Have you ever dealt with Transport Canada?
Because I have.
And I'd disagree with your apparent suggestion that they're incompetent.
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Boeing 737 Max 8
- Thread starter nobbie48
- Start date
Have you ever dealt with Transport Canada?
Because I have.
And I'd disagree with your apparent suggestion that they're incompetent.
Roadghost
Well-known member
What did you deal with them for?
Well, without giving away more PIA than I really like to online, for one, my pilots licence....to start.
Roadghost
Well-known member
Great. I look forward to seeing you fly a 737 Max. I just won't be on it.
Well, that escalated quickly.
Posts unsubstantiated claim based on an opinion that isn't based in reality and gets refuted based on first hand real life experience.
Jumps to conclusion regardless.
I see.
Marc Garneau is a pretty cool fellow, FWIW.
Roadghost
Well-known member
Says the guy who fancies himself a Transport Canada expert because he got a pilots license from them. Quit trying to pick a fight troll.
What, substantiating an opinion with actual real world first hand experience is now considered "trolling"?
Hey, you know Transport Canada oversees more than just aviation as well, right?
So, do share - what's was your experience that caused you to form your opinion that they're apparently incompetent nincompoops?
Hey, you know Transport Canada oversees more than just aviation as well, right?
So, do share - what's was your experience that caused you to form your opinion that they're apparently incompetent nincompoops?
Roadghost
Well-known member
Since you've elected to make assumptions as usual, let me fill you in. In 1984 I had to do a research paper on motorcycle safety. I zeroed in on the most obvious contentious issue at the time, coming on the heels of the last jurisdiction in Canada to enact a helmet law. There was a fair bit of resistance to that, culminating in one rider paying his Manitoba no-helmet fine in pennies dumped all over a counter in anger.
Transport Canada at the time had a convincing pro-helmet campaign through their subsidiary Road Safety Canada, which had successfully helped get seatbelt laws decreed throughout the provinces. There was trouble in safety lotus land however. A study on those recently enacted laws by a man named MacArthur torpedoed the lofty claims of government on the effectiveness of the laws. Peer-reviews and basically flawless MacArthur showed that the result of the seatbelt legislation had been if anything, negative.
So, seeing statements like "helmets are 35-65% effective" at reducing fatal injury and "how can we let the bloodbath on our highways continue?" made me just a little skeptical. There was an ongoing helmet law debate raging in the United States, with thousands of bikers protesting their federal governments attempts to strong-arm states into forced helmet useage. That resistance was interesting but even more intriguing was a peer reviewed study (Adams JGU Public Safety Legislation and the Risk Compensation Hypothesis) showing that U.S. motorcycle fatality rates had not gone down at all after helmet laws were enacted, but actually went up.
So, I decided to ask the question, if helmets are 35-65% effective at reducing injury (something that seemed entirely credible) what was the effect of those laws on the fatality rate in Canada? To that end I got in contact with Stats Can who steered me to Road Safety Canada and I put in a request for the raw data on motorcycles. Of course, being a non-political entity (as we KNOW all Canadian government agencies are ha, ha) I felt I could expect excellent cooperation. "What do you want the data for?" I was asked. "Well we have studies on that already and we found that..." It seemed there was a bit of resistance but I eventually received data from the FARS (Fatal Accident Research) system that looked legit, but as I performed my calculations things I got some astonishing results and contacted Bruce Reeve at Cycle Canada Magazine who did a follow up on the numbers and found that Road Safety Canada had sent the wrong data. I actually got pedestrian fatalities. Well, what a surprise. Was that incompetence? Or was it some idiot at Transport Canada trying to steer me wrong?
I eventually did get the correct data after a lot of foot-dragging from these dopes. I never did find any significant long-term changes in the Canadian motorcycle fatality rate before and after helmet laws. Nationally, the aggregated effect of the laws over a 10 year period before and after was about .4 per 10,000. If the data was correct that would missile the propaganda being spun out by myraid reasearchers, some of it coming from Transport Canada. Can't imagine why they'd jerk me around. I questioned just how legit that data was, and the competence an interest of the people in charge of it.
So, I'm expected to have faith in the same government department rubber stamping a plane that has proven deadly a number of times over, and argue with a guy who got a bush pilot license from them 'cuz he just thinks they're great and loves to start arguments. Again, feel free to fly in the Max. Feel free to fly one. Take Transport Canada with you. I'll wait several years.
A few comments.
- 1984 was 35+ years ago.
- Yes, someone screwed up and sent you the wrong data. Fair enough. But to jump to the conclusion that it was an intentional effort to mislead is arguably a stretch. Did you pursue the issue to get the correct data?
- One person who did their job poorly doesn't necessarily mean an entirely organization is incompetent. There's not many companies on the face of the planet that doesn't have some bad apples, but that doesn't mean the entire company is full of them.
Lastly, and OT to the thread, looking at helmet laws solely with the fatality numbers as a sole judgement of effectiveness is a massive mistake in drawing a conclusion on their overall effectiveness without including debilitating head injuries. Just because someone survived an accident without a helmet (but has needed someone to feed them and wipe their arse for the rest of their lives because they didn't have a helmet on that could have made that low speed crash a complete non event so far as a head injury versus making a vegetable out of the person) is a very shortsighted approach to the issue. My wife crashed last summer..I should post a picture of her helmet she was wearing at the time. Had she not had it on she'd have almost certainly suffered a head injury.
- 1984 was 35+ years ago.
- Yes, someone screwed up and sent you the wrong data. Fair enough. But to jump to the conclusion that it was an intentional effort to mislead is arguably a stretch. Did you pursue the issue to get the correct data?
- One person who did their job poorly doesn't necessarily mean an entirely organization is incompetent. There's not many companies on the face of the planet that doesn't have some bad apples, but that doesn't mean the entire company is full of them.
Lastly, and OT to the thread, looking at helmet laws solely with the fatality numbers as a sole judgement of effectiveness is a massive mistake in drawing a conclusion on their overall effectiveness without including debilitating head injuries. Just because someone survived an accident without a helmet (but has needed someone to feed them and wipe their arse for the rest of their lives because they didn't have a helmet on that could have made that low speed crash a complete non event so far as a head injury versus making a vegetable out of the person) is a very shortsighted approach to the issue. My wife crashed last summer..I should post a picture of her helmet she was wearing at the time. Had she not had it on she'd have almost certainly suffered a head injury.
Roadghost
Well-known member
Your entire response shows that you're only interested in arguing, or you just plain don't understand. This isn't about helmets. It isn't about statistics. It's about incompetence and politics. Transport Canada, in the first round, had plenty of time to properly evaluate the 737 Max. They didn't do their job and people died, luckily not ours. Here we are the second time around and again, we're hearing about oversights from the very people we're paying to protect us.
Transport Canada, I suggest, saw the FAA findings and decided to make it look like they weren't just acquiescing by requiring some piecemeal training for Canadian pilots in addition. The clear insinuation being that once again, we're pretending pilots were the problem, or they didn't understand, or they just weren't trained. Once they understand the software, everything will be alright. Bullsht.
Boeing kinda forgot to clearly tell regulators about exactly how MCAS functioned, or the level of integration it entailed Transport Canada actually reported after the crashes started that they'd been misled.
It was all very unfortunate, but they could only evaluate systems to the extent they were informed about them - If you were tasked tomorrow with evaluating a new motorcycle that had, say, a collision avoidance emergency braking system, but it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the manuals or ever spoken of by the manufacturer during your evaluations, or perhaps glossed over, you might never even know it existed, much less tried to activate and evaluate it's performance, or consider potential points of failure accordingly.
Some look at it as being an apologist for TC's (and the FAA's, and every other worldwide governmental agency that also approved the Max) failures.
Some just look at it as being Boeing's fault in reality.
Care to elaborate on what "we're hearing about"? Genuinely curious.
Now that it's known, I think most pilots can deal with it. Suppressing it's existence and possible repercussions should get manslaughter charges for a bunch of boeing staff. Anything less is yet another failure to prosecute people with money and connections.
Roadghost
Well-known member
Didn't we just hear from the FAA about non-standard wiring? Was that issue addressed by TC?
As a point of interest: You remember the old Power Divider they had on trucks, that allowed drivers to lock the axle to dig out when they got stuck? Can you remember (about 25 years ago) when they introduced the Traction Control System (TCS) on the new trucks? Long before it was ever on cars. It was to stop the axle from spinning too fast when you locked the axle, thus preventing tire burnout and drive line damage. It worked by reducing power to the drives and/or applying the brakes. No worries, there was a still a switch that allowed the driver to turn the system off, in case he had to but...
...it didn't turn completely off. You could drive along a country road in sub-zero temps with the cruise on and suddenly when you crossed an iced over bridge the drives would spin, the TC would shotgun the brakes and you would be damn lucky if you didn't end up jackknifed. I would love to have seen the TC testing on that. Eventually someone caught on and it was fixed.
If we could trust manufacturers like Boeing to be honest about their products, we wouldn't need government testing. We're paying those guys to test. I expect it to be thorough.
Roadghost
Well-known member
My feeling is that when you turn a system off, it should be OFF.
Well it did turn off but the symptoms were so confusing, there was a complete lack of documentation and the best solution they were given was impossible to implement (trim wheel spun freely in simulator and required something like 70 lbs of force in the plane) that in at least one of the crashes, the pilots reactivated electric trim as they were having no luck recovering with the switches off.
That was back in February. I'm also not sure that sort of thing is part of any compliance checks - these sorts of wiring bundles are buried deep in the aircraft. There are regulations and guidelines relating specific to things like wiring and AFAIK (admittedly haven't looked into it much) it's mostly on good faith that they are adhered to. Boeing voluntarily declared they weren't, through whatever reasoning.
It's akin to governments dictating how fuel mileage or emissions are calculated and what is allowed, and what is not - things are tested by the regulating bodies to some extent, but it's impossible to check *everything* and some is left on good faith. When that good faith is breached we end up with things like the Volkswagen emissions scandal - VW knew what they were supposed to do but someone didn't follow the rules.
Yes I remember the early days of traction control, as I remember the early days of ABS on commercial equipment. Both had their problems but IMHO some of that was rooted in the fact the industry had been dragging their feet on the technology and were only pushed into things through regulation. I'm also not sure either feature needed TC's "blessings" to be introduced, either - the level of regulation and oversight in the aviation industry is not equal to the level of regulation and oversight in the vehicle industry.
BTW, TC systems on many tractors are still not entirely override-able - they are just downrated to allow *some* wheel spin to allow a driver to rock himself out of a situation (versus outright refusing it, which was indeed problematic), but it's been my experience now that the work more *with* you instead of against you - they'll limit wheel spin still even when "disabled" (but allow some spin), but will brake spinning wheels to allow power to shift to alternate wheels that may not be spinning - better the energy used vs wasted spinning.
My recent experience with traction control on any tractor I've operated in the last 10 years is that it doesn't slam on the brakes anymore if you break traction at speed, it just reduces power instantly to allow the wheels to regain traction. Brakes only come into play if the tractor starts to go sideways.
On that front, having experimented with the stability control systems as well...they are pretty freakin epic as well - long ago at a company far away from the one I work at now we used to blast around the yard in the snow fishtailing the tractors and doing donuts - lots of fun. The same physics were at work that causes jackknifes. Try that on a new tractor with stability control enabled - you can't even force it them to fishtail anymore by cranking the steering to bring the back end around much less just hammering on the brakes - as soon as the computer detects sideways motion it starts braking individual wheels to snap things back into line. Try all you want (without disabling the system) and it just goes around a corner like it's on rails for the most part. IMHO these systems have probably saved millions of jackknife accidents over the years.
Another gov't wrist slap. Boeings quest for profit while completely ignoring safety killed hundreds of people and today they were fined $2.5B for deceiving the FAA.
It sounds like a big number but they have made 450 and have a backlog of ~1000 planes. That is 1450 planes at ~125M each. That is 181B in revenue. The fine represents 1.4%. F that. Hundreds of people died. The fine needs to be very close to the profit margin so the whole program breaks even. Probably at least an order of magnitude higher would start to be in the ballpark for what they deserved. 1.4% sends a clear message that you can continue to do whatever you want without worry of meaningful repercussions.
www.cp24.com
It sounds like a big number but they have made 450 and have a backlog of ~1000 planes. That is 1450 planes at ~125M each. That is 181B in revenue. The fine represents 1.4%. F that. Hundreds of people died. The fine needs to be very close to the profit margin so the whole program breaks even. Probably at least an order of magnitude higher would start to be in the ballpark for what they deserved. 1.4% sends a clear message that you can continue to do whatever you want without worry of meaningful repercussions.
Boeing will pay $2.5 billion to settle charge over 737 Max
Boeing will pay $2.5 billion to settle a Justice Department investigation and admit that employees misled regulators about the safety of its 737 Max aircraft, which suffered two deadly crashes shortly after entering airline service.
www.cp24.com
Another gov't wrist slap. Boeings quest for profit while completely ignoring safety killed hundreds of people and today they were fined $2.5B for deceiving the FAA.
It sounds like a big number but they have made 450 and have a backlog of ~1000 planes. That is 1450 planes at ~125M each. That is 181B in revenue. The fine represents 1.4%. F that. Hundreds of people died. The fine needs to be very close to the profit margin so the whole program breaks even. Probably at least an order of magnitude higher would start to be in the ballpark for what they deserved. 1.4% sends a clear message that you can continue to do whatever you want without worry of meaningful repercussions.
Boeing will pay $2.5 billion to settle charge over 737 Max
Boeing will pay $2.5 billion to settle a Justice Department investigation and admit that employees misled regulators about the safety of its 737 Max aircraft, which suffered two deadly crashes shortly after entering airline service.
The 1.4% will come out of net profits so a bigger impact than what it sounds. They'll have to add $1.75 million somewhere to make it back. (Or use thinner parts) (Or need more frequent oil changes, blinker fluid tests)
Where do they stand with civil suits. Probably a paltry hundred million or so if it happens.
So the FAA who didn't really do their job gets 2.5 Billion and the families of the innocent ones that died might collectively get less than 1/10th of that. Less legal fees. Is it taxable income?
Forgive my jaundiced attitude.
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