Boeing under investigation... again....

If you see something, don’t say something, for 1/3rd of the guys designated by the FAA in ensuring safety. That’s not good. What doesn’t make sense to me is why did they outsource the responsibility to the guys who will have a conflict of interest? I know we have imagined how bad ATC would be if it were outsourced to the US airlines.
 
masloki said:
If you see something, don’t say something, for 1/3rd of the guys designated by the FAA in ensuring safety. That’s not good. What doesn’t make sense to me is why did they outsource the responsibility to the guys who will have a conflict of interest? I know we have imagined how bad ATC would be if it were outsourced to the US airlines.
Click to expand...
Canada and the U.S. have done that in most industries as a cost-cutting measure. Actual visits from government inspectors are rare these days in everything from meat packing to healthcare to aircraft manufacturing to construction.
 
“We take these matters with the utmost seriousness…”

This is a variation of the common response to safety related questions. Of course everyone knows that if something is of “upmost seriousness” it would be dealt with before someone is compelled to blow the whistle or defend their decisions.
 
TrueCourse said:
“We take these matters with the utmost seriousness…”

This is a variation of the common response to safety related questions. Of course everyone knows that if something is of “upmost seriousness” it would be dealt with before someone is compelled to blow the whistle or defend their decisions.
Click to expand...

My last agency's network group's standard reply was "we have a team of experts working on it." Which, technically speaking, wasn't always a lie. It didn't mean that there was any expectation that things would change, though.

I think that part of the problem with government/industry regulation is that it's too easy to monetize the penalties, and part of the problem is that some companies have been allowed to get large enough that it's politically difficult to just let them fail. I'll get a lot of flak for this, but I think the country would be better off if Boeing were split into military and civilian aircraft builders. We were all better off with multiple companies building both.
 
masloki said:
If you see something, don’t say something, for 1/3rd of the guys designated by the FAA in ensuring safety. That’s not good. What doesn’t make sense to me is why did they outsource the responsibility to the guys who will have a conflict of interest?
Click to expand...
The problem is, where does the FAA find engineers with adequate experience in building/certifying commercial transports? There are only two companies in the US building the full-size jets, and one of them does its engineering in Europe.

So you're basically trying to hire the experienced Boeing engineers to do a non-design job for less salary than Boeing or Airbus would be happy to pay them.

Recent retirees are a good choice, but that means the FAA ranks get a constant turnover.

When the engineer strike happened ~20 years ago, Boeing was shocked to find out that the DERs were covered by the union. Boeing thought it could just continue to roll airplanes off the factory floor, but not if the DERs were out. After the strike, Boeing tried unsuccessfully to re-categorize them as management.

Ron Wanttaja
 
wanttaja said:
The problem is, where does the FAA find engineers with adequate experience in building/certifying commercial transports? There are only two companies in the US building the full-size jets, and one of them does its engineering in Europe.
Click to expand...
That's one of the problems with regulatory agencies in general: the government doesn't/can't hire the people who have the experience and knowledge of those that work in industry. And that results in one of 2 things: what we see with Boeing or more regulations for "administrative convenience" to let bureaucrats or less experienced folks do an adequate job. We could most likely avoid a bunch of regs (and reduce the need for staff) if the government would/could hire the best and brightest.
 
Since the days of the Jack Welch management style, they don't want to work for Fortune 100's, either. So it comes down to pay/benefits, promotional opportunities, and overall working environment. Just cogs in the machine at most places.
 
Meh, a bunch of people will die. Boeing will just pay the fines and move on. SOP.
 
wsuffa said:
What cash value does Boeing put on a human life?
Click to expand...
Apparently not much. It seems like it's just a cost of doing business. I would not be surprised if it was factored into the budget.
 
Mxfarm said:
Can’t imagine the best/brightest would want to work for a bureaucracy regardless of pay.
Click to expand...
Some do. The thing is, if you're one of the best and brightest, you can (maybe) accomplish 10x as much as the average person, but that's a hard stop. If you want to see anything more than that happen, you're going to have to do it in cooperation with other people. To do really big things, you need thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people, and it requires a lot of bureaucracy to coordinate that many people.

Aid is a good example. Bill Gates managed to do it right with his foundation by mostly directing money to governments or other aid organisations to do the work, but when big egos like Greg Mortenson ("Three Cups of Tea"), Jeffrey Sachs (millennium villages), or Canada's own Kielburger brothers (WE Charity) try to fly solo because they think they're more brilliant than everyone else, the results are almost invariably catastrophic.
 
wsuffa said:
What cash value does Boeing put on a human life?
Click to expand...
$1-3M for a single person, $5-10M for a family person head of household What's interestingly morbid is the payout is lower for instant death as opposed to being trapped in wreckage suffering for a period of time ☠️
 
Robert Gee said:
$1-3M for a single person, $5-10M for a family person head of household What's interestingly morbid is the payout is lower for instant death as opposed to being trapped in wreckage suffering for a period of time ☠️
Click to expand...
They probably factor in age too. An old geezer probably isn't worth the same as a kid. Ugh!
 
In my career as an engineer in the USAF aircraft development business, I encountered some pretty stupid people on both sides. Quite a job getting them off my projects wether they were contractors or on the USAF side.

The worst were those who followed rules without understanding why they existed and how they applied to the particular tasks at hand, if they did at all.

Just one example. Douglas offered and signed up for a requirement that the C-17 tires last 200 landings. Think about it, an almost 600000 lb MTOW airplane having tires lasting 200 landings on anything from concrete to gravel to who knows what. The USAF tried to enforce it. I ignored it and told each side to pound sand and moved on.

Cheers
 
Book review:

How decades of deskilling at Boeing doomed two 737 MAX flights – author dissects the death of its safety culture at the hands of corporate profiteers
  • Aviation reporter Peter Robison charts the hollowing out of a once-great engineering company by managers focused on narrow corporate self-interest and profit
  • Their cost-cutting, the firing of thousands of engineers and a disregard for safety led to the crashes of two brand new Boeing 737 MAX airliners, he writes
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post...-decades-deskilling-boeing-doomed-two-737-max
 
"The FAA surveyed 32 of the roughly 1,400 Boeing employees who are deputized to work on the FAA's behalf. Of those surveyed, one-third raised concerns. "
32 is a pretty pitiful sample size...
 
Mtns2Skies said:
"The FAA surveyed 32 of the roughly 1,400 Boeing employees who are deputized to work on the FAA's behalf. Of those surveyed, one-third raised concerns. "
32 is a pretty pitiful sample size...
Click to expand...

possibly although I’m more stunned that the FAA has 1400 “deputies” at Boeing
 
Hengelo said:
FAA has 1400 “deputies” at Boeing
Click to expand...
..yeah, agreed

Mtns2Skies said:
32 is a pretty pitiful sample size
Click to expand...
I agree, but stats people have used '30' as a rule of thumb for statistical sample sizes forever, because it's the cut off for z-test and t-test. If just one or two of the 32 they asked had an issue.. sure, that's dubious.. but for 10 to 11 of them.. probably warrants a deeper look. If 10 of the 32 planes in a club crashed we'd be safe to assume the club had some underlying issues, vs if one goes down
 
Hengelo said:
possibly although I’m more stunned that the FAA has 1400 “deputies” at Boeing
Click to expand...
When you consider the tens of thousands of assemblies that go into a large jet, maybe it's not so surprising. You'd need a lot of different kinds of specialists.
 
TrueCourse said:
“We take these matters with the utmost seriousness… unless the cash is provided in small, unmarked bills, in a Nike duffel bag, late at night, in an unremarkable location to be determined…..”

This is a variation of the common response to safety related questions. Of course everyone knows that if something is of “upmost seriousness” it would be dealt with before someone is compelled to blow the whistle or defend their decisions.
Click to expand...


Corrected
 
I'm old enough to remember the phone company monopoly. The best thing we ever did to telecommunications in this country wasn't inventing the Internet, it was splitting up AT&T. Yet we let all the aerospace companies merge to the point we can't let them fail when they need to. Just my 2 cents. I'm sure there are a lot of good people at Boeing. Their leadership failed, though.
 
David Megginson said:
….
Aid is a good example. Bill Gates managed to do it right with his foundation by mostly directing money to governments or other aid organisations to do the work, but when big egos like Greg Mortenson ("Three Cups of Tea"), Jeffrey Sachs (millennium villages), or Canada's own Kielburger brothers (WE Charity) try to fly solo because they think they're more brilliant than everyone else, the results are almost invariably catastrophic.
Click to expand...

So the path to success is to forgo big egos ( aka entrepreneurs ) and instead outsource your money/resources to government bureaucracies …. that’s pretty innovative, in the late 19th century sort of way ….but still, some truly outside of the box thinking for sure.
 
Warmi said:
So the path to success is to forgo big egos ( aka entrepreneurs ) and instead outsource your money/resources to government bureaucracies …. that’s pretty innovative, in the late 19th century sort of way ….but still, some truly outside of the box thinking for sure.
Click to expand...
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, what we have now is the worst possible approach — except for all the others that have been tried. Nobody claims that the current aid system is ideal; it's just that everything else ends up much worse, especially the big-ego, vanity approaches.

I (and many others) think what we need is for more money to flow directly from donor countries to local/national NGOs in aid-recipient countries, but that's difficult, because the donor countries don't have the ability to evaluate a local NGO in, say, Somalia or Bangladesh, and they're also used to much larger grants (e.g. $1m, not $10k). Right now, the iNGOs (like Save the Children) and agencies (like UNICEF) act as intermediaries — they have offices on the ground in the aid-recipient countries and relationships with the local NGOs, so they know who has what skills and who is reliable. They can take those $1m grants, split them up, project manage, and hand out $10k grants, but they take a big cut, and also don't give the local NGOs any extra for administrative overhead, so it's hard for them to rent office space, retain staff, etc.

I'm not sure what the best solution is, but before I came into hospital, I was working on a prototype to map out the local NGOs' past experience and partners, so that (for example) USAID or the UK FCDO could go and find NGOs who have done teacher training in Hargeisa Province (Somalia), and see that they've worked with UNICEF or other recognised partners. Other people are trying other approaches. We'll get there, but we're going to have to change attitudes towards aid, especially the White Saviour/Colonial attitudes where most people think aid means sending (mostly white) people from rich countries to "fix" things in (mostly non-white) poorer countries, rather than transferring funds so that the poorer countries can fix things themselves.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top