DOJ fines Boeing over $2.5B, charges it with fraud conspiracy

As much as those names you named are important, they are peasants compared to power wielded by the big guys.

How about prohibiting them from holding executive positions in the future?

"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."

Hyman G. Rickover, father of the US nuclear navy

Post-Enron accounting rules via Sarbanes-Oxley made it so that the CEO had to sign off on and certify the financial statements. The buck stopped there. [0]

Why not here as well?

Unless you are thinking about putting the system that incentivizes a CEO and company to do this on trial.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2014-152

If the CEO goes to prison, other CEOs will care more than this one, if some compliance officer does, the next one won't be as willing to bend to implied pressure from leadership.

The I'd go over all the certification process. Any person who concealed information or misled in an official capacity goes to jail. That's the whole point of requiring titled engineers signatures. The buck stops with them.

The way to get less of an undesirable behavior is to make it lead to undesirable outcomes. Unless there is some other operative reason, you're right in another way - we don't have to care where that (dis)incentive comes from.

The firm owners are ultimately responsible - they are responsible for hiring the execs responsible for the firms' actions. Fine the criminal company so hard that shareholders of their future potential employers will think twice about the risks they might impose on their savings.

Of course, this is a national security concern, and so TBTF. Man, isn't the US a great place, if you're filthy rich?

>Boeing admitted that two of its 737 Max flight technical pilots “deceived” the FAA about the capabilities of a flight-control system on the planes, software that was later implicated in the two crashes, the Justice Department said.

...what exactly does that mean when "deceived" is in quotation marks? Seems like deceiving regulators would be a straightforward crime. Unless "deceived" means something other than the usual definition.

Or another way would be to temporarily send the company to "jail" meaning to suspend its operations for a while.

When you look at this example or what happens to banks when they support criminal activity like money laundering or tax evasion the fines are simply way too low for them to stop doing bad stuff.

Last time I checked neither of these individuals programmed the ECU of VWAG diesel engines to cheat emissions tests although some engineers were blamed and fired.

It all starts at the top.

Boeing should be forced to publish all trade secrets that were used in their planes which contributed to the deaths of these people (so basically all IP that Boeing owns), and they should have all their patents annulled.

The above comment is very, very uninformed. Aviation is a heavily regulated industry, totally unlike IT.

There's several legal avenues for individual prosecution:

1) False certification documents about MCAS performance were submitted to the FAA, so it would be very easy to find out who those people were, and who their managers were. The US government has no problem prosecuting people for fraud in the aviation world. (FAA certification is almost totally dependent on paperwork, both in mfg. and operations.)

2) The manager of the test pilots who wrote the critical SMS messages was fired, so that is another easily traceable route related to the above.

3) Southwest asked for a penalty of $1 million per airplane if type-specific traning was required, so both Southwest and Boeing negotiators agreed in a reckless manner to disregard airliner safety with that perverse incentive. (Reckless is a catchall in the FARs for pilots, but could be applied to companies and mfgs.)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.13

To give Congress credit, they are re-visiting the ODA delegation process because of MCAS, which Boeing abuses by having managers pressure ODAs:

https://www.aviationpros.com/aircraft/commercial-airline/new...

Boeing is the US' largest exporter, so should face intense government scrutiny as it affects not just passengers and suppliers, but all Americans.

Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot who has followed MCAS very closely, far more closely than anybody else on HN.

"It is the government that is too powerful, government tries to open an investigation with an explicit objective of jailing the [person responsible]."

Oh no. Just wait until you learn what the job of the police is in a civil society.

> Boeing did not benefit from 346 deaths on other hand it suffered massive losses.

It absolutely did. It benefited up front from not having to redesign the 737 MAX to conform to global aviation standards. This allowed it to go to market faster, reduced development costs, and gave it an edge in sales against its competitor, the A320 family on the order books. You know, the one that didn't fall from the sky spontaneously. Boeing achieved this through lying and deception.

All this fine did was attenuate the benefit.

> Remember how USA bombed countries while making completely fraudulent claims about WMD ? Who went to jail for that ?

One unprosecuted crime doesn't mean all crime should no longer be prosecuted. Whataboutism is never a good look.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that an investigation was opened with the specific purpose of jailing an executive: I don't see any indication that was the case, and just about anyone in or outside of government could have predicted before the investigation that no executive would go to jail over this.

I do think the way you said it may be more true (with no evidence) that a management culture which had switched more to acquisition choked out good engineering culture. You are essentially correlating it with the acquisition in timeline.

Note I'm in no way attacking you, just adding what I've seen online and heard in bars.

What is plausibly the cause for the engineering fiasco of the 737 Max? Why go back to the merger in 1997 and why not blame the 9/11 attacks or the election of G.W Bush or Obama's for this disaster?

Why go back to the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas? Because it allows Boeing engineers to deflect blame for the terrible product they built and foisted on the flying public by coasting on their past reputations.

> There is no way a recall coordinator with a global view of the company's welfare in mind would have made the decision to go forward.

When the information about the sensors and software first emerged everyone was saying there was no way any one engineer would have not spoken up about it... It was later relieved they outsourced the software development to $9/hr engineers. It wouldn't be surprising if their "recall coordinator" did not speak up for one reason or another.

How much did they actually lose? I mean, excluding coronavirus essentially destroying passenger airflight... Boeing does not have competition in many areas. The US military won't buy Airbus, Dassault or Saab planes, the NASA won't exclusively shift to SpaceX because ULA space flight is actually a job program. On the passenger airflight side the only competition is Airbus who have limited capacity.