United Airlines pilots said pedals that control rudder movement on the plane were stuck as they tried to keep the plane in the center of the runway during the Feb. 6 landing.

The pilots were able to use a small nose-gear steering wheel to veer from the runway to a high-speed turnoff. The rudder pedals began working again as the pilots taxied to the gate with 155 passengers and six crew members on the flight from Nassau, Bahamas, according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Boeing said this is the only rudder-response issue reported on a Max, although two similar incidents happened in 2019 with an earlier model of the 737 called NG or next generation, which has the same rudder-pedal system.

The manufacturer said the issue was fixed by replacing three parts. The plane has made dozens of passenger-carrying flights since then, according to data from FlightAware.

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 months ago

    It is one of the annoying side-effects of capitalism. Many companies start in a good place with quality setting them apart from others, and they then experience natural organic growth. Then they go public, go through some merger/takeovers, the original owners are either forced out, retire, or die, and at that point, the focus is shareholder profits and not what got them there.

    Their lack of QA eventually catches up with them, people die, bad things happen. They’ll up their quality, hire QA engineers again, claim they are doing the best for quality for a few quarters until the public eye is off them. Then they’ll just start cutting quality back again.

    Publicly traded companies eventually never care about quality, or safety, or human lives. It is in their nature.

    • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOP
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      8 months ago

      Last week’s John Oliver had a great episode on how Boeing backslid after merging with McDonnell Douglas.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Hilarious. We either let corporations kill people or we live in Russia. There’s nothing in between there. Nothing at all.

        • Tja@programming.dev
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          8 months ago

          In the latest Boeing news (door plugs, bolts, this rudder thing) there have been 0 deaths. Nothing at all.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            This time. Nobody went to prison for killing 400 people with MCAS or for lying about it after. And the documents that have come out prove they knew it was a deathtrap. Their own test pilots reported it was unrecoverable.

              • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                No it isn’t. You pointed out that the recent news has zero deaths. But it’s just a matter of time until something critical fails and a Boeing falls out of the sky. If we don’t hold them accountable for previous failures, they will not change.

      • Rusty Shackleford@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        The prevalence of incompetence in large organizations and institutions is independent of economic and political systems, and is more so from the dilution of talent and accountability as it grows.

        • Tja@programming.dev
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          8 months ago

          Well, that’s not what the guy above said, it’s all capitalism’s fault, apparently.

          • Rusty Shackleford@programming.dev
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            8 months ago

            One of my favorite activities, as someone who had to actually read both Adam Smith and Karl Marx in college, is to ask AnCaps and Tankies (and pretty much every other political and economic pontificator) to strictly define capitalism and socialism. Then I ask them if they think “pure” versions of those systems have ever existed.

            🅖🅞🅞🅓 🅣🅘🅜🅔🅢

          • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOP
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            8 months ago

            Last week John Oliver essentially said it is both, with capitalism (stock buybacks and cost cutting) being primary.

            • Tja@programming.dev
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              8 months ago

              So is Airbus also equally bad? Also capitalist economy…

              Or is it maybe greed, which exists in any system, and in this case has cough up with Boeing and the drop in share price is exactly what they wanted to prevent?