U.S. is said to open criminal inquiry into Boeing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624602
You can “open” and “close” a door without documenting it. If you “remove” a piece of an airplane, you document it.
So perhaps a part of Boeing’s error is that they think about “opening” a door plug but they did not design it such that it could be safely “opened” and “closed” without special care.
As I understand it, the door plug is indeed an awkward in-the-middle design in that you can remove four bolts and do something resembling “opening” it without fully removing it. But if you open a door, the plane has better alert the pilots if you try to fly the plane without properly closing the door, and the plug has no such feature.
The problem here is not that Boeing does not know how to run both the original quality system and the system to modify it if necessary. The problem is the quality culture that puts "implementing the quality system" above "make line go up" is degraded.
Whereas a door plug can't be opened and only has one state, "installed", but the internal processes treated it as if it were a door, generating the documentation that would be appropriate for opening and closing a door (nothing) rather than the documentation that would be appropriate for removing and reinstalling a structural element.
Then, when the door plug wasn't reinstalled correctly, there was no system checking whether it had been "closed", because that concept doesn't apply to door plugs. Whereas an actual door, if it had been left open, would still have generated no relevant documentation, but the plane wouldn't have taken off in that state because the problem would have been obvious.
The process for checking that the door plug bolts are correctly installed was simply skipped, as nominally no work had been done on it due to it not being marked as worked on. So it was not re-inspected.
So one might argue that calling this thing a door (plug) and “opening” it is a mistake. And one might argue that a design that “closes” a bit like a door but isn’t correctly installed when it looks closed is a poor design.
That gasket got changed, but they did not mark that they had done work on the door, requiring reinspection.
Silly take. There is nothing wrong with the design of the door plug, which as I understand it is over twenty years old with no other reported failures. "Special care" is standard procedure in aviation.
By this logic the wings/engines/etc. are all faulty because if you don't install the bolts, they might fall off.
I don’t believe the parent comment is saying the design is poor, it’s about the process during assembly and maintenance.
Does not compute
Now they call it a "door plug", and the technician working on it searched the QA SOP document for the right procedures and searched for "door" and "open" and got the SOP for "opening a door", which requires zero documentation after the work is done.
I'l know it's contrived, but it's so stupid that it might just be what happened.
https://viewfromthewing.com/boeing-whistleblower-production-...
It doesn't really seem like it?
The whistelblower account actually rracks, depending on which kind of documentation you talk about. You now, the lazy rethoric trick of providing a technically correct answer, what Boeing did, while still lying through obmission of the general point. If so, don't worry, the NTSB and FAA will find out.
Sounds exactly like MCAS.. That omission. I thought that was just to preserve the same type certificate without retraining but it seems like a more systemic problem then.
- regulators provide general rules to be followed
- companies define theirbway of complying with those rules, the Means-of-compliance, and relevant processes and tools
- regulators audit those, sign of on them and audit the final product, hardware, software and documentation (!) to make sure compabies have their shit in order
- deviations are documented and recorded on work order level, e.g. one has to remove a door plug even this isn't part of the work instructions; in this case, either some non-standard instructions exist to be pulled up or an ad-hoc obe is written, both have to signe off by quality before the work is done, then said work is duly documented on work order level and again signed off and checked by quality (this is the most common way to handle those individual non-conformities I came across in my career, there sure are others)
- the above has to be defined in a dedicated process description, which itself is subject to regulatory approval
- not following the above, even worse trying to mislead regulators and auditors about it, does amount to a criminal offense for the senior execs responsible / accountable, depending on circumstances (from what little I know, Boeing is extremely close to this, if line workers cheat there isbnothing obe can do besides firing them, at Boeing the issues are far more serious, deeper and far reaching than some individual worker cutting corners so, it seems).
For example perhaps a rule says "you need to do an inspection when a panel is removed" so the engineers and quality will get together and say "what if we just have the technician remove a couple screws on the panel and peek under it, then the panel hasn't technically been removed so we don't need to do the inspection". And then it turns out they remove all but one screw and twist the panel completely away so it's basically open but not "removed". And, it's all there in the work instructions, exactly what they did, but if anyone asks they can say "oh no, we didn't REMOVE the panel". And of course, the actual work instructions are only viewable in some 1970s green screen terminal or an all-caps printout thereof that comes in a multi-binder acceptance packet.
Also, none of those instruction live in some opaque system. Don't know where got that idea from.
this is kind of what github did for version control. it went from being this arcane chore to a fun little interface with colorful buttons.
You would be surprised but the overwhelming majority of maintenance procedures and their bureaucracy is decided by airplane makers and airlines exactly because local authorities have different or no rules at all.
Besides who can know better than Boeing how to maintain a Boeing airplane? Same for other companies.
The issues arise when companies know that some procedure is required to be done and logged but shrug it off for whatever reason. Remains to be seen why.
> A removal should be written in either case for QA to verify install, but as it turns out, someone (exactly who will be a fun question for investigators) decides that the door only needs to be opened, and no formal Removal is generated in CMES (the reason for which is unclear, and a major process failure). Therefore, in the official build records of the airplane, a pressure seal that cannot be accessed without opening the door (and thereby removing retaining bolts) is documented as being replaced, but the door is never officially opened and thus no QA inspection is required.
[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA24MA063%20P...
I said somewhat unpopularly at the time that this is not an incident that should meet with curious blameless fact finding but instead the many responsible parties need to be stomped for negligence by the legal system.
Boeing’s board needs to be fired and some executives probably need jail time. Given the defense position of Boeing, the executive branch should probably take some direct action outside the judicial system once there are some more clear cause and effect facts about what’s going on at Boeing.
On the other hand, Boeing is “national security” so there will be political pressure to not fuck with it too much.
But to some extent it only proves the point. Boeing has been fucking up so badly for so long that the Feds won't give them anything that isn't a fixed price contract.
There is a current smell of Boeing not being particularly cooperative with investigation. That is the usual path that gets somewhat more important people charged for committing crimes. Various brands of lying, conspiracy, and evidence tampering where people get charge for what goes on during the investigation instead of the actual incidents.
Creating environments where these processes are kicked into the bucket in whatever way is NOT what workers do, it is coming from the very top. Do I need to continue on ... ? Maybe about what happens to workers if they try to do the right thing? Ever heard about engineers at Boeing who spoke up ... ?
It is time the head honchos not just at Boeing but more generally get to see that accountability, responsibility, and all these other fancy words also have some actual meaning. We have to stop playing this stupid game of "deferred responsibility", because in the end it is not a company but humans making decisions and there are always consequences from that. Some just take a while to cause some effects and not all of them take the direct route, either. But that doesn't make the decision makers less/not responsible.
The NTSB "fact finding" is intentionally and necessarily blameless, because if it becomes a prosecutorial investigation then you lose cooperation of everyone involved. If you lose that cooperation, you can't work out what caused an accident, and so the same accidents keeps recurring.
The entire point of the NTSB is to find what caused the accident, and that's not going to be "Sarah was tired that day", "Frank was distracted by his kid's academic struggles", etc. That might be relevant (a common action by budget carriers use to be frequent schedule changes for line pilots, so that they had "sufficient" sleep by the law but were being forced to work through their circadian low, etc - stopping that took multiple crashes where the NTSB said "this is the cause"), but it isn't going to be the cause here. Afaict it takes multiple people to install the plug, all of whom failed to do or check the bolts, Boeing has a lot of cross checks, none of them caught this, Alaska did an acceptance flight and had performed maintenance, but did not catch this, etc.
Firing the mechanics involved doesn't tell you why they messed up, it doesn't tell you how this got through checks, it doesn't do anything other than provide retribution. It doesn't even do anything to the people who presumably created the environment that allowed this to happen.
So instead of trying to get retribution, we try to discover what made it possible for this to happen, so we can stop the same thing happening again in future. That is how flying got as safe as it is today.
People who cause accidents due to criminal behavior, or corporations that cause the accidents due to criminal behavior, can be charged or sued, but saying "I want people punished so lets sabotage the accident investigation, and inhibit our ability to prevent them in future" is counter productive.
The NTSB is a lovely organization but they're already calling out Boeing for not cooperating. They should continue doing what they're doing but a separate independent criminal investigation is in order. Jail time and large fines also help accidents from not recurring, preferably also legislative action and Congressional investigations. What is actually in order now is the legal discovery process to uncover what people are talking about, recording, failing to record, and otherwise documenting to bring to light the sources of the failed safety and reliability of these planes.
Afterward, criminal prosecutors can use those facts as leads to pull on when doing their investigation.
I do think the person you're responding to phrased it poorly though. While a blameless investigation can result in someone being held liable (i.e. "blamed"), an equally valid result could be that nobody is blamed when no individual liability is warranted by the facts.
You're advocating for punishing specific people before any evidence has pointed to their guilt, which feels like the opposite extreme of treating everyone as blameless (which is also not what blameless fact finding is about, as other replies correctly pointed out).
Blameless fact finding is for dealing with errors and failures made in good faith. Far too many things have happened for these to be "good faith" errors and evidence and attitudes which have come out have made this plain. You stop being nice about it when foul play is the most reasonable suspicion at this scale.
>You're advocating for punishing specific people before any evidence has pointed to their guilt
The Boeing board should be replaced for what is already public.
>executives probably need jail
Notice the qualifier "probably". What I'm saying is this is what criminality looks like, the exact nature is still being investigated, but it should and is now being investigated like a crime instead of the normal flow for accidents which is the blaming fact finding which is only useful when everybody is actually interested in safety.
At a higher altitude and higher pressure difference, without seat belts, 100%.
But few miles in the air with seat belts there's not going to be a decompression that will strap you out of your seat belts.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240309232411if_/https://www.ny...
This feels very much like the MCAS situation. They spun their wheels for months after the initial crash. And another tragic crashed happened due to the same issue.
Come on. Someone somewhere at Boeing knows exactly what happened. Even if they don’t want to reveal this, it’s not even clear to me if they now have better QC procedures to catch these kinds of issues.
I don't think that's true for any of the issues, or airline accidents in general. Remember ultimately we're still talking about very rare events that almost always involve a number of different factors lining up in just the right way.
Even the MAX crashes were 2 out of how many thousands of MCAS equipped flights with no issues and those crashes also required other things to go wrong. It's easy to say MCAS was the obvious cause in retrospect, but it's much less clear it should have been easy to predict that outcome before any investigations were done regardless of how much inside knowledge one had.
This is not at all to excuse the causes, but there is a reason crash investigations take time. Demanding immediate explanations is just asking for wrong conclusions to be reached in the name of expediency. In fact taking the time to fully investigate probably produces better accountability in the long run because it can uncover more subtle but serious problems.
If you ask 50 people at Boeing what happened, you may receive 50 very different answers
The United app and website also show equipment type under the "details" expansion. You can also filter searches by equipment type. Yes, it can change but it's correct the vast majority of the time.
It helps Kayak so, more people booking there by selecting a certain model. And the airlines, they can easily price tickets for non-737 MAX flights higher now (they propably don't, but why not?). In the end, it is pointless: planes get swapped out all the time, so there is no guarantee dor the model to be correct. Unless you fly with an airline that has no MAX's in their fleet. In which case this whole Kayak thing is on the same level like vegan vegetables or lactose-free cheese.
Add to that the fact that both, Boeing and Airbus, are fully booked for years to come, and it is pretty clear that the MAX isn't going anywhere as there are simply not enough alternatives to come by. Passengers aren't the ones deciding which planes are bought, airlines and leasing companies are.
There isba quite cynic name for passeneger: self-loading freight, also real freight doesn't complain.
"Passenger demand doesn't matter" is simply not true. Its effect is indirect, slowed, insulated, but it's still there. At least if sellers like Kayak enable differentiation by plane type.
If it makes you feel any better, as with all commercial airplanes, even a Max-8 is far safer than driving your car to get groceries.
* Just saw that your comment is 2 hours old and you said your flight is in 2 hours. Hope you're enjoying your flight! See you when you land!
1: https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...
In almost all plane fatalities the only dead people who had a chance of doing something better were the pilots. The passengers were doomed from the start.
Statistically speaking, being comfortable with driving makes no sense.
You frame it as comparing something dangerous to something safe.
I see it as something you would be willing to do without fear, to something even safer than that.
I don't disagree that driving is dangerous, but most people are willing to accept that danger.
Anecdotally I have seen a lot more bad bike accidents than car accidents, despite the number of bikes being much, much lower. This makes sense, since you are much more exposed when on a bicycle and while you are moving slower the cars aren’t.
If the stats do say this (I assume you have indeed read that somewhere), I suspect there is some large selection bias at play. Like, people with a safe bike route available are more likely to bike, which skews the numbers towards safe even though I imagine switching any random car commute to biking on the road would make it more dangerous on average.
Public transit of course makes sense, and I do wish biking in urban areas was safer since I don’t do it now because it’s dangerous and it would be great to be able to do it safely.
https://chessintheair.com/the-risk-of-dying-doing-what-we-lo...
If bike vs car choice is confounded by route safety, deaths per distance or time does not tell you anything useful about whether switching will make you safer.
Railways and busses are a lot closer to airplanes in statistics then cars https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... so going car less is probably the single biggest improvement we can make to transportation safety.
It seems pretty clear from their initial report (which largely corroborates the whistleblower a few months ago), no?
The bolts were not reinstalled after they were removed to perform a QA fix.
If you mean beyond that, why weren't the bolts reinstalled, nothing too shocking there. The system of record between Boeing and their subcontractors, as well as their procedures to pass off work between companies and crews, is not sufficient to prevent lapses in workmanship like this.
The good news is, all of these door plug bolts are confirmed to be properly installed ;) They just grounded them all to do that. Now...what _other_ bolts are missing, well that's anybody's guess.
But one of the interesting facts I learned: the FAA has “regulators” that are paid by the airline industry themselves. This is largely due to how inexperienced the FAA is with the manufacturing process and thus rely on the industry to self-regulate.
Someone may raise an issue on the ground floor of these airline manufacturers. But the complaints are sent to people paid for by the airline manufacturers.
The conflict of interest is high. Yet FAA thinks this is okay.
No, because you're leaving out context.
They abide by this, due to a limited budget, and no ability to hire, train, and maintain such capabilities.
Amd I'm willing to bet politicians on both sides of the coin have contributed to this.
[1]: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/miss...
[2]: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2023-03/F...
> reflexively oppose regulation
"Regulations" is just a scary word for "rules".
There is a similar problem with financial regulation; my understanding is that the knowledge transfer between industry and regulation there is solved by the equally problematic "revolving doors", where people alternate between regulating and advising companies (and thus as regulators they don't want to make too many enemies).
Still has a conflict of interest, just a less dangerous one.
Also, the FAA could ask people from Lockheed to mark Boeing's homework.
After a bit of Googling, looks like the FAA do also get Airbus to do this to Boeing, despite Airbus being famously not American: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-wi...
If that system was made one way so that people retiring from industry to government were forced to burn all "financial" bridges to the industry they were regulating by forcing them to accept a clause that they can newer go back especially not as a consultant a lot of those issues goes away.
How does the FAA get experience manufacturing planes without manufacturing planes?
I'm not sure the people building the planes are the problem.
I'm pretty sure its the management trying to spend less money to build planes that's the problem
By hiring people who have worked in plane manufacturing.
Just like wall street executives getting in politics to regulate banking and then go back to highly paid positions or are paid millions in consulting fees for doing few speeches an hear.
Anyway I know that FAA investigators aren't necessarily from the industry (they are engineers in the field and can investigate the matters anyway), but I know little about regulators.
At the beginning of commercial air travel people needed to be convinced by extreme levels of safety standards, we are now in middle of the slow process of transitioning to a point where airplane crashes are as commonplace as car crashes. We see more fatalities and more near-misses in the last few years. It's not just Boeing it's the entire industry, everyone is forced to do the same or you'll be uncompetitive.
> In 897, the 9-month-old corpse of the late Pope Formosus stood trial by the reigning pontiff, Stephen VII. Stephen VII convicted Formosus, sentenced the cadaveric Pope to have three fingers of his right hand amputated and then had him buried in a common grave.
Satire mismatch.
Yeah, the C-suite execs running the show
This is the least credible possible evidence, because shows like that have a long history of doing selective editing or purposely taking things out of context.
Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.
Re: selection of statements, the reports in Fukushima and Cherbobyl do the same. The point is to showcase the underlying issues with concrete examples and statements. Nothing wrong with that per-se. And in th LWTN segment, it was not done in bad faith, it is bot FOX news after all.
This is the danger in it.
They pick someone they don't like and basically do a hit piece. Now sometimes the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism, and then if you try to get the real story, the real story is that the target is actually bad and deserving of the criticism.
But then they'll run a segment in the same style where the target is just someone from the outgroup of the show's target audience.
Just because comedy shows focus on entertainment value doesn't mean there's no evidence. They have a different focus from investigators or courts, but in democratic countries, the funds to run investigations come from politicians and public outcry, and that comes from the people actually giving a sh*t about it. So they do perform a function.
1. Continuously make fun of superficial attributes and mannerisms
2. Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition
3. Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance
Even when I agree with the narrative, the mechanisms by which the audience is persuaded feels quite disingenuous to me. Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism. My perspective is based on episodes I watched in 2016. The small bits I've seen from him and other similar formats since then suggest it is still this way.
And, this show in particular, gets the fact right almost all of the time. And it provided more context and details on the whole Boeing saga than any other news source I have seen or read so far since the door plug blew out. Heck, going back to the 737 Max crashes I would be hard pushed to find main stream media reporting that was, factually and regarding context, better.
If not humor, what mechanism would you prefer?
I like it when John Oliver or whoever goes after corruption and incompetence, but it still has to be said that popular comedy news shows are kind of the left’s version of Fox News in terms of shrillness, pandering, and brainwashing. While episodes on many topics are cringey to watch, at least they aren’t completely post-truth yet. When the writers do wade all the way in to culture war nonsense, I think they do this with a certain self awareness and I like to think they feel bad about it.
It would be easier to tolerate bias or low-brow ad hominem in comedy news if it wasn’t also still better than most “real” news. I don’t really want to hold a comedian to a journalist’s standard, but the real question is where are the journalists at anyway?
NPR (my old favorite) has jumped the shark. Other outlets generally harass me with paywalls when I’m already forced to sift through a total shit show of a website with op Ed’s no one asked for, celebrity gossip, and lengthy gpt-powered regurgitation all fluffing up the same few short blurbs from the AP wire.
Mainstream media for both the left and the right, domestic and foreign, all have websites with ads like “free WiFi for senior citizens” and “Just add this one weird thing to your toothpaste” next to big brain articles about dealing with disinformation in the next round of elections.
None of this is very confidence inspiring, so no, I doubt they’ll sell many subscriptions, and yeah, I expect quality will continue to decline. So I guess comedian-journalism is probably here to stay, regardless of whether I like the format
The journalists are in the same boat as the engineers at Boeing: being held hostage by MBAs management at the behest of shareholders.
Journalists are in a boat that Youtube, Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist and Google search plowed into. Until consumer habits change, the sinking continues.
If they spent that time rubbing two brain cells together, they could have come up with something that, for example, resembled OG Hulu or Spotify -- A product that appealed to the new generation of news consumers instead of expecting them to faithfully put in a doorstep newspaper subscription like their parents did.
> Push said narrative with ad hominem attacks and jokes about someones' appearance
> Look at the episodes he did about Trump in 2016, the host spends half the time making fun of small hands, when you could fill hours with Trump's fascism.
It is foremost a comedy show yes, and they present things in a light hearted way. For an American show that means stuff like that. Mind you the jokes about Trumps' hands are more about something that Trump brings up constantly, a weird public insecurity about the size of them.
> Selectively present a biased narrative without opposition
I mean. I didn't say it doesn't pick a side. But it does go in depth, and it does present opposing arguments reasonably faithfully (even if it immediately rebuts them) (in my opinion!)
These days I just assume that’s the quality of the average episode and I don’t know enough to know otherwise.
Isnt this how newspapers work? Isnt this also how journalism works in general? If that wasnt the case, you wouldnt have two/three completely different takes on stories given which side of the political spectrum you're on.
Also:
> Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.
By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects. Last party to pull them to court over it was this cial guy. And it was found that the reporting was factually correct. Not like, say, Fox News with its usual defwnc ein court that boils down to "who in his right mind would take us for a serious news outlet employing journalists".
You're defending this particular story when I never claimed it was necessarily false.
> By the way, LWTN was not once found to have wrong reporting on any of their subjects. Last party to pull them to court over it was this cial guy. And it was found that the reporting was factually correct.
That is how "out of context" works. They don't affirmatively lie, they lie through omission. They have lawyers who know how defamation laws work.
You did point out those "interviews", which weren't even interviews to begin with but recording of shop floor banter, without realizing they were done by Al-Jazzeera and not LWTN, not realizing they covered the B787 and were done over a decade ago.
And then you accusse others of discussing out of context? Difficult to have context when you din't even get your basic facts right, isn't it?
Doesn't real line up with this, which is essentially claiming its false:
> ... shows like that have a long history of doing selective editing or purposely taking things out of context.
> HBO also argued that other statements were opinions and jokes, not factual assertions
> HBO said Murray’s accusations were a matter of “hurt feelings about jokes,” and said jokes are protected speech.
https://www.thewrap.com/coal-magnates-lawsuit-john-oliver-di...
Also, if I remeber correctly, Murray didnnot attack them on the reportes facts, did he?
With jokes like "looks like a geriatric Dr. Evil", "appears to be on the side of black lung", and "[his political activity is] the equivalent of watching My Girl and rooting for the bees" they suggested that Murray was evil without making any actionable claims.
And in their show after the case was dismissed, they embraced the "who in his right mind would take [this] seriously" defense wholeheartedly: accusing Murray of things like being Epstein's prison guard.
Factual (even if obviously untrue), but not defamation because, much as the court wrote in the case against Tucker Carlson (and before that, a similar case against Rachel Maddow): “the statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation”
I also found that Genwal Resources, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Murray Energy, agreed they had violated two safety regulations.
They were fined $500,000, but the government said "We were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the company's actions caused the mine collapse"[1].
LWT didn't include that. Instead they simply said "the government's investigation...found it was caused by unauthorized mining practices." Don't you think "we were unable to prove [that]" should have been included by LWT?
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/09/148319836...
There is no law for "wrong reporting". LWTN has not lost a defamation suit, which is very narrow.
"Wrong reporting" is a much broader ethical category of lying by omission to create a narrative or choosing unreliable sources. Think of things like NYTimes and the Iraq War. Or basically any article of the format "x% of some group wants Y evil thing".
No one makes a career about reporting how the free coffee in the break room was changed to a pay your own way plan.
That is "Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I will find something in them to have him hanged."
Generally attributed to Richelieu
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
Rather than fix their airplanes Boeing is trying to discredit the NTSB.
How about the U.S. government opening a criminal inquiry that corroborates what they were reporting?
That said, I was greatly amused by this in the article:
> “In an event like this, it’s normal for the D.O.J. to be conducting an investigation,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating and do not believe we are a target of the investigation.”
> Boeing had no comment.
> "We were unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the company's actions caused the mine collapse," said David Barlow, the U.S. Attorney for Utah.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/09/148319836...
But let's be honest, Oliver didn't hate Murray because of the mine disaster, he hated Murray for mining coal. The mine disaster (responsibility for which wasn't even proven) was all LWT could dig up.
And the audience will pretty much hate anyone Oliver tells them to hate. That's why they watch - to enjoy their Two Minutes Hate.
When your entire comedy seems to be built around "Hah the stupid left thinks trans women are real women but they were born with penises", well, that's just not very funny to people who tend to have a non-homogenous friend group.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
I think Oliver is funny. His show makes good points and gives good arguments. It should not, however, by itself be the sole basis of one’s opinion on any given topic (not many things should) as many take it to be. It is intelligent and honest but also one-sided and biased.
They are, at least, not generally purposefully misleading in service of their bias, which is why I think people trust them more than a lot of other sources like cable news.
As someone who stopped taking certain news outlets on my side of the political spectrum serious after running into Gell-Mann once to often, I have to say, with decent backgroind in the topic we discuss here, aerospace and quality and such, this particular LWTN segment got it right. Heck, some of it was even than what I heard in my life from co-workers in the industry. I wouldn't go as far as doing a reverse Gell-Mann on LWTN based on this, but overall their reporting is, factually, correct. And they don't even try to hide their bias, nor donthey use to spin a story, which is refreshing if you ask me.
Another neat heuristic is that if there's a video/blog/whatever information product more often than once a week, it probably doesn't have enough research behind it to be reasonably accurate, even handed, and well, researched.
Journalism is stupidly expensive. Modern advertising actually doesn't pay enough to do it. Consider that just since 2008, newsroom employees have dropped by 20% or so, while the information space has significantly more manufactured misinformation than it ever used to. How many local government stories do you even see anymore? Are you paying for someone to keep tabs on your state legislators?
More often than not you won't find truth even if you read thousands of pages from a lawsuit.
Pulcinella is the carnival character from Naples and he's a joker.
Just because you learnt the exact topics that were to be examined doesn't mean you're good at the whole subject.
Likewise, those diesel cars were very good at the exact things that were tested, and terrible at everything else. They were literally engineered to the exact test syllabus.
Yet we somehow don't call the student a cheater.
In my view, in both cases, the shortcoming is with the test/syllabus designer. The test topics need to be not announced beforehand, and the sylabus needs to not be rigid and narrower than the field in the real world.
Fact is, VW engines had a mode recognizing a test and adopted AdBlue and fuel mixture to meet emission standards. On the road, these engines ran dirty. That was explicitely stated to be illegal in the applicable laws.
It was all the other brands that played, as it turned out also illegal, games with temp windows and such.
Blaming this on regulators is putting this while story on its head.
That was the classical role of the jester in some monarchies. They were the only person who could openly criticize the king without retribution (in theory).
And public pressure, Boeings reputation is not great at the moment. If that pressure is kept up, it can lead to change as well.
KC-46 tanker replacement was a fixed-price contract and Boeing lost $7 billion on that.
Starliner is a similar story, $1.5 billion down the hole.
EDIT:
T-7A Red Hawk trainer: $1 billion in losses. Air force one VC-25B program: Its losses are now at about $2.4 billion. T-38 Talon trainer, MQ-25...
Yea, it's not going well for them. Other programs are still fine, e.g. F-35, but fixed price contracts are in a dump.
The experience of mrtt a330 it bid for tanker replacement was enough. It of course went to Being KC-46.
And the reputation and incidents is poking a hole in shareholders pockets.
It turns out there is a whole company of executives who are so not-worried about it that they’ll continuously cut budgets and decrease the time available to make those planes until multiple planes fall out the sky. And even then are still not really that worried about safety.
"We don't need to brief anyone on the technicals of our plane, we know better and it's great for stock prices to mislead buyers into thinking it's just a New and Improved model of the same plane flyable in the exact same way!"
It's criminal. They should be criminally charged. I hope this goes through, and I hope prosecutors sweep up all of the floor workers who have already stated they would never fly in the newer planes.
Next time you hear corp talk about how regulations make x unaffordable, look for the real incentives and benefactors of gutting that regulation.
Stock buybacks take precedence over spending on safety improvements, and reduction in working capital (finished product) to appease the bean counters results in missed sales when the inevitable process upset occurs and there is no surge capacity.
Nice prose, and an astute point
I dunno. I think that's a little melodramatic. There are a lot of activities in the world with dangerous failure modes, and flying is pretty far down the list in terms of impact. You could make the same argument about chemical engineers designing pesticide plants, insulin pump manufacturers, hell even folks doing car suspensions are probably responsible for more deaths than Boeing.
People do their jobs, and if the impact is low they'll live with it. Clearly Boeing's leadership thought they were doing OK. And even in hindsight they... kinda were? The MAX is the most dangerous airliner in decades, maybe a half century. But I'd still fly on it.
For my entire life, the most pervasive theme in executive leadership is that the _only_ responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders.
Boeing may reach a point where it has to stop killing passengers, but dead passengers aren’t an issue at all until it creates a major threat to their bottom line.
If you think it shouldn’t take many downed planes before that happens, then given the situation, the real question is why it hasn’t threatened their business enough yet.
The alternative—fining the company into the bankruptcy and letting the courts restructure the company has too many downsides for the shareholders.
/joking, but I mean.... it doesn't sound as far fetched as it should
But at any point do these consultants like at McKinseys, BCG, AT Kerney etc who advise these money saving tactics get what they deserve?
You can't legally tell someone to commit negligent homicide, but if you tell them the engineering process efficiency management program has passed mandatory quality and safety checks by an accredited third party auditor, then the law can't touch you.
Much like computer science, every problem (like how to avoid being charged for homicide) can be solved by layers of indirection.
It's also much easier to find a loophole than it is to predict and avoid all loopholes, especially with all the compromise required to pass a law.
However, buying Boeing stock, with the current management in place, is synonymous with wanting less safe commercial planes.
Yet no lawyer raised an objection. They lawyers also successfully argued that FAA testing was not needed and Boeing can and should be trusted to signoff internally.
There are lots of ways to justify.
In the US those are often the same people, right?
From what I've seen, regulatory agencies and processes are created for a combination of well intended concern for public safety and a power grab. Neither of those are based on indirection so much as ignorance (or hopefulness?) and greed, respectively.
> development budget estimated at US$7 billion as Boeing management claimed that they would "require subcontractors to foot the majority of costs"
> The accumulated losses for the 787 totaled almost $27 billion (~$32.8 billion in 2022) by May 2015.
The short version is that it's hard making things fit together and meet your standards when you're dealing with dozens of different suppliers and suppliers of suppliers who aren't necessarily aligned with your goals. The full story is a cautionary tale about letting business school types displace people who know how to build planes. I recommend seeking out one of the many retellings of Boeings struggles since the McDonnell Douglas merger.
Instead of a retelling, I'll point you to the latest chapter: Boeing trying to re-acquire ownership of Spirit AeroSystems. It's a substantial indictment of past policy to do a full reversal in the name of "strengthening safety".
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/business/boeing-spirit-ae...
Power is doing something and then saying "what are you going to do about it?"
The supreme court takes bribes and says "what are you going to do about it?" They clearly have the power to take bribes. Nobody appears to be able to do anything about it.
Congresspeople trade stocks of companies they regulate in a gross conflict of interest, then defend their ability to be corrupt as a right. "What are you going to do about it?" Congress clearly has the power to be openly corrupt without consequences.
The 2008 crisis was wall street telling the government that they have many answers to that question. "Too big to fail" was born to capture the idea that there is an entity so powerful there are no reasonable answers to them asking "what are you going to do about it?"
Boeing is too big to fail. Boeing knows that there is no one with the will or fortitude to do anything about putting profit over safety. Investigations to make it look like you're doing something, sure. Canning a few low level employees that you can pin blame on, no problem. Sacrifice a contractor? That's what they're there for. But to hold a CEO or shareholders responsible for gross mismanagement in any kind of meaningful way, threatening all other American oligarchs and hordes of people rich enough to say "what are you going to do about it?" without answer?
Admiral Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, is the past's best answer to Boeing. He deeply understood the forces at play. He had this to say to congress:
Political and economic power is increasingly being concentrated among a few
large corporations and their officers - power they can apply against society,
government and individuals. Through their control of vast resources, these
large corporations have become, in effect, another branch of government. They
often exercise the power of government, but without the checks and balances
inherent in our democratic system.
The "easiest" way to fix this is to bail them out, because then the company itself can carry on fulfilling its obligations and you don't need all the people relying on them to individually apply to get bailed out or otherwise have to rearrange their affairs when the institution is instantly vaporized. But that, as they say, is a moral hazard.
What you really want to do is to destroy them in slow motion. Step one, the existing owners get nothing, they chose their executives poorly and suffer the consequences. Step two, those executives are out too, and the company gets new leadership and a bailout with the condition that the company will soon cease to exist and be sold off for parts, but first it's going carry on operating for a bit to satisfy its obligations to innocent third parties.
Leaving it to private investors to ride on the public saving a company is just another slap on the face. Yes, I know that the bailouts from 2008 have recouped the public money invested but it's a moral hazard to allow private investors to use this mechanism. Over time private investors will just find loopholes on how to leverage public bailouts for their own gain, they have a massive incentive for gaming it.
IE, I suspect the decision makers behind the bank cared much more about bailing out the depositors of the bank - who were effectively complicit because they weren't shopping around - than the nominal shareholders of the bank. There were apparently specific requirements that startups used SVB if they received funding from certain VCs which suggests something was happening.
This is pure fantasy. What you have described is sets of people not doing what is in their best (short term selfish) interest.
It is not in a politicians best interest to hold Boeing accountable because then Boeing can withdrawal funding and fund their opposition, or more importantly economically harm constituents.
It is not in Boeing exec's interests because by the time Boeing experiences the long term consequences of short term thinking the people responsible will have already made bank, diversified, or invested in competitors. Some other company that wants to cash out their future will probably hire them.
Problems only get solved when those most harmed are the enact-ers of the solution. So if you're thinking about "what you really want to do", then you have to start with how you personally can add your feather onto the scales of justice rather than using hope as a strategy by fantasizing about some powerful responsible government.
(This bundling problem affects all kinds of products. When you're shopping, you pay attention to price, and everything else is secondary. In a perfect market, you'd price in the forced arbitration clause, or you'd price in the social cost of anti-competitive business practices of the vendor. But it just doesn't happen because the cognitive load is too high.)
I really miss the days when we at least paid lip-service to the idea that character and integrity mattered most in our pols. Even that system was gamed, its still better than overtly, cynically abandoning society's most laudable values.
You’re half right.
Politicians must fund raise before their primaries and we see many fundraising efforts throughout their tenure too.
To get elected a candidate must:
Fundraise -> win a primary -> win a general election.
Therefore fundraising is structurally an election and money is structurally votes. Since money gets to vote on candidates before people do, we end up with a "democracy" that responds to money and not votes, which is pretty blatantly obvious. It's also why many people feel that both parties are basically the same. It's not that they're the same, it's just people with money get to filter candidates first and therefore both parties are the same in that they have to appease their funders first and can't threaten corporations or rich people because then their funding goes down and their opponents goes up.
Biden is just another example of this (as was Hillary). Biden 2024 is made possible because the democratic party doesn't have to answer to their voters. The democratic party has a symbiotic relationship with republicans where neither has to rule effectively or hold themselves to any standards which allows both to profiteer and trade stocks while the country slowly becomes oligarchic/fascist.
It still matters if you’re a Democrat. Hillary Clinton was crucified for keeping her official emails on a private server.
We have an unequal system, where one party is held to a high standard, and the standard for the other party is always low enough for them to slither over.
Trump harped on it with the whole "lock her up" stuff, again because it's politically advantageous. He reneged on it once in office, admitting he wasn't going to pursue any charges against her. It was probably calculated that doing so would be bad optics as using the justice system to go after the top candidate of the competing party would be considered divisive. It was also potentially unproductive as she had already lost. There's also the element of personal connection, Trump was an NY Democrat for decades and had known the Clintons personally. Their daughters had a friendship in the past.
Also see George Santos as a counterpoint. Fellow NY Republican congressmen went after him knowing that their party would likely lose his seat. Again, I interpret their actions as self serving, they wanted to distance themselves from his shenanigans to their own constituents and appear to be acting objectively rather than in the interest of their party but the right result was achieved regardless.
Jack Welch is dead but if they wanted to try someone he’d be a great person to start with.
- Chernobyl: great lessons on how to engineer complex systems, the importance of safety culture, the role humans and management olay and how all of this can lead to disaster
- AF 447: lessons on training and HMI design and human factors
- B737 MAX: to be read after Chernobyl, lessons on safety again, mandatory essay to be writen about the parallels between Chernobyl and the B737 MAX
- Bonus reading for the above two points: Fukushima
- B737 MAX 9 and door plugs (once the final repoets are done): lessons on the importance of failure culture and strong quality processes
- Bad Blood, Money Men: Everybody needs a primer in corporate governance, ethics and the red flags that come with it; add the final reporting on the UK postal scandal and FTX
> Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.
There is myth about how corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize "shareholder value" and short term corporate profits at the cost of everything else. This is false. No such thing exists in corporate law. While Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is a deplorable decision, there is a rather remarkable sentence in there:
> modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so.
> Shareholder primacy is a theory
> The doctrine waned in later years
But, isn't it the case that activist investors aren't really using legal means to ensure that same result; they are using other means anyway? And, the net result is the same?
Not sure about FAA rules, but I assume they are somewhat similar. So at the very least, those individuals, at Boeing and Spirit Aerospace, should be a tad worried now. By the way, senior means VP-levek and above, usually one for the design side (propably less relevant in the door plug question), one on production side (they should be worried), one each for design and production quality (same as above, the production quality oeople should be worried a lot) as well as one for supply chain and other functiobs with less responsibilities (the supply chain people are imolicated in this door plug thing as).
Personally, I don't see how the FAA can just let this slip, their relationship with international partbers and their reputation is already damaged by the 737 MAX, so they have to do something about it.
Trust is something thats hard earned and easily lost, they already went through both so if FAA wants to come back they have some serious effort on their shoulders in upcoming decade at least.
And slapping Boeing and those responsible so hard that wall will give them another is mandatory first step since this theatre is played out for literally everybody in the world, everybody is watching.
And everyone knows this, besides Boeing it seems, which is the reason why I am cautiosly optimistic about the investogations.
I guess trust only works when the other agency is up to the same standards as you, but then "certified by the FAA and the EASA" only really means "certified by one of the two".
And being certified by both means that orgs and aircraft are certified by both. Decades of cooperation and alignment of regulations and requirements mean that the sevond certification is covering the delta between both, believing the common stuff to be properly cerified by the other regulator. That is where the FAA lost trust.
Hence my believe the FAA will not show much liniency to Boeing this time.
We have to zoom out here, the FAA are not dropping the ball.
To some folks human lives don't have the same value but it depends highly on passport, as long as stuff happens outside of their border all is fine (although in this case nothing is since this affects everybody everywhere). I wouldn't expect such a comment here in 2024 but here we are.
It’s funny to see comments like. You think this isn’t just a dog and pony show? They don’t give a damn. They will sleep just fine. Nothing will happen because the government is in bed with these folks and they don’t implicate their own and the sooner you understand that the less it shocks you when nothing happens.
And no, I know that it is not just a dog and pony show. "It" is the reason air travel is as safe as it is today, and that is way saver than 20 or 30 years ago, despite whatever Boeing did with the 737 MAX.
Is it?
Even if they're bed with each other, the people in government are sitting at an infinitely longer lever. They'll throw the Boeing folks under the bus as soon as it is politically expedient and replace them with a different set of cronies.
In practice so, there are only two aircraft OEMs. Hence those structure tier ones are kind of screwed. Automotive tier ones have much more choice regarding customers.
- you can’t blame the low level employees inhabiting the system be their powerless to change it
- the CEOs are hoping that they’ve installed enough layers of middle management that they can claim plausible deniability about any on the ground problems (and ignore that their job is to be the manager-of-managers)
That's only for petty criminals, murderers and people who can't pay bills.
The strongest irony of what I suspect you are suggesting is that the #1 lesson of high-performance safety cultures is a blameless attitude to accidents. Criminal liabilities for the CEO ... are better than criminal liabilities for lower level employees. But still not the path to the highest levels of safety.
If people don't want to do serious jail time they shouldn't do serious crimes, the contract couldn't possibly be more simple. The purpose of incarceration isn't to coddle murderers, it's great if they change their life but ultimately it's to extract murderers from society so decent people can live peaceful and successful lives and anything else beyond that is ancillary.
Unfortunatly in the real world your criminal justice ethics will have to accommodate crimes that are not murder, so you might need to think about some prisoners eventually getting released, who might then go on and do more criming.
> it's great if they change their life but ultimately it's to extract murderers from society
In that case, there is no need to make prisons particularly cruel. Cost can be debated, but surely as a society, we can put a value on humaneness. Even if not, if say I, a billionaire, wanted prisoners eat caviar every night and am willing to fund it, surely this should be allowed.
If the mechanic was reselling the real parts on eBay and instead using shoddy parts, everyone would agree on criminal liability.
If the CEO and leadership are also cutting corners and destroying a safety culture for money, and endangering the public, that is also criminal.
People have been making similar arguments since the development of the limited liability company. It turns out that limiting liability is a far better system than the alternative for getting good things done.
We've already got a problem where all the manufacturing is heading to Asia. Criminal penalties hanging over the heads of CEOs of manufacturing companies will not help the situation.
Endangering the health of the public like for example dumping toxic waste or destroying a safety culture are criminal.
If Boeing decided to build a 797 story that was even bigger than the Airbus 380 and lost a lot of money, then limited liability would kick in. However, to deliberately cut safety culture and endanger the public is criminal.
That is neither fair nor helpful. Hit the company with a huge fine then let the board decide if the CEO stays or goes - that is how it is traditionally done and it is an effective model for getting results.
2. Deliberately changing a culture isn't criminal; that is something CEOs are expected to do sometimes. It is equivalent to saying a developer should be liable if they do an unnecessary refactor and it makes the code worse for a customer.
3.
> and endanger the public is criminal.
You say this but we allow car manufacturers to operate. Cars manufacturers have done more damage to people I know than Boeing could hope to. The focus on Boeing is hysterical.
Change the incentives, change the targets of incentives, change the results.
That does cut it. It is crazy to criminally prosecute someone if they haven't broken any law.
No. I'm suggesting that if there is a criminal inquiry into safety defects of a product, it should target the company as an entity, not company officers.
And that we should maintain consistent standards; ie, display more tolerance of Boeing's performance than people are showing.
It's hilarious how gung-ho free market cheerleaders are about systematic responsibility and accountability and skin-in-the-game decision making... right up until the millisecond that involves something other than rich people getting paid for being rich, and then it's bailouts this and limited liability that.
And criminal prosecutions of decision makers isn't as much skin in the game as it is making it risky to be responsible. It is just asking for lower-quality people to move in to high ranking posts and for confusing corporate structures to emerge.
It is better to impose large financial penalties on the company then let the markets sort out the details. I don't even mind the CEO suffering large penalties, but he and Boeing need to negotiate that before the event and put it in his contract, not after the fact.
It works well because it encourages investors to take risks and fund new ventures.
It doesn't give them immunity to commit criminal acts, and therefore it doesn't protect the officers they appoint either (like the CEO).
If the CEO knowingly makes criminal decisions, he can absolutely be prosecuted.
In addition yeah also prosecute criminals. But that doesn’t stop crime. See “war on drugs” for example.
Let's say Bob gets a job in a Boeing factory and on every plane he works on, he deliberately hides a bunch of broken components in the system, thereby causing the planes to fall out of the sky. We can talk blamelessly about how we can avoid every hiring someone like Bob again, or taking precautions against malicious employees, but Bob himself has to accept the criminal liabilities that come with the choices he made: his decisions caused people to die.
But what happens when Bob instead installs himself as the CEO, and deliberately makes choices that prioritise revenue and stock prices over safety, knowing full well the risks that he is forcing on people, and that his planes in some cases fundamentally don't work? From a blameless culture perspective, we again need to figure out how we can avoid hitting another Bob and having these mistakes happen again, but surely we also have to recognise that our CEO actively, and in some sense maliciously, made decisions that caused people to die?
In this case, thankfully (and ultimately lucky) nobody has died - although previous incidents have not had such good outcomes. But we still need to recognise that this culture came from decisions made at the top of the organisation. I fully support a blameless culture that doesn't punish people for making mistakes and tries to fix the long-term, fundamental issues rather than find a scapegoat for each incident. But this goes beyond simply making mistakes, especially when one remembers the pattern of behaviour within the Boeing organisation that has caused several incidents like this.
I picked the CEO as an example because it's a visible role, although in this case I believe several CEOs have overseen the decision making that has lead to these incidents. I am not saying that the CEO specifically is at fault here. But wilful decisions have absolutely been made that have put us in this situation, and I think it is absolutely right that if you make decisions that ultimately lead to potential injury and death, you need to suffer the consequences of those decisions. And for that, we have a criminal justice system.
We can quibble with the amount that got picked. It turns out in this case the amount spent was too low. But it is unreasonable to talk about "... deliberately makes choices that prioritise revenue and stock prices over safety ...". At some point the call has to be made that the planes being built are safe enough, and that from there start to focus on profits. These companies have to produce more value than they consume (which is what "profits" represents at the macro level) otherwise there isn't any point producing.
In this case the call was made poorly, but the call had to be made. Holding the call maker personally responsible isn't the path to more successful outcomes in the future. The path that has been working quite well for around 2 centuries is to hold the company responsible for what the company did. If we start penalising CEOs for trying to build planes profitably, then it is possible that the industry will collapse. There is no justification here to hold people personally liable. It is enough to hit Boeing with an appropriate fine.
I can't see how that is unreasonable. Nobody here is arguing that Boeing officials should be held criminally liable because they didn't invest enough money into safety. The liability is because they are blatantly disregarding safety. They invented MCAS and didn't let pilots know about it. One plane crashes and they don't care. Second plane crashes and they don't care. For years, stupid things keep happening and they still don't care.
By your logic, a psychopath CEO may deliberately undermine safety culture to earn more profits and still won't be held responsible, because it's “limited liability”. Limited liability means that financial liability is limited, not criminal one.
Yep. This is how it is generally done. Shareholder's in Boeing are literally responsible for installing "a psycopath CEO" who undermined safety and they aren't liable. I see little difference between that and extending the protection to the CEO as well. It gets better results because we don't chase risk-averse people out of the CEO position. In this situation, we WANT the most risk-averse people we can find in the CEO seat of the airline manufacturers. They won't take it if the response to a crisis is making the position more risky.
There is an argument that the CEO should be liable if it leads to more productive results. But I don't see why that would be true - it is more effective to adjust the profitability of the company when things go wrong and let the incentives do the rest. The default position is that doing your job poorly is not criminal.
Also; most CEOs are psycopaths. You don't need to include it as an adjective. It is built in to the title.
0: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BA/boeing/gross-pr...
How is expecting the person who is responsible for the outcome of the company to be responsible draconian?
If I kill someone, I am responsible. If I direct someone else to kill someone, we’re both responsible to different degrees. If I create an elaborate structure wherein the lower levels are inculcated that killing people is just part of the job, the responsibility starts dramatically shifting upwards.
It makes total sense to hold him as the person responsible. It even (probably) makes sense for the board to sack him immediately. But it is arbitrary and excessive to criminally prosecute him. Lots of CEOs have done worse and gotten away with it; they're in positions of great power and being human they make a lot of mistakes. The bankers alone have ruined the wealth of generations, let alone the sitautions the military-industrial complex creates.
Picking on this person because of 2 plane crashes is not remotely consistent with how this sort of thing is handled elsewhere. It is unfair and it'll just add pressure to the death of manufacturing in the west. And to top it off it probably won't change the safety profile of Boeing planes going forward.
Why do you bring "draconian" punishment? Is punishment always draconian? Are the best results observed in places where crimes are not punished? Could you provide references to research that confirms this? Or your worries that punishments should not apply to CEOs?
Is that same logic applied to the lower class? Or is this basically admitting that if you are rich enough and bury your crimes and negligence behind enough paperwork and complexity, that you are no longer culpable?
I get your point that applying hard rules will encourage people to escape them, but there needs to be some framework opposed to the current anything goes and we might fine you at worst.
We politely ignore that and focus on the present and the future, because they have too much power as a class to be punished and it wouldn't do much good anyway.
The US security state, in all its facets, has a lot of popular support. By people who I think are a bit foolish, but nevertheless. (although I'll sneak in that the karmic justice of watching the mechanisms of the War on Terror get turned on Republican voters has been sad but satisfying)
However, criminal liability in itself won't solve it. Capitalism forces this kind of behavior; it's the natural trend for any company. The Dictator's Handbook describes it well.
What's needed is what's been done in every other industry: Regulation which changes incentive structures. Raw capitalism forces meat packing plants to pack ground rats in with your ground beef, quack medicines, and all sorts of other issues. The regulatory solution needs to have short-term economic consequences of some kind for doing the wrong thing. There are many of those, including:
1) Require insurance, and let the market sort it out. If the settlements and fees came from an insurance company rather than Boeing, the insurance company could set rules and inspections as it believed adequate to turn a profit.
2) Have high standards and regular inspections
3) Major changes to both capitalism and corporate governance. We have the best system we've thought of so far, but we sort of stopped thinking about new systems 50-100 years ago (fascism and communism were the last major attempts, and didn't turn out too well)
4) Completely overhaul our infrastructure for transparency. This could include whistleblower protections, as well as FOIA-like schemes, where an academic can look at what Boeing is doing.
It's worth noting this is a quasi-monopoly / duopoly situation, so market systems tend to work worse than most places.
But yes, it's a problem that criminal consequences are for poor people or people lower down the rungs. People at the top should go to prison too if they do something bad, with the same quality legal process as poor people.
Fine. I'll help them pack their bags, and move furniture into the moving truck.
No but I can come up with a KPI that does.
As long as our government is beholden to large corporations, either through lobbying or the "too big to fail" card, we functionally have a fascist state where industry took over our government. I'm not saying we're all the way there by any means, but that's inevitable if we keep bandaiding problems without getting to the root cause.
Moreover though, if my original argument is right, the failing system of regulation will fail slowly (presumably then all at once). The FAA and other bodies involved in the air industry may be broken, but it still takes a kick to push a company over the edge. A company like Airbus could continue to operate extremely well despite the broken system, though I'd argue with enough time they will be hit by it as well.
OK, seriously though, when it comes to outsourcing, it's because Airbus/CASA rigorously defined systems interfaces and all sorts of other stuff before outsourcing design. I've been a part of the supplier chain there, and it's intense, but it means your part's got a good shot of slotting in the first time.
787 - and a whole truckload of BDS work - it's less "strict systems interface" and more "what is systems interface". You can get decades pass where the part still doesn't fit.
But the problem with the Eight, at least initially, was the way the suppliers were organized. Or, more specifically, how they weren't organized. Boeing had flushed through a half dozen generation of Systems Engineers in the aughties, and no one really had a half chance to get familiar with anything that was laid down before. Suppliers generally took their best guess and went with it - that's where we were, at the time, because it proved completely impossible to make any contact with a person at Boeing who knew what the FMS data bus was . . or, on most days, even what a FMS data bus was. So we guessed either ARINC429 or ARINC664 and got (mostly!!) lucky.
There were also some . . ah, I don't want to say "bad" . . so let's say, "non-technical" SEs . . who advocated for their own vision vis a vis SE and supplier management. In short, this was a giant mish mish, and, speaking for myself, it colored my personal perception of Systems Engineering as a discipline to this day. While you get some real SE rockstars, you also get an epidemic of shysters with mild sociopathy, and it takes good, technical leadership to tell one from the other.
Keep in mind this was . . sheesh . . almost two decades ago, so take it all with a grain of salt.
With that said, a nontechnical SE is a sign of a fundamentally broken system and org. Someone had to hire them for the role. Meaning they were interviewed and deemed fit for the role, likely with room to grow given more experience and opportunities to learn from. While I would say a nontechnical SE is bad st their job, stopping there doesn't fix the problem at all and its important that the context of why they had that job isn't lost.
I would personally want to see all of those agencies disbanded and regulations removed in favor of trusting markets and consumers to deal with problems. If nothing else, government intervention should be an extremely rare occurrence rather than business as usual.
With that said, there are certainly benefits of those agencies that would be lost. Its just my opinion that the good doesn't outweigh the bad, and that a system with fundamental issues and misaligned incentives should be gotten rid of as soon as possible. The short term damage caused would always be less than the long term damage of continuing to hold them together with duct tape and bubble gum.
They totally won't screw you over and/or kill people due to poor design choices if it means they can save a buck.
Without government oversight providing plausible deniability and the appearance of safety, companies wouldn't get this large. When consumers don't believe the government is ensuring that only safe products and services are available they will step up to make their own decisions.
Case in point, if Boeing flights started to show a pattern of safety issues and customers didn't believe that planes must be safe because they are regulated, consumers may decide to fly less or not at all. Companies would have to respond when money dries up and plane sit empty. Companies would also focus on safety if they know their business could disappear either through customers losing faith in them or due to the heavy cost of litigation when their safety lapses create a pattern of harm.
Regulation on this scale serves a few purposes. Most importantly, I'd argue, to give financial and legal cover to the largest corporations, and to create the appearance of control and safety beyond what any realistic guarantee could ever possibly be.
As it stands, consumers don't have much reason to act for themselves as the FAA and government at large would prefer that we trust they have it under control.
That may even be true, but surely that falls under the information imbalance you mention. We don't know exactly how the regulators are responding, though we do know that FAA regulations rely heavily on self-report mechanisms in which the companies effecrively regulate themselves.
I will however argue that with no oversight at all, things would be much worse.
I do think your arguments give people too much credit though. If the choice was a cheaper flight but on a plane with a dubious safety record vs a more expensive flight on a plane with a good safety record I'd wager most would take option 1
> I'd wager most would take option 1
If those people where aware of the safety concerns and made the choice knowingly, what's the problem? We don't need to regulate people from informed consent, do we?
No worries. It is text after all.
>If those people where aware of the safety concerns and made the choice knowingly, what's the problem? We don't need to regulate people from informed consent, do we?
I would say no, but in the same vane argue that such things shouldn't be a choice you have to make, that all planes should be some base level of safe. And since no company (at least in the US) is going to do that willingly because that hurts profits someone with teeth needs to exist to make them.
Regulations and administrative law exists to prevent a free-for-all of “fuck you, do something about it”.
Because your air, your water, your society is at risk from this kind of “unfettered” capitalism.
To be clear, administration doesn't create law - only legislation does. Regulation only makes sense if its enforcing the will of the people. If the people have access to the basics, like what Koch industries actually does or a record of the most recent safety issues with Boeing planes, they can act themselves. Why do we need a heavy and every-growing web of regulators and centralized authority to enforce this?
If a company is screwing with the environment in ways that I am not okay with, why wouldn't I just stop giving them my money rather than waiting for regulators to eventually catch up and hope that both regulators aren't bought by special interests and that they leave no loop holes?
> this kind of “unfettered” capitalism.
What does this mean exactly? What is fettered capitalism in your definition, and when does it stop being capitalism at all? As far as I see it, capitalism like free speech is an all or nothing affair. I'm totally okay with people choosing to not want the risks of free speech or capitalism, but it isn't a spectrum as the value if both is lost as soon as you start putting guard rails on it.
The investigation hasn't stopped at Boeing nor Boeing contractors.
It's not covered in the NYT article linked in this HN topic, but the Wall Street Journal article that was first to report the Justice Department investigation says the NTSB is "seeking to interview Federal Aviation Administration Officials in the Seattle area who oversee Boeing's manufacturing".[0]
Sounds like an initial step towards identifying any fault that lies with the FAA and FAA oversight.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/justice-department-ope...
That could mean anything at the moment, though hopefully its a good sign.
It wouldn't be suprising for the NTSB or Justice Department to want testimony from the FAA related to a case against Boeing. It will be very surprising in my opinion if the interviews lead to any question of the FAA itself. Importantly, if the FAA was in any way a subject of the investigation they likely wouldn't be seeking interviews as that generally isn't a term used for potential defendants.
For anyone interested in a brief summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URoVKPVDKPU
This reason this is real real bad was because the 737 Max. The C suite said it was real come to Jesus moment. Now we’re finding out not only is the culture not fixed, but it has such mismanagement that there’s no effective QA.
I'd imagine they'd have caught signs of these QA issues while working through the software stuff.
If they’re found criminally liable, the most likely outcome is bankruptcy. Victims (airlines) would have a claim. Workers, their unpaid wages. Whatever comes out of bankruptcy will likely need some public support; even then, it’s hard to imagine we don’t see layoffs.
1. Boeing is a huge defence contractor with both civil and military products sold worldwide. A big loss to Boeing will be seen as a big loss to American hegemony.
2. GOTO 1
----------------
You can still cut a few heads, the hydra has plenty.
What I'm wondering, could this lead to the government forcing Boeing to "be less profitable"?
At the end of the day that's the question.
I mean if USA will decide to isolate itself as trend suggest, then they will lose that hegemony anyway. So at least they could have safe planes
I think that would "only" affect the broader foreign policy.
My take is that arms trade is a good business (my assumption) and unprincipled foreign policy could see more indiscriminate trading taking place. I.e. the opposite effect.
> Swiss arms industry is having same problem, but there it is stemming from neutrality of Swiss government.
This is interesting. Any good references to read up on the topic?
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/re-export-ban-beginnin...
Edit: There is also a couple of high ranking people that are "holders" of those certifications, Design Organisation Approval and Production Organisation Approval in EASA parlance. Forgot the exactvtitle of those people, but usually they aee at least VP level, sometimes even C-level and always a seperate one from Quality. They are vetted by the national authorities and sign to confirm their obligation, incl. legal, to adhere to the stabdards and do everything to meet those. In Europe, negligence of this can lead to criminal prosecution and jail time. No idea how this is done under FAA regulations. Boeing peopably doesn't fall under EASA jurisdiction in that regard so, having not operations in Europe.
But saying “no, they’ll just be jobless and hire an engineer who’ll rubber stamp it” feels like a cop out to me. Why couldn’t you also extend that further? “no, the board/shareholders will just hire a CEO who prioritizes schedule and profit” fits in the same domain, and nobody is clamoring to hold shareholders accountable.
My personal opinion is that there are a few professions (doctor, lawyer, engineer) who have ethical duties to the public, irrespective of the consequences to their personal career. That’s a legal duty, as opposed to a personal duty to your family.
The question is about who has an ethical duty to the public and how to hold them accountable as such. I’m not sure why it applies only to one group when there’s a reasonable precedent that engineers also have an ethical duty to the public.
* If you work for a public company, you've almost certainly had a training about its ethics hotline with information about your protection from retaliation.
Boeing didn't like when they went on strike and moved to South Carolina where it was cheaper and there were less union friendly laws.
The SEC has a whistleblower program to ensure whistleblowers are financially well off after basically getting blacklisted when the industry when they report crimes
There are no such protections for engineers and the aerospace industry is very consolidated these days.
I.e. not only is innovation crushed by regulation, liability also prevents any new designs, because new designs always carry an element of risk.
Criminal liabilities mean people will do their best to deny it and cover it up, rather than fix it. The incredible safety of aviation today is not the result of punishing people who make mistakes.
Feels like this has been the status quo for Boeing for a few years regarding the 737 MAX. Actions with real teeth are required to incentive change.
Even fixing a mistake is an implicit admission of guilt, and so people will not fix them. They will cover up and deny instead.
Can you go into more detail about this? What regulation/liability specifically has stifled modern engine development? And is the answer deregulation? Or more carefully applied regulation of a different sort?
I think specifics are critically important for this kind of thing. General rhetoric is often “too much regulation” or “not enough regulation,” but what we usually want is “the correct regulation to align incentives,” which is often different for different cases.
New entrants in this industry need a ton of capital, made only worse by the monopoly suppliers in every single airframe sector. If anything, there needs to be more regulation to breakup these behemoths (or, prevent mergers like McDonnell Douglas and Boeing) in the first place.
Isn't that rather self-contradictory? Having an unsafe airplane is bad for business. It put Lockheed out of the airliner business, for example (Elektra). Also DeHaviland (Comet).
We should also be careful of underregulation. Most of all, we should be careful of reflexive, reactionary, and/or partisan reasoning and decision-making. Part of that is this hypersenstive allergy to regulation that has people sneezing and coughing every time the idea is within a mile of them. That's arguably a reason for the Boeing situation.
Business leaders always clamor for less regulation because they have big egos (they cannot be constrained! also they must know more than the regulator), because sometimes there is a negative impact on their quarterly revenue, and because many have embraced an ideology. When things go to heck, then it would have been better to be regulated more - a situation Boeing is in now, and that financial markets seem to find themselves in every decade or so.
(Regulation also helps create a marketplace where you can focus on making better planes, not taking risks with people's lives to keep up with the other crazy competitors.)
I think the point is more about what we treat as crimes. My assumption is that the grandparent post is a reaction to the number of people in the comments here demanding criminal liability for the door plug issue, especially for Boeing executives, despite a notable lack of evidence of criminal actions (or actions that should be criminal) by Boeing executives or anyone else for that matter.
Charging people with crimes when there is evidence they've committed crimes seems like fair game, but the assumption that a crime was involved just because something bad happened seems like a bad approach to aviation safety. Maybe that's where this case will end up, but calls for it now seem wildly premature and likely to have the chilling effect the grandparent poster is talking about.
I recall one where the vent for dumping fuel turned out to be upstream of the cabin air intake. Eventually, an airliner needed to dump fuel, it was sucked up by the cabin air intake and the vapors blown through the cabin, and of course it blew up.
It sounds like "how could someone have made such a mistake!". The cabin engineers were a separate group from the engine people, that's how.
Another crash happened because a maintenance worker taped over the pitot tubes to protect them when the airplane was cleaned. He forgot to remove them afterwards. The tape wasn't very visible, and the inspection missed the tape. The airplane took off and crashed. The maintenance worker was prosecuted for his mistake. I felt sorry for the poor bastard - not only did he have to live with the guilt, but was jailed as well.
P.S. if someone in the aviation industry comes to work high or drunk, and makes a mistake while under the influence, I have no issue with prosecuting them.
I agree, but of course the difficult grey area is negligence; obviously some things are criminally unacceptable. The standard is sort-of 'should they have known better?' There's no easy, objective, logical map to an answer.
Criminal prosecutions of corporations and executives are rare enough that I'm not too worried about it being overdone, but of course there is the risk of emotional or crowd-pleasing decisions.
Back when I worked on the 757 stab trim gearbox, I certainly knew far more about it than the regulators. There was just no way they knew every detail of it like I did. I also did all the math on it, and I was never questioned about it by the regulators. They never asked me a single question about any of it.
> Business leaders always clamor for less regulation because they have big egos
They often clamor for more regulation for the purpose of making it very difficult for anyone to compete with them.
> Regulation also helps create a marketplace where you can focus on making better planes, not taking risks with people's lives to keep up with the other crazy competitors
That's a self-contradictory statement. Making better planes is how you compete successfully.
See "Competition & Monopoly in Medical Care" by Frech https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Fre...
Regulation is not always done in the best interests of the public. It's a blunt, and dangerous, weapon.
It is hardly blunt. It's enormously detailed in many areas, created by experts. We can find negative outcomes for any enterprise as m massive as regulatoin; in itself it doesn't mean much.
There are concerns and issues to consider, but this mass, very blunt :) critique and rejection of it prevents us from addressing them.
Certainly we are better off with the FAA regulating Boeing and the airlines than not regulating them!
Are we really? Then why all these Boeing fails? They are quite regulated and that's supposed to prevent them but regulatory failures abound.
I'd much rather have a strong free market where competition is keeping companies honest and on their toes. But one of the effects of regulation is reducing competition (through raising the barrier of entry).
Thus regulation becomes even more necessary to replace the lost competition... A self-fulfilling prophecy if you want.
The company had been asked to produce any documentation it had related to the removal and re-installation of the panel. ... Boeing said it had conducted an extensive search but could not find a record of the information ...
“We likewise have shared with the N.T.S.B. what became our working hypothesis: that the documents required by our processes were not created when the door plug was opened,” the Boeing letter reads. “If that hypothesis is correct, there would be no documentation to produce.”
In the letter, Boeing also said that it had sent the N.T.S.B. all of the names of the individuals on the 737 door team on March 4, two days after it was requested.
How laughably shameless: Offer the lowest-level employees as sacrifices, while burning any connection up the chain to the rest of Boeing. If Trump wins, and Boeing pays what he asks, the government might blame those employees.
Watch for the leaks that begin to smear them - alcohol use, a history of (something bad), etc. A traditional way the powerful destroy the weak is to use far superior media resources to smear them. True or not, ordinary people can't fight a tide of disinformation about them.
Stopping at that level won't work there, Boeing tries to spin it that way, but this plane was not the only one woth issues on the door plug. And they already admitted that there was a work around decision loop regarding the necessary documentation work. And FAA audits do not stop at individuals and their behaviour, the explicitely focus on processes and culture (I assume FAA does in principle the same thing EASA does).
But hey Boeing tried to blame the 737 Max crashes on the pilots, so I guess trying the same with shop floor teams tracks.
I'll wait for all the facts and their defense before drawing a conclusion (and even then, I really don't know and would trust a jury more). IME, pointing moral outrage at seemingly sure targets turns out to be a sure way to make myself the sinner.
You're assuming all that is true. Do we have more than Boeing's possible CYA claims to go on? (An honest question.) Also, have we heard their side of the story?
We will know once the FAA and NTSB did their investigation and audits, and published their reports.
Just to repeat: When you work in aerospace, you do not work on an aircraft without documenting your work and any deviations or non-conformities. Period. And even if you are forced and pressured by higher ups to do so, you do it properly. The fact that we have a whistleblower tells me rank and file are less than happy with the status quo so. Doesn't change the fact that someone made a serious mistake working on an aircraft. That alone is serious, even if it wouldn't have resulted in an incident.
> Boeing admitted there is no documentation to come by
Doesn't that serve Boeing's interests, to bury any record of possible harmful events, and to also bury the record of that information passing through other hands at Boeing?
In other words, should 'Boeing admitted' be taken at face value, as an admission of guilt, rather than a possible coverup of much worse and a way to throw the line workers under the wheels?
Falcon Aviation got hold of various aircraft, which I think they'll just reverse-engineer and throw out what's not working. It's like taking pretrained weights from an established LLM: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-spacex-bought-a-b...
With Trump coming to power, Boeing's tarnished credibility will be a major issue to address. I'm expecting US government will incentivize this process. Boeing will lose good engineers out to this fresh competition.
Now for my own wild speculation: SpaceX has shown renders of using Starship to do point to point passenger travel. And Elon appears to fixate on goals like that. My impression is that he would view reverse-engineering a passenger plane as a distraction for the company.
Boeing and its subcontractors apparently didn’t even keep appropriate records of the maintenance that was performed here. That’s a huge oversight and probably a big part in why they’re being criminally investigated.
I've certainly never heard that. Boeing is a private entity and doesn't represent America; nobody voted for them or chose them, and they don't represent America any more than everyone else.
People voted for their representatives. Giving special status to these companies ends up giving them special power and treatment in order to facilitate their mission, instead of equality before the law.