
Work on production line of Boeing 737 Max ‘not adequately funded’ - ksajadi
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49142761
======
akerl_
I look at this and see surprising parallels to the Wells Fargo scandal (
[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-23/fake-a...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-23/fake-
accounts-still-haunt-wells-fargo) ).

In both cases, management appears to have applied significant pressure to the
teams doing the work, pushing them to achieve extremely unrealistic targets.
And in both cases, the results of that incentive ended up being extremely
detrimental to basically everybody (to the general public in the form of
identity fraud / unsafe aircraft, to the companies in the forms of fines /
grounding / PR / etc).

I doubt anybody in Boeing’s offices woke up and thought “what a nice morning!
Time to go to work and build some dangerous airplanes that will kill people,
so that I can get slightly richer”. I suspect the execs involved were just
amazingly (and potentially even criminally) negligent: in their minds, they
were pushing their employees to make the airplane actually similar enough to
qualify as a “minor” change, without any of the oversight that would have
caught what was actually happening. They turned a blind eye any time somebody
told them that the new plane would require larger changes, and the results are
unsurprising: their teams declared all the changes “minor”, not because they’d
successfully made only minor changes, but because exec pressure mandated that
all changes be “minor”.

~~~
lnsru
While reading your text I was thinking about Volkswagen, diesel cars and their
defeat devices. This article (sorry for German only writing)
[https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/verkehr/audi-
abgasskanda...](https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/verkehr/audi-abgasskandal-
betrugssoftware-diesel-defeat-device/) states exactly opposite! The VW guys
were writing poems for their clever defeat device! I am pretty sure, that some
people at Boeing were also clapping hands about sales potential and cost
savings of the new planes. There are more evil people in the corporate floors
than you think. And top management plays with them!!! There is no way to build
in defeat device in millions of cars without top management agreeing. I can
guess, that Boeing’s management had enough clues, that their software wasn’t
in the best shape.

~~~
akerl_
I don’t think anybody is arguing that Boeing execs hate money, or weren’t
excited to make loads of money. And, as I wrote, the incentive structure the
Boeing execs created has an incentive structure whose outcome was incredibly
dangerous. Realizing those incentives required that the executives turn a
blind eye to how the problems were being solved. But I think it’s pretty
implausible to suggest that the “evil people” at Boeing we’re clapping their
hands about savings with an understanding that they were trading human lives
for those profits. It’s tempting to imagine that the executives of
corporations are all comic villains, sitting in their offices plotting the
demise of humanity, but to imagine them in that way is detrimental to the goal
of actually avoiding these problems. If we treat corporations as if they’re
comic villains, we ignore that they’re actually made up of normal people with
a variety of social and economic incentives, and being aware of those
incentives is crucial if we’d like to actually change corporate behavior.

~~~
ljm
Maybe I'm wrong but it feels a bit simpler than people being evil or
malevolent. It's more like squeezing a juice out of a lemon: at first, it only
requires light pressure to get the juice, but as you want more and more juice,
your grip must get increasingly tighter. At some point it becomes clear you
need a new lemon to get more juice, but for some reason it seems cheaper/more
effective to keep squeezing the one that has nothing left to give.

So it is with businesses extracting value (/making as much money as possible).

~~~
akerl_
The tricky part is figuring out the “for some reason” in your metaphor, and
then designing a system that causes them to rethink that calculus instead of
just finding a different way to keep squeezing the same lemon.

------
WhoBeI
What will the certification process for the next plane from Boeing look like?

The FAA certified a plane that had obvious flaws. From what I understand they
out sourced the certification process to Boeing but that doesn't remove their
responsibility, it's still their "stamp". The real certification process
started after the accidents and only needed a few weeks to find additional
flaws. I'd assume the process is normally months long so "a few weeks" would
be finding it early.

But why should I trust the FAA? They seem to be working hard now projecting an
image of a for-the-people agency while throwing as much dirt as they can on
Boeing but I haven't really seen anything addressing their own problems with
out sourcing, corruption, and political interference.

Have I missed something?

~~~
cremp
What happens most of the time with the big companies (Boeing, Cessna,
Bombardier...) is that it is cheaper to have an in-house DER (Designated
Engineering Representative) for the part of the aircraft that they are
certifying. DERs themselves

You have Mechanical DERs, Electrical DERs, Software DERs, and others.

A good example for the HN crowd, the Software DER. Per regulations, the
software standard is the DO-178B. The DER isn't actually spinning up the dev
environment, or building the piece of software used; just checking to make
sure the process was followed. (the dev environment was documented, what
dependancies...) These people are a step up from code reviewers and just check
paperwork more than software.

The FAA itself isn't concerned with safety; it is just there to make sure
there is a papertrail to follow in the event of a safety issue.

~~~
dv_dt
I think that's a rewriting of the role of the FAA. A papertrail is a strong
prerequisite to being able to adequately review the safety of an aircraft.
Without strict conformance to both complete written instructions on how to
build, assemble, and configure an aircraft, how would one ever know a plane,
no matter how many tests you do is the same design that is later flown vs what
was certified?

BTW when the plan was floated to let Boeing self certify more in the process,
in the name of 'efficiency' there were objections made to the political
appointees driving that.

------
farseer
>>Since 2013, Boeing has paid $17bn (£13.74bn) in dividends to shareholders
and has spent a further $43bn buying its own shares - a spending spree that
has helped Boeing treble its share price in just five years.

Are share buy backs a common strategy for large companies?

~~~
fcantournet
For the last ~10 years yes. Almost all big companies that are profitable do
it.

This is actually a major problem for innovation and investments in general,
there are lots of economist who talk about this issue: Mariana Mazzucato has
some very convincing arguments for public investments based, among other
things, on this very problem.

(neo-liberal) Governments lower corporate taxes to boost corporate profit in
the (unfunded) hope that this will drive massive investments in innovation and
create job, and bigCo just buy their stock back because it is by far the most
profitable short-term for their shareholders and their executives.

Major reason is : they don't know what else to do. There was a very cool
article on HN about the specific Boeing case that went over how it changed in
the last 20y to go from engineering company to finance-driven company

~~~
chii
> Major reason is : they don't know what else to do

no, they just don't like the risk of innovation. A share buy-back program is
guarenteed to increase the share price, which is benefitial to executives who
hold their bonuses in shares (and share holders would also like it).

Doing innovation comes with risks - which may or may not pan out. If it
doesn't pan out, the executives would get chewed for it, and if it does pan
out it is unlikely to pay off for a long time (in terms of bonuses - at least,
not within their tenure).

Gov'ts should just invest in startups, rather than give tax breaks. Invest in
up and coming students who show promise, and get to claim a share of their
innovation as taxes as well! And if it fails, it fails - the gov't doesn't
need to be profitable.

~~~
throw0101a
Yes, it is prudent to invest capital back into the company (R&D), but it may
not be the best use of money or have the best ROI.

It should also be noted that share buy-backs are also useful to shareholders
as an alternative to dividends. Whereas a dividend creates a tax event that an
investor may nor may not welcome, the same investor can choose to sell their
stock or hang on to it.

Financially speaking, if you start with $1000 in stocks, it does not matter
whether you end up with $1000 in stock and $100 in cash from dividends, or
$1100 in stocks (from the price going up).

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpXI_Vd51dA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpXI_Vd51dA)

And yet companies that payout dividends are not vilified the same was as buy-
back companies--in fact dividend payers are lauded in an almost fetishist way
due to human psychology:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting)

~~~
chii
the issue here is that gov't lower corp taxes in the hopes that the money gets
put into R&D. Instead, it goes into share buyback schemes.

Instead, gov't should use the taxes (rather than returning it to corps) and
pay startups for innovation, rather than hope companies use it on R&D.

------
Causality1
>We have always held true to our values of safety, quality and integrity and
those values are complementary and mutually reinforcing with productivity and
company performance

It says something very bad about the state of accountability in this country
when someone's negligence can kill hundreds of people and they have absolutely
nothing to fear from putting out a completely horseshit statement like that.
Half a dozen different Boeing executives should be in prison for the rest of
their lives on 346 counts of manslaughter but I'd be amazed if Boeing faces so
much as a monetary fine.

~~~
ekianjo
do you pass the same judgment on car manufacturers since they are also
somewhat responsible for numerous deaths every single year?

~~~
Causality1
Indeed I do. For example, the Takata corporation negligently ignored many
warnings that its airbags were unsafe. This resulted in hundreds of injuries
and the deaths of 24 people. The Takata corporation was fined ~250% of its
annual EBIT and three of its executives were prosecuted. For Boeing, a
comparable fine would be thirty billion dollars. If you multiplied the fine by
the ratio of deaths, the fine would be over 420 billion dollars.

~~~
ekianjo
That would bankrupt Boeing. That's probably not a desirable outcome for such a
company - and this would discourage any investment in aviation moving on.

~~~
Causality1
It is the job of the federal government to protect the lives of its citizens
by enforcing the law. It is not the job of the federal government to protect
the existence of certain corporations by giving them special exemptions to the
law.

But even if you wanted to do that, you can still have your cake and eat it
too. Boeing's yearly profit is 4.2 billion dollars. Take three billion of that
per year and let them pay off the fine over ten years.

~~~
ekianjo
Thats all good and dandy but the Federal government has not just one mission
but several hundreds of them. They also have to protect their citizen from
foreign threats and Boeing is also huge in the military space. Conflicts of
interests everywhere.

------
jfnixon
Want to see senior management laser focused on safety? Require forfeiture of
all benefits, options, and bonuses, plus all personal cap gains from stock
sales in the event of an engineering flaw resulting in loss of life. Claw it
back from all senior management who worked during the lifetime of the
airliner, even if they left or retired. You'll see the midnight oil being
burned on walnut row, and fanatical effort going into testing and design
reviews.

~~~
esoterica
That’s a terrific way to ensure no want ever wants to work on aviation or
infrastructure projects ever again. I guess they can come work on adtech like
the rest of us.

~~~
jfnixon
It is a bit tongue in cheek, but giving the top couple of layers some serious
skin in the game is the only way to align their interest with safety rather
than the next 10-Q.

------
throwaway3627
I'm surprised almost no one is also talking about the 2010 Boeing
subcontractor Ducommun 737 NG (-600/700/800/900) critical structural elements
deficiencies scandal and coverup Al Jazeera exposed. Several passengers have
also already died from this on runway overruns and hard landings when the
fuselage breaks up whereas it didn't used to happen on previous 737's.

~~~
acqq
It is obviously still an unknown story.

Some details:

[https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/16150378-post10.html](https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/16150378-post10.html)

~~~
Calloutman
It's somewhat amusing to see the pilots in that thread criticise airbus for
having computer systems that take control away from the pilot, given what we
now know about MCAS.

~~~
acqq
It's irrelevant for this thread, which is about:

"If you're Boeing, you realize you have a multi-billion dollar liability on
your hands that will bankrupt your company 10 times over if you actually had
to tear apart and inspect or rebuild all the suspect aircraft. So, you bury
the reports, fire anyone involved, call in all your favors and unleash your
lawyers with all the political power you have as a major defense contractor to
make it all go away. (The program suggested that's exactly what they were
doing)."

Also, the link to the program summary:

[https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/12/...](https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/12/20101214104637901849.html)

------
cryptozeus
For once i hope these x employees come forward before these
incidents...Nothing new in this article, article is being posted for this
“Watch BBC Panorama: Boeing's Killer Plane, on 29 July at 8.30pm on BBC One.”

~~~
raxxorrax
The dark side of that is that in contrast to management, employees face far
harsher penalties than a million dollar settlement. You will only get that if
you have "responsibility".

------
crististm
"Boeing said it wasn't relying on the single sensor, because the pilots were
there as back up."

Pilots are part of the redundancy package?! NO! Pilots are not part of your
hardware!!

Imagine the contrast from what we've been told for years that aviation
hardware is about redundancy and what really is going on in their management
offices.

------
smz2
"We did not cut corners or push the 737 Max out before it was ready," it said.

After two crashes and the groundings, i would say they did. Of course that's
not what all of this is about, just their pr dept.

------
ecmascript
I will never ever get into one of those planes, whatever they rename it to and
however many updates they push.

~~~
ekianjo
On the contrary this will probably be one of the safest planes to fly once
they fix all issues (assuming they can) since no other plane would have
undergone such in depth review and testing ever.

~~~
chopin
How do you know they fixed all issues? Surely all issues will be fixed which
the regulators can find. But I am sure there will be cover-up still. And more
to it regulators have clearly demonstrated their incapability and
unwillingness to find something.

~~~
junipertea
How do you know all the previous planes have no issues at all? The only way
you truly know is the track record and we do need to give the Max or its
successor the benefit of doubt at some point. What's the point of having
regulations of we don't believe in them anyway and depend on feelings? Of
course, the regulations allowed 300+ people to die, but that's a thing to be
fixed and improved.

~~~
saiya-jin
It could go as something like this - since we know how much safety was omitted
in chase of profit, we see the most common problems. But airplanes are
massively complex, and compromises could have been done on thousands of other
places. Those could start failing after 10+ years of service for example, or
in some rather unusual corner cases.

Faith is a funny thing - once lost, it needs to be massively overcompensated
to come to similar levels as before, and even after that things are just not
the same...

------
cosmodisk
I am so called self taught developer.I learned how to write software out of
boredom at work. Subsequently,I wrote some parts of the system,my current
employer uses,that range from 'nice to have' all the way to 'mission
critical'. I allowed myself a lot of freedom in terms of errors, mistakes and
etc. The company provides training to people,so the worst that can happen is
someone may not get a correct email or internal user won't see an update on
training they were expecting.Now if I were working for Boeing and had to write
code that'd go into production,aka a working plane,I'd probably either say I
couldn't do it or do so many iterations that they'd would sack me...I couldn't
sleep for the rest of the life knowing that I pushed some update that
ultimately controls some parts of the plane and that it can go wrong any
time...

------
ekianjo
Why are they showing the compensation vs Boeing revenues in the beginning?
Does Boeing pay for compensation directly? I thought this was rather paid by
insurance companies, and had nothing to do with manufacturers?

~~~
desdiv
Boeing voluntarily paid compensation to the victims and their communities
directly. This is in addition to the travel insurance claims that the victims
could file for.

[0] [https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2019-07-03-Boeing-Pledges-
Suppo...](https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2019-07-03-Boeing-Pledges-Support-to-
Families-Communities-Affected-by-Lion-Air-Flight-610-and-Ethiopian-Airlines-
Flight-302-Accidents)

------
crististm
It is my hope that whatever bureaucratic process that allowed that to happen
will be chopped into pieces, burned into ashes and scattered into the four
winds.

Whatever will remain can continue building planes if it still can.

------
qwsxyh
The free market working at its most efficient.

~~~
bsaul
I’m curious to understand what you mean by free market. Civil aviation is
probably among the most regulated industry you could find, isn’t it ?

~~~
cultus
Actually, it looks as if it wasn't that strictly regulated, hence the hundreds
of deaths because Boeing was allowed to self-certify. The magic of the free
market was indeed at work here, producing value for shareholders.

~~~
fuzz4lyfe
Their competitors were highly regulated, preventing them from existing in the
first place. As always in incumbent firm wrote the regulations and defacto
decides who is in violation or not.

~~~
cultus
The economy cannot be separated from the government. If large capitalist
interests exist, they will exert power with the government, in the form of
influencing regulations or other rent-seeking. Thus you cannot have a "fair"
capitalist economy.

It would be nice if capitalism worked as it did in econ classes, but it
doesn't with real humans.

------
sundvor
"We did not cut corners or push the 737 Max out before it was ready,"

The family and friends of 346 people would beg to disagree.

------
mlang23
Anyone surprised that an U.S. company was actively trying to bypass
regulations to boost commercial success? If money is _all_ you are aiming for,
putting people at risk is suddenly not a problem at all.

~~~
qaq
Right this would never happen in EU oh wait VW AG

------
fcantournet
Classic SemVer :D

