> When congressional investigators started digging into what caused the crashes, they found a range of problems at Boeing — both with the design of the Max 8's flight control systems, and with pilot training — and they found insufficient oversight by the FAA.
And at that layer of the onion the investigation stops, because the underneath is Congress' underfunding of the FAA, forcing the latter to resort to the sham of "self-inspection" by Boeing.
Congress does not investigate itself; legislators are never to blame. NPR, as usual, has no clue.
Inspectors could have spotted quality issues but I'm not convinced inspections would have found the MCAS issue. Boeing hid the feature, literally renaming it to sound less important, under existing trim control. Boeing emails showed management placed huge pressure internally to ensure no additional pilot training would be mandated. If the company is so willing to hide, obfuscate and outright lie, would external inspectors have helped?
Or, or, NPR management knows exactly what it's doing, and knows well not to bite the hand that feeds. The hand that feeds is extended by, of course, Congress!
Why does it seem like the average American doesn't care at all about exactly how much sway corporate interests hold in our government? Boeing's influence on politicians and regulatory agencies is a glaring example. The safety of passengers should come first, but somehow the 737 MAX keeps ending up getting the necessary approvals to carry passengers even after multiple crashes and now the doors falling off.
What could you possibly think average Americans could do about this if they did care? Who says there isn't many of them (like you) that do? What are YOU doing about it?
This is also a lesson of what the nature of government interests and protection of a company can do as much as it is the reverse. If Boeing wasn't so integral to national security and defense, and therefore too big to fail and catered to with defense budgets, maybe it would have failed and changed. It doesn't really have domestic competition. This is state failure and bureaucratic interests as much as corporate.
> What could you possibly think average Americans could do about this if they did care?
Reach out to their congress-person (and other political representatives) with their worries. If that is hopeless a priori, please abolish the district system (which tends to cause a two-party system) asap and implement something that actually represents the people.
I'm not sure how saying that electing a serial scammer & the actual impersonation of brutal, moral-less capitalism is an example of the culture of, and linked to, corporations capturing politics, is a lack of critical thinking. please show your work.
I think you're just one of the people who say "you can't think critically" or "you're biased" to anyone you disagree with, without actual honest structured thought yourself
It's indicative because you instantly think of and whine about Trump and his voters rather than realizing that this corruption is propped up by both parties. It's as if you think history and all these issues with defense contractors started in 2016.
Contractors like Boeing spread their operations across all 50 states specifically because that allows them to essentially bribe every politician with promises of creating jobs in their area.
Similarly, the revolving door between defense contractors and government offices is not just a Trump thing. Democrats claim to be opposed to the "brutal" capitalism you describe, yet they support and benefit from it just as much, even with as divided as the country is right now, you'll find fairly bipartisan support when it comes to handing over money to entrenched contractors like Boeing.
Hell, even now Congress is, in bipartisan agreement, trying to find excuses to write into law a means of handing Boeing $8B per year for 50 years in the form of SLS launches, regardless of need.
I agree that Trump is a particularly notable example of the issues with the country, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that not only him, but all of our ruling class is beyond redemption. It's increasingly frustrating how dysfunctional everyone is.
We really should be cracking down hard on companies like Boeing, prosecute their leadership, clawback money for failures and be assertive in expecting technology transfer to backup companies for national security stuff, similar to how AMD used to be a backup manufacturer for Intel chips.
It’s not about who voted for Trump or not. There’s democratic politicians who just as likely take beoing money.
The crux of it is that more and more education is being eroded and the education we do get is funneled through the lens of what’s profitable. Americans critical thinking ability is being eroded. And we all know the systemic issues that cause this.
> Americans critical thinking ability is being eroded.
It's more nuanced than that. The internet has made critical thinking harder than ever. The search for engagement means headlines and half truths are pushed over deep analysis. And, once a person shows any interest in taking a side they are funneled into a bubble that's hard to leave. Even the best critical thinkers are going to have problems as AI takes off.
The absolute impact of this situation is pretty minimal, as the reality remains that only two people have died on a US airline flight in the past 15 years.
There’s a lot of outrage in forums like this, where everyone is suddenly an expert on how to regulate extremely complex and expensive aerospace systems, but most people understand the system is still actually working fine.
My only question at this point: How has Airbus managed to avoid such problems so far? I really have begun admiring Airbus for this. It looks almost like Boeing is losing the grip on its core business and slowly decaying into some half-assed bureaucratic mess.
During the aughts, DERs (14 CFR section 183, employees of the company but "FAA Avatars") - were given relatively godlike powers compared to their role even in as recently as the 1990s. From what I understand that trend only intensified in the decades since.
With my own eyes, I've seen activities rescheduled for a "friendly" DER's shift, and I have seen those "Pet DERs" go back and forth to the government offices, because those are the ones the manufacturer trusts to hire back from government service. Supposedly, the FAA offices around Puget Sound are thoroughly infiltrated with Boeing or Boeing-Subcon rotating door staff like this, but take that with a grain of salt.
I think it's this sort of abuse that's primarily coming under the microscope, but if I'm being honest, the whole DER scheme needs to be reset to something viable.
I mean, cmon. If I am employed by X, but I am an FAA DER, who do you think I am going to side with? The guy who pays my mortgage, or the guy who gives me a fancy shingle to hang on the office? That's a role that should have sharply defined boundaries.
Isn’t it in both the FAA and Boeing’s interest to produce safe and reliable airplanes? It seems like the regulatory picture is not effectively fulfilling its duties, but the ultimate responsibility is with Boeing’s leadership structure for promulgating a culture where design lapses can persist and human error can be compounded.
Yes, but it’s always a question of timeframe and personal distance. One of the insidious problems behind the modern MBAs’ veneration of Jack Welch is that GE always made its numbers, irregardless of the long-term cost to the company. If you’re in a position where your personal compensation depends on something going on a particular schedule, such as a huge sale of airplanes once a new model is approved, it’s going to be very easy to tell yourself that it’s “just”government red-tape delaying your cabin cruiser and the “safety Nazis” are just over-concerned. The odds are good that nothing will happen for years so you might not even be there when it happens, and complex failures usually mean there will be some complicating factors so the guys who made bad calls might be telling themselves that everything would have been fine if it wasn’t for someone else’s actions.
Somewhat in the same vein as what acdha says, but you're dealing with multiple goals and incentives, some ideological.
acdha covers the most important ideological obstacle: financialism. Basically, the notion that if you're good at managing money, you're good at managing everything[1]. This is itself an ideological proposition, ironically resembling the late-Soviet tendency to inject "marxist" or "socialist" into every branch of learning, because, well, if you know class dynamics, you know everything.
Some might say, "Regulation is good, we need a very large and meticulous government-managed safety group, because large capital projects with little safety margin require government involvement". The risk here is creating an unnecessarily hostile relationship with industry, which could increase scope until productivity falls below a theoretical floor. This is starting from "regulation is good", and it's going to want to prove the point.
Others might say, "government entities are ipse facto incapable of meeting goals, therefore we need to eliminate or decrease regulation so industry has greater freedom to establish safety practice." The risk here is when industry is operating under a different set of incentives (see, again, acdha's point on financialism), their goals don't align with value (reliability, safety, performance), but rather on the revenue, or even complex derivatives thereof. This is another ideological incentive, but there's a risk of a death spiral: regulation is bad and stupid -> shrink it -> bad things happen -> proof that regulation is bad -> regulation is bad and stupid.
[1] I'd posit that Welchian financialism is actually not even good at making money, over a risk horizon longer than a few years (or even a few quarters), but it's quite good at belching out cash in a very short term.
Boeing's relationship with government agencies is beyond alarming. There needs to be better oversight and accountability for the sake of both passengers as well as workers in the aviation industry. People's lives are more important than profit. I can't believe this is a controversial position in our society.
Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, RTX (Raytheon), etc are essentially subsidiaries of the DoD, with privatized returns. They are too vital to the US military to be allowed to fail. Many countries like Russia and China have more overtly state-owned weapons manufacturers, whereas the U.S. pretends that theirs are legitimate free-market suppliers. When your business is deemed essentially to national security, and when the government signs trillion-dollar multi-decade contracts for equipment and maintenance, market forces no longer apply.
There is no guarantee that a country has to have a leading-edge aircraft manufacturer. On either the civilian or military side.
If companies lose too much money and don't receive bailouts, they simply cease to exist.
And you can't magic a new one on demand, given the specialized expertise and subcontractor requirements for something this complex.
So the reality is the government is stuck with a multi-variable optimization problem -- what combination of price, competition, and sustained R&D/production capability is best?
There is no easy answer. The modern, less-competitive, merged market is a deliberate consequence of the US refusing the spend Cold War levels of money to keep a larger number of manufacturers afloat.
Beoings relationship with the U.S. only barely starts at commercial planes. They support the U.S. mission militarily. It is and should be alarming but also not surprising. The gov cozies up with any corporation that can further its interest
If that's how they cut corners in civilian aviation, which is used by the public all the time, how can they cut corners when they deliver obscure military hardware that just sits in the warehouse waiting for WW3?
On the one hand, Boeing fucked up the project badly. On the other hand, the contract was written so Boeing ate the $5B+(?) in rework / deficiency remediation.
Reading more around it, Northrop Grumman won the initial contract with an Airbus model and Boeing complained, got the proposal rewritten in their favour. They had an official who passed them info and got a highly inflated contract written, who was then jailed for corruption, Boeing was fined and the CEO was fired. Yet the US is still going with them for the tankers despite the ongoing problems that still aren't resolved. The Airbus version has now been in service in other countries for 10+ years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC-X
From memory, without looking back through Wikipedia, the original contract award was killed. Then Boeing won the new bid.
Acquisition at that level is extremely cutthroat, so who knows what happened.
The broader perspective is that the current major aircraft contracts are:
- F-35 Lockheed-Martin
- B-21 Northrop Grumman
- KC-46 Boeing
- X-37 (Space) Boeing
- MQ-25 (Naval Refueling) Boeing
That seems like a pretty fair spreading of contracts among the remaining majors, especially if you had less faith in Boeing to produce combat equipment, but still wanted to maintain it as a company.
We do know what happened though. Boeing used an insider to pass information about their competitors bids and then gave them a high paying job with a large sign on bonus.
They got the contract killed because they knew they could work up a furor about a European design being used by the US. Of course it's fine in the other direction.
There's legitimate reasons to not want to depend on an ally for equipment but in this case it seems that Boeing haven't been able to deliver on it at all. Losing might have been a good kick up the ass to improve for the next time this type of contract comes around.
> But the longstanding special relationship between the U.S. government and Boeing has come under growing scrutiny, particularly after two crashes involving Boeing's 737 Max 8 plane, in 2018 and 2019.
> The head of the FAA says it's time to reexamine the longtime practice of delegating some of the agency's oversight responsibilities to Boeing employees, raising the possibility of moving some of those duties to a third party.
Third party? I’m no expert, but I reckon the FAA should shift the FAA’s responsibility of Federally Administering the Aviation industry to the FAA. It would probably be a real bummer to have all of that sudden accountability and such, and to be fair I’m sure he didn’t assume he’d have that responsibility when he took the helm at that particular critical government regulatory agency. However, ensuring the safety of airplanes and protecting one of the US’s most important industries from the incompetence of grubby-fingered, greedy, executives might be a worthwhile pursuit.
I wonder why the FAA is held to such a higher standard than other regulatory agencies like the SEC, FTC, USDA, and FDA who arguably have far less objectivity, and whose failures are so much more frequent and have wrought so much more damage on the lives of the public?
FAA involves international cooperation whereas most of the rest handle only internal US matters.
Things that could be passed over in traditional wheeling & dealing of US politicians corruption won't fly (pun intended) because failures will get international consequences and scrutiny and tend to involve big medially visible tragedies (and not white collar crime or slow and unmarketable deaths of poor aka nobody important).
Noticeably, two times that president pushed a deregulation policy on FAA, the result was deadly accidents - DC-10 cargo door issues (Nixon) and 737 MAXX development (policy pushed under Bush Jr).
Additionally, FAA and related orgs elsewhere tend to take "regulations are written in blood" even more than regular pilots, and thus there's a drive to self correct even in face of problematic political reality.
Commercial airline failures often lead to sudden and large-scale loss-of-life. I don't know that you can say the same for products and services regulated by the other agencies you mentioned.
I also don't know that I agree with your assertions. Do you have further evidence about FAA is held to such a higher standard than other regulatory agencies and how those other agencies failures are so much more frequent and have wrought so much more damage on the lives of the public?
The FAA isn't held to a higher standard, that's the entire point of this article and the discussion around it. We can and should oppose corruption in all government agencies, and if the FAA is where we can get enough will to start then so be it!
You act like it’s possible to be perfect and that accidents don’t happen in this world. why don’t you hold car makers to the same expectation just because they only go in two dimensions instead of three? Every company has bad workers that do bad jobs even mission critical jobs that endanger lives
We actually do, the main reason there's less scrutiny is that a car can stop, an aircraft stopping is a completely different deal. And when it comes to airliners it involves way more possible damage and lives lost.
The thing is, we have regulations on how one has to run aircraft manufacturing, maintenance, repair, and operations, BECAUSE of all of that.
Complying with them is considered cost of doing business. If you can't, it means you're no longer fit for the market.
And Boeing pretty clearly let the quality assurance required of them fail.
Do you know when people talk about aliens coming to visit? We only discuss whether they exist or not but nobody seems to have a problem with the fact that beings that can traverse solar systems also crash.
As an investor you should know that past results are no guarantee of future performance. There’s no guarantee that airline travel continues to be safe.
The 737 has had four major generations. Each were safer than the last until the 737 Max. The safety history of the 737 overall was not a reliable indicator of the safety of the 737 MAX.
737 hull losses per million departures:
Original: 1.75
Classic: 0.71
Next Generation: 0.17
non-MAX (cumulative): 0.2
MAX: 4.0
This is the reason "past performance is not indicative of future results" is plastered all over every investment website.
I’m sorry to inform you that just because of plane crashes doesn’t actually change the value of the company at all. First off the plane was purchased by someone else already, so they lose the plane. Second Boeings orders are placed in advance. You have to put up half the money before they even start to build the plane nobody’s gonna back out. There were hundreds of crashes in the 1970s today. We average about one every three years. The Boeing 777 is the safest airplane of all time. Followed by the 767 followed by the 757. Member airbus just crashed, although wasn’t their fault but things happen. If anything, it shows how strong the aircraft is, that a door can blow off on the thing stay together. Do you remember the Hawaiian airlines flight?
And at that layer of the onion the investigation stops, because the underneath is Congress' underfunding of the FAA, forcing the latter to resort to the sham of "self-inspection" by Boeing.
Congress does not investigate itself; legislators are never to blame. NPR, as usual, has no clue.