Boeing faces new US investigation into 'missed' 787 inspections | Hacker News Reader

Boeing faces new US investigation into 'missed' 787 inspections

theguardian.com

255 pointsmindracer134 comments

Is this the kind of problem that is being uncovered because of the extra scrutiny that Boeing is currently under? To put it another way, is this the kind of problem that is endemic across industry and we’re only finding out now because we are taking the time to look?

One can only imagine the horrors lurking in industries lucky enough not to have had any famous failures recently.

Boeing used to have a safety culture and and engineering excellence culture. That changed over the past twenty to thirty years as leadership rotted the company and monetized that rot by choosing to skip safety and engineering in favor of profits.

I work in a different sector. If we built planes it'd be raining bodies.

If you go looking you will find. And it's almost never pretty stuff. There is however a lot of paperwork filled in that says everything is fine.

You are inverting cause and consequence. It's because Boeing has had so many failures that it has come under particular scrutiny. Failures which, from a statistical point of view, suggest that there may be a cause to look for. Other companies do not have as many (and as basic) problems.

Depends what you mean by industry.

If you mean the US big airliner industry, then Boeing is essentially it, so yes, And I presume it comes directly from the FAA delegating so much of their job to Boeing meaning Boeing had to inspect itself.

The you had the bad deal grand fathered between USA and EU : FAA inspect Boeing planes, EASA has to accept that certification without checking by themselves.

Airbus need to be certified by the EASA, they have much less if any delegated authority for that (though they do pay a lot into that, there is a difference between you need to pay into your regulator and you are your own regulator through your own employees). And then they need to separately be certified by Boeing.

This means the surface area for Boeing screwing around is much, much larger.

I don't doubt there are flaws if we looked into airbus assembly, but I highly doubt they would be systemic and part of a larger screwed process like what is being found at Boeing.

The delegation of authority was a Bush Jr. policy about deregulation and making airline aviation "more agile" or some other BS. It involved defunding FAA efforts at control and explicit policies for more self-governance in the industry.

There wasn't a "bad deal grandfathered" - there was a general acceptance of FAA flight certificates in many regulatory areas due to previous good performance of those, which was wrecked by 737 MAX crashes. Even then it wasn't automatic pass, it was more that local certification authorities would let you submit it in lieu of some checks but could require more.

Also, apparently Airbus has wildly different policies for dealing with suppliers, which are seen as both bad (they aren't easy to work with and most importantly they mean more risk to supplier) but also good (better oversight, integration, and Airbus will actually help you deal with your suppliers, and the risk is shared)

> There wasn't a "bad deal grandfathered"

It's a grandfathered deal from the formation of the EASA. Before that, most national aviation authority in europe didn't have the ability to check all planes, so they accepted others'; while the FAA checked the planes of everyone. When the EASA was formed, we kept that part.

Thanks to M&A's, Boeing is the industry (at least in the US). Then the bean counters figured out that they can outsource a lot of the manufacturing to '3rd parties' who pinky-promise they have a functional QA process.

When MCAS drove 2 planes into the ground, they were able to proclaim "It wasn't us, it was our software vendor!." All the airframe problems? Well, that's Spirit Aerosystems!

There should be a lot of Boeing execs in prison for manslaughter.

> When MCAS drove 2 planes into the ground, they were able to proclaim "It wasn't us, it was our software vendor!."

They did not say that.

The owners/economy has demanded for things to become more efficient then last year every year for decades now.

If no massive technological breakthrough happens at some point the operation is as efficient as it can be while producing safe products but still you have to become more efficient for next quarterly/yearly results to keep the shareholders happy (if you can't find new clients to expand to). It is at that point that you start cutting corners and end up in situations like this.

This happens in every field but obviously in most fields the cost of these failures is not big enough to really matter but when you apply it to aviation you get planes with hundreds of people crashing into the ocean.

>This happens in every field but obviously in most fields the cost of these failures is not big enough to really matter but when you apply it to aviation you get planes with hundreds of people crashing into the ocean.

Is that so bad? According to the IIHS there were 43k automotive deaths in the US in 2021. Meanwhile the last passenger death in a scheduled commercial flight[1] in the US was 4 years ago. In the past decade there has only been 2 deaths.

[1] this excludes flights like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Mutiny_Bay_DHC-3_Otter_cr..., because they're essentially flying general aviation planes which are far less reliable than airliners that people typically associate with air travel. If you include them the number goes up to 27.

It's not so bad yet because the aviation industry comes from a place of extremely high safety standards, but it could get worse pretty fast.

Airline

------------

Total number of global flights per year: ~38.9 Million

Total deaths over the last decade (3,562)

-> 21.2 deaths per million trips

Cars

------------

Total number of driving trips per year US: 227 Billion

(using your number of 43K deaths per year)

-> 1.9 deaths / million trips

Wow, I'm surprised but actually airline travel is less safe then driving.

Links:

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-....

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra...

Deaths per trip is a bad comparison. As you can see from those numbers, Americans take about 1000 car trips per year and many fewer plane trips (hard to get exact numbers based on that since it’s global and planes can have dozens-hundreds of people).

It makes no sense to look at number of flights for a comparison. You need to look at passenger miles.

You need to look at hours invested. If I'm planning to go away for a week, I'm choosing whether to sit in a car for 12 hours or airports+airplanes for 12 hours -- these are the equivalent options for how to spend my time away from home, so between these, how much safer is one over the other?

Said another way, compare "trips by plane" against "a set of car trips whose average duration matches that of trips by plane."

>[...] these are the equivalent options for how to spend my time away from home

No they're not. If you're in San Fransisco for instance, a 12 hour drive maybe gets you to LA, Vegas, and maybe salt lake city. It can't even get you to Seattle or Phoenix. Meanwhile even if you factor in getting to the airport 3 hours before departure, 1 hour to get to the airport, and 1 hour to get to your final destination, that leaves you with 7 hours of flight time. That's enough for a direct flight anywhere in the lower 48 states, and as well as many cities in Canada and Mexico.

If I have a certain amount of time to spend and want a reasonable ratio of travel time to time-at-destination, some ratio that I prefer regardless of mode of travel, those are indeed the options I can choose from (e.g., driving to the next state or flying across the country). There will be many factors leading to a decision of which option to select, and if I want travel safety to be a factor, then the safety stats need to be presented as I'm describing.

Fuck, in 12 hours time I can get from Germany to USA Atlanta no problem, probably still 1-2 hours extra time.

"Per trip" is an utterly meaningless way of looking at the data. Some car trips last ten minutes and a 10 or 12 hour flight isn't uncommon. You know for a fact that it's more dangerous to drive from NYC to Miami than it is to drive to the grocery store and back, so why would you use a meaningless statistic like this?

I would say the most sensible is "per passenger hour", followed by "per passenger mile", since in some cases one might be choosing between driving somewhere and flying there.

By both of these metrics, airplanes are much safer than cars.

> I would say the most sensible is "per passenger hour", followed by "per passenger mile"

Not trying to be contrarian or anything but I'm curious why. Another comment mentioned the material difference in available options between comparing an 8 hour flight to an 8 hour drive. In my mind, the only meaningful metric then would be the "per passenger mile". This should be emphasized by the fact that there are destinations that literally no amount of driven miles will get you to. The utility provided from 8 hours of flight versus 8 hours of driving are so drastically different I can't imagine how you'd compare them. 8 hours of flight will let you visit roughly a quarter of the world. 8 hours of driving won't even get you a quarter of the way across the US.

You're calculating per trip, which is very misleading. Each flight two orders of magnitude more people on it.

You want per person per trip to actually calculate an individual's risk on a single trip.

Then you need to account for distance or time. If I had to guess, that's three to four orders of magnitude more time or distance per trip.

Actually, I think it's a fair comparison for several reasons:

- The decision of "is it safe to take this trip or not" is tied to the trip. Once you get in a plane or get in a car, you've made the safety decision. It's not really reversable for flight, and it's only partially reversable if you're driving a car.

- The risk in air travel is largely dominated by the takeoff, landing and quality of plane production and maintenance. It's not strongly tied to distance or flight time. Once you're in the air, I speculate that there are fewer opportunities for adverse events then a car. To put it another way, flying from SF to San Diego is not 2x risker then flying from SF to LA despite it being more than 2x the distance and flight time. Compare this to a car, where you encounter many more cars in close proximity, many more obstacles (stop lights, pedestrians, turns). A 15 minute ride to get groceries likely has 10x the number of opportunities for adverse events as compared to an airplane. Car risk is denser and linear, where as flight risk seems more constant.

- Number of people on a plane doesn't really affect the safety of a trip. (saw this in some other comments)

However, I do recognize that commercial airline deaths are a better metric for general travel comparison. Though I would use the global data. We do know of two fatal crashes of the Boeing planes in the last decade so if you're cherry picking the US data then you are also introducing bias. This is especially true given my earlier point about risks associated with plane quality.

Are you comparing global flights to US driving?

In addition to the other points brought up, you're comparing global flight statistics with US driving statistics. Fatal commercial aviation accident rates are heavily region dependent. If I recall correctly, the number of fatal aviation accidents on scheduled US commercial flights over the last decade is zero. Meanwhile, some other regions are vastly less safe: for example, while this was some number of years ago, I remember a statistic of flights in Africa accounting for single-digit percentages of global flights and a quarter of passenger fatalities.

Most US aviation deaths are from general aviation, not commercial. As you've pointed out, commercial flights in the US are far, far safer than driving almost no matter how you want to cherry pick stats. General aviation has an accident rate equivalent to if not higher than automobile accidents. Commercial airline practices and procedures largely work and are very effective at reducing casualties. But some of these small general aviation airports don't even have full time staff coordinating landings and departures and you have to handle that yourself and hope anyone else landing at and taking off from that airport are on the right frequencies.

After listening to a few too many aviation accident breakdowns and the reasons behind them, I'm honestly surprised the general population doesn't hear more about these shenanigans and the dangers surrounding the hobby. It's way too easy to mix the commercial airline safety records with general aviation and have a false sense of security around those types of flights. It's one thing when an inexperienced pilot kills themselves through neglect and incompetence, but a very different sort of impact when looking at these reckless pilots who get others killed. Think of any celebrity who has died in an aviation incident from Denver to Kobe and they are all general aviation accidents. Small planes with less experienced or complacent pilots.

That’s a sentence you can say if you don’t find yourself or a loved one on that plane.

Not even more efficient. Just cheaper. Efficiency implies there's no drop in quality.

This would mean that failures should be spread evenly over an industry. Airbus clearly does not have the problems Boeing has.

I also don't think you understand the current airline industry. Both Boeing and Airbus desperately want to grow, they have orders lined up for decades and just need factories and people. The issue is not a stagnant industry looking for cost-cutting it is a very in demand industry desperate to fill orders.

The shareholders care about stock price and dividends, and those aren't necessarily linked to company actually growing.

Ultimately, for a lot of publicly held companies, quite often the "boss making the decision" is an excel sheet on some analysts desk that will result in a specific pressure being applied on company.

> Is this the kind of problem that is being uncovered because of the extra scrutiny that Boeing is currently under?

Yes.

> To put it another way, is this the kind of problem that is endemic across industry and we’re only finding out now because we are taking the time to look?

That is a completely different matter. The increased scrutiny on Boeing can simply be uncovering that the wheels have been coming off for a while as result of the stock-chasing policy they’ve been following for 25 years.

Previously it could be covered up because their primary regulator was too hands off but recent events have led to the FAA dedicating more resources to Boeing, and thus having a lot more opportunities to trip over malfeasance.

Yes, I mean obviously cargo ships are not well inspected, they lose power all the time and companies just hope it doesn't happen near anything important. The oil industry is like this, you've got bottom-of-the-barrel tankers (https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-...), spills continuing for decades (https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-will-pay-record-f...), leaking methane wells permanently abandoned by "bankrupt" companies, etc.

You're definitely right that we're all paying extra attention to Boeing at the moment, but if you look around I think you'll find that there actually have been pretty recent famous failures in quite a few industries.

I thought ships were a little different since they can just follow the regulations of their flagged country and skirt a lot of rules.

With the amount of overlapping vocabulary, I would've thought airplanes are basically just ships in the sky. Ports, captains, boarding, etc.

Or are these used metaphorically, like virtual computer stuff versus physical office stuff (desktop, folder, etc.) where there's enough similarity to avoid making new words but they're operated quite differently?

The need to overfly a country, vs just sail round, means that airlines need country's permission to fly into/through a country. Overflight privileges cost money.

In addition protectionism has meant that you generally have to land or take off at an airport run by the flag you carry.

So unlike shipping, a Malaysian airline can't fly from the US to UK.

This means that airlines need to be based at their 'real' base of operations, they can't just register in a tax-shelter.

Additionally, the fact that passenger airplanes carry, well, passengers, while cargo ships don't, means that airlines are automatically under more scrutiny. Further to what you wrote, some airlines have even been blacklisted by e.g. the EU because of safety reasons, like PIA (the flag carrier of Pakistan!) from 2020 to 2023.

I guess cargo tends to go more by ship and passengers tend to go more by plane, but all 4 combinations certainly exist so no need to assume 2 variables are being compared simultaneously.

Which is the country their rules should follow?

Their flag?

Their company's residency?

Their production location?

Guess what, all are bought and sold off for cheap on the market.

Oh and they pay less than 1.5% taxes, usually, if they even pay taxes.

I agree it's a tricky problem to solve without agreements in place governing it. The airline industry seems to have settled on you follow the laws of the destination country. Ships in particular though do everything they can to abuse flagging their ships with the most lax working regulations.

The union of the ruleset of the flag country, the source country, and the destination country seems pretty reasonable - you should have to follow all three. Obviously not how it’s currently done, it’s an industry that has been doing it by flagging out of places like Liberia or Mauritania since time immemorial, but we can clearly do better.

If this causes conflicts that make certain flags legally incompatible with certain combinations of sources and destinations - good. Those flags-of-convenience can harmonize their rules to the rest of the world. The environment and human rights will benefit.

(tongue in cheek) isn't that what boeing did with the FAA?

Ships and planes are so different in their regulations and safety measures, it's not even close or comparable.

Losing power in a ship that spends almost its entire life in the open ocean is much less risky than losing power in an airplane though. Its reasonable that expectations, regulations, and maintenance schedules differ there.

I have nothing good to say for oil spills though. I was interning st Exxon's upstream research department when the BP oil spill happened in the gulf. What I heard from many people that had been there for a a long time amounted to no one being too surprised given how the industry works and how much is outsourced. They also (rightfully) expected the main concern to be PR. Exxon researchers were the ones to give BP the chemicals to coagulate the oil into globs and sink it just below the surface. They were really proud of it at the time, though having family on the Gulf Coast I was less impressed with the solution or the tar balls that washed up on the beach for years.

> is much less risky

well Baltimore thinks otherwise

My point stands in the context of the GP comment I replied to, they were pointing out how frequently container ships lose power.

Baltimore was a terrible scenario with power failure at just the wrong time, but ships do regularly lose power or have mechanical issues and very rarely cause Amy damage. If a plane loses power it falls and hits whatever is below.

I agree with you, but I would like to point out that airplanes without power should glide, i.e. see gimli glider. I do wonder though if anyone has tried with recent Boeing models.

They do glide, in fact airliners have a glide ratio rivaling gliders, and substantially exceeds general aviation airplanes.

I knew most planes have quite reasonable glide distances and I knew that large commercial airliners were no exception. But from a relative standpoint (GA vs CA) this seemed suspect at first. Intuitively to me the enormous mass differences would make up for the wing surface area differences and the advantage would be to much smaller / lighter planes. On further reflection makes a lot of sense. Fuel is one of the highest costs of commercial airlines. Of course they are going to be hyper-optimizing for this where they can. A 747 being fuel efficient is far more important to bottom lines than a tiny Cessna being fuel efficient and with the relative costs of these aircraft, Boeing can invest far more in research to reduce drag and optimize lift. Aircraft glide ratios certainly seem to confirm this.

Airliner glide ratios fall between 15 and 20, which is comparable with cheapest immediately post-war training gliders for category B, aka the gliders you put a student pilot to learn how to make turns before the advent of two-seater trainer gliders.

And that 15 to 20 glide ratio is for best possible condition.

It is endemic across society. People confuse goals with results all the time, and accept that inspections are scheduled or that some box was checked in lieu of an "actual" inspection all the time. It is one of the major reasons that I am always very skeptical of the "just throw more regulations at it" solution to anything; generating paperwork and generating compliance are two very different things.

The fundamental error of bureaucracy is to conflate paperwork with reality.

The shocking thing is that as cynical as that may sound, things do in fact generally work. This suggests that the problem is less on the side of reality and more on the side of the paperwork and the bureaucracy. You see this one instance where the mismatch is problematic, but honestly there's immense mismatch everywhere, and generally, things work, because while in bureaucratic theory a mismatch between paperwork and reality is itself intrinsically a problem, in reality, it's only a problem if something goes wrong, and usually it doesn't.

If that doesn't make sense to you, consider that there is an evolutionary process in play. The particular ways in which mismatches cause real problems tend to get squeezed out of the system by the very failures they create, whereas all the harmless mismatches can persist. And yeah, eventually some of those "harmless" mismatches will get upgraded to "whoops less harmless than we thought", but they will be the exceptions, not the rule, and calling in advance which they will be is a lot harder than meets the eye.

There's kind of a variant of Gell-Mann Amnesia at work here; $YOU know that in the specific place you work, paperwork is a faint echo of reality, documentation is perpetually underinvested in, processes are constantly diverging from the paper processes, the field workers in charge of managing paperwork generally coevolve a particular "flavor" of compliance that passes initial checks but may have shall we say "complicated" relationships with reality... but $YOU think that all the other paperwork in the world is being done studiously by superhumans with unflagging concentration, impeccable ethics, and presumably, about 96 hours in their day. It seems to be built into the human condition somehow. Somehow, we are all bureaucrats at heart.

A lot of people defending Boeing are simply using the Trump playbook. Which always goes as follows: Yes it's true -- Boeing may be bad -- but even Airbus is worse! It must be the entire industry that is doing this due to increased scrutiny on Boeing -- drain the airline industry swamp!

McDonnell-Douglas have no involvement with Airbus and Airbus still maintains an immaculate safety record the past few years relative to Boeing. Boeing alone was never the issue -- their partnership with McDD however has caused these issue perhaps the US gov should buy out their stake with a compulsory purchase order for the sake of national security.

Boeing is only a few disasters away from a complete loss in confidence in the company at this point.

No, this is relatively new. This is the result of decades of the quest to "dismantle the regulatory state".

The book Flying Blind is a thorough account of how Boeing transformed from a respectable engineering shop to a business-school-jock-run FAA revolving door. Unabated capitalism sort of doesn't work when your planes are losing pieces mid-air and Airbus is eating your dinner.

Not surprisingly, there are solid arrows leading to GE and Jack Welch.

According to the Netflix documentary on Boeing’s culture and engineering problems, those have been there for years. Falsifying quality reports had been going on regularly at Boeing. Quality engineers were harassed out of their positions, and this was all lead by the executives in charge.

This was the stuff that former quality engineer and whistleblower was in the middle of a five day deposition when he died to a gunshot wound. Allegedly “self-inflicted”.

This stuff isn’t being uncovered so much that there had been people loudly trying to tell this to the world for years now. What’s changed is that with the series of very public failures and flight safety, it’s become difficult to spin this away. In addition, the executives may be facing felonies — not for harassing whistleblowers, but in regards to flight safety.

It’s galling to hear them “celebrate” the whistleblower for the issues reported in this article. Boeing used to have a culture where quality was the top concern, ahead of profits. With three whistleblowers dead in the past several months, the optics is not looking good for Boeing. Maybe this is more spin.

> With three whistleblowers dead

I thought it is 2…?

Looks like I was wrong. The Guardian article published four days ago reports two, not three.

Auto manufactures issue recalls fairly regularly. To me, this shows how easy it is to "miss" something, or let something questionable pass and hope for the best while knowing there is a mechanism in place to bring things back. Food industry also has recall notices frequently. Both of these industries have inspections not by the manufacturing company. Boeing weaseled their way into self inspection and certification. OF COURSE things went bad. I can think of no examples of self policing working, ever. They eye of Sauron is on Boeing, but it is of their own making.

It is the result of the McDonnell Douglas Merger. McDonnell Douglas' focus on affordability and shareholder value replaced Boeing's passion for great planes.

It is kinda funny - Boeing bought the company but it was McDonnell Douglas executives who held the rulership of the merged company

Boeing's Downfall: A Tale of Corporate Culture, Greed, and Safety Compromises https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boeings-downfall-tale-corpora....

The person who started critical changes in culture was a Boeing lifer - who also merged in McDonnel-Douglas.

This is a Boeing specific problem. Boeing does things which no other company would dare doing, the failure on engineering the MAX is simply inexcusable. The same goes for the failure to correctly plug a door. These things don't happen by chance, they can only happen if you have a deep institutional rot in your organization. These things don't happen by chance, because the systems are designed in a way such that they can never happen. If they do happen the system has failed.

The entire airline industry knows that if you are lax on safety critical issues, there will be consequences. The consequences over the last few years have focused on Boeing, because it actually is a Boeing problem.

How am I supposed to have any confidence I won't be the next casualty/news headline if I travel on a Boeing plane (which feels like the majority of planes in America)?

insert meme: that's the neat part, you don't

Feels like Boeing is trying to shift the blame on the individual instead of their incentive and corporate culture about missed inspections.

Its not the company, but rather x individual that falsified their safety report. Don't worry, we'll fire them and everyone can forget about this. Is the feeling I'm getting.

They remember that VW "it was a lone developer" play.

who was charged and went to prison

Also, that one bank employee (Kareem Serageldin) that went to jail over the financial crisis.

Don't worry guys, we got him.

An utter disgrace.

Then they would have forgotten that former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn was indicted on fraud and conspiracy charges.

That was 4 years ago, and the case has not gone to trial.

Trial is starting this year: https://apnews.com/article/germany-volkswagen-diesel-scandal...

It was all the fault of this one guy not doing his job. Also, it's just a coincidence that we fired his peers who were doing their jobs, and that the one who went to the feds was found dead in his car recently.

Exactly this. Could it be we told the safety inspector to do X inspections a day (which would be literally impossible) or be reprimanded? Nope, it's the person's fault for falsifying the inspection. No need to do a root cause analysis.

How many organizations of similar size bamboozle regulators?

When a fast food restaurant is responsible for an ecoli outbreak, regulars are quick to point out broken processes in the organization that need fixed.

It's a bit of reactionary theater, where both sides are playing a game to show that they are not the source of the problem. If you are the regulator, there is plenty of motivation to show the world you are doing your job by pointing to missteps in a process. If you are the offender, there is plenty of motivation to concede to "some" failures in process, cut your losses, and show that you are improving.

Everyone, if you could just submit your TPS reports on time that would be great.

Regulators are generally blinder when it comes to huge organizations. Boeing is a huge DOD contractor. They have a direct line to people at the top of the US govt., just like other huge organizations.

It is a big fish, and it is hard to fry.

US govt. discussed shut downs during COVID with largest organizations in the US before they even occurred. Some knew they were coming before anything was announced.

It isn't some kind of conspiracy either, most governments will "care" more about the biggest contractors and businesses in their nation.

I sincerely hope this whole Boeing debacle will be used as wake-up call for other large corporations, or the general public.

Most of them are not as safety-critical, but some of them are, thinking about Big Pharma and Chemical giants...

Not sure what you mean: there have, to-date, been no repercussions for Boeing! They're getting away with all kinds of shit here!

In an ideal world, companies with a massive safety-related function should have Warhammer 40k gun servitors hovering over the execs in the event they cut corners on safety with orders to empty the clip!

Boeing are really a gov extension these days from what I can see.

I vote for the servitors. Either that or an arco-flagellant on quick dispatch for the entire room.

That aside, yes, Boeing and in EU Airbus are very much intertwined with government. It's inevitable when their products are strategically important and barriers to entry high. It's unfortunate, but that's how it is.

Better to lobotomize the entire c-suite into servitors for tech heresy.

https://www.pewpewtactical.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Ma...

Clips help fill internal magazines on older weapons. A servitor drone would have a magazine.

Just being pendantic but I think you'd want "dump a mag into c-suite executives found guilty of corruption in safety critical industries." I'd also say since we don't currently have servitor drones we may have to do it ourselves.

In an ideal world of course.

In an ideal 40k world, the c-suite would already have been lobotomized into servitors to serve penance for tech heresy.

I wouldn't say they haven't had any repercussions. The whole 737 Max debacle cost them an estimated $20 billion (https://web.archive.org/web/20201221001329/https://www.cnn.c...).

But I do agree that overall there needs to be more repercussions. Unfortunately they are a "too big to fail" kind of company considering how critical they are to the aviation industry as a whole.

For the military boeing is too big to fail.

Accountability seems to be slower in the pharma industry, but it did come for Theranos and Purdue. There doesn't seem to be the same kind of safety issue, only horrific pricing issues and a complicated supply problem for certain kinds of medications.

I don’t see how we can say that pharmaceuticals don’t have serious safety issues.

Consider Vioxx:

> Merck withdrew the drug after disclosures that it withheld information about rofecoxib's risks from doctors and patients for over five years, allegedly resulting in between 88,000 and 140,000 cases of serious heart disease.

Vioxx is fine. Just improper disclosures. Many patients who it was right for lost out because of the withdrawal

Noting though that barring extreme cases, a safety issue with a batch of drugs would be really hard to detect.

I'd hope it'd be a signal that we can't allow an industry to regulate itself

We already had a strong and clear signal from the financial industry in 2008...

I will say it's having an impact on me personally. In the tech world, we work in 2 week Sprints and Sprints have Stories. Stories are Pointed efforts rated on level of effort that need to be completed within a single Sprints. Developers can only be allotted X number of Points per Sprint. If stories aren't done, then you usually need to reflect on why and improve, typically breaking down high pointed stories into smaller ones. The problem with many organizations face is that instead of leaving a Story open and answering the why, they'll simply close the problem Story and open a new one with the missed worked. This causes problems all over the place and snowballs if not addressed. In my situation, we also cancelled Retros so concerns weren't being raised further compounding things and finger pointing.

So what may have started as an over zealous developer with a well intentioned manager can become a trend leading to missed deadlines, cut corners and defective code making it to production.

I started to realize that I was no different than Boeing; that I was Boeing and that hasn't sat right with me. So for better or worse, I'm going to be more vocal about things.

Except that people aren't dying as a result

Yes, this is all about risk tolerance. If a component on a website doesn't function as expected, it rarely kills people. Flight engineering should have the lowest risk tolerance possible. This is expensive, but necessary.

Joke's on you, he works on engineering software used in a highly safety critical industry! /s

Managers with spreadsheets are the cause in both cases though?

> I sincerely hope this whole Boeing debacle will be used as wake-up call for other large corporations

Why would it? Stock's still up from 2016, higher than Airbus has ever been and those who sold between 2018 and 2020 made absolute bank.

It's not hurt any current board or C-suite member to say nothing of those who actually taken the strategic decisions leading to the current fallout, I've not seen anyone seriously suggesting Stonecipher should be even mildly inconvenienced.

Unless the whole management got enough punishment, it's only going to serve as incentive for them to keep the old way.

Like, put your feets into their shoes -- wouldn't you?

By saying enough punishment, I meant at least something like Enron -- Exec went to jail, regulation people got slashed and hacked, company re-structured as we cannot afford to lose it.

I'm not a fan of industry "self-regulation."

Everyone keeps calling for it (as opposed to government regulation), but these stories keep popping up.

We need to have self-regulation success stories to be highlighted, if we want to go that way.

I believe it's time to nationalize Boeing, remove their leadership and replace them with engineers.

The people who run the company should be the people who know how to build planes. It's in our economic and industrial and defense interest to have a well run, high quality aerospace manufacturer.

>it's time to nationalize Boeing

I seem to have lost the thread between that and

> The people who run the company should be the people who know how to build planes. It's in our economic and industrial and defense interest to have a well run, high quality aerospace manufacturer.

As a reminder, the leadership competitions in bureaucracy select for loyalty to the bureaucracy, not the bureaucracy's stated mission. Exceptions are rare and fleeting.

I may suggest that the link between the two statements is exactly to escape from the trap you talked about. If the leadership is elected by the state rather than by internal competition, you don't end up with a group of people who are loyal to themselves but with a meritocratic leadership.

I liked the analogy with hyenas and Saint Bernard's. The Saint Bernard is high-maintenance, require lots of care and attention. They are very loyal but need to constantly be told what to do. The hyena is highly opportunistic, they see and hear everything and need to be monitored constantly or they run off with your company. They over-sell everything specially themselves. The Saint Bernard's all need their own pen or they cant write, if there is one pen in the building all of the hyenas can write.

Yeah, but actually, that nationalize part isn't something in trend in USA, isn't it ?

Gwynne Shotwell, engineer and COO of SpaceX maybe considered from the job of CEO of Boeing. It seems to me more USA-ish move than nationalize Boeing. Don't know witch one is the best for Boeing in the end.

I'd say reversing the McDonnell Douglas merging via antitrust enforcement would be a more promising route given the issues the US government has with running anything competently.

If the FAA can't hire competent independent inspectors then just let the competitor do the inspection and tie the bonuses for inspectors to finding something wrong with the competition's planes.

FAA can't hire because Congress and Bush Jr. took away the money to do so and instituted a policy of self-checking for corps.

Reversing McDonnell Douglas merger wouldn't really work, the remaining product lines that could be separated are very much non-overlapping.

> Stocker said the company would “celebrate” the employee who spoke up.

My advice to this employee: run.

Interesting read regarding "missed inspections": https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

It's a well known phenomenon that over time profits tend to fall [1]. Investors demand growth however so the consequence is obvious: all companies will tend to try and increase prices and/or cut costs to maintain profits.

Raising prices tends to lower demand. It might be the case that a lower volume at higher margin leads to a higher gross profit but often it doesn't. So raising prices tends to be limited to where demand is ineleastic or you have or can construct a monopoly or enclosure of some kind.

So most companies have to resort o cutting costs. This means suppressing wages and doing what Boeing has done in spades: using subcontracting to lower costs. Being is now in the FAFO phase of cost-cutting. Since around the time of the McDonnell-Douglas merger, the engineers lost and the accountants won.

Once again, this Steve Jobs quote [2] is apropos.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0

>So raising prices tends to be limited to where demand is ineleastic or you have or can construct a monopoly or enclosure of some kind.

United States Medical

Anyway, outside of that, this typically is a good thing. $200 flat screen tvs make it easier to live life. I remember moving out of my parents house and being amazed at how affordable the minimum products were. Yes offbrand TV with 50 hz, yes you $2/lb meat with 30% fat, yes your shower curtain was a pain in the butt to install... But making 19k/yr, I could afford it.

> $200 flat screen tvs make it easier to live life.

From what I've been reading, those cheap TV's won't last more than 3 years. So those poor people will end up spending more on TV's than if they bought an old-style expensive TV. Same thing with shoes, rent, cars, etc.

? I am still using my 200 dollar tv from 2012.

If you want to repeat a fiction story about boots, that's fine, but its still a fiction story.

That's more typical of the "Black Friday special". That TV cuts corners that don't make sense to cut, but the reputational damage that a super cheap low volume TV causes is minimal to none.

TV's from Hisense and TCL are fine

Total nonsense. Do you not know what is happening in the airline industry right now?

Boeing is not facing a stagnant market, they have customers even now begging them to give them planes as soon as possible. What Boeing is trying to do is fill enormous demand, they actually could easily grow if they had the leadership capacity to do so.

At what point do we say "This company is rotten to the core and needs shut down"? This article alleges that they may be falsifying safety stuff!

It's not like they're making lollipops ffs... they're transporting millions of people per day in things that cannot afford to have issues... ever!

Sure, I understand that the media has them under a spotlight right now but even so!

On another note this quote got me laughing: "Stocker said the company would “celebrate” the employee who spoke up."

"Yeah, Mike, just step out the back while Tony and Big Joe celebrate you in the alleyway here"! :)

Boeing is in the position of TBTF. The best can happen is a change of management but this doesn't solve anything. Good leadership does not grow like grass, and if the soil is corrupt none grows.

IMO there needs to be personal criminal responsibility for safety related issues in an engineering org like this. We did this in New Zealand a few years back, you can get prosecuted and sent to prison for wilfully ignoring safety issues that cause serious injury or death, and that responsibility exists at every level up to the board.

I’m not knowledgeable in this area, is there any precedent or legal method for the US government unilaterally shutting down a large publicly traded conglomerate (purely as a hypothetical)?

Not that I think they’d actually do it, I’m just curious if it’s even possible.

I imagine they could bog them down with lawsuits but Boeing has a deep war chest and it would take many years.

Yes, the US can nationalize a company. And it's happened before [1]. The current political climate means there's no appetite for any party to alienate actual or potential donors by doing something like this however. The one exception is banks where the FDIC can (and does) take over nonperforming banks all the time [2].

Think of it as eminent domain but for companies.

[1]: https://thenextsystem.org/history-of-nationalization-in-the-...

[2]: https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/in-...

Not just Boeing, all of their shareholders, including institutional ones. This would essentially be an edict that the stock price is now $0, modulo liquidation plans. But I don’t think you could declare the company too rotten to operate and also sell off its operations, so enterprise value would be best case. Oh, and many of its assets in the form of planes would presumably be instantly devalued/worthless.

It’s a fun hypothetical (unless you work for Boeing), but I don’t think there’s a legal precedent or a good outcome even if it were possible.

This would almost certainly fail legally on "taking" grounds.

It also fails politically, since Boeing is a critical US defence contractor, and the US is not going to cut off its supply of parts for military aircraft. Killing Boeing is a fantasy.

A more practical approach would be to fine them a huge amount of money after a fair investigation and trial. Then, when the company is forced to declare bankruptcy or is on the brink of it, the US Government could buy the company out of bankruptcy, replacing all executive management and run it for a enough time to ensure that corrections have been implemented, then the Government could take the company public again and divest itself.

Not sure about the US but in the UK, the government can close companies down for things like not filing taxes or failing to pay them for example. So it wouldn't be outwith the realms of possibility that a company making planes that are potentially unsafe could have their doors closed!

I'm not mega pro-government intervention but there are times I'd like to think my gov has my back... this is one of them!

shutting it fully down would likely be very difficult, but the FAA definitely has the authority to not certify any Boeing planes for a couple years and let Boeing go bankrupt

you’ve heard how the government certifies these things right? they allow the company to inspect and certify.

yes. they can stop doing that (and in fact have already walked back some of that)

Because Bush Jr. government policy ordered them to and reduced funding for inspections.

In principle it is possible. But shutdown isn't what you want. Because that would cause job losses, collapse of supply chain and all of that horror.

You need restructuring. Replace management, take control over the direction. Keep things running while the mess is resolved. It's not going to be fast, an it's not going to look nice. But at this point there are no other options.

The federal government did take over GM somehow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reor...

All this Boeing thing is now really seriously dangerous, up to life threatening.

Something seems REALLY wrong. Maybe time to ramp up the type of "services" to understand what is going up there...

I sure hope the investigation finds some fault with management for creating an environment where falsifying records was considered an option.

Always remember that one guy testifying that he saw employees jumping with their feet on airplane parts to insert them in somewhere. LOL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278391

really excited to be flying one these in 36 hours

Oh, there might be some exciting in-flight moments!

I read that Boeing's new natural ventilation system was quite breathtaking.. And, if you are in the right seat, you might get a better outside view!

If companies are people in the US after how many crimes does a company get a life sentence or death penalty?

For a split second I thought how ironic there were 787 missed inspections.

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