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Former Boeing 737 Max Chief Technical Pilot Indicted for Fraud

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341–350 of 367 posts

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

#341
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine they could test multiple planes at the same time.

Sure. So you take half the staff and put them on testing a second plane. Then each individual plane takes 10 years to test instead. (Remember that you don't gain person-hours for free just by shuffling people around.) What would this accomplish? Instead of a total system time average of 10 years, you now get an average testing time of 10 years to which you still need to add the queuing time, so you're even worse off…

Only if the workload doesn't shake out favorably in light of Amdahl's law.

Most mechanical processes aren't necessarily conducive to parallelization. Verification and information processing on the other hand can do favorably in the presence of non-reliance on a physical system-under-test.

Which subsystem vetting arguably is. If you're talking vetting specs.

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

#342

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.

If it's in the US it's likely the OP is in a "Right to work" state, so can be fired for whatever reason.

One family in particular funded a lot of the push to implement "Right to work" - the AmWay owning DeVos's.

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

#343
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…

What you talk about the FAA doing thier own testing and validation is (unfortunately) almost impossible. Back in the 90s, a senior FAA official (I think a Director) had said something along the lines of “The FAA does not and cannot check everything, we just see that companies are doing their tests.” The FAA would require several times more manpower to be able to actually audit or test everything, and that is assuming…

> What you talk about the FAA doing thier own testing and validation is (unfortunately) almost impossible.

No, it isn't. It's just more work than the government feels like doing, involving more technical skill than the government feels like hiring.

The problem is that the government can't have it both ways. It can't both claim that it is regulating airlines and airplane manufacturers to protect public safety, and also claim that it can't independently check what the regulated entities are telling it. It has to be one or the other: either we get the actual independent regulation that the government claims to be doing, with whatever resources it takes, or we all admit that we are not going to get that because the government is incapable of doing it, and we figure out some other way of ensuring safety.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and for most of the agencies, it's not that their budget is small or the agency itself is incompetent: it's what's required by law and they can't override it unless Congress decides to change the laws.

You don't want regulatory agencies creating law on their own though. Not only is that unconstitutional but the reason its unconstitutional is because you would inevitably end up with some busybody who is not accountable to the people massively over stepping their power and creating tyranny.

> You don't want regulatory agencies creating law on their own though.

While I agree with this as a matter of personal opinion, it is not at all the actual fact in our current regulatory regime. Federal regulatory agencies create law all the time. Look at the Federal Register; every regulation in there has the force of law and was written by a regulatory agency.

> you would inevitably end up with some busybody who is not accountable to the people massively over stepping their power and creating tyranny.

Which is exactly the situation now.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't want regulatory agencies creating law on their own though. Not only is that unconstitutional but the reason its unconstitutional is because you would inevitably end up with some busybody who is not accountable to the people massively over stepping their power and creating tyranny.

> Not only is that unconstitutional While I do study relevant US laws as required in my job (requiring familiarity with how law operates in countries where we operate), I am not an American, but I do understand certain things with regards to the US constitution and relevant case laws. The Congress originally meets only for a few months' time, usually less than 6 months. This is due to the reality of the time, where t…

> the constitution, even considering the various amendments, is unfortunately not aligned with your opinion.

Sure it is. Article I of the Constitution says that all legislative power shall be vested in Congress. That means anything that has the force of law--and all Federal regulations created by executive branch agencies under the current US regulatory regime have the force of law; you can be fined or jailed for violating them--has to be passed by Congress using the process described in Article I. So any Federal regulation that has not been passed by that process--i.e., every one of them--is unconstitutional.

The fact that current US jurisprudence disagrees with that statement just illustrates how far current US jurisprudence has diverged from what the Constitution actually says. The status of Federal regulations is by no means the only example: current US jurisprudence says that Congress can regulate farmers growing crops for their own personal use because of the Commerce Clause; and that a city government can use the eminent domain power to evict people from their homes and turn the property over to a private development corporation (that ends up never developing the land anyway), and that counts as a "public use" under the Fifth Amendment.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's in the US it's likely the OP is in a "Right to work" state, so can be fired for whatever reason. One family in particular funded a lot of the push to implement "Right to work" - the AmWay owning DeVos's.

So as to not discourage people - right to work does not prevent you from going after a company that mistreated you in a civil lawsuit. If they ask you to do something unreasonable that was not in the job description, you can sue them for things like lost wages while you look for a new job, any relocation expenses to the new job, and to a harder extent emotional suffering an punitive damages.

Let me give a clearer example. Your boss tells you "shoot that old lady or you're fired." you refuse, he fires you. You can sue him, you will win, it has nothing to do with right to work or not. In my case it was asking me things to endanger patients, and refusing to put the request in writing so there's a record of it.

The issue with that is it's a civil suit, in court, and your law firm is now fighting a huge corporation for the amount equivalent to a couple of months' salary. It's not worth it in most cases, and they know that. But if you want to break even, and the huge amount of time and added stress of the lawsuit is worth revenge - not cash - absolutely do it, and punish those assholes. Except they're not really punished. The payout disappears in a database and becomes a rounding error somewhere, and the management responsible never gets punished. They don't have the stress and time waste of the lawsuit - there are zero consequences to them, and it's yet more loss to you.

Unless you're willing to find a lawyer who'll just take part of the settlement if you win and guarantee you it won't take up a lot of your time. I contacted a bunch of attorneys, and that was a no-go. Contrary to popular belief, getting the guilty party to pay the attorney bills of the winner almost never happens in real life. Even if you get awarded those costs (doubtful) - they will simply refuse to pay. You can then show up and take their office furniture and put it on ebay.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come you were paid more when unemployed ?

I was paid much less than my salary when I was unemployed. I made more per week from the salary than I did per month on unemployment. I assume you mean more than someone else you know who had UI. The benefit amount depends on your salary. UI is insurance paid by the company that fired you - in essence the company that fired you pays your unemployment (by paying for the insurance for their employees). The more people…

Thanks for the reply bro have a good weekend

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this style of regulation is limited to FAA. FDA does not independently test all drugs either. They just review and ensure the drug companies' tests are acceptable.

Yeah, people are are drastically underestimating how enormous the testing apparatus is at a company like Boeing. It's thousands of employees. Expecting the FAA to duplicate those efforts is ridiculous. I don't know much about the FAA, but as someone who works in healthcare, I know the FDA conducts regular audits of medical device manufacturers. They roll in for a week, request access to everything and everywhere, the…

And ISTR that just around the time I entered the medical device industry, that this is exactly what happened to Abbott and they were forced to remove some of their products from the market for months until they could bring their quality system back up to FDA satisfaction.

Hard to believe that it was so long ago. Man, I'm old :-) https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-11-03-991103...

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point? That the FAA screwed up? That Boeing intentionally lied? Those were nver in question. If it is the point that the FAAs job should be easy because the only oversee Boeing and Airbus, well that point is just ignorant.

If you're unable to understand LattleLazy's point it's probably best to refrain from responding to them until you do.

Attacking the poster is not moving the discussion forward!

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

#350
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how confident are you that there aren’t any other novel systems that didn’t exist before on a similar level as MCAS? Having not had a public debacle around them, how much effort would it take for you to personally certify that MCAS is the only novel system of its caliber on these aircraft?

The airplane couldn't have been built without many system diagrams showing MCAS, or a similarly complex component. The FAA should have pulled schematics directly from Boeing engineering during certification. And the FAA should have someone with enough technical expertise and experience look at them. And that person should have said "The submitted information by Boeing doesn't include full details on this subsystem."…

Now you're talking about the FAA essentially replicating the scope of Boeing's test/QA operation. There are thousands of pages of diagrams and likely millions of lines of code. One person is not going to scan them and say "Here! This is a problem."
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