Comments by "GH1618" (@GH-oi2jf) on "Plainly Difficult" channel.

  1. Reluctant or not, the driver had a duty to stop, look, and listen. He didn’t.
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  2. It depends on whether you know what is happening in detail. Here, they clearly didn’t. The engineer was hoping for a cheap fix.
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  3. The NG has nacelles that look like a flat tire.
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  4. A lot of engineering is done in English units in the USA. For a strictly domestic project, it doesn’t matter.
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  5. It’s a state highway. The road was probably there first. FIU was established only in 1965 and that’s where they decided to build it.
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  6. The blame for that rests with FAA acting director at the time, Daniel Elwell, not with the United States generally.
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  7. The wind load is entirely separate from the dead load. If it had been completed without falling down, it might have withstood hurricane winds easily.
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  8. To allow farm equipment through, more expensive than building a suitable right-angle grade crossing.
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  9. Perhaps, but combined with marginal design.
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  10. The board was probably clueless except for Muilenburg, whe was both Chairman and CEO. Most of the board members at the time knew nothing about airplanes. They were just there for show. The current CEO was on the board then. The board was not performing its duty of oversight.
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  11. The traffic was interrupted when the span was moved into place.
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  12. Your 1st point is true enough, but outside the scope of the NTSB. On your 2nd point, the NTSB found that ABC was not a cause of the collapse.
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  13. The irony is, it didn’t look good.
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  14. The problem with MCAS has been fixed, and the solution was documented. There is no need to rehash it here.
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  15. exactly
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  16. MCAS for the KC-46 is more likely a completely separate product.
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  17. That would have been fast, cheap, and unsafe. It should have been a conventional steel truss.
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  18. AirSafe ranks the B737 as one of the safest airliners. The NG series has a crash rate of only 0.07 per million flights.
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  19. The university is far bigger than the claims that could be made against them for this disaster, which killed only a few people, especially considering that they were not solely responsible. I would be satisfied if their engineering school lost enough credibility to have to close.
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  20. The NTSB found that the concrete and steel met specifications.
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  21. The NTSB found that the concrete met specifications.
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  22. It was a high-speed train disaster. The high speed made it impossible for the train operator to see the obstruction in time to stop safely., and also increased the severity of the collision. There was no adequate system for deconflicting the two vehicles.
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  23. That would be an excessive response that would hurt a lot of innocent people. What should have happened is that the Engineer of Record should have lost his P.E. certifications. Perhaps other P.E.s as well.
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  24. It may have been able to withstand hurricane winds, but it couldn’t support its own weight. They are separate things.
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  25. The Engineer of Record, a P.E., did visit the site and more than once said the cracks were not a safety risk, even though they were steadily growing.
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  26. People who say that are referring to shrinkage cracks. I live in a reinforced concrete building. There are a few shrinkage cracks in some walls. There is nothing like what happened to the FIU bridge, though, which was undergoing structural collapse in plain view of the Engineer of Record, who said it was ok.
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  27. The Engineer of Record relinquished his license voluntarily.
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  28. Some bridges are art, but the structural engineering has to be the first priority.
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  29. There were no suspension cables planned for this bridge.
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  30. The I35W collapse was atypical. It was a weak design, underdesigned or built in a critical place, and overloaded during repair work. Every bridge failure is a unique event.
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  31. Bridges have collapsed in China as well.
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  32.  @peteconrad2077  — The Qantas 72 incident in a A330 was similar. It didn’t crash, but only by the narrowest of margins. Several people were seriously injured.
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  33. It doesn’t give me confidence in the reporter. It’s just snark. The reintroduced MAX has had no crashes at all. Its reliability should be as good as or better than that of the NG-series. Time will tell.
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  34. Yes. The center car should have had the monitoring equipment. The car on each end should be for the driver (and passengers). No need to turn the train around, just reverse it. No sightseers on an experimental train.
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  35. Technology that prevents trains from entering a curve too fast is more than 50 years old. Amtrak has had it in some places in the NE for 30 years. People often refer to Positive Train Control as the answer, but PTC today involves a lot of technology beyond basic speed protection. The complexity of PTC is used as an excuse for the long time being taken to implement it, but speed control for curves is simple. A transponder in the trackbed sends the speed limit to the train controls, which stop the train if necessary. No external computer network is required to implement this level of protection. There have been at least three derailments in recent years which would have been prevented by this technology.
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  36. It wasn’t stolen. The US and UK were allies in WW II. British Engineers worked with General Electric to develop the Whittle engine in the United States.
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  37. ABC was not at fault here.
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  38. The weight of the tower would not have been on the truss.
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  39. I’m wondering if Pate lost his P.E. license. He should have.
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  40. They are disgusting, but I have no qualms about flying on the reworked MAX or any other Boeing aircraft. I want Boeing to get better, not go out of the commersial airplane business.
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  41. MTN Productions — Moisseiff was a consulting engineer on the Golden Gate bridge. Charles Ellis was the design engineer.
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  42. If we forced companies out of business every time they made a major screwup, eventually we would have no large industrial companies and we would have to buy all of our atomobiles and aircraft from other countries, mostly from China. I don’t think that would be better.
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  43. A gigantic flop. The number of seats in all the B747s far exceeds the number of seats in all the A380s. The 747 was the aircraft that dominated intercontinental air travel.
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  44. Every new model of a commercial aircraft, such as one with a stretched fuselage, has a separate cerification. During the certification of the first MAX model, it was determined that the flight characteristics were sufficiently different that a new type rating would be required of pilots. Since one objective of the MAX was that it would not require a new type rating, the MCAS was developed to tweak the handling automatically to bring it into line with the NG models. The FAA went along with the concept. Where both Boeing and the FAA went wrong is that the implementation of MCAS was rushed and it was botched. On top of that, it was hidden. All that is well documented. Then they compounded the error by denying that there was a problem after the first crash. It was a shameful performance by both Boeing and the FAA, but the MAX is now fixed and flying safely. I have flown on it and have no concerns about its safety.
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  45. What is an “honest mistake” though. There must be accountability for negligence. In this case, there is mitigation in that there was not an adequate safety protocol in place. The managers of the system were partly to blame, in my opinion.
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  46. Not a problem if they had built four trusses — essentially two four-lane bridges, and if they had made the joints stronger. Then they could have worked on one bridge at a time with other carrying both directions of traffic temporarily. That would have been a much safer design. It would have cost more, but when you add in the cost of the failure, the cheap design does not look like a good deal.
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  47. It depends on where the brush is. I don’t think the railroad was primarily responsible. They were not required to have crossing gates at that location.
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  48. That would have required closing the road. It could not have been done with Accelerated Bridge Construction.
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  49. The public is better served by having competition in the airliner industry. Boeing should be fixed, not put out of the commercial aircraft business.
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  50. AvE speculated and got some things wrong. The OSHA and NTSB reports are the places to find the facts.
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