Chapter 1: What led to Boeing's decline from a respected engineering firm?
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There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos Podcast. And for Mental Health Awareness Month, we'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety.
I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic.
This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans.
I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program.
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The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you.
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Chapter 2: How did the 737 MAX become a controversial aircraft?
So they said, you know what, we don't need this redundancy. It's not necessary. Which is still, it's just insane. Like that is a basic principle. Redundancy is a basic principle of any engineering, right? And it just, I don't, I still couldn't find why they made that decision, why it was so much harder for that to have the sensors have to match. It's just nuts.
But as we'll see, somebody clearly forgot to carry the one because that calculation they came up with for that probability was not correct. Yeah, not correct. So there was another thing that they did. They didn't tell anybody about the MCAS. Yeah, this is the one that really gets me.
they created this was brand new no one had ever created something like the mcast before it wasn't like they took an existing software and just kind of redesigned it they made new software to do a brand new thing that hadn't been done before and then they didn't tell anyone about it and again just want to reiterate the mcast took over the controls from the pilot if you were the pilot
you were no longer in control of the plane while the MCAS was bringing the nose back down to a more suitable angle of attack. Imagine that happening and you having no idea what's going on because you don't know the MCAS exists.
Yeah, and all of this is because they don't want to, again, make the plane less appealing to buyers, to airlines, because they're going to have to invest a lot of money in pilot retraining and even as simple things as flight manuals and stuff like that. Supposedly, I mean, it was reported at least that Boeing made a deal with Southwest Air that said, hey, if you buy enough planes from us,
And if you don't require your special training for the pilots, like save yourself some money, we'll give you a discount on these planes. And Boeing lobbied the FAA, like actively lobbied them to allow them not to make any mention of the MCAS in the manual. Like, we don't even want this in the flight manual. And the FAA said, sure. Yeah, they said, OK.
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Chapter 3: What were the critical design flaws in the 737 MAX?
Boeing told them that it was such a minor part of an already existing system, I think the existing airspeed sensor system, that it was not worth mentioning. And the FAA, like you said, they're like, sure, that's fine. They also didn't even put an indicator light for it in there. That's how secret they kept this thing. So you would have no idea it was on, right? Right.
So this was like, that was, you might be stunned that the FAA just went along with that. It also shows you that they didn't, they had no idea what the MCAS was. They didn't go and look and say, well, let us see if it's actually important or not. Tell us what this thing is. Later on, FAA officials, some of them would testify they didn't get the MCATs. They didn't understand what it was.
And they really were encouraged not to ask too many questions. So they just said, sure, if you guys don't think that it's worth mentioning, we won't make you. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, this is all, you know, how I mentioned at the beginning, part of the systemic failures of just how things work.
So we should talk a little bit about that as far as the FAA is concerned, because when they were formed in 1958, it was pretty clear right out of the gate that their kind of co-mandates could often be in conflict with one another, which was to promote the interest of the aviation industry and very important to promote the safety of the flying public.
So they knew pretty quickly that like those, like I said, those don't always align. So Congress in I think 1967 said, all right, maybe we should have a new agency that really guides the safety side. So they created the National Transportation Safety Board And they're like, they'll keep everybody safe and recommend regulations to the FAA to enforce, but they can't demand that.
The FAA has never, like, had to do the things that they're suggested to do. Right. It's just the NTSB is looking out for the safety, but the FAA doesn't have to enact it because, again, that might conflict with the interests of the aviation industry. And that stuck out to me, Chuck, that the safety of the flying public isn't always in the interests of the aviation industry.
It should 100% of the time be in the interests of the aviation industry. Yeah. That's just my take. Hot take. But what ended up happening was the FAA said, all right, well, you know, we're good at the industry stuff, so why don't we just let Boeing, like they know planes, why don't we let them handle their own certification process?
And it wasn't, I mean, that seems to be sort of standard practice. It wasn't like some big exception was made, right? Yeah, no, they have a name for it. Organizational Designation Authorization. The FAA can say, like you just said, you know a lot about what we want and what we require.
We're just going to let you go through and verify that all this stuff adheres to FAA requirements and guidelines. And then you come back and tell us If it does, you, planemaker, certify your own plane and tell us if we should certify it in turn. And that's exactly what it is. That's that process. Yeah. They're like, hey, here's what you do. Just do it all.
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