It's our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not military-related.
Lord Nelson and I recently watched the series Empire of the Seas on Youtube. It's a four-part BBC documentary about the importance of the Royal Navy to British and world history. It was very well-done, although I thought that the last episode (1800s to WWI) would have been better if they hadn't had to trim so much nuance. (I might be a geek.) Highly recommended.
Overhauled posts this time are Going Back to Iowa, The Washington Naval Treaty, the survivability posts on flooding and fire, my review of LA maritime sites, and Falklands Part 7.
Comments
It seems that RV Petrel has found Kaga
I find it interesting that the Falklands war was fought purely between the UK and Argentina, whereas in (e.g.) Vietnam the US had some assistance from Commonwealth countries (Australia and New Zealand). Do you know if there was any effort by the UK to call in assistance from the Commonwealth in the Falklands? Were there any Commonwealth navies - I'm thinking particularly of Canada - that could have made a meaningful contribution alongside the Royal Navy?
The basic difference is that the Falklands was a very bilateral war, while Vietnam wasn't. Officially, the US was there as a partner of Vietnam under SEATO, as were Australia et al. The Falklands weren't covered under any existing treaty, and it's kind of hard to intervene without one of those. There was diplomatic support from the Commonwealth, particularly Australia, New Zealand and Canada. New Zealand offered to send HMNZS Canterbury to join the task force, but were turned down. Instead, she was sent to the Persian Gulf to release a British ship for the fight. There was informal logistical support from both Commonwealth and NATO allies, although the French apparently played both sides to some extent.
David Perell has some interesting things to say about why the recent 737 MAX problems happened.
TL/DR: Since its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, Boeing has been run by bean-counters who put profits before safety.
Anyone know how trustworthy this Perell guy is?
Judging by his position on this, not very. I've seen several versions of the "It's All McDonnell Douglas's Fault!" screed, and none of them ring true.
First, I think the idea behind the MCAS was sound. Anyone who says "yes, let's address an edge case that should never occur if the airplane's flown properly with a major aerodynamic rework instead of a minor software patch" is either a non-engineer or maybe someone who's only worked in academia.
Second, the idea that Boeing places profit above lives (in the sense implied by the article) is completely at odds with my experience of the industry. I more than once had to point out while working in said industry that if all we cared about was not crashing, we'd just ground the entire fleet. People at Boeing take their responsibilities for safety very seriously.
Third, if Boeing really was that sloppy, there would have been more incidents. This is really rare, from an industry that does an incredibly hard job day in and day out.
But the main issue I have is that greed is uniquely bad at explaining this failure. There were two AoA sensors on the airplane, and using both of them for the MCAS wouldn't have been significantly more expensive than using one. Once you've paid the overhead for the software team (and aerospace software is expensive to write) then going for both sensors is a trivial incremental cost. So something really weird happened, and I'd really like to see a honest deep dive, but greed on a corporate level wasn't it.
So who wants to explain why we can't get the elevators on the ford class working right? I mean, I I can understand why EMALS is tricky, but why are magnetic elevators so tough?
Part of the new design of the elevators is the airlock system that prevents flash from entering from the flight deck into the magazine. In principle, this is simple (the linear elevator rail can have gaps that the elevator "jumps", so that the elevator is always attached to the rail at a sufficient distance, allowing a hatch cover to seal the entire elevator shaft), but in practice getting this right so that the elevator never hits a hatch and nothing goes wrong has proven a bit more difficult than anticipated.
It's flash protection? I find that rather hilarious, given how long that problem has been known. At least they haven't pulled a Beatty and just taken them off.
Perell seems to mostly be upset that aircraft development isn't exciting enough--he calls for "radical ideas such as supersonic passenger airplanes and small jets that could land and take off in cities" and mourns the grounding of the Concordes--and using the MAX crashes to say "See, I knew Boeing's approach was wrong!"
Boeing does all those things. Sometimes under its own name, more often by partnerships with startups. If you read their press releases, there's something about those kind of ventures every few months.
Yes, Boeing (and every aerospace engineer on the planet) knows something you don't. You cannot get supersonic travel without a big jump in fuel consumption/cost, and so far, there's been precious little public appetite for that.
Define "radical new experiments" and "failure". Today, thanks to the miracles of science, it is possible to figure out quite accurately how a plane will perform (including costs) without actually building it. So would it count as a radical new experiment if a major airplane manufacturer came up with a concept for an airliner that would cruise at just under the speed of sound, 15% faster than standard airliners, and shopped it around, then abandoned it in favor of a refinement of conventional airliners because the airlines didn't want to buy it?
This guy is really annoying me. The aerospace industry doesn't exist for his entertainment. We have to make products that people want to buy, and the demand for supersonic travel just isn't there.
And then there's this gem, from the footnotes:
The US military may not buy from Airbus, but it does buy from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The only area of serious concern is civilian-derived aircraft, and the whole tanker replacement has indeed been a mess from day 1. But that's a small part of defense spending, and I have no confidence he was trying to make this more subtle point.
I agree with Bean re. the MAX. There are those who picked up the MD being the source of all problems and are, quite mistakenly, making a cottage industry out of it.
Where the agreement stems from, whether it be Bean's engineering view or my and my colleagues operational frame, is the puzzlement of why there was not dual input into the MCAS? As Bean notes, the expense is trivial for the hardware compared to the software engineering. This is, to me at least, the mystery.
Where things have really gotten off track is to ascribe the failure to do this as indicative of unbridled corporate greed on Boeing's part. Those commentators in that cottage industry of Boeing bashing who run with this have, it seems to me, never wished to gain an understanding of aircraft development and production and their lack of insight in this area is glaringly obvious.
Aircraft design and manufacturing is a staggeringly complicated and sophisticated undertaking and does not lend itself to trite accusations of "safety be damned - costs above all" thinking. This is not a movie in other words and as Bean states, the engineers at Boeing (and Airbus I would add) are committed to safety. If one is to traduce their approach to safety then it best be done with detailed evidence.
This is, btw, where I disagree with the other side of this argument such as put forth to a certain extent by William Langewiesche in that the pilots should have been able to easily handle this. There is a lot of informed and serious discussion about that on pilot's forums/fora to keep one busy for weeks. I just have some lingering doubts but I will readily admit that I just don't know.
My point is that something did go seriously wrong. Let's first fix the problem and then fix the blame. The latter requires serious and rigorous forensic analysis. Blaming greed, the 3rd world pilots, MD, etc. alone is a recipe for missing the mark.
The definitive account of what led to the loss of these two aircraft might be a couple years in the future and I look forward to a cool and rational examination--something lacking heretofore from many out there chiming in.
I had a thought on this, actually. This case is the first time we’ve had a major airliner engineering failure in decades. The last time I can think of was the 737 Classic rudder problems back in the 90s. That’s 20-25 years ago, depending on how you count. This is a really good record, and one that probably every other industry wishes it had. (Right up until the time it comes to pay the bill, that is.)
For what it's worth, the US military IS buying an awful lot of H145s from Airbus, they just make them in the US. And it probably would have bought A330s built in the US had McCain (was it McCain? I forget the details) not intervened.
Speaking of elevators, here's some British Pathe footage of shells being loaded on HMS Rodney, during the bombardment of Alderney.
It's the first time I've really understood just how big those things are. I know folks who could probably fit inside a hollowed-out 16" shell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3E80CRKcPg
This case is the first time we’ve had a major airliner engineering failure in decades.
What about the Boeing 787 Lithium Battery fires?
No planes were lost, but my completely uninformed view is that this was a matter of good luck, rather than it not being on the cards.
It’s really fancy flash protection. Normal flash protection usually requires some kinds of moving the bomb from one mechanism to another. The idea with the elevator is that the bomb lift goes from the flight deck straight down to the middle of the bomb magazine. At the bottom, they can just load the lift, and then hit a button to send it straight up at a respectable speed, with the flash protection automatically opening doors in front of it and closing them behind, maintaining multiple closed doors in the shaft at all times. And each door seals the shaft completely, and maintains seal against both over and underpressure.
This would require less crew and be faster than the systems currently in use. Of course, apparently it isn’t as easy as they thought.
@cassander
That's true, but sort of beside the point. (Also, it was probably Patty McMurray and Maria Cantwell, Senators from the Great State of
WashingtonBoeing. The fact that he didn't acknowledge competition in the defense arena was deeply weird.@Doctorpat
Good point. I was thinking in terms of crashes, and missed that one. To some extent, it was more understandable, as that was new tech.
@Tuna
Oh, very true. I just find the whole thing funny.
I have this excellent photo of the USS Normandy in transit across the North Atlantic as my desktop background. My question is: what is the significance of the box with the dashed line immediately in front of the 5" gun mount?
That box is the forward VERTREP drop area. I forget if that's the official terminology or not, but that's the basic gist - they train the gun to one side or the other, then supply helos can drop pallets of cargo in that area. That's used if the flight deck is being used for something else, or sometimes just to transfer stores faster than they can clear them off the flight deck.
When I was on Ramage, we never used it, but on Sirius (a supply ship), we did drop supplies there on various ships during VERTREPs.
@Jade Nekotenshi
Thanks for the explanation. That said, it seems like kind of a small target to set a pallet down on.