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Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

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Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#191

Post by soylentnewsorg »

Chyzwar wrote: post #184
soylentnewsorg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a gig at a hospital. They got an MBA Karen with 3 years of experience. She learned the very basics of IT, then started micromanaging. As in, she'd tell you what switches to put on CLI commands. If you said that's wrong, or would cause data corruption - you're not a team player. The entire team of 18 people were not team players - the team consisted of her alone. One time, she told me to do something very dange…

Depending on country/state you could possibly sue for wrongful termination. In addition, you could send your story to media or contact someone higher in the food chain of the company.

I reported them to OSHA and to the state health authority. This was a while ago. I got reminded of it today and posted the story because I had a call this week asking me to send in written testimony in addition to the form I filled out.

Wrongful termination is a no-go. I talked to a literal slew of lawyers. The amount I'd be looking to recover would be probably the cost of court. Also chump change compared to my overall income, so not worth my time.

Now, as far as media - no one died, no one was greatly impacted - probably not very interesting, and very technical. There was an outage for a day, records of a couple of hours of data (5-10 patient visits) was lost.

Now, as far a "higher up the food chain" - I got a rant here about my 20+ years of experience in corporate america. The guy up the food chain took a chance (saved money on salaries) by hiring a manager of an 18 person team, who has literally had 3 years of work experience. That was a bad decision. He (my boss's boss) doesn't want his boss, (my boss's boss's boss), to see this bad decision. So he's going to protect her until someone dies and he throws her under the bus. This is just a fact of life.

I've been at several hospitals over many years. All the IT people care greatly about patient care. The management is willing to have deaths on their hand to shave a day off a project. Management at hospitals are people who shouldn't be allowed near medical care. The higher up the chain you go, the closer you get to the money, the closer you get to the purpose of the hospital: pretend you're losing money while underpaying and overworking staff, and scamming sick people.

Think about it: you are a supplier. Your demand curve is inelastic. Your customers don't know the price before they buy. Now, what kind of people is this type of corporation going to attract? The worst of the worst.

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#192

Post by Cipater »

KMag wrote: post #156
landemva wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'and dole out severe punishment for bad behaviour' When will Boeing CEO and Board of Directors get locked up as part of the severe punishment?

Presumably when it is shown beyond a reasonable doubt that they conspired or deliberately overlooked the fraud. The prosecutor has every incentive to get participants to roll over and follow the conspiracy as high up the ladder as it goes. Successfully prosecuting such a large profile case, particularly with defendants with very little public sympathy, would make his/her career.

>The prosecutor has every incentive to get participants to roll over and follow the conspiracy as high up the ladder as it goes.

This is naivette.

See this:

https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/lead-boeing-...

From the article:

the case was settled with a deferred prosecution agreement — an agreement that Columbia Law Professor John Coffee at the time called — “one of the worst deferred prosecution agreements I have seen.”

Boeing did not have to plead guilty to any of the allegations.

No Boeing executive was charged.

And the Boeing deferred prosecution agreement included an unusual provision finding that a compliance monitor was not necessary because “the misconduct was neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior mismanagement.”

“That is without precedent,” Coffee told Corporate Crime Reporter earlier this year. “I have not seen that anywhere else and I’ve looked at a number of deferred prosecution agreements. Prosecutors themselves are not conducting the investigation.”

Boeing’s lead corporate criminal defense law firm is Kirkland & Ellis.

Erin Nealy Cox, the lead prosecutor in the Boeing case, left the Justice Department earlier this year.

And last month she joined Kirkland & Ellis as a partner in its Dallas office.

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#193

Post by lazide »

nuerow wrote: post #185
lazide wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like they are knowingly incompetent? If a utility regulator had no one on staff who knew how utility scale power transmission/generation/whatever worked, that’s what we’d call it for sure. And aerospace engineers are dirt cheap. What sort of clown show is the FAA running?

> And aerospace engineers are dirt cheap. I suspect you're letting your software world experience dictate your expectations of what engineering is all about, and what it takes to actually get work done. Software development is a rare field where the only relevant resource is man hours. In other fields, including aerospace engineering, trained meat bags tend to have a negligible cost to the point where replacing a who…

It sounds a whole lot like you’re agreeing with me - but seem to think you’re not?

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#194

Post by hellbannedguy »

Chyzwar wrote: post #184
soylentnewsorg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a gig at a hospital. They got an MBA Karen with 3 years of experience. She learned the very basics of IT, then started micromanaging. As in, she'd tell you what switches to put on CLI commands. If you said that's wrong, or would cause data corruption - you're not a team player. The entire team of 18 people were not team players - the team consisted of her alone. One time, she told me to do something very dange…

Depending on country/state you could possibly sue for wrongful termination. In addition, you could send your story to media or contact someone higher in the food chain of the company.

I wish California was one.

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#195

Post by foldr »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #179
dsq wrote: post #164

It is important to note that Boeing settled for 2.5 billion in which it is agreed that "...the misconduct by its former employees was “neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior management". ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-reaches-2-5-billion-sett... ). So remember, when push comes to shove, the technical lead always gets thrown to the wol…

It's possible this is the initial charge to get them in the door with search warrants and subpoenas and testimony because someone dropped a dime with some info that there were criminal acts not know to the government at the time, not covered by the settlement. I doubt the settlement was a "you're pardoned for ALL acts related to 737 MAX." A refresher since this happened so long ago: Airbus was eating Boeing's 737 sal…

Fly by wire isn’t really the right term here. Fly by wire means that control inputs are transmitted to actuators via an electrical signal (rather than by a hydraulic or mechanical connection). As far as I know, the 737 MAX retains conventional primary flight controls. Lots of airliners with conventional flight controls also have various forms of artificial stability that modify pilot inputs (such as yaw dampers).

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#196

Post by bloqs »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #174
dsq wrote: post #164

It is important to note that Boeing settled for 2.5 billion in which it is agreed that "...the misconduct by its former employees was “neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior management". ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-reaches-2-5-billion-sett... ). So remember, when push comes to shove, the technical lead always gets thrown to the wol…

I took a gig at a hospital. They got an MBA Karen with 3 years of experience. She learned the very basics of IT, then started micromanaging. As in, she'd tell you what switches to put on CLI commands. If you said that's wrong, or would cause data corruption - you're not a team player. The entire team of 18 people were not team players - the team consisted of her alone. One time, she told me to do something very dange…

I'm puzzled by the do not discriminate bit, doesn't that mean you do discriminate by only choosing the names you can't pronounce?

Minutae aside, as a European I'm shocked and appalled at that process, but surely an employment tribunal would have been the next step? Seems open and shut if you have the details to hand and everything evidenced properly. That said I'm sure you probably didn't want to be there from that point

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#197

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

paulmd wrote: post #155
pdonis wrote: post #65

While 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…

At the end of the day this is what you want, though: people need to realize that they are going to be held personally responsible if they're involved in pencilwhipping the FAA approval process, and tell their boss they're not going to jail so that Boeing can make another 1% profit this year. I'm not saying it's just the test pilot who lied, or held sole responsibility, but yeah, he was a member of a criminal enterpri…

I like the result. Too many people hide behind “I was just doing my job and helping the company.” At some point you have to make a personal stand to not harm humanity. And programmers reading this, that era is definitely upon us.

When we see programmers charged who implemented the twisted evil shit Facebook or whoever ordered them to, we will be making some progress on fixing the problem.

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#198

Post by Daub »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #179
dsq wrote: post #164

It is important to note that Boeing settled for 2.5 billion in which it is agreed that "...the misconduct by its former employees was “neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior management". ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-reaches-2-5-billion-sett... ). So remember, when push comes to shove, the technical lead always gets thrown to the wol…

It's possible this is the initial charge to get them in the door with search warrants and subpoenas and testimony because someone dropped a dime with some info that there were criminal acts not know to the government at the time, not covered by the settlement. I doubt the settlement was a "you're pardoned for ALL acts related to 737 MAX." A refresher since this happened so long ago: Airbus was eating Boeing's 737 sal…

> Except...they also cheaped out on both the number of sensors and even the frigging lightbulbs to warn pilots of sensor error.

I believe that the issue was more tragic than that (no expert)...

They wanted to 'hide' the fly by wire (FBW) as for it to be apparent would require that the plane (effectively) be re-classified as a new plane, requiring expensive up-skilling of the pilots. The existence of the new FBW was even hidden from the manual!

The FBW required information from the pitot tubes in order for it to know how fast the plane was flying. Planes have two such tubes, one for backup as they are prone to blockage. Normal practice would be to poll both tubes, and if their reading disagreed the pilot would be notified and assume blockage in one of the tubes.

However, they could not do this as a pitot tube warning would reveal the existence of the FBW to the pilot, who would not have been aware of its existence. Hence they relied on one pitot tube input and (of course) no warning lights.

This must have been a calculated risk on their behalf. They must have known that sooner or later it would fail.

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#199

Post by hef19898 »

dsq wrote: post #164

It is important to note that Boeing settled for 2.5 billion in which it is agreed that "...the misconduct by its former employees was “neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior management". ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-reaches-2-5-billion-sett... ). So remember, when push comes to shove, the technical lead always gets thrown to the wol…

Boeing got away with that, VW tried and didn't. I would prefer companies not getting away with these settlements.

Re: Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

#200

Post by l33tman »

foldr wrote: post #195
KennyBlanken wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible this is the initial charge to get them in the door with search warrants and subpoenas and testimony because someone dropped a dime with some info that there were criminal acts not know to the government at the time, not covered by the settlement. I doubt the settlement was a "you're pardoned for ALL acts related to 737 MAX." A refresher since this happened so long ago: Airbus was eating Boeing's 737 sal…

Fly by wire isn’t really the right term here. Fly by wire means that control inputs are transmitted to actuators via an electrical signal (rather than by a hydraulic or mechanical connection). As far as I know, the 737 MAX retains conventional primary flight controls. Lots of airliners with conventional flight controls also have various forms of artificial stability that modify pilot inputs (such as yaw dampers).

The trim can be controlled by an electrical motor in the 737, and the MCAS system in question here controls that motor, so you could argue its part of a FBW system (but I guess normally you refer to the main flight surfaces which are not FBW in the 737 like you say).
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