12 ms·

Boeing falsified records for 787 jet that developed a fuel leak

java-man 7y ago
nothing will change until we start holding executives responsible (i.e. jail time).
- xnyan 7y ago
  Or charge real fines that are impactful. The article mentions a $12M fine from US regulators - you might as not even levy a fine that's so small.
  - jld 7y ago
    Boeing's defense contracts make it too big to fail. Sure, huge fines might deflate its shares/exec's comp packages, but I don't think the risk of giant fines endangers Boeing the way they might other businesses.
    - NowThenGoodBad 7y ago
      Execs comp packages won't hurt that much, they can just downsize and then go on a hiring glut when things look better.
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      This concept of 'too big to fail' is eventually going to come a cropper when something deemed as such, fails anyway and wipes out entire industrial sectors from the dependent country.
      - CamperBob2 7y ago
        The idea behind being too big to fail is that the full faith and credit of the US government will be used to prop you up if necessary. Failing anyway? Go back to step 1. That absolutely describes Boeing.
  - close04 7y ago
    A real fine that targets the company is not a deterrent. All the damages get to trickle down to employees, customers, partners, etc. The punishment has to be applied to the individual who knowingly broke the law. Taking a bad business decision is one thing, hiding behind corporate accountability after you falsified records to get that bonus should be punished with both prison time and fines. Unfortunately part of that bonus probably went to "lobbying" so don't hold your breath for the moment when laws will be about actual justice.
    - ghayes 7y ago
      When I hear this arguments, I just wonder, why does the argument always apply "to the executives," and not all of the employees down the line that signed off on a given decision. I think the reason we don't adopt more of these rules is that it's kind of naïve, in my opinion, to blame the problem on only part of the parties involved in a given decision. This would then have to be coupled with better whistle-blower protections, giving employees a right and duty to call out bad behavior.
      - save_ferris 7y ago
        > why does the argument always apply “to the executives” Because the power asymmetry between executives and workers is vast and continuously growing. Executives are phenomenally powerful powerful people within these industries, whose influence and interests make it possible for such scandals to take place. And they’re the ones truly incentivized to cut corners and break rules in order to meet deadlines, generate as much growth as possible, etc. Whistleblower rights, at least in the US, are completely insufficient to enable your vision of corporate oversight. Whistleblowers risk their careers, reputations and livelihoods, and often there’s no guarantee that blowing the whistle changes anything. Who makes such retribution not just possible, but inevitable? Executives.
      - close04 7y ago
        > why does the argument always apply "to the executives," and not all of the employees down the line that signed off on a given decision Because the executives are given a lot of power over those employees, they are paid accordingly, and they are privy to far more information to aid them in taking a decision. A CEO is paid over 300 times more than the average worker. [0] Multiply that by a factor to represent the authority of the position, and the acute awareness of what those actions represent and you should get the magnitude of the difference in accountability. > giving employees a right and duty to call out bad behavior. You already have this right. But you either do it to the authorities at great personal expense (in any way you can imagine) and with far higher burden of proof, or you do it internally in front of another executive. There is no incentive to take any action because the executive will always have the company as a shield in front of the law. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/05/22/ceo-pay-skyrockets-to-361-times-that-of-the-average-worker/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/05/22/ceo-pay...
- akira2501 7y ago
  We license engineers and many other similar professions.. perhaps we need an "executive" license, complete with certifications and standards and a long "journeyman's training" period before we trust you with the massive amount of power, both real and abstract, that can come with one of these positions. We may never be able to hold them criminally liable with much success, but we could much more easily invalidate their license and prevent them from holding any similar position for a very long time. Which, for some reason, seems far more just than simply jailing and possibly fining them.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Would it make sense to you to also have a licensing scheme for politicians? After all, we don't even require them to be non-criminals under existing law (at least in my jurisdiction).
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      And coming up next, a licensing scheme for people who invent licensing schemes.
    - nraynaud 7y ago
      In France a lot of politicians went to an administration school (real dorky stuff, state accounting rules, procurement rules, how to interact with other countries etc.), but we have the same complaints about them. Also to be fair they have slightly better objective result with a longer life expectancy, but nothing extremely better.
  - java-man 7y ago
    We don't license software engineers, who essentially create the foundation of modern society. Just today, there was a news story about Boeing employing offshore contractors at $9/hr to write software for 737 MAX. Nearly all large software companies utilize whiteboard coding quizz as a way to measure the quality of their candidates. Imagine what would happen when the modern crop of javascript developers start working on avionics? I don't know what's worse - an incompetent politician or an incompetent software developer. Think heartbleed, microsoft windows updating in the middle of surgery, Mars mission crashing because someone mixed imperial and metric units... We may never be able to hold them liable (because people who write the laws are also corrupt and incompetent), and we will never be able to weed out incompetence in our technical infrastructure (because, frankly, most of us [me included] are lazy, incompetent, greedy, and selfish.
tomohawk 7y ago
Problem caught during self audit, self reported. Seems like they're being transparent, and the auditing they have in place has found a problem which is being addressed. Talk about a misleading headline.
- sasasassy 7y ago
  Well, they were caught (warned about it), so they came clean. It's still a bit troubling that they didn't detect themselves. Better than nothing I suppose.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  I don't know man? I wouldn't characterize being caught out and warned about it, and then saying "Oh... you're right, let's report this." As necessarily the same thing as "self-audit"-ing and "self-report"-ing. If we're going to characterize the article as misleading, I think the same can be said of your post.
- jussij 7y ago
  The page says the records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not. If that statement is correct then it means Boeing or someone at Boeing had been lying to the FAA and that would be a rather big deal in line with the headline.
mopsi 7y ago
Air Canada and fuel issues - Gimli Glider deserves a mention! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider#History
- arcticbull 7y ago
  We learned all about it in common core engineering classes in Canada, even as software engineers. Crazy that nobody to my knowledge has been able to replicate what the pilot did.
- mmariani 7y ago
  There’s also this one too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
- koolba 7y ago
  That was an intense read!
  - beanjammin 7y ago
    Metric, Imperial... whoops!
Ice_cream_suit 7y ago
The employees responsible for the falsification should be jailed.
- aaronbrethorst 7y ago
  The executives who created and sustained the culture where this was considered acceptable should too.
  - Ice_cream_suit 7y ago
    Should you be jailed for your employees crimes?
    - jchw 7y ago
      Higher pay grades equal higher responsibilities. Accountability for an incident cannot ever sit with a single individual in an organization, nor should it sit with no individuals. Why was this allowed to occur? What processes failed? If it’s an endemic issue, getting rid of employees at the bottom won’t prevent future issues and potentially future loss of life.
    - sb057 7y ago
      Yes.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      That's a simple question with a complex answer. The answer is 'it depends'. Yes, there definitely are cases where execs should be jailed for their employees crimes, and others where that definitely should not be the case. For instance, if an employee of a company embezzles a bunch of money from either a customer or the company itself then the execs should typically not be culpable. But, if the execs themselves were the ones that ordered the employee to do this, either directly or through the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' method of communications (and there is corroborating evidence that this indeed happened, for instance the issues not being limited to single employees but being institutionalized) then yes, they should definitely be punished as though they themselves were the ones doing it. It should not be possible for executives to use employees as a cut-out layer when crimes are committed.
tomglynch 7y ago
All the revelations regarding Boeing are pretty damning. Though it seems they are too big to fail with defence contracts, huge market share and thousands of planes already in service, that will need continued maintenance. It is a worldwide duopoly, just Boeing and Airbus. So where too from here? I can't see the USA ever jailing executives - but potentially they could ramp up the fines? In my opinion we need Europe and other countries to begin heavily fining companies skirting their responsibilities, because what we are doing at the moment is obviously not working.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  Or they can jail executives.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "In my opinion we need Europe and other countries to begin heavily fining companies skirting their responsibilities" Well, the cliche when stuff like this happens is that the company diverted too much money to stock buybacks, dividends, and so on, leaving their actual business operations starved for resources. So, sounds reasonable, but how then does diverting more money to more external entities cause them to do better? I'm not arguing against it, I just don't understand what the rationale is. I think it's unwise to try to punish an abstract entity without thinking carefully about how it will affect the actual people involved.
  - mulmen 7y ago
    You don’t think there is a difference between a stock buyback and a fine?
    - salawat 7y ago
      A stock buyback decreases external liability. It may decrease liquidity for the company, but the asset tied up in that Stock is still retained, and remaining stocks increawe in share value accordingly. This can increase liquidity in the long run, by stimulating demand whilst supply dwindles. It all depends on the Market. The fine, to my understanding, extracts liquidity whilst also leaving all existing liabilities intact. It "sets the company back'. As it were. At least, that's how it works to my meager understanding. If that isn't, could you go into detail about what really happens?
chvid 7y ago
You incentivise your employees to manipulate, misrepresent or outright lie. Then when it is found out; you throw your employees under the bus.
Farradfahren 7y ago
I m willing to bet these two employes where new when they made that decision. New to the company- and most likely new to the industry and the world of employment. The trainees are always the ones who have these disgusting conversations with middle-management, where the manager specifys a goal or asks for something, that is clearly either illegal or creates great risks for the employee. In industrial automatization, its usually the request to temper with security settings, progams and sensors - "to make production more efficient". There is never a paper trail, there is always plausbile deniability, and if something happens, because another employe dances around some deactivated light-grid into a running maschine and gets squished by a robot, the guy who made the last change (when and what is usually chronicled by a hash over the security programs)is going out of a job, into prison for manslaughter. Even if he is found not guilty, he wont be touched by companys, while the investigation is hanging over him/her. The industry which had the accident then promptly has a change of heart, vows that "never again will such a thing happen." Security is tightend, machines reinvestigated, and reprogrammed to remove all those procedures who where created to circumvent the sec-tax slowdown. After this, those in managment who survived the affair, are promoted, new fresh faces, replacing the old guard, asking why this or that cant be more efficent, and wether that new trainee could not temper with the program. The cycle of screw begins anew. My recommendation is that a CEO has to wear a permanently active 360° sealed camera + mic on the shoulder. Middle Management has to do so while on duty. Make the burden of proof a burden of evidence. Suddenly no more PLEASE.
gouggoug 7y ago
What a sensationalist headline. > Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak. > The records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not. > "immediate corrective action was initiated for both the Boeing mechanic and the Boeing inspector involved." So "Boeing" didn't falsified records, 2 of their employees did. Now, whether Boeing's company culture (tight deadlines? overworked employees?) contributed to this or not, is another story, but, the headline is misleading; borderline dishonest.
- OpieCunningham 7y ago
  Wouldn’t that mean that a company can never be responsible for the output of the company? At every level, anything is just “a couple of employees”. The headline is reasonable.
  - n_o_u 7y ago
    I would agree with you if they had not self reported and taken immediate corrective action.
    - everybodyknows 7y ago
      Boeing self-reported after Air Canada had already created a "paper trail". At that point, they could hardly hope to keep the failure secret.
      - _Codemonkeyism 7y ago
        I've met executives who said 'Don't mail me problems, always call me.' or who said 'Don't ever tell me problems'. Because the moment there is a paper trail, they can't hide. As an employee you always want to create a paper trail otherwise they will pin it on you. Print emails if necessary.
        Farradfahren 7y ago

nothing will change until we start holding executives responsible (i.e. jail time).

xnyan 7y ago
Or charge real fines that are impactful. The article mentions a $12M fine from US regulators - you might as not even levy a fine that's so small.
- jld 7y ago
  Boeing's defense contracts make it too big to fail. Sure, huge fines might deflate its shares/exec's comp packages, but I don't think the risk of giant fines endangers Boeing the way they might other businesses.
  - NowThenGoodBad 7y ago
    Execs comp packages won't hurt that much, they can just downsize and then go on a hiring glut when things look better.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    This concept of 'too big to fail' is eventually going to come a cropper when something deemed as such, fails anyway and wipes out entire industrial sectors from the dependent country.
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      The idea behind being too big to fail is that the full faith and credit of the US government will be used to prop you up if necessary. Failing anyway? Go back to step 1. That absolutely describes Boeing.
- close04 7y ago
  A real fine that targets the company is not a deterrent. All the damages get to trickle down to employees, customers, partners, etc. The punishment has to be applied to the individual who knowingly broke the law. Taking a bad business decision is one thing, hiding behind corporate accountability after you falsified records to get that bonus should be punished with both prison time and fines. Unfortunately part of that bonus probably went to "lobbying" so don't hold your breath for the moment when laws will be about actual justice.
  - ghayes 7y ago
    When I hear this arguments, I just wonder, why does the argument always apply "to the executives," and not all of the employees down the line that signed off on a given decision. I think the reason we don't adopt more of these rules is that it's kind of naïve, in my opinion, to blame the problem on only part of the parties involved in a given decision. This would then have to be coupled with better whistle-blower protections, giving employees a right and duty to call out bad behavior.
    - save_ferris 7y ago
      > why does the argument always apply “to the executives” Because the power asymmetry between executives and workers is vast and continuously growing. Executives are phenomenally powerful powerful people within these industries, whose influence and interests make it possible for such scandals to take place. And they’re the ones truly incentivized to cut corners and break rules in order to meet deadlines, generate as much growth as possible, etc. Whistleblower rights, at least in the US, are completely insufficient to enable your vision of corporate oversight. Whistleblowers risk their careers, reputations and livelihoods, and often there’s no guarantee that blowing the whistle changes anything. Who makes such retribution not just possible, but inevitable? Executives.
    - close04 7y ago
      > why does the argument always apply "to the executives," and not all of the employees down the line that signed off on a given decision Because the executives are given a lot of power over those employees, they are paid accordingly, and they are privy to far more information to aid them in taking a decision. A CEO is paid over 300 times more than the average worker. [0] Multiply that by a factor to represent the authority of the position, and the acute awareness of what those actions represent and you should get the magnitude of the difference in accountability. > giving employees a right and duty to call out bad behavior. You already have this right. But you either do it to the authorities at great personal expense (in any way you can imagine) and with far higher burden of proof, or you do it internally in front of another executive. There is no incentive to take any action because the executive will always have the company as a shield in front of the law. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/05/22/ceo-pay-skyrockets-to-361-times-that-of-the-average-worker/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/05/22/ceo-pay...
akira2501 7y ago
We license engineers and many other similar professions.. perhaps we need an "executive" license, complete with certifications and standards and a long "journeyman's training" period before we trust you with the massive amount of power, both real and abstract, that can come with one of these positions. We may never be able to hold them criminally liable with much success, but we could much more easily invalidate their license and prevent them from holding any similar position for a very long time. Which, for some reason, seems far more just than simply jailing and possibly fining them.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Would it make sense to you to also have a licensing scheme for politicians? After all, we don't even require them to be non-criminals under existing law (at least in my jurisdiction).
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    And coming up next, a licensing scheme for people who invent licensing schemes.
  - nraynaud 7y ago
    In France a lot of politicians went to an administration school (real dorky stuff, state accounting rules, procurement rules, how to interact with other countries etc.), but we have the same complaints about them. Also to be fair they have slightly better objective result with a longer life expectancy, but nothing extremely better.
- java-man 7y ago
  We don't license software engineers, who essentially create the foundation of modern society. Just today, there was a news story about Boeing employing offshore contractors at $9/hr to write software for 737 MAX. Nearly all large software companies utilize whiteboard coding quizz as a way to measure the quality of their candidates. Imagine what would happen when the modern crop of javascript developers start working on avionics? I don't know what's worse - an incompetent politician or an incompetent software developer. Think heartbleed, microsoft windows updating in the middle of surgery, Mars mission crashing because someone mixed imperial and metric units... We may never be able to hold them liable (because people who write the laws are also corrupt and incompetent), and we will never be able to weed out incompetence in our technical infrastructure (because, frankly, most of us [me included] are lazy, incompetent, greedy, and selfish.

Problem caught during self audit, self reported. Seems like they're being transparent, and the auditing they have in place has found a problem which is being addressed. Talk about a misleading headline.

sasasassy 7y ago
Well, they were caught (warned about it), so they came clean. It's still a bit troubling that they didn't detect themselves. Better than nothing I suppose.
bilbo0s 7y ago
I don't know man? I wouldn't characterize being caught out and warned about it, and then saying "Oh... you're right, let's report this." As necessarily the same thing as "self-audit"-ing and "self-report"-ing. If we're going to characterize the article as misleading, I think the same can be said of your post.
jussij 7y ago
The page says the records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not. If that statement is correct then it means Boeing or someone at Boeing had been lying to the FAA and that would be a rather big deal in line with the headline.

mopsi 7y ago

Air Canada and fuel issues - Gimli Glider deserves a mention! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider#History

arcticbull 7y ago
We learned all about it in common core engineering classes in Canada, even as software engineers. Crazy that nobody to my knowledge has been able to replicate what the pilot did.
mmariani 7y ago
There’s also this one too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
koolba 7y ago
That was an intense read!
- beanjammin 7y ago
  Metric, Imperial... whoops!

Ice_cream_suit 7y ago

The employees responsible for the falsification should be jailed.

aaronbrethorst 7y ago
The executives who created and sustained the culture where this was considered acceptable should too.
- Ice_cream_suit 7y ago
  Should you be jailed for your employees crimes?
  - jchw 7y ago
    Higher pay grades equal higher responsibilities. Accountability for an incident cannot ever sit with a single individual in an organization, nor should it sit with no individuals. Why was this allowed to occur? What processes failed? If it’s an endemic issue, getting rid of employees at the bottom won’t prevent future issues and potentially future loss of life.
  - sb057 7y ago
    Yes.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    That's a simple question with a complex answer. The answer is 'it depends'. Yes, there definitely are cases where execs should be jailed for their employees crimes, and others where that definitely should not be the case. For instance, if an employee of a company embezzles a bunch of money from either a customer or the company itself then the execs should typically not be culpable. But, if the execs themselves were the ones that ordered the employee to do this, either directly or through the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' method of communications (and there is corroborating evidence that this indeed happened, for instance the issues not being limited to single employees but being institutionalized) then yes, they should definitely be punished as though they themselves were the ones doing it. It should not be possible for executives to use employees as a cut-out layer when crimes are committed.

tomglynch 7y ago

All the revelations regarding Boeing are pretty damning. Though it seems they are too big to fail with defence contracts, huge market share and thousands of planes already in service, that will need continued maintenance. It is a worldwide duopoly, just Boeing and Airbus. So where too from here? I can't see the USA ever jailing executives - but potentially they could ramp up the fines? In my opinion we need Europe and other countries to begin heavily fining companies skirting their responsibilities, because what we are doing at the moment is obviously not working.

SubiculumCode 7y ago
Or they can jail executives.
perl4ever 7y ago
"In my opinion we need Europe and other countries to begin heavily fining companies skirting their responsibilities" Well, the cliche when stuff like this happens is that the company diverted too much money to stock buybacks, dividends, and so on, leaving their actual business operations starved for resources. So, sounds reasonable, but how then does diverting more money to more external entities cause them to do better? I'm not arguing against it, I just don't understand what the rationale is. I think it's unwise to try to punish an abstract entity without thinking carefully about how it will affect the actual people involved.
- mulmen 7y ago
  You don’t think there is a difference between a stock buyback and a fine?
  - salawat 7y ago
    A stock buyback decreases external liability. It may decrease liquidity for the company, but the asset tied up in that Stock is still retained, and remaining stocks increawe in share value accordingly. This can increase liquidity in the long run, by stimulating demand whilst supply dwindles. It all depends on the Market. The fine, to my understanding, extracts liquidity whilst also leaving all existing liabilities intact. It "sets the company back'. As it were. At least, that's how it works to my meager understanding. If that isn't, could you go into detail about what really happens?

chvid 7y ago

You incentivise your employees to manipulate, misrepresent or outright lie. Then when it is found out; you throw your employees under the bus.

Farradfahren 7y ago

I m willing to bet these two employes where new when they made that decision. New to the company- and most likely new to the industry and the world of employment. The trainees are always the ones who have these disgusting conversations with middle-management, where the manager specifys a goal or asks for something, that is clearly either illegal or creates great risks for the employee. In industrial automatization, its usually the request to temper with security settings, progams and sensors - "to make production more efficient". There is never a paper trail, there is always plausbile deniability, and if something happens, because another employe dances around some deactivated light-grid into a running maschine and gets squished by a robot, the guy who made the last change (when and what is usually chronicled by a hash over the security programs)is going out of a job, into prison for manslaughter. Even if he is found not guilty, he wont be touched by companys, while the investigation is hanging over him/her. The industry which had the accident then promptly has a change of heart, vows that "never again will such a thing happen." Security is tightend, machines reinvestigated, and reprogrammed to remove all those procedures who where created to circumvent the sec-tax slowdown. After this, those in managment who survived the affair, are promoted, new fresh faces, replacing the old guard, asking why this or that cant be more efficent, and wether that new trainee could not temper with the program. The cycle of screw begins anew. My recommendation is that a CEO has to wear a permanently active 360° sealed camera + mic on the shoulder. Middle Management has to do so while on duty. Make the burden of proof a burden of evidence. Suddenly no more PLEASE.

gouggoug 7y ago

What a sensationalist headline. > Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak. > The records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not. > "immediate corrective action was initiated for both the Boeing mechanic and the Boeing inspector involved." So "Boeing" didn't falsified records, 2 of their employees did. Now, whether Boeing's company culture (tight deadlines? overworked employees?) contributed to this or not, is another story, but, the headline is misleading; borderline dishonest.

OpieCunningham 7y ago
Wouldn’t that mean that a company can never be responsible for the output of the company? At every level, anything is just “a couple of employees”. The headline is reasonable.
- n_o_u 7y ago
  I would agree with you if they had not self reported and taken immediate corrective action.
  - everybodyknows 7y ago
    Boeing self-reported after Air Canada had already created a "paper trail". At that point, they could hardly hope to keep the failure secret.
    - _Codemonkeyism 7y ago
      I've met executives who said 'Don't mail me problems, always call me.' or who said 'Don't ever tell me problems'. Because the moment there is a paper trail, they can't hide. As an employee you always want to create a paper trail otherwise they will pin it on you. Print emails if necessary.
      - Farradfahren 7y ago