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Aviation Geeks unite?! Anybody else care about planes here?

What's your level of interest in aviation?!


  • Total voters
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaggio_P.180_Avanti
Piaggio_P-180_Avanti_Rennes_2010_%28cropped%29.jpg

That's a really neat airplane with a unique (borderline annoying) sound. I can hear them from miles away, they sound like a flying weed-whacker. I like to watch them, though. The wings look super thin and narrow.

I mentioned the VC10 earlier; below is one on the cover of a great album from my teen years. That's a lot of wing with no engines!
english_beat_cv10.png
 
The Air Force has been trying to kill it.
There is a “film” called Grunts In The Sky that the USAF tried to stifle.
Why did you put "film" in quotes? Yeah, it's probably all digital, but that's still a useable term, IMO. In ay case Grunts in the Sky is a really nice piece of work that shines well on both the infantry and the Hog pilots:
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a new company wants to restart the age of supersonic flying and plan to unveil their prototype in October and planning for a test flight in 2021.

https://www.engadget.com/boom-supersonic-xb-1-2021-130025910.html

The company says the advanced technologies will over come issues like pollution levels and running costs for Concorde and will be aiming at the business market.

Nothing about the issue of the sonic boom, so assume the aircraft will be supersonic over open water as the Concorde was (the example for trip time they give is Seattle Tokyo).
 
There is a small seaplane that I really like the Lake Renegade

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Also this series on youtube is good.

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The House Transportation Committee report on the 737 MAX has been released.
https://transportation.house.gov/committee-activity/boeing-737-max-investigation

Is anyone as disappointed in Boeing as I am? I used to root for them as the company that took risks but made the right decisions that brought us the jet age as we know it, but here they are ignoring dangerous design faults and concealing safety-critical information that winds up killing 346 people. I wouldn't care if they went out of business, now.
 
The House Transportation Committee report on the 737 MAX has been released.
https://transportation.house.gov/committee-activity/boeing-737-max-investigation

Is anyone as disappointed in Boeing as I am? I used to root for them as the company that took risks but made the right decisions that brought us the jet age as we know it, but here they are ignoring dangerous design faults and concealing safety-critical information that winds up killing 346 people. I wouldn't care if they went out of business, now.
From page 13, in the Executive Summary:

3) Culture of Concealment.

In several critical instances, Boeing withheld crucial information from the FAA, its customers, and 737 MAX pilots. This included concealing the very existence of MCAS from 737 MAX pilots and failing to disclose that the AOA Disagree alert was inoperable on the vast majority of the 737 MAX fleet, despite having been certified as a standard aircraft feature. The AOA Disagree alert is intended to notify the crew if the aircraft’s two AOA sensor readings disagree, an event that can occur if one sensor is malfunctioning or providing faulty AOA data. Boeing not only concealed this information from both the FAA and pilots, but also continued to deliver MAX aircraft to its customers knowing that the AOA Disagree alert was inoperable on most of these aircraft.​

The only words I can think of at the moment to describe this behavior by Boeing are shocking and appalling.

The conflict of interest that Boeing Authorized Representatives have when performing oversight duties for the FAA, the behavior of management at the FAA, and the roles that these played in the causes of these crashes that is described on the next page are, sadly, all unsurprising.

This is all I can stomach at the moment.
 
The House Transportation Committee report on the 737 MAX has been released.
https://transportation.house.gov/committee-activity/boeing-737-max-investigation

Is anyone as disappointed in Boeing as I am? I used to root for them as the company that took risks but made the right decisions that brought us the jet age as we know it, but here they are ignoring dangerous design faults and concealing safety-critical information that winds up killing 346 people. I wouldn't care if they went out of business, now.

Between the shutdown on production and sales of the Max and the lawsuits over the crashes, I think Boeing is in for a whole world of hurt when all is said and done.

There needs to massive firings at management level and a complete refresh of the corporate culture. Too many corners are being cuts in production. They've recently announce more issues with the 787s that a forcing airlines to ground them and carry out extra inspections.
 
Between the shutdown on production and sales of the Max and the lawsuits over the crashes, I think Boeing is in for a whole world of hurt when all is said and done.

There needs to massive firings at management level and a complete refresh of the corporate culture. Too many corners are being cuts in production. They've recently announce more issues with the 787s that a forcing airlines to ground them and carry out extra inspections.

It seems to be a glaring example of regulatory capture. This is after the 767 vs A330 tanker scandal in the early 2000s, when two Boeing officials went to jail, the CEO had to resign and the company paid a $600 million fine. The only reason I can see that they didn't learn a lesson from that was that the FAA and others in the government basically told them not to worry, they were partners.

Once again we see that government corruption actually kills people.
 
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This is after the 767 vs A330 tanker scandal in the early 2000s, when two Boeing officials went to jail.

They also stole EELV data from LockMart before they became one big happy fleet under ULA. Musk showed all his rocket explosions rather than hiding them.
 
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I don't care for the music choices, but if you like Pitts Specials, its interesting seeing this guy fly one cross country. At his age I was just trying to have enough money at the end of the week to pay rent.
 
From page 13, in the Executive Summary:

3) Culture of Concealment.

In several critical instances, Boeing withheld crucial information from the FAA, its customers, and 737 MAX pilots. This included concealing the very existence of MCAS from 737 MAX pilots and failing to disclose that the AOA Disagree alert was inoperable on the vast majority of the 737 MAX fleet, despite having been certified as a standard aircraft feature. The AOA Disagree alert is intended to notify the crew if the aircraft’s two AOA sensor readings disagree, an event that can occur if one sensor is malfunctioning or providing faulty AOA data. Boeing not only concealed this information from both the FAA and pilots, but also continued to deliver MAX aircraft to its customers knowing that the AOA Disagree alert was inoperable on most of these aircraft.​

The only words I can think of at the moment to describe this behavior by Boeing are shocking and appalling.

The conflict of interest that Boeing Authorized Representatives have when performing oversight duties for the FAA, the behavior of management at the FAA, and the roles that these played in the causes of these crashes that is described on the next page are, sadly, all unsurprising.

This is all I can stomach at the moment.

I have a really severe fear of flying, but my girlfriend and I had a trip coming up to New Zealand to attend the wedding of some friends of hers (pre-COVID, of course). I started trying to manage my anxiety over it by looking up safety statistics for the model of plane Air New Zealand uses on its Los Angeles/Auckland route, the Boeing 777-300ER. It made me feel a lot better... but damn, this whole 737-MAX thing is just terrifying. It makes me not trust newer planes!
 
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I have a really severe fear of flying, but my girlfriend and I had a trip coming up to New Zealand to attend the wedding of some friends of hers (pre-COVID, of course). I started trying to manage my anxiety over it by looking up safety statistics for the model of plane Air New Zealand uses on its Los Angeles/Auckland route, the Boeing 777-ER. It made me feel a lot better... but damn, this whole 737-MAX thing is just terrifying. It makes me not trust newer planes!

Yes the 777s in general have a good record.

Though in 2009 my now wife was flying back to Canada on a 777 (Sydney/Vancouver non-stop) and what's on the tvnews while at the airport in Adelaide?

The crash of a BA777 at Heathrow.

Fortunately the other half didn't see it as she's not the best of flyers.

On another try we had to do a go around as the aircraft before us was slow to clear the runway. Before the announcement the nose comes up and the engines throttle up and the wife grabs my hand.
 
Naval Aircraft Factory N3N-3, a navy trainer of the '30s and '40s. After WW2 most were sold, but a handful were kept at the Naval Academy for midshipman flight familiarization. They were the last biplanes in the US armed forces when retired in 1961.

n3n_corpus.png

n3n_airandspace.png
 
https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/

The reason Boeing lost it's way and had the 737 Max Debacle is because of the internal culture that started with the McDonnel Douglass takeover and how the Bean Counters within MDD somehow ended up taking over Boeing.

At that point, Boeing was run by Bean Counters instead of Engineers.

I think there needs to be laws against Bean Counter types and regulate the eff out of them so that they can never have the kind of corporate power that they have now.
 
At that point, Boeing was run by Bean Counters instead of Engineers.
Ah, the good old Lazy B Ranch. This from a local Seattle TV comedy show during yet another machinist's strike in the 90's:
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