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Comment by 2T1Qka0rEiPr | Hacker News Reader

> ...the F.A.A. outsourced key elements of the certification process to Boeing itself, and that Boeing’s safety analysis of the new plane contained some serious flaws, including several relating to the mcas.

This sounds insane. Is there a reasonable explanation?

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I'm an aerospace engineer and I work in certification. This is par the course. The regulatory authority allows delegates to make findings of conformance w.r.t. airworthiness standards for aeronautical products. These delegated engineers have narrow specialties and are delegated for only specific ATA chapters or subsections. So Boeing will have a few delegated engineers whose only job is to certify Chapter 28 'Fuel Systems' components. These delegated engineers act as 'Design Approval Representatives' (DARs). They do this through something called an 'Organization Designation Authorization' (ODA). This is the regulators way of allowing some trusted individuals to make decisions on behalf of the regulator. This is often because these engineers are experts in their fields so they take on full responsibility. It's the equivalent of an engineers 'stamp' in civil engineering.

So it sounds like some Boeing engineers should be held personally liable for all the deaths in these two plane crashes.

It's not necessarily terrible. Boeing obviously has a strong financial interest in safety. The Fight Club theory of managing an acceptable number of fatal mistakes really doesn't hold for the airline industry, because their failures are large and public, because people are inherently afraid of air travel, and because the investigation of plane losses tend to produce far more definitive results than car crashes.

This investigation seems to be turning against Boeing. They will survive, but it almost definitely will cost them far more than whatever they saved by cutting corners. There will also be changes to the certification process, and non-US authorities will take a hard look. Any new incident would become an existential risk for Boeing.

It's important to remember that a company like Boeing isn't a single person. People working on the certification process would usually have incentives that differ from the company as a whole: they do not individually reap the benefits of cutting corners, but bear the brunt of any mistakes, including moral responsibility, possible criminal charges, and an end to their careers.

Such schemes are employed in many industries. Usually, corporate structures and cultures prevent the sort of top-down pressure that people imagine being at play here. Threatening your safety engineers (fire marshals, data protection officers, etc) with job loss for doing their job would result in whistleblowers and lawsuits. It will be interesting to see how exactly this failed at Boeing.

Clearly, Boeing didn't have enough interest. The idea that self preservation should be enough to make companies "do the right thing" ignores the fact that if they cut corners, people die. If the CEO could be held criminally liable, that might work, but in this case the only downside for Boeing will likely be share price drops.

I am not aircraft specialist, but I have seen similar things in IT/telecommunication. I think this is competence issue. F.A.A don't have people and tech to really understand/analyse anything that is going on with modern plane. More broadly USA specifically likes usage of contractors, some other countries at least try do have technical competence in govermental agency. So that is mostly question, why F.A.A don't have third party, like Lockheed Martin, to audit Boeing, but that is probably against Boeing (and reverse situation Lockheed Martin) commercial interest (like trade secrets).

When I read it I was reminded of a report I heard in the Private Eye (UK magazine), in which they mentioned that large firms were both managing the accounts of Russian companies suspected of wrong-doing and auditing them.

(edit): Podcast link if of interest - http://www.private-eye.co.uk/eyeplayer/play-350

The Seattle times report[0] that the delegation was largely politically motivated in an effort to save time on the certification so that Boeing would not be left behind with respect to Airbus.

So it is not a competency issue, so at best it was mostly capacity related: the FAA didn't have enough resources to certify at the speed Boeing needed. Of course, the fact that you are certifying yourself might also speed things up for other reasons than purely your willingness to allocate more resources.

[0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...

This is the way most engineering work is certified, actually. A standards bureau creates a standard, the engineering design organization follows it and self-certifies that they did.

Only in case of failure is the self-certification process checked for errors, usually by insurance investigators, because they have the most incentives to do so.

The visible examples of public failures investigated by public agencies are the exception, in my understanding.

Exactly. This is how the medical device industry does it. One important part you skipped was the mandatory audits of the development process (often with little or no warning: FDA audit team announces that they'll be there tomorrow).

I honestly don't think there's any other realistic way of doing it properly. The true experts are the ones doing the work.

Everyone these days want to 'delegate' work to someone else if permissible by law, and sometimes even if they are not, I guess. I have a feeling the report would come out with, 'due to lack of funding and experts, some of the work had to be 'delegated' to Boeing' etc...

Boeing has been allowed to self certify for years[0].

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-e...

I guess they trusted Boeing. After all they also don't want their planes to crash and have a long record of being reasonably responsible.

They also want to make a profit and therefore might make compromises in security. There is a reason we have independent inspections like everywhere we deem sensible enough to pay for it as a society.

It's tricky when it comes to software systems though. Imagine you had to inspect a new Boeing. It would be ok to look at the construction and see it was stuck together ok but hard to understand all the software systems unless you'd helped write them. Normally with software written by others you find the problems by using it and seeing it have bugs or crash, not by inspecting the code.

In this case I imagine someone at Boeing knew moving the elevator jack 2.5 degrees based on one sensor was unsafe hence them selling an optional upgrade that made the system safe. That seems kind of criminal.

I'd agree if the problems is within the software "black box" (the software term, not the aircraft thingy).

But to me it currently looks like it's largely a problem of how the different systems interact and how it's communicated to the users aka pilots. That's something one should be able to spot from the flowcharts/blueprints or whatever they have to document system integration.

Except for the fact that they really like to throw their customers and pilots under a bus if it's convenient to them.

This was, in my opinion, one of the most disgusting aspects of this whole sordid story. They had to cut back after the Ethiopian crash, but blaming everybody else seems a big part of their DNA.

After the Lion Air crash it wouldn't have been unreasonable to assume pilot error. Almost all recent accidents have been pilot error.

I read somewhere that the sensor was misreading by 20° and Lion should have noticed.

Should Boeing have shipped the system with a single point of failure by default? Probably not.

Should the FAA have raised questions about that? Probably.

Should Boeing have considered a test case where a pilot didn't know about MCAS? Probably. But we don't know that they didn't. Perhaps they did and their test pilots recovered the plane in time. That would make it a Lion Air training failure.

There's no single point of blame here, but thankfully the airline industry reacts as a whole to incidents like this and takes as many steps as possible to make sure it doesn't happen any more.

That would make it a Lion Air training failure.

Well, how could they train for it, when Boieing conveniently hushed over such a significant change, because it was commercially expedient? Until the Lion Air crash the airlines and their pilots didn't even know that such a system is in place.

According to an AA pilot the entire training consisted of less than an hour presentation on an iPad, in which the new behavior wasn't mentioned at all.

Add to that that Boeing offered a paid upgrade which at least would make pilots aware that the system malfunctions.

This paid upgrade sounds a bit like "Nice plane you have here, would be a shame if it crashes"

No matter how you look at it: Boeing displayed despicable behavior in this whole sorry mess. Behavior which comes back now to bite them badly.

I don't disagree with your reasoning, for what it's worth. I just think there really should be a special place in hell for the Boeing executives who allowed this to happen. Especially after the first crash.

Again, unless I've missed a statement, we don't know if Boeing has tested for this case internally.

This case being "pilots untrained and unfamiliar with the MCAS system recovering from a catastrophic systems failure / error".

They are at fault no matter what though from straying from their long held principle that the pilot has the final say on control of the aircraft. Inputs from the yoke and throttle levers should always supercede the computer.

The pilots could have been trained to understand all the control surfaces on the airplane and how to identify their configuration.

From what is reported about the Lion Air crash it sounds like the pilots may not have sorted out what the stabilizer trim was set to and what to do to correct it. Hopefully that is not the case as such a situation would be a glaring problem with pilot competence.

This is all fairly irrelevant to the fact that the safety procedures themselves seem unjustifiable. How could the FAA have raised questions if they weren't even doing the testing?

Nobody in either the article or this train of comments has suggested that it was unreasonable to assume pilot error after a single crash. The problem is the oversight process which allowed it to be certified in the first place.

The airline industry isn't responsibly reacting, they're reacting after trying for quite some time to ignore the problem because it's becoming increasingly obvious that they and the FAA have been horrendously negligent, and ignoring it isn't working anymore.

There’s no reasonable explanation. It also speaks to the lack of oversight and funding of FAA by Congress. Pathetic really.

> lack of oversight

From the article:

> It turns out that the F.A.A., with congressional approval, has “over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes,”

This ran through Congress. Not that any of them or the bureaucrats at the FAA will face penalty.

Still lack of oversight - as in Congress approved it but did not follow up to see if it's working or sensible.

Same thing with the european car industry, sadly.

If you speak German, this piece in Süddeutsche Zeitung from 2015 is enlightening: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/zertifizierung-von-au...

It does sound insane, yet every country does something similar (that "key" part varies).

There is a great deal of goal alignment between airplane designers, large air travel companies and safety regulators.

> In October of 2017—six months after the 737 MAX was certified—President Donald Trump signed a law that allows aircraft manufacturers to press the FAA to give them authority over how they certify components considered to be low- or medium-risk items. And if the manufacturers can convince the FAA that something falls into one of those two categories, they could essentially have free rein over how they certify their craft as safe. [0][1]

[0]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/boein...

[1]https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/boeing-had-too-much-sway-checkin...

It is not a reasonable explanation, but the explanation is that the FAA is underfunded. It cannot handle the work itself, and cannot afford to contract it out.

It is not realistic for the FAA to do all the work independently, but now it cannot even effectively audit the self-certification.

Money.

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