8 ms·

Hang on: Boeing and FAA officials coached test pilots towards an outcome of a test related to a system where, if there were a problem with it (as there has been

Hang on: Boeing and FAA officials coached test pilots towards an outcome of a test related to a system where, if there were a problem with it (as there has been in the past), people will die in relatively large numbers (as they have in the past)? What is wrong with these people? If the plane can't be brought up to snuff without you fudging the test results then you can the thing. There is no other way. Because if you don't can it what's going to happen? More crashes. The subsequent investigations will reveal that there is still a problem with the plane. Investigators will follow the trail back to the certification, and then you'll find yourselves in a whole heap of trouble. Oh, and Boeing will go under. Where's your shareholder value then? Of all the short-sighted, obtuse, shady, unethical, blithering idiocy we have all witnessed in various quarters in 2020 this ranks amongst the worst. I honestly no longer care what the certification status of the 737 Max is. There is such a cloud of untrustworthiness around the plane, its systems and its certifications that there is no way I will ever risk flying on one. Boeing have done some amazing things in the past. The 747, for example, was for its time an extraordinary aircraft and is still without doubt the most iconic passenger airliner even today. The Boeing museum near Seattle is incredible, and I highly recommend it. In more recent years it's clear that they've lost their way, but I hope that they are able to get back on track, and back to building more amazing aircraft. It's time to let the 737 Max die though.

sumanthvepa 6y ago
I agree. The decline of Boeing started with the merger with McDonald Douglas. Douglas, was famously lead by bean counters to Boeing's engineering driven culture. And the bean counters won.
clueless123 6y ago
I might be biased (I am an engineer) but I call this behaviour " MBA mentality VS Engineer mentality". Is this malady that slowly has infected top engineering firms (Read HP, Boeing, IBM) and converted them into "sales organizations" that rely on marketing and old reputation to survive. MBA's concentrate on the (albeit short term) profits, Engineers concentrate on the the product.
- newyankee 6y ago
  Intel also i guess ?
- andi999 6y ago
  Famous example was NASA (according to Feynman)
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    Not Another Shuttle Accident? Need Another Seven Astronauts? When just recently I was explaining the Boeing situation to my children, my twelve year old mentioned that it sounds exactly like what happened at NASA. That's a twelve year old's conclusion, and I told her how insightful that was. So many people in the field are so blinded by their patriotism towards a company or organization that they are unable to identify the roots rotting out under their own feet.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  I've seen enough engineering students cheat on tests because "it was the only way to get the grade they deserved" to not really buy this distinction. I think that there is an uncomfortably common belief that cheating is done to prevent randomness from interfering with the "correct" outcome. A bunch of people think "well, our system is great and we just don't want something weird to happen in the test that makes it seem otherwise". It starts with the assumption that your system is already good before the test is done.
  - headmelted 6y ago
    Just wanted to reply to this in case it gets lost in the stack of replies to say that this is incredibly insightful, and that virtually no-one has the humility to realise that they are as capable of failing as anyone else. There is a ubiquitous bias to assume that everyone else is stupid but we’re somehow especially intelligent or infallible ourselves, which as we’re seeing here as some fairly dire consequences at scale.
    - 6y ago
headmelted 6y ago
I got flack on here after the MAX was grounded because I said no-one will ever fly on one of those planes ever again. I’m astonished that the echo chamber between Boeing and the FAA is so oblivious to their customers that they’re plowing on ahead even prior to this latest scandal. I’m not flying with any airline that can’t guarantee my flight won’t be on one of these. I doubt I’m alone.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  Does any airline guarantee a flight won't happen on MAX? I haven't heard of such a thing. Can't they later change the plane? Do they give you your money back?
  - pirisek453 6y ago
    the onus is on the consumer to perform due diligence: https://www.planespotters.net/special/boeing-737-max-grounding https://www.planespotters.net/special/boeing-737-max-groundi...
  - tannedNerd 6y ago
    Ya the ones that never bought them like Delta etc
    - tzsfo 6y ago
      Yet. If they are cheap enough - all the airlines will be interested. I'd guess Boeing is nearly giving them away now. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-delta-air/delta-hints-at-the-possibility-of-purchasing-boeings-737-max-ft-idUSKBN2820FD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-delta-...
- mannykannot 6y ago
  > I got flack on here after the MAX was grounded because I said no-one will ever fly on one of those planes ever again. How much would you wager on that?
Zigurd 6y ago
I agree overall that the engineering culture was lost, but it is plainly not as simple as having the engineers in charge. The CEO at the time of the 737 MAX certification and subsequent crashes was Dennis Muilenburg who started as an intern at Boeing's defense and space division. His degrees are in engineering. Apparently no MBA. Still, the wrong mindset.
- bartread 6y ago
  Yes: some commenters are reading my comment as a distinction between an MBA and an engineer mindset. Whilst that might be a genuine phenomenon in some contexts I wasn't drawing any firm conclusions about that in my comment above. I've worked with plenty enough engineers who've cut corners over the years to know that we're not inherently more virtuous or competent than other professions. We are however just as human and subject to the same foibles and vices so, yes, to everyone reading it: please don't over-interpret my earlier comment.
jMyles 6y ago
> Oh, and Boeing will go under. Where's your shareholder value then? Part of the wager in situations like this is that the state will, in a variety of ways, from contracts to bailouts to regulatory capture, keep the crony corporation afloat.
intricatedetail 6y ago
People who do this kind of thing are not the people who will do the dying, nor be affected by it in any way, plus they will never go to jail for that and what really counts is that short term profit. Get this thing over the line, collect the money and move onto something else. The problem is that there are no real consequences to what they done. Why nobody is doing life for this and you have people doing time for a bag of weed? Why would they care?
marcosdumay 6y ago
> Oh, and Boeing will go under. Where's your shareholder value then? The involved shareholders will have already sold their shares by then, and be busy destroying some other company's long term existence for some short term valuation that they can dump and run. And any criminal investigation will stop on the small people they coerced into doing the illegal deeds, because they of course left no evidence trail of those decisions.
- DennisP 6y ago
  We'd be so much better off if shareholder voting power were weighted by the amount of time they enforceably commit to holding the stock, after the vote.
  - ssivark 6y ago
    Interesting idea. Every time a vote goes your way, you accumulate more holding time on your stock. Those who lose votes will have negatives added against any compulsory holding time they’ve accumulated (since they are misaligned with the direction in which the company is headed). Status quo for those who don’t vote or lose don’t have such restrictions. I wonder if we can frame a system starting with this approach (correcting for aspects like some votes are on really minor issues, and some are really major issues).
    - ysavir 6y ago
      Sounds interesting on the surface, but a common reality is that the more moving parts there are, the more opportunity for things to go wrong or against intended use.
      - DennisP 6y ago
        I've never understood this idea that we shouldn't a fix problem we know about, on the grounds that we might introduce a new problem we don't know about. I think the best approach is to try to figure out everything that might go wrong, address those things, and then go ahead and try to make things better, instead of just giving up and accepting the problems we have. That's how civilization advances. This particular problem is heavy on game theory, which is a pretty well-developed field at this point. So I think there are grounds to believe we might be able to predict consequences with some accuracy.
wincy 6y ago
I flew on Spirit recently and noticed before takeoff in the little speech the flight attendants make they mention their “all Airbus fleet”, which honestly made me feel better. I don’t want to fly on a Boeing at this point, as I fly so seldom anyway and this has just devastated my opinion of them.
- mannykannot 6y ago
  There has been a slow-simmering pop-hypothesis, fueled by a number of accidents such as AF 447, that Airbus' approach to fly-by-wire controls is less intuitive than Boeing's in a crisis. As far as I know, there is no real evidence for this making Airbus planes less safe, but until the 737 Max crashes, I think there was, if anything, a bias against Airbus.
  - clZIXvt9Jz 6y ago
    This is a quick & dirty statistic that I just made. Incidents listed on Wikipedia excl. hijacking/being shot down where >=20 people perish: year airbus boeing 2000 2 3 2001 1 0 2002 0 4 2003 0 3 2004 0 1 2005 0 6 2006 2 2 2007 1 3 2008 1 2 2009 2 0 2010 2 2 2011 0 2 2012 0 1 2013 0 1 2014 1 1 2015 1 0 2016 1 1 2017 0 1 2018 0 2 2019 0 1 2020* 1 2 I couldn't find any data on the number of journeys per year. The statistic is useless as an indicator of safety as it isn't normalized to either a unit of distance or journey. * To date.

sumanthvepa 6y ago

I agree. The decline of Boeing started with the merger with McDonald Douglas. Douglas, was famously lead by bean counters to Boeing's engineering driven culture. And the bean counters won.

clueless123 6y ago

I might be biased (I am an engineer) but I call this behaviour " MBA mentality VS Engineer mentality". Is this malady that slowly has infected top engineering firms (Read HP, Boeing, IBM) and converted them into "sales organizations" that rely on marketing and old reputation to survive. MBA's concentrate on the (albeit short term) profits, Engineers concentrate on the the product.

newyankee 6y ago
Intel also i guess ?
andi999 6y ago
Famous example was NASA (according to Feynman)
- dotancohen 6y ago
  Not Another Shuttle Accident? Need Another Seven Astronauts? When just recently I was explaining the Boeing situation to my children, my twelve year old mentioned that it sounds exactly like what happened at NASA. That's a twelve year old's conclusion, and I told her how insightful that was. So many people in the field are so blinded by their patriotism towards a company or organization that they are unable to identify the roots rotting out under their own feet.
UncleMeat 6y ago
I've seen enough engineering students cheat on tests because "it was the only way to get the grade they deserved" to not really buy this distinction. I think that there is an uncomfortably common belief that cheating is done to prevent randomness from interfering with the "correct" outcome. A bunch of people think "well, our system is great and we just don't want something weird to happen in the test that makes it seem otherwise". It starts with the assumption that your system is already good before the test is done.
- headmelted 6y ago
  Just wanted to reply to this in case it gets lost in the stack of replies to say that this is incredibly insightful, and that virtually no-one has the humility to realise that they are as capable of failing as anyone else. There is a ubiquitous bias to assume that everyone else is stupid but we’re somehow especially intelligent or infallible ourselves, which as we’re seeing here as some fairly dire consequences at scale.
  - 6y ago

headmelted 6y ago

I got flack on here after the MAX was grounded because I said no-one will ever fly on one of those planes ever again. I’m astonished that the echo chamber between Boeing and the FAA is so oblivious to their customers that they’re plowing on ahead even prior to this latest scandal. I’m not flying with any airline that can’t guarantee my flight won’t be on one of these. I doubt I’m alone.

mehrdadn 6y ago
Does any airline guarantee a flight won't happen on MAX? I haven't heard of such a thing. Can't they later change the plane? Do they give you your money back?
- pirisek453 6y ago
  the onus is on the consumer to perform due diligence: https://www.planespotters.net/special/boeing-737-max-grounding https://www.planespotters.net/special/boeing-737-max-groundi...
- tannedNerd 6y ago
  Ya the ones that never bought them like Delta etc
  - tzsfo 6y ago
    Yet. If they are cheap enough - all the airlines will be interested. I'd guess Boeing is nearly giving them away now. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-delta-air/delta-hints-at-the-possibility-of-purchasing-boeings-737-max-ft-idUSKBN2820FD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-delta-...
mannykannot 6y ago
> I got flack on here after the MAX was grounded because I said no-one will ever fly on one of those planes ever again. How much would you wager on that?

Zigurd 6y ago

I agree overall that the engineering culture was lost, but it is plainly not as simple as having the engineers in charge. The CEO at the time of the 737 MAX certification and subsequent crashes was Dennis Muilenburg who started as an intern at Boeing's defense and space division. His degrees are in engineering. Apparently no MBA. Still, the wrong mindset.

bartread 6y ago
Yes: some commenters are reading my comment as a distinction between an MBA and an engineer mindset. Whilst that might be a genuine phenomenon in some contexts I wasn't drawing any firm conclusions about that in my comment above. I've worked with plenty enough engineers who've cut corners over the years to know that we're not inherently more virtuous or competent than other professions. We are however just as human and subject to the same foibles and vices so, yes, to everyone reading it: please don't over-interpret my earlier comment.

jMyles 6y ago

> Oh, and Boeing will go under. Where's your shareholder value then? Part of the wager in situations like this is that the state will, in a variety of ways, from contracts to bailouts to regulatory capture, keep the crony corporation afloat.

intricatedetail 6y ago

People who do this kind of thing are not the people who will do the dying, nor be affected by it in any way, plus they will never go to jail for that and what really counts is that short term profit. Get this thing over the line, collect the money and move onto something else. The problem is that there are no real consequences to what they done. Why nobody is doing life for this and you have people doing time for a bag of weed? Why would they care?

marcosdumay 6y ago

> Oh, and Boeing will go under. Where's your shareholder value then? The involved shareholders will have already sold their shares by then, and be busy destroying some other company's long term existence for some short term valuation that they can dump and run. And any criminal investigation will stop on the small people they coerced into doing the illegal deeds, because they of course left no evidence trail of those decisions.

DennisP 6y ago
We'd be so much better off if shareholder voting power were weighted by the amount of time they enforceably commit to holding the stock, after the vote.
- ssivark 6y ago
  Interesting idea. Every time a vote goes your way, you accumulate more holding time on your stock. Those who lose votes will have negatives added against any compulsory holding time they’ve accumulated (since they are misaligned with the direction in which the company is headed). Status quo for those who don’t vote or lose don’t have such restrictions. I wonder if we can frame a system starting with this approach (correcting for aspects like some votes are on really minor issues, and some are really major issues).
  - ysavir 6y ago
    Sounds interesting on the surface, but a common reality is that the more moving parts there are, the more opportunity for things to go wrong or against intended use.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      I've never understood this idea that we shouldn't a fix problem we know about, on the grounds that we might introduce a new problem we don't know about. I think the best approach is to try to figure out everything that might go wrong, address those things, and then go ahead and try to make things better, instead of just giving up and accepting the problems we have. That's how civilization advances. This particular problem is heavy on game theory, which is a pretty well-developed field at this point. So I think there are grounds to believe we might be able to predict consequences with some accuracy.

wincy 6y ago

I flew on Spirit recently and noticed before takeoff in the little speech the flight attendants make they mention their “all Airbus fleet”, which honestly made me feel better. I don’t want to fly on a Boeing at this point, as I fly so seldom anyway and this has just devastated my opinion of them.

mannykannot 6y ago
There has been a slow-simmering pop-hypothesis, fueled by a number of accidents such as AF 447, that Airbus' approach to fly-by-wire controls is less intuitive than Boeing's in a crisis. As far as I know, there is no real evidence for this making Airbus planes less safe, but until the 737 Max crashes, I think there was, if anything, a bias against Airbus.
- clZIXvt9Jz 6y ago
  This is a quick & dirty statistic that I just made. Incidents listed on Wikipedia excl. hijacking/being shot down where >=20 people perish: year airbus boeing 2000 2 3 2001 1 0 2002 0 4 2003 0 3 2004 0 1 2005 0 6 2006 2 2 2007 1 3 2008 1 2 2009 2 0 2010 2 2 2011 0 2 2012 0 1 2013 0 1 2014 1 1 2015 1 0 2016 1 1 2017 0 1 2018 0 2 2019 0 1 2020* 1 2 I couldn't find any data on the number of journeys per year. The statistic is useless as an indicator of safety as it isn't normalized to either a unit of distance or journey. * To date.