Boeing docs show staffers discussing ways to manipulate regulators on 737 Max | Hacker News Reader

Boeing docs show staffers discussing ways to manipulate regulators on 737 Max

washingtonpost.com

146 pointspseudolus44 comments

This article has the actual email and chat transcripts (scroll down to the bottom): https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21059420/boeing-employees-...

Most of the discussion is about the 737 Max simulator, not the aircraft itself. Page 19 seems particularly damning.

Except from page 19 done with OCR:

Sent: 20 February 2017 12:22 To: r 13)boeinn com> Subject: REr—r. 777 ECL COC update request Fly home today — having the kitchen replaced on Thursday through to Friday next week L Amazing what a brown envelope can achieve — it isn't anywhere near as good as it would appear to be reading the report. The FAA were neither thorough nor demanding and failed to write up marry issues. And the lies, the damned lies — I was removed from the simulator for three days in the week leading up to the evaluation on the instructions of a Senior Manager so that certainly individuals could 'tune' with the pilot. The tiring then fouled up multiple QTG tests and was clearly wrong and the pilot was forced to sign a SoC that was clearly based on a lie. Another Senior Manager was also screamed at in a temper tantrum by said individual and also barred from the simulator. The Go/No Go decision comes along and then aforementioned Senior Manager and Senor Engineer then state to a cast of 30 —"we have to trust the decision of ti ]on Site". Needless to say, I tore straight into riland E.1117171about the lies and the unethicaticleceiffd nature of this comment as it meant I was set up to take the blame should it have gone wrong. It is a joke and nothing more — whilst 9 PMs were on Site last week during the evaluation, it was for a jolly/free meal. One PM even said that given that we are tiler budget, we should hire a yacht a sail around Miami harbour to celebrate and even asked submit the request...

I guess this is a reminder of how useful "CYA" emails can be.

Anybody noticed that they failed to redact some of the names on the chat transcript?

“Looks like my jedi mind trick worked again!” the pilot wrote. “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”

Pretty bold culture over there. (When talking about putting pressure on regulators to not demand simulator training for the MAX.)

The 737 Max fiasco is a tragedy and these emails are damning.

That said, it's likely one could find similar remarks in other high pressure / high stakes situations; what we would need to see to know, are other email exchanges regarding other plane certification processes.

I think in any large organization, you are going to find people that think like this/talk like this. These emails are bad and the culture definitely needs to change, but who hasn't heard someone refer to their manager as a clown? No matter how good or bad your boss is, sometimes people are just going to complain.

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

What I found most concerning was the reference to Singapore being tough, while "the FAA were neither thorough nor demanding and failed to write up many issues".

Definitely reinforces the impression the FAA has gotten way too cozy with industry.

I'm sure most people at one point or another have been critical of management, were anyone to dig through my IM history they'd certainly find something.

what's more damming are the efforts made to cover up to safety regulators

Well in one exchange, one person asked another if they would be willing to fly their family on a MAX plane, to which they responded no. And perhaps more importantly than the content of these messages is their volume. There's 100 pages of this stuff. This isn't an isolated case of disgruntled employees like you'd find at most companies. This is an entire project in which just about everyone working on it had something bad to say about it, and was acknowledged to be dangerous, and it still got rammed through.

> who hasn't heard someone refer to their manager as a clown?

I have never personally heard anyone do this in writing, even when their manager was a clown. But I'm sure that I'm the exception, not the rule.

I think (based on seeing how many of these types of messages are coming up in discovery in recent cases) that many people these days don't think of "text messages" (email, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, FB, you name it) qualify as "in writing". Doubtful most people would dare write a printed memo and sign their name to it with the same content that they would write in a text or email.

True, but when I said "in writing", I meant including various instant messaging and email.

I wasn't being specific with the word "clown", but every organization has employees critical of their manager. If you are a manager, you just have to accept that some people won't agree with your methods and will share their thoughts with others.

Yes, I understood.

What I mean is that I've never personally seen anyone engage in a personal attack toward a manager in written form, not the use of "clown" in particular.

I've seen plenty of criticism about various managerial practices, but that's entirely different from personal attacks.

Isn't this the point of every third or forth Dilbert cartoon? This seems pretty universal. Humans are very flawed. There are those who accept that reality and those who like to believe in some fairy tale that for really "important" things that somehow we can put some management and twenty point processes in place, some motivational posters, a big team building group hug and then we will walk on water(NOT).

These emails are good. They’re only Bad for Boeing. 346 people are dead.

The result of this, unfortunately, is probably going to be management at Boeing and elsewhere to step up corporate email monitoring and in a visible way so that employees will know they are being monitored and punished for documenting it.

Employees will have to resort to non corporate communications, used off hours, with a kill cord.

Agreed. In any large org, you’ll have thoughts and opinions all over the place and I’m sure you could find much more damaging stuff than these comments.

Folks just need to learn not to write this stuff down.

One wonders what has led society to a place where this is so sadly unsurprising. Why should employees ever feel the need to deliver results quickly, even at the expense of safety? How have we managed to flood engineering with incompetent people to the extent that they manage to infiltrate such critical systems without thinking twice.

We've clearly screwed up somewhere in setting incentives for these companies...

I think one of the root problems is that there are too many "public" companies, that serve not the public, but their shareholders instead, with the additional problem being that public companies are required to put their shareholders first; thus "public company" is a complete oxymoron.

As we've seen so many times, this results in the public interest being put aside, with negative consequences to the public in order to benefit the shareholders.

But how many of those situations have “plane falls out of sky and kills hundreds” as one of the end scenarios?

The important barrier to such thinking is company culture, as long as only a few people think this way others will correct their mistakes.

This reinforces that my decision to avoid flying on the Max until it has been in service for at least a few years is the right one.

Murder charges. Jail time.

This must happen.

No one wanted people to die, it is not murder, at worst it is involuntary manslaughter. And maybe justice will come down to that conclusion and some people will end up in jail.

But is it the solution? Is it what should be done?

Because if people are going to jail, then who? There are probably hundreds of people who have some responsibility. There are the higher ups who encourage such behavior, those who are a bit too liberal with the rubber stamp, the liars, the ones who trust the liars even if it is their job not to, the ones who failed to report, the one who didn't listen for the reports, the engineers who designed the solution, and of course, the pilots, the flight instructors,... There are enough people for an entire prison city here.

This is not a case we can solve by pointing fingers. There is a systemic problem that needs to be solved. And just throwing a few people in prison will just result in Boeing hiring new scapegoats.

> No one wanted people to die, it is not murder, at worst it is involuntary manslaughter >

Try again - more like criminal negligence at a minimum.

> But is it the solution? Is it what should be done?

Yes - there needs to be some serious consequences, not the usual typical 'Company shuts down, execs get huge severance while whistleblowers and investors get shafted' type thing.

Also, some heads at the FAA need to roll. Utter failure of an agency that's supposed to protect the public.

And I also hope the victims' families also sue for pain and suffering, because they're victims of this too.

Involuntary manslaughter implies criminal negligence or some other crime being committed. Otherwise it is just an accident.

And I am not against the idea of serious consequences, the problem is about whose heads are going to roll?

It is easy to blame the executives, they are high profile, they are rich, they are the kind of people we like to hate. But are they really at fault, execs are just employees serving the shareholders, and if you have Boeing stocks in your portfolio, then you are a shareholder, so maybe you should go to jail.

And what will happen if the CEO goes to jail? The board of directors will name a new scapegoat CEO, there are many people who are ready to risk jail time in exchange for being the CEO at Boeing...

Same thing about the FAA, except that's more about the politicians you elected than about the shares you bought...

Putting a few high profile people in prison will certainly appease some vindictive minds, but I don't want vengeance, I just want safer airplanes. And as someone mentioned, they are already impressively safe despite all these shenanigans.

As for the victims' families, of course they should be compensated. But I don't think putting random people in jail is the best way to do it.

I am not saying that no one should go to jail. Some people most likely committed real jailable offenses, like corruption, and they should get punished. But making some heads roll for the sake of it isn't a good solution in my book.

> and if you have Boeing stocks in your portfolio, then you are a shareholder, so maybe you should go to jail.

Personally, I'm not opposed to that type of thing happening - I always thought a company being "public" is an oxymoron, since they only serve the shareholders (just look how Facebook prefers to serve its shareholders/execs over democracy... but I digress). If you can't fund terrorist organizations without consequences, then I think there should be equal consequences when your demands for your share values compromise the safety of society. Also, might cause people to keep the companies 'in check' if their own butts were on the line too... But that'd be another whole discussion for another time...

The whole point of consequences is to discourage future bad behaviour: "Wow, that guy's and his family's life is ruined now! Shit, I don't want the same thing to happen to me, I'd better be more careful than he was!". But if all anyone gets is a slap on the wrist, or find a scapegoat, then really what's the point of laws (especially when a nobody gets years in jail for a minor crime, but some high-profile execs can charm/buy their way out with little consequences).

More and more of this reveals that there was very little "involuntary" things happening - they were quite deliberate in what they did, and knew what they were doing wasn't on the "up and up" and compromised safety (with even someone saying "I wouldn't fly on one of those!").

They should apply eminent domain to shareholders and then auction the confiscated stock.

That way the government (society) gets something, and shareholders in general would be more cautious of the crap they invest into.

If you own any US equity large cap index funds, then you own Boeing stock.

> It is easy to blame the executives, they are high profile, they are rich, they are the kind of people we like to hate. But are they really at fault

Yes. One of the things about being at such a high level is having responsibility. Responsibility means you are ultimately at fault for things that go wrong.

Going to jail isn’t one of the main risks of being a CEO of a company like Boeing. It certainly shouldn’t be a likely one if things are being done correctly.

The debacle, and the dilemma of who to blame, exposes a pretty big flaw in capitalism theory: the idea that the market will choose to punish the shareholders. The reality is, the shareholders have been insulated from the negatives and rewarded with the gains.

Boeing's board has no meaningful aerospace expertise at all on it, going back to the McDonald Douglas merger. Shareholders have been rewarded for this successfully executed, multi-decade, and anti-competitive plan, so they keep re-electing the same board members who in turn ensure the shareholders aren't punished for objectively unethical decisions.

But capitalism doesn't require any ethics, it's completely amoral. Corporate charters don't require morality, ethics, or for companies to be a benefit to society or disallow them from being a negative to society (except insofar as they aren't breaking laws). And none of what Boeing has done has broken any laws, such as they are.

No one is going to prison. They're all protected by an explicitly designed system. The Commerce Department, overseeing the FAA, has had their select panel of industry experts and insiders say in a report this week, that everything at Boeing and the FAA is perfect. It's completely, totally, unquestionably perfect. And Congress would be risking this perfection by changing even one single thing about the existing arrangement.

Commerce won't change without a significant leadership change. Congress has cut FAA funding for decades, relative to the growth of commercial aviation, meaning there aren't enough regulators to move even a little bit away from manufacturer "self-certification".

What we have is what the industry wants, the politicians want, the average American consumer wants, and the American citizen wants -> profits for shareholders, kickbacks for politicians, cheap airfares, and please stop talking policy so I can get back to my consumerism.

Absolutely not - do you realize how safe flying in the US is? And you want to charge the people (flawed - yes) as murders? Absolutely revolting!

Unfortunately, this wouldn't stick, only because they didn't know who would end up getting killed, or when, beforehand.

It would be manslaughter via negligence, or something similar to it

Interfering with regulators when you know the plane isn't safe to fly sounds pretty much like "premeditated" to me.

Indeed, nothing "involuntary" in any of this.

Intent matters; you're going to have a hard time proving they wanted people to die.

Intent goes both ways - while perhaps there was no intent to have people die, there was deliberate intent to not do something about safety being compromised that they knew they should've done something about (or that they should have known about, being in their position to affect it or bring it to attention, instead of hiding or skirting around it).

It's not unreasonable to think that compromising safety (which they knew they were doing) could bring harm to people (including death).

Typically to prove murder, one must prove purposeful intent to harm. In this case, that would be proving that the engineers/managers wanted people to die.

Obviously jurisdiction matters. This is a matter of legal doctrine, not linguistics or ethics.

I agree murder wouldn’t fit here (unfortunately), and I was speaking more in the context of negligence - there were definitively intentional things done that affected safety, with intent to either violate it or withhold information about it to third parties. Manslaughter definitively, but 'involuntary' I feel doesn't apply (nor does "voluntary manslaughter" because there wasn't that specific intent), which is why I'm going with "criminal negligence".

Specifically what I’m getting at is that they’d have a hard time claiming that they reasonably didn’t think any harm could happen given the context of what was said and done/not done.

I wonder if Boeing could have edited the documents before passing them on the authorities, or even "losing" some emails, if there was something really incriminating.

And this is what they said in written communications, where there's a common understanding that the content may later be widely shared, published on CNN etc.

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