This article, along with other articles I’ve seen about this, talk about the door plug being “opened”. This brings to mind an interesting comment from a few days ago:
You can “open” and “close” a door without documenting it. If you “remove” a piece of an airplane, you document it.
So perhaps a part of Boeing’s error is that they think about “opening” a door plug but they did not design it such that it could be safely “opened” and “closed” without special care.
As I understand it, the door plug is indeed an awkward in-the-middle design in that you can remove four bolts and do something resembling “opening” it without fully removing it. But if you open a door, the plane has better alert the pilots if you try to fly the plane without properly closing the door, and the plug has no such feature.
In a properly functioning quality and safety management system, there's no awkward in-the-middle. The "open door plug" procedure is a planned part of the construction, inspection and maintenance of the airplane. And even if there was a doubt, the thing to do in that case is stop and document the doubt, and then document the process of discussion of the doubt, and then document the decision, including whatever change to the quality system may be needed to avoid this doubt arising the next time.
The problem here is not that Boeing does not know how to run both the original quality system and the system to modify it if necessary. The problem is the quality culture that puts "implementing the quality system" above "make line go up" is degraded.
> they did not design it such that it could be safely “opened” and “closed” without special care
Silly take. There is nothing wrong with the design of the door plug, which as I understand it is over twenty years old with no other reported failures. "Special care" is standard procedure in aviation.
By this logic the wings/engines/etc. are all faulty because if you don't install the bolts, they might fall off.
The failure here is that the door was not reinspected after the bolts had been removed to “open” it. A reinspection would be required if had been “removed”, and I’d bet that wings are always inspected for proper construction and installation (because there’s no way to “open” the wings).
I don’t believe the parent comment is saying the design is poor, it’s about the process during assembly and maintenance.
Old, established design does not equal good. You should know that from the software world. It seems obvious now that a door plug design that has the same failsafe at pressure of the actual doors would be a good improvement.
I think the message of the rest of the comment thread is that a door has two states, "open" and "closed", and the processes around those states know about both of them and handle them appropriately.
Whereas a door plug can't be opened and only has one state, "installed", but the internal processes treated it as if it were a door, generating the documentation that would be appropriate for opening and closing a door (nothing) rather than the documentation that would be appropriate for removing and reinstalling a structural element.
Then, when the door plug wasn't reinstalled correctly, there was no system checking whether it had been "closed", because that concept doesn't apply to door plugs. Whereas an actual door, if it had been left open, would still have generated no relevant documentation, but the plane wouldn't have taken off in that state because the problem would have been obvious.
Oh the process and procedure for generating that documentation exists, it was just not followed.
The process for checking that the door plug bolts are correctly installed was simply skipped, as nominally no work had been done on it due to it not being marked as worked on.
So it was not re-inspected.
I’m sure the process exists. But I can understand how an employee could mess it up. If some fairly common work on an airplane involves opening a door, I imagine it’s okay to open and close the door without documenting it. (Just like (I imagine) turning on and off some lights or locking and unlocking a door, etc.) But now there’s a special kind of door (that’s really a plug but works a bit like a door and is literally called a “door plug”), and opening it involves removing four bolts but does not involve removing it completely from the fuselage. So, in a culture where there isn’t a checklist that gets followed for everything, they think “I opened the door (plug)” instead of “I partially removed the door (plug)”, and then they access the rivets (and document that!), and then they sloppily “close the door (plug)” and it is indeed “closed”. But they might not be thinking “I reinstalled the door (plug),” and they don’t check the checklist or fill out the form, and no one ever tracked those four bolts, and a near-catastrophe occurs.
So one might argue that calling this thing a door (plug) and “opening” it is a mistake. And one might argue that a design that “closes” a bit like a door but isn’t correctly installed when it looks closed is a poor design.
I honestly think the flaw is in the name. It's /not/ a door. It's a temporary hole in the airframe that's used when the interior is installed, and it can be _converted into a door_ if the airline/regulations require additional entry/egress points.
Now they call it a "door plug", and the technician working on it searched the QA SOP document for the right procedures and searched for "door" and "open" and got the SOP for "opening a door", which requires zero documentation after the work is done.
I'l know it's contrived, but it's so stupid that it might just be what happened.
Seems to be consistent. The NTSB report already corroborated most of this [1]. What they are trying to locate from my understanding is a record of the door being removed. Which the whistleblower already explained is a process that does not create an entry in the log:
> A removal should be written in either case for QA to verify install, but as it turns out, someone (exactly who will be a fun question for investigators) decides that the door only needs to be opened, and no formal Removal is generated in CMES (the reason for which is unclear, and a major process failure). Therefore, in the official build records of the airplane, a pressure seal that cannot be accessed without opening the door (and thereby removing retaining bolts) is documented as being replaced, but the door is never officially opened and thus no QA inspection is required.
It's a bit complicated as there are things that are mandatory according to some agencies and some that are only recommended but not required.
You would be surprised but the overwhelming majority of maintenance procedures and their bureaucracy is decided by airplane makers and airlines exactly because local authorities have different or no rules at all.
Besides who can know better than Boeing how to maintain a Boeing airplane? Same for other companies.
The issues arise when companies know that some procedure is required to be done and logged but shrug it off for whatever reason. Remains to be seen why.
From what I read, there was seperate decision channel to decide what had to be documebted how at Boeing, which is a big problem in itself.
The whistelblower account actually rracks, depending on which kind of documentation you talk about. You now, the lazy rethoric trick of providing a technically correct answer, what Boeing did, while still lying through obmission of the general point. If so, don't worry, the NTSB and FAA will find out.
I assumed the regulatory body define what kinds of documentation needs to recorded, not Boing. And noncompliance (including not being able to produce that documentation on request) with that might be a (criminal) offense.
And you are absolutely right. To some details, for anyone interested (from an EASA point of view, working in Europe I never had to bother directly with the FAA):
- regulators provide general rules to be followed
- companies define theirbway of complying with those rules, the Means-of-compliance, and relevant processes and tools
- regulators audit those, sign of on them and audit the final product, hardware, software and documentation (!) to make sure compabies have their shit in order
- deviations are documented and recorded on work order level, e.g. one has to remove a door plug even this isn't part of the work instructions; in this case, either some non-standard instructions exist to be pulled up or an ad-hoc obe is written, both have to signe off by quality before the work is done, then said work is duly documented on work order level and again signed off and checked by quality (this is the most common way to handle those individual non-conformities I came across in my career, there sure are others)
- the above has to be defined in a dedicated process description, which itself is subject to regulatory approval
- not following the above, even worse trying to mislead regulators and auditors about it, does amount to a criminal offense for the senior execs responsible / accountable, depending on circumstances (from what little I know, Boeing is extremely close to this, if line workers cheat there isbnothing obe can do besides firing them, at Boeing the issues are far more serious, deeper and far reaching than some individual worker cutting corners so, it seems).
This is exactly right, except that whenever there is a deviation there is a side channel conversation of "How can we fix this without needing to do all this paperwork, while still complying with the regulations?" between the factory floor, quality, and the engineers.
For example perhaps a rule says "you need to do an inspection when a panel is removed" so the engineers and quality will get together and say "what if we just have the technician remove a couple screws on the panel and peek under it, then the panel hasn't technically been removed so we don't need to do the inspection". And then it turns out they remove all but one screw and twist the panel completely away so it's basically open but not "removed". And, it's all there in the work instructions, exactly what they did, but if anyone asks they can say "oh no, we didn't REMOVE the panel". And of course, the actual work instructions are only viewable in some 1970s green screen terminal or an all-caps printout thereof that comes in a multi-binder acceptance packet.
> You now, the lazy rethoric trick of providing a technically correct answer, what Boeing did, while still lying through obmission of the general point.
Sounds exactly like MCAS.. That omission. I thought that was just to preserve the same type certificate without retraining but it seems like a more systemic problem then.
Interesting, but a simplistic analysis. It could very well be the case that the thing being talked about the most in earnings calls (in this case, production) is being talked about because it's constantly being missed, whereas the stuff that is going well aren't being talked about. Like how the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
I said somewhat unpopularly at the time that this is not an incident that should meet with curious blameless fact finding but instead the many responsible parties need to be stomped for negligence by the legal system.
Boeing’s board needs to be fired and some executives probably need jail time. Given the defense position of Boeing, the executive branch should probably take some direct action outside the judicial system once there are some more clear cause and effect facts about what’s going on at Boeing.
> not an incident that should meet with curious blameless fact finding
The NTSB "fact finding" is intentionally and necessarily blameless, because if it becomes a prosecutorial investigation then you lose cooperation of everyone involved. If you lose that cooperation, you can't work out what caused an accident, and so the same accidents keeps recurring.
The entire point of the NTSB is to find what caused the accident, and that's not going to be "Sarah was tired that day", "Frank was distracted by his kid's academic struggles", etc. That might be relevant (a common action by budget carriers use to be frequent schedule changes for line pilots, so that they had "sufficient" sleep by the law but were being forced to work through their circadian low, etc - stopping that took multiple crashes where the NTSB said "this is the cause"), but it isn't going to be the cause here. Afaict it takes multiple people to install the plug, all of whom failed to do or check the bolts, Boeing has a lot of cross checks, none of them caught this, Alaska did an acceptance flight and had performed maintenance, but did not catch this, etc.
Firing the mechanics involved doesn't tell you why they messed up, it doesn't tell you how this got through checks, it doesn't do anything other than provide retribution. It doesn't even do anything to the people who presumably created the environment that allowed this to happen.
So instead of trying to get retribution, we try to discover what made it possible for this to happen, so we can stop the same thing happening again in future. That is how flying got as safe as it is today.
People who cause accidents due to criminal behavior, or corporations that cause the accidents due to criminal behavior, can be charged or sued, but saying "I want people punished so lets sabotage the accident investigation, and inhibit our ability to prevent them in future" is counter productive.
>The NTSB "fact finding" is intentionally and necessarily blameless, because if it becomes a prosecutorial investigation then you lose cooperation of everyone involved. If you lose that cooperation, you can't work out what caused an accident, and so the same accidents keeps recurring.
The NTSB is a lovely organization but they're already calling out Boeing for not cooperating. They should continue doing what they're doing but a separate independent criminal investigation is in order. Jail time and large fines also help accidents from not recurring, preferably also legislative action and Congressional investigations. What is actually in order now is the legal discovery process to uncover what people are talking about, recording, failing to record, and otherwise documenting to bring to light the sources of the failed safety and reliability of these planes.
> Boeing’s board needs to be fired and some executives probably need jail time.
You're advocating for punishing specific people before any evidence has pointed to their guilt, which feels like the opposite extreme of treating everyone as blameless (which is also not what blameless fact finding is about, as other replies correctly pointed out).
>which is also not what blameless fact finding is about, as other replies correctly pointed out
Blameless fact finding is for dealing with errors and failures made in good faith. Far too many things have happened for these to be "good faith" errors and evidence and attitudes which have come out have made this plain. You stop being nice about it when foul play is the most reasonable suspicion at this scale.
>You're advocating for punishing specific people before any evidence has pointed to their guilt
The Boeing board should be replaced for what is already public.
>executives probably need jail
Notice the qualifier "probably". What I'm saying is this is what criminality looks like, the exact nature is still being investigated, but it should and is now being investigated like a crime instead of the normal flow for accidents which is the blaming fact finding which is only useful when everybody is actually interested in safety.
The blameless fact finding is necessary to know who to blame. The NTSB needs to know the answers to a bunch of whys about how things got to this point so they can work to prevent it in other aircraft. That requires them using their time-testing blameless process.
Afterward, criminal prosecutors can use those facts as leads to pull on when doing their investigation.
I don't think "blameless" means nobody can ever be held responsible if they actually did something truly malicious, negligent, etc. It's that the point of the investigation is to improve the system rather than assign blame. This is in stark contrast to the post by 'colechristensen assuming that someone must be responsible and that they should be "stomped for negligence".
I do think the person you're responding to phrased it poorly though. While a blameless investigation can result in someone being held liable (i.e. "blamed"), an equally valid result could be that nobody is blamed when no individual liability is warranted by the facts.
I suspect the people charged will be low level mechanics and assembly people and maybe a first level manager for appearances sake. You really think anyone at the executive level is getting arrested for this?
But to some extent it only proves the point. Boeing has been fucking up so badly for so long that the Feds won't give them anything that isn't a fixed price contract.
What makes people so convinced the door plug problem is obviously something that should be blamed on the executives? At the risk of being accused of shilling for corporate executives, convincing yourself that low level people can't be responsible for an issue before responsibility is determined feels like the wrong approach.
Part of being a leader is taking responsibility for the actions of those you are in charge of. Obviously it wasn't an executive who failed to properly install bolts, which is the proximate cause of the failure, but someone above the worker should have noticed the missing bolts when they were doing the documentation, someone above that should have noticed the missing documentation when they were auditing, and someone above that should have noticed the missing audit, and so on and so forth up the ladder until you get to an executive that doesn't have someone doublechecking their work. Now maybe the problem was noticed and an executive did take action but for some reason a subordinate deceived their superior into thinking they were following the directions when they weren't, but that seems at best highly unlikely. Even if that is what happened, the deception would have to be very elaborate for the executive to not be responsible for independently verifying that their orders were being properly followed. For better or worse, you don't get to take credit for the successes of those beneath you without also taking the blame for their failings.
I have a couple books here that carry terms like DO-178C, ISO 26262, IEC 62304 and so on on their covers. All that paperwork, all these processes, all that has a single reason: To make doubly^N sure that humans, who love to do all sorts of mistakes, don't.
Creating environments where these processes are kicked into the bucket in whatever way is NOT what workers do, it is coming from the very top. Do I need to continue on ... ? Maybe about what happens to workers if they try to do the right thing? Ever heard about engineers at Boeing who spoke up ... ?
It is time the head honchos not just at Boeing but more generally get to see that accountability, responsibility, and all these other fancy words also have some actual meaning. We have to stop playing this stupid game of "deferred responsibility", because in the end it is not a company but humans making decisions and there are always consequences from that. Some just take a while to cause some effects and not all of them take the direct route, either. But that doesn't make the decision makers less/not responsible.
>You really think anyone at the executive level is getting arrested for this?
There is a current smell of Boeing not being particularly cooperative with investigation. That is the usual path that gets somewhat more important people charged for committing crimes. Various brands of lying, conspiracy, and evidence tampering where people get charge for what goes on during the investigation instead of the actual incidents.
If you look at the widely-circulated video, someone was sitting one seat over next to the hole. I believe seatbelt use is what prevented them from being forcibly expelled from the aircraft. This is another event that shows why keeping your seatbelt on whenever you're in the seat is a good idea.
No, he is being down voted for trying to be a smart ass.
The OP never said the main reason you should wear your seat belt is so you don't get sucked out the side of the airplane, just that massive plane construction failure is a reason. I remember an awful incident some years ago, where the roof of the plane came off when landing and everyone but a flight attendant lived because they were preparing to land. The flight attendant was in the aisle checking seat belts and preparing for landing and sadly was sucked out of the plane.
I can see how it would be taken that way. My point was that it's not a risk at all, in any meaningful sense; people are way overreacting to the risk of these events affecting them individually (not to Boeing's potential manufacturing issues).
> Also the only way to win the lottery is to play.
Seriously? The way to 'win' the lottery is to not play. I mean, have some fun if you like, but don't play for profit.
It was faded before because its score was <1. As far as I know, flagging a post doesn't do that; enough flags will [flagged] the post and even more flags will [dead] the post.
It still covered by wearing a seatbelt, you onow, ad one of those things were a seatbelt helps. I mean you cannot wear it while for turbulances and simultaniously not wear it in case the door next to you blows out. Schroedinger's seatbelt is not a real thing.
I’m about to fly on a Max-8 airplane in the next 2 hours. I can’t help but be very nervous about the fact that we are still unclear on what exactly happened.
This feels very much like the MCAS situation. They spun their wheels for months after the initial crash. And another tragic crashed happened due to the same issue.
Come on. Someone somewhere at Boeing knows exactly what happened. Even if they don’t want to reveal this, it’s not even clear to me if they now have better QC procedures to catch these kinds of issues.
> I can’t help but be very nervous about the fact that we are still unclear on what exactly happened.
It seems pretty clear from their initial report (which largely corroborates the whistleblower a few months ago), no?
The bolts were not reinstalled after they were removed to perform a QA fix.
If you mean beyond that, why weren't the bolts reinstalled, nothing too shocking there. The system of record between Boeing and their subcontractors, as well as their procedures to pass off work between companies and crews, is not sufficient to prevent lapses in workmanship like this.
The good news is, all of these door plug bolts are confirmed to be properly installed ;) They just grounded them all to do that. Now...what _other_ bolts are missing, well that's anybody's guess.
Kayak.com gives you the option to sort and filter plane types! It's now one of their most popular features. Lots of people are happy to filter out 737-MAX planes and pay more for other flights.
Who does, Kayak? The airline? I don't know about Kayak but that's not a thing with any airline contract of carriage that I'm aware of. In fact a lot of airlines explicitly say that their ticket does not guarantee particular equipment, seats, etc. Just that the airline will get you from the origin to the destination(s) in the cabin class you paid for.
Under what set of regulations? I only book flights on Airbus planes these days, but would like an extra insurance policy against switching in a Boeing.
Or, it allows consumers to make better informed decisions?
The United app and website also show equipment type under the "details" expansion. You can also filter searches by equipment type. Yes, it can change but it's correct the vast majority of the time.
god forbid Boeing sees a market reaction that is tied to consumers rather than investors when their shoddy worksmanship fails in a catastrophic manner, right?
Yes, but a lot of 737 Maxs are still on order, and if nobody wants to fly in those anymore, airlines will cancel those orders. Boeing still hopes to continue selling these planes, because it's apparently a very lucrative market segment.
There isba deep misunderstanding how aircraft purchases worm. Airlines run the numbers, and as soon as it becomes cheaper to buy a new one the old one gets replaced. Which model they choose depends a lot on their current fleet, switching from A320s to B737s and vice-verca is expensive, takes years and requires significant training of flight and maintenance crews. Only the big ones afford mixed fleets.
Add to that the fact that both, Boeing and Airbus, are fully booked for years to come, and it is pretty clear that the MAX isn't going anywhere as there are simply not enough alternatives to come by. Passengers aren't the ones deciding which planes are bought, airlines and leasing companies are.
There isba quite cynic name for passeneger: self-loading freight, also real freight doesn't complain.
I don't see anyone here misunderstanding any of that. But if passengers refuse to fly Boeing, that changes the numbers quite drastically. And empty fleet is not making money. Switching is expensive, but so is not flying at all, or being forced to fly at reduced rates. If flying with airlines using Airbus is more popular than flying with airlines using Boeing, Airbus airlines will be more profitable, and Boeing airlines will buy less planes. They won't be buying any planes if they go bankrupt.
"Passenger demand doesn't matter" is simply not true. Its effect is indirect, slowed, insulated, but it's still there. At least if sellers like Kayak enable differentiation by plane type.
Airlines are typically repeat buyers of airplanes. If customers avoid Boeing planes enough to hurt business that will affect future purchasing decisions.
It doesn't affect Boeing at all. Both, Airbus and Boeing are booked out for years to come. Airlines are buying those olanes, and quite frankly, passanger opinion doesn't factor into that much, if at all.
It helps Kayak so, more people booking there by selecting a certain model. And the airlines, they can easily price tickets for non-737 MAX flights higher now (they propably don't, but why not?). In the end, it is pointless: planes get swapped out all the time, so there is no guarantee dor the model to be correct. Unless you fly with an airline that has no MAX's in their fleet. In which case this whole Kayak thing is on the same level like vegan vegetables or lactose-free cheese.
Maybe I want to fly a specific model because it is more comfortable than the alternatives. Would I rather fly in a cramped 737 to Hawaii or a wide body airbus? Makes a difference to my comfort!
Comparing the safety of x to driving should be an official fallacy on par with Godwin's Law at this point (which in turn is no longer as firm as it once was). Driving is by far the most dangerous activity that most of us undertake on a regular basis, and is the leading cause of death in Canada among people aged 5-25, and remains in the top three until age 40 (after self-harm and drug use).[1] Switching your commute from a car to a bike or public transit will extend your lifespan, not because it's healthier, but because you're less likely to be killed by another car.
I’m pretty skeptical that switching a car commute to a bike commute increases safety.
Anecdotally I have seen a lot more bad bike accidents than car accidents, despite the number of bikes being much, much lower. This makes sense, since you are much more exposed when on a bicycle and while you are moving slower the cars aren’t.
If the stats do say this (I assume you have indeed read that somewhere), I suspect there is some large selection bias at play. Like, people with a safe bike route available are more likely to bike, which skews the numbers towards safe even though I imagine switching any random car commute to biking on the road would make it more dangerous on average.
Public transit of course makes sense, and I do wish biking in urban areas was safer since I don’t do it now because it’s dangerous and it would be great to be able to do it safely.
I think the proper way to compare bike and car fatalities is to compare deaths per mile traveled or, as this article does in a charming way, deaths per hour.
No definitely not, when we are talking about “Switching your commute from a car to a bike or public transit will extend your lifespan”.
If bike vs car choice is confounded by route safety, deaths per distance or time does not tell you anything useful about whether switching will make you safer.
It's of cause worth noting in comparing cars to bicycles that cars are the number one cause of bicyclist and pedestrian fatalities, so fewer cars will lead to fever cyclist dying.
The issue with that table is that it's comparing apples to oranges. It compares general travel to the most dangerous part of a dangerous activity, like the final push for the summit of mount Everest. It compares activities that take a few minutes and are done for fun to activities that take hours every day and people to do get to work. It's not like I'm going to hang-glide to work.
What makes it a fallacy? Statistically speaking, being ok with driving but being scared of going on an airplane, any airplane, makes absolutely no sense
The fallacy is contending that something is safe by comparing it favourably to an extremely unsafe activity. The takeaway of "you are more likely to die on the drive to the airport" should be "cars are dangerous" not "planes are safe". Planes are ~safe (save evidently for those made by Boeing post-2000), but why not say that the annual global death toll due to plane crashes (~500/yr) is comparable to that of hippopotamuses? Automobiles kill 1.2 million people per year.
Statistically speaking, being comfortable with driving makes no sense.
But it makes perfect sense, because in many car fatalities there were numerous things the dead person could have done better like not drink, brake sooner, not speed, etc that would have spared them.
In almost all plane fatalities the only dead people who had a chance of doing something better were the pilots. The passengers were doomed from the start.
> Come on. Someone somewhere at Boeing knows exactly what happened.
I don't think that's true for any of the issues, or airline accidents in general. Remember ultimately we're still talking about very rare events that almost always involve a number of different factors lining up in just the right way.
Even the MAX crashes were 2 out of how many thousands of MCAS equipped flights with no issues and those crashes also required other things to go wrong. It's easy to say MCAS was the obvious cause in retrospect, but it's much less clear it should have been easy to predict that outcome before any investigations were done regardless of how much inside knowledge one had.
This is not at all to excuse the causes, but there is a reason crash investigations take time. Demanding immediate explanations is just asking for wrong conclusions to be reached in the name of expediency. In fact taking the time to fully investigate probably produces better accountability in the long run because it can uncover more subtle but serious problems.
Along with the very low actual incident rate, grandparent comment also suggests a certain degree of functional organizational coherence which is often wildly missing at large organizations
If you ask 50 people at Boeing what happened, you may receive 50 very different answers
To clarify: I too am not excusing Boeing and think they’re likely a hot trash mess that deserves to have C-levels lose their heads with no golden parachute (or maybe their punishment should be a Boeing-produced parachute)
There was a small segment on Boeing recently and the industry as a whole on John Oliver’s show. Boeing being the main issue and how this company has repeatedly shit the bed multiple times since the takeover and shift of HQ to Chicago.
But one of the interesting facts I learned: the FAA has “regulators” that are paid by the airline industry themselves. This is largely due to how inexperienced the FAA is with the manufacturing process and thus rely on the industry to self-regulate.
Someone may raise an issue on the ground floor of these airline manufacturers. But the complaints are sent to people paid for by the airline manufacturers.
The conflict of interest is high. Yet FAA thinks this is okay.
The problem is real though. It stands to reason that the people that know how planes can be built safely are the one building planes; otherwise you could get in a situation where "those who know, build planes; those who don't, tell them how to do it".
There is a similar problem with financial regulation; my understanding is that the knowledge transfer between industry and regulation there is solved by the equally problematic "revolving doors", where people alternate between regulating and advising companies (and thus as regulators they don't want to make too many enemies).
Boeing merged with one of their competitors, and now outsource to subcontractors; both of these suggest the barriers, high though they are, are not insurmountable.
Also, the FAA could ask people from Lockheed to mark Boeing's homework.
The revolving door problem is mostly people coming back from a stint at a regulator to private employment at an salary that sometimes affect how beneficial their stint as a regulator was to the company hiring them post public service.
If that system was made one way so that people retiring from industry to government were forced to burn all "financial" bridges to the industry they were regulating by forcing them to accept a clause that they can newer go back especially not as a consultant a lot of those issues goes away.
Also many Americans - including many here on HN - reflexively oppose regulation. That's one reason regulator's budgets are cut (and now GOP-appointed judges are hamstringing the 'administrative state). And then when a private business does something wrong, the same people ask, 'where are the regulators'?
Exactly. The difference between a Boeing employee doing “regulating” versus an ex-Boeing employee who now works for the FAA doing the regulating is significant.
And then few years later we find out that the FAA employee is offered a 3/4 times higher pay in the company again..
Just like wall street executives getting in politics to regulate banking and then go back to highly paid positions or are paid millions in consulting fees for doing few speeches an hear.
Anyway I know that FAA investigators aren't necessarily from the industry (they are engineers in the field and can investigate the matters anyway), but I know little about regulators.
We can talk about management cutting corners and enforcing a culture all day long, and they should be prosecuted for their negligence... but that doesn't absolve the idiots that forgot to put the bolts in or the other idiots that can't drill a hole properly.
It seems kind of obviously foolish, like sure you can wind-down safety standards for profits, but in the long run making flying wildly recognized as unsafe would surely be so detrimental to profits of the entire industry. Except that they probably did the math and in many circumstances it's not like you can take the high-speed train instead anyhow.
At the beginning of commercial air travel people needed to be convinced by extreme levels of safety standards, we are now in middle of the slow process of transitioning to a point where airplane crashes are as commonplace as car crashes. We see more fatalities and more near-misses in the last few years. It's not just Boeing it's the entire industry, everyone is forced to do the same or you'll be uncompetitive.
This is accountability theater because of institutional US government support and dependency on Boeing as a strategic defense contractor for other divisions. After MCAS, they know they can't be touched.
I wouldn't be surprised if we get to this level of legal theatricality at some point.
> In 897, the 9-month-old corpse of the late Pope Formosus stood trial by the reigning pontiff, Stephen VII. Stephen VII convicted Formosus, sentenced the cadaveric Pope to have three fingers of his right hand amputated and then had him buried in a common grave.
Deferred prosecution worked as intended, i.e. no effect. This company is too big to fail. Some mid-level employee will be sacrificed to mollify DOJ, and business as usual will continue. Crapification of the economy continues...
John Oliver recently did an episode on the Boeing shitstorm. And while I would take anything a comedian says with a large grain of salt, the undercover staff interviews seemed pretty damning. I'm not sure if it's criminal negligence on Boeing's part, but it seems pretty obvious that engineering excellence isn't on the top of their minds.
> the undercover staff interviews seemed pretty damning
This is the least credible possible evidence, because shows like that have a long history of doing selective editing or purposely taking things out of context.
Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.
That doesn't really tell you anything. The way the format works is they take a large amount of material and pare it down to whatever they can find to make the target look stupid or nefarious. It works the same whether they were holding the camera or not.
Also:
> Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.
As someone who read the official reports on the B737 MAX and the 787 battery fires and who is from the industry, I can tell you that your accusations are completely unfounded in reality.
By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects. Last party to pull them to court over it was this cial guy. And it was found that the reporting was factually correct. Not like, say, Fox News with its usual defwnc ein court that boils down to "who in his right mind would take us for a serious news outlet employing journalists".
>By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects.
There is no law for "wrong reporting". LWTN has not lost a defamation suit, which is very narrow.
"Wrong reporting" is a much broader ethical category of lying by omission to create a narrative or choosing unreliable sources. Think of things like NYTimes and the Iraq War. Or basically any article of the format "x% of some group wants Y evil thing".
What do you think of those "man on the street" interviews where they ask people questions like "point to America on a map," and everyone gets it wrong, except the last person in the segment?
Of course they were smart enough not to make a factual claim like Murray was intentionally getting people killed. They were able to convey the same message using jokes and a few cherry picked facts, and thus be immune to defamation suits.
With jokes like "looks like a geriatric Dr. Evil", "appears to be on the side of black lung", and "[his political activity is] the equivalent of watching My Girl and rooting for the bees" they suggested that Murray was evil without making any actionable claims.
And in their show after the case was dismissed, they embraced the "who in his right mind would take [this] seriously" defense wholeheartedly: accusing Murray of things like being Epstein's prison guard.
Factual (even if obviously untrue), but not defamation because, much as the court wrote in the case against Tucker Carlson (and before that, a similar case against Rachel Maddow): “the statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation”
Looking for that, I found wrongful death lawsuits that were settled under nondisclosure agreements, so they probably weren't LWT's source.
I also found that Genwal Resources, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Murray Energy, agreed they had violated two safety regulations.
They were fined $500,000, but the government said "We were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the company's actions caused the mine collapse"[1].
LWT didn't include that. Instead they simply said "the government's investigation...found it was caused by unauthorized mining practices." Don't you think "we were unable to prove [that]" should have been included by LWT?
Now I could do my own digging, or I could trust Murrays lawyers doing that for their law suite against LWT (no idea why I kept adding a N...). A law suite they lost. If LWT reporting were factually wrong, I assume it would have been brought up in court.
> As someone who read the official reports on the B737 MAX and the 787 battery fires and who is from the industry, I can tell you that your accusations are completely unfounded in reality.
You're defending this particular story when I never claimed it was necessarily false.
> By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects. Last party to pull them to court over it was this cial guy. And it was found that the reporting was factually correct.
That is how "out of context" works. They don't affirmatively lie, they lie through omission. They have lawyers who know how defamation laws work.
Man, you started all of this by pointing to the interviews in the particular show about Boeing, and you wonder why people keep coming back to that particular show?
You did point out those "interviews", which weren't even interviews to begin with but recording of shop floor banter, without realizing they were done by Al-Jazzeera and not LWTN, not realizing they covered the B787 and were done over a decade ago.
And then you accusse others of discussing out of context? Difficult to have context when you din't even get your basic facts right, isn't it?
I watched the original report from Al-Jazeera on the 787 (called "Broken Dreams") where those factory line scenes were filmed when it came out in 2014. There's no editing from LWTN to make it look worse, in my opinion the original reporting was much more damning than what the clips show.
That's how reporting and journalism works. No one watches a multi hour interview with Putin by Tucker Carlson. It's boring as hell and just Putin talking about his dreams. The only known instance of this would be the Frost-Nixon interviews, which occurred after the US elected an actual criminal to the highest office.
No one makes a career about reporting how the free coffee in the break room was changed to a pay your own way plan.
Wow, Richelieu. You know what, this changes if whatever was written is backed up by actual facts, like recorded quality issues being left unmittigated that let to hull losses and serious incidents as it did in the case of Boeing. That is the context that was provided.
If you read the official reports on Chernobyl and Fukushima, you will find the same quotes to drive the reported points home.
Shows using the format where they do an interview and then selectively air parts of it rather than the whole thing. In general The Daily Show and its offspring -- not the interviews that happen in front of the audience in the studio, the ones for the pre-recorded segments.
Have you seen this show at all? It generally dedicates the bulk of its episode to a single story and goes in depth. Not saying this can't be happening, and there's always going to be stuff left out in even a 30 minute timeframe, but it tries to educate on the "complete picture" with nuanced points on a single issue per ep
Further, they're relying on prior reporting. Like Sagan did for science, Oliver is simply popularizing current events. Oliver's not claiming to be like 60 Minutes or Frontline.
1. Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms
2. Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition
3. Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance
Even when I agree with the narrative, the mechanisms by which the audience is persuaded feels quite disingenuous to me. Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism. My perspective is based on episodes I watched in 2016. The small bits I've seen from him and other similar formats since then suggest it is still this way.
It is a comedy show after all. One that tackles very serious subjects in ahumerous way. Doesn make the reporting wrong.
And, this show in particular, gets the fact right almost all of the time. And it provided more context and details on the whole Boeing saga than any other news source I have seen or read so far since the door plug blew out. Heck, going back to the 737 Max crashes I would be hard pushed to find main stream media reporting that was, factually and regarding context, better.
The thing that irked me was the mechanism by which it seemed people were convinced. It could be used to push whatever viewpoint they want to push. While it is a comedy show, they do a for the rest of the industry embarrassingly thorough job of investigating topics. So that puts a lot of responsibility on them.
Yeah, it's a formulaic, juvenile approach, hard to watch more than a little without feeling empty and exhausted. The research seems very solid, but the tone is shallow and teeters on the edge of Fox News-style partisan ragebaiting.
Speaking as a person with an amazing ability to offend and alienate folks on both sides of the political spectrum.
I like it when John Oliver or whoever goes after corruption and incompetence, but it still has to be said that popular comedy news shows are kind of the left’s version of Fox News in terms of shrillness, pandering, and brainwashing. While episodes on many topics are cringey to watch, at least they aren’t completely post-truth yet. When the writers do wade all the way in to culture war nonsense, I think they do this with a certain self awareness and I like to think they feel bad about it.
It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?
NPR (my old favorite) has jumped the shark. Other outlets generally harass me with paywalls when I’m already forced to sift through a total shit show of a website with op Ed’s no one asked for, celebrity gossip, and lengthy gpt-powered regurgitation all fluffing up the same few short blurbs from the AP wire.
Mainstream media for both the left and the right, domestic and foreign, all have websites with ads like “free WiFi for senior citizens” and “Just add this one weird thing to your toothpaste” next to big brain articles about dealing with disinformation in the next round of elections.
None of this is very confidence inspiring, so no, I doubt they’ll sell many subscriptions, and yeah, I expect quality will continue to decline. So I guess comedian-journalism is probably here to stay, regardless of whether I like the format
> It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?
The journalists are in the same boat as the engineers at Boeing: being held hostage by MBAs management at the behest of shareholders.
The MBAs trying to keep old media afloat are held hostage by shareholders who don't even watch the product. The general public has become increasingly less willing to spend any amount of time (eyes on ads) or money (subscriptions) on broadcast and print journalism. A whole generation of consumers has grown up on ad-free content and cannot fathom how the business model worked so well, pre-AdSense. Even if they can comprehend broadcast and print business models, they refuse to participate and then complain about the rising cost of subscription services; services that are now experimenting with reintroducing advertisements.
Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.
Have they ever considered ... idk, making a compelling product? They sat around watching the whole Metallica vs Napster saga unfold while calling the internet a fad and writing articles about how "blogs aren't trustworthy".
If they spent that time rubbing two brain cells together, they could have come up with something that, for example, resembled OG Hulu or Spotify -- A product that appealed to the new generation of news consumers instead of expecting them to faithfully put in a doorstep newspaper subscription like their parents did.
Can we please stopping the cringe-meme of blaming MBAs? I assure you, engineers are just as prone to fall for greed and being unethical and sycophantic as MBAs, doctors, journalists or software engineers.
> Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms
> Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance
> Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism.
It is foremost a comedy show yes, and they present things in a light hearted way. For an American show that means stuff like that. Mind you the jokes about Trumps' hands are more about something that Trump brings up constantly, a weird public insecurity about the size of them.
> Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition
I mean. I didn't say it doesn't pick a side. But it does go in depth, and it does present opposing arguments reasonably faithfully (even if it immediately rebuts them) (in my opinion!)
I have found the Gell-Mann amnesia affect to be quite strong with this show. Generally I watch it I feel very convinced of the quality of the arguments and their research. The handful of times the topic has been about something I’ve been fairly knowledgeable on, I’ve been surprised by how poor the episode was.
These days I just assume that’s the quality of the average episode and I don’t know enough to know otherwise.
>> Shows using the format where they do an interview and then selectively air parts of it rather than the whole thing.
Isnt this how newspapers work? Isnt this also how journalism works in general? If that wasnt the case, you wouldnt have two/three completely different takes on stories given which side of the political spectrum you're on.
That's not evidence at all; there was going to be an investigation no matter what.
That said, I was greatly amused by this in the article:
> “In an event like this, it’s normal for the D.O.J. to be conducting an investigation,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating and do not believe we are a target of the investigation.”
A criminal inquiry that concluded with only a $500k fine, because:
> "We were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the company's actions caused the mine collapse," said David Barlow, the U.S. Attorney for Utah.
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a very high bar to match. Certainly way higher than would be expected of even the most respectable newspaper, for example.
It's a reasonable bar to ask for before you start demonizing someone in front of millions of people.
But let's be honest, Oliver didn't hate Murray because of the mine disaster, he hated Murray for mining coal. The mine disaster (responsibility for which wasn't even proven) was all LWT could dig up.
And the audience will pretty much hate anyone Oliver tells them to hate. That's why they watch - to enjoy their Two Minutes Hate.
They're comedy shows. They send someone to record an hour-long interview but the whole segment is 5 minutes long and the clip they air is only a few seconds. Selective editing is built into the format, they don't spend the airtime to run the full interview and their purpose is to choose the short clip which has the most comedy value or makes the target look bad.
There was not a single interview done by LWTN for that segment, they took those from other sources. And the segment was pretty good actually, covered all the major points and didn't have any major errors. Actually, it is light years ahead of what other news outlets reported. Surey it is not on the same level as an audit report, but that is not its purpose. It is much closer to a comprehensive executive summary of an incident report than anything I have ever seen in media elsewher.
Re: selection of statements, the reports in Fukushima and Cherbobyl do the same. The point is to showcase the underlying issues with concrete examples and statements. Nothing wrong with that per-se. And in th LWTN segment, it was not done in bad faith, it is bot FOX news after all.
> It is much closer to a comprehensive executive summary of an incident report than anything I have ever seen in media elsewher.
This is the danger in it.
They pick someone they don't like and basically do a hit piece. Now sometimes the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism, and then if you try to get the real story, the real story is that the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism.
But then they'll run a segment in the same style where the target is just someone from the outgroup of the show's target audience.
> My entire point is that this style of show sometimes gets it wrong. You keep pointing to an instance when they may have gotten it right and ignoring the sometimes.
Do you have any concrete examples? You have yet to provide a direct example of this and instead only keep alluding to it happening.
As I said, their reporting has been scrutinzed a lot. Including a multi-million dollar defamition suite brought by this coal magnate. Guess what, the show didn't get it wrong. You don'z have to like the humor or bias of the show. Factually so, so far, their reporting was always as correct as possible at the time of filming. Or do you have proof otherwise, retractions they did, law suites they lost, that kind of stuff?
The lawsuit wasn't just lost, it was thrown out. That's pretty strong that they "didn't get it wrong". Now weigh that against your evidence of nothing.
You’re still not getting it. A lawsuit for defamation still has nothing to do with “getting it wrong”.
You can say many things that are literally correct while conveying the completely wrong message.
It’s like the picture with the soldier, gun, water, and the child. You can present whichever cross section of those that you want to paint completely opposing narratives without defamation.
The point is that defamation is a minimum bar not indicative of anything related to the overall narrative.
Saying 'maybe' about anything without evidence is hollow and meaningless. Maybe 'the message' is wrong? It's public, watch it and come back with evidence if you think that.
It was legally tested to be true and neither of your posts have any actual substance. Maybe the sun will explode tomorrow too. I have as much evidence of that as you have put here, which is none at all.
I don’t think you understand the difference between “not defamation” and good reporting. You can easily use a bunch of true statements to paint a completely misleading narrative.
All of those are true and would invalidate a defamation claim that the soldier on the left was pointing a gun at the unarmed guy’s head.
None of that is relevant to whatever massively biased narrative shows like LWTN present. The art of these shows is to say a bunch of true things and exclude other things so the emergent picture is grossly misleading without ever lying.
LWTN is a terrible way to stay informed. It’s an entertaining way to get a very biased take on a topic though.
We have to go by some standard, if we don't we fave full anarchy. In a democratic society, that ultimately comes down to the laws and courts at the bitter end. If we ignore that, we can just forget about anything, can't we?
And yes, the two things you mentioned are incredibly close, close enough to see them as equal outside a very deep legal discussion.
I think it's interesting how normalized it has become in our culture that burden of proof is only necessary in one direction, or is not necessary at all to adopt a belief.
Well put. Most skeptics these days are borderline conspiracists when it comes to delivering their opinions. The person above only needed to say, “trust but verify comedic claims” but instead they went down the all too common road of dogwhistling to other “skeptics.” I’m confident that quite a lot of John Oliver’s claims are verifiable (I have spent a lot of time doing my own research on the claims after watching the show). Not saying I’m a brilliant investigator but wanted to offer an opposing opinion. Blatantly sowing distrust is exactly the kind of behavior a true skeptic hopes to avoid.
They do that because nobody wants to look at hundreds of dead bodies or talk to grieving widows, or search through rubble for broken airplane parts or data recorders. That's not so funny.
Just because comedy shows focus on entertainment value doesn't mean there's no evidence. They have a different focus from investigators or courts, but in democratic countries, the funds to run investigations come from politicians and public outcry, and that comes from the people actually giving a sh*t about it. So they do perform a function.
I made a general comment about the format and then all of the people who remove any nuance (i.e. can't distinguish between a criticism of the format and a criticism of the story) started posting replies defending the story even though the possibility of the story being accurate was explicitly admitted in the original comment.
That was the classical role of the jester in some monarchies. They were the only person who could openly criticize the king without retribution (in theory).
Engineers stopped running such firms long ago cause they are totally inept at financial engineering. Its the financial engineers who run things, and you can bet right now whatever happens they will get the govt to bail them out. The culture will only change when financial engineering is reined in or part of tech/engineering education. Until then John Oliver will have a never ending supply of such stories from helpless engineers who are so out of control over anything they run to stand up comedians to cry about their problems.
As a half-engineer myself, I have to say this: people need to be reminded that it was engineers that were at the highest levels, CEO and down, behind Dieselgate and, yes, the issues at Boeing as well. Engineers are not per-se better at business ethics or corporate governance. Greed is universal.
Dieselgate was akin to a student learning the whole geography syllabus just before the exam, then getting a top score and claiming to be good at geography.
Just because you learnt the exact topics that were to be examined doesn't mean you're good at the whole subject.
Likewise, those diesel cars were very good at the exact things that were tested, and terrible at everything else. They were literally engineered to the exact test syllabus.
Yet we somehow don't call the student a cheater.
In my view, in both cases, the shortcoming is with the test/syllabus designer. The test topics need to be not announced beforehand, and the sylabus needs to not be rigid and narrower than the field in the real world.
Fact is, VW engines had a mode recognizing a test and adopted AdBlue and fuel mixture to meet emission standards. On the road, these engines ran dirty. That was explicitely stated to be illegal in the applicable laws.
It was all the other brands that played, as it turned out also illegal, games with temp windows and such.
Blaming this on regulators is putting this while story on its head.
This is flat out bullshit. The previous Boeing CEO under who the Maxes were rolled out and started crashing, was a career engineer at Boeing. The idiots that failed to add redundancy to a critical system, and hid all about it were also engineers. There is no magic "engineer good manager bad". People can be greedy and stupid and reckless and negligent regardless of their profession.
We live in a timeline where a comedian will actually point to more facts than, say, a "serious" anchor like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, who will just blatantly make stuff up. "I am just asking questions".
Because Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are not real reporters, they just play them on TV. They're "angertainers", stoking anger in their viewers as a form of entertainment. The anger doesn't have to be based on facts. Their viewers come to be angry, and they get what they want.
John Oliver is funny until he covers a segment that you have spent a lot of personal time researching then it becomes shocking when you realize that he selectively edits things to craft a certain narrative in the viewers mind. I also saw this with Trevor Noah when Bernie Sanders was running. I was a volunteer tasked with digging up lots of old videos of him for promotional material and I was shocked to see some of the videos I found aired on the Daily Show but deceptively cut to make him look like a grumpy mean old man when if you watched the whole clip it would show the opposite.
In the segment about Boeing they purposefully mislead the audience into believing instead of issuing a software update, the company issued stock buy backs. Looking at the dates if the source articles shows a much different timeline.
I think Oliver is funny. His show makes good points and gives good arguments. It should not, however, by itself be the sole basis of one’s opinion on any given topic (not many things should) as many take it to be. It is intelligent and honest but also one-sided and biased.
They are, at least, not generally purposefully misleading in service of their bias, which is why I think people trust them more than a lot of other sources like cable news.
Agree, nobody should base their opinions on a single source of news.
As someone who stopped taking certain news outlets on my side of the political spectrum serious after running into Gell-Mann once to often, I have to say, with decent backgroind in the topic we discuss here, aerospace and quality and such, this particular LWTN segment got it right. Heck, some of it was even than what I heard in my life from co-workers in the industry. I wouldn't go as far as doing a reverse Gell-Mann on LWTN based on this, but overall their reporting is, factually, correct. And they don't even try to hide their bias, nor donthey use to spin a story, which is refreshing if you ask me.
News in video format is guaranteed to be missing nuance. It turns out, reading a teleprompter as a funny/angry/whatever character is completely unrelated to journalism.
Another neat heuristic is that if there's a video/blog/whatever information product more often than once a week, it probably doesn't have enough research behind it to be reasonably accurate, even handed, and well, researched.
Journalism is stupidly expensive. Modern advertising actually doesn't pay enough to do it. Consider that just since 2008, newsroom employees have dropped by 20% or so, while the information space has significantly more manufactured misinformation than it ever used to. How many local government stories do you even see anymore? Are you paying for someone to keep tabs on your state legislators?
Is there a right wing comedy show that is in the format of John Oliver or Daily Show? Closest I can think of is Babylon Bee but they produce (unfunny) original parodies.
I've seen a couple of attempts - like 1/2 hour news hour - but they're all terminally unfunny. The problem is punching up vs punching down. Left-wing humor tends to make a mockery of power and social injustice, whereas right-wing comedy tends to make a mockery of groups and ideas that most of society has sympathy for. The right is simply too cruel to be funny.
This might be an example of a bubble you unknowingly live in. "Gutfeld" is the right wing equivalent and has more viewers than the Colbert late night show which you might have heard of.
Being in a bubble is not what makes Gutfeld not funny.
When your entire comedy seems to be built around "Hah the stupid left thinks trans women are real women but they were born with penises", well, that's just not very funny to people who tend to have a non-homogenous friend group.
Exactly, not all of us on the left are that stupid. It's just that a particularly stupid faction of the left is drawing a lot of attention on that topic. The rest of us see the concept of "male women" being as ridiculous as the right-wingers do.
It would make sense if it was more so a neoliberal show posing as a left wing show, comedy is one of the easiest ways to divide up a public so they can be conquered.
I’ve personally run into both Richard Branson flying Virgin Atlantic and Oscar Munoz flying United. The C Suite of an airline is likely using it plenty.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with your 'scare' 'quotes'. Qatar also famously got fired by Airbus as a customer and refused to take 787s built in South Carolina. It's not like there are a lot of other options for them.
Boeing's dismal track record has been years in the making and the problems we're seeing were inevitable. However, I'm not holding my breath here hoping for a real change. Boeing is a huge defence contractor with deep connections. I hope I'm mistaken but I doubt we'll see any real systemic change.
Two things: Boeing doesn't have just to worry about the FAA and US prosecution, depending on the outcome their civil aircraft business might face a ton of EASA scrutiny as well. And that actually is a big deal in the industry.
And public pressure, Boeings reputation is not great at the moment. If that pressure is kept up, it can lead to change as well.
The US needs Boeing, it doesn't need the current C-suite of Boeing. Cleaning house would be an opportunity for the powers that be to put their guys in charge and make an asset work better for them. Boeing's lobbyists aren't on the chopping block, nor are the shareholders; if change is good for the institution they have no reason to invest substantial resources in resisting it.
It’s quite mad isn’t it. Can you imagine running a company that makes aeroplanes and not going to sleep each night panicking about all the lives you’re ferrying around up in the sky?
It turns out there is a whole company of executives who are so not-worried about it that they’ll continuously cut budgets and decrease the time available to make those planes until multiple planes fall out the sky. And even then are still not really that worried about safety.
> Can you imagine running a company that makes aeroplanes and not going to sleep each night panicking about all the lives you’re ferrying around up in the sky?
For my entire life, the most pervasive theme in executive leadership is that the _only_ responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders.
Boeing may reach a point where it has to stop killing passengers, but dead passengers aren’t an issue at all until it creates a major threat to their bottom line.
If you think it shouldn’t take many downed planes before that happens, then given the situation, the real question is why it hasn’t threatened their business enough yet.
"We don't need to brief anyone on the technicals of our plane, we know better and it's great for stock prices to mislead buyers into thinking it's just a New and Improved model of the same plane flyable in the exact same way!"
It's criminal. They should be criminally charged. I hope this goes through, and I hope prosecutors sweep up all of the floor workers who have already stated they would never fly in the newer planes.
I think criminal negligence might be one. Even if a law doesn't exist, such behaviour should absolutely be corrected, and if the market can't do it then the government must step in.
Misleading marketing, skirting inspection regulation by employing your own inspectors, failing to notify pilots of a system that could not initially be overridden (directly causing two flights to nose dive, killing everyone on board). Ignoring safety concerns from employees (negligence).
I'm not a lawyer so I'm sure the list could go on.
EDIT: probably having a single point of failure for that catastrophic system (a single sensor) could be something.
I'm all for calling the MCAS system bad engineering, but raising any of those things to the level of criminality seems a bit ridiculous. Lacking sensor redundancy is arguably a bad design decision, but what law was actually broken?
Criminal negligence. It is obvious to any practitioner the safety consequences of implementing systems that way. Fraud would be another. Agents of Boeing represented to airlines and regulators that training nor knowledge of implementation details were necessary for safe operation. Airlines and regulators relied on that misrepresentation to the public's and their own detriment. Finally, securities fraud.
The problem of course, is any evidence from the NTSB must be omitted from any criminal prosecution.
> Criminal negligence. It is obvious to any practitioner the safety consequences of implementing systems that way.
I'm not an aerospace engineer, but it doesn't seem at all obvious the design of MCAS would rise to the level of criminal negligence, which is an understandably high bar. It's not a flight critical system (pilots can easily safely fly the plane without it functioning) and pilots are trained to respond to issues with automatic trim regardless of the cause. The particular failure mode of the system and the difficulty the pilots had in responding to it, even after they knew about it in the case of the second MAX crash, should obviously be addressed and arguably should have been considered during the design phase. But I don't see any world where that reasonably meets the bar of criminal liability.
> Fraud would be another. Agents of Boeing represented to airlines and regulators that training nor knowledge of implementation details were necessary for safe operation.
Again I don't see how that meets the criminal fraud bar unless Boeing knew in advance that extra training and awareness were required and deliberately chose not to provide those things.
MCAS's design was single sensor because dual sensor eould not have skated by the FAA without simulator time as a requirement which Boeing could not afford, because their contracts were competitive over Airbus contingent on there not being simulator training required to get pilots type rated.
Boeing absolutely knew. As Upton Sinclair famously states however, it is hard to get a man to understand that which his paycheck depends on him not understanding.
Negligent homicide and/or involuntary manslaughter, and false or misleading information resulting in a death (18 U.S. Code § 1038) both are. I would imagine evidence tampering is another.
Actually this is how it's supposed to work. Because the focus is on capital the feedback loop that reigns them in happens too late to penalize and bring change. Gov really needs to create a mechanism where the feedback loop happens before lives are affected in critical industries. We will see if they get the point.
In my experience, this is yet more evidence of the quite unethical culture that has come to dominate executives in the last 4-5 decades across many industries. So many of them fail upwards by mindlessly focusing on shareholder value and cost-cutting for short term gains and the long term detriment of products and consumers under their watch. The way that safety and the health of customers and the general public is consistently ignored or thrown under the bus by executives in the name of cost-cutting and shareholder value, often against the explicit recommendations of employees, has become so common that I can't help but think there is something seriously wrong in the "education" (MBAs are more like finishing schools for corporate climbers) and hiring of these executives. We've incentivized ghouls to take over the reins who spend their days a bubbled class that have no need to, and can afford through absurd wealth to not, interact with or see the consequences of their asinine and dangerous decisions.
I think it's even broader than that. An entire corporate philosophy has arisen that insists that mindlessly searching for profits and shareholder value over everything else will actually be better for everyone, employees and public included. This insulates them from criticism by insinuating that maximizing profits and shareholder value is a moral imperative - if you're against them then you're against the mutual uplifting of everyone through corporate benevolence. It turns out, however, that it's really just better for the execs, who conveniently just so happen to also have their compensation tied to the share price.
Incidentally, never believe tales of “we can self regulate!” If they had any intention of self regulating, they wouldn’t be spending billions to get rid of regulation.
It's not just the safety and health of customers and the public that the modern executives don't seem to care about. I work in the CPI and process/employee safety has started to take a back seat to DEI and environmental concerns (to be sure, fair hiring practices and environmental stewardship are great goals to have, but not to the detriment of a safe workplace.)
Stock buybacks take precedence over spending on safety improvements, and reduction in working capital (finished product) to appease the bean counters results in missed sales when the inevitable process upset occurs and there is no surge capacity.
> We've incentivized ghouls to take over the reins who spend their days a bubbled class that have no need to, and can afford through absurd wealth to not, interact with or see the consequences of their asinine and dangerous decisions
The reason they're not worried is because in the worst case, they will get millions of dollars of severance payment, instead of jail time. I'm sure there are sound legal and even economic reasons behind this, but it's still unacceptable and infuriating.
> Can you imagine running a company that makes aeroplanes and not going to sleep each night panicking about all the lives you’re ferrying around up in the sky?
I dunno. I think that's a little melodramatic. There are a lot of activities in the world with dangerous failure modes, and flying is pretty far down the list in terms of impact. You could make the same argument about chemical engineers designing pesticide plants, insulin pump manufacturers, hell even folks doing car suspensions are probably responsible for more deaths than Boeing.
People do their jobs, and if the impact is low they'll live with it. Clearly Boeing's leadership thought they were doing OK. And even in hindsight they... kinda were? The MAX is the most dangerous airliner in decades, maybe a half century. But I'd still fly on it.
Knowing the way the world works, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them literally think "you know we could kill a lot more people, planes are pretty safe"
I guess it all comes down to thinking outsourcing is magic. Get same thing done at 1/4th the cost with virtually no downside. Hopefully C suites get what they deserve or at least get fired.
But at any point do these consultants like at McKinseys, BCG, AT Kerney etc who advise these money saving tactics get what they deserve?
You can't legally tell someone to commit negligent homicide, but if you tell them the engineering process efficiency management program has passed mandatory quality and safety checks by an accredited third party auditor, then the law can't touch you.
Much like computer science, every problem (like how to avoid being charged for homicide) can be solved by layers of indirection.
What happens in the case of Boeing where there’s evidence that the quality checks were not complied with? At least with MCAS, there seems to be evidence they didn’t adhere to their own process requirements.
the OP was asking about the consultants and their liability. they are able to keep far away enough from operational details so it wont matter to them. much like a prsident, dictator, or mafia boss can have plausible deniability because the entire system is set up so that they set a general tone and strategy but can claim they dont know any details, even though a child could guess what the details would be.
They were stating that a consultant has vouched that the process has passed quality checks. If it hasn’t (and it seems Boeing had not appropriately set up their quality checks), your statement implies the consultant doesn’t gave any liability? Ie they aren’t responsible for checking the system they are paid to check?
Its not so much in direction as it is bureaucracy and corruption.
From what I've seen, regulatory agencies and processes are created for a combination of well intended concern for public safety and a power grab. Neither of those are based on indirection so much as ignorance (or hopefulness?) and greed, respectively.
This is why regulation is rarely the answer. Corporate lawyers are ultimately more clever and better-paid than the congressional staffers that are writing the laws.
It's also much easier to find a loophole than it is to predict and avoid all loopholes, especially with all the compromise required to pass a law.
They don't have to be more clever. They just have to be faster to adapt, which is trivial given the glacial pace at which legislation is passed in the US.
They also have to make an example out of cases which they know they can win dead-to-rights. The chilling effect can be a societal good if used correctly.
Which also means that the regulatory agency most be structured to remain un-captured by the corporate interests it regulates, and empowered to react and adapt rapidly to the 'clever' legal hacks.
Correction: No lawyer is dumb enough to go on the record, or to leave a signature on something that could reasonably create the impression upon discovery that they knowingly want or facilitated the creation of, less safe commercial planes.
However, buying Boeing stock, with the current management in place, is synonymous with wanting less safe commercial planes.
This was glaringly obvious where I took a course on engineering law. So much boiled down to “don’t put bad stuff in writing” more than “don’t do bad stuff in the first place.” The press or made a point to distinguish the way engineers think can get them in legal trouble (eg, trying to be open and transparent about design flaws). It kinda bummed me out.
That's never the proposal but is often the outcome. Firing your engineers and outsourcing or eliminating large amounts of QA most would agree was likely to make Boeing planes less safe.
Yet no lawyer raised an objection. They lawyers also successfully argued that FAA testing was not needed and Boeing can and should be trusted to signoff internally.
We need "leadership" people in companies to aign off on decisions like how engineers need to sign off on designs. That signature needs to make them accountable for future issues.
Everyone including Boeing officially and internally since admitted it was a dumb idea, however it's a lot to recap in a HN comment. Maybe someone else will feel like it.
The short version is that it's hard making things fit together and meet your standards when you're dealing with dozens of different suppliers and suppliers of suppliers who aren't necessarily aligned with your goals. The full story is a cautionary tale about letting business school types displace people who know how to build planes. I recommend seeking out one of the many retellings of Boeings struggles since the McDonnell Douglas merger.
Instead of a retelling, I'll point you to the latest chapter: Boeing trying to re-acquire ownership of Spirit AeroSystems. It's a substantial indictment of past policy to do a full reversal in the name of "strengthening safety".
Yes. The door that fell off was part of a subcontracted fuselage assembly. Boeing inspectors found, on delivery, that it was not correctly installed. Apparently they very frequently found defects like this in delivered 737 fuselages. Rather than do something sensible such as shut down the fuselage plant until it could make defect-free assemblies, instead Boeing adopted a continuous re-work and re-inspect flow on the delivery side of the contracting relationship, with of course the cost borne by the subcontractor. This meant that Boeing staff essentially did the equivalent of filing bugs in the subcontractor's repo, but accepted the subcontractor's CI being green as proof the bug was fixed. Which in this case it was not.
It’s aimed at entertainment but the latest Last Week Tonight covered this and is on YouTube. Hope this links works from my phone https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc
The SEC's mandate is to enforce the accuracy of financial disclosures. It's not their mandate to ensure that a business model is appropriate. Only that it is transparent to investors.
From their perspective, it would be management, investors, and the FAA who had the responsibility to ensure Boeing was behaving appropriately.
Financial disclosure is NOT more important than safety. Even if it involves all kinds of financial non-transparency and even financial crimes to ensure that lives are safe, at the impact of Wall Street billionaires' profits, I'm in support of it. I'd like to get to my destination alive.
If a plane can be made twice as safe, I'll buy Boeing stock at twice the price. Then when the plane is 3X as safe I'll sell it at 3X the price. Their financials don't matter to me. As a non-billionaire without a private jet, safety is how I "value" a transportation company.
I'm not saying financial disclosure is more important than safety (and I certainly don't believe that), I'm saying their bailiwick ends and making sure the financials are reported accurately. It's like blaming the referee because a player dropped the ball, they're not responsible for making good decisions based on that information, they're responsible for making sure we have the information we need to make good decisions.
Which is not to say they're even doing a good job at that, just that this particular thing isn't on them. It's not like they're being accused of cooking the books. I didn't see a charge in the article, but I would assume they're being investigated for negligence.
That overblamed decision was (a) specific to Michigan corporate law, and a reason why Ford reincorporated in Delaware shortly afterwards and (b) a finding that Ford had to pay dividends to its shareholders rather than reinvesting profits in expansion, which no modern court would require. Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs both cancelled dividends and nobody objected.
The story behind the lawsuit was that the Dodge brothers had just left Ford (then a private company) and they planned to use their dividends to start a competitor - which Ford suspected and which is the reason why the dividend was canceled.
I don't doubt that it's possible to find out what kind of car the jury members drove, but is there actually a public record of it? If so, please show the link.
The 737 MAX, stock trading senators, and bribe taking justices are all the same thing for the same reason.
Power is doing something and then saying "what are you going to do about it?"
The supreme court takes bribes and says "what are you going to do about it?" They clearly have the power to take bribes. Nobody appears to be able to do anything about it.
Congresspeople trade stocks of companies they regulate in a gross conflict of interest, then defend their ability to be corrupt as a right. "What are you going to do about it?" Congress clearly has the power to be openly corrupt without consequences.
The 2008 crisis was wall street telling the government that they have many answers to that question. "Too big to fail" was born to capture the idea that there is an entity so powerful there are no reasonable answers to them asking "what are you going to do about it?"
Boeing is too big to fail. Boeing knows that there is no one with the will or fortitude to do anything about putting profit over safety. Investigations to make it look like you're doing something, sure. Canning a few low level employees that you can pin blame on, no problem. Sacrifice a contractor? That's what they're there for. But to hold a CEO or shareholders responsible for gross mismanagement in any kind of meaningful way, threatening all other American oligarchs and hordes of people rich enough to say "what are you going to do about it?" without answer?
Admiral Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, is the past's best answer to Boeing. He deeply understood the forces at play. He had this to say to congress:
Political and economic power is increasingly being concentrated among a few
large corporations and their officers - power they can apply against society,
government and individuals. Through their control of vast resources, these
large corporations have become, in effect, another branch of government. They
often exercise the power of government, but without the checks and balances
inherent in our democratic system.
Americans need to start thinking about how to answer someone clearly more powerful saying "what are you going to do about it?" Because every time we say "nothing" those people get that much more powerful.
Good post, and the pat response is "vote them out". The problem with this is that the neither party really thinks this kind of corruption is a problem, and the individual pols that do can't get elected on that issue alone. That is, there's a critical "bundling" problem with modern politics: you have to accept a bundle of 100 positions, and "integrity issues" are usually pretty low. Even worse, a cynical body politic begins to perceive "integrity" as a liability, that someone with conscience and self-restraint is actually LESS capable of "winning" within a corrupt system. You've now allowed your short-term need to win to further degrade the system, which of course becomes a positive feedback loop.
(This bundling problem affects all kinds of products. When you're shopping, you pay attention to price, and everything else is secondary. In a perfect market, you'd price in the forced arbitration clause, or you'd price in the social cost of anti-competitive business practices of the vendor. But it just doesn't happen because the cognitive load is too high.)
I really miss the days when we at least paid lip-service to the idea that character and integrity mattered most in our pols. Even that system was gamed, its still better than overtly, cynically abandoning society's most laudable values.
> I really miss the days when we at least paid lip-service to the idea that character and integrity mattered most in our pols.
It still matters if you’re a Democrat. Hillary Clinton was crucified for keeping her official emails on a private server.
We have an unequal system, where one party is held to a high standard, and the standard for the other party is always low enough for them to slither over.
I find your take partisan. During primaries her competition tried to use it as leverage against her which is a completely normal thing to do in politics. It basically went away when Bernie, in one of the debates, decided he was tired of hearing about her emails, establishing that this is something we're just not going to talk about anymore because it's too damaging to our top candidate.
Trump harped on it with the whole "lock her up" stuff, again because it's politically advantageous. He reneged on it once in office, admitting he wasn't going to pursue any charges against her. It was probably calculated that doing so would be bad optics as using the justice system to go after the top candidate of the competing party would be considered divisive. It was also potentially unproductive as she had already lost. There's also the element of personal connection, Trump was an NY Democrat for decades and had known the Clintons personally. Their daughters had a friendship in the past.
Also see George Santos as a counterpoint. Fellow NY Republican congressmen went after him knowing that their party would likely lose his seat. Again, I interpret their actions as self serving, they wanted to distance themselves from his shenanigans to their own constituents and appear to be acting objectively rather than in the interest of their party but the right result was achieved regardless.
Sadly no. Bernie Sanders explicitly put Citizens United at the top of his legislative priority list. Clinton used her pull with the DNC to undermine his nomination, and the rest is history. This was a triumph of the corrupt status quo over a high integrity pol, and it happened within the DNC.
Citizens united was literally a judicial coup against constitutional rule. We went from flawed democracy to literal plutocracy the day citizens united was ruled on.
Politicians must fund raise before their primaries and we see many fundraising efforts throughout their tenure too.
To get elected a candidate must:
Fundraise -> win a primary -> win a general election.
Therefore fundraising is structurally an election and money is structurally votes. Since money gets to vote on candidates before people do, we end up with a "democracy" that responds to money and not votes, which is pretty blatantly obvious. It's also why many people feel that both parties are basically the same. It's not that they're the same, it's just people with money get to filter candidates first and therefore both parties are the same in that they have to appease their funders first and can't threaten corporations or rich people because then their funding goes down and their opponents goes up.
Biden is just another example of this (as was Hillary). Biden 2024 is made possible because the democratic party doesn't have to answer to their voters. The democratic party has a symbiotic relationship with republicans where neither has to rule effectively or hold themselves to any standards which allows both to profiteer and trade stocks while the country slowly becomes oligarchic/fascist.
The premise of "too big to fail" is that a thing is depended on by too many other things, innocent people, to allow it to suddenly become rubble. It's an insurance company and its policyholders did nothing wrong. It's a bank and its depositors did nothing wrong. It's Boeing and they're the sole supplier of some critical things.
The "easiest" way to fix this is to bail them out, because then the company itself can carry on fulfilling its obligations and you don't need all the people relying on them to individually apply to get bailed out or otherwise have to rearrange their affairs when the institution is instantly vaporized. But that, as they say, is a moral hazard.
What you really want to do is to destroy them in slow motion. Step one, the existing owners get nothing, they chose their executives poorly and suffer the consequences. Step two, those executives are out too, and the company gets new leadership and a bailout with the condition that the company will soon cease to exist and be sold off for parts, but first it's going carry on operating for a bit to satisfy its obligations to innocent third parties.
Instead of bailing them out while keeping it private do the right thing: public money bailed them out, so it's a public company now, nationalise, save the innocents from harm, and sell its parts to recoup the bailout after it's been properly managed through the crisis.
Leaving it to private investors to ride on the public saving a company is just another slap on the face. Yes, I know that the bailouts from 2008 have recouped the public money invested but it's a moral hazard to allow private investors to use this mechanism. Over time private investors will just find loopholes on how to leverage public bailouts for their own gain, they have a massive incentive for gaming it.
This isn't how class systems work in the US. The moral hazard is the point. The tails I win, heads you lose policies for these giant companies and their owners is not an accident. It is deliberate and crafted. What you are suggesting is no less than to change the entire social hierarchy of the country.
This is pure fantasy. What you have described is sets of people not doing what is in their best (short term selfish) interest.
It is not in a politicians best interest to hold Boeing accountable because then Boeing can withdrawal funding and fund their opposition, or more importantly economically harm constituents.
It is not in Boeing exec's interests because by the time Boeing experiences the long term consequences of short term thinking the people responsible will have already made bank, diversified, or invested in competitors. Some other company that wants to cash out their future will probably hire them.
Problems only get solved when those most harmed are the enact-ers of the solution. So if you're thinking about "what you really want to do", then you have to start with how you personally can add your feather onto the scales of justice rather than using hope as a strategy by fantasizing about some powerful responsible government.
Sounds good but it is still vulnerable - one part of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse that was interesting to me was the money deposited in the bank was appeared to be money controlled by the same people who owned the bank.
IE, I suspect the decision makers behind the bank cared much more about bailing out the depositors of the bank - who were effectively complicit because they weren't shopping around - than the nominal shareholders of the bank. There were apparently specific requirements that startups used SVB if they received funding from certain VCs which suggests something was happening.
The rot runs so much deeper than whichever scapegoats they want to pin it on. The story of Boeing is the story of modern American managerial culture. Excess all around. Excessive executive compensation. Excessive financialization. Excessive outsourcing. Excessive offshoring. Excessive returns to uneconomic activity. Excessive credentialism. Excessive lobbying.
Jack Welch is dead but if they wanted to try someone he’d be a great person to start with.
It's interesting you would mention Jack Welch because he said:
> Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.
There is myth about how corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize "shareholder value" and short term corporate profits at the cost of everything else. This is false. No such thing exists in corporate law. While Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is a deplorable decision, there is a rather remarkable sentence in there:
> modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so.
> Shareholder primacy was famously established in the decision of Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. in 1919. In Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.'s court opinion, it stated that "there should be no confusion" that "a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders." Because of this opinion, a precedent was set that managers had to maximize shareholder profit.
Dodge v Ford Motor Co was a Michigan Supreme Court decision while I quoted SCOTUS. The very article you linked strongly suggests it's not a general law:
I really enjoyed your comment because I have found myself speaking that untruth out loud when I lament the state of corporate ethics.
But, isn't it the case that activist investors aren't really using legal means to ensure that same result; they are using other means anyway? And, the net result is the same?
Yeah this isn’t just Boeing, it’s the senators who don’t want Boeing jobs to be risked in any serious consequences is my interpretation of how this seems to work
Jack Welch is a great case study in corporate psychopathy, but I feel like the Boeing chapter would address different aspects in the future MBA’s reading list. This is something more along the lines of the Postal Service scandal in the UK.
Real world incidents, and their incident report, that ahould be mandatory reading for every engineering and management student:
- Chernobyl: great lessons on how to engineer complex systems, the importance of safety culture, the role humans and management olay and how all of this can lead to disaster
- AF 447: lessons on training and HMI design and human factors
- B737 MAX: to be read after Chernobyl, lessons on safety again, mandatory essay to be writen about the parallels between Chernobyl and the B737 MAX
- Bonus reading for the above two points: Fukushima
- B737 MAX 9 and door plugs (once the final repoets are done): lessons on the importance of failure culture and strong quality processes
- Bad Blood, Money Men: Everybody needs a primer in corporate governance, ethics and the red flags that come with it; add the final reporting on the UK postal scandal and FTX
If you can't meet DEI without compromising on merit, your country must have serious fundamental problems at every stage of your education system.
And even that's if you need a significant fraction of your nation's elites — given observed problems such as "failing to install bolts correctly" and "management deliberately ignoring raised safety concerns" and "there's no automatic cut off timer for something which will damage the aircraft if left on for more than 5 minutes" don't even need elites, if you really believe what you wrote, you need to campaign for much better fundamental education starting decades ago. Boeing doesn't hire a significant fraction of the USA, so this must, if you were right, be basically endemic across your nation.
Your response neglects simple facts.
You are missing that certain vocations are not as popular to women as they are to men.
I doubt this is inherently an issue with the education systems.
I think what corporate America has been focusing on heavily recently was DEI, which is fine, but it seems that has caused management to lose focus on other matters impacting quality.
I've seen this first hand where a high ranking VP announced his highest priority is diverse hiring, again this is fine, but it's a choice in priority setting that sends a clear message if tradeoffs need to be made down the chain.
I am not against DEI or blaming diverse hires for issues.
I think management in corporations sometimes does poorly identifying metrics that measure what success means to a company.
Is it a 50/50 mix of women and men or to uphold the highest quality standard.
Boeing does not exist in isolation. There are many other companies in the labor market.
What I am referring to is a well understood dynamic. It's unclear to me what your counter point is here.
People seem to have an easier time forgiving crimes if they're highly abstracted. I'm not sure if this is apocryphal but apparently drone pilots are less likely than other soldiers to feel extreme guilt about killing people. Prince Harry flew a helicopter in action and compared it to a video game, likely a PR recruiting statement but revealing nonetheless. I'm not a soldier so am speaking out of turn and may be completely off base.
IIRC I read some similar research as well - not only about drones, but also in general that most casualties are made by "fire and kill" weapons like artilery and air power mostly due to how soldiers tend to avoid killing other people unless prepared psychologically.
Is it more important to dole out punishments or to get the best result? Because the best result isn't going to be from draconian punishments for CEOs.
The strongest irony of what I suspect you are suggesting is that the #1 lesson of high-performance safety cultures is a blameless attitude to accidents. Criminal liabilities for the CEO ... are better than criminal liabilities for lower level employees. But still not the path to the highest levels of safety.
How is expecting the person who is responsible for the outcome of the company to be responsible draconian?
If I kill someone, I am responsible. If I direct someone else to kill someone, we’re both responsible to different degrees. If I create an elaborate structure wherein the lower levels are inculcated that killing people is just part of the job, the responsibility starts dramatically shifting upwards.
It isn't a question of responsibility, he is the one responsible. He shouldn't be criminally liable. He didn't design the plane, build or operate it; his responsibility for an accident is something of a commercial fiction.
It makes total sense to hold him as the person responsible. It even (probably) makes sense for the board to sack him immediately. But it is arbitrary and excessive to criminally prosecute him. Lots of CEOs have done worse and gotten away with it; they're in positions of great power and being human they make a lot of mistakes. The bankers alone have ruined the wealth of generations, let alone the sitautions the military-industrial complex creates.
Picking on this person because of 2 plane crashes is not remotely consistent with how this sort of thing is handled elsewhere. It is unfair and it'll just add pressure to the death of manufacturing in the west. And to top it off it probably won't change the safety profile of Boeing planes going forward.
But the difference there is that the mechanic is selling things that aren't his. The CEO & friends are making decisions that are their within their remit to make, they just made poor decisions.
People have been making similar arguments since the development of the limited liability company. It turns out that limiting liability is a far better system than the alternative for getting good things done.
We've already got a problem where all the manufacturing is heading to Asia. Criminal penalties hanging over the heads of CEOs of manufacturing companies will not help the situation.
> It turns out that limiting liability is a far better system
It's hilarious how gung-ho free market cheerleaders are about systematic responsibility and accountability and skin-in-the-game decision making... right up until the millisecond that involves something other than rich people getting paid for being rich, and then it's bailouts this and limited liability that.
And criminal prosecutions of decision makers isn't as much skin in the game as it is making it risky to be responsible. It is just asking for lower-quality people to move in to high ranking posts and for confusing corporate structures to emerge.
It is better to impose large financial penalties on the company then let the markets sort out the details. I don't even mind the CEO suffering large penalties, but he and Boeing need to negotiate that before the event and put it in his contract, not after the fact.
Endangering the health of the public like for example dumping toxic waste or destroying a safety culture are criminal.
If Boeing decided to build a 797 story that was even bigger than the Airbus 380 and lost a lot of money, then limited liability would kick in. However, to deliberately cut safety culture and endanger the public is criminal.
1. You're talking about a model that incentivises shareholders (with limited liability) to appoint incompetent CEOs who then take the fall for over-cutting safety standards. That isn't the best approach to safety - in fact, it would slightly reward the people most responsible for this situation because some of the liability would fall on the CEO rather than on profits.
That is neither fair nor helpful. Hit the company with a huge fine then let the board decide if the CEO stays or goes - that is how it is traditionally done and it is an effective model for getting results.
2. Deliberately changing a culture isn't criminal; that is something CEOs are expected to do sometimes. It is equivalent to saying a developer should be liable if they do an unnecessary refactor and it makes the code worse for a customer.
3.
> and endanger the public is criminal.
You say this but we allow car manufacturers to operate. Cars manufacturers have done more damage to people I know than Boeing could hope to. The focus on Boeing is hysterical.
You are assuming the same people blaming C-suite execs at Boeing would not blame the same people who OK'ed high grilles on pickup trucks that caused an increase in pedestrian deaths. That might be a bad assumption. "But there's no specific law," and "but consumer choice" don't cut it.
Change the incentives, change the targets of incentives, change the results.
Cars are regulated for safety. High grills and raised trucks kill. Pedestrian deaths in the US go up because of these things while they are going down in the rest of the world. Are you really suggesting that we must have a law against high grills? Or does that fit a regulatory framework?
> Are you really suggesting that we must have a law against high grills?
No. I'm suggesting that if there is a criminal inquiry into safety defects of a product, it should target the company as an entity, not company officers.
And that we should maintain consistent standards; ie, display more tolerance of Boeing's performance than people are showing.
A blameless
culture
needs to take into account bad actors. You might add more processes for part sovereignty for example. This is what you rely on for safety.
In addition yeah also prosecute criminals. But that doesn’t stop crime. See “war on drugs” for example.
I assume you’re not being intentionally dishonest, but have instead been taken in by propaganda, so allow me to remind you that the primary purpose and effect of incarceration is preventing reoffending. Fortunately a tiny minority commits the vast majority of violent crimes[1], so considerable reduction can be achieved by containing those criminals’ ability to commit crimes.
Not sure which USA you're living in but what you're saying does not match reality. I've had a lot of friends and family in and out of jail and it's hell, at least in the US.
Hell is living in a place where you have a 1 in 70 chance of being a victim of a violent crime per year, and being gaslit by extremely co-dependent people into having more empathy for narcissist sociopaths than their traumatized innocent victims.
If people don't want to do serious jail time they shouldn't do serious crimes, the contract couldn't possibly be more simple. The purpose of incarceration isn't to coddle murderers, it's great if they change their life but ultimately it's to extract murderers from society so decent people can live peaceful and successful lives and anything else beyond that is ancillary.
And how is that strategy working out? Because lots and lots of countries have more humane justice systems and are safer. But I guess throwing more people in jail than the Soviet Union had in gulags can’t fail, only we can fail at throwing more people in jail.
It would be nice if society could develop some kind of technique to use in these cases of "we live in different realities". It sucks to have to write a guy off just because he lives in a different filter bubble than you do, yet I currently don't see any other option. And it seems like an issue that's growing in size.
Especially when the other guy “lives in a reality” where he thinks violently victimizing you is fine. It’s almost as if we need some way to separate from such people.
> The purpose of incarceration isn't to coddle murderers,
Unfortunatly in the real world your criminal justice ethics will have to accommodate crimes that are not murder, so you might need to think about some prisoners eventually getting released, who might then go on and do more criming.
> it's great if they change their life but ultimately it's to extract murderers from society
In that case, there is no need to make prisons particularly cruel. Cost can be debated, but surely as a society, we can put a value on humaneness. Even if not, if say I, a billionaire, wanted prisoners eat caviar every night and am willing to fund it, surely this should be allowed.
> Is it more important to dole out punishments or to get the best result? Because the best result isn't going to be from draconian punishments for CEOs.
Is that same logic applied to the lower class? Or is this basically admitting that if you are rich enough and bury your crimes and negligence behind enough paperwork and complexity, that you are no longer culpable?
I get your point that applying hard rules will encourage people to escape them, but there needs to be some framework opposed to the current anything goes and we might fine you at worst.
Yes, it is. Lower class voters (ie, the majority of voters) are typically responsible for some of the most horrific damage done to society through a combination of inattention and negligence through poor financial, healthcare, welfare, warfare and industrial policies.
We politely ignore that and focus on the present and the future, because they have too much power as a class to be punished and it wouldn't do much good anyway.
What counts as the "national security state"? Because as far as I recall the military is popular, the FBI was a trusted institution up to 2016 and getting a bit partisan since then. PATRIOT Act was passed in an environment of roaring support for the Bush administration over the screams of anyone who cared about basic rights and process. You don't have to go far to find people who support US intervention in Ukraine.
The US security state, in all its facets, has a lot of popular support. By people who I think are a bit foolish, but nevertheless. (although I'll sneak in that the karmic justice of watching the mechanisms of the War on Terror get turned on Republican voters has been sad but satisfying)
>>Because the best result isn't going to be from draconian punishments for CEOs.
Why do you bring "draconian" punishment? Is punishment always draconian? Are the best results observed in places where crimes are not punished? Could you provide references to research that confirms this?
Or your worries that punishments should not apply to CEOs?
I think having a blameless culture is a separate issue.
Let's say Bob gets a job in a Boeing factory and on every plane he works on, he deliberately hides a bunch of broken components in the system, thereby causing the planes to fall out of the sky. We can talk blamelessly about how we can avoid every hiring someone like Bob again, or taking precautions against malicious employees, but Bob himself has to accept the criminal liabilities that come with the choices he made: his decisions caused people to die.
But what happens when Bob instead installs himself as the CEO, and deliberately makes choices that prioritise revenue and stock prices over safety, knowing full well the risks that he is forcing on people, and that his planes in some cases fundamentally don't work? From a blameless culture perspective, we again need to figure out how we can avoid hitting another Bob and having these mistakes happen again, but surely we also have to recognise that our CEO actively, and in some sense maliciously, made decisions that caused people to die?
In this case, thankfully (and ultimately lucky) nobody has died - although previous incidents have not had such good outcomes. But we still need to recognise that this culture came from decisions made at the top of the organisation. I fully support a blameless culture that doesn't punish people for making mistakes and tries to fix the long-term, fundamental issues rather than find a scapegoat for each incident. But this goes beyond simply making mistakes, especially when one remembers the pattern of behaviour within the Boeing organisation that has caused several incidents like this.
I picked the CEO as an example because it's a visible role, although in this case I believe several CEOs have overseen the decision making that has lead to these incidents. I am not saying that the CEO specifically is at fault here. But wilful decisions have absolutely been made that have put us in this situation, and I think it is absolutely right that if you make decisions that ultimately lead to potential injury and death, you need to suffer the consequences of those decisions. And for that, we have a criminal justice system.
Someone has to make the final call on how much money to spend on making planes safe. The spend can't be $infinite and will be more than $1.
We can quibble with the amount that got picked. It turns out in this case the amount spent was too low. But it is unreasonable to talk about "... deliberately makes choices that prioritise revenue and stock prices over safety ...". At some point the call has to be made that the planes being built are safe enough, and that from there start to focus on profits. These companies have to produce more value than they consume (which is what "profits" represents at the macro level) otherwise there isn't any point producing.
In this case the call was made poorly, but the call had to be made. Holding the call maker personally responsible isn't the path to more successful outcomes in the future. The path that has been working quite well for around 2 centuries is to hold the company responsible for what the company did. If we start penalising CEOs for trying to build planes profitably, then it is possible that the industry will collapse. There is no justification here to hold people personally liable. It is enough to hit Boeing with an appropriate fine.
Maybe it should be okay to punish the decision makers when they decide to go against the recommendation of engineers for profit and it leads to hundreds of dead people. If not prison maybe they should be stripped of all their wealth rather than get a golden parachute as that's the worst outcome they have today.
When you consistently make decisions that knowingly prioritise profit over product safety[0], you have crossed the line between financial prudence and corporate manslaughter.
> But it is unreasonable to talk about "... deliberately makes choices that prioritise revenue and stock prices over safety ..."
I can't see how that is unreasonable. Nobody here is arguing that Boeing officials should be held criminally liable because they didn't invest enough money into safety. The liability is because they are blatantly disregarding safety. They invented MCAS and didn't let pilots know about it. One plane crashes and they don't care. Second plane crashes and they don't care. For years, stupid things keep happening and they still don't care.
By your logic, a psychopath CEO may deliberately undermine safety culture to earn more profits and still won't be held responsible, because it's “limited liability”. Limited liability means that financial liability is limited, not criminal one.
> By your logic, a psychopath CEO may deliberately undermine safety culture to earn more profits and still won't be held responsible, because it's “limited liability”.
Yep. This is how it is generally done. Shareholder's in Boeing are literally responsible for installing "a psycopath CEO" who undermined safety and they aren't liable. I see little difference between that and extending the protection to the CEO as well. It gets better results because we don't chase risk-averse people out of the CEO position. In this situation, we WANT the most risk-averse people we can find in the CEO seat of the airline manufacturers. They won't take it if the response to a crisis is making the position more risky.
There is an argument that the CEO should be liable if it leads to more productive results. But I don't see why that would be true - it is more effective to adjust the profitability of the company when things go wrong and let the incentives do the rest. The default position is that doing your job poorly is not criminal.
Also; most CEOs are psycopaths. You don't need to include it as an adjective. It is built in to the title.
I (personally) think the best result does involve criminal liabilities for CEOs. That's having seen this same story play out at many organizations.
However, criminal liability in itself won't solve it. Capitalism forces this kind of behavior; it's the natural trend for any company. The Dictator's Handbook describes it well.
What's needed is what's been done in every other industry: Regulation which changes incentive structures. Raw capitalism forces meat packing plants to pack ground rats in with your ground beef, quack medicines, and all sorts of other issues. The regulatory solution needs to have short-term economic consequences of some kind for doing the wrong thing. There are many of those, including:
1) Require insurance, and let the market sort it out. If the settlements and fees came from an insurance company rather than Boeing, the insurance company could set rules and inspections as it believed adequate to turn a profit.
2) Have high standards and regular inspections
3) Major changes to both capitalism and corporate governance. We have the best system we've thought of so far, but we sort of stopped thinking about new systems 50-100 years ago (fascism and communism were the last major attempts, and didn't turn out too well)
4) Completely overhaul our infrastructure for transparency. This could include whistleblower protections, as well as FOIA-like schemes, where an academic can look at what Boeing is doing.
It's worth noting this is a quasi-monopoly / duopoly situation, so market systems tend to work worse than most places.
But yes, it's a problem that criminal consequences are for poor people or people lower down the rungs. People at the top should go to prison too if they do something bad, with the same quality legal process as poor people.
All the issues are systemic, so it can't be the responsibility of some low-level employees. But it is kind of curious that Boeing suddenly wants to buy Spirit Aerosystems.
The curious things is that they divested Spirit Aerosystems in the first place, in a financial engineering move that seemed to serve no business purpose besides a PE pump and dump.
It kind ofnmade sense so: Tier one aerostructure suppliers are doing the easiest work, not like avionics and engine OEMs. By having those activities in-house, you have a cost center. Having that as a third-party turns it into a profit center. Also, a third party can theoretically work for other customers. Airbus did the same thing.
In practice so, there are only two aircraft OEMs. Hence those structure tier ones are kind of screwed. Automotive tier ones have much more choice regarding customers.
It only makes sense if your only metric is cost. There are a lot of reasons why Airbus owns the subsidiaries who do Spirit's type of work for Airbus (such as the airframe). Airbus does not do the same thing as Boeing.
Well, Airbus is a customer of Spirit Aerospace. And Premium Aerotec, well, they were very, very close to spin it out completely. Bavk the day, it was part of what today is Defence and Space. And Premium Aerotec is subsiediary of Airbus, it is not part of any of its divisions. So, somewhere between Spirit Aerospace and and being in-house.
Airbus didn't spin them out. It doesn't matter if they thought about it, because they decided it was a bad idea. It's nothing like Spirit and Boeing. Even as a subsidiary, the relationship is much more vertically integrated.
No idea. When it comes to bad quality controls and processes, the model doesn't matter much so. Also, I have no idea how Airbusbis surveilling and working with Spirit Aerospace compared to Boeing.
We might get the answers soon. If Boeing really wants to buy Spirit we might see Airbus’ exposure. That said, it wouldn’t be unheard them building for each other. Pretty sure Airbus manufactured parts for Boeing and vice versa in the past.
Boeing spun off Spirit Aerosystems to create the appearance of better RONA,, fragment their unionized workforce, and substitute contract demands for price and quality for engineering.
sometimes I wonder if org charts are engineered to make sure misdeeds are attributed to diffuse cultural/systemic problems that can’t be prosecuted:
- you can’t blame the low level employees inhabiting the system be their powerless to change it
- the CEOs are hoping that they’ve installed enough layers of middle management that they can claim plausible deniability about any on the ground problems (and ignore that their job is to be the manager-of-managers)
Right, but it is nebulous as to who to pin it on. You can't arrest every employee of Boeing. "The buck stops here" won't work, their lawyers are too good. So the answer isn't criminality, the answer is huge fines, in terms of 5% plus of annual revenue and oversight.
I would love for an impossible outcome from this that MBAs are deemed illegal. Can anyone honestly point to an example of where an MBA has had a positive long term effect by any of their decisions?
As I wrote elsewhere, under EASA rules high ranking people at an organization holding design and / or production organisation approvals, are personally responsible, and liable incl. criminal liability, to make sure their organisation works properly. I forget the exact term for this role so.
Not sure about FAA rules, but I assume they are somewhat similar. So at the very least, those individuals, at Boeing and Spirit Aerospace, should be a tad worried now. By the way, senior means VP-levek and above, usually one for the design side (propably less relevant in the door plug question), one on production side (they should be worried), one each for design and production quality (same as above, the production quality oeople should be worried a lot) as well as one for supply chain and other functiobs with less responsibilities (the supply chain people are imolicated in this door plug thing as).
Personally, I don't see how the FAA can just let this slip, their relationship with international partbers and their reputation is already damaged by the 737 MAX, so they have to do something about it.
>>> Not sure about FAA rules, but I assume they are somewhat similar. So at the very least, those individuals, at Boeing and Spirit Aerospace, should be a tad worried now.
It’s funny to see comments like. You think this isn’t just a dog and pony show? They don’t give a damn. They will sleep just fine. Nothing will happen because the government is in bed with these folks and they don’t implicate their own and the sooner you understand that the less it shocks you when nothing happens.
Comments like this just propagate a public opinion of indifference which really does make it harder for the government to hold people responsible. There obviously have been numerous cases of the govt stepping in effectively on such malfeasance and the smart thing to do is to demand that this becomes one of those cases. Not “I’m so smart I see through the bullshit so I expect (and therefore am encouraging) nothing to happen.”
Not sure I can actually agree with that, at least in such broad strokes.
And no, I know that it is not just a dog and pony show. "It" is the reason air travel is as safe as it is today, and that is way saver than 20 or 30 years ago, despite whatever Boeing did with the 737 MAX.
Yes, it is. And 20-30 years ago it was saver than, say, 50 years ago. Like in medcine, people don't always see those incrementle improvements over time.
I would've agreed with you five or so years ago but https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/305868 is more than an accident, you begin to wonder what's going on. There are staff shortages everywhere, why not with pilots? Are they as rested and trained as they ought to be? Together with the plane safety issues surfacing like an army of skeletons falling out of an infinite closet, I am not so sure we are on the same track as we were before.
Yes, the tendency is not great. Besides the Boeing issues, there is a tendency in pilot training and flight operations I don't like, e.g. more flight hours, tough shift planning, training to be paid for the junior pilots. That being said, I'm on the production / design / maintenance side of things, and not operations, so my opinion on that is just that, an opinion.
>Nothing will happen because the government is in bed with these folks and they don’t implicate their own
Even if they're bed with each other, the people in government are sitting at an infinitely longer lever. They'll throw the Boeing folks under the bus as soon as it is politically expedient and replace them with a different set of cronies.
Why would currently anybody globally trust FAA? Clearly regulatory capture has happened, its not 1 or 2 isolated cases at this point.
Trust is something thats hard earned and easily lost, they already went through both so if FAA wants to come back they have some serious effort on their shoulders in upcoming decade at least.
And slapping Boeing and those responsible so hard that wall will give them another is mandatory first step since this theatre is played out for literally everybody in the world, everybody is watching.
You are pinting to a very serious issue. Up until the 737 MAX, if someone or something had FAA or EASA certification, getting the other one was more or less just a formality. And this helped everyone a lot, and in fact made things saver as the engineering was less, constraint, limited, bothered by regulation (no idea how to phrase this...), because they only had to worry deeply about either FAA or EASA requirements. The 737 MAX did put a dent in this, and that was and is a problem.
And everyone knows this, besides Boeing it seems, which is the reason why I am cautiosly optimistic about the investogations.
It is certified by both, with EASA nasically accepting the FAA certication at face value (oversimplified a bit). That means trusting the other agency. It was this trust that was hurt by the initial B737 MAX scandle and the handling of it by both, Boeing and the FAA.
Ah, I see, thanks. So the FAA cut corners when certifying?
I guess trust only works when the other agency is up to the same standards as you, but then "certified by the FAA and the EASA" only really means "certified by one of the two".
No, the FAA didn't cut corners, Boeing did. The FAA did a bad job catching it.
And being certified by both means that orgs and aircraft are certified by both. Decades of cooperation and alignment of regulations and requirements mean that the sevond certification is covering the delta between both, believing the common stuff to be properly cerified by the other regulator. That is where the FAA lost trust.
Hence my believe the FAA will not show much liniency to Boeing this time.
Regardless of whether flying is safer or not, the citation is incorrect: a passenger on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 died in 2018 following a contained engine failure.
You think the crashes of the two 737 MAX being outside of the US was not luck, but determined at least in part by the FAA? Would you care to explain how you came to this conclusion, as I really, really don't see it...
His comments point to borderline racist statements from boeing early in the saga where they tried to blame this all on incompetence of the Ethiopian/other pilots, maintenance crew and so on.
To some folks human lives don't have the same value but it depends highly on passport, as long as stuff happens outside of their border all is fine (although in this case nothing is since this affects everybody everywhere). I wouldn't expect such a comment here in 2024 but here we are.
Inquiries won't help if they stop at Boeing, or contractors Boeing used. The problem here is much more fundamental to the regulatory bodies overseeing the airline industry and the dependence on a few companies that have become too big for the government to let fail.
As long as our government is beholden to large corporations, either through lobbying or the "too big to fail" card, we functionally have a fascist state where industry took over our government. I'm not saying we're all the way there by any means, but that's inevitable if we keep bandaiding problems without getting to the root cause.
>>> Inquiries won't help if they stop at Boeing, or contractors Boeing used.
The investigation hasn't stopped at Boeing nor Boeing contractors.
It's not covered in the NYT article linked in this HN topic, but the Wall Street Journal article that was first to report the Justice Department investigation says the NTSB is "seeking to interview Federal Aviation Administration Officials in the Seattle area who oversee Boeing's manufacturing".[0]
Sounds like an initial step towards identifying any fault that lies with the FAA and FAA oversight.
> seeking to interview Federal Aviation Administration Officials in the Seattle area who oversee Boeing's manufacturing
That could mean anything at the moment, though hopefully its a good sign.
It wouldn't be suprising for the NTSB or Justice Department to want testimony from the FAA related to a case against Boeing. It will be very surprising in my opinion if the interviews lead to any question of the FAA itself. Importantly, if the FAA was in any way a subject of the investigation they likely wouldn't be seeking interviews as that generally isn't a term used for potential defendants.
I’ll go one further: this is a compelling argument for, at least, direct government participation in markets we consider crucial to a functioning society.
This gets to the core of what modern governments are even trying to do. At least in the US, the concept of Executive branch agencies creating and enforcing regulations, and therefore manipulating markets, is fairly new.
I would personally want to see all of those agencies disbanded and regulations removed in favor of trusting markets and consumers to deal with problems. If nothing else, government intervention should be an extremely rare occurrence rather than business as usual.
With that said, there are certainly benefits of those agencies that would be lost. Its just my opinion that the good doesn't outweigh the bad, and that a system with fundamental issues and misaligned incentives should be gotten rid of as soon as possible. The short term damage caused would always be less than the long term damage of continuing to hold them together with duct tape and bubble gum.
Yes we should totally get rid of any oversight of large companies, because they will totally continue to put the safety of their customers ahead of making profit number bigger.
They totally won't screw you over and/or kill people due to poor design choices if it means they can save a buck.
Are you arguing that they don't do that with federal oversight?
Without government oversight providing plausible deniability and the appearance of safety, companies wouldn't get this large. When consumers don't believe the government is ensuring that only safe products and services are available they will step up to make their own decisions.
Case in point, if Boeing flights started to show a pattern of safety issues and customers didn't believe that planes must be safe because they are regulated, consumers may decide to fly less or not at all. Companies would have to respond when money dries up and plane sit empty. Companies would also focus on safety if they know their business could disappear either through customers losing faith in them or due to the heavy cost of litigation when their safety lapses create a pattern of harm.
Regulation on this scale serves a few purposes. Most importantly, I'd argue, to give financial and legal cover to the largest corporations, and to create the appearance of control and safety beyond what any realistic guarantee could ever possibly be.
No I was not doing that. I was mostly being sarcastic.
I will however argue that with no oversight at all, things would be much worse.
I do think your arguments give people too much credit though. If the choice was a cheaper flight but on a plane with a dubious safety record vs a more expensive flight on a plane with a good safety record I'd wager most would take option 1
I didn't catch your sarcasm there, sorry about that.
> I'd wager most would take option 1
If those people where aware of the safety concerns and made the choice knowingly, what's the problem? We don't need to regulate people from informed consent, do we?
> I didn't catch your sarcasm there, sorry about that.
No worries. It is text after all.
>If those people where aware of the safety concerns and made the choice knowingly, what's the problem? We don't need to regulate people from informed consent, do we?
I would say no, but in the same vane argue that such things shouldn't be a choice you have to make, that all planes should be some base level of safe. And since no company (at least in the US) is going to do that willingly because that hurts profits someone with teeth needs to exist to make them.
the fundamental problem is information asymmetry. when a consumer makes a purchase, they do not and can not evaluate the safety of a product design. As such, the nash equilibrium is for manufacturers to cut all the corners they can.
When Boeing flights have repeated safety issues on passenger flights, what more information is needed?
As it stands, consumers don't have much reason to act for themselves as the FAA and government at large would prefer that we trust they have it under control.
That may even be true, but surely that falls under the information imbalance you mention. We don't know exactly how the regulators are responding, though we do know that FAA regulations rely heavily on self-report mechanisms in which the companies effecrively regulate themselves.
That only holds up if consumers are either withheld almost all information, or simply don't care.
To be clear, administration doesn't create law - only legislation does. Regulation only makes sense if its enforcing the will of the people. If the people have access to the basics, like what Koch industries actually does or a record of the most recent safety issues with Boeing planes, they can act themselves. Why do we need a heavy and every-growing web of regulators and centralized authority to enforce this?
If a company is screwing with the environment in ways that I am not okay with, why wouldn't I just stop giving them my money rather than waiting for regulators to eventually catch up and hope that both regulators aren't bought by special interests and that they leave no loop holes?
> this kind of “unfettered” capitalism.
What does this mean exactly? What is fettered capitalism in your definition, and when does it stop being capitalism at all? As far as I see it, capitalism like free speech is an all or nothing affair. I'm totally okay with people choosing to not want the risks of free speech or capitalism, but it isn't a spectrum as the value if both is lost as soon as you start putting guard rails on it.
OK, seriously though, when it comes to outsourcing, it's because Airbus/CASA rigorously defined systems interfaces and all sorts of other stuff before outsourcing design. I've been a part of the supplier chain there, and it's intense, but it means your part's got a good shot of slotting in the first time.
787 - and a whole truckload of BDS work - it's less "strict systems interface" and more "what is systems interface". You can get decades pass where the part still doesn't fit.
It might be now? Honestly, it probably is, given the reworks.
But the problem with the Eight, at least initially, was the way the suppliers were organized. Or, more specifically, how they weren't organized. Boeing had flushed through a half dozen generation of Systems Engineers in the aughties, and no one really had a half chance to get familiar with anything that was laid down before. Suppliers generally took their best guess and went with it - that's where we were, at the time, because it proved completely impossible to make any contact with a person at Boeing who knew what the FMS data bus was . . or, on most days, even what a FMS data bus was. So we guessed either ARINC429 or ARINC664 and got (mostly!!) lucky.
There were also some . . ah, I don't want to say "bad" . . so let's say, "non-technical" SEs . . who advocated for their own vision vis a vis SE and supplier management. In short, this was a giant mish mish, and, speaking for myself, it colored my personal perception of Systems Engineering as a discipline to this day. While you get some real SE rockstars, you also get an epidemic of shysters with mild sociopathy, and it takes good, technical leadership to tell one from the other.
Keep in mind this was . . sheesh . . almost two decades ago, so take it all with a grain of salt.
System Engineering is a technical profession. I honestly don't think is does anyone any good to avoid calling nontechnical SEs bad at the job. The truth is important especially when it leads to the development of metal tubes that fly 150+ people through the air at hundred of miles per hour.
With that said, a nontechnical SE is a sign of a fundamentally broken system and org. Someone had to hire them for the role. Meaning they were interviewed and deemed fit for the role, likely with room to grow given more experience and opportunities to learn from. While I would say a nontechnical SE is bad st their job, stopping there doesn't fix the problem at all and its important that the context of why they had that job isn't lost.
I don't known nearly as much about thisyhud specifically, but I've seen compelling arguments for how the Boeing merger really damaged leadership and the company as a whole. I can't vouch for that personally, but it was convincing to me.
Moreover though, if my original argument is right, the failing system of regulation will fail slowly (presumably then all at once). The FAA and other bodies involved in the air industry may be broken, but it still takes a kick to push a company over the edge. A company like Airbus could continue to operate extremely well despite the broken system, though I'd argue with enough time they will be hit by it as well.
They've probably just managed to avoid gaining such an extreme cost cutting culture that Boeing management is believed to have. Probably also less openly corrupt politicians over in Europe. Congress-critters don't even really make an effort to hide that they're at Boeing's beck and call.
In what some call a frightening abuse of executive power the FAA and Dept of Justice have combined powers in a "Power Rangers type thing" and issued a sweeping judgement against all holders of an MBA. A prepared statement released by the lead investigators from the Dept of Justice said "Those who can't do teach and those who can't do either become either an accountant or an MBA or probably both. At some point the gangrenous limb must be swiftly cleaved and that is our intent here today."
I hate how far Boeing has fallen. The merger with McDonnell Douglas seems to have been a disaster of leadership. I'm sure that's not the only factor, but multiple articles I've read have pointed to that as the turning point.
This also isn’t the first issue. Ignoring the stock maximization issues & issues like the Dreamliner mess.
This reason this is real real bad was because the 737 Max. The C suite said it was real come to Jesus moment. Now we’re finding out not only is the culture not fixed, but it has such mismanagement that there’s no effective QA.
It's even worse, because after the initial disastrous test flight of Starliner, NASA had ordered a review of all of Boeing's software practices (especially testing procedures), not just the Starliner code.
I'd imagine they'd have caught signs of these QA issues while working through the software stuff.
They can probably coast on prior successes for a long time. Not to mention many airline fleets will be older stock, the replacement schedules on those things can be long. A systemic deterioration might take decades until people notice.
Here’s hoping they pay for their cost-cutting crimes (yeah I know it’s not a crime per se but the efforts are putting people at undue risk, allegedly). And that it’s followed up by a civil case. And that the criminal case causes the board and management to change and the civil case somehow makes workers and victims whole.
> civil case somehow makes workers and victims whole
If they’re found criminally liable, the most likely outcome is bankruptcy. Victims (airlines) would have a claim. Workers, their unpaid wages. Whatever comes out of bankruptcy will likely need some public support; even then, it’s hard to imagine we don’t see layoffs.
Where do you get “the most likely outcome is bankruptcy” and not say, a $5b fine and something akin to a consent decree? Totally exaggerating the likely consequences.
Ordered list of reasons I don't believe anything worthwhile will happen:
1. Boeing is a huge defence contractor with both civil and military products sold worldwide. A big loss to Boeing will be seen as a big loss to American hegemony.
Actually you could argue having one of your biggest defence contractors behave like this is a bigger loss to American power than holding their feet to the fire and trying to develop a more engineering focused culture.
You forgot one thing: Boeing is not only under FAA and US scrutiny, all their processes and planes are certified by EASA, and others, as well. The B737 Max crashes alread harmed the trust between EASA and FAA, if nothing happens now, EASA might very well take seperate action. I have a hunch Boeing doesn't want that.
Edit: There is also a couple of high ranking people that are "holders" of those certifications, Design Organisation Approval and Production Organisation Approval in EASA parlance. Forgot the exactvtitle of those people, but usually they aee at least VP level, sometimes even C-level and always a seperate one from Quality. They are vetted by the national authorities and sign to confirm their obligation, incl. legal, to adhere to the stabdards and do everything to meet those. In Europe, negligence of this can lead to criminal prosecution and jail time. No idea how this is done under FAA regulations. Boeing peopably doesn't fall under EASA jurisdiction in that regard so, having not operations in Europe.
I think that would "only" affect the broader foreign policy.
My take is that arms trade is a good business (my assumption) and unprincipled foreign policy could see more indiscriminate trading taking place. I.e. the opposite effect.
And what's the point of having US weapons, when USA won't give you ammunition because it decided it would be escalatory? Swiss arms industry is having same problem, but there it is stemming from neutrality of Swiss government.
That’s an interesting question. The engineering ethics course I was required to take would unequivocally say yes, the engineers should be held accountable. If you, as an engineer, raise the concern, and management overrides you, then what? You could whistleblow and/or quit in protest. But does that leave you jobless? My engineering ethics course didn’t talk about duties to support your family financially.
That’s the question I had in a recent engineering law course. It’s clearer IMO when engineering licenses are involved, but most manufacturing (like aerospace) operate under industrial exemptions for PE licenses.
But saying “no, they’ll just be jobless and hire an engineer who’ll rubber stamp it” feels like a cop out to me. Why couldn’t you also extend that further? “no, the board/shareholders will just hire a CEO who prioritizes schedule and profit” fits in the same domain, and nobody is clamoring to hold shareholders accountable.
My personal opinion is that there are a few professions (doctor, lawyer, engineer) who have ethical duties to the public, irrespective of the consequences to their personal career. That’s a legal duty, as opposed to a personal duty to your family.
Now replace “PE” with “CEO” and you have the same dynamic, which is what the previous post was trying to point out.
The question is about who has an ethical duty to the public and how to hold them accountable as such. I’m not sure why it applies only to one group when there’s a reasonable precedent that engineers also have an ethical duty to the public.
Only for securities related fraud and crime. Engineering work doesn't really get covered. I mean with a lot of indirection you can twist that it's lying to shareholders but the SEC wouldn't dare overextend that far without more clearer law.
As Matt Levine says, everything is securities fraud. Boeing defrauded its shareholders (and its public company customers) by saying that it was building safe planes. Even beyond that, the law guarantees protection for whistleblowers within these companies.* These hypothetical engineers would have absolutely been protected.
* If you work for a public company, you've almost certainly had a training about its ethics hotline with information about your protection from retaliation.
I took the same course but frankly don't need an education to know I would never work at a company that is so systematically broken and careless about building safe, quality products. I feel genuinely bad for those who don't feel they have that choice or aren't gutsy enough to make it.
My experience is that people get slowly indoctrinated into thinking it’s ok. They see the pattern over and over and never see a bad outcome just due to the low probability of bad events. It leads people to get complacent, “normalization of deviance” and all that.
I knew a team lead for one of Boeing's machinist groups in Seattle. They were a blue collar bunch and not college educated engineers. He wanted to have pride in their work but was constantly frustrated with their management and told me once that he didn't trust Boeing planes.
Boeing didn't like when they went on strike and moved to South Carolina where it was cheaper and there were less union friendly laws.
I know a lot of Boeing people. Boeing’s management shit-show is legendary around here. The night of the door plug incident a former Boeing coworker of mine very confidently told me his hypothesis of what happened — and he was exactly right when the details came out. He worked there more than ten years ago.
In the case in question here, there is no obvious engineering design flaw in the door plug to hold anyone accountable for. To the point you were replying to, it's also not clear there was an obvious management decision that led to the plug being reinstalled improperly.
I don’t know enough about the door plug, but TFA also implicates the MCAS scenario. In that case, not only were there design flaws, but had the engineers followed their own internal design processes, the flaws could have been mitigated better.
I think that’s part of the issue. For example, if you require engineers to have licenses and stamp designs, this gives engineers more leverage for pay. This extends to software engineering as well.
Licensed engineers today don't really get that much benefit in increased pay these days. It's just considered part of the job and it's really your professional liability insurer carrying the most burden and hence your premiums. Lol
If a job requires a PE and not all engineers have a license, that constrains supply. If you believe that the balance of supply/demand influences pay, then it can lead to pay increases. The issue is that most jobs that require PEs are also in industries with lower margins (eg construction). I suspect that if social media software engineers were regulated to require a license, those with a PE would see an increase in pay.
The SEC has a whistleblower program to ensure whistleblowers are financially well off after basically getting blacklisted when the industry when they report crimes
There are no such protections for engineers and the aerospace industry is very consolidated these days.
I'd be careful about over-regulation and liabilities (especially criminal liability). Such has completely crushed the general aviation business. This is why Cessnas flying today are all from the 1960s. Their engines require leaded gas, which is a big problem, but regulation and liability has made it impractical to develop a modern engine.
I.e. not only is innovation crushed by regulation, liability also prevents any new designs, because new designs always carry an element of risk.
Criminal liabilities mean people will do their best to deny it and cover it up, rather than fix it. The incredible safety of aviation today is not the result of punishing people who make mistakes.
The idea that people shouldn't be charged with crimes because that makes them cover up crimes is pretty hard to grok.
We should also be careful of underregulation. Most of all, we should be careful of reflexive, reactionary, and/or partisan reasoning and decision-making. Part of that is this hypersenstive allergy to regulation that has people sneezing and coughing every time the idea is within a mile of them. That's arguably a reason for the Boeing situation.
Business leaders always clamor for less regulation because they have big egos (they cannot be constrained! also they must know more than the regulator), because sometimes there is a negative impact on their quarterly revenue, and because many have embraced an ideology. When things go to heck, then it would have been better to be regulated more - a situation Boeing is in now, and that financial markets seem to find themselves in every decade or so.
(Regulation also helps create a marketplace where you can focus on making better planes, not taking risks with people's lives to keep up with the other crazy competitors.)
> The idea that people shouldn't be charged with crimes because that makes them cover up crimes is pretty hard to grok.
I think the point is more about what we treat as crimes. My assumption is that the grandparent post is a reaction to the number of people in the comments here demanding criminal liability for the door plug issue, especially for Boeing executives, despite a notable lack of evidence of criminal actions (or actions that should be criminal) by Boeing executives or anyone else for that matter.
Charging people with crimes when there is evidence they've committed crimes seems like fair game, but the assumption that a crime was involved just because something bad happened seems like a bad approach to aviation safety. Maybe that's where this case will end up, but calls for it now seem wildly premature and likely to have the chilling effect the grandparent poster is talking about.
My point is not about deliberate criminal behavior (such as sabotage) but simply making mistakes. Designing and building an airliner is an incredibly complex undertaking, and most mistakes are "obvious" only in hindsight.
I recall one where the vent for dumping fuel turned out to be upstream of the cabin air intake. Eventually, an airliner needed to dump fuel, it was sucked up by the cabin air intake and the vapors blown through the cabin, and of course it blew up.
It sounds like "how could someone have made such a mistake!". The cabin engineers were a separate group from the engine people, that's how.
Another crash happened because a maintenance worker taped over the pitot tubes to protect them when the airplane was cleaned. He forgot to remove them afterwards. The tape wasn't very visible, and the inspection missed the tape. The airplane took off and crashed. The maintenance worker was prosecuted for his mistake. I felt sorry for the poor bastard - not only did he have to live with the guilt, but was jailed as well.
P.S. if someone in the aviation industry comes to work high or drunk, and makes a mistake while under the influence, I have no issue with prosecuting them.
> My point is not about deliberate criminal behavior (such as sabotage) but simply making mistakes.
I agree, but of course the difficult grey area is negligence; obviously some things are criminally unacceptable. The standard is sort-of 'should they have known better?' There's no easy, objective, logical map to an answer.
Criminal prosecutions of corporations and executives are rare enough that I'm not too worried about it being overdone, but of course there is the risk of emotional or crowd-pleasing decisions.
Back when I worked on the 757 stab trim gearbox, I certainly knew far more about it than the regulators. There was just no way they knew every detail of it like I did. I also did all the math on it, and I was never questioned about it by the regulators. They never asked me a single question about any of it.
> Business leaders always clamor for less regulation because they have big egos
They often clamor for more regulation for the purpose of making it very difficult for anyone to compete with them.
> Regulation also helps create a marketplace where you can focus on making better planes, not taking risks with people's lives to keep up with the other crazy competitors
That's a self-contradictory statement. Making better planes is how you compete successfully.
> Regulation is ... a blunt, and dangerous, weapon.
It is hardly blunt. It's enormously detailed in many areas, created by experts. We can find negative outcomes for any enterprise as m massive as regulatoin; in itself it doesn't mean much.
There are concerns and issues to consider, but this mass, very blunt :) critique and rejection of it prevents us from addressing them.
Certainly we are better off with the FAA regulating Boeing and the airlines than not regulating them!
> Certainly we are better off with the FAA regulating Boeing and the airlines than not regulating them!
Are we really? Then why all these Boeing fails? They are quite regulated and that's supposed to prevent them but regulatory failures abound.
I'd much rather have a strong free market where competition is keeping companies honest and on their toes. But one of the effects of regulation is reducing competition (through raising the barrier of entry).
Thus regulation becomes even more necessary to replace the lost competition... A self-fulfilling prophecy if you want.
> but regulation and liability has made it impractical to develop a modern engine.
Can you go into more detail about this? What regulation/liability specifically has stifled modern engine development? And is the answer deregulation? Or more carefully applied regulation of a different sort?
I think specifics are critically important for this kind of thing. General rhetoric is often “too much regulation” or “not enough regulation,” but what we usually want is “the correct regulation to align incentives,” which is often different for different cases.
I've seen discussions of the engine, about the regulatory barriers to designing new piston engines for Cessnas so the leaded gas can be dispensed with. Businesses don't want anything to do with changing anything at all about those airplanes.
This is quite an outlandish take. The safety of the aviation industry is by and large directly due to strict safety regulations, many of which Boeing pioneered before being taken over and financialized into the mess it is today.
New entrants in this industry need a ton of capital, made only worse by the monopoly suppliers in every single airframe sector. If anything, there needs to be more regulation to breakup these behemoths (or, prevent mergers like McDonnell Douglas and Boeing) in the first place.
> The safety of the aviation industry is by and large directly due to strict safety regulations, many of which Boeing pioneered
Isn't that rather self-contradictory? Having an unsafe airplane is bad for business. It put Lockheed out of the airliner business, for example (Elektra). Also DeHaviland (Comet).
You can hang people if you like, but you won't like the result. The aviation industry has not gotten as safe as it is today by whipping, hanging, or jailing people.
Even fixing a mistake is an implicit admission of guilt, and so people will not fix them. They will cover up and deny instead.
Real teeth don't require hanging anyone. It can involve things like mandatory FAA audits at random, and removing the ability for manufacturers to self-audit. It can involve the SEC delisting stocks from the exchanges. It can involve a government takeover of bad actors, removing the board of directors, and installing a board assigned by the FAA.
Never said they had to be. Prosecutors can get very creative with plea bargains. Executives receive no punishment or admission of guilt, and in exchange, the FAA gets to make Boeing its playground.
The liability, in this case, is not about innovation, but about cost-reduction and outsourcing to a vendor with (allegedly) no audit and compliance controls.
The company had been asked to produce any documentation it had related to the removal and re-installation of the panel. ... Boeing said it had conducted an extensive search but could not find a record of the information ...
“We likewise have shared with the N.T.S.B. what became our working hypothesis: that the documents required by our processes were not created when the door plug was opened,” the Boeing letter reads. “If that hypothesis is correct, there would be no documentation to produce.”
In the letter, Boeing also said that it had sent the N.T.S.B. all of the names of the individuals on the 737 door team on March 4, two days after it was requested.
How laughably shameless: Offer the lowest-level employees as sacrifices, while burning any connection up the chain to the rest of Boeing. If Trump wins, and Boeing pays what he asks, the government might blame those employees.
Watch for the leaks that begin to smear them - alcohol use, a history of (something bad), etc. A traditional way the powerful destroy the weak is to use far superior media resources to smear them. True or not, ordinary people can't fight a tide of disinformation about them.
There is no way to excuse behaviour of the people working on the door that day, none.
Stopping at that level won't work there, Boeing tries to spin it that way, but this plane was not the only one woth issues on the door plug. And they already admitted that there was a work around decision loop regarding the necessary documentation work. And FAA audits do not stop at individuals and their behaviour, the explicitely focus on processes and culture (I assume FAA does in principle the same thing EASA does).
But hey Boeing tried to blame the 737 Max crashes on the pilots, so I guess trying the same with shop floor teams tracks.
> There is no way to excuse behaviour of the people working on the door that day, none.
I'll wait for all the facts and their defense before drawing a conclusion (and even then, I really don't know and would trust a jury more). IME, pointing moral outrage at seemingly sure targets turns out to be a sure way to make myself the sinner.
I am in aerospace, and working at that door plug the way it was done, is simply unexcuseable. No documentation, doing non-standard work, sloppy work on the safety critical bolts... Overall culture is to blame, no doubt about that. And still, it does not absolve the rank and file.
> working at that door plug the way it was done, is simply unexcuseable. No documentation, doing non-standard work, sloppy work on the safety critical bolts
You're assuming all that is true. Do we have more than Boeing's possible CYA claims to go on? (An honest question.) Also, have we heard their side of the story?
It peetty much looks like that; Boeing admitted there is no documentation to come by, it was not the only time the mistake happened and we have rather credible whistelblower. Add to that a DoJ investigation, and the above looks like a realistic scenario.
We will know once the FAA and NTSB did their investigation and audits, and published their reports.
Just to repeat: When you work in aerospace, you do not work on an aircraft without documenting your work and any deviations or non-conformities. Period. And even if you are forced and pressured by higher ups to do so, you do it properly. The fact that we have a whistleblower tells me rank and file are less than happy with the status quo so. Doesn't change the fact that someone made a serious mistake working on an aircraft. That alone is serious, even if it wouldn't have resulted in an incident.
> Boeing admitted there is no documentation to come by
Doesn't that serve Boeing's interests, to bury any record of possible harmful events, and to also bury the record of that information passing through other hands at Boeing?
In other words, should 'Boeing admitted' be taken at face value, as an admission of guilt, rather than a possible coverup of much worse and a way to throw the line workers under the wheels?
No, the intentional absence of documentation is in itself a serious issue. It can even be assumed that tjis documentation, wpupd it exist, wouod proof wrong doing. It tje opposite of Boeing interest to hide stuff.
You sure about that? It is true so, by the time those people go to jail, they rend to be neither rich nor powerfull anymore. See Elizabeth Holmes, SBF, just spontaniously.
You know, I don't like to kick a dead horse while it's down. I bet Boeing feels just awful about all of this and they're someday soon going to start doing their best to remedy it. I don't think one or two or three major problems in rapid succession is anything more than bad luck and hey, look at all the good work they've done for their shareholders! We should just trust that they're a good American company and they're going to get better and leave it at that! Besides, the FAA is almost bankrupt and Trump is about to go back into office so why waste our time on things we know aren't going to get fixed?
Here's a wild guess: Through SpaceX design experience (rip apart, challenge all assumptions and rebuild better), Elon Musk (Falcon Aviation) will try to build a far more efficient and safe alternative to existing 737s.
With Trump coming to power, Boeing's tarnished credibility will be a major issue to address. I'm expecting US government will incentivize this process. Boeing will lose good engineers out to this fresh competition.
I love me some wild speculation, but it seems more likely that SpaceX needed a more capable jet to ferry large, critical parts from Hawthorne to Brownsville. Otherwise they'd need to go on a trailer.
Now for my own wild speculation: SpaceX has shown renders of using Starship to do point to point passenger travel. And Elon appears to fixate on goals like that. My impression is that he would view reverse-engineering a passenger plane as a distraction for the company.
I wonder whether the recent release of the Comac C919 [1] has anything to do with it - either through pushing Boeing to cut corners to compete on cost, or through malicious amplification of bad news stories involving Boeing.
Boeing screwed up here and let a door fall out of a flying plane. They don’t need anyone amplifying their bad news; it’s going to come to them.
Boeing and its subcontractors apparently didn’t even keep appropriate records of the maintenance that was performed here. That’s a huge oversight and probably a big part in why they’re being criminally investigated.
I really hope they find something. Boeing is stupposed to represent America. Products represent the country you belong to and are support to incentivize trading. If we are not making good planes someone will gap fill that.
> Boeing is stupposed to represent America. Products represent the country you belong to and are support to incentivize trading.
I've certainly never heard that. Boeing is a private entity and doesn't represent America; nobody voted for them or chose them, and they don't represent America any more than everyone else.
People voted for their representatives. Giving special status to these companies ends up giving them special power and treatment in order to facilitate their mission, instead of equality before the law.
