yes and no. Like you said, automotive and aviation industries are bound by a lot regulatory and path dependent constraints.
Elon's strength is his willingness to pull the plug and transition away from suboptimal solutions. This is bolstered by his willingness to double down.
Imagine if Boeing said "screw all this recertification technical debt for the 737 MAX airframe, we will start fresh. Customers can take it or leave it"
According to a version I heard, Boeing engineering did say more or less just that, at which point Southwest, the near-monopoly in some regions, said something like, "Oh yeah? Then we'll plan to leave it."
And Boeing upper management overruled the engineers.
Color me skeptical.
There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept. The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good.
Unfortunately, two of the 3 crews did not understand the runaway stabilizer trim procedure. The 3rd crew did, and landed safely, and the media never reports on that.
The runaway stab trim procedure is a "memory item", meaning pilots shouldn't need a checklist to deal with it.
> The runaway stab trim procedure…
But doesn’t apply to MCAS because the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct.
The MCAS system wasn’t documented, pilots weren’t trained on it, it didn’t indicate anything distinct in the cockpit, and it could rapidly put the plane into an unrecoverable attitude where pilots no longer had the physical strength to overcome the forces involved.
I know how the stab trim system works. I worked on it (for the 757) for three years.
Yes, it applies to MCAS.
> the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct
Nope. MCAS failure manifests itself as runaway trim, and the emergency procedures for it are exactly what is needed to recover from it.
1. the stab trim switches override the MCAS signals. Override. That means the pilot can trim to normal using the column mounted trim switches. The column switches will power the trim back to normal. No physical strength is required.
2. there's a "stab trim cutoff" switch on the console. That turns off the trim system. MCAS cannot bypass it.
The proof is the 3rd MCAS incident. The pilots trimmed it back to normal, and turned the stab trim system off.
That's all they had to do.
This is supposed to be a "memory item". The other two crews did not remember the memory item. Boeing even sent out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterating this information. It was ignored by the EA pilots, who did everything wrong (including overspeeding the airplane at full thrust).
The narrative you wrote is the typical one in the mass media, which is utterly wrong. The proof of that is they ignore the 3rd incident which didn't fit the narrative.
I've talked with two 737 pilots about this. They agree with me, though I knew I was right anyway.
Food for thought: ever wonder why the stab trim cutoff switch is in a prominent place on the center console in easy reach?
You just took Boeing adding a secret system that can cause a plane to crash and then blamed the pilots who were unfortunate to be a victim of malfunctioning sensors and then put all the blame on them because pilots who didn't want to die inside a deathtrap aircraft figured out how to avoid their own death the moment they realized that the MCAS crashes were not an isolated incident?
What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of? That they had some perverse incentive to die?
> put all the blame on them
Nope. I wrote: "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good"
> What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of?
Not following the runaway stabilizer trim procedure. This is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning a checklist is not required.
There were 3 MCAS incidents:
1. crew trimmed to normal with the thumb switches, then turned off the trim system. Flew the rest of the flight, landed safely.
2. crew trimmed it back to normal at least 11 times (if I recall correctly) and never turned off the trim system. Crashed.
3. Boeing Emergency Airworthiness directive was sent to all MAX pilots. In a nutshell, it says to restore normal trim using the thumb switches then turn off the trim system. EA pilots instead turned off the trim system while the airplane was pointed down at full throttle. Crashed.
The two 737 pilots I talked to about this both asserted pilot incompetence.
Personally, I assign half the blame on Boeing and the other half on the pilots. Flying is not a joke. Not paying attention to an Emergency Airworthiness Directive is not acceptable.
> "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good"
It was purposefully deceptive -- Boeing management actively decided to hide its existence from pilots.
The narrative that the pilots were at fault was Boeing leadership covering their ass.
The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts.
MCAS would also re-activate with a five second delay, just long enough to confuse pilots.
More importantly, deactivating the electrical trim system would make it all too easy to enter a regime where the pilots couldn't physically recover the plane.
This is a Catch-22 scenario: Activate the electrics and be killed by MCAS, or deactivate the electrics and be killed by physics.
I could go through each of your comments in this thread and point out how NTSB crash investigators proved that Boeing was directly or indirectly at fault in almost every aspect, but I don't want to write out ten pages. Others have done so already, more eloquently, and often with more colourful language. Most professional pilots were rightly furious with Boeing.
Boeing's arguments have been mutually exclusive with each other: "Just remember how to operate MCAS... which we hid from you!" and "Just disable the electric trim... which will pit you against forces you can't overcome"... "Which is not a problem because you can turn electric trim back one... but then MCAS will try to kill you again"... "It won't do that because it is dual redundant... an option... that nobody purchased... and we didn't even tell most customers about."
I expect this kind of self-contradictory "logic" from narcissists and sociopaths -- I know one of each and I'm now intimately familiar with the self serving arguments that make no sense, especially in combination.
This is exactly correct in the context of the decision as it played out, but stretches and re-engines are very common in commercial airlines. Changing that decision without reinforcing the safety culture probably would have ended in the same place.
Wasn't the whole point of the MAX that they had reached the limit of what their existing design had, but due to the demands of the airlines, as well as their current position in the market, they felt it was an easier idea to extend the lifespan of their already tired design by using software to overcome the physical limitations of the aircraft? I do understand that the airplane would have flown fine without the MCAS system, but then it would not have satisfied all their requirements.
Taking a step back, I think it's more than that. It's just the company structure. It remains to be seen if SpaceX and Tesla survive long term. But if they do, a lot will be attributed to the company structure that Elon designed. When you have a company that does stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1InUlHXv718
Compared to Airbus: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KS9Xt6hmbTU
You just think to yourself, even if the airplane was completely safe, and they are incredibly safe, this is just not a great look. Both doors accomplish the task but little thought was put into the operator of the door. The little things matter and I notice them more and more everywhere I go with a lot of legacy American companies.
My point was more too highlight his approach to problems, not make the argument that this would have been successful or profitable for Boeing.
In fact, I would say there's probably a very narrow set of circumstances where his back to the drawing board approach can be deployed successfuly.
That said, the 787 Dreamliner remains statistically one of the safest widebody long-haul aircraft in commercial aviation history, which I think is a Counterpoint. It achieves this despite any more globally diverse supply chain, and moving production out of unionized Boeing manufacturing plants.
Safety by Design and design for manufacturability can help eliminate the possibility of quality issues during production.
> very narrow
He applied it to Tesla and SpaceX, which are very very different.
Sure, that is no accident. Elon seeks out markets ripe for disruptive engineering innovation.
His approach probably wouldn't work as well if you threw him in as CEO of a random company like JC penny or Pizza Hut. Other CEO's are good at different things - like squeezing the extra 0.1% out of a 40 year old brand or product line
Now I'm thinking about him firing the pizza cooks and bringing in a crack team of engineers to redesign the concept of Pizza from first principles.
> Elon seeks out markets ripe for disruptive engineering innovation.
I.e. products that everyone else dismisses as impractical/impossible. And then people complain when he's late delivering the impossible products.
Yes
That's basically what happened at DOGE, there was a hilarious quote from one of the software engineers he brought in that they thought the government would be full of useless and overpaid people, like silicon valley.
I mean, they're not wrong, but it's a harder problem for real reasons. A lot of over constrained problems leaning to bizarre Solutions
The decision to re-engine the 737 rather than design a new airframe saved the airlines a vast amount of money.