Work on production line of Boeing 737 Max ‘not adequately funded’
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
In both cases, management appears to have applied significant pressure to the teams doing the work, pushing them to achieve extremely unrealistic targets. And in both cases, the results of that incentive ended up being extremely detrimental to basically everybody (to the general public in the form of identity fraud / unsafe aircraft, to the companies in the forms of fines / grounding / PR / etc).
I doubt anybody in Boeing’s offices woke up and thought “what a nice morning! Time to go to work and build some dangerous airplanes that will kill people, so that I can get slightly richer”. I suspect the execs involved were just amazingly (and potentially even criminally) negligent: in their minds, they were pushing their employees to make the airplane actually similar enough to qualify as a “minor” change, without any of the oversight that would have caught what was actually happening. They turned a blind eye any time somebody told them that the new plane would require larger changes, and the results are unsurprising: their teams declared all the changes “minor”, not because they’d successfully made only minor changes, but because exec pressure mandated that all changes be “minor”.
I think you're probably correct but shaming the engineers in the hopes they'll stop it has repeatedly failed to work: that's why this isn't a thread about VW. IMHO it's because actions from a single individual carry too much risk for enough to accept. It needs collective bargaining.
We are aware how the hierarchies function: "I was just following the orders"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#Nuremberg_Tria...
I agree with you that it doesn't have sense trying to discuss about the abstract evilness, but I claim that the Boeing's top brass should be brought to the court!
If those who make decisions aren't held accountable, the results are provably terrible.
"I was ''just'' securing the profit for my shareholders" shouldn't be an excuse.
Carrie Tolstedt of Wells Fargo is as close to a comic villain as you're going to get, designing a system which forced multitudes of employees into unethical actions. And even after clawbacks Tolstedt ended her career tens of millions of dollars ahead.
Executives are already so coddled and protected from failure that terrible actions are rewarded and inevitable.
Speaking practically, treating execs as comic villains gets in the way of actually fixing their behavior. There are a variety of ways to force corporations to behave differently, but they all start with actually figuring out why they act this way in the first place. Otherwise we end up making the same mistake as Wells Fargo and Boeing: if we apply pressure on them to act better without clearly understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing, we’re just going to incentivize them to misbehave differently to get around the new rules.
I take you at your word. It's just hilarious that a post urging empathy for executives floats to the top while it's bootstraps for everyone else. [EDIT: in other upvoted HN posts, not necessarily yours.]
> There are a variety of ways to force corporations to behave differently, but they all start with actually figuring out why they act this way in the first place.
It starts with whittling down the outrageous soft power enjoyed by corporations, their owners, and their agents — and which you are contributing to by delaying, denying, and softening accountability for the most outrageous of executive actions.
- I believe that "understanding your enemy" ("Empathy") is absolutely positively crucial in successfully fighting your enemy
- This frequently gets interpreted as "Sympathizing with your enemy", being too soft, making excuses,etc; by those who want simple action.
So for example, I think we need to understand what makes a terrorist, how they come to their beliefs and motivations, and what we can do to prevent that. Others interpret that as being 'soft on terrorism', and we just need to 'bomb them into oblivion'; whereas I fear that while actual physical fighting is definitely a critical part of the overall campaign, there's a tremendous danger it'll just create more terrorists because we haven't eradicated the actual root source.
To me, striving to understanding an enemy doesn't prevent direct, firm action, if that is then convincingly found to be the most effective and efficient way of fighting them. In turn, I feel understanding your enemy prevents random, ineffective, emotionally-satisfying but results-lacking action. Others, of course, will disagree.
So - to the point of the article and discussion: I agree with op, if that is their intention, that you have to look at incentives; I've worked in corporate world for decades and I fully agree that you can have whatever value pledges, official goals, mission statements, and even official rules you darn well want to; and they're completely irrelevant if actual incentives, when summed out, reward a different behaviour. External and internal rules, and power, and statements, and goals, are all factors in incentives; as are the more subtle, emergent incentives. Going for a blunt approach may shift those incentives insufficiently far, or in an incorrect direction.
...My 2.4 Canadian Pennies :-D
> “The real crime here is that low-level retail bankers set up fake accounts in order to scam Wells Fargo out of their modest paychecks” just doesn’t work as a story of the scandal, even if there is a certain partial truth to it as a mechanical matter.
Meanwhile, the upper managers who put in place the incentives that guaranteed fraud would occur by low-level bankers are only guilty of "mismanagement":
> In the case of Wells Fargo, though, I suppose it’s possible that the attorney general thinks the shareholders really were the victims. They didn’t benefit from the fake accounts, and it is not crazy to say that they were harmed by Wells Fargo’s mismanagement.
Carrie Tolstedt took home tens of millions of dollars for inducing fraud, but only the scapegoats who did the dirty work for her are held morally culpable. The author doesn't even notice that just like those low-level retail bankers, Tolstedt scammed shareholders out of her (enormous) paycheck.
It's a perfect example of extending excessive empathy to executives while hypocritically withholding it from others.
And that is exactly what's happening in this thread. Executive malfeasance gets endlessly excused away as the product of poor incentives, because in your quest to humanize executives, you succumb to the perfectly natural human foible of "to know all is to forgive all".
Now, I'm not saying you're a mustache-twirling villain. But people who are unable to apply their principles when the chips are down and hold executives accountable are at the root of the problem.
Your comment again points to some perceived inability on my part to “hold executives accountable”, citing some flaw with my principles. I’d invite you to review the site guidelines and my comments: at no point have I suggested that the executives aren’t culpable in both the Boeing and Wells Fargo examples. You seem to be inferring that empathy is incompatible with judgement, and that misconception is basically the heart of what I’m trying to call attention to in this exchange.
Why is it a given that low-level retail bankers wanted faked accounts for the sake of their income, yet it is outside the realm of possibility that Carrie Tolstedt wanted faked accounts because they led to income for her — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars?
Why is it utterly inconceivable that Carrie Tolstedt is corrupt?
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about the strength of my principles.
In some ways, having empathy (or even sympathy) for executives in situations such as this is a more damning call to action.
If a problem is a result of evil people doing evil things, then the obvious solution is to punish the evil people. If instead a problem is a result of good-natured people following a system with broken incentives, then the only effective response would be large-scale, systematic change.
Unfortunately, we don't often see things this way as a society. Our drive to action seems directly correlated to our sense of moral outrage, and we skip over the "broken system" step between "freak accident" and "mustache-twirling villain."
The legal system distinguishes between deliberate premeditated murder and accidental or negligent manslaughter.
Corporate ethics seems oddly resistant to understanding the distinction. If your actions cause significant harm the profit motive gives you very strong legal protection - a literal get out of jail free card. While it's not completely reliable, it's certainly more powerful than any non-corporate defence where culpability is obvious.
You're far more likely to go to jail for corporate fraud - which is an outrage against the profit motive - than for life-terminating harm inflicted on innocent bystanders.
This has the predictable effect of selecting executives who either don't understand that their actions cause harm, or don't care.
The system selects the people, and the people propagate its values. Neither is wholly innocent.
Every so often someone with a genuine ethical sense says "I'm not doing this." And they often lose their job when they do.
So it is with businesses extracting value (/making as much money as possible).
It's like the idea of "pot odds" in poker: Boeing here wasn't just looking at the marginal return on investment, it was looking at the cost of essentially deprecating an entire line of aircraft. It would lose value from its entire "installed base" of customers, as competition from Airbus would become more viable.
In economic terms, the marginal value of the investment was probably close to nil, but it protected profitable infra-marginal investments. Interestingly, this seems like a problem that large companies face far more often than startups, which is perhaps why conventional wisdom thinks the latter are far more 'agile'.
I really dont believe that someone having fought their way up to a job that pays a 7 figure number per year actually cares about normal human people anymore. I just dont.
What I've always wanted to know is: do psychopaths make better managers? Do they somehow gravitate towards management positions in some other way? Or is it the management position that brings out the psychopath in people?
> do psychopaths make better managers?
I've had 2. No, they're horrible to work for. Indifferent to you as a human, bullying, lying, destructive (edit: and manipulative). The best bosses I've had, the ones that got the most out of me, were humane and decent (Also 2 of them).
> Do they somehow gravitate towards management positions in some other way?
I guess so. Power, control, money (all of these really boil down to power).
> Or is it the management position that brings out the psychopath in people?
No. A psychopath is a definite mental phenomenon that AFAIK is something you're born with. It is thought to be perhaps made worse by bad childhoods, but it certainly isn't something you develop if you weren't born with it.
What I do see in those psychopaths that I recognise as such is that they often really driven for money/power. They're often great fun to be with because they're so impulsive, but wear you down with constant demands.
Above is just my personal understanding and experiences.
They might not be clapping hands at the death of few humans, but they would not be crying either.
That's the real corporate evil: losing sight of the big picture of what your product is supposed to accomplish in the world, and see it merely as a vehicle for profit, where the regulations are merely obstacles you need to bypass, rather than a necessary good that ensures your product is safe and provides real value to the world.
And I fear this kind of thinking is incredible common in large corporations. It doesn't always lead to disasters like the 737 Max, the VW emission scandal, or the Fukushima or Deepwater disasters, but losing sight of the larger context of what you're doing does enable those kind of disasters.
After the mortgage crisis and other banking misbehaviours, all people working at Dutch banks (including developers like me) are required (and trained, to some extent) to always keep this big picture in mind: what does this decision mean for the company, the customers, the shareholders and also society in general. All 4 need to be balanced. Maybe this should be more common among all industries.
Corporations certainly do need to be held accountable for their actions, and for the corporate culture they create, because that will impact the actions of the corporation as a whole. If everybody just focuses on the immediate requirements (passing that emissions test no matter how, making the plane pretend to be the same in order to pass certification) without considering the larger picture, that is a result of the corporate culture and the way performance of employees is measured. The corporation is absolutely responsible for that, and yes, maybe it should be considered evil when upper management fosters or allows a culture of this kind of short-sightedness.
The airplane needs more efficient engines.
The new engines are physically larger and the space underwing too low.
Let's move the engines forward.
That causes the stick force curve in an uncommon region of the envelope seen mostly only when hand flying and out of normal envelope.
We could fix the stick force curve by actively displacing the horizontal stabilizer under those conditions.
We can limit the authority of the stab under MCAS to 0.6°, a figure which would only be a slight hazard to flight as pilots could easily override.
We can prevent the need to retrain pilots (even if only differences training), but this requires us to use only a single angle-of-attack sensor to drive the system. That's OK, because the 0.6° limit is safe.
Later, someone else decides to give MCAS a little more control authority. It's not clear (to me) that the 0.6° prior limit was documented as something that was being relied on by regulators or not. A "safe" system being given a little more authority in the name of safety doesn't sound so bad, after all.
No analysis appears to be done for the case of multiply resetting the MCAS system, allowing for progressively more authority.
No analysis appears to be done for the fact that line pilots were relying on the "control breakaway" to interrupt automated trim motion on legacy 737s. Pilots using this undocumented technique may have become overly accustomed to it and assumed the plane was designed that way. Of course, MCAS, being a system to protect the stick force curve during manual flight, could not reasonably be disabled by a control column breakout switch, because it's designed to protect the aircraft exactly during hand flying situations where the pilot had the column in an aircraft nose up attitude (where the column breakout switches would be activated).
I agree with your overall point that the holistic outcome was bad, that it's a systems problem, but want to amplify the fact that a great many people were working diligently to accomplish their goal(s) in the face of their constraints. Very few (to perhaps none of them), pilots included, likely realized that they were acting in a short-sighted way.
For the 737 Max, moving the engines forward meant changing the aerodynamic balance. That alone should mean recertification, and every attempt to cover that up in order to save money, is part of the problem.
Everything that adds cost to aviation has a safety balance. Why do we allow 0 and 1 year olds to fly as lap children (without buying a seat)? Because displacing the fraction of families who would substitute a car trip if forced to buy more tickets would mean greater overall injuries and fatalities. Saving money has its own real safety benefit that needs to be balanced holistically.
If I could get prosecuted for accidents my code coused I would never work which such tasks.
Yet it's entirely plausible that they were consciously making that trade off. I see a lot of similarities to cases like these:
> Ford (..) Pinto became a subject of controversy after Mother Jones magazine exposed that it was prone to deadly fires in rear-end collisions; Ford’s internal documents showed the company knew of the potential problem but chose not to fix it, calculating that it would be cheaper to pay out possible injury claims.
> The Japanese manufacturer of airbags has recalled airbags in some 19.2 million vehicles in the U.S. due to a tendency of the device to deploy with too much force, sending metal scraps flying into the passenger cabin. Eight deaths and about 100 injuries in the U.S. have been attributed to the defect. According to a New York Times report, Honda, one of the companies using the bags, and Takata knew about the dangerous airbags for years before disclosing it to the public and issuing recalls.
I mean it was pretty clear that everybody who really wanted to know could discover the cheating, but somehow it was covered up for a long time. Everybody knew about gas mileage results drifting further and further away from reality, too... And finally we got WLTP, which is somewhat less bad but still pretty bad.
Bosch sells engine hardware (ECU, pump, injectors etc..), but the software is custom made. The automaker pays Bosch to implement the SW they want, as a lot of features differentiating automakers are SW features that they do not want their competitors to have.
Hence it doesn't mean that every diesel engine with a bosch ECU had the cheating device from VW.
It's probably quite easy to justify to yourself if you see everyone else doing it, even though it has abhorrent consequences[1]. Like people dropping cigarette butts.
[1] Which they should have known existed - the oligarchy of car companies ensures a huge impact from just one company playing unfairly.
Didn't know that one; nice.
Would it still happen, if responsbility was placed directly on the worker? Why isn't there a review teams were senior enough and given the time to critique an outcome?
Why is it management doesn't understand the consequences of these actions, or are too shameless to admit them and plow ahead?
And then, progressively larger fines (comparative to potential damage caused in the event of failure) to offset the "savings" by misdeclaring the scope of changes.
That's a great way of putting it — nice!
What I'm looking for is a way to put responsibility where it truly lies. Blaming regulators alone is reductive, because the architects of the regulatory framework and the context in which it exists have ensured that corruption will occur. Those architects are the ones most at fault, starting with the Roberts Court.
But that's literally what you said?
"This is easily fixed by governments doing their jobs."
Catching speeders on the road is easy (trivially, you just need a radar gun, or an automated radar mounted in a car). Getting the police out of their offices and to actually do their job is hard (atleast here, in my country).
In the US, regulators may not do their jobs because it is can be extremely financially advantageous to look the other way. But the system of legalized bribery is in place because of deliberate choices by the system architects who made the problem much worse than it had to be.
The US government has been sabotaged. Blame the saboteurs.
It is the other way around. People should understand that adding pressure on teams delivering mission critical systems is dangerous. Intentions matter very little in this context, the outcome does.
Based in my aerospace experience, it is mire likely that lower level employees raised concerns about certification which where then subsequently ignored by management (TM) as they asumed rightly to have a lot of leaway with the FAA. All that of course i usually documented extensively.
I suspect the above scenario because I took part in quite a few change boards affecting much smaller and less critical tickets. And everyone is informed and changes are signed of by the relevant peiple quite high up the food chain.
I'd suggest some other issue here, willful ignorance by upper management. At Boeing it is a fair bet for managemet to have solid certification knowledge (as shown in their creative approach to it). Thus taking the risks they did with MCAS involves a lot of ignorance. And potentially panic when they realized the commercial risk a failing 737 MAX would have. So they chose to take shortcuts, ignore warnings and hope for the best.
It's been thought for a while that the suits of McDonnell Douglas have "ruined" the engineering company that Boeing once was:
> Where on earth did Boeing go? Directory assistance does list an aerospace concern by that name in Chicago, but surely it's not the American icon that boldly launched the world into the jet age. That company's president once received a standing ovation from a Senate committee. This "Boeing" has boldly violated Pentagon rules, broken new ground in industrial espionage, and somehow made an enemy of the U.S. government--all while falling behind its foreign rival. Besides, everybody knows that Boeing is in Seattle.
[...]
> Now that Condit has pulled the ripcord on yet another bad relationship, the "reverse takeover" theorists seem prophetic: Harry Stonecipher, 67, is Boeing's CEO. While he might be the man to mend fences with the Pentagon, his pit-bull routine seems unlikely to mend Boeing's broken culture. "We have the right strategy," he declared at a news conference. "The task before us is to execute."
> If there's one bright spot, it's that Boeing finally looks poised to launch its first new plane since 1990: the hyper-efficient 7E7 "Dreamliner," so dubbed after a global naming contest. If it gets the go-ahead, the $7 billion project might restore some of Boeing's once-famed esprit de corps--maybe even enough to lure its severed head back to Seattle. If, on the other hand, the company loses its nerve, it might consider another naming contest--this one for itself.
> May we suggest McDonnell Douglas?
* https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
Which begs the question: If a big company fails (or some Boeing branch in a near future), even if Airbus doesn’t buy it, should it dodge job applications from the former employees of that competitor?
That depends on the reason for the failures: was it management or engineering?
An internal auditor will forever be at risk by executives focused on the short-term. So long as executive compensation is decoupled from long-term health, no auditor can endure — eventually somebody's going to force out the auditor for the sake of padding their paycheck.
This is unfortunate because external regulation introduces lots of inefficiencies.
The FAA certified a plane that had obvious flaws. From what I understand they out sourced the certification process to Boeing but that doesn't remove their responsibility, it's still their "stamp". The real certification process started after the accidents and only needed a few weeks to find additional flaws. I'd assume the process is normally months long so "a few weeks" would be finding it early.
But why should I trust the FAA? They seem to be working hard now projecting an image of a for-the-people agency while throwing as much dirt as they can on Boeing but I haven't really seen anything addressing their own problems with out sourcing, corruption, and political interference.
Have I missed something?
https://globalnews.ca/news/5072383/canada-eu-reviewing-certi...
> Canada and the European Union say they are re-examining the approval it gave Boeing 737 MAX jets, following reports of a U.S. investigation into the Federal Aviation Administration certification of the aircraft.
Expect the procedure to change, a lot.
As a consumer, I'm happy to have more oversight on the planes.
As a Boeing shareholder, I'd be pissed the company demolished the trust that allowed for a lot of cost savings during the certification phase.
Time and time again, we see that companies are terrible at self-regulation. They'll abuse it to save pennies today at the cost of dollars and lives tomorrow.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airplane-canada/...
You have Mechanical DERs, Electrical DERs, Software DERs, and others.
A good example for the HN crowd, the Software DER. Per regulations, the software standard is the DO-178B. The DER isn't actually spinning up the dev environment, or building the piece of software used; just checking to make sure the process was followed. (the dev environment was documented, what dependancies...) These people are a step up from code reviewers and just check paperwork more than software.
The FAA itself isn't concerned with safety; it is just there to make sure there is a papertrail to follow in the event of a safety issue.
BTW when the plan was floated to let Boeing self certify more in the process, in the name of 'efficiency' there were objections made to the political appointees driving that.
Are share buy backs a common strategy for large companies?
This is actually a major problem for innovation and investments in general, there are lots of economist who talk about this issue: Mariana Mazzucato has some very convincing arguments for public investments based, among other things, on this very problem.
(neo-liberal) Governments lower corporate taxes to boost corporate profit in the (unfunded) hope that this will drive massive investments in innovation and create job, and bigCo just buy their stock back because it is by far the most profitable short-term for their shareholders and their executives.
Major reason is : they don't know what else to do. There was a very cool article on HN about the specific Boeing case that went over how it changed in the last 20y to go from engineering company to finance-driven company
no, they just don't like the risk of innovation. A share buy-back program is guarenteed to increase the share price, which is benefitial to executives who hold their bonuses in shares (and share holders would also like it).
Doing innovation comes with risks - which may or may not pan out. If it doesn't pan out, the executives would get chewed for it, and if it does pan out it is unlikely to pay off for a long time (in terms of bonuses - at least, not within their tenure).
Gov'ts should just invest in startups, rather than give tax breaks. Invest in up and coming students who show promise, and get to claim a share of their innovation as taxes as well! And if it fails, it fails - the gov't doesn't need to be profitable.
It should also be noted that share buy-backs are also useful to shareholders as an alternative to dividends. Whereas a dividend creates a tax event that an investor may nor may not welcome, the same investor can choose to sell their stock or hang on to it.
Financially speaking, if you start with $1000 in stocks, it does not matter whether you end up with $1000 in stock and $100 in cash from dividends, or $1100 in stocks (from the price going up).
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpXI_Vd51dA
And yet companies that payout dividends are not vilified the same was as buy-back companies--in fact dividend payers are lauded in an almost fetishist way due to human psychology:
Instead, gov't should use the taxes (rather than returning it to corps) and pay startups for innovation, rather than hope companies use it on R&D.
It can if capital gains are taxed lower than dividends, which is the case in much of the world.
*edit copy/pasted the quote wrong
You really nailed the problem. It is faced by all companies with sizeable middle management (read, all companies above a certain size).
Let's look at the incentives. A middle manager with an entrepreneurial spirit who tries to enact change, try new ideas and stay ahead of the curve has a chance to make it to the top, provided they have allies already at the top who are also willing to bet their reputation on the underling and also that none of the bets backfire badly.
On the other hand, let's take a pointy haired boss type middle manager who does jack-all, avoids responsibility where possible and therefore by definition they also don't participitate in any cockups. They sort of coast by, being too average to notice either for outperformance or underperformance. After 20 years at the company, they retire.
Which of these two are going to be the majority? In my experience, the latter outweighs the former by a large margin. Being in the latter, you don't have to do anything, just stay away from trouble. Squash any ambitious projects your group comes up with, maintain some token efforts that look good on quarterly presentations, but keep it all fairly toothless.
Over time they get entrenched in the company and whether consciously or not, they ensure that only similarly minded people are promoted to middle management, since anyone more ambitious is a direct threat. None of these people are individually evil, and they perhaps aren't even consciously impeding the company. They become a product of the environment. A natural selection of sorts.
Edit: a bit off topic but this "discussion" between Theil and Schmidt in my opinion highlights why companies are buying back their stock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsXFwy6gG_4
Microsoft announcing in 2016 an increase to their existing buyback plans: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-20/microsoft...
Google stock buyback from 2016: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-stock-buy-back-858986...
Facebook stock buyback from 2016: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-doing-a-6-billio...
So, yes, definitely a thing.
I'm not a finance person, but there are reasons why a stock buyback would make sense. Returning money to investors is one. Another is that the more of its own stock the company owns, the easier it is to give stock (or options or whatever) as bonuses to employees.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-25/alphabet-...
Yes. They’re a transfer of money from the company to its owners but they have tax advantages over dividends because instead of all owners paying tax twice, once on profits and again as income they’re only taxed as corporate profits unless you’ve actually sold your shares. The owners who don’t sell have a larger share of the remaining company by virtue of the smaller number of shares outstanding.
This seems like a totally irrelevant metric. Wouldn't the relevant one be market capitalization? That's up about 2.5x over the last five years... all of which seems to be due to something that happened in the fall of 2016 (and continued through early 2018).
Dividends used to be the be-all and end-all of giving back capital to investors. However, the 'problem' with dividends is that by receiving cash, it creates a taxable event that not all investors are happy with.
With share buy backs, an investor could choose to either sell their share (at the presumably higher value) or hang onto them (again, assuming the price goes up).
Financially/mathematically speaking, whether a company does share buy backs or dividends does not matter:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpXI_Vd51dA
Yet for some reason there is an idea the dividend-paying companies are better than those who do not, and that share buy backs are bad/evil in some way.
It says something very bad about the state of accountability in this country when someone's negligence can kill hundreds of people and they have absolutely nothing to fear from putting out a completely horseshit statement like that. Half a dozen different Boeing executives should be in prison for the rest of their lives on 346 counts of manslaughter but I'd be amazed if Boeing faces so much as a monetary fine.
That's the point. The idea is to inflict the death penalty on any company who plays games with human lives like this.
But even if you wanted to do that, you can still have your cake and eat it too. Boeing's yearly profit is 4.2 billion dollars. Take three billion of that per year and let them pay off the fine over ten years.
Some details:
"If you're Boeing, you realize you have a multi-billion dollar liability on your hands that will bankrupt your company 10 times over if you actually had to tear apart and inspect or rebuild all the suspect aircraft. So, you bury the reports, fire anyone involved, call in all your favors and unleash your lawyers with all the political power you have as a major defense contractor to make it all go away. (The program suggested that's exactly what they were doing)."
Also, the link to the program summary:
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/12/...
I just watched it. This is bad. Boeing, with the help of the American government, is covering up serious issues with how the 737NG is being built with faulty parts.
Pilots are part of the redundancy package?! NO! Pilots are not part of your hardware!!
Imagine the contrast from what we've been told for years that aviation hardware is about redundancy and what really is going on in their management offices.
After two crashes and the groundings, i would say they did. Of course that's not what all of this is about, just their pr dept.
Faith is a funny thing - once lost, it needs to be massively overcompensated to come to similar levels as before, and even after that things are just not the same...
How can you claim that since the plane has not been allowed to resume flights around the world since it was stopped? Are you privy to the current investigation? Any secret you'd like to share?
> Surely all issues will be fixed which the regulators can find
Funny you say that, since this is precisely how aviation has progressed over time: we keep finding failure modes and fixing them so that we make flying a little more safe every time. If all companies were fined to death every single time they made a mistake/had an accident, there would be no one flying anymore.
[0] https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2019-07-03-Boeing-Pledges-Suppo...
Whatever will remain can continue building planes if it still can.
It would be nice if capitalism worked as it did in econ classes, but it doesn't with real humans.
The family and friends of 346 people would beg to disagree.