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I got flack on here after the MAX was grounded because I said no-one will ever fly on one of those planes ever again.

I’m astonished that the echo chamber between Boeing and the FAA is so oblivious to their customers that they’re plowing on ahead even prior to this latest scandal.

I’m not flying with any airline that can’t guarantee my flight won’t be on one of these. I doubt I’m alone.

Does any airline guarantee a flight won't happen on MAX? I haven't heard of such a thing. Can't they later change the plane? Do they give you your money back?

the onus is on the consumer to perform due diligence: https://www.planespotters.net/special/boeing-737-max-groundi...

Ya the ones that never bought them like Delta etc

Yet. If they are cheap enough - all the airlines will be interested. I'd guess Boeing is nearly giving them away now.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-delta-...

> I got flack on here after the MAX was grounded because I said no-one will ever fly on one of those planes ever again.

How much would you wager on that?

Of course people will fly on it. 95% of people will be just thinking of what they want to do when they get there. They assume that someone else has verified the planes. And what else can they do? I certainly can't verify the safety of a plane.

Yes, and I regret making a snarky comment.

There are clearly quite a few people who are determined to avoid flying on a 737 Max (or avoid Boeing altogether) and also seem to expect this to be a widespread view. While I can understand the former (though not hold it myself), there is no realistic prospect of the latter.

I can't verify the safety of airliners either, but so long as they are flown by an on-board crew of professional pilots, there will be a body of informed* people with a vested interest in keeping things safe.

* Though not always fully informed, which is, of course, a big part of the 737 Max debacle.

Oh zero. Even when I said it I fully understood that it wasn’t true. I was just venting.

A lot of people won’t fly on these planes, but far from a majority I’m quite sure.

Those same people will also be aghast if something goes wrong in the future as “they” were supposed to have made sure the planes were safe.

People still want to believe in The Magical Them.

You know how shady mattress and TV retailers mix up the model numbers so you can't comparison shop? Your next flight might be on a 737-super-1912713-b.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/20/boeing-737-...

737-8

You say that jokingly, but the configurations & carriers are actually part of the model numbers contained in the last two digits (and occasionally letter afterwards) [0].

[0] https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/04/27/reader-ma...

Fortunately, the 737-MAX / 737-8 is visually distinctive from the previous generations of 737.

Or you could just avoid all 737s.

> I’m not flying with any airline that can’t guarantee my flight won’t be on one of these. I doubt I’m alone.

You have to outweigh the cost of retraining all pilots for an alternative plane. This whole mess happened because that is something the airlines really want to avoid and Boeing was greedy enough to offer it.

Absolutely the airline has to look at that, given that as you’ve said the big draw for airlines is redeploying their 747 crew, but that’s their problem (or not. If I’m the only person that cares enough to not fly because of it then it hardly matters).

I flew on Spirit (which has a bad reputation but whatever, I love it for cheap flights), and they make a point before takeoff of saying their fleet is 100% Airbus planes.

I recall hearing Airbus had its own messes to deal with... such as https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbus-probe/airbus-bribe...

Yeah, that's just as bad as the Max.

Joking or not joking?

I don’t see repeated crashes in the article.

> Oh, and Boeing will go under. Where's your shareholder value then?

The involved shareholders will have already sold their shares by then, and be busy destroying some other company's long term existence for some short term valuation that they can dump and run.

And any criminal investigation will stop on the small people they coerced into doing the illegal deeds, because they of course left no evidence trail of those decisions.

We'd be so much better off if shareholder voting power were weighted by the amount of time they enforceably commit to holding the stock, after the vote.

Interesting idea. Every time a vote goes your way, you accumulate more holding time on your stock. Those who lose votes will have negatives added against any compulsory holding time they’ve accumulated (since they are misaligned with the direction in which the company is headed). Status quo for those who don’t vote or lose don’t have such restrictions.

I wonder if we can frame a system starting with this approach (correcting for aspects like some votes are on really minor issues, and some are really major issues).

Sounds interesting on the surface, but a common reality is that the more moving parts there are, the more opportunity for things to go wrong or against intended use.

I've never understood this idea that we shouldn't a fix problem we know about, on the grounds that we might introduce a new problem we don't know about. I think the best approach is to try to figure out everything that might go wrong, address those things, and then go ahead and try to make things better, instead of just giving up and accepting the problems we have. That's how civilization advances.

This particular problem is heavy on game theory, which is a pretty well-developed field at this point. So I think there are grounds to believe we might be able to predict consequences with some accuracy.

Linus Torvalds calls this trading new bugs for old bugs. And I agree with the idea in principle: don't replace buggy working code with untested new code. People already know how to deal with the old bug.

And look how it turns out every time that principle is broken, albeit in userland and not the kernel: KDE 4, PulseAudio, Systemd.

I'm fully aware of the differences between a product (airplane) and software, but the 737 Max is born of the same principle being broken. The problem that was being fixed was fuel efficiency. So Boeing replaced the engines and associated structures with more efficient engines, which required different structures to hold them, which required MCAS, and now the whole thing is untested, as compare to the old setup with decades of proven reliability despite 1.6% more fuel consumption.

So never change any laws and or invent new things? I can't imagine many people really think that's the answer.

I'd also point out that arguments like this, while often well-intentioned, can also be abused, by people who don't like a particular new idea but can't articulate a defensible reason. It's easiest then to just fall back on conservatism.

The real answer is to invent new stuff and try not to be idiots about it. Use good design principles, don't cut corners, do the testing, roll out gradually when that's feasible, etc. For the Torvalds principle you mentioned "untested" new code, and Boeing definitely cut corners.

The first step of not cutting corners is not ignoring obvious flaws.

If you are adding complexity into a very complex system, in order to govern it, it is very likely that the change will make the system harder to control. So you must have a pretty good certainty that this will give you governance and not destroy it.

Shareholder voting is not that complicated, it's just a simple majority vote weighted by number of shares held. My suggestion is a modest extension of that, to address a specific problem.

Can you come up with specific ways it might fail? I can definitely think of issues that would have to be addressed, but so far all the critical comments in this subthread could apply, unmodified, to thousands of unrelated ideas, rather than just this one.

If corporation governance were simple, we wouldn't see that kind of failure.

> Can you come up with specific ways it might fail?

It's trivially exploitable by the executive team by just behaving in a sustainable way for a while, and then changing it suddenly when every other shareholder is locked-in.

The reason the comments apply to thousands of possible suggestions is that the problems appear on thousands of possible suggestions, and nobody wants to keep writing thousands of comments debunking each bad idea.

Finally, a criticism that is not completely generic conservatism. It's a good point that this would work better for shareholder votes on policy decisions rather than board elections.

Then you immobilize some long term holders with many proposals for them to vote, and after they can't do anything anymore, bribe the employees directly into doing the shortsighted action.

Again, it's an extra bonus to the unethical ones, because they are the only ones that can sell, and will take all the profits from the short lived stock pump.

Do you also have a home-made encryption algorithm you'd like to push?

Cryptography is a well-developed professional field with rigorous peer review. Their products do what they're supposed to almost perfectly, and many people use them.

Perhaps you could point me to an equivalent field for making society better, with a well-developed utopia that lots of people live in today.

I might be biased (I am an engineer) but I call this behaviour " MBA mentality VS Engineer mentality". Is this malady that slowly has infected top engineering firms (Read HP, Boeing, IBM) and converted them into "sales organizations" that rely on marketing and old reputation to survive. MBA's concentrate on the (albeit short term) profits, Engineers concentrate on the the product.

Intel also i guess ?

Famous example was NASA (according to Feynman)

Not Another Shuttle Accident? Need Another Seven Astronauts?

When just recently I was explaining the Boeing situation to my children, my twelve year old mentioned that it sounds exactly like what happened at NASA. That's a twelve year old's conclusion, and I told her how insightful that was. So many people in the field are so blinded by their patriotism towards a company or organization that they are unable to identify the roots rotting out under their own feet.

I've seen enough engineering students cheat on tests because "it was the only way to get the grade they deserved" to not really buy this distinction. I think that there is an uncomfortably common belief that cheating is done to prevent randomness from interfering with the "correct" outcome. A bunch of people think "well, our system is great and we just don't want something weird to happen in the test that makes it seem otherwise". It starts with the assumption that your system is already good before the test is done.

Just wanted to reply to this in case it gets lost in the stack of replies to say that this is incredibly insightful, and that virtually no-one has the humility to realise that they are as capable of failing as anyone else.

There is a ubiquitous bias to assume that everyone else is stupid but we’re somehow especially intelligent or infallible ourselves, which as we’re seeing here as some fairly dire consequences at scale.

That might be true of those fresh out of school. I've been proven to be fallible and stupid enough times to believe it.

It's been over a decade since I've last said "that decision that somebody else made was stupid". I've since replaced it with "I would have done it differently, but I don't know what other constraints they were faced with at the time".

Hi. I’m an mba. Profits are pretty important and firms should undertake NPV positive activities. We’ve seen amazing products fail many times due to lack of market fit. However, there’s certainly no shareholder value in bankruptcy or lawsuits.

I do not know whether it was your intent, but you appear to be endorsing the view that anything goes, unless it reduces NPV.

No, come on, let's assume good intent here.

History is littered with failed products that were very well engineered. For any business to last there needs to be an effective partnership between commercial and product development areas of the company (or, if you prefer, MBAs and engineers, not that the distinction is so clean).

GP is merely pointing that out.

Agreed and point taken.. A good MBA's would realize the short sightedness of the actions they are taking (like they should have done in Boeing's case) and good engineers should have the integrity to say "you want me to do what? hell no!" That said, the malady I speak about is very real. (maybe even endimic?)

Thank you. I certainly did not intend to communicate that “anything goes.” What I meant is that even when you apply the most cold-hearted financial analysis, short sightedness is often suboptimal. It’s tougher when your public investors watch every quarter like hawks.

Isn't this what typically happens to companies as they grow? Technical people get pushed out of power by money people?

The bias is the part where you don't know what an 'MBA' is.

I agree. The decline of Boeing started with the merger with McDonald Douglas. Douglas, was famously lead by bean counters to Boeing's engineering driven culture. And the bean counters won.

I flew on Spirit recently and noticed before takeoff in the little speech the flight attendants make they mention their “all Airbus fleet”, which honestly made me feel better. I don’t want to fly on a Boeing at this point, as I fly so seldom anyway and this has just devastated my opinion of them.

There has been a slow-simmering pop-hypothesis, fueled by a number of accidents such as AF 447, that Airbus' approach to fly-by-wire controls is less intuitive than Boeing's in a crisis. As far as I know, there is no real evidence for this making Airbus planes less safe, but until the 737 Max crashes, I think there was, if anything, a bias against Airbus.

This is a quick & dirty statistic that I just made.

Incidents listed on Wikipedia excl. hijacking/being shot down where >=20 people perish:

  year airbus boeing
  2000 2 3
  2001 1 0
  2002 0 4
  2003 0 3
  2004 0 1
  2005 0 6
  2006 2 2
  2007 1 3
  2008 1 2
  2009 2 0
  2010 2 2
  2011 0 2
  2012 0 1
  2013 0 1
  2014 1 1
  2015 1 0
  2016 1 1
  2017 0 1
  2018 0 2
  2019 0 1
  2020* 1 2

I couldn't find any data on the number of journeys per year. The statistic is useless as an indicator of safety as it isn't normalized to either a unit of distance or journey.

* To date.

> Oh, and Boeing will go under. Where's your shareholder value then?

Part of the wager in situations like this is that the state will, in a variety of ways, from contracts to bailouts to regulatory capture, keep the crony corporation afloat.

People who do this kind of thing are not the people who will do the dying, nor be affected by it in any way, plus they will never go to jail for that and what really counts is that short term profit. Get this thing over the line, collect the money and move onto something else. The problem is that there are no real consequences to what they done. Why nobody is doing life for this and you have people doing time for a bag of weed? Why would they care?

I agree overall that the engineering culture was lost, but it is plainly not as simple as having the engineers in charge. The CEO at the time of the 737 MAX certification and subsequent crashes was Dennis Muilenburg who started as an intern at Boeing's defense and space division. His degrees are in engineering. Apparently no MBA. Still, the wrong mindset.

Yes: some commenters are reading my comment as a distinction between an MBA and an engineer mindset. Whilst that might be a genuine phenomenon in some contexts I wasn't drawing any firm conclusions about that in my comment above. I've worked with plenty enough engineers who've cut corners over the years to know that we're not inherently more virtuous or competent than other professions. We are however just as human and subject to the same foibles and vices so, yes, to everyone reading it: please don't over-interpret my earlier comment.