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Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

npr.org

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Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#221

Post by tim333 »

tigershark wrote: post #73
thaumasiotes wrote: post #3

Geez. > "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, "No." > Peter DeFazio, [D-Oregon], called newly released documents "incredibly damning" That's hard to argue with. You'd like to think this kind of thing would... leak. Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?

Here on hn, on the other hand, there are plenty of people that say that they don’t see any problem in flying on the max once it is again in service. From my point of view I’ll happily let them be the guinea pigs while I’ll avoid at all costs to fly on that death machine.

I'm one of those who would fly it. It's about figuring probabilities rather than gut feel. The odds of me dying riding a motorcycle which I do sometimes are like 10,000x those of dying in any airliner crash.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#222

Post by robbiep »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #219
robbiep wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, the quote you’re referring to was dated 2018. The 737 MAX started operations in May 2017. So the comment was after the plane was regularly flying, and people on the inside were STILL joking about its safety. (0) https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/09/boeing-737-...

In that case the NPR article (which doesn’t mention a date) is just factually incorrect. > Another damning exchange calls into question the safety of the 737 Max long before the plane was approved to fly passengers. > "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, "No." If that quote was from 2018, then it’s from a year after FAA approval, not…

The source and year of the quote I took from the guardian article I referenced.

I’ve got no idea what you mean by ‘long before’, unless you somehow Switched what I was talking about - my point is exactly that the employees were discussing that they wouldn’t fly on it the year following the start of service. QED?

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#223

Post by perl4ever »

ls612 wrote: post #205
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This [0] makes me nervous about flying on a 787. [0] https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/boeing-787-dreamliner-safet...

The 787 has been in service for 8 years now and has never had a single fatality, never mind a hull loss yet. Your fears may be misplaced.

People have been talking about Boeing management grinding things down for years too; it's just that it finally had unignorable consequences. A lot of the difficulty with preventing and evaluating bad stuff is how long it takes for a big structure to rot.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#224

Post by perl4ever »

tim333 wrote: post #221
tigershark wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here on hn, on the other hand, there are plenty of people that say that they don’t see any problem in flying on the max once it is again in service. From my point of view I’ll happily let them be the guinea pigs while I’ll avoid at all costs to fly on that death machine.

I'm one of those who would fly it. It's about figuring probabilities rather than gut feel. The odds of me dying riding a motorcycle which I do sometimes are like 10,000x those of dying in any airliner crash.

You seem to be confusing "known unknowns" with "unknown unknowns". I find this unaccountably irritating because everybody intuitively knows the difference, and that it's huge, except when they pretend to be "rational".

What's the probability of something happening when the probability you are given is probably wrong?

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#225

Post by perl4ever »

majewsky wrote: post #155
morsch wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only per mile. Per journey it's the most dangerous transport typically used. Per hour it's about average. This doesn't matter if you have to make a specific trip (the number of miles is fixed), but that's not always the case. Whatever you do, don't walk, that seems to be the most dangerous common mode of transportation (unless motorcycles are common). "Aviation industry insurers base their calculations on the deaths…

> don't walk, that seems to be the most dangerous common mode of transportation Not walking is also a bad idea, though. I don't have numbers at hand, but I can imagine that a sedentary lifestyle gives you way more micromorts than the risk of traffic accidents when walking to work.

Walking to work does not prevent a sedentary lifestyle. A little exercise doesn't make you fit.

I mean, it's pretty common for people to have a heart attack from sudden exertion, too. Like snow shoveling.

And I remember Douglas Adams died after a workout and he was probably reasonably fit at the time (in theory anyway).

So don't exercise.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#226

Post by perl4ever »

gmac wrote: post #145
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confident I'm a safer driver than at least 50% of the people on the roads - if I thought pilots were only as safe as an average driver I'd be worried.

I'm confident I'm a safer driver than at least 50% of the people on the roads So is almost everybody else. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority#Driving_a...

Everybody may think they are "skilled", but any given person can in principle assess their own risk more accurately than assuming they are average. Don't confuse safety with nebulous ideas of skill or ability.

You can compare your insurance rate with the average, and you can consider objective factors that are really blatant such as whether you drive drunk, or when falling asleep, or while texting. And of course you can compare the number of accidents and tickets you have to average.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#227

Post by perl4ever »

techslave wrote: post #171
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confident I'm a safer driver than at least 50% of the people on the roads - if I thought pilots were only as safe as an average driver I'd be worried.

even if that were true (statistically it isn’t), unlike with a plane roads aren’t so tightly controlled and other drivers are barely competent. head-ons happen all too frequently and i’m sure one of the victims is ... a safe driver. driving isn’t unsafe because of your own (self-assessed) skill, it’s unsafe because of that other 50%. no matter how safe of a driver you are, you should be worried.

skill != safety, because how much of a safety margin you leave generally swamps most of the effect of skill. And your safety margin reduces the effect of other drivers' stupidity.

And I hate it when people say "statistically that isn't true". How can a fact about an individual be statistically not true? Is it statistically true that I have 2.4 (or whatever) children, even if I have none?

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#228

Post by perl4ever »

_ea1k wrote: post #183
lgeorget wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I want to defend Boeing, but it's easy to play Nostradamus and predict catastrophies to then only dig up the prophecies if they turn up true. The article doesn't say how much the claims were substantiated and backed up by the concerned employees. Looking back, Boeing certainly should have investigated the claims more seriously but just from reading the article I feel we don't have a very clear picture of wha…

This is what gets overlooked in these stories. Most failures have at least a few of these. But if the same investigation happened with successful aircraft, they'd likely find a lot of the same things. "Employee at X mocks regulator" is not exactly uncommon.

Well, perhaps they didn't have enough vehement disagreements.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#229

Post by perl4ever »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #116
jpmoral wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How'd you get there? >"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, "No."

Conceptualize it as a three-point scale of trust: 1: I will fly with you. 2: I will fly with you without even wearing shoes. (Realistically, I can't imagine why shoes would make a difference.) 3: I would let my family fly with you. If you say you wouldn't put your family in a Max, then your trust in the Max is not at level 3. Logically, this is a very weak constraint; it only shows that trust However, vernacular lang…

This is missing the forest for the trees. The context is a passenger aircraft whose normal job is to transport families, so "level 3" is all that matters.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#230

Post by perl4ever »

FooHentai wrote: post #112
cedivad wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VW wasn't nearly as bad. People need to go to jail over those deaths and their legacy used as a reminder for those that come next. Here is another damning Boeing message, follow the source for more: https://twitter.com/cedivad/status/1215558552229683200

As bad by what metric? VWs emissions overshoot has been projected to cause 1200 deaths: http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deat...

How do we know that something caused 1200 deaths, instead of, say for example, 1% of a death of each of 120,000 individuals?
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