Hacker News Reader

Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

>A Boeing spokesman disputed Homendy's account in an emailed statement to NPR. "Since the first moments following the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident, we have worked proactively and transparently to fully support the NTSB's investigation," said Boeing's Connor Greenwood

By 'proactively and transparently' I assume Boeing means telling NTSB 'we don't know anything so we can't answer your questions lalala.'

>"Early in the investigation, we provided the NTSB with names of Boeing employees, including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information. We have now provided the full list of individuals on the 737 door team, in response to a recent request," Greenwood said.

Boeing throwing its employees under the bus- 'no we don't have any record of the work. Why don't you bother our plant crew instead. They would know everything because someone does, and it's not us Boeing.'

View on HN

Oh my lord that all sounds so seriously bad. I can't even believe this. My grandpa used to assemble landing gears in the 80s for boeing and they kept records of the torque applied to every nut and bolt, in duplicate or triplicate (2 people in assembly would check, and 1 from QA). He would be rolling in his grave right now

The Boeing guy who posted the detailed history of the plane a few weeks ago[1] said something to the effect that they discussed things in a slack-like system rather than enter in the official records system because managers would get upset at KPIs not being met.

[1] https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installa...

Double bookkeeping is a bad sign. At best it’s incompetence that causes confusion and errors, and at worst it’s fraud.

I think the NTSB would probably love to interview to the crew who actually used the tools--even if nobody can figure out which exact team used the tools on this exact plane--they probably wouldn't so much as incriminate themselves as to paint a picture of incredibly shoddy quality control. Instead carefully parse that phrase "names of Boeing employees, including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information" which are all likely management / project-management kinds of positions who are vetted by Boeing.

> throwing its employees under the bus

The NTSB is literally asking for names. That’s what Boeing is allegedly refusing to provide.

From the GP: ">"Early in the investigation, we provided the NTSB with names of Boeing employees, including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information. "

How is that Boeing refusing to provide employee names based on the quote in the comment you are replying. I'm assuming on good faith the GP's quote is from the TFA.

The NTSB asked Boeing for the names of the specific people on the team that replaced that door, and they said Boeing hasn't provided that. In Boeing's response, they didn't say they provided that, either. They said they provided "names of Boeing employees, including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information." If they had actually provided the names of the crew that did the work, they'd have said they did exactly that rather than giving a lawyerish sidestep. I don't even think that the people who'd have done the actual repairs were even Boeing employees. Isn't a big part of the criticism that this work is farmed out? Not positive, though: that could have been work for one of the other recent Boeing catastrophes.

The question is not "which team is responsible for installing or removing the plug?" it is explicitly "which specific people did this specific job?".

Boeing is meant to have the answer to the second part documented - because that's how QA in this type of operation is meant to work: you document the people who did the task, and they document the exact tasks they did, you document the people who checked the task completion, and they document what they checked and the outcome of those checks.

In software terms if it helps the NTSB is asking "which engineer landed this change?" and Boeing is responding with "this is the team that maintains that code".

The reason the NTSB wants to know the exact people involved is not to assign blame. The goal, and sole reason the NTSB exists, is to determine why an accident occurred, so they can work out what needs to happen to stop it happening again. So the NTSB needs to know the exact people involved, so it can interview them, and see what they were doing and experiencing leading up to and during the maintenance work that may have contributed to the accident. These interviews are what led NTSB to find out things like sleep issues contributing to accidents, and so investigate what issues were leading to those sleep issues, etc which is why there are now strict rules about pilot flight times and scheduling changes. These interviews with the actual people involved are _extremely_ valuable for reducing recurrence of accidents.

The fact that numerous other aircraft were found with missing bolts and similar implies something systemic is occurring in the installation of these plugs (imo the core issue is the attempts to make the plugs "permanent" leading to inspection of these connection points being essentially impossible is the core issue, but also that Boeing missed the issue repeatedly shows something else is wrong). So interviewing the people doing the work will presumably shine a light on what is causing the oversights, which again, is the goal of the NTSB.

> The reason the NTSB wants to know the exact people involved is not to assign blame. The goal, and sole reason the NTSB exists, is to determine why an accident occurred, so they can work out what needs to happen to stop it happening again.

Anyone who has ever worked at basically any corporation knows this is career suicide. If Boeing ever discloses who that person is, he will effectively be barred from working in aviation for the rest of his career, full stop.

What are you talking about? The NTSB regularly interviews individuals of all sort. This is not career suicide.

I'll state it another way:

If you were an airline, would you knowingly hire the same maintenance engineer who installed a door that failed and nearly killed hundreds of people?

If you were a patient, would you knowingly accept surgery from a doctor who had a documented record of making fatal mistakes in surgeries?

Once this man's name is released, he will be unhireable.

> Once this man's name is released

There are multiple unfounded assumptions here.

Just because boeing tells the investigators the name of the individual the name does not “get released”. NTSB reports most of the time describe people in general terms such as “the captain of the accident flight” or “maintainer 2”.

Then the assumption is that it is a single individual, when it is most likely multiple people. (There were multiple aircrafts found with the missing screws.)

Then of course you are also assuming a gender. Not everyone who works on airplanes is a male you know.

> would you knowingly hire the same maintenance engineer who installed a door that failed

Yes. Assuming that it wasn’t an intentional act of sabotage, my answer is yes. We don’t get good results by assuming that nobody makes mistakes.

> > would you knowingly hire the same maintenance engineer who installed a door that failed

> Yes. Assuming that it wasn’t an intentional act of sabotage, my answer is yes. We don’t get good results by assuming that nobody makes mistakes.

And in fact that's the whole point of these interviews. A safety system that fails if a single person makes a mistake indicates a failure of the safety system, not the individual that actually made the mistake. The design of the system is meant to be such that even if one of there was a mechanic that was trying to intentionally sabotage the maintenance it would not result in a safety issue.

So a few points:

1. Pilots, even those responsible for accidents, talk to the NTSB, and unless grossly negligent continue to be pilots. The people who do get blackballed are the ones that actually report unsafe behavior before accidents occur.

2. If someone was unreasonably negligent in a way that caused an accident or death, then they should not still be working in a field that impacts safety of others

3. If conditions at Boeing are what are causing these failures, then not interviewing the people who made the mistake means that the mistakes will happen again, until people actually do die.

I'd like to know if you can point to cases where people who were not entirely at fault for an accident were forever unable to work in the industry, given you're saying that everyone knows it's career suicide I would expect every NTSB report of this kind to have resulted in the responsible parties being forever unable to work in the field, so this should be a long list.

But also, if Boeing knows who this person is, and would fire them because of it, why would they not have already fired them? If they had, why would the person not have gone to the NTSB? and similar basic follow ups to your logic.

It just seems super weird that you're claiming that no one talks to the NTSB because it's career suicide, when objectively the NTSB has spent decades interviewing everyone they can find that is involved in accidents.

The NTSB redacts the names of individuals. None of the names Boeing hands over will ever be known to the public. No one will know they were interviewed by the NTSB nor who said what (even Boeing won't know that). At worst the final report will say "Engineer 1", "Engineer 2", etc.

It is deliberately done this way to avoid the issue you describe. If people knew talking to the NTSB could get them doxxed and fired it would make cooperation impossible.

>including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information.

Yes, by telling the NTSB to ask the door specialists "which of you installed the door", instead of having proper documentation on who did exactly what work. If the workers can't answer the question, now Boeing can wash its hands clean and blame the workers.

I doubt the workers themselves keep track of which specific planes they worked on- and they shouldn't need to, this is project management.

> I doubt the workers themselves keep track of which specific planes they worked on- and they shouldn't need to, this is project management.

Didn't they find loose/missing bolts on other aircraft? Talking to employees who worked on other planes around this time seems like it would still be extremely important for this investigation.

Yep, they did. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/united-ai...

> ... now Boeing can wash its hands clean and blame the workers.

That's not what being responsible for the final product means. ;)

The aeronautical safety culture specifically avoids blaming individuals, and prefers focusing on procedural and organisational issues. If one person made a mistake, why didn't the rest of the organisation around them catch it and prevent it from causing a problem?

I don't think the NTSB is going to look kindly on Boeing if they even try to throw the techs under the bus.

Did we read the same article? The article I read said the NTSB was seeking the singular person who failed to reinstall the door plug correctly and Boeing was not giving that person up.

I have no love for Boeing, but it sounded like they were trying to _prevent_ some poor line worker taking the fall.

The NTSB does not have any prosecution power and their investigation docket + reports are, by law, not admissible as evidence in court.

The NTSB will not identify the person responsible even to Boeing, let alone anyone else.

There is no "taking the fall" for talking to the NTSB. If it were otherwise a great many investigations would be impossible. Besides which the whole point of having a certified aircraft manufacturing process is to avoid making issues any one person's responsibility because all humans make mistakes. Allowing one person's mistake to endanger an aircraft means the process has failed, not the individual.

FWIW Airline pilots and ATC also have an ASRS reporting system: Aviation Safety Reporting System. It is blameless as well. Everyone makes mistakes, period. If you punish every pilot or controller who makes a mistake naturally they will try to cover up all such mistakes and that leads to worst outcomes. All the big airlines follow the rules and do not punish pilots for issues reported via the system. At worst you will get sent for some training to address problem areas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com