Boeing overwrote security camera footage of repair work on Alaska door plug | Hacker News Reader

Boeing overwrote security camera footage of repair work on Alaska door plug

axios.com

130 pointsbelter71 comments

"Boeing Overwrote" makes it sound like they actively did something to cause the footage to be lost. Most video surveillance systems record to a giant circular buffer, newest video overwrites oldest video automatically. In many cases there are no standards or requirements for specific retention periods, and 30-60 days is a common max storage duration. The logic being that for most incidents, you know about it in plenty of time to go back and archive the relevant video.

This looks like a scenario where there should have been standards in place for video retention, at a minimum for particularly sensitive operations where effects might not be realized for months, or even years.

> Most video surveillance systems record to a giant circular buffer

Right...because the alternative is stopping recording at a full buffer and losing new videos, instead. Considering recency is generally most valuable (followed by total length), this would be the sub-optimal option.

Editorializing really should be a bannable offense on this site. I've seen too many instances of this lately.

It's possible the headline changed or the link was changed. I've seen a few headlines that were using the same "Boeing Overwrote" phrase as the title here.

The other side of that is that original titles are often editorialized or confusing without context and the HN mantra of "OG titles only" leads to perplexing entries on the article list you have no idea what they're talking about until you've clicked through.

I don't think this is editorializing. Check the url "boeing-video-footage-overwrite-erased-door-plug-alaska". Basically the same as the title.

From the article: "Boeing overwrote security camera footage of repair work on the door plug of an Alaska Airlines 737-9 plane that failed during a flight in January, federal inspectors said Wednesday."

ive seen the same headline in a lot of places like lemmy and reddit.

not saying it's good, just that OP may not have been making the effort to spin it.

The <title> tag is "Boeing says overwriting video footage of airplane's door plug standard". At least now. It may have been different earlier.

It was different earlier. But the linked article still leads with "Boeing overwrote security camera footage of repair work..."

It’s okay to wilfully mislead people if it’s in service of dunking on whoever Hacker News hates this month.

I mean, they did overwrite it.

I would argue that video of a maintenance cycle should be kept at the very least until the next maintenance cycle. Then if something is overwritten, you still have the data.

Anything earlier than that is willful neglect at best.

>> and 30-60 days is a common max storage duration. Depend on the industry. In the aerospatial's case, a year of backup for maintenance raw data doesn't seems absurd, even if it cost a bit more.

Bottom of the article:

"Consistent with standard practice, video recordings are maintained on a rolling 30 day basis."

I find it funny how filming people doing the building of a plane is fine for 30 days, but no way you can record for a day when it is being flown...

> but no way you can record for a day when it is being flown

What are you trying to say?

Pilots in USA are against recording more than 2 hours of black box flight data. When there is many significantly longer flights.

Cockpit voice recorders are frequently overwritten because they are limited to only 2 hours in the US. Pilots' unions have pushed back on increasing this, stating they have privacy concerns.

Flight recorders are fireproof / water proof / shock proof devices on the airplane and are limited in size of memory they can have. On the factory floor, on the other hand, one can store lots of data or/and upload it to some massive cloud storage for backup / retention. It is totally different ball game.

It's not at all a technical limitation here. The cockpit voice recorder will record 25 hours in the EU and only 2 hours in the US, and that's been the case for years.

Who's calling for longer recordings? The NTSB or random people who don't know anything about crash investigations or politicians trying to win points with voters? Would longer recordings really help with investigations? From all the videos I've seen about them, maybe it's just selective memory, I can't recall a single time the NTSB pointed out they needed longer recordings to do or complete their investigation. I also can't think of any case off the top of my head where it would have helped in any way, much less a significant enough number to justify the cost (financial or otherwise).

Where is this call for longer recordings coming from, exactly?

The NTSB after Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 since the pilots forgot to pull the circuit breaker:

> The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was overwritten after the accident. The CVR on the aircraft records a two-hour loop, and the circuit breaker in the cockpit was not pulled to stop the recording after the aircraft landed.[20] NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy subsequently called for extending capacity to 25 hours, rather than the currently mandated two hours, on all new and existing aircraft. If implemented, the new rule will align with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and European Union Aviation Safety Agency's (EASA) current regulations.[42]

In this incident with Alaska, the fuse for the recorder was not pulled within two hours and they lost recordings from the moment the door fell out. There have been other lost recordings in the past.

Okay, and how would that have changed the investigation when the primary cause is Boeing's incompetence during assembly?

Helios flight 522 had no usable voice recordings due to the nature of the incident. The cockpit recordings begin well after the last pilot actions from what I recall. They were able to piece it together using comms with the towers, but that was more luck.

Im not sure I understand the hesitation with it either way, however. Can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t want the data preserved.

I watch alot of air incident reports on YT. Many of accidents (not crash) include words like "Unfortunately we wouldn't know exactly what happened, because pilots forgot to turn off the voice recorder after landing". Pilots become conviniently forgetful when some accident happens and it can possibly point to their mistake. Because privacy of two people at their job place is above safety of whole industry, you know, so others cannot earn on their expirience. I'd say, keep it at 2 hours, but suspend and send for training all the forgetful ones. OR, even better, make it impossible to open cockpit door after you have landed if voice recorder is still on. Make it a part of after-landing checklist. Make huge alarm siren. Make SWAT surround every plane until recorder is off. Anything is better then just waiving off the responsibility and potentially valuable experience

You'd think an active investigation would trump standard practice. This doesn't inspire confidence in Boeing's QA process. If it was OK, it would be in Boeing's interest to hold the footage erasure so they could present it as a piece of evidence in their favor.

Edit: See child comment. I made a wrong assumption which made me think this was likely intentional. I no longer stand by this comment.

The work in question was done in, what was it, at the latest October or November if I recall? More likely before even that. The incident then happened in January.

Footage stored on a 30 day rolling basis would have been overwritten or otherwise disposed of long ago before anything even happened.

Honestly, 30 days for security camera footage seems fine to me. I don't see wrongdoing here.

Neither do I, and I despise this article, the author, and the outlet for inducing unwarranted anger and sensationalism that only adds noise to a very serious matter.

I agree. I wonder to how many months/years would people here agree to if their workplace was to be filmed with security cameras?

How long would it be reasonable to keep footage filmed in modern open-office?

IMO, at least however long the statute of limitations in that jurisdiction is for things like sexual harassment, physical/sexual assault, etc. Way too many of those types of cases go totally unpunished because there's no camera evidence, and it seems quite reasonable to me to retain that footage so that if an issue arises, the relevant evidence is available. I don't think you should have any reasonable expectation of privacy for committing crimes at work, and while yes that means that there would be a camera overhead recording my every move, I'm not the kind of person that necessarily sees that as a bad thing; that footage would both protect and bind all of us to a clear social contract, and that seems better than just throwing our hands in the air and saying "oopsies, the footage was overwritten! So sorry!"

I don't think most people would be OK with videoing every public and semi-public place and keeping the footage for 30 years just on the off-chance that a crime might be committed with no witnesses and a trial held a couple decades later.

This was a security camera. Usually you notice security-relevant things pretty quickly.

It's especially weird to focus on this completely normal event when, elsewhere in the news, "a Boeing whistleblower was found dead in his truck in the parking lot of his South Carolina hotel after he failed to show up for the second part of his testimony for a bombshell lawsuit against the company".

( https://nypost.com/2024/03/11/us-news/boeing-whistleblower-j... )

Not that Boeing's attitude toward QA does not deserve to have massive shade thrown on it, but what the hell, do you think that the QA department, likely understaffed, is staffed with precogs? They'd have needed to know something was up, which the documentation wasn't generated for to ensure. It'd traditionally be the security people who'd worry about managing security camera footage, and legal who'd generally be overseeing record retention and preservation of records in extraordinary circumstances.

I wasn't aware of the duration of time between the Boeing incident and the QA check. Without that in mind, the footage being lost seemed rather suspicious to me, but after your sibling commenter pointed this out, I see how my comment comes across now. I've edited the comment to make this clear.

We all know, if they don't fall within the first 30 days, they pretty much go on flying for ever....First item on Boeing Rules of Acquisition...

Disk space is so expensive today, they couldn't possibly afford to keep more than 30 days.

Also, their video cameras probably shoot in 8K 10bit RAW uncompressed.

For video (especially with proper 3-2-1 backup) it is somehow expensive.

5 years of our sales and finance data from 10+ countries takes less than a petabyte

Our 2 years backup of hundreds CCTV for only a single factory compressed, reduced to 15 fps takes around 4 PB. This data only used when we have a complaint case. Most of the times it just overwritten with new data without a single person ever see the video.

My back of the napkin calculation for S3's glacier tier says that would cost roughly 50 grand a year.

That seems...reasonable?

It's very reasonable.

I should wrote somehow "feel" expensive because :

This data only used when we have a complaint case. Most of the times it just overwritten with new data without a single person ever see the video.

This may be true, but I would expect Boeing, a titan of the industry and up until recently assumed leader of aviation safety, to retain footage for much, much longer for training and QA purposes.

Yes, I'm aware this opens them up to all kinds of liability, but corporate liability is worth so much less than data that could save human lives. I'm of the opinion that corporate retention policies are specifically encouraging companies to cover up mistakes rather than fixing them. It feels to me like, if we required companies to retain data for years rather than days, and then rewarded companies that use that data to fully cooperate with investigators, swiftly admit fault, and take corrective action when the screw up, with lower fines and penalties, that that would trump the perceived "danger" of retaining data for too long.

The fact that companies are actively encouraged to delete evidence of wrongdoing so that when a situation emerges where that data would be useful, the company can just shift blame on an asinine written policy is completely nuts to me, and shows that we've totally lost the f**ing plot when it comes to actually encouraging better safety practices.

>This may be true, but I would expect Boeing, a titan of the industry and up until recently assumed leader of aviation safety, to retain footage for much, much longer for training and QA purposes.

I mean, as someone who grew up two minutes from Boeing's Everett plant with pride, I would've said the same thing up until about a decade or so ago. Everything we have learned about Boeing's culture in the time since strongly suggests that we should expect the opposite from them.

It isn’t just “corporate liability”, it’s literally illegal in some jurisdictions to retain camera footage for that long. There are significant privacy implications for recording someone at their workplace and deciding on a retention period has to take that into account.

My guess is that the workers unions at Boeing’s plants would fight tooth and nail to keep those recordings from being retained longer.

Which is too bad, because those recordings are extremely useful for harassment cases, worker safety violations, etc.

So this is essentially on the FCC for approving an quality assurance scheme that leaves them with no clue to figure out if this event would have been prevented if Boeing had followed it's own processes.

The problem for this investigation is that it's not a single door but an entire line of planes designed, made and inspected using processes and policies that the FCC should probably never have approved in the first place creating an situation where half the us aviation industry would collapse if a halt operations until everything have been reinspected under a more correct regulatory framework.

So there is a huge pressure on the NTSB for finding something fixable wrong as the alternative is to start the certification process for both the MAX 8/9 designs and the Boeing manufacturing lines in question from scratch.

The FCC is not involved here. You might be thinking of the FAA, they are in charge of airplane things.

What makes you think that boeing - a company scrutinized over the last few years for shoddy work, negligent employees and incomptent management - actually followed an approved procedure? There's been a lot of reports lately of missing paperwork and lack of qc, both of which are supposed to be part of the procedures (and are in fact in the approved procedures).

There seems to be a big miss here on the purpose of the cameras. Are they there as security cameras to help monitor the facility, or are they there to act as an audit trail for manufacturing?

Presumably the documentation processes in place (whether Boeing followed them or not) are meant to handle the manufacturing accountability need. That leaves the security cameras as just that, security cameras.

I can't get mad at a local convenience store for not retaining footage from last week or last month when 24 hours of retention fits their needs. Why should anyone complain that Boeing's security footage region doesn't meet the requirements for a use that they were never meant to handle?

This seems like a nothingburger. Pretty sure security camera footage isn't part of the standard quality/audit process (at Boeing or anywhere else) so a 30 day rolling window makes sense.

What's damning for Boeing is that the actual records of the work performed are missing[1]. Security footage of the work, even if it was present, might not have helped since we're talking about small details like screws here.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/03/09/1237204488/boeing-door-plug-a...

Published standards say that it's OK to destroy evidence as long as you are following written policy that says you shall destroy evidence after a certain limited time. Everything is copacetic here, at least according to published international standards and written corporate policy. Move along.

Or change the laws and standards and have Boeing retain all its camera footage for all its planes permanently.

This only makes it worse ...

The team managing them probably worked before at the MCC New York...

For whom though?

[dupe]

Some more discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39696071

tangential, but this was an outright hit, right? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/business/john-barnett-boe...

I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but this stinks to high heaven

As bad as it seems, it’s just as plausible he was suffering from the stress.

Do you really think a company that is already getting undesirable press coverage would put a hit on someone?

it's kind of the point right? Make an example of a prominent whistleblower.

> Do you really think a company that is already getting undesirable press coverage would put a hit on someone?

I don't see why undesirable press coverage would make it less likely. If you're not already getting undesirable press coverage... why would you need to bother?

Certainly is also plausible. All I'm saying is I hope they are investigating this very carefully. Frankly, the fact that they immediately called it self inflicted is suspicious to me. It smacks of ruling out other scenarios not on the basis of evidence.

Very tangential as he didn't work at Boeing for 7-years before this incident (retired in 2017). People seem to be claiming that he was a whistleblower for this specific incident, which he was not.

Plus I believe he was in a TV documentary where he discussed/disclosed all of the safety issues he witnesses at Boeing's plant/QA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnett_(Boeing_employee)

He was about to testify in a few days.

About illegal reuse of potential defective parts and potentially dangerous metal shavings. Neither of which are related to this incident.

> About illegal reuse of potential defective parts and potentially dangerous metal shavings

I'm no expert, but I'd expect a history of (criminal) negligence would be relevant in a legal proceeding about potential negligence, if only for precedent.

The lawsuit has already started on the door incident, and his testimony even if he was alive isn't relevant. The door was a process problem + screw-up, 2016 parts was potentially criminally illegal (and on purpose). Plus in civil court, where the standards are lower, they could bring in his interviews to the FAA/BBC anyway (they won't, because relevance).

I feel like a bunch of people online have irrationally decided these two things are directly connected, and are now massaging the facts to meet that narrative. Aside from Boeing, there isn't a lot of reason to connect these two things. But people want to ignore the facts to make this sound like a sexy movie script.

Two things happened. They happened around the same time. Even if he was alive today, it is unlikely the two would intersect outside of [bad] Boeing PR.

I'm not sure why that matters. The public concern with Boeing isn't about a single incident, but that there is a culture of corporate recklessness that has resulted in multiple incidents (and might result in more in the future). The notion that they'd kill a whistleblower absolutely speaks to that.

His own family doesn’t think so.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow...

> The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.

> "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."

I'm but sure why a murder would make the situation better for Boeing. Especially after his depositions were recorded. If anything, his entire testimony is now fair game without the ability to cross examine him.

Besides, this case was unrelated to the current issues and stemmed from practices under a previous executive team.

Unless you really just love conspiracy theories, this one is awful.

Corps bought all politicians, they can do whatwever they want at this point. Like getting away with sending the quality assurance whistleblower dude to Belize.

Update to something modern maybe.

Digital footage could be kept indefinitely.

You mean "destroyed evidence".

In ready for a Boeing free news feed. While I don’t think hn itself is being manipulated, fairly certain Reddit is under the influence of state actors at this point where most of the links are sourced.

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