>“So I basically lied to regulators (unknowingly)”
Does not get you anywhere near “killing people with criminal negligence”.
Maybe there exists more, but whatever may exist isn’t public yet. But perhaps yummypaint was just confused and thought he’s on reddit? The UX is fairly similar so it’s an understandable mistake.
"Single sources of data are considered acceptable in such cases by our industry," the Boeing spokesperson said.
This has never been true, and this article was from a time when Boeing was still successfully covering up now public information (they did indeed simulate the sensor failure mode, which is what this new scandal is about).
The decision to have the new MCAS use a single physical sensor itself flies in the face of over a half century of aviation engineering practices. That design decision alone is already negligence. Planes typically have 3 fully independent hydraulic control systems for redundancy. Flight computers are redundant and run on different architectures (there is lots of interesting reading about this if you google). Boeing has known how to do fault tolerance correctly on planes for a long time. In this case management faced a conflict between forseen catastrophic failures and the bottom line, and buried warnings from engineers and pilots.
After the first crash Boeing should have told airlines to ground their planes. They had all the information. Instead they attempted to shift blame to pilots while continuing to lie about the safety of the plane. It doesnt get much clearer than this.
I simply do not believe anyone will end up facing criminal charges over this, which “criminal negligence” very strongly implies. And even if someone somehow ended up facing criminal charges I seriously doubt it'd be over killing people as suggested by yummypaint.
Careers have ended over lesser personal attacks, I’d watch out if I were you.
>Careers have ended over lesser personal attacks, I’d watch out if I were you.
Heard that one before. That company also got investigated by DoJ coincidentally.
Pro tip: Threats get you nowhere. Especially on the Internet.
The fact of the matter is, you asking for "proof" now is an empty, vacuous gesture, as the only people's judgement that matters is the belief of the eventual Grand Jury, and Trial Jury if the DoJ decides to move. You will be challenged to find any executive signing or sending an order that directly screams out "I'm telling you to do an evil thing." Corporate communication revolves around getting people to do what you want without outright saying "I want X" in any format which could hit the media or legal system and blow back on anyone but the company.
If it were easy, or direct, it would have happened or been caught long before now. Each and every judicial action is a balancing act where the interests of the public are set against the liberties of an individual.
The CEO and executive suite have left sufficient paper trail in regards to organizational changes to clearly communicate intent. The prosecution will likely focus on proving the company itself knowingly skimped on commitments to do as they were required by law. Every questionable decision will be weighed upon by a jury as to whether or mot that decision was ultimately reasonable or criminal.
I'm waiting to see some of the details hidden in the paperwork, but I'm fairly certain the case for going after specific high level executives may end up being successful; if only because I believe in this case a large portion of the public from which the potential jury pool can be selected have very marked interests in not having the confluence of responsibility abrogations that led to these disasters ever repeating again.
It's only after the jury has come back that the evidence can be said to have ascended to "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".
Certainly agree with your fundamental point, but also kind of thinking that a whole lot more people than just the CEO need to go here.
I hesitate to say this about any organization that I don't have personal experience in, but at some point even unfamiliar outsiders can be forgiven for wondering if this is just a systemic problem at Boeing?
The two crashes are the final outcome of a structural failing of Boeing at all levels, from engineering to manufacturing to management. The fact that they did not speak out until it was much too late is evidence of that coverup, if they had been up front about any of this the second crash could have surely been avoided and if they had simply done the right thing and name the 737 differently and obtained proper type certification without MCAS it would have avoided the first one as well.
This might be, but the argument needs to be made. Two Sukhoi Superjet 100 have crashed - is that proof that “there’s something seriously wrong with [Sukhoi]’s culture”? Well, maybe, maybe not.
To review: Aperocky said that this is a full coverup. spaceandshit asked for sources (evidence) to demonstrate that this is a coverup. You said that the bodies are evidence. I said that they're evidence of crashes, but not evidence of a coverup. You said that the fact that "they" didn't speak out until much too late is evidence of a coverup.
Once again, I say, that isn't evidence of a coverup. So far the only "evidence" of a coverup is your claim, and Aperocky's claim. Stop just making claims. What is your evidence?
(Why isn't "they didn't speak out until too late" evidence of a coverup? "Some people had doubts and expressed it in an email that's now all over the press" is not a coverup. Did they have hard data? Can you prove it? Did they deliberately try to keep that data from reaching the FAA, the press, and the public? Can you prove it?)
[Edit: And no, "it was misbehaving in sim when I flew it" isn't data, either. It's anecdote. Was the sim correct? Did they know the sim was correct?]
Asking for sources is the internet way of shutting down any argument when you know that whatever sources there are are not going to be made public in the foreseeable future.
But there is more than enough smoke to conclude there is fire, even absent handy incriminating smoking guns in .pdf format. Enough people knew about this and decided not to talk about it when it mattered with two very serious crashes as a result. If you want to chalk that up to innocent mistakes then you really should read up on the whole thing from day #1 and how long Boeing held the line that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the aircraft.
I thought we were well past the stage where this would even need to be argued at all. Asking for proof I'll leave to the courts, in the meantime, even absent proof I'll take my chances in making up my own mind. This may led me astray but if proof to the contrary surfaces I'll be more than happy to adjust. But for now the various narratives seem to support a cover up a lot better than an organization that is transparent about its mistakes and forthcoming with documentation supporting that story.
This isn't a systematic problem at Boeing. This is standard corporate operating procedure applied to company that had nonstandard qualities.
The previous CEO [1], who had done a tour corporate America positions, joined the company "with a focus on cost cutting" and made the decision to produce the 737 Max.
The standard approach has become to gut, deskill, out-source the operations and return the resulting profits. The problem is that this approach can't be maintained for long by company producing high-tech, high-quality, safety-critical merchandise.
In a lot of these kinds of cases, that's the carrot that the board will dangle in front of them. If they cause damage to the company by not stepping down they can lose that parachute, but if they step down now to help the company save face then they can keep some (or all) of it and possibly avoid further investigations into things.
Germans generally hold their leaders to a higher standard as well as everyone generally respecting norms. Ignoring norms is a defining quality of Americans.
Such generalizations do not help, and one need only to look to history to know that this isn't true in the least.
Lining up all Germans against all Americans is the kind of silly stuff that leads to confrontation, recognizing that all of these are individuals and that both on the German and on the American side there are plenty of good individuals that do care is a first step towards a solution. You can then decide on a plan to ensure that those make it to the front of the line on both sides of the Atlantic.
Oh hell no we don't. There have been no real consequences for the Dieselgate. The infrastructure minister Scheuer is still in office after:
- botching an Autobahn toll exposing the state to 500M € liabilities to the private companies that should have implemented it
- (together with his predecessors) not giving a flying fuck about broadband internet outside of cities and LTE access being one of the most expensive in Europe
- STILL continuing to fuck up the Deutsche Bahn railway
Former scandal-ridden army minister Ursula von der Leyen got promoted to EU commission chief despite having utterly failed to clean up the shitshow that is the German Army.
Interior Minister Reul (NRW) is still in office despite ordering illegal raids in the Hambach forest, a colossal police fuck-up during the investigation of pedophiles in Lügde, police beating up a Jew in Bonn and a load of other scandals.
Interior minister Seehofer (federal) is still in office despite nearly bringing the federal government to collapse multiple times, undermining Merkel's authority and doing everything he could to keep a Nazi-protecting Hans-Georg Maaßen as head of one of the secret service branches.
So tell me, where do we Germans keep our leaders to higher standards?
Oh yeah, but heads did roll for that clusterfuck. And unlike most problems in Germany this one isn't just restricted to the Conservatives, literally everyone had their fair share of contributing to it.
I don't think these are comparable except that both are related to cultural issues.
Boeing seems to be short-cutting processes on safety-critical code.
VW was related to gaming a system for environmental compliance. While bad and a breach of trust, it doesn't carry the same immediate threat as safety critical code.
I understand your point, but that's why I put immediate in my comment.
Boeing can be directly linked to the deaths of 346 people in this case. VW is at least a few degrees removed and likely a contributor but not the sole actor in any deaths related to climate change.
It's going to be difficult to prove that VW cheating led to asthma deaths and pollution. It's easy to say that VW is the root of all evil, but the most popular vehicles sold in the US are pickup trucks, which have a diesel engine variant.
But pickup truck are not classified as cars, so their emissions were complying to the higher truck limits of 0.4g/mile of nox, unlike VW which was supposed to comply to the stringent car limits of 0.07g/mile. And of course they found that cummins diesels also cheated (less blatantly).
And anyway, the US is still the biggest contributor on earth of air pollution, and I doubt that it comes from the few VW vehicles sold there
This is an interesting point, but I need to dig more on it. On the surface, trucks significantly outpaced car sales in the U.S. [0].
But there's some added nuance needed. Only 13% or so of trucks are diesels [1] and the sales numbers include SUVs as trucks. I personally don't know of a single person (or model for that matter, although I'm sure they exist) who drives a diesel SUV. The numbers are further complicated because SUVs used to be classified as station wagons in the U.S.
U.S. emission laws used to heavily favor gasoline vehicles vs. diesel although I think this gap has narrowed recently. I believe the converse is true in Europe which is why there is a disparity between the regions in terms of diesel usage
I think what VW did with dieselgate is much worse considering how (a) they willfully effed up the environment (b) actively sought to cheat the very entities i.e. emissions testing facilities, set up to regulate them (c) the scale and sheer assholeishness of their cheating and the cherry on top (d) pretending that "clean diesel" is a thing.
Pollution's effects are cumulative (as per whatever I've read online as a layperson) while a plane crash is more visceral and scary but personally, I think the dieselgate scandal has left me mistrusting any subsdiary owned or any initiative launched by VW.
Last Friday afternoon he was replaced as chairman of the board. I suspect his Congressional testimony later this month will...not reflect well on him, and he'll be retiring fully in the next few months.
It is presented as a smoking gun, but as an outsider to the industry, I don't have the context. How many messages do pilots exchange? How formal are they? How guarded are they? In other words, was this a major report that was hushed; or one of 100,000 informal messages over company IM, some of which were statistically bound to be negative (or somewhere in between)
I would imagine that in development of ANY complex technology, no matter how ultimately successful, somebody somewhere over some channel will at some point say "Well, THIS sucks". From personal experience, even for systems in the end I'm most proud of, at some point during development, I would've vented frustration...
(this is not to say that 737Max Fiasco / MCAS design / any of this is justifiable; I just don't know how much that specific, seemingly casual message between two pilots, contributes value to conversation...)
46 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] thread>“So I basically lied to regulators (unknowingly)”
Does not get you anywhere near “killing people with criminal negligence”.
Maybe there exists more, but whatever may exist isn’t public yet. But perhaps yummypaint was just confused and thought he’s on reddit? The UX is fairly similar so it’s an understandable mistake.
"Single sources of data are considered acceptable in such cases by our industry," the Boeing spokesperson said.
This has never been true, and this article was from a time when Boeing was still successfully covering up now public information (they did indeed simulate the sensor failure mode, which is what this new scandal is about).
The decision to have the new MCAS use a single physical sensor itself flies in the face of over a half century of aviation engineering practices. That design decision alone is already negligence. Planes typically have 3 fully independent hydraulic control systems for redundancy. Flight computers are redundant and run on different architectures (there is lots of interesting reading about this if you google). Boeing has known how to do fault tolerance correctly on planes for a long time. In this case management faced a conflict between forseen catastrophic failures and the bottom line, and buried warnings from engineers and pilots.
After the first crash Boeing should have told airlines to ground their planes. They had all the information. Instead they attempted to shift blame to pilots while continuing to lie about the safety of the plane. It doesnt get much clearer than this.
Careers have ended over lesser personal attacks, I’d watch out if I were you.
Heard that one before. That company also got investigated by DoJ coincidentally.
Pro tip: Threats get you nowhere. Especially on the Internet.
The fact of the matter is, you asking for "proof" now is an empty, vacuous gesture, as the only people's judgement that matters is the belief of the eventual Grand Jury, and Trial Jury if the DoJ decides to move. You will be challenged to find any executive signing or sending an order that directly screams out "I'm telling you to do an evil thing." Corporate communication revolves around getting people to do what you want without outright saying "I want X" in any format which could hit the media or legal system and blow back on anyone but the company.
If it were easy, or direct, it would have happened or been caught long before now. Each and every judicial action is a balancing act where the interests of the public are set against the liberties of an individual.
The CEO and executive suite have left sufficient paper trail in regards to organizational changes to clearly communicate intent. The prosecution will likely focus on proving the company itself knowingly skimped on commitments to do as they were required by law. Every questionable decision will be weighed upon by a jury as to whether or mot that decision was ultimately reasonable or criminal.
I'm waiting to see some of the details hidden in the paperwork, but I'm fairly certain the case for going after specific high level executives may end up being successful; if only because I believe in this case a large portion of the public from which the potential jury pool can be selected have very marked interests in not having the confluence of responsibility abrogations that led to these disasters ever repeating again.
It's only after the jury has come back that the evidence can be said to have ascended to "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".
I hesitate to say this about any organization that I don't have personal experience in, but at some point even unfamiliar outsiders can be forgiven for wondering if this is just a systemic problem at Boeing?
Once again, I say, that isn't evidence of a coverup. So far the only "evidence" of a coverup is your claim, and Aperocky's claim. Stop just making claims. What is your evidence?
(Why isn't "they didn't speak out until too late" evidence of a coverup? "Some people had doubts and expressed it in an email that's now all over the press" is not a coverup. Did they have hard data? Can you prove it? Did they deliberately try to keep that data from reaching the FAA, the press, and the public? Can you prove it?)
[Edit: And no, "it was misbehaving in sim when I flew it" isn't data, either. It's anecdote. Was the sim correct? Did they know the sim was correct?]
But there is more than enough smoke to conclude there is fire, even absent handy incriminating smoking guns in .pdf format. Enough people knew about this and decided not to talk about it when it mattered with two very serious crashes as a result. If you want to chalk that up to innocent mistakes then you really should read up on the whole thing from day #1 and how long Boeing held the line that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the aircraft.
I thought we were well past the stage where this would even need to be argued at all. Asking for proof I'll leave to the courts, in the meantime, even absent proof I'll take my chances in making up my own mind. This may led me astray but if proof to the contrary surfaces I'll be more than happy to adjust. But for now the various narratives seem to support a cover up a lot better than an organization that is transparent about its mistakes and forthcoming with documentation supporting that story.
The previous CEO [1], who had done a tour corporate America positions, joined the company "with a focus on cost cutting" and made the decision to produce the 737 Max.
The standard approach has become to gut, deskill, out-source the operations and return the resulting profits. The problem is that this approach can't be maintained for long by company producing high-tech, high-quality, safety-critical merchandise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney
Lining up all Germans against all Americans is the kind of silly stuff that leads to confrontation, recognizing that all of these are individuals and that both on the German and on the American side there are plenty of good individuals that do care is a first step towards a solution. You can then decide on a plan to ensure that those make it to the front of the line on both sides of the Atlantic.
- botching an Autobahn toll exposing the state to 500M € liabilities to the private companies that should have implemented it
- (together with his predecessors) not giving a flying fuck about broadband internet outside of cities and LTE access being one of the most expensive in Europe
- STILL continuing to fuck up the Deutsche Bahn railway
Former scandal-ridden army minister Ursula von der Leyen got promoted to EU commission chief despite having utterly failed to clean up the shitshow that is the German Army.
Interior Minister Reul (NRW) is still in office despite ordering illegal raids in the Hambach forest, a colossal police fuck-up during the investigation of pedophiles in Lügde, police beating up a Jew in Bonn and a load of other scandals.
Interior minister Seehofer (federal) is still in office despite nearly bringing the federal government to collapse multiple times, undermining Merkel's authority and doing everything he could to keep a Nazi-protecting Hans-Georg Maaßen as head of one of the secret service branches.
So tell me, where do we Germans keep our leaders to higher standards?
Boeing seems to be short-cutting processes on safety-critical code.
VW was related to gaming a system for environmental compliance. While bad and a breach of trust, it doesn't carry the same immediate threat as safety critical code.
And that's ignoring VW's malfeasance impacts on climate change over a decade.
Boeing can be directly linked to the deaths of 346 people in this case. VW is at least a few degrees removed and likely a contributor but not the sole actor in any deaths related to climate change.
But pickup truck are not classified as cars, so their emissions were complying to the higher truck limits of 0.4g/mile of nox, unlike VW which was supposed to comply to the stringent car limits of 0.07g/mile. And of course they found that cummins diesels also cheated (less blatantly).
And anyway, the US is still the biggest contributor on earth of air pollution, and I doubt that it comes from the few VW vehicles sold there
But there's some added nuance needed. Only 13% or so of trucks are diesels [1] and the sales numbers include SUVs as trucks. I personally don't know of a single person (or model for that matter, although I'm sure they exist) who drives a diesel SUV. The numbers are further complicated because SUVs used to be classified as station wagons in the U.S.
U.S. emission laws used to heavily favor gasoline vehicles vs. diesel although I think this gap has narrowed recently. I believe the converse is true in Europe which is why there is a disparity between the regions in terms of diesel usage
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/199981/us-car-and-truck-...
[1] https://news.pickuptrucks.com/2018/09/diesel-pickup-sales-ar...
Pollution's effects are cumulative (as per whatever I've read online as a layperson) while a plane crash is more visceral and scary but personally, I think the dieselgate scandal has left me mistrusting any subsdiary owned or any initiative launched by VW.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21293550
I would imagine that in development of ANY complex technology, no matter how ultimately successful, somebody somewhere over some channel will at some point say "Well, THIS sucks". From personal experience, even for systems in the end I'm most proud of, at some point during development, I would've vented frustration...
(this is not to say that 737Max Fiasco / MCAS design / any of this is justifiable; I just don't know how much that specific, seemingly casual message between two pilots, contributes value to conversation...)