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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

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The president has the power to pardon; he does not have the power to overturn a conviction. That would require a constitutional amendment.

The British parliament has recently done exactly that in the wake of the Horizon scandal - the convictions have been deleted and considered to have never happened.

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

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The president has the power to pardon; he does not have the power to overturn a conviction. That would require a constitutional amendment. The British parliament has recently done exactly that in the wake of the Horizon scandal - the convictions have been deleted and considered to have never happened.

Thanks. Am just trying to think through how a potential dodgy president could manage to get themselves cleared of things like that. ;)

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

#563
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This might be unfamiliar to software engineers, but there's a reason mechanical engineering and architecture (there might be more, but these are the ones I'm familiar with) schools put students through at least a semester of ethics classes. We are literally the last line of defense in a lot of industries. From the first line of the ASME code of ethics: > Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welf…

This is a noble goal but unrealistic and unfair at scale. Also it belays just a wildly unrealistic understanding of how risk distribution works in corporations. It’s as if in your mind one engineer makes the singular call and sees the entire picture of the project and its risks. Where as more likely a downstream worker who very likely had an incomplete picture will be blamed. Also the personal insult is not needed. I…

> This is a noble goal but unrealistic and unfair at scale. It is in the current organisation of software development because it doesn't allow that.

In the building sector you can't build without your design being signed of by an engineering office and the engineer and its office take the responsability for it, both at the criminal and civil level.

If the same rule existed for the software industry, the organisation would adapt itself around it.

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

#564
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to "kill their users" but they realistically have meeting to vote on whether the system is "go/nogo". This is the basic structure of many aerospace designs. If you ever watch a rocket launch, they are literally checking in with every system owner for that decision. Prior to even getting to the launch date, there are meetings where they are checking with the designers for similar decisions. There are good document…

Wait, what? I'm sure here we can relate to the software side of things. How many times have you been in a position of saying "go/nogo" where saying "nogo" didn't imply it would also be your last day on the job? (or at least a severe Career Limiting Move)

I was able to formaly state a "nogo" when I worked in banks. The management could bypass it, but it was then a formalized decision of their part and it discharged me of any liability for the problem that lead to my "nogo".

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one. Possibly, but not if it were a one-off. Are the airlines that chose to keep flying Boeing 737 MAX not equally (or more) responsible?

After the first accident, Boeing was said to be blaming the pilots, in private, despite knowing about MCAS but not revealing it. They deliberately misrepresented the design (and in particular they minimised the severity of the failure modes) of MCAS to the FAA during the certification process. There are transcripts of the test pilots discussing this stuff. Boeing also heavily lobbied the FAA not to ground the Max 8 d…

Ah I see - makes sense then, if that is all accurate. It would be good to know how coordinated this was internally. If the malicious behaviour genuinely went all the way to the top, then probably those people all deserve criminal sentencing, for sure.

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

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the first accident, Boeing was said to be blaming the pilots, in private, despite knowing about MCAS but not revealing it. They deliberately misrepresented the design (and in particular they minimised the severity of the failure modes) of MCAS to the FAA during the certification process. There are transcripts of the test pilots discussing this stuff. Boeing also heavily lobbied the FAA not to ground the Max 8 d…

Ah I see - makes sense then, if that is all accurate. It would be good to know how coordinated this was internally. If the malicious behaviour genuinely went all the way to the top, then probably those people all deserve criminal sentencing, for sure.

For me the real kicker was that Boeing convinced the FAA that the aircraft did not need redundant Angle of Attack sensors, even though they knew that this meant that there was a single point of failure in a system which had control authority (ie, MCAS).

Boeing did not disclose the existence of MCAS to pilots, and therefore did not train the pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure, and there was no redundancy in the key sensors that fed MCAS.

IIRC at least one of the crashes was caused by an AoA sensor failure.

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

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A woman spilled McDonald's coffee on herself, fusing her labia together and receiving third-degree burns. She needed skin grafts. McDonald's knew that their coffee was dangerously hot and had been repeatedly warned about it, so the jury awarded punitive damages.

FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.

[deleted]

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

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A woman spilled McDonald's coffee on herself, fusing her labia together and receiving third-degree burns. She needed skin grafts. McDonald's knew that their coffee was dangerously hot and had been repeatedly warned about it, so the jury awarded punitive damages.

FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.

> FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.

This doesn't even make sense—water that hot destroys the flavor of the coffee. Why do they not just make and serve the coffee at a temperature people actually expect? Is it so hard to not be an asshole to your customers?

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

#569
post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Boeing" is not a cause. Things like their safety culture can be a cause, or lack of good process control can be a cause. The reason why Boeing is catching a lot of flack is because they deviated substantially from best practices. This is related to your other comment so I'll just respond here.

There is a general hierarchy when it comes to controlling hazards (remember, Boeing already identified MCAS as hazardous): remove the hazard, engineering controls, administrative controls, and PPE. We can apply a little thought experiment to see the gaps in what you're advocating when it comes to the MCAS issue. (Admittedly, this is contrived to just illustrate the point within the confines of a forum reply).

1) Remove the hazard: They could have redesigned the airframe to adjust the center-of-gravity to remove the stall issue that MCAS was developed in the first place. Why didn't Boeing do this? Because of cost and schedule pressure to have a new plane ready, after threats that American Airlines would take their business elsewhere.

2) Engineering controls: MCAS was an engineering control, but an incomplete one. Because MCAS was listed as "hazardous" in the hazard analysis it required redundant sensors. Why didn't they put on redundant sensors as the default? I can only speculate, but considering they were sold as optional, profit motive seems likely. (This also ignores the fact that MCAS should have been categorized as 'catastrophic' meaning they didn't fully understand the impacts of their system)

3) Administative controls: this was the training piece that you're hanging your hat on. This has multiple problems. For one, even though MCAS changed the handling dynamics of the airframe, Boeing pushed hard to reuse the same certification to avoid additional pilot training. Again, this was a business decision to make the airframe more competitive. Secondly, administrative controls are an inherently weak because of human factors. There's a lot that can go wrong if your plan is to have humans follow an administatrive procedure. You claim "it's not hard". Sorry, this is just a bad mindset. Usually when I hear people say things like "it's not hard" or "all you've gotta do" when they're talking about complex systems, it indicates they take an overly simplified mental model. In this case, you may be ignoring the chaos in the cockpit, the fact that the plane has handling characteristics different from what the pilots were trained on, human factors related to stab trim force at speed, conflicting or confusing information (like why the MCAS comes on at changing timeframes, time criticality, etc. Having adminstrative controls as your main mitigation is bad practice, and setting the system up for failure.

4) PPE: this isn't particularly relevant to this case, but a silly example of PPE control is giving everyone parachutes and helmets in case things went south.

You can obviously see PPE is an absurd control. But your main point is that the main control should be administrative, which is the next worst option. Boeing ignored good safety practice to pursue profit. So they probably deserve some of the heat they are getting.

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

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the official statistic for federal inmates: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... To summarize, 44% of current federal inmates are there for drug-charges. The second most category is weapons charges at 22%. So a good 2/3 of current federal inmates are there for non-violent crimes. Sex offense is third most common at 13% I’m sure many are there for illegal sex work or consumption rath…

> Here is the official statistic for federal inmates Federal inmates are a tiny minority of inmates in the United States, because the vast majority of crimes are prosecuted at the state level. There are about 147,000 convicted federal inmates compared to over a million held in state prisons and 103,000 convicts held in local jails. > This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious cr…

> This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts.

This is HN, threads are supposed to get more interesting as they get longer. I was simply expending on my parent’s point by providing the data which was lacking, and my editorialization was to provide the necessary context.

Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost, and it was placed on a demonstrably biased spot. Moving the goalpost away from a biased spot is not a logical fallacy, it is a correction.

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