8 ms·

> Instead, Boeing tried to claim that flight 427 crashed because a pilot had a seizure and depressed the rudder. NTSB investigators dismissed this as ridiculous

by usaphp 8y ago

> Instead, Boeing tried to claim that flight 427 crashed because a pilot had a seizure and depressed the rudder. NTSB investigators dismissed this as ridiculous. > Boeing had no choice but to carry out the changes, but the company never stopped trying to deflect blame. While the investigation was ongoing, it adopted a philosophy of trying to avoid paying out damages to families of crews because this could be legally interpreted as an admission of responsibility. It had tampered with the PCU from the Colorado Springs crash and repeatedly tried to misdirect the investigation with “alternative” theories. Should not there be some criminal charges?

rkangel 8y ago
That would require more evidence than it sounds like there is. And that's assuming that you subscribe to the motivations put forward in this article. I generally follow Hanlon's razor - "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence". I have a hard time believing that a cover-up in Boeing was orchestrated over several years by a group of people all who didn't care about loss of life. I can easily believe that they didn't take the problem seriously, and that they were biased towards conclusions that weren't their fault.
- kartan 8y ago
  > I have a hard time believing that a cover-up in Boeing was orchestrated over several years by a group of people all who didn't care about loss of life. No orchestration is needed. Managers only need to look with disdain to anyone that brings the issue. If your company does not put a lot of resources to make it transparent it is going to be opaque by default. Transparency is hard to achieve when humans are so good reading a superior expression of disapproval. Most people does not need to be told to not bring that problem again, all that we need is a subtle clue. So, to get a cover up you only need to do nothing. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
  - projectileboy 8y ago
    Exactly right - same thing that happened at NASA. There aren’t grand conspiracies - just people acting in their own interests, based on the incentives that have been set up (or evolved) in the organization.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    No orchestration is needed. Managers only need to look with disdain to anyone that brings the issue. Networks and social media extend the reach of these kinds of disdain, and take these mechanisms beyond the walls of the office and organization. In the present day climate, where accusations causing outrage tend more easily to become viral, one need not be someone's manager or even have a close relationship to exercise such power of disdain. The incentive structures in social media can act as a very efficient transmission substrate for these mechanisms. One doesn't have to look far, to see how social media amplified groupthink has short circuited professional judgement -- even in highly visible and public circumstances. In particular, forums, email lists, and social media groups of journalists can be seen to be having such effects. So, to get a cover up you only need to do nothing. With just a modicum of digging, this can be seen quite clearly in 2019, in the mainstream media, which is declining but still trusted by the public. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” This effect is very real and very powerful. This is why we as a society should be wary of the political exclusiveness of entire professions, entire industries, and of academia. If you're surrounded only by people of like minds, you're far less likely to have your idea checked by people highly motivated to find your faults. It's only diversity of opinions which guards against groupthink.
    - Retric 8y ago
      It’s not really social pressure when managers have so much direct power not just in major events like a lay off or promotion, but also day to day tasking. This generally results in people becoming hypersensitive to their boss’s disapproval. Social networks on the other hand have far less direct impact which results in less socially accepted statements becoming common.
- lgvln 8y ago
  I think you might be missing the point stated in the article: the damage to the reputation of Boeing and possibly US economy is more important than the loss of a few (hundred) lives. You can say they cared about the loss of lives, just not as much as the damage to their company.
- wefarrell 8y ago
  Hanlon's razor doesn't apply here. No one is implying that anyone at Boeing allowed this to happen due to malice, that would be truly insane. Negligence perpetuated by greed is far more likely and equally as criminal.
  - rkangel 8y ago
    In this case I mean it as 'active' vs 'passive'. There is the implication in the article that Boeing purposefully went and stole springs that could be used to diagnose an issue that they were fully aware of. That I would describe as 'active' and I have trouble believing. Didn't put credence, time and effort into reports because they were inconvenient I would describe as 'passive'. Passive is still bad - likely results in the same number of people dying, but a different interpretation of the situation.
- droithomme 8y ago
  > "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" I don't see that that should be applied as a rule of thumb to investigations involving civil liability and possible criminal liability. We have a situation where there are literally piles of dead bodies, massive civil and possible criminal liability, and key evidence goes missing when in the possession of the party that was in the end found to be at fault, who more than anyone else would have realized that the evidence that disappeared was a smoking gun. It's reasonable to assume that malice might have been a factor in such a scenario and it's a reasonable hypothesis to investigate.
  - sitkack 8y ago
    > Never underestimate the power of a cliched thought terminating pithy statement.
- mbostleman 8y ago
  Agreed. The implications of the story make a good movie script, but it's hard for me to imagine how this could play out practically across so many people and so many years. I mean whole careers started and ended in this saga. I was thinking a more likely explanation is that once the original issue that ultimately was found to be the cause was dismissed, and after more and more fatalities built up, the consequence of admitting the problem may have been perceived as game over for Boeing. As in the financial and legal consequences would be unrecoverable. So basically like the web of lies problem - once they passed a certain point they couldn't go back.
  - jplayer01 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost-benefit_analysis,_the_Pinto_Memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost-benefit_analys... These are companies driven by greed. If they're in any way culpable, they should suffer consequences. There's nothing else to it.
    - mbostleman 8y ago
      The root motivation may very well be greed - I'm not attempting to go that deep. And whether or not they should or shouldn't suffer consequences is also a different issue.
      - jplayer01 8y ago
        It's not a different issue. If they're responsible, there should be consequences.
- peteradio 8y ago
  > didn't take the problem seriously, and that they were biased towards conclusions that weren't their fault. I think that is malice personally.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    I was about to say, then that is a definition you have made for yourself. My understanding of the word malice is to mean "desire to cause pain, injury, or distress to another" as Webster defines the word. But I discovered there is a second, legal context for the word which means "intent to commit an unlawful act or cause harm without legal justification or excuse" so I guess in the law, "malice" is just another word for "deliberate." I still think the first definition is what most people are familiar with, and that unless you think the engineers deliberately designed the rudder control system to behave in this way, knowing it would cause crashes and fatalities, the company having a bias after the fact to not blame themselves does not rise to that standard.
  - da_chicken 8y ago
    I would call it human nature. Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- pfortuny 8y ago
  The Volskwagen saga can also be attributed to incomptenence but alas! it was not caused by it but by malice. We are humans after all and money talks. The razor is for non-economical causes.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    "The razor" is for credulous morons. "Never attribute"? Yeah that sounds logical we should just stop thinking bad thoughts and being suspicious of people who got rich by destroying our society.
- fgonzag 8y ago
  I generally follow: never ascribe a reason until you have sufficient evidence to support it, Be it malice or incompetence...
- yongjik 8y ago
  > "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" That's why we have a term "criminal negligence", because sometimes it's impossible to tell malice from incompetence. So the law basically decided, "Well, fuck this, if you do something as stupid as (putting a faulty brake on a train, for example), then you deserve to go to jail, and we don't care if you were actually thrilled to kill passengers or were simply too stupid to understand what you were doing."
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Don't slit your wrists with Hanlon's razor. As a rule, it has high performance, but as a policy, it's trivial to exploit. Children figure out how to play dumb before they figure out how to articulate complete sentences. If you let conmen do it, they'll bleed us all dry.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  > "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" Clever people deliberately structure their malice to be plausibly explained away as incompetence.
- MFLoon 8y ago
  I don't think Hanlon's razor should be applied to multi-billion dollar corporate persons. Private individuals, even small to medium sized institutions with limited resources and unproven levels of competence, are fair applicants to Hanlon. But a) Boeing is typically a hyper competent corporate person, having executed massive, multi-decade engineering projects that have been largely successful, and b) regardless of (a), the disappearance of a very specific piece of technical evidence while in the possession of the potentially liable party, while the rest of the evidence is successfully delivered, is not adequately explained by incompetence.
nabla9 8y ago
Having theories and arguments that are convenient and self serving is not a crime. It's called public relations. For crime to happen there has to be criminal activity.
- paganel 8y ago
  > It had tampered with the PCU from the Colorado Springs crash This looks like "activity" to me.
  - nabla9 8y ago
    Good point. This claim seems to be very original.
- metapsj 8y ago
  would it be a stretch to say criminally negligent? or conspiring to obstruct an active investigation? obviously it would require further investigating the back channel of communication within the company and the individuals involved, but in this day and age courts can request company emails and phone records.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Having theories and arguments that are convenient and self serving is not a crime. It's called public relations It's not just PR. It's default behavior for Homo sapiens.
matz1 8y ago
> Should not there be some criminal charges? That depends on whether you can convince the court.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Don’t those facing charges get brought to the court, guilt being decided by the court? Does the court press charges anywhere?
mannykannot 8y ago
I do not wish to diminish how serious any tampering with the evidence would have been, or of Boeing's more general attitude of dismissing signs that there was a problem with the equipment, but it is not entirely clear from the article that someone from Boeing removed the Colorado Springs PCU spring and end cap. The article says the item had apparently been in the possession of United Airlines and valve designer/manufacturer Parker Bertea before their absence was noticed. The unit is also described as having been heavily damaged in the crash, to the point where several other parts had to be replaced before it was tested.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Boeing's more general attitude of dismissing signs that there was a problem with the equipment Having worked in software for decades, I've noted a particular sort of bias in myself and other developers. We tend to feel that our creations are like our children, and we are far too ready to blame the user. I've caught myself doing this. I've been caught out by QA doing this. I've caught fellow developers doing this, where I am in the position of the user. On that last count, I'm still surprised at the unrealistic levels of incompetence and/or malice ascribed to me in support of those face saving theories. Emotions are a tricky thing. Do not formulate theories in the heat of them. If you care about being truthful, be especially mindful of your incentives in those moments.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    That's why dogfooding is so powerful. The best way to first hand experience the shortcomings of your product is to use it. This makes me wonder if anyone at Google is using G-Suite themselves.
    - usrusr 8y ago
      The effect of dogfooding is limited though: when you know all the quirks you won't when notice that you constantly work around them.
      - 8y ago
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
> Should not there be some criminal charges? With the size of the defense contract they have with the USG?

by usaphp 8y ago

rkangel 8y ago

That would require more evidence than it sounds like there is. And that's assuming that you subscribe to the motivations put forward in this article. I generally follow Hanlon's razor - "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence". I have a hard time believing that a cover-up in Boeing was orchestrated over several years by a group of people all who didn't care about loss of life. I can easily believe that they didn't take the problem seriously, and that they were biased towards conclusions that weren't their fault.

kartan 8y ago
> I have a hard time believing that a cover-up in Boeing was orchestrated over several years by a group of people all who didn't care about loss of life. No orchestration is needed. Managers only need to look with disdain to anyone that brings the issue. If your company does not put a lot of resources to make it transparent it is going to be opaque by default. Transparency is hard to achieve when humans are so good reading a superior expression of disapproval. Most people does not need to be told to not bring that problem again, all that we need is a subtle clue. So, to get a cover up you only need to do nothing. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
- projectileboy 8y ago
  Exactly right - same thing that happened at NASA. There aren’t grand conspiracies - just people acting in their own interests, based on the incentives that have been set up (or evolved) in the organization.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  No orchestration is needed. Managers only need to look with disdain to anyone that brings the issue. Networks and social media extend the reach of these kinds of disdain, and take these mechanisms beyond the walls of the office and organization. In the present day climate, where accusations causing outrage tend more easily to become viral, one need not be someone's manager or even have a close relationship to exercise such power of disdain. The incentive structures in social media can act as a very efficient transmission substrate for these mechanisms. One doesn't have to look far, to see how social media amplified groupthink has short circuited professional judgement -- even in highly visible and public circumstances. In particular, forums, email lists, and social media groups of journalists can be seen to be having such effects. So, to get a cover up you only need to do nothing. With just a modicum of digging, this can be seen quite clearly in 2019, in the mainstream media, which is declining but still trusted by the public. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” This effect is very real and very powerful. This is why we as a society should be wary of the political exclusiveness of entire professions, entire industries, and of academia. If you're surrounded only by people of like minds, you're far less likely to have your idea checked by people highly motivated to find your faults. It's only diversity of opinions which guards against groupthink.
  - Retric 8y ago
    It’s not really social pressure when managers have so much direct power not just in major events like a lay off or promotion, but also day to day tasking. This generally results in people becoming hypersensitive to their boss’s disapproval. Social networks on the other hand have far less direct impact which results in less socially accepted statements becoming common.
lgvln 8y ago
I think you might be missing the point stated in the article: the damage to the reputation of Boeing and possibly US economy is more important than the loss of a few (hundred) lives. You can say they cared about the loss of lives, just not as much as the damage to their company.
wefarrell 8y ago
Hanlon's razor doesn't apply here. No one is implying that anyone at Boeing allowed this to happen due to malice, that would be truly insane. Negligence perpetuated by greed is far more likely and equally as criminal.
- rkangel 8y ago
  In this case I mean it as 'active' vs 'passive'. There is the implication in the article that Boeing purposefully went and stole springs that could be used to diagnose an issue that they were fully aware of. That I would describe as 'active' and I have trouble believing. Didn't put credence, time and effort into reports because they were inconvenient I would describe as 'passive'. Passive is still bad - likely results in the same number of people dying, but a different interpretation of the situation.
droithomme 8y ago
> "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" I don't see that that should be applied as a rule of thumb to investigations involving civil liability and possible criminal liability. We have a situation where there are literally piles of dead bodies, massive civil and possible criminal liability, and key evidence goes missing when in the possession of the party that was in the end found to be at fault, who more than anyone else would have realized that the evidence that disappeared was a smoking gun. It's reasonable to assume that malice might have been a factor in such a scenario and it's a reasonable hypothesis to investigate.
- sitkack 8y ago
  > Never underestimate the power of a cliched thought terminating pithy statement.
mbostleman 8y ago
Agreed. The implications of the story make a good movie script, but it's hard for me to imagine how this could play out practically across so many people and so many years. I mean whole careers started and ended in this saga. I was thinking a more likely explanation is that once the original issue that ultimately was found to be the cause was dismissed, and after more and more fatalities built up, the consequence of admitting the problem may have been perceived as game over for Boeing. As in the financial and legal consequences would be unrecoverable. So basically like the web of lies problem - once they passed a certain point they couldn't go back.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost-benefit_analysis,_the_Pinto_Memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost-benefit_analys... These are companies driven by greed. If they're in any way culpable, they should suffer consequences. There's nothing else to it.
  - mbostleman 8y ago
    The root motivation may very well be greed - I'm not attempting to go that deep. And whether or not they should or shouldn't suffer consequences is also a different issue.
    - jplayer01 8y ago
      It's not a different issue. If they're responsible, there should be consequences.
peteradio 8y ago
> didn't take the problem seriously, and that they were biased towards conclusions that weren't their fault. I think that is malice personally.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I was about to say, then that is a definition you have made for yourself. My understanding of the word malice is to mean "desire to cause pain, injury, or distress to another" as Webster defines the word. But I discovered there is a second, legal context for the word which means "intent to commit an unlawful act or cause harm without legal justification or excuse" so I guess in the law, "malice" is just another word for "deliberate." I still think the first definition is what most people are familiar with, and that unless you think the engineers deliberately designed the rudder control system to behave in this way, knowing it would cause crashes and fatalities, the company having a bias after the fact to not blame themselves does not rise to that standard.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  I would call it human nature. Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
pfortuny 8y ago
The Volskwagen saga can also be attributed to incomptenence but alas! it was not caused by it but by malice. We are humans after all and money talks. The razor is for non-economical causes.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jessaustin 8y ago
  "The razor" is for credulous morons. "Never attribute"? Yeah that sounds logical we should just stop thinking bad thoughts and being suspicious of people who got rich by destroying our society.
fgonzag 8y ago
I generally follow: never ascribe a reason until you have sufficient evidence to support it, Be it malice or incompetence...
yongjik 8y ago
> "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" That's why we have a term "criminal negligence", because sometimes it's impossible to tell malice from incompetence. So the law basically decided, "Well, fuck this, if you do something as stupid as (putting a faulty brake on a train, for example), then you deserve to go to jail, and we don't care if you were actually thrilled to kill passengers or were simply too stupid to understand what you were doing."
jjoonathan 8y ago
Don't slit your wrists with Hanlon's razor. As a rule, it has high performance, but as a policy, it's trivial to exploit. Children figure out how to play dumb before they figure out how to articulate complete sentences. If you let conmen do it, they'll bleed us all dry.
darkpuma 8y ago
> "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" Clever people deliberately structure their malice to be plausibly explained away as incompetence.
MFLoon 8y ago
I don't think Hanlon's razor should be applied to multi-billion dollar corporate persons. Private individuals, even small to medium sized institutions with limited resources and unproven levels of competence, are fair applicants to Hanlon. But a) Boeing is typically a hyper competent corporate person, having executed massive, multi-decade engineering projects that have been largely successful, and b) regardless of (a), the disappearance of a very specific piece of technical evidence while in the possession of the potentially liable party, while the rest of the evidence is successfully delivered, is not adequately explained by incompetence.

nabla9 8y ago

Having theories and arguments that are convenient and self serving is not a crime. It's called public relations. For crime to happen there has to be criminal activity.

paganel 8y ago
> It had tampered with the PCU from the Colorado Springs crash This looks like "activity" to me.
- nabla9 8y ago
  Good point. This claim seems to be very original.
metapsj 8y ago
would it be a stretch to say criminally negligent? or conspiring to obstruct an active investigation? obviously it would require further investigating the back channel of communication within the company and the individuals involved, but in this day and age courts can request company emails and phone records.
stcredzero 8y ago
Having theories and arguments that are convenient and self serving is not a crime. It's called public relations It's not just PR. It's default behavior for Homo sapiens.

matz1 8y ago

> Should not there be some criminal charges? That depends on whether you can convince the court.

lostlogin 8y ago
Don’t those facing charges get brought to the court, guilt being decided by the court? Does the court press charges anywhere?

mannykannot 8y ago

I do not wish to diminish how serious any tampering with the evidence would have been, or of Boeing's more general attitude of dismissing signs that there was a problem with the equipment, but it is not entirely clear from the article that someone from Boeing removed the Colorado Springs PCU spring and end cap. The article says the item had apparently been in the possession of United Airlines and valve designer/manufacturer Parker Bertea before their absence was noticed. The unit is also described as having been heavily damaged in the crash, to the point where several other parts had to be replaced before it was tested.

stcredzero 8y ago
Boeing's more general attitude of dismissing signs that there was a problem with the equipment Having worked in software for decades, I've noted a particular sort of bias in myself and other developers. We tend to feel that our creations are like our children, and we are far too ready to blame the user. I've caught myself doing this. I've been caught out by QA doing this. I've caught fellow developers doing this, where I am in the position of the user. On that last count, I'm still surprised at the unrealistic levels of incompetence and/or malice ascribed to me in support of those face saving theories. Emotions are a tricky thing. Do not formulate theories in the heat of them. If you care about being truthful, be especially mindful of your incentives in those moments.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  That's why dogfooding is so powerful. The best way to first hand experience the shortcomings of your product is to use it. This makes me wonder if anyone at Google is using G-Suite themselves.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    The effect of dogfooding is limited though: when you know all the quirks you won't when notice that you constantly work around them.
    - 8y ago

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

> Should not there be some criminal charges? With the size of the defense contract they have with the USG?