Boeing waited until after Lion Air crash to tell Southwest safety alert was off

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/28/boeing-didnt-tell-southwest-that-safety-feature-on-737-max-was-turned-off-wsj.html

by magtux • 7 years ago

91 64 7 years ago

cnbc.com

larrik• 7 years ago

Wow, I'd be surprised if some young congressperson doesn't make their career by publicly eviscerating Boeing soon.

mieseratte• 7 years ago

I hope you don't think it's going to be a US congresscritter.

"Why do you hate American jobs!"

gorb314• 7 years ago

Boeing as a whole might not be "evil", the same way VW as a whole is not "evil". So going after the whole of Boeing may not be the right thing.

At the same time, some high-up people in VW are paying for the emissions-cheating scandal, which arguably could endanger human beings and the environment.

When are people in Boeing going to pay for actually contributing to the deaths caused by this scandal?

dontbenebby2• 7 years ago

You can turn that logic around real quick since Boeing also makes planes and other equipment for the US military:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Defense,_Space_%26_Secu...

You don't hate the troops after all, do you?

dsfyu404ed3• 7 years ago

I'm thinking of a particular congresswoman that almost certainly isn't going to do it because she'd lose the vote of pretty much every blue collar worker that aspires to have a stable job somewhere like Boeing. It's not an obvious political win.

Edit: Ah, the good ol' "reality makes me unhappy so I'll shoot the messenger" down-votes. I don't know why I even comment in any of the Boeing threads anymore.

BonesJustice• 7 years ago

If it were me, I'd rail against the Boeing _leadership_. Frame it as management's greed putting blue collar jobs at risk (by putting sales and corporate reputation at risk).

everdev3• 7 years ago

So let's not make a fuss about safety, because of jobs?

_eht• 7 years ago

I feel like you are fantastically undervaluing the power of the Boeing lobby groups...

karlkatzke• 7 years ago

"If it's boeing I ain't going"

LeoPanthera• 7 years ago

I wonder how many serious problems Airbus have that we simply don't know about because they haven't been caught.

simion3142• 7 years ago

How is this helping, even if Airbus are as bad that does not help the people that were killed, at least after the first crash Boeing should have ground the planes until the problem was completely understood and fixed (in software or other way).

I will wait for the emails and other documents to surface and see how they took the decisions after the first crash, if the engineers reported the issues but nobody listen etc.

Hopefully some lessons will be learned from thins and engineers from other companies like Airbus would speak if shortcuts that are not safe are pushed.

village-idiot3• 7 years ago

Well, they designed their airframe to handle the larger engines properly, rather than patching it with software. So I'm going to wager that the answer is "a lot less".

balls187• 7 years ago

Or...now that Boeing has clearly lost trust, how much harder will they work to earn that trust back?

JetSpiegel• 7 years ago

0 times harder is they bankrupt themselves.

triangleman• 7 years ago

What an unfortunate blunder by Boeing.

Until this episode I was deliberately looking for 787's and such when booking international flights, despite what I had heard about the batteries, because I thought Boeing had to be just that much better than Airbus and their unintuitive UI's that I heard crashed AF447.

And now all that good will is gone.

jpeter• 7 years ago

AF447 was a pilot error

magtux• 7 years ago

I always had great respect for aerospace and thought they'd put safety above all else but seeing all this, Boeing seems like a fucking travesty.

ilikehurdles2• 7 years ago

Boeing opened its South Carolina plant to avoid a unionized workforce, and that plant has been responsible for producing these horrific excuses they call airplanes. They had the benefit of a doubt before, but now it's clear that Boeing's leadership, like that of other public companies, values cheap labor over safety.

ogn3rd• 7 years ago

Gosh, it's almost like corporate greed is ruining our country.

kevin_thibedeau3• 7 years ago

This is not a manufacturing issue. It is all on poor engineering and poor management making poor decisions.

tomatotomato37• 7 years ago

I'm not sure how unions have any relations to this. They exist as a mediator between management and workers for pay and rights; customer satisfaction or safety is completely outside their domain

bgorman2• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure the 737 Max planes has been entirely assembled in Washington State, where the Boeing employees are unionized.

loceng• 7 years ago

Things would change if there was accountability transferred all the way along the chain of command, and then the salaries C-level executives would certainly be much more warranted; the not just fines but hard jail time argument.

benttoothpaste• 7 years ago

In South Carolina Boeing produces 787 Dreamliners. The 737 Max is produced in Washington.

tastygreenapple3• 7 years ago

It didn't always used to be this way - at one point Boeing delivered planes that were substantially safer than their competitors.

Moving the HQ to Chicago was a terrible idea. Companies like boeing should be managed by engineers not salespeople.

kevin_thibedeau3• 7 years ago

It's hard to keep a mistress when she lives in the same city as your wife.

PhantomGremlin• 7 years ago

Companies like boeing should be managed by engineers not salespeople.

Dennis Muilenburg, the Boeing CEO, is an engineer.[0] And he apparently doesn't even have an MBA. It's hard to know exactly how and when he became seduced by the dark side.

Here's a summary (which I've posted before) of his egregiously bad behavior:

   Oct 29, 2018 Lion Air crash, 189 dead

   Nov 10, 2018 pilots already talking about Boeing
   emergency airworthiness directive related to MCAS[1]

   Mar 10, 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash kills 157

   Mar 11, 2019 Boeing CEO "confident in 737 MAX safety"[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg

[1] https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/614857-indonesian-aircra...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo...

Florin_Andrei• 7 years ago

thought they'd put safety above all else

The bottom line is always above all else. Or is it executive compensation? I always forget which is first.

simion3142• 7 years ago

As I commented in previous articles here on HN, the chance that there are other subsystems that were rushed and self-approved by Boeing is not zero, people thinking that fixing the MCAS is enough are forgetting to consider that other components had to be updated for the new design.

gdubs• 7 years ago

If I recall from earlier reporting, this is the safety light that Southwest paid extra to have installed, right?

mhandley• 7 years ago

And it's recently emerged that the AoA sensor misread itself may have been Boeing's fault, and due to foreign object damage to wiring:

https://interestingengineering.com/boeing-whistleblowers-rep...

Boeing also has foreign object damage problems on the 787 and on the KC46 tankers. Looks like this story still has a long way to run.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/u-s-a...

RankingMember3• 7 years ago

Wow, I'm surprised that's not more well-known (that the USAF halted all deliveries of the KC-46 after finding loose material and debris in delivered planes). Amazingly bad.

I wonder what the odds are that the Dreamliner gets grounded (again) soon to have them all gone over with a fine-tooth comb.

gthtjtkt• 7 years ago

This is pretty disturbing and makes me far more confident in my decision to never set foot on a Boeing airplane again.

I thought the American airlines had all opted for the AoA disagree light, but now it sounds like Southwest didn't have it because Boeing lied to them and said it was standard.

porpoisemonkey• 7 years ago

I've recently contacted all of the major airlines that fly the 737 Max as well as my congressional representatives and the FAA to let them know I have serious reservations about a software fix to the aircraft.

If this issue is concerning to you I'd recommend you do the same. To make it easier, I've put the links to all the contact sites below.

United Airlines https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/customer/customercare

Southwest Airlines https://www.southwest.com/contact-us/contact-us.html

American Airlines https://www.aa.com/contact/forms?topic=CR#/

Find your Congressional representatives https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representati...

FAA https://hotline.faa.gov/

RankingMember3• 7 years ago

For anyone interested in an insider's perspective on recent quality issues at Boeing, check out this short New York Times podcast wherein they interview whistleblowers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/podcasts/the-daily/boeing...

The excerpt that stands out to me the most related the story of one of the whistleblowers finding pieces of debris within a 787 aircraft (between the passenger compartment and the skin), telling his supervisor, and then being told not to worry about it. In another case, a whistleblower in charge of defective inventory found that some of the items marked defective were going missing and ending up installed on aircraft to meet production goals rather than wait for a proper replacement, the red paint marking them defective having been clumsily rubbed off.

itsaidpens• 7 years ago

These stories are from an acquired factory - it seems like they acquired a lot of problems when they bought Embraer.

cryptonector• 7 years ago

Who knows. Maybe the problems where imposed on those factories.

jbarberu• 7 years ago

I don't fly very often, but being in the midst of booking flights I'm very thankful for websites having filters by airplane type. I'll be paying the additional 10-20% to not set foot on a Boeing this time.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

very timely, AvE just made a teardown of an AOAS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhZ0D-JRtz0

Boeing waited until after Lion Air crash to tell Southwest safety alert was off

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