Boeing 737 Max: Worker said plane 'designed by clowns' | Hacker News Reader

Boeing 737 Max: Worker said plane 'designed by clowns'

bbc.co.uk

65 pointsdberhane27 comments

Active discussion already going for 7 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008091

The response is shocking:

"These communications do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and they are completely unacceptable"

Boeing appears outraged that employees raised issues in writing, not about the issues themselves. That's reflective of a very, very bad culture. A response like that -- and an internal house cleaning about what gets put in email which will surely follow -- will lead to MORE safety issues. You can't address safety issues if you can't raise them.

This whole response will just make it harder to investigate and understand failures in engineering processes. That's not just the investigations by regulators. You can't have working internal RCAs and similar processes if you have filtered records.

Boeing can't even see this is wrong. This response went to press from an official PR department.

Exactly, punish the engineer for using mildly unflattering language, never mind that he was right and that hundreds of people have subsequently died. Mind boggling response, and as you have said indicative of the cultural issues that caused the crashes in the first place.

Additionally, notice the strange and perhaps clever wording of “do NOT reflect the company WE ARE AND NEED TO BE”.

It appears they’re trying to have it both ways: They imply that these emails do NOT reflect the company they “are”, but also imply that they DO reflect the ways in which the company needs to be better (which seems a contradiction). So which is it? You can’t be simultaneously innocent and guilty of the same offense.

Imagine if someone committed some crime, and made a statement: “My actions do not reflect the person I am and need to be.” What does that even mean, precisely?

Playing devil's advocate but I have worked for Airbus for a couple of years and for each aircraft designed in the past 20 years (A380, A400M, A350), I can find dozens of workers ready to say that plane was 'designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys'.

Such an unsubstantiated declaration is covered in news just because is is compliant with what is known because of other, better documented sources about the failures at Boeing that led to the 737MAX fiasco but it brings zero information.

The truly damning part was "I wouldn't let my family fly on a plane where the pilot was trained on MAX simulator".

I've worked with mechanical fitters for quite a few years now and going by what they say I don't think there's a single machine ever built that wasn't designed by clowns.

> I can find dozens of workers ready to say that plane was 'designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys'.

But are they saying it as a form of venting, or in the context of bringing up serious concerns? And do they say this consistently, refusing to accept the validity of the design?

It's still stange to me that killing 1 person means that a person goes to prison immediately, but after a manslaughter of hundreds of people the people who did it are still making decisions for the company and prison isn't even discussed.

Intent matters, and negligence is very socially constructed; our leniency depends on seeing how easily we could make the same mistake. Road negligence is the big one; even surprisingly gross negligence that results in the death of a non-negligent cyclist or pedestrian will be treated really leniently.

I wouldn't put too much store in these emails. For every successful, safe product there is probably also an email somewhere complaining about how badly it is managed. What's needed is a specific link about the specific problem found in the parts of the system that actually caused crashes.

You still often get few years of jail if you kill cyclist or pedestrian even if its completely not your fault and you did everything by the rules. Some heads definitely should roll to prison at Boeing

Where? Do you have some example news stories?

Intent of going against regulations was clear in this case: somebody decided that regulators shouldn't know the details of how the MCAS used only 1 sensor.

There's a reason why the relationship between FAA and Boeing got worse after these important details surfaced.

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"

Just remember, if one lowly employee does it, it's negligent homicide, and they go to prison. And if they blame everyone but themselves, the judge adds a few more years to the sentence.

But if a big bunch of nameless managers and executives in a corporation do it, just shrug and say "that's life".

"These communications do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and they are completely unacceptable."

A stronger response from some emails than the death of ~350 passengers.

"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."

The response comes from the "monkeys"

I think that the healthiest part of the culture indicated by this story is that people are in fact willing to use company systems to raise serious issues about the design and safety of their products. That behaviour should be encouraged.

Unfortunately that is probably the part the Boeing management is most embarrassed about.

"designed by clowns who were supervised by monkeys", to be exact. And, with hindsight, this assessment turns out to be tragically spot on - if you commit (or approve) the gross negligence of implementing a system which can command a nosedive based on data from only one sensor, you deserve to be called a clown or a monkey...

or a criminal

... nosedive command that can push the trim further than what manual controls allow you to override. It's just a shitfest. Any idiot looking at that specification could have told you what a terrible idea that was. I mean Ardupilot has better coding standards.

The scariest part:

    The documents also appear to show problems with the simulators being discussed.

    In February 2018, a Boeing worker asked a colleague: "Would you put your family on a Max simulator-trained aircraft? I wouldn't."

    "No," came the reply.

I wouldn’t condemn a company because of what employees say in internal chat rooms, but given what happened and what we already know it’s pretty clear they are guilty of e everything.

Unfortunately the company will pay a couple millions or more, but the people who said that will pay with their livelihood.

Why no jail for the top managers at Boeing ?

In (corporate) Capitalism, high-level decision makers are mostly immune from criminal responsibility. The financiers and insurance people who pushed untenable mortgages and then peddled them through securitization and credit-default swaps - thus triggering the 2008 economic crisis - none of them were ever prosecuted criminally, for _anything_. The head of Union Carbide (part of Dow Chemical) whose factory in Bhopal essentially exploded in 1984, killing 16,000 and disabling 40,000 - avoided extradition and lived out his life in Florida. And those are just a couple of examples.

So - why would the Boeing management be held responsible for anything? That's naive to expect. You'd need to have a very deep change in US society for something like that to happen.

At that level more than half of a manager’s day is spent covering their asses. Also they are so removed from any sort of smoking gun it’s very difficult to even successfully charge them on anything.

This is in part a problem with the structure of Boeing as a commercial company: The owners appoint people who make the strategic decisions, and those must be followed by a chain of command down to the last employee. It's like an autocracy, based on the sanctity of property-ownership.

Instead, the _employees_ - especially those with technical expertise - must be able to participate in the decision making, and have some veto power over it in certain cases. One of these cases should be health & safety hazards.

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