
Boeing 737 Max: Worker said plane 'designed by clowns' - dberhane
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51058929
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merricksb
Active discussion already going for 7 hours:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008091)

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murgindrag
The response is shocking:

"These communications do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and
they are completely unacceptable"

Boeing appears outraged that employees raised issues in writing, not about the
issues themselves. That's reflective of a very, very bad culture. A response
like that -- and an internal house cleaning about what gets put in email which
will surely follow -- will lead to MORE safety issues. You can't address
safety issues if you can't raise them.

This whole response will just make it harder to investigate and understand
failures in engineering processes. That's not just the investigations by
regulators. You can't have working internal RCAs and similar processes if you
have filtered records.

Boeing can't even see this is wrong. This response went to press from an
official PR department.

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electrograv
Additionally, notice the strange and perhaps clever wording of _“do NOT
reflect the company WE ARE AND NEED TO BE”_.

It appears they’re trying to have it both ways: They imply that these emails
do NOT reflect the company they “are”, but also imply that they DO reflect the
ways in which the company needs to be better (which seems a contradiction). So
which is it? You can’t be simultaneously innocent and guilty of the same
offense.

Imagine if someone committed some crime, and made a statement: “My actions do
not reflect the person I am and need to be.” What does that even mean,
precisely?

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Neracked
Playing devil's advocate but I have worked for Airbus for a couple of years
and for each aircraft designed in the past 20 years (A380, A400M, A350), I can
find dozens of workers ready to say that plane was 'designed by clowns who in
turn are supervised by monkeys'.

Such an unsubstantiated declaration is covered in news just because is is
compliant with what is known because of other, better documented sources about
the failures at Boeing that led to the 737MAX fiasco but it brings zero
information.

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taneq
I've worked with mechanical fitters for quite a few years now and going by
what they say I don't think there's a single machine ever built that wasn't
designed by clowns.

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xiphias2
It's still stange to me that killing 1 person means that a person goes to
prison immediately, but after a manslaughter of hundreds of people the people
who did it are still making decisions for the company and prison isn't even
discussed.

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pjc50
Intent matters, and negligence is very socially constructed; our leniency
depends on seeing how easily we could make the same mistake. Road negligence
is the big one; even surprisingly gross negligence that results in the death
of a non-negligent cyclist or pedestrian will be treated really leniently.

I wouldn't put too much store in these emails. For every successful, safe
product there is probably also an email somewhere complaining about how badly
it is managed. What's needed is a specific link about the specific problem
found in the parts of the system that actually caused crashes.

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saiya-jin
You still often get few years of jail if you kill cyclist or pedestrian even
if its completely not your fault and you did everything by the rules. Some
heads definitely should roll to prison at Boeing

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pjc50
Where? Do you have some example news stories?

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epicgiga
Just remember, if one lowly employee does it, it's negligent homicide, and
they go to prison. And if they blame everyone but themselves, the judge adds a
few more years to the sentence.

But if a big bunch of nameless managers and executives in a corporation do it,
just shrug and say "that's life".

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nness
"These communications do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and
they are completely unacceptable."

A stronger response from some emails than the death of ~350 passengers.

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zwirbl
"This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."

The response comes from the "monkeys"

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JamisonM
I think that the _healthiest_ part of the culture indicated by this story is
that people are in fact willing to use company systems to raise serious issues
about the design and safety of their products. That behaviour should be
encouraged.

Unfortunately that is probably the part the Boeing management is most
embarrassed about.

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rob74
"designed by clowns who were supervised by monkeys", to be exact. And, with
hindsight, this assessment turns out to be tragically spot on - if you commit
(or approve) the gross negligence of implementing a system which can command a
nosedive based on data from only one sensor, you deserve to be called a clown
or a monkey...

~~~
cedivad
... nosedive command that can push the trim further than what manual controls
allow you to override. It's just a shitfest. Any idiot looking at that
specification could have told you what a terrible idea that was. I mean
Ardupilot has better coding standards.

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invalidusernam3
The scariest part:

    
    
        The documents also appear to show problems with the simulators being discussed.
    
        In February 2018, a Boeing worker asked a colleague: "Would you put your family on a Max simulator-trained aircraft? I wouldn't."
    
        "No," came the reply.

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PedroBatista
I wouldn’t condemn a company because of what employees say in internal chat
rooms, but given what happened and what we already know it’s pretty clear they
are guilty of e everything.

Unfortunately the company will pay a couple millions or more, but the people
who said that will pay with their livelihood.

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rvnx
Why no jail for the top managers at Boeing ?

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einpoklum
In (corporate) Capitalism, high-level decision makers are mostly immune from
criminal responsibility. The financiers and insurance people who pushed
untenable mortgages and then peddled them through securitization and credit-
default swaps - thus triggering the 2008 economic crisis - none of them were
ever prosecuted criminally, for _anything_. The head of Union Carbide (part of
Dow Chemical) whose factory in Bhopal essentially exploded in 1984, killing
16,000 and disabling 40,000 - avoided extradition and lived out his life in
Florida. And those are just a couple of examples.

So - why would the Boeing management be held responsible for anything? That's
naive to expect. You'd need to have a very deep change in US society for
something like that to happen.

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einpoklum
This is in part a problem with the structure of Boeing as a commercial
company: The owners appoint people who make the strategic decisions, and those
must be followed by a chain of command down to the last employee. It's like an
autocracy, based on the sanctity of property-ownership.

Instead, the _employees_ - especially those with technical expertise - must be
able to participate in the decision making, and have some veto power over it
in certain cases. One of these cases should be health & safety hazards.

