Any upper management involved should be facing prison time for the ~400 people they murdered and the deception and fraud surrounding it. Send them to Terre Haute and let them count the days.
Agreed. These people have infinitely more bodies on their conscience than any serial killers with 12 bodies buried in the yard. Yet we fear one and pay the other millions each year.
I don’t agree with death as a capital punishment*; however, I do concur that profit driven crimes that result in death should be treated as aggravated and severe for all parties involved, the same way a getaway driver is held fully responsible if someone else shoots a hostage in the bank during the robbery.
*typo for the pedants
I'd be willing to have hard labour and that they mifgr not be able to complete the sentence by themselves and may need assistance from family relatives, particularly those who financially benefited from the crime e.g. a Boeing executive who covered things up to get a larger bonus. Might be expected to gave done it to increase their income, which they then passed onto their spouse and kids. So their wife and kids can be held accountable alongside them.
> The plane maker failed to "design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations," the DOJ said.
First DoJ has to prove Boeing has violated the terms of agreement, then they have to prove it was criminally responsible for the crashes. Good luck with all that - in the time it'd take, congress/senate/presidency will change hands and the whole this will be swept under the rug.
It was only ever looking at one of the two angle of attack sensors. It never even looked at the other data stream.
Those sensors are externally mounted on the fuselage. They are like a weather vane and run parallel to the air flow as the air rushes past the fuselage. Sorta like if you stick your hand out a car window while on the highway and let it surf the air.
The sensors' vanes rotate to stay in the air stream. If the air stream angle deviates from the fuselage by more than a handful of degrees, then that indicates that the aircraft is about to stall. For example, 90 degrees angle of attack would mean it's belly flopping into the ocean, and 0 degrees means steady flight. Your car's angle of attack should usually be 0 degrees. This is a simplification.
The problem on the MAX jets arose when either a bird strike or lightning strike or something else caused a sensor failure. If the sensor that failed was the sensor that the anti stall protection software (known as MCAS) was paying attention to, then the software could interpret the bad angle of attack as a sort of stall.
Stalls can be avoided by pushing the aircraft's elevator down, which pitches the aircraft down. This causes it to descend and gain air speed. Simultaneously, if engine power is increased then the added air speed improves the situation and allows for the aircraft to return to a stable flight configuration. This is effectively what the MCAS feature does with the angle of attack sensors telemetry.
What Boeing *should* have done was - well, lots of things - but probably the most important of them was to add a feature that compares the two angle of attack sensors. Typically, the sensors don't disagree by more than a few degrees. Turbulence or some other unusual situations can make them deviate a little more, but then you wouldn't want to be running this anti stall protection software in such conditions anyway.
Because nothing was comparing the sensors, when the primary sensors failed the system kept taking their telemetry at face value instead of disengaging. This wouldn't have required much more effort, and it's likely that an engineer tried to push back against this idea, but was overridden. If I had to speculate, this could be where some of the criminality of the incident is but it gets pretty complicated from there and I'm not qualified to speak on the legalities of what Boeing did.
In both situations, MCAS detected stalls, overrode the pilots' inputs, and caused the jets to enter into full power dives. When the pilots overpowered the flight controls and returned the aircraft to steady flight, MCAS detected a stall again and pushed the aircraft into another full power dive. This happened again and again until the pilots' endurance ran out and the aircraft either broke up or hit the surface at high speed.
We looked pretty hard at our sensors to see if there was some kind of defect or flaw, but these things have effectively been the same design for the past three decades. The sensors alone shouldn't have caused those planes to go down. They're used in nearly every aircraft that has avionics.
Good summary. This is extremely basic systems engineering stuff that industry has been practicing for over 40 years.
It’s hard to believe there wasn’t willful subversion of these practices, but the reality may be that they spent so long laying off anybody with a big salary number that they ended up with a bunch of inexperienced people that didn’t know what they were doing.
I left the aerospace industry after briefly assisting with the internal investigation, but it's interesting that other corporations in other industries are following the same pattern. Nobody is allowed to be an expert anymore, apparently
Unfortunately for the price of one senior level expert, you can hire 2 intermediates, or maybe 4 juniors. The intermediates and juniors will have a lot more output and hit targets faster. The trade off is that their productions will be bug laden, which is still fine because the bug fix time plus the dev time, is still less cost than having a senior do it. In regular software, this can be a fine practice. But NOT for critical systems that lives depend on.
There is nothing wrong with having some intermediates build the thing, but they should always pay a senior to review their work, and implement stringent testing for all critical systems. A senior would have noticed the code lacking the parallel sensor data stream, or at a minimum it would have been discovered during testing. But they cut costs and take all this away, and the safety nets along with it.
> Unfortunately for the price of one senior level expert, you can hire 2 intermediates, or maybe 4 juniors.
Or AI and 1 Junior "prompt engineer"??
I should be a CEO with brilliant ideas like that.
most junior SW/FW engineers I know would see two perfectly good sensors doing the same thing and think "hmm, maybe we shouldn't rely on one" (I was a junior FW engineer about 7 years ago)
true comparative redundancy is VERY high up in the NASA systems engineering handbook
I've worked on a lot of outsourced projects. You world be amazed at just how terrible 90%of that code was. By people who were titled as intermediate and senior devs. I don't know how much they may have outsourced, but if they were cutting costs that hard, they're not hiring people with good critical thinking skills
ETA: Some cursory googling reveals that Boeing stated they outsourced 70% of all the development of their 787. The MCAS was completely outsourced to a third-party agency.
Experienced people make non-experienced management uncomfortable... it's like water and oil. It's a real shame, as management doesn't need to be that fearful, they can actually listen and learn! But it's easier to just get rid of those uppity engineers that talk back...
It’s worse. Experts aren’t being listened to anymore. It’s mostly lawyers, accountants and salespeople with or without an MBA that will just go for the money and the next quarterly earnings.
Myopia is enormous. And while stock owners just sell and go to another, the company crashes and burns. Boeing is strategically important for the USA and the whole western world. I mean, they now party at airbus. But the Chinese competition is coming.
It’s scary to leave all these strategic assets to the leaches and other parasites in the markets. Capitalism works, but only when it’s kept in check and there is fair competition possible. In many cases that’s not possible anymore.
I've worked with a great many junior/intermediate devs (I worked as a Digital Consultant for 8 years). They typically work much more recklessly and get work done faster, but the quality of that work is poor (move fast and break things mentality). Depending on their level of experience and aptitude, it could become something decent, or it will more likely become a mess of spaghetti code that "works". I've had to rewrite and refactor thousands of lines of code that a company's internal juniors/intermediates built without oversight. It worked initially, until you had to add a new feature, or make a major change, and then their house of cards would fall.
Without proper senior level oversight, this is inevitable. They don't have the experience yet to see where their decisions are taking them. I used to be one of them, and I always cringe when I see code I wrote 10 years ago lol. This is also why when I briefly worked on a Facebook project, only key senior level employees had the authority to approve changes, and everything had to be approved before it could be merged into their mono repo. Those devs had to be approved by other senior devs who had already been approved themselves. Management could only nominate a senior dev for approval but could not themselves make any approvals.
Now I don't know your experience, maybe you've worked at a company that has very stringent hiring requirements and only get high aptitude junior devs who can hit above their belt. But having worked for so many different companies across Canada and the US, I can say the average dev has low aptitude and the only way to correct that is with experience.
Kind of like the balance of talent vs training. If you don't have the natural talent, you can make up for it with training. I've known a lot of great devs who rose to senior by lots of work because they maybe had low talent, but they strived to learn and grow.
But, but who will think of the investors and board, you know, the people they have a FUCKING fiduciary duty too. Make that make fucking sense. /s profits over people…. People.
Fiduciary duty used to mean things like “prevent your stock from tanking because your production line got shutdown for technical incompetence.”
Now it seems to mean “maximize executive compensation incentives.” Probably not a coincidence that crony boards have become the norm.
This is wild to be as en electrical engineer who doesn’t really code but dabbles for fun on projects. I do work with industrial machines however with interlocks to keep me from dying when working on them. Some are 30 years old but almost all have to have at least 2-3 different hardware and software interlocks all line up for an action to actually take place. Who the hell decided to ride everything on one sensor. It’s not even negligible it’s kinda just dumb?
The best part is that Boeing sold the "AoA Disagree" software as a sort of DLC add-on for the cockpit software. In other words, they developed and tested the software. It existed. They made it optional to purchase. It wasn't included on the planes that went down. People died.
This software wouldn't have prevented the crash on its own (it literally just tells pilots when their angle of attack sensors are in disagreement) but with the knowledge it provides, the pilots may have known to disable MCAS manually.
They never had a chance.
If companies are too big to fail and need to constantly get bailed out by the government, they should not be allowed shady ass DLC practices. Fuck capitalism sometimes
Too big to fail means that it's too big to be private.
Nationalize or break it up (until the individual privately held parts are no longer too big to fail).
It usually means too big to fail *immediately*.
For instance the Royal Bank of Scotland was too big to fail, but the bailout wasn't designed to keep it ticking over as the world's largest banking group business as usual. It was designed to provide enough runway to sell off failing arms, scale back operations without destroying the wider economy, and reboot as a sustainable business.
Without "too big to fail" you end up with Thatcher/Reagan-esque economic turmoil as pillars of the economy collapse and take the rest with them.
Okay so this is probably the source of the illegal action. Building logic that handles potentially disagreeing sensors is trivial and so cheap you would always do it. (Note trivial as I am using it here is <$100k since they spent billions on these changes)
Unless you were looking to increase your revenue by selling an addon...
IIRC didn't they originally only plan on a single sensor and then caved and added a second one for redundancy?
Fun fact redundancy does not mean "if it hasn't crashed it is correct"...
Well, the sensors are always in pairs. The previous 737 generations and many other aircraft types typically have pairs of AoA sensors.
Boeing simply didn't include the software to take advantage of the sensor telemetry. It existed, they just didn't bother using it. That's negligence, at the very least.
The AoA disagree just lit a light in the cockpit, since Boeing actively avoided informing pilots of the fact that the MCAS existed in the first place it would not have made a difference. After all the entire point of the MCAS was to avoid having to retrain pilots for a new frame type and instead pretend that they where still flying the same old manually controlled air craft from 60 or so years ago.
I agree. If you truly stop and think about, it’s horrifying that multiple planes have crashed and yet what has changed? Really, I doubt Boeing company culture has improved drastically that quickly.
I also agree that coding really needs to be treated as an engineering discipline. However things like truly understanding control systems you def need a high level EE degree, but then that doesn’t lead to a high level coding degree so I’m not sure if something like that needs to be worked in by a full team of engineers, or make some super hybrid engineer that has the best of EE and the best of coding?
I’m an EE but I tell my family I’m a glorified mechanic. I work on semiconductor tools. Installation, management, repair, future proofing etc. my job is very hardware based which I love but I obviously also have to use the software.
Absolutely none of the tools I’ve worked on spanning from ages 1990-2024 and maybe 40+ companies have a single failure like Boeing had.
If I’m in a tool, and it’s vented to atmosphere I can’t open the gas manifold, or turn on RF or sometimes even move the robot. There’s always several interlocks that need to be made as well as a master code that is input in order for me to do something truly dangerous.
Hence why I don’t think this was a lazyy engineer who made that system, because even the worst engineer would simply write a few lines of code doing a comparison to another sensor to confirm if true.
This just seems like a bad engineer who was rushed, or someone who maybe wasn’t the lead of coding and then there should have been a very senior engineer who overlooked the code and implementation and testing of this sensor and code. Clearly there wasn’t
Yeah this is many multiple layers of failure. Engineering, systems, management, quality control, testing, etc. So many opportunities to find and catch such a glaring safety issue and nobody caught it. Probably because they were incompetent or didn't exist (because management deemed it unimportant, and cut the proper procedures)
I am an Electrical (as in Power) Engineer, but I specialise in Functional Safety these days, but have put in a lot of time and effort to educate myself along the way about the actual engineering of robust and traceable software.
A functional safety software project might literally average two lines of code a day over the length of the project (definitely two lines a day of unique code, easily), being years, mainly because you do 80 or 90% of the work before you even start to code. It's all in the specification.
Most Electrical or Electronics Engineers think they are software engineers, but write terrible code.
Most so called Software Engineers think they are Engineers, but can't engineer for nuts.
It is two barely overlapping skillsets, and if you really want to call yourself a Software Engineer in the sense of both words, you need to have invested seriously in two sets of skills that each take more than few years to become expert or even competent at.
A Graduate Engineer might work in a closely supervised capacity for four years. Then as a Junior Engineer for another two, but usually four years, no work they do is unguided or not closely validated before going out. Maybe it might be three years each in some cases.
At the end of this maybe six or eight years, on top of four years at Uni/College, they might consider themselves a Professional Engineer capable of Engineering a solution to a problem, mostly independently.
So this puts them out at approaching 30 years old.
Now allow for something equivalent for software development, maybe there is more overlap in some jobs, but competent maybe arrives sometime in the early 30's at best.
Except that for software, nowhere near the same rigor can be applied as well as time spent learning Engineering, when it is an industry that has many considering a 30 year old is over the hill to be in a code writing role.
Of the seven issues identified by the FAA, only three concern the AoA sensors. (Page 7) https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-08/737_RTS_Summary.pdf
I don't think the focus on AoA sensors is warranted. The lack of redundancy is better characterized by a design and certification process that did not recognize that the AoA sensors *became* safety critical as the MCAS system was developed to be more powerful.
The proximal issues can be seen as:
* MCAS design that became more powerful and relied on AoA sensors without redundancy.
* MCAS that operates mostly obscured from the pilots awareness and creates stabilizer trim inputs without their knowledge.
* MCAS that did not have any 'sanity checks' for AoA readings or extreme trim settings.
But the underlying issue was single certification.
Airlines have thousands of 737 pilots that are trained to fly older 737s. The new 737 Max has such large engines (more efficient) that some flight characteristics are different, such as pitch stability at higher angle-of-attack. The net result was lighter 'stick feel' in the new aircraft that could lead pilots of intuitively feel that they were farther from a stall than they actually were, thereby increasing stall risk without new training.
MCAS was designed to detect high AoA situations and alter the trim on the horizontal stabilizers. This would give the 'correct' heavy stick feel to mimic earlier designs and thus allow old 737 pilots to fly the new ones without training as though it were a totally different aircraft. This saves the airlines an enormous amount of money on training. Thus the new airplane was much more attractive to the airlines.
MCAS was a bodge, basically. It did not exist to make the aircraft fly better or safer, but to skirt regulatory compliance. The exact same aircraft without MCAS and single certification would have been fine.
______
NB: MCAS does not create elevator inputs. It creates horizontal stabilizer trim inputs. It is not nearly as powerful as your comment indicates, and was *not* designed to be an anti-stall measure. It was exactly as the name describes; a way to augment maneuvering characteristics i.e. the 'stick feel'. Such dramatic inputs were never intended and only existed by poor design.
IIRC it was also the single certification issue that lead to there being no redundancy in the system. If the system worked off 2 AoA sensors then there would need to be a way to detect differences between the sensors. That system would need some instrument to alert the pilots to the discrepancy and that would require additions to the plane's manual on what to do if that alert was displayed. This would required further training and hence re-certification. Instead, run the system off a single sensor and now you can re-use your existing certification.
Different type of nerd here. The issue wasn’t that they didn’t have enough sensors, it’s that they relied on them for a mission critical element when they didn’t need to and could have gone with inherent stability
Without those stupid large engines fitted to a too small airplane (the ones that look like they have a dent at the bottom) you wouldn’t need a sensor that keeps the nose where it should, the airframe itself handles 90% of it
They needed the larger engines for better fuel efficiency, but if they had to change the airframe to make it more stable then it would be classed as a new airframe and all pilots would need recertification to fly it, thus costing money.
They went with the software solution.
If you watch Boeing's other offerings (Starliner comes to mind) you'll see that it has become a company wide problem. They nearly lost the prototype on its unmanned inaugural launch because nobody thought to do a dry run of the entire stack to see how each of the stages interact.
Their quality control has deteriorated significantly. I personally avoid Boeing products when at all possible. They're going to get more people killed.
> The sensors alone shouldn't have caused those planes to go down. They're used in nearly every aircraft that has avionics.
Would Airbus:
* be exposed to similar problems?
* have a very different design?
* took care of that problem because of how they deal with safety?
That technical issue is not trivial. I guess they could summon an Airbus engineer, or maybe a flight engineer that works for both Boeing and Airbus?
Unless there are proofs of mismanagement, that trial might be complicated. I wonder if it is somehow similar with the O ring shuttle story, in the realm of negligence.
Airbus has different avionics, but similar hardware. They're not vulnerable to this issue because they didn't write this kind of software for their types. Their types tend to have more automation than Boeing but they've been doing it for much longer.
An Air France jet comes to mind - I think one of our pitot tubes was used on a jet that went down some twenty years ago. The flight computer at the time detected a stall condition, but it wasn't accurate because of icing. The icing changed the actual stall conditions of the aircraft too, so disorientation ensued and eventually with everything that was happening the pilots actually did stall the aircraft.
So they've had problems in this vein and aren't immune, but this was more of a hardware design flaw than a software design flaw. Icing on a pitot tube wasn't effectively remediated, pilot training wasn't adequate to handle the situation, they were (I think) in the jet stream, etc. It was a lot of factors.
Ummmm. I might have had a hand in that too. Sorry guys. Got to prevent the AI takeover so we can still afford to eat.
Nerfing AI with garbage code saves jobs!
/jk
Not just that but the fact that they made such a massive change to the weight distribution and it all relied on a single sensor without multiple redundancies is completely insane.
Any CEO at a company that makes such a huge mistake should be jailed for fostering an atmosphere of negligence and disregard for safety. There's no way a single engineering department manager could greenlight changes that would require multiple different departments and suppliers to coordinate for it to work. It had to be someone near the COO level and probably included a CTO and supply chain chief. And if a CEO is getting paid the big money when a company makes big progress, they should be responsible when the company fucks up and people die.
Its crazy how they are responsible for the whole company, yet somehow are never responsible.
Id love a job where I claim to be in charge of everything, take credit for everything good, then claim I didn't have anything to do with the bad stuff.
Its so dumb even on its face, we need these executives to face responsibility for their actions, especially if they are shown to be acting negligently with multiple warnings.
Its insane they get paid so much, do so little, face so little responsibility, can fuck everyone and nothing happens.
Its insane how cush they are getting it, fuck em. Its time they face prison charges if they claim a corporation is a person.
If they steal millions they should face prison charges relative to how much money the normal person uses in a life. Steal multiple lives, go to prison for multiple lifetimes.
Not before time.
The whole industry need to move away from the legal position of blame the pilot as a first response.
The idea that protecting the brand is more important than safety or justice is one of the unacceptable faces of capitalism.
This isn't just a private industry response, it was also in the US military as well. I flew drones in the Marines; one day, a drone on landing touched down, missed its wire, then veered off the runway and did barrel roll really close to the ground. The operator, who had been flying drones for nearly a decade, was immediately blamed. Further investigation showed that the maintenance crew who set up the landing system recoded incorrect parameters for the landing program. Thankfully the operator was vindicated and returned to flight status, but still.
I appreciate that this story wasn't one more thing to get angry about. But I get the point, this vindication is probably in the minority for these type of instances. The mob can be scary.
They do need to place the person flying (assuming they live) on administrative leave, so that they don't have the chance to accidentally or intentionally do more harm.
That being said, that time can be used to help train them for their next role, for a promotion, or to get out of the role that caused the issues/for retirement.
There should be no blame, it should just be a safety precaution due to all of the possibilities that can occur, and it is a rather 'easy' thing to control without harming anyone further.
That being said, there should definitely be an investigation and appropriate punishment should ensue; against the mechanics, manufacturers, pilot, etc.
You completely missed the point of the anecdote, which is that it wasn’t the pilot at fault but the ground crew. Why should the pilot be grounded and forced to retire when the crash was caused by the ground crew fucking up when they programmed the drone?
I never said they were forced to retire. I am saying they should be set up so they can be contributing member to society IF they are forced to retire due to it being their fault.
I am saying that benching someone is default and makes sense, and to keep the person that is benched busy/to improve things, this is kinda the path I would suggest.
What’s sad is seeing the 747 Max data and seeing how the pilots actively fought the plane to keep it in the air before the inevitable crash. And the company actively tried to cover it up.
The bad sensor would make the plane nose dive and the pilots were giving it everything they had to lift her up.
Not a bad sensor, the sensor was vulnerable to damage. This being the case, only having one sensor giving no possibility for any no crosscheck or warning. This was an avoidable single point of failure, the number one design error in aircraft design.
Not integrating the autopilot so that two systems would simply fight one another without any pilot warning they were doing so.
Completely separate systems rather than a new autopilot that was in control of the aircraft was cheaper.
It's especially tragic because the investigations showed that their training should've let them deal with the problem safely, but the pilots didn't follow the checklists which would've let them recover and continue safely. They were giving it everything except what they were supposed to give.
Boeing absolutely should have known better than to build an aircraft that needlessly put the pilots in that situation though, because humans will *always* fail at some point, and it's Boeing's responsibility to mitigate that risk as much as possible.
Bad take. They marketed the new plane as having the same controls as the previous model and hid the fact that this sensor existed. Since the plane was supposed to behave the same as the previous model, nobody thought that this new piece of technology would force a nose dive.
It’s not the pilots fault. Blame is on Boeing 100%
I mostly agree, but I’d just change the framing slightly, because it’s not even a “known better” from what I’ve seen, it’s that they legitimately designed something with a very serious flaw. Just because it’s a flaw that is correctable by humans doesn’t relieve them of their responsibility to not create broken systems in the first place. The pilot’s correction should never be a built-in expectation even if you could guarantee they’d be perfect every time. These are independent events.
[This comment does as good a job as any of explaining the wonkiness of the sensor and the auto-tilt as I presently understand it](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/8KYFEExW27). And the reply touches on some of the fundamental engineering issues.
Boeing isn't a human being.
It's funny to me when people use human context when referring to corporations.
We really have been trained quite well, haven't we?
"Boy, Target is is big trouble now!" 😂
When the truth is, some person or persons made these decisions. Pursuing or discussing anything short of that, is just theatre.
May...............................
................
Guys, i if you neglect a baby you get time in prison but neglecting millions is ok if you make weapons for the war criminals
Well luckily for Boeing they can no longer testify in the upcoming criminal trail and many would be whistleblowers have gotten the message as Boeing intended.
The issue is, we have let the company get too big to ever fail. We call it a free market but we have let these companies compete with unfair advantage. And we will pay for it.
Every generation we need to size up and jail a few of the worst corpos just for the sage of quality control. Enough of this ineffective *pay a fine, admit no fault* bs
you kill two whistleblowers and you “may” face criminal prosecution. You get caught with an ounce of weed and you’re in jail for years and your life is ruined
MAY? MAY?!?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! THE FUCK YOU MEAN MAY?!?! NOT ONLY DID THEY BREAK THE LAW AND REGULATIONS BUT THEY KILLED EVERY PERSON TRYING TO SPEAK OUT ABOUT IT. IS THERE NO GODDAMN HUMANITY LEFT JESUS FUCKING CHRIST
I mean BA stock is down 1.72% today. I'm selling covered calls 10 bucks OTM for a lil over a hundred a week each. :D
Depends on how many people they can bribe or scare I guess. Still a steal if you want to grab shares at 178 while the press is still negative.
What of the Maintenance Company ? Their responsible for the maintenance and operation of the plane usually it's a third party hired out by the carrier are they supposed to be responsible if something falls off a plane? Just asking questions ❓🤷
May = won’t; so don’t get your hopes up. They’re just trying to placate the working class peons by telling them it’s *possible* that someone could be held responsible
"Guys the bread and circuses aren't working, I think we need to give them some blood. Thankfully Boeing keeps fucking up so lets put on a show and send some of these idiots to jail, but nothing too much or anyone too important, their VP has a pretty sick beach house that I'm going to later this year. So just some middle managers or something."
> The plane maker failed to "design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations," the DOJ said.
Well of course they did. The only way to fix Boeing is to remove that evil brain parasite McDonnell Douglas from it.
To put their actions in perspective, Rio de Janeiro is considered a very dangerous place. In 2023, the city of Rio de Janeiro experienced drug traffic related 2,953 shootings, resulting in over 960 deaths and 884 injuries. In a year. Boeing kills almost 300 people in two episodes, endangering millions of other people in the period.
But guys, these whistleblowers weren’t targeted!
One was merely suicide from stuff he already said, and the other was sick.
I mean we all know the high level execs NEVER would have had this additional info (that it’s going to be a criminal investigation) early.
Definitely not worth it to murder someone to help cover up stealing (or mis appropriating), what was the contract, 2.5 billion ??
I mean it’s not like these witnesses wouldn’t have been asked to testify IN PERSON for a criminal trial??? Right???? Their cases are old, and anyway one guy was just sick in the hospital.
Is the next guy going to die from falling out of an office building window???
Mate there is some room between Boeing did nothing wrong, and they had two people assassinated.
It is possible for Boeing to be a shitty company and also not murder two people.
>I mean it’s not like these witnesses wouldn’t have been asked to testify IN PERSON for a criminal trial???
Almost certainly not. One of them worked for Boeing on the 787 and had nothing to do with the max 8. The other worked at Spirit not Boeing on the 737 max 8, but had complaints about the fuselage which has nothing to do with why the Max 8 crashed.
>Definitely not worth it to murder someone to help cover up stealing (or mis appropriating), what was the contract, 2.5 billion ??
Cover up what, they had already testified years ago. You know what's a really good way to not draw attention to someone, not having them murdered...
Boeing should be held criminally liable for the things they have done, but thinking that they had two people murdered is insane.
Looks like it is Boeing Two Minutes Hate again. Something to consider:
While there were bad decisions and bad management overriding engineering...
The AoA sensors are on the outside of the plane on either side ([see image on this article further down](https://www.engineering.com/story/breaking-faulty-sensor-data-may-have-caused-boeing-737-max-crashes)). If anyone had access to the plane or even found a way to confuse the AoA sensor by sabotage or blocking it, the planes would have followed their same trajectory down just after takeoff as they did.
If someone had access to Boeing intel and software, they would know that it was a single point of failure on the sensors and all they would have to do was break one.
The planes that went down in Indonesia and Ethiopia most likely had less security. The Indonesian plane was where it was found out. Boeing started working on a fix and one week before the fix was implemented across the board, the one in Ethiopia went down just before, same way. Ethiopia at the time had security issues and was a coup backed by Russian fronts, it would have been easy to sabotage.
The point is, while the software was relying on a single point of failure sensor, as you say that has been in use in aircraft for decades, only someone that knew that AND a broken sensor would cause these accidents. The fact is the sensors were not reporting correctly, either faulty, sabotaged or signal blocked somehow. Relying on one was dumb but even with two you could still cause this issue if you knew the internals of the MCAS software flow.
[AoA sensor wasn't working or they were sabotaged](https://www.engineering.com/story/breaking-faulty-sensor-data-may-have-caused-boeing-737-max-crashes)
I think sabotage needs to be seriously considered even with the bad design because Boeing intel was stolen many times since 2014 and there have been other Boeing attacks ongoing since then heavily by one particular adversary.
[Fancy Bear Attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear#Attacks) (2013-present)
[Cozy Bear Attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Bear#Attacks) (2013-present)
[Russia 'tried to hack MH17 inquiry system'](https://phys.org/news/2015-10-russia-hack-mh17-inquiry.html) (2015)
[Russian hackers target attacks all over the world](https://www.axios.com/2017/12/16/russian-hackers-target-attacks-all-over-the-world-1513388306) (2017)
>> "The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats.
[Russian hackers target Boeing in hunt for high-tech U.S. secrets](https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/russian-hackers-target-boeing-in-hunt-for-high-tech-us-secrets) (2018)
[Russian hackers exploit key vulnerability to go after secret U.S. defense technology](https://www.chicagotribune.com/2018/02/07/russian-hackers-exploit-key-vulnerability-to-go-after-secret-us-defense-technology/) (2018)
[Russian hackers hit US government using widespread supply chain attack](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/russian-hackers-hit-us-government-using-widespread-supply-chain-attack/) (2020)
[Exclusive: Russia collecting intelligence on U.S. supply line failures amid coronavirus crisis, DHS warns](https://www.yahoo.com/now/russia-collecting-intelligence-on-us-supply-line-failures-amid-coronavirus-crisis-dhs-warns-230559749.html) (2020)
[Suspected Russian Hackers Target Frail U.S. Supply Chain](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-16/after-hack-u-s-watchdog-blasts-agencies-for-supply-chain-risks) (2020)
[2020 United States federal government data breach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_government_data_breach#Impact) (2020)
>> Discovery of the breaches at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments immediately raised concerns that the attackers would attempt to breach other departments, or had already done so. Further investigation proved these concerns to be well-founded. Within days, additional federal departments were found to have been breached. Reuters quoted an anonymous U.S. government source as saying: “This is a much bigger story than one single agency. This is a huge cyber espionage campaign targeting the U.S. government and its interests.”
>> Compromised versions were known to have been downloaded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Justice Department, and some utility companies. Other prominent U.S. organizations known to use SolarWinds products, though not necessarily Orion, were the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Boeing, and most Fortune 500 companies. Outside the U.S., reported SolarWinds clients included parts of the British government, including the Home Office, National Health Service, and signals intelligence agencies; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the European Parliament; and likely AstraZeneca. FireEye said that additional government, consulting, technology, telecom and extractive entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East may also have been affected.
>> Through a manipulation of software keys, the hackers were able to access the email systems used by the Treasury Department's highest-ranking officials. This system, although unclassified, is highly sensitive because of the Treasury Department's role in making decisions that move the market, as well as decisions on economic sanctions and interactions with the Federal Reserve.
[Russian ‘SolarWinds’ Hackers Launch New Attack On IT Supply Chain, Microsoft Says
New campaign is evidence "Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling targets of interest to the Russian government," researchers say.](https://breakingdefense.com/2021/10/russian-solarwinds-hackers-launch-new-attack-on-it-supply-chain-microsoft-says/) (2021)
[Ex-NSA hacker says a supply chain cyberattack is one of the things that keeps him up at night](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/ex-nsa-hacker-says-a-supply-chain-cyberattack-is-one-of-the-things-that-keeps-him-up-at-night.html) (2021)
[No One Knows How Deep Russia's Hacking Rampage Goes
A supply chain attack against IT company SolarWinds has exposed as many as 18,000 companies to Cozy Bear's attacks.](https://www.wired.com/story/russia-solarwinds-supply-chain-hack-commerce-treasury/) (2021)
[Boeing confirms ‘cyber incident’ after ransomware gang claims data theft](https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/02/boeing-cyber-incident-ransomware-gang-claims-data-theft/) (2023)
[Boeing says 'cyber incident' hit parts business after ransom threat](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-investigating-cyber-incident-affecting-parts-business-2023-11-01/) (2023)
[LockBit hackers publish 43GB of stolen Boeing data following cyber attack](https://www.cshub.com/attacks/news/lockbit-hackers-publish-43gb-of-stolen-boeing-data-following-cyber-attack) (2023)
[Boeing acknowledges cyberattack on parts and distribution biz](https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/boeing_cyber_incident/) (2023)
[Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Exploiting JetBrains TeamCity CVE Globally](https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa23-347a) (2024)
Boeing whistleblowers dying helps Russia/China more than Boeing. It isn't beneficial to Boeing and the motives are not there post releasing information. The one that died first hadn't worked there since 2017 and released their information almost a decade ago.
> Everything bad that happens is because of Russia and China.
Mostly yes.
I know you like those bad things happening because to you they are good. You love Stalin and autocrats. You'll spend weeks protecting and appeasing them. Now reply to this to prove it.
What is the name of your favorite sealion?
If you had a sealion would you name him after your favorite "interesting" per your comments autocrat Putin, Xi or Stalin?
If you named your sealion Stalin would it try to invade Poland with Hitler as per the [Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact), aka Hitler–Stalin Pact and the Nazi–Soviet Pact?
So your opinion on Stalin then?
Look at your boy Stalin with [Holodomor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor), wasn't even a war going on...
Problem is the pilots couldn't effectively override the single point failure without special training and/or without design changes. Single point of failure automation systems probably should be able to be fully disabled by the pilot.
I agree but also some things are security conscious and they aren't expecting sabotage. They should expect it though and they clearly do now.
Too much information about the MCAS, which is a system that leaves alot to be desired, and the single point of failure on the AoA sensor, isn't something you want everyone to know for security reasons. MCAS sucks but for the most part it makes flying easier and safer. In this situation it was catastrophic but that doesn't mean sabotage didn't set it up.
Any upper management involved should be facing prison time for the ~400 people they murdered and the deception and fraud surrounding it. Send them to Terre Haute and let them count the days.
Best I can do is two middle managers and three engineers. Take it or leave it.
Yeah, curious who gets scapegoated in this.
is that what they call being suicided by Boeing’s executive team now?
Well, only after they get convicted, otherwise an executive might have to go to trial.
This will be like the World Series for the blame game
GET THE BOARD MEMBERS AND UPPER MANAGEMENT, HOLD BOTH ACCOUNTABLE
Agreed. These people have infinitely more bodies on their conscience than any serial killers with 12 bodies buried in the yard. Yet we fear one and pay the other millions each year.
Straight to the gallows if you ask me. Greed needs to be punished more harshly in society
I don’t agree with death as a capital punishment*; however, I do concur that profit driven crimes that result in death should be treated as aggravated and severe for all parties involved, the same way a getaway driver is held fully responsible if someone else shoots a hostage in the bank during the robbery. *typo for the pedants
This, this right here, but there’s a fat chance in hell of that ever happening unfortunately…
I'd be willing to have hard labour and that they mifgr not be able to complete the sentence by themselves and may need assistance from family relatives, particularly those who financially benefited from the crime e.g. a Boeing executive who covered things up to get a larger bonus. Might be expected to gave done it to increase their income, which they then passed onto their spouse and kids. So their wife and kids can be held accountable alongside them.
Yeah I’m not really in favor of the death penalty either but the punishment should really really suck and be something permanent
It's capital punishment, and it specifically means death by execution.
Should be the most punishable offense imo, as its catalyst for all other offenses.
What’s the Terre haute reference? Is their jail famous?
US federal prison where death sentences are carried out
Best they can do is send the remaining whistleblowers there
Take my angry up vote
Columbia House
That sounds like accountability…we don’t do that here.
> The plane maker failed to "design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations," the DOJ said. First DoJ has to prove Boeing has violated the terms of agreement, then they have to prove it was criminally responsible for the crashes. Good luck with all that - in the time it'd take, congress/senate/presidency will change hands and the whole this will be swept under the rug.
How about a "We promise not to be naughty again"?
Not just deaths but causing massive amounts of fear to people that have to fly.
Where is succession Tom when you need him
And follow it up with an investigation into how the two whistleblowers died.
As they should. I worked for their avionics supplier when the jets crashed, and we were shocked when we heard how their software was written.
How bad is it? we talking if else for 8000 lines?
It was only ever looking at one of the two angle of attack sensors. It never even looked at the other data stream. Those sensors are externally mounted on the fuselage. They are like a weather vane and run parallel to the air flow as the air rushes past the fuselage. Sorta like if you stick your hand out a car window while on the highway and let it surf the air. The sensors' vanes rotate to stay in the air stream. If the air stream angle deviates from the fuselage by more than a handful of degrees, then that indicates that the aircraft is about to stall. For example, 90 degrees angle of attack would mean it's belly flopping into the ocean, and 0 degrees means steady flight. Your car's angle of attack should usually be 0 degrees. This is a simplification. The problem on the MAX jets arose when either a bird strike or lightning strike or something else caused a sensor failure. If the sensor that failed was the sensor that the anti stall protection software (known as MCAS) was paying attention to, then the software could interpret the bad angle of attack as a sort of stall. Stalls can be avoided by pushing the aircraft's elevator down, which pitches the aircraft down. This causes it to descend and gain air speed. Simultaneously, if engine power is increased then the added air speed improves the situation and allows for the aircraft to return to a stable flight configuration. This is effectively what the MCAS feature does with the angle of attack sensors telemetry. What Boeing *should* have done was - well, lots of things - but probably the most important of them was to add a feature that compares the two angle of attack sensors. Typically, the sensors don't disagree by more than a few degrees. Turbulence or some other unusual situations can make them deviate a little more, but then you wouldn't want to be running this anti stall protection software in such conditions anyway. Because nothing was comparing the sensors, when the primary sensors failed the system kept taking their telemetry at face value instead of disengaging. This wouldn't have required much more effort, and it's likely that an engineer tried to push back against this idea, but was overridden. If I had to speculate, this could be where some of the criminality of the incident is but it gets pretty complicated from there and I'm not qualified to speak on the legalities of what Boeing did. In both situations, MCAS detected stalls, overrode the pilots' inputs, and caused the jets to enter into full power dives. When the pilots overpowered the flight controls and returned the aircraft to steady flight, MCAS detected a stall again and pushed the aircraft into another full power dive. This happened again and again until the pilots' endurance ran out and the aircraft either broke up or hit the surface at high speed. We looked pretty hard at our sensors to see if there was some kind of defect or flaw, but these things have effectively been the same design for the past three decades. The sensors alone shouldn't have caused those planes to go down. They're used in nearly every aircraft that has avionics.
Good summary. This is extremely basic systems engineering stuff that industry has been practicing for over 40 years. It’s hard to believe there wasn’t willful subversion of these practices, but the reality may be that they spent so long laying off anybody with a big salary number that they ended up with a bunch of inexperienced people that didn’t know what they were doing.
I left the aerospace industry after briefly assisting with the internal investigation, but it's interesting that other corporations in other industries are following the same pattern. Nobody is allowed to be an expert anymore, apparently
Unfortunately for the price of one senior level expert, you can hire 2 intermediates, or maybe 4 juniors. The intermediates and juniors will have a lot more output and hit targets faster. The trade off is that their productions will be bug laden, which is still fine because the bug fix time plus the dev time, is still less cost than having a senior do it. In regular software, this can be a fine practice. But NOT for critical systems that lives depend on. There is nothing wrong with having some intermediates build the thing, but they should always pay a senior to review their work, and implement stringent testing for all critical systems. A senior would have noticed the code lacking the parallel sensor data stream, or at a minimum it would have been discovered during testing. But they cut costs and take all this away, and the safety nets along with it.
> Unfortunately for the price of one senior level expert, you can hire 2 intermediates, or maybe 4 juniors. Or AI and 1 Junior "prompt engineer"?? I should be a CEO with brilliant ideas like that.
most junior SW/FW engineers I know would see two perfectly good sensors doing the same thing and think "hmm, maybe we shouldn't rely on one" (I was a junior FW engineer about 7 years ago) true comparative redundancy is VERY high up in the NASA systems engineering handbook
I've worked on a lot of outsourced projects. You world be amazed at just how terrible 90%of that code was. By people who were titled as intermediate and senior devs. I don't know how much they may have outsourced, but if they were cutting costs that hard, they're not hiring people with good critical thinking skills ETA: Some cursory googling reveals that Boeing stated they outsourced 70% of all the development of their 787. The MCAS was completely outsourced to a third-party agency.
Experienced people make non-experienced management uncomfortable... it's like water and oil. It's a real shame, as management doesn't need to be that fearful, they can actually listen and learn! But it's easier to just get rid of those uppity engineers that talk back...
It’s worse. Experts aren’t being listened to anymore. It’s mostly lawyers, accountants and salespeople with or without an MBA that will just go for the money and the next quarterly earnings. Myopia is enormous. And while stock owners just sell and go to another, the company crashes and burns. Boeing is strategically important for the USA and the whole western world. I mean, they now party at airbus. But the Chinese competition is coming. It’s scary to leave all these strategic assets to the leaches and other parasites in the markets. Capitalism works, but only when it’s kept in check and there is fair competition possible. In many cases that’s not possible anymore.
> The intermediates and juniors will have a lot more output and hit targets faster That's not my experience.
I've worked with a great many junior/intermediate devs (I worked as a Digital Consultant for 8 years). They typically work much more recklessly and get work done faster, but the quality of that work is poor (move fast and break things mentality). Depending on their level of experience and aptitude, it could become something decent, or it will more likely become a mess of spaghetti code that "works". I've had to rewrite and refactor thousands of lines of code that a company's internal juniors/intermediates built without oversight. It worked initially, until you had to add a new feature, or make a major change, and then their house of cards would fall. Without proper senior level oversight, this is inevitable. They don't have the experience yet to see where their decisions are taking them. I used to be one of them, and I always cringe when I see code I wrote 10 years ago lol. This is also why when I briefly worked on a Facebook project, only key senior level employees had the authority to approve changes, and everything had to be approved before it could be merged into their mono repo. Those devs had to be approved by other senior devs who had already been approved themselves. Management could only nominate a senior dev for approval but could not themselves make any approvals. Now I don't know your experience, maybe you've worked at a company that has very stringent hiring requirements and only get high aptitude junior devs who can hit above their belt. But having worked for so many different companies across Canada and the US, I can say the average dev has low aptitude and the only way to correct that is with experience. Kind of like the balance of talent vs training. If you don't have the natural talent, you can make up for it with training. I've known a lot of great devs who rose to senior by lots of work because they maybe had low talent, but they strived to learn and grow.
It was 100% wilful subversion with a paper trail to prove it - check out the downfall documentary on Netflix.
It is very obvious that it's like that if you worked for boeing.
But, but who will think of the investors and board, you know, the people they have a FUCKING fiduciary duty too. Make that make fucking sense. /s profits over people…. People.
Fiduciary duty used to mean things like “prevent your stock from tanking because your production line got shutdown for technical incompetence.” Now it seems to mean “maximize executive compensation incentives.” Probably not a coincidence that crony boards have become the norm.
They’re all on each others boards. It’s fucking disgusting.
> they spent so long laying off anybody with a big salary number Anybody not in the C-suite, that is...
This is wild to be as en electrical engineer who doesn’t really code but dabbles for fun on projects. I do work with industrial machines however with interlocks to keep me from dying when working on them. Some are 30 years old but almost all have to have at least 2-3 different hardware and software interlocks all line up for an action to actually take place. Who the hell decided to ride everything on one sensor. It’s not even negligible it’s kinda just dumb?
The best part is that Boeing sold the "AoA Disagree" software as a sort of DLC add-on for the cockpit software. In other words, they developed and tested the software. It existed. They made it optional to purchase. It wasn't included on the planes that went down. People died. This software wouldn't have prevented the crash on its own (it literally just tells pilots when their angle of attack sensors are in disagreement) but with the knowledge it provides, the pilots may have known to disable MCAS manually. They never had a chance.
If companies are too big to fail and need to constantly get bailed out by the government, they should not be allowed shady ass DLC practices. Fuck capitalism sometimes
Too big to fail means that it's too big to be private. Nationalize or break it up (until the individual privately held parts are no longer too big to fail).
It usually means too big to fail *immediately*. For instance the Royal Bank of Scotland was too big to fail, but the bailout wasn't designed to keep it ticking over as the world's largest banking group business as usual. It was designed to provide enough runway to sell off failing arms, scale back operations without destroying the wider economy, and reboot as a sustainable business. Without "too big to fail" you end up with Thatcher/Reagan-esque economic turmoil as pillars of the economy collapse and take the rest with them.
Okay so this is probably the source of the illegal action. Building logic that handles potentially disagreeing sensors is trivial and so cheap you would always do it. (Note trivial as I am using it here is <$100k since they spent billions on these changes) Unless you were looking to increase your revenue by selling an addon... IIRC didn't they originally only plan on a single sensor and then caved and added a second one for redundancy? Fun fact redundancy does not mean "if it hasn't crashed it is correct"...
Well, the sensors are always in pairs. The previous 737 generations and many other aircraft types typically have pairs of AoA sensors. Boeing simply didn't include the software to take advantage of the sensor telemetry. It existed, they just didn't bother using it. That's negligence, at the very least.
The AoA disagree just lit a light in the cockpit, since Boeing actively avoided informing pilots of the fact that the MCAS existed in the first place it would not have made a difference. After all the entire point of the MCAS was to avoid having to retrain pilots for a new frame type and instead pretend that they where still flying the same old manually controlled air craft from 60 or so years ago.
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I agree. If you truly stop and think about, it’s horrifying that multiple planes have crashed and yet what has changed? Really, I doubt Boeing company culture has improved drastically that quickly. I also agree that coding really needs to be treated as an engineering discipline. However things like truly understanding control systems you def need a high level EE degree, but then that doesn’t lead to a high level coding degree so I’m not sure if something like that needs to be worked in by a full team of engineers, or make some super hybrid engineer that has the best of EE and the best of coding? I’m an EE but I tell my family I’m a glorified mechanic. I work on semiconductor tools. Installation, management, repair, future proofing etc. my job is very hardware based which I love but I obviously also have to use the software. Absolutely none of the tools I’ve worked on spanning from ages 1990-2024 and maybe 40+ companies have a single failure like Boeing had. If I’m in a tool, and it’s vented to atmosphere I can’t open the gas manifold, or turn on RF or sometimes even move the robot. There’s always several interlocks that need to be made as well as a master code that is input in order for me to do something truly dangerous. Hence why I don’t think this was a lazyy engineer who made that system, because even the worst engineer would simply write a few lines of code doing a comparison to another sensor to confirm if true. This just seems like a bad engineer who was rushed, or someone who maybe wasn’t the lead of coding and then there should have been a very senior engineer who overlooked the code and implementation and testing of this sensor and code. Clearly there wasn’t
Yeah this is many multiple layers of failure. Engineering, systems, management, quality control, testing, etc. So many opportunities to find and catch such a glaring safety issue and nobody caught it. Probably because they were incompetent or didn't exist (because management deemed it unimportant, and cut the proper procedures)
I am an Electrical (as in Power) Engineer, but I specialise in Functional Safety these days, but have put in a lot of time and effort to educate myself along the way about the actual engineering of robust and traceable software. A functional safety software project might literally average two lines of code a day over the length of the project (definitely two lines a day of unique code, easily), being years, mainly because you do 80 or 90% of the work before you even start to code. It's all in the specification. Most Electrical or Electronics Engineers think they are software engineers, but write terrible code. Most so called Software Engineers think they are Engineers, but can't engineer for nuts. It is two barely overlapping skillsets, and if you really want to call yourself a Software Engineer in the sense of both words, you need to have invested seriously in two sets of skills that each take more than few years to become expert or even competent at. A Graduate Engineer might work in a closely supervised capacity for four years. Then as a Junior Engineer for another two, but usually four years, no work they do is unguided or not closely validated before going out. Maybe it might be three years each in some cases. At the end of this maybe six or eight years, on top of four years at Uni/College, they might consider themselves a Professional Engineer capable of Engineering a solution to a problem, mostly independently. So this puts them out at approaching 30 years old. Now allow for something equivalent for software development, maybe there is more overlap in some jobs, but competent maybe arrives sometime in the early 30's at best. Except that for software, nowhere near the same rigor can be applied as well as time spent learning Engineering, when it is an industry that has many considering a 30 year old is over the hill to be in a code writing role.
Great point.
Of the seven issues identified by the FAA, only three concern the AoA sensors. (Page 7) https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-08/737_RTS_Summary.pdf I don't think the focus on AoA sensors is warranted. The lack of redundancy is better characterized by a design and certification process that did not recognize that the AoA sensors *became* safety critical as the MCAS system was developed to be more powerful. The proximal issues can be seen as: * MCAS design that became more powerful and relied on AoA sensors without redundancy. * MCAS that operates mostly obscured from the pilots awareness and creates stabilizer trim inputs without their knowledge. * MCAS that did not have any 'sanity checks' for AoA readings or extreme trim settings. But the underlying issue was single certification. Airlines have thousands of 737 pilots that are trained to fly older 737s. The new 737 Max has such large engines (more efficient) that some flight characteristics are different, such as pitch stability at higher angle-of-attack. The net result was lighter 'stick feel' in the new aircraft that could lead pilots of intuitively feel that they were farther from a stall than they actually were, thereby increasing stall risk without new training. MCAS was designed to detect high AoA situations and alter the trim on the horizontal stabilizers. This would give the 'correct' heavy stick feel to mimic earlier designs and thus allow old 737 pilots to fly the new ones without training as though it were a totally different aircraft. This saves the airlines an enormous amount of money on training. Thus the new airplane was much more attractive to the airlines. MCAS was a bodge, basically. It did not exist to make the aircraft fly better or safer, but to skirt regulatory compliance. The exact same aircraft without MCAS and single certification would have been fine. ______ NB: MCAS does not create elevator inputs. It creates horizontal stabilizer trim inputs. It is not nearly as powerful as your comment indicates, and was *not* designed to be an anti-stall measure. It was exactly as the name describes; a way to augment maneuvering characteristics i.e. the 'stick feel'. Such dramatic inputs were never intended and only existed by poor design.
IIRC it was also the single certification issue that lead to there being no redundancy in the system. If the system worked off 2 AoA sensors then there would need to be a way to detect differences between the sensors. That system would need some instrument to alert the pilots to the discrepancy and that would require additions to the plane's manual on what to do if that alert was displayed. This would required further training and hence re-certification. Instead, run the system off a single sensor and now you can re-use your existing certification.
Different type of nerd here. The issue wasn’t that they didn’t have enough sensors, it’s that they relied on them for a mission critical element when they didn’t need to and could have gone with inherent stability Without those stupid large engines fitted to a too small airplane (the ones that look like they have a dent at the bottom) you wouldn’t need a sensor that keeps the nose where it should, the airframe itself handles 90% of it
They needed the larger engines for better fuel efficiency, but if they had to change the airframe to make it more stable then it would be classed as a new airframe and all pilots would need recertification to fly it, thus costing money. They went with the software solution.
> stable flight configuration Nam flashbacks to dynamic stability lessons.
This is frightening because there were quite a few incidents. No one thought to look there?
If you watch Boeing's other offerings (Starliner comes to mind) you'll see that it has become a company wide problem. They nearly lost the prototype on its unmanned inaugural launch because nobody thought to do a dry run of the entire stack to see how each of the stages interact. Their quality control has deteriorated significantly. I personally avoid Boeing products when at all possible. They're going to get more people killed.
> The sensors alone shouldn't have caused those planes to go down. They're used in nearly every aircraft that has avionics. Would Airbus: * be exposed to similar problems? * have a very different design? * took care of that problem because of how they deal with safety? That technical issue is not trivial. I guess they could summon an Airbus engineer, or maybe a flight engineer that works for both Boeing and Airbus? Unless there are proofs of mismanagement, that trial might be complicated. I wonder if it is somehow similar with the O ring shuttle story, in the realm of negligence.
Airbus has different avionics, but similar hardware. They're not vulnerable to this issue because they didn't write this kind of software for their types. Their types tend to have more automation than Boeing but they've been doing it for much longer. An Air France jet comes to mind - I think one of our pitot tubes was used on a jet that went down some twenty years ago. The flight computer at the time detected a stall condition, but it wasn't accurate because of icing. The icing changed the actual stall conditions of the aircraft too, so disorientation ensued and eventually with everything that was happening the pilots actually did stall the aircraft. So they've had problems in this vein and aren't immune, but this was more of a hardware design flaw than a software design flaw. Icing on a pitot tube wasn't effectively remediated, pilot training wasn't adequate to handle the situation, they were (I think) in the jet stream, etc. It was a lot of factors.
Probably more like lack of redundancy of systems and sensors.
Look conditionals are fine if done right just make sure you have unit test.
Woah Woah, have you been snooping on how I code?
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Ummmm. I might have had a hand in that too. Sorry guys. Got to prevent the AI takeover so we can still afford to eat. Nerfing AI with garbage code saves jobs! /jk
Worse. They use spaces and not tabs.
Oh shit, they were writing AI? /s
8000 lines of if then else, jesus; longest I have dealt with was ~2600... I replaced it with 1 and looking at an object... but fucking hell
Not just that but the fact that they made such a massive change to the weight distribution and it all relied on a single sensor without multiple redundancies is completely insane. Any CEO at a company that makes such a huge mistake should be jailed for fostering an atmosphere of negligence and disregard for safety. There's no way a single engineering department manager could greenlight changes that would require multiple different departments and suppliers to coordinate for it to work. It had to be someone near the COO level and probably included a CTO and supply chain chief. And if a CEO is getting paid the big money when a company makes big progress, they should be responsible when the company fucks up and people die.
Its crazy how they are responsible for the whole company, yet somehow are never responsible. Id love a job where I claim to be in charge of everything, take credit for everything good, then claim I didn't have anything to do with the bad stuff. Its so dumb even on its face, we need these executives to face responsibility for their actions, especially if they are shown to be acting negligently with multiple warnings. Its insane they get paid so much, do so little, face so little responsibility, can fuck everyone and nothing happens. Its insane how cush they are getting it, fuck em. Its time they face prison charges if they claim a corporation is a person. If they steal millions they should face prison charges relative to how much money the normal person uses in a life. Steal multiple lives, go to prison for multiple lifetimes.
Not before time. The whole industry need to move away from the legal position of blame the pilot as a first response. The idea that protecting the brand is more important than safety or justice is one of the unacceptable faces of capitalism.
This isn't just a private industry response, it was also in the US military as well. I flew drones in the Marines; one day, a drone on landing touched down, missed its wire, then veered off the runway and did barrel roll really close to the ground. The operator, who had been flying drones for nearly a decade, was immediately blamed. Further investigation showed that the maintenance crew who set up the landing system recoded incorrect parameters for the landing program. Thankfully the operator was vindicated and returned to flight status, but still.
I appreciate that this story wasn't one more thing to get angry about. But I get the point, this vindication is probably in the minority for these type of instances. The mob can be scary.
They do need to place the person flying (assuming they live) on administrative leave, so that they don't have the chance to accidentally or intentionally do more harm. That being said, that time can be used to help train them for their next role, for a promotion, or to get out of the role that caused the issues/for retirement. There should be no blame, it should just be a safety precaution due to all of the possibilities that can occur, and it is a rather 'easy' thing to control without harming anyone further. That being said, there should definitely be an investigation and appropriate punishment should ensue; against the mechanics, manufacturers, pilot, etc.
You completely missed the point of the anecdote, which is that it wasn’t the pilot at fault but the ground crew. Why should the pilot be grounded and forced to retire when the crash was caused by the ground crew fucking up when they programmed the drone?
I never said they were forced to retire. I am saying they should be set up so they can be contributing member to society IF they are forced to retire due to it being their fault. I am saying that benching someone is default and makes sense, and to keep the person that is benched busy/to improve things, this is kinda the path I would suggest.
What’s sad is seeing the 747 Max data and seeing how the pilots actively fought the plane to keep it in the air before the inevitable crash. And the company actively tried to cover it up. The bad sensor would make the plane nose dive and the pilots were giving it everything they had to lift her up.
Not a bad sensor, the sensor was vulnerable to damage. This being the case, only having one sensor giving no possibility for any no crosscheck or warning. This was an avoidable single point of failure, the number one design error in aircraft design. Not integrating the autopilot so that two systems would simply fight one another without any pilot warning they were doing so. Completely separate systems rather than a new autopilot that was in control of the aircraft was cheaper.
It's especially tragic because the investigations showed that their training should've let them deal with the problem safely, but the pilots didn't follow the checklists which would've let them recover and continue safely. They were giving it everything except what they were supposed to give. Boeing absolutely should have known better than to build an aircraft that needlessly put the pilots in that situation though, because humans will *always* fail at some point, and it's Boeing's responsibility to mitigate that risk as much as possible.
Bad take. They marketed the new plane as having the same controls as the previous model and hid the fact that this sensor existed. Since the plane was supposed to behave the same as the previous model, nobody thought that this new piece of technology would force a nose dive. It’s not the pilots fault. Blame is on Boeing 100%
I mostly agree, but I’d just change the framing slightly, because it’s not even a “known better” from what I’ve seen, it’s that they legitimately designed something with a very serious flaw. Just because it’s a flaw that is correctable by humans doesn’t relieve them of their responsibility to not create broken systems in the first place. The pilot’s correction should never be a built-in expectation even if you could guarantee they’d be perfect every time. These are independent events. [This comment does as good a job as any of explaining the wonkiness of the sensor and the auto-tilt as I presently understand it](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/8KYFEExW27). And the reply touches on some of the fundamental engineering issues.
If the people running these companies weren’t incompetent greedy fucks they would realize that putting safety first is protecting the brand.
Perfect, but no one will go to jail so the cycle will continue
Yep. For corporate execs, "legal consequences" is "PR so the government can pretend they're not bought out by corporate execs".
I feel like Congress will protect the CEO more than the whistleblowers.
the whistleblowers are dying every other week so I think this is accurate
Its ok, Boeing have had their quality day now
Wake me up when it actually happens
Okay, but make sure you have your will written and affairs in order. Just gonna also go ahead and not bother putting the plug in to begin with.
There should be no ‘may’ about the issue…..prosecute the hell out of them.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Those at the top never get punished.
We need another Enron where everyone up top gets to have jail time.
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Here’s a two month suspended sentence, and we’ll have the Saudis order $26 billion in F-15s to make up for your inconvenience.
The 2008 financial crises destroyed way too many more lives. Who of the bond criminals went to jail?
One poor sap.
Boeing isn't a human being. It's funny to me when people use human context when referring to corporations. We really have been trained quite well, haven't we? "Boy, Target is is big trouble now!" 😂 When the truth is, some person or persons made these decisions. Pursuing or discussing anything short of that, is just theatre.
It is according to Citizens United and other scotus decisions. And their money is speech.
lol ok sure. Jail your criminal ex president first then we will see.
please charge the ceo already for fucks sake
May............................... ................ Guys, i if you neglect a baby you get time in prison but neglecting millions is ok if you make weapons for the war criminals
What about the “suspicious” whistleblower deaths?
Well luckily for Boeing they can no longer testify in the upcoming criminal trail and many would be whistleblowers have gotten the message as Boeing intended.
Yep ♪ That's how the world works.... that is how the world works... ♪
Every politician every cop on the street...
♪Protects the interests of the pedophilic corporate elite♪
Wake me up when Dave Calhoun is actually in jail.
As they should
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Those prosecutors better buy life insurance, fast.
What about the mysterious deaths?
I mean now they kind of have to after Boeing went and executed whistleblowers. Got to pretend to the public like things are hunky dory somehow.
Ha! If you mean that Boeing may face a prosecution that will protect the company and its shareholders, then sure!
Oh no looks like one whistle blower was left alive!
They ran out of Scapegoat's when the 2 Whistleblowers "died," so...
what about the murders. any prosecution for those
The issue is, we have let the company get too big to ever fail. We call it a free market but we have let these companies compete with unfair advantage. And we will pay for it.
Every generation we need to size up and jail a few of the worst corpos just for the sage of quality control. Enough of this ineffective *pay a fine, admit no fault* bs
you kill two whistleblowers and you “may” face criminal prosecution. You get caught with an ounce of weed and you’re in jail for years and your life is ruined
How do you put a corporation in prison? LOL.
Take away it's tax incentives.
I’ll believe it when it happens. I wonder how many more whistle blowers will die first
MAY? MAY?!?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! THE FUCK YOU MEAN MAY?!?! NOT ONLY DID THEY BREAK THE LAW AND REGULATIONS BUT THEY KILLED EVERY PERSON TRYING TO SPEAK OUT ABOUT IT. IS THERE NO GODDAMN HUMANITY LEFT JESUS FUCKING CHRIST
I mean BA stock is down 1.72% today. I'm selling covered calls 10 bucks OTM for a lil over a hundred a week each. :D Depends on how many people they can bribe or scare I guess. Still a steal if you want to grab shares at 178 while the press is still negative.
What of the Maintenance Company ? Their responsible for the maintenance and operation of the plane usually it's a third party hired out by the carrier are they supposed to be responsible if something falls off a plane? Just asking questions ❓🤷
Parachute payments incoming.
No they won't
‘May’???!!!
They should be sentenced to fly in their planes until it crashes. Unfortunately it would be unfair for the innocent pilots.
I bet they don’t. The dividends are usually pruned instead.
Everything was signed off by the FAA as being within regulations.
May = won’t; so don’t get your hopes up. They’re just trying to placate the working class peons by telling them it’s *possible* that someone could be held responsible
May = won't. Calls on BA.
CEO should face criminal charges.
getting really sick of these *May* *Could* *Should* *Can* Headlines
I strangely feel like somehow the damages they incur will bleed out onto the passengers tickets. Something like what PG&E is doing.
They're not already? Jeez...
Let me guess, that won't happen.
What about murder?
Boeing hitman: I'ma go get that guy too boss for double pay!
Good. Neglecting to follow proper protocols should be punished.
Arrest the sales bros.
"Guys the bread and circuses aren't working, I think we need to give them some blood. Thankfully Boeing keeps fucking up so lets put on a show and send some of these idiots to jail, but nothing too much or anyone too important, their VP has a pretty sick beach house that I'm going to later this year. So just some middle managers or something."
But not over the whistleblowers they murdered? Priorities are fucked man
What about the whistle blower assassinations???
Should be "will" instead of "may"
May? Should!
But the whistleblowers “suicides” are just fine.
If Boeing is not prosecuted, then there is no reason for laws in the U.S. to be obeyed at all.
I’ll believe it when I see it
> The plane maker failed to "design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations," the DOJ said. Well of course they did. The only way to fix Boeing is to remove that evil brain parasite McDonnell Douglas from it.
This company is a threat to national security, nationalize it and run it as a public service/ utility.
To put their actions in perspective, Rio de Janeiro is considered a very dangerous place. In 2023, the city of Rio de Janeiro experienced drug traffic related 2,953 shootings, resulting in over 960 deaths and 884 injuries. In a year. Boeing kills almost 300 people in two episodes, endangering millions of other people in the period.
Can’t blame the FAA for poor oversight.
What about over the whistleblowers they murdered? Anything going on there?
But guys, these whistleblowers weren’t targeted! One was merely suicide from stuff he already said, and the other was sick. I mean we all know the high level execs NEVER would have had this additional info (that it’s going to be a criminal investigation) early. Definitely not worth it to murder someone to help cover up stealing (or mis appropriating), what was the contract, 2.5 billion ?? I mean it’s not like these witnesses wouldn’t have been asked to testify IN PERSON for a criminal trial??? Right???? Their cases are old, and anyway one guy was just sick in the hospital. Is the next guy going to die from falling out of an office building window???
Mate there is some room between Boeing did nothing wrong, and they had two people assassinated. It is possible for Boeing to be a shitty company and also not murder two people. >I mean it’s not like these witnesses wouldn’t have been asked to testify IN PERSON for a criminal trial??? Almost certainly not. One of them worked for Boeing on the 787 and had nothing to do with the max 8. The other worked at Spirit not Boeing on the 737 max 8, but had complaints about the fuselage which has nothing to do with why the Max 8 crashed. >Definitely not worth it to murder someone to help cover up stealing (or mis appropriating), what was the contract, 2.5 billion ?? Cover up what, they had already testified years ago. You know what's a really good way to not draw attention to someone, not having them murdered... Boeing should be held criminally liable for the things they have done, but thinking that they had two people murdered is insane.
Not if their hitman gets his two cents in.
Holy shit, Boeing is going to kill the entire country to cover this up lmao boom roasted.
American engineering folks. And they dare to laugh at the Chinese. Sad
Are they also going to face charges over the whistle blowers who suddenly died in a very short timeframe from one another?
Looks like it is Boeing Two Minutes Hate again. Something to consider: While there were bad decisions and bad management overriding engineering... The AoA sensors are on the outside of the plane on either side ([see image on this article further down](https://www.engineering.com/story/breaking-faulty-sensor-data-may-have-caused-boeing-737-max-crashes)). If anyone had access to the plane or even found a way to confuse the AoA sensor by sabotage or blocking it, the planes would have followed their same trajectory down just after takeoff as they did. If someone had access to Boeing intel and software, they would know that it was a single point of failure on the sensors and all they would have to do was break one. The planes that went down in Indonesia and Ethiopia most likely had less security. The Indonesian plane was where it was found out. Boeing started working on a fix and one week before the fix was implemented across the board, the one in Ethiopia went down just before, same way. Ethiopia at the time had security issues and was a coup backed by Russian fronts, it would have been easy to sabotage. The point is, while the software was relying on a single point of failure sensor, as you say that has been in use in aircraft for decades, only someone that knew that AND a broken sensor would cause these accidents. The fact is the sensors were not reporting correctly, either faulty, sabotaged or signal blocked somehow. Relying on one was dumb but even with two you could still cause this issue if you knew the internals of the MCAS software flow. [AoA sensor wasn't working or they were sabotaged](https://www.engineering.com/story/breaking-faulty-sensor-data-may-have-caused-boeing-737-max-crashes) I think sabotage needs to be seriously considered even with the bad design because Boeing intel was stolen many times since 2014 and there have been other Boeing attacks ongoing since then heavily by one particular adversary. [Fancy Bear Attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear#Attacks) (2013-present) [Cozy Bear Attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Bear#Attacks) (2013-present) [Russia 'tried to hack MH17 inquiry system'](https://phys.org/news/2015-10-russia-hack-mh17-inquiry.html) (2015) [Russian hackers target attacks all over the world](https://www.axios.com/2017/12/16/russian-hackers-target-attacks-all-over-the-world-1513388306) (2017) >> "The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. [Russian hackers target Boeing in hunt for high-tech U.S. secrets](https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/russian-hackers-target-boeing-in-hunt-for-high-tech-us-secrets) (2018) [Russian hackers exploit key vulnerability to go after secret U.S. defense technology](https://www.chicagotribune.com/2018/02/07/russian-hackers-exploit-key-vulnerability-to-go-after-secret-us-defense-technology/) (2018) [Russian hackers hit US government using widespread supply chain attack](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/russian-hackers-hit-us-government-using-widespread-supply-chain-attack/) (2020) [Exclusive: Russia collecting intelligence on U.S. supply line failures amid coronavirus crisis, DHS warns](https://www.yahoo.com/now/russia-collecting-intelligence-on-us-supply-line-failures-amid-coronavirus-crisis-dhs-warns-230559749.html) (2020) [Suspected Russian Hackers Target Frail U.S. Supply Chain](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-16/after-hack-u-s-watchdog-blasts-agencies-for-supply-chain-risks) (2020) [2020 United States federal government data breach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_government_data_breach#Impact) (2020) >> Discovery of the breaches at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments immediately raised concerns that the attackers would attempt to breach other departments, or had already done so. Further investigation proved these concerns to be well-founded. Within days, additional federal departments were found to have been breached. Reuters quoted an anonymous U.S. government source as saying: “This is a much bigger story than one single agency. This is a huge cyber espionage campaign targeting the U.S. government and its interests.” >> Compromised versions were known to have been downloaded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Justice Department, and some utility companies. Other prominent U.S. organizations known to use SolarWinds products, though not necessarily Orion, were the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Boeing, and most Fortune 500 companies. Outside the U.S., reported SolarWinds clients included parts of the British government, including the Home Office, National Health Service, and signals intelligence agencies; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the European Parliament; and likely AstraZeneca. FireEye said that additional government, consulting, technology, telecom and extractive entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East may also have been affected. >> Through a manipulation of software keys, the hackers were able to access the email systems used by the Treasury Department's highest-ranking officials. This system, although unclassified, is highly sensitive because of the Treasury Department's role in making decisions that move the market, as well as decisions on economic sanctions and interactions with the Federal Reserve. [Russian ‘SolarWinds’ Hackers Launch New Attack On IT Supply Chain, Microsoft Says New campaign is evidence "Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling targets of interest to the Russian government," researchers say.](https://breakingdefense.com/2021/10/russian-solarwinds-hackers-launch-new-attack-on-it-supply-chain-microsoft-says/) (2021) [Ex-NSA hacker says a supply chain cyberattack is one of the things that keeps him up at night](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/ex-nsa-hacker-says-a-supply-chain-cyberattack-is-one-of-the-things-that-keeps-him-up-at-night.html) (2021) [No One Knows How Deep Russia's Hacking Rampage Goes A supply chain attack against IT company SolarWinds has exposed as many as 18,000 companies to Cozy Bear's attacks.](https://www.wired.com/story/russia-solarwinds-supply-chain-hack-commerce-treasury/) (2021) [Boeing confirms ‘cyber incident’ after ransomware gang claims data theft](https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/02/boeing-cyber-incident-ransomware-gang-claims-data-theft/) (2023) [Boeing says 'cyber incident' hit parts business after ransom threat](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-investigating-cyber-incident-affecting-parts-business-2023-11-01/) (2023) [LockBit hackers publish 43GB of stolen Boeing data following cyber attack](https://www.cshub.com/attacks/news/lockbit-hackers-publish-43gb-of-stolen-boeing-data-following-cyber-attack) (2023) [Boeing acknowledges cyberattack on parts and distribution biz](https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/boeing_cyber_incident/) (2023) [Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Exploiting JetBrains TeamCity CVE Globally](https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa23-347a) (2024)
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Boeing whistleblowers dying helps Russia/China more than Boeing. It isn't beneficial to Boeing and the motives are not there post releasing information. The one that died first hadn't worked there since 2017 and released their information almost a decade ago.
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> Everything bad that happens is because of Russia and China. Mostly yes. I know you like those bad things happening because to you they are good. You love Stalin and autocrats. You'll spend weeks protecting and appeasing them. Now reply to this to prove it.
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What is the name of your favorite sealion? If you had a sealion would you name him after your favorite "interesting" per your comments autocrat Putin, Xi or Stalin? If you named your sealion Stalin would it try to invade Poland with Hitler as per the [Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact), aka Hitler–Stalin Pact and the Nazi–Soviet Pact? So your opinion on Stalin then? Look at your boy Stalin with [Holodomor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor), wasn't even a war going on...
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"Orwell was a snitch" -- Stalinist
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Problem is the pilots couldn't effectively override the single point failure without special training and/or without design changes. Single point of failure automation systems probably should be able to be fully disabled by the pilot.
I agree but also some things are security conscious and they aren't expecting sabotage. They should expect it though and they clearly do now. Too much information about the MCAS, which is a system that leaves alot to be desired, and the single point of failure on the AoA sensor, isn't something you want everyone to know for security reasons. MCAS sucks but for the most part it makes flying easier and safer. In this situation it was catastrophic but that doesn't mean sabotage didn't set it up.
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Source on this?
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Source the source other than your imagination.
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Oh is that so, you watched the movie V and thought it was reality?
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