Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 247 posts

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#181

Post by MisterTea »

toyg wrote: post #92
awb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible? Companies are pretty opaque by design and I'm sure these people signed NDAs. As long as they believed the company was acting legally (even if not ethically) they might not have felt like they had the legal right to share insider information. Others might have simply felt the company was working on it. And others might not have wanted to damage the c…

> And others might not have wanted to damage the company that employs them. Paraphrasing a famous saying, it's hard to make somebody care about something if their livelihood depends on them not caring.

Indeed. Another thing consider is if someone blows the whistle it could leave all of their coworkers without jobs. Men and women with families, mortgages, bills and lives. That is a lot of guilt and a very heavy decision to make, especially when there is no consequence in sight. Now that hundreds of people have died as a result that guilt has waned.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#182

Post by wayoutthere »

silvestrov wrote: post #173
wayoutthere wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, the decision to change it from using 2 sensors to 1 sensor was specifically because if the system used 2 sensors it was considered a safety system requiring simulator training for the failure scenarios. IMO Boeing should be required to separate the military and civilian parts of the company and allow the military side to build civilian aircraft based on existing civilian models. I honestly thi…

What’s worse is that we will lose trust in FAA as they still allow for a single non-redundant sensor. At this point FAA should require minimum 2 sensors for something like MCAS which can crash they plane. This should be without regard to any prior certification of the planes.

I think the FAA does require a minimum of 2 sensors for safety systems -- Boeing intentionally lied to hide the true purpose of MCAS from the FAA in order to make the planes easier to sell.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#183

Post by _ea1k »

lgeorget wrote: post #68
thaumasiotes wrote: post #3

Geez. > "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, "No." > Peter DeFazio, [D-Oregon], called newly released documents "incredibly damning" That's hard to argue with. You'd like to think this kind of thing would... leak. Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?

Not that I want to defend Boeing, but it's easy to play Nostradamus and predict catastrophies to then only dig up the prophecies if they turn up true. The article doesn't say how much the claims were substantiated and backed up by the concerned employees. Looking back, Boeing certainly should have investigated the claims more seriously but just from reading the article I feel we don't have a very clear picture of wha…

This is what gets overlooked in these stories. Most failures have at least a few of these.

But if the same investigation happened with successful aircraft, they'd likely find a lot of the same things.

"Employee at X mocks regulator" is not exactly uncommon.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#184

Post by _ea1k »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #16
thaumasiotes wrote: post #3

Geez. > "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, "No." > Peter DeFazio, [D-Oregon], called newly released documents "incredibly damning" That's hard to argue with. You'd like to think this kind of thing would... leak. Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?

I feel that particular quote is taken out of context a bit. The line immediately preceding it is: > Another damning exchange calls into question the safety of the 737 Max long before the plane was approved to fly passengers. It’s the quality of the finished product I care about, not the quality of the product at some unspecified point during R&D.

Bluntly, this is why companies have email "retention"[1] policies. Lots of products have internal emails about all the scary things that can (and will) go wrong. Its hard to put them into context, but if things do go wrong they will be all over the press.

[1] Really deletion policies

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#185

Post by elcomet »

phire wrote: post #131
tigershark wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here on hn, on the other hand, there are plenty of people that say that they don’t see any problem in flying on the max once it is again in service. From my point of view I’ll happily let them be the guinea pigs while I’ll avoid at all costs to fly on that death machine.

As long as they give pilots proper training, I'd actually rather fly on the recertified MAX than certain other Boeing planes. They have gone though the whole plane with a fine toothed comb, Identifying any other potential problems. It will probably be the safest Boeing in the sky. This whole MAX situation has made me very nervous about flying on the 787 (built in the same era) or the 737 NG (while it lacks MCAS, some…

What if they missed another flaw ? Some older boeing planes have been flying for years without an issue, I'd rather fly on those.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#186

Post by amyjess »

HappySweeney wrote: post #144
slumdev wrote: post #142

If it's not Airbus, I'm not going.

While I agree with this sentiment, buying tickets specifying Airbus, and having the airline switch them to Boeing one week before travel time (as happened to me this holiday season) means I wouldn't be able to do any long distance travel. Is there a way to mitigate this?

Fly a carrier that uses Airbus exclusively, such as Spirit or JetBlue.

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#187

Post by BurningFrog »

majewsky wrote: post #155
morsch wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only per mile. Per journey it's the most dangerous transport typically used. Per hour it's about average. This doesn't matter if you have to make a specific trip (the number of miles is fixed), but that's not always the case. Whatever you do, don't walk, that seems to be the most dangerous common mode of transportation (unless motorcycles are common). "Aviation industry insurers base their calculations on the deaths…

> don't walk, that seems to be the most dangerous common mode of transportation Not walking is also a bad idea, though. I don't have numbers at hand, but I can imagine that a sedentary lifestyle gives you way more micromorts than the risk of traffic accidents when walking to work.

Tons of people die in their sleep!

So, just to be safe, don't ever sleep...

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#188

Post by Balgair »

cm2187 wrote: post #106

I must say that seeing the SEC’s handling of internal emails in the Tourre affair taught me a lesson about internal corporate communications. Some personal emails which were unrelated to the affair were published in the SEC report (clearly for the benefit of the front page of newspapers). The extract contained jokes where the sentence had been edited to alter the meaning of the sentence. The published extract was “wh…

Si vous me donnez six lignes écrites par la main de la plus honnête des hommes, je vais trouver quelque chose en eux qui le ferai pendre.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

- Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu and Fronsac (1585–1642)

Re: Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

#189

Post by elcomet »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #179
rurp wrote: post #37

Wow, this article is full of amazing quotes. I highly recommend reading the entire thing. My favorite one I haven't seen posted yet > "I still haven't been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year," one employee says in 2018, referring to an exchange of information with the FAA. Utterly unbelievable, yet also totally unsurprising given everything else that's come out about Boeing recently.

> Utterly unbelievable, yet also totally unsurprising given everything else that's come out about Boeing recently. What amazes me is that the same thing is happening with Tesla, but HN hardly bats an eye, because Silicon Valley: https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-push-to-build-a-self-dri... Engineers speaking up and getting fired or resigning. What's worse is that, as opposed to having a choice to fly on a 737 MAX,…

But a car involves far less people than a plane.
Post reply on HN