Department of Justice says Boeing may be criminally liable in 737 MAX crashes
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
Narrator: You wouldn't believe.
Business woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?
Narrator: A major one.
While I think I get your point, I also believe that the background is very important. If your company applied standard engineering procedures, that's critically different from building a new product and actively hiding the differences with respect to the last one.
> The prototype was convincing even when we tried to fool it. De-clutching leaves the car coasting, and selecting lower gears increases the regenerative braking, simulating the feeling of engine braking. When downshifting, it's possible to rev match by blipping the accelerator in the brief moment when the clutch is fully depressed. The penalty for letting the clutch up too abruptly when selecting a low gear is a bump of shift shock—momentarily over-revving the electric motors—and a similar lack of finesse when trying to pull away without sufficient revs results in a virtual stall.
Sure, simulating the stall characteristics of an aeroplane is several orders of magnitude worse than simulating the stall characteristics of a car, but… still.
(The feature sounds stupid to me)
It’s not about max speed but enjoying the experience of driving.
(And it makes those steering wheel flappy paddles at least somewhat useful. The paddles on mine just change the regenerative braking level...which could have been done with a steering wheel button.)
Apparently they used to behave to cvts but people hated that so they switched to faking gears. Maybe your car predates that, I don't know what year they started doing that non-sense.
Boeing 737 MAX 7 is 138,699 lbs vs 737 800 @ 90,710lb vs 737 100 @ 61.994 lbs. Hell the new 737 MAX 10 is ~203,000 lb.
Boeing was trying to pretend scaling the aircraft again and again wasn’t significant due to regulations and physics eventually disagreed.
In addition, the door-plug issue is tied in here on account of the 2021 deferred prosecution agreement, which also followed from Boeing's duplicity over the MAX issue.
You’re skipping over the first half of my statement. If the unexpected difficulties had been handled openly they would have needed to go through more regulatory hurdles. Physics didn’t put them into some kind of catch 22 situation the aircraft could have been safe, it just couldn’t be safe while playing games with regulators. That’s where criminal liability shows up.
The point I have been making all along is that, regardless of what led Boeing to the point of choosing to hide or misrepresent the situation, it is the choice to do so that turns this into a potentially criminal matter. With the same physical/technical problems but proper and timely disclosure of the issues during development, by far the most likely outcome would have been a delayed program delivering MAXes substantially similar (in both construction and operation) to the ones which are certified and flying today. After that, even in the unlikely event that the crashes had occurred, criminal prosecution would be unlikely, and certainly not on the basis of the facts for which it is currently being considered.
Except they aren’t beside the point.
> substantially similar (in both construction and operation)
The physical aircraft would have been similar, but airlines would have spent 10’s of millions more on training which makes a real difference to them and thus sales.
Boeing could have released the aircraft on exactly the same date while complying with the spirit of relevant relations though at higher costs, but the product would have been meaningfully worse from a sales perspective. Even today regulators have allowed Boeing and the airlines to treat the 737 MAX family as much more closely related to earlier 737’s than they actually are.
In addition, even if it is true that regulators have now allowed Boeing and the airlines to treat the 737 MAX family as much more closely related to earlier 737’s than they actually are, this is not the basis of the DOJ's investigation, either.
Regulators aren’t at issue, but trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny is. Or as is often said it’s the coverup that they get you for.
I won't dispute the implicit claim that this was an important factor in Boeing running into development difficulties, but running into development difficulties is not a crime. Materially misrepresenting the state of the development process (specifically (IMHO) the magnitude of the high-AofA handling problem, rather than merely weight issues) to the FAA is a crime, and it is this, not the fact that Boeing ran into technical difficulties, that is the point of DOJ's investigation, the article, and the discussion here of it.
So when it failed and pilots had no idea what the issue was people died. The crazy thing here is telling pilots about it could have prevented those crashes even with an absolutely identical aircraft being released.
The second omission from this summary is any mention of Boeing's interaction with the FAA staff having the responsibility for certifying the MAXes as airworthy (together with the adequacy of the flight manuals and training materials), and yet, in all other accounts I have seen, Boeing misrepresented (to put it mildly) the extent to which MCAS was modifying the handling characteristics of the airplane and therefore the consequences of its failure and the need for pilots to know about it. No-one else, as far as I am aware, disputes the fact that the DOJ's investigation is centered on this dissembling (together with similar dissembling relating to the plug door incident, which is being included on account of the MAX issue being in a deferred prosecution status.) Once your account here is augmented with this missing information, it becomes clear that this pattern of dissembling is what the DOJ is investigating as a possible crime, as I have been saying all along.
Now you want to extend this disagreement by disputing my characterization of Boeing's difficulties in developing the MAXes as being, well, development difficulties! It is not clear to me what point you are trying to make by doing so, but to be clear, I am most certainly not dismissing the tragedy as merely a matter of development difficulties. On the contrary, I am saying that this became a criminal matter precisely when Boeing went beyond treating the matter as an above-the-board technical problem, and started misleading the FAA.
The problem with the Max is aerodynamics: Civil airplanes are designed with negative aerodynamic feedback, so the nose-down torque (“pitching moment”) increases as the AoA increases. But on the Max at very high AoA this feedback torque becomes somewhat smaller due to interaction of airflow around the engines and the wing. That by itself is not a problem because the nose-down torque still exists and airframe is still stable.
There is a regulatory requirement that the amount of pilot’s control force required to maintain a given AoA must be a non-decreasing function of AoA[1]. Due to the Max’s aerodynamics, this requirement is not met.
Boeing’s MCAS was a bandaid to make the plane meet regulations by applying nose-down trim while at high AoA. The trim results in a higher yoke force, so the plane meets the requirement. A better method would have been a “stick pusher” (which have been used as stall prevention devices for over 50 years, though not on the 737) or addition ventral fins (like on the Beech 1900). But either of those would have probably required recertification
[1] The purpose of this is to reduce pilot-induced oscillations: see what happened with AA flight 587, where the lack of a similar requirement for rudder pedals and yaw led to PIO which ultimately resulted in the tail falling off an Airbus.
No, you are confusing the empty weight of the 737-800 with the mass gross takeoff weight of the 737 max 7.
The correct comparison of MGTW is 174,200 (-800) vs 177,000 (max 7).
Similarly, the -100’s MGTW was 110,000, not 61,994. Also, the only source I can find for the max 10 is 197,900, not 203,000.
Edit: so the plane grew by 80%, not 320%
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States
Babies are worth a lot of money even at a low imputed earning potential just because they have so much life to live.
This is very different than the recall story, because in that scenario there is no cost to the public at all, only to the corporation. When government agencies make rules about product recalls, they do not try to balance the benefit to the public against the cost to the recalling company, that would be insane.
See the DoT's own guidance here: https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2021-03/D.... They do not at all use this figure in the same way that a profit-driven entity does.
> The benefit of preventing a fatality is measured by what is conventionally called the Value of a Statistical Life, defined as the additional cost that individuals would be willing to bear for improvements in safety (that is, reductions in risks) that, in the aggregate, reduce the expected number of fatalities by one.
The word "individuals" is very important in this definition.
...assuming they don't pass it on to the customers
What do you mean it would be illegal? Obviously the corporation prices in all the expected future recalls into their prices. Yes they won't charge you for the recall, but the future costumers will pay higher prices if in the corporation's calculation the chance of recalls (or the cost of doing them) is increased.
> What do you mean it would be illegal? Obviously the corporation prices in all the expected future recalls into their prices. Yes they won't charge you for the recall, but the future costumers will pay higher prices if in the corporation's calculation the chance of recalls (or the cost of doing them) is increased.
Why oh why do I have to read this on HN again and again? The price of a good does not primarily depend on the cost to make it. So no Boeing can't easily raise their future prices to account for the cost of saving lifes, because there are competitors.
Unfortunately, in Boeing's case there aren't very many competitors.
> Why oh why do I have to read this on HN again and again?
This is unnecessarily confrontational.
As the other commenter has mentioned, it's passed on via higher prices in the future.
>This is beside the point though. The government asks "would the average person be willing to pay $x to lower their chance of death by y%". The corporate executive asks "would I be willing to pay >$0 to lower their chance of death by y%". "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
Okay, but surely you don't agree that Boeing should spend infinite amounts of money making their planes safe? For instance we don't install backup engines on the off chance that all 2 engines fail. That's all I'm trying to argue, that the cold calculation/cost benefit analysis as mentioned in the OP isn't where Boeing went wrong, it's that they they undervalued the value of a human life. This was specifically mentioned in my original comment.
I agree that the ceiling for how much money you could spend trying to make an airplane perfectly safe is infinite, so by definition they have to stop somewhere. However, I disagree that finding that line of where to stop has anything to do with the statistical value of a human life.
For example, imagine the Boeing CEO says "we could spend $20 billion on R&D and manufacturing of a new safety system that would on average prevent 1 crash per year, but a 737 MAX carries 200 people, at $15M per life that's only $3 billion in value, so it's obviously better for us to skip it and pass that $20 billion on to shareholders". This would be criminal, and not because their value of a life is off and they got the math a little bit wrong. It's criminal because they are consciously choosing to kill people unnecessarily.
If it is physically and financially possible to make your product safer, you do it, without any thought to how much a life is worth. If it is not possible, because you can't figure out how to solve a problem or it would be so expensive to fix that your business couldn't survive, then you sit down and think about whether it's worth selling your product at all. Are there safer alternatives available? Could a better-funded company fix the flaws you've found? If you determine that your product is important, there are no alternatives out there, and it cannot be made safer, only then do you start weighing the benefits to society against the deaths you expect to occur. I don't really think this is a financial decision involving the value of a life - if you expect your product to kill people then the expected benefits need to be so overwhelming that doing the financial math is unnecessary.
It is not criminal and I have no idea how anyone can think it is.
The crime is in the first paragraphs of the article:
>Boeing has violated a 2021 agreement that shielded it from criminal prosecution after two 737 Max disasters killed 346 people overseas, the Justice Department told a federal judge in a court filing Tuesday.
>According to the Justice Department, Boeing failed to "design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the U.S. fraud laws throughout its operations."
So to recap, they were agreed to implement internal rules that match US laws after killing a bunch of people to avoid criminal liability, _which they failed to do_.
A cursory glance at how literally any product is designed will tell you that this is not true.
All engineering is fundamentally compromise between utility functions and cost functions (where cost is monetary, or weight, or size, or poor usability, ugliness etc). There's always a balance point somewhere. It may be the cost/benefit functions to the user differ from those of the manufacturer, and again to regulators, so the product appears out-of-balance to one or the other, but a meta-balance was struck somewhere.
If every light switch was a 2-foot, 200kg cube with a titanium shell filled with monitoring electronics running on lockstepped processors, fire suppression and potting compound, and was tested individually for a year before sale, it's still not as safe as one with six grounding points (in case the first 5 fail) and triple-thick gold plating on the contacts. You have to stop somewhere.
In the case of a normal light switch, for example, two cable screws rather than one per wire would be safer than one as the cables are less likely to come adrift. This would easily be affordable for the manufacturer and the buyer, and well within the abilities of the manufacturer. And yet no light switch has those.
And every aircraft manufacturer could think of something the costs $20 billion to develop and adds safety but they don't, unless the product is unsafe already The one crash a year is, to be fair, solidly in the unsafe end of the spectrum, but would they spend the same to avoid a once in 10,000 year crash and if not, what's the cut-off? There must be a cut-off or it would be impossible for any manufacturer of anything to make any profit, ever, as all spare cash must go into safety system research. And this is demonstratively not what they do.
Boeing has a slightly different problem in that they actively made something less safe and lied about it. They'd have gotten away with it but they flubbed the execution with a single point of failure, which made it easier to line up the Swiss cheese holes and the rest is history.
Yes, I know - I think I read the parent comment as "If it is physically and financially [reasonable] to make your product safer, you do it"
This is basically what I was taught working in automotive safety.
> ... what's the cut-off? There must be a cut-off...
There's no hard $$ or other cutoff though, it's a soft cutoff that may come down to engineers and/or management arguing about what is really safer.
> Boeing has a slightly different problem in that they actively made something less safe and lied about it.
Yes I agree, for Boeing it is different, reading about their management's intention destruction of positive safety culture is sickening.
We used to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
Each person can just choose individually a different manufacturer from the many options, one being "none at all". But you only get one government, it takes a majority to choose, and once chosen you're bound to its directions. So not the same thing at all.
Take for instance the recent train derailments. Are the costs of cleanup n>0 if the company can get their lawyers to successfully argue they don’t need to pay it? For the company it’s n=0 but for society it is n>0.
Doing the maths is simpler when you can disregard many factors and leave only the ones that affect your bottom line.
The issue with Boeing and the MAX is that they sort of used the designation of the plane to for lack of a better term, avoid some of the risk calculations.
With the early issues, a pretty cut and dry type training program would have likely prevented catastrophic incidents. They shaved pennys and set many dollars (and hundreds of people) on fire.
If you run a company where low probability, high impact risks drive the operations of your products, setting trust on fire is going to have a real impact on your bottom line. You go from a trusted, admired company to target of memes about assassinated whistleblowers.
Basically either it didn’t require recertification or it wasn’t worth making. I suspect somewhere along the line they realized that wasn’t practical and they either shipped a shoddy project and maybe burned a pile of money or they gave up and definitely burned a smaller but still sizable pile of money.
Probably also some worry that if they didn’t have a competitive smaller plane, they’d lose market share and there’d be even less interest in their next plane.
Despite that, they made a coscious decision to deceive airlines, pilots, and their regulators. All to "maximize shareholder value".
That's what's criminal.
The US Coast Guard explicitly stated that they "do not associate cost with saving a life" following that fateful Billionaires game of chicken with extreme water pressure.
Z = brand trust
2. Boeign exists
Get some data and graph it. It’s long tail
Somehow I think this phrase would have been better without the word "overseas". After all (to quote the old Depeche Mode song), people are people, no matter if they're from the US, Ethiopia or Indonesia, so the fact that it happened overseas shouldn't make a plane crash less relevant. Although, if the first crash had happened in the US, maybe the increased scrutiny would have led to the second one being avoided...
Nah, the US is extremely aggressive all over the world, to the extent I'm not sure anyone in that country understands the word jurisdiction outside of state/federal in their own context. Be it extradition of people committing crimes elsewhere/online, enforcing their own sanctions on companies in other countries, and tons of other things. Otherwise you wouldn't have Ukrainians getting extradited to the US for running torrent websites in Ukraine, Australians being extradited for running leak websites, French banks being fined for working with Iranian businesses, Colombians and Mexicans being assassinated or extradited for running drug empires in their own countries exporting to the US, kidnapping random civilians to be tortured based on their name/watch model, a law being on the books allowing the army to invade any place that held American war criminals (like the Hague and the courts there) and on and on and on.
E.g. Artem Vaulin didn't commit crimes in the US by running a torrent website from his home in Ukraine, yet he was extradited and sued by a court in Illinois, instead of a court in Ukraine where his alleged crimes took place.
Random guys kidnapped by the CIA didn't commit crimes in the US either.
While the DoJ's often-obnoxious international behavior gets plenty of attention, the "how much does this matter to the US?" threshold for them to get involved rises sharply beyond the US border. And the legal basis for their involvement (Boeing does have lawyers, to argue the details in court) often changes, too.
OR - if a small-time, local crook is robbing US banks, how likely is the DoJ to get involved? (Hint: Answer includes "FBI".) Vs. how many small-time, local bank robbers is the DoJ chasing in Canada? Poland? Thailand?
It de facto allow foreign nationals to sue parties with sufficient ties to the US (most black money ends up in the US in some way) in Federal Courts for human rights violations committed outside the United States
We also have the Magnitsky Act that allows US sanctions on foreign politicians found to have been corrupt (and it's named after the accountant who Jamison Firestone hired to manage his Russian business and who was assassinated for his investigations into corruption and malfeasance)
There are a slew of additional laws, acts, and precedents that allow the DoJ to step in (or allow foreign nationals to push the DoJ to step in) if bad practices arise.
Unsurprisingly, both China and Russia have been very vocally opposed to both acts, as it makes laundering ill gotten gains much harder.
Source?
>a law being on the books allowing the army to invade any place that held American war criminals (like the Hague and the courts there) and on and on and on.
Seems reasonable, considering they don't recognize such organizations. If they held Americans for crimes, it'd basically be kidnapping.
In practical terms, America's policy is that might makes right - an attractive policy, when you've got the might.
Extradition is essentially a one-way affair: Ukrainian Artem Vaulin runs a torrent website hosted in Ukraine? Arrest and extradition at America's demand. An American like Anne Sacoolas kills someone in the UK by negligent driving? No extradition.
> Arrest and extradition at America's demand.
Was he extradited? The article you linked to suggests not.
> Anne Sacoolas kills someone in the UK by negligent driving? No extradition. This article says: "Sacoolas admitted causing death by careless driving, which carries a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment. Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said Sacoolas' actions were "not far short of deliberately dangerous driving," but she reduced the penalty because of Sacoolas' guilty plea and previous good character."
Which seems to suggest you should blame a UK judge for letting Sacoolas go free, no?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harry-dunn-uk-anne-sacoolas-sus...
By the time it got to trial, Sacoolas was already beyond the reach of law. The only decision the judge faced was whether to further the controversy or brush it under the rug.
He tried to get his case dismissed on the basis that he wasn't in the US, and that motion was dismissed by a judge[1]. The reasoning given was that even though he was situated in Ukraine, he was doing crimes in the US by abetting Americans in copyright infringement. This seems somewhat reasonable to me. If a Ukrainian was hacking American computer networks from Ukraine, should he also be immune from US prosecution?
But he wasn't actively doing anything to Americans or American networks like hacking. He was hosting a website where people, including Americans, could post links, and use links to download pirated content. The fact that Americans broke their country's laws is a crime they committed, not him.
The judge's reasoning would imply that anything that happens online where Americans could access it and is criminal in the US automatically becomes a crime that happened in the US, which is crazy and total bullshit. Why isn't the US extraditing Hungarian porn actors and porn companies for showing online where Americans can see it exhibitionist porn which would be illegal in many places in the US?
It's a ridiculous case.
But you can bet that if France tries to extradite someone posting antisemitic bullshit on X related to France (e.g. about the recent desecration of the Shoah memorial), US courts will refuse extradition.
The underlying gist is that people important to the government or possessing sensitive knowledge are immune to prosecution from allies to prevent prosecution being a viable method of coercing information from government officials. Ie the US cannot charge a UK ambassador, because that ambassador may be tempted to leak secrets in exchange for leniency.
The same typically goes for family members for the same reason.
In this case Sacoolas had done undercover work for the CIA at some point, so likely had knowledge the State Department did not want leaked. Her husband was active in the CIA and likely also had similar knowledge.
The same is true in reverse. You can look up the court cases, the US has had to drop several cases due to diplomatic immunity.
There is an element of might makes right to diplomatic immunity because there is no real higher power to enforce it. If a country is willing to weather the political fallout (and reciprocal loss of diplomatic immunity), potential hostile action, and can get their hands on the perpetrator, they’re free to ignore diplomatic immunity.
In practice, diplomatic immunity is almost always respected, even when it could probably be ignored, because of onlookers. If the US ignores eg Kenya’s diplomatic immunity (who they can likely afford to piss off), it might worry the UK who the US does not want to piss off.
Diplomatic immunity is very, very rarely ignored, but is waived with some regularity. The US is particularly liberal with granting diplomatic immunity, though, and more reluctant to waive it than most countries.
I agree with you that there is nuance involved.
I would say the precise nuance is irrelevant. Whether Sacoolas had immunity in theory is unimportant - only that she had immunity in practice.
Then she agreed to voluntarily appear (virtually) and plead guilty, but was given a suspended sentence because the judge noted there was no way to enforce any actual punishment.
So you’re right, though it played out basically the same way it would have if she was immune. The UK was never actually able to punish her, but they do technically get to say she was found guilty.
> Seems reasonable, considering they don't recognize such organizations. If they held Americans for crimes, it'd basically be kidnapping.
So if an American is detained in Germany for a crime committed there, that's kidnapping and the US can invade Germany? I'm sure you realise how delusional that is.
Reminds me of when FAA didn't ground the Boeing, despite the fatal crashes because of that association. Instead, it was Chinese aviation authority that did, which forced every other airline to follow suit.
Most likely a fine, round up a few line workers to take the heat, a manager or two, then call it a day.
I think there will be criminal indictments, but the punishment will be monetary and will not damage the company long term.
It would be really hard to put anyone in jail anyway, there's too much diluted responsibility.
I think you're overestimating Europe here.
The biggest problem would be the absence of an European criminal law pertaining to companies.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/agreement...
This is a reference to an existing criminal indictment, for which Boeing entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in which they paid $2.5 billion in penalties and compensation and accepted various behavioral commitments, which DoJ is now saying they have breached, allowing prosecution to be recommenced.
So, no, your prediction is wrong, it is a criminal indictment.
If I had killed someone, would I be allowed to buy my freedom?
Get a very expensive defense team. There are too many instances of people who bought their freedom that way.
But those have their own separate issues, of course.
You mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Team_(law) ?
One difference between an individual and a company is the former can't be guilty of a crime because of knowledge held by the hand and imputed to the person by law, but not possessed by the brain.
Which was pretty much the basis for the deferred prosecution agreement here, and why besides the monetary penalty Boeing was obligated to take steps to prevent similar frauds.
Deferred prosecution saves a lot of money and time, on both sides, as well as deflects some amount of discovery. It also leaves a sword of Damocles over them that if they don’t reform everything they hoped to avoid by paying all that money comes back upon them and worse.
This feels like a pretty effective way to punish and attempt to reform a corporation. The fact Boeing is so managed by the accountants that even their lawyers can’t convince them to stop cutting corners and trying to get away with substandard work to juice EPS is baffling though. The fact literally everyone on earth knows this is the problem yet they are still appointing a new airplanes unit CEO that is an accountant doubly so. (No joke, undergrad in accounting, MBA, both marginal schools)
But material consequences for companies are monetary and since a company’s life is money, that’s actually usually pretty compelling.
In some cases this has been allowed, assuming it was not intentional. For example a neurosurgeon who accidentally hits someone in a crosswalk. The family can ask for no jail time so the surgeon can continue practicing because that's the only way the civil settlement will get paid. This depends on the victim or family's wishes, whether or not the prosecutor will approve, and what the judge thinks.
From a societal view and the victim's view it might be a better outcome to get monetary compensation.
FWIW since Boeing is too big to fail I'd love to see the US Government get rid of the current upper management and board. Put engineers back in charge and move HQ back to Seattle.
Boeing's "new" CEO is another accountant. How much do you think he really cares or even understands the engineering and process issues? And how long do you think that "care" will last once the heat dies down?
I'm not getting off with anything less than jail time.
So to get prosecuted by the DoJ, you'd need to kill one of those groups.
For example, say you shove someone on a plane and they fall and hit their head - federal manslaughter that would likely be a candidate for deferred prosecution.
Doesn’t matter how many they kill with their negligence it’ll just be a slap on wrist
Was all this craziness due to some business magazine article about Southwest Airlines doing so well because they only had one major type of aircraft?
> Southwest integrated AirTran's fleet of Boeing 737-700 series aircraft into Southwest Airlines brand and livery, and the Boeing 717 fleet was then leased out to Delta Air Lines starting in mid-2013
Same as Alaska Airlines getting rid of the A320s they got by acquiring Virgin America. (Although they're in the same predicament again by acquiring Hawaiian).
Not that this matters much since they ended the 757 in 2004.
We can't really know what would have happened but it is possible introducing a telescoping landing gear system to let the 757 MAX sit higher off the ground would have avoided all of these problems. The engines could have remained at their actual design location meaning no need for MCAS. The failure mode would be failure to retract landing gear if the telescoping system failed... rather than uncommanded pitch changes. A simpler failure mode with less risk.
None of this would have helped with Boeing's current problem (and a problem that plagued the 787 too): splitting off bits of the company and massive outsourcing to screw labor as hard as possible.
Folks don't seem to remember the 787 was a huge fiasco because Boeing outsourced so much of that aircraft and their vendors were unable to deliver parts on the required timelines, at the required quality, or in the required quantity. Boeing ended up having to buy a bunch of them to bring work back in-house to rescue the program.
Spirit Aerosystems was just the same strategy: outsource construction of the airframe (!!) by spinning off that department as a separate company so they could easily squeeze their now-vendor which would by design turn around and squeeze the employees. Kick them out of the Boeing retirement plan, cut benefits and pay, etc. Is anyone surprised Spirit filled positions with the cheapest bodies they could find? Think about the whole door fiasco: the ticket filed by Boeing QA was initially closed by the Spirit people basically doing nothing and hoping QA would just close the ticket without checking. That behavior didn't raise any alarms within Boeing indicating it was normal behavior by that point.
I think that’s the key point. I don’t think Boeing could have built _any_ aircraft successfully with that business strategy and culture. If not MCAS, it would have been something else.
So if you have a pension, should we be locking you up 'cause it was partially invested in Boeing?
Alternatively, you can have a specifically named role which is to be held liable? But then as far as the 'company' is concerned it's still just cost of doing business.
There's only three viable ultimate sanctions for a corporate entity: financial, being split up, and the death penalty.
No, they would be better off if they had known what the pilots were doing and stopped the fraud rather than allowing it.
> If there were potentially harsh penalties for allowing this to happen, regardless of knowledge, I think you’d see much better controls put in place, and the incentive would be to keep safety critical operations kept in-house, where they can be better monitored, rather than spun out to make the return on capital look better to public markets.
If you made inaccurate reports to governments a strict liability crime with a harsh pubishment not requiring intent, recklessness,or negligence, I think that would actually be a bad thing and lead people to actively avoid any activity or field of business that might require reporting to the government.
But, in any case, the fraud offenses at issue ARE NOT strict liability crimes now, so people without the requisite knowledge and intent cannot be guilty of them.
Of course, i am in the camp of changing the regulation such that outcomes that would be considered gross neglegence leading to loss of life is layed on the management, regardless of whether the decision is diffused or not. Aka, they hold the statutory responsibility, and is criminally liable - that's the price of being in management. They would get the tools as management to put in place preventative measures, which can be used to cover their ass.
It doesn't. That's not what "limited liability" is for.
> Limited liability is a legal status in which a person's financial liability is limited to a fixed sum, most commonly the value of a person's investment in a corporation, company or joint venture. If a company that provides limited liability to its investors is sued, then the claimants are generally entitled to collect only against the assets of the company, not the assets of its shareholders or other investors. A shareholder in a corporation or limited liability company is not personally liable for any of the debts of the company, other than for the amount already invested in the company and for any unpaid amount on the shares in the company, if any, except under special and rare circumstances permitting "piercing the corporate veil." The same is true for the members of a limited liability partnership and the limited partners in a limited partnership. By contrast, sole proprietors and partners in general partnerships are each liable for all the debts of the business (unlimited liability).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability
(emphasis mine)
so should any vp, second line and even front line managers if they collaborated.
whistleblowers should get government protection. not sure which government, though.
If they individually committed crimes and that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, sure.
Of course, by DoJ’s own description of why they approved the deferred prosecution agreeement, that's absolutely not the case with the 737 Max charges.
Very easily. Companies as aggregates of people beyond just the decision makers can both do actions and have knowledge that the decisionmakers do not, and knowledge and action tend to be important in the definition of crimes.
The problem with modern C-suite culture is that it's no risk, all reward. This does not make sense, and seems unsustainable in the long term.
This is what criminal convictions with large fines do. The Board members and executives then get to spend years in shareholder lawsuits. If those suits turn up evidence of individual criminality, prosecution is on the table.
Hold executives criminally liable. Fine companies, sure, but if people die from gross negligence or due to processes endorsed by leadership, that should end with prison time as a warning to others. Don't let them say they didn't know and that the decisions were spread out over people and time. The buck stops with leadership -- that is, ostensibly, why they make the big bucks. If they couldn't know due to spread out decision making then they set up and perpetuated the wrong system.
Seems like they really should. No business activities, commerce or services for the period of incarceration; the company effectively freezes or ceases to exist.
It would naturally be as life-destroying to the company and its relationships with business partners, customers, employees and those who rely on it as it is to the average joe.
Make up a new position with equal authority as the CEO, but their only charter is safety and compliance. Lift the corporate veil specifically for that role (and only that role) so that they are personally liable for the performance in their role and the safety of the company’s products.
Require that companies halt sales and production if this role is unfilled.
In a free market, no sane human would accept that job unless there was a (legitimately) extremely small risk that they would ever be personally liable.
CEOs need incentive structures like this in order to change their priorities/behaviors.
Sending CEOs to jail is the brute force approach.
The only way honest people would take it is if they outranked the CEO on safety matters.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/iabbdbcbohcifefhimd...
However, there were occasions when the airline rescheduled my flights (for many different reasons), which resulted in me being on a max flight. While I can change one of them, changes to most of them were not practical (time-wise, effort-wise, etc). So, at some point, I have to live with the fact that flying max is unavoidable. Any idea how we can practically circumvent this?
TooBigToJail as they say.
They need witnesses. Like the ones who suddenly die a lot.
No, they won’t. For one thing, the charges aren’t personal charges against the executives, so they don’t have to prove that executives, specifically, knew anything.
The basis of the 737 Max charges that were put on hold because of the deferred prosecution agreement that DoJ has now determined that Boeing violated are addressed by DoJ here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...
https://apnews.com/article/boeing-justice-department-737-max...
Well, it was solid enough that Boeing was willing to pay $2.5 billion plus accept a bunch of behavioral controls not to settle the charges, but simply to get a deferred prosecution agreement in which, if they were really good, they wouldn’t have to face charges for it.
And I don't think he emails much :)
what happened also seems to fall much more squarely under fraud (e.g. lying to the FAA) than simple negligence. failing to notice that they missed steps or didn't complete paperwork would be negligent (which they probably have done), but existing criminal case is about intentionally lying about a design change and it's ramifications to game the certification process. that's really bad. way worse.
Fraud related relating to the 737 Max, plus subsequent violations of a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement (that agreement was why they hadn’t yet been prosecuted for the fraud), and the violations of the non-prosecution agreement also may have included subsequent fraud about matters which contributed to the recent door incidents.
Among other things. There are very strict rules in aircraft manufacturing on procedures to follow, documentation to have, etc. And Boeing have been found lacking to say the least in a number of those.
That plus all the coverups and lying around MCAS are probably enough to put a few people in jail if one had faith in the Justice department.