Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/795123158/boeing-employees-mocked-faa-in-internal-messages-before-737-max-disasters

by jfaat • 7 years ago

380 236 7 years ago

npr.org

shadowgovt3• 7 years ago

Any internal correspondence can become public information in a disclosure proces.

~ first rule of corporate communications

Pxtl• 7 years ago

Yup. Talk as much crap as you want in person, but what goes in email and web messages and pull-requests and code comments must be immaculate.

AmericanChopper10• 7 years ago

Why? I’ve ragged on my employers in DMs, and will often express very blunt concerns about quality/risks in emails or PRs. Providing my opinions in such channels is part of what I’m paid to do. If my employer doesn’t heed my advice, manages to majorly mess something up, and my comments come back to haunt them, why is that my problem?

perlgeek• 7 years ago

Even in person, you shouldn't talk crap all the time. It creates a toxic culture.

MaxfordAndSons• 7 years ago

Heh, this reminds me: at a former employer, the eng team communicated exclusively by IRC (when Slack was already a thing) specifically because the CTO had previously experienced his communications being picked apart and taken out of context when his old company had ended up in the scope of a congressional investigation. So that's one way around it...

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

I completely agree, but I'm pretty sympathetic to the employees. I've worked enough and made enough jokes at work that I don't give much credence to them. At a lot of places I've worked, people internally often viewed the infrastructure as shit, even when it's well-received by users. I think it's part cynicism, and part that so much time goes to fixing bugs, when all you see is that bad part of something, it colors your judgement.

thaumasiotes3• 7 years ago

Geez.

"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, "No."
Peter DeFazio, [D-Oregon], called newly released documents "incredibly damning"

That's hard to argue with. You'd like to think this kind of thing would... leak. Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?

wyxuan• 7 years ago

Blow your whistle all you want but until something catastrophic happens, the whistleblowers would turn out the way the whistleblowers for the 737ng airframe cracking came out: fired and then ignored.

panarky• 7 years ago

"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."

The monkeys will ruthlessly suppress any evidence that they are monkeys or that they supervise clowns.

koheripbal• 7 years ago

Whistle-blowing is misunderstood.

You can't just start leaking internal documents and making accusations without evidence. ...that will get you fired, and possibly in jail.

You need to talk to a lawyer, follow the legal process, and make allegations that you can PROVE.

So many whistle-blowers come out with wild stories (often true), but since they bring zero evidence to the table they are ignored. ...and if they have evidence, they just blindly leak it to the press without going through the process, which can endanger people/privacy and destroy IP.

Don't get me wrong - whistleblowers are important, but if you really want to make positive change and not just stick it to your employer - do it responsibly.

seibelj• 7 years ago

How many people in the government knew about the NSA spying on citizens before Snowden finally spilled the info? That was a massive effort involving many (thousands?) of people. Then when Snowden reveals it, his life is destroyed and he’s forced to live in exile. Sends a very strong warning to any other potential do-gooders considering telling the truth.

mickael-kerjean• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why this got downvoted, I personally wasn't aware of the conditions on which boeing were making plane before the accidents. My gut feel is nobody did care before something really bad happen and having access to a journalist who is interested enough to make a story ain't simple when you're not in their network. As an example, I did notice a few months ago that twitter did receive identifying information about youporn users (here's a proof: https://archive.kerjean.me/public/2020/twitter.jpg). At that time, I did contact a few journalist from techcrunch, gizmodo and some linux techies but never got any answer and the story never went out

rsynnott3• 7 years ago

Eh. In that case, there _had_ been prior leaks, for years; they were just much less complete and taken less seriously. As far as I know, there was never a pre-production leak that Boeing employees thought the MAX was unsafe.

polytely• 7 years ago

While true, Snowden position as administrator placed him outside the usual compartmentalization (because he worked on connecting separate parts of the infrastructure)[0], and placed him in a unique position to realize what was happening and to exfiltrate the proof. I suspect most of the other people who knew the whole picture, were a lot higher up the food chain.

[0]: see his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast (it's really long and rambly but there are some fun nuggets in there) Snowdens book might be a better source but I haven't read it yet.

x86_64Ubuntu2• 7 years ago

Before Snowden? Everyone in the tech field knew the US government was spying on everyone WELL before Snowden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

michaelcampbell• 7 years ago

The NSA's secret boxes in the now famous AT&T closet were well known long before Snowden

AmericanChopper10• 7 years ago

I feel that particular quote is taken out of context a bit. The line immediately preceding it is:

Another damning exchange calls into question the safety of the 737 Max long before the plane was approved to fly passengers.

It’s the quality of the finished product I care about, not the quality of the product at some unspecified point during R&D.

robbiep4• 7 years ago

I don’t see that extra bit of context changing the quote

admax88q• 7 years ago

Presumably internal employees are familiar with the design process of planes. Or do you suspect they make statements like this for every plane during th early stages?

_ea1k2• 7 years ago

Bluntly, this is why companies have email "retention"[1] policies. Lots of products have internal emails about all the scary things that can (and will) go wrong. Its hard to put them into context, but if things do go wrong they will be all over the press.

[1] Really deletion policies

tasty_freeze• 7 years ago

The Washington Post article says that quote was from 2018, contrary to your speculation that it was some long-ago comment that is no longer relevant.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/int...

TrueDuality2• 7 years ago

Group think is a real thing unfortunately...

kortilla• 7 years ago

Two things:

1. You would be surprised at how normal talk like that is in huge corporations due to internal politics. People bad-mouth other projects that are getting limelight, taking away resources, etc. A more benign example is how often Google employees rag on the GCP engineers as being inferior, which has more to do with the money flowing into GCP than merit.

2. People are irrational about safety, despite data showing something is ok. There were droves of people that said they would never get on a fly-by-wire plane (Airbus), despite having no evidence to support their fears.

ReptileMan3• 7 years ago

In pilot lingo there are four levels of trust in a pilot (ascending order):

1. I won't fly with you 2. I will fly with you 3. I will fly with you and take my shoes off during take off 4. I will let my family fly with you.

This phrase used verbatim means quite a lot.

awb• 7 years ago

Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?

Companies are pretty opaque by design and I'm sure these people signed NDAs.

As long as they believed the company was acting legally (even if not ethically) they might not have felt like they had the legal right to share insider information.

Others might have simply felt the company was working on it. And others might not have wanted to damage the company that employs them.

The people that knew something wrong was going on and kept passing the buck are certainly at fault though and in retrospect I bet a lot of people wish they said something.

It's a tragedy what's happened and unfortunately a bunch of people probably could have saved some lives but didn't.

toyg• 7 years ago

And others might not have wanted to damage the company that employs them.

Paraphrasing a famous saying, it's hard to make somebody care about something if their livelihood depends on them not caring.

lgeorget• 7 years ago

Not that I want to defend Boeing, but it's easy to play Nostradamus and predict catastrophies to then only dig up the prophecies if they turn up true. The article doesn't say how much the claims were substantiated and backed up by the concerned employees.

Looking back, Boeing certainly should have investigated the claims more seriously but just from reading the article I feel we don't have a very clear picture of what happened.

makomk3• 7 years ago

Also, this prophecy didn't come true. If anything it was completely ass-backwards - it's about the quality of the 737 MAX sim, not the plane itself, and it looks like Boeing's engineers believed internally that Boeing shouldn't have pushed so hard to release it given that existing 737 pilots didn't need simulator training on the MAX and felt safer flying on the MAX with pilots trained on the NG than they did about flying with MAX-simulator trained pilots. You may recall that the general narrative is that the crashes were, in part, the result of Boeing's desire to avoid MAX-specific simulator training.

_ea1k2• 7 years ago

This is what gets overlooked in these stories. Most failures have at least a few of these.

But if the same investigation happened with successful aircraft, they'd likely find a lot of the same things.

"Employee at X mocks regulator" is not exactly uncommon.

tigershark4• 7 years ago

Here on hn, on the other hand, there are plenty of people that say that they don’t see any problem in flying on the max once it is again in service. From my point of view I’ll happily let them be the guinea pigs while I’ll avoid at all costs to fly on that death machine.

beefield2• 7 years ago

To be fair, flying in MAX was/would still be orders of magnitude safer than pretty much any other transportation method outside flying.

(No, I don't think I still want to fly that, either)

phire3• 7 years ago

As long as they give pilots proper training, I'd actually rather fly on the recertified MAX than certain other Boeing planes.

They have gone though the whole plane with a fine toothed comb, Identifying any other potential problems. It will probably be the safest Boeing in the sky.

This whole MAX situation has made me very nervous about flying on the 787 (built in the same era) or the 737 NG (while it lacks MCAS, something else could theoretically put the stabilizer massively out of trim, and this whole situation has proven pilots have problems recovering from out-of-trim stabilizers)

utopian3• 7 years ago

I mean, I have already flown on them dozens of times prior to the catastrophic events, so I’m not really opposed to boarding them again after recertification.

Then again, it’s not clear to me what else they “covered up” or issues that this new article is focused on. I’d be happy for the FAA to delay them further and get to the bottom of this.

techie128• 7 years ago

Unless they redesign the airframe, I don't think there is any way of fixing the aircraft. One of the requirements ought to be that the aircraft is capable of gliding when it loses power. Given that its airframe is unbalanced it will have a hard, neigh, impossible time "gliding". It will most certainly plunge to the earth killing all the souls onboard.

tim3333• 7 years ago

I'm one of those who would fly it. It's about figuring probabilities rather than gut feel. The odds of me dying riding a motorcycle which I do sometimes are like 10,000x those of dying in any airliner crash.

playeren• 7 years ago

The company official said the language used and sentiments expressed in these communications "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."

Do you think this means:

a) Change the environment that fosters those kinds of messages?

-or-

b) Punish those who wrote those messages?

dannyw• 7 years ago

Boeing is saying the language used and sentiments expressed are bad.

They're not saying that releasing a plane that employees were sounding safety alarms are about is bad.

a13692099932• 7 years ago

This. Exactly this. They are literally saying:

[Sounding safety alarms is] inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate [ie punitive] action in response [to prevent any alarms on the next unsafe design].

mfkp• 7 years ago

Why not both?

zentiggr• 7 years ago

Do you honestly expect anything _but_ [punishment for the ones who got outed]?

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

Both, but as a higher priority, c) punish the exec team on whose watch it happened.

Bring back the concept of responsibility. They are paid to be in overall responsibility for anything that happens under their remit.

Time was such a behaviour in the department, or under their leadership would have ended a career. Realising the actions of a lowly engineer or janitor can end their gravy train, they might implement adequate oversight.

freepor2• 7 years ago

Why just end a career? Why not go to jail?

craftinator2• 7 years ago

In a system with social capital this would be entirely possible.

bikeshed• 7 years ago

Cool how Boeing's response appears to be to find and punish those responsible for the communications, not those responsible for deceiving the FAA and regulators in order to certify an aircraft that never should have left the design phase.

tw04• 7 years ago

My favorite quote:

The company official said the language used and sentiments expressed in these communications "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."

Values? Your values appear to be maximizing profits at the expense of human lives. Your response to: "the guys developing our simulator were emailing back and forth they'd never fly on this plane" shouldn't be - let's fire them. It should be: how did management fail SO HORRENDOUSLY that the feedback from these testers wasn't pushed up the chain so we could build a reliable product?

The fact that we're this far removed from the accidents and they still don't get it tells me the company probably needs to just fail.

ryanisnan• 7 years ago

I completely agree. It's a great example that they are still incapable of owning their mistakes, and cannot be trusted without a significant dressing down. Let them fail.

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

Except American interests will trump all so they'll play as dirty as they need against Airbus and kill Canadian aerospace in the process.

notJim• 7 years ago

This seems right to me. I think most of us have been in situations where we've commiserated with coworkers about a problem that we felt was beyond us to fix, because it's coming from the top. Either management is actively refusing to invest in the necessary changes, or they're creating an environment where it's not even safe to bring those problems to light. And even worse, a culture where it's normalized that there are unfixable problems, such that employees barely even remark on them.

tus88• 7 years ago

This is shocking. Said by a cynic.

blaisio• 7 years ago

I think this is a reminder - do not say or do inappropriate things using company resources (chat, email, VPN, etc). Don't complain about co-workers, don't joke about breaking the law, don't say or do anything rude or disrespectful. You'll get about 5 seconds of happiness from a joke that can ruin your career.

freepor2• 7 years ago

That’s what you took away from this?

TrueDuality2• 7 years ago

I'd blunt that with: It is still appropriate for you to respectfully raise concerns with coworkers, management, etc using company resources. That especially includes if you suspect something may actually be illegal, in violation of a contract etc. Basic human decency and ethics aside, getting fired is still better than going to jail as a scape goat.

ShorsHammer• 7 years ago

You'll get about 5 seconds of happiness from a joke that can ruin your career.

And your coworkers may gain enough courage to actually stand up publicly against what they all say in private. What a horrendously self-interested take on this whole saga.

sitkack• 7 years ago

Boeing might be just the place for you.

boardwaalk• 7 years ago

The cost (not just money) of this to Boeing needs to be way, way more than the cost of the additional training/certification/better sensors and software or whatever would have been needed to do this right to begin with.

We can’t let this to come down to a cynical “what’s the cost of a life?”-style calculation.

It needs to be much more consequential relative to the crime/incompetence than Equifax, Facebook, etc.

linsomniac• 7 years ago

"this airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys"

In the moment, I would imagine this comes across as sour grapes. With the benefit of hindsight, that sentiment seems to hold some water.

mzs• 7 years ago

It's about how bad the flight management computer is, the ridiculously short testing timeline, and how it is likely to never be fixed:

https://twitter.com/davidshepardson/status/12154759339661926...

Traster• 7 years ago

That comment leapt out to me to. I would wager that the same sentiment has been expressed about any sufficiently large project whether it's successful or not. There's always going to be someone in a company who thinks someone else is an idiot.

btmorex• 7 years ago

I think the only thing that can actually fix Boeing is bankruptcy, so I hope that people refuse to fly on the Max even after recertification and it ends up being too big of a financial blow to recover from.

oska2• 7 years ago

I agree. I'll be boycotting the Max just on principle, regardless of what extra safety measures are implemented to get it re-certified.

I'm hoping (and kind of expecting) that people will build simple apps or websites to check whether an advertised flight is on a 737 Max. It should be quite easy for people to avoid/boycott this plane.

thaumasiotes3• 7 years ago

regardless of what extra safety measures are implemented to get it re-certified.

To be fair, after this the Max is likely to be one of the most intensively studied and prepped planes in existence for pilots who might have to fly one. Pilots don't want to die either.

tigershark4• 7 years ago

Not on Ryanair. The CEO explicitly said that their plane allocation is defined 24 hours before the flight and if the passengers discover that the plane is a max they are welcome to not fly but they won’t get any refund.Ah, and they had the balls to rename their max planes to 737-8800 or something similar trying to deceive everyone. Result: it’s almost 1 year that I don’t fly with Ryanair even if before this I used it several times per year.

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

How would bankruptcy fix Boeing? Bankruptcy is a process around restructuring debts (or winding down the company). It's also very likely to get a bailout (if it comes to that) since the world needs more than one major commercial aircraft maker.

ReptileMan3• 7 years ago

Bankruptcy is also great time to fix corporate culture. People are malleable when no one is sure if the next paycheck will come at all.

Pfhreak• 7 years ago

Or nationalization. Make success about safety and transport rather maximizing profit.

mschuster91• 7 years ago

Boeing (and Airbus) are effectively nationalized: no matter what, their respective governments will bail them out due to their importance for military hardware.

tonyedgecombe• 7 years ago

As someone who remembers the nationalised British car industry I am sure that will not resolve these problems.

djabatt• 7 years ago

This sort of stuff makes me freak out when I find out I am flying on a Boeing product. I expect people that are making aircraft to be better than when this NPR reporting purports.

zxienin• 7 years ago

It’s panicking thought to assume that similar culture and malice doesn’t exist at Airbus, just because they haven’t had their public 737 MAX event yet.

rurp• 7 years ago

Wow, this article is full of amazing quotes. I highly recommend reading the entire thing. My favorite one I haven't seen posted yet > "I still haven't been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year," one employee says in 2018, referring to an exchange of information with the FAA.

Utterly unbelievable, yet also totally unsurprising given everything else that's come out about Boeing recently.

aguyfromnb2• 7 years ago

Utterly unbelievable, yet also totally unsurprising given everything else that's come out about Boeing recently.

What amazes me is that the same thing is happening with Tesla, but HN hardly bats an eye, because Silicon Valley:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-push-to-build-a-self-dri...

Engineers speaking up and getting fired or resigning. What's worse is that, as opposed to having a choice to fly on a 737 MAX, driving on autopilot on public roads puts other people at risk.

elcomet2• 7 years ago

But a car involves far less people than a plane.

_ph_2• 7 years ago

There is a very fundamental difference. The Tesla autopilot is a mere driving assist system. Like with plain cruise control, the driver is still fully in charge and needs to pay enough attention to take over at any moment. All accidents happened because drivers were not paying attention at all.

With the Boeing, the MCAS system put the 737 in a flight state which trained pilots couldn't recover from.

blululu• 7 years ago

Someone once gave the sage advice of never using the word 'kill' in your code base. 'm_Object.KillListeners();' can sound pretty bad in court. A lawyer can try to make your source code a legal matter, and a jury is free to interpret 'm_Object.KillChildren();' as being proof of willful negligence. Of course, this doesn't really matter when you're actually exposing willful negligence over your internal communication channels.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

man kill

    KILL(1)     User Commands                    KILL(1)

    NAME
       kill - send a signal to a process

    SYNOPSIS
       kill [options] <pid> [...]

Probably not a unix user then?

tirpen• 7 years ago

That's exactly his/her point.

To a techie it's obvious what it means, but if the code runs on some hardware that ends up killing people for real and the code gets inspected during discovery, having words like that could be a liability since jurors are less likely to understand the technical meaning.

I worked in the automotive industry for a few years, we where told not to use the terms "crash","kill","die" and a few others anywhere in code or documentation for exactly this reason.

jplayer01• 7 years ago

Opposing counsel doesn't care and nobody on the jury will be a Unix user. So ...

noodlesUK2• 7 years ago

'The company official said the language used and sentiments expressed in these communications "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."'

The company is taking action in response. Against its employees. Not the ones responsible for killing hundreds of people, but the ones who were calling the program out on its flaws that led to those deaths? If I were working on a safety critical program and I thought it was risking lives I'd lose my shit. The employees that said this should be getting an "I told you so" badge, and the executive team should be going to prison. Fuck Boeing for this.

dgzl3• 7 years ago

That's just not how massive companies work. Sometimes the leaf-level employee knows a secret to improve the entire system in significant ways, but they'll never be heard. Sometimes the root employee (we'll say CEO) catches a earful from any given section of their company they don't like, regardless of how accepted or pervasive it the sentiment is, and that employee could be picked from the tree. It's just how it works in a massive structure. Someone at one end thinks the values and ethic is one way, and the people at the other end have an entirely different understanding.

noodlesUK2• 7 years ago

There’s a difference between knowing something that would improve a system and knowing that there are specific flaws with a significant degree of lethality. It should be acceptable to miss someone telling you the first (if perhaps a missed opportunity), but it’s negligent to miss the second. It sounds to me that these people were taken aback and appalled by the cavalier attitude towards safety. If you have a decent number of professionals telling you something is unsafe and you ignore their cries, and then you kill people, you’ve fucked up in a big way.

Edit: more to my original point though, the response should be to improve internal processes to prevent this kind of tragedy again, rather than to throw the people doing the right thing by speaking up under the bus, saying it’s against company culture to call out dangerous risks.

optimiz3• 7 years ago

For every truly insightful potential whistle-blower, you have plenty of disgruntled Peter-principle know-it-alls.

Still, it's management's job to create an environment that distills signal from noise.

BLanen• 7 years ago

Completely irrelevant to the point you're replying to.

He's mostly saying the employee shouldn't be punished for saying this in some internal chat(but the CEO should).

Someone at one end thinks the values and ethic is one way, and the people at the other end have an entirely different understanding.

Like, how is this relevant to the employee getting punished being bad?

restlessdesign• 7 years ago

I came back to the comments to reference this exact quote! If the actions are inconsistent with Boeing values, then Boeing has the wrong values.

tasogare• 7 years ago

Same. Sure firing competent employees is the right and only necessary move here. /s

farseer• 7 years ago

>The language used in these communications, and some of the sentiments they express, are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response. This will ultimately include disciplinary or other personnel action, once the necessary reviews are completed.

And that my friends is all that you need to know about the boeing of 2020.

auiya2• 7 years ago

About a year ago, I was considering investing in Boeing. I would have made a good chunk of change doing so. I'm glad today I decided not to.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

It's interesting that Boeing apparently has a bigger issue with the language used than with the culture that fostered these communications in the first place. That is one sick company, trying hard to pretend it was a sick company.

rs23296008n1• 7 years ago

From the rpr article, "This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys" This says a lot about Boeing's internals / culture. Probably their subcontractor interaction quality as well. While we can't take one comment in isolation it is a relevant indicator.

Its telling there were no[?] whistleblowers able to come forward beforehand. Consequences are too real and the search for the guilty talkers likely continues and I don't even think they were even remotely whistleblowers.

Perhaps technical prowess isn't as highly respected as it should be? Too many corners cut? Excessive priority of business over engineering? Timelines too tight? Budgets too small? Misallocations?

Don't know. Lots of symptoms of an unhealthy organization. It will become an interesting case-study regardless.

swebs2• 7 years ago

Does anyone know where we can read the actual documents? This article is missing a lot of information.

cdowns• 7 years ago

This article has them: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21059420/boeing-employees-...

ejolto• 7 years ago

The Washington Post has them https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/boeing-documents-reve...

swebs2• 7 years ago

Wow, that email at the bottom of page 109 sounds particularly bad.

jannes• 7 years ago

Direct link to PDF: https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do...

antpls• 7 years ago

Other quote from the reuters article (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737max/designed-by...) :

“I want to stress the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition from NG to MAX,” Boeing’s 737 chief technical pilot said in a March 2017 email.

“Boeing will not allow that to happen. We’ll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement.”

markdown• 7 years ago

Boeing’s 737 chief technical pilot

He's one who really needs to go to jail. Why didn't they name him?

ChuckNorris893• 7 years ago

Because Boeing is a company of national importance and also a monopoly on home turf, vital to the US security and economy so they're untouchable in the US.

Just like how no VW employee went to jail in Germany for emissions cheating.

adwww2• 7 years ago

The further down the PDF I go, the more I agree with you.

Here's another one of his quotes:

There is absolutely no reason to require your pilots to require a Max simulator to begin flying the Max. Once the engines are started, there is only one difference between NG and Max procedurally, and that is that there is no OFF position of the gear handle. Boeing does not understand what is to be gained by a 3h simulator session, when the procedures are essentially the same.

CaptainZapp• 7 years ago

With that pustule breaking up, releasing more and more of that really evil, stinking and ugly slime I start to wonder if that plane goes into service ever again.

Maybe the FAA will yield to poltical pressure. But I can't imagine any other certification agency accepting responsibility for any accident occurring on their watch now that more and more about the ugly, incompetent, fraudulent and outright evil engineering process for that death trap comes to light.

A plane only certified by the FAA is essentially dead.

selimthegrim• 7 years ago

It’s like a 49 state emissions car or a Mexican market auto. Maybe the Third World will take it.

theprop• 7 years ago

The McDonnell Douglas leadership seems to have put business ahead of engineering (and safety) at Boeing (from other pieces I've read). There are at present just two manufacturers of big planes in the world (China may have a third soon I believe) so it would be terrible for airline safety/efficiency if Boeing did go bankrupt (which is still unlikely) and left just one company with no competition. I think what we should all hope for is a return to Boeing's engineering-centered roots. There are tens of thousands of people who work hard at Boeing, do incredibly difficult work and take justifiable pride in the amazing planes they build. It's a shame that some bad leadership has led to these tragically avoidable crashes. As disturbing and infuriating as these messages are, I believe Boeing if it is once again engineer-lead can get back to strong form and that's what we should all hope for.

eldelshell• 7 years ago

Basically, aircrafts manufacturing is a duopoly: Airbus & Boeing. Isn't there enought market for these two as to not having to cut costs anywhere and airlines pony up with whatever price they set? I know we're talking big numbers here, but come on, Airbus can't produce enough aircrafts to satisfy 100% of the market, so why obsess with cost cutting in such ridiculous things like avionics or simulators?

forgetfulusr• 7 years ago

It may be Exec culture or just culture in general. We all want to be successful/ better than the competiton. It attracts/feeds our narcissism and eventually gets buried by people who only optimize for profit, success on paper.

Can't we replace the finance folks with software yet? It seems that should be the easiest to automate. They can see it, but of course they are closest to the money, and can't let go.

windthrown• 7 years ago

The McDonnell Douglas leadership seems to have put business ahead of engineering (and safety) at Boeing (from other pieces I've read)

The merger happened 22+ years ago. When will you start considering the “new” Boeing company to be responsible for their current actions? It’s 2020 and the problems at Boeing are the fault of Boeing, not McDonnell Douglas.

cm2187• 7 years ago

I must say that seeing the SEC’s handling of internal emails in the Tourre affair taught me a lesson about internal corporate communications. Some personal emails which were unrelated to the affair were published in the SEC report (clearly for the benefit of the front page of newspapers). The extract contained jokes where the sentence had been edited to alter the meaning of the sentence.

The published extract was “whole building is about to collapse anytime now. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab […] standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications”

Out of memory the […] that was left out by the SEC said something like “as kindly calls me xxx, but there is nothing fabulous about me, just a tender... etc”. And that was an email to his girlfriend, nothing to do with any transaction.

Morale of the story: no jokes, even innocuous, they will be weaponised against you in bad faith. Stick to boring, neutral language. And no personal communications on corporate systems. Write everything on the assumption it will be published with bad intent.

rusk3• 7 years ago

It amazes me in this day and age that people don't realise that anything they say on these systems can be dug out and read by anybody, anywhere at any time ...

chopin2• 7 years ago

You're not thinking about this with every keystroke even if you know this. I certainly don't.

Balgair• 7 years ago

Si vous me donnez six lignes écrites par la main de la plus honnête des hommes, je vais trouver quelque chose en eux qui le ferai pendre.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

- Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu and Fronsac (1585–1642)

sudoaza• 7 years ago

I'd like to know what they say internally about other Boeing planes.

makomk3• 7 years ago

If anyone is reading the original messages, this might provide some context for the comments mocking the competence and training of the FTC's AEG:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/senat...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/faa...

slumdev2• 7 years ago

If it's not Airbus, I'm not going.

HappySweeney• 7 years ago

While I agree with this sentiment, buying tickets specifying Airbus, and having the airline switch them to Boeing one week before travel time (as happened to me this holiday season) means I wouldn't be able to do any long distance travel. Is there a way to mitigate this?

slumdev2• 7 years ago

On AA, for example, you can improve your odds of getting an Airbus aircraft if you route through a former US Airways hub (e.g. CLT).

You might find similar patterns for other carriers if you search by city pairs.

Equipment swaps are pretty unusual for international routes, too, because it's harder to reaccommodate people. I think you were unlucky and shouldn't expect that in the future.

amyjess• 7 years ago

Fly a carrier that uses Airbus exclusively, such as Spirit or JetBlue.

bookofjoe• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/9fEvf

jordache• 7 years ago

scrap all those planes.. F-ing Boeing

supernova87a• 7 years ago

Sounds like Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani might be a good candidates for a new management roles at Boeing!

avionicsguy• 7 years ago

I worked with Boeing during the 00's. It's when they started outsourcing everything including IT.

Holy shit this goes deeper than I thought and some people are heavily cleaning Wikipedia.

Didn't even know about this bit stealing rocket tech.: https://www.justice.gov/archive/criminal/cybercrime/press-re...

Also check out: Darleen Druyun https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-probe-intensifi...

Phil Condit was ousted over Darleen and that's why Harry was brought in... although the Wikipedia page doesn't mention any of this...fu wikipedia. He was not "retired" he was forced out and Boeing was banned from Space Contracts for 5 years.

Damn I wish I save all those news articles. Whoever said the Internet is forever is wrong! The Internet is fickle ...some things will be memes forever and others will be forgotten.

And here's what happened to Harry Stonecipher: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111019724886272076

So much for "cleaning" up the company culture. F Boeing. The company not the engineers. I also know some very talented people there.

[Edit Note:1] The WSJ link should not be paywalled as it's an old article...at least it wasn't for me.

[Edit Note:2] The WSJ link is very detailed about what went down if it ends up blocked/paywalled I will...f'ck it I will edit wikipedia....grrrrr history is not fickle and Condit was and is an ass.

adev_• 7 years ago

The monkeys will ruthlessly suppress any evidence

Yeah, I would even say that from the following part "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."

The Monkey will fire the clown, while still being employed and probably not being hold responsible for the shit they have done.

Management liability at its best.

Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters

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