DOJ to offer Boeing "sweetheart" plea deal in pursuit of criminal charges | Hacker News Reader

DOJ to offer Boeing "sweetheart" plea deal in pursuit of criminal charges

cnn.com

89 pointsBostonFern52 comments

I want to see charges levied against some specific individuals, not an amorphous corporation, in order to drive actual changes to individual’s behavior within said corporation.

The Chief Project Engineer, Michael Teal, would seem to be an appropriate person to be charged. It was his responsibility as the CPE to oversee the safe design and testing of the MAX. It was his responsibility to ensure that adequate engineering processes and resources were in place to assess the safety and certification impact of design changes that occurred as the design matured, in accordance with federal law. (14 CFR §21.93 if you care. Mr. Teal apparently did not.) It was his physical signature on the FAA form 8110-12 Application for Type Certificate that affirmed that all the data provided to the FAA to support certification was true and correct, and it apparently was not. If the Federal Government was defrauded, that would the smoking gun to indicate whodunnit.

https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Form/8110-12_20240...

If you want a laugh, just read the transcript of his testimony before Congress. In my opinion, his answers provide clear evidence of his dereliction of duty.

Insipid local media coverage: https://archive.is/fPy0p

The real meat: https://democrats-transportation.house.gov/imo/media/doc/FIN...

I totally agree that individuals should be targeted, even lower-down people in my opinion. I think it actually protects those people with less authority... when you disobey orders from above in service of executing your duties responsibly it's a meaningful defense to say "people have gone to jail for doing what you are asking me to do."

But I also see why it can't happen. If anyone gets charged they have a lot of rights about what information to bring to their defense. Any single individual can pull in the entirety of Boeing. Because Boeing is strategically important to the country (along several axes) that can't happen. (Just in a realpolitik sense.)

I do wish at least that notable people in leadership were fired with cause. It's inadequate, but at least it's something.

Boeing is a strategic embarrassment to the United States.

Jail 5 layers deep from the CEO to send a message.

Yes, in some sense it's important to have airplane manufacturing capability, but it's not important that it has to be Boeing. And it's definitely not the case that it has to be this iteration of Boeing.

Yes, let the chips fall, clean up the floor, and if it's that important to have this, then the state with the prospective buyers can help restart Boeing. (There are thousands of Boeing planes that need servicing, replacement parts, and there are probably pending orders. It's not like it's a burn pit for money.)

Criminal charges aside, I thought the whole premise of having licensed engineers was that licenses can be revoked if the engineer screws up badly enough. Presumably this CPE has a license in some engineering discipline and should most definitely not have that license anymore, no?

If we can't even get that right we're definitely not going to escalate to criminal charges.

> I thought the whole premise of having licensed engineers was that licenses can be revoked if the engineer screws up badly enough

The cynical take is that the primary role of industry licensing bodies is to limit competition to insiders. I suppose we’ll find out if it’s more realistic than cynical if this individual remains licensed.

Yes and no. In some industries (namely civil), licensed engineers actually deal with the weight of their licenses.

In others it seems like there isn't enough weight for licensed engineers to actually care. A bunch of engineers may work on a project but then a handful quickly go through and sign off on the drawings. You could go through your entire career as a mech E or chem E without getting a license. You still do the same job, just someone else signs off on it.

So there is unfortunately in a lot of places a culture where licensing is less about holding the actual engineers responsible and more about having a designated fall guy to throw to the wolves in the event something goes wrong.

Well, right, but where is the fall guy at Boeing? Someone put their signature on everything, why are they still practicing?

Also, what is the "responsibility" of a C-level, if not for faults like this? I thought that was the argument for getting 7+ figures.

I’m not disagreeing with you, but the whole point of a corporation existing is to have a legal entity that takes responsibility for the work of one or more individuals. The corporation provides the basis for limited liability, to the extent of the law.

In theory, this protection isn’t supposed to cover criminal liability. But we often see it do just that or something adjacent to it. Corporations get punished all the time, but their board of directors, officers, employees, and shareholders rarely do. Even in cases where people knowingly and deliberately make dangerous decisions.

I don’t think this is going to change without fundamentally reconsidering the role of corporations in our society. Which… is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

No. A corporation in an entity formed to provide a limited liability legal shield for the owners and investors of the company. It does not protect the officers who operate the company. Officers of corporations go to jail all the time for violating the law for the benefit of their company. Including Boeing employees, for example, Darlene Drunyun and Michael Sears, if you feel like checking out their Wikipedia entries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_M._Sears

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darleen_Druyun

Thanks for the real meat, the transcript.

So now, why is it forbidden for participants to record the interview also? Apparently only the court is allowed to do so, which makes editing / censoring / falsifying court records really easy. This sounds extremely worrying to me.

I only found this UK legislation https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Guidance...

Generally, courts can strike items from the transcript, if someone misspeaks / reveals things they were not supposed to reveal / if a witness speaks to things that were not part of the question, etc. That mechanism would slip a lot more often if there were multiple recordings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_to_strike_(court_of_law...

I'm pretty sure committees examining confidential materials routinely have someone review the transcript for accidental disclosures.

This is an insult to the whistleblowers. Especially the ones who died.

It’s also a pressure tactic to extract a guilty plea because there’s no negotiation and a one week deadline.

And an insult to the 346 human beings who've died so far in 737 MAX (Max Profit) crashes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

Seems like it would be better to go to trial even if they are not convinced the jury will convict. It's in the publics interest to have all the information out there instead of swept under the rug

This was to be expected. Boeing is vital to national security not because of the aircraft it makes, but the supply chains it sustains.

As long as the USD has any value, Boeing will be kept alive.

If Boeing is so vital they can nationalize it and place actual officials in charge. There's no legitimate reason not to yank the current suits out and throw them in a neglected muddy pit.

I'm not going to argue for or against nationalization; I'm just pointing out why Boeing will be shielded from reality by our government

If it is vital to national security -- not disagreeing there -- it is paramount for everything and everyone to be investigated. You want the defense of NATO and the U.S. to be in the hands of people that can not deliver a plane?

Time for heads to drop and roll, and FBI (or any applicable agency, including DoD) to do a cleanup. That ideally should happen via the Courts too, but placing this under the rug is like inviting known enemies to utilize this weakness.

it's not like US departments can't function with shit placed "under the rug" or anything...

TBF only one NATO member is averse to buying airbus/BAE/Leonardo manufactured stuff.

They should let it go bankrupt and nationalize it like we should have done with banks

That turned out well didn't it? :p

SVB was cleaned up amazingly well.

They didn't. They bailed out the banks and let the managers keep their bonus

that was sarcasm. hence the :p

Rest of us: "Why do you earn the big bucks?"

Executives: "Because we take great risks."

Rest of us: "Oh, this must mean that you either resign or gets fired when you fuck up, right?"

Executives: "Lolz no. We can't do that. We fire other people."

Rest of us: "At least, for major fuck ups, go to jail right?"

Executives: "Roflz no. Hellz naw. That's why created plea deals and pay petty fines."

Rest of us: "Thank you for your service."

Don’t be ridiculous. Plea deals were created by prosecutors so they could eliminate the right to a jury trial by overcharging and making it far too risky to exercise.

This reminds me of the premise in the movie, "Law Abiding Citizen".

I like how people are found dead, there are living whistle blowers, doors fall off planes, processes aren’t followed, complaints, and accusations of forging certifications…

And their stock doesn’t even move on the 3 month timeline. Take the whole market dip away at 6 months and I’m not sure it’s moved at all.

looks like the doj is doing just the slap (or tap?) on the wrist that the market was expecting.

I'm hardly an investment expert, but I wouldn't expect anything to change on the market unless people are actually cancelling orders en masse. If I'm recalling correctly, they're basically already booked solid for the next decade or so.

That leaves a lot of time for them to worry about booking new sales before it becomes an issue.

I couldn't find an easy answer to whether or not that's already happened, though (order cancellations out of the norm).

It’s not that simple. Boeing could be forced to pay a settlement, or retrofit sold airplanes, or make modifications to their manufacturing process that raise their costs, or key executives could resign, or their negotiation of far future deals could suffer, etc etc.

Boeings future isn’t boolean.

I never said it was, but in the context of this issue's specific impact, it seems pretty straightforward to me.

None of the things you mentioned have been even hinted at to my knowledge beyond mere speculation. They also probably won't affect the bottom line much in the long run even if they do happen; some level of unforeseen circumstance mitigation is almost certainly already factored into their business plan. Not to mention the effects of various insurance policies they may or may not have.

Possibility won't move the stock much; probability will. As it stands, it appears that the most likely outcome is that they'll skate, so no movement.

The only other potential to tank it that I see is order cancellations because the aircraft ceases to be viable for the buyers. For most of them, it'll have blown over well before the delivery date anyway, and if it was going to happen, it probably would have by now.

Therefore, nothing to see here... until the next mishap, anyway.

Airbus has big backlogs too. So even if a major carrier wanted to drop a bunch of Boeing orders and switch they can’t get planes any faster. They’ll go at the end of the line and wait even longer. And that ignores new training for maintenance teams and pilots and everyone else who would need it.

It’s a duopoly with reservations far into the future. Airlines don’t have much choice.

Maybe they’ll switch future orders from a 787-Z to the 797-Q because they don’t trust the former, but to switch to Airbus would be a very long process.

COMAC has entered the chat

Although the C919 (B737/A320 clone) is not feasible even in theory anywhere outside China until various regulators approve it, and in the double-aisle market the C929 is a long, long way off.

It'd be nice to see Dassault try to bring back the Mercure. It was a pretty solid plane designed to compete with the 737 but it just never managed to break out of France due to the economy in the 80s and Boeing & Airbus' comparative success.

Dassault is still a major producer of business jets and military fighter jets so it's certainly not like they don't have the skills or capability.

I was just noticing that also. Institutional investors own a lot of the stock and probably know it's too big to fail.

With respect to the stock, you have to keep events in perspective of a company with 100+ billions of revenue. The public engages with the topic because it resonates with anticorporate emotional sentiment, but that obviously doesn't mean as much about fundamentals. In all honestly, it is probably a good time to buy.

The whole whistleblower murder thing is pretty deep in delusional conspiracy territory.

If you discount the conspiracy theories, the normal reason for these types of deals is the DOJ does not feel confident they would actually win their case.

The deal essentially measures how likely each party feels that they can win.

Yeah, this is the most likely answer. The conspiracy theories are just-so and appeal to emotion, possibly even somewhat true, but it's far more likely the DOJ has very low confidence in their case and that Boeing's excuses/answers are basically legitimate (subcontractor + airline negligence accounts for many of the serious problems).

I'd love for it to go to trial for discovery to benefit the American public, but just doesn't seem like enough of a reason to do it.

This highlights a greater point --

This deathtrap bureaucracy is so entangled with government departments that you really have no practical hope of fighting it or keeping it accountable. It might as well be considered part of the US government now.

If we adjusted our perspective like this, it makes more sense why you can't "have justice". The ego of the US military complex is so massive, there's not telling it that it's wrong.

> DOJ does not feel confident they would actually win their case

Sort of.

Another possibility is limited budgets incentivise settling

Likely the problem is that Boeing can point to the FAA approved 'no need for new type certification for pilots' defense, which probably has some documentation about how whatever the fuck MCAS was doing is supposedly covered by the "runaway stabilizer" procedure.

http://www.b737.org.uk/runawaystab.htm

(Of course it would be up to the prosecution to argue that the actual problem that MCAS produced was completelybrand-fucking-new, and thus both the FAA and Boeing should go and suck redundant bags of AoA sensors.)

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40841004

All three of my representatives have AIPAC babysitters. I wonder how many of them have "boeing babysitters"

What does one have to do with the other? Or do you just like making everything be about Israel somehow?

Your representatives are not part of the DOJ...

People should be talking more about Jim McNerney. More than anyone else, he caused the cultural changes at Boeing that led to these disasters. He was some generic MBA with no aviation experience that followed the typical Jack Welch playbook and left before the consequences became apparent.

Absolute corruption.

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