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While I don't have any sympathy for this pilot, I also find the FAA's excuses here to be less than convincing. Basically, their position is "Well, we trusted th

by pdonis 5y ago

While I don't have any sympathy for this pilot, I also find the FAA's excuses here to be less than convincing. Basically, their position is "Well, we trusted this Boeing employee to tell us the truth about the new flight controls, and he didn't." But if the regulators had actually done their job and independently evaluated the new flight controls, they wouldn't have had to take the word of any Boeing employees. I realize that that's the way the FAA does things now, but this whole debacle should be a warning to everyone that that method of regulation is not acceptable. The whole point of independent regulation is to not allow obvious conflicts of interest to harm the public.

larrydag 5y ago
Also this feels a lot like Boeing offering up a sacrificial lamb. I find it hard to believe that the FAA can focus on one person at Boeing as the reason for the failure in reporting the issue. There are too many managers and engineers involved. On the surface this sounds a lot like the Challenger disaster story.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Overall though, I'm at least happy some individuals are getting prosecuted, it sends a message that there are legal risks to individuals involved in this kind of thing, not just diluted corporate responsibility.
  - trebligdivad 5y ago
    Only if the people actually responsible get prosecuted; prosecuting the wrong person sneds the message that the people really responsible get away with it - so there is need for some care.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      Even prosecuting the wrong people at least encourages whistle blowing. If someone thinks they might be the sacrificial lamb if excrement hits the fan they can protect themselves by being the first to report it to regulators
  - jandrese 5y ago
    What really needs to change is the corporate culture that led a person to think that they would be doing the company a favor by lying to the regulators. This probably goes all the way to the top. Also, whomever decided that a basic software safety check would be an optional extra with a price tag should definitely not be in the management chain. That's the sort of next quarter profit-only thinking that rots companies from the middle out. That is the kind of thinking that results in your brand new product killing 346 human beings.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      The "software safety check" wasn't an optional extra. It didn't exist at all! The optional add on was for an "AOA DISAGREE" warning light, which would have indicated that the MCAS might be relying on faulty data (if the pilot was even aware of MCAS in the first place) but wouldn't have actually stopped it from doing so. Now, the updated MCAS will only activate if both AOA sensors agree. Which seems like a fucking no brainer that should have been the case from the start, but... yeah.
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  Is Boeing offering a lamb, or the justice dept applying pressure to get him to cooperate and try to get higher level targets?
- softawre 5y ago
  At least it is somebody with a big title. Chief Technical Pilot.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    Genuinely curious; how big is that title? Are they essentially an overall project manager who gives the green light? Do they have the power to tell the executive class "Nope" without getting fired? Never mind. I saw Buildsjets comment that explains his position.
theknocker 5y ago
Years later, we're still blaming the pilot just so a bunch of brainwashed hipsters don't have to admit Donald Trump had a point about something and they were wrong. We live in a giant kindergarten; thanks.
nickff 5y ago
At some point, auditors have to trust some things that their subjects are saying. If the auditor has to re-evaluate every piece of information, they will end up re-doing the subjects' jobs.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  And that's how we got the VAG emissions scandal. Instead of trusting computer outputs, we could have done tried and true dyno tests and the entire thing would have been avoided.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    The defeat devices were designed to detect dyno conditions and reduce emissions, it wasn't a case of a regulator trusting a computer output. They were uncovered by doing road tests.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Which a competent regulator would surely be doing randomly across the industry no? If all they are doing is trusting what the regulated folks are saying they are doing, that isn’t what I would call effective regulation.
      - nickff 5y ago
        Most regulators don’t verify much, (the SEC almost never actually looks at bank account balances,) they just look for inconsistencies in the information they receive.
        lazide 5y ago
        The SEC isn’t regulating banks generally so bank account balances shouldn’t matter much - they are regulating security markets no? So looking at discrepancies between data from market participants IS verifying and regulating. Same as if the FDA looked at raw study data and compared it to equivalent studies for similar types of drugs/treatments, or the FAA had an engineer on staff to double check elements of a new design from a major manufacturer for plausibility
dboreham 5y ago
How were they supposed to do that? They'd have had to either review the source code and somehow notice that it had too much control authority over the horizontal stabilizer, or run the flight control system in a simulator that reproduced the failure conditions found in the field. These seem _possible_ but not exactly easy. It'd have been much easier for the Boeing engineers who designed the thing so badly to have had bosses who said "wait...what? No you can't do it like that".
- amluto 5y ago
  As I understand it, the source is a very careful implementation of a spec, and the FAA should have the spec. In any case, I strongly doubt that the buck should really stop at this test pilot. Someone higher up surely has some degree of responsibility. The test pilot did not invent MCAS.
- scottlamb 5y ago
  > It'd have been much easier for the Boeing engineers who designed the thing so badly to have had bosses who said "wait...what? No you can't do it like that". Interesting. I never even imagine that happening anymore. I find the reverse so much more plausible: the bosses say to design it like that but the engineers have the backbone to say no (even at the risk of being fired and replaced). On the one hand, I see where you're coming from. Executives are the ones with the money and power, so they should have the responsibility. They should go to prison when they order misconduct (whether that's negligence, fraud, etc.). This should incentivize them to act conservatively. (Where right now, we reward them largely based on short-term stock performance, and we never punish them, and I think our executives are overwhelmingly sociopaths who pursue short-term stock performance above all else.) On the other hand, engineers are the ones who throughly understand the issues and have licenses with ethical standards attached. They're going to notice the problem. I believe many already aren't willing to sign off on something they don't believe is safe. With good enough whistleblower protection, they'd be likely to speak up when they see someone else signing off improperly.
- landemva 5y ago
  FAA could have looked at how the fans were upsized and pushed forward to avoid dragging on the runway, and called for a new type certification. The FAA failed by allowing Boeing to not get a new type certification, which would have required greater scrutiny of the new airframe.
GavinMcG 5y ago
It isn't one or the other! This guy could have committed fraud and been effectively abetted by a regulatory body that lacks the resources, incentives, or power to actually regulate.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
user_7832 5y ago
What you talk about the FAA doing thier own testing and validation is (unfortunately) almost impossible. Back in the 90s, a senior FAA official (I think a Director) had said something along the lines of “The FAA does not and cannot check everything, we just see that companies are doing their tests.” The FAA would require several times more manpower to be able to actually audit or test everything, and that is assuming they have the technical skills (which they haven’t had for highly complex systems and electronics for decades now). I’m afraid I’m saying a lot of things from memory from the time I had written a report on the Max 8 accidents and an actor analysis. (I’d anyone is interested I could perhaps share it.) Most of this stuff came from the DoT report on the accident, the rest from reputable news articles.
- yason 5y ago
  FAA could facilitate smoketesting and focus on parts they deem the most suspicious/experimental/new in a new airplane. And then outsource the actual tests to a third party.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    By law, the certifiction activities done by the EASA (I assume the FAA is the same) cannot be done by third parties. It also worth noting, that the aircraft certification procedures worked pretty well for decades, up until Boeing started to lie to the FAA. Not sure how Boeing kept its design org approval after that. EDIT: Some required activities by the organizations to be certified can be outsourced to third parties, the org itself is still accountable.
    - VBprogrammer 5y ago
      > Not sure how Boeing kept its design org approval after that That's an easy one. It's too big to fail. One way or another Boeing had to make it out the other end of the 737 Max disaster intact as an organisation. Anything else would have been unpalatable from the point of view of the American military industrial complex. I know that phrase is usually applied in a derogatory way but here I don't even disagree with the thinking.
CheezeIt 5y ago
There is such thing as too much regulation. If they had more funding, that would lower industrial output simply by sucking engineers away from productive activity. That’s even if it doesn’t negatively affect aviation with too much regulation.
paulmd 5y ago
At the end of the day this is what you want, though: people need to realize that they are going to be held personally responsible if they're involved in pencilwhipping the FAA approval process, and tell their boss they're not going to jail so that Boeing can make another 1% profit this year. I'm not saying it's just the test pilot who lied, or held sole responsibility, but yeah, he was a member of a criminal enterprise that resulted in people's deaths.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I like the result. Too many people hide behind “I was just doing my job and helping the company.” At some point you have to make a personal stand to not harm humanity. And programmers reading this, that era is definitely upon us. When we see programmers charged who implemented the twisted evil shit Facebook or whoever ordered them to, we will be making some progress on fixing the problem.
  - paulmd 5y ago
    and in particular, it appears this guy was actively talking about how to deceive the FAA and avoid attention, so yeah... fuck him, this isn't a random fall guy, this is a chief test pilot who was in on the plan. again, by all means, this should not be the only prosecution here, and if they can flip him on the rest of his conspirators then he should get a reduced sentence, that's the standard RICO playbook. But prosecution is the lever you use to flip the ones you catch on the rest of their conspirators, and this guy very clearly was a willful participant in this criminal enterprise. (obviously the jury gets to decide that, but this isn't a courtroom, and barring some gross miscarriage of justice, the quotes they're presenting sound pretty damning)
zeristor 5y ago
Given that the engines were moved forward changing the Centre of Mass I would expect an Aerospace Engineer to be aware and concerned that this is an issue that would require an automated intervention to correct for that, and that would need to be extremely robust. In hindsight that’s easy for me to say, and the FAA had gone to relying on Boeing engineers, but as mentioned if there was huge pressure for Boeing to compete things could get overlooked.
KarlKemp 5y ago
At some level, you have to trust the information you get. There is also good reason to trust it, especially when it comes from a large company such as Boeing: it is stupid for such an organization to lie to you, because it risks its existence for the rather small payoff of avoiding delays for a single model. It’s even worse for individual employees at the company: they risk jail time and aren’t even the direct beneficiary. Example: see above
roenxi 5y ago
> ...a warning to everyone that that method of regulation is not acceptable. What part of the situation here is unacceptable? There were, I believe, 2 crashes. We accept more than that with most modes of transport. It isn't obvious that tightening the regulatory process is a net win.
ekianjo 5y ago
> The whole point of independent regulation is to not allow obvious conflicts of interest to harm the public. Like all centralized systems, easy to hack over time. A better system would be decentralized regulatory bodies that check on each other's conclusions instead of a monolithic one. At this stage you absolutely should not trust any regulatory body, FDA included. (The FDA never replicates any trial for example)
snarf21 5y ago
I think the other approach is to have more corporate whistle blower programs with teeth and upside. In a case like this, lots of people knew everything wasn't on the up and up. But it is hard to get someone to understand something when their job depends on not understanding it (Upton Sinclair). However, if the whistle blower programs came with immediate cash (after initial proof was obtained) with more to come and potentially relocation and identity change, people would be more likely to come forward. Fighting something like this in court plus media scrutiny will basically ruin someone's life and make them almost unhire-able in their field. Excepting someone to ruin their family's life for the greater good isn't likely. There won't always be a young single ideologue who is willing to move overseas to escape his own government. There are lots of major crime systems where someone is the spouse of the criminal and knows what is going on but how are they going to give up their home and life for their kids while also putting their life at risk for the sake of doing the right thing. People have shown that they will do the right thing if you make it easy enough and safe enough.
- josho 5y ago
  I can’t help but feel that this is all by design. Legislators require financing from corporations for re-election, corps don’t want whistleblowers because it risks their bottom line. Therefore legislators don’t improve protections. Does everything come back to campaign finance reform?
  - snarf21 5y ago
    It could be a factor for sure. I don't think campaign finance reform will ever happen but whistle blower could. I've given up hope on the altruistic billionaire to do things the government is reluctant to.
- curryst 5y ago
  > basically ruin someone's life and make them almost unhire-able in their field. It will make them almost unhireable everywhere. Even outside their field, they're still a risk. They've now got a very public "troublemaker" label. The prizes would also have to be pretty large. We're talking "never have to work again" large, because that's a very real possibility, or at least a very real perceived concern. We're talking people who make a good living. For people not close to retirement, it's probably a multi-million dollar number. At $200k/year, that's $2 million per decade, and not including potential raises. After you pay income taxes on the prize, you probably need it to be close to $10m to break even.
raxxorrax 5y ago
This is the reality of most certification processes. There is no government agency that has the knowledge to evaluate planes on a technical level. So what they do is ensuring engineering care and diligence, clear responsibilities and paper trails in a way that risk is minimized and failures can quickly be located and corrected. At least that is how it is done for medical appliances, I assume FDA and FAA work similarly. But government just doesn't have the extra engineers to technically evaluate every part of a new plane. That would induce massive costs and the manpower simply doesn't exist. But if companies don't use due diligence to ensure safety, these agencies have the power to penalize you heavily, so you have to comply anyway. Sadly there is also a political component so agencies sometimes have to work against pressure from politicians that don't want to damage domestic brands. I believe this case was a clear management error for that matter but the FDA probably has more info.
Bostonian 5y ago
Government regulation makes sense when there are externalities, for example a polluting factory that harms society but not the company. Airplane manufacturers, however, can self-regulate. If their planes are unsafe they will be bankrupted by the lawsuits of families of dead passengers, and airlines will not buy their planes.
cs702 5y ago
To paraphrase J. K. Galbraith, at any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered regulatory fraud in the economy, and this inventory is part of the bezzle.[a] In good times regulators are relaxed and trusting, and their approval is easier to obtain. Under these circumstances the rate of regulatory fraud grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the regulatory bezzle increases rapidly. In bad times all this is reversed. Actions are watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. Regulators assume everyone is dishonest until proven otherwise. Regulatory audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The regulatory bezzle shrinks. -- [a] The term "bezzle" was proposed by J. K. Galbraith in The Great Crash of 1929: "To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country’s business and banks. This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks." (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1466583-the-great-crash-of-1929 https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1466583-the-great-cras...)
rbanffy 5y ago
Dance like nobody's watching. Email like it will one day be read aloud at a deposition.
desertedisland 5y ago
Well the FAA discovered the pilot lied and now the pilot is in serious ** with his career and reputation destroyed: I'm assuming he is looking at possible jail time (not a lawyer). I'd say this is a serious deterrent to pilots contemplating similar action in the future but I don't think the problem was with the FAA or this pilot. The real problem was the senior management at Boeing who made the conscious decision to put profits ahead of safety. Thus they were directly responsible for creating a culture of short cuts and cheating which lead to the ending of several hundred lives.
spfzero 5y ago
Supposedly, having a serious penalty for lying to the FAA should imply veracity. Same way perjury penalties should ensure truthful court testimony. Agree the FAA should cross-check, before a plane crashes, but when they catch this behavior they should, IMHO, punish it.
IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
The principle here should be the same as the principle of proper auditing. Take the population of x , then sample y and if the sample passes the tests then you have z degree of confidence of projecting the results of the sample over the entire population. Its not hard. Its only that bureaucrats are generally not hired for the industry knowledge but instead career paper pushers and ticking boxes on their way up, instead of, you know, getting dirty with actual work

by pdonis 5y ago

larrydag 5y ago

Also this feels a lot like Boeing offering up a sacrificial lamb. I find it hard to believe that the FAA can focus on one person at Boeing as the reason for the failure in reporting the issue. There are too many managers and engineers involved. On the surface this sounds a lot like the Challenger disaster story.

HPsquared 5y ago
Overall though, I'm at least happy some individuals are getting prosecuted, it sends a message that there are legal risks to individuals involved in this kind of thing, not just diluted corporate responsibility.
- trebligdivad 5y ago
  Only if the people actually responsible get prosecuted; prosecuting the wrong person sneds the message that the people really responsible get away with it - so there is need for some care.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    Even prosecuting the wrong people at least encourages whistle blowing. If someone thinks they might be the sacrificial lamb if excrement hits the fan they can protect themselves by being the first to report it to regulators
- jandrese 5y ago
  What really needs to change is the corporate culture that led a person to think that they would be doing the company a favor by lying to the regulators. This probably goes all the way to the top. Also, whomever decided that a basic software safety check would be an optional extra with a price tag should definitely not be in the management chain. That's the sort of next quarter profit-only thinking that rots companies from the middle out. That is the kind of thinking that results in your brand new product killing 346 human beings.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    The "software safety check" wasn't an optional extra. It didn't exist at all! The optional add on was for an "AOA DISAGREE" warning light, which would have indicated that the MCAS might be relying on faulty data (if the pilot was even aware of MCAS in the first place) but wouldn't have actually stopped it from doing so. Now, the updated MCAS will only activate if both AOA sensors agree. Which seems like a fucking no brainer that should have been the case from the start, but... yeah.
WillPostForFood 5y ago
Is Boeing offering a lamb, or the justice dept applying pressure to get him to cooperate and try to get higher level targets?
softawre 5y ago
At least it is somebody with a big title. Chief Technical Pilot.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Genuinely curious; how big is that title? Are they essentially an overall project manager who gives the green light? Do they have the power to tell the executive class "Nope" without getting fired? Never mind. I saw Buildsjets comment that explains his position.

theknocker 5y ago

Years later, we're still blaming the pilot just so a bunch of brainwashed hipsters don't have to admit Donald Trump had a point about something and they were wrong. We live in a giant kindergarten; thanks.

nickff 5y ago

At some point, auditors have to trust some things that their subjects are saying. If the auditor has to re-evaluate every piece of information, they will end up re-doing the subjects' jobs.

calvinmorrison 5y ago
And that's how we got the VAG emissions scandal. Instead of trusting computer outputs, we could have done tried and true dyno tests and the entire thing would have been avoided.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  The defeat devices were designed to detect dyno conditions and reduce emissions, it wasn't a case of a regulator trusting a computer output. They were uncovered by doing road tests.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Which a competent regulator would surely be doing randomly across the industry no? If all they are doing is trusting what the regulated folks are saying they are doing, that isn’t what I would call effective regulation.
    - nickff 5y ago
      Most regulators don’t verify much, (the SEC almost never actually looks at bank account balances,) they just look for inconsistencies in the information they receive.
      - lazide 5y ago
        The SEC isn’t regulating banks generally so bank account balances shouldn’t matter much - they are regulating security markets no? So looking at discrepancies between data from market participants IS verifying and regulating. Same as if the FDA looked at raw study data and compared it to equivalent studies for similar types of drugs/treatments, or the FAA had an engineer on staff to double check elements of a new design from a major manufacturer for plausibility

dboreham 5y ago

How were they supposed to do that? They'd have had to either review the source code and somehow notice that it had too much control authority over the horizontal stabilizer, or run the flight control system in a simulator that reproduced the failure conditions found in the field. These seem _possible_ but not exactly easy. It'd have been much easier for the Boeing engineers who designed the thing so badly to have had bosses who said "wait...what? No you can't do it like that".

amluto 5y ago
As I understand it, the source is a very careful implementation of a spec, and the FAA should have the spec. In any case, I strongly doubt that the buck should really stop at this test pilot. Someone higher up surely has some degree of responsibility. The test pilot did not invent MCAS.
scottlamb 5y ago
> It'd have been much easier for the Boeing engineers who designed the thing so badly to have had bosses who said "wait...what? No you can't do it like that". Interesting. I never even imagine that happening anymore. I find the reverse so much more plausible: the bosses say to design it like that but the engineers have the backbone to say no (even at the risk of being fired and replaced). On the one hand, I see where you're coming from. Executives are the ones with the money and power, so they should have the responsibility. They should go to prison when they order misconduct (whether that's negligence, fraud, etc.). This should incentivize them to act conservatively. (Where right now, we reward them largely based on short-term stock performance, and we never punish them, and I think our executives are overwhelmingly sociopaths who pursue short-term stock performance above all else.) On the other hand, engineers are the ones who throughly understand the issues and have licenses with ethical standards attached. They're going to notice the problem. I believe many already aren't willing to sign off on something they don't believe is safe. With good enough whistleblower protection, they'd be likely to speak up when they see someone else signing off improperly.
landemva 5y ago
FAA could have looked at how the fans were upsized and pushed forward to avoid dragging on the runway, and called for a new type certification. The FAA failed by allowing Boeing to not get a new type certification, which would have required greater scrutiny of the new airframe.

GavinMcG 5y ago

It isn't one or the other! This guy could have committed fraud and been effectively abetted by a regulatory body that lacks the resources, incentives, or power to actually regulate.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

user_7832 5y ago

What you talk about the FAA doing thier own testing and validation is (unfortunately) almost impossible. Back in the 90s, a senior FAA official (I think a Director) had said something along the lines of “The FAA does not and cannot check everything, we just see that companies are doing their tests.” The FAA would require several times more manpower to be able to actually audit or test everything, and that is assuming they have the technical skills (which they haven’t had for highly complex systems and electronics for decades now). I’m afraid I’m saying a lot of things from memory from the time I had written a report on the Max 8 accidents and an actor analysis. (I’d anyone is interested I could perhaps share it.) Most of this stuff came from the DoT report on the accident, the rest from reputable news articles.

yason 5y ago
FAA could facilitate smoketesting and focus on parts they deem the most suspicious/experimental/new in a new airplane. And then outsource the actual tests to a third party.
- hef19898 5y ago
  By law, the certifiction activities done by the EASA (I assume the FAA is the same) cannot be done by third parties. It also worth noting, that the aircraft certification procedures worked pretty well for decades, up until Boeing started to lie to the FAA. Not sure how Boeing kept its design org approval after that. EDIT: Some required activities by the organizations to be certified can be outsourced to third parties, the org itself is still accountable.
  - VBprogrammer 5y ago
    > Not sure how Boeing kept its design org approval after that That's an easy one. It's too big to fail. One way or another Boeing had to make it out the other end of the 737 Max disaster intact as an organisation. Anything else would have been unpalatable from the point of view of the American military industrial complex. I know that phrase is usually applied in a derogatory way but here I don't even disagree with the thinking.

CheezeIt 5y ago

There is such thing as too much regulation. If they had more funding, that would lower industrial output simply by sucking engineers away from productive activity. That’s even if it doesn’t negatively affect aviation with too much regulation.

paulmd 5y ago

At the end of the day this is what you want, though: people need to realize that they are going to be held personally responsible if they're involved in pencilwhipping the FAA approval process, and tell their boss they're not going to jail so that Boeing can make another 1% profit this year. I'm not saying it's just the test pilot who lied, or held sole responsibility, but yeah, he was a member of a criminal enterprise that resulted in people's deaths.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
I like the result. Too many people hide behind “I was just doing my job and helping the company.” At some point you have to make a personal stand to not harm humanity. And programmers reading this, that era is definitely upon us. When we see programmers charged who implemented the twisted evil shit Facebook or whoever ordered them to, we will be making some progress on fixing the problem.
- paulmd 5y ago
  and in particular, it appears this guy was actively talking about how to deceive the FAA and avoid attention, so yeah... fuck him, this isn't a random fall guy, this is a chief test pilot who was in on the plan. again, by all means, this should not be the only prosecution here, and if they can flip him on the rest of his conspirators then he should get a reduced sentence, that's the standard RICO playbook. But prosecution is the lever you use to flip the ones you catch on the rest of their conspirators, and this guy very clearly was a willful participant in this criminal enterprise. (obviously the jury gets to decide that, but this isn't a courtroom, and barring some gross miscarriage of justice, the quotes they're presenting sound pretty damning)

zeristor 5y ago

Given that the engines were moved forward changing the Centre of Mass I would expect an Aerospace Engineer to be aware and concerned that this is an issue that would require an automated intervention to correct for that, and that would need to be extremely robust. In hindsight that’s easy for me to say, and the FAA had gone to relying on Boeing engineers, but as mentioned if there was huge pressure for Boeing to compete things could get overlooked.

KarlKemp 5y ago

At some level, you have to trust the information you get. There is also good reason to trust it, especially when it comes from a large company such as Boeing: it is stupid for such an organization to lie to you, because it risks its existence for the rather small payoff of avoiding delays for a single model. It’s even worse for individual employees at the company: they risk jail time and aren’t even the direct beneficiary. Example: see above

roenxi 5y ago

> ...a warning to everyone that that method of regulation is not acceptable. What part of the situation here is unacceptable? There were, I believe, 2 crashes. We accept more than that with most modes of transport. It isn't obvious that tightening the regulatory process is a net win.

ekianjo 5y ago

> The whole point of independent regulation is to not allow obvious conflicts of interest to harm the public. Like all centralized systems, easy to hack over time. A better system would be decentralized regulatory bodies that check on each other's conclusions instead of a monolithic one. At this stage you absolutely should not trust any regulatory body, FDA included. (The FDA never replicates any trial for example)

snarf21 5y ago

I think the other approach is to have more corporate whistle blower programs with teeth and upside. In a case like this, lots of people knew everything wasn't on the up and up. But it is hard to get someone to understand something when their job depends on not understanding it (Upton Sinclair). However, if the whistle blower programs came with immediate cash (after initial proof was obtained) with more to come and potentially relocation and identity change, people would be more likely to come forward. Fighting something like this in court plus media scrutiny will basically ruin someone's life and make them almost unhire-able in their field. Excepting someone to ruin their family's life for the greater good isn't likely. There won't always be a young single ideologue who is willing to move overseas to escape his own government. There are lots of major crime systems where someone is the spouse of the criminal and knows what is going on but how are they going to give up their home and life for their kids while also putting their life at risk for the sake of doing the right thing. People have shown that they will do the right thing if you make it easy enough and safe enough.

josho 5y ago
I can’t help but feel that this is all by design. Legislators require financing from corporations for re-election, corps don’t want whistleblowers because it risks their bottom line. Therefore legislators don’t improve protections. Does everything come back to campaign finance reform?
- snarf21 5y ago
  It could be a factor for sure. I don't think campaign finance reform will ever happen but whistle blower could. I've given up hope on the altruistic billionaire to do things the government is reluctant to.
curryst 5y ago
> basically ruin someone's life and make them almost unhire-able in their field. It will make them almost unhireable everywhere. Even outside their field, they're still a risk. They've now got a very public "troublemaker" label. The prizes would also have to be pretty large. We're talking "never have to work again" large, because that's a very real possibility, or at least a very real perceived concern. We're talking people who make a good living. For people not close to retirement, it's probably a multi-million dollar number. At $200k/year, that's $2 million per decade, and not including potential raises. After you pay income taxes on the prize, you probably need it to be close to $10m to break even.

raxxorrax 5y ago

This is the reality of most certification processes. There is no government agency that has the knowledge to evaluate planes on a technical level. So what they do is ensuring engineering care and diligence, clear responsibilities and paper trails in a way that risk is minimized and failures can quickly be located and corrected. At least that is how it is done for medical appliances, I assume FDA and FAA work similarly. But government just doesn't have the extra engineers to technically evaluate every part of a new plane. That would induce massive costs and the manpower simply doesn't exist. But if companies don't use due diligence to ensure safety, these agencies have the power to penalize you heavily, so you have to comply anyway. Sadly there is also a political component so agencies sometimes have to work against pressure from politicians that don't want to damage domestic brands. I believe this case was a clear management error for that matter but the FDA probably has more info.

Bostonian 5y ago

Government regulation makes sense when there are externalities, for example a polluting factory that harms society but not the company. Airplane manufacturers, however, can self-regulate. If their planes are unsafe they will be bankrupted by the lawsuits of families of dead passengers, and airlines will not buy their planes.

cs702 5y ago

To paraphrase J. K. Galbraith, at any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered regulatory fraud in the economy, and this inventory is part of the bezzle.[a] In good times regulators are relaxed and trusting, and their approval is easier to obtain. Under these circumstances the rate of regulatory fraud grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the regulatory bezzle increases rapidly. In bad times all this is reversed. Actions are watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. Regulators assume everyone is dishonest until proven otherwise. Regulatory audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The regulatory bezzle shrinks. -- [a] The term "bezzle" was proposed by J. K. Galbraith in The Great Crash of 1929: "To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country’s business and banks. This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks." (https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1466583-the-great-crash-of-1929 https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1466583-the-great-cras...)

rbanffy 5y ago

Dance like nobody's watching. Email like it will one day be read aloud at a deposition.

desertedisland 5y ago

Well the FAA discovered the pilot lied and now the pilot is in serious ** with his career and reputation destroyed: I'm assuming he is looking at possible jail time (not a lawyer). I'd say this is a serious deterrent to pilots contemplating similar action in the future but I don't think the problem was with the FAA or this pilot. The real problem was the senior management at Boeing who made the conscious decision to put profits ahead of safety. Thus they were directly responsible for creating a culture of short cuts and cheating which lead to the ending of several hundred lives.

spfzero 5y ago

Supposedly, having a serious penalty for lying to the FAA should imply veracity. Same way perjury penalties should ensure truthful court testimony. Agree the FAA should cross-check, before a plane crashes, but when they catch this behavior they should, IMHO, punish it.

IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago

The principle here should be the same as the principle of proper auditing. Take the population of x , then sample y and if the sample passes the tests then you have z degree of confidence of projecting the results of the sample over the entire population. Its not hard. Its only that bureaucrats are generally not hired for the industry knowledge but instead career paper pushers and ticking boxes on their way up, instead of, you know, getting dirty with actual work