My suspicion: the whole world lets the FAA validate airplanes and then sort of rubber stamps. Boeing was able to capture the FAA, but Airbus wasn't(since it's a foreign company). As such Airbus is still working with a proper adversarial regulator, whereas Boeing can get away with more cut corners. Eventually that screwed them.
The EUs move for greater local safety review, ironically, might make Airbus less safe, since they might be able to capture the EU regulators.
[edit] to emphasize: it's not market competition or the EU being better than the USA that's different. It's just the quasi-monopoly the FAA has on global aviation safety checks and the effect it has on foreign versus local companies.
In fairness, if there were multiple US aircraft manufacturers, they might battle each other for FAA regulatory capture and prevent either of them from achieving it.
[double edit] For the reverse of this see Dieselgate: discovered by some random American(named of all things John German) and pushed into the limelight by the EPA or whatever. It's not a perfect metaphor since he worked for an NGO, but arguably even civil society faces a sort of funder capture. Would German environmental NGOs have blown the whistle on something like this? Maybe?
> Would German environmental NGOs have blown the whistle on something like this? Maybe?
I think yes, it's just that they expected the regulatory system to work. Companies intentionally defeating emissions tests, unthinkable! ... just as unthinkable as the FAA rubberstamping whatever Boeing puts in front of them :(
> Airbus is still working with a proper adversarial regulator
I'm not sure this is true in a practical sense. For example, Airbus does the same unbelievable things with AoA sensors that Boeing did with MCAS: even if they have two or three of them on an aircraft, they don't compare them before allowing one sensor to drive automatic functions, so a single failed sensor can cause the airplane to do unexpected and dangerous things (for example, multiple uncommanded pitch down events on Quantas Flight 72). A true adversarial regulator would never have allowed such design flaws.
The Qantas Flight 72 incident was quite a bit different, as all AoA sensors were working correctly. The issue was due to corruption on one of the CPU exploiting these AoA sensors value [1]. Though you are entirely correct that there was a design flaw and the incident should not have happened, since these corrupted values ended up overriding the correctly calculated ones from the other ADIRU units.
[1] "The exact nature of the corruption was that the ADIRU CPU erroneously re-labelled the altitude data word so that the binary data that represented 37,012 (the altitude at the time of the incident) would represent an angle of attack of 50.625 degrees." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72#Potential_tri...
Let's not forget that until the two MAX crashes, Boeing had an overall safer record for its 7x7 line than Airbus did with its equivalent passenger jets.
So the EU's "vaunted" adversarial regulator actually was doing a much worse job than the FAA.
I think you have both misunderstood the argument being made, and misrepresented the relative safety of Airbus and Boeing passenger jets – which, by my understanding, is broadly comparable.
Because Europe has not legalized corruption to the same degree as the US. Massive campaign contributions is not as common in Europe, hence large European multi-nationals likely don't have the same opportunity to change regulations to serve them.
Of course they can still influence politicians by talking about all the jobs they will provide etc. Also power in Europe is not centralized the same way as it is in the US. In the US you can lobby Washington DC.
American lobbyist companies started swarming Brüssels as soon as the EU started gaining more power over national legislation.
So there is potential for the EU to head in the US direction, but it isn't quite there yet.
> Massive campaign contributions is not as common in Europe
Also far more complex - the political groupings in europe (EPP, ALDE, etc) are far looser organizations than the US parties, and power is spread in lots of different levels. Most Euro countries are coalitions of smaller parties too, defence in depth.
The US and UK suffer from having just two parties that from time to time get all the power. Infiltrate one party and your time will come. Infiltrate both and you're safe.
Please stop that. Brussels is the English name for the city and clearly that letter does not exist in English. Alternatives are "Brussel" (Dutch) and "Bruxelles" (French). The closest to what you wrote is the German "Brüssel" (no S).
It is funny how you think there is no corruption in Brussels. Of course it is there! The rules of the game are though that we don't touch our own Corporations. So Brussels will look the other way when VW cheats their customers in the US and Washington won't care when let's say Google has its way in EU. The real difference is that corruption is somehow legalized in the USA (a.k.a "lobbying") while it's not in the EU, so you will just not know about VW CEO hadling bags of money to Brussels unelected environnmental commissar.
socialdemocrat didn't claim no corruption, simply not the same degree.
Corruption in Europe is different, and often more subtle, than in the US (have lived and worked in both) but I do feel that over the 30 years the US has really gotten a lot worse compared to the EU countries.
The corruption also flourished during communism, but in different apparent form. Before communism, I don't know. (But the Habsburg empires I expect were deeply corrupt too - but the "west" was deeply corrupt too so it also gets difficult to compare.)
yeah, but they will not attempt destroying them financially too. EU fines US companies as if it wanted to get rid of them from the market. Not like it'd like to just fine them.
Also, note, how during Trump presidency EU is so much more cautious with that. Cynic in me says that's the proof that it is and has always been political. US can go after VW, MB, BMW, Porsche, Siemens, etc. There is no way that no federal laws are violated with the scale od operations these companies have in the US. All it takes is skilled and ambitious US Attorney General on Trump orders. Look at Lufthansa. All they need to do, and there were gossips about it being implemented already, is to ban electronics on flights to the US due to "battery self-ignition risk". But exempt US based carriers. Remember customer is always right. And Germany's BEST customer (who also happens to provide military security) is the US. Some people in EU seem not to grasp this simple truth
EU law is proposed by the Commission, made up of appointed representatives of each member state's elected government. It's voted and amended by the directly elected members of the EU parliament.
This is HN not the Daily Mail comments section, let's keep this space free of baseless europhobic disinformation.
It's not, and it could easily have gone the other way. By not having any competition or diversification, countries expose themselves to tremendous risk: the balance of the aerospace industry rested on a coin flip and the US bet tails. Without the cronyism, we could have had many separate raffle tickets against Europe's one.
It seems like Airbus currently is different. Maybe the friction from it being very multinational prevented it from becoming like Boeing, maybe it will have its own big scandal in a month. Who knows. But currently, Airbus does look better.
I mean, it wasn’t a safety scandal, but the A380 was a huge disaster for the company. I’d be more comfortable getting on a notional A360 than a notional 797, but both companies have self-harmed recently.
It lost them money but it didn't hurt their brand. Those are great planes to fly in as a passenger, they're just not profitable in the end for Airbus.
Boeing can't even keep its newest plane in the skies, and may have killed off the 737 line for good. Think another revision after the MAX is ever going to be approved?
As well as being great to fly in (seriously, business class on the upper deck by the window is an absolute dream) they have that "WOW" factor that I haven't experienced since first seeing a 747 or Concorde.
The 737 needs to go away. It's a great plane from a different era (staircases instead of jetways). That era has long passed. They've been trying to shoehorn it in. Rather than scale up the 737 cockpit flight controls they could have scaled down the 777 cockpit. Or even developed an all new one license cockpit in the same vein as the A320 series.
I think that the MAX was about as modest as they could make it. That was really the point of the whole exercise. A more modern engine core with a smaller fan wouldn't have moved the fuel economy needle enough to justify a new model I don't think, and Boeing would have lost a lot of orders to the A320neo.
Everything would have been fine except there was so much pressure to make every change as modest as possible that it didn't quite all work. They needed to either make significant changes to the landing gear or significant changes to the flight control computer and they chose neither.
787 doesn't fill the same role as 737 and A320, it's a much larger plane that carries more passengers. 737 and A320 seem to be much more popular for domestic flights within the US than larger planes.
Airbus scandal won’t come “in a month”: Boeing’s problems became public in 2013 and it is the same problem over and over.
- The Ducommon airframes in 2013, problem is FAA delegated certification to Boeing,
- The batteries, albeit smaller,
- The MAX, 2 crashes due to oversight and to the FAA delegating certification to Boeing.
Boeing’s problem didn’t come in a day, but in 20 years since the merge with MD, who had the same lose and fast culture. Airbus is safe for the time being, even if risks always exist, political instability for example. Not the case for the moment.
This is the same basic design flaw that Boeing's MCAS has (allowing a single AoA sensor failure to cause the airplane to do unexpected and dangerous things), but unlike MCAS, it wasn't an ad hoc addition to deal with an issue in a redesign of an old airplane, it was designed into all Airbus fly-by-wire aircraft from the start.
You keep posting this, but it's simply not true- Qantas flight 72 did not experience an AoA sensor failure, and even if it had, the A330 uses all 3 independent AoA sensors and all 3 independent air data inertial reference units to command control movements.
The issue was caused by one of the ADIRU CPUs corrupting valid sensor data to produce a series of very specific spikes, hitting a specific edge case in the AoA cross-check logic that made the flight computer behave as if the erroneous data it was seeing was valid.
It's undoubtedly a serious design flaw, but it's not even remotely in the same ballpark as the Max's flagrant disregard for all process and well known design standards.
> a specific edge case in the AoA cross-check logic
What the article you linked to describes doesn't look quite like that to me. It looks like a design that does not use the "median of three values" method that the article says is used for "most" sensors (but not AoA). I agree, however, with your correction that it was not a direct AoA sensor failure such as occurred in the 737 Max incidents.
> It's undoubtedly a serious design flaw, but it's not even remotely in the same ballpark as the Max's flagrant disregard for all process and well known design standards.
It's not the same as MCAS in the sense that it's not an ad hoc addition to deal with an issue that arose in a redesign of an old airplane, true.
However, it is a case of (a) a flaw in an automated system causing the plane to automatically take an action that is unexpected and dangerous, instead of the automated system detecting the error; and (b) an automated system overriding the input of the human pilot in a case where the human pilot can plainly see that the automated system is doing something wrong.
Also, it illustrates a more general design philosophy with Airbus that has led to other incidents, which is to hide important information about what the automated system is doing from the pilots and limit their ability to interfere with its operation. The pilots have no direct readout of the AoA sensor values that the automated system is using, or indeed of most of its other inputs. It was also not clear to the pilots exactly what mode the automated system was in (they thought it was in Direct Law when it wasn't), and there was not a simple "stop the automation" button they could press to put the plane into a known manual mode with known behavior.
While I would agree that this is not the same specific failure mode as MCAS was with Boeing, I'm not sure it's not "remotely in the same ballpark" as far as long term implications are concerned.
As somebody who lives close to the Hamburg Airbus Factory and read a lot about the Boeing story: the regulators are more strict within the EU, and my feeling is the biggest mistake in the whole Boeing saga was to have them regulate themselves.
While there might be a economic benefit to not having to go the extra mile to get a regulators aproval, this can bite you really badly if you cannot uphold quality yourself any longer. And the interviews I heard wirh Boeing personel is nothing I ever heard even in personal exchanges with Airbus people. They surely also have their issues, bur to me it feels like a few magnitudes difference in severity.
So in short: underfunding the FAA isn’t doing you airplane manufacturers a favour in the long term. I know in the US people are usually anxious to give any job to the state, but regulating is actually one of the things they should do, and should do well
Airbus isn't focused on profit (cutting corners), it's focused on politics (i.e. providing jobs in different countries). Hopefully that would make (local) engineers more powerful...
The context of the reply is why Airbus would not encounter the same organizational faults as Boeing. The general consensus is that Boeing pursued profit over safety with respect to the MAX. & they did so by cutting corners.
I think it is fair to say that Boeing cut some corners which resulted in the current situation - but even Airbus surely only prioritises safety over profit to a point - and I'm also sure Airbus cuts some corners. And this is also not really clarifying why Airbus, a publicly listed company with shareholders, is not focused on profits.
I think what is being missed here is nuance - I don't think air-travel with 0 risk is possible - most things come with risk and if we are not willing to consider anything else nothing will ever get done.
There is being prudent and then there is being negligent - I think people conflate them. I don't think there is any publicly traded company that does not care about profit - Boeing is not somehow unique in this. If the profit is competently pursued then you won't jeopardise safety beyond a certain point though - because that will in the long term impact profits and shareholders who appoint execs are not benefited by reduction in long term profits and therefore the value of the company.
