Comment by unlinked_dll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unlinked_dll | Hacker News Reader

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Most troubling to me is this:

> AA technical and safety experts determined that certain Boeing design approaches on its transport category aircraft were potentially unsafe and failed to comply with FAA regulation, only to have FAA management overrule them and side with Boeing instead

from the linked citation [0]:

> In 2015, the FAA drafted an issue paper, finalized in 2016, that offered Boeing a chance to establish compliance without implementing a design change.4 At least six FAA specialists refused to concur

>It is our understanding that non-concurrence by FAA technical specialists is fairly infrequent and not to be taken lightly. In addition, my staff has been told that it was virtually unprecedented for six or more FAA specialists to jointly non-concur on a single issue, highlighting the gravity of their concerns regarding the rudder cable issue. Despite all of this, in June 2017, the F AA's Transport Airplane Directorate upheld the controversial issue paper

Someone needs to name names, and those people should be investigated for corruption.

[0] https://transportation.house.gov/news/press-releases/amid-co...

Sounds like the FAA needs to do some house cleaning in there upper management because they're in bed with Boeing.

It's the White House that is responsible for doing that "house cleaning" of the FAA's upper management, since those folks are political appointees that serve at the pleasure of the President.

I don't know about you, but I don't see the current admin prioritizing the flushing out of regulators in bed with industry.

That's why I say name some names.

I'd like to point out that vast majority of this lax enforcement of FAA oversight of the Boeing 737 Max certification happened during the Obama Administration by political appointees of Barrack Obama and the Democratic Party.

I am centre-left political (socially liberal, fiscally conservative) and It really really bothers me to see the double standards. Once you start to notice the pattern of one-sided appropriation of blame in pretty much every fking scenario, you end up discounting any criticism of republicans as bias.

It's really disappointing to see this comment downvoted. Apparently we're all fine with blaming the current administration for not firing them but we're not ok with blaming a previous administration for hiring them?

We've also had countless posts talking negatively on the very merger that lead this iteration of Boeing (McDonnel-Douglas) with no regard for the administration that basically encouraged the merger.

It's okay to admit it guys: both parties suck and are corporate shills.

> Apparently we're all fine with blaming the current administration for not firing them but we're not ok with blaming a previous administration for hiring them

One of these two parties has the ability to affect change. It's not the latter.

The official report just came out. On what grounds would the existing administration just fire upper level management at an early stage?

The appropriate response would be to force FAA to ground the planes (if and which FAA did not do themselves), and wait for the official report and then open an investigation in to Boeing and FAA. Time is a factor to take into account.

Appointing someone that ends up breaking the law vs. keeping someone that is known to have. These are not the same thing.

They're not the same thing, no. But that doesn't change the fact that stuffing the FAA with Boeing insiders is a dumb idea.

anyone who looks at my comments on Boeing knows I’m fairly critical. However, it’s probably fair to say anyone with any bonafides in commercial aviation by definition is a Boeing insider since it has either squashed or acquired all of its domestic competition. We talk all the time about banks are too big to fail yet when it comes to defense we simultaneously create projects that only Boeing can bid and look the other way when Boeing acquires companies that might represent an alternative while increasingly taking delivery of weapons systems that don’t work as intended. One doesn’t have to look that deep into history to see scandals like the Air Force tanker which rose all the way to the Supreme Court, or the failed SLS project which has sent so much pork spending to specific congressional districts that Spacex could build something like 300 falcon 9’s instead, to see that Boeing’s relationship with the US government is problematic at its very core. Blaming both parties is surface level equivocation that does nothing. The simple fact is Boeing is too big, they know it and the government knows it and unless we want our defense to be outsourced to foreign ownership, preserving this status quo is quite literally the only thing keeping Boeing from reverse-mergering itself out of this country. We have overlooked our own strategic resources - be it pharmaceutical, manufacturing, telecom, etc, for far too long and have pursued incredibly near-sighted policy objectives to our own detriment. In the spirit of HN, I’ve already gotten too political here but I will say one final thing: don’t equivocate both parties as equal, neither should you be complacent and assume what your party is telling you is the right direction either — there’s more to this issue than simply saying oh let’s arm the regulators with more regulations and vice versa.

> there’s more to this issue than simply saying oh let’s arm the regulators with more regulations and vice versa.

If it is, there’s no support for that claim in anything written in the message I reply to.

They should be rules against stuff like that. Our current head of Health and Human Services is a former pharmaceutical lobbyist...there are more examples...

It’s really disappointing to see that after all the crazy stuff done by the current administration, even after senators admitted the guilty of the current potus and declined to remove it, after he put in charge of containing the Coronavirus the least qualified person to do so while removing qualified people, there is still someone that has the nerve to say that both sides suck. It’s okay to admit it, you probably didn’t follow so much what happened in the White House and in the world in the last three years.

My comment wasn't on who appointed the regulators but on the likelihood of the people who have the power to remove them to do so.

I'm sorry if that was unclear.

Once you step back and read a little political history, it is remarkable how little sunlight there is between the two major parties in the USA and also in my home country of Australia (labour and liberal). Arguments like yours really expose the system for what it is (a loose conspiracy to maintain the status quo and prevent third parties from competing).

Uh, there is glaring sunlight between Labor and liberal in Australia at a federal level. Look at their history of fiscal policy. Carbon tax, NBN, selling off public assets etc. It's rubbish to say they're not that different.

State level is where they are all the same.

Whether they are in favour of a loose status quo in terms of the political system is entirely different to their operations within it.

> Uh, there is glaring sunlight between Labor and liberal in Australia at a federal level. Look at their history of fiscal policy. Carbon tax, NBN, selling off public assets etc. It's rubbish to say they're not that different.

The "they're all the same" argument in Australia is a very common talking point you see on the ABC and "left-leaning" (actually corporatist) outlets like The Project. Folks who tune in are inundated with this crap.

The ABC's idea of balance is to feature the viewpoint of the Lib/Nats (to cover the right-wing) and the Greens (to cover the left-wing). Labor gets all of the criticism for "not being left enough" by the Greens and "being too far left" by the Lib/Nats. You even see the Murdoch papers making both arguments simultaneously.

> State level is where they are all the same.

Maybe, but I doubt a Labor NSW state government would've privatised the vast majority of WestConnex before construction began. Or engaged in outright corruption by giving discounted land to developers who then gave them kickbacks.

That's fair, state level they're all as corrupt as each other, but Labor is still a union base. Libs are more cosy with banks and business in general.(and pro privatisation)

I dunno about the left saying that though. I see it most from people who aren't really into politics in general justifying their lack of interest in voting. Definitely agree on abc having a weird split identity, but that's due to external pressure and a lack of funding.

I think uninterested voters who say it are indeed thinking of the parties habits of acting for and on behalf of proprietary interests. Their complaints don't follow up with policy statements but with complaints about handing out favors to their mates.

I think that at a state level you get substantially different programs, but public and commercial journalists basically act like covering state politics is an unreasonable attack on their credibility, so it's quite true that state politicians act corruptly.

President Trump did the right thing: first force the FAA to ground the MAX earlier than the FAA would have on its own, then let them hang out there for all to see. This report (and no doubt others) will destroy their reputations more than having fired them earlier would have if that also stopped the inquiries from going after them (though that might not have happened). Among other things, as long as they remain government employees, they can't refuse to testify.

Sure, if the President had fired them earlier that would have been satisfying -- at first, then when they all lawyered up and refused to testify, we'd all have thought that the President was a moron for having fired them too soon.

The report says that the FAA estimated there would be 15 more crashes, and still didn’t ground the plane until the second crash.

It is clear that many people were involved in conspiracies, and that their negligence directly lead to many deaths, as they knew that it would.

Why hasn’t the current administration brought criminal charges against them?

Also, the courts can force non-government employees to testify, and most of the evidence in the report seems to have come from non-government employees. Firing them doesn’t somehow absolve them of their crimes.

> Why hasn’t the current administration brought criminal charges against them?

No idea. My guess is that it takes time, and that the DoJ will need to be prodded to do it, that the DoJ won't do it of its own volition. Whether the AG or deputy AG have to get involved, or the POTUS, or perhaps a criminal complaint has to be filed by, e.g., Ethiopia, I don't know, but I expect there are no DAs who would initiate a case here on their own (whether because government protects government, or because they think the case is radioactive, or whatever).

He didn’t. He was conspiring with Boeing to avoid grounding the 737 max. And as proof the 737 Max was not grounded after the first crash, it was not grounded after the second crash, it was grounded only after pretty much every other flight security agency on the planet grounded it.

I wouldn't expect the President to get involved after one crash. Yes, the President let the FAA get egg all over its face first, but he forced them to ground the plane. They ruined their own reputations. The President shouldn't have had to be have been involved at all.

> Once you start to notice the pattern of one-sided appropriation of blame in pretty much every fking scenario, you end up discounting any criticism of republicans as bias.

Exactly this. What people like me are tired of is the legions of armchair experts that opine in such way as to support their prejudices while pretending to be rational and intellectual about it.

For example: complaints about the complicated tax filing system, yet when Ted Cruz offers a postcard-sized tax return as a proposal, that idea is ignored and “Republicans” get blamed for being in bed with TurboTax. When Rand Paul calls out and presents proposals against excessive government surveillance, he gets ignored and this crowd still overtly or tacitly support the party to which they belong, rather than supporting the actual ideas that claim to care about. If Obama cut taxes, it’s “good,” when Republicans do it, it’s “for the rich” or whatever tribal argument is en vogue. When Republicans wanted to reduce SALT deductions, all hell broke lose (in California at least,) while the increase in the standard deduction gets ignored. Nancy Pelosi argued the tax cut was “for the rich,” while saying that the $1000 average in lower taxes for working people was a pittance. $1000 isn’t a pittance for many people.

In the current discussion, the FAA is “bad,” but only because Trump is in office, despite the Max certification happening with officials appointed by Obama. When Obama put kids “in cages,” the media literally ignored it. When Trump did it, there was mass outrage, ironically using Obama-era photos as “proof” of how bad Trump is.

Even the Coronavirus is being politicized beyond all reason. The Democrat aligned media makes it seem like we are all about to suffer a zombie apocalypse, despite a low American infection rate. When the economy was up, that was because of Obama’s policies, yet when it’s down, that’s because of Trump.

San Francisco “liberals” are every bit as tribal and biased as some NRA bubbas in an Arkansas Cracker Barrel — and both groups are wrong. The answer is somewhere in the middle. But the middle has dissolved because honestly, the near non-stop Trump hatred has turned the country into a place that is barely removed from some warlord-infested tribal region in Africa. Republicans weren’t fans of Obama, but they didn’t launch non-stop, media fueled investigations over and over again. First it was Russia. Then Ukraine. Now it’s Coronavirus. We had the FBI at the highest levels sending text messages vowing to stop Trump.. even before he was inaugurated. Imagine if the George Bush FBI started wiretapping the Obama campaign and then, Republicans calling for impeachment before he even took office. Imagine if Trump directed the head of the IRS to not testify to Congress over proven discrimination over tax exempt statuses of left wing groups. That would be considered obstruction, yet Obama did exactly that when Loris Lerner refused to testify about IRS targeting of conservative tax exempt groups. Was Obama impeached over that obstruction? Of course not.

There is a huge double standard fueled by an intellectual class that’s offended that the crowd that shops at Bass Pro Shops has just as much a right to their opinions as some writer at the New Yorker. Some cafe-culture liberal doesn’t have more right to their opinion than anyone else. Hillary Clinton actually called half of the country “deplorable,” and Bloomberg said farmers were essentially stupid.

It’s evil, this environment. Bill Maher even publicly wished for a recession so that Trump wouldn’t be re-elected. There are Democrats actually hoping this Coronavirus thing gets worse because, as Rahm Emmanuel once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” It’s disgusting.

More effective would be to put in place a lengthy blackout period (years) for aviation industry employees before allowing them to join the FAA and vice versa. The point being to significantly degrade the influence and political utility of "revolving door" hires.

I'm a former Congressional staffer -- these types of blanket restrictions on employment are thought to be unconstitutional (like a blanket noncompete). People have a right to careers. Plus the FAA needs industry expertise. Need a different solution.

Why would anybody then switch from industry to the FAA? No industry related pay until hired by the FAA - thats a bold transition

Agreed, as much as the current administration has pledged to "drain the swamp" the hill is looking just as corrupt as ever, if not more so. Instead of corrupt industry insiders and lobbyists, we just have corrupt industry outsiders or those who will immediately bow to the administration.

Why wouldn't Trump want to fire someone at the FAA? He fires staff constantly. Would be a strong publicity stunt to make it seem like he's delivering on draining the swamp.

Just a remainder: at the start of his presidency, Trump wanted to appoint his own personal pilot at the head of the FAA. So yes, don't expect too much from them in cleaning the upper levels.

Maybe appointing a pilot would be a good idea. Probably better than appointing someone who never flew an airplane. Obama’s appointee had zero aviation experience. He had transportation experience, but appointing a non-pilot to the head of the FAA is like appointing a non-doctor to be Surgeon General.

More important is to appoint someone with the right motivations and with a technical background. A pilot with a good formal technical background might be a fine FAA leader, but so might someone with technical expertise in the operations of the national airspace, or a Chief Engineer type involved with aircraft certification. What's critical though is that they remember they are supposed to work on behalf of the people, not the short-term economic interests of the regulated, and not to see themselves as firstly serving political patrons.

Trump's personal pilot nominee (John Dunkin) was not qualified.

He was the man in charge of Trump's presidential campaign’s air fleet. There were multiple incidents. One of the pilots was convicted violent felon that had to be fired. The landings were constantly so horrible that press joked that nobody survives covering Mike Pence. It all ended with serious incident where one of the crews overshot the runway resulting shut down of Laguardia airport. Mike Pence was on board.

I mean what it tells you about a man who can't even hire competent pilots in America.

> It all ended with serious incident where one of the crews overshot the runway resulting shut down of Laguardia airport. Mike Pence was on board.

The aircraft you are referring to was chartered from Eastern Airlines (since acquired by a different airline) and flown by Eastern Airline pilots. [1]

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_(2015)>

John Dunkin was responsible for the fleet, selecting airline that didn't train their pilots enough. He was responsible for decision to vet or not vet the pilots and their experience.

> The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this incident to be:

>The first officer's failure to attain the proper touchdown point and the flight crew's failure to call for a go-around, which resulted in the airplane landing more than halfway down the runway. Contributing to the incident were, the first officer's initiation of the landing flare at a relatively high altitude and his delay in reducing the throttles to idle, the captain's delay in manually deploying the speed brakes after touchdown, the captain's lack of command authority, and a lack of robust training provided by the operator to support the flight crew's decision-making concerning when to call for a go-around.

https://app.ntsb.gov/pdfgenerator/ReportGeneratorFile.ashx?E...

FAA acquiescence to Industry, especially these days, is probably not much worse than a lot of other Government regulatory agencies. As much as the current administration has zealously populated high-level leadership roles with people whose ideology tends toward "what's good for the short-term economic interests of the large enterprises we regulate is good for the people", the corrosion and inadequate response to Industry pressures has been going on a long time. 737 Max, for example, was mostly developed in the Obama era.

I do have strong views about which US administration and present-day political party has been worse for the people in terms of quality of regulation, but rather than go down that road, we may be able to make progress if we can seek explicit agreement that "what's good for the short-term economic interests of the large enterprises we regulate is good for the people" cannot be the philosophy underlying regulation and public policy.

..and the irony is that Boeing would be better served by a truly indipendant FAA: finding fault before planes start falling out of the sky.

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