> Republicans on the committee did not endorse the investigative report. [..] criticized Democrats for an investigation that "began by concluding that our system was broken and worked backwards from there."
So, do many republicans hold the view that killing 346 people in the first year of service is acceptable business practice?
Even if the conclusion is that it is "acceptable business practice", it doesn't make the system less broken. Just as making a bug "won't fix" doesn't make the bug disappear.
But this is all political bickering, I don't think republicans are proud when American planes crash and kill their passengers, some of them US citizens. But because the report is written by democrats, and I suspect it is a little about safety and a lot about attacking the republican government, somehow, republicans feel the need to fight back instead of trying to find solutions.
I hope there are real engineers trying to actually solve the problem behind the scenes.
As a parallel I submit to you the FAA Medical process - a system by which it is better for a pilot to conceal or not report until terrible a condition that could invalidate their medical and remove them from flight duties.
While both of these are bad for the consumer, I ask - who is at fault? The big company, the pilot, or the people making the rules that encourage such behaviors.
Please present one system that you designed and implemented and it worked without faults. Imperfect (as all things are) does not equal broken!
From a system design point of view I've lived to see multiple "broken" systems being replaced by a worse system with the best of intentions.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_analysis
To be clear: I am not saying FAA is faultless, I am no expert on aviation security, I simply have no opinion. I'm just saying some people are quick to take out the pitchforks.
Killing 300+ people is broken. And our obligation is to admit that it is broken, and fix that thing. When we find another thing, we admit that the system is broken there as well, and go fix that.
Trying to diminish the seriousness of 300 deaths with mealy-mouth terms like "imperfect" is pure spin. If a plane, staffed by pilots allegedly trained on how to fly it, crashes from pilot error... TWICE, the system is broken. terribly broken.
See also: Security, physical or digital.
Terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. The system was broken. We fixed some of it. We put on some secuity theatre too. But we didn't say, "It's impossible to fix everything, so the system is fine." We didn't shrug it off as "imperfect."
We always begin by being truthful with ourselves about the fact that we have discovered that the system is broken. And if the consequences of its broken-ness are unacceptable, we fix it.
"Imperfect" is a word that should only be used for acceptable faults. Like, "The seating in economy is imperfect." It's too close together, but we don't have planes falling from the sky because they're cramming passengers together.
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And now a footnote: Please avoid ad hominem arguments like "please name one system you've..." If the speaker's argument has a logical fallacy, point it out. If the speaker's argument is sound, it doesn't matter whether they write faultless software, or even whether they write software at all.
It's the argument we are discussing, not the person making it.
This is a massive trivilisation of the problem.
This is not 'code' - it's a massively complex system of large companies, various bits of tech, supply chains, varying international standards, considerably amount of legislation and that's before we get into the humane issue of 'acceptable loses' because '0 deaths' may not actually be feasible. Maybe, but maybe not.
"Terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. The system was broken. We fixed some of it."
Again, this is a misrepresentation. The system was not 'broken' because culturally, people 'didn't do things like that'. The 'fix' for this wouldn't be 'more security' but rather to encourage a civil culture where people don't take over planes and fly them into buildings. And some of the solutions are systematic, i.e. not 'safety checks on planes' but externalities like 'invading countries and destroying places where terrorist plan things' - which isn't so nice.
These are very complicated problems that don't have obvious solutions.
All systemic problems have complex sets of interactions and unexpected consequences. Racism, automobile deaths[1], and yes, air transportation.
We still don't shrug our shoulders and deny that the causes of deaths reflect a broken system, nor do we refuse to attempt to find solutions just because it's damn hard to make progress.
[1]: Sometimes, making the vehicle safer makes drivers more reckless. Making cars safer in practice is not as obvious as it appears in theory.
And it's possible in attempting to launch several thousand pounds of metal into the air that sometimes your testing is off and people die. That may mean the system is broken, it may mean it's just imperfect - it is not sufficient for either of those claims by itself. That people died does not mean the system is inherently broken - life is not without risk nor should our goal be to make that risk non-existent.
Security, to use your example, is fundamentally a trade off - accessibility vs security. Are we willing to trade a more intrusive screening process to prevent some set of attacks? Even if we make that tradeoff and an attack still happens, should we keep it? Would you be willing to be stripped search each and every time you fly if it lowered that risk of an attack another 10%?
Your call out of an ad hominem is incorrect. Parent is generalizing human behavior in an uncertain world, not attacking you as an individual. Nobody can write a perfect system, even NASA has failures. A super abstract argument about flawless systems loses to real life statistics every time - theory is great but only reality matters.
The difference between an accident and what happened here is that the issue was caused _deliberately_ by a series of bad choices, reflected in the fact it happened twice in exactly the same way. Yes, it took a lot of bad choices to get to the point of creating the issue, but that doesn’t really matter, and in fact, might only serve to further the point.
When a system allows for deliberate choices to cause an issue, the system needs to be addressed.
Anecdotally, I have never worked at a company where the management didn’t have an outsized say in how we broke apart our time between product development and stability.
I suspect this is endemic of a system that lacks accountability for people in managerial positions, and is probably even beyond the scope of the FAA, MCAS or Boeing.
Have you considered you may not be correct here? I know that may be difficult to comprehend, but you are not a teacher shedding light on the unenlightened - you're just another layperson attempting to understand a complex system.
> what happened here is that the issue was caused _deliberately_ by a series of bad choices
Are you suggesting Boeing intentionally downed it's own planes? That would seem to be an extraordinary claim - and not one reflected by any news source.
> When a system allows for deliberate choices to cause an issue, the system needs to be addressed.
What was the deliberate choice here? Only enabling one MCAS sensor or having calibration issues? Was it not making the need to disable the MCAS sensor in some situations clear? Was it changing the altitude model without changing the plane model number and forcing a pilot relicense?
Or, was the issue with Boeing being able to do their own testing? Was it due to a lack of guidelines on MCAS sensor calibration and placement?
> I suspect this is endemic of a system that lacks accountability...
Yet we are talking about this after their fleet was grounded, a congressional inquiry has happened and the investigation and analysis are ongoing. That doesn't seem like a lack of accountability to me.
Again, you're making the claim that the system is broken intrinsically because this occurred. You keep even saying it's deliberate - do you have evidence here? Because making poor choices is not the same as intent, and a bad actor does not a fundamentally broken system make. You seem to be in the position that because bad things happened we must dismantle the entire system without actually proposing a replacement - it is not enough to throw stones, we must actually put forth a solution set.
Wait until you find out how many people die in car crashes every single day. It does not mean “the system is broken”. In the real world systems can be improved without throwing disruptive tantrums to make fundamental changes.
>Terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. The system was broken. We fixed some of it. We put on some secuity theatre too. But we didn't say, "It's impossible to fix everything, so the system is fine." We didn't shrug it off as "imperfect."
Excellent example of an extreme overreaction that caused immense destruction to the aviation industry because emotional politicians wanted to fix a “fundamentally broken system”. The correct approach would have been, “we’ve found a big flaw in security, we will now install flight deck door locks”. Instead, some dim politicians went with the “system is broken” approach and now we have nudity machines (or grope-downs if you don’t submit) at every major airport in the US.
You don’t drastically change a system on the discovery of a single flaw, no matter how big. You fix the flaw because it’s one known bad vs the giant pile of unknown flaws with fundamental redesigns.
Nevertheless, in my lifetime cars have gotten safer by several metrics, most notably by distance traveled.[1] And they did not get better by thinking that driving around in deathtraps without seat belts and swigging whisky behind the wheel was acceptable.
They got better when people like Nader and MADD stood up and defied arguments like yours and loudly complained that yes, the system was BROKEN and needed to be fixed.
And then other people went about trying to fix automobile safety. Imperfectly. In fits and starts. And sometimes entirely wrongly. But nevertheless, progress happened when people attempted to fix things they acknowledged were broken.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
I don’t think you understand. Cars are still killing thousands of people and the system is not considered broken right now. You’re emotionally lashing out and assuming I’m promoting drinking and driving when I said no such thing.
The entire point is that deaths alone do not indicate a broken system. Society is riddled with acceptable death rates in countless industries and people don’t childishly accuse politicians of being “okay with people dying”.
There is a world where nobody can accept any deaths and then there is reality where the adults exist and make trade-offs to have a functioning society.
Very, very funny considering it took TWO crashes for people to start bringing out pitchforks.
Isn't this just outcome bias though? You're arguing that because there are 346 deaths, the system is necessarily broken. That may not be the case. From what I've seen, it probably is, but it's not a foregone conclusion, and we shouldn't look for evidence supporting that conclusion. 346 deaths might actually be a very small number compared to what could have happened had the system actually been broken. The point is, it's a logical fallacy to say that because there were 346 deaths, the system is broken, and we need to work back from there. This could have been a rare combinatorial explosion of bad luck.
And no system is so broken and corrupt that you won't find plenty of people willing to insist that it is all just fine as it is.
This is mostly a management and political issue, not an engineering one. And being cynical, I'm pretty hopeless about politicians or managers taking responsibility for their actions here.
First you very carefully selected what to quote. You cut out this part:
> A statement from ranking member Sam Graves of Missouri says, "if aviation and safety experts determine that areas in the FAA's processes for certifying aircraft and equipment can be improved, then Congress will act."
Which makes it clear they mostly disagree about what the investigation results say about FAA, not Boeing business.
Then you suggest the republicans not being ok with the investigation findings means they are ok with killing people. They do not agree with WHY and HOW these people got killed, obviously not disagree that this should have not happened.
How you can misrepresent the other side so badly and still be so self righteous is beyond me.
It takes some pretty significant mental gymnastics to convince yourself that the FAA's approval process wasn't critically flawed in the case of the MAX.
The reality is one party long believes in giving business a lot of slack, and then only speaks in grumpy platitudes about the limits of business free-for-all when people die. They don't want a bullshit idea to be seen as bullshit. They just want to profit as much as possible with a number of deaths that the public finds acceptable enough to not call b.s. on the system itself.
If any event involving hundreds of deaths at the same time could be pinned on a person, they'd go to prison. This system is expressly designed to spread the blame and obfuscate just enough that fines will be paid, and life goes on. Except for those who died.
I agree this doesn't exactly equate to the conclusion drawn about republicans, but it does further expose that there is no limit to generating partisan/political quotes where they don't belong.
Regardless of who you side with, note that many on the congressional investigative team took contributions from Boeing and tried to steer blame to individual pilots/airlines (including Sam Graves and some democrats).
Source: https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/blaming-dead...
That's quite the assumption. I don't even know what 'broken' would mean for a certification process as byzantine as the one used by the FAA. I think you should either be more specific, or take the time to learn a bit about the systems, processes, and failure modes of complex multi-stakeholder processes.
Yes, but for me, regulatory capture seems to be a central issue in what went wrong, so I am highly skeptical that this is not an ideologically-flavored conclusion.
FWIW, I first approached this incident (prior to the second crash) from the point of view that it was probably either pilot error and/or an unfortunate malfunction, so I think I can fairly say that I have come to my conclusions in a forwards direction.
The fact that this is an accepted business practice is insane to me.
Note that without the revolving door both sides would be worse off. (Unless you take some other action to mitigate this - I can't think of anything but there might be a complex answer)
The process of doing so and ensuring it would be very laborious in that you would have to document every last detail, go through and make sure they were covered, make sure they were retained, and make sure that their understanding of every last detail is identical. Making matters worse is the mix of implicit and explicit. If you use a sprocket on something the design implicitly states "Do not allow it to rotate that way!" An added strut on a panel already more than capable of supporting itself and the rest of the structure may be redundant or needed to shift resonant frequencies into a range where they would be irrelevant.
One of the reasons DARPA program managers sit a fixed term is to precisely prevent careerism and castle building. The reason members of congress have a staff is to support them in researching topics.
But ultimately it comes down to the public, being informed by media, holding politicians responsible. I may disagree with portions of Bernie and AOC's political platforms, but one thing I don't have to worry about with them is that they're in the pocket of a company like Boeing.
We get the government we ask for. Want better? Raise your expectations and vote accordingly.
It’s ironically not unlike the regulatory landscape that led to the Boeing situation in the first place - the entity charged with oversight was much too deferential to those it was supposed to be overseeing.
This statement alone is hilarious considering that the FAA approval is a poster-child example of regulatory capture.
Here's the secret: the FAA let's the companies SELF-REGULATE and SELF-APPROVE planes.
The FAA did NOT approve the Max, because Boeing did.
>>A total of 79 companies are allowed under federal policies to let engineers or other workers considered qualified report on safety to the FAA on systems deemed not to be the most critical rather than leaving all inspections to the government agency.
>>To critics, it's a regulatory blind spot.
Once you know how this works, that statement by bad-faith-actor Sam Graves is laid bare. Of course we know how to improve the processes: Step 1: Don't put the Fox in charge of the Hens!
>>> How you can misrepresent the other side so badly and still be so self righteous is beyond me."
Something you yourself could have learned from before posting!
"Here are the total contributions from Boeing to members of the House Aviation Subcommittee during the 2018 election cycle. Republicans: Troy Balderson (R-Ohio) $0. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pennsylvania) $9,700. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin) $5,999. Garret Graves (R-Louisiana) $6,000. Sam Graves (R-Missouri) $10,000. John Katko (R-New York) $15,400. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) $0. Brian Mast (R-Florida) $7,681. Paul Mitchell (R-Michigan) $5,000. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) $3,000. David Rouzer (R-North Carolina) $2,000. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pennsylvania) $8,000. Ross Spano (R-Florida) $0. Pete Stauber (R-Minnesota) $0. Daniel Webster (R-Florida) $0. Rob Woodall (R-Georgia) $2,000. Don Young (R-Alaska) $1,000. Total Boeing Contributions to Republicans on the Aviation Subcommittee $75,780. Average for each of the 17 members: $4,457.
Democrats: Colin Allred (D-Texas) $94. Anthony Brown (D-Maryland) $8,500. Julia Brownley (D-California) $0. Salud Carbajal (D-California) $5,000. Andre Carson (D-Indiana) $10,000. Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee) $2,000. Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) $703. Sharice Davids (D-Kansas) $122. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) $5,000. Jesus Garcia (D-Illinois) $0. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) $6,000. Henry Johnson (D-Georgia) $1,000. Rick Larsen (D-Washington) $7,048. Daniel Lipinski (D-Illinois) $6,000. Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts) $0. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-New York) $3,500. Grace Napolitano (D-Washington) $0. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) $0. Donald Payne (D-New Jersey) $1,000. Stacey Plaskett (D-USVI) $0. Greg Stanton (D-Arizona) $2. Dina Titus (D-Nevada) $3,000. Total Amount Boeing contributions to Democrats on the Aviation Subcommittee in 2018 cycle: $58,969. Average for each of the 22 members. $2,680.
Total contributed by Boeing to the 39 members of the Subcommittee: $134,749. Average per member: $3,455."
Source: https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/blaming-dead...
You know, there has to be a story behind this. I'm not sure what it is, but I hope it is good.
The implication of course being that Boeing and its engineers want to kill people and the only thing standing between them and their goals of mass murder is the government.
It's not that management wants to kill people on a personal/visceral level, it's that they're willing to take on unacceptable risks in order to lock in short term monetary gains. We have seen this over and over again with modern large corporations, across industries.
And is it surprising management behaves this way? Their compensation is directly tied to short term stock value shifts. Meanwhile, when the game of musical chairs stops, they know that they'll still be able to make a lateral career shift to another similar company and just play the same game all over again.
I'm less clear on what Sam Graves means when he says "if aviation and safety experts determine that areas in the FAA's processes for certifying aircraft and equipment can be improved, then Congress will act," but I can see why people would be upset. It seems to me that we don't need input from anyone after two crashed airliners, be they safety experts or not: there clearly are areas in which the FAA's processes can be improved and they should be improved ASAP.
Yes, my comment was a gut reaction. That reaction was purely based on the gall of calling into question whether the system is broken at all. To formalize my thought process:
1. $system exists to certify machines in $domain (premise)
2. 346 people die in two related $domain failures (premise)
3. $politician rejects the notion that $system is broken (premise)
4. a well-functioning system is apparently allowed to result in 346 deaths (conclusion)
Hundreds to thousands of people die everyday in vehicles and the NTSB doesn’t even open investigations. It’s regarded as a well-functioning system. Are Democrats fine with thousands of deaths every year?
But not due to systemic issues like the Toyota unintended accelerations.
Deaths arising from systemic issues in automotive manufacture or poor road design are relatively rare in comparison to driver-induced deaths due to e.g. impairment by alcohol.
>> and the NTSB doesn’t even open investigations
It does for (systemic issues - the issues in question this whole conversation)
"driving while 80 years old"
"driving while on 4 hours of sleep in the past 72"
"driving with the brake warning light on"
I'd count all of the above as "systemic", and bet that they cause a multitude of deaths. We just don't want to accept the societal and monetary cost to eliminate them. Others, like "driving while intoxicated", we penalize but still do not take more than superficial steps to combat. (Superficial from the perspective of aviation, at least)
Adding just a few lessons from Aviation - things like "only allow the use of spare parts that are approved by the manufacturer", "forbid use when diagnostic errors are present", "mandate pilot rest periods and duty cycles" and "revoke the license of anyone with a sufficiently serious medical condition" would have huge consequences. I'm personally confident that each of those would reduce driving fatalities in the US by more than 346/yr. Of course, they'd also destroy the livelihoods of millions, make car travel far more expensive, and have (prior to 2020) unfathomable social consequences. But hey, any system that allowed that many deaths must be broken!
Climate experts determined things too. Congress has acted... by ignoring those experts. Why should we expect them to listen this time when they have demonstrated an unwillingness to listen in the past? Judging by history, they aren't planning on acting.
Working backwards from a desired claim to generate only supporting facts would reinforce only that claim. It’d be like the police only investigating the one usual suspect and refusing to look for evidence that did not pertain to that suspect.
Working forwards from gathering facts to a conclusion may lead to the same place or somewhere entirely different.
It’s called parallel construction. When police use it, it’s grounds to get your whole case thrown out (for very valid reasons... if you can prove it).
See:
In my opinion, the crashes are not facts with which anyone could reasonably argue. I don't think there's room to argue that maybe the crashes were unrelated, for instance. Given that we can all agree that the crashes occurred and were caused by a similar fault (in this case MCAS), I think it's entirely reasonable to "work back from there" and figure out _why_ this airliner was certified as safe and through that exercise discover what changes can be made to that certification process to prevent other dangerous airliners from being certified.
I don't know if that is really a desired claim, but both sides in politics have their desired claim to support whatever solution better fits their desired end.
Sounds a lot like whataboutism to me
346 people in the first year is a horrible. It is also an outlier. In general, flying is extremely safe, and new planes are safe.
If we freak out about everything that ever goes wrong and try to create a system with zero deaths ever no matter what, we risk not being able to do anything new because it is paralyzed by regulation.
Of course, it's a balance, and the balance that commercial aviation has found is heavily focused on safety.
I generally ask if anyone anymore believes in cause and effect. By and large aviation is safe because of the work of governments and corporations together to create safe aviation. It doesn't just "exist." As we see here with the 737.
> we risk not being able to do anything new because it is paralyzed by regulation.
This isn't frontier science or sending someone to the moon. Aviation can be extremely safe and innovative if based on sound principles and not just trying to make an extra buck.
The problem isn't that flying is unsafe, but that the MAX specifically was/is, and something very clearly failed both at Boeing and in regulation.
Yet would one consider mandatory seatbelts and stricter laws on driving under influence and so forth "paralyzing regulation"? You are talking about the other extreme with its polar opposite of not having any rules. But there evidently is a huge middle-ground where we can have regulation and not having people killed in large numbers.
Consequently, if we look at history most of these "freak outs" have in fact resulted in regulation that has saved lives. Eg the gun laws in UK. We as humans are very short-sighted in general and I think it's more of a rule rather than the exception, that we need these kinds of accidents to improve the regulation and the laws in place. Sometimes maybe to the extreme, but I think it's better to be too strict than too lax.
Even if 100% of global elextricity generation was replaced with nuclear, that wouldn't be true. You'd have to also replace (for instance) 100% of transportation with nuclear. (And that's assuming that the infrastructure construction and maintenance costs of doing all that are carbon neutral, too, and that the reduced demand and price for fossil fuels resulting from that shift doesn't open up new uses that get you back into problems, which—absent aggressive regulation—youd naturally expect it would.) [55% reduction is CO2 is needed, electricity is 27%, transportation 28%.)
Or maybe you are thinking that the absence of nuclear safety regulation would result in enough accidents to reduce the growth of population and industry enough to solve climate change, which I guess is a valid thought, if an extreme example of glass-half-full thinking.
Well yeah the US had 36k automobile deaths and globally its 1.3 million (that's 3500 per day). You need to accept some level of fatalities as normal.
Probably not the best example...!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
America has such huge clout for setting design standards for vehicles, has very large, very well funded law enforcement departments, a reasonably young average age for registered cars.
If it wanted, it could smash those fatality figures in not much time at all.
I knew roads in the US were dangerous, I didn't realize they were nearly as dangerous as Bangladesh or Egypt! No slight against those countries in particular but they are comparatively less prosperous (meaning older, less-safe vehicles, more pedestrians), have worse roads, and presumably not as advanced healthcare systems. I'm amazed the US, with all its advantages, does so poorly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
No, you don't. You never "accept" it. You always strive to preserve life.
When did life stop being precious?