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Well, then I'm irrational too, because I won't set foot in a 737 MAX after this shitfest. The FAA also lost a lot of trust, for rubber-stamping this.

The first accident was maybe understandable. We all know that shit happens. But Boeing has zero excuses for not immediately grounding the whole fleet after, and for putting out that useless recovery procedure which didn't work in this case. They let a deadly plane fly for 5 months after they were aware of it, and after the second crash they were phoning Trump to keep it in the air.

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> The FAA also lost a lot of trust, for rubber-stamping this.

From documents I've seen (which I cannot find the links to now), it appears that the FAA let Boeing themselves do some of the certification work and sign offs.

Putting the foxes in charge of the hen house, so to speak.

If I recall, this boiled down to the FAA not having engineers who could properly test these systems.

And now whistleblowers have said that Boeing didn't have properly trained people to handle it either.

It's called Regulatory Capture, and it happens to all regulatory agencies sooner or later.

They become primarily concerned with the interests of the companies they're regulating, rather than the public interest they're in theory tasked with working for.

Unfortunately, that is just how a regulated society works.

How do you arrive at such a conclusion? Have you researched regulatory agencies in EU? For example they just blocked a meeger between two massive train manufacturer. Your argument sounds like a weak libertarian talking point.

I owned a Volkswagen. Why wouldn’t regulatory capture be a thing everywhere?

Why is corruption in some countries is more than others? I dont know the answer but it is.

If anything corruption seems more common in countries with fewer regulations, if anything (not that I have any data to back this up).

Many - not all, but perhaps most - of those who get corrupted are regulators.

So without regulations, there are fewer people to corrupt.

regulatory capture is an event, threshold, inflection point, or whatever else you want to call it. it isn’t something that just poofs into existence as soon as a regulatory body is created. however, it does seem to be an end state or at least an evolutionary state of many agencies. for example, the faa in this case or the fcc.

just because a regulatory agency did its job by protecting the pulic’s interest doesn’t mean it will always work that way. so your example doesn’t negate the existence of regulatory capture, which is an actual thing and not some political propaganda.

My point is reverse also holds true just because some regulatory agencies was taken over or was allowed to be taken over corporations doe not mean that it is the end state of some sorts. Whe it becomes political propoganda is when you accept that it is the inevitable end state.

It's not something I've dreamed up personally. Economists have done a lot of work in this area (Public Choice Theory) in the last 60 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

Of course, my post above is sharpened and overgeneralized to fit in an online forum. There are more nuances.

A current example in the news is Facebook asking congress to be regulated. This makes little sense from a conventional perspective. From the Regulatory Capture perspective it's an obvious play. Government regulation will be very costly to comply with, and only FB and a few other giants will be able to afford it, thus cementing FBs monopoly position for the foreseeable future.

https://www.insidesources.com/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-asks...

It sounds like you are dreaming of it tough. To make such a strong statement. It is like saying all corporations end up like Theranos or Enron eventually. Economists do a lot of research and disagree with each other violently. So I will not take your links as any proof that regulatory capture is an inevitable end. Yes it is concerning that it happens but there is absolutely no reason to believe it is the fate of all.

Economists don't disagree on most things, but people who don't like to adjust their beliefs according to Economic science often like to think that.

To be fair, Public Choice theory is certainly on the more controversial half of the subfields.

And of course you shouldn't blindly take some random post on this forum as complete proof of how the world works. That would be a foolish gullibility. Then again, completely rejecting it isn't the wisest thing either. At least that's my view :)

'Economic science'?

When has economics ever been a science?

as much as psychology and history are sciences, depends who you ask.

They are humanities, not sciences.

If all the economics you know of is Macroeconomics, I understand your question. It is an extremely difficult field to study, and we may never really understand it.

But that's a small part of Economics, and the field in general is as hard as any science outside of physics, and had given us an enormous amount of insights we lacked 200 years ago, and contributed immensely to the relative peace and prosperity the world enjoys today.

Regulatoy capture is a prblem, but not an inevitable one.

Private enterprise has an analogue: principle-agent problem.

This is deregulation in action. This is what people clamor for when they say they want "small government." This is in no way a fringe position. It is deliberate and desired by an entire political party in the US. And it's hardly limited to the FAA. The meat and coal industries are just some other examples of this deregulation in action. People die and will die because of this philosophy. It may not be as dramatic in other industries as it is in aviation, but death is death. We should remember that when politicians and their supporters start throwing about phrases like "deregulation" and "small government." This kind of tragedy is what those phrases mean.

The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives. Realistically and pragmatically speaking, you only ever get to have just one single shot at establishing and maintaining that kind of life/death level of trust. Fuck it up, and you're gone- quite literally, mind you.

This is some Challenger O-ring type of shitshow. Accidents are one thing; incompetency or, worse yet, callous indifference is absolutely unacceptable.

>The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives.

That's just unrealistic. Unless you want plane and car rides to cost as much as a trip to space, after all, since everything would need to be engineered to that level of quality.

Finish reading first, and then spend some time thinking before responding.

I said: "Accidents are one thing; incompetency or, worse yet, callous indifference is absolutely unacceptable."

I continue to be fascinated with consumers who assume the role of shareholder in times of crisis, even against their own interests.

Affordable air travel is in most people's interests.

Safe travel surprasses affordable for ALL customers not most.

Neither safe nor affordable are booleans. They are on a scale, and a dependency exists between them.

Anybody may have a different judgement with respect to exactly where on the scale is appropriate, but we cannot just pretend that there's no trade-off to be made. Or that absolute safety is even a possibility.

It's pretty freaking safe, isn't it? We've literally had zero-fatality years in the US. That doesn't happen through good luck alone. Clearly the manufacturers, regulators, and operators are doing almost everything right.

Then why do people still drive (i.e. use cars)?

Because they think it is safe.

'most people' don't fly at all

Talk about a strawman, mate.

Or you could fly Airbus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

Black box high five for the win, amirite?! Roll it back up to the top of the hill and lets see if it records something different...

It's sad, but most faults seem to be like this. First one is treated as an anomaly, second one is treated as the start of a trend. It happens so many times I'm glad I'm not working with human lives.

Jamais deux sans trois

“Never twice without a third time.”

> Realistically and pragmatically speaking, you only ever get to have just one single shot at establishing and maintaining that kind of life/death level of trust. Fuck it up, and you're gone- quite literally, mind you.

I wish this statement was held with as much as accountability as this comment implies. But have any of the major outlets been discussing potential prison sentences for Boeing or FAA employees / executives or potentially even board members? If you want accountability in today's age it seems the pressure needs to be applied at the point where financial decisions are held with more precedent than safety of life.

Boeing stock was up today on the glimmer of hope that the "software fix was working". Investors are assuming the stock is on sale and this only impacts Boeing for, what, a few weeks? I said something similar in another comment but I think Volkswagen is going to do more jail time and have more brand detriment than Boeing or the FAA will. Egregious doesn't begin to describe the misdirection of conversation. Why is the focus not yet on who will be sentenced for death over profits?

> Investors are assuming the stock is on sale and this only impacts Boring for, what, a few weeks?

Reminds me of the Equifax breach. Stock tumbles then recovers. Overall, it validates that breaches are not a liability; therefore, additional resources to address future problems could be seen as a moot point.

Same with Boeing. If there is no impact to the company, then why change the business model?

Equifax is not comparable to this. The difference with Equifax is that there has been little actual damage compare to how much data got compromised. With Boeing we've had hundreds who got killed.

If the world was fair they should all (decision makers at Boeing and FAA both) be packed by the lot and send to stand trial in Ethiopia and Indonesia for 300+ murder, which is what I consider this to be.

If you don't have food in your belly and you steal you get jailed. You are not satisfied with your million dollar salary and your billion dollar company profit and don't care if people get killed, you get to have PR firm write how sorry and sincere you are. Justice seems truly blind so many times just not in the way the phrase was coined.

>If the world was fair they should all (decision makers at Boeing and FAA both) be packed by the lot and send to stand trial in Ethiopia and Indonesia for 300+ murder

And they're totally going go get a fair trial and not some sort of kangaroo court to appease the locals?

I actually thought about that a little also but if I have to find a fairer choice between Boeing most likely to get away with a slap in US because big corps almost always do (too big to fail) vs. them getting taken down by a kangeroo court in those two countries it's not hard not to pick a potential kangeroo court.

But I do get your point.

The difference between Wolkswagen and Boeing is the latter is an american company and hence is probably not going to face billion of dollars of damage from american authorities and current administration. Probably no jail time either.

That and Volkswagen knowingly and deliberately conspired to break the law.

Agreed. It remains to be seen if Boeing deliberately used a loophole to avoid reclassification of the MAX8. If so, I'm curious to see how this would be different in a court of law. Especially if Boeing is compelled to provide email around the comms with specific regard to MAX8 certification.

This is some Challenger O-ring type of shitshow.

I think it's worse.

The first crash can be compared to the Challenger shitshow. It was a (massive) engineering mistake, which lead to the Lion Air plane crashing. Looking at the history of the 737 in general and the 737-MAX specifically it was rekless, but I'm pretty certain not intentional or foreseen by Boeing.

That massively changed by the fact that they didn't immediately pull the plane after this crash and went into deep analysis mode to really evaluate the cause. Instead they smeared everybody but themselves, developed a completely useless checklist without really knowing or (apparently) caring if it's useful at all and let that deathtrap fly.

The second crash, in my opinion is corporate mass murder for profit. Maybe not legally, but morally most certainly.

"The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives."

There is always a trade off, your statement is too bold for a world of limited resources. We can use engineering to make the roads safer. Spent a trillion USD on road safety will save lives for sure. But maybe it is spend better on cancer R&D efforts?

The safest plane would be the most expensive and most uncompetitive since it needs unlimited resources and unlimited time for being designed.

I must say I disagree with this stance.

It's not so much a matter of ressources than of specifically engineering excellence. There's plentiful examples of a much better product that was created with less ressources than the shitty existing competition (this must be commonplace for HN members).

I'm convinced the safest plane is not the most expensive, it's the one designed through sound and clear-sighted engineering.

Since there won't be an ultimately and best product for ever, there is always a way to improve things. Then time and financial restrains come into place again.

Are you an engineer? Your argument sounds naive. Or to give a counter example: In the Soviet Union there were likely more accidents (normalized) compared to the west. Yet, they did not focus on maximizing profits.

How is that a counter example? Just because you're not focusing on profits doesn't mean you are focusing on rigorous engineering.

rigorous engineering comes for free?

I am, and I have experienced many times what I'm talking about.

A simpler yet effective design (may it be initial or rework) comes at a much lower cost than a flawed one, which inevitably aggregates irrelevant complexities.

You're talking about the cost of the product, but what about the cost of redesigning in itself? Including the opportunity cost of delaying the product to keep reworking the design.

"aggregates irrelevant complexities"

Who decides this? This is not a trivial question.

The F-35 fighter is a good example. Trades many disadvantages (not fast, not good in dog-fighting, tremendous long maintenance time, low payload etc.) for one advantage. The F-35 may or may not be invisible to an able opponent. But this decision is a tremendous difficult one. Based on your argument, it would be better to stick with a simple design. This was worked for the Soviet Union in WW2 (don't build the best tank, build a decent one, build many).

You may like this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)

Thanks for the suggested read, sounds interesting indeed.

I'm not comparing simple vs. complex but rather sound vs. flawed, although often sound = simpler than flawed.

The 737 here is yet another example of this : - the MAX design is flawed : faulty risk assessment of MCAS, seemingly unstable airframe in some configurations - a likely sound design could be : airframe rework, thorough risk assessment, extra pilot training...

While the flawed design came at a lower initial cost, it will now overrun the cost of a likely sound one (further rework + retrofit + sales/reputation damage + legal), including the cost of a probable longer design phase in the latter.

(I concede that legal/sales costs are not directly technical debt costs).

In my mind, the difference between science and engineering is that science is concerned about what's provably true, whereas engineering (and I include applied math and even medicine here) is about getting to a result.

Therefore, our medicine is not perfectly safe, our cars are not perfectly safe, our building are not perfectly safe, we don't / can't provide 100% health coverage to everyone, and so on... but in aggregate, they make the world a better place, so it's worth it.

I think lack or major crashes in recent years made them complacent and emboldened them to roll the dice. Then hit snake eyes. Then also may have looked down on the foreign pilots are the airline. Had this been a Southwest plane they may have grounded the plane.

I do think the complacency issue might be a component here. Humans tend to quickly accept recent history as "normal" and over time forget the lessons learned by past disasters.

"Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it"

It's been a couple of decades I think, maybe more, since an engineering screwup affected a passenger airliner like this. You could argue that the 787 LiIon battery thermal runaway thing was a red flag. That also resulted in an FAA grounding, but that was fairly easily remedied and nobody died.

The fact that the recovery procedure doesn't work proves that the FAA should pull the MAX8 type certificate. It isn't the same aircraft.

I suspect we're going to end up seeing evidence that the first accident was also the result of known risks being down-played / swept under the rug in the name of profit. One perspective is that the first and second accidents happened because the band-aid fell off, and the first accident should have been the cue to use stickier bandaids. But it seems very unlikely that no engineer anywhere through the development said "This design is for shit and is WAY too dependent on a bandaid that can't realistically be adequate".

>The FAA also lost a lot of trust, for rubber-stamping this.

I wonder if the European agency (don't remember the name) will stop trusting the FAA from now on and do their own tests. I'd thank them for that.

(According to what I read here, the European agency doesn't do exhaustive tests because they mostly trust whatever the FAA says; maybe that's false)

According to what I read here, the European agency doesn't do exhaustive tests because they mostly trust whatever the FAA says

That's true. The FAA had a stellar record as a certification agency, which, it can be argued, they fucked in three days (sure, the hole history of this sad debacle is more complex. But by keeping the plane in the air longer than any other certification body in order to not hurt their buddies at Boeing they completely ruined their reputation, which was built in decades of good work).

I can't imagine that any responsible certification body anywhere trusts the FAA anymore without a complete and significant shakeup.

It's a sad story, really.

Europe and the FAA have Cross-certification schemes. In reverse, Airbus is certified primarily in Europe. The same happens to varying degrees in medicines, appliances, etc.

This is unlikely to change. It’s expected that some changes will occur at the FAA. Certifying an airliner is also a prohibitively expensive undertaking, which is part of the reason for this mess in the first place. It would take years even to train enough personnel to duplicate all those efforts.

Agreed. But the EASA ought to be at least in a position to put pressure on FAA to put their house in order. You can add this to my very long list of reasons why the UK really ought to decide to remain in a position of influence within the EU instead of choosing to join the Trumpist libertarian shitshow those far-right loons are trying to push us into.

> European agency

EASA.

FWIW, the Brazilian regulator (whose name I don't remember...) did not rubber-stamp the FAA's type certification of the 737 MAX, and required some differences training for MCAS, IIRC.

Very curious whether the additional Brazilian MCAS training would have helped, given how strange its behavior appears in practice.

Good question. Would be interesting to hear what (if any) additional training pilots there got.

And, yes, the Ethiopian Air pilots apparently did follow the procedures initially, flipping the Stab Trim Cutout switches, but did not manage to recenter the trim manually (via the trim wheel), so apparently re-enabled electric trim, and then let MCAS drive the trim even further down to their doom. :-/

I will. I like flying places, and I'm not going to let some unfortunate hiccups get in the way of that. I trust Boeing and the people who work on airline safety a heck of a lot more than I trust ride share drivers who flip U-turns in the middle of the block, slam on the brakes, narrowly miss bicycle riders, etc. And I use the heck out of Lyft & Uber. I've got better things to worry about.

You write as if the 737 MAX was the only airplane in the world.

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