Boeing 737 MAX 8 landing [image credit: Acefitt @ Wikipedia]
What is or isn’t genuinely ‘climate-friendly’ is a separate issue, but public perceptions are obviously important to competitive airlines and the plane makers they buy from.
We need to know if safety considerations at Boeing took a back seat to producing a climate-friendly plane, says Miranda Devine @ The New York Post (via The GWPF).
When Swedish eco-pessimist Greta Thunberg came to New York to shout, “How dare you!” last month, she maintained her climate purity by traveling on a carbon-neutral, solar-powered yacht.
Now that she’s in Canada, the teen doomsayer hasn’t explained how she’ll travel 4,000 miles home to Sweden without flying. She’s given up airplanes because she believes their greenhouse emissions drive cataclysmic climate change.
Air travel, which accounts for 2 percent of global emissions, has become the great bogeyman for climate alarmists, sparking a backlash against airlines.
Punitive eco-taxes, aviation regulations, activist investors, green NGOs and climate-aware passengers conspire to force airlines and manufacturers to lower CO2 emissions by using less fuel, which accounts for 99 percent of aviation’s carbon footprint.
No one has said it explicitly yet, but this relentless pressure to reduce emissions appears to have been a significant factor in the disastrous safety failures of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, which resulted in two fatal crashes in the past year, claiming 346 lives.
The warning from Boeing’s catastrophes is that climate ideology can have fatal consequences.
The 737 MAX was trumpeted as “Boeing’s game changer.” It reduced emissions by 14 percent and Boeing raced it into production to compete with a climate-friendly new offering from Airbus.
But in order to achieve its green goal, Boeing had to use much bigger engines that didn’t fit in the usual position under the wing of the repurposed, 53-year-old 737 design.
The engines had to be moved forward and hoisted higher. As a result, the aerodynamics changed, and the planes had a tendency to pitch up and potentially stall on takeoff.
Boeing’s solution to this hardware defect was an imperfect software bandage that would automatically correct the pitch.
In both crashes, preliminary investigations found this software kicked in even when the plane wasn’t stalling, with lethal consequences.
Continued here.
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Footnote – the last paragraph of the GWPF report:
Boeing has lost more than $25 billion in market value and this week belatedly replaced a senior executive, after messages came to light between senior pilots complaining about the 737 MAX software “running rampant” during a test simulation in 2016.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
reads like something the USSR would have done back in the day.
When America came up with the stretch DC-8 the Russians just had to make one bigger. So they took a standard model Ilyushin airliner, cut it in two just behind the wing, inserted another section of cabin, and cobbled the thing together. To celebrate their wonder plane they flew out to the boonies and took aboard an entire small village, men, women, and children, to fly them back to Moscow to celebrate. Somewhere midway the bubblegum and bandaids let loose and the aircraft disintegrated and plunged to Earth killing everyone.
Fifty years later – rinse, repeat, and voila! the Max.
A typical engineering domino effect. But it is obvious that at heart this was a management generated fiasco. I seriously believe there was at least one engineer that objected on good grounds to mounting an oversized engine to an old airframe design. Again, another management snafu is depending upon software–unproven, robust software at that–to compensate for the problem, and then not tell pilots about the “fix” as a potential hazard. Truth be told, this fiasco very similar to the shuttle disasters. Mid and upper level managers over-riding experienced engineers, treating them capable of working magic because their own butts are on the line for budgetary myopia. I deliberately avoided software development as an engineer because management has developed the attitude that when something is programmable, the device can be made to do anything desired, and loopholes, dead-end conditions, electrical fault recovery be damned. No company wants to spend the money testing software, because it is a budgetary black hole.
Miranda Devine’s commentary is really stretching the issue of failure modes to make CO2 a primary factor. Root Cause Analysis always leads back to human misconception and/or faulty business decisions. Its rarely the physics.
It appears there is a line of code, one of millions/billions/trillions that cause the plane to nose dive into the denser parts of our planet.
It’s been like a year, still no fix.
No professional pilot would ever let his/her ride do that.
If the pilot can’t override the computer, what is the use of having one onboard ??
“If the pilot can’t override the computer, what is the use of having one onboard”
The computer was able to be & also had been, overridden.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-crash-problems-human-error-mcas-faa
JB says: No company wants to spend the money testing software, because it is a budgetary black hole.
But if they don’t, they may end up with no company.
Here’s a Cliché:
Rule one: No matter what else happens, fly the airplane.
Interesting to see Miranda Devine writing in the US media
She’s always based in Australia and on their conservative circuit
Such rushing in and GreenHurry was the reason why the UK ended up with so many diesel cars
… which are now demonised just as their pollution levels massively improved.
If it’s not in an APL level language , it’s too verbose to ever understand .
The biggest difference between dying when the MCAS software bug on the 737 Max8 was triggered and living, was the pilot’s presence of mind to turnoff the faulty sensor/ control triggering the bug before it was too late…..
That the bug was allowed to remain in the production aircraft seems to be similar to how demonstrably bad climate models are used to make trillion dollar policy decisions:too many decision makers knew too little about actually flying.
The three rules for surviving to be an old pilot are:
Aviate
Navigate
Communicate
Boeing’s sales managers forgot that in pushing the Max into production. The MCAS, if not disengaged, could fight the pilot to death.
LOL, THAT yacht is not remotely carbon neutral !
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.press.
Will the public ever board this aircraft again?
Boeing 737 Max Lion Air crash caused by failures including design flaws and inadequate training, official report finds
25/10/2019
Indonesian investigators found that Boeing, acting without adequate oversight from US regulators, failed to grasp risks in the design of cockpit software on its 737 Max airliner.
. . .
Indonesian regulators criticised the design of the anti-stall system known as MCAS, which automatically pushed the plane’s nose down, leaving pilots fighting for control.
“The design and certification of the MCAS did not adequately consider the likelihood of loss of control of the aircraft,” the report said.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/boeing-737-max-lion-air-crash-caused-by-failures-including-design-flaws-and-inadequate-training-a4270986.html