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Comment by cameldrv | Hacker News Reader

They weren't doing nothing. They've been working on a software fix since the Lion Air crash, but it wasn't ready by the time of the Ethiopian crash. The plan was to update some checklists as a stopgap and get new software ASAP. Obviously in hindsight they should have grounded the fleet until the new software was ready. At the time that would have been a very difficult decision to make internally at Boeing, given that the 737MAX has $250 Billion worth of orders, and arguably at the time, the updated checklists made a crash unlikely. This is the situation where an independent regulatory body is most important. The commercial pressure to keep flying was almost irresistable, and you need someone without those commercial pressures to put the brakes on.

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> At the time that would have been a very difficult decision to make internally at Boeing, given that the 737MAX has $250 Billion worth of orders

That is exactly right and exactly why they need to be nailed for this.

No hindsight is required to know Boeing was focused on making sure the welfare of Boeing and it's shareholders was taken care of, with little or no regard to the welfare of the flying public.

It's not that simple. There's no denying that there was tremendous commercial pressure, but ... from a single data point (prior to the second crash), it wasn't obvious that the risk of continuing to fly the aircraft was greater than grounding the planes, which results in cancelled flights and greater risk of road deaths due to some passengers taking road alternatives instead of re-booking flights. Also, the 737 MAX is a longer-range aircraft, and some of the slack would be taken up by capacity in shorter-range aircraft, converting direct flights to multi-leg flights, where most of the risk is in takeoff and landing. All else being equal, more flight legs means more risk. Some of the slack would be taken up by smaller regional airlines flying older planes, and I'm not sure how those safety records generally compare to larger airlines flying newer planes. In any case, I expect the majority of the offsetting risk would be from people deciding to drive when their flights got cancelled.

Now that we see that training and procedural changes appear to be a less effective mitigant than expected, we can say that with a high degree of certainty that the risk of increased road deaths does not offset the risks of continuing to fly the aircraft.

> from a single data point (prior to the second crash), it wasn't obvious that the risk of continuing to fly the aircraft was greater than grounding the planes

Call me a skeptic but I have no doubt Boeing was well aware of the issue with the MCAS well before that first data point.

Even before that first crash, there have been reports in the media that claim many pilots had complained about the dangers of the MCAS.

> Even before that first crash, there have been reports in the media that claim many pilots had complained about the dangers of the MCAS.

I don't think this is true - the newspaper that first made this claim overstated their findings. Pilots, in general, did not know about MCAS before the Lion Air crash.

This has very little to do with the existence of the MCAS but instead was the plane actually safe to fly and when did information come to hand to show that it was not.

Consider this link:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-13/737-max-pilots-report...

From that link:

Airline pilots on at least two US flights have reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes to tilt down suddenly.

That reporting suggests problems were known well in advance of the first crash.

> and greater risk of road deaths due to some passengers taking road alternatives

Such a consideration (while valid) is not Boeing's to make.

Almost no-one decides they'll just drive instead of flying because their plane was delayed.

After the first crash, Boeing certainly knew that it had hooked up MCAS to a single AoA vane. I don't think they could sincerely argue that hooking up a single sensor to a primary control surface with no backup sensor is airworthy -- either practically or legally. There are regulations about it, and that's why Airbus has three AoA vanes and uses majority quorum. That's why I think the grounding should have happened earlier.

Oh I'm sure they weren't literally doing nothing. I imagine meetings took place and they decided to roll the dice in not grounding the fleet before the software update was ready. But they rolled snake eyes, time to pay the piper.

Or, you know, someone who values human lives more than money.

Statistical value of human life. Learn it , breathe it.

Ok mr expert, please tell me exactly how much these two crashes have & will end up costing Boeing.

You risk your life and the lives of others for money every time you drive to work.

We actually do put a monetary value on human lives in a huge variety of situations. We just like to pretend that we don't and try not to talk about it.

For example, most health insurance systems around the world have a value they place on one year of "quality" human life, and won't cover medical treatments that cost more than that amount per year. In 2008, that number was about $50k [1]. I don't know what it is now.

When considering whether the monetary costs of a regulation are worth it in the US the EPA used about $9 million as the worth of a life saved in 2010, and the FDA used about $8 million. The DoT used almost $10 million in 2016. Cites for those are in this Wikipedia article [2].

[1] http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,0...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

If these crashes are both from the same system then they effectively did nothing. The only I'd accept that they didn't do nothing is if they intervened and stopped the problem. Still waiting till the dust settles to take my opinion tho.

commercial pressure should have been the liability exposure they find themselves in now.

The problem is this: From the CEO's standpoint, grounding the fleet might have cost him his job given that there was a plausible (even though we know now ineffective) checklist based solution to the problem. Another crash might also cost the CEO his job, but that has a probability of less than one. The incentive in this situation is to roll the dice. The problem is that the decision maker does not bear the liability for his actions. He's not the one making a smoking crater in the ground. That's why you need a regulator with different motivations. Historically, the FAA has been exceptionally effective at improving air safety. The Republican/business argument is that they have overdone it and the costs of compliance exceed the benefit at the margin. These accidents are a strong argument otherwise.

> The commercial pressure to keep flying was almost irresistable, and you need someone without those commercial pressures to put the brakes on.

I fully agree (even expanded to all fields/areas/industries/activities - but let's try not to over-regulate everything, if possible :) ).

I hear sentiments like this a lot as if everything in the universe is over regulated.

What do you believe are some examples of things that are over regulated?

What is worse, this 737-MAX issues appears to have been caused by under regulation, which has subsequently resulted in the needless deaths of many hundreds of passengers.

> What do you believe are some examples of things that are over regulated?

Ok, this is a very good question.

Thinking about it, I cannot think of any area I know about that is regulated, as a baseline, too much for my taste.

BUT:

E.g. 2 years ago I thought that the logs of my app (whiĉh is SOX-relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act ) weren't nice, so after talking to the other team members I slightly changed them to e.g. align strings (using tabs instead of fixed chars) and posting more informative/detailed messages.

When the auditors performed their review they saw that the new logs did not match the old ones (aaargh - string mismatch!!!) therefore we had to go over each change, checking why-it-was-done-by-whom-based_on_which_request_and_did_it_get_the_approval_to_go_live_and_was_it_reviewed_and_signed_off_by_business_after_go_live etc..., so an infinite pain. This is what over-regulation means technically for me :)

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you asked that we "not over-regulate everything" and you couldnt come up with a single example of over-regulated things and then brought up one issue in an app you made as why you brought up that "everything" is over-regulated?

This logic makes me really sad. You're complaining about overregulation when under-regulation just killed 300 people because you had to make a few changes in an app once. Please think about this more deeply than, "I know a few hundred people died, but lets not respond too harshly and have me spend a few more hours on my apps".

Please do that next time.

In "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" Sam Pelzman shows with statistics that the increased safety of drugs is more than counterbalanced by the commensurate delays in approval of life saving treatments, along with new treatments never developed because of the cost of the approval process.

Sorry, I think that I don't understand meanings of the sentence => could you pls split it into smaller/simpler sections?

Thx :)

Costly regulations slow down or prevent life-saving drugs from being developed.

In reality it's the financing model that works against new life-saving drugs. Goldman Sachs says it's the financing model. I'm inclined to believe them instead of a neocon think tank.

I've read that in the US you need a license to cut people's hair for money. That seems like over-regulation to me.

Just because I'm pretty stunned. The answers to the above question of "what are some things that are over-regulated?" in response to "everything is over-regulated" are:

From the OP: "I CANT THINK OF ANYTHING"

"Haircuts seem overregulated"

"The drug approval process might move too slowly"

So on one side we have "planes not crashing", "electrical codes being followed", "air quality not as bad as in Shanghai".

On the other side we have "haircuts are over-regulated".

Hmm, not sure which side I'm on here...

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