, as happened with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet
.
I guess GP's point could be summarized as "Does the amount of complexity required to improve planes _now_ exceed our ability to manage?"
Curious in responses from that perspective. Are airframes that much more complicated? Or just better due to advances in aerodynamic understanding, but not much more complicated?
And same question for engines. Are modern high-bypass turbofans more complex?
This. It seems that to some degree our knowledge rests on prior experience and passed down knowledge. As we build abstraction layers on top of technology the bare metal understanding is lost.
Iâm going to contradict my original question to some degree by stating that I know that air travel is safer than ever.
My question is more just wondering out loud if there is a point where we rely on âsolvedâ problems so much that we start to lose comprehension of the factors that are involved. It feels like the MCAS was an example.
Agree that you can never âknowâ how an airframe will age until you build it and doesnât seem like this is as critical as MCAS issue but it could be that we have to wait 15 years to find out.
I think complexity + necessarily large organizations are a huge contributing factor.
MCAS would have not been an issue is any one of the layers above engineering had questioned the decision to avoid training requirements (e.g. Boeing management, FAA management).
Unfortunately, systems are so complex now that it was possible to summarize the details in a way that hid the necessary information. And when it went up further, even more summarization.
It feels like this wouldn't have been as easy with simpler, older systems. I mean, presumably a manager could look at a biplane and say "Hey, that doesn't have enough thrust to weight."
If you look back through history you'll find that every major technology shift in aviation was marked by a period of some instability after which the initial problems were ironed out and then the new planes usually ended up being more reliable than their predecessors. This goes for the shift to composites, but also for the shift to jets, pressurized passenger compartments, widebodies and so on. The impressive thing is that the first take on these is usually so close to the final one that the differences can be overcome without a complete redesign.
But mistakes (such as the rectangular window problem with the de Havilland Comet, and more recently, the attempt to keep the same type certification for a completely redesigned airframe) do happen and when they do, unfortunately, the results can be terrible.
3 months ago....
"Qatar Airways grounds 13 Airbus A350s as fuselage degrading"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28098888
Imagine doing the walk-around inspection as part of the flight crew and seeing that sort of degradation? The flight crews were possible told it wasn't a major issue and to keep on schedule. As a pilot myself, I get very concerned whenever I see any sort of abnormal surface feature. I am lucky in that I can cancel my own flights.
Any commercial pilots here willing to share their experience with this sort of thing? In the US, the FAA gives the pilot command over the flight, but I imagine companies take a dim view of pilots canceling flights over certain maintenance issues.
Aircraft paint has to provide a tough, weather-proof surface that can withstand being blasted by dust and hail at 900 km/h.
When you call it cosmetics, you're likening that to eye shadow or lipstick.
No engineer would care to be named as the source of that idiotic statmeent.
The more I learn about them, the more astonishlgy complex and amazing technological marvels modern commercial jetliners are.
Airbus says there is no risk to the A350's safety - a point echoed by the other airlines, which have not grounded any jets and describe the issue as "cosmetic."
Talk about parties with vested interest in a ânothing to see here, keep movingâ conclusion. The only opinion that actually matters here is that of the regulators.
Certainly looks more than cosmetic in the photos, surely has an effect on the aerodynamics if you're flying around with mesh on show.
It might increase parasitic drag by a tiny amount, which will reduce fuel efficiency, but these planes have so much thrust that the increase in drag is negligible to the actual operations of the aircraft.
Oh absolutely, it says a lot about modern aircraft design that when I say it has an effect I just mean a 1% increase in fuel consumption!
When I read article saying and showing how Airbus is failing badly on its paint and Boeing is only slightly mentioned in it it does look to me like an article to build up certain emotions against Airbus.
I'm quite scared of modern journalism and how facts can be used to manipulate and mislead people.
There is an excellent documentary on the Boeing 787 on Amazon Prime Video. Very detailed on how it is built, what materials, engines, everything.
It's called "The Great Boeing 787"
That lightning limiting conducting screen is too inherently flexible for the coating they used - it aged and became brittle and cracks appeared as the screen flexed. They are cosmetic AND protective to stop the naked screen from mechanical abrasion and fatigue flexure. They will watch and replace the coating when it gets bad
Are the wings painted too? Would it result in detachment of the airflow?
Yes, especially the leading edges undergo a lot of protection because otherwise the structure underneath would suffer from the continuous impact of airborne particles, insects, precipitation and so on.
Detachment of airflow across the whole wing would require a lot of damage, normal inspection would result in such a plane to be grounded well ahead of that happening.
looking at that mesh over carbon skin it is really hard to imagine how any paint can adhere long term there given the flight conditions, temp changes ,vibration, etc. Went out of curiosity to check out how Boeing solves the issue on 787 and voila, Boeing didn't disappoint :
https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-removed-lightning-str...
"Boeing removed a feature that protects its 787 planes during lightning strikes as a cost-cutting measure, even after FAA experts objected"
Mind you, that is 2019, after the 737 MAX crashes, it is like the 787 department just didn't get the memo. Or may be there weren't any memo inside Boeing.
Arguably this is a much greater problem than it at first appears because it exposes a serious and fundamental problem with our materials development processes. Currently development of new products is going faster than we can understand the qualities and limitations of those products. How exactly this happened and what is the best response is not clear. Because of how these materials are made a failure of the exterior coating can potentially render that whole aircraft unfit for safe use similar to how metal fatigue can lead to progressive cracking. What kind of exterior would be best for such a radical carbon fiber structure being exposed to extremes of heat and cold and pressure is wide open question, and how best to patch a damaged structure is also difficult to asses.
I've read this paragraph a couple times - and what I find intriguing is how it's the sort of thing that GPT-3 can write based on the initial news statement. Every sentence in it is somewhat tautological. Maybe I'm just more suspicious, but I can envision a time (uh, maybe it's already here?) when forums like HN start to get peppered with AI commentary...
This sentence, though - seems to be without any basis:
"Currently development of new products is going faster than we can understand the qualities and limitations of those products."
I would think that in 2021 we know _far_ more about the "qualities and limitations" of products under development - through virtue of more sophisticated testing, more sophisticated test equipment, and advanced analytical capability.
Funny, I had a similar reaction. The wording is just strange. Like on Reddit when bots are trying to create fud.
I'm having "MongoDB is webscale" flashbacks.
Was that brilliant guerilla marketing or just serendipity for them?
Carbon fiber airframes are new and have displayed unanticipated failures. Maybe they should have had more testing or more should have gone into reliable inspection and repair. We as a society may come to appreciate demonstrated robustness as much as novelty and efficiency.
> Maybe they should have had more testing or more should have gone into reliable inspection and repair.
Hindsight is so very easy to deploy from the comfort of the HN comments section.
If everyone was this pessimistic, nobody would ever get things out of the R&D lab and into the real world.
There are other industries beside "code fast, break things often and let the user test it". In some industries a test not done on time or skipped can cost later a lot of money.
Aviation is already one of the most conservative industries there is.
What is todayâs date?
What's 2 + 2?
GPT-3 can do some kinds of basic arithmetic. Specially so memetic calculations (if that's a thing) like 2+2.
> I would think that in 2021 we know far more about the "qualities and limitations" of products under development - through virtue of more sophisticated testing, more sophisticated test equipment, and advanced analytical capability.
Not to mention that the current state of knowledge is based also on what we've learned so far about existing good _and_ bad technologies.
You forgot quality tailoring. See Boeing for examples.
I wasted time reading a paragraph by an AI? That comment should be downvoted, as should any AI generated comments.
> Currently development of new products is going faster than we can understand the qualities and limitations of those products.
This indicates a very superficial understanding of materials science. No, development of new processes and materials does not go faster than our understanding is progressing, they are progressing in lockstep.
The only thing that occasionally happens is that accelerated aging testing and lightning damage testing does not turn up issues soon enough for them not resulting in visible damage during operations. But aircraft are inspected with great regularity and such defects will almost always be noticed in time. To the best of my knowledge this particular defect has not resulted in any planes crashing.
There were some more substantial issues with early planes using composites but those were to the best of my knowledge resolved, it is of course entirely possible that as these airframes age that new issues will crop up. The main question around these is usually what was the cause, bad maintenance, bad process during application (for instance: a respray by another entity than the manufacturer) or a manufacturing error, and that in turn leads to the question of who will pay for the damage. It isn't rare for there to be additional factors involved, such as issues like these being used to pressure a manufacturer into absorbing costs or waiving cancellation fees on surplus orders.
So before jumping to conclusions about our ability to develop new materials you'd probably have to absorb a lot of information about this particular issue, it is likely a lot more complex than a superficial reading would tell.
I think some of the responses are missing the larger point here. Every new tech has unknowns and potential issues, some of which don't come to light for years. If it takes 20+ years to go from initial small-scale uses to volume production on big projects (e.g. Airbus), then sometime during those years many of the issues will come to light.
It's pretty clear that technology is accelerating (and has been for a long time). What is not as clear is that our ability to artificially age products, in order to test how they will stand up over time, has always only been part of the way in which problems were found. Another, perhaps more important, and certainly more authoritative way, is to look at how they actually hold up over time. If technology takes long enough to go from small-scale uses to volume production, that's good enough. At some point, and perhaps we've reached it, the pace of technological change is fast enough that we end up relying almost entirely on testing methods that try to simulate long-term aging in a short amount of time. These methods won't always do the job.
Notably, none of these issues are unique to aerospace.
> _none of these issues are unique to aerospace_
Aerospace has slowed in its pace of innovation relative to other industries in the last decades. Its long design times similarly mitigate this line of broad criticism.
The bleeding-edge materials on this plane didnât fail. Paint over copper mesh did. That paint might have had some novel features, but nothing unknowably new. We donât even have evidence this was a material interaction versus QC failure.
> Arguably this is a much greater problem than it at first appears
You can make the argument. Doesn't mean its true or has any relevance.
on the contrary, it absolutely makes it true and relevant.
Also if they didn't bother to test such relatively straight forward thing as paint for those conditions, what kind of confidence can one have that other parts have passed those kind of tests?
Go read Bruce Sterling's 1993 article on something relatively straight forward, like glue:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3zode9/bruce_sterling_...
I've done a bit more reading about paint; if anything, it's even more complicated than glue (bigger design space, for one thing:
https://www.essentialchemicalindustry.org/materials-and-appl...
)
You can bet that they did test for those conditions. The question is what combination of elements here is causing the problem, which is likely not an easy to answer question. Paint is complex, especially airplane paint.
> _such relatively straight forward thing as paint_
Think about high performance paint as a very thin surface that happens to be applied in liquid form.
TFA argues that is not a safety issue.
Well at least carbon fiber composites are not new, used in Formula 1 probably when most posters here weren't born.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_MP4/1
Ha ha, I was a teenager.
Formula 1 though were never looking for 50-year integrity for their cars. While your example establishes the beginning of the use of carbon fiber, it seems otherwise orthogonal to its present use in commercial aircraft.
1981 is hardly the beginning. It was for example used in the Airbus A300, which entered service in 1974.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A300
Infamous but acquitted from the rudder incident on American Airlines Flight 587
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fractured-carbon-fibers-...
I recently rode in an Iberia Air Airbus A350. I was struck by how the paint seemed to be dirty / droopy under the windows. This was supposedly a ~10 year old plane (I forget the tail number, so I can't look it up).
That's an A330. The A350 did not yet exist 10 years ago.
