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Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

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Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#551

Post by smolder »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #546
smolder wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of your arguments are left unexplored. They are inadequate to absolve Boeing of wrongdoing. The idea about unions sharing some blame is especially absurd and the suggestion of it makes your post very difficult to take seriously. Even if unions caused Boeing to become unprofitable, they are blameless in the decisions that led to the crashes.

> They are inadequate to absolve Boeing of wrongdoing. How so? For example if staying competitive (and therefore surviving) forces you to squeeze through without recertification, isn’t that a sign that maybe there is a better version of the regulations that should be considered that doesn’t have bad incentives? What about the well-documented reality that numerous pilots from airlines with higher requirements have had…

You have submitted a lot of words with no tenable logic. Good luck with your campaign here.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#552

Post by docmars »

eastbound wrote: post #387
ActionHank wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it does go to trial it would be great for people behind this to be directly tried for their criminal actions as well. The reality is that a company is on trial for the actions of individuals and if there is no follow through on that it will not change anything. I doubt it goes to trial as I am 99% sure that the judge will rubber stamp the whole thing because the US is a corporate driven hellscape where peasants ar…

95% of US inmates are on plea deal, which means the prosecutor never had to prove the charges before the (potentially) criminal admitted it. It is unfair for those who admitted the charges because they believed they couldn’t defend themselves further. So the Boeing trial being on plea deal would be on paar with that standard…

I agree with you on principle, if the stat you shared is true.

With regards to Boeing, I'm not sure that's relevant, given the numerous reports of poor maintenance and outright mid-flight failures and flaws caused as a result is sufficient evidence for some kind of wrongdoing on Boeing's part. For this case, given that plea deals are used to expedite the court process and result in a less harsh penalty as an incentive, it's the most advantageous thing for Boeing to do because there was probably no hope in defending a guiltless verdict.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#553

Post by abduhl »

diob wrote: post #423
ActionHank wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it does go to trial it would be great for people behind this to be directly tried for their criminal actions as well. The reality is that a company is on trial for the actions of individuals and if there is no follow through on that it will not change anything. I doubt it goes to trial as I am 99% sure that the judge will rubber stamp the whole thing because the US is a corporate driven hellscape where peasants ar…

Don't worry, it's now legal for the judge and everyone else involved to get a nice present from Boeing, as long as it happens afterwards! :(

The case is brought by the federal government in federal court. The recent Supreme Court ruling is applicable only to the enforcement of the federal gratuities law against state and local officials, federal officials are still prosecutable under the federal gratuities law. So, bribing these particular folks after the fact is still illegal.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#554

Post by carapace »

bluGill wrote: post #377
carapace wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planes are falling out of the sky. I'm a fan of nuance but we're a little past that now.

Even with that, flying is still vastly safer than driving. We thus know there is a level of risk society is willing to accept.

There's no "even with that"!? Planes fly. If they don't fly people die. This is not an acceptable regression.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#555

Post by justinclift »

razakel wrote: post #175
justinclift wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If such a convicted felon were to pardon themselves, would they be a convicted felon any more?

Yes. Pardons are clemency - they don't overturn the conviction, it just means the person doesn't receive any punishment.

Interesting. Would such a person be able to change the rules so presidential pardons entirely void whatever they're pardoning?

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#556

Post by WalterBright »

bumby wrote: post #545
WalterBright wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing indeed has a failure here, and is responsible for it. But as the first LA incident confirms, the pilots, by following their training, were able to deal with it. It was the subsequent flight on the same airplane that crashed. This remains omitted by the mass media, which contraindicates any of the reporting on it as "good". There is also responsibility in the production of a faulty AOA sensor, and the failure o…

I disagree. The media has covered the training (or lack of it) extensively. It seems like you want to point to a singular cause. As with most mishaps with complex systems, it’s the result of a cascade of failures. Training is only one part of the problem. Fixing that is still only an administrative mitigation which is the least desirable form of mitigation when designing a safety system. Even if the pilots had additi…

> The media has covered the training (or lack of it) extensively.

I've never seen it in the media. Not knowing what the stab trim cutoff switch does is a massive failure either on the part of the pilot or the training. Not reading the Emergency Airworthiness Directive is a failure of the pilot.

> It seems like you want to point to a singular cause

Au contraire. It seems that everyone but me wants to blame a singular cause - Boeing. There was a cascade of failure here:

1. A defective AOA sensor was manufactured and installed

2. After the first LA incident landed safely, LA failed to correct the problem before sending the airplane aloft again

3. Single path MCAS inputs could not detect failure

4. Pilots failed to apply known emergency procedures

> require humans to act perfectly in accordance with their training, all the time.

Of course we try to design airplanes so they do not cause emergencies. But we still need pilots to train to react to emergencies. You don't put a person in the pilot seat who is not well-trained in emergency procedures.

Making airplane travel safe means identify and correct ALL causes in the cascade of failures. Most accidents are a combination of airplane failure and pilot failure.

Sometimes pilots make deadly mistakes. That's why we have copilots, they check each other. But in the MAX crashes, both pilot and copilot failed to follow known emergency procedures. Why they didn't, I have no idea.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#557

Post by abeppu »

bpodgursky wrote: post #548
abeppu wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairness and equality before the law benefits everyone. But we live in a broken society where corporations have the rights of people (including political donations as free speech), but don't have the ability to be punished in a way that is at all aligned with what we inflict on actual people. This also means that punishment is largely not an effective deterrent for large companies, where the penalties when they're ca…

This is dated 2019 luxury vibe. Everyone else has gotten the memo grown up. If you're fine actively sabotaging the US for your own pet grievances, go find some other country to live in and annoy.

Dated vibe?

I mean I would have said that about Roe v Wade but apparently it just took a few decades of complaining and making abortion an engine for a political apparatus, and they got it rolled back. If I don't complain about citizens united for at least another 30 years, I'm not trying hard enough.

All the good things in this country came from people who were willing to keep pushing when everyone else didn't have the patience. We might not agree about which those things are, but if you think continuing to carp about injustice is out of place here ... maybe you're the one who missed a memo. This country started b/c rich colonists didn't want to pay taxes and they escalated to fighting a war of attrition. These were businessmen, and they picked a fight that started by disrupting all their existing trade relationships and continued rolling production disruptions as a multi year war ran all over the country. So you can take your quiet, lazy acquiesce and go find some other country to be snide about it in.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#558

Post by WalterBright »

bumby wrote: post #544
WalterBright wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean, but pilots are trained to deal with runaway stabilizer trim. The EA pilots were also sent an Emergency Airworthiness Bulletin reiterating instructions on dealing with runaway stabilizer trim. They're also trained to reduce thrust when they hear the overspeed horn, rather than continue at full throttle. Overspeeding the aircraft is extremely dangerous, and also makes it almost impossible to man…

As an example, you said they “ignored” the over-speed warning. I would bet it’s much more likely that there was too much going on in the cockpit, likely with confusing or conflicting information, that prevented them from making the correct assessment in a time critical environment. Expecting the humans to act perfectly when the system is working against them is as bad of a design assumption as assuming your airspeed…

In the LA crash, the pilots restored normal trim something like 25 times over 11 minutes (or maybe it was 11 times in 25 minutes, I forgot). That's plenty of time to realize that the stab trim system should be turned off. They never turned it off.

In the EA crash, they restored normal trim at least once. They had the overspeed warning going off. I don't recall the exact sequence of events, but they turned off the stab trim with the airplane sharply nose down, and tried to restore normal trim by turning the manual wheel. At high speed, they should know that wouldn't work. They'd need to unload the stabilizer first by reducing the speed.

The overspeed warning should never be ignored, as it means parts of the airplane can be torn off. Especially in a dive.

Even so, if they had followed the directions in the Emergency Airworthiness Directive to use the electric trim thumb switches (which override MCAS) they could have restored normal trim.

It's not hard:

1. restore normal trim with the thumb switches

2. turn off the stab trim

That's it.

> Expecting the humans to act perfectly

Reading the EAD and do steps 1 and 2 is not some super complicated thing. Besides, pilots who get flustered in emergency situations should be washed out of flight school.

My dad was a military pilot for 23 years. He had many in flight emergencies, but kept a cool head and properly resolved each of them. In one, the engine on his F-86 conked out. The tower told him to bail out. But he knew exactly what the rate of descent of the F-86 was, his altitude, his speed, how far he was from the landing strip, the effect of the wind, etc., and calculated he could make the field. Which he did, saving the very expensive airplane. (However, he was reprimanded for not bailing out, as the pilots were more valuable than the jet.) But he was unrepentant, confident in his calculations.

BTW, I've talked to two different 737 pilots on different occasions. Their opinion is the pilots should have been able to recover.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#559

Post by watwut »

swozey wrote: post #466
cjbgkagh wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have ME/CFS which means for most of my life I've barely been able to make enough in the good times to cover the extended bad times. Running out of money for me is basically a death sentence as it would become increasingly impossible to dig my way out of such a hole. Normal people at their worst could probably stack shelves or wash dishes for a living but that option is not available to me. I'm better at managing my…

I was homeless at 17 in high school before going into the Marines in 2002. I know what having negative money is like, health problems or not. That doesn't change the fact that it comes from absolute privilege to tell someone that they should just quit their job because you don't agree with the ethics or morality of work they're doing. If you HAVE the privilege, the savings, the good health not needing COBRA, etc, the…

Honestly, meh, especially for white collar professes like ours or this one. First of all, generally we are not talking about people who have no other choice but do something unethical. We are talking about people who have choices and are choosing either somewhat higher salary or inertia.

And second, I do know multiple people who made the choice of not getting employment somewhere unethical. It is not some kind of rare decision making. These people have children and parents that depends on them.

It is not some great unusual privilege to walk away from job like this you want to frame this as. It is where quite a lot of technicians are. You could make that argument about factory near some trailer park or poor area, but not really about us.

Re: Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

#560

Post by davedx »

ryandrake wrote: post #187
davedx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boards are often toothless though, just look at Tesla's. Replace the C-suite. This is done frequently in M&A's and other corporate strategies in extremis. Fire the guys at the top and replace them with people with good track records.

You can rotate people in and out of the C-suite, but incentives and culture aren’t going to change. These people are largely figureheads that get paid a lot of money because they are Ivy Leaguers whose friends on company boards who set their salaries are all Ivy Leaguers, too. It’s not like Boeing is going to get a new CEO and then suddenly middle management is going to start prioritizing safety, engineering rigor, a…

Who do you think sets the incentives?

This conversation is so weird to me, I don't get what people are arguing: is the argument that it's better to replace middle management than top level management? That we shouldn't do anything? What?

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