Some lessons to be drawn after the 2 Boeing crashes

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A lot of things have been written about the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines Boeing crashes: political, circumstantial and even technical, but not really engineering, on the one hand, and no strategic view has been proposed on the other. This is the purpose of this paper to develop these last two points of view.

Let us begin with the engineering aspects. Let us briefly remind what the problem is. On the picture hereunder, you can see the “square shape” of the engine of a B737-400.

The reason for this shape is that the plane is “short legged”. Upon take-off, a circular traditional engine would hit the ground. Now, the Airbus A320 Neo, consists in the same A320 but with fewer consuming engines, which can be obtained by the increase of the double flux and results in an increase of the diameter of the engine. You can imagine how much this can be detrimental to Boeing which was already stuck with its B737. In order to compete with Airbus, Boeing decided to put the engines more to the front. You can see what it means on the following pictures for comparison.

The problem is that such a little change in the configuration has a big incidence. Indeed, it changes the aerodynamics and the centering. Therefore, for an engineer, it deeply changes the way to pilot it. The way Boeing treated the problem, a posteriori, does not seem to be very serious since they tried, as far as we can understand, to go around it through software. At no moment they seem to have figured out that centering a plane is a paramount activity and which is kind of an engineering art; and if you modify any piece of art, in particular with non-artists, you get no more art, but a piece of crap… On the system engineering point of view, it seems that Boeing has completely missed what the word “system” means and that you cannot make any apparently miscellaneous change on a big system without having a Damocles Sword above your head if you don’t go through all the system again to verify that it remains globally coherent.

Was it to be expected? The answer obviously is yes and does not only concern Boeing, but as well Airbus and all the other plane manufacturers. Indeed, for decades now, the planes all look the same. As an example, here is the French Caravelle which was designed in 1952.

It looks like any Boeing or Airbus, doesn’t it? So, what did the engineers do along those decades? They made minor changes: the wings, the rear controls, the engines place, etc. As you can see for the Caravelle, the engines are not under the wings and Airbus was able to change their place without any damage. So why Boeing failed this time? My opinion is the following. Along the decades, the engineers did not design new planes, they optimized the existing ones and reused already existing parts in order to reduce the costs. What is the result of this? It is that there is roughly no engineer in both Boeing and Airbus who is able to design any plane from scratch, but an already existing one. They are so much contaminated that if you present them any kind of revolutionary design, they will irremediably tell you that “this cannot work”. For comparison, look at what the people of the launcher sector said (I should say barked!) to Elon Musk and Space X for its recoverable launcher. There is unfortunately no Elon Musk on the horizon for aeronautics, but for sure if some new rich comer had any will to disrupt the aeronautics landscape, he would for sure succeed as much in this field as Elon Musk did in the field of launchers for the very same reasons and the ones explained in this paper.

But coming back to the original question, when you face a very optimized product and when the competition forces you to change anything, even something which seems to be harmless, then you have the risk to deeply damage the whole concept. I shall soon release a disruptive theory of systems (in the book Thu$ Work€d Humankind) which shows how such “harmless change” can in fact completely spoil the initial concept. And, of course, the nearer to the optimum you are, the bigger the risk is that you do so.

Let us now tackle the strategic point. There is a polemic about the role of the FAA which delegated the verification to Boeing. The reader should know that as much the EASA as the FAA, when they certify a plane, certify in fact about 5% of it. So, they already do not really certify anything. In addition, for EASA for example, the plane manufacturer has to pay the organization which is a so-called a public service and the cost is huge (about 237€/h and per person). For the A380 program, the global cost of certification was not far from €2 bn, all included. What can be the purpose to have any official stamp for the right to fly of a plane, which is, we just saw it, an optimization of a preceding one, made by a manufacturer which has built planes for more than 50 years? In fact, the only purpose of this is to increase the entry ticket. Because if these organizations only check 5% of a Boeing or Airbus, for sure, they would look much deeper into other designs by other manufacturers. Therefore, the only purpose of these agencies seems not to give more safety to the passengers, but to protect the existing actors like the godfather would protect its troops in the mafia. For the newcomers, like China with its C919, this imposes them to keep a traditional design and avoids any (dangerous to both Boeing and Airbus) breakthrough, so that even if people come with huge money, they will have difficulty in making any disruption.

What I would propose, as a consequence, is to dismantle these agencies totally, suppress all the rules, and replace all this by a norm about the statistics of accidents. As soon as the statistics would be out of the fixed limit and, of course, every time any inquiry commission would prove a mistake of the manufacturer (in case of accident), the responsibility would be on the shoulders of both the head of the company and its shareholders, the case being jailing them (and not the basic workers). This would impose them to take the life of the passengers as a serious issue. The same for the airlines and the maintenance.

In conclusion, it is time to rethink the aeronautics system and liberalize it. It is quite extraordinary that we are in a more and more liberal world, economically and that we still have regulation organizations which only are impeding newcomers, avoiding true competition and providing protection to old-minded, sclerotic engineers.