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Human beings and their machines find it hard to understand each other.
When congressional hearings were inaugurated, they were supposed to be information-seeking exercises. Not much information seeking went on at last week’s hearings on the Boeing 737 MAX. Senators gave speeches deploring plane crashes. Even when they asked questions, they seldom waited for answers. And if any legislation results, it will surely be written by staffers based on agendas long ago hashed out.
All in all, a display of institutional decadence not unlike the one that seems to have afflicted Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration in their implementation and approval of MCAS, the automatic software system blamed for two terrible crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
To the question of how such a system could find its way into a plane, the answer seems to be “by mistake.”
Excerpt from WSJ
Inflows of cash from the once-troublesome 787 Dreamliner are now sustaining the production of the grounded 737 MAX
In a twist of fate, Boeing’s BA +1.23% financial health through the 737 MAX crisis will rely heavily on what was once another problem child: the 787 Dreamliner.
During the release of its third-quarter results late in October, Boeing said the 787’s production rate would be lowered from 14 to 12 a month in late 2020 as a result of weakening demand for large jets. The model is now a key source of cash for Boeing, especially while the smaller MAX remains grounded by regulators world-wide.
Boeing spends roughly $3 billion a quarter to face debt payments and the dividend that has helped retain investors through the crisis. But producing MAX jets without selling them is creating a quarterly cash drain that seems to amount to between $4 billion and $7 billion, forcing the company to issue debt.
Excerpt from WSJ
A panel of international air-safety regulators is finishing a report expected to criticize the initial U.S. approval process for Boeing Co. BA -0.24% ’s 737 MAX jets, according to people briefed on the conclusions, while urging a wide-ranging reassessment of how complex automated systems should be certified on future airliners.
As part of roughly a dozen findings, these government and industry officials said, the task force is poised to call out the Federal Aviation Administration for what it describes as a lack of clarity and transparency in the way the FAA delegated authority to the plane maker to assess the safety of certain flight-control features. The upshot, according to some of these people, is that essential design changes didn’t receive adequate FAA attention.
The report, these officials said, also is expected to fault the agency for what it describes as inadequate data sharing with foreign authorities during its original certification of the MAX two years ago, along with relying on mistaken industrywide assumptions about how average pilots would react to certain flight-control emergencies. FAA officials have said they are devising new pilot-reaction guidelines after two fatal crashes.
Excerpt from WSJ
Indonesian investigators have determined that design and oversight lapses played a central role in the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 MAX jet in October, according to people familiar with the matter, in what is expected to be the first formal government finding of fault.
The draft conclusions, these people said, also identify a string of pilot errors and maintenance mistakes as causal factors in the fatal plunge of the Boeing Co. plane into the Java Sea, echoing a preliminary report from Indonesia last year.
Misfires of an automated flight-control feature called MCAS on the MAX fleet led to the nosedive of the Lion Air jet and a similar crash of an Ethiopian Airlines MAX shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa in March. The two crashes took 346 lives, prompted the grounding of all 737 MAX planes and disrupted the global aviation industry.
Excerpt from WSJ
LONDON—British travel agency Thomas Cook was born to cater to moneyed Victorians, taking them on grand tours around Europe and the U.S. It evolved over nearly two centuries into a charter service for European budget holidaymakers.
Early Monday, the 178-year-old company went bust, stranding as many as 500,000 of these modern-day globe-trotters and triggering what the U.K. government said was its biggest-ever peacetime repatriation.
The marooning of an estimated 150,000 U.K.-based travelers alone by the bankruptcy set off round-the-clock news coverage here. It also provided newly minted Prime Minister Boris Johnson —already fighting both the European Union and his country’s Parliament over Brexit—a fresh crisis.
Excerpt from WSJ
The new TWA Hotel at JFK cracks down on miserly aviation hobbyists; ‘it was getting crazy crowded’. At the rooftop pool bar at the new TWA Hotel, nobody watches as the sun sets over the distant Manhattan skyline.
But when a British Airways 747 takes off, a half a dozen heads turn in unison to admire a rare retro paint scheme on the jumbo jet: a midnight-blue belly and the airline’s coat-of-arms emblazoned on the tail.
“All the action is right in front of you,” says Eric Dunetz, who has whiled away several weekends at the pool bar since the hotel opened in May, sometimes for upward of 10 hours at a time. “It’s a good place to relax and just watch planes.”
Excerpt from WSJ
The aircraft maker’s Americas unit is digitizing the approval of expense reports and payment of invoices
An Airbus A350 XWB prepares for landing. The aircraft maker’s Americas division is using artificial intelligence to shave costs from its expense report approval process.
Airbus SE is using artificial intelligence to squeeze cost out of its finance function, an experiment launched in the aircraft maker’s Americas division that could save the corporation millions of dollars annually if rolled out in other regions.
It’s one of the latest examples of how companies across sectors are digitizing operations to increase efficiency, reduce human error and free up employees for tasks that require more human judgment, such as strategic planning, analysis and audits.
“Companies can now automate highly repetitive activity at a lower cost with a higher degree of accuracy,” said David Axson, head of the CFO consulting practice at Accenture Strategy, a unit of consulting firm Accenture PLC. “This especially applies to high-volume-use cases like accounts payable.”
Excerpt from WSJ
At the root of the company’s miscalculation was a flawed assumption that pilots could handle any malfunction
Almost as soon as the wheels of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 spun free from the runway March 10, the instruments in front of Capt. Yared Getachew went haywire.
The digital displays for altitude, airspeed and other basic information showed dramatically different readings from those in front of his co-pilot. The controls in Capt. Getachew’s hands started shaking to warn him the plane was climbing too steeply and was in imminent danger of falling from the sky.
Soon, a cascade of warning tones and colored lights and mechanical voices filled the cockpit. The pilots spoke in clipped bursts.
“Command!” Capt. Getachew called out twice, trying to activate the autopilot. Twice he got a warning horn.
Excerpt from WSJ