U.S. is said to open criminal inquiry into Boeing

In previous topic, people told me that they would never want to live in a place that expects criminal liability from CEOs and executives in companies.

That's only for petty criminals, murderers and people who can't pay bills.

Handy for Boeing executives maybe, but the reputation damage is probably here to stay.

All the issues are systemic, so it can't be the responsibility of some low-level employees. But it is kind of curious that Boeing suddenly wants to buy Spirit Aerosystems.

I would love for an impossible outcome from this that MBAs are deemed illegal. Can anyone honestly point to an example of where an MBA has had a positive long term effect by any of their decisions?

the undercover staff interviews seemed pretty damning

This is the least credible possible evidence, because shows like that have a long history of doing selective editing or purposely taking things out of context.

Sometimes they don't have to because what they're reporting is real, but you can't tell that one way or the other just by watching the segment.

John Oliver is funny until he covers a segment that you have spent a lot of personal time researching then it becomes shocking when you realize that he selectively edits things to craft a certain narrative in the viewers mind. I also saw this with Trevor Noah when Bernie Sanders was running. I was a volunteer tasked with digging up lots of old videos of him for promotional material and I was shocked to see some of the videos I found aired on the Daily Show but deceptively cut to make him look like a grumpy mean old man when if you watched the whole clip it would show the opposite.

Those interviews the comedian has shown are a decade old from Al Jazeera:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os

Engineers stopped running such firms long ago cause they are totally inept at financial engineering. Its the financial engineers who run things, and you can bet right now whatever happens they will get the govt to bail them out. The culture will only change when financial engineering is reined in or part of tech/engineering education. Until then John Oliver will have a never ending supply of such stories from helpless engineers who are so out of control over anything they run to stand up comedians to cry about their problems.

We live in a timeline where a comedian will actually point to more facts than, say, a "serious" anchor like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, who will just blatantly make stuff up. "I am just asking questions".

Only comedians can tell the truth sometimes.

That was the classical role of the jester in some monarchies. They were the only person who could openly criticize the king without retribution (in theory).

First amendment loophole.

You can't legally tell someone to commit negligent homicide, but if you tell them the engineering process efficiency management program has passed mandatory quality and safety checks by an accredited third party auditor, then the law can't touch you.

Much like computer science, every problem (like how to avoid being charged for homicide) can be solved by layers of indirection.

In all honesty I think we need a criminal investigation on the SEC, which mandates quarterly earnings reports and "fiduciary duty" to shareholders above safety. It is the SEC's governance over the stock market that determines exactly how C suite people behave.

For a company like Boeing, their stock price and C suite pay should be determined by their safety record, not the whim of some quarterly-profit-happy idiots on Wall Street.

Any evidence outsourcing is the issue?

We need "leadership" people in companies to aign off on decisions like how engineers need to sign off on designs. That signature needs to make them accountable for future issues.

In my experience, this is yet more evidence of the quite unethical culture that has come to dominate executives in the last 4-5 decades across many industries. So many of them fail upwards by mindlessly focusing on shareholder value and cost-cutting for short term gains and the long term detriment of products and consumers under their watch. The way that safety and the health of customers and the general public is consistently ignored or thrown under the bus by executives in the name of cost-cutting and shareholder value, often against the explicit recommendations of employees, has become so common that I can't help but think there is something seriously wrong in the "education" (MBAs are more like finishing schools for corporate climbers) and hiring of these executives. We've incentivized ghouls to take over the reins who spend their days a bubbled class that have no need to, and can afford through absurd wealth to not, interact with or see the consequences of their asinine and dangerous decisions.

Can you imagine running a company that makes aeroplanes and not going to sleep each night panicking about all the lives you’re ferrying around up in the sky?

For my entire life, the most pervasive theme in executive leadership is that the _only_ responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders.

Boeing may reach a point where it has to stop killing passengers, but dead passengers aren’t an issue at all until it creates a major threat to their bottom line.

If you think it shouldn’t take many downed planes before that happens, then given the situation, the real question is why it hasn’t threatened their business enough yet.

they've offshored all safety corncerns to an insurance corporation

/joking, but I mean.... it doesn't sound as far fetched as it should

Yep.

"We don't need to brief anyone on the technicals of our plane, we know better and it's great for stock prices to mislead buyers into thinking it's just a New and Improved model of the same plane flyable in the exact same way!"

It's criminal. They should be criminally charged. I hope this goes through, and I hope prosecutors sweep up all of the floor workers who have already stated they would never fly in the newer planes.

The reason they're not worried is because in the worst case, they will get millions of dollars of severance payment, instead of jail time. I'm sure there are sound legal and even economic reasons behind this, but it's still unacceptable and infuriating.

Can you imagine running a company that makes aeroplanes and not going to sleep each night panicking about all the lives you’re ferrying around up in the sky?

I dunno. I think that's a little melodramatic. There are a lot of activities in the world with dangerous failure modes, and flying is pretty far down the list in terms of impact. You could make the same argument about chemical engineers designing pesticide plants, insulin pump manufacturers, hell even folks doing car suspensions are probably responsible for more deaths than Boeing.

People do their jobs, and if the impact is low they'll live with it. Clearly Boeing's leadership thought they were doing OK. And even in hindsight they... kinda were? The MAX is the most dangerous airliner in decades, maybe a half century. But I'd still fly on it.

Actually this is how it's supposed to work. Because the focus is on capital the feedback loop that reigns them in happens too late to penalize and bring change. Gov really needs to create a mechanism where the feedback loop happens before lives are affected in critical industries. We will see if they get the point.

Do you think engineers who design the systems also have a duty to the public and should be held accountable?

Those responsible will golden-parachute out and will simply be replaced by similar.

I'm sure recording and documenting your work is legally required to get certified for aviation things.

Seems to be consistent. The NTSB report already corroborated most of this [1]. What they are trying to locate from my understanding is a record of the door being removed. Which the whistleblower already explained is a process that does not create an entry in the log:

A removal should be written in either case for QA to verify install, but as it turns out, someone (exactly who will be a fun question for investigators) decides that the door only needs to be opened, and no formal Removal is generated in CMES (the reason for which is unclear, and a major process failure). Therefore, in the official build records of the airplane, a pressure seal that cannot be accessed without opening the door (and thereby removing retaining bolts) is documented as being replaced, but the door is never officially opened and thus no QA inspection is required.

[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA24MA063%20P...

It could still "match" if it emerges that one of them is lying, and I can't tell which possibility is more terrifying.

That would be the McDonnell/Douglas merger.

or the wrong people are being employed there

Yeah, the C-suite execs running the show

Good post, and the pat response is "vote them out". The problem with this is that the neither party really thinks this kind of corruption is a problem, and the individual pols that do can't get elected on that issue alone. That is, there's a critical "bundling" problem with modern politics: you have to accept a bundle of 100 positions, and "integrity issues" are usually pretty low. Even worse, a cynical body politic begins to perceive "integrity" as a liability, that someone with conscience and self-restraint is actually LESS capable of "winning" within a corrupt system. You've now allowed your short-term need to win to further degrade the system, which of course becomes a positive feedback loop.

(This bundling problem affects all kinds of products. When you're shopping, you pay attention to price, and everything else is secondary. In a perfect market, you'd price in the forced arbitration clause, or you'd price in the social cost of anti-competitive business practices of the vendor. But it just doesn't happen because the cognitive load is too high.)

I really miss the days when we at least paid lip-service to the idea that character and integrity mattered most in our pols. Even that system was gamed, its still better than overtly, cynically abandoning society's most laudable values.

The premise of "too big to fail" is that a thing is depended on by too many other things, innocent people, to allow it to suddenly become rubble. It's an insurance company and its policyholders did nothing wrong. It's a bank and its depositors did nothing wrong. It's Boeing and they're the sole supplier of some critical things.

The "easiest" way to fix this is to bail them out, because then the company itself can carry on fulfilling its obligations and you don't need all the people relying on them to individually apply to get bailed out or otherwise have to rearrange their affairs when the institution is instantly vaporized. But that, as they say, is a moral hazard.

What you really want to do is to destroy them in slow motion. Step one, the existing owners get nothing, they chose their executives poorly and suffer the consequences. Step two, those executives are out too, and the company gets new leadership and a bailout with the condition that the company will soon cease to exist and be sold off for parts, but first it's going carry on operating for a bit to satisfy its obligations to innocent third parties.

I think this is why the French invented guillotines.

This is largely due to how inexperienced the FAA is with the manufacturing process and thus rely on the industry to self-regulate.

How does the FAA get experience manufacturing planes without manufacturing planes?

I'm not sure the people building the planes are the problem.

I'm pretty sure its the management trying to spend less money to build planes that's the problem

The conflict of interest is high. Yet FAA thinks this is okay.

No, because you're leaving out context.

They abide by this, due to a limited budget, and no ability to hire, train, and maintain such capabilities.

Amd I'm willing to bet politicians on both sides of the coin have contributed to this.

The problem is real though. It stands to reason that the people that know how planes can be built safely are the one building planes; otherwise you could get in a situation where "those who know, build planes; those who don't, tell them how to do it".

There is a similar problem with financial regulation; my understanding is that the knowledge transfer between industry and regulation there is solved by the equally problematic "revolving doors", where people alternate between regulating and advising companies (and thus as regulators they don't want to make too many enemies).

Come on. Someone somewhere at Boeing knows exactly what happened.

I don't think that's true for any of the issues, or airline accidents in general. Remember ultimately we're still talking about very rare events that almost always involve a number of different factors lining up in just the right way.

Even the MAX crashes were 2 out of how many thousands of MCAS equipped flights with no issues and those crashes also required other things to go wrong. It's easy to say MCAS was the obvious cause in retrospect, but it's much less clear it should have been easy to predict that outcome before any investigations were done regardless of how much inside knowledge one had.

This is not at all to excuse the causes, but there is a reason crash investigations take time. Demanding immediate explanations is just asking for wrong conclusions to be reached in the name of expediency. In fact taking the time to fully investigate probably produces better accountability in the long run because it can uncover more subtle but serious problems.

I know what you mean. I had a flight recently and didn't look at the plane before I booked it. Then woke up that night, "Shit, is it a Max-8?"

If it makes you feel any better, as with all commercial airplanes, even a Max-8 is far safer than driving your car to get groceries.

* Just saw that your comment is 2 hours old and you said your flight is in 2 hours. Hope you're enjoying your flight! See you when you land!

Kayak.com gives you the option to sort and filter plane types! It's now one of their most popular features. Lots of people are happy to filter out 737-MAX planes and pay more for other flights.

TBF that was 27 years ago.

But why is Airbus so much better ?

In what some call a frightening abuse of executive power the FAA and Dept of Justice have combined powers in a "Power Rangers type thing" and issued a sweeping judgement against all holders of an MBA. A prepared statement released by the lead investigators from the Dept of Justice said "Those who can't do teach and those who can't do either become either an accountant or an MBA or probably both. At some point the gangrenous limb must be swiftly cleaved and that is our intent here today."

I’ll go one further: this is a compelling argument for, at least, direct government participation in markets we consider crucial to a functioning society.

Their defense and space contracts are not going well.

KC-46 tanker replacement was a fixed-price contract and Boeing lost $7 billion on that.

Starliner is a similar story, $1.5 billion down the hole.

EDIT:

T-7A Red Hawk trainer: $1 billion in losses. Air force one VC-25B program: Its losses are now at about $2.4 billion. T-38 Talon trainer, MQ-25...

Yea, it's not going well for them. Other programs are still fine, e.g. F-35, but fixed price contracts are in a dump.

Two things: Boeing doesn't have just to worry about the FAA and US prosecution, depending on the outcome their civil aircraft business might face a ton of EASA scrutiny as well. And that actually is a big deal in the industry.

And public pressure, Boeings reputation is not great at the moment. If that pressure is kept up, it can lead to change as well.

civil case somehow makes workers and victims whole

If they’re found criminally liable, the most likely outcome is bankruptcy. Victims (airlines) would have a claim. Workers, their unpaid wages. Whatever comes out of bankruptcy will likely need some public support; even then, it’s hard to imagine we don’t see layoffs.

You sure about that? It is true so, by the time those people go to jail, they rend to be neither rich nor powerfull anymore. See Elizabeth Holmes, SBF, just spontaniously.

Actually you could argue having one of your biggest defence contractors behave like this is a bigger loss to American power than holding their feet to the fire and trying to develop a more engineering focused culture.

A big loss to Boeing will be seen as a big loss to American hegemony

I mean if USA will decide to isolate itself as trend suggest, then they will lose that hegemony anyway. So at least they could have safe planes

There is no way to excuse behaviour of the people working on the door that day, none.

Stopping at that level won't work there, Boeing tries to spin it that way, but this plane was not the only one woth issues on the door plug. And they already admitted that there was a work around decision loop regarding the necessary documentation work. And FAA audits do not stop at individuals and their behaviour, the explicitely focus on processes and culture (I assume FAA does in principle the same thing EASA does).

But hey Boeing tried to blame the 737 Max crashes on the pilots, so I guess trying the same with shop floor teams tracks.

I can’t tell if this is genuine or sarcasm. Well done.

In a properly functioning quality and safety management system, there's no awkward in-the-middle. This procedure is a planned part of the construction, inspection and maintenance of the airplane. And even if there was a doubt, the thing to do in that case is stop and document the doubt, and then document the process of discussion of the doubt, and then document the decision, including whatever change to the quality system may be needed to avoid this doubt arising the next time.

The problem here is not that Boeing does not know how to run both the original quality system and the system to modify it if necessary. The problem is the quality culture that puts "implementing the quality system" above "make line go up" is degraded.