FAA, Boeing Blasted Over 737 MAX Failures
On Wednesday, the Transportation Committee Blasted FAA, Boeing Over 737 MAX Failures
The 238-page document, written by the majority staff of the House Transportation Committee, calls into question whether the plane maker or the Federal Aviation Administration has fully incorporated essential safety lessons, despite a global grounding of the MAX fleet since March 2019.
After an 18-month investigation, the report, released Wednesday, concludes that Boeing’s travails stemmed partly from a reluctance to admit mistakes and “point to a company culture that is in serious need of a safety reset.”
The report provides more specifics, in sometimes-blistering language, backing up preliminary findings the panel’s Democrats released six months ago, which laid out a pattern of mistakes and missed opportunities to correct them.
In one section, the Democrats’ report faults Boeing for what it calls “inconceivable and inexcusable” actions to withhold crucial information from airlines about one cockpit-warning system, related to but not part of MCAS, that didn’t operate as required on 80% of MAX jets. Other portions highlight instances when Boeing officials, acting in their capacity as designated FAA representatives, part of a widely used system of delegating oversight authority to company employees, failed to alert agency managers about various safety matters.
Boeing Purposely Hid Design Flaws
The Financial Times has an even more damning take in its report Boeing Hid Design Flaws in Max Jets from Pilots and Regulators.
Boeing concealed from regulators internal test data showing that if a pilot took longer than 10 seconds to recognise that the system had kicked in erroneously, the consequences would be “catastrophic”.
The report also detailed how an alert, which would have warned pilots of a potential problem with one of their anti-stall sensors, was not working on the vast majority of the Max fleet. It found that the company deliberately concealed this fact from both pilots and regulators as it continued to roll out the new aircraft around the world.
In Bed With the Regulators
Boeing’s defense is the FAA signed off on the reviews.
Lovely. Boeing coerced or bribed the FAA to sign off on the reviews now tries to hide behind the FAA.
Only One Way to Stop This
There is only one way to stop executive criminals like those at Boeing.
Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them to prison for life, then take all of their stock and options and hand the money out for restitution.
Mish
The focus at the House Committee meeting, was the failure of MCAS stall avoidance system, for the Boeing 737 Max. It was the failure of the MCAS system, that resulted in the crash of 2 Boeing 737 Max Airliners.
The problem with this scenario is, management was encouraged, by senior members of the project, not to build the 737 Max, but to design a new plane. The 737 a forty year old design, would require a larger , heavier , more powerful engine. The CFM Leap engine, would require a modification to the engine pod, moving the engine forward and upward. This modification would allow for the proper ground clearance. The problem is, this modification would alter the Center Of Gravity of this aircraft, A crucial factor in maintaining control of the aircraft. An out of center condition, would most likely result in a stall condition. Instead of designing a proper airliner, Boeing decided to correct the stall problem with the MCAS software program with sensors.
Many attempts have been made to correct the stall problems have been made without success. Boeing has been deceitful in not reporting these issues to the FAA. Personally, I see no corrective action on the 737 Max, beside adapting the MCAS program. The program is nothing more than a giant bandaid.
This sentence below makes me think whoever wrote this doesn’t understand how regulatory agencies work with companies like this, because it’s utterly ridiculous:
“Lovely. Boeing coerced or bribed the FAA to sign off on the reviews now tries to hide behind the FAA.”
Nobody coerced or bribed anyone. These regulatory agencies, whether we’re talking about the FAA in aerospace or the FDA in medical devices – nobody coerced or bribes. They don’t need to. These agencies become like lap dogs for the biggest companies – I’ve worked at a high level in both industries for years.
Nobody is going to go to jail, and if anyone does it’s not going to be executives – especially when they regulators are the ones who abdicated.
Mish, I wholeheartedly agree. These bloody bastards operate as if the Deep State has their backs, which they do, of course.
Reminds me of when the car manufacturers ran the numbers on people killed because of a defect versus the cost of fixing said defect.
Money victorious, people dead.
This read made me laugh. Very funny stuff. I’m am headed to the store on my unicorn now.
[May 17, 2019] I disagree. Quadrupling the authority limit (on the angle of trim) of the MCAS without telling the FAA and revising their submissions is surely black letter fraud.
[Oct 24, 2019] Not incompetence and greed. These are easy sins to admit to when not doing so would be worse. Fraud and the rule of law is what should be being discussed.
[Jul 7, 2019] It’s not just the mistakes that were made. It’s also the fraud committed in getting the thing approved. Nor is the FAA free of blame. But revising the authority of MCAS to 4× the original without resubmission of the plans is simply black letter fraud.
In the game of politics, no one goes to prison anymore. Boeing is just another political animal.
My father-in-law was a high level police executive in Denver and his opinion was that in white collar crime it is almost impossible to get a conviction, because none of the jurors can understand it. Having served on a Federal jury and a state jury, I have to agree.
Maybe the prosecutors don’t want a conviction, just the illusion they’ve done everything they they could so they can advance their career. Medical damage lawsuits are similarly complex, yet plaintiffs’ attorneys are able to find experts who are good at communicating to the average person.
There is civil court, take their money
Where there’s smoke; there’s fire.
Laws are made for punishing small fries, not for big fish like Boeing executives and FAA officials
Dennis Muilenburg is the man first in line who must be held responsible for the demise of Boeing
He’s already been fired, so they can’t prosecute him.
Say what? What is your working theory that an action by a corporation such as firing a CEO somehow grants that person immunity from prosecution? But, the Max was announced in 2011 and entered service 2017, so his predecessor should also be indicted.
I agree….and he got a bonus on leaving. I will never trust boeing again, especially with the max plane…
Too Bad . . . Nobody goes to jail these days . . . just a small fine . . .
Prosecutions are for Little People
Z; use the proper terminology or the thought police will be at your door. The new term for us is the “POORS!”
Barr’s DOJ does not prosecute crimes like these. It’s vey unlikely they’ll go after any Boeing executives
To be fair these executives would be just as safe in a Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton or any other administration. Ultimately there is no personal accountability for the well connected.
Not only will Boeing execs not be held accountable, the taxpayers will eventually get to pay for their willful mistakes, I’m pretty sure. Because what’s good for Boeing is good for America. Right?
Eddie_T you nailed it. Just as GM has so much DoD business the DoD and federal government cannot afford for that company to go under, why do you think it is called Government Motors? Same with Boeing though they are not building the F35 or other gigantic next gen fighter, they make parts for most aviation that the military depends upon.
Oct 31, 2019 – Boeing received $23.4 billion in government contracts in 2017 from the Pentagon, which makes for roughly a quarter of its net revenues.
The Max is a dangerous artifact of unregulated Wall Street culture that puts short term profits ahead of any other considerations and that is what we need to end before it ends us. Going after Boeing execs that made actual decisions with this ruling ideology is just the start, corporate execs have to be made accountable. The Max is a fundmentally flawed craft that should be decertified. And it would not even cost that much to change their design so that those unstable characteristics are resolved. Of course it will defeat the purpose of the Max, a two engine jet that is both powerful and efficient to the point where it can compete in a market that carriers were demanding more efficiency out of jets, with more range and more payload capacity. Boeing decided not to design a new generation of plane to compete, instead they reworked a 50 year old body with new engines that are too large for the plane, requiring nacelles to move the engines up off the ground and forward. It is an unstable platform subject to stall.
So it is not just that they made decisions they knew would be unsafe, but it depicts the inability of American enterprise to compete over any but about a 90 day timeline, till the next quarter, and because of that the US industrial lead has been lost and will go the way of the brontosaurus.
Politically the GOP on the right is okay with this as long as they and their patrons get appropriate bribe money, and the democrats are okay with it as long as their constituants have middle class employment.
I totally agree there should be individual liability. And the report is correct that the FAA was a captured regulator. The irony is that the Senate and House probably contributed to that regulatory capture by way of budget pressure.
There are strong parallels to the Financial crisis of 2008 here
They will never be held criminally negligent. For the same reason car execs would never either. Because, generally speaking, you can’t imprison someone for doing their job badly. The companies can be sued, but no one will be held accountable for company mistakes.
I agee there is a high bar but it is possible. Trump administration has not pursued such cases but a Volkswagon executive was held liable for misconduct. Sarbanes Oxley was a law that was intended to bring individual responsibility but in practice its failed. The bar is higher and the defendants needed to clerly be aware they were breaking the law. The typical standard is to the corporation is a person and the officers are protected but there have been cases recently in fact against drug copany executives
We’re not talking negligence here. I think that’s key
I think there has to be some effort to ensure that the C-Suite level people, particularly the CEO, are held personally accountable with punishment including jail time and stripping of assets in cases of malfeasance or gross negligence.
Boeing should be shut down…..
KH, there is doing your job badly which implies you are unable to discern outcomes of your work, and then there is doing your job so negligently that you compromise safety in a knowing manner. The people at Boeing knew for a fact that there was a high probability people would die as a direct result of their decisions when they made them. Yet they traded away those lives for profits and the decision was how many lives could be lost before it was unacceptable to regulators and the population, a strictly actuarial calculation. Just as tire manufacturers know people’s lives and those of their loved ones literally ride on their products, they know that a certain death toll is inevitable, and their warranties are built around those assumptions. But in this case the choices are a bit more defined, you may survive an auto accident due to faulty tires, you will not survive a jetliner stall or hopelessly confused pilots that are fighting an automated onboard system that seeks to crash the jet.
Boeing needs to be dismantled and parted out. It’s execs need fair trials. If found negligent and guilty of placing greed over public safety they need not only civil forfeiture but prison time. I am not personally worried about the firms contracts and commitments to the US military because they would be parted out to buyers like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grummen, GE, United Technologies, General Dynamics…. ETC. Those are experienced aerospace companies that did not go out on the limbs Boeing did and are quite capable of not only fulfilling Boeings role in aviation but also completing it’s contracts.
This is a watershed moment in modern capitalism not just some lesson to be learned by sloppy management. It is time to reform capitalism. Our survival is at stake in ways much MUCH larger than a few planeloads of dead folks. The quarterly profit chase is as deadly to our capitalism as wealth inequality or any other cpaitalist impulses in the modern world. If Boeing is allowed to get away with this and nobody serves time in a true sense of justice than what incentives do any companies have to stay responsible?
If I were CEO of a corporation manufacturing products that have the potential to be lethal I would have to look at this and say F{}CK this, I am tired of not maximizing profit at the expense of safety like all other corporations. Start cutting corners. Let’s crank up the money machine and when people die the worst that can happen to me is a get a big fat golden parachute.
And it is another major dent in capitalism that convinces people that capitalism is not worth saving.
People do go to jail for malfeasance, like Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay at Enron. Skilling was in prison for 12 years, and Lay was awaiting his sentencing hearing when he died of a heart attack. When the actions of executives result in the deaths of innocent people, the case is much clearer than simple fraud. There may be pharma executives going to jail in the opioid scandal. I think there is a decent chance a Boeing exec goes to jail.
I believe Boeing’s regulator is the FAA, not the FDA.
not if drugs were involved…
Thanks – corrected
LOL, nice catch but…. Didn’t the CDC which knows a lot about disease and little or nothing about macroeconomics just void the property rights of all landlords in the US by unilaterally banning evictions? And frankly I am pretty amazed that has not been analysed and discussed here. So, why wouldn’t the FDA, or EPA, or Nuclear Regulatory Commission get involved in the Boeing issue? Government offices are taking all sorts of things on as their privilege that have NOTHING to do with their charters.