1. Is SGP41 (the one in your website) something that I can just insert into the PCB like how we could connect a computer case fan into the motherboard header or will it need soldering? Also, I saw in your build instructions that 2 tiny resistors have to be removed for SGP30 sensor. Is that the case with SGP41 as well?
2. Do you sell the "PRO Pre-soldered" kit or any other products/devices that come with SGP41 prebuilt? If not, is there an option to buy the "PRO Pre-soldered" one with SGP41?
3. Will the software automatically start reading SGP41 values or are any changes needed on software side?
I don't believe this at all. I see the exact opposite happening in my Indian company. They are encouraging women leaders so much. I am right now working with one who climbed 2 grades in 2-3 years (which normally would take several years), and she has an all female team now (which is discriminatory by the way). Her male Indian bosses encourage and support her so much, while my male managers treat me (a male) like shit most of the time.
Indian companies are required to give paid maternity leave of 26 weeks by the way.
I find it hard to believe that you live and work in India and don't believe this. It's literally everywhere, I'm glad your company isn't like that but even spending 15 minutes talking to someone working at an MNC will tell you that this is unfortunately common.
And India offering maternity leave does nothing to solve the prejudice against women by hiring managers.
Glad to hear your company is a good employer. This is just a guess but is it an Indian tech company? Culture is changing for sure but what’s happening at tech companies doesn’t shows the full picture (though it is also true the other way around). I know several women who were asked about their plan to start family in their job interview. I was myself asked a few years back about my family background and I decided to hide that my father was ill.
The fact that India doesn’t have strong labor laws allows all this to happen. Many existing laws were created for factories and the way they are worded they exclude many present day industries. Also, this is all when considering white collar jobs. Blue collar jobs are just another level of misery.
Again, happy for you but there are people who have suffered because of these practices.
Infosys stopped hiring Indians in US at least 2-3 years ago, may be before President Trump moved out. Al their job ads (in Indeed) would have this line: "U.S. citizens and those authorized to work in the U.S. are encouraged to apply. We are unable to sponsor at this time."
Majority of those who need visa sponsorship are Indians & Chinese.
And this is not just Infosys. I have seen the same wording in job ads of many American companies.
My friend who worked in Infosys told me that they were so desperate to hire Americans that they conducted a job fair and if selected, they would give offer letter on the same day.
I am pretty sure Infosys did this because of all the negative media about them preferring to hire Indians in US causing Americans to loose jobs.
I have a relative that worked for a US medical company. There were certain people who would take women's lunches out of the microwave right in front of them just so they could cook their own. She said they were mostly from the south central area of Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangledesh). It was only a few individuals, not everyone.
Obviously this is a secondhand story, so I can't vouch for it directly. I was shocked and could barely believe what I was hearing.
Technology firms in India have a better female to male staff ratio than the tech giants of Silicon Valley [1].
India has a much better male-to-female ratio compared with the U.S. Engineering male-female ratio in India is 1.96 as compared with 4.61 in the U.S.
The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.
"The sun rises each morning" is also a provable fact but has no correlation (I guess) to the alleged ghosting of women by Indian men in the US. Again I'm not understanding the argument.
Absolutely there is more gender parity, largely because the type of IT work done by the bodyshop firms like Infosys and TCS is more like a decently paid white collar McJob than anything else. You see a lot of female developers in Infosys because it’s (accurately) seen in the same universe as accounting or secretarial work.
Yes, when I was there for training a large 20+ person team, the women stood out as some of the best & the brightest doers. Unfortunately none of them were ever onshored or promoted up. They were all kept behind the scenes while the men tried to control the comms to onshore.
The pattern seems to be that as a country becomes more gender-equal, gender-specific preferences become stronger: "the more that women have equal opportunities, the more they differ from men in their preferences"
Common! This gets brought up all the time when the topic is Boeing. Max's issue had nothing to do with the outsourced software. Netflix has a documentary called 'Downfall' which talks about what all went wrong. AirBus also outsources, they haven't crashed right?
When I mentioned AirBus, I was thinking of this - that the Max crash is clearly due to corporate greed. I am not aware of any such scenario with AirBus. Not only that, according to the Netflix documentary, Boeing was trying to blame the pilots of the Indonesian and Ethiopian airlines initially. Then in turns out that the Indonesian pilot was an Indian who was trained in US, and the Ethiopian pilots followed Boeing's guidelines on MCAS failure properly.
I am looking at these blames on outsourcing from that perspective - that Boeing is trying to blame others to hide their greed.
> the Ethiopian pilots followed Boeing's guidelines on MCAS failure properly.
The Ethiopian pilots did not follow the procedure in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive distributed to all MAX pilots that says:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any
stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be
used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB
TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be
used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved
to CUTOUT."
Thanks for the links. I am not trying to refute what you said above. But I don’t want anyone to think that I am spreading misinformation here. So I checked the Netflix Downfall documentary again. It says at 34:30 that the pilots did what Boeing instructed them to do.
The documentary talks about the Ethiopian crash from 32:00 onwards. The below excerpt is from 34:30 onwards. Name of the person talking is in '[]' brackets.
[Pasztor] Soon after the hearings got underway, we managed to get more information about what actually happened in the cockpit of the Ethiopian aircraft. We got the information from the FAA within hours after they received it from the Ethiopian investigators. It was very late at night, and we tried to put together the most comprehensive story we could. When it came out, this was the first story that revealed that the crew, in fact, realized that MCAS had kicked off. And they did what Boeing instructed them to do.
[Tajer] When the MCAS kicks in, it runs for ten seconds and pushes the airplane very powerfully nose-down. Runs for ten, off for five. Runs for ten, off for five.
[Cox] They’ve got this cacophony of stick shaker, master cautions, airspeed disagree, altitude disagree. All of these…these warnings going off. The captain, who’s flying the airplane, is trying to figure out what’s gone wrong.
[Tajer] The first officer called out, “Stab trim cutout switches, Captain.” I think he said it twice. He did what Boeing said. He turned off the MCAS system. I remember reading that, and I said, “Man, the kid got it right. The kid got it right”.
[Cox] The problem now is that the airplane is going too fast. And because of the force on the tail itself, they cannot manually trim the airplane to be able to recover.
That is not following the instructions in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive issued to all MAX pilots:
"Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any
stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be
used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB
TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be
used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved
to CUTOUT."
The airframe was changed significantly, creating the need for the whole MCAS solution — why? Because this was seen as a solution to avoid a recertification of the airframe, which would mean pilots had to re-train, which would mean airlines wouldn't buy, which means money would not flow.
Avoiding this recertification was the only reason MCAS was chosen instead of designing an airframe in such ways the now bigger engines actually have their center of gravity where it is expected to be.
This was ultimately a cost saving measure. Boeing could not be bothered to recertify the airframe purely for comercial reasons, not because it objectively made sense.
There is nothing wrong with making an airplane behave like the previous version. In fact, it enhances safety, as pilots can and do make errors when under stress they do the right thing for the wrong airplane. Making airplanes predictable and consistent with existing training is a safety enhancing practice.
I worked on the 757 design, which was designed concurrently with the 767. A lot of effort was made to make them behave in a common manner, even though they were quite different airplanes. This makes perfect sense.
It's the same reason the steering wheel and pedals on your car are laid out the same and do the same things across nearly all very diverse cars. And yes, carmakers adjust the handling characteristics to be predictable and not need the drivers to have additional training.
Boeing had originally proposed a new small aircraft (with carbon fiber), but the airlines did not want this as it would have higher operations costs to have two different types of aircraft, so Boeing had to come up with a new 737, and the MAX was it.
Boeing was claimed to have "known the FAA would not certify a dual sensor system without Level D simulator training".
This was from an insider at the time, and admittedly, I've not heard of an identity being put to them, but that signal was claimed to have been there.
There is also corroborating evidence that the Chief Technical Pilot actively dissuaded customers who asked for simulator time anyway, characterizing it as unnecessary. I don't have those at my fingertips right now, and unfortunately, my memory is failing me as to whether or not an "oh shit" moment was had at some point as to whether the Chief Technical Pilot had mischaracterized the system to regulators.
I just remember I thought it was awful convenient at the yime that this Chief Technical Pilot had all the hallmarks of a scapegoat for management to start piling blame on, and being glad he got independent counsel instead of relying on Boeing's General Counsel.
Thanks for that bit of information, I didn't know that. It sounds like it could be true. But being uncorroborated, and considering all the false information swirling around the issue, I'd want some confirmation.
I watch every episode of "Aviation Disasters". On more than one, the pilots would get some warning light and would ask each other what it meant. That implies that simulator training is not required for every warning light.
I figure we'll find out more if/when a criminal case is finally brought and prosecuted, until then, I consider anecdotally credible. Here's those texts and articles btw...
It seems they never leveraged anything more from this supposed whistleblower, so until more is seen, it's kinda moot. Still thought Forkner was a fall guy for bad management though.
That, of course, immediately raises the question of why, then, this was not done.
There is a proximate answer that still does not get us to root causes: An MCAS failure was rated as a Major condition as opposed to Hazardous, in which case the regulations allowed (but did not, of course, require) a single source of input.
This rating was arguably justifiable for the 737 MCAS in its original form, but its power had to be increased significantly after flight testing revealed the original version to be inadequate.
As it happens, the 737 MAX airframe was not the first use of MCAS: the KC-46 also has it. Despite the fact that this system is less powerful than that which was fitted to the initial production 737 MAXs, it uses two AofA sensors. There is clearly a strong and obvious engineering case for doing so, so simply observing that Boeing did not have to do so does not exhaust the questions that should be asked.
I have seen it stated in several places that using two AofA sensors would have required a warning in the case of their being in disagreement, which in turn would require it to be mentioned in the AFM, which might have prompted a reevaluation of the no-training decision, either directly or through a reevaluation of the risk classification. Unless a smoking gun has been found, Boeing can stonewall on whether the training concern suppressed a full and objective evaluation of the risks posed by MCAS (especially after its strengthening), and thereby improperly influenced design decisions (among other issues), but the concern is obvious to everyone except those who want to avoid considering it.
> That, of course, immediately raises the question of why, then, this was not done.
Which I raised in the antecedent post.
I did not write that Boeing "did not have to" have dual sensor input. I said if they did have dual sensor input, and had done the other changes to the software, in my not-so-humble opinion additional simulator training would have been entirely unnecessary.
The other question I have is why two sets of pilots did not understand what the STAB TRIM CUTOFF switch was for, despite it being in a very prominent position on the console and is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning the pilot should not have to look it up in an emergency. That indicates inadequate training, whether the airplane had MCAS or not.
Keep in mind that the first MCAS incident, which is never mentioned by the press, landed safely because the crew simply turned off the misbehaving trim system. That crew didn't even seem particularly concerned about it after they landed.
>> That, of course, immediately raises the question of why, then, this was not done.
> Which I raised in the antecedent post.
You did, in the sense that you wrote "I've never seen an explanation for why this mistake was made." That does not mean it is somehow wrong for me to also make that point as a prelude to continuing that line of thought.
> I did not write that Boeing "did not have to" have dual sensor input...
And I did not say that you did. I pointed out that this would not be a full answer to the question that both of us raised.
> ...in my not-so-humble opinion additional simulator training would have been entirely unnecessary.
I very much doubt that Boeing was at all concerned about what you or I think. It is rather more plausible that it was concerned about what the FAA might think, especially if the FAA also understood the extent to which MCAS's power had been increased.
And nothing else you have written here has any bearing on the possible motives behind Boeing making a decision that you yourself call a mistake - one which was made before these incidents.
> To him, it is perhaps closer to humiliating and debilitating
Exactly. Considering what I went through already, I can't even think of spending the next couple of years like that hoping I will get GC one day. If I go through again even half of what I went through already, the stress alone will kill me soon. I already lost all my memory - I don't remember anything about my past, no memory of my childhood, parents, school. What I went through probably shortened my life by 10 years. And I am worried if I will get dementia because of that.
Its really disappointing that people are using his gender and caste as excuses for dismissing whatever he went through.
How often will one have to deal with Indian bureaucracy? Its very rare. Being on the GC backlog means I always have to deal with the bureaucracy and at the mercy of my employer. It simply takes away any hope I have, I will always be on the h1b leash. Considering what I went through the last couple of years, I simply don't have the courage to deal with h1b any more. If I could find a job in India, I will pack up this instant.
1. Is SGP41 (the one in your website) something that I can just insert into the PCB like how we could connect a computer case fan into the motherboard header or will it need soldering? Also, I saw in your build instructions that 2 tiny resistors have to be removed for SGP30 sensor. Is that the case with SGP41 as well?
2. Do you sell the "PRO Pre-soldered" kit or any other products/devices that come with SGP41 prebuilt? If not, is there an option to buy the "PRO Pre-soldered" one with SGP41?
3. Will the software automatically start reading SGP41 values or are any changes needed on software side?