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US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

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Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#71

Post by asdff »

dmurray wrote: post #17
brink wrote: post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

Stockbroking, cinema, accountancy, law, life insurance, financial planning, nuclear power, real estate, medicine, advertising, media...[0][1] Self-regulation (especially at the industry level rather than delegating to individual companies) doesn't seem completely broken. Actually it can work quite well. You keep some oversight, and reserve the right for the state regulator to step in if the SRO goes bad. The people w…

Those 10 sorts of industries you cited aren't exactly models of self regulation. Well, they are, in the sense of how to abuse regulatory capture to maximize returns, but not in the sort of sense most people think of regulation which is limiting harm to consumers.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#72

Post by Guzba »

Seems like an empty threat. The obviously best position for gov is to always have the "you all messed up don't make us come regulate" line available to them. It sounds good. The moment they start regulating, all the mess-ups are mud on their face. Who wants that?

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#73

Post by randomdata »

josh_carterPDX wrote: post #38
brink wrote: post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

The FAA is bad, but I would say the FDA is worse. Any industry in which you have companies actually writing the text of the regulations used to oversee them is a recipe for disaster. Sadly it usually takes a tragedy to highlight these egregious systems that exist in our country. We also need to get lobbyists out of Washington so that the real impactful work can begin to separate the government agencies from the compa…

> We also need to get lobbyists out of Washington

You can't have (representative) democracy without lobbying. It is not that you need to get the lobbyists out, you need to convince more lobbyists in. It is likely that the average Joe has not talked to their representatives even just once, let alone on the ongoing basis necessary to fulfill the demands of democracy.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#74

Post by mattmaroon »

beambot wrote: post #68
rkangel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An industry regulating itself is different from an organisation regulating itself. Self regulation of the industry is common as you say. It tends to involve one central body enforcing the standards on the members, and acting as a central point for agreement of the standards. This is not the case with the Aviation regulation. The FAA is the regulator, and has delegated the testing to the people it is meant to be regul…

Prominent examples of "Self Regulating Organizations": The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), The Financial Planning Association (FPA), Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (FINRA), Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC), Options Clearing Corporation (OCC), American Institute of Certified Public Accounts (AICPA) https://www.investopedia.…

By organization he clearly meant single for-profit corporation. While the language was imprecise, he surely wasn’t referring to these types of entities.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#75

Post by graton »

treesknees wrote: post #53
strangattractor wrote: post #47

Many people seem to think this couldn't/wouldn't have happened if someone else had been doing the inspections. This problem was likely caused by a flaw in the process. A mistake a 3rd party could also make. It is not a mistake where Boeing is doing nefarious cost cutting and needs to hide it or has made a huge engineering mistake affecting all the aircraft. Somebody put the plug in - got a phone call, or shift change…

I was with you until midway. You're making quite an assumption while the NTSB's investigation is still ongoing. We don't know the root cause - Those bolts may have very well been in place and passed an inspection during install, but rattled loose and fell out (and then subsequently were blown out of the plane when the plug failed.) United reported loose bolts, not missing bolts. This indicates a more systemic issue a…

> Those bolts may have very well been in place and passed an inspection during install, but rattled loose and fell out (and then subsequently were blown out of the plane when the plug failed.)

The bolts the NTSB can't find are not the ones that have been found to be loose. The bolts they can't find are the ones with the castellated nuts and cotter pin. Very hard to imagine those vibrating loose. And for the door to transit in an upward direction it would really require all four of those to fail or for them to not exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maLBGFYl9_o at around the 7:26 mark has a great explanation of how the door is secured and it seems like as long as there is at least one of the four bolts installed the door can't move.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#76

Post by burnerthrow008 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #16
brink wrote: post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

A lot of industries self-inspect with regulatory oversight. For example, the SpaceX Starship mishap investigation that required 63 corrective actions from SpaceX before they were allowed to fly Starship again was done by SpaceX with FAA oversight. It seems that the oversight was effective; I highly doubt that SpaceX would have imposed 63 corrective actions on itself without effective oversight. It's hard to see how i…

> I highly doubt that SpaceX would have imposed 63 corrective actions on itself without effective oversight.

Eh, I don't know if I agree with that. Most of the actions were very straightforward "stuff we need to fix to make the rocket do what we want it to do and not do what we don't want it to do".

Like, one of the actions was "make the launch pad not explode when the engines turn on". That was the root cause of the engine failures that led to the flight termination. Was SpaceX really not going to do that anyway?

Besides formalizing the process and writing down a list of 63 bullet points and using the legalese of "corrective actions" for them, I think the result would have been basically the same without the FAA looking over their shoulder.

But the main reason for my belief is that the Falcon 9 launch success streak is currently better than any other rocket in history (by a large margin), at 241 launches and counting (and 180 launches since the last landing failure). To put this in context, other launchers with a similar or greater number of launches go 30-50 launches between failures. Unless SpaceX is just incredibly unbelievably lucky, they seem to understand how to do RCA to build reliable rockets.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#77

Post by asdff »

strangattractor wrote: post #47

Many people seem to think this couldn't/wouldn't have happened if someone else had been doing the inspections. This problem was likely caused by a flaw in the process. A mistake a 3rd party could also make. It is not a mistake where Boeing is doing nefarious cost cutting and needs to hide it or has made a huge engineering mistake affecting all the aircraft. Somebody put the plug in - got a phone call, or shift change…

This entire narrative about Boeing in the media to me just screams of insider trading. The stock went up 68% in a month, then held flat for two weeks, only breaking down the day the screw story breaks. People definitely knew this was coming in December and were selling off what they could without triggering a panic sell off. Perhaps even that November pump and favorable headlines about order sheets at the time was also orchestrated. Interesting to speculate.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#78

Post by sschueller »

janice1999 wrote: post #55
strangattractor wrote: post #47

Many people seem to think this couldn't/wouldn't have happened if someone else had been doing the inspections. This problem was likely caused by a flaw in the process. A mistake a 3rd party could also make. It is not a mistake where Boeing is doing nefarious cost cutting and needs to hide it or has made a huge engineering mistake affecting all the aircraft. Somebody put the plug in - got a phone call, or shift change…

The company responsible for the door installation is Spirit AeroSystems. They've been sued for "widespread quality failures" before [0]. The workers raised issues and were ignored [1] and allegedly told to falsify records. [0] https://news.yahoo.com/maker-boeing-door-plugs-sued-00335449... [1] https://jacobin.com/2024/01/alaska-airlines-boeing-parts-mal...

Let's not pretend that Spirit AeroSystems isn't just basically a sub devision of Boeing.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#79

Post by mattmaroon »

strangattractor wrote: post #47

Many people seem to think this couldn't/wouldn't have happened if someone else had been doing the inspections. This problem was likely caused by a flaw in the process. A mistake a 3rd party could also make. It is not a mistake where Boeing is doing nefarious cost cutting and needs to hide it or has made a huge engineering mistake affecting all the aircraft. Somebody put the plug in - got a phone call, or shift change…

The same problem has been found on several plans. Far too many and too high a percent to not be a systemic issue. A phone call or shift change might explain one or two errors, not the same error in many planes across multiple airlines.

They don’t build 100 of those things a day. They don’t even average one a day. Whatever the issue, it went on over quite a period of time.

Given the other issues with the 737 Max line, it is reasonable to believe there would be a good chance of improvement if regulators were more heavily involved.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#80

Post by cycomanic »

rkangel wrote: post #23
dmurray wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stockbroking, cinema, accountancy, law, life insurance, financial planning, nuclear power, real estate, medicine, advertising, media...[0][1] Self-regulation (especially at the industry level rather than delegating to individual companies) doesn't seem completely broken. Actually it can work quite well. You keep some oversight, and reserve the right for the state regulator to step in if the SRO goes bad. The people w…

An industry regulating itself is different from an organisation regulating itself. Self regulation of the industry is common as you say. It tends to involve one central body enforcing the standards on the members, and acting as a central point for agreement of the standards. This is not the case with the Aviation regulation. The FAA is the regulator, and has delegated the testing to the people it is meant to be regul…

That's sort of the same with the SEC and (parts of) financial industry?

One can even argue the tax office is sort of like it.

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