26 ms·

The Roots of Boeing’s 737 Max Crisis: A Regulator Relaxes Its Oversight

382 points by tafda 7y ago

jorblumesea 7y ago
One issue the article didn't cover, but I wish it did, was the obvious corruption of the FAA by industry lobbying. The revolving door of industry -> government -> private industry leaves any regulation weak and often ineffectual. We call it "lobbying" but the reality is that it's just corruption and bribery under a nicer name. One specific example to highlight the issue... Ali Bahrami works for the FAA, lobbies to delegate oversight to the airlines, then leaves for a lobbying job, then is back at the FAA again at a higher position. It's hard to believe he's always acting in the public's interest with so much industry money and connections. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/with-close-industry-ties-faa-safety-chief-pushed-more-delegation-of-oversight-to-boeing/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/with-...
40acres 7y ago
There are so many underlying threads here: the revolving door between government and industry, the influence of lobbying, lack of competition within critical American industries, deregulation, lack of funding for regulatory agencies. All sums up to regulatory capture. Sickening. Time and time again regular people are getting screwed by the same patters, the previous paragraph basically summarizes what led to the 2008 financial crisis as well.
- bartimus 7y ago
  In a deregulated world banks wouldn't get bailouts. They would go bust. Governments wouldn't pressure France with import tariffs to protect their aviation industry. In a heavily regulated you still got dieselgate. It got exposed by the private sector. There's many factors at play. There exists no world where Boeing benefits from having their planes crashing.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    There does exist a world. It's a world of calculated risks, where people figure out how far they can push things before the risks start eating into profits. It's the same thing that occurs with risk analysis using customer data. They only fund exactly as much security as they need. Does the company benefit from having private data leaked? Not particularly, but if the cost of having data leaked is less than the cost of securing that data, then businesses will not secure their data. Which is where regulations come in.
    - bartimus 7y ago
      The regulatory world is also a world of calculated risks. In any case. The result of the calculation will always be: "crashing planes = not good for our company"
  - zucker42 7y ago
    Boeing benefits from cutting costs. Cutting costs can lead to decreased quality. The plane crashing is a risk of decreased quality. Making anything often involves tradeoffs and the point of Boeing's maximum profit is probably not the same as the point of the maximum benefit to society.
    - sgregnt 7y ago
      Isn't Boeing a part of society? How do you define maximum benefit of the whole society please share the wisdom! A point where there is maximum benefit to one part of society is probably not the point where there js maximum benifit to the other part of society.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    > In a deregulated world banks wouldn't get bailouts. They would go bust. Is this not what capitalism is?
  - sumedh 7y ago
    > It got exposed by the private sector. Was it really exposed by the private sector, I thought it was bunch of university students and their prof doing some research.
- jostmey 7y ago
  I think there is a simple solution--pay civil servants well
  - danieltillett 7y ago
    That would help on the quality side, but it is not going to help on the revolving door problem.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    Some can never have enough and will always welcome more money in their pocket.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  There is a structural flaw inherent in the characteristics and relations between traditional money and traditional government.
- TomMckenny 7y ago
  > the revolving door between government and industry, the influence of lobbying, lack of competition within critical American industries, deregulation All very serious problem. But regulatory capture comes only from money in politics.
std_throwaway 7y ago
> In the middle of the Max’s development, two of the most seasoned engineers in the F.A.A.’s Boeing office left. > In their place, the F.A.A. appointed an engineer who had little experience in flight controls, and a new hire who had gotten his master’s degree three years earlier. This is how you grow an army of YES-men without any substantial backbone. The type that makes good middle managers and keeps the process moving smoothly. Unfortunately for these engineers, they might ultimately be responsible for the system they signed off on.
- mtgx 7y ago
  They will be the scapegoats thrown under the bus when the scandals will erupt. Remember Volkswagen's "rogue engineer" who apparently single-highhandedly caused millions of VW vehicles to cheat on emission tests? Yeah, don't be that guy and whistle-blow on such things.
- tomohawk 7y ago
  This is how the government works. The government is just an institution, and institutions do not care about you. They just don't. They follow their rules and guidelines. If the guide is to put a GS-13 in that slot (employment category), then that is what will happen. There's no magic. Just rules. Boeing did not build great planes because of the FAA. They built them because their culture and expertise were aligned to do so. In the fact, the safety culture at Boeing was once so great that they often worked with the FAA to establish standards and guidelines, because the FAA simply did not have the expertise that Boeing had. When that culture failed, Boeing failed.
  - std_throwaway 7y ago
    It goes deeper all the way to the value systems that once were bestowed upon the populace by the church.
    - cmurf 7y ago
      Money is the new deity and we're selling out values to get it. Corruption and trust loss follow the insistence that the government can't be trusted. But it's a nation of spectators, people who want to be entertained, a decadent culture, not of citizens. It will continue to corrupt itself until we care to hold it accountable. And if we don't, it will turn into something where individuals have even less say than we do now.
readams 7y ago
The underlying assumption here seems to be that if only the FAA had examined in detail every aspect of the development of the plane, of course they would have found all the problems. Underlying this assumption is the idea that Boeing is either trying intentionally to create unsafe planes (as though this is good for Boeing) or that the FAA could hire engineers that are way better than Boeing's engineers. I don't buy it.
- danso 7y ago
  The latter half of the article makes specific claims to how lack of FAA expertise and manpower, and increasing deference and complacency to the industry's self-reporting, led to missed signals. For example: > When company engineers analyzed the change, they figured that the system had not become any riskier, according to two people familiar with Boeing’s discussions on the matter...So the company never submitted an updated safety assessment of those changes to the agency. In several briefings in 2016, an F.A.A. test pilot learned the details of the system from Boeing. But the two F.A.A. engineers didn’t understand that MCAS could move the tail as much as 2.5 degrees, according to two people familiar with their thinking. > Under the impression the system was insignificant, officials didn’t require Boeing to tell pilots about MCAS. When the company asked to remove mention of MCAS from the pilot’s manual, the agency agreed. The "change" mentioned is Boeing overhauling MCAS to have a four-fold increase in magnitude of control over the stabilizer (2.5 degrees vs 0.6 degrees). Your belief is that the FAA, even with a better-staffed review team, and less of a culture of rubber-stamping industry engineer assessments, would have reached the same conclusion? And/or do you think the MCAS change is actually not a problem it's scapegoated to be, and that Boeing was right to tell FAA to remove it from the pilot's manual?
  - readams 7y ago
    I'm saying I don't buy that the FAA was ever likely to catch the problems with this system that the engineers at Boeing didn't catch. In hindsight it's easy to say the system was a problem and clearly it was, but the FAA was never going to catch anything. The meeting with the FAA pilot you mention only goes to reinforce this; nobody in the FAA is ever going to have all the right context to put this together. Rather than trying to find some meeting with the FAA where someone could have caught it, there were probably many many meetings inside Boeing where it should have been caught.
danso 7y ago
Seems like another anecdote of where seniority and experience in engineering is something that can't be quite replicated/replaced by technical qualifications: > In the middle of the Max’s development, two of the most seasoned engineers in the F.A.A.’s Boeing office left. The engineers, who had a combined 50 years of experience, had joined the office at its creation...In their place, the F.A.A. appointed an engineer who had little experience in flight controls, and a new hire who had gotten his master’s degree three years earlier. People who worked with the two engineers said they seemed ill-equipped to identify any problems in a complex system like MCAS. I assume engineers new to the industry (and government regulation) would be lacking in "big picture" thinking and in confidence and skill in navigating and investigating bureaucracy – the NYT notes that Boeing's early MCAS report "didn't prompt additional scrutiny from the F.A.A. engineers". But the NYT also reports that the engineers made what seemed to be a straightforward technical misjudgment: > In several briefings in 2016, an F.A.A. test pilot learned the details of the system from Boeing. But the two F.A.A. engineers didn’t understand that MCAS could move the tail as much as 2.5 degrees, according to two people familiar with their thinking. Though it's hard to tell from that paragraph and its context whether the misunderstanding came from simple technical error and incompetence – e.g. misreading or not fully reading the specs – or deliberate deception/obfuscation from Boeing, and/or inexperience and naivety in doing regulatory work.
rectang 7y ago
The background of all of this is increased corporate power in American society relative to individuals. Regulatory capture happens more quickly and fluidly when government is more accountable to corporate money than to voters.
mevile 7y ago
Deregulation never seems to result in more competition, just more consolidation and more and more powerful companies with increased lobbying powers and personal connections to top government officials.
- std_throwaway 7y ago
  Is it really getting any worse or has it always been this way and we just don't learn it in history class?
  - jliptzin 7y ago
    The causes are the same, the effects accumulate over time
  - tehjoker 7y ago
    Some things are better many important things are worse. Consumer goods are doing well, and are high quality where regulations are intact, the good can be trivially inspected on purchase, or reputation provides enough of a backstop to prevent quality decreases. That's the upside of capitalism. On the downside, many people are underemployed even in a so-called tight labor market, fewer and fewer people own anything like a house or car and are highly indebted. Few people have any savings whatsoever and the administration in conjunction with the monied classes seeks to strip whatever protections remain while scapegoating immigrants. Additionally, the US and the west appear to be better off than they are because we use the power of our military, monetary system, and relationships to make sure items are produced cheaply overseas with negligible labor protections resulting in abusive labor conditions. Also, the planet is dying due to unlimited resource extraction.
    - breatheoften 7y ago
      The depressing truth ... how do you deal with it? I’ve been going through depression cycles — sometimes I can ignore the depressing nature that comes from holding an inherently non-positive expectation for the future as basically my best attempt to rationally assess the present and predict the future from it — ignorance is bliss? - but sometimes I embrace that most rational perspective as the “most likely source of truth” and promptly get incredibly (deeply) depressed ... to the point where i can feel myself faking “normal” interpersonal interactions and struggling against the fact that most or all locally true reasons for a hopeful outlook basically pale in comparison to the macroscopic reasons to be non-hopeful ... It’s deeply sad to know that future generations won’t have as much opportunity as I had to enjoy life ... but to pity them will feel patronizing to them - and so what is left for them to know of me and me to know of them ...? Dear citizens of the future, know that some of us are sorry for how your life will go — and know that some of us are not for they got theirs before you arrived and that was enough for them ... for some of us this wasn’t enough - we lived your pain in our imaginations while enjoying a physical life of abundance that, in the end, has helped you in no way at all ...
Proven 7y ago
That's an arbitrary call. Maybe if they had less regulatory crap to deal with, more real issues would have been addressed. There's no way to know for sure.
PieUser 7y ago
This article ends abruptly
- interestica 7y ago
  Yeah, what was the deal there? Cliffhanger? I legitimately can't tell if intentional.
  - danso 7y ago
    I think it's just an example of a common news article pattern: put the most memorable and/or important finding or anecdote at the top, and end with the second most memorable. It's not a cliffhanger. It's an anecdote – a FAA employee asking what seems like a seemingly-too-basic question "days after the Lion Air crash". The Lion Air crash happened last year, and the body of this article is ostensibly the answer to that employee's outburst.
Merrill 7y ago
The roots are when they moved the Boeing Headquarters from Seattle, where they made airplanes, to Chicago, where they did not. They stopped being an engineering and production company and became a marketing and accounting company.
- vermontdevil 7y ago
  It started when Boeing bought McDonnell and in turn McDonnell took over Boeing. You can read more here https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout
sddfd 7y ago
The elephant in the room is that we made requirements for getting a completely new plain design into the market so expensive and time-consuming, that Boeing cut corners and reused an existing design to get around the process.
- ProfSarkov 7y ago
  Completely new plane designs are being introduced into the market all the time. What are you talking about?
  - sddfd 7y ago
    No, they don't. New variants enter the market, such as the 737 MAX, which are easier to certify. Boeing introduced the last new airframe for commercial passenger transport on 2009 (the 787). Before that, it introduced the 747 in 1994. Which new airframes that enter the market all the time are you talking about?
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      The 737 MAX is a new plane, they hacked the type certification process to get around that.
- danso 7y ago
  Giving you the benefit of the doubt about the approval process for new plane designs, what does that have to do with the more directly relevant cost-cutting that Boeing pushed for: minimizing pilot training on the MAX system?
  - sddfd 7y ago
    It is not pilot training. The root problem is that Boeing and Airbus are currently retrofitting larger engines into old airframes at the cost of pitch stability, when what they should be doing if safety was their primary concern is change the airframe to accommodate the larger engines. Boeing in particular was under pressure from the more fuel efficient Airbus A320neo, and they needed bigger engines (larger fans) to compete on fuel efficiency. Those large engines don't fit under the 737 airframe, but getting a new airframe approved is time-consuming. So Boeing placed the bigger engines more forward from the wing, resulting in flight instability and pitch-up. Boeing tried to fix that problem with software, but, as became apparent recently, weren't very successful with it.
jeffdavis 7y ago
Probably true but not nafarious/corrupt. It's just human nature that if you watch something and it appears to be safe for long enough, you stop watching so closely. It's also alkind of a paradox: the safer something appears to be, the more the safety is taken for granted and pushed to unsafe levels. C.f. the mortgage crisis or a million other examples.
- danso 7y ago
  From what data are you deriving this theory of inevitable entropy? The safety record of the airline industry overall does not appear to be declining or regressing. On the metric of commercial jet fatalities, 2017 was the safest year ever [0]. Or are you suggesting that the 737 MAX is the canary in the coal mine of an imminent era of airline disasters caused by complacency? Why is that more likely than the lobbying and bureaucratic changes documented in the article? [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aviation-safety/2017-safest-year-on-record-for-commercial-passenger-air-travel-groups-idUSKBN1EQ17L https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aviation-safety/2017-safe...
  - mikeash 7y ago
    2017 was the safest year ever with zero fatalities in jets and less than a hundred fatalities total. 2018 saw a couple hundred deaths in jet crashes. Where does one get the idea that airline safety is regressing? Well....
    - dwaltrip 7y ago
      Looking at a single year in isolation is not useful when trying to identify a trend.
      - mikeash 7y ago
        But it’s ok on the other side?
        dwaltrip 7y ago
rubenhak 7y ago
Systems are getting too complex for traditional methods of validation and certification to operate. Safety and correctness of intelligent machines should be validated by even more intelligent machines. Another big problem is that there is very little competition. In reality there are only two players. Smaller manufacturers get absorbed by big ones. As a result grounding a single model causes economic catastrophe in many airlines - leading to significant ticket price increase!
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Simply applying the rules would have worked just fine here.
cgb223 7y ago
Where are the smaller airline creating startups trying to eat Boeing’s lunch? If there ever was a time to take down a giant, this is it
- dnh44 7y ago
  It’ll probably be Airbus that eats a portion of Boeing’s lunch (but not all of it). And whatever Airbus can’t eat will just go back to Boeing. An MVP for a passenger airplane requires considerably more effort and experience than an app, or even a car. You can’t just ship then iterate quickly.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  How on earth does 'airline creating startups' live in the same sentence as 'Boeing'? Boeing is an aircraft manufacturer, not an airline. Airline creating startups do not compete with Boeing, they compete with Lufthansa, Air-France-KLM, Delta and so on. And even if they did create airplanes, small start-ups do not usually directly compete with giants the size of Boeing on their home territory. Airline manufacture - even with shitty regulation - of a new model passenger plane is not something a 'smaller airplane creating startup' would successfully pull off. It will take a very large amount of money and a huge team to do this.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  For anyone to try to compete with Boeing today, from zero, in that aircraft segment, they would need at least, as in bare minimum, $10Bi dollars. Minimum And that would be to get the plane out of the door. Boeing (and Airbus) has several other non-tangible advantages to their product such as: extensive maintenance and parts logistics (including used parts that can be acquired), well known product, etc There is one possible competitor in the future: COMAC If your Boeing or Airbus plane suffers a non-trivial failure that makes it unable to fly, both companies have a team that are able to go and fix it there.
bgorman 7y ago
A major problem is that regulatory capture leads to less competition, yet the common solution proposed is "more regulation/government". The US federal government effectively forced Boeings 2nd biggest competition to shut down their business in 2017 (Bombardier's C Series program, now sold to Airbus for pennies on the dollar). It seems to me that if a democratic government is given broad arbitrary regulatory power, it is a given that it will be used to limit competition for special interest's groups benefit. If anyone has any examples of a large federal agency that hasn't been captured, I would be interested to know more.
- kartan 7y ago
  >A major problem is that regulatory capture leads to less competition Safe regulations are to avoid people dying not to stimulate competition. Without safety regulations, way more people will get sick, injured or die. And, in this case, it is not about adding more regulation. It is just about making sure that the current one is in place. Someone though, too much regulation is reducing my profit and 350 people died. Will deregulation bring that people lives back?
- creato 7y ago
  > A major problem is that regulatory capture leads to less competition, yet the common solution proposed is "more regulation/government" Neither "regulation" nor "government" are single dimensional quantities that can be compared with a simple "more" or "less". Having regulatory agencies act in the public interest is probably going to require constant oversight and guidance. It's a hell of a lot harder to have conversations like that when more than half of the political influence in the US is able to dismiss any suggestions with reflexive "more regulation = bad" arguments. Some regulations decrease competition. Some regulations increase competition. Some regulations provide incentives aligned with the public interest. Some regulations don't. They need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
- tw04 7y ago
  Except the bombardier issue had literally nothing to do with regulation and to claim it did is misleading. That was 100% Trump with his tarriff BS. The FAA and safety regulations played 0 part in it. We could have literally an unregulated airline industry and it wouldn't have changed the bombardier situation.
tehabe 7y ago
This is what I always fear when I hear deregulation. It is not that regulation is gone, it is just that it is shifted to the regulated and this is one possible outcome, people die.
dogsh1t 7y ago
Clojure and its dynamic typing caused the 737 Max crisis.
azinman2 7y ago
Kind of BS. Yes the regulations and oversight should be amazing and effective, but Boeing should have redesigned the airframe from the beginning when it became clear that the more efficient engines didn’t work with the frame. Let’s not misplace the blame here. Their business driven goals (don’t require simulator training) were smart until they couldn’t be made to work. Instead they forced it, resulting in death of human lives and possibly Boeing itself.
- rwc 7y ago
  This is way over the top. Boeing will be fine on account of being too important to fail (and we can debate endlessly whether that’s a good thing or bad thing but that doesn’t change the veracity of the statement). Boeing’s customers wanted the Max to be built on the 737 platform. You’re vastly underestimating the impact of a new airframe on carrier operations if you think it’s as simple as simulator training.
  - nrb 7y ago
    I think above ALL, Boeing’s customers want airplanes that only make controlled landings. If that’s unachievable in practical terms with the current airframe, then it shouldn’t exist in its current form.
  - markdown 7y ago
    > Boeing’s customers wanted the Max to be built on the 737 platform. You say that as if that's an excuse. What Boeing's customers wanted is irrelevant, but in any case, your claim is incorrect. Airlines just want a plane that can make them money. Boeing could have build them a plane much better than the MAX, but they chose not to because if they had done so, then the airlines would have the option to switch to Airbus. The Airbus option would not be on the table if Boeing was just selling them another 737 variant.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    > You’re vastly underestimating the impact of a new airframe on carrier operations if you think it’s as simple as simulator training. What about the impact of a new model on the ground for several months, maybe a year, even maybe (with a tiny chance, of course) forever? I bet it would have been cheaper if they started adding a new model to their operations already (for those who don't have it already) Sure, customers always want the cheapest option, and it's up to Boeing to say when enough is enough.
plazmatic 7y ago
So much for "MAGA"...
naikrovek 7y ago
> The F.A.A. eventually handed over responsibility for approval of MCAS to the manufacturer. This is pure WTF, right here.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  Just WTF or corruption?
- russdpale 7y ago
  Yes, an MCAS system with 0 redundancy. > So even some of the people who have worked on Boeing’s new 737 MAX airplane were baffled to learn that the company had designed an automated safety system that abandoned the principles of component redundancy, ultimately entrusting the automated decision-making to just one sensor — a type of sensor that was known to fail. Boeing’s rival, Airbus, has typically depended on three such sensors. “A single point of failure is an absolute no-no,” said one former Boeing engineer who worked on the MAX, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the program in an interview with The Seattle Times. “That is just a huge system engineering oversight. To just have missed it, I can’t imagine how.” https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/a-lack-of-redundancies-on-737-max-system-has-baffled-even-those-who-worked-on-the-jet/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/a-lac...
  - Nomentatus 7y ago
    No need to imagine - Boeing was selling the sane more-sensors solution as an extra, and just assumed - before the fact - that no airline would pass on the extra sensor. That would be insane. So, more money for Boeing, AND a lower list price. The airlines shouldn't have bought unsafe airplanes, but were crazy enough to do so. The buyers turned out to be even worse chancers.
    - markdown 7y ago
      > The airlines shouldn't have bought unsafe airplanes, but were crazy enough to do so. The buyers turned out to be even worse chancers. The plane was made by Boeing, and signed off by the FAA as being safe. Some airline on the other side of the world isn't going to even pretend to know more about the plane than Boeing and the FAA do. It was a completely reasonable assumption to make that the aircraft was airworthy. The only airlines who would know that the FAA is actually corrupt (captured by Boeing) and could be failing at their regulatory function are the US airlines. It's unfortunate that you seem to be blaming Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines for the crashes because apparently they should have known better than to trust that Boeing and FAA would approve a faulty plane. Keep in mind that the FAA approved the plane as is and not "airworthy only if you buy the extra features"
8bitsrule 7y ago
"they followed proper procedures and adhered to the highest standards." And here I thought 'highest standards' meant not creating death traps.
stretchwithme 7y ago
I think it's more a lack of long term thinking. Leaders that do not have a long term stake in the company but who can profit from a rise in the stock price in the short term. What if executives could only sell their shares five years after they acquired them? What if they experienced losses when the company does? Boards and shareholders need to get smarter. I'm hesitant to regulate it but I see no problem the SEC rating companies for their incentive structure. It should be updated whenever leadership changes or the company changes compensation. Companies lad by founders who still have most of their wealth in company stock should garner the highest rating. Companies that don't require CEOs to invest and who allow CEOs to exercise options stock and sell stock whenever they want might get the lowest. How executives can sell stock should be part of that rating. If executives can only sell an amount of stock gradually, say in 8% increments every month for the next year and can't change that schedule, that is safer for shareholders than allowing them to sell whenever they want.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  > What if executives could only sell their shares five years after they acquired them? This is something like what Salomon Brothers did. Results were mixed. That said, I like the idea of spreading them out a bit. CEOs and top execs do behave a lot like how agency theory predicts, it's just that if you can come up with the perfect monitoring scheme, you don't need a CEO.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  It'd be interesting if executives and upper management were paid in dividends for 30 years. That way, you have a vested interest -- even after you leave the company -- to make sure it does the right thing.
  - stretchwithme 7y ago
    Definitely something to that. 30 years might seem like too long a period. But if you want your pension to stay healthy, build it to last. That message would be pretty clear.
solotronics 7y ago
I wonder if critical systems such as this would become more or less reliable if a law forced the companies to release the source code to the public so that anyone could audit. Something like the rewards Tesla gives to the hackers that compromise their systems should be set up by the government for critical software.
WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
It's interesting how this lesson is never learned. We constantly see how oversight is reduced or removed because companies decide that the costs are too high and the rules too stringent. But as soon as the rules are relaxed the companies immediately begin to cut corners and things begin to fail. It's human nature to find ways to get from point A to point B using the least amount of energy even if we need to break the rules. We should all keep that in mind.
- georgebarnett 7y ago
  This lesson will continue until we realise that the ultimate goal is the improvement of our society and that to get there we create markets which serve society. At the moment we appear to be confused and think the goal of society is to have markets, so we regulate for the market and hope society gets an outcome.
  - WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
    Well put.
throwaway3627 7y ago
This is regulatory capture that corporate-political plutocracy brings. I hope Nader sues the pants off them in his goddaughter's memory.
p5a0u9l 7y ago
It's seems easy to dogpile on Boeing in this situation - there is likely even truth to narratives of under valuing engineering at Boeing, I should know. But the story of corporate greed and callous corner cutting is too easy and starts to feel like group think. Boeing, as the plane manufacture, has the task of ensuring safety under a vast array of conditions. And in truth, they, along with industry have made flight incredibly safe. Not only are planes complicated, they are complicated systems composed of many more complicated subsystems operated by Airlines across the world under different regulatory agencies, with differing training and maintenance standards. It's complicated and it's always easier to see flaws in hindsight. Second, don't think that Boeing doesn't know that there business hinges on consumer confidence. Every time there is an incident with a plane - manufacturer's fault, operator's fault, or whatever, Boeing gets a black eye. Regulation is critical, but not a blanket solution to industry challenges. It may not be right, or ideal, but there are good reasons the faa delegates. How much more funding should we give them to make us feel safe? Fatality frequency is measured in "per billion" today. We want a bad guy when there is tragedy. I fear that want will further damage a company already fighting for it's life with Airbus. Let's not let them off the hook, but neither are the causes or solutions simple.
zzw918 7y ago
come on
cedivad 7y ago
The root is our current form of capitalism.

382 points by tafda 7y ago

One issue the article didn't cover, but I wish it did, was the obvious corruption of the FAA by industry lobbying. The revolving door of industry -> government -> private industry leaves any regulation weak and often ineffectual. We call it "lobbying" but the reality is that it's just corruption and bribery under a nicer name. One specific example to highlight the issue... Ali Bahrami works for the FAA, lobbies to delegate oversight to the airlines, then leaves for a lobbying job, then is back at the FAA again at a higher position. It's hard to believe he's always acting in the public's interest with so much industry money and connections. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/with-close-industry-ties-faa-safety-chief-pushed-more-delegation-of-oversight-to-boeing/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/with-...

40acres 7y ago

There are so many underlying threads here: the revolving door between government and industry, the influence of lobbying, lack of competition within critical American industries, deregulation, lack of funding for regulatory agencies. All sums up to regulatory capture. Sickening. Time and time again regular people are getting screwed by the same patters, the previous paragraph basically summarizes what led to the 2008 financial crisis as well.

bartimus 7y ago
In a deregulated world banks wouldn't get bailouts. They would go bust. Governments wouldn't pressure France with import tariffs to protect their aviation industry. In a heavily regulated you still got dieselgate. It got exposed by the private sector. There's many factors at play. There exists no world where Boeing benefits from having their planes crashing.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  There does exist a world. It's a world of calculated risks, where people figure out how far they can push things before the risks start eating into profits. It's the same thing that occurs with risk analysis using customer data. They only fund exactly as much security as they need. Does the company benefit from having private data leaked? Not particularly, but if the cost of having data leaked is less than the cost of securing that data, then businesses will not secure their data. Which is where regulations come in.
  - bartimus 7y ago
    The regulatory world is also a world of calculated risks. In any case. The result of the calculation will always be: "crashing planes = not good for our company"
- zucker42 7y ago
  Boeing benefits from cutting costs. Cutting costs can lead to decreased quality. The plane crashing is a risk of decreased quality. Making anything often involves tradeoffs and the point of Boeing's maximum profit is probably not the same as the point of the maximum benefit to society.
  - sgregnt 7y ago
    Isn't Boeing a part of society? How do you define maximum benefit of the whole society please share the wisdom! A point where there is maximum benefit to one part of society is probably not the point where there js maximum benifit to the other part of society.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  > In a deregulated world banks wouldn't get bailouts. They would go bust. Is this not what capitalism is?
- sumedh 7y ago
  > It got exposed by the private sector. Was it really exposed by the private sector, I thought it was bunch of university students and their prof doing some research.
jostmey 7y ago
I think there is a simple solution--pay civil servants well
- danieltillett 7y ago
  That would help on the quality side, but it is not going to help on the revolving door problem.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Some can never have enough and will always welcome more money in their pocket.
ilaksh 7y ago
There is a structural flaw inherent in the characteristics and relations between traditional money and traditional government.
TomMckenny 7y ago
> the revolving door between government and industry, the influence of lobbying, lack of competition within critical American industries, deregulation All very serious problem. But regulatory capture comes only from money in politics.

std_throwaway 7y ago

> In the middle of the Max’s development, two of the most seasoned engineers in the F.A.A.’s Boeing office left. > In their place, the F.A.A. appointed an engineer who had little experience in flight controls, and a new hire who had gotten his master’s degree three years earlier. This is how you grow an army of YES-men without any substantial backbone. The type that makes good middle managers and keeps the process moving smoothly. Unfortunately for these engineers, they might ultimately be responsible for the system they signed off on.

mtgx 7y ago
They will be the scapegoats thrown under the bus when the scandals will erupt. Remember Volkswagen's "rogue engineer" who apparently single-highhandedly caused millions of VW vehicles to cheat on emission tests? Yeah, don't be that guy and whistle-blow on such things.
tomohawk 7y ago
This is how the government works. The government is just an institution, and institutions do not care about you. They just don't. They follow their rules and guidelines. If the guide is to put a GS-13 in that slot (employment category), then that is what will happen. There's no magic. Just rules. Boeing did not build great planes because of the FAA. They built them because their culture and expertise were aligned to do so. In the fact, the safety culture at Boeing was once so great that they often worked with the FAA to establish standards and guidelines, because the FAA simply did not have the expertise that Boeing had. When that culture failed, Boeing failed.
- std_throwaway 7y ago
  It goes deeper all the way to the value systems that once were bestowed upon the populace by the church.
  - cmurf 7y ago
    Money is the new deity and we're selling out values to get it. Corruption and trust loss follow the insistence that the government can't be trusted. But it's a nation of spectators, people who want to be entertained, a decadent culture, not of citizens. It will continue to corrupt itself until we care to hold it accountable. And if we don't, it will turn into something where individuals have even less say than we do now.

readams 7y ago

The underlying assumption here seems to be that if only the FAA had examined in detail every aspect of the development of the plane, of course they would have found all the problems. Underlying this assumption is the idea that Boeing is either trying intentionally to create unsafe planes (as though this is good for Boeing) or that the FAA could hire engineers that are way better than Boeing's engineers. I don't buy it.

danso 7y ago
The latter half of the article makes specific claims to how lack of FAA expertise and manpower, and increasing deference and complacency to the industry's self-reporting, led to missed signals. For example: > When company engineers analyzed the change, they figured that the system had not become any riskier, according to two people familiar with Boeing’s discussions on the matter...So the company never submitted an updated safety assessment of those changes to the agency. In several briefings in 2016, an F.A.A. test pilot learned the details of the system from Boeing. But the two F.A.A. engineers didn’t understand that MCAS could move the tail as much as 2.5 degrees, according to two people familiar with their thinking. > Under the impression the system was insignificant, officials didn’t require Boeing to tell pilots about MCAS. When the company asked to remove mention of MCAS from the pilot’s manual, the agency agreed. The "change" mentioned is Boeing overhauling MCAS to have a four-fold increase in magnitude of control over the stabilizer (2.5 degrees vs 0.6 degrees). Your belief is that the FAA, even with a better-staffed review team, and less of a culture of rubber-stamping industry engineer assessments, would have reached the same conclusion? And/or do you think the MCAS change is actually not a problem it's scapegoated to be, and that Boeing was right to tell FAA to remove it from the pilot's manual?
- readams 7y ago
  I'm saying I don't buy that the FAA was ever likely to catch the problems with this system that the engineers at Boeing didn't catch. In hindsight it's easy to say the system was a problem and clearly it was, but the FAA was never going to catch anything. The meeting with the FAA pilot you mention only goes to reinforce this; nobody in the FAA is ever going to have all the right context to put this together. Rather than trying to find some meeting with the FAA where someone could have caught it, there were probably many many meetings inside Boeing where it should have been caught.

danso 7y ago

Seems like another anecdote of where seniority and experience in engineering is something that can't be quite replicated/replaced by technical qualifications: > In the middle of the Max’s development, two of the most seasoned engineers in the F.A.A.’s Boeing office left. The engineers, who had a combined 50 years of experience, had joined the office at its creation...In their place, the F.A.A. appointed an engineer who had little experience in flight controls, and a new hire who had gotten his master’s degree three years earlier. People who worked with the two engineers said they seemed ill-equipped to identify any problems in a complex system like MCAS. I assume engineers new to the industry (and government regulation) would be lacking in "big picture" thinking and in confidence and skill in navigating and investigating bureaucracy – the NYT notes that Boeing's early MCAS report "didn't prompt additional scrutiny from the F.A.A. engineers". But the NYT also reports that the engineers made what seemed to be a straightforward technical misjudgment: > In several briefings in 2016, an F.A.A. test pilot learned the details of the system from Boeing. But the two F.A.A. engineers didn’t understand that MCAS could move the tail as much as 2.5 degrees, according to two people familiar with their thinking. Though it's hard to tell from that paragraph and its context whether the misunderstanding came from simple technical error and incompetence – e.g. misreading or not fully reading the specs – or deliberate deception/obfuscation from Boeing, and/or inexperience and naivety in doing regulatory work.

rectang 7y ago

The background of all of this is increased corporate power in American society relative to individuals. Regulatory capture happens more quickly and fluidly when government is more accountable to corporate money than to voters.

mevile 7y ago

Deregulation never seems to result in more competition, just more consolidation and more and more powerful companies with increased lobbying powers and personal connections to top government officials.

std_throwaway 7y ago
Is it really getting any worse or has it always been this way and we just don't learn it in history class?
- jliptzin 7y ago
  The causes are the same, the effects accumulate over time
- tehjoker 7y ago
  Some things are better many important things are worse. Consumer goods are doing well, and are high quality where regulations are intact, the good can be trivially inspected on purchase, or reputation provides enough of a backstop to prevent quality decreases. That's the upside of capitalism. On the downside, many people are underemployed even in a so-called tight labor market, fewer and fewer people own anything like a house or car and are highly indebted. Few people have any savings whatsoever and the administration in conjunction with the monied classes seeks to strip whatever protections remain while scapegoating immigrants. Additionally, the US and the west appear to be better off than they are because we use the power of our military, monetary system, and relationships to make sure items are produced cheaply overseas with negligible labor protections resulting in abusive labor conditions. Also, the planet is dying due to unlimited resource extraction.
  - breatheoften 7y ago
    The depressing truth ... how do you deal with it? I’ve been going through depression cycles — sometimes I can ignore the depressing nature that comes from holding an inherently non-positive expectation for the future as basically my best attempt to rationally assess the present and predict the future from it — ignorance is bliss? - but sometimes I embrace that most rational perspective as the “most likely source of truth” and promptly get incredibly (deeply) depressed ... to the point where i can feel myself faking “normal” interpersonal interactions and struggling against the fact that most or all locally true reasons for a hopeful outlook basically pale in comparison to the macroscopic reasons to be non-hopeful ... It’s deeply sad to know that future generations won’t have as much opportunity as I had to enjoy life ... but to pity them will feel patronizing to them - and so what is left for them to know of me and me to know of them ...? Dear citizens of the future, know that some of us are sorry for how your life will go — and know that some of us are not for they got theirs before you arrived and that was enough for them ... for some of us this wasn’t enough - we lived your pain in our imaginations while enjoying a physical life of abundance that, in the end, has helped you in no way at all ...

Proven 7y ago

That's an arbitrary call. Maybe if they had less regulatory crap to deal with, more real issues would have been addressed. There's no way to know for sure.

PieUser 7y ago

This article ends abruptly

interestica 7y ago
Yeah, what was the deal there? Cliffhanger? I legitimately can't tell if intentional.
- danso 7y ago
  I think it's just an example of a common news article pattern: put the most memorable and/or important finding or anecdote at the top, and end with the second most memorable. It's not a cliffhanger. It's an anecdote – a FAA employee asking what seems like a seemingly-too-basic question "days after the Lion Air crash". The Lion Air crash happened last year, and the body of this article is ostensibly the answer to that employee's outburst.

Merrill 7y ago

The roots are when they moved the Boeing Headquarters from Seattle, where they made airplanes, to Chicago, where they did not. They stopped being an engineering and production company and became a marketing and accounting company.

vermontdevil 7y ago
It started when Boeing bought McDonnell and in turn McDonnell took over Boeing. You can read more here https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

sddfd 7y ago

The elephant in the room is that we made requirements for getting a completely new plain design into the market so expensive and time-consuming, that Boeing cut corners and reused an existing design to get around the process.

ProfSarkov 7y ago
Completely new plane designs are being introduced into the market all the time. What are you talking about?
- sddfd 7y ago
  No, they don't. New variants enter the market, such as the 737 MAX, which are easier to certify. Boeing introduced the last new airframe for commercial passenger transport on 2009 (the 787). Before that, it introduced the 747 in 1994. Which new airframes that enter the market all the time are you talking about?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    The 737 MAX is a new plane, they hacked the type certification process to get around that.
danso 7y ago
Giving you the benefit of the doubt about the approval process for new plane designs, what does that have to do with the more directly relevant cost-cutting that Boeing pushed for: minimizing pilot training on the MAX system?
- sddfd 7y ago
  It is not pilot training. The root problem is that Boeing and Airbus are currently retrofitting larger engines into old airframes at the cost of pitch stability, when what they should be doing if safety was their primary concern is change the airframe to accommodate the larger engines. Boeing in particular was under pressure from the more fuel efficient Airbus A320neo, and they needed bigger engines (larger fans) to compete on fuel efficiency. Those large engines don't fit under the 737 airframe, but getting a new airframe approved is time-consuming. So Boeing placed the bigger engines more forward from the wing, resulting in flight instability and pitch-up. Boeing tried to fix that problem with software, but, as became apparent recently, weren't very successful with it.

jeffdavis 7y ago

Probably true but not nafarious/corrupt. It's just human nature that if you watch something and it appears to be safe for long enough, you stop watching so closely. It's also alkind of a paradox: the safer something appears to be, the more the safety is taken for granted and pushed to unsafe levels. C.f. the mortgage crisis or a million other examples.

danso 7y ago
From what data are you deriving this theory of inevitable entropy? The safety record of the airline industry overall does not appear to be declining or regressing. On the metric of commercial jet fatalities, 2017 was the safest year ever [0]. Or are you suggesting that the 737 MAX is the canary in the coal mine of an imminent era of airline disasters caused by complacency? Why is that more likely than the lobbying and bureaucratic changes documented in the article? [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aviation-safety/2017-safest-year-on-record-for-commercial-passenger-air-travel-groups-idUSKBN1EQ17L https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aviation-safety/2017-safe...
- mikeash 7y ago
  2017 was the safest year ever with zero fatalities in jets and less than a hundred fatalities total. 2018 saw a couple hundred deaths in jet crashes. Where does one get the idea that airline safety is regressing? Well....
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    Looking at a single year in isolation is not useful when trying to identify a trend.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      But it’s ok on the other side?
      - dwaltrip 7y ago

rubenhak 7y ago

Systems are getting too complex for traditional methods of validation and certification to operate. Safety and correctness of intelligent machines should be validated by even more intelligent machines. Another big problem is that there is very little competition. In reality there are only two players. Smaller manufacturers get absorbed by big ones. As a result grounding a single model causes economic catastrophe in many airlines - leading to significant ticket price increase!

jacquesm 7y ago
Simply applying the rules would have worked just fine here.

cgb223 7y ago

Where are the smaller airline creating startups trying to eat Boeing’s lunch? If there ever was a time to take down a giant, this is it

dnh44 7y ago
It’ll probably be Airbus that eats a portion of Boeing’s lunch (but not all of it). And whatever Airbus can’t eat will just go back to Boeing. An MVP for a passenger airplane requires considerably more effort and experience than an app, or even a car. You can’t just ship then iterate quickly.
jacquesm 7y ago
How on earth does 'airline creating startups' live in the same sentence as 'Boeing'? Boeing is an aircraft manufacturer, not an airline. Airline creating startups do not compete with Boeing, they compete with Lufthansa, Air-France-KLM, Delta and so on. And even if they did create airplanes, small start-ups do not usually directly compete with giants the size of Boeing on their home territory. Airline manufacture - even with shitty regulation - of a new model passenger plane is not something a 'smaller airplane creating startup' would successfully pull off. It will take a very large amount of money and a huge team to do this.
raverbashing 7y ago
For anyone to try to compete with Boeing today, from zero, in that aircraft segment, they would need at least, as in bare minimum, $10Bi dollars. Minimum And that would be to get the plane out of the door. Boeing (and Airbus) has several other non-tangible advantages to their product such as: extensive maintenance and parts logistics (including used parts that can be acquired), well known product, etc There is one possible competitor in the future: COMAC If your Boeing or Airbus plane suffers a non-trivial failure that makes it unable to fly, both companies have a team that are able to go and fix it there.

bgorman 7y ago

A major problem is that regulatory capture leads to less competition, yet the common solution proposed is "more regulation/government". The US federal government effectively forced Boeings 2nd biggest competition to shut down their business in 2017 (Bombardier's C Series program, now sold to Airbus for pennies on the dollar). It seems to me that if a democratic government is given broad arbitrary regulatory power, it is a given that it will be used to limit competition for special interest's groups benefit. If anyone has any examples of a large federal agency that hasn't been captured, I would be interested to know more.

kartan 7y ago
>A major problem is that regulatory capture leads to less competition Safe regulations are to avoid people dying not to stimulate competition. Without safety regulations, way more people will get sick, injured or die. And, in this case, it is not about adding more regulation. It is just about making sure that the current one is in place. Someone though, too much regulation is reducing my profit and 350 people died. Will deregulation bring that people lives back?
creato 7y ago
> A major problem is that regulatory capture leads to less competition, yet the common solution proposed is "more regulation/government" Neither "regulation" nor "government" are single dimensional quantities that can be compared with a simple "more" or "less". Having regulatory agencies act in the public interest is probably going to require constant oversight and guidance. It's a hell of a lot harder to have conversations like that when more than half of the political influence in the US is able to dismiss any suggestions with reflexive "more regulation = bad" arguments. Some regulations decrease competition. Some regulations increase competition. Some regulations provide incentives aligned with the public interest. Some regulations don't. They need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
tw04 7y ago
Except the bombardier issue had literally nothing to do with regulation and to claim it did is misleading. That was 100% Trump with his tarriff BS. The FAA and safety regulations played 0 part in it. We could have literally an unregulated airline industry and it wouldn't have changed the bombardier situation.

tehabe 7y ago

This is what I always fear when I hear deregulation. It is not that regulation is gone, it is just that it is shifted to the regulated and this is one possible outcome, people die.

dogsh1t 7y ago

Clojure and its dynamic typing caused the 737 Max crisis.

azinman2 7y ago

Kind of BS. Yes the regulations and oversight should be amazing and effective, but Boeing should have redesigned the airframe from the beginning when it became clear that the more efficient engines didn’t work with the frame. Let’s not misplace the blame here. Their business driven goals (don’t require simulator training) were smart until they couldn’t be made to work. Instead they forced it, resulting in death of human lives and possibly Boeing itself.

rwc 7y ago
This is way over the top. Boeing will be fine on account of being too important to fail (and we can debate endlessly whether that’s a good thing or bad thing but that doesn’t change the veracity of the statement). Boeing’s customers wanted the Max to be built on the 737 platform. You’re vastly underestimating the impact of a new airframe on carrier operations if you think it’s as simple as simulator training.
- nrb 7y ago
  I think above ALL, Boeing’s customers want airplanes that only make controlled landings. If that’s unachievable in practical terms with the current airframe, then it shouldn’t exist in its current form.
- markdown 7y ago
  > Boeing’s customers wanted the Max to be built on the 737 platform. You say that as if that's an excuse. What Boeing's customers wanted is irrelevant, but in any case, your claim is incorrect. Airlines just want a plane that can make them money. Boeing could have build them a plane much better than the MAX, but they chose not to because if they had done so, then the airlines would have the option to switch to Airbus. The Airbus option would not be on the table if Boeing was just selling them another 737 variant.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  > You’re vastly underestimating the impact of a new airframe on carrier operations if you think it’s as simple as simulator training. What about the impact of a new model on the ground for several months, maybe a year, even maybe (with a tiny chance, of course) forever? I bet it would have been cheaper if they started adding a new model to their operations already (for those who don't have it already) Sure, customers always want the cheapest option, and it's up to Boeing to say when enough is enough.

plazmatic 7y ago

So much for "MAGA"...

naikrovek 7y ago

> The F.A.A. eventually handed over responsibility for approval of MCAS to the manufacturer. This is pure WTF, right here.

AdrianB1 7y ago
Just WTF or corruption?
russdpale 7y ago
Yes, an MCAS system with 0 redundancy. > So even some of the people who have worked on Boeing’s new 737 MAX airplane were baffled to learn that the company had designed an automated safety system that abandoned the principles of component redundancy, ultimately entrusting the automated decision-making to just one sensor — a type of sensor that was known to fail. Boeing’s rival, Airbus, has typically depended on three such sensors. “A single point of failure is an absolute no-no,” said one former Boeing engineer who worked on the MAX, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the program in an interview with The Seattle Times. “That is just a huge system engineering oversight. To just have missed it, I can’t imagine how.” https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/a-lack-of-redundancies-on-737-max-system-has-baffled-even-those-who-worked-on-the-jet/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/a-lac...
- Nomentatus 7y ago
  No need to imagine - Boeing was selling the sane more-sensors solution as an extra, and just assumed - before the fact - that no airline would pass on the extra sensor. That would be insane. So, more money for Boeing, AND a lower list price. The airlines shouldn't have bought unsafe airplanes, but were crazy enough to do so. The buyers turned out to be even worse chancers.
  - markdown 7y ago
    > The airlines shouldn't have bought unsafe airplanes, but were crazy enough to do so. The buyers turned out to be even worse chancers. The plane was made by Boeing, and signed off by the FAA as being safe. Some airline on the other side of the world isn't going to even pretend to know more about the plane than Boeing and the FAA do. It was a completely reasonable assumption to make that the aircraft was airworthy. The only airlines who would know that the FAA is actually corrupt (captured by Boeing) and could be failing at their regulatory function are the US airlines. It's unfortunate that you seem to be blaming Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines for the crashes because apparently they should have known better than to trust that Boeing and FAA would approve a faulty plane. Keep in mind that the FAA approved the plane as is and not "airworthy only if you buy the extra features"

8bitsrule 7y ago

"they followed proper procedures and adhered to the highest standards." And here I thought 'highest standards' meant not creating death traps.

stretchwithme 7y ago

I think it's more a lack of long term thinking. Leaders that do not have a long term stake in the company but who can profit from a rise in the stock price in the short term. What if executives could only sell their shares five years after they acquired them? What if they experienced losses when the company does? Boards and shareholders need to get smarter. I'm hesitant to regulate it but I see no problem the SEC rating companies for their incentive structure. It should be updated whenever leadership changes or the company changes compensation. Companies lad by founders who still have most of their wealth in company stock should garner the highest rating. Companies that don't require CEOs to invest and who allow CEOs to exercise options stock and sell stock whenever they want might get the lowest. How executives can sell stock should be part of that rating. If executives can only sell an amount of stock gradually, say in 8% increments every month for the next year and can't change that schedule, that is safer for shareholders than allowing them to sell whenever they want.

jacques_chester 7y ago
> What if executives could only sell their shares five years after they acquired them? This is something like what Salomon Brothers did. Results were mixed. That said, I like the idea of spreading them out a bit. CEOs and top execs do behave a lot like how agency theory predicts, it's just that if you can come up with the perfect monitoring scheme, you don't need a CEO.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
It'd be interesting if executives and upper management were paid in dividends for 30 years. That way, you have a vested interest -- even after you leave the company -- to make sure it does the right thing.
- stretchwithme 7y ago
  Definitely something to that. 30 years might seem like too long a period. But if you want your pension to stay healthy, build it to last. That message would be pretty clear.

solotronics 7y ago

I wonder if critical systems such as this would become more or less reliable if a law forced the companies to release the source code to the public so that anyone could audit. Something like the rewards Tesla gives to the hackers that compromise their systems should be set up by the government for critical software.

WheelsAtLarge 7y ago

It's interesting how this lesson is never learned. We constantly see how oversight is reduced or removed because companies decide that the costs are too high and the rules too stringent. But as soon as the rules are relaxed the companies immediately begin to cut corners and things begin to fail. It's human nature to find ways to get from point A to point B using the least amount of energy even if we need to break the rules. We should all keep that in mind.

georgebarnett 7y ago
This lesson will continue until we realise that the ultimate goal is the improvement of our society and that to get there we create markets which serve society. At the moment we appear to be confused and think the goal of society is to have markets, so we regulate for the market and hope society gets an outcome.
- WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
  Well put.

throwaway3627 7y ago

This is regulatory capture that corporate-political plutocracy brings. I hope Nader sues the pants off them in his goddaughter's memory.

p5a0u9l 7y ago

It's seems easy to dogpile on Boeing in this situation - there is likely even truth to narratives of under valuing engineering at Boeing, I should know. But the story of corporate greed and callous corner cutting is too easy and starts to feel like group think. Boeing, as the plane manufacture, has the task of ensuring safety under a vast array of conditions. And in truth, they, along with industry have made flight incredibly safe. Not only are planes complicated, they are complicated systems composed of many more complicated subsystems operated by Airlines across the world under different regulatory agencies, with differing training and maintenance standards. It's complicated and it's always easier to see flaws in hindsight. Second, don't think that Boeing doesn't know that there business hinges on consumer confidence. Every time there is an incident with a plane - manufacturer's fault, operator's fault, or whatever, Boeing gets a black eye. Regulation is critical, but not a blanket solution to industry challenges. It may not be right, or ideal, but there are good reasons the faa delegates. How much more funding should we give them to make us feel safe? Fatality frequency is measured in "per billion" today. We want a bad guy when there is tragedy. I fear that want will further damage a company already fighting for it's life with Airbus. Let's not let them off the hook, but neither are the causes or solutions simple.

zzw918 7y ago

come on

cedivad 7y ago

The root is our current form of capitalism.