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They weren't doing nothing. They've been working on a software fix since the Lion Air crash, but it wasn't ready by the time of the Ethiopian crash. The plan

They weren't doing nothing. They've been working on a software fix since the Lion Air crash, but it wasn't ready by the time of the Ethiopian crash. The plan was to update some checklists as a stopgap and get new software ASAP. Obviously in hindsight they should have grounded the fleet until the new software was ready. At the time that would have been a very difficult decision to make internally at Boeing, given that the 737MAX has $250 Billion worth of orders, and arguably at the time, the updated checklists made a crash unlikely. This is the situation where an independent regulatory body is most important. The commercial pressure to keep flying was almost irresistable, and you need someone without those commercial pressures to put the brakes on.

jordache 8y ago
commercial pressure should have been the liability exposure they find themselves in now.
- cameldrv 8y ago
  The problem is this: From the CEO's standpoint, grounding the fleet might have cost him his job given that there was a plausible (even though we know now ineffective) checklist based solution to the problem. Another crash might also cost the CEO his job, but that has a probability of less than one. The incentive in this situation is to roll the dice. The problem is that the decision maker does not bear the liability for his actions. He's not the one making a smoking crater in the ground. That's why you need a regulator with different motivations. Historically, the FAA has been exceptionally effective at improving air safety. The Republican/business argument is that they have overdone it and the costs of compliance exceed the benefit at the margin. These accidents are a strong argument otherwise.
empath75 8y ago
Or, you know, someone who values human lives more than money.
- theredbox 8y ago
  Statistical value of human life. Learn it , breathe it.
  - joosters 8y ago
    Ok mr expert, please tell me exactly how much these two crashes have & will end up costing Boeing.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  You risk your life and the lives of others for money every time you drive to work.
- tzs 8y ago
  We actually do put a monetary value on human lives in a huge variety of situations. We just like to pretend that we don't and try not to talk about it. For example, most health insurance systems around the world have a value they place on one year of "quality" human life, and won't cover medical treatments that cost more than that amount per year. In 2008, that number was about $50k [1]. I don't know what it is now. When considering whether the monetary costs of a regulation are worth it in the US the EPA used about $9 million as the worth of a life saved in 2010, and the FDA used about $8 million. The DoT used almost $10 million in 2016. Cites for those are in this Wikipedia article [2]. [1] http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,0... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
pupppet 8y ago
Oh I'm sure they weren't literally doing nothing. I imagine meetings took place and they decided to roll the dice in not grounding the fleet before the software update was ready. But they rolled snake eyes, time to pay the piper.
zepearl 8y ago
> The commercial pressure to keep flying was almost irresistable, and you need someone without those commercial pressures to put the brakes on. I fully agree (even expanded to all fields/areas/industries/activities - but let's try not to over-regulate everything, if possible :) ).
- ryguytilidie 8y ago
  I hear sentiments like this a lot as if everything in the universe is over regulated. What do you believe are some examples of things that are over regulated?
  - jussij 8y ago
    What is worse, this 737-MAX issues appears to have been caused by under regulation, which has subsequently resulted in the needless deaths of many hundreds of passengers.
  - zepearl 8y ago
    > What do you believe are some examples of things that are over regulated? Ok, this is a very good question. Thinking about it, I cannot think of any area I know about that is regulated, as a baseline, too much for my taste. BUT: E.g. 2 years ago I thought that the logs of my app (whiĉh is SOX-relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act ) weren't nice, so after talking to the other team members I slightly changed them to e.g. align strings (using tabs instead of fixed chars) and posting more informative/detailed messages. When the auditors performed their review they saw that the new logs did not match the old ones (aaargh - string mismatch!!!) therefore we had to go over each change, checking why-it-was-done-by-whom-based_on_which_request_and_did_it_get_the_approval_to_go_live_and_was_it_reviewed_and_signed_off_by_business_after_go_live etc..., so an infinite pain. This is what over-regulation means technically for me :)
    - ryguytilidie 8y ago
      I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you asked that we "not over-regulate everything" and you couldnt come up with a single example of over-regulated things and then brought up one issue in an app you made as why you brought up that "everything" is over-regulated? This logic makes me really sad. You're complaining about overregulation when under-regulation just killed 300 people because you had to make a few changes in an app once. Please think about this more deeply than, "I know a few hundred people died, but lets not respond too harshly and have me spend a few more hours on my apps". Please do that next time.
jussij 8y ago
> At the time that would have been a very difficult decision to make internally at Boeing, given that the 737MAX has $250 Billion worth of orders That is exactly right and exactly why they need to be nailed for this. No hindsight is required to know Boeing was focused on making sure the welfare of Boeing and it's shareholders was taken care of, with little or no regard to the welfare of the flying public.
- KMag 8y ago
  It's not that simple. There's no denying that there was tremendous commercial pressure, but ... from a single data point (prior to the second crash), it wasn't obvious that the risk of continuing to fly the aircraft was greater than grounding the planes, which results in cancelled flights and greater risk of road deaths due to some passengers taking road alternatives instead of re-booking flights. Also, the 737 MAX is a longer-range aircraft, and some of the slack would be taken up by capacity in shorter-range aircraft, converting direct flights to multi-leg flights, where most of the risk is in takeoff and landing. All else being equal, more flight legs means more risk. Some of the slack would be taken up by smaller regional airlines flying older planes, and I'm not sure how those safety records generally compare to larger airlines flying newer planes. In any case, I expect the majority of the offsetting risk would be from people deciding to drive when their flights got cancelled. Now that we see that training and procedural changes appear to be a less effective mitigant than expected, we can say that with a high degree of certainty that the risk of increased road deaths does not offset the risks of continuing to fly the aircraft.
  - jussij 8y ago
    > from a single data point (prior to the second crash), it wasn't obvious that the risk of continuing to fly the aircraft was greater than grounding the planes Call me a skeptic but I have no doubt Boeing was well aware of the issue with the MCAS well before that first data point. Even before that first crash, there have been reports in the media that claim many pilots had complained about the dangers of the MCAS.
    - 8y ago
thatoneuser 8y ago
If these crashes are both from the same system then they effectively did nothing. The only I'd accept that they didn't do nothing is if they intervened and stopped the problem. Still waiting till the dust settles to take my opinion tho.

jordache 8y ago

commercial pressure should have been the liability exposure they find themselves in now.

cameldrv 8y ago
The problem is this: From the CEO's standpoint, grounding the fleet might have cost him his job given that there was a plausible (even though we know now ineffective) checklist based solution to the problem. Another crash might also cost the CEO his job, but that has a probability of less than one. The incentive in this situation is to roll the dice. The problem is that the decision maker does not bear the liability for his actions. He's not the one making a smoking crater in the ground. That's why you need a regulator with different motivations. Historically, the FAA has been exceptionally effective at improving air safety. The Republican/business argument is that they have overdone it and the costs of compliance exceed the benefit at the margin. These accidents are a strong argument otherwise.

empath75 8y ago

Or, you know, someone who values human lives more than money.

theredbox 8y ago
Statistical value of human life. Learn it , breathe it.
- joosters 8y ago
  Ok mr expert, please tell me exactly how much these two crashes have & will end up costing Boeing.
WalterBright 8y ago
You risk your life and the lives of others for money every time you drive to work.
tzs 8y ago
We actually do put a monetary value on human lives in a huge variety of situations. We just like to pretend that we don't and try not to talk about it. For example, most health insurance systems around the world have a value they place on one year of "quality" human life, and won't cover medical treatments that cost more than that amount per year. In 2008, that number was about $50k [1]. I don't know what it is now. When considering whether the monetary costs of a regulation are worth it in the US the EPA used about $9 million as the worth of a life saved in 2010, and the FDA used about $8 million. The DoT used almost $10 million in 2016. Cites for those are in this Wikipedia article [2]. [1] http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,0... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

pupppet 8y ago

Oh I'm sure they weren't literally doing nothing. I imagine meetings took place and they decided to roll the dice in not grounding the fleet before the software update was ready. But they rolled snake eyes, time to pay the piper.

zepearl 8y ago

> The commercial pressure to keep flying was almost irresistable, and you need someone without those commercial pressures to put the brakes on. I fully agree (even expanded to all fields/areas/industries/activities - but let's try not to over-regulate everything, if possible :) ).

ryguytilidie 8y ago
I hear sentiments like this a lot as if everything in the universe is over regulated. What do you believe are some examples of things that are over regulated?
- jussij 8y ago
  What is worse, this 737-MAX issues appears to have been caused by under regulation, which has subsequently resulted in the needless deaths of many hundreds of passengers.
- zepearl 8y ago
  > What do you believe are some examples of things that are over regulated? Ok, this is a very good question. Thinking about it, I cannot think of any area I know about that is regulated, as a baseline, too much for my taste. BUT: E.g. 2 years ago I thought that the logs of my app (whiĉh is SOX-relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act ) weren't nice, so after talking to the other team members I slightly changed them to e.g. align strings (using tabs instead of fixed chars) and posting more informative/detailed messages. When the auditors performed their review they saw that the new logs did not match the old ones (aaargh - string mismatch!!!) therefore we had to go over each change, checking why-it-was-done-by-whom-based_on_which_request_and_did_it_get_the_approval_to_go_live_and_was_it_reviewed_and_signed_off_by_business_after_go_live etc..., so an infinite pain. This is what over-regulation means technically for me :)
  - ryguytilidie 8y ago
    I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you asked that we "not over-regulate everything" and you couldnt come up with a single example of over-regulated things and then brought up one issue in an app you made as why you brought up that "everything" is over-regulated? This logic makes me really sad. You're complaining about overregulation when under-regulation just killed 300 people because you had to make a few changes in an app once. Please think about this more deeply than, "I know a few hundred people died, but lets not respond too harshly and have me spend a few more hours on my apps". Please do that next time.

jussij 8y ago

> At the time that would have been a very difficult decision to make internally at Boeing, given that the 737MAX has $250 Billion worth of orders That is exactly right and exactly why they need to be nailed for this. No hindsight is required to know Boeing was focused on making sure the welfare of Boeing and it's shareholders was taken care of, with little or no regard to the welfare of the flying public.

KMag 8y ago
It's not that simple. There's no denying that there was tremendous commercial pressure, but ... from a single data point (prior to the second crash), it wasn't obvious that the risk of continuing to fly the aircraft was greater than grounding the planes, which results in cancelled flights and greater risk of road deaths due to some passengers taking road alternatives instead of re-booking flights. Also, the 737 MAX is a longer-range aircraft, and some of the slack would be taken up by capacity in shorter-range aircraft, converting direct flights to multi-leg flights, where most of the risk is in takeoff and landing. All else being equal, more flight legs means more risk. Some of the slack would be taken up by smaller regional airlines flying older planes, and I'm not sure how those safety records generally compare to larger airlines flying newer planes. In any case, I expect the majority of the offsetting risk would be from people deciding to drive when their flights got cancelled. Now that we see that training and procedural changes appear to be a less effective mitigant than expected, we can say that with a high degree of certainty that the risk of increased road deaths does not offset the risks of continuing to fly the aircraft.
- jussij 8y ago
  > from a single data point (prior to the second crash), it wasn't obvious that the risk of continuing to fly the aircraft was greater than grounding the planes Call me a skeptic but I have no doubt Boeing was well aware of the issue with the MCAS well before that first data point. Even before that first crash, there have been reports in the media that claim many pilots had complained about the dangers of the MCAS.
  - 8y ago

thatoneuser 8y ago

If these crashes are both from the same system then they effectively did nothing. The only I'd accept that they didn't do nothing is if they intervened and stopped the problem. Still waiting till the dust settles to take my opinion tho.