• Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I think a lot of people would actively refuse to fly on a 737 MAX in the future.

    The design of the MAX was flawed to begin with. Essentially, the Boeing 737, designed in the 1960s,could not compete with the newer A320Neo on fuel efficiency due to Airbus redesigning the A320 around the much larger, state of the art CFM LEAP engines (Neo stands for “New Engine Option”), Boeing choose to jerryrig the CFM LEAP engines on their existing 737 airframe instead of redesigning another plane around the engine.

    Now, since the engine is oversized with respect to the airframe, the newly christened 737 MAX has a tendency to tip upward due to too much lift when flying. Boeing opted to correct this in software by having the plane automatically correct its flight by tipping downward if it senses the plane was tipping up, which they called the MCAS. And of course, since one of the selling point of the 737 MAX Boeing promised was that no additional training was needed for the 737 MAX, the pilots did not know about MCAS, much less have a way to have a manual override for it.

    So what if the sensors made a mistake and tipped downward when it’s not supposed to, you ask? We found out in 2018.

    It is not something that is fixable barring a grounds up redesign. But that’s not going to happen.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      At this point I’m not flying on any Boeing if I can help it. There’s no way to know how recently it was made or refurbished and anything that Boeing touched in the last few years is suspect.

        • smort@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          So if I were looking to fly with this in mind, you have any suggestions on finding flights on Airbus or older Boeing planes? I.E. is there a flight search site where you can specify? Or at least where it shows the plane on the search results page?

        • 5C5C5C@programming.dev
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          8 months ago

          Beyond personal safety concerns, I want to boycott Boeing whole sale. Make the whole brand toxic to airlines, period. Make airlines decide that they lose too much business to their use of Boeing to ever use their planes again. If Boeing doesn’t totally collapse, other airplane makers will eventually follow their example.