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Why the 737 MAX has been such a headache for Boeing
- xiphias2 1y agoI don't really understand how a company can be criminally liable without any person working in it (especially the president)
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoCorporations are legally people who can't be jailed. Make sense?
- mjevans 1y agoThat never made sense to me. Isn't the whole reason the 'board' gets paid so much that they're the ones who go to jail if stuff is messed up (and they're culpable rather than clearly wronged by someone else)?
- AngryData 1y agoTheoretically sure, that is the excuse given for their massive pay. But really that has only been true in practice for a few short periods of time, atleast in the US.
- avalys 1y agoHow much do you think the board gets paid?
- Y-bar 1y agoIn my company our chairman has a yearly compensation less than our CEO, but greater than our CFO.
- somat 1y agocorporations are not people, they don't have personal privilege, corporations are governments, they have governmental privilege. A corporation is the ruling apparatus for a group of people, which is a fancy way of saying government.
- Animats 1y agoCounty of Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.
- gonzo41 1y agoI remember suggesting during the VW emissions scandal that we needed something like a corporate guillotine to execute companies of scale that were involved in serious crime. Not just a change out of directors, but wholesale breakup. But you know, just a person on the internet yelling into the void...
- alexey-salmin 1y agoThey jailed the engineer, all working as expected
- ahazred8ta 1y agoSomeone said "Speaking truth to power isn't just shouting into the cannons"
- graceevans 1y ago[dead]
- cameldrv 1y agoCorporations can be jailed. You can freeze their assets and suspend their operations for a period of time. We do this in some circumstances like failing to renew a business license, but not for say, murder.
- ars 1y agoIt's because of dilution of responsibility, each individual didn't do anything wrong, but take all together it adds up to wrongdoing. It's not usually nefarious, it's usually a result of imperfect information - each individual works off of the information they have which leads them to wrong actions as a whole, but correct actions individually.
- xiphias2 1y ago,,It's because of dilution of responsibility, each individual didn't do anything wrong'' In that case it would be true, but it would be hard for me to think that nobody told the leader of Boeing (who should have known it himself as the leader of the biggest airplane company) that putting an engine over the wing is both stupid and dangerous and unstable.
- bambax 1y agoYes. It's good to inflict huge fine on the company itself, as it will eventually hurt stockholders; but management should be held accountable too, especially C-level personnel who quit with golden parachutes of various sizes. They should have to pay those back, at the very least.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoAs an American I sort of live in a bubble. I didn't realize the rest of the world views the US as a country that's falling apart until recently. This article solidifies what I've heard even further. With Airbus dominating the commercial aviation market, what is the US currently best at? Space, Defense, cinema and software?
- graceevans 1y ago[dead]
- iancmceachern 1y agoMedical devices
- fakedang 1y agoPretty much all of the above. And drugs, although America's healthcare model is so well known it cancels that out. Tbf, the rest of the world also views Europe in the same boat (if not having taken an early-bird ticket on it).
- jiggawatts 1y agoSoftware, cloud, AI, financial services, movies, computer games, space (i.e.: Starlink), military technology, etc... There are entire categories of things where it is just the US doing the thing, OR without the US the thing would implode. For example, there are only two popular mobile phone operating systems: Android and iOS. Both are made by US companies (Google and Apple). Let me put it this way: If every undersea fibre link out of the Americas was suddenly severed, people in the USA might not even notice for a while. The rest of the planet would make a winding down noise as every second piece of hardware or software stopped dead because of some missing dependency.
- wiseowise 1y ago> For example, there are only two popular mobile phone operating systems: Android and iOS. Both are made by US companies (Google and Apple). Not for long. https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_unveils_its_own_pc_os__harmonyos_pc-news-67711.php https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_unveils_its_own_pc_os__harmo...
- mjevans 1y agoOffhand, what I remember reading during the initial 737 MAX crashes: Part of the appeal of the 737 series of airplanes was pilot certification across a wide fleet allowed for carrier flexibility and cost savings. Same airframe, same 'response', 'same certification'. So they tried to lie to everyone. Mount the engines on the same airframe a bit differently. Use software to make the behavior (in most circumstances) the same as the older models. etc. The rational was that they 'couldn't' spend the time, money, or above pilot training needs to field a new competitive model. They'd just come off of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner . Which skimming the Wikipedia article, probably also dovetails in with the seemingly eternal struggle between the Machinists union and Boeing the company who used to be headquartered in Seattle. Penny pinching decisions there probably had negative effects on safety too.
- raverbashing 1y agoYeah, because the legacy carriers apparently can't be bothered with spending any more money in moving out of the 70s But pray tell me, did you save money in having part of your fleet grounded for 1.5yrs?
- jiggawatts 1y ago"That's a different budget." -- a comment I've heard several times, from several bean counters, justifying $billions wasted.
- henry2023 1y agoThis is not the carriers fault. Boeing promised one thing and was lying about it. Why would the customers take the heat?
- philosophty 1y agoA miser pays twice...and kills 346 people.
- dehrmann 1y agoI'm actually sympathetic to using fly-by-wire technology to keep the interface the same. When it works, it can be safer since pilots' experience transfers directly, they don't mix up subtle differences between the models, and it makes it an easy sell to airlines. I fault Boeing for not making it robust enough. It needed to be bullet-proof, and it wasn't.
- Gathering6678 1y agoFor anyone who is interested, Petter @MentourPilot on Youtube has a few videos about this topic that are worth watching.
- ChicagoDave 1y agoBoeing: we should cut costs by getting away from being an engineering company. Then we’ll make very bad decisions because we’re behind AirBus. Execs: sounds perfect
- dingaling 1y agoEMBRAER of Brazil has been slowly expanding its market for 60 years but they've been reluctant to move into the A320/737 category. I don't understand why - there are over 12,000 orders backlogged with Airbus and Boeing, surely that's the strongest possible indicator of potential demand. An airline placing an order for an A320 or 737 now will have a decade to wait for delivery. Instead EMBRAER keep themselves locked in the regional jet market and are lucky to get 80 orders a year.
- trhway 1y agoIt is a very complicated product. Whole countries like Russia and China are trying to build even somewhat smaller modern jets and basically haven't been able so far. And for "national jet" the task is easy as you can allow some inefficiencies. For a pure commercial jet product like EMBRAER would supposedly build, it must be a topline on all KPIs otherwise some ROI numbers over 10-20 years would project it to be several percent worse than Boeing/Airbus, and the airlines wouldn't buy it.
- tpm 1y agoLook what happened when Bombardier tried to do something similar. Brazilian market is too small to accomodate that and other markets will try to protected their own aircraft industry, if they have one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220#Boeing_dumping_petition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220#Boeing_dumping_pet...
- richardatlarge 1y agoThe first fault that bedeviled the MAX was the compliance and safety bodies. They built what turned out to be a trap for corporate executives, and Boeing flew right into it
- metalman 1y agofirst of all, Boeing does not exist as the company the created the truely great airliners that they were known for...747's the current compsny is the result of Boeing buying/merging with Macdonald Douglas and then having the Mac Doug executives perform an internal coup, and oust the manager/engineers from Boeing Second, the 737 max was designed partialy in Russia, not that there is anything wrong with rusdian aviation engineering, but that the russians worked cheap, and boeing set up a campus there,the issues bieng that it's non engineering managers running dirrerent teams, who dont speak the same language, and the old way, where the engineers worked directly with each other and the factory floor in real time, was lost. Three, the software was also out sourced to India, or some of it, and lo there you have it, a management frenzy, oooooooo, I bet it sure is busy busy busy, memo storms, and brisk self congradulaotory got it done's and fourth, Boeing moved head office to be as close to the pentagon and the faa as possible in order to concentrate on what they saw as important
- karmakaze 1y agoThis isn't the kind of technical post I'd expect to see on HN. There's not much details on the MCAS[0]. It wasn't only for the 737 Max to be cheap to make, it was up to MCAS to make it so current 737(NG) pilots could fly them without extensive retraining. This is where multiple things went wrong, basically MCAS is lying to the pilots pretending to be a plane it's not, and unfortunately relying on a single AOA sensor that it bases those lies upon. The MCAS that's in 737 MAX today is different than what were the source of confusion and fatalities in the past. (e.g. Pilots can now always override MCAS inputs using the control column; MCAS can no longer command more stabilizer movement than the pilots can counteract by pulling back on the yoke). The whole idea isn't bad in itself, but the bean counters gleefully skimped to save too many beans in initial/early versions and there wasn't a culture where engineers could pull 'the brake' and blamelessly improve a bad situation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...