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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

#231

Post by jeffrallen »

sofixa wrote: post #178
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the airframe was fine. the problem was that mcas was implemented in a totally shitty way. If it had just replied on 3 sensors instead of 1, wet likely wouldn't be talking about it now.

No, the airframe was different and didn't handle the same way as the old one. In order to hide that, Boeing implemented in a terribly negligent way MCAS. Had they accepted it's a different one, and had a different type rating, all would have been fine.

And also, the MAX would not exist at all, because the flagship customer (Southwest) had basically said, "If it requires pilot retraining, we won't buy it."

There's plenty of blame to go around, up to and including the society that says it's ok to not pay a living wage to the working class because "infinite downward price pressure is good for consumers" (until they die in a plane crash, that is).

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

#232

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> The whole point of independent regulation is to not allow obvious conflicts of interest to harm the public.

Like all centralized systems, easy to hack over time. A better system would be decentralized regulatory bodies that check on each other's conclusions instead of a monolithic one.

At this stage you absolutely should not trust any regulatory body, FDA included. (The FDA never replicates any trial for example)

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

#234

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rightbyte wrote: post #226
mvc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector". When people vote for politicians who say "government is wasteful", "there's too much red tape" what did they think was going to happen?

I think the worlds greatest agency couldn't evaluate a so complex system as the Max. They should just have said no. I believe it is foremost a complexity issue, and the MCAS(?) failure is just one of the many things that could go wrong, that actually did. Boing probably have more issues with the plane that is waiting to surface given their culture ...

Saying "no" would have been an evaluation.

It's a management function. If someone comes to you and says "We want to rewrite everything so it runs on a Raspberry PI powered by a hamster wheel" you don't need to ask about the engineering spec of the hamster wheel.

The Max MCAS was only marginally more plausible in overview. Details were never going to rescue it.

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

#235

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

pgeorgi wrote: post #224
mvc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector". When people vote for politicians who say "government is wasteful", "there's too much red tape" what did they think was going to happen?

When politicians say "government is wasteful" or "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector", what they're saying is that their management style is wasteful. Would somebody asserting that about _their_ _own_ _job_ even make it past the interview in the private sector?

What they're actually saying is "If you sponsor us we will make sure government money goes your way."

Efficiency - or the lack of it - is absolutely not the point.

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

#236

Post by notahacker »

lazide wrote: post #193
nuerow wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I believe the OP's point is that if you're not just using engineers to audit the tests Boeing does, then additional engineers are a fraction of the cost of running a full parallel aerospace test programme. The capex to set up the test infrastructure is significant even if Boeing is legally obliged to supply you with prototypes to destroy at no cost (which obviously has an impact on the amount of R&D Boeing is willing to do).

Also, you're not hiring from a diversely employed Valley pool: most of the engineers with the requisite level of understanding to test Boeing's hardware work for Boeing (and to an extent its supply chain), which might mean you don't have to offer them much of a pay rise, but it also means [i] you're weakening the engineering capability of the firms actually designing and building the stuff by poaching them and [ii] their views on what's safe and what's an appropriate level of testing aren't fully independent anyway.

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

#237

Post by kiklion »

OneTimePetes wrote: post #219
asah wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this is a sauce effect of the complexity of modern systems: regulators have no choice but to trust companies and regulate the results of tests, with heavy penalties for cheating. Consider pharmaceutical trials: it's impractical for the FDA to check on each patient. Financial audits often assume the client isn't directly lying to the auditor, with criminal penalties as the disincentive. The alternative requi…

It can be done, it just costs money. It can not be done within the liberal frame of mind, were everything that costs money is tax and thus theft. So why not reformulate it correctly. In my ideology, it is not possible to solve this problem. If that ideology would be out of the way, it could actually be tested pretty good via unittest running a simulation. So once developed those tests would actually be pretty cheap t…

> It can be done, it just costs money.

Well money and time.

You speak as if you think that if only the great billionaires accepted a little less money then we could have safety.

How many lives are you willing to lose for a multi year delay to accommodate the FDA recreating every required test that the pharmaceutical company did? How many lives are currently lost because the current system doesn’t work?

Your suggestion is akin to voter id’s as a requirement to prevent voter fraud. How many legitimate voters are going to be prevented from voting due to the new rules to stop how many prior confirmed cases of voter fraud?

This isn’t a lack of resources. This is society deciding that the resources are better used elsewhere.

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

#238

Post by supportlocal4h »

It is human nature to detest regulation in general but insist upon it after the fact of some failure. This can be easily illustrated with automobile speed limits. Almost everyone would be outraged if they were ticketed for driving 2 k/mph over the posted limit. It is a widely held belief that drivers traveling at or just below the maximum limit pose a safety risk because they are too slow. An officer who rigorously enforced posted speed limits would get run out of town. But who's to blame when the officer looks the other way and it results in a crash?

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

#239

Post by [deleted] »

2rsf wrote: post #230
mvc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector". When people vote for politicians who say "government is wasteful", "there's too much red tape" what did they think was going to happen?

I don't think so, testing like you refer to is not scalable and even more inefficient. Letting an external auditors understand all the small technical details and test them independently will basically halt any progress. It might make this specific change safer but for the long run will slow down innovation and development of better and safer products. This has some similarity to software development- we test much be…

[deleted]

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

#240

Post by dash2 »

pgeorgi wrote: post #224
mvc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector". When people vote for politicians who say "government is wasteful", "there's too much red tape" what did they think was going to happen?

When politicians say "government is wasteful" or "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector", what they're saying is that their management style is wasteful. Would somebody asserting that about _their_ _own_ _job_ even make it past the interview in the private sector?

Or they could be saying that centralized monopolies are rarely efficient. That is certainly my experience. For example, SpaceX undercut NASA by a factor of about 10, according to this FT report: https://www.ft.com/content/25e2292b-a910-41c8-9c55-09096895f...
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