FAA says Boeing withheld ‘concerning’ messages about the 737 Max

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/18/boeing-shares-slide-on-report-faa-is-concerned-it-was-misled-about-737-max.html

by kyleblarson • 7 years ago

106 46 7 years ago

cnbc.com

Havoc• 7 years ago

Boeing just can't catch a break it seems

yummypaint2• 7 years ago

Maybe they should stop killing people with criminal negligence

ryanlol4• 7 years ago

Can you refer to any sources discussing Boeing killing people with criminal negligence?

droopyEyelids• 7 years ago

It was actually a continuous series of catching the biggest breaks possible from regulators that allowed them to get into this situation.

jacquesm7• 7 years ago

It's their breaks catching up with them.

catalogia• 7 years ago

Well it seems they may have caught some of the breaks, and then suppressed knowledge of them...

jacquesm7• 7 years ago

It's a small miracle Boeing's CEO hasn't stepped down yet.

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

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?

Aperocky2• 7 years ago

This is a full coverup from the bottom to the top. There’s something seriously wrong with Boeing’s culture

joe_the_user• 7 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney

jonny_eh• 7 years ago

What incentive is there for someone so highly paid to step down? Would he even still get his golden parachute?

simcop2387• 7 years ago

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.

jonplackett• 7 years ago

You can’t cover up what you’ve done if you step down

jacquesm7• 7 years ago

That's true. But it will at least give the company a means to clean the slate. The longer they wait with this the harder it will be to recover.

r00fus2• 7 years ago

Meanwhile heads rolled at VW for something similar.

nerpderp82• 7 years ago

Germans generally hold their leaders to a higher standard as well as everyone generally respecting norms. Ignoring norms is a defining quality of Americans.

bumby3• 7 years ago

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.

saimiam• 7 years ago

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.

mrpippy• 7 years ago

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.

WhyKill• 7 years ago

why regulation capture is bad in a nutshell

mzs• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21292860

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21293550

NikolaNovak• 7 years ago

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...)

FAA says Boeing withheld ‘concerning’ messages about the 737 Max

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