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Boeing Crashes Highlight the High Costs of Cheap Government

92 points by molecule 8y ago

purplezooey 8y ago
Many people don't realize that as much as we like to complain about big government and wasteful spending, the private sector is just as bad, or worse in some cases.
Proven 8y ago
> Today, corporations spend more than $2.6 billion a year on congressional lobbyists How's that a cheap (or small) government? Such sums are spent precisely because the government creates way more cost and damage than $2.6 bn per year, so the lobbying is there to offset it. A truly small government would be characterized by an absence of lobbying because no amount of lobbying would help anyone make or save money on the account of government helping them do that by redistribution, restrictions or legislative burden.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
>It is true that the F.A.A.’s current delegation rules have been around for more than a decade — and that America’s commercial airlines have assembled an enviable safety record over that period. But the available evidence also suggests that America’s refusal to adequately fund the F.A.A. allowed corporations to gain inordinate influence over a public-sector function — and many people died as a result. This is classic motivated reasoning. The authors know that the US Airline safety profile over that time is stellar. Knowing they can’t base their claim on the actual statistical safety record, thy resort to using a comparison with vague words such as ‘suggests’ and ‘inordinate’ and emotionally charged phrases: such as ‘corporations to gain inordinate influence’ and ‘many people died.’ They are hoping that your emotional brain will overlook the lack of argument of real quantitative evidence and jump on the emotional bits of the argument. This is similar to how anti-immigration groups will seize on a high profile crime committed by an immigrant and use that to say that immigration should be stopped/cut back without discussing if immigrants are actually more likely to commit violent crimes than natives.
- olefoo 8y ago
  The proper metaphor here would be "controlled descent into terrain"; where everything is fine, until the terminal event.
- AceyMan 8y ago
  To work from the same passage, >It is true that the F.A.A.’s current delegation rules have been around for more than a decade [...] Yeah, well, great. But aircraft development timespans are on the order of ten to fifteen, sometimes twenty years—how many new models (or significant variants) were shipped in that window? IOW, any "ten-year-old track record" in transport category aviation isn't really saying much due to the timescales involved.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  You could argue that the current record is simply a legacy of previous high quality government regulation and oversights. And that the 737-MAX is the first article of the new regime. Another good example of that is the defective Bay Bridge replacement between Treasure Island and Oakland. That bridge is going to fail during the next earthquake because of design flaws that the oversight agency didn't have the manpower to spot. CALTRANS after three decades of Republican lead budget cuts doesn't have the ability to safely oversee projects of that size anymore.
  - DrScump 8y ago
    CALTRANS after three decades of Republican lead budget cuts doesn't have the ability to safely oversee... Republicans have been in the minority in both houses and had absolutely no power in the CA legislature appropriations process for over two decades. For much of that time, the Democrats had supermajorities. The new Bay Bridge debacle falls squarely on the Browns.
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      Guess who doesn't know how government appropriations work.
Farradfahren 8y ago
Now playing - echo chambermusic : the silence
jmclnx 8y ago
Well as the saying goes, "You get what you pay for"
kazinator 8y ago
Throwing money at government just to make it expensive won't fix this kind of problem. What if a bigger, fatter, better funded FAA is still in cahoots with Boeing?
- pohl 8y ago
  I grant the existence of some who seek to make government less expensive for the sole sake of it being less expensive. (Existence proof: Grover Norquist, who wants to drown it in a bathtub.) Who are these mythical creatures who want it to be more expensive without providing more/better services?
  - kazinator 8y ago
    Pretty much every governmental bureaucrat.
    - pohl 8y ago
      People say that a lot, but without really thinking it through. There are 2.79M civil servants, each of which can be pejoratively referred to as a "bureaucrat" if that is your wont, and pretty much every one of them wants government services to become more expensive solely for expense's sake? That doesn't even pass the smell test.
SlipperySlope 8y ago
Regulatory capture is the obvious problem. The proven fix is to mandate public interest members on these oversight boards. This solution is orthogonal to the extent of regulation.
watertom 8y ago
Seems like in the U.S. the pilots are properly trained and are capable of handling the difference in the new vs old aircraft. Other countries aren't fairing so well. Is this a failing of the U.S. Government's FAA? No. I have a good friend who was a Naval aviator and did crash investigations for the Navy, his ordered list for causes of aviation crashes. The top 3 causes he believes are responsible for 99.9% of all crashes. 1. Pilot error due to fatigue (Which the U.S. has made strides to drastically reduce) 2. Pilot error not due to fatigue 3. Pilot lack of training 4. Plane failure (hardware, software, mechanical, etc)
- cmurf 8y ago
  >Seems like in the U.S. the pilots are properly trained and are capable of handling the difference in the new vs old aircraft.Other countries aren't fairing so well. What specific difference training did U.S. pilots receive that foreign pilots did not? How are pilots in other countries improperly trained? What is the evidence either 737 MAX crash had anything to do with training? If better training can mitigate flawed design, should that absolve any portion of manufacturer liability for any discovered flawed design? In a proper investigation, all bias must be removed, and that includes statistical likelihood of prior causes of crashes.
  - DuskStar 8y ago
    > What specific difference training did U.S. pilots receive that foreign pilots did not? Well, they all have far more than 200 hours of flight time, for one. Even the copilots. > What is the evidence either 737 MAX crash had anything to do with training? The fact that the problem was displayed to the pilots (trim severely out of norm) and they didn't follow the correction procedures properly. Though that might not be "training" as much as "competence". > If better training can mitigate flawed design, should that absolve any portion of manufacturer liability for any discovered flawed design? Really depends on the flaw.
    - cmurf 8y ago
      The pilots of Lion Air 610 had in excess of 5000 hours. Flight experience doesn't answer the question I asked either. The assertion was made that U.S. pilots received difference training (NG vs MAX). What difference training? You assume without evidence the problem manifests like runaway trim. And then proceed to assume without evidence the incompetency of two pilots. And yet you refuse to assume the incompetency of the automation, which didn't mere fail, it countermanded with lethal force the 100% correct control inputs of the pilots. The idea they have to assert their sanity by flipping two switches, is about as ridiculous as automation not having to assert its sanity when it, by design, trusts a single point of failure one upping that by trusting it while it's failing and one upping that to extreme by taking action on it without any regard to other input sources including the pilots themselves. It's beyond obscene to me. I have personally trained private pilots with competency at identifying failed gauges, knowing which one to disregard, and estimating the missing values by inference from the remaining gauges. And this is in sub-200 hour pilots. The skill required for the instrument rating exceeds this particular automation in the AOA failure case by quite a lot. And the skill required for commercial and ATP ratings is even greater than that by quite a lot. Meanwhile MCAS upset from judgement of a single sensor induced such an unusual attitude it became unrecoverable. So the assumption of incompetency by pilots, while cutting automation all kinds of slack is to me 180 degrees backwards.
stillbourne 8y ago
There is only one way to fix this problem folks. Privatize the FAA, deregulate airplane manufacture, and use the money saved to give the rich a tax cut. The rich will then trickle down on the planes to save us from these software issues.
- mieses 8y ago
  actually you are right

92 points by molecule 8y ago

Many people don't realize that as much as we like to complain about big government and wasteful spending, the private sector is just as bad, or worse in some cases.

Proven 8y ago

> Today, corporations spend more than $2.6 billion a year on congressional lobbyists How's that a cheap (or small) government? Such sums are spent precisely because the government creates way more cost and damage than $2.6 bn per year, so the lobbying is there to offset it. A truly small government would be characterized by an absence of lobbying because no amount of lobbying would help anyone make or save money on the account of government helping them do that by redistribution, restrictions or legislative burden.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

>It is true that the F.A.A.’s current delegation rules have been around for more than a decade — and that America’s commercial airlines have assembled an enviable safety record over that period. But the available evidence also suggests that America’s refusal to adequately fund the F.A.A. allowed corporations to gain inordinate influence over a public-sector function — and many people died as a result. This is classic motivated reasoning. The authors know that the US Airline safety profile over that time is stellar. Knowing they can’t base their claim on the actual statistical safety record, thy resort to using a comparison with vague words such as ‘suggests’ and ‘inordinate’ and emotionally charged phrases: such as ‘corporations to gain inordinate influence’ and ‘many people died.’ They are hoping that your emotional brain will overlook the lack of argument of real quantitative evidence and jump on the emotional bits of the argument. This is similar to how anti-immigration groups will seize on a high profile crime committed by an immigrant and use that to say that immigration should be stopped/cut back without discussing if immigrants are actually more likely to commit violent crimes than natives.

olefoo 8y ago
The proper metaphor here would be "controlled descent into terrain"; where everything is fine, until the terminal event.
AceyMan 8y ago
To work from the same passage, >It is true that the F.A.A.’s current delegation rules have been around for more than a decade [...] Yeah, well, great. But aircraft development timespans are on the order of ten to fifteen, sometimes twenty years—how many new models (or significant variants) were shipped in that window? IOW, any "ten-year-old track record" in transport category aviation isn't really saying much due to the timescales involved.
Gibbon1 8y ago
You could argue that the current record is simply a legacy of previous high quality government regulation and oversights. And that the 737-MAX is the first article of the new regime. Another good example of that is the defective Bay Bridge replacement between Treasure Island and Oakland. That bridge is going to fail during the next earthquake because of design flaws that the oversight agency didn't have the manpower to spot. CALTRANS after three decades of Republican lead budget cuts doesn't have the ability to safely oversee projects of that size anymore.
- DrScump 8y ago
  CALTRANS after three decades of Republican lead budget cuts doesn't have the ability to safely oversee... Republicans have been in the minority in both houses and had absolutely no power in the CA legislature appropriations process for over two decades. For much of that time, the Democrats had supermajorities. The new Bay Bridge debacle falls squarely on the Browns.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    Guess who doesn't know how government appropriations work.

Farradfahren 8y ago

Now playing - echo chambermusic : the silence

jmclnx 8y ago

Well as the saying goes, "You get what you pay for"

kazinator 8y ago

Throwing money at government just to make it expensive won't fix this kind of problem. What if a bigger, fatter, better funded FAA is still in cahoots with Boeing?

pohl 8y ago
I grant the existence of some who seek to make government less expensive for the sole sake of it being less expensive. (Existence proof: Grover Norquist, who wants to drown it in a bathtub.) Who are these mythical creatures who want it to be more expensive without providing more/better services?
- kazinator 8y ago
  Pretty much every governmental bureaucrat.
  - pohl 8y ago
    People say that a lot, but without really thinking it through. There are 2.79M civil servants, each of which can be pejoratively referred to as a "bureaucrat" if that is your wont, and pretty much every one of them wants government services to become more expensive solely for expense's sake? That doesn't even pass the smell test.

SlipperySlope 8y ago

Regulatory capture is the obvious problem. The proven fix is to mandate public interest members on these oversight boards. This solution is orthogonal to the extent of regulation.

watertom 8y ago

Seems like in the U.S. the pilots are properly trained and are capable of handling the difference in the new vs old aircraft. Other countries aren't fairing so well. Is this a failing of the U.S. Government's FAA? No. I have a good friend who was a Naval aviator and did crash investigations for the Navy, his ordered list for causes of aviation crashes. The top 3 causes he believes are responsible for 99.9% of all crashes. 1. Pilot error due to fatigue (Which the U.S. has made strides to drastically reduce) 2. Pilot error not due to fatigue 3. Pilot lack of training 4. Plane failure (hardware, software, mechanical, etc)

cmurf 8y ago
>Seems like in the U.S. the pilots are properly trained and are capable of handling the difference in the new vs old aircraft.Other countries aren't fairing so well. What specific difference training did U.S. pilots receive that foreign pilots did not? How are pilots in other countries improperly trained? What is the evidence either 737 MAX crash had anything to do with training? If better training can mitigate flawed design, should that absolve any portion of manufacturer liability for any discovered flawed design? In a proper investigation, all bias must be removed, and that includes statistical likelihood of prior causes of crashes.
- DuskStar 8y ago
  > What specific difference training did U.S. pilots receive that foreign pilots did not? Well, they all have far more than 200 hours of flight time, for one. Even the copilots. > What is the evidence either 737 MAX crash had anything to do with training? The fact that the problem was displayed to the pilots (trim severely out of norm) and they didn't follow the correction procedures properly. Though that might not be "training" as much as "competence". > If better training can mitigate flawed design, should that absolve any portion of manufacturer liability for any discovered flawed design? Really depends on the flaw.
  - cmurf 8y ago
    The pilots of Lion Air 610 had in excess of 5000 hours. Flight experience doesn't answer the question I asked either. The assertion was made that U.S. pilots received difference training (NG vs MAX). What difference training? You assume without evidence the problem manifests like runaway trim. And then proceed to assume without evidence the incompetency of two pilots. And yet you refuse to assume the incompetency of the automation, which didn't mere fail, it countermanded with lethal force the 100% correct control inputs of the pilots. The idea they have to assert their sanity by flipping two switches, is about as ridiculous as automation not having to assert its sanity when it, by design, trusts a single point of failure one upping that by trusting it while it's failing and one upping that to extreme by taking action on it without any regard to other input sources including the pilots themselves. It's beyond obscene to me. I have personally trained private pilots with competency at identifying failed gauges, knowing which one to disregard, and estimating the missing values by inference from the remaining gauges. And this is in sub-200 hour pilots. The skill required for the instrument rating exceeds this particular automation in the AOA failure case by quite a lot. And the skill required for commercial and ATP ratings is even greater than that by quite a lot. Meanwhile MCAS upset from judgement of a single sensor induced such an unusual attitude it became unrecoverable. So the assumption of incompetency by pilots, while cutting automation all kinds of slack is to me 180 degrees backwards.

stillbourne 8y ago

There is only one way to fix this problem folks. Privatize the FAA, deregulate airplane manufacture, and use the money saved to give the rich a tax cut. The rich will then trickle down on the planes to save us from these software issues.

mieses 8y ago
actually you are right