Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? If there's no evidence of a conversation, it won't help his case.
It does point some heat at the named person, and maybe drags their name through the mud.
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Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
81–90 of 367 posts
Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#82While I don't have any sympathy for this pilot, I also find the FAA's excuses here to be less than convincing. Basically, their position is "Well, we trusted this Boeing employee to tell us the truth about the new flight controls, and he didn't." But if the regulators had actually done their job and independently evaluated the new flight controls, they wouldn't have had to take the word of any Boeing employees. I rea…
How were they supposed to do that? They'd have had to either review the source code and somehow notice that it had too much control authority over the horizontal stabilizer, or run the flight control system in a simulator that reproduced the failure conditions found in the field. These seem _possible_ but not exactly easy. It'd have been much easier for the Boeing engineers who designed the thing so badly to have had bosses who said "wait...what? No you can't do it like that".
Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#83Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#84"Ohhh, those Chief Technical Pilots! God Bless'em!" - C-suite.
Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. There's a reason when you deal with people senior enough in any big organization that everything is verbal...
Not sure I agree. Look at all these court cases producing juicy emails from tech giants.
Many of those juicy emails are from before the past few years' wave of tech lawsuits.
At least at the entry level, I think a lot of the "don't say the word 'competition'" training started as a reaction to relatively recent legal tangles - it wouldn't be surprising if people at the senior level also have gotten more careful about how they communicate.
Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point, auditors have to trust some things that their subjects are saying. If the auditor has to re-evaluate every piece of information, they will end up re-doing the subjects' jobs.
And that's how we got the VAG emissions scandal. Instead of trusting computer outputs, we could have done tried and true dyno tests and the entire thing would have been avoided.
The defeat devices were designed to detect dyno conditions and reduce emissions, it wasn't a case of a regulator trusting a computer output. They were uncovered by doing road tests.
Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
"he was probably coerced or induced by someone with more authority" Then he should flip. Naming names will at least buy some sympathy points.
How? If there's no evidence of a conversation, it won't help his case.
It's not that simple.
Sincere cooperation has value and is weighted by authorities, regardless of where it does or does not lead. Years served are based on such factors.
Also, there are the civil suits. Standards of evidence are generally lower and a credible and cooperative peon has value to plaintiffs as they pursue the big targets.
Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#88While I don't have any sympathy for this pilot, I also find the FAA's excuses here to be less than convincing. Basically, their position is "Well, we trusted this Boeing employee to tell us the truth about the new flight controls, and he didn't." But if the regulators had actually done their job and independently evaluated the new flight controls, they wouldn't have had to take the word of any Boeing employees. I rea…
How were they supposed to do that? They'd have had to either review the source code and somehow notice that it had too much control authority over the horizontal stabilizer, or run the flight control system in a simulator that reproduced the failure conditions found in the field. These seem _possible_ but not exactly easy. It'd have been much easier for the Boeing engineers who designed the thing so badly to have had…
As I understand it, the source is a very careful implementation of a spec, and the FAA should have the spec.
In any case, I strongly doubt that the buck should really stop at this test pilot. Someone higher up surely has some degree of responsibility. The test pilot did not invent MCAS.
Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#89While I don't have any sympathy for this pilot, I also find the FAA's excuses here to be less than convincing. Basically, their position is "Well, we trusted this Boeing employee to tell us the truth about the new flight controls, and he didn't." But if the regulators had actually done their job and independently evaluated the new flight controls, they wouldn't have had to take the word of any Boeing employees. I rea…
It isn't one or the other! This guy could have committed fraud and been effectively abetted by a regulatory body that lacks the resources, incentives, or power to actually regulate.
Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud
#90Boeing were idiots selling this new model into the markets they did right out the gate. It was greed and bit them hard. Poor maintenance. Pilot skills in hand flying and unusual flying and recovery so different (overseas they don't always come through a normal US style GA background). If they would have looked more closely at the US, they would have found that this system was triggered (and resolved) I suspect pretty…
>Pilot skills in hand flying and unusual flying and recovery so different (overseas they don't always come through a normal US style GA background).
This is repeating lies propagated by Boeing management and is not true. The flight control system's design was flawed. It was a "fly into the ground sometimes" machine.