The actual transcript is illuminating. This feels like corporate throwing the test pilots under the bus.
https://graphics.reuters.com/BOEING-737/0100B2J51TY/Boeing%2...
Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
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Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#42What’s the implication here? That it’s these pilot’s fault? Surely their job is just to report what they experience during a flight sim and it’s someone else who would have decided to hide that.
The implication is that Boeing needs to broken up into managable pieces. Right now it's a giant behemoth that's doing both passenger planes and also all kinds of hardware that is critical to the US DoD.
This sorta worked as long as Boing built consumer aircraft that worked exceedingly well. But alas...
Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#43What’s the implication here? That it’s these pilot’s fault? Surely their job is just to report what they experience during a flight sim and it’s someone else who would have decided to hide that.
The implication is that people at Boeing knew there were problems with MCAS before the crashes happened. I am not saying these particular guys are at fault. The transcript ( https://tmsnrt.rs/2OZl4Ic ) shows them specifically talking about MCAS doing weird stuff in simulators and they they didn't know what was going on, or what the expected behaviour was. Interesting that it happened in a simulator where I presume th…
I guess the response would depend on if you think the flaw is in the existing type or not.
You could suggest that the trim system is defective regardless of MCAS. That the pilot should always be able to counteract automatic trim in any flight mode.
Or the problem is solely in the max modifications and you can safely ignore issues with the original design.
Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#44>The pilot, Mark Forkner, complained that the system, known as MCAS, was causing him trouble. “It’s running rampant in the sim,” he said in a message to a colleague, referring to the simulator. "Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” he went on to say, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed by The New York Times. People need to go to prison over this.
Boeing has designed planes that have an INCREDIBLE safety record, particularly when flying in US regulated airspace. Interesting that prison time is demanded here when a much more simple explanation is that this was an oversight by the pilots in the sim who didn't fully understand the issue was MCAS related. Millions killed from opioid epidemics, thousands killed from violence and various preventable diseases, huge n…
They also denied there was a problem with thrust reversers until Niki Lauda forced the issue and they were found to have obfuscated.
There are serious questions to be answered about the corporate governance.
Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's super simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_passing#%22The_buck_stops... If the CEO's are held responsible for the deeds of the companies they lead you can bet that there would be an instant improvement of corporate accountability.
You'd also get no new airplane designs.
That may be preferable to broken ones, but no I don't think that will be the outcome. The outcome will be that companies will still follow the money and that executives will make it very plain that we're all playing by the same set of rules.
Rules without accountability and enforcement are meaningless.
Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would support this sentiment usually, but in this case I don't really see a way to determine the chain of responsibility. Who do we force into prison in this scenario? The engineer(s) who made MCAS? Just the one that wrote the lines of code that monitor the airflow sensors? Do we also imprison the QA people that signed off on this? Why not also their managers? Who of the C-suite? Probably the CTO and maybe the CEO,…
It's super simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_passing#%22The_buck_stops... If the CEO's are held responsible for the deeds of the companies they lead you can bet that there would be an instant improvement of corporate accountability.
Will the engineers also be responsible? I don't see how any attribution of blame can work in a system where causes are very distributed, such as in any large corporation. There is no one person responsible and claiming there is would just lead to a different sort of injustice.
Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's super simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_passing#%22The_buck_stops... If the CEO's are held responsible for the deeds of the companies they lead you can bet that there would be an instant improvement of corporate accountability.
Will the engineers also be responsible? I don't see how any attribution of blame can work in a system where causes are very distributed, such as in any large corporation. There is no one person responsible and claiming there is would just lead to a different sort of injustice.
No solution will ever be perfect. But the present day one clearly does not work, it leads to endless games of externalization and avoidance of eventual responsibility.
I've seen up close what even a little bit of accountability can do to large organizations, something a bit stronger would surely still have a positive effect.
As for whether the engineers will also be responsible: REAL engineers already carry responsibility and do so without any problem at all because they know their fellow engineers would not do any different. Professional integrity that's called. Software does not even come close to those standards, nor does most of tech.
And aviation - supposed to be different - went downhill in a hurry in the last decade and a half, not too late to turn back, though for Boeing it may very well be too late to recover their reputation.
Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's super simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_passing#%22The_buck_stops... If the CEO's are held responsible for the deeds of the companies they lead you can bet that there would be an instant improvement of corporate accountability.
You'd also get no new airplane designs.
You'd get no new broken airplane designs - which is the point of the exercise.
Management culture needs to change. Feral greed needs to stop being seen as an acceptable excuse for unacceptable behaviour.
Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
IDK, it's overused in the US, but a lot of people died too and that's... pretty bad?
Sometimes people die and there is no one to blame. The tendency to find a scapegoat is strong and human and needs to be resisted. Maybe someone should go to jail here, but I doubt it.
The legal definition of culpable negligence is actually pretty straightforward.
I see no reason not to hold key decision-makers responsible for the consequences of decisions that aren't just misguided or incorrect, but actively and wilfully negligent of factual information - especially if they cause even more deaths by attempting to suppress that information and place blame on innocent parties.
Re: Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd also get no new airplane designs.
You'd get no new broken airplane designs - which is the point of the exercise. Management culture needs to change. Feral greed needs to stop being seen as an acceptable excuse for unacceptable behaviour.
> You'd get no new broken airplane designs - which is the point of the exercise.
Nobody seems able to write software that doesn't have bugs in it, in fact it seems to be humanly impossible. So, if you're going to jail people for buggy software, no new software will get written.
The same goes for airplanes.