Blow your whistle all you want but until something catastrophic happens, the whistleblowers would turn out the way the whistleblowers for the 737ng airframe cracking came out: fired and then ignored.
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.
It feels like the problem is cultural. If the culture doesn't allow enough time for confidence in deliverables, then what proof would you have? Often there are a million items that can go wrong (although all tests pass). So probabilistically something is wrong, but there's no solid item to latch on to.
How many people in the government knew about the NSA spying on citizens before Snowden finally spilled the info? That was a massive effort involving many (thousands?) of people. Then when Snowden reveals it, his life is destroyed and he’s forced to live in exile. Sends a very strong warning to any other potential do-gooders considering telling the truth.
I'm not sure why this got downvoted, I personally wasn't aware of the conditions on which boeing were making plane before the accidents. My gut feel is nobody did care before something really bad happen and having access to a journalist who is interested enough to make a story ain't simple when you're not in their network. As an example, I did notice a few months ago that twitter did receive identifying information about youporn users (here's a proof: https://archive.kerjean.me/public/2020/twitter.jpg). At that time, I did contact a few journalist from techcrunch, gizmodo and some linux techies but never got any answer and the story never went out
Eh. In that case, there _had_ been prior leaks, for years; they were just much less complete and taken less seriously. As far as I know, there was never a pre-production leak that Boeing employees thought the MAX was unsafe.
While true, Snowden position as administrator placed him outside the usual compartmentalization (because he worked on connecting separate parts of the infrastructure)[0], and placed him in a unique position to realize what was happening and to exfiltrate the proof. I suspect most of the other people who knew the whole picture, were a lot higher up the food chain.
[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.
Here on hn, on the other hand, there are plenty of people that say that they don’t see any problem in flying on the max once it is again in service. From my point of view I’ll happily let them be the guinea pigs while I’ll avoid at all costs to fly on that death machine.
As long as they give pilots proper training, I'd actually rather fly on the recertified MAX than certain other Boeing planes.
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)
Yep, the issue is the culture and the idea of "we are going to make subtle yet fatal changes to the plane, but not require pilots to learn about these changes" that's got everyone shook.
>They have gone though the whole plane with a fine toothed comb,
Are we sure this is happening? This is a modified airplane so they are checking the new addition but are they checking say the wheels or all the screws because some forces might be different and numbers changed and everything should be redone.
People have been talking about Boeing management grinding things down for years too; it's just that it finally had unignorable consequences. A lot of the difficulty with preventing and evaluating bad stuff is how long it takes for a big structure to rot.
They have only two flight computers - either of which are capable of crashing the plane. With only two its not always possible to know which is incorrect.
Regardless of how much you go over it you can’t fix a fundamentally broken design.
> 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.
More like they've done the bare minimum to get the planes back in the air. The entire point of the plane is to avoid having to certify a new frame ie avoid doing exactly what you're implying they've done.
They've already recommended simulator time as a requirement to fly it. The shared type cert to avoid retraining is kind of moot.
The sad thing is this could be seen as a successful (in the Pyrrhic sense) business move by Boeing in that they were given an impossible goal, secured sufficient sales to airlines, and show all indications of being on the road to getting away with it if there are still sufficient people out there who are still willing to fly on one afterward.
Just gotta be willing to crack a few eggs, and cash in on that goodwill on occasion, yet the business churns on regardless.
It's a bit sickening to be honest. To be faced with what we're finding, and to show all indications of just moving on with business as usual.
It makes it hard to take anything seriously anymore. Cripes, I used to hang aerospace over my teams as a "you could be in a situation where I'd reject this work wholesale because you haven't convinced me you've thought it through, and I don't feel like killing people down the road."
Now the tables have turned... Even there, in what I thought was the last bastion of "it absolutely must be provably right", it seems that wasn't ever the case, or if it was, the rot has set in so badly as to leave it unrecognizable.
Leaves me feeling like a Diogenes, searching desperately for someone who isn't cutting irresponsible corners, and is dedicated to not just achieving the mission, but caring about how they do it.
Sorry, bit of a tangent there... But jeez. I figured it'd be bad. Not this bad though.
Only per mile. Per journey it's the most dangerous transport typically used. Per hour it's about average.
This doesn't matter if you have to make a specific trip (the number of miles is fixed), but that's not always the case. Whatever you do, don't walk, that seems to be the most dangerous common mode of transportation (unless motorcycles are common).
"Aviation industry insurers base their calculations on the deaths per journey statistic while the aviation industry itself generally uses the deaths per kilometre statistic in press releases."
Your point that accidents per journey might be more interesting than accidents per passenger-kilometer is a very good one, however it seems like the data in the table in the Wikipedia article you linked is a bit old ("The following table displays these statistics for the United Kingdom 1990–2000").
If you take a look at the "Fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometres" plot in the same article, it looks like flying got a lot safer since 2000 (maybe ~10x?).
The conclusion that flying isn't a lot safer than other common modes of transport when you compare by journey is still correct though... (But maybe it is a little bit safer, or similarly safe).
The other thing is that the statistics for car travel include all journeys by car. You can do a lot to improve your own safety by avoiding the common risk factors: not driving drunk, driving in daytime (that also avoids drunk drivers), not being in an all-teenage vehicle, driving well-rested & so on. If you do that, per journey you'll be safer than in your regular commercial aviation airplane.
> don't walk, that seems to be the most dangerous common mode of transportation
Not walking is also a bad idea, though. I don't have numbers at hand, but I can imagine that a sedentary lifestyle gives you way more micromorts than the risk of traffic accidents when walking to work.
I'm confident I'm a safer driver than at least 50% of the people on the roads - if I thought pilots were only as safe as an average driver I'd be worried.
Everybody may think they are "skilled", but any given person can in principle assess their own risk more accurately than assuming they are average. Don't confuse safety with nebulous ideas of skill or ability.
You can compare your insurance rate with the average, and you can consider objective factors that are really blatant such as whether you drive drunk, or when falling asleep, or while texting. And of course you can compare the number of accidents and tickets you have to average.
even if that were true (statistically it isn’t), unlike with a plane roads aren’t so tightly controlled and other drivers are barely competent. head-ons happen all too frequently and i’m sure one of the victims is ... a safe driver.
driving isn’t unsafe because of your own (self-assessed) skill, it’s unsafe because of that other 50%.
no matter how safe of a driver you are, you should be worried.
I'm aware that people over-estimate their skill, I'd have been inclined to say "in the top 20%" otherwise, lol. Whilst my reaction time has slowed slightly, and my focus deteriorated a little with age (IMO), I've been driving cars for 25 years without an at fault collision (taxi driver hit me when I braked hard to avoid killing a dog -- we were sub 30mph otherwise I'd have chosen to hit the dog). Have avoided some accidents for sure. I also hold a full motorbike license, have driven minibuses and car&trailer pairs. I'm aged enough to have calmed down and having ridden motorbikes feel I've much more road awareness than the average driver.
Also, I considered head-ons, etc., where the injured party is not at fault - but whilst they increase the risk an experienced and competent drive can avoid some collisions, mitigate the harm of others, and will nonetheless reduce their chances of being in a collision from their side. If 50% of injured parties are the cause, and I can reduce that 50% by 50% then I've still reduced my chance of being injured by 25%.
Does anyone think that doesn't put me in the bottom 50% for risk?
Still, the point stands that I expect aeroplanes to be better maintained and have more redundant and fail-safe systems than a car; and expect pilots to be better trained and more competent (prevented from driving drugged/drunk/tired more than truck/car drivers, etc.) than the average car driver. So, aeroplanes only having the same per-mile safety as cars is [would be] terrible.
skill != safety, because how much of a safety margin you leave generally swamps most of the effect of skill. And your safety margin reduces the effect of other drivers' stupidity.
And I hate it when people say "statistically that isn't true". How can a fact about an individual be statistically not true? Is it statistically true that I have 2.4 (or whatever) children, even if I have none?
Sure, though many people aren't deciding between flying a 737 MAX and driving or taking a bus. They're often deciding between flying on a specific flight that uses a 737 MAX and flying at a different time and/or on a different airline that doesn't use a 737 MAX.
Unless they redesign the airframe, I don't think there is any way of fixing the aircraft. One of the requirements ought to be that the aircraft is capable of gliding when it loses power. Given that its airframe is unbalanced it will have a hard, neigh, impossible time "gliding". It will most certainly plunge to the earth killing all the souls onboard.
I mean, I have already flown on them dozens of times prior to the catastrophic events, so I’m not really opposed to boarding them again after recertification.
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.
I'm one of those who would fly it. It's about figuring probabilities rather than gut feel. The odds of me dying riding a motorcycle which I do sometimes are like 10,000x those of dying in any airliner crash.
You seem to be confusing "known unknowns" with "unknown unknowns". I find this unaccountably irritating because everybody intuitively knows the difference, and that it's huge, except when they pretend to be "rational".
What's the probability of something happening when the probability you are given is probably wrong?
1. You can't claim your risk of dying using a particular method of transportation is above another method just by looking at per mile death rates unless you travel a similar distance in both, or say it in a context of making a decision of using one or the other to travel from place to place (although to be precise the length of the trip depends somewhat on the used method).
2. The commercial airlines figure which you've used is not from using the particular method of transportation, 737 max, which the use of you are justifying with the comparison.
3. If you wear a helmet, don't ride drunk, don't speed and otherwise follow traffic rules it will make riding a motorcycle a lot safer than average.
Well, yeah it's complicated. From the perspective of an all knowing god your chances of dying in some way are probably either 1 or 0 depending on what fate will bring so practical probability estimates are guesses based on limited information. Based on my limited information I'd be happy enough to fly the max. It'll probably be the world's most scrutinised aircraft by the time it flies again anyway.
Guesses based on limited information need to include the information you do have, and not include information you don't have. If a probability doesn't reflect what you know and don't know, it's not valid, period, limited information in general not withstanding.
> Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?
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.
Indeed. Another thing consider is if someone blows the whistle it could leave all of their coworkers without jobs. Men and women with families, mortgages, bills and lives. That is a lot of guilt and a very heavy decision to make, especially when there is no consequence in sight. Now that hundreds of people have died as a result that guilt has waned.
Not that I want to defend Boeing, but it's easy to play Nostradamus and predict catastrophies to then only dig up the prophecies if they turn up true. The article doesn't say how much the claims were substantiated and backed up by the concerned employees.
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.
Also, this prophecy didn't come true. If anything it was completely ass-backwards - it's about the quality of the 737 MAX sim, not the plane itself, and it looks like Boeing's engineers believed internally that Boeing shouldn't have pushed so hard to release it given that existing 737 pilots didn't need simulator training on the MAX and felt safer flying on the MAX with pilots trained on the NG than they did about flying with MAX-simulator trained pilots. You may recall that the general narrative is that the crashes were, in part, the result of Boeing's desire to avoid MAX-specific simulator training.
Presumably internal employees are familiar with the design process of planes. Or do you suspect they make statements like this for every plane during th early stages?
I have no idea. I doubt anybody commenting in this thread does either, given the complete lack of context.
Given Boeing’s proven track record, you could potentially speculate that the comments are actually in reference to some serious failure. But the quote as it’s presented doesn’t provide any meaningful information.
> Given Boeing’s proven track record, you could potentially speculate that the comments are actually in reference to some serious failure
Read the whole sentence. Boeing does have a proven track record of serious failures, negligence, coverups... If you were inclined to speculate, you could speculate that this comment is in reference to some sort of serious issue that eventually made it into the production model. However the article doesn’t substantiate that implication (and it is only an implication).
The author of the article clearly wants you to come away from reading it with a diminished impression of Boeing. They have a clear profit incentive to make the article as outrageous as possible. A lot of people (myself included) already have a pretty poor opinion of Boeing, and I’d bet a lot of people who clicked on the article would be inclined to believe any negative claims made against them. The dangers of Fake News are often discussed on HN, and this is exactly the sort of situation where it is most important to exercise critical thinking.
That quote, without context, doesn’t reveal any meaningful information at all. I presume I’m getting downvoted because people think I’m defending Boeing, which I haven’t done once. I’m simply pointing out the danger of getting sucked in by outrage journalism, especially when it plays into your preconceived notions (no matter how well founded they are).
The greatest irony of all is that this quote doesn't impugn the quality of the 737 MAX in the slightest. It's entirely about the simulator--which isn't implicated in the MAX disaster since the pilots were not being retrained for it (i.e., using the simulator).
Bluntly, this is why companies have email "retention"[1] policies. Lots of products have internal emails about all the scary things that can (and will) go wrong. Its hard to put them into context, but if things do go wrong they will be all over the press.
Vague remarks about the design of the plane being unsound at any point in time prior to it being approved to fly passengers, doesn’t reveal any information at all about the soundness of the design of the plane that was eventually approved to fly passengers.
The source and year of the quote I took from the guardian article I referenced.
I’ve got no idea what you mean by ‘long before’, unless you somehow Switched what I was talking about - my point is exactly that the employees were discussing that they wouldn’t fly on it the year following the start of service. QED?
I feel like you haven’t read OP article, or the parent comments in this thread. The quotes I posted above are directly from the NPR article that this thread is commenting on.
I wasn’t making any comments regarding Boeing’s culpability, I was specifically commenting on the quality of the OP article. As those quotes are presented in the NPR article, they lack sufficient context to communicate anything meaningful, and based on what you’ve posted, appear to be reported in a factually incorrect manner (they directly contradict the guardian reporting, so at least one of them must be incorrect).
At least another paper using 2018 as the source year for that same quote.
How the hell this single quote can, ‘without context’ lack enough punch to convey anything meaningful is just wrong. Your attempt at being even-handed here seems totally misguided. If I met you on the street I would immediately assume you’re massively long Boeing. What’s the point? There are no redeeming features from the whole MAX story - every month another piece of disasterous news comes out about the practices of this company and the culture that allowed this to happen
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.
2: I will fly with you without even wearing shoes. (Realistically, I can't imagine why shoes would make a difference.)
3: I would let my family fly with you.
If you say you wouldn't put your family in a Max, then your trust in the Max is not at level 3. Logically, this is a very weak constraint; it only shows that trust < 3. Maybe trust is 2. That's what fingerlocks is saying.
However, vernacular language generally doesn't work that way. A common mode might come from the following train of thought:
- I don't trust this plane.
- How much do I not trust it? The MAXIMUM LEVEL, LEVEL 3!
- "I would not let my family fly on this plane."
Here, from a logical perspective, the person has confused "lack of level 3 trust" with "level 3 distrust". This is bad in a math class (the scope of the negation is wrong -- [not [level 3 trust]] vs [level 3 [not trust]]), but routine in ordinary speech.
This is missing the forest for the trees. The context is a passenger aircraft whose normal job is to transport families, so "level 3" is all that matters.
No, the context is internal communications between employees during the design and construction phase of the aircraft.
Imagine if your conversations of various bugs for a software project that you were building were released after the fact, what do you think they would sound like out of context?
I generally try not to write things at work that could look bad to the NY Times, but my point was just that it's overanalyzing to distinguish between levels of confidence here. In context, if the crashes hadn't happened, maybe it wasn't all that significant. But at least momentarily, it must have seemed important to the writer. It is true that often at work I'm concerned about something, and it's because I'm confused so when I'm reassured I realize my earlier comments are inapplicable.
> "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?