Much as I'd like to see Boeing investigated for what look like systemic failures in their construction processes, I don't think a totally anonymous comment on some blog article on the internet really qualifies anyone as "a Boeing whistleblower".
This is why we still need serious journalism by the way - a reporter would personally contact and verify the credentials of the whistleblower while protecting their identity, with their career on the line. Random news blogs or independent reporters will never replace this.
In my view, a "whistleblower" is someone who gives their information confidentially (not anonymously) to a responsible investigating authority.
Not someone who writes a comment on the internet that you or I could write ourselves, with a little research sprinkled with credible-sounding 'insider chit-chat'.
This company's incompetence killed 346 people in 2018-2019, and the postmortem revealed an unethically cozy relationship with their regulator, the FAA. Now, five years later, we are seeing more catastrophic failures that will eventually claim more lives, and once again the FAA is coming under scrutiny for being too lax in its oversight of Boeing.
It seems to me that the FAA lacks some kind of either technical or organizational competence to regulate Boeing. Screws must be turned publicly until Boeing's financier-led culture is replaced with the original engineering-led culture. Anonymous insider comments are one reasonable way to do this, although it might be better to work as an anonymous source to a well-known journalistic outlet.
It wasn't incompetence, it was greed. They said "no new training for pilots" in order to keep sales volume up and to ensure no new training they kept the MCAS system a secret from pilots.
Or maybe we could wait another 20 years: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213075
On the other hand, wouldn't that also sound like something someone completely unqualified could easily make up and it would just fit our own bias enough to avoid thinking about it too critically?
Complaining about Boeings quality, especially in the 737 Max department, is just an easy and cheap shot.
Also note that I never claimed that the comment is wrong (I have no private knowledge about Boeings processes), just that the comment could easily be fake.
Biases can be entirely accurate.
And even if this is a work of fiction around this particular incident, the reality may not be far enough off to matter.
There's enough smoke that all the biased people rushing to assume there's a fire are likely more correct than the skeptics demanding to see the flames enveloping the building before rushing to any judgement.
There's solid evidence that there's a metaphorical fire; trusting an anonymous internet comment actually weakens/poisons the pile of evidence.
Exactly. I'd expect a whistleblower wanting to be taken seriously to be talking to a real journalist with editors and a publication with a history of getting things right, not a single-author mid-tier aviation blog.
The temptation to spin things "just a little" and to fail to verify identity and authority, for a site like this, is just too high.
I do not blame someone for not wanting to risk the exposure.
[1] And let's also be clear: journalists from both those organizations are surely on the phones full time right now trying to find dirt on Boeing quality processes. That would be a huge story if they could land it.
Of course no way to know the truth for now.
The page is absolutely filled with ads. Clearly it's a revenue source, not a labor of love.
Also your ideas about the media industry somehow being compliantly beholden to the interests of Boeing (a company less than a tenth the size of Google or Apple) seems a bit silly. This would be a huge scoop and a big win for any paper that got the story. That they don't have it speaks broadly to this blog's story being spun.
The linked page that the comment that is the source of all this is actually on is "Leeham News and Analysis", which looks like a professional-quality aerospace news site. I don't see any ads or tracker scripts on them at all. The author and the bulk of the commenters sound pretty professional and knowledgeable. It looks like they sell subscriptions at substantial cost, which explains a lot. That's enough for me to presume they're much more trustworthy about the aviation industry than any legacy media source.
When was the last time the legacy media did a real investigative report about something that wasn't super hip or somebody had a grudge against already? You may not necessarily agree, but I think it's at least reasonable that an actual whistleblower like this wouldn't bother with them. Or maybe they already did, and got ignored, because they thought the article would cost too much to put together and not get enough clicks to bother. On Leeham's site, the author did ask the commenter to contact them - perhaps something will come from that, or maybe not.
Accessing the SAT system to re-read all the tickets to the reporter sounds like the easiest possible way to get fired. Obviously someone is going to review every access and be very skeptical of anyone viewing that data after the news broke.
I guess there is always "use your coworker's computer when they go to the bathroom", though. Lock your screen!