Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaglesss | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Yes, firing ordinary workers and moving production elsewhere is definitely going to fix bad management and rotten company culture on top level.

Boeing management created the 737MAX fiasco and killed those people.

> Glad to see these guys out the job and production moving to the Carolinas

Here's an idea: let them compete. Seattle versus North Charleston. I quite literally don't know if I agree with your or not, but that's the point--none of you, I or a dickwad in Chicago or D.C. should be making that call unilaterally. The market should. Split them up and return us to the competition that built America's golden age of aviation.

You'll have to break up the FAA first. The certification costs are ungodly, rigid, and the certification process created fascistic interweaving of industry with government.

To break the monopoly, counterintuitively, we have to deregulate Boeing.

The FAA broke itself up already. They allowed Boeing to self certify.

Seems Boeing effectively became part of the FAA. I've produced and designed experimental aircraft. The FAA made it clear they would not certify it, simply wasn't legal since it wasn't contemplated under any certifiable title in the CFRs other than experimental.

> You'll have to break up the FAA first. The certification costs are ungodly, rigid, and the certification process created fascistic interweaving of industry with government

Why do you need to break up the FAA to simplify certification?

The golden age of flight had not only competition of manufacture, but competition from consumers and purchasers on risk appetite. It could not emerge under an FAA as we know it. To come anywhere near that you'd need to break up the FAA, as it has a virtual monopoly on violence in enforcing the CFRs here. Let people pick which, if any enforcer they want certifying their airplanes.

That is, the FAA suffers from the same lack of competition as Boeing.

The golden age of flight splattered the blood of professionals and innocents alike to write those regulations.

Flight is not for cowboys.

You can't count all the dead from flight being held back FAA. It's similar with housing regulations -- the code inspector sees dead in a house but not the 10 homeless people he killed by making housing less accessible.

How would insufficient ability to make more dangerous planes kill anyone? By what mechanism? Who, for example? What are you even talking about?

One example is FAA balking at certifying evtols for years after they started to emerge. They're dangerous but could allow more accessible rescue options for people already in a dangerous survival situation, or need a fast ride to a hospital.

Invisible hand of the market would catch passengers mid air

The golden age of flight had ~100x the fatal accident rate that we do today.

No thanks.

Airbus seems to be doing just fine, including their final assembly lines in the US.

It's Boeing man.

I won't get into too many specifics, but there's a reason they call it ScreamLiner. And it ain't because final assembly in the Carolinas is implemented to exacting, high quality standards, by excellent and exemplary employees.

There are a lot of poor performers throughout Boeing. Starting with their C-Suite execs.

The people who decided to build the 737 max were sitting in Chicago at the time and now are sucking up to Washington politicians from Arlington County, Virginia

I don't think you understand who made the max and why it failed.

Sure it's failed from the floor workers because they forgot the plug door needs bolted. It's failed other ways due to the other (SPEEA) union botching the MCAS.

Sometimes it's easy to lose track of how basically all the Washington unions are so broken in their homicidal negligence while begging for more money to fail miserably.

The MCAS failure was a multilayered one. The engineers who designed it, software engineers who developed it, QA, testing, pilots, managers who approved, managers who instilled that work culture, etc etc are all responsible and should all have been fired and sentenced to prison for their negligence and dereliction of duty.

If everyone is a little bit responsible then no one is fully responsible.

It’s like dieselgate. Or the Pornhub chaos.

The VP’s tell the directors to get it done. The directors get it done.

There’s a liability force field and those that protect and serve are elevated.

In the aerospace industry, and other safety critical industries, they use the "swiss cheese" model for risk analysis. For an accident to get through all the layers (slices of cheese) meant to stop accidents, you need the holes in all of those layers to line up in just the wrong way. When that happens you need to investigate and fix each layer of cheese, not focus on the single layer of cheese on the top and ignore the rest. You will never build reliable safety critical systems with the mentality that only a single point of responsibility needs to be identified and corrected.

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

I've written safety-critical firmware. You'd be surprised :D

The phrase "accountability sink" was brought up recently in the context of AI.

This thing with duty feeling is hard. They all feel they did their best. Exactly as my precursor who spend 17 years in the role and did way below bare minimum. No single comment in the code. Last project does not work at all, but was approved as finished. Laziness and ignorance are everywhere. As long as managers accept it there is no way to stop that. Maybe I should stop drawing flowcharts in ascii art manner. Nobody will say “thank you” for that anyway. Nobody will give me a raise for that. It might help the next guy in my chair, but should I care about him?

> This thing with duty feeling is hard. They all feel they did their best

If you work in aerospace and your "best" is non-redundant inputs from a sensor known to fail, you're not good enough for aerospace and never were. I know not to do that and I'm just a former SRE who also likes air crash investigation. My homelab has more redundancy than a critical system that could by design crash an airplane.

And people at Boeing knew this. That's why they hid the system's existence from everyone and lied to the FAA, who also utterly failed at doing its job.

I heard this was done on purpose because they'd need a lot more documentation if the system was important, and having redundancy would tip off the FAA to its importance.

The 737 MAX was a poor, cheap design from the start. It was a cost-cutting plane and compromises, like MCAS, had to be implemented to make it work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com