> "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," says one employee to another, who responds, "No."
> Peter DeFazio, [D-Oregon], called newly released documents "incredibly damning"
That's hard to argue with. You'd like to think this kind of thing would... leak. Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?
You can't just start leaking internal documents and making accusations without evidence. ...that will get you fired, and possibly in jail.
You need to talk to a lawyer, follow the legal process, and make allegations that you can PROVE.
So many whistle-blowers come out with wild stories (often true), but since they bring zero evidence to the table they are ignored. ...and if they have evidence, they just blindly leak it to the press without going through the process, which can endanger people/privacy and destroy IP.
Don't get me wrong - whistleblowers are important, but if you really want to make positive change and not just stick it to your employer - do it responsibly.
The monkeys will ruthlessly suppress any evidence that they are monkeys or that they supervise clowns.
[0]: see his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast (it's really long and rambly but there are some fun nuggets in there) Snowdens book might be a better source but I haven't read it yet.
They have gone though the whole plane with a fine toothed comb, Identifying any other potential problems. It will probably be the safest Boeing in the sky.
This whole MAX situation has made me very nervous about flying on the 787 (built in the same era) or the 737 NG (while it lacks MCAS, something else could theoretically put the stabilizer massively out of trim, and this whole situation has proven pilots have problems recovering from out-of-trim stabilizers)
(No, I don't think I still want to fly that, either)
Then again, it’s not clear to me what else they “covered up” or issues that this new article is focused on. I’d be happy for the FAA to delay them further and get to the bottom of this.
Companies are pretty opaque by design and I'm sure these people signed NDAs.
As long as they believed the company was acting legally (even if not ethically) they might not have felt like they had the legal right to share insider information.
Others might have simply felt the company was working on it. And others might not have wanted to damage the company that employs them.
The people that knew something wrong was going on and kept passing the buck are certainly at fault though and in retrospect I bet a lot of people wish they said something.
It's a tragedy what's happened and unfortunately a bunch of people probably could have saved some lives but didn't.
Paraphrasing a famous saying, it's hard to make somebody care about something if their livelihood depends on them not caring.
Looking back, Boeing certainly should have investigated the claims more seriously but just from reading the article I feel we don't have a very clear picture of what happened.
But if the same investigation happened with successful aircraft, they'd likely find a lot of the same things.
"Employee at X mocks regulator" is not exactly uncommon.
> Another damning exchange calls into question the safety of the 737 Max long before the plane was approved to fly passengers.
It’s the quality of the finished product I care about, not the quality of the product at some unspecified point during R&D.
[1] Really deletion policies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/int...
1. You would be surprised at how normal talk like that is in huge corporations due to internal politics. People bad-mouth other projects that are getting limelight, taking away resources, etc. A more benign example is how often Google employees rag on the GCP engineers as being inferior, which has more to do with the money flowing into GCP than merit.
2. People are irrational about safety, despite data showing something is ok. There were droves of people that said they would never get on a fly-by-wire plane (Airbus), despite having no evidence to support their fears.
1. I won't fly with you 2. I will fly with you 3. I will fly with you and take my shoes off during take off 4. I will let my family fly with you.
This phrase used verbatim means quite a lot.
“I want to stress the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition from NG to MAX,” Boeing’s 737 chief technical pilot said in a March 2017 email.
“Boeing will not allow that to happen. We’ll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement.”
He's one who really needs to go to jail. Why didn't they name him?
Here's another one of his quotes:
> There is absolutely no reason to require your pilots to require a Max simulator to begin flying the Max. Once the engines are started, there is only one difference between NG and Max procedurally, and that is that there is no OFF position of the gear handle. Boeing does not understand what is to be gained by a 3h simulator session, when the procedures are essentially the same.
Just like how no VW employee went to jail in Germany for emissions cheating.
Do you think this means:
a) Change the environment that fosters those kinds of messages?
-or-
b) Punish those who wrote those messages?
They're not saying that releasing a plane that employees were sounding safety alarms are about is bad.
> [Sounding safety alarms is] inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate [ie punitive] action in response [to prevent any alarms on the next unsafe design].
Bring back the concept of responsibility. They are paid to be in overall responsibility for anything that happens under their remit.
Time was such a behaviour in the department, or under their leadership would have ended a career. Realising the actions of a lowly engineer or janitor can end their gravy train, they might implement adequate oversight.
The published extract was “whole building is about to collapse anytime now. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab […] standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications”
Out of memory the […] that was left out by the SEC said something like “as kindly calls me xxx, but there is nothing fabulous about me, just a tender... etc”. And that was an email to his girlfriend, nothing to do with any transaction.
Morale of the story: no jokes, even innocuous, they will be weaponised against you in bad faith. Stick to boring, neutral language. And no personal communications on corporate systems. Write everything on the assumption it will be published with bad intent.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
- Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu and Fronsac (1585–1642)
Utterly unbelievable, yet also totally unsurprising given everything else that's come out about Boeing recently.
What amazes me is that the same thing is happening with Tesla, but HN hardly bats an eye, because Silicon Valley:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-push-to-build-a-self-dri...
Engineers speaking up and getting fired or resigning. What's worse is that, as opposed to having a choice to fly on a 737 MAX, driving on autopilot on public roads puts other people at risk.
With the Boeing, the MCAS system put the 737 in a flight state which trained pilots couldn't recover from.
We can’t let this to come down to a cynical “what’s the cost of a life?”-style calculation.
It needs to be much more consequential relative to the crime/incompetence than Equifax, Facebook, etc.
And that my friends is all that you need to know about the boeing of 2020.
Can't we replace the finance folks with software yet? It seems that should be the easiest to automate. They can see it, but of course they are closest to the money, and can't let go.
The merger happened 22+ years ago. When will you start considering the “new” Boeing company to be responsible for their current actions? It’s 2020 and the problems at Boeing are the fault of Boeing, not McDonnell Douglas.
~ first rule of corporate communications
I'm hoping (and kind of expecting) that people will build simple apps or websites to check whether an advertised flight is on a 737 Max. It should be quite easy for people to avoid/boycott this plane.
To be fair, after this the Max is likely to be one of the most intensively studied and prepped planes in existence for pilots who might have to fly one. Pilots don't want to die either.
In the moment, I would imagine this comes across as sour grapes. With the benefit of hindsight, that sentiment seems to hold some water.
https://twitter.com/davidshepardson/status/12154759339661926...
Maybe the FAA will yield to poltical pressure. But I can't imagine any other certification agency accepting responsibility for any accident occurring on their watch now that more and more about the ugly, incompetent, fraudulent and outright evil engineering process for that death trap comes to light.
A plane only certified by the FAA is essentially dead.
Holy shit this goes deeper than I thought and some people are heavily cleaning Wikipedia.
Didn't even know about this bit stealing rocket tech.: https://www.justice.gov/archive/criminal/cybercrime/press-re...
Also check out: Darleen Druyun https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-probe-intensifi...
Phil Condit was ousted over Darleen and that's why Harry was brought in... although the Wikipedia page doesn't mention any of this...fu wikipedia. He was not "retired" he was forced out and Boeing was banned from Space Contracts for 5 years.
Damn I wish I save all those news articles. Whoever said the Internet is forever is wrong! The Internet is fickle ...some things will be memes forever and others will be forgotten.
And here's what happened to Harry Stonecipher: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111019724886272076
So much for "cleaning" up the company culture. F Boeing. The company not the engineers. I also know some very talented people there.
[Edit Note:1] The WSJ link should not be paywalled as it's an old article...at least it wasn't for me.
[Edit Note:2] The WSJ link is very detailed about what went down if it ends up blocked/paywalled I will...f'ck it I will edit wikipedia....grrrrr history is not fickle and Condit was and is an ass.
Its telling there were no[?] whistleblowers able to come forward beforehand. Consequences are too real and the search for the guilty talkers likely continues and I don't even think they were even remotely whistleblowers.
Perhaps technical prowess isn't as highly respected as it should be? Too many corners cut? Excessive priority of business over engineering? Timelines too tight? Budgets too small? Misallocations?
Don't know. Lots of symptoms of an unhealthy organization. It will become an interesting case-study regardless.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/senat...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/faa...
Yeah, I would even say that from the following part "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."
The Monkey will fire the clown, while still being employed and probably not being hold responsible for the shit they have done.
Management liability at its best.
The company is taking action in response. Against its employees. Not the ones responsible for killing hundreds of people, but the ones who were calling the program out on its flaws that led to those deaths? If I were working on a safety critical program and I thought it was risking lives I'd lose my shit. The employees that said this should be getting an "I told you so" badge, and the executive team should be going to prison. Fuck Boeing for this.
Edit: more to my original point though, the response should be to improve internal processes to prevent this kind of tragedy again, rather than to throw the people doing the right thing by speaking up under the bus, saying it’s against company culture to call out dangerous risks.
Still, it's management's job to create an environment that distills signal from noise.
He's mostly saying the employee shouldn't be punished for saying this in some internal chat(but the CEO should).
> Someone at one end thinks the values and ethic is one way, and the people at the other end have an entirely different understanding.
Like, how is this relevant to the employee getting punished being bad?
>The company official said the language used and sentiments expressed in these communications "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."
Values? Your values appear to be maximizing profits at the expense of human lives. Your response to: "the guys developing our simulator were emailing back and forth they'd never fly on this plane" shouldn't be - let's fire them. It should be: how did management fail SO HORRENDOUSLY that the feedback from these testers wasn't pushed up the chain so we could build a reliable product?
The fact that we're this far removed from the accidents and they still don't get it tells me the company probably needs to just fail.
You might find similar patterns for other carriers if you search by city pairs.
Equipment swaps are pretty unusual for international routes, too, because it's harder to reaccommodate people. I think you were unlucky and shouldn't expect that in the future.
And your coworkers may gain enough courage to actually stand up publicly against what they all say in private. What a horrendously self-interested take on this whole saga.
KILL(1) User Commands KILL(1)
NAME
kill - send a signal to a process
SYNOPSIS
kill [options] <pid> [...]
To a techie it's obvious what it means, but if the code runs on some hardware that ends up killing people for real and the code gets inspected during discovery, having words like that could be a liability since jurors are less likely to understand the technical meaning.
I worked in the automotive industry for a few years, we where told not to use the terms "crash","kill","die" and a few others anywhere in code or documentation for exactly this reason.