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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

> The agency now has more power to choose which Boeing employees represent the FAA’s interests, and there are new protections for them from undue pressure by company managers.

This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.

I wonder if after it's all said and done, whether the splitting up of parts manufacturing will really have saved that much money. I also wonder how much of this is caused by pushing materials as far as they can go to get to the fuel/efficiency targets they want to hit.

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1) it is absolutely a problem, but... 2) to fix it, you'd have to pay federal FAA employeees as much as equally-skilled members of the private sector at Boeing, and that hasn't happened in a long time. My understanding is this system started because the FAA's best technical people kept leaving for Boeing and other private-sector employers.

Build it into the cost of certification. You absolutely want the brightest people working their hardest to uncover potentially fatal issues so they can be fixed before people die.

How often do you certify a new plane of this magnitude? I’d wager you would have to plan on contracting that out vs hiring a bunch of people to only work periodically, and how are you going to find contractors who know how to build these?

There's problems on any side, if they're direct FAA employees they end up being paid way more than other similar FAA employees - though given that the only major airplane manufacturer is Boeing you could just charge Boeing enough to pay all FAA airplane examiners the requisite amount.

No you want the brightest people (I object to the term brightest in general but anyway) making the systems so that people don't die. That's the first priority, it doesn't work to get them to check other people's works, they have to make the best works, actually perform what needs to be performed. Then check.

Bright and diligent.

For sure. Absolutely.

It’s not a money issue. The US government has plenty of money. It’s a perception of corruption issue. The government can’t have high paying jobs because voters will punish politicians if they do.

I don't have a US-context, so excuse my naivety but to me it'd appear as if government can't pay well for _some_ jobs.

If the politician themselves make too much, then voters might not like that. If all government jobs pay "too well" then that too would meet opposition. But, as a colorful example: suppose that being a politician was tied to the median wage of the nation, then would anyone object to paying this type of oversight position adequately?

Also, I'm not necessarily convinced a decent enough paycheck is enough to dissuade from corruption. Sure, it helps but it isn't enough on its own. If a person is getting money under the table, then they are making even more money even if they are already making a pretty sum. It's just that the size of the bribe would have to increase proportionally to their salary.

In my country (the Netherlands) there is a norm that says "No government employee shall earn more than the prime minister". The idea being to prevent certain heads of departments from setting their own pay to high.

This has had a side-effect of some actually qualified technical people from leaving because of salary.

The US federal government is similar. The President makes $400k, cabinet secretaries $225k, and everyone else less than that. There are a very few exceptions—-some doctors for example.

A way out that is popular with governments is to use contractors. Certification is a highly specialist job that requires independent experts. Perfect job for subcontracting to companies that employ such specialists.

The FAAs job is to ensure that certification happens and that it is done right; but not necessarily doing it themselves. And effectively they aren't because they let Boeing self certify currently. So, this would be an improvement.

This seems like the best idea, as a balance both of "it works" and "it could happen".

Maybe it's time to finally pay market rate for government employees?

The underpayment is a consistent factor that keeps cropping up wherever you search for the reason why a government project or entire structure failed or went over time/budget.

I agree, but you'd probably also need to have government NOT offer the job security far above what the private sector does, otherwise you have the opposite problem of all the people with the most in-demand skills in the government, not producing, just checking what other people produce.

It does seem, though, like you might want to have something like government pay at 90% of the market rate, so that highly-skilled and in-demand jobs do get pay that is close to the market rate.

The total of base compensation and benefits are already more or less required by law to be 100% of the market rate, as justified by surveys in the private sector. However, that does not include any stock compensation or bonuses. So government employees make about the same in industries that don't have significant stock or bonus. They make considerably less when more compensation is in those categories.

So the situation is already what you describe, for the most part.

>> even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.

Yeah but after I read this:

>The FAA delegated an increasing number of tasks to a group of Boeing employees authorized to work on the agency’s behalf.

I first imagined a typical corporate group which might have turnover and I thought: What if the FAA delegated to individual people, so if Boeing fired someone for raising too much concern the role would fall back to the FAA? But yeah, its still a conflict of interest no matter how you do it.

> This still smells strange, even if the Boeing employees are the most knowledgeable about the planes, having them be under FAA "control" but Boeing pay seems counter-productive.

This is what happens in the US when your company is in a regulated industry and has been found to be so far from best practices that the regulatory body shows up one day, says "We need x number of offices" and then takes over managing your firm until they are satisfied enough Corrective Action have been performed and enough Preventive Actions are in place to right the ship.

Solution: don't get into a regulated industry, and if you must, keep your house in order.

It does seem strange but, even including the 737 MAX disaster, air travel is safer today than it ever was. Since the 1960s, miles traveled increased tenfold while deaths (in absolute numbers) dropped by 90 %, for a combined 100-fold increase in safety.

No thanks to the MBAs flying people into the ground to pay for their yachts.

Consider the record of the 737 MAX alone and up to the point where it was grounded worldwide. I bet that's not a great ratio of fight hours to lives lost compared to Boeing pre-merger.

Yes, these unscientific MBAs that will just ignore data if it doesn't fit their opinions.

FWIW the only person charged with criminal offenses in the 737 max is the chief test pilot, Mark Forkner[0]. Guess how many business degrees the guy has?

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/business/boeing-737-pilot...

you’re spot on with how safe commercial air travel is today. it’s actually insane when you think about it.

but the reason its so safe is because there are so many redundancies built into so many different layers of the system.

once rot starts to happen, it’ll take the better part of several years or a decade for a wave of elevated fatalities to manifest themselves in these stats.

If engineering standards had dropped 5 years ago, that would not really be reflected in the current numbers yet. A commonly heard thesis is that this track record of safety has been used as an excuse for reducing engineering standards. I don't think the historical track record of safety can be used to disprove that thesis.

Honestly, the engineering standards dropped much longer ago than 5 years ago.. The Dreamliner probably shouldn't have been certified in it's current state, to start with. Among other reasons, because of li-ion batteries and all..

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