Lion: "we'd like to practice using this plane so we don't crash it".
Boeing: "no".
Lion: crashes it. Hundreds die.
Boeing: "not our fault, their pilots were untrained".
How is no one is prison again?
How is no one is prison again?
We're not talking about "calculated" deaths like the ones VW's CEO hopefully goes to prison for. Rather directly attributable ones like the 737MAX or GM's faulty ignition switch scandals.
Given that Boeing and GM are/were some of the most powerful in the US stands to reason that most companies will fall under the "less powerful" characterization. But I think my point was clear already: the more powerful the company, the more clout they have when it comes to keeping their CEOs out of prison. whether or not this is doable for smaller players is irrelevant when talking about a heavyweight like Boeing.
Then I'm sure you also noticed none of this makes my point* less valid. Despite the wave of downvotes (which are probably aimed at me explicitly mentioning the US) I can't see any rebuttal of something I actually said:
*Given the precedents (like the GM scandal), CEOs of big/powerful companies (Boeing) in the US (where Boeing "lives") will pretty much get away with anything, including knowingly allowing hundreds to die (which Boeing/CEO did).
Later edit:
> simply trying to lockup CEOs I don't think is the right way to go.
Indeed, it's just a good first step. The very same companies and CEOs will always fight any legal changes that would further a culture of safety first because that usually hurts the bottom line.
But you don’t have a single example of less powerful executives going to prison in situations comparable to the one we’re discussing, right?
In Brazil Vale and a number of its executives (along with the European dam inspector) are expected to be indicted. It will like be about falsifying documents related to dam safety.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vale-sa-disaster-exclusiv...
Proving that the CEO is the one that should go to jail, while satisfying, is actually quite difficult. While I would probably agree with one piece of your sentiment, senior executives are often able to escape prosecution for things that are clearly illegal (looking at you HSBC), simply trying to lockup CEOs I don't think is the right way to go.
The 737 MAX was a failure of process, not by specific choices made by a leader - he was fired however for his poor response to the crashes, he committed many tactical and PR errors, which made the restoration process longer than it should have been.
If still you want to lay blame at any single persons feet, lay the blame at the feet of James McNerney, the CEO who ran Boeing while the bulk of the development of the MAX was done, he's the one who kicked the MAX program off.
Airbus absolutely uses its fly-by-wire system to change the handling characteristics of its airplanes, to make them fly the same - I see no reason why Boeing couldn't do the same thing.
And I argue the opposite: it can‘t be made to behave exactly the same as soon as the failure scenarios are considered.
In computer speak, you just look from the point of view of a “most common” run, not all the special cases, exceptions etc.
There are other impossibilities too, directly related to the certification requirements, already documented in the news articles before.
Wait to see what the final opinion of European agencies are once the latest changes are evaluated and you’ll see that it’s not the same plane, even if Boeing all the time bent over backwards over the dead bodies of others.
AFAIK, being on the same type rating means the A320neo has the same behaviour as the A320ceo _even when in direct law_, where there's a 1:1 mapping between input and behaviour. (Yet alone the very limited mechanical fallback!)
The purpose of the MCAS is to make the aircraft certifiable - full stop. The MAX is dynamically unstable, in the sense that at high angles of attack it will tend to continue increasing AOA into a stall - a terrible airframe sin which they tried to fix in software. This is the real story, not this type rating stuff.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19695757
As a pilot and former CFI, without any question whatsoever, a pilot must know how the airplane behaves near stall. Student pilots have demonstrated certified pilot level competency of their particular make/model aircraft stall behavior, before any CFI feels comfortable doing a student pilot sign off for solo flight. It's that goddamn basic.
And 737 MAX airplanes have two such stall behaviors, with MCAS and without (via stabilizer trim cutoff). I'd like to see every Boeing pilot involved in these decisions put on a hot seat and asked if they really think it's appropriate to sign off a pilot, as competent to fly, when they aren't completely aware of two different stall behaviors for this aircraft.
In my opinion it's unconscionable to have deprived pilots of this knowledge. I am aware of the make/model type certificate arguments. As yet no authority has said for sure whether MCAS knowledge requirements would have then required a new type certificate, or if in fact MCAS is improperly papering over an airworthiness deficiency.
What we do know is, it's damn suspicious that this make/model has been grounded this long, with multiple supposedly official statements that software fixes are done and tested and should be ready for FAA approval and deployment any day now, and yet that's been postponed at least 3 times that I'm aware of. If this is strictly a software fix, and a mere tweak back to the original basis of certification, why all the delays?
So they use SAFe Agile at Boeing, too?
The truly fatal decision though was made in 2016 when Muilenberg was CEO. That decision was to make MCAS a single sensor system vs. a two sensor system. Originally, MCAS would activate based on a combination of a G sensor and the AoA sensor. Sometime in the middle of 2016, when they did flight testing, they found that the undesirable handling characteristics could manifest without high G, so they took the G sensor out of the mix. In order to account for the low-speed, low-g handling problem, they also had to make the MCAS corrections be much more powerful, which made it much more dangerous. The FAA apparently wasn't informed of this.
This key moment was approximately one year into Muilenberg's tenure, and so the buck has to stop with him. Muilenberg was also CEO after the Lion Air crash, and he's responsible for the decision not to ground the fleet at that time. He's also responsible for not wanting to ground the fleet after the second crash, and pressuring the FAA to quickly certify a fix.
isn't the whole problem here that the program wasn't ready for flight?
Is it just an American thing? Why not just put the executives against a wall while we’re at it? That’ll teach them!
"The company" did nothing wrong, the leaders, for encouraging the type of culture that lead to this, and specific other employees, etc. are the ones who did this.
It's like a bad tooth. You don't kill the patient for it.
Did the CEO PERSONALLY kill them? No, but the claim for outlandish executive pay is executives get paid like they do because they have "all the responsibility". Every time the responsibility bird comes calling, they seem to claim they should have none. Cake and eating and such.
Seems like it might be better not to pay them such ridiculous amounts of money in the first place.
I have yet to see evidence that the oft-complained-about high tier executive pay in the US is artificially inflated and isn’t just market conditions pricing the work.
I can find someone on my parents couch who can’t be hired for $100k/yr. That doesn’t mean they are worth that much to the economy
It really feels like many commenters here are just after some weird revenge porn.
1. The company has an inherently bad culture and should be shuttered.
2. The leader of the company is responsible for that bad culture and should be punished (in some way).
1 is a non starter, because Boeing is "too big to fail".
We can argue about the correct punishment for 2, but "go home with $60 million" probably isn't sufficient.
This I think is the root of the problem. If we can’t conceive of and apply meaningful consequences for the distributed failures of groups of people, then people will group themselves in ways that allow them to distribute their failures in unpunishable ways.
I'm just not sure what a court-ordered re-structuring would look like. Something between a bankruptcy proceeding and an anti-trust action? Lots of moving parts and laws and whatnot.
I don't think anybody would complain if the CEO at the time was charged with 300+ crimes of some sort, manslaughter, gross negligence, murder, whatever. On a jury I'd be pretty lenient to the prosecution in this matter if they could find evidence that the CEO was aware of the calculus taking place, i.e. let's cut some corners with our regulatory capture so we can ship this plane more quickly and make more money, it is at that point that premeditation for me seems apt.
Indeed.
Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
Right... but why always prison? Why's it always 'who's going to prison for this'?
And the way it's written 'someone should be in prison', 'why isn't anyone in prison' it looks like nobody cares much who goes to prison, just has to be someone.
And it's never a case of 'this person should be tried carefully'. It's always just 'PRISON'.
Overall, seems like you want to find someone - anyone - drag them out of bed - put them in prison immediately, and you think that'll make something better somehow.
I'm not convinced fines work to actually punish rich executives. Likely they have liability insurance that will cover a lot of it, and golden parachutes will cover the rest. The deprivation of freedom caused by prison is pretty unique.
Do you have suggestions for alternative punishments that actually punish the target, and serve as a disincentive for other corporate malfeasance?
The layman wants "don't cut corners and kill people, or punishment". The legal system tends to deliver "Accept a plea bargain, get reduced sentence," or "Cut corners,and apply sufficient lawyer to defray the consequences."
Justice is for many distinct from the machinations of the legal system. I like to use the story told in the song "The Night the Lights went out in Georgia" as an example.
A person finds out their wife was cheating with the whole town. Gets distraught. Goes home, finds just his gun left behind. Goes to a friend's house, sees weirdly sized footprints that don't match his friend's, eventually finds his friend dead. Flags down a cop with a shot. Cop assumes he killed the friend, Judge open shuts the case, guy gets hanged.
Turns out hanged guy's sister killed the friend and the cheating wife.
Without knowledge of the sister's deeds, the legal system believes justice was served by hanging him. He killed, therefore his life is forfeit. Where's the justice when the sister is taken into account and the hanging has been done? The legal system would have hanged the sister if it bothered to work right and done nothing to the man, but as the score stands, two will have been executed for the crime, one wrongfully. The judge facilitated the death of an innocent man. Should the Judge not suffer for his dereliction of duty? What about the sister? Even if we recognize she forfeit her life through her actions, an innocent man was killed. To balance that out, it stands one must be spared. Does the Sister get let off Scot-free?
Justice != legality. We try to keep them lined up as well as we can, and collectively we begrudgingly submit to it as the best compromise overall. That doesn't mean though that everyone feels that what the legal system musters is always appropriate for the perceived wrong doing.
Messy business all of it. The messier the business, the worse the legal system seems to be at generating a long-term satisfying result.
At this point it's pretty obvious that there was, at minimum, negligence. They knew what could happen, and took the least-cost route through the forest. And we've all seen countless cases where high-level people at companies have clearly committed some sort of crime, but get off incredibly easy. Prison is IMO a reasonable punishment, if we can adequately assign blame to individuals.
Another option is of course a large enough fine directed at the company, but that doesn't really hurt the people involved enough. The CEO will get his golden parachute, and will perhaps have a slightly-tarnished reputation, but will find another job and his lifestyle won't be harmed one bit. All that does is reinforce the message that you can cut corners, cause deaths, and suffer no consequences. Other executives see that and continue to do the same thing.
I suppose another alternative to prison might be fines directed at individuals, but I expect the response to that will be stronger legal-liability insurance packages for executives, and so the targets of those fines won't get hurt all that much. Depriving someone of their freedom for a period of time is the great equalizer.
But as long as we’re showing that movie, right now it shows another man being arrested, and the police do not confiscate his cellphone.
He uses it in remand, and when it runs out of batteries, he asks for help charging it. He is then charged (npi) with illegally possessing a communications device in remand, and upon conviction for possessing a thing that was not confiscated from him, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
I’d rather not watch a movie where 9% of the citizenry of a country rots in jail with no expectation of changing their lives for the better when released, with them basically performing slave labour for corporations, and with little evidence it works to deter crime.
But if we are going to make this movie, it shouldn’t be a movie about only the poor citizens going to jail for misdeeds. The movie should show this broken concept of punishment being applied to all citizens, equally.
Justice theatre is the same thing. It doesn’t do anything about poverty or crime, but locking “scary people” up provides enough of the appearance of safety to make people feel like we’re doing everything we can.
The fact that it is theatre, and not real policy, helps explain why it’s so tilted against the poor. They’re the scary people.
—
Theatre is the metaphor. Movie theatre, stage theatre, whatever you like. If you’d prefer not to use a metaphor, fine, but once a metaphor goes around a few times and people have a shared understanding of what it means, it provides a convenient shorthand for communicating something.
“Security Theatre” has achieved a certain success as a metaphor. I’m trying to tap into how the justice system resembles the air traffic security system and the bank’s five questions systems and so on.
As I said right off the bat, I do not think it should suck for anyone, so if the argument is, “let’s fix the justice system by not making it suck,” you know you have a ready and willing ear.
None of those people should be going to prison, and in many sane countries they aren’t.
2. If #1 is unachievable, or while we're working on #1, poor people should not go to prison while rich people slide out of going to prison.
I don’t know why you have a lot of trouble with #2. It’s not like you can only argue for #1 or #2, and by arguing for #2, you give up the right to argue for #1.
It’s not a dichotomy.
https://www.deepsouthvoice.com/index.php/2020/01/11/black-ma...
229. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction sound, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, the builder shall be put to death.
233. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction sound, and a wall cracks, that builder shall strengthen that wall at his own expense.
Bugs in houses have been criminalized for a very long time. I don't think it's unreasonable to treat aircraft that carry passengers in a similar fashion.
[0] http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Hamm.htm
They weren't commenting on the severity of the punishment, but rather showing an example of a very old case where similar scrutiny was placed on poor workmanship making the builder culpable to negligence and the ensuing fallout of that negligence.
From HN guidelines: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
In 2020 the US is the only western country with the death penalty.
I’m sure everyone is aware that most countries used to have very severe punishments, but that’s not the case today.