Boeing's Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
thefp.com
thefp.com
Is that so? The simulators would have been able so simulate the failure of one of the two AOA sensors, and the simulated MCAS would've kicked in, issuing stabiliser trim nose-down commands, and the pilots would've tried to fix it with the trim nose-up switch on the yoke, and this would've gone back and forth a while until they'd stopped trimming up for a bit, and it would've simulated a crash?
That's possible, but news to me. Here's a source [0] saying "the simulators have been shown to be incapable of replicating the conditions under which the two 737 MAX aircraft crashed" and "Boeing have discovered that their simulators cannot accurately recreate a fault with the anti-stall system."
Seems to me that (at least) one of the two articles is wrong.
Boeing wanted the pilots to take the cheaper training, because it ment that the buyers could save a lot of money. So they convinced the FAA that the cheaper training was appropriate. They convinced the FAA that the MCAS system wasn't a "big difference." This was a mistake
My question here though was specifically whether, as the article alleges, MAX-specific simulator training (whether required or not) would have exposed this problem in time to prevent the accidents. And I don’t think it would.
If Boeing was a chinese company with no American ownership, the USA government would be all head over the heels investigating the cause of death.
In my opinion, Boeing is a company that is expected to do something about 10x more difficult than other companies: they build and sell massively complex machines that have to work safely and reliably 100% of the time (discounting planned redundancy), and even a small mistake in design or execution compromises the safety of hundreds or thousands of people, even if it takes years for the flaw to become apparent. If you couple this with all the growth in air traffic in the past few decades, I think failures like we've seen are nearly inevitable.
Honestly, even with the tragic MAX crashes, I think it's nearly a miracle that air disasters happen as infrequently as they do (Boeing, Airbus, or what have you). People point to mismanagement at Boeing, including lately labor outsourcing / labor arbitrage (building plants in SC instead of WA to avoid unions, Spirit Aerosystems, etc) but I see that as part of how Boeing tried to meet the growing demands of air travel. That's not to let everybody off the hook, because clearly some changes need to take hold so that this doesn't happen again. That's the gold standard of the aviation industry, after all - that we can prevent a particular disaster from ever happening again, and we're willing to spend the time and money to see it so.
I think all the true crime enthusiasts following the John Barnett case is just going to distract from solving the hard problems - getting the design and execution right on every single plane, 100% of the time. Professional class people have gotten used to cheap/affordable jet travel anywhere, anytime, that is safe all the time - but I don't think many have internalized how difficult this is to do and maintain.
Lots of companies produce complex machines where safety is critical. Arguably making something that won't accidentally kill people is the lowest standard of quality a company is expected to meet. Yes planes are big, and flying is hard, so there are more things that can potentially fail, but it's a matter of scale, it isn't a fundamentally different problem. Boeing knew what it was getting into, and took on the responsibility of allocating sufficient resources to make proper aircraft.
> I think failures like we've seen are nearly inevitable.
Failures in general are inevitable, but the failures we've seen are most certainly not. The particular quality issues in the spotlight are solved problems, and in fact Boeing specifically already solved those problems when they crafted their quality procedures. The were multiple deliberate decisions made to not follow procedures, and these failures are only inevitable as a consequence of those decisions.
So, no, the failures were not inevitable, but contingent, and what's needed now is to analyse how/why they were allowed to develop.
In other words, Airbus isn’t doing too bad for a European jobs program.
People also point to management pressuring employees to shut up about manufacturing defects. From the referenced article:
>In 2019, Barnett told a journalist at Corporate Crime Reporter that his managers “started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. . . . They just wanted to push planes out the door and make the cash register ring.”
So no, if you believe Barnett, failures like Boeing's are not inevitable. They are criminal.
I believe Barnett's claims should be treated seriously and scrutinized by experts in the industry (which is exactly what was happening when he died, by the way - it's not like people were ignoring what he had to say). I don't believe that he or anyone else is entitled to our faith just because he's saying things that confirm our worldview.
But you are.
The only flaw in your argument is that the entire aerospace industry has managed to pull off what you claim is a miracle we shouldn't expect to be the standard... for decades. Only when Boeing lost their engineering culture that they and only they have been failing to this extent. Whatever Airbus is doing is working.
2 companies?
> a miracle we shouldn't expect to be the standard... for decades
In the past few decades, the number of scheduled flights has grown tremendously, the number of aircraft has grown, traffic has increased substantially at many major airports, fuel economy demands have become increasingly important... (which means those old aircraft aren't as viable anymore) A lot has changed, which requires new aircraft to compensate. I think all of this should be considered. Remember that the incident rate per million miles or per thousand flight hours is _down_ today compared to the imagined golden period in the past.
The industry is obviously more than 2 companies. Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Bombardier, and likely in the future, Comac, Mitsubishi, and UAC. This is ignoring the (primarily) civil aviation companies, military manufacturers (who sometimes venture into commercial, e.g., Lockheed's Tristar), and the entire supply chain that feed into those manufacturers.
In some ways this doesn't matter that much (since these planes might actually do many more takeoffs and landings per day/week/lifetime and have to be engineered for that), but in other ways it does matter a lot.
As for the other companies you name, I will admit I am not familiar with them. Is there something relevant to add to the discussion from those companies? I would be curious to learn more
Using seat-miles leads to some very strange conclusions. Consider cargo aircraft with zero seats, or a helicopter that mostly hovers in place all day.
Aviation safety primarily looks at airframe hours and pressurization cycles. At least on the mechanical side.
Like, you take up a seat, so if you were to randomly select a mile that you've traveled in your life, what are the odds that it was on a Boeing / Airbus or a regional jet? But, I think this wasn't really clear from what I wrote
That's not fair. There are lots of Bombardier and Embraer planes flying commercial flights in the US.
A really common sense standard of effort would be "people feel comfortable internally reporting problems". The opposite was true to the point that Boeing's management seemingly did everything possible to prevent people reporting issues. And now, potentially, someone with an interest in Boeing felt this strongly enough that someone was literally murdered over reporting a problem.
I know this isn't quite what you meant, but that's exactly what we do when a plane fails and people die, as happened in this case, as I'm sure you know! But only the plane that has the issue is grounded, not all planes.
As to the merits of John Barnett's complaints, I leave that to other people to decide. That he was murdered over reporting this is a claim I'm highly skeptical of, and to my knowledge there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was.
Bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, dams, submarines, elevators, (some) medicine/medical equipment, ...
> Professional class people have gotten used to cheap/affordable jet travel anywhere, anytime, that is safe all the time - but I don't think many have internalized how difficult this is to do and maintain.
The price of an airplane should increase if needed to keep up with growing demand, not the quality decrease.
I encourage people to tinker with modern electronics and software, it's usually harmless and you can learn easily. That's not the case with air crafts and air travel. You need to learn BEFORE doing. Getting interested in flying and airplanes is probably the most dangerous thing for modern dilettantes, maybe tinkering with explosives is more dangerous.
This is the fundamental flaw of modern american capitalism: it's not that profit is the #1 concern, it's that profit is the ONLY concern.
There's a huge difference between the two, the system we have places no balancing considerations against returns. It's not even really "profit", but stock value.
Comensating employees, especially the c-suite, in stock should return to being illegal.
"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."'
FROM: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow...
Can we stop trying to make this some conspiracy. The man shot himself with is own gun (making him an unfortunate statistic). What articles like this do are give an unlikely narrative that Boeing can weasel out of.
They were shitty to him. The stress they caused drove the man to kill himself. Thats the story, dont buy this other sensational nonsense and give them a pass.
If he was murdered rather than having killed himself, you wouldn't find the evidence in forum posts.
This dude hasn’t been employed by Boeing for some years. He was part of a Netflix documentary made about it. I don’t think the public took him seriously until people died, and there were multiple safety incidents.
It would be interesting to see what the police report about this was. How long has he owned that gun? From what angle the that bullet come from? Were there any drugs still in his system? Any witnesses at the time of the shooting?
If it was suicide, surely there are evidence that it is suicide and other evidence disproving that he was murdered.
They take care of the rest.
This is why whistleblower laws have to be strong and be enforced very swiftly.
Isn't it worth checking?
They are definitely part of something criminal, not murder but the whole mess and the resulting deaths are a criminal act.
You don't have the knowledge to make such statements. And you shouldn't guess when making aspersions against a large number of peoples' character.
The rest of it goes over how he was justified in being a whistleblower. The article is fine IMO.
"he was upbeat about his testimony, feeling he was finally able to tell the story of his efforts to get the company to take safety more seriously"
The police said it was “a self-inflicted wound.” (Are those quotes or air quotes? cause they feel like the latter).
" No one can believe it."
"A family friend told ABC News that he had told her, “I ain’t scared, but if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.” "
"The internet lit up. It was an “alleged suicide,” or “an apparent suicide.”"
and then... "it's suspicious, but nobody's going to look into it harder than they have."
At no point did the author of the article cover what the actual family said. That the man was ready to be a statistic from stress. Boeing was the source of that stress.
By opening up the article leaning into the conspiracy theory side of things, it only serves to discredit the rest of the content.
The narrative of "his doctor told him to quit the dam job or have a heart attack" ... "the situation gave him anxiety and PTSD" is another strike against Boeing in all this. He becomes a man pushed to, and over the brink by a corporate giant. Considering the circumstances that sounds awful and reasonable.
> As suspicious as his death was, no one in a position of power is calling for an investigation. And they’re not likely to. But I do know this: everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too.
This article is about the cultural problem at Boeing, and only tangentially about John Barnett.
Give them a pass for driving a man to suicide?
Could Boeing be held legally responsible in some way? Maybe so, and maybe they should be in most peoples' opinion, but it isn't as clear as assuming they must have been directly responsible for driving a man to suicide.
There are plenty of recent examples of murders to cover up corporate crimes. This would not be particularly out of the ordinary. Unfortunately we’ll never know for sure because for some reason no one is going to do a serious investigation into his death.
What’s the motive? Not sure. Maybe he really did it himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb...
Not saying this is the case here, but him being in great spirits doesn't really contradict the action of killing yourself.