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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I know it's unlikely cause, America, but I'd like to see some of these executives tried for criminal negligence. They'll most likely just face civil suits and make settlements with passengers/pilots families ... which honestly isn't enough. Executives need to know fucking up this bad can lean to prison time.

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Could they potentially face jail time in Ethiopia or Indonesia (where the doomed flights flew from, and the airlines are based)? I'm sure there would be quite the fight over extradition, but it would certainly send the message that you can't escape your negligence because of an eye to corporate profit on a global scale.

It could certainly complicate their lives, but I doubt we would ever extradite them.

Extradition not required. Start threatening their business in these countries. They could try something like "no Boeing aircraft in our airspace" while they refuse to cooperate. Get their local allies on board with a similar ban, and then maybe the Boeing board would hand them over willingly.

That's quite the hypothetical, and I don't advocate it. But they certainly don't have to be limited by extradition.

> maybe the Boeing board would hand them over willingly

This is not something the board can do

Sure they can. They can physically make it happen. Put money in the right hands and it happens.

Morally, ethically, legally questionable. But certainly not impossible.

I'm sure they'd just fire the executive(s) in question first. Lots cleaner and maybe cheaper depending on the golden parachute in the executive's back pocket.

There would not be a fight over extradition, at least as long as the executives stay in the USA. The USA does not have an extradition treaty with either Ethiopia or Indonesia, and the USA won't even consider extradition if they are convicted of a crime that doesn't exist in the USA.

Doesn’t criminal negligence exist in the US, along with a number of other statutes that could apply? Not to say they would face trial here if the events occurred here, but there are laws that would apply given sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

First, I am not a lawyer. Yes, negligence can be tried as a criminal act, but there's no way this situation would pass the Justice Department's sniff test. Any negligence that would have happened almost certainly happened on US soil. Even though foreign governments are free to convict however they like, if the act happened on US soil and the US doesn't find you guilty of a crime, then there is no way they are handing you over. If in the unlikely case an executive is found guilty of a crime in the USA they would serve out their sentence in the USA first before extradition is considered. Even then, we'd be real reluctant to hand them over.

What I think is more likely to happen (but still unlikely) is that Boeing is penalized through corporate liability. The aggregation of the executives' actions create a responsibility for Boeing, although no single person's actions meet any criminal action. In that case the USA would fine Boeing or punish it in some other way, but I don't think that money is going to Ethiopia or Indonesia.

Lastly, since we don't have extradition agreements with either of those countries these arguments would probably not even come up, as we'd tell their embassy to go pound sand- we're not handing over American citizens until you reciprocate with us, prove that your courts are not kangaroo courts, and sign an extradition agreement. And there's no way we're signing one- you think the Trump administration is going to sign an extradition agreement with either of those countries? No, these guys are going to skate.

Some references, they probably don't hit everything but they are a good start:

https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-612-role...

https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-603-dete...

https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/extradition....

I honestly don't understand why families settle in this kind of case. It's one thing if the victim is alive and has medical bills. If they're dead, all you can hope to achieve is justice. Don't settle for money. Take them down. Make it actually hurt.

Serious question: how would you go about determining who is at fault in such a situation?

Start with the people whose signatures exist on paper, or however the approval chain works in this context.

Very difficult, just as it would be in any large organization. Facilitation of plausible deniability is a principle design requirement for company structure.

Worse, because of the corporate shield, any malefactors get to keep their ill-gotten gains. (Wells Fargo's execs, even after clawbacks, wound up tens of millions of dollars ahead.) There's no serious deterrent -- the system encourages wrongdoing at the individual level, the perpetuation of entities where wrongdoing occurs, and the creation of new entities where wrongdoing will commence.

Prediction: everyone at Boeing will come in for a safe landing after a bit of turbulence.

Not sure. Every single design change goes through well documented review processes in Aerospace. The bigger the change the higher the up the hierarchy it goes. The definitely is a paper trail here. If someone is willing to investigate.

Agree with rest, organized deniability is pretty much how large orgs are set up.

1) find the systems-level people (business and engineering) who signed-off on MCAS as being safe. point to them and say "how could you not have tested the failure modes of MCAS, specifically AoA sensors?". There's no answer to that. Off to prison.

2) find the people who allowed the Max to keep flying after the first wreck. Not literally one hour later, but once they had information that MCAS might have been involved, a crime was committed (endangering public safety) allowing flights after that moment.

3) If any whistle-blowers emailed their superiors about MCAS failures, whoever ignored the complaint committed a crime unless any written concerns were properly documented, filed, considered, etc.

You'd have to cause heavy losses (in money or lives) to the rich and powerful to see the executives get prison time (see Bernie Madoff). Some brown people on the other side of the world dying doesn't quite cut it.

But why is everyone blaming Boeing? They were working on the issue, and I wouldn't want to rush a software patch on plane either. The pilots clearly thought it was an issue, by why are they talking to Boeing? Shouldn't they be talking with the Carrier? I mean if anyone is to blame for loss of life surely it's the carriers?

Everyone is blaming boeing because every time you think you learned the last possible either dumb or reckless thing they did with the 737 max there is another dumber more reckless thing. Every single rock you look under there is more of this crap.

Let's recertify our jet instead of doing a new one, shorten time to market.

New engines don't fit, ruin the handling of the aircraft. Can't recert that.

Try to fix aircraft handling in software. Designed flawed system to hide this from pilots and get regulatory apptoval. Under testing discover that system as submitted to regulators does not work well enough in flight. Update to allow to run repeatedly instead of once as well as increasing movement ranger per cycle. Do not tell regulators.

Ship aircraft with 1 hour iPad video intro for pilots. Do not mention this system.

Discover that the indicator in the cockpit for sensor failure for the system only works if you have optional HUD upgrades. Sit on this data. Do not patch until your aircraft is grounded.

Reassign the guys who are supposed to be doing safety oversight for you if they ask for more safety testing.

You missed the final step: people die. No individual or group of individuals is ever tried for a crime because corporate personhood.

There is no evidence (yet) the MAX engines placement "ruin the handling of the aircraft". That's still speculation. Clearly it handles different from other 737 type aircraft which would require a different pilot type certification, which is a big deal and a huge competitive disadvantage vs a320neo.

What? The whole purpose of MCAS was to address the tendency for the aircraft to pick up under throttle because the engineers are placed more forward on the wings causing a change in lift

Yes, but that's not "ruining" the handling of the plane, only changing it from the handling of a real 737.

They gave MCAS extremely powerful control over the trim, apparently powerful enough to overcome the pilots. That implies that the handling characteristics that MCAS is supposed to overcome are pretty bad.

Or that they're pretty out of spec for a 737. I think other people in the thread have pointed out that the extra lift from the engine position is considered normal in other airplane models, but I haven't seen a lot about that aspect of the MCAS issue so I can't comment on it.

I think it’s the degree of lift from the engines in a stall situation that made the 737Max8 unusually dangerous. But you’re correct in that Boeing desperately wanted to maintain the 737 type certificate to make it easier to train existing 737 pilots.

It's like back when every single week on Hackernews there was another article about Uber, either dealing with harassment, a corrupt or cut-throat business culture, the hell map, programs to get around laws in various countries, hiring Eric Holder's law firm for damage control, a self driving car driving the wrong way up a 1-way street, a self driving car killing a lady on a bicycle, said self-driving car intentionally had sensors disabled for testing the computer vision system, etc. etc.

There still in business though, so Boeing will probably pull out of this fine.

I could imagine that the biggest risk for Boeings exec comes from the certification issues. That they lost two planes because of the system will result in civil law suits and, I'd guess, a settlement. If Boeing can get these settlements without admitting to wrong doing they will have an advantage on the certification front. If they have to admit wrong doing to get a settlement, like VW had to, the Execs are in much more trouble. And the bad thing for them is that the FAA certification process and any potential cheating in it can be litigated and prosecuted in the US.

Boeing itself should be fine after a couple of really expensive years. VW was as well and I for my part really thought VW could go under. Instead it hit some high level managers and around 30 billion in fines.

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