> In an effort to get the plane out quickly, Boeing, with the assent of the FAA, had even told the airlines that their pilots didn’t need to conduct flight simulator tests. That was a critical mistake, because the pilots would have discovered the issue that caused the planes to crash.
Is that so? The simulators would have been able so simulate the failure of one of the two AOA sensors, and the simulated MCAS would've kicked in, issuing stabiliser trim nose-down commands, and the pilots would've tried to fix it with the trim nose-up switch on the yoke, and this would've gone back and forth a while until they'd stopped trimming up for a bit, and it would've simulated a crash?
That's possible, but news to me. Here's a source [0] saying "the simulators have been shown to be incapable of replicating the conditions under which the two 737 MAX aircraft crashed" and "Boeing have discovered that their simulators cannot accurately recreate a fault with the anti-stall system."
Seems to me that (at least) one of the two articles is wrong.
My understanding of the situation is this:
When there is a new plane released, the FAA determins what type of training the (existing) pilots need to undergo to be certified to fly on it. If the plane is new or very different from existing planes, then the pilots have to go through long and expensive training- this training includes flight simulators.
If the plane is "mostly the same" as an existing plane, the pilots go through shorter and cheaper training.
Boeing wanted the pilots to take the cheaper training, because it ment that the buyers could save a lot of money. So they convinced the FAA that the cheaper training was appropriate. They convinced the FAA that the MCAS system wasn't a "big difference." This was a mistake
Sure, Boeing’s desperate attempts to “grandfather” in this plane under the original type certificate constituted the root cause for all this.
My question here though was specifically whether, as the article alleges, MAX-specific simulator training (whether required or not) would have exposed this problem in time to prevent the accidents. And I don’t think it would.
In my opinion, Boeing is a company that is expected to do something about 10x more difficult than other companies: they build and sell massively complex machines that have to work safely and reliably 100% of the time (discounting planned redundancy), and even a small mistake in design or execution compromises the safety of hundreds or thousands of people, even if it takes years for the flaw to become apparent. If you couple this with all the growth in air traffic in the past few decades, I think failures like we've seen are nearly inevitable.
Honestly, even with the tragic MAX crashes, I think it's nearly a miracle that air disasters happen as infrequently as they do (Boeing, Airbus, or what have you). People point to mismanagement at Boeing, including lately labor outsourcing / labor arbitrage (building plants in SC instead of WA to avoid unions, Spirit Aerosystems, etc) but I see that as part of how Boeing tried to meet the growing demands of air travel. That's not to let everybody off the hook, because clearly some changes need to take hold so that this doesn't happen again. That's the gold standard of the aviation industry, after all - that we can prevent a particular disaster from ever happening again, and we're willing to spend the time and money to see it so.
I think all the true crime enthusiasts following the John Barnett case is just going to distract from solving the hard problems - getting the design and execution right on every single plane, 100% of the time. Professional class people have gotten used to cheap/affordable jet travel anywhere, anytime, that is safe all the time - but I don't think many have internalized how difficult this is to do and maintain.
> Boeing is a company that is expected to do something about 10x more difficult than other companies: they build and sell massively complex machines that have to work safely and reliably 100% of the time
Lots of companies produce complex machines where safety is critical. Arguably making something that won't accidentally kill people is the lowest standard of quality a company is expected to meet. Yes planes are big, and flying is hard, so there are more things that can potentially fail, but it's a matter of scale, it isn't a fundamentally different problem. Boeing knew what it was getting into, and took on the responsibility of allocating sufficient resources to make proper aircraft.
> I think failures like we've seen are nearly inevitable.
Failures in general are inevitable, but the failures we've seen are most certainly not. The particular quality issues in the spotlight are solved problems, and in fact Boeing specifically already solved those problems when they crafted their quality procedures. The were multiple deliberate decisions made to not follow procedures, and these failures are only inevitable as a consequence of those decisions.
Sure, the task is incredibly difficult. But aviation engineering is exacting and rule-based and slow and expensive (no "move fast and break things") for just that reason, and Boeing (and Airbus) basically got it right for decades. But clearly Boeing dropped the ball somewhere in the past two decades, while Airbus (so far) hasn't.
So, no, the failures were not inevitable, but contingent, and what's needed now is to analyse how/why they were allowed to develop.
I assume that, for a variety of reasons (political, economic, cultural), Airbus is under somewhat less pressure to maximize shareholder returns than Boeing has been subject to for last couple decades. Theres probably a pretty interesting case study to be written about the outcome of stakeholder capitalism and something more focused on short-term shareholder value.
In other words, Airbus isn’t doing too bad for a European jobs program.
>People point to mismanagement at Boeing, including lately labor outsourcing / labor arbitrage (building plants in SC instead of WA to avoid unions, Spirit Aerosystems, etc) but I see that as part of how Boeing tried to meet the growing demands of air travel.
People also point to management pressuring employees to shut up about manufacturing defects. From the referenced article:
>In 2019, Barnett told a journalist at Corporate Crime Reporter that his managers “started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. . . . They just wanted to push planes out the door and make the cash register ring.”
So no, if you believe Barnett, failures like Boeing's are not inevitable. They are criminal.
I believe Barnett's claims should be treated seriously and scrutinized by experts in the industry (which is exactly what was happening when he died, by the way - it's not like people were ignoring what he had to say). I don't believe that he or anyone else is entitled to our faith just because he's saying things that confirm our worldview.
The only flaw in your argument is that the entire aerospace industry has managed to pull off what you claim is a miracle we shouldn't expect to be the standard... for decades. Only when Boeing lost their engineering culture that they and only they have been failing to this extent. Whatever Airbus is doing is working.
> a miracle we shouldn't expect to be the standard... for decades
In the past few decades, the number of scheduled flights has grown tremendously, the number of aircraft has grown, traffic has increased substantially at many major airports, fuel economy demands have become increasingly important... (which means those old aircraft aren't as viable anymore) A lot has changed, which requires new aircraft to compensate. I think all of this should be considered. Remember that the incident rate per million miles or per thousand flight hours is _down_ today compared to the imagined golden period in the past.
The industry is obviously more than 2 companies. Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Bombardier, and likely in the future, Comac, Mitsubishi, and UAC. This is ignoring the (primarily) civil aviation companies, military manufacturers (who sometimes venture into commercial, e.g., Lockheed's Tristar), and the entire supply chain that feed into those manufacturers.
It's true that other jets exist, especially regional jets, but remember that these serve overall a fairly small percentage of the seat-miles (aka miles flown * number of seats) overall since they are smaller and fly shorter routes.
In some ways this doesn't matter that much (since these planes might actually do many more takeoffs and landings per day/week/lifetime and have to be engineered for that), but in other ways it does matter a lot.
As for the other companies you name, I will admit I am not familiar with them. Is there something relevant to add to the discussion from those companies? I would be curious to learn more
Oh, you're right. I was thinking about it from the perspective of a passenger, like if you're just a regular non-crew person who travels, then you're probably on Boeing or Airbus, so I picked a metric that I thought would capture that angle, but it's a weird one to choose.
Like, you take up a seat, so if you were to randomly select a mile that you've traveled in your life, what are the odds that it was on a Boeing / Airbus or a regional jet? But, I think this wasn't really clear from what I wrote
I disagree about expectations. Boeing is expected to meet a reasonable standard of effort to build safe planes that can be competitive. Failures can and will happen, and in the same way we accept the risk of death by car accident every time we drive, no one is shouting "we must stop all air travel!!!" every time a plane fails and people die.
A really common sense standard of effort would be "people feel comfortable internally reporting problems". The opposite was true to the point that Boeing's management seemingly did everything possible to prevent people reporting issues. And now, potentially, someone with an interest in Boeing felt this strongly enough that someone was literally murdered over reporting a problem.
> no one is shouting "we must stop all air travel!!!" every time a plane fails and people die.
I know this isn't quite what you meant, but that's exactly what we do when a plane fails and people die, as happened in this case, as I'm sure you know! But only the plane that has the issue is grounded, not all planes.
As to the merits of John Barnett's complaints, I leave that to other people to decide. That he was murdered over reporting this is a claim I'm highly skeptical of, and to my knowledge there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was.
> Professional class people have gotten used to cheap/affordable jet travel anywhere, anytime, that is safe all the time - but I don't think many have internalized how difficult this is to do and maintain.
The price of an airplane should increase if needed to keep up with growing demand, not the quality decrease.
Sorry, but your suffering from the tech mindset, traditional engineering and manufacturing is a different skill set and many of your assumptions are off.
I encourage people to tinker with modern electronics and software, it's usually harmless and you can learn easily. That's not the case with air crafts and air travel. You need to learn BEFORE doing. Getting interested in flying and airplanes is probably the most dangerous thing for modern dilettantes, maybe tinkering with explosives is more dangerous.
What is wrong about my assumptions? I'm not advocating for "move fast and break things" in aviation, I'm saying that actually the issues at Boeing are not as dire as some people believe when considered in their broader context. I struggle to see how that is a tech mindset, really I think what I can be accused of credibly is carrying water for a defense-industrial complex, and that's the part of my argument that I struggle with.
None of the problems we've seen lately are things that someone just didnt forsee happening over the course of years. It was simply a failure to properly install or inspect fairly simple parts of the plane. While I agree that these are complex machines with many moving parts, these were not complex failures. They should have Never happened and are completely unacceptable.
Ok. Are you saying it’s cool and fine for there to be a bottom-shelf aircraft manufacturer that passengers accept more risk to life and limb by using, as long as it’s cheaper so it makes up for it?
“Instead of building airplanes, all they cared about was building the bottom line.”
This is the fundamental flaw of modern american capitalism: it's not that profit is the #1 concern, it's that profit is the ONLY concern.
There's a huge difference between the two, the system we have places no balancing considerations against returns. It's not even really "profit", but stock value.
Comensating employees, especially the c-suite, in stock should return to being illegal.
'The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.
"He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."'
Can we stop trying to make this some conspiracy. The man shot himself with is own gun (making him an unfortunate statistic). What articles like this do are give an unlikely narrative that Boeing can weasel out of.
They were shitty to him. The stress they caused drove the man to kill himself. Thats the story, dont buy this other sensational nonsense and give them a pass.
Besides on non-serious forums, I haven't seen people seriously propose this (this being anything nefarious like Boeing actually trying to take him out) with any evidence. The sentiment on HN from what I've seen is that we believe he killed himself due to the harassment and hostile work environment enabled and encouraged by Boeing leadership. They should be held responsible via existing laws around protecting whistleblowers.
> Besides on non-serious forums, I haven't seen people seriously propose this (this being anything nefarious like Boeing actually trying to take him out) with any evidence.
If he was murdered rather than having killed himself, you wouldn't find the evidence in forum posts.
Emotionally, it seems hard for me to believe that the Boeing leadership would be part of something criminal. And yet, the timing is weird.
This dude hasn’t been employed by Boeing for some years. He was part of a Netflix documentary made about it. I don’t think the public took him seriously until people died, and there were multiple safety incidents.
It would be interesting to see what the police report about this was. How long has he owned that gun? From what angle the that bullet come from? Were there any drugs still in his system? Any witnesses at the time of the shooting?
If it was suicide, surely there are evidence that it is suicide and other evidence disproving that he was murdered.
While that can be true, there would still be evidence supporting that, besides making things unlivable. My questions still stands -- what were the circumstances around the gun shot? How long has he owned that gun? How exactly did it happen?
Maybe people manage to segment off what it means to be a defence contractor in their own heads. But I figure if you produce and sell the means of killing people, you would be fine with killing people.
Echoing the other response, this doesn't seem fair at all (and I don't even work in the space). I'd suggest you reflect on that opinion some more and think about why people work in defence.
what if his whistle was just the tip of the iceberg mate. What if there are other whistles prepping to blow which will unleash a barrage of global lawsuits which would break boeing and diminish us air manufacturing superiority. That would be a hell of an incentive wouldn't it? Make an example of this whistle.. all other whistles go silent!!
The whole first half of the article is a veiled implication that he was killed.
"he was upbeat about his testimony, feeling he was finally able to tell the story of his efforts to get the company to take safety more seriously"
The police said it was “a self-inflicted wound.” (Are those quotes or air quotes? cause they feel like the latter).
" No one can believe it."
"A family friend told ABC News that he had told her, “I ain’t scared, but if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.” "
"The internet lit up. It was an “alleged suicide,” or “an apparent suicide.”"
and then... "it's suspicious, but nobody's going to look into it harder than they have."
At no point did the author of the article cover what the actual family said. That the man was ready to be a statistic from stress. Boeing was the source of that stress.
By opening up the article leaning into the conspiracy theory side of things, it only serves to discredit the rest of the content.
The narrative of "his doctor told him to quit the dam job or have a heart attack" ... "the situation gave him anxiety and PTSD" is another strike against Boeing in all this. He becomes a man pushed to, and over the brink by a corporate giant. Considering the circumstances that sounds awful and reasonable.
> As suspicious as his death was, no one in a position of power is calling for an investigation. And they’re not likely to. But I do know this: everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too.
This article is about the cultural problem at Boeing, and only tangentially about John Barnett.
That's a really, really complex line to draw. Suicide is by definition a choice a person makes for themselves. How do we decide where responsibility transitions from running your company (very) poorly to directly causing someone to decide to take their own life?
Could Boeing be held legally responsible in some way? Maybe so, and maybe they should be in most peoples' opinion, but it isn't as clear as assuming they must have been directly responsible for driving a man to suicide.
Absolutely ridiculous to not be suspicious here. Yes, stressed people kill themselves often, but not during a deposition that could accomplish everything they’ve been working for and putting their job security on the line for over the past decade. That is not when people feel hopeless.
There are plenty of recent examples of murders to cover up corporate crimes. This would not be particularly out of the ordinary. Unfortunately we’ll never know for sure because for some reason no one is going to do a serious investigation into his death.
The piece you linked shows many indications he was in great spirits and eager to testify, so I am not sure it supports your efforts to refute the conspiracy. Personally, I am more vulnerable to the conspiracy that the suicide was forced or staged after reading that article.
Everyone is different but it's not uncommon for a person who commits suicide to appear to be happy and normal in advance of it. There's a variety of reasons for this such as they've made up their mind and are finally at peace, or that they cover it up because they don't want anyone to interfere, etc. Some people are manic and have super highs and crushing, sudden lows and they kill themselves when they crash.
Not saying this is the case here, but him being in great spirits doesn't really contradict the action of killing yourself.
You act like nobody has ever conspired to do anything immoral before, like it’s some completely outlandish thing. History is rife with conspiracy. Maybe this guy did kill himself, but your attitude is quite unserious and ignorant.
Fine, I'll only concede on the uppercase letter point.
Seriously? A bunch of talented, hard working hackers, researchers, and investigative journalists doing their own independent investigation is now called a "witch hunt".
> Seriously? A bunch of talented, hard working hackers, researchers, and investigative journalists doing their own independent investigation is now called a "witch hunt".
Who ? Where is the list of those vetted people who can be called "the OSINT community" ? Who define that list ?
Because the way it was phrased, ufo_lover56 and anon98 are just as much part of it as the undefined talented bunch you said.
absolutely, but CAPS are intended to draw attention, and we should be paying much more attention to this. How did we end up in a society where multinational companies can assassinate their whistleblowers in plain daylight and we're all completely apathetic about it? Same with Epstein.
No, we shouldn't be paying more attention to unsupported conjecture, mostly made up by people on the internet who watch too many spy movies, and who resort to putting their text in capital letters because nobody is taking them seriously.
Just because people have conspired in the past doesn't mean literally every unrelated thing that happens in the future must be for the same reason. Most things that happen, happen for simple reasons.
Is that so? The simulators would have been able so simulate the failure of one of the two AOA sensors, and the simulated MCAS would've kicked in, issuing stabiliser trim nose-down commands, and the pilots would've tried to fix it with the trim nose-up switch on the yoke, and this would've gone back and forth a while until they'd stopped trimming up for a bit, and it would've simulated a crash?
That's possible, but news to me. Here's a source [0] saying "the simulators have been shown to be incapable of replicating the conditions under which the two 737 MAX aircraft crashed" and "Boeing have discovered that their simulators cannot accurately recreate a fault with the anti-stall system."
Seems to me that (at least) one of the two articles is wrong.
[0] https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-simulator/