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.
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.
You know how shady mattress and TV retailers mix up the model numbers so you can't comparison shop? Your next flight might be on a 737-super-1912713-b.
You say that jokingly, but the configurations & carriers are actually part of the model numbers contained in the last two digits (and occasionally letter afterwards) [0].
I flew on Spirit (which has a bad reputation but whatever, I love it for cheap flights), and they make a point before takeoff of saying their fleet is 100% Airbus planes.
> 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.
You have to outweigh the cost of retraining all pilots for an alternative plane. This whole mess happened because that is something the airlines really want to avoid and Boeing was greedy enough to offer it.
Absolutely the airline has to look at that, given that as you’ve said the big draw for airlines is redeploying their 747 crew, but that’s their problem (or not. If I’m the only person that cares enough to not fly because of it then it hardly matters).
Of course people will fly on it. 95% of people will be just thinking of what they want to do when they get there. They assume that someone else has verified the planes. And what else can they do? I certainly can't verify the safety of a plane.
There are clearly quite a few people who are determined to avoid flying on a 737 Max (or avoid Boeing altogether) and also seem to expect this to be a widespread view. While I can understand the former (though not hold it myself), there is no realistic prospect of the latter.
I can't verify the safety of airliners either, but so long as they are flown by an on-board crew of professional pilots, there will be a body of informed* people with a vested interest in keeping things safe.
* Though not always fully informed, which is, of course, a big part of the 737 Max debacle.
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?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Linus Torvalds calls this trading new bugs for old bugs. And I agree with the idea in principle: don't replace buggy working code with untested new code. People already know how to deal with the old bug.
And look how it turns out every time that principle is broken, albeit in userland and not the kernel: KDE 4, PulseAudio, Systemd.
I'm fully aware of the differences between a product (airplane) and software, but the 737 Max is born of the same principle being broken. The problem that was being fixed was fuel efficiency. So Boeing replaced the engines and associated structures with more efficient engines, which required different structures to hold them, which required MCAS, and now the whole thing is untested, as compare to the old setup with decades of proven reliability despite 1.6% more fuel consumption.
So never change any laws and or invent new things? I can't imagine many people really think that's the answer.
I'd also point out that arguments like this, while often well-intentioned, can also be abused, by people who don't like a particular new idea but can't articulate a defensible reason. It's easiest then to just fall back on conservatism.
The real answer is to invent new stuff and try not to be idiots about it. Use good design principles, don't cut corners, do the testing, roll out gradually when that's feasible, etc. For the Torvalds principle you mentioned "untested" new code, and Boeing definitely cut corners.
The first step of not cutting corners is not ignoring obvious flaws.
If you are adding complexity into a very complex system, in order to govern it, it is very likely that the change will make the system harder to control. So you must have a pretty good certainty that this will give you governance and not destroy it.
Shareholder voting is not that complicated, it's just a simple majority vote weighted by number of shares held. My suggestion is a modest extension of that, to address a specific problem.
Can you come up with specific ways it might fail? I can definitely think of issues that would have to be addressed, but so far all the critical comments in this subthread could apply, unmodified, to thousands of unrelated ideas, rather than just this one.
If corporation governance were simple, we wouldn't see that kind of failure.
> Can you come up with specific ways it might fail?
It's trivially exploitable by the executive team by just behaving in a sustainable way for a while, and then changing it suddenly when every other shareholder is locked-in.
The reason the comments apply to thousands of possible suggestions is that the problems appear on thousands of possible suggestions, and nobody wants to keep writing thousands of comments debunking each bad idea.
Finally, a criticism that is not completely generic conservatism. It's a good point that this would work better for shareholder votes on policy decisions rather than board elections.
Then you immobilize some long term holders with many proposals for them to vote, and after they can't do anything anymore, bribe the employees directly into doing the shortsighted action.
Again, it's an extra bonus to the unethical ones, because they are the only ones that can sell, and will take all the profits from the short lived stock pump.
Do you also have a home-made encryption algorithm you'd like to push?
Cryptography is a well-developed professional field with rigorous peer review. Their products do what they're supposed to almost perfectly, and many people use them.
Perhaps you could point me to an equivalent field for making society better, with a well-developed utopia that lots of people live in today.
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.
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.
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.
That might be true of those fresh out of school. I've been proven to be fallible and stupid enough times to believe it.
It's been over a decade since I've last said "that decision that somebody else made was stupid". I've since replaced it with "I would have done it differently, but I don't know what other constraints they were faced with at the time".
Hi. I’m an mba. Profits are pretty important and firms should undertake NPV positive activities. We’ve seen amazing products fail many times due to lack of market fit. However, there’s certainly no shareholder value in bankruptcy or lawsuits.
History is littered with failed products that were very well engineered. For any business to last there needs to be an effective partnership between commercial and product development areas of the company (or, if you prefer, MBAs and engineers, not that the distinction is so clean).
Agreed and point taken.. A good MBA's would realize the short sightedness of the actions they are taking (like they should have done in Boeing's case) and good engineers should have the integrity to say "you want me to do what? hell no!" That said, the malady I speak about is very real. (maybe even endimic?)
Thank you. I certainly did not intend to communicate that “anything goes.” What I meant is that even when you apply the most cold-hearted financial analysis, short sightedness is often suboptimal. It’s tougher when your public investors watch every quarter like hawks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
They were testing to see if pilot reaction times were fast enough to counter MCAS.
> The whistleblower alleges Boeing officials were present for the testing and encouraged the test pilots to “remember, get right on that pickle switch” immediately prior to the exercise.
> “Pickle switch” refers to the stabilizer trim control switches
The implication is that the pilot reaction times were only fast enough to counter the original MCAS design if they were explicitly reminded how to react immediately before the exercise.
I mean, if pilots know they're there to test the MCAS changes then surely they'll be right on it anyway. So the whole "test" is sort of pointless isn't it?
They were testing if the original assumption that went into the original design of MCAS was correct. The assumptions that pilots would be able to react to a failure correctly within 10 seconds.
From what I understand the whole reason this happened was that Boeing wanted the new efficient engines without having to call the plane a new model. So they were really asking pilots with no training on the new Max planes to react correctly to a situation that didn't exist on the old plane within 10 seconds. Surely this is basically admitting to being at fault?
Also, these airlines that bought the Max on the basis they wouldn't have to re-train the pilots are presumably having to foot the bill for this?
Private pilot here. You have it exactly right. The problem is not the ten-second reaction time. There are a lot of emergencies that require that kind of reaction time (engine failure, to cite the obvious example). The problem is ten-second reaction time to a new kind of emergency without special training for that emergency.
Agree´. I think the (german version) of the starfighter had a 2 second window for retracting the landing gear during lift-off otherwise the stall protection will crash the jet into the ground. Well there was a lot wrong with this model 296 crashed (during peace time training....)
The running joke at that time was that the fastest way to acquire a starfighter was to buy a plot of land and wait. That thing was nicknamed widowmaker for a reason.
I remember the value from a report on TV (who knows if it is correct). But then lift-off is not a too unexpected event, so better keep your hand close to that control.
So the plane is built with the assumption that the pilots are ready to jump in and override within 10 seconds, if out of the blue the auto-pilot decides to try to crash the plane. How about a no, and we re-build the system so a failure like that becomes extremely unlikely and not a regular occurrence?
I think what is left unsaid is that there is no way the US government will not allow the 737-MAX to fly again.
My understanding is that the design is aerodynamically flawed. The MCAS system was an ugly hack and even the new solution is just an improved MCAS.
However the 737-MAX is Boeing’s answer to Airbus’ competitive threat in the biggest commercial airplane segment. Not approving the plane would leave this segment to Airbus and would cripple Boeing’s commercial airplane business as a whole.
The US considers this business strategic given past history of government incentives. Europe and other countries also consider this business strategic and likewise have provided massive government incentives.
This calculus alone almost forces the FAA to approve the plane for flying.
Furthermore, the 737-MAX not flying could bankrupt Boeing. All those hundreds of planes that they manufactured would be scrap. All the existing planes flown would become lawsuits.
But Boeing is a big defense contractor with a revolving door with the Defense Department. There is no way the US would let one of its biggest defense contractors go bankrupt. The gravy train for that military industrial complex would end.
That isn’t going to happen. Look at Biden’s nominees. They are part of the revolving door between the military and defense contractors.
If we could peer through closed doors I bet we would see the US government pressuring other governments to approve the 737-MAX for flight. They also need to give approval for the plane to fly to their countries.
I would guess that depends on how complicated the entire thing is, if they have ten possible solutions and get told to try the one that works first would certainly improve reaction times.
However, that to me points to the larger problem, that "Boeing officials," whoever that group may entail precisely, treat the 737 Max safety as a test that needs to be passed, instead of a safety problem, that would require best effort.
Unfortunately this is true for a lot of professional certifications. The goal is too often not really to teach anything but protect the company from liability.
It reminds me a bit the "training" we do in finance. Is the right answer "call the police" or "help the terrorist hide the money in offshore accounts"?
Not pointless, but not definitive, either. To some extent, all Max pilots will now be primed for this, but the effect will probably dissipate over time.
For all I know, the benefits of this effect, as a function of time and whatever other factors are relevant, may well be well-studied and amenable to modeling. Perhaps one possible source of data for such studies would be measurements of reaction times in training and proficiency-check simulator sessions, where no single issue is under scrutiny.
Seems weird that pilots doing tests for boeing would need to be reminded about MCAS countermeasures, I would have guessed that would be on their mind already.
> Investigators accused Boeing and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials of "attempting to cover up important information".
This will hamper peoples trust in both Boeing and the FAA for years. It doesn't take much for flyers to choose an alternate flight that isn't on a Boeing. And for overseas aviation authorities to not trust FAA airworthiness certificates.
you'd be surprised at how often they'll change a plane out. In europe at least I tend to get told about that, but not sure how much of a right i have to object to or refund that flight. Pretty sure part of the terms and conditions are "we can change your plane out for operational reasons".
Maybe they meant pay for a more expensive ticket. In my country the national airline sells different types of tickets. You can get cheap non-refundable, non-transferable tickets, or you can pay more to get a ticket that allows you to reschedule any time.
> I didn't say they would succeed, but that's not really the point. If people don't ask for this, no airline will implement it.
If you address the right people in the right way in writing, you may elicit a written response and (if you're extremely lucky) some form of compensation. It is very doubtful that many companies that can afford a 747 Max will change their operations unless political pressure is put on them due to an extreme imbalance of power.
If we lived in a world where the imbalance did not exist, things would be different. In some cases, we can see that in smaller airlines which tend to be more responsive to customer concerns and needs. But those companies are flying much smaller planes to start with.
There are plenty of operators that already have flight routes not serviced by Boeing. They would more than happy to guarantee certain tickets a certain flight with a certain seat.
I'm unfamiliar with the FAA so is there a particular set of circumstances that would give incentive to them being complicit in the cover up?
Do Boeing contribute funding to the FAA in a direct and discretionary way?
I can't comprehend how a federal body would aid a private company like this when the ramifications could be so severe (threat to life and to the FAA's public credibility).
> I can't comprehend how a federal body would aid a private company like this when the ramifications could be so severe (threat to life and to the FAA's public credibility).
Entrenched government agencies never appear to have concern about public credibility. Their security is guaranteed not by the public but by politicians, and these same politicians are the beneficiaries of donations by large corporations like Boeing. Further, large corporations employ lots of people who would be rather pissed off if they lost their job. So by punishing the large corporation, the agency would in effect be giving an incentive to its key stakeholder (politicians) an incentive to punish the agency (limiting authority, etc).
The world is a messed up place, where agencies tasked to do a very specific thing undermine that task out of self-preservation.
Over time, regulatory bodies become populated by 'retirees' from upper management and directorship of the subject they once regulated. The google-able term for this is 'Regulatory Capture'.
The 737 Max and A320neo are direct competitors. The A320neo was announced 6 months before the 737 Max in 2011, and both were certified for flight in March 2017. (Give or take - the A320neo has a few variants.)
Back when the 737 was first grounded, initial investigation found that Boeing and the FAA cooperated to rush the 737 into service to beat the A320neo [1,2].
The FAA has every incentive to make sure that American companies, especially large ones like Boeing, are treated favorably. Even outside of donations or smells of corruption, Boeing is a major employer and S&P500 member. If Boeing does well, our economic metrics (employment/stocks) do well, and the lawmakers who regulate the FAA are happy.
Those same incentives appeared in the FAA's refusal to ground the Max for days after the second crash. (First crash was 8/29/18; second was 3/10/19; grounded 3/13/19)[3]
I suspect we're seeing a replay of the original certification. As soon as the 737 Max is recertified, all those grounded planes can get back to making a profit, and Boeing can go back to making them.
Not how it should work, but the recertification effort seems consistent with how Boeing and the FAA acted in the initial certification. It's not right, but the same incentives still exist.
I think the reason could be that the FAA made mistakes too. Like how did they approve of the design in the first place? They were made part of a cover-up process from the beginning.
It seems that you’re not going to die, if the pilot is from a major western airliner company.
However, if the 737 Max is flown by a pilot from a 3rd world country, then, yes, you might die.
And this was the problem to begin with. The pilots in 3rd world countries were not even trained on the 737 Max. They just told them, that it flew the same way as the older 737 planes.
To everyone’s horror, they found out the hard way. While the plane was in flight.
So in the tests to the feature that they claimed did not need additional pilot training to be safe, they effectively provided spot training for the pilots testing it to demonstrate that training wasn’t needed... Am I getting this right? At what point do these people start to become criminally liable for all the deaths caused by this circus?
I guess that airline really feels somewhat left out as many of the "national" ones (Lufthansa, SAS etc.) are getting enormous amounts of money as Corona relief, while they are on their own. Too bad they are making up for the difference with these planes
