> Can you imagine running a company that makes aeroplanes and not going to sleep each night panicking about all the lives you’re ferrying around up in the sky?
For my entire life, the most pervasive theme in executive leadership is that the _only_ responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders.
Boeing may reach a point where it has to stop killing passengers, but dead passengers aren’t an issue at all until it creates a major threat to their bottom line.
If you think it shouldn’t take many downed planes before that happens, then given the situation, the real question is why it hasn’t threatened their business enough yet.
> No company is safe. Boeing is exactly the type of company that won't know they're dying until they are dead.
Yes, but they're in a sufficiently protected region of state space guarded by landscape difficulty, moats, massive contracts and cash flows, the government, you name it.
You can't just build a better plane from zero and immediately start taking orders. You have to start with something small, tangential, and then grow into that market. That's still very hard to do in aerospace because the requirement is "don't kill people" yet the problem involves putting people in mortal danger.
I don't doubt that it could happen, but I think it's a very tall order.
> Can you imagine running a company that makes aeroplanes and not going to sleep each night panicking about all the lives you’re ferrying around up in the sky?
I dunno. I think that's a little melodramatic. There are a lot of activities in the world with dangerous failure modes, and flying is pretty far down the list in terms of impact. You could make the same argument about chemical engineers designing pesticide plants, insulin pump manufacturers, hell even folks doing car suspensions are probably responsible for more deaths than Boeing.
People do their jobs, and if the impact is low they'll live with it. Clearly Boeing's leadership thought they were doing OK. And even in hindsight they... kinda were? The MAX is the most dangerous airliner in decades, maybe a half century. But I'd still fly on it.
>> 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”.
It is the other way around. People should understand that adding pressure on teams delivering mission critical systems is dangerous. Intentions matter very little in this context, the outcome does.
>However, given the amount of Boeing planes out there, and the number of employees, the company dying would be harsh.
346 dead from wilful incompetence, followed by utter bullshittery, half-truths, outright lies and finally, when it has to admit what it has been doing, a desperate insistance that executives could not possibly have known.
And all the while fighting against them being grounded.
>>>Given how cozy Boeing is with the US government, I fear that it will be the engineers and lower managers who are nailed to the wall, not Boeing’s leadership
Tricky, unless the management specifically told them to ignore safety. Otherwise, "I'm the CEO and that's why I have xx thousand engineers"
> Given the scrutiny on this plane, do you think Boeing would be able to survive as an organisation if another one crashes? I'm surprised they're willing to risk it.
Did you think that after the first one crashed?
If a third one crashes, will your logic become even stronger in the aftermath of that?
> The only viable solution is an independent safety board (paid for out of Boeing profits) that supervises every aspect of design and production at Boeing and its contractors until Boeing learns how to build safe airplanes again.
At this point I’d go further than that. Their ability to manufacture and sell aircraft should be at stake. This needs to be an existential threat for Boeing to take it seriously.
> We are talking about an industry that consistently chooses safety above all else, regardless of profits and minor inconveniences. And for some reason that just doesn't seem to be the case here.
Or maybe it is the case here. We all seem to think it's obvious Boeing should ground this plane and yet they aren't. I hope Boeing aren't idiots and are making their decisions based on engineering factors we don't have.
It bothers me that when lives are lost, our first response as a greedy capitalistic society is to cut funding, considering there aren't really many competitors, and the switch-over costs for airlines would be prohibitive.
We should be funding efforts to investigate the heck out of this and make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm not sure how one would structure such funds to make sure they aren't abused, but I certainly don't want Boeing cutting more corners and hiring less-competent lower-salary aircraft engineers because they are now low on funding and need to get the plane out before some damn quarterly earnings report.
> Yes but do the flight crew have the ability to tell if a plane is safe to fly?
Do you have the ability to tell if a street is safe to cross?
Most of the time, yes.
Sometimes, you can't tell for sure, but you cross anyways.
Sometimes, you are dead wrong about your judgement. Shit happens. Nobody expects 100% certainty.
The problem here may be that Boeing may be falling to meet the expectation of 99.????% certainty, and regressing down to 99.????% certainty, due to a broken corporate culture.
> That is the effect that will cause Boeing management to do something about the safety problems.
And yet, here we are, it hasn't. The fact you can't get an Airbus for love nor money for the next decade doesn't help either.
> I dunno, someone would do something, these plane crashes are expensive and bad PR.
They are indeed. Largely for Boeing rather than the airline, at the moment.
> If you have enough money to hurtle through the air at a million meters per hour in a tin can, you have enough money to walk away from a plane ticket.
> mistakes can easily cost lives. I want to be able to sleep at night.
Everyone who works in the safety field has to deal with this. How do you think the MCAS engineers feel?
But let's rewrite history, and say Boeing decided to scrap MCAS before it ever shipped on a 737 MAX. Now let's say a MAX crashes from stalling on takeoff - the exact scenario MCAS was meant to prevent. How would those engineers feel? How would we be looking at Boeing if we knew there was work done on a prevention device, and the higher-ups decided to scrap it before it was completed?
No one engineer or manager is responsible for a tragedy. Organizations, sure, but no organization can be perfect. You can only try to use whatever power you have to guide it towards better practices and regulations.
> People are applying a heuristic and for many the outcome (correct in my opinion) is that Boeing should not be trusted.
That's how I see it. Boeing has already demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice safety and even human lives in exchange for greater profits and stock price increases. They then showed a willingness to lie and try to cover up their actions after it came to light that they caused the deaths of hundreds of passengers. They've also shown that they'll fight to avoid taking responsibility for the lives they took (https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-737-max-crash-victims...)
>because right now it looks like they cut some corners, the FAA let them, and families are mourning. Pilot error isn’t really the issue, it’s engineering, process, and training.
That doesn’t seem like engineering, process, nor training.
That looks like something connected to large scale corporate profit.
How did Boeing manage to gain self reporting to the FAA?
> Do you honestly think that there was anyone at Boeing that thought, "well, this aircraft is definitely unsafe and is going to kill a bunch of people, which will likely destroy this company and greatly damage the entire industry I've spent my whole career on, and that I and everyone I care for will regularly board and fly in, but hell, my stock options are due, so what the fuck, I think I'll organize a conspiracy to commit mass murder"? These were human and systemic failures that, like most human failures, were perhaps not innocent but understandable. Of course, there were warnings. There always are. The problem is that the real warnings are easy to pick out of the noise after the fact.
No, that would indicate thoughtfulness & deliberation. Everything that seems to have emerged indicates recklessness and a lack of commitment (at the company level) to sound engineering processes, bordering willful disregard.
> Yes, Boeing was too aggressive about reducing cost to compete with Airbus and they need some major reform because hundreds of people are dead. But ...
"Yes, Boeing killed hundreds of people due to their negligence, but think of the cost savings!"
For my entire life, the most pervasive theme in executive leadership is that the _only_ responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders.
Boeing may reach a point where it has to stop killing passengers, but dead passengers aren’t an issue at all until it creates a major threat to their bottom line.
If you think it shouldn’t take many downed planes before that happens, then given the situation, the real question is why it hasn’t threatened their business enough yet.
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