6 ms·

Former Boeing official subpoenaed in 737 MAX probe won’t turn over documents

30 points by CaptainZapp 7y ago

cm2187 7y ago
It's not necessarily an admission of guilt. If the investigation is about negligence, and trying to establish whether it was intentional or not, it is a very grey line and it is understandable that the pilot would be defensive.
- smachiz 7y ago
  Specifically, asserting your 5th amendment rights is not an admission of guilt in a criminal case. In a civil case, it may be taken as an admission of guilt - partially because the rules are different. There are different standards for guilt (preponderance of evidence vs beyond a reasonable doubt) for the two. In a civil case, you do not have a presumption of innocence - and asserting a 5th amendment right can intimate guilt. According to the Supreme Court, asserting your 5th amendment rights explicitly cannot be used by a prosecutor as evidence of an admission of guilt - specifically because you are presumed innocent until the prosecutor proves otherwise, and you are under no obligation to prove yourself innocent.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    But I think the article used "admission of guilt" in the ethical sense rather than legal sense.
jaclaz 7y ago
I wonder what the actual documents are. I mean, Boeing should have at least a copy of every document ever produced by its staff, unless all internal copies of those documents have been (intentionally or accidentally) destroyed and the only surviving copy is known to be in the hands of Mr. Forkner.
- meristem 7y ago
  Could be handwritten notes, for example.
  - ChicagoBoy11 7y ago
    Your comment about the handwritten note made me think of Feymann's story of being tasked with find some note that had been scribbled before the Challenger launch with something akin to "go for it!" or the like. Presumably whatever was in the note was evidence of some sort of cavalier attitude towards safety. His conclusion, though, was that this was an extreme distraction and likely intentional misdirection to prevent them from spending time focusing on the real questions and systemic causes of the accident. Part of me does wonder how much of that is happening here. It would do Boeing wonders to be able to pinpoint as a "root cause" of these failures some sort of cavalier attitude by a few engineers rather than a very large systemic failure on the part of the company itself, which includes but is not limited to cost-cutting, regulatory capture, and abuse of their oversight authority.
  - jaclaz 7y ago
    >Could be handwritten notes, for example. Good, but how would they be relevant? A handwritten note is only a "personal" record of sorts, possibly capturing the opinion of the writer at the moment it is written, not something "objective" or actually proving anything. And it can be recreated at will. I mean, let's say that you actually have an a4 sheet of paper where you wrote by hand (at the time) either of: "Today's meeting has been almost completely unuseful, the managers don't want to consider the safety issues involved with the MCAS operation" or: "Today's meeting has been almost completely succesful, I finally managed to tell the managers how there are no foreseeable safety issues with the MCAS operation." Now, if you had the second piece of paper what would prevent you to destroy it and re-create the first one? Or simply destroy it? If it is a hand-written note, it must be a hand written note by someone else, and still if it was - even - tangentially implicating the "current custodian" in the matter it would probably have been destroyed the day after the second accident or in the very early stages of the investigation, particularly since - being a handwritten note - there is no possible way to prove that it ever existed at all. On the other hand, if those documents are in any way "official" they should have a track record on "Boeing side". Clearly something is escaping us (well me at least).
virgakwolfw 7y ago
> Invoking the Fifth to avoid testifying, while a legal right, is sometimes interpreted as an admission of guilt. Its use to resist a subpoena for documents is less common and may only imply a dance between prosecutors and defense attorneys, legal experts say. Fifth amendment rights only apply to criminal situations -- so the correct inference is that a former Boeing official believes Boeing's design process for the 737 MAX is criminal, implicating whatever his personal role was in illegal conduct. This inference may be drawn in civil situations, without violating the rights of the former official -- the Fifth Amendment only applies to criminal prosecutions. If Boeing can't turn over documentation related to the 737 MAX without revealing criminal conduct, then we should seriously doubt the robustness of their engineering. Everything designed by Boeing since the 787, designed just after their move to Chicago, has had increasingly poor results - 787: Battery troubles, composite assembly troubles, manufacturing defects in SC. 737 MAX: Killed two flights worth of passengers from poorly designed UX and ignoring standard engineering principles. 777X: The doors blow off. This is your company on MBAs.

30 points by CaptainZapp 7y ago

It's not necessarily an admission of guilt. If the investigation is about negligence, and trying to establish whether it was intentional or not, it is a very grey line and it is understandable that the pilot would be defensive.

smachiz 7y ago
Specifically, asserting your 5th amendment rights is not an admission of guilt in a criminal case. In a civil case, it may be taken as an admission of guilt - partially because the rules are different. There are different standards for guilt (preponderance of evidence vs beyond a reasonable doubt) for the two. In a civil case, you do not have a presumption of innocence - and asserting a 5th amendment right can intimate guilt. According to the Supreme Court, asserting your 5th amendment rights explicitly cannot be used by a prosecutor as evidence of an admission of guilt - specifically because you are presumed innocent until the prosecutor proves otherwise, and you are under no obligation to prove yourself innocent.
- cm2187 7y ago
  But I think the article used "admission of guilt" in the ethical sense rather than legal sense.

jaclaz 7y ago

I wonder what the actual documents are. I mean, Boeing should have at least a copy of every document ever produced by its staff, unless all internal copies of those documents have been (intentionally or accidentally) destroyed and the only surviving copy is known to be in the hands of Mr. Forkner.

meristem 7y ago
Could be handwritten notes, for example.
- ChicagoBoy11 7y ago
  Your comment about the handwritten note made me think of Feymann's story of being tasked with find some note that had been scribbled before the Challenger launch with something akin to "go for it!" or the like. Presumably whatever was in the note was evidence of some sort of cavalier attitude towards safety. His conclusion, though, was that this was an extreme distraction and likely intentional misdirection to prevent them from spending time focusing on the real questions and systemic causes of the accident. Part of me does wonder how much of that is happening here. It would do Boeing wonders to be able to pinpoint as a "root cause" of these failures some sort of cavalier attitude by a few engineers rather than a very large systemic failure on the part of the company itself, which includes but is not limited to cost-cutting, regulatory capture, and abuse of their oversight authority.
- jaclaz 7y ago
  >Could be handwritten notes, for example. Good, but how would they be relevant? A handwritten note is only a "personal" record of sorts, possibly capturing the opinion of the writer at the moment it is written, not something "objective" or actually proving anything. And it can be recreated at will. I mean, let's say that you actually have an a4 sheet of paper where you wrote by hand (at the time) either of: "Today's meeting has been almost completely unuseful, the managers don't want to consider the safety issues involved with the MCAS operation" or: "Today's meeting has been almost completely succesful, I finally managed to tell the managers how there are no foreseeable safety issues with the MCAS operation." Now, if you had the second piece of paper what would prevent you to destroy it and re-create the first one? Or simply destroy it? If it is a hand-written note, it must be a hand written note by someone else, and still if it was - even - tangentially implicating the "current custodian" in the matter it would probably have been destroyed the day after the second accident or in the very early stages of the investigation, particularly since - being a handwritten note - there is no possible way to prove that it ever existed at all. On the other hand, if those documents are in any way "official" they should have a track record on "Boeing side". Clearly something is escaping us (well me at least).

virgakwolfw 7y ago

> Invoking the Fifth to avoid testifying, while a legal right, is sometimes interpreted as an admission of guilt. Its use to resist a subpoena for documents is less common and may only imply a dance between prosecutors and defense attorneys, legal experts say. Fifth amendment rights only apply to criminal situations -- so the correct inference is that a former Boeing official believes Boeing's design process for the 737 MAX is criminal, implicating whatever his personal role was in illegal conduct. This inference may be drawn in civil situations, without violating the rights of the former official -- the Fifth Amendment only applies to criminal prosecutions. If Boeing can't turn over documentation related to the 737 MAX without revealing criminal conduct, then we should seriously doubt the robustness of their engineering. Everything designed by Boeing since the 787, designed just after their move to Chicago, has had increasingly poor results - 787: Battery troubles, composite assembly troubles, manufacturing defects in SC. 737 MAX: Killed two flights worth of passengers from poorly designed UX and ignoring standard engineering principles. 777X: The doors blow off. This is your company on MBAs.