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Comment by Fischgericht | Hacker News Reader

It appears some here aren't fluent in WeaselSpeak.

NTSB wanted the names of the specific people who had removed the door plug.

Boeing then gave then the names of employees who may or may have not something to do with doors, for example, accounting, the chef and the janitor.

NTSB then said that no, they did not want that, they want the names of the specific employees who had removed/installed that specific door plug on that specific airplane.

And then Boeing replied: "Sure, here are the names of our 170.000 employees."

The End.

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That sounds like it has some obvious ways for the NTSB to play along:

"Alright, sounds good. We've scheduled preliminary interviews with the 170000 employees. Here's the list of 5-minute appointment slots at our office. Please make sure your employees are on time, we expect the first batch of 28800 employees next week. We'll ask them a) whether they have anything to do with the door b) whether they want to report any other unethical practices, then schedule follow-up meetings as needed. No, we can't do this via Zoom."

Optionally one week later: "due to the concerning number of reports we've received during our preliminary interviews, the planes are grounded until we finished the interviews".

However, the article doesn't support your claim. They provided a list of everyone "on the door team", so probably a much smaller number, and they claim they can't figure out who did it because their documentation is incomplete. Which might be real, but also has an obvious solution: Ground all potentially affected planes until they're able to ensure their documentation is accurate.

Well, the article somewhat supports my claim if you read between the lines (remote the WeaselSpeak).

But on a somewhat more serious note, my view on this is:

I run a small company. We produce small-business electronic devices.

If you would give me the serial number of one product produced 15 years ago, it would take me less than 2 minutes to query our database of work reports, showing which employee had produced it on what date and time, using which components, coming from which delivery lot.

It would also be impossible that someone "forgot to put that in". You have to log in. You have to scan the device to be built. You have to scan the parts. You have to scan the finished product. There is automated QA. And there is manual inspection. Repair means - scan and go to step 1. You can not delete records from this database, unless you are a system administrator, and if you are, there are offline backups.

And this is the minimum legal requirement in regards of product safety according to UL. For things that reside in homes on offices, not in the sky.

"The dog sadly has eaten our homework" should be technically and practically impossible. It can't be possible by a single entity to forget this, let alone possible for multiple different management layers departments (production, QA, Compliance Management, whatever) to all on this one day having had "bring your kid to work day", while all going out smoking pot while the kids are building the airplanes for that day :) - Either these work logs exist, or they have been intentionally (!) not produced, or they have intentionally be purged. There is no such thing as "can't find" in this regard.

To ground the planes may be good for aviation safety. But it also hurts the wrong people.

But what really needs to happen here is to someone go there, knock down the door, and ground the management until the work reports are produced, or management guilt be admitted.

It is shocking that the NTSB clearly does not have such powers, and that after more than two months of obvious stone-walling still have not been provided with any such powers. It should not even have come to the point of "If you won't provide the work reports, can we at least talk to the employees, pretty please?". They are supposed to be the regulatory authority.

Where is the A-Team when you need it?

>No, we can't do this via Zoom.

I think an important side note you bring up here is that remote work ISN'T really feasible in many cases, and being in person creates a huge difference in results.

A&P mechanics are individually tracked, or if not, Boeing has bigger problems. Dicking around with NTSB is NOT good form.

If what the grandparent comment says is true, I agree with Boeing. I HATE Boeing and what they've done to themselves. They had such a leg up on Airbus post A380 market, and squandered it with greed, but I digress.

What good does giving the names of individuals to the NTSB do?

I'm with NASA on this one: There's a process problem and the whole team should suffer not leaving individuals to hang and dry. Except perhaps the executives that allowed this to happen.

It allows the NTSB to know who to interview. That gives them a much better picture and helps validate if what Boeing says is actually true.

It also allows the NTSB to find out whether Boeing did track it's production line as vigorously as it should. They try to figure out where everything went wrong. If there is no paper trail, that indicates that there is a systematic security issue at hand at Boeing, where people can go in and do what they want without documenting it.

It allows them the opportunity to interview specifically involved people who may be culpable or point to those who are for making decisions that impacted this scenario.

Boeing playing whack a mole with a Federal Agency is just going to be the Streisand Effect of regulatory attention.

I'm frankly ok with Boeing getting a Federally mandated enema until what's left of the firm could be carried in a sandwich bag.

>I'm with NASA on this one

The way to improve a process includes interviewing the specific employees involved in the issue to formulate process improvements.

I've been the subject of such an inquiry, and while uncomfortable (facing your failings) it is also incredibly valuable when done correctly.

It's fair to say "how much do we trust boeing to do their own internal investigation and properly change the process"?

I think you can get to this without externally naming individuals.

Personally, I'm more interested in "what else is messed up" than the individuals in this specific situation.

Honestly, I don't want to ride Boeing today.

What good does giving the names of individuals to the NTSB do?

They can give detailed testimony, eg indicating what the process was but also things like (for example) 'I spent the first half of my shift getting the door plug in place with the help of A and B, and then broke for lunch. As I returned to work a supervisor directed me to work on [something else]. I said the door plug wasn't finished but the supervisor told me it would be taken care of.'

The thing with a spreading responsibility across the whole team is that it gets reduced to an abstraction and the disciplinary measures are ultimately up to Boeing. I think finding the faults in the chain of command requires canvassing individual workers who can share their first-hand experience on the factory floor. Otherwise the whole thing gets blamed on the 'door fitting team', but there isn't any incentive to look at whether similar corner-cutting happens on the wheel teams or the fuel tank installation teams or (fill in the blank).

From what I've read about Boeing's work culture and the 737 production line, I really doubt it was just one unit that didn't pull their weight.

> They can give detailed testimony

The incident report can be given this without naming the individual. Technician#2512....

And thusly I agree with your last sentence - it's not just one guy having the problem. There was a chain of failures. If someone forgot to put the plugs back, who was performing the inspection that that confirmed the plug was there? Who is the safety engineer that signs "this plane is fit to fly".

America, esp Senators, like scapegoats. Individuals we can pin the blame on and say "You screwed up! You're fired!" okay, problem solved! I fixed it!

All of Boeing has HUGE problems and naming an individual isn't going to fix it. US Gov needs to go in and review all the steps in details. What are the failurem modes? Between this and the Max, Boeing can't be trusted with its own internal processes anymore.

The NTSB can't get an interview with Technician#2512 unless they know who the fuck that is. They need to know who to talk to. Whether that name is subsequently omitted from public documents is another matter.

What if that person doesn't have the right qualification yet was told to remove the bolt?

What if management was notified that the employee doesn't follow procedures yet did nothing?

Then these are signs that there was a conscious decision somewhere in the management chain that created the circumstances to allow that to happen, which is exactly the type of thing NTSB is there to root out. For heaven sake, cooperation with NTSB gives you a legal shield from the information being used against you by prosecutors. There is no downside unless there is something so egregious being hidden that it damn well has escalated to being a point of major public concern.

Surely being able to gather information is a key point in identifying process problems. NTSB wont blame them but they might want to speak to them.

Greed isn't the problem here, stupidity is. A smart greedy person adds value for the long haul, enjoying both the greater financial rewards and social prestige of being an all-round good guy.

A dumb greedy person sucks a national treasure dry for a quick bump of profit ($BA has lost a ton of money for years now) and then slinks away to the sound of jeers and booing.

A smart non-greedy person isn't motivated enough to do either, so at least they're not bad.

It helps them root out the source of the problem. I doubt if they're out for blood. Was it a lazy tech? was it ridiculously long work hours? was it a manager pushing his employees to do fast & sloppy work? They want it to not happen again. From what I read about the plugs, the engineering of them is sound if implemented correctly, so it likely lies in faulty processes.

Well, Boeing isn't providing the work documentation / reports that should exist. Boeing also does not want to admit that such documentation does not exist - the required database lookup for this surely should have completed within the last months.

I do not think this is about protecting individual employees at all. What in the recent history of Boeing makes you think they have a business in protecting employees (or their customers customers, for that matter)?

I find it much more logical to assume that ass-covering operations are in full process. Admitting "we don't have documentation" surely won't bring engineers into trouble, but potentially someone from management into jail (at least one can dream).

Seriously: If you would manufacture ... anything ..., and would be legally mandated to have work reports on file in a database, and were told the serial number of the product, date of production, date of door installation - would it take you more than two months to write an SQL query for that?

And even if so: Again I would doubt it's the engineer who no longer remembers how to write SQL queries would be identified as the person of guilt here.

> What good does giving the names of individuals to the NTSB do?

It lets the NTSB ask them questions and figure out if it was a once-off error, or a systemic error.

You’re making a lot of leaps here. Neither what NTSB said nor what Boeing said remotely insinuates what you said.

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