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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

One example:

David Calhoun told the newspaper that pilots from Indonesia and Ethiopia “don’t have anywhere near the experience that they have here in the US”. He added the planemaker made a “fatal mistake” by assuming those flying the aircraft would immediately counteract software failures, which played a role in both accidents.

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Minimizing the damage (legal and reputational) is of course the job of any executive. What that looks like will vary between business and legal cultures, but that's what it looks like in the US. The way the US law works (as I understand it from popular culture and news) is a good idea to deflect liability as much as possible as any admittance of liability could end up costing.

That doesn't sound like "covering up," that sounds like saying "the flight crews should have been skilled enough to compensate for our awful software." Still terrible, mind you, but I'm not seeing a "cover up."

They already knew what was the problem before and during those crashes.

But never admitted anything and deflected any problem until the very last second when it was already so obvious.

The awful software they intentionally made not redundant so they wouldn't have to retrain and inform the pilots about it, as it would have then be classified as Security Critical (which it obviously was)?

Also first blaming bad maintenance then poor training, when they knew they fucked up?

That’s exactly what a coverup looks like. At that time, they knew they had significant airworthiness issues AND that they had deliberately removed mention of the MCAS system from the training guides in support of their marketing pitch that it’d save the airlines a ton of training costs. Those pilots did what they were trained to do but he lied about it trying to cover up the problems which Boeing had known about years earlier because that would make his company liable.

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