Diffuse responsibility is a real problem. 'Teaching to the test' is a real problem. Normalizing risk is a real problem.
Blaming individuals is very satisfying, and it's very easy to do with hindsight, but if you want large complex systems to work better, you have to get over individual blame. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying that we should stop looking for law-breakers, but I am saying that punishment will not lead to better outcomes in the absence of other positive actions.
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
Hyman G. Rickover, father of the US nuclear navy
Post-Enron accounting rules via Sarbanes-Oxley made it so that the CEO had to sign off on and certify the financial statements. The buck stopped there. [0]
Why not here as well?
Unless you are thinking about putting the system that incentivizes a CEO and company to do this on trial.
If the CEO goes to prison, other CEOs will care more than this one, if some compliance officer does, the next one won't be as willing to bend to implied pressure from leadership.
The I'd go over all the certification process. Any person who concealed information or misled in an official capacity goes to jail. That's the whole point of requiring titled engineers signatures. The buck stops with them.
The way to get less of an undesirable behavior is to make it lead to undesirable outcomes. Unless there is some other operative reason, you're right in another way - we don't have to care where that (dis)incentive comes from.
The firm owners are ultimately responsible - they are responsible for hiring the execs responsible for the firms' actions. Fine the criminal company so hard that shareholders of their future potential employers will think twice about the risks they might impose on their savings.
Of course, this is a national security concern, and so TBTF. Man, isn't the US a great place, if you're filthy rich?
>Boeing admitted that two of its 737 Max flight technical pilots “deceived” the FAA about the capabilities of a flight-control system on the planes, software that was later implicated in the two crashes, the Justice Department said.
...what exactly does that mean when "deceived" is in quotation marks? Seems like deceiving regulators would be a straightforward crime. Unless "deceived" means something other than the usual definition.
Or another way would be to temporarily send the company to "jail" meaning to suspend its operations for a while.
When you look at this example or what happens to banks when they support criminal activity like money laundering or tax evasion the fines are simply way too low for them to stop doing bad stuff.
Last time I checked neither of these individuals programmed the ECU of VWAG diesel engines to cheat emissions tests although some engineers were blamed and fired.
It all starts at the top.
Boeing should be forced to publish all trade secrets that were used in their planes which contributed to the deaths of these people (so basically all IP that Boeing owns), and they should have all their patents annulled.
The above comment is very, very uninformed. Aviation is a heavily regulated industry, totally unlike IT.
There's several legal avenues for individual prosecution:
1) False certification documents about MCAS performance were submitted to the FAA, so it would be very easy to find out who those people were, and who their managers were. The US government has no problem prosecuting people for fraud in the aviation world. (FAA certification is almost totally dependent on paperwork, both in mfg. and operations.)
2) The manager of the test pilots who wrote the critical SMS messages was fired, so that is another easily traceable route related to the above.
3) Southwest asked for a penalty of $1 million per airplane if type-specific traning was required, so both Southwest and Boeing negotiators agreed in a reckless manner to disregard airliner safety with that perverse incentive. (Reckless is a catchall in the FARs for pilots, but could be applied to companies and mfgs.)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.13
To give Congress credit, they are re-visiting the ODA delegation process because of MCAS, which Boeing abuses by having managers pressure ODAs:
https://www.aviationpros.com/aircraft/commercial-airline/new...
Boeing is the US' largest exporter, so should face intense government scrutiny as it affects not just passengers and suppliers, but all Americans.
Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot who has followed MCAS very closely, far more closely than anybody else on HN.
A closer scrutiny reveals exactly the opposite. It is the government that is too powerful, government tries to open an investigation with an explicit objective of jailing the executive. At some point Boeing has to ask how much it stands to lose if the executive goes to jail. Even though the probability is low, the DOJ has long arms and more resources to harass Boeing. $2.5B is not a fine but a bribe that an all powerful DOJ has extracted from Boeing.
$2.5B is still lot of money and 346 deaths is even bigger disaster for Boeing. Boeing did not benefit from 346 deaths on other hand it suffered massive losses. A selfish and greedy company like Boeing have far greater incentives to course correct rather than DOJ or US government. Remember how USA bombed countries while making completely fraudulent claims about WMD ? Who went to jail for that ?
"It is the government that is too powerful, government tries to open an investigation with an explicit objective of jailing the [person responsible]."
Oh no. Just wait until you learn what the job of the police is in a civil society.
> Boeing did not benefit from 346 deaths on other hand it suffered massive losses.
It absolutely did. It benefited up front from not having to redesign the 737 MAX to conform to global aviation standards. This allowed it to go to market faster, reduced development costs, and gave it an edge in sales against its competitor, the A320 family on the order books. You know, the one that didn't fall from the sky spontaneously. Boeing achieved this through lying and deception.
All this fine did was attenuate the benefit.
> Remember how USA bombed countries while making completely fraudulent claims about WMD ? Who went to jail for that ?
One unprosecuted crime doesn't mean all crime should no longer be prosecuted. Whataboutism is never a good look.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that an investigation was opened with the specific purpose of jailing an executive: I don't see any indication that was the case, and just about anyone in or outside of government could have predicted before the investigation that no executive would go to jail over this.
They don't. For example, 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination do not apply to corporations. Also, corporations have a right to an attorney but one is not provided to them free of charge by the government.
> But when it comes to criminal liability, the people in charge are not held accountable...
Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Martha Stewart, and others put in jail for corporate crimes would disagree with you.
As much as those names you named are important, they are peasants compared to power wielded by the big guys.
What then? Should we shut Boeing down? Should we arrest the executive team out of principle?
I think a lot of enormous fuckups like this are not directed by individuals, but more likely a miasma of incompetence that cannot be directly associated with any one person. It's more like we should arrest Harvard Business School professors for teaching MBA strategy wrong.
How about prohibiting them from holding executive positions in the future?
This argument is frequently put forth by ex-Boeing engineers. This is an apologia for Boeing's behavior which killed 346 people and endangered the lives of 1000s more and destroyed jobs/wealth around the world. These apologists want you to think that the unholy trinity of the McDonnell Douglas culture which infected Boeing, the decisions of Harry C. Stonecipher, CEO of McDonnell Douglas at the time of the merger and Dennis Muilenburg, the last CEO of Boeing who greenlighted the 737 MAX are responsible for this outcome.
So strong is the apologists conviction in the purity of Boeing's engineering culture that they ignore the fact that thousands of engineers worked on the 737 Max. Not a single engineer raised issues with the engineering of the aircraft. Not a single engineer wrote a blistering memo calling out its failing or quit in protest. They were all held in thrall, paralyzed and forced to go against their ethics, professionalism, decency by the power of this unholy trinity!
Eventually, all stellar organizations, public or private, become complacent (e.g. Israeli Intelligence Failure, 1973). Boeing made an unstable plane with a dangerous MCAS to get it to market fast. They then topped it off by making it rely on a single sensor. They then made the dual-sensor an upgrade. An undergraduate engineering student with a basic course on probability can see that this is tailor-made for disaster. Boeing made an essential safety feature an upgrade!! But wait there is more. They then proceeded to hide this monstrosity from every regulator and airline on the planet and insisted that the plane was no different in every aspect of its flight behavior than its predecessor which was over 30 years old and did not require additional safety training.
Boeing had become so criminally blatant that the head of airline training at Lion Air inquired about extra training for the 737 Max and they rebuffed him. After the Lion Air crash, Boeing proceeded to cast aspersion on the safety practices of Lion Air. Lion Air does have a spotty safety record but in this case, Boeing rebuffed their requests for additional training because it would set a precedent for other airlines in SE Asia. When that lack of training was a factor in the crash, Boeing proceeded to blame Lion Air. Chutzpah!
Released transcripts of messages show how Boeing employees worked in unison to ensure no extra simulator training was required. Great engineering culture obsessed with safety, this aint!
We need to start accepting that whatever stellar engineering culture existed at Boeing is dead. We as a society need to stop scapegoating imaginary forces in the past and giving Boeing engineers a pass. Let's agree that strong regulation is necessary to ensure the safety of Boeing Products.
[1] https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
[2] https://fortune.com/longform/boeing-737-max-crisis-sharehold...
In essence, the great engineering culture at Boeing was dead at the time of the 737 MAX debacle and the death of Boeing's previously near perfect engineering culture was directly responsible for the failure of the 737 MAX.
I do think the way you said it may be more true (with no evidence) that a management culture which had switched more to acquisition choked out good engineering culture. You are essentially correlating it with the acquisition in timeline.
Note I'm in no way attacking you, just adding what I've seen online and heard in bars.
What is plausibly the cause for the engineering fiasco of the 737 Max? Why go back to the merger in 1997 and why not blame the 9/11 attacks or the election of G.W Bush or Obama's for this disaster?
Why go back to the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas? Because it allows Boeing engineers to deflect blame for the terrible product they built and foisted on the flying public by coasting on their past reputations.
I don't think this is true. There was an HN thread some time ago on an article describing how one senior production manager, who was an engineer by background and had previously worked at Boeing as an engineer, looked at the design specs, talked to people he knew in engineering, realized there were problems coming, and did exactly what you describe: wrote a blistering memo, found it wasn't going to get listened to, and quit in protest.
Why would this matter? The MCAS software is the only thing that failed. It probably only involved a dozen engineers and they did their job to a reasonable extent. What if none of them were told that the pilots are not trained to be aware of the MCAS?
The real failure is that there was a pseudo autopilot software that completely overrode pilot control. Why did it override pilot input? Because managers wanted to sell it as a 737 upgrade with 0 training required. Making the 737 MAX safe does not neccesarily require better engineering, pilot training alone would be more than enough.
(Reference: In 2017, Boeing booked over $22 BILLION in revenue from the US government. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/01/02/ho... )
Which, by the way, is totally not state support, especially if anyone from Airbus is within hearing distance...
Sounds a bit like a like a fight club math answer. I wonder what a recall would have cost.
> There is no way a recall coordinator with a global view of the company's welfare in mind would have made the decision to go forward.
When the information about the sensors and software first emerged everyone was saying there was no way any one engineer would have not spoken up about it... It was later relieved they outsourced the software development to $9/hr engineers. It wouldn't be surprising if their "recall coordinator" did not speak up for one reason or another.
How much did they actually lose? I mean, excluding coronavirus essentially destroying passenger airflight... Boeing does not have competition in many areas. The US military won't buy Airbus, Dassault or Saab planes, the NASA won't exclusively shift to SpaceX because ULA space flight is actually a job program. On the passenger airflight side the only competition is Airbus who have limited capacity.
What a cruel joke
How about this: I'll shoulder that grave responsibility for a mere 50x the typical worker, and I'll settle for a golden parachute of just $6M. That's a bargain!
Unfortunately US justice is very unfair against foreign corporations.
We can’t know the small or incremental damage that VW’s emissions did to people’s health... but at face value, it feels like Boeing’s punishment is an order of magnitude or two too low.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/11/1...
>Boeing had around 450 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft built and awaiting delivery.
>Boeing has unfilled orders for over 4,000 737 MAX jets.
* 243.6 million fine
* $500 million into a fund for the families of passengers who were killed in the crashes
* $1.77 billion in compensation to airlines that were unable to use their Max jets while they were grounded
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/boeing-pay-25-bill...
For the most part, the U.S. Department of Justice saved some Fortune 500 companies from civil litigation costs.
Boeing is a national asset and has hundreds of marketing vendors in India.
Gonna boom under spaceforce and India vs. CCP.
Boeing is a national asset and it's gonna be institutionally owned heavily or dismantled and sold off into different units.
Gonna be wild to watch.
