Plane Engines and the 737 MAX 8 Accidents

[95EagleAWD]

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They guys I'm quoting I've known since 1999 when we all started playing the same WW2 online flight simulator Aces High (the creator is responsible for both the name and the first code for Massively Multiplayer Online/MMO Games). They are all x USAF/USN fighter pilots, and current airline pilots with time on various 737 including the MAX.

For myself, my first real job after school in 1993 was as an air traffic controller for IFR/enroute centers (I was stationed at Winnipeg ACC initially, and it wasn't called that back then), back before NAV Canada was around, I worked for Transport Canada back then. I did my PPL, and have been interested in military flight sims since then - ran www.combatsim.com out of Calgary from 99 to the early 200s/dot.com crash, it was one of the largest gaming/sim sites in the world then, Nucleus's 2nd largest co-located server traffic wise (we did 40mil hits, 1 mil uniques, and had 250k forum registered users, and sold banner adds for 5 to 10k USD per month back then). I've kept in touch with a lot of pilots and guys working in the military and aerospace industry, Carl Norman is a good friend, he started Eagle Dynamics/Digital Combat Simulations, and now works for DARPA doing wizzy things. Just to give an example.

Regarding PC flight sims - the new F14 DCS simulation is very accurate, you can use the NATO NATOPS manual in fact to learn the game, and the guy who usually does the "guides" for players refuses to do the F14 one due to Iran having them, and the ITAR treaty being so aggressive that he's afraid he could lose his real job in defense/aerospace for violating that by creating a simple guide for DCS players, which Iran could use to train their new pilots on the F14. It's that accurate now.


I agree though, the level of knowledge is incredible here, Phil the CPS member's knowledge and posts surprised me, and of course beyond has a number of knowledgeable pilots that post here. Great thread IMO.

Also, when ED made the A-10C module for DCS, they had to "downgrade" it from the military version they made, since some of the weapons/systems aren't available to the public. I'm actually blown away by the Hornet, even though I haven't bought it yet. A friend of mine is a CF-18 pilot, and he just said "they have someone in the Navy giving them info, because we'd never get away with this". The Hornet, while not complete yet, is gonna be a masterpiece for at least a decade. I'm surprised it's so in-depth because it's still in service.

Of course, buying that, I'll have to buy better hardware to, and a HOTAS setup. I'll stick with the Tomcat and F-5 right now.

[sabad66]

Interesting info, i had no idea how advanced the consumer simulators are. Seems like a pretty fun hobby to get into. Maybe i'll try and push my son into it as he gets older so that i can piggyback off him lol. No time to start now on my own

[lilmira]

Can't wait to see a thread on surgery some day because of surgeon simulator.

[vengie]

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Can't wait to see a thread on surgery some day because of surgeon simulator.

[Gman.45]

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Also, when ED made the A-10C module for DCS, they had to "downgrade" it from the military version they made, since some of the weapons/systems aren't available to the public. I'm actually blown away by the Hornet, even though I haven't bought it yet. A friend of mine is a CF-18 pilot, and he just said "they have someone in the Navy giving them info, because we'd never get away with this". The Hornet, while not complete yet, is gonna be a masterpiece for at least a decade. I'm surprised it's so in-depth because it's still in service.

Of course, buying that, I'll have to buy better hardware to, and a HOTAS setup. I'll stick with the Tomcat and F-5 right now.

To expand on this a bit, if you listen to the Fighter Pilot Podcast, Matt Wagner(Wags), who took over for my friend Carl when he moved to DARPA, did an interview recently. He explained about the subject matter experts they hire, which are all former pilots in each module's type. Very interesting. Heatblur had several F14 pilots and RIO's as well as enlisted avionics experts work with them. On the Hornet module Wags explained how they've had to ride an edge regarding performance in the Hornet sim as there are still US Marines and NATO pilots using the C model Hornet (Plus us canucks with our upgraded A models which are essentially the same). He especially mentioned the low speed AOA handling characteristics and speeds as something they intentionally changed so as not to give any hostile nations information.

It's fascinating stuff.

95EagleAWD- A friend I went to high school with was a RCAF Hornet pilot too, he just retired recently. He has 3800 hours in 40 types (Empire test pilot school), and had close to 2000 in the Hornet IIRC. He's flown the Gripen, Typhoon, Superhornet on exchange, backseated in the F16 and F15E as well. Tons of interesting talks/posts with him, again, it's really fascinating stuff.

Sorry to go O/T, but aviation threads tend to do that, hah.

[95EagleAWD]

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Can't wait to see a thread on surgery some day because of surgeon simulator.

I mean, I am a commercial pilot as well. But the sims are good enough that you could learn the systems for sure.

[lilmira]

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I mean, I am a commercial pilot as well. But the sims are good enough that you could learn the systems for sure.

I was half joking and half serious. I tried flight sim long time ago. It was quite overwhelming even back then though I couldn't tell how realistic it was. Flight sim was probably quite primitive when it started at some point and look at what it has become. Just may be one day, who's to say there won't be a realistic surgeon sim lol.

[Misterman]

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Can't wait to see a thread on surgery some day because of surgeon simulator.

I've been dying to try this game.

[95EagleAWD]

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To expand on this a bit, if you listen to the Fighter Pilot Podcast, Matt Wagner(Wags), who took over for my friend Carl when he moved to DARPA, did an interview recently. He explained about the subject matter experts they hire, which are all former pilots in each module's type. Very interesting. Heatblur had several F14 pilots and RIO's as well as enlisted avionics experts work with them. On the Hornet module Wags explained how they've had to ride an edge regarding performance in the Hornet sim as there are still US Marines and NATO pilots using the C model Hornet (Plus us canucks with our upgraded A models which are essentially the same). He especially mentioned the low speed AOA handling characteristics and speeds as something they intentionally changed so as not to give any hostile nations information.

It's fascinating stuff.

95EagleAWD- A friend I went to high school with was a RCAF Hornet pilot too, he just retired recently. He has 3800 hours in 40 types (Empire test pilot school), and had close to 2000 in the Hornet IIRC. He's flown the Gripen, Typhoon, Superhornet on exchange, backseated in the F16 and F15E as well. Tons of interesting talks/posts with him, again, it's really fascinating stuff.

Sorry to go O/T, but aviation threads tend to do that, hah.

Fighter Pilot podcast is great. I loved the one on the Tomcat, and the French Navy pilot regarding the Rafale. The French Navy is really the only other Navy that has a good fleet arm, besides maybe the Spanish (and the USMC). It's interesting to see how they operate off their smaller carrier, and they must feel like it's a luxury to cross-deck with the USN. Plus, the Rafale is sexy as hell. I'll be curious to see when Japan brings in their "helicopter destroyers" for refit with a ski-jump for their F-35 fleet. Japan having aircraft carriers again has got to make China nervous.

I saw SAAB advertising the Gripen on Twitter yesterday for the RCAF, and I thought that was interesting as well...

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I've been dying to try this game.

Heh. I see what you did there.

[Gman.45]

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Fighter Pilot podcast is great. I loved the one on the Tomcat, and the French Navy pilot regarding the Rafale. The French Navy is really the only other Navy that has a good fleet arm, besides maybe the Spanish (and the USMC). It's interesting to see how they operate off their smaller carrier, and they must feel like it's a luxury to cross-deck with the USN. Plus, the Rafale is sexy as hell. I'll be curious to see when Japan brings in their "helicopter destroyers" for refit with a ski-jump for their F-35 fleet. Japan having aircraft carriers again has got to make China nervous.

I saw SAAB advertising the Gripen on Twitter yesterday for the RCAF, and I thought that was interesting as well...

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Heh. I see what you did there.

The Gripen is one of the fighters in the "new" (cough) RCAF competition, as is the Rafale, SH, Typhoon, and F35. I'm sure you know all that, but it'll be interesting for others to see how this competition plays out. I know from a friend that's flown it and also flown against it in exercises, that it's small size is a huge advantage in WVR fights, plus it has a ton of other positive attributes, not the least of which is a $5000 per hour operating cost, and the ability to land, be refueled, and rearmed with up to 6 AAM in under 15 minutes. The sortie rates the Gripen can generate make it like buying 2 or 3 fighters for each copy. The competition is starting to get momentum so far as the public is concerned, not surprising to see them advertising on Twitter, I'll have to look for that today myself (I avoid Twitter/FB unless it's for specific stuff like this).

The new Japanese helo ships are great, it's obvious from their construction that they had the F35 in mind all the time, and not just helicopters as they designated it, ha ha for China. Right now the USN has the USS Wasp sailing right by islands that the Chinese have just grabbed and created bases on, and China is pretty PO'd about it. They have a full squadron of US Marine Corps F35B STOVL aircraft on board, 12 total I believe, which is the "sea control" air wing configuration. Pretty bad ass. Once all the assault ships are modified to take the down thrust from the F35B engine, it'll give the USA about another dozen if not more pocket carries to supplement the 10-12 full sized CATOBAR nuclear carriers they are operating right now. Huge advantage, in fact I hope they build more, and there are plans to do so if they get their shit together, and even make them catobar instead of vstovl only, so they can operate all the aircraft in the USN/USMC fleet, as well as the F35B is they desired to. Putting a small single nuclear reactor or 2 inside such assault class vessels would = effective IMO, as the only drawback right now is that under combat ops conditions the assault ship carriers need a fleet oiler every 2 or 3 days to refuel them with both aviation fuels and fuel oil to make their props go spin spin.

[OTown]

I find it funny FS is mentioned... I learned most of the systems avionics nav etc by self-taught trial and error and research via Flight Sim. Played on and off since FS95 (I picked it up later), probably have hundreds if not thousands of hours on FSX through the last decade or more. Even took up virtual flight control on one of the most prominent servers at the time, controlling dozens of flights as either ground tower approach departure or center controllers.

I was in the pilot process for the Air Force before pulling the pin. The military would have owned my ass for too long and I got accepted for my other dream job anyways. Not something I regret, but it would have been interesting had things gone that way.

Not to be braggy but I got an intro flight at Springbank a few years back and the instructor was amazed at how skilled and how much knowledge I had without any official ground school. So there is something to be said for Flight Sim!

I was looking at getting my PPL but the costs are just too high at the moment. Maybe one day.

[sabad66]

Good video for simpletons like me:

[HiTempguy1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNEOfEGe3I

This video was interesting, explained the reasons behind why Boeing did what it did, as well as the engineering hurdles required to be overcome.

[Mitsu3000gt]

Apparently Qatar won't even buy planes from Boeing's South Carolina plant. I guess it is not to the same level of product quality as the Washington plant, and they set it up in a rush with mostly freshly trained people. Is there any way for an average person to find out what planes came out of what plant before you fly on them?

[Tik-Tok]

Lol, no. I mean if you have the plane registration, you could find it in sure, but tail swaps happen daily and sometimes hourly). You would literally need to look it up right before boarding.

[Mitsu3000gt]

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Lol, no. I mean if you have the plane registration, you could find it in sure, but tail swaps happen daily and sometimes hourly). You would literally need to look it up right before boarding.

Thanks, I didn't know. You can find out so much about specific planes/flights these days I didn't think it would be a stretch at all to be able to find out it's assembly location, which can only be 1 of 2 places.

[benyl]

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Apparently Qatar won't even buy planes from Boeing's South Carolina plant. I guess it is not to the same level of product quality as the Washington plant, and they set it up in a rush with mostly freshly trained people. Is there any way for an average person to find out what planes came out of what plant before you fly on them?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/b...ype=collection

[msommers]

But anything Made in America is bulletproof, the way our good Lord intended! How can this be *head explodes*

[Misterman]

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNEOfEGe3I

This video was interesting, explained the reasons behind why Boeing did what it did, as well as the engineering hurdles required to be overcome.

Finally got a chance to watch this. To be more specific, this video outlines the "economic" reasons Boeing did what they did. I was hoping for it to shed some light on the glaring engineering failures of this project. It's been mentioned already, but any engineer that knows anything about process control, knows that for automated control that can cause catastrophic consequences, you would never run 1o2 voting. If a simple failure of an angle of attack sensor will kill everyone on the plane, then it is an automatic that the system would need similar readings from both sensors before it could initiate a nose down, assuming you did any form of risk ranking at all. This is bush league shit. I do this at work for things far less critical.

[revelations]

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Apparently Qatar won't even buy planes from Boeing's South Carolina plant. I guess it is not to the same level of product quality as the Washington plant, and they set it up in a rush with mostly freshly trained people. Is there any way for an average person to find out what planes came out of what plant before you fly on them?

Thats not surprising - that they did the cheapest method possible (again) and its now burning them a hole financially. My understanding is that they paid very low wages for everyone in comparison to the other plants.

How many times does the Board of Directors need to be told: going with the cheapest option in the Aviation world - that demands the highest levels of quality - will come bite you in the ass almost everytime? 787 outsourcing failure, 787 battery - no protective case, 737 MAX - implement MCAS as cheaply as possible (no secondary self checks)

I used to work in Aviation and seeing this type of thinking was common. We would redo work many times because an operator went with low cost option.